Ask HN: Have you ever experienced any paranormal or unexplained phenomena?
Always been more interested in this sort of answer from the tech or scientific community, especially after reading previous threads on the 'ufo glare'
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it hurts my brain, and it also scares me. It seems definite to me that there must be some truly incredible quality of existence which allowed it to come to be out of nothing, one that I don’t have even the slightest hope to even explain or probably even understand.
I've come to two conclusions, only one of which is correct:
1. We are in a continuous universe, and time is a human construct. The only thing that actually exists is force interaction and momentum/velocity. Time is merely an emergent property of these things, and one that we use to measure, as humans. God may or may not exist.
2. We are in a discrete simulation, and time, specifically the Planck Time, is derived from the clock frequency of the computing substrate. God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator.
Currently leaning to option 2, but who knows?
Why do those things exists at all? And not 'why did they start in the first place', but rather why don't they stop existing? What causes them to keep going?
> God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator.
That doesn't answer anything, it just moves it to another layer of the stack: what is running the simulation?
You're asking "where it came from?" in the sense of "who pushed the first domino over in the chain of events?". A more interesting question is "what keeps it going?".
As in: if the universe/reality was a song, who is playing the instrument that is making the sound?
The fact that there needs to be an Uncaused Cause is the Argument from Motion of Aristotle/Aquinas:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...
> I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it hurts my brain, and it also scares me.
For a fuller treatment on these question see:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
Our reality exists because existence was possible. there are no contradictory rules to the way the universe functions. maybe for all abstract possibilities of non-contradictory existence, it spontaneously happens. this is where the multiverse theories come from.
The fact that anything is tangible, or has a "where" or any property at all is just a subset of that existence so as far as "where did this all come from" goes.. it didnt. It exists to us only because we are in it, but is as consequential as a thought experiment. This spawned the "universe is a simulation" theories. the universe is large because we are small within it, it feels so full of time because we are shortlived within it.. but maybe the entire thing is a near instantaneous collapse of some wave function in some other system.
Maybe that system is looking to us to use our relatively fast existence to give it answers in its slow world.
More impossible from a materialist perspective to me is the experience of the self - I experience myself in a non-physical way. I can tell (though I cannot possibly prove to anyone else) that I have a self-aware internal life. From the outside it would be indistinguishable from a simulation of one (via computer or via atoms/molecules/neurons), but for every person's internal life they have a self-experience that I don't believe can be explained without the supernatural (a soul or similar). Certainly it's extremely connected to the physical, and chemicals/impulses etc shape my entire experience, but the experience itself is not physical (IMHO).
I've always found this line of reasoning interesting, because to me it just kicks the can down the road. What created the universe? God. Ok, so what created God?
The logical conclusion is that there needs to exist an Uncaused Cause:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
If you're asking "What caused God?":
* https://strangenotions.com/if-everything-requires-a-cause-wh...
Generally, starting with the premise "everything has a cause" is where people's problems start.
That may sound handwavey, but lets look at it the other way around - something existed "first" casually, because the universe exists. (Note I'm saying casually, I'm not ruling out something existing "forever" or getting into the existence or nonexistence of time, but something exists/existed without a cause that caused everything else.) Either that primary cause is the universe itself, for some reason, or it was something that caused the universe (force, God, whatever). It's unclear to me why the universe itself needs to exist, and to me the alternative that makes more sense that a perfect being needs to exist and caused the rest of it.
2) One day in high school, for no apparent reason whatsoever, I informed a friend that I believed something bad was going to happen to their vehicle. Later that day, someone unknown to me (ie: not someone I might have “overheard” discussing this) broke into it and stole things.
3) In my 20s, driving at night with a friend along a highway that bordered a US army base, with giant evergreen trees along the boundary there, a flying object with dozens of lights appeared on the other side of the trees, matching my speed, and only slightly higher “altitude”. This went on for a minute or so. After we reached the destination, I began telling other friends about the weird encounter with a helicopter we had just had, and the friend with me looked at me like my brain had fallen out and exclaimed that was definitely not a helicopter. (The encounter was silent, and whatever it was flew at about 50 mph at 20-30 feet above ground, so he had a point, but I had fully bought into “it was a helicopter”.)
Could go on, but this seems a fine place to stop.
One summer night I was having difficulty falling asleep, my mind was racing, so I read a book until my eyes couldn't stay open. I had a very vivid and lucid dream. It was like I was driving on winding and curving roads through the hills/bluffs. Then I began going faster and faster and faster. I felt terrified. Normally in my lucid dreams I can take control of what is happening. I tried to slow things down. But in this dream I couldn't which made me feel even more terrified! Then I saw and felt it all go slow motion and felt like I was falling back and to my side and sliding on the roadway. Then everything froze. I woke up frightened! I said some prayers and asked for comfort. Then I heard a strange (yet slightly recognizable) sound in my room. I was frozen stiff, scared to move. I felt someone in the room. The sound repeated a few times. Not knowing what to do I made the same sound with my mouth. I got goosebumps and chills that ran all over my body. But I felt a bit less scared and a bit more at peace. I was able to say a short prayer and fall back asleep. The next morning I found out that my cousin had died the previous evening in a motorcycle accident while driving along and through the river bluffs. His back tire hit some loose sand/gravel and he ended up in the ditch. He wasn't wearing a helmet at the time. :( The sound I heard in my room that night was one he used to make all the time when we were young.
I had a couple of weird experiences (will not share here) while making my dinner late at night. I got creeped out to the extent, that I knocked my next door buddies. Had no history of such occurrences before and after. Few hours later, I got the call from home.
neither of us in the car thought it was a helicopter. timeframe was late 90's.
Keep digging, the truth is out there.
The only explanation I can think of is a coincidence between my having an unprompted fit of delusional paranoia, and her having a car accident at the same time. She is a generally disaster-prone person, but I don't normally worry about it, and that's the worst thing that ever happened to her.
There are people who can verify that I was in fact out of my mind and flipping out before anybody knew anything had happened.
The lesson was to backup my phone as I do with PC and never buy Samsung again.
There's no way for me to appropriately convey the timing that 100% convinced me none of the 3 of us said "that's funny"
She was so sure everything is fine. I told her she is probably right, but I have to look anyway. I just had to.
When I found him he was laying on the side under a display. He was still moving his legs and his tounge was hanging out to the ground. He was breathing quite rapidly. I picked him up and put him on his feet, but he just kept walking and his tounge was still out. I put him in a box and watered his tounge and pet him for an hour. His legs were going and going, but he could move his tongue from time to time. Like he was annoyed by the water, he kinda scoffed and it broke his breathing shortly. I kept dripping water on his tounge and he sighed a few times. I felt horrible.
Eventually he snapped out of it and looked at me exhausted of his ordeal, drank a little, licked my hand and fell asleep with normal breathing.
He was fine the next day.
I can not explain this, but this dog and I had an emotional connection that went through closed door, walls, stairs and even over reassurance of my girlfriend and the comfort of a warm cosy bed.
For me it was absolutely paranormal and still is.
When I was a kid I was very sick with some kind of very severe immune reaction. While trying to figure out what was wrong with me, the doctors discovered that I have tachycardia. After the immune reaction went down and things became less critical, my mom took me to another hospital to get a followup EKG. This hospital had just gotten a new EKG machine (these were the types of machines that printed the results out on a very long strip of paper).
When they hooked me up to it, the machine did not work. Not sure exactly how this manifested, but basically they could not get any measurements. They thought the new machine was just faulty, and to confirm they tried to use it on the child in line after me while we waited. It worked just fine on him, so they hooked me up again, and again it suddenly "broke". They checked me for metal or any other items that might interfere with the machine, and tried having a few other kids go before me as well, but the machine worked for all of them. I never did end up getting an EKG to get my heat checked, until years later as an adult.
We were looking over the lake and there was some light in the air, which was seemingly ascending. It would sometimes jump left and right, which looked extremely unusual. After a while it was like passing infront of us over the lake and we heard some weird loud noise that echoed over the lake. We couldn't tell how far away it was due to darkness and its movements being pretty weird.
It was a really weird experience and we still sometimes talk about and ponder about it. It was probably just a plane but the way it moved just looked so unusual.
Where I lived, earthquakes were very rare, this was my first time experiencing one. I also had poor ear canals so the pressure was likely a mix of blood rush and pressurized ear drums. As for the spectre, coming from a dreaming state to so many different stimuli, my mind must of just though up something I would see as imminent danger.
The earthquake was around a Mag. 3.
Savor the mystery. It's a luxury not everyone can enjoy.
Once when I was a student, my girlfriend asked me to close the bedroom door. For some bizarre reason, I instantly pointed at it and commanded it to close, and it slammed shut. Apparently I didn't actually say anything, so I must have just thought it.
There were no draughts, the door was heavy and didn't move on its own, and more to the point, why did I even do that? I don't make a habit of attempting telekinesis!
I'm sure it was just a bizarre set of coincidences, but it was pretty weird.
As for the "unexplained phenomena"... You might not have an explanation, but if you can study it closely and reproduce it reliably, you may be on the path to knowledge.
It's still doing it. Did it last night. My wife thinks it's ghosts, but she's Irish, so.... :-D And our house is nearly 200 years old, so if some poor bastard didn't die here at some point I'd be frankly shocked.
Like chatting with my future wife, chatting with my dead grandfather, seeing christ, seeing satan, Grudge like Japanese girls under my bed etc.
That’s a hell of an experience to mention casually! Did you wish for these terrifying encounters and they happened? Or the control over your dreams isn’t that fine grained?
I recall borrowing both from the library and reading them when I was in my late teens or early twenties, found them utterly fascinating.
The Monroe Institute also had (or developed?) an audio technique to help entrain the brain, called Hemi-Sync - with a set of cassettes for OBE / lucid dream training, and various other cassettes to train other brain skills. In part they used a tech called 'Binaural Beats' (along with guided meditation), which is where one frequency, e.g. 440hz is played into one ear, and e.g. 450hz is played into the other, which makes one hear/percieve an internal oscillation of e.g. 10hz (the difference between them). The tapes used different frequencies to target different states, at different stages of the meditation, believing them to enhance different types of brain waves (e.g. 10hz is in the range for alpha waves), which was intended to teach the student how to invoke these states themselves at will.
I still have some of his original cassettes, although nowadays they can be bought on CD IIRC (or perhaps snagged in mp3 format, if one looks around torrent sites). But I believe there is also an app nowadays.
Interesting topic - and Monroe was an interesting guy.
FWIW: back then, I believed in all manner of strange things, including OBE, but nowadays I'm mostly a rational skeptic. Monroe's books were very interesting to me back then, because they were quite fantastical, and claimed to have been written over many years of experiences.
Each couple years I have same dream extended for another couple minutes. It starts as recap of previous time and then it continues.
It is not nightmare neither some trauma and I know it will happen again.
I recommend the book “deciphering the cosmic number” which is a biography of Wolfgang Pauli and his efforts towards studying the paranormal.
EDIT: Our software ist not that buggy!!
It is as if we had two lives: one conventional, with our partners, work, worrying about Russia etc., and another one, where the universe is made up mostly of void, with the rest of the space being filled by what we currently call quantum fields organizing in particles forming our experience of the universe and being, down to photons reflected from surfaces and striking cells in our eyes so that the brain can flip the vision upside down and interpret it with some anticipation, so even our idea of "present" is somewhat illusory. Frankly, the reality itself is just amazing.
Every time I have been presented with "evidence" for the paranormal, I can always come up with rational explanations almost immediately. It often boils down to "that person must be lying" or "this is clearly a forgery".
Yet I still feelt the attraction from "the unexplained". After all, all discoveries have been done after grappling with it. And discovery is good - it increases survival, so your genes get passed down.
I fortunately found a way to channel those energies in a more satisfying (to me) way: science! It turns out if you look at the borders of what we know, you will find lots of interesting and exciting mysteries.
In Astronomy, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are two examples of unexplained mysteries.
On the other side of the spectrum, there's Quantum Physics, where reality becomes "pixellated" and our intuition stops working, there's lots of unexplained stuff. Questions like "what is Gravity, really" or "what is time". Every new answer we get opens 2 or 3 new questions.
We are still far away from implementing practical Nuclear Fusion, which would be really helpful with climate change tbh. How do we overcome the Coulomb Barrier and make deuterium atoms produce energy in a way we can use?
In biology, we are currently deciphering how DNA works. It's a whole programming language and operative system originated from Nature itself, without a conscious inventor behind it. Isn't that neat? And how the hell are we supposed to make sense of it. It's like a big hack. We will need computers to make even partial sense of all of it.
Speaking of computers. We are doing advances in AI, but we are still far away from "Real" AI. But Nature somehow managed to do it in less than 2 kilograms of biomass.
In Math, if you dig a little deep, things get just weird, fast. Just, pick a favorite. (Mine is Russells Paradox).
Most of these mysteries you cannot encounter just by walking on a dark alley. You have to work in order to even understand them. You can (in theory) validate everything yourself (admittedly, no one does this, we all walk upon the shoulders of giants). Instead of ouija table to talk with the spirits, you use a telescope, and a bunch of math, to try to figure out a puzzle set up by the Universe.
Once I started doing this, I found I didn't "need" the supernatural.