The life after death stuff. The “thrust” being that champions of free inquiry on paper are often anything but in practice.
Well yes, that’s entirely the point of what Mack’s work was building towards.
Maybe I’m just too woke but when professionals like Mack say the trauma of so-called abductees is real and their experiences were real (if only to them) then I’m going to suggest you take the rape jokes elsewhere.
"Life after death stuff" and past lives also fall under the "free inquiry" umbrella. None of which is off limits to critical examination, which should be part of the inquiry. (Though to respect the forum, we need not go there, or to religion & politics generally.)
No one disputes that abduction claims have been made.
Or that abductees may actually believe they were abducted. Like alcoholism, admitting the problem is only the first step.
If your neighbor honestly proclaimed to be Napoleon reincarnate, you'd probably think he was off his rocker. But if the same neighbor honestly proclaimed to have been kidnapped by beings from another planet, you'd listen in awed wonder?
I'd say that's one for the psychiatrists. Or perhaps something even more serious.
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Sorry to say I have witnessed plenty personally. OTOH most folks here are talking medical or psychological scientists. The physicists IME are simply dirty old men of one kind or another, there is little money to be made in theoretical physics. 50yr. old professors were abusing their young students long before Epstein was born.
I don't mean any offense to anyone, but if something is real, then it's real to everyone. No exceptions.
I was very close to a very mentally ill person and they will try to make you suffer from their delusions. Their delusions are real to them but read my lips: THEY'RE NOT REAL. They will get very angry when you don't buy into their delusions. And I did have sympathy for this person (I loved him) but never for one second did I ever entertain his delusions. And the sympathy was never reciprocated either; he had zero empathy and was essentially a sociopath. He made my life as miserable as he possibly could while I tried to make his life as good as I could.
So nobody is going to tell me that I can't crack a joke about delusional thinking, when I was harangued by a delusional thinker my whole damn life. Nope.
That's kind of what I think. A little sleuthing uncovered what was basically an echo chamber.
I feel like we’re talking past each other maybe. I don’t disagree with anything you said above. My remark about free inquiry was about Mack’s colleagues at Harvard and what they were willing to do to his career out of professional discomfort.
In Mack’s professional opinion the trauma of the so-called abductees was genuine. It was perhaps misleading to bring Mack’s work up because I’m not not willing to commit to an ET hypothesis and I can see how the whole alien abduction angle might suggest otherwise. All that was intended was to demonstrate the professional repercussions of delving into these topics and that there doesn’t seem to be a level of respectability that can inoculate one against it.
There is a long history of “abduction” in folklore; people being taken to the faerie realm, being abducted by the Puca, etc. Perhaps there’s rare, anomalous occasions where one’s subconscious takes over one’s senses and uses whatever symbols (faeries, elves, aliens) are around and that such episodes are traumatic for the victim. I’d like to think maybe that was something Mack was working towards an understanding of. I just don’t know.
I'm not sure Mack's career suffered lasting harm. The Harvard "witch-hunt" was definitely uncalled for without real evidence of misbehavior or incompetence.
It's maybe not investigating the abduction as much as it is investigating the resulting symptoms.
This all could be seen as resting on the presumption that there is a mental disorder. With my current understanding I couldn't suggest that be true for all the cases.
It seems to me there simply isn't enough evidence for a large-scale (or mainstream, if you prefer) "UFO science" to engage in. There's no field sampling, no UFOscopes. At least the theoretical physicists have math tools.
It's maybe not investigating the abduction as much as it is investigating the resulting symptoms.
This all could be seen as resting on the presumption that there is a mental disorder. With my current understanding I couldn't suggest that be true for all the cases.
It seems to me there simply isn't enough evidence for a large-scale (or mainstream, if you prefer) "UFO science" to engage in. There's no field sampling, no UFOscopes. At least the theoretical physicists have math tools.
That’s a fair assessment, which is why Skylab (I linked you to it before) is the most exciting development in UFOlogy right now. At the end of the day, grainy cellphone images and videos aren’t going to really convince anybody, which is why they don’t really excite me anymore. It’s also why I find complaints about the lack of cellular phone evidence to not be a very compelling counter-argument.
I see no real need for a “UFO science”; it seems like a study of the phenomenon would be interdisciplinary at the least.
I see no real need for a “UFO science”; it seems like a study of the phenomenon would be interdisciplinary at the least.
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"It seems to me what is needed is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.)
On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at at." - Carl Sagan
On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at at." - Carl Sagan
What is useful about a statement underlining the extremes of thought processes we all exercise? No one falls generally into either. The balance is inherent to human nature, unless of course you're deranged. Is that who he's addressing this to?
I think you're incorrect on this. Societies and individuals go out of kilter in their thinking all the time. People just don't recognize that they are acting deranged. An example, people that believe COVID vaccines are more dangerous than getting COVID.
How I see it...
One takes the extremes too literally, rather than as the illustrative examples they were intended to be. (Sagan was no doubt aware of the contradiction of being "only skeptical" yet having "data to support.")
Another probably doesn't know the odds of each. I know I don't, so I haven't an opinion.
Yet another appears to relate very strongly to the political angle.
The "exquisite balance" is likely far from either extreme. Neither certainty nor scepticism serve up their respective plates ready for consumption. They're each tools, and you still have do the mental work.
One takes the extremes too literally, rather than as the illustrative examples they were intended to be. (Sagan was no doubt aware of the contradiction of being "only skeptical" yet having "data to support.")
Another probably doesn't know the odds of each. I know I don't, so I haven't an opinion.
Yet another appears to relate very strongly to the political angle.
The "exquisite balance" is likely far from either extreme. Neither certainty nor scepticism serve up their respective plates ready for consumption. They're each tools, and you still have do the mental work.
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