10.26.08
Here we go again, the ‘experts’ are stuck on ghosts
And the experts, once again, are evolutionary psychologists.
Could someone tell these evolutionary psychologists that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false. I have given up trying, they are too far gone.
I welcome any effort to assist people with their confusions over psychic phenomena, ghosts, or reincarnation. But the evo-psych approach isn’t going to resolve the problem.
People are stubborn in these beliefs because they are traces of something real but which they can’t understand, and which proceed by their own momentum from half-truth to quarter-truth to…., evo-psych idiocy.
Belief in the paranormal reflects normal brain activity carried to an extreme.
Once again we can cite our own stand-by here, a popular post on Schopenhauer on death.
Incidentally the real founder of modern ‘Darwinism’, Wallace, was a believer in ghosts, and attempted to research the issue…
If you conceive the issues in terms of the concepts given by ordinary language, ‘ghost’, ‘esp’, etc, you tend to get nowhere because they are imaginary versions of something else.
The perspective of Schopenhauer can help here, because it shows how access to knowledge of such things is blocked at the limits of the phenomenal. Thus the delusive nature of our beliefs is not indicative of anything whatever.
I am puzzled at the stance of scientists here. First they get evolution wrong, then they get psychology wrong, then they get religion wrong, now they are going to get the paranormal wrong.
Every generation of man has had such beliefs, which doesn’t make them correct.
But human historical culture has immense resources that can clarify some of the confusions.
What is the consensus these psychologists are speaking of?
Why don’t psychologists sit down and attempt the methods of Buddhists for a half century, plus study the literature on the subject? Fifty years is a long time, but not so long as the cultural delusion of Darwinism.
Meanwhile, the dumbing down of the human psychological totality around reductionism/Darwinism is doing immense harm to human culture.
Wise up, guys. Your science is a joke. A peer reviewed joke.
If you take the word “normal” as characteristic of the norm or majority, then it is the superstitious and those who believe in ESP, ghosts and psychic phenomena who are normal. Most scientists and skeptics roll their eyes at such sleight of word, asserting that belief in anything for which there is no empirical evidence is a sign of mental pathology and not normalcy. But a growing number of researchers, in fields such as evolutionary psychology and neurobiology, are taking such beliefs seriously in one important sense: as a window into the workings of the human mind. The studies are an outgrowth of research on religious faith, a (nearly) human universal, and are turning out to be useful for explaining fringe beliefs, too. The emerging consensus is that belief in the supernatural seems to arise from the same mental processes that underlie everyday reasoning and perception. But while the belief in ghosts, past lives, the ability of the mind to move matter and the like originate in normal mental processes, those processes become hijacked and exaggerated, so that the result is, well, Walter Semkiw.