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Jeffery Kripal, UFOs and the return of the miraculous

#1
Magical Realist Offline
I read Kripal's book called "Super-Natural" and enjoy his nuanced and profound thinking on this issue. Here is some of his thoughts on UFO's and what they may mean for modern humanity..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSnHybj9FJw

  "To study the UFO phenomenon adequately is, in actual fact, to study pretty much everything. It is also to come up against, hard, the realization that the institutional or university order of knowledge within which we work and think today, an order that effectively splits the sciences off from the humanities, is simply not helpful, and certainly not reflective of the reality we are trying to understand. The difficult truth is that the UFO phenomenon has both an objective “hard" aspect (think fighter jet videos, photographs, alleged metamaterials, apparent advanced propulsion methods, and landing marks) and a subjective “human” aspect (think close encounters, multiple and coordinated visual sightings, altered states of consciousness, visionary displays, often of a most baroque or sci-fi sort, and experienced traumatic or transcendent abductions). And both sides — both the material and the mental dimensions — are incredibly important to get a sense of the full picture.

Of course, one can slice up the UFO phenomenon into the “scientific” and the “humanistic,” but one will never understand it by doing so. That, in the end, is why I think the subject is so incredibly important: it bears a particular power to challenge, or just obliterate, our present order of knowledge and its arbitrary divisions. Whatever “it” is, it simply does not behave according to our rules and assumptions. Period."

https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/jeffrey-...phenomenon

Jeff Kripal Ted Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX7WDqZuyvQ&t=58s
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#2
Syne Offline
As soon as anyone wants to merge the hard sciences with the humanities, you know they have no grasp on the former and are very likely pushing some sort of agenda with the latter.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
The one thing I never understood about UFO investigation is why any of it is or was top secret. I mean if there is a technology that visits on a daily basis and has been for who knows how long then what are we going to do about it if it is aliens? Answer: Nothing....oh, make a movie or two. The most important thing in my mind would be to attempt contact, it's that close, but instead we search the galaxies for needle in a haystack radio signals. A good photograph would be nice also, so let's petition congress to make camera improvement a priority, above anything else including global warming. If aliens can fix GW or even if they planned it, what are we going to do?

The fact that aliens seem to prefer avoiding personal contact with us can only tell us two things...they don't want to or they're not really there at all. Advocates will believe the former and skeptics the latter. I don't see why that's even a problem. I do see a problem with super intelligence communicating with lesser intelligence, which i would classify as us, simply because we're the first Earth has produced. Can't remember the last time a snail tried to contact me or vice versa or maybe the poor thing is trying but it's too far below my level. My point is we'll just have to accept not knowing anything until the aliens decide its ok to seek us out for talks. In the meantime the whole subject should be put on the back burner, which already may be happening, its that futile an endeavour.
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#4
C C Offline
(Nov 3, 2021 07:17 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/jeffrey-...phenomenon [...]

KRIPAL: "Miles O’Brien, the science correspondent for PBS, confessed on camera a few days ago about witnessing a UFO that behaved in ways that are basically identical to the ways the objects reported in the document behave: impossibly."

https://www.thirteen.org/programs/pbs-ne...624820378/

MILES O'BRIEN: 'What really struck me the most [document events] were the ones where they said we have multiple and varied sensors all returning the same information. Anytime you get involved in any aspect of science and technology, and you had separate streams of data that check out each other, that's when you start saying there's something here. That's what made it more than just a random, causal 'you're not going to believe what I saw when I was flying'.

"[...] Hari, I am a guy who has seen one of these. I can tell you right now that there is a certain amount of validation in knowing that this is not just something that I saw and imagined.
"

HARI SREENIVASAN: "For people who don't know, you are a trained pilot. You've spent countless hours in the sky. Did you feel like you would be laughed out of the bar if you told somebody?"

MILES O'BRIEN: 'It was my wife and I at the time in the 1980s, in Maine. [...] it looked like an extremely bright planet, something like Venus only even brighter. Just hovering there, and then all of a sudden it just took off at speeds that were beyond my comprehension. I chalked it up at the time to 'Oh well, I'm kind of in the remote part of Maine'. If I were the U.S. military and I was testing out something super-duper secret, this probably wouldn't be a bad place to do it, and I just don't know about it. But now, what I saw is almost identical to what we've heard from a lot of these Navy pilots."

PBS Interview with O'Brian

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nLeL3_GIqTI
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#5
Magical Realist Offline
Great find CC..Surely an eyewitness that would make even the most diehard skeptic raise an eyebrow.
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#7
C C Offline
(Nov 5, 2021 03:32 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: There’s always this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis

If true then is it paranormal?

"Some critics of the hypothesis say that only a single dissident group in an alien civilization, or alternatively the existence of galactic cliques instead of a unified galactic club, would be enough to break the pact of no contact. To Stephen Webb, it seems unlikely, taking humans as reference, that such prohibition would be in effect for millions of years without a single breach thereof. Others say that the zoo hypothesis, along with its planetarium variation, is highly speculative and more aligned with theological theories."


Obviously, though, the galaxy lacks several space-traveling intelligent civilizations coinciding with each other to both constitute a Federation and rival cliques. Either that or they're extremely introverted in terms of grand technological projects and detectable activity.

Quasi-programmed superorganisms (akin to ants) and multi-species holobionts would have less individuality for deviation from protocol, and even an oddball form of discursive intelligence like humans seems destined to be become a hive mind as each successive generation graduates from addiction to smartphones to brain implants connecting them to each other and the metaverse.

In addition, interstellar explorers would be machines with non-personal, potential alternative-to-biology behaviors and interests, as well the original species eventually being replaced by such: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-11152-...l#pid46673

As depicted in the novel Solaris, an alien intelligence might display all sorts of complexity in the way it tries to communicate with us, and yet what is directing that is just a psittacine like copycat that doesn't really grasp the human function of what it is emulating. Or is akin to the motivations and level of a child or an animal that is manipulating intricate affairs. Or is totally foreign and un-Earthly in its intentions and purposes (unlike any familiar organism in terms of goals and activity).

In the context of Yazata's proposal that UAPs might be the result of time-travel... Simulated time-travel experiments some years ago (Seth Lloyd, 2009) indicate that time-travel would only be allowed when the intruding effects or objects causally contributed to the established history of the past, rather than changing it. So the temporal probes or "peering eyes" of some technological singularity slash archilect two million years in the future would accordingly be only fulfilling the sightings already on record, in the dispassionate manner of an investigative observer.

Similarly, if any ETs occupying the Milky Way in this era (and earlier) were actually time and space traveling descendants from Earth's future... Those settlers could not have reached the past if they were destined to interfere with their own ancestral development and emergence on Earth (in a manner that either altered or prevented it, as opposed to facilitating or making their own origin possible through non-interference and prescriptive interference).
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#8
Zinjanthropos Offline
Who’s to say an intelligent race didn’t spring up way before the Earth came to be. At one stage in their development they wondered if there were other civilizations out there. They may have encountered the same problems we’re experiencing finding intelligent life. Now let’s say this civilization existed for much longer time then we have so far They’d mastered many things from deep space travel to creating life in the lab. They could either manufacture or modify a life to suit a habitable planet. You can see what I’m getting at, they could still be monitoring us with machines while still out there doing their thing or extinct.

Are there still some mysterious gaps in the biology of the planet? Did animals really evolve from plants, although I think I’ve heard that scientists say yes. The appearance of vertebrates? Whatever else?
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#9
Leigha Offline
I think it's great if you find value from his work MR, but he seems a bit word-saladish to me. I'm not a fan of modern day philosophers who feel the need to tear down spiritual beliefs of others or even religious ideas (unless those beliefs are detrimental to others), in order to 'sell' their ideas.
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#10
Magical Realist Offline
(Nov 23, 2021 08:58 PM)Leigha Wrote: I think it's great if you find value from his work MR, but he seems a bit word-saladish to me. I'm not a fan of modern day philosophers who feel the need to tear down spiritual beliefs of others or even religious ideas (unless those beliefs are detrimental to others), in order to 'sell' their ideas.


I like renegade thinkers whose thinking seeks to subvert the common approach to an unexplained phenomena. I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, but I respect and appreciate their ability to think outside the box and so shift the paradigm so to speak.
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