The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #26240   Message #317050
Posted By: Wolfgang
12-Oct-00 - 05:54 AM
Thread Name: Alternative Beliefs - a pattern?
Subject: RE: Alternative Beliefs - a pattern?
Sorry, I'm coming late to this thread and I'd like to revolve it back for a moment:

Ebbie writes skeptics will often lay it to whatever turns them on- whether it's suggestibility, ignorance of 'science', hallucination, stupidity.. Ebbie, I'd be sad if you'd only remember the bits that sound offending from sceptics arguments. Imagine you cut a lemon in two halves, squeeze one half slightly and lick at the open side. What do you feel? I'm safe to bet you produce more saliva than in the seonds before the thought and even smell or taste that lemon. You smell it from your memory of how it smells and I can assure you that the very same neurons are involved in your head as in real smelling. My picture was enough to evoke these percepts without any real lemon being involved. Nothing unusual with that.

And there's perception without awareness. It means that you have processed some information by your usual senses but this information has not entered your consciousness. Nevertheless this information may influence later actions by or feelings of you. Like if you hear a very slight change in the inflexion of the voice of a friend (or a different timing of the word flow) and you get a hunch that something has happened or will happen without ever knowing what the sensory origin of that hunch was. In my present opinion: Special ability? Yes. Supernatural ability? No. Just trying to show that not all sceptic explanations are offending.

The original question of this thread is poorly worded: If you mean, Fmaj7, whether there is a higher probability for a believer in astrology also to believe in reincarnation and supernatural explanations of crop circles (compared to a person drawn randomly from the population) the unequivocal response from several surveys is: yes. If you mean as implied in your actual question whether all persons believing in astrology also believe in...the obvious answer is: no, as shown in many responses. People are very variable as individuals, but nevertheless there is a pattern if you average across many individuals.

Wolfgang