9 ms·

The Disturbing Consequences of Seeing Your Doppelgänger

90 points by prismatic 11y ago

giltleaf 11y ago
Why is there so much bbc content today? The episode of the man jumping out the window is terrifying though.
- matheweis 11y ago
  "...he had not really wanted to commit suicide, said Brugger. He had jumped to “find a match between body and self”." Wow, it's like Inception, except for real!
- yclept 11y ago
  Probably submitters are inspired by Oliver Sacks' death.
givan 11y ago
I don't view the "electrode stimulation and see what happens and then believe it's probably the same as patients experiences" as something scientific. Given that we don't exactly know how the brain works, what if out of body experiences are real and the scientific explanation just tries to fit it in the general accepted world view as a brain bug just because it's too strange?
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Are you suggesting that their "souls" are actually leaving their bodies? Care to propose an experiment to verify that?
  - andrewflnr 11y ago
    Well, it would be pretty simple to test if they have access to information "out of body" that they didn't before. Put them in the scanner or whatever, put out a card with a freshly-invented message, see if they remember it when they come out.
    - carapace 11y ago
      My understanding is that OOB experiences where the person gets access to information that could not conceivably be related by their physical bodily senses are quite common. There seems to be a sort of "barrier" for many people who will absolutely refuse to believe evidence of this sort. It is really hard to "do science" to a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester. People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. YMMV (BTW, if you see your body in bed don't jump out the window, jump into your body.)
      - nradov 11y ago
        If it's easy to reproduce then why hasn't anyone reproduced it?
      - abritinthebay 11y ago
        Well.. then your understanding is rather wrong. Stories about those are quite common but actual verifiable or repeatable events? Those have yet to happen. > a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester This is synonymous with "made up".
      - lambda 11y ago
        > People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. So, have someone who is "open" to it go and view something that they haven't otherwise had a chance to perceive in person, then when they wake up tell the experimenter what it was. If it's easy to reproduce, then they should be able to do that, and it should be easy to verify that they had an out of the body experience. Instead, you just get anecdotes, of people repeating past experiences with no controls to blind it. Human memory is surprisingly faulty, people can fill in details later on in their memory, and so on. So it's very easy to think that you had a dream in which you saw something for the first time, and then later recognize it while you're awake; but it's also possible that you brain just filled in the memory when you saw it later. Or maybe you had seen it in the past but didn't have conscious recollection. And so on. Simply hearing people say that they had OOB experiences in which they saw things that they never saw in person is not particularly credible.
- stupidcar 11y ago
  Nobody's disputing that OOB experiences are “real”. What's at issue is the mechanism(s) by which they occur. The hypothesis in the article is that it's a psychological effect that can be exacerbated by brain injury. And the evidence outlined, such as experiments that can reliably produce equivalent effects, and similar brain lesions accompanying the most extreme examples provides some, although not overwhelming, evidence for the hypothesis. If you're suggesting that people's perceptions and consciousness are actually physically separating from their body, well then that's just another hypothesis. One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can be taken seriously. That is how science works. Simply saying “this phenomenon is strange” doesn't change anything. It doesn't make it immune to scientific inquiry, and it doesn't lower the standard of proof required of explanations. Science has successfully explained many phenomenon far weirder than OOB experiences.
  - phkahler 11y ago
    >> One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can be taken seriously. IMHO it only needs supporting evidence - good solid evidence. A proposed mechanism is nice but is it really necessary? Do they really know how aspirin works? If so, did they prior to widespread use? Does anyone have a mechanism for quantum physics? Did Kepler have a mechanism for planetary motion? I think a lot of science is actually people looking for the mechanism to explain accepted phenomena.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  That's a good question to ask, but AFAIK the answer is 'we tried that and so far have been unable to exploit it.' If OBE's involved some unsuspected extension of physical reality, then when someone is outside their own body, it should be possible to learn things that would not be knowable otherwise, eg to report an item placed under a bed, out of view of the experimental subject lying in the bed. I don't know if that's been tried, but there was extensive research into psychic phenomena in the 1970s that failed to yield any useful results. If you could gather hidden information during an induced out-of-body-experience that would be massive scientific breakthrough, and such an experiment would be trivially easy to design, so why hasn't it happened? I am sympathetic to the idea because I've had chemically-induced experiences, including during surgery, that seemed extremely real, as well as certain experiences with precognition that I am unable to explain (ie trying to apply the most rigorous observational standards to an unfalsifiable situation; I am honestly unable to explain the phenomenon but I can't exclude the possibility of an episodic delusion, so scientifically it's almost worthless).
coldcode 11y ago
The more we learn about the brain the more amazing/frightening it becomes. What if this type of experience can be triggered on purpose via drugs or other mechanisms. It would make a scary as hell weapon.
dx211 11y ago
I had an interesting experience a few days ago: I was walking to my office, through a small cluster of other buildings in the same complex, and I ended up walking perpendicular to someone who I immediately recognized, based on body shape, face, hairstyle, dress, and shoes, as myself. Of course my rational bits knew it was just some other guy who looked a lot like me, but it was a close enough match that my recognition bits would intermittently "lock on" and tell me I was watching myself from 20 feet away. And that was disturbing as hell. Anyway, now I know I have a doppelgänger working two buildings over, so I need to figure out what team he's on so I can crash his next office unwinder.
- gamegoblin 11y ago
  When I was in high school, my girlfriend texted me a photo of me kissing some girl (not her) who was sitting in a swing. At first I thought "Woah who is taking secret pictures of me?!" but then I realized I didn't recognize the girl I was kissing in the photo. So at that point I'm really confused -- there is a photo of me kissing a girl I don't know, in a park I've never been to. Photoshop? Is this a prank? My girlfriend then quickly follows up with "Weird right? I met this couple at the park and he looks just like you from the side. From the front he has a bit of a wider face, though. And he's Italian." Had she not told me that, I would have completely believed that I'd been photoshopped into a photo. I couldn't spot a single dissimilarity. I wonder if any relationships have ended because someone's significant other saw what looked like them with another person.
  - robertk 11y ago
    Phenotype space is probably not continuous given genome structure. So it appears like you can vary features almost arbitrarily, as you see in the Oblivion video game, but in fact you see a lot of genetic collisions due to a much smaller search space combined with the birthday paradox.
mrob 11y ago
This sounds similar to the much more common false awakening dreams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening I get these occasionally, sometimes with multiple nested dreams, and the sensation of waking is highly realistic. It can last a subjectively long time until some detail tips me off that it's not real (usually attempting to read and the text reading like Markov chain output). If I'm capable of generating all this highly believable imagery it seems only a minor change to also generate a model of my own body.
- zkhalique 11y ago
  It's interesting how you sometimes can't tell if you are awake or not, when you are sleeping, but you can ALWAYS tell if you're awake when you're awake. Looks like some faculties are working robustly when you are awake which aren't when you are asleep. That said, I've had dreams where characters in my dream knew things I didn't, and even made fun of me. When I woke up, I realized that they were actually quite interesting, fully developed characters with their own personalities and knowledge! And they would develop over several months of dreaming. Sometimes I also awoke with a solution to a problem I had been thinking about the night before. So... interesting!
- dx211 11y ago
  I've had lucid dreams on and off for several years. I remember one particular dream where I was visiting a friend, and he showed me a project he was working on in his back room. It was a hand-cranked machine that looked like a mashup of an astronomical orrery and an automatic transmission with the case taken off. Before I woke up, I was able to examine it for some time, and as far as I can recall, I could see each piece, in motion and interacting with its adjacent parts, with perfect resolution. Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)
- krick 11y ago
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Doing a sensory deprivation experiment once gave me an OOBE. It was pretty wild, didn't have enough time to start doing research though. One of the experiments I would run is have an assistant go into another room and write or draw something on a pad, then do your OOBE, go over to the room and read the pad, then come back into your body, wake up and tell them what they wrote (or reproduce it). That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted to test. The interesting bit from this research is that it adds a bit of credence to the notion that you can at least perceive you are outside your body, given the right conditions. The question being then how you do this to yourself on demand without sticking an electrode into your head in order to do some research on it. [1] http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html
- zkhalique 11y ago
  You can do this without paying an assistant. Just have a display show a random number in a room that changes every minute.
- declan 11y ago
  >That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted to test. I take it you were unable to reproduce any psychic claims! :) If you could, it would be a trivial way to win $1M: http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html The fact that the James Randi challenge has existed (in one form or another) since 1964, and no psychic in over half a century has ever passed the challenge, well, that should speak volumes about psychic/paranormal/parapsychology claims.
  - robertk 11y ago
    To play devil's advocate, it could also indicate Randi is using a god of the gaps type play and psychics have given up knowing he won't part with the money.
    - btilly 11y ago
      Nope. He works with the psychic to agree on a test of what the psychic claims to be able to do, with low enough probability that you can't pass by chance. (I believe the threshold is somewhere below 1/million.) Doesn't matter what ability you think you have. A test can be set up and agreed to. A number of psychics have wound up concluding that their abilities won't work under the influence of unbelievers. But nobody that I know of has complained that Randi was not willing to set up a fair test.
jarin 11y ago
Reminds me of the classic "Tulpa" creepypasta: http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa
yeukhon 11y ago
So how do you actually create doppelgänger on your own?
Phithagoras 11y ago
This story reminds me a lot of the Dostoevsky novel "The Double". Does anyone know if Dostoevsky himself suffered an incident like this, or of any similar incidents at the time that he may have heard about?
- dang 11y ago
  He definitely used his own experiences with epilepsy and pre-epileptic visions when writing The Idiot, but that was much later. I think The Double had more purely literary antecedents. Doppelgängers were an established trope by then, which Dostoevsky got from the German romantics—people like E.T.A. Hoffmann, who specialized in stories with weird phenomena that could have a natural explanation (e.g. the mentally ill hero's delusional imagination) but are uncanny and probably magical all the same. The Double was only Dostoevsky's second novel but it was one of the best things he ever wrote. It's fabulous! And short.
- samwiseg 11y ago
  Poe also wrote a pretty disturbing short story about a doppelganger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilson_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilson_(short_story)
- re_todd 11y ago
  There is a good foreign film about a doppelganger called "The Double Life of Véronique" by the great European director Krzysztof Kieślowski. It's one of the few times I've watched a foreign movie more than once.
smoyer 11y ago
I've seen pictures of a guy that was once a college student in our city. Though I never met him, my sister walked up to him and started a conversation - convinced it was me. When his voice didn't match she still thought it was me trying to prank me. Finally she called me at work and heard my voice while he was talking to someone else. I wish I'd have bumped into him while he lived here.
sethammons 11y ago
Story time. When I was 4 or so, I fell asleep at my aunt's house on the couch. I recall being above my body, looking down. I then looked over to the table where the adults were, still looking down. I could look down upon the table and its contents, something I could not see normally (hey, I was 4 and small, I could not see over the edge of the thing). This is the first time I ever saw square pizza. From Dominoes. The experience of being out of body was not meaningful to me at the time, but, man, square pizza?! I remember thinking that was quite novel.
- robertk 11y ago
  I've heard enough of these stories to have no doubt this is a real experience, but what could a scientific explanation of this possibly look like? I take coherence of worldview very seriously and will rewrite my entire ontology if necessary, but I'm having difficulties here. I don't want to accept the cognitive dissonance and say you're making it up or are fabricating the memory, or simply dismiss this comment altogether. On the other hand, it seems a very difficult hallucination to conjure.
  - themodelplumber 11y ago
    Giving possible scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena on HN: It's like asking for downvotes. There's very little social approval of that behavior here.
    - robertk 11y ago
      The problem is you're using "supernatural" as a semantic stop sign (http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/). Would it help if I rephrased it as: given this natural phenomenon reported by thousands of people in a wide array of circumstances, what is a possible scientific explanation?
      - dasil003 11y ago
        Excellently put. "Supernatural" around here is just shorthand for "bullshit", something is only "supernatural" until it is explained, and then it just "natural" and no one has a problem with it. But where I think this is harmful is for rationalists who don't want to acknowledge that some things may be true but ultimately unprovable or unexplainable because of the limited human perspective. That's what I think is interesting about philosophy and metaphysics—the ability to play around and ask what-if about things which probably are unknowable. This opens you up to a much wider world of ideas than that which is reasonably tractable by today's science.
jonah 11y ago
François Brunelle did a photoseries called "I’m not a look-alike!" photographing unrelated people who do look alike. Pretty neat. https://portrait.photogrist.com/francois-brunelle/ https://portrait.photogrist.com/francois-brunelle/ http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2013/02/me-myself-and-i-francois-brunelle-and-his-doppelganger-project-find-your-look-alike/ http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2013/02/me-myself-and-i-fra... (His site is down otherwise I would link to the source.)
brusch64 11y ago
All that happened a long time ago, but in 2001 I went to a event in the next bigger town. There were lots of people strolling around, suddenly a girl greeted me a little bit too enthusiastic. I didn't know her at all, but greeted her and started small talk with her. She was obviously bugged and asked me if I didn't know her ? I declined, but she didn't give up. She thought she knew me from a party from a town about 15km away and had an affair with him on this party. She was very angry, that I didn't recognise her and didn't remember any thing. She even knew which school this guy went to (different school) and some things about his friends. She didn't trust me that I wasn't this guy and was pretty angry that I didn't recognize her. Never met this guy. Don't know if he was really so similar to me, but it was a really strange experience.
rainer_muell 11y ago
Will these insights induce the next paradigm shift in the science of torture? Simply hook the victim to a brain stimulator and alter his perception of reality. Can be administered by the press of a button and is even cleaner than water-boarding.

90 points by prismatic 11y ago

giltleaf 11y ago

Why is there so much bbc content today? The episode of the man jumping out the window is terrifying though.

matheweis 11y ago
"...he had not really wanted to commit suicide, said Brugger. He had jumped to “find a match between body and self”." Wow, it's like Inception, except for real!
yclept 11y ago
Probably submitters are inspired by Oliver Sacks' death.

givan 11y ago

I don't view the "electrode stimulation and see what happens and then believe it's probably the same as patients experiences" as something scientific. Given that we don't exactly know how the brain works, what if out of body experiences are real and the scientific explanation just tries to fit it in the general accepted world view as a brain bug just because it's too strange?

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Are you suggesting that their "souls" are actually leaving their bodies? Care to propose an experiment to verify that?
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  Well, it would be pretty simple to test if they have access to information "out of body" that they didn't before. Put them in the scanner or whatever, put out a card with a freshly-invented message, see if they remember it when they come out.
  - carapace 11y ago
    My understanding is that OOB experiences where the person gets access to information that could not conceivably be related by their physical bodily senses are quite common. There seems to be a sort of "barrier" for many people who will absolutely refuse to believe evidence of this sort. It is really hard to "do science" to a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester. People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. YMMV (BTW, if you see your body in bed don't jump out the window, jump into your body.)
    - nradov 11y ago
      If it's easy to reproduce then why hasn't anyone reproduced it?
    - abritinthebay 11y ago
      Well.. then your understanding is rather wrong. Stories about those are quite common but actual verifiable or repeatable events? Those have yet to happen. > a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester This is synonymous with "made up".
    - lambda 11y ago
      > People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. So, have someone who is "open" to it go and view something that they haven't otherwise had a chance to perceive in person, then when they wake up tell the experimenter what it was. If it's easy to reproduce, then they should be able to do that, and it should be easy to verify that they had an out of the body experience. Instead, you just get anecdotes, of people repeating past experiences with no controls to blind it. Human memory is surprisingly faulty, people can fill in details later on in their memory, and so on. So it's very easy to think that you had a dream in which you saw something for the first time, and then later recognize it while you're awake; but it's also possible that you brain just filled in the memory when you saw it later. Or maybe you had seen it in the past but didn't have conscious recollection. And so on. Simply hearing people say that they had OOB experiences in which they saw things that they never saw in person is not particularly credible.
stupidcar 11y ago
Nobody's disputing that OOB experiences are “real”. What's at issue is the mechanism(s) by which they occur. The hypothesis in the article is that it's a psychological effect that can be exacerbated by brain injury. And the evidence outlined, such as experiments that can reliably produce equivalent effects, and similar brain lesions accompanying the most extreme examples provides some, although not overwhelming, evidence for the hypothesis. If you're suggesting that people's perceptions and consciousness are actually physically separating from their body, well then that's just another hypothesis. One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can be taken seriously. That is how science works. Simply saying “this phenomenon is strange” doesn't change anything. It doesn't make it immune to scientific inquiry, and it doesn't lower the standard of proof required of explanations. Science has successfully explained many phenomenon far weirder than OOB experiences.
- phkahler 11y ago
  >> One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can be taken seriously. IMHO it only needs supporting evidence - good solid evidence. A proposed mechanism is nice but is it really necessary? Do they really know how aspirin works? If so, did they prior to widespread use? Does anyone have a mechanism for quantum physics? Did Kepler have a mechanism for planetary motion? I think a lot of science is actually people looking for the mechanism to explain accepted phenomena.
anigbrowl 11y ago
That's a good question to ask, but AFAIK the answer is 'we tried that and so far have been unable to exploit it.' If OBE's involved some unsuspected extension of physical reality, then when someone is outside their own body, it should be possible to learn things that would not be knowable otherwise, eg to report an item placed under a bed, out of view of the experimental subject lying in the bed. I don't know if that's been tried, but there was extensive research into psychic phenomena in the 1970s that failed to yield any useful results. If you could gather hidden information during an induced out-of-body-experience that would be massive scientific breakthrough, and such an experiment would be trivially easy to design, so why hasn't it happened? I am sympathetic to the idea because I've had chemically-induced experiences, including during surgery, that seemed extremely real, as well as certain experiences with precognition that I am unable to explain (ie trying to apply the most rigorous observational standards to an unfalsifiable situation; I am honestly unable to explain the phenomenon but I can't exclude the possibility of an episodic delusion, so scientifically it's almost worthless).

coldcode 11y ago

The more we learn about the brain the more amazing/frightening it becomes. What if this type of experience can be triggered on purpose via drugs or other mechanisms. It would make a scary as hell weapon.

dx211 11y ago

I had an interesting experience a few days ago: I was walking to my office, through a small cluster of other buildings in the same complex, and I ended up walking perpendicular to someone who I immediately recognized, based on body shape, face, hairstyle, dress, and shoes, as myself. Of course my rational bits knew it was just some other guy who looked a lot like me, but it was a close enough match that my recognition bits would intermittently "lock on" and tell me I was watching myself from 20 feet away. And that was disturbing as hell. Anyway, now I know I have a doppelgänger working two buildings over, so I need to figure out what team he's on so I can crash his next office unwinder.

gamegoblin 11y ago
When I was in high school, my girlfriend texted me a photo of me kissing some girl (not her) who was sitting in a swing. At first I thought "Woah who is taking secret pictures of me?!" but then I realized I didn't recognize the girl I was kissing in the photo. So at that point I'm really confused -- there is a photo of me kissing a girl I don't know, in a park I've never been to. Photoshop? Is this a prank? My girlfriend then quickly follows up with "Weird right? I met this couple at the park and he looks just like you from the side. From the front he has a bit of a wider face, though. And he's Italian." Had she not told me that, I would have completely believed that I'd been photoshopped into a photo. I couldn't spot a single dissimilarity. I wonder if any relationships have ended because someone's significant other saw what looked like them with another person.
- robertk 11y ago
  Phenotype space is probably not continuous given genome structure. So it appears like you can vary features almost arbitrarily, as you see in the Oblivion video game, but in fact you see a lot of genetic collisions due to a much smaller search space combined with the birthday paradox.

mrob 11y ago

This sounds similar to the much more common false awakening dreams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening I get these occasionally, sometimes with multiple nested dreams, and the sensation of waking is highly realistic. It can last a subjectively long time until some detail tips me off that it's not real (usually attempting to read and the text reading like Markov chain output). If I'm capable of generating all this highly believable imagery it seems only a minor change to also generate a model of my own body.

zkhalique 11y ago
It's interesting how you sometimes can't tell if you are awake or not, when you are sleeping, but you can ALWAYS tell if you're awake when you're awake. Looks like some faculties are working robustly when you are awake which aren't when you are asleep. That said, I've had dreams where characters in my dream knew things I didn't, and even made fun of me. When I woke up, I realized that they were actually quite interesting, fully developed characters with their own personalities and knowledge! And they would develop over several months of dreaming. Sometimes I also awoke with a solution to a problem I had been thinking about the night before. So... interesting!
dx211 11y ago
I've had lucid dreams on and off for several years. I remember one particular dream where I was visiting a friend, and he showed me a project he was working on in his back room. It was a hand-cranked machine that looked like a mashup of an astronomical orrery and an automatic transmission with the case taken off. Before I woke up, I was able to examine it for some time, and as far as I can recall, I could see each piece, in motion and interacting with its adjacent parts, with perfect resolution. Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)
krick 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Doing a sensory deprivation experiment once gave me an OOBE. It was pretty wild, didn't have enough time to start doing research though. One of the experiments I would run is have an assistant go into another room and write or draw something on a pad, then do your OOBE, go over to the room and read the pad, then come back into your body, wake up and tell them what they wrote (or reproduce it). That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted to test. The interesting bit from this research is that it adds a bit of credence to the notion that you can at least perceive you are outside your body, given the right conditions. The question being then how you do this to yourself on demand without sticking an electrode into your head in order to do some research on it. [1] http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html

zkhalique 11y ago
You can do this without paying an assistant. Just have a display show a random number in a room that changes every minute.
declan 11y ago
>That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted to test. I take it you were unable to reproduce any psychic claims! :) If you could, it would be a trivial way to win $1M: http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html The fact that the James Randi challenge has existed (in one form or another) since 1964, and no psychic in over half a century has ever passed the challenge, well, that should speak volumes about psychic/paranormal/parapsychology claims.
- robertk 11y ago
  To play devil's advocate, it could also indicate Randi is using a god of the gaps type play and psychics have given up knowing he won't part with the money.
  - btilly 11y ago
    Nope. He works with the psychic to agree on a test of what the psychic claims to be able to do, with low enough probability that you can't pass by chance. (I believe the threshold is somewhere below 1/million.) Doesn't matter what ability you think you have. A test can be set up and agreed to. A number of psychics have wound up concluding that their abilities won't work under the influence of unbelievers. But nobody that I know of has complained that Randi was not willing to set up a fair test.

jarin 11y ago

Reminds me of the classic "Tulpa" creepypasta: http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa

yeukhon 11y ago

So how do you actually create doppelgänger on your own?

Phithagoras 11y ago

This story reminds me a lot of the Dostoevsky novel "The Double". Does anyone know if Dostoevsky himself suffered an incident like this, or of any similar incidents at the time that he may have heard about?

dang 11y ago
He definitely used his own experiences with epilepsy and pre-epileptic visions when writing The Idiot, but that was much later. I think The Double had more purely literary antecedents. Doppelgängers were an established trope by then, which Dostoevsky got from the German romantics—people like E.T.A. Hoffmann, who specialized in stories with weird phenomena that could have a natural explanation (e.g. the mentally ill hero's delusional imagination) but are uncanny and probably magical all the same. The Double was only Dostoevsky's second novel but it was one of the best things he ever wrote. It's fabulous! And short.
samwiseg 11y ago
Poe also wrote a pretty disturbing short story about a doppelganger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilson_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilson_(short_story)
re_todd 11y ago
There is a good foreign film about a doppelganger called "The Double Life of Véronique" by the great European director Krzysztof Kieślowski. It's one of the few times I've watched a foreign movie more than once.

smoyer 11y ago

I've seen pictures of a guy that was once a college student in our city. Though I never met him, my sister walked up to him and started a conversation - convinced it was me. When his voice didn't match she still thought it was me trying to prank me. Finally she called me at work and heard my voice while he was talking to someone else. I wish I'd have bumped into him while he lived here.

sethammons 11y ago

Story time. When I was 4 or so, I fell asleep at my aunt's house on the couch. I recall being above my body, looking down. I then looked over to the table where the adults were, still looking down. I could look down upon the table and its contents, something I could not see normally (hey, I was 4 and small, I could not see over the edge of the thing). This is the first time I ever saw square pizza. From Dominoes. The experience of being out of body was not meaningful to me at the time, but, man, square pizza?! I remember thinking that was quite novel.

robertk 11y ago
I've heard enough of these stories to have no doubt this is a real experience, but what could a scientific explanation of this possibly look like? I take coherence of worldview very seriously and will rewrite my entire ontology if necessary, but I'm having difficulties here. I don't want to accept the cognitive dissonance and say you're making it up or are fabricating the memory, or simply dismiss this comment altogether. On the other hand, it seems a very difficult hallucination to conjure.
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  Giving possible scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena on HN: It's like asking for downvotes. There's very little social approval of that behavior here.
  - robertk 11y ago
    The problem is you're using "supernatural" as a semantic stop sign (http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/). Would it help if I rephrased it as: given this natural phenomenon reported by thousands of people in a wide array of circumstances, what is a possible scientific explanation?
    - dasil003 11y ago
      Excellently put. "Supernatural" around here is just shorthand for "bullshit", something is only "supernatural" until it is explained, and then it just "natural" and no one has a problem with it. But where I think this is harmful is for rationalists who don't want to acknowledge that some things may be true but ultimately unprovable or unexplainable because of the limited human perspective. That's what I think is interesting about philosophy and metaphysics—the ability to play around and ask what-if about things which probably are unknowable. This opens you up to a much wider world of ideas than that which is reasonably tractable by today's science.

jonah 11y ago

François Brunelle did a photoseries called "I’m not a look-alike!" photographing unrelated people who do look alike. Pretty neat. https://portrait.photogrist.com/francois-brunelle/ https://portrait.photogrist.com/francois-brunelle/ http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2013/02/me-myself-and-i-francois-brunelle-and-his-doppelganger-project-find-your-look-alike/ http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2013/02/me-myself-and-i-fra... (His site is down otherwise I would link to the source.)

brusch64 11y ago

All that happened a long time ago, but in 2001 I went to a event in the next bigger town. There were lots of people strolling around, suddenly a girl greeted me a little bit too enthusiastic. I didn't know her at all, but greeted her and started small talk with her. She was obviously bugged and asked me if I didn't know her ? I declined, but she didn't give up. She thought she knew me from a party from a town about 15km away and had an affair with him on this party. She was very angry, that I didn't recognise her and didn't remember any thing. She even knew which school this guy went to (different school) and some things about his friends. She didn't trust me that I wasn't this guy and was pretty angry that I didn't recognize her. Never met this guy. Don't know if he was really so similar to me, but it was a really strange experience.

rainer_muell 11y ago

Will these insights induce the next paradigm shift in the science of torture? Simply hook the victim to a brain stimulator and alter his perception of reality. Can be administered by the press of a button and is even cleaner than water-boarding.