Psychic phenomena caught on cam

[zurew]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

There seems to be no pattern.

I don't see why we would think that, but regardless, that would just mean that the facts in the video are brute (in principle they dont have any explanation) or they are just random (which you understandably had an issue with). Both (bruteness and randomness) are compatible with  both physicalism and idealism.

But I dont think that psychic thing necessarily opens up a debate about physicalism vs idealism, because I don't see why psychic abilities wouldn't be in principle compatible with physicalism.

 

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Suddenly, they are willing to entertain the most absurd and groundless hypotheses just to hold on to their materialist assumptions. Meanwhile, if you grant idealist assumptions, the answers become simple: consciousness is at the bottom, physical quantities are the results of measurement and don't have standalone existence. Likewise, when granting psychic assumptions, the answers become simple: information about the universe can be obtained non-locally; no five-digit probabilities, no vague unexplained patterns/mechanisms.

At the end of the day, it will be about what kind of theoretical virtues you care about more.

With respect to the topic at hand about providing a hypothesis that can explain the facts in the video - I think you need to do a lot more work to establish psychic phenomena being the best or even a good explanation and I don't see why after invoking psychic ability you would be freed from needing to provide the patterns/mechanisms of that ability.

So there are two claims there, 1 that psychic ability explains the facts and 2 that psychic ability itself is brute. But if you grant bruteness when it comes to that ability, I don't see why a phyiscalist couldnt make the same move and say for example that Rainbolt's subsconscious mind picked up on patterns and thats how he managed to do it (and also claiming that the subconscious mind is brute, and it doesn't have any further explanation). Or they can invoke any other mechanism and then claim that that particular mechanism is brute.

 

But anyway, there seem to be two different discussions. 1 about what explanation can account for the facts in the video and 2 physicalism vs idealism. I think that solving the second isn't needed in order to solve the first one.

 

Also just as a further point, I don't think that all versions of physicalism commited to the idea that only things with physical quantities exist. My understanding is that as long as the mechanisms/things/relations that are invoked are not mind dependent, those can be categorized potentially under physicalism (so that can include things that are outside of time and space that cant be detected ,  and they can have an existence without a Mind grounding them).

So a physicalist in pinciple could invoke weird shit like: things/laws/principles outside of time and space with causal power exist,and their existence isn't grounded/depended on a Mind.

Edited Sunday at 10:23 PM by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

18 minutes ago, zurew said:

I don't see why we would think that

It "seems", meaning as far as we can tell, there is no pattern. If not, what is the pattern?

 

18 minutes ago, zurew said:

Both (bruteness and randomness) are compatible with  both physicalism and idealism.

I was not bringing up idealism vs physicalism here to argue for or against either one. I was just showing how similar the thinking is between physicalists and skeptics of psychical phenomena when encountering an anomaly, as a rhetorical device, as many here are familiar with the flaws of physicalism.

 

18 minutes ago, zurew said:

- I think you need to do a lot more work to establish telepathy

I'm not establishing anything. I'm saying the video becomes so simple to explain when you grant psychical phenomena. And I'm pointing out how not-simple the alternative explanations are.

 

18 minutes ago, zurew said:

and I don't see why after invoking telepathy you would be freed from needing to provide the patterns/mechanisms of telepathy.

There is no mechanism but the fact that information is gathered and beamed into your mind so to speak. It's truly mysterious. And that's not a problem. It's materialists that need to find a mechanism.

 

18 minutes ago, zurew said:

Also just as a further point, I don't think that all versions of physicalism commited to the idea that only things with physical quantities exist. My understanding is that as long as the mechanisms/things/relations that are invoked are not mind dependent, those can be categorized potentially under physicalism (so that can include things that are outside of time and space that cant be detected ,  and they can have an existence without a Mind grounding them).

So a physicalist in pinciple could invoke weird shit like: things outside of time and space with causal power exist,and their existence isn't grounded/depended on a Mind.

They believe they have standalone existence, as I said.

Edited Sunday at 10:33 PM by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

It "seems", meaning as far as we can tell, there is no pattern. If not, what is the pattern?

I am agnostic on it. I don't see the reason to claim either.

What is the seeming that makes you to take the position that there isn't a pattern vs taking the agnostic position of "Im not sure if there is a pattern".

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

I'm not establishing anything. I'm saying the video becomes so simple to explain when you grant psychical phenomena. And I'm pointing out how not-simple the alternative explanations are.

Yeah, but presumably simplicity is not the only virtue we care about when it comes to explanations.

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

There is no mechanism but the fact that information is gathered and beamed into your mind so to speak. It's truly mysterious. And that's not a problem. It's materialists that need to find a mechanism

Again I don't see why materlalists couldn't claim bruteness.

The idea that the PSR (Principle of sufficient reason) is somehow necessary for or entailed by physicalism is something that I would ask an argument for if you have one.

or I might be misinterpreting and you are trying to say that materialists usually have a norm of asking for or needing to find a further explanation/mechanism for things and you are not claiming that in principle they need to provide one explanation/mechanism for things. If this is the case, then my bad.

Edited Sunday at 11:06 PM by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

I am agnostic on it. I don't see the reason to claim either.

What is the seeming that makes you to take the position that there isn't a pattern vs taking the agnostic position of "Im not sure if there is a pattern".

There seems like there is no pattern, meaning I can't find any pattern. "This is literally just blue". He was given a random zoomed-in picture of a blue sky. That seems like all that was going on there. If you find something, please tell.

 

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Yeah, but presumably simplicity is not the only virtue we care about when it comes to explanations.

Sure, but I think you're overestimating what I'm really saying here. I'm not here to undoubtably prove psychic phenomena, even though the title might suggest that. This is all I said:

On 31.1.2025 at 5:37 PM, Carl-Richard said:

If you just accept that psychic phenomena exist, the explanation becomes so incredibly simple.

 

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Again I don't see why materlalists couldn't claim bruteness.

I'm not the one framing this as either/or. Materialist, highly improbable and vague "explanations", are fine too. I'm just pointing out that psychic explanations are particularly fine. When you see essentially a color and you derive that we're speaking of Mexico, and then you straight after derive we're speaking of Pretoria, South Africa, that's headshot for psychic phenomena. If you want to go out to definitely prove psychic phenomena, there are other ways to do that.

 

1 hour ago, zurew said:

The idea that the PSR (Principle of sufficient reason) is somehow necessary for or entailed by physicalism is something that I would ask an argument for if you have one.

or I might be misinterpreting and you are trying to say that materialists usually have a norm of asking for or needing to find a further explanation/mechanism for things and you are not claiming that in principle they need to provide one explanation/mechanism for things. If this is the case, then my bad.

Man, I didn't bring up materialists having to justify their metaphysics; you did 😂 Again, I just said this looks, smells and feels like psychic phenomena, and then I point out that @Nemra's skepticism seems to be putting materialism as the default position and making it harder for him to see that, because again, he is willing to gulp down five-digit probabilities and vague nothing-burgers.

What is probably the strongest argument in favor of the non-psychical position is @something_else's estimate that he has 20k hours of playtime and that considering essentially everything is streamed, something weird is bound to be caught on tape. But I "intuit" with my pseudo-psychical powers that I could go on a Rainbolt research spree and find dozens of such clips where psychic phenomena similarly looks like an obvious explanation. You can take that up if you want and "prove" that I'm indeed "psychic" (or just lucky? 🤔).

Edited Monday at 12:21 AM by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

19 hours ago, Nemra said:

@Carl-Richard, the answer could also be materialistic.

More time and information is needed to negate what is not the case.

You could say it's psychic using your understanding of your direct experience of psychic phenomenon. However, materialistic answer could also satisfy.

It could be both at the same time. I don't know. Luck and psychic phenomenon could look the same. It's just that psychic phenomenon is less likely the case, but could be in the end.

I'm considering that psychic humans are less represented as they are few of them.

I agree with all that, except calling it "less likely". Psychic phenomena is so much more common than you think. It's an everyday occurence for many people, and in a real sense, like @The Crocodile is saying, reality is psychical.

Because let's even assume Rainbolt used distinct memories of past games to somehow deduce Mexico and Pretoria, South Africa. Even if we grant he isn't able to fully "download" the correct answer with atleast some deliberation and weighing of options, how exactly does his mind pull out the relevant things to deliberate on? Why those particular memories? And how does his mind land on exactly those two options and not anything else?

I bet if you gave a computer access to all of his previous games and made it present a list of most plausible answers, you would have a long list of almost equally plausible answers, and you would have no good reason to decisively pick one over the other.

The very mechanics of the human mind is psychic. It acts on very limited information, and it pulls that information seemingly out of nowhere. More generally, it runs on relevance realization. And that's what distinguishes us from AIs and why we currently don't have fully autonomous robots doing everything humans can do.

Edited Monday at 12:13 PM by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

6 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I'm not the one framing this as either/or.

I explcitly stated and implied multiple times that it is compatible with both.

6 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Man, I didn't bring up materialists having to justify their metaphysics. You did 😂

Where did I brought up that they need to justify their metaphysics?

"its materialists that need to find an explanation" was the statement that made me think that you tried to claim that they have an obligation that idealists don't have. I don't think its unreasonable to interpret your statement that way.

 

6 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

There seems like there is no pattern, meaning I can't find any pattern. "This is literally just blue". He was given a random zoomed-in picture of a blue sky. That seems like all that was going on there. If you find something, please tell.

The potential pattern I was referring to isn't necessarily picture related in that "whats on the picture" . But looking back I can see the google watermark on the image at different positions (the exact watermark position might be region specific)

It could also be about  patterns related to the timing of when a sky picture is brought up by the algorithm.

Or another one could be related to camera quality that can be different from region to region.

6 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Again, I just said this looks, smells and feels like psychic phenomena, and then I point out that @Nemra's skepticism seems to be putting materialism as the default position and making it harder for him to see that, because again, he is willing to gulp down five-digit probabilities and vague nothing-burgers.

You seem to be implying  that psychic phenomena is either the best or one of the most reasonable explanations which is a crazy stance in my view.

What set of things have you seen that moved your priors so much in favour of psychic phenomena being a probable explanation for things like this?

My priors on psychic phenomena must be way different than yours, because I would consider so many other alternative explanations before concluding that "its more than likely that it was a psychic phenomena" or "one of the most reasonable explanation is that it was a psychic phenomena".

When there are multiple alternative explanations that doesnt involve any psychic phenomena and you still find it a good explanation that epistemically opens up so much bullshit when it is not necessary.

At this point whats stopping anyone from creating any incredibly weird esoteric, ontologically rich explanation for any given set of facts given that "simplicity" is valued this much?

We can eliminate all the cringe low chance events and make all of them expected and probable by invoking invisible beings with certain intentions working behind the scenes.

Why shouldnt we in principle just eliminate all low chance events and make all of them expected and purposeful under some grand narrative(embracing conspiracy theories)?

Edited Monday at 07:18 AM by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

I just randomly got recommended this one 😂:

 

 

[Jirh]

On 1/31/2025 at 8:18 PM, Vibes said:

Every video I saw online about these psychic powers could be faked. So until I see it in front of me, I can't believe it or disbelieve it.

Even your eyes could deceive you. Magicians use sleight of hand to make their magic tricks, and it's nothing but physics.

On 1/31/2025 at 10:17 PM, Carl-Richard said:

He gets a photograph and is supposed to guess where in the world the photograph was taken. He got a photograph of a clear blue sky twice and guessed the right country twice.

So what? Try a third, fourth, fifth, etc... time.

Make a real study, not a lucky video nonsense.

[Jirh]

On 1/31/2025 at 7:57 PM, AION said:

This can be faked so easily.

Nuff said.

[Salvijus]

 

[Carl-Richard]

23 hours ago, zurew said:

I explcitly stated and implied multiple times that it is compatible with both.

Where did I brought up that they need to justify their metaphysics?

"its materialists that need to find an explanation" was the statement that made me think that you tried to claim that they have an obligation that idealists don't have. I don't think its unreasonable to interpret your statement that way.

Again, I brought up materialism vs idealism as a rhetorical device (which I maybe should have made more clear) while you actually started talking about materialism vs idealism. That's not really what the discussion is about. Materialists tend to be skeptical of psychical phenomena, and that informs the discussion, but I wasn't intending to evaluate materialism as a metaphysical system (and weigh it up against idealism).

 

23 hours ago, zurew said:

The potential pattern I was referring to isn't necessarily picture related in that "whats on the picture" . But looking back I can see the google watermark on the image at different positions (the exact watermark position might be region specific)

Sure, those are valid explanations. I would re-iterate that I'm open for all explanations, but also that virtually all cognition is fundamentally psychic and that we're talking about a spectrum.

When you have extremely little learned information to go by (especially unconscious information), but the right answer just "occurs" to you and you can't really explain why, then that is on the far end of the psychic spectrum. This is likely the times where Rainbolt acts surprised and turns off the camera (he has no idea how he got it right). Meanwhile, the times where he thinks or vocalizes a particular reason for why he picked what he picked (which is what he most often does), he generally seems less surprised, like "yep, that is what I thought". But even that is on the psychic spectrum, because why his mind produced exactly those answers is still mysterious.

For the cases that are closer to zero learned information, you would have to find clips like the one I just posted above. But again, such clips are not "proof" of anything. If you want "proof" (which is of course also debatable), go read actual scientific studies on psychic phenomena. When Rupert Sheldrake attended a panel in my town, he mentioned that there is a vast psychic literature of replicated experiments with overwhelming statistical significance (the names of the institutes and journals escape me; I haven't read them because I don't need convincing 😆).

Edited yesterday at 01:05 AM by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

11 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

When Rupert Sheldrake attended a panel in my town, he mentioned that there is a vast psychic literature of replicated experiments with overwhelming statistical significance (the names of the institutes and journals escape me;

I know about Rupert, but I havent checked the studies yet, so I have no comments on them.

I also know about some of the parapsych experiments that were done by the CIA , but I havent done a quality analysis on them, but they definitely seemed to be interesting back then.

The interesting part of these discussions to me isn't necessarily about whether certain things are true or exist, but more about adjusting my epistemic standards and priors so that they can account for more things in a way where they don't lead to absurd categorization/conclusion. 

And yes, sometimes this can potentially mean that one needs to accept weird things being true/existing.

11 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I haven't read them because I don't need convincing 😆).

In your case it seems that even if all those studies are bad, you still have independent reason(s) that makes you think that the phenomena is real.

What convinced you?

Edited 22 hours ago by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

I once made a thread about some prophetic or rather spatially non-local but temporally parallel dreams I had. I think I just had another one, and this one is probably one of the weaker ones, but it's still interesting so I'll share it:

Firstly, all these dreams are nightmares which end with me suddenly waking up. I seldom have such nightmares, and I can't remember the last one I've had. And all of them seem to happen temporally parallell to the real-life event (so while I'm dreaming, the event is happening).

So in the dream, me and two people I know are in a garage. One of them is standing on what looks like a skateboard, but instead of a wooden board, it's this thin, red, carbon-fiber-like but also spandex-like fabric that is stretched out really thin, and it has a tiny hole in it, maybe two centimeters in diameter, near one of the corners.

They are very inexperienced with skating and are barely able to keep balance. They slowly skate over to this low (probably 30 centimeters tall) non-mortar brick wall consisting of decently sized natural rocks. Then they lose balance and fall ontop of this wall of rather pointy, sharp and unwelcoming rocks. They really hurt themselves and lie there screaming.

Me and the other person walk over to see if the person is alright. The person starts shouting really fast and desperately while in intense pain, saying "Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now!" etc., and they just keep going. And the other person starts supporting one of their legs which seems totally broken, almost missing parts of it. In general, their legs were really badly broken. As their voice becomes more and more desperate, I wake up from the dream.

It also turns out I had overslept (the time was 1 PM and I had to rush to get to a meeting). Anyways, I found out later that day, as I was asleep and starting at 12:30 PM, there was a school shooting in Sweden, the worst they have ever experienced. This reminds me of one of my earlier dreams that occured during one of the worst disasters that particular area had ever experienced.

Now, the overlap here with the dream and the real-life event is obviously people getting hurt, lying on the ground, probably some of them screaming for help, possibly somebody screaming to call 911, and possibly somebody having their legs severely broken and not being able to get up.

But then as I'm writing this, I just thought about something else: why was the skateboard made out of red fabric? Why was there a tiny hole in it? I feel like I'm really stretching it here, but you simply cannot not ask the question: is it a bullet hole? Is it red because it has something to do with blood? Or danger?

That last detail is not really the main attraction that drives it home for me, but it makes you think.

Edited 10 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

12 hours ago, zurew said:

In your case it seems that even if all those studies are bad, you still have independent reason(s) that makes you think that the phenomena is real.

What convinced you?

I think the dream I had last night which I wrote about above came as if you had ordered it 😆 Talk about psychically communicating with the universe 😆 But yes, I've had a decent amount of personal experiences that, even if most aren't "100% proof", if I grant psychic phenomena to be possible, they just become so much easier to explain.

Edited 10 hours ago by Carl-Richard