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And what happens as you push is that the scope shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it becomes no longer functional, at that point it's cultural, but that's never where they start
7:24 PM
They start by appealing to people who are schizophrenic, we don't have a strong idea of the difference between fantasy and reality, who are desperate for a cure for an illness, or who knows what else. They bring them these great claims and they believe it because they're not in the state of mind to question that sort of thing, they're vulnerable
7:24 PM
You, if you've got a brain in your head, will see that stuff and go if it doesn't quite make sense, you will try those experiences out and you'll go well it didn't really work.
7:25 PM
But if you're really desperate, if you really need help, if you aren't quite all there, you get sucked in
7:25 PM
And this is me getting into a rant at this point, forgive my opposition here, because I'm a long time oppositioner or of this sort of thing(edited)
No, that's all fair enough, I'm not going to argue with it since you're clearly more knowledgeable on magick than me
7:26 PM
So there are basically a couple phenomena here that I'm thinking of when I talk about IMO "natural" phenomena that most people (including tulpamancers) would consider "metaphysical"(edited)
Let's say this was the case, I would expect to have seen fairly rigorous studies have been attempted on it and come out positive to show that there is some sort of extra knowledge there
7:30 PM
There's quite a big reason to dismiss them as physically impossible, first and foremost it would require some sort of magical information transmission from previous physical body to the next physical body
7:31 PM
Such a medium of transfer has never been discovered or supported in the past by any research I'm aware of
If it is giving knowledge to children then I would imagine it could be measurable
7:32 PM
Knowledge is stored in the mind, it has to somehow get in there
7:33 PM
This is one of those cases where it may be technically unfalsifiable or at least hard to test (you can say it's being dismissed as researched unfairly if there is extra knowledge, or liars may exist in cases where people are caught lying), but it flies in the face of everything we currently understand about the world and the universe, it contradicts a lot of what we know to be fairly universal physical truths that hold up very well despite years of attempting to debunk them
I dismissed it as 99.9% unlikely because people have been caught lying about the sort of thing, there is known to be no mechanism of information transfer between a person who has died years ago and a person who exists today, most reports of past lives are statistically unlikely things like old king or whatever else, and I would expect that if it did exist it is test capable enough that there would have been substantially bigger bulk to research on the topic(edited)
I'm saying that I would accept it as a sort of "illusion" (which I wouldn't use as an antonym to "real")
7:44 PM
Instead of illusion, I'd prefer to label it, say, as a "mind experience"
7:45 PM
Really, the "deep" question here is really, what is consciousness and where does it come from?
7:46 PM
I don't think most people give any deep sort of thought to why they are even here
7:46 PM
Why there is a consciousness "inhabiting" the body
7:47 PM
I think a view that information could not possibly be transferred from a "past life" requires the assumption that consciousness is 100 % "physical", created by the brain
This gets into the difference between the on falsified and the proven. You can't prove that there is nothing invisible and undetectable as of yet interacting with the world powering our consciousness and allowing for information transfer of this sort
7:50 PM
However, you can say it is very unlikely based on what we have learned about the world so far. Everything we have seen up to this point says that consciousness is tied directly into the functioning and processing of the brain.
All I can really say, which I know is "weak sauce", is that you'll know it once you know it...
7:52 PM
With the right kind of "practising" (akin to tulpamancy), experiences that feel absolutely "real", sometimes even much more so than "ordinary" waking life, can be had that point at a much different nature of consciousness than could be examined with scientific methods(edited)
7:53 PM
Everything we have seen up to this point says that consciousness is tied directly into the functioning and processing of the brain.
Btw I think this is a popular misconception, and if you actually talk to neuroscientists you'll find that the status quo is really much closer to "no fucking clue"
We know that the two are connected, we don't know how or why one causes the other, but we know they are very closely connected because if you mess with the brain you mess with the person's consciousness
This either means that the brain is some sort of signaling receiver for this third undetectable system of information transfer, or that the two are arising from one another
I agree, however I don't think you're really considering the implications of "arising from ONE ANOTHER" rather than the monodirectional view most people hold
