ITT: Confess your WOO!

[Majeh]

I like this topic, it managed to drag me out of my lurking.

-I practice magic, mostly chaos magic, but other differently labeled shit as well. It works well for me.
-I dont believe time is liner, nor is it the same everywhere. I feel I notice small time fluctuations in various areas, it makes me wonder.
-I will forever believe that the idea of work is utter bullshit and how we treat labor in the US ought to be considered criminal.

[rong]

I like this topic, it managed to drag me out of my lurking.

-I practice magic, mostly chaos magic, but other differently labeled shit as well. It works well for me.
-I dont believe time is liner, nor is it the same everywhere. I feel I notice small time fluctuations in various areas, it makes me wonder.
-I will forever believe that the idea of work is utter bullshit and how we treat labor in the US ought to be considered criminal.

What are your thoughts on retrocausality?  That is, future events affecting the present or past.  (Or present events affecting the past, etc)

[Cain]

Huh, I thought I had already posted in this thread, but I will confess my woo, such as it is.

During the lockdown I have really gotten into watching ghost hunting videos, both compilations put together by Youtube channels and by the ghost hunters themseves. Do I believe in ghosts? Not really. Have I seen some weird shit that I can't explain in these videos? Definitely. Could it be faked? Possibly, though in some cases it seems very hard to have done so to produce the effects seen. So I don't know what to make of some of the videos, except that they are quite entertaining, especially when you're watching them on your own, late at night.

My other obsession is the dogman cryptid. Biologically I know there is no way such a creature can exist. It's impossible, both from a evolutionary point of view (it's lineage would be supported through the fossil record) and from an ecological one (600 pound beasts need a lot of food to keep living, their hunting impact would be obvious). Nevertheless, there have been thousands of sightings and some quite emotionally distraught eyewitness testimony associated with the creature (at least one podcaster has over 300 such interviews, with many more reports from people who did not want to talk on the show). Again, I have no idea what is going on here, but key eyewitness reports tend to agree on certain details and so I'm loathe to dismiss it entirely out of hand, even if what is actually going on is not what seems to be going on.

I feel quite similarly about the UFO phenomena - there are lights in the sky that pull off moves that can't be explained and don't seem to be natural events...beyond that, I've got nothing. I am mostly convinced that "alien abduction scenarios" are sleep paralysis episodes. I've had a few experiences with sleep paralysis myself, I can appreciate how terrifying it can be especially if you have no idea of what is happening. Luckily I read about it well before I ever suffered it myself, so once my mind woke up a bit more I realised, logically, that what I was experiencing wasn't real. But it can be extremely disorientating and frightening, even so.

[Doktor Howl]

Once in my life, I have seen something that could have been a ghost.

But there are other possibilities that could explain my experience without requiring anything supernatural, so I consider it a "far left field possibility."

[Cain]

Yeah. Even if it's a supernatural phenomena of some kind, there's a heck of a lot of assumptions packed into that word "ghost", so it's one I'm quite wary about.

[Doktor Howl]

Yeah. Even if it's a supernatural phenomena of some kind, there's a heck of a lot of assumptions packed into that word "ghost", so it's one I'm quite wary about.

I am more inclined to believe it was a TIA or momentary fugue state (which happens to almost everyone at least once or twice) than anything supernatural.  It was concrete enough that it kinda had to be either an outright ghost, or my brain meat being ornery.  This was years and years before the brain flukes.

[chaotic neutral observer]

Does belief in the efficient market hypothesis qualify as woo?

[Doktor Howl]

Does belief in the efficient market hypothesis qualify as woo?

It's an outright denial of reality.

[Cain]

Yeah. Even if it's a supernatural phenomena of some kind, there's a heck of a lot of assumptions packed into that word "ghost", so it's one I'm quite wary about.

I am more inclined to believe it was a TIA or momentary fugue state (which happens to almost everyone at least once or twice) than anything supernatural.  It was concrete enough that it kinda had to be either an outright ghost, or my brain meat being ornery.  This was years and years before the brain flukes.

Yeah, that does sound more likely.

Does belief in the efficient market hypothesis qualify as woo?

It's uberwoo. It's like the platonic ideal of woo.

[Majeh]

I like this topic, it managed to drag me out of my lurking.

-I practice magic, mostly chaos magic, but other differently labeled shit as well. It works well for me.
-I dont believe time is liner, nor is it the same everywhere. I feel I notice small time fluctuations in various areas, it makes me wonder.
-I will forever believe that the idea of work is utter bullshit and how we treat labor in the US ought to be considered criminal.

What are your thoughts on retrocausality?  That is, future events affecting the present or past.  (Or present events affecting the past, etc)

You know, I haven't thought much in that direction, but it makes some sense. If our subconscious beliefs can have physical manifestations as chaos magic states, then yeah. The things we do now can affect the past by making alterations to what we discover in the future about the past and have us believe that the past events were truth all along.

Makes me wonder if objective Truth is something that can even exist at all or if we just have to choose the truth that best fits our worldview and roll with it, let the psychic censor filter out everything that doesn't fit or rationalize it into something that does fit our version of reality.

[rong]

I like this topic, it managed to drag me out of my lurking.

-I practice magic, mostly chaos magic, but other differently labeled shit as well. It works well for me.
-I dont believe time is liner, nor is it the same everywhere. I feel I notice small time fluctuations in various areas, it makes me wonder.
-I will forever believe that the idea of work is utter bullshit and how we treat labor in the US ought to be considered criminal.

What are your thoughts on retrocausality?  That is, future events affecting the present or past.  (Or present events affecting the past, etc)

You know, I haven't thought much in that direction, but it makes some sense. If our subconscious beliefs can have physical manifestations as chaos magic states, then yeah. The things we do now can affect the past by making alterations to what we discover in the future about the past and have us believe that the past events were truth all along.

Makes me wonder if objective Truth is something that can even exist at all or if we just have to choose the truth that best fits our worldview and roll with it, let the psychic censor filter out everything that doesn't fit or rationalize it into something that does fit our version of reality.

I flirted with the idea without realizing it first when learning fourier transforms - that is transforming a mathematical representation of a signal from time domain to frequency domain.  when doing this, half the amplitude of the signal is represented as a positive frequency and the other half as a negative frequency.  i could only make sense of that by interpreting it to mean the signal was flowing both forward and backward in time.

it hit me again when listening to some physicist prattle on about how newton's theories of motion do not take the direction or flow of time into consideration.  they only predict position as a function of time - at any given time.  if time were to flow backwards, the equations work just as well.

the last time was when there was some big hype about something that was supposed to happen in seattle - I believe this was it.  nothing ended up happening, but during the lead up, there was a lot of reference to all the predictive programming leading up to 9/11.  it occurred to me that, maybe 9/11 was such a profound, significant event that it retroactively caused all these predictive events to happen just prior to it.

i'm no physicist and i like to describe myself as a recovering mathematician, but it seems that any calculus based physics is unable to account for the flow of time.  and, really, it is us that are travelling through time - time can be thought of as static - just like the other 3 physical dimensions.  if that is the case then it's perfectly reasonable to say that "a caused b" and "b caused a" are not mutually exclusive.

however - a lot of nature seems better described with recursive mathematics X_n+1 is a function of X₁.  That is to say the next X depends on the previous X in the sequence.  The calculations most likely could be reversed to show a non-time dependent relationship.  Until you take chaos theory into account - but, I think the argument there is it boils down to a lack of precision.

Anyhow - I seem to be rambling on.   I think this stuff is fun to think about and I enjoyed getting it all down "on paper"  - it's probably why I made that post about retrocausality a couple weeks ago.

Edit:  I wanted to add that I think maybe a belief in retrocausality could be a useful technique for neuro-linguisting programming.  one could say "in the future, I will be healthy because I am taking care of my body now"  or one could say, "I am taking care of my body now because, in the future, I am healthy"

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

I'm into WOO. I have been a devotee of all shapes of UFO woo since the '70s, I fucking love it; can't get enough. Can't say it's extraterrestrial for sure because how the fuck would I know? All I'm pretty sure of is the weird behavior of unidentified phenomena doesn't make me think humans are running it. Throw in ghosts, cryptids, etc sure, why the fuck not - this is a weird universe and all I can be really sure of is that it's a lot weirder and way more complex than my dumb meat could ever process. Alternative universes/causality blips/retrocausality - bring it on, it's fascinating. I'm reading a lot of Anthony Peake right now - https://www.anthonypeake.com/ super entertaining.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm into WOO. I have been a devotee of all shapes of UFO woo since the '70s, I fucking love it; can't get enough. Can't say it's extraterrestrial for sure because how the fuck would I know? All I'm pretty sure of is the weird behavior of unidentified phenomena doesn't make me think humans are running it. Throw in ghosts, cryptids, etc sure, why the fuck not - this is a weird universe and all I can be really sure of is that it's a lot weirder and way more complex than my dumb meat could ever process. Alternative universes/causality blips/retrocausality - bring it on, it's fascinating. I'm reading a lot of Anthony Peake right now - https://www.anthonypeake.com/ super entertaining.

For me, the UFO thing is a settled argument.

I hate aliens, and I hate humans.  So it doesn't matter what UFOs are.

[rong]

I don't know why it doesn't get brought up more, but I think it makes more sense that UFOs are from deep within our own oceans.  They're more often spotted by Navy pilots flying over the ocean and, more importantly, it solves that rather insurmountable problem of every other planet that could harbor life is really fucking far away.

[Doktor Howl]

I don't know why it doesn't get brought up more, but I think it makes more sense that UFOs are from deep within our own oceans.  They're more often spotted by Navy pilots flying over the ocean and, more importantly, it solves that rather insurmountable problem of every other planet that could harbor life is really fucking far away.

But I hate fish, too.