now the Mediums' Book.
you should read it all.
thanks.

ORZIL wrote:read the introduction to the study of spiritist doctrine
there are 17 items
above all from item 3 to item 6 of the Spirits' Book
but read all this introduction are 17 items
then I indicate what to read in the Mediums' Book
Good reading

I am not clear what part. There's no index, and there's no sub-title "Introduction to the Study of Spiritist Doctrine"

Do you mean pages 31 to 35?

Or do you mean pages 63 to 68?


Bear in mind that this book's copyright expired a very long time ago and is now free access. It would be fine to quote it anyway under the entitlement of Fair Use.

Once I am clear what part you wish to discuss, I will copy and paste it here. Really, this should be your job and you shouldn't be making it difficult for me to find the information you want to forward to support your proposition... but at least no one can accuse me of not engaging charitably.

ORZIL wrote:now the Mediums' Book.
you should read it all.
thanks.

Not good enough Orzil.

The reason we're discussing these books is that I asked you for evidence. I also told you very clearly what form that evidence would need to take.

You then replied that I would find that evidence in these books.

Ok, I am open to reviewing the evidence in these books.

However, you cannot place a burden on me in a discussion to read 470+ pages to find what you want me to read.

You need to find the part that's relevant and cite it for me to review.

I already gave you an object example of why this is a fair expectation on my part.

So please cite page references and quote the body of text that is relevant to your argument and my request for evidence.

Spearthrower wrote:

ORZIL wrote:read the introduction to the study of spiritist doctrine
there are 17 items
above all from item 3 to item 6 of the Spirits' Book
but read all this introduction are 17 items
then I indicate what to read in the Mediums' Book
Good reading

I am not clear what part. There's no index, and there's no sub-title "Introduction to the Study of Spiritist Doctrine"

Do you mean pages 31 to 35?

Or do you mean pages 63 to 68?


Bear in mind that this book's copyright expired a very long time ago and is now free access. It would be fine to quote it anyway under the entitlement of Fair Use.

Once I am clear what part you wish to discuss, I will copy and paste it here. Really, this should be your job and you shouldn't be making it difficult for me to find the information you want to forward to support your proposition... but at least no one can accuse me of not engaging charitably.

in the Spirits' Book
from page 23 to page 30
item 3 to item 5 of the introduction.
I don't know the english language
I use a translator who misses the word.

Is this a serious thread?

ORZIL wrote:
in the Spirits' Book
from page 23 to page 30
item 3 to item 5 of the introduction.

Aha, finally... thank you!

ORZIL wrote:I don't know the english language
I use a translator who misses the word.

Ok, I understand. I will try to be direct in meaning and not use idiomatic language or expressions.

I'll start addressing these items in the next post to keep this clear.

Sorry Orzil but I am still confused.

Pages 23 to 30 are written in prose format - there are paragraphs but no items.

The first paragraph on page 23 reads:

For want of such a term for each of the other ideas now loosely understood by the word soul,we employ the term vital principle to designate the material and organic life which, whatever may be its source, is common to all living creatures, from the plant to man. As life can exist without the thinking faculty, the vital principle is something distinct from independent of it.The word vitality would not express the same idea. According to some, the vital principle is a property of matter; an effect produced wherever matter is found under certain given conditions; while, in the opinion of the greater number of thinkers, it resides in a special fluid, universally diffused, and of which each being absorbs and assimilates a portion during life, as inert bodies absorb light; the vital principle being identical with the vital fluid, which is generally regarded as being the same as the animalised electric fluid, designated also as the magnetic fluid, the nervous fluid, etc

But I can't imagine that's the particular quote you want me to look at.

However, on page 31 there are actually items:

"God is eternal, immutable, immaterial, unique, all-powerful, sovereignly just and good.

"He has created the universe, which comprehends all beings, animate and inanimate, material and immaterial.

"The material beings constitute the visible or corporeal world, and the immaterial beings constitute the invisible or spiritual world, that is to say, the spirit-world, or world of spirits.

"The spirit-world is the normal, primitive, eternal world, pre-existent to, and surviving,everything else.

"The corporeal world is only secondary; it might cease to exist, or never have existed, without changing the essentiality of the spiritual world.

"Spirits temporarily assume a perishable material envelope, the destruction of which, by death, restores them to liberty.

"Among the different species of corporeal beings, God has chosen the human species for the incarnation of spirits arrived at a certain degree of development; it is this which gives it amoral and intellectual superiority to all the others.

"The soul is an incarnated spirit, whose body is only its envelope.

"There are in man three things -(1.) The body, or material being, analogous to the animals,and animated by the same vital principle; (2.) The soul, or immaterial being, a spirit incarnated in the body; (3.) The link which unites the soul and the body, a principle intermediary between matter and spirit.

"Man has thus two natures.: by his body he participates in the nature of the animals, of which it has the instincts; by his soul, he participates in the nature of spirits.

"The link, or perispirit, which unites the body and the spirit, is a sort of semi-material envelope. Death is the destruction of the material body, which is the grossest of man's two envelopes; but the spirit preserves his other envelope, viz., the perispirit, which constitutes for him an ethereal body, invisible to us in its normal state, but which he can render occasionally visible, and even tangible, as is the case in apparitions.

"A spirit, therefore, is not an abstract, undefined being, only to be conceived of by our thought; it is a real, circumscribed being, which, in certain cases, is appreciable by the senses of sight, hearing, and touch.

"Spirits belong to different classes, and are not equal to one another either in power, in intelligence, in knowledge, or in morality. Those of the highest order are distinguished from those below them by their superior purity and knowledge, their nearness to

Is this the part you mean for me to address?

Spearthrower wrote:

ORZIL wrote:
in the Spirits' Book
from page 23 to page 30
item 3 to item 5 of the introduction.

Aha, finally... thank you!

ORZIL wrote:I don't know the english language
I use a translator who misses the word.

Ok, I understand. I will try to be direct in meaning and not use idiomatic language or expressions.

I'll start addressing these items in the next post to keep this clear.

I will quote from these two books what I believe to be evidence.
for you to analyze according to skeptical thinking.
Not knowing English makes the debate difficult for me.

I will make the quote.

III
Spiritist doctrine, like all new theories, has its Supporters and its opponents. We will
endeavour to reply to some of the objections of the latter, by examining the worth of the
reasons on which they are based, without, however, pretending to be able to convince
everybody, but addressing ourselves to those who, without prejudices or preconceived ideas,
are sincerely and honestly desirous of arriving at the truth; and will prove to them that those
objections are the result of a too hasty conclusion in regard to facts imperfectly observed.

Of the facts referred to, the one first observed was the movement of objects, popularly called
"table-turning." This phenomenon, first observed in America (or rather, renewed in that
country, for history proves it to have been produced in the most remote ages of antiquity),
was attended with various strange accompaniments, such as unusual noises, raps produced
without any ostensible cause, etc. From America this phenomenon spread rapidly over
Europe and the rest of the world. It was met at first with incredulity; but the movements were
produced by so many experimenters, that it soon became impossible to doubt its reality.
If the phenomenon in question had been limited to the movement of inert objects, it might
have been possible to explain it by some purely physical cause. We are far from knowing all
the secret agencies of nature, or all the properties of those which are known to us. Electricity,
moreover, is not only multiplying, day by day, the resources it offers to mankind but appears
to be about to irradiate science with a new light. It seemed, therefore, by no means impossible
that electricity, modified by certain circumstances, or some other unknown agent, might be
the cause of these movements. The fact that the presence of several persons increased the
intensity of the action appeared to strengthen this supposition; for the union of these might
not ineptly be regarded as constituting a battery, of which the power was in proportion to the
number of its elements.
That the movement of the tables should be circular was in 110 way surprising, for the circular
movements is of frequent occurrence in nature. All the stars move in circles; and it therefore
seemed to be possible that in the movement of the tables we had a reflex on a small scale of
the movement of the universe; or that some cause, hitherto unknown, might produce,
accidentally, and, in regard to small objects, a current analogous to that which impels the
worlds of the universe in their orbits.
But the movement in question was not always circular. It was often irregular, disorderly; the
object moved was sometimes violently shaken, overthrown, carried about in various
directions, and, in contravention of all known laws of statics, lifted from the ground and held
up in the air. Still in all this, there was nothing that might not be explained by the force of
some invisible physical agent. Du we not see electricity overthrow buildings,

Did you download the link that sent you?

ORZIL wrote:I will quote from these two books what I believe to be evidence.

Great!

ORZIL wrote:for you to analyze according to skeptical thinking.

Ok

ORZIL wrote:Not knowing English makes the debate difficult for me.

Appreciated. I could not even attempt to hold this discussion in Spanish, so good on you for trying!

I think it's better to stop.
because of the language.
will make the debate very difficult.
thanks

ORZIL wrote:I will make the quote.

III
Spiritist doctrine, like all new theories, has its Supporters and its opponents. We will
endeavour to reply to some of the objections of the latter, by examining the worth of the
reasons on which they are based, without, however, pretending to be able to convince
everybody, but addressing ourselves to those who, without prejudices or preconceived ideas,
are sincerely and honestly desirous of arriving at the truth; and will prove to them that those
objections are the result of a too hasty conclusion in regard to facts imperfectly observed.

Ok, so this is a preamble. There's nothing to address in there for my part.

Of the facts referred to, the one first observed was the movement of objects, popularly called "table-turning." This phenomenon, first observed in America (or rather, renewed in that country, for history proves it to have been produced in the most remote ages of antiquity), was attended with various strange accompaniments, such as unusual noises, raps produced without any ostensible cause, etc. From America this phenomenon spread rapidly over Europe and the rest of the world. It was met at first with incredulity; but the movements were produced by so many experimenters, that it soon became impossible to doubt its reality. If the phenomenon in question had been limited to the movement of inert objects, it might have been possible to explain it by some purely physical cause. We are far from knowing all the secret agencies of nature, or all the properties of those which are known to us. Electricity, moreover, is not only multiplying, day by day, the resources it offers to mankind but appears to be about to irradiate science with a new light. It seemed, therefore, by no means impossible that electricity, modified by certain circumstances, or some other unknown agent, might be the cause of these movements. The fact that the presence of several persons increased the intensity of the action appeared to strengthen this supposition; for the union of these might not ineptly be regarded as constituting a battery, of which the power was in proportion to the number of its elements.

From here, I will separate my responses first to address the writer's claims, then to Orzil with respect to the wider discussion regarding evidence for spirits.

The writer was living in the 19th century and therefore has no chance to respond to discoveries made after his death.

His assumption is that the seance like table-turning - basically the same as an ouija board - represents legitimate contact with spirits seeking to communicate with the people.

As a skeptic, my very first impression would be: isn't it odd that someone should have just discovered this peculiar way to contact spirits? It's hard to imagine it happened by coincidence, so I assume that someone set out trying to communicate with spirits and formulated this idea.

I also find it strange that a spirit which can affect the material world with sufficient force as to move a table is unable to pick up a pen and write on a piece of paper.

Instead, what we have are a bunch of human beings sitting round a table and placing their hands on it. We know without any doubt that humans can move tables. Why would the spirit require the humans to have their hands on the table to move it? Why couldn't the spirit move the table without human hands on it? Aren't human hands sufficient to explain the movement of the table? If they are sufficient, then how does this then generate a further condition that needs explaining?

Occam's Razor: Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate - there is no need for extra explanations here other than the mundane. Given that human hands move tables, there's nothing to explain here - humans moved the tables.

However, it would then require explanation as to why they moved the tables. Were they all enacting a grand deceit intended to fool others? It's possible, but without access to these people to question them and test their table-turning independently, I cannot make that assertion. However, I don't need to as their actions can be explained as being involuntary.

Consequent to that, in the intervening century and more since the writer's death, scientists have reported and studied the ideomotor reflex - an unconscious physical reflexive response. Experiments have been conducted over the decades of the 20th century establishing this phenomenon as credible.


Orzil: so in response, I would say that table-turning doesn't offer any evidence of spirits. It would be a very bizarre way for a spirit that can manipulate physical objects to choose to use - it would be much easier to simply pick up a pen and write. If a pen were to levitate in the air without any obvious physical force, then that would make accepting something else existing there much more likely. However, the fact remains that we have an example of human muscles operating on the table and the alleged spirit incapable of performing a physical feat in the absence of human muscles... which can unarguably cause the table to turn regardless of spirits.

Now, I don't have any real ability to conduct an experiment on this as I don't have a group of people to call on to offer their presence in such a test, nor do I possess a round table.

However, I think that there is a perfectly reasonable expectation here that if X phenomenon can be explained by mundane factors, then an appeal to the supernatural is just not warranted. It is a fifth wheel.

That the movement of the tables should be circular was in 110 way surprising, for the circular movements is of frequent occurrence in nature. All the stars move in circles; and it therefore seemed to be possible that in the movement of the tables we had a reflex on a small scale of the movement of the universe; or that some cause, hitherto unknown, might produce, accidentally, and, in regard to small objects, a current analogous to that which impels the worlds of the universe in their orbits.
But the movement in question was not always circular. It was often irregular, disorderly; the object moved was sometimes violently shaken, overthrown, carried about in various directions, and, in contravention of all known laws of statics, lifted from the ground and held up in the air. Still in all this, there was nothing that might not be explained by the force of some invisible physical agent. Du we not see electricity overthrow buildings,...

I am not sure why the circular movement of the tables is so surprising when it is surrounded by humans exerting roughly equal resistance to the table moving any other way. Circles are not typically found in nature.

The stars do not move in circles; they are gravitationally attracted by objects' mass and their passage will tend to be elliptical, approaching closer to the greater point of mass at some points, and moving further away at later points in the orbit. Given that Kardac was writing 100 years after Newton already showed this and explained how and why this occurs, it is hard to forgive him this slip. He is mistaken.

Further, circles are not so much found in nature as to be noteworthy comparative to other shapes, and what circles we do find tend on close inspection not to actually be perfectly circular. We also find many other shapes in nature, like hexagons. So this is all a strange claim to be making.

Then the writer contradicts himself by saying that the movements weren't always circular - so there was no definable pattern.

He claims that the tables were sometimes violently shaken, overthrown, carried about in various directions... if a spirit is capable of exerting this much force on the material world, then it can unarguably pick up a pen and write on paper with it. Even easier today: it could type on a keyboard. Why aren't we seeing this occur? It's far less force to tap a keyboard than to pick up a table, and there's no chance of human ideomotor reflex causing the keys to compress.

This claim, however, "in contravention of all known laws of statics, lifted from the ground and held up in the air" makes me think the writer is either lying or naively reporting something he did not personally see occur. A levitating object would be hard to dismiss, however, this is not reproducible - in fact, even this report doesn't provide any details other than asserting that it happened.

Finally, no we do not see electricity overthrow buildings except by powering a machine designed to exert smashing force, and anyway electricity is eminently detectable by material means.


Orzil: none of this strikes me as being 'evidence' that I can independently verify. Essentially, these are all simply claims made by Kardec.

You could have asserted the same thing, and I would have responded the same way saying that your claim is not something available for me to witness first hand.

I can tell you that my cat stood up and began singing and tap-dancing just now. I doubt you would believe me regardless of how insistent I was that it happened. You would demand evidence. You would want to see it occur for yourself before you would accept it as true. So would you not agree that - from my perspective - all of the excerpt of this book so far offers only claims, not actual evidence?

ORZIL wrote:I think it's better to stop.
because of the language.
will make the debate very difficult.
thanks

Ok, I understand.

I will make a very simply skeptic's reason as to why I don't believe that spirits exist: because I honestly cannot believe in things which aren't evident.

All the best!

Finally, could you explain to me in a scientific way why you don't believe in spirits? according to scientific skepticism?
I think you should read these books.
The English language is very important.
thanks.

I will learn the English language.

BlackBart wrote:

Fallible wrote:

aufbahrung wrote:It isn't belief in ghosts on the rise. A ageing demographic means more people are dying and becoming ghosts. There is no such thing as actual ghosts maybe, however like phantom limbs, the bereaved see the deceased often for years after the dead after left the departure lounge.

Quite right, why bother reading the OP?

Excellent command of the English language, by the way.

How to learn English Speak English Online English course.

ORZIL wrote:Finally, could you explain to me in a scientific way why you don't believe in spirits? according to scientific skepticism?

That would be hard with the limitations of language available to us.

In basic form, the universe's most foundational character is thermodynamic; the exchange of energy for stuff to happen. Energy gets locked up doing work in a system and typically exchanged to heat in the process. For you to live, you must eat - that food is converted in your body to usable energy to fuel your movement and physical functions. Doing so also produces heat - which is why I originally mentioned the idea of spirits giving off heat.

A spirit, however, is like an electronic device without a battery and no means to power it. This is so contrary to the most fundamental aspects of our universe, I cannot see how a spirit could exist within the universe.

To then try and justify that would require adding ever more complex entities, all of which are not evident and would be outside the scope of any plausible experiment we could do to test the idea. We'd basically be wish-thinking our way to oblivion.

One thing you can ask yourself and it's something that motivates a lot of my decisions when there is little resting on it: does the idea offer you any benefit? What can you do with that idea? If you hold that idea up as a candle to light your way through the darkness of existence, does it reveal anything that substantially helps you? Or is it just a nice idea you quite like?

As a skeptic, I don't care about what things I'd like to be true, only what I am obliged to believe is true through weight of evidence.

ORZIL wrote:I think you should read these books.

I won't promise I will as I have lots of books that are higher on my priority.

However, if I do happen to, I will be reading them out of historical interest rather than out of interest in the validity of the claims therein.

¡Hasta luego!

Spearthrower wrote:

ORZIL wrote:Finally, could you explain to me in a scientific way why you don't believe in spirits? according to scientific skepticism?

That would be hard with the limitations of language available to us.

In basic form, the universe's most foundational character is thermodynamic; the exchange of energy for stuff to happen. Energy gets locked up doing work in a system and typically exchanged to heat in the process. For you to live, you must eat - that food is converted in your body to usable energy to fuel your movement and physical functions. Doing so also produces heat - which is why I originally mentioned the idea of spirits giving off heat.

A spirit, however, is like an electronic device without a battery and no means to power it. This is so contrary to the most fundamental aspects of our universe, I cannot see how a spirit could exist within the universe.

To then try and justify that would require adding ever more complex entities, all of which are not evident and would be outside the scope of any plausible experiment we could do to test the idea. We'd basically be wish-thinking our way to oblivion.

One thing you can ask yourself and it's something that motivates a lot of my decisions when there is little resting on it: does the idea offer you any benefit? What can you do with that idea? If you hold that idea up as a candle to light your way through the darkness of existence, does it reveal anything that substantially helps you? Or is it just a nice idea you quite like?

As a skeptic, I don't care about what things I'd like to be true, only what I am obliged to believe is true through weight of evidence.

ORZIL wrote:I think you should read these books.

I won't promise I will as I have lots of books that are higher on my priority.

However, if I do happen to, I will be reading them out of historical interest rather than out of interest in the validity of the claims therein.

¡Hasta luego!

what is your opinion about Rationalism?
Is scientific skepticism against Rationalism?