[simiones]

This paper lends absolutely no credence to the various crackpots and deluded people who claim they have met aliens.

And the reasons why that is essentially impossible all stem very clearly from much more solid physical considerations, that have to do with the extreme amounts of energy necessary for interstellar travel at anything approaching a reasonable time frame (i.e. less then the age of most stars).

[gadf]

Because you don't know if they're "Crackpots and deluded people"...that's the claim without credence. So unfair to all those witnesses. You can't judge them, you don't have any idea. It's your personal opinion that you parade as truth, but pretend others are wrong. But not just wrong, crazy.

But that claim, yours, is crazy. Can you prove all those people wrong? Can you prove they haven't? Nooope.

"is essentially impossible all stem" -- so because you have a belief that you understand everything that's possible (An arrogant humancentric "if we haven't figured it out" it can't be done), you're going to pretend everyone that has a personal experience that contravenes your prejudgment is crazy. That's the crazy thing dudettee ... you don't see that tho right.

It's also a narrow minded viewing. You could say they worked out how to jump from far away to get here, in ways we don't understand. Possible. You could also take the more-feasible-to-you view that they are already in the solar system and can come take a look at us when they want. Also possible. But acknowledging such possibilities would rob you of the posture of saying anyone who has an experience you don't want to even try explain is crackpot and delude. You sound like the lazy and deluded crackpot nutcase for saying that anyone who has something you can't explain is crazy. I suppose pretending this must have high payoff for you. You can't just impose your priors on others and think they're true. I guess you don't yet see that.

[simiones]

There are thousands of years worth of people claiming personal experiences with various gods, aliens, animal spirits and so on. None of these have ever led to any kind of verifiable results, so I think it's about time we entirely stop listening to such stories, whatever the reason they are being told.

Your position on the other hand could be used as well to believe in God (YHWH), Lord Vishnu, kami, aliens or anything else that someone has ever claimed to see.

You are also treating pretty well understood physical limits (the speed of light, E=(mv^2)/2 etc.) as mere technological problems that someone could "figure out". And all this to justify listening to a few disparate people who can offer no more proof than their own story telling.

As a side note, please refrain from calling people you are directly talking to "lazy and deluded crackpot nutcases", especially for relatively simple logical inferences.

[gadf]

Hahahaaha. This so hilarious. I just saw your comment now. You are so blind to what you're doing. You really think you're going to get away with your abusive language and expect silence in return? Who's been enabling you? I used that language because it's the commensurate response to you using that language to describe people you disagree with or don't believe, and the right response to your claim that believers are wrong and you know better. So you can't take it, simiones? Don't dish it out. Please refrain from having a double standard.

Define "verifiable results"? There's plenty of stories of corroboration between people saying they had some experience that can't be explained and that you want to pretend to yourself has to be untrue, and something more verifiable happening. Like they got cured, or they went missing, or they got an implant, or a mark was left on their body, or the ground was irradiated, and so on.

Many of these have led to such "verifiable" results, it's only that you're too resistant to see that. Have you proved all these stories to be false? Have you debunked everyone's experiences, stories and beliefs in things you can't explain? No. you. have. not. So I think it's time you entirely stop pretending that because you don't want to see it, it isn't happening. It's very very disrespectful to witnesses of this.

Do we have any "verifiable" data on drug abuse? Sexual assault? Parental abuse of children? Much of that data is self-reported. But it's "hard data" from the point of view of public health / legal system. It's only because you're unwilling to concede that there's anything outside your understanding, so you'd rather pretend these people are lying, crackpot, deluded, than having experienced something that you, in your arrogance, don't understand and therefore refuse to accept is real.

You're trapped by your own biases and priors, ignoring evidence and seeking confirmation bias. Ok, fine, you do that. But please don't ever - EVER - call people crackpot nutcases deluded liars and think you can get away with having people be silent in the face of that, and not calling you the same.

Pretty well understood physical limits - who says they're limits? You? What are you, God? You don't know for sure. Stop pretending if humans can't understand it it can't be done. How arrogant and stupid that is! But you think you can persist in this, call people you disagree with "crackpot deluded liars" and then you want everyone to silently accept your abusive language and not push back, as you complain when the very same language is used against you. Hahahaha! This totally shows not only your intellectual bias, but your personal bias and arrogance. Please reform yourself.

[simiones]

There is so much to unpack here.

First of all, you are the one claiming knowledge that more or less contradicts some of our most fundamental physical understanding based on hearsay. If you don't understand how fundamental the speed of causality limit (c) or the mass/energy equivalence are to all of the rest of modern physics (and technology), how well proven they are, to what extraordinary precisions, how many other observations would make no sense without them, then there really is no point in continuing our discussion. Until you can account for the hundreds of thousands of reproducible experiments showing how speeds compose and time dilates without a fundamental limit to speed, saying that someone thinks they saw some bizarre phenomenon is very weak evidence.

Comparing "evidence" of aliens (which, I keep stressing, could as likely be angels or demons or devas) to evidence of drug abuse, parental abuse, rape etc is disgusting. Those in the later case are known, well understood phenomena, where we have clear, obvious reasons why reporting is going to be necessarily one-sided. By contrast, there is no clear reason why or how aliens (or angels, gods, kami) would interact sporadically with a few individuals, leaving little if any clear trace of their passing, despite the inordinate amounts of energy that would actually be required to achieve their stipulated movements (try to hide a space rocket launch for comparison).

Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return. I didn't even initially insult the people making these claims (I "insulted" the claims themselves), though I did do that in my follow-up comment, for which I apologize. Still, some of the people making these claims have been proven to have simply lied for various reasons. I firmly believe all of the others have had various hallucinations such as sleep paralysis or symptoms of various mental illnesses. This is not an insult, anymore than claiming that all people who have heard Lord Vishnu's voice and seen his chariot are either mistaken, lying, or have experienced some kind of altered mental state.

Claims of implanted devices have never been medically confirmed.

[gadf]

Wow, you're trying to get out of what you did. You didn't insult the people, you insulted the claims? No you did not.

"as they are all either delusions, lying, false memories etc."...

"the various crackpots and deluded people who claim"...

You don't think it's an insult to a person to call their experience, sincerely recounted, a delusion, a lie, a false memory? Of course it is. Then as you admit, honorably, you do call them crackpots and deluded. Fair enough, but just because some people have been proven liars (or in the rape case, fake accusers), does not mean we should doubt other people coming forward, does it? and certainly does mean we should blanket call those people crackpots, or deluded or pretend they're lying, does it? "Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return." You don't expect to be insulted in return for accusing others in this abusive way of being without credibility? Exactly what I said, You expect silence in response to your abuse. Reform yourself. I saw you pushing down on people, and I pushed back. You can't take it? Don't dish it out. That's the way it is, focker.

You may firmly believe it, but then you're blind (or empathically missing the point) that accusing someone of having a mental illness, or hallucinating something you haven't experienced and have no frame for, is an insult, and more than that. You're saying you know their mind better than they do. You're saying their experience, of their life, is trumped by your opinion. And is less valuable than your "in the stands" commentary on it. You are not involved at all in what they experienced, yet you denigrate it, and claim you're not insulting them. Abusive insulting practice hiding behind veneer of being legitimate.

All I'm saying about physics is we don't know it all yet, and can't assume we do. Science admits as much, but few on the inside are courageous enough to take that to its logical conclusion.

Comparing evidence for rape, abuse, etc, to evidence for aliens is not disgusting, and you're certainly okay with doing that because you're okay to claim that all these millions of people with their stories and experiences must have simply imagined it, implanted a false memory, lied, etc. It's not about reporting being one-sided, it's about reporting consisting solely of witness testimony, often just of one person. That's true both for the alien case, and the rape and abuse case. You don't quite seem to see what you're doing when you want to doubt so many people for telling their story. It wasn't a long time in the past when people were laughed at or dismissed for telling their stories of rape and abuse, just like you'd have people do with those with stories of aliens today.

It seems you have not been acquainted with enough stories, I suggest you do some research and read up on people discussing abduction stories, and so on. Enter it as a skeptic, full of confidence you'll be able to explain it away. Talk to people involved. Give them a chance to be heard. Empathize with them. Instead of pretending you're "disgusted" by the very same comparative dismissal you yourself are hawking, while somehow laying claim to a moral grounding in this when you've been behaving anything but about it.

[simiones]

Recently my grandmother, whom I had just helped out of an ambulance and back into her apartment, told me that she had just come back home after meeting with a neighbor. I was not "accusing" her of something, nor insulting her, when I called her doctor to let them know she was having delusions.

Similarly, when someone is reporting something we know to be impossible or extremely improbable from other considerations, we are not accusing them of something when we say that their experience or memory of that experience was delusional (or mistaken, depending on the details). Again, I was insulting when I called such people "delusional", as it implies they often have such hallucinations, which of course I can't know and don't believe - and, again, for this I apologize.

Now, the major difference to accusations of sexual assault is the plausibility of the claim. I of course do not personally know if Harvey Weinstein assaulted any of the women that accused him. However, I know that such accusations are painful and risky for the person making them; and I know that sexual assault is something that can absolutely happen; so, the witness testimony carries a lot of weight.

If on the other hand the exact same women accused Harvey Weinstein of stealing their souls through satanic rituals, I would not think much of these claims, and I would believe, and feel justified in believing, that the women are either lying or have had some hallucinations that have convinced them of this (or are having false memories).

Of course, if you tend to believe that aliens (or angels, curses etc) are plausible, you may lend more credence to these testimonies, even without scientific style evidence for what may have happened.

I still believe that comparing the certainty we can have that sexual assault is a real thing that real men and women may experience to the certainty that aliens (or demons and ghosts) are real is deeply insulting to victims of sexual assault.

I also don't believe there are millions of people claiming to have experienced alien abductions. Looking around a bit, I assume this claim is coming from a Roper Poll that found 119 out of some 6000 respondents had experiences which were considered typical of alien abduction, which would be extrapolated to 3.7 million out of the 185 million people for which the poll was representative. Crucially, the respondents were not claiming that they had had an experience of being abducted by aliens, they were claiming that they had had some experiences like "waking up paralyzed and feeling a presence in the room", "finding puzzling scars on your body", "seeing unexplained lights in a room" - all of which require a significant jump to conclude "ALIENS!". In the best case, they could be used to claim unknown phenomena are real, but to pick any specific posited phenomenon would be deeply wrong: these are as likely to be signs of aliens as they are of being fairies or ancestor spirits or mind/body dualism or anything else; including altered mental states (especially as the poll didn't even ask about the respondent's belief that the experience was real - for all we know, some of those 119 people could have sought psychiatric help themselves after these experiences).

[draregbr]

You don't need to travel physically when you can do it instantly with your conscience.

[simiones]

Your consciousness is a physical process happening in your body (especially your brain). It can no more travel the universe than your digestion can manifest in another galaxy.

Also, even if consciousness is somehow separate from the body, it is still subject to the speed of light limit, as long as it can interact with the physical world.

[gadf]

Stop pretending. You have NO idea what consciousness is or isn't. You speak these words as if they are truth, "it can no more", but you are not god. You don't decide. You're trying to limit the reality of existence to your own limited and biased experience of it. Fine, OK. Do that if it's too scary for you to look outside that shell, but don't you dare - EVER - try to call people crackpots liars and deluded because they think different and have experienced different to you. See your own bias, and exist within that if that's what you choose. But don't persecute others or impose your priors as if they're truth. You think it's fair game to attack people whose stories you don't believe as liars, crackpots and deluded? Well I'm here to push back on you. Do you get it? I'm here to tell you it's not fair game, focker. Do you get that?

[simiones]

This is getting borderline abusive on your part.

I will simply note that I am merely stating what is the current understood scientific consensus, and my personal belief. Obviously everyone is free to believe whatever they want, but I am also free to think they are entirely wrong and explain why.

[gadf]

It's already abusive if you were an innocent here, but as it stands it's the commensurate response to your abuse, and that's the point, you're getting back what you gave, and it's justified because because you're the primary aggressor. You started it but try to disown your responsibility. You're still blind to the that.

If you'd stated your opinion in this respectful way differential to the opinions of others initially then there would have been no issue. It was your arrogance and abusive language that led to your downfall here.

even if you're unable to publicly admit your responsibility here, nor acknowledge your mistake and admit your guilt, hopefully you learn that now for yourself. That would be good.

[simiones]

On this thread, I did state my opinion in a clear and respectful way. I did not accuse the GP of anything at all, and I responded to their definite assertion (that consciousness can travel non-materially at infinite speed) with a definite assertion of my own (that consciousness is a physical process and subject to special relativity as much as other physical processes).

[draregbr]

"Scientific consensus" seems a little bit like a dogma. The science of the mind and the philosophy of life on nowadays hegemonic culture is so in daipers that I wouldn't try to take it so seriously. I won't talk about your beliefs, they're yours and nobody is entitled to question them. The thing about scientific consensus though... Not so much.

[simiones]

Still, if consciousness can pass physical barriers and disconnect from the body, and interact with matter or other consciousnesses, we should be able to scientifically test this with relative ease, at scientific standards of reproducibility.

You could argue that we just lack the mental technology to achieve this, just as some string theorists argue we lack the physical technology to detect supersimmetry, and then we are each left with our beliefs until such a time as these mental/physical technologies are developed.