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Which "sixth sense" do you consider most likely to be real?


mynah

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Seeing the future, telepathy, telekinesis, communication with the "other side", out of body experiences, etc., have never been proven by science to exist, and yet many people believe in them. If you do, which do you believe in, and what do you personally see as proof of their existence?

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Seeing the future, telepathy, telekinesis, communication with the "other side", out of body experiences, etc., have never been proven by science to exist, and yet many people believe in them. If you do, which do you believe in, and what do you personally see as proof of their existence?

 

I've had many OBEs and a few experiences of telekineses, and some telepathy, so those three at least.

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There can be only one "sixth sense" and that is the ability to discriminate plausible reality from the Bad Memes of pseudoscience and crackpottery.

 

I have this sixth sense in plentitude, which is why >>I<< am Pyrotex, Slayer of Bad Memes.

 

BWAHAHAHAHA... Tremble all ye who believe in UFOs, ESP and boojums. :shrug:

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There can be only one "sixth sense" and that is the ability to discriminate plausible reality from the Bad Memes of pseudoscience and crackpottery.

 

I have this sixth sense in plentitude, which is why >>I<< am Pyrotex, Slayer of Bad Memes.

 

BWAHAHAHAHA... Tremble all ye who believe in UFOs, ESP and boojums. ;)

 

:shrug:

 

:hihi:

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Seeing the future, telepathy, telekinesis, communication with the "other side", out of body experiences, etc., have never been proven by science to exist, and yet many people believe in them. If you do, which do you believe in, and what do you personally see as proof of their existence?
I don’t “believe” in many of the dogma common in the psychic community (though I share many of them, such as belief in the rightness of peace, love, and introspection). However, It’s possible to speculate about “extra senses” without using the terms and conventions of paranormalism.

 

Several species of shark, cuttlefish, and other aquatic exotics have electroreception organs, while some bacteria, fungus, bees, birds, and possibly even humans have magnetoception organs, which allow them to sense the presence of other living animals, and their magnetic heading, respectively, senses beyond the usual five. While these sense are rudimentary, their pinnacle appearing to be the ability of sharks, rays, and similar bottom-feeding predators to catch prey camouflaged or even slightly buried on the sea floor (and also causing them to occasionally attack and damage submarine communication cables), it’s far-fetched but not completely beyond the bounds of scientific plausibility to imagine that such senses could evolve and develop into the ability to sense more detailed data about the neurological activity of other animals, resulting in a form of telepathy.

 

Artificial active electroreception devices such as fMRI scanners show that it’s possible to non-intrusively detect (though not necessarily accurately interpret) brain and nerve activity. Because the signal strength drops off sharply with distance, and is subject to a lot of environmental noise, I think it unlikely that such telepathy could be very “tele”, occurring over great distances as claimed by many paranormalists.

 

Some of the other “senses” mynah lists, such as seeing the future and out of body experiences, seem to me not senses but types of imagination. Nearly every human “sees the future” well enough to do things like drive cars and speculate on the stock market, while anyone who can render a sketch of the interior of a building from its floorplan and elevation drawing is using an out-of-body visualization technique. Such phenomena are more accurately described, as I understand the common use of the terms, as perception rather than senses.

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MoonMan, telekineses really? do tell....

 

Well it's not as exciting as you might think, its unpredictable and doesn't make friends. When I was young I demonstrated making an electric wall clock with a second hand run backward. I also had a knack of causing fluorescent lights to go out by pointing at them and commanding them to go out. Once I did it and the light exploded and everyone in the office ran like rabbits. The two people I shared the office with refused to come back and had to be given a new office. I recommend doing this to get your own private office! Making the lights flicker was fairly easy. When I hit about 35 this stopped completely and never came back. As I get older all of these things seem to be fading. None of them was ever really useful anyway. I also used to cause street lights to go out as I walked or rode my motorcycle under them. I also had many impressive saves from getting a feeling of dread just before something very bad was going to happen. Like getting a feeling of dread as I approached an intersecting with green light and hesitating just enough to avoid a tractor trailer running a read light. Impossible to prove now but i made believers out of several people (my mom thinks I'm demon possessed) OBEs were quite common when I worked shift work and I saw people in places and situations I was able to confirm later on. My wife and I seem to share a common mind set that allows us to know what the other is thinking about even when we are far away (radar love) things like going to pick up the phone to call her and it rings just as I pick it up, knowing she is in trouble or needs my help, and predicting the death of other people. (If I dream of someone being swept away in a flood they die) My grandmother had some of these talents too.

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The "sixth sense" does not render itself to scientific experiment easily because it is not always functional at will, but appears to occurs sporadically. It may be one of those effects, analogous to a winning streak in gambling. For example, we take a person, who just claimed they won the jackpot (they did). To prove this is real we set up an experiment to have them repeat it for the scientific community. If he can not we may conclude, winning streaks do not occur and they have no basis in provable science. This appears to be a place where a rational scientific method may not be the method of choice to settle it one way or the other. It may require chaos theory or statistical predictions to help narrow down when it may occur.

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I don't believe in any of the alleged supernatural senses. There may be something real about intuition but I think it's likely a natural brain process we just don't understand yet, if it exists. OTOH, I don't know if it qualifies as a sense since all of the other senses have sensors built into the nervous system and there's no equivalent for intuition.

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