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Your personal anecdote and whatever personal conclusions you draw from it are not science. This is the same line of thinking that lets someone have a personal r
by geuis 14y ago
Your personal anecdote and whatever personal conclusions you draw from it are not science. This is the same line of thinking that lets someone have a personal religious experience and then site that as proof of God.
- javert 14y agoHow do you think science gets done, if not by persons? Yes, the author is in error, because he has postulated an arbitrary solution (i.e., one without evidence) to the problem of hearing voices. And, yes, religion also postulates arbirary solutions. tl;dr The problem isn't that he is going on personal observation and experience; it's that he's made an error in doing so.
- seiji 14y agoThe problem is that it's a well understood brain state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia) but if you don't think about it or look it up or realize you're the same as everybody else, you are likely to fill in the blanks with nonsense psychic religiosity.
- ehsanu1 14y agoI'm not supporting jumping to psychic conclusions, but I don't see anything on that page that specifically refutes it. So while it may be very unlikely (which is just a prior based on my own subjective experiences), psychic phenomenon can indeed be scientifically studied, and is studied as well. You might be interested in watching a Google tech talk by Dean Randin (also wrote a book): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew He seems to have been pretty rigorous when investigating possible subconscious psychic activity in regular humans. And it does seem like most people dismiss such things out of hand, which is the very antithesis of scientific thought. Tangentially, I don't think we can call any brain state "well understood", never mind hypnagogia.