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Originally Posted by tore
^Neapolitan, I doubt you are sceptic like I am because, and I don't mean to offend, but there are methods to being sceptical
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I'm skeptical of that are more than one method of skeptism, I think if you yourself applied the Law of Parsimony to Skeptism you should be able to come up with only one method of Skeptism, right? I think the best definition of a Skeptic is do not emphatically say "yes" or "no." Well it's not a defintion so much as it is a rule of thumb of how to speak without being corrected. This way you will never be taken to task for saying something. By saying that I am skeptical of aliens I think will eliviate any pressure on me to prove there are aliens than if I would of said "Yes, there are aliens." I mean that is tremendous amount of stress to prove there are ETIs visitng Earth especially since there is this vast international conspiracy for the suppression of evidence. Now if I said "No, there are no aliens." and then they land, well then my credibilty would be shot. I might not be taken seriously anymore, it would be analogous to a Police Officer who gets caught in perjury, his/her testimony will always be taken as questionable whenever he/she is on the witness stand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
which I think you may not have heard of or at least don't apply much in your daily life. There are optimality criterions which let you choose one hypothesis over another even when you don't know which one is correct. Have you for example ever heard of occam's razor?
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Honestly I haven't so much heard of it, or really know the true definition of it, and what it's applications and ramifications are.
Though I have seen it used quite often on another forum (no one here on MB) by atheist. I am quite amused that they used it so much in their arguements taken into consideration of the fact it is attributed to a Fransican monk, William of Okham.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
You are correct in that if I see evidence of the ancient astronauts hypothesis, I may change my stance. I probably will if it becomes the most parsimonious explanation. Saying that these aliens may come from another dimension does not really make it much easier to accept. You then have to assume that the multiple worlds hypotheses are true, that beings are able to somehow cross over from one world to another and you still have the problem of explaining why we don't see these extradimensional creatures, their architecture, their technology and so on today. You know, why isn't our world more like Half-Life video game series?  |
The question of life on other planets, isn't the same as the question of ETIs interfacing with Earthlings, or however they would consider us to be, that kind of contact would be classified as something like Close Encounters of the Fourth (or Fifth) kind. I think you first have to start off with a certain criterion of what life is possible statically in outerspace. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to find the probabilty of life in outerspace, you could just use something like Drake's Equation to do that, mabye throw in a couple of more variables to narrow it down to meet your criterea.
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Originally Posted by tore
I'm not saying these hypotheses can't be true. I don't know that. What I'm claiming is that the chances of them being true are much more slight and believing in them requires a range of explanations relating to them, and many of those could turn out to be wrong. Not that I study aliens, but let's say I could, then I would more likely do so when the support for their existence is so great that it should not be ignored. I wouldn't just do it out of the blue. That's when you say the ball is in the believers court - it's they who have to convince us, not us who have to "look harder".
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Well most of the evidence of creatures from outerspace so far is unverifyable, second handed, mere speculation. I see for the most part that those who are indeed true believers are basically paranormalist begging for recognition from a more academic scientific community for their UFO hypothesis. I don't mean to sound harsh, it just my skeptism speaking. But I can not rule out thinking about it hypothetical the possiblity of ETIs. So since I would look for a more practical explaination of the evidence brought forth so far, esp. by shows on the History Channel and the paranormal society in general, I think the question of ETIs poses a interesting philosophical debate.
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Originally Posted by zevokes
i live in canada. in my first post in this thread (at least i think it was the first one... and in this thread) i mentioned PAUL HELLYER and his associates. Paul Hellyer is the former Canadian Defense Minister and also served as deputy PM under Trudeau. my father has known who paul hellyer is for probably 40 or 50 years. he's not some random dude citing stuff he's heard on the net or creating far-fetched notions pertaining to beings from other planets/dimensions/densities. he's been a functioning member in canada's government for several decades, and many people see him as a staple in our system in one way or another.
anyway, i was looking around at some stuff a buddy showed me when i stumbled across a video of Hellyer speaking at the Exopolitics conference. up until that point, i was probably more skeptical than you. then i took some of what he said, some names he'd mentioned, and took it some steps further, and now i think if i denied the likelihood of any of what he claims, i would be lost.
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Is Paul Hellyer a Freemason? Most of the American presidents and founding father, etc who believe in the Plurarity of Worlds, ETI's or spoke of UFO as an worth investigation (like Gerald Ford) were in fact Freemasons.