Creepy Green Light
Paranormal Adept
So with that flawed logic - you must believe that Heflin's UFO isn't a model train wheel either.
-
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
A Troubling Observation About UFO Reality
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Trajanus
Paranormal Adept
If any logic is flawed, it's the insistence that the object MUST be a truck mirror even though this has NOT been proven. In fact there's no real evidence, since the only mirror displayed for comparison is FAR from a match. As for the Heflin object, a train wheel is at best a possibility NOT a fact. It would be a fact if Heflin confessed to it, or if a wire supporting the object was definitely proven to exist. Heflin initially thought it was from a nearby Marine base--pretty strange for a putative hoaxer intent on convincing people he had a genuine pic of a UFO.
Creepy Green Light
Paranormal Adept
Ok, so when I see Boeing 737 fly over my house it's not really a Boeing 737 unless the pilot confesses to it - even though I can tell what it is and that it looks exactly like other 737's. Lol.
Trajanus
Paranormal Adept
Either you're trolling, don't read my posts or can't learn...Yet again, the truck mirror does NOT look "exactly" like the McMinnville object!!! FAR from it!! There are a number of obvious differences pointed out at least twice already....
Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
In the predictive procession model discussed in that paper the argument is that we are bottom up processors and not top down processors so what we see is firstly a controlled hallucination thanks to the interplay of sensory systems and internal processing, but our memory banks are the predictive component that cause us to see what we expect to see.
So, if we go back to my model that the ufo stimulus is in fact a very strange and unique stimulus unfamiliar to the memory banks then the predictive processing mechanism will aid in helping to fill in the blanks and make this very strange object appear coherent and fit into our own personal narrative of seeing something weird in the sky. And when such a stimulus is very close to a witness we see some kind of reality breakdown that is along the lines of a hallucinogenic or schizophrenic event, also covered in the article, which is where the high strange component comes into play. Our system will not allow external reality to violate internal knowledge and so something about the strangeness of the ufo renders something for the witness that they can integrate even though what they are seeing makes no sense up close I. E. flying hotels, flying tank structures, spider webbed honeycombed craft, black wrought iron interiors etc.
So it's not mind control so much as the interplay of received information from senses combined with memory expectations and how our virtual reality processing systems creates what we see. Does thay make sense?
marduk
quelling chaos since 2352BC
Not really. At least not to me.
Because what I think you just said that we hallucinate every time we see something new.
I don't think we do that.
Trajanus
Paranormal Adept
Right a more parsimonious view of HS is the phenomenon is putting on a show, probably to confuse us.
marduk
quelling chaos since 2352BC
Actually I think parsimony would say that they're doing it probably with nothing to do with us.
Because if they're trying to confuse us, it's a spectacular failure. At least to the general population that thinks it's nonsense.
If they're trying to communicate, they're also failing.
The simplest solution is they're either stupid, or it has nothing to do with us.
Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
Well technicially according to leading consciousness research we are always hallucinating. But you keep placing the ufo in the container of the ordinary. It's not just something new.....it's something unique that is beyond our sensory capacity. This is not like seeing a new kind of fish....we've been down that road before. I'm arguing the the ufo is such a strange and bizarre stimulus that it results in the up close high strange witness reports as we know them.
And giving them agency is wrong think as well. We have to start first with how the human perceives a unique stimulus before we get into all that magical alien mind control thing that people look to. We need to stop inventing realities for the ufo and start with understanding human perceptual reality first.
Whose 'leading consciousness research' are you referring to? You've cited Donald Hoffman earlier in this discussion, whose claims have been described as presenting only "a framework for a hypothesis." In one of your last few posts you've referred to a specific paper. I must have missed the link to it, so would you provide it again? And please link other papers by other consciousness researchers who have contributed to the 'leading consciousness research' you allude to. Finally, what do you mean by the term 'technically' in the sentence I've quoted above? Thanks.
ETA: I've tracked back in the current discussion here to your link to a recent post in the C&P thread by @Soupie and several links he provided there, which have been discussed in that thread in the last several days. I gather that your reference to 'leading consciousness research' is a reference to the papers linked by Soupie. Perhaps either you or Soupie could provide at this point in this thread a succinct summary of the hypothesis expressed or assumed variously in these few papers. Anyone here who is sufficiently interested in this hypothesis and its relevance to ufo research can follow these links and read the papers Soupie has linked. Here is the link you provided several pages back to Soupie's post in C&P and the papers he linked in support of his particular approach to 'consciousness studies' and the nature of 'perception':
A Troubling Observation About UFO Reality
Last edited:
Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one | Aeon Essays
I'd say more but this was posted already in the C & P thread. But I don't believe you subscribe to @Soupie 's version of reality.
I'd say more but this was posted already in the C & P thread. But I don't believe you subscribe to @Soupie 's version of reality.
That essay might be most helpful in orienting newcomers to the issues involved in the hypothesis put forward by the reductivist cognitive neuroscientists that @Soupie follows.
It seems apparent then that to pursue our present discussion in this thread we need also to consult at least the recent discussion in C&P. You are correct that I don't subscribe to @Soupie's approaches to major issues in consciousness studies, especially concerning the nature of perception.
Extract:
"Complexity measures of consciousness have already been used to track changing levels of awareness across states of sleep and anaesthesia. They can even be used to check for any persistence of consciousness following brain injury, where diagnoses based on a patient’s behaviour are sometimes misleading. At the Sackler Centre, we are working to improve the practicality of these measures by computing ‘brain complexity’ on the basis of spontaneous neural activity – the brain’s ongoing ‘echo’ – without the need for brain stimulation. The promise is that the ability to measure consciousness, to quantify its comings and goings, will transform our scientific understanding in the same way that our physical understanding of heat (as average molecular kinetic energy) depended on the development, in the 18th century, of the first reliable thermometers. Lord Kelvin put it this way: ‘In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it.’ More simply: ‘To measure is to know.’"
To know what? As I see it, to measure is to know that which can be measured, in this case observable 'brain activity'. The question is: can a third-person observation of brain activity in a specific living individual brain reveal the nature of what that individual is experiencing and thinking? If so, how?
Last edited:
marduk
quelling chaos since 2352BC
Reading on we come to this claim:
"We’re taking a description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience, and mapping it to objective descriptions of brain mechanisms."
{What 'description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience' does the author refer to here? We'll have to read on to find out.}
"Some researchers take these ideas much further, to grapple with the hard problem itself. Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that
consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism. The additional mathematical contortions needed also mean that, in practice, integrated information becomes impossible to measure for any real complex system. This is an instructive example of how targeting the hard problem, rather than the real problem, can slow down or even stop experimental progress."
Several parts back in the C&P thread we discussed Tononi's 'Integrated Information Theory', discovering in medias res that in his third published version of this theory, published at the time of our discussions of his earlier versions, Tononi and Koch had recognized that the complex phenomenology of experience, radically temporal in its nature, could not be tracked and accounted for in the terms of IIT at that point in its development. Thus it seems apparent that "targeting the hard problem" is indeed targeting "the real problem" that experimental progress in neuroscience must address.
The founders of the discipline of neurophenomenology (Varela, Thompson, and their colleagues) recognized this decades ago and began developing the methods of neurophenomenology. The author of the Aeon paper claims that his research program differs from neurophenomenology in significant ways. Let us read on and see how.
"We’re taking a description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience, and mapping it to objective descriptions of brain mechanisms."
{What 'description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience' does the author refer to here? We'll have to read on to find out.}
"Some researchers take these ideas much further, to grapple with the hard problem itself. Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that
consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism. The additional mathematical contortions needed also mean that, in practice, integrated information becomes impossible to measure for any real complex system. This is an instructive example of how targeting the hard problem, rather than the real problem, can slow down or even stop experimental progress."
Several parts back in the C&P thread we discussed Tononi's 'Integrated Information Theory', discovering in medias res that in his third published version of this theory, published at the time of our discussions of his earlier versions, Tononi and Koch had recognized that the complex phenomenology of experience, radically temporal in its nature, could not be tracked and accounted for in the terms of IIT at that point in its development. Thus it seems apparent that "targeting the hard problem" is indeed targeting "the real problem" that experimental progress in neuroscience must address.
The founders of the discipline of neurophenomenology (Varela, Thompson, and their colleagues) recognized this decades ago and began developing the methods of neurophenomenology. The author of the Aeon paper claims that his research program differs from neurophenomenology in significant ways. Let us read on and see how.
Last edited:
Hmm. That's a sweeping statement with which I need to register disagreement. I will agree that philosophy of mind is a vast, complex, and contentious discipline, complicated by profound differences in the approaches of the two major schools of POM, the analytical and the phenomenological. But philosophers of science have also necessarily engaged the major issues and arguments raised in consciousess and perception studies. The field of Consciousness Studies, now about thirty years into its development, is an unavoidably interdisciplinary field within which none of the disciplines involved can be ignored. That's what makes it so fascinating, despite the investment of time required to pursue the various strands of its development.
marduk
quelling chaos since 2352BC
Sure.
And how exactly does it propel the debate forward?
If you throw a rock at a UFO, what do you think would happen?
Which debate? The one concerning the nature of consciousness, mind, and reality? Or the one about the materiality of some ufos?
victimized
Skilled Investigator
Multiple UFO witness cases state their car affected by witness of the UFO....such as motors stop running or being lifted.Being that I used to be an inflight photographer in the U.S. Navy, I can tell you that nothing would have appeared on any film taken at night time anyway. But if the military released the photo and it showed structure and/or showed an elliptical shaped craft with no wings or horizontal/vertical stabilizers - then no, I would not say the military was hoaxing the photo.
On the other hand, when a farmer from Orygun miraculously has the worlds only "real" flying saucer photo that happens to look exactly like a truck mirror that is also miraculously below telephone wires - then yeah, I don't believe that.
Once again;
The atmosphere, changed by scientific conversion of Earth's nuclear which belongs to a cold sun fusion. Earth sun became hotter after last conversion incident that incinerated Earth millions of years ago as archaeological evidence.....human artifacts found inside of sink holes inside of coal.
The UFO condition interaction as I witnessed.....causes heated interaction and then I witnessed the burning of the atmosphere and the manifestation of fixed images/bodies as the atmosphere cooled......the manifestation of a many varied condition including human images. Why wouldn't an alien condition cause a recording of the body that interacts with? The UFO condition seems to have interacted with planes (metallic bodies) and car bodies.