Occult and Psychical Sciences: "What is BELIEF"? Pt1🔥

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The word occult comes from the Latin occultus (clandestine, hidden, secret), referring to "knowledge of the hidden"

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Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck

-Carlin

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*This group's aim is polite philosophical debate*

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Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life. As such, it is concerned with explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world and our immediate senses.

Metaphysical - Glossary Definition - PBS

Is the Universe Conscious?

Some of the world's most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own.

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At the end of the day, what you choose to believe is your own to choose,  and protected by the US constitution.

(Co-authored with Niemann, Clio, MCcrowler, Left Leaner,Carstonio,and others. Thank you!)

Religion

(Niemann):

A Pew study found that a majority of American Christians, including a majority of evangelical Christians, believe it is possible to find god and “salvation” through other religions (including some non-Christian ones).

Also, many religions don’t even have a comparable concept of “heaven” and “salvation”.  And in the mature forms of the various religions, they don’t at all believe what you claim.

I keep having to bring up this anecdote I read about years ago, about one of the first international conferences on religion, in which representatives from different religions were brought together to promote understanding.  The administrator, legalistic types of the various religions — the day-to-day upholders of the institutions — couldn’t get along or understand each other at all.  They were the rigid “us/them” types.

The various representatives of the inner experiential sides of the religions, however — the meditators and “mystics” you might call them, the monks and nuns — got along great and were thrilled and delighted to meet each other because they all felt they were talking about and familiar with the same things, even though they were from vastly different cultures.

They weren’t dogmatic and didn’t at all feel their religion was the Only True One.  They understood perfectly well that all their imagery was cultural-based metaphor, pointing to an underlying truth common to all.

Hinduism is well-known for its position — in its more mature form — that one can be both a devout Christian, say, and Hindu at the same time. Thomas Merton was a well-known Christian monk who loved Buddhism and held that studying Buddhist texts helped him understand aspects of Christianity better

What is belief?

There are various ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be (Jerry Fodor), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true (Roderick Chisholm), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions (Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson), or as mental states that fill a particular function (Hilary Putnam).[2] Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief (Paul Churchland) and formal epistemologists who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either we have a belief or we don't have a belief") with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence ("there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief").[2][3]

Beliefs are the subject of various important philosophical debates. Notable examples include: "What is the rational way to revise one's beliefs when presented with various sorts of evidence?", "Is the content of our beliefs entirely determined by our mental states, or do the relevant facts have any bearing on our beliefs (e.g. if I believe that I'm holding a glass of water, is the non-mental fact that water is H2O part of the content of that belief)?", "How fine-grained or coarse-grained are our beliefs?", and "Must it be possible for a belief to be expressible in language, or are there non-linguistic beliefs? en.m.wikipedia.org/…

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Religious service attendance has been dropping for decades

Religious service attendance, mapped

www.axios.com/...

Occult :

(Clio 2):

"Not to diss all use of intuition, I had an interest in stage magic at one time and learned there are a few ways that performers have historically been able to convince without actual communication with the dead. So caution is warranted.

The crudest method was simply to work with one or more confederates who only pretended to be audience members.

Or arranging with and paying off an audience member to play along.

Another tack was to identify an audience member in advance and get hold of information about them in clandestine ways (gossip, a confederate chatting them up, even picking their pocket before the show to go through their wallet and returning it just as clandestinely before the lights go down). Today, of course, just a name and address is enough to unearth troves of information in a twinkling.

A further angle was a learned art called "cold reading," which is what niemann's video is sending up. It involves starting with a few tentative, general "messages" (like, "Is there someone who passed away that...I'm seeing the letter N") until they get a "hit," (like perhaps, "My cousin's name was Marianne, but when she was little we called her Nini") and expanding from there, while causing people to quickly forget the duds. Once the person being addressed starts talking back, a dialog develops that becomes informative to the performer. There are also certain things most people want to hear, which can contribute to what might be called "motivated credence." In all, the method requires exceptional sensitivity to the audience members' self-presentation and nonverbal responses, as well as being verbally quite deft. First tentative "messages" using this method are often in the form of questions, so they are less likely to be perceived as "wrong"; in the video, this technique is mocked when the "psychic" forges onward despite a solid negative reaction.

Again, this is not to dismiss all intuition. But on TV? Um, so many opportunities to do it another way, it might be, but I wouldn't consider anything in that kind of forum evidentiary.

I've had my "fortune told" (not talking to the dead) a few times just for amusement. There have been a handful of what seemed like startling (and, significantly, flattering) "hits" as well as generalities and errors that I found boring, didn't focus on, and recall less well because that is how the human mind works."

MCcrowler:

"I’ve long thought that any spirits or higher entities to whom we could relate as humans would be the lesser gods of nature, life, and the everyday events of common experience. The ideaof a single, omnipotent and omnipresent God who created the entire universe and its almost endless mechanistic, mindless (at least in a human sense) blazing suns, incomprehensible distances of space, and unimaginative chemicals bumping against each other may be something worthy of meditation and contemplation but such a God, or gods, is basically meaningless to us as living, biological creatures. The earth is based upon miles of inanimate rock but its the thin crust of living activity that makes it interesting, at least to us.

Of course one can say that a great enough God can be involved in all of the exploding stars and dead planets and also living creatures, and that God may well be, but its much more comfortable to think of the Gods and Goddesses who act and think and care on the human level of harvest, birth and death and everyday love (and hate) and commerce between people.

I find the idea of a spring, birth and life Goddess like Oestre who is right there with us watching over birth and babies charming and frankly, much more accessible than the god who created the (mostly) inanimate Universe. The lesser gods of hearth and home and humanity."

"It is not possible, in process metaphysics, to conceive divine activity as a "supernatural" intervention into the "natural" order of events. Process theists usually regard the distinction between the supernatural and the natural as a by-product of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. In process thought, there is no such thing as a realm of the natural in contrast to that which is supernatural"

Carstonio

"The core question I’m addressing is this — what exists or doesn’t exist independent of human belief or human emotion? In other words, if all life ceased to exist in the universe, what would continue to exist? The value proposition I’m making is that the answers to those questions are important and they matter. If one doesn’t like a proposed answer to a question, that’s all the more reason to try to determine whether the answer is correct or incorrect.

Is the empirical method the only possible way to determine what exists independent of belief and emotion? Of course not — there may be other ways unknown to us. Does the method embody the principle that objective fact isn’t determined by one person’s subjective viewpoint? Absolutely. Put another way, if a proposed hypothesis isn’t testable or falsifiable, we know of no way of determining whether it’s objectively correct. It could be indeed be true, but if we have no way of knowing that, then it appears to serve no purpose in the goal of knowing what exists and what doesn’t.

Here’s why that matters. Suppose a tree falls on someone’s house, and another person claims that a deity caused the tree to fall, either in a fit of anger or as a supposedly deserved punishment. The homeowner would understandably want to avoid having the deity do something like that again, so the person might want to know what would placate the deity, or what actions resulted in the punishment. The homeowner would be justified in asking the other person how they supposedly knew for a fact that a deity caused the tree to fall.

So by asserting a nontestable and unfalsifiable entity as a cause for the event, the person making the claim could arguably be characterized as cheating. A responsible journalist would want more evidence for the claim before writing a story about the tree falling. Similarly, a court wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, accept that standard of evidence when determining the guilt of a defendant.

We don’t know if human emotions are really perceptions of the world around us or reactions to other perceptions or some of both. Emotions can often mislead us — someone with traumatic experiences, especially in childhood, can have emotional reactions to situations that superficially resemble the trauma-causing events, even though the situations pose no danger to the person. The real issue is that what is in a person’s mind isn’t absolutely knowable to other people. We can have a reasonable suspicion what someone else is feeling by their behavior, but without asking we wouldn’t know if, say, they’re crying because of a personal tragedy or because they read a sad story. Or outside the emotional context, I could say I’m thinking of a purple elephant, but no one else would know if that’s true, they would know only that I say that I’m thinking of such an animal.

Again, of course there may be things beyond the bounds of empirical inquiry. That’s only objectionable when someone claims as absolute fact that such things exist and that the existence has direct implications for another person. The claimant should present evidence instead of expecting the other person to take his or her word for it."

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MCcrowler:

"Science says something causes all of the Universe to behave in certain, specific ways with no deviations whatsoever allowed, though. If there were not an ordering principle then we would have pure chaos. I cannot imagine any attempt to understand the universe that doesn’t have some sense of all things being held under certain patterns of behavior.

Call it a being or call it coincidentally co-operative behavior, a totally non-conscious demiurge, Lovecraft’s blind, insane, mindless god or call it what you will, it still amounts to the same thing.

A deep subject and there is no way to say anything about it without bringing up more complexities. I don’t think many religions think a specific entity commands every single drop of rain and every pebble to fall (though perhaps some of them do) but most of them conceptualize something that organized the rules in the first place.

And everything I say here I can immediately think of qualifying definitions and exceptions so I probably shouldn’t even say anything"

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Leftleaner

I can never decide if Paganism is just another set of theories about the world based on the fact that there was no early knowledge of science or if there is something more earthly and real to it. It is certainly less patriarchal from what I can tell.  And there are things that happen that we don’t understand and Paganism seems to accept that.  I haven’t studied it at all, but I do have a scroll on my wall that says MAGIC. I haven’t had a verifiable experience but I have had a couple of odd things happen. We will probably never know.

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This group is named after "Complete illustrated Book of the Psychic Sciences" a book by Walter B. Gibson 1966.A fun and interesting read.

Walter Brown Gibson (September 12, 1897 – December 6, 1985) was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Wikipedia

 ☆The 'Occult and Psychical Sciences' on DK

is a spooky group here on DK)☆

The group will consist of stories about the spooky and scary, personal anecdotes, and general Paranormal, Philosophical,metaphysical,Arcane, Esoteric,and Existential information,& conversation about the unexplained in the world and universe.

(& all Religion is welcome here in this space.)

People are encouraged to share their personal spooky experiences, philosophy, and similar influences. (Please contact me in kmail if you wish to join us).~A spookylink: psychicscience

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Below is a conversation between Niemann and another poster:

From Anonymous 

Before people “indulge” in further discussion of the metaphysical (which I don’t think exists), I’d first like anyone who intends to do so to justify the activity at all. Is it really a sincerely held belief that you have? Or is it something that you CHOOSE to believe in because it makes you feel special and different?

And if so, is that a good reason or is it more responsible to face reality as it exists and then build beauty in your life based on that?

(Niemann response )

My thought is:  What if “belief” isn’t the reason?  As usual I see the skeptic types going on and on about “belief,” but what if it has nothing to do with “belief”?  What I see totally missing from your comment is any acknowledgment of the experiential aspect of all this … almost as if it didn’t even occur to you as a possibility.

I bring up the experiential side over and over here, yet it is regularly ignored — apparently because it doesn’t fit “skeptics’” own belief that “Believers” — (the usual derogatory term used here) — are credulous morons who accept anything told them, people who want to “feel special,” or whatever.

I started out in my later teens basically heading toward being a materialist atheist.  What halted that?  A whole lot of really weird spiritual/psychic/whatever experiences.

Because of that, certain topics that fall under the term “metaphysical” (whatever that means) are things I can’t help but be open to, or even find likely.  When things force themselves on you, there is no choice involved, and it has nothing to do with “belief”.

The way I’ve put it is, if you’re several times interrupted in your work in your home office by a woman with no face standing in the doorway talking to you — as happened to a minister I knew — you’re likely going to be open to the idea of there being ghosts in your house.  

It’s not just a matter of “Do you believe in ghosts?”  It’s a matter of something freaking weird that happened to you.  That’s what justifies thinking about it and focusing on it.

If you’re sitting in your living room late at night and hear the voice of a boy in your congregation who recently died in a tragic accident, asking you to tell his parents that he’s all right — as also happened to that same minister — you’re likely to be open to the idea of spirits and an afterlife.  If, a few nights later, the same thing happens again … and the next morning your wife asks who stopped by so late because she heard the TWO voices talking from upstairs — you’re likely to be even more open to it.

In short, if you have had a lot of really strange experiences, it’s not at all matter of “belief.”  And again, it’s not a matter of choice.  It is a matter of things that have happened to you that you can’t help but take into account and put stock in."

Definition:

Conceptions

Various conceptions of the essential features of beliefs have been proposed, but there is no consensus as to which is the right one. Representationalism is the traditionally dominant position. Its most popular version maintains that attitudes toward representations, which are typically associated with propositions, are mental attitudes that constitute beliefs.These attitudes are part of the internal constitution of the mind holding the attitude. This view contrasts with functionalism, which defines beliefs not in terms of the internal constitution of the mind but in terms of the function or the causal role played by beliefs. According to dispositionalism, beliefs are identified with dispositions to behave in certain ways. This view can be seen as a form of functionalism, defining beliefs in terms of the behavior they tend to cause. Interpretationism constitutes another conception, which has gained popularity in contemporary philosophy. It holds that the beliefs of an entity are in some sense dependent on or relative to someone's interpretation of this entity. Representationalism tends to be associated with a mind-body-dualism. Naturalist considerations against this dualism are among the motivations for choosing one of the alternative conceptions.[4]

Representationalism

Representationalism characterizes beliefs in terms of mental representations. Representations are usually defined as objects with semantic properties—like having a content, referring to something, or being true or false.[4][5] Beliefs form a special class of mental representations since they do not involve sensory qualities in order to represent something, unlike perceptions or episodic memories.[6] Because of this, it seems natural to construe beliefs as attitudes towards propositions, which also constitute non-sensory representations, i.e. as propositional attitudes. As mental attitudes, beliefs are characterized by both their content and their mode.[6] The content of an attitude is what this attitude is directed at: its object. Propositional attitudes are directed at propositions.[7][8][5] Beliefs are usually distinguished from other propositional attitudes, like desires, by their mode or the way in which they are directed at propositions. The mode of beliefs has a mind-to-world direction of fit: beliefs try to represent the world as it is; they do not, unlike desires, involve an intention to change it.[4][6] For example, if Rahul believes that it will be sunny today, then he has a mental attitude towards the proposition "It will be sunny today" which affirms that this proposition is true. This is different from Sofía's desire that it will be sunny today, despite the fact that both Rahul and Sofía have attitudes toward the same proposition. The mind-to-world direction of fit of beliefs is sometimes expressed by saying that beliefs aim at truth.[9] This aim is also reflected in the tendency to revise one's belief upon receiving new evidence that an existing belief is false.[4] Upon hearing a forecast of bad weather, Rahul is likely to change his mental attitude but Sofía is not.

There are different ways of conceiving how mental representations are realized in the mind. One form of this is the language of thought hypothesis, which claims that mental representations have a language-like structure, sometimes referred to as "mentalese

en.m.wikipedia.org/…

Series about phenomena 

(Average Unexplained Phenomena type series but it contains a very interesting episode about gelatinous substances that fell on Washington state containing human cells)

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Dr. John Dee 1574:

"Some persons have super-normal powers not of a magitien but of a peculiar and scientific qualiti"

*This group's aim is polite philosophical debate*

(Belief pt2 coming soon)

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