(Dec 26, 2017 06:58 AM)Syne Wrote: When the knowable explanations include mistaken identity, drunk or high, lying, or delusional, there's plenty to account for all the sightings. Failure to accept this lands you in one of those categories.
No...none of that accounts for all the sightings and footprints we have acquired over the years. There are literally thousands of reports, many of bigfoot within 50 feet. You live in a fairy land if you think people are making this up. It is what it is.
Yes, and your confirmation bias seems to preclude you from realizing that "mistaken identity, drunk or high" are not people "making this up." It's just the vagaries of human perception and recall. Oh right, I forgot...you think everyone has an eidetic memory.
Oh so this is you, after failing to impugn human sight, and then failing to impugn human memory, trying to impugn both again just because you don't want to believe in bigfoot. That's a hell of a price to pay for a belief. I hope you don't mistake your car for a moose tomorrow and then forget where you parked it.
People don't misperceive 16 inch footprints. And they don't misperceive bellowing 8 ft hominids that smell of rotten eggs. It is what it is.
(Dec 26, 2017 07:47 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: Oh so this is you, after failing to impugn human sight, and then failing to impugn human memory, trying to impugn both again just because you don't want to believe in bigfoot.
"The result was striking. Before kicking, both groups had the same perception of the size of the goal (incidentally, an inaccurate one: everybody underestimated its actual width-to-height ratio). But after 10 kicks, the poor performers (those who scored two or fewer successful kicks) saw the goal as about 10 percent narrower than they had before, whereas the good kickers (those who scored three or more) perceived the goal to be about 10 percent wider. How well you have performed over the past few minutes influences the way you see the world! Not just metaphorically, but on a physiological level—it changes your actual perceptions." - https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...n-deceive/
Quote:That's a hell of a price to pay for a belief.
It's called the null hypothesis. It's the default assumption you are desperately trying to disprove. 80% of the world believes in god, but I assume you don't just accept that because you hold the null hypothesis that there is no evidential need for a god.
"Wilson used the scientific method, starting with a hypothesis: "Bigfoot is real."
He then listed several examples of reported proof, like footprints, remains, DNA, photographs, videos and eyewitness reports.
But with each category of evidence, Wilson disproved the hypothesis, explaining why each is not scientifically convincing.
"Scientists don't think it's very likely that Bigfoot is out there. ...There's no evidence yet to support the 'Bigfoot is real' hypothesis," he said.
Footprints, DNA, remains, photographs and films have been faked and disproved in the past, he said.
YazataDec 26, 2017 04:54 PM (This post was last modified: Dec 26, 2017 05:12 PM by Yazata.)
(Dec 23, 2017 07:28 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Good in depth interview with Les Stroud on his new mission to explore the Bigfoot phenomenon and Dave Paulides' Missing 411 phenomenon.
...It’s a great question that leads to that, because I love this little thought of mine here. And that is that when you have somebody say to you, “I saw a Bigfoot”. Let’s establish that this is somebody that you trust. Someone that you respect. We’re going to go right there...
You trust them. You respect them. And they say to you, Last weekend from 15 feet away I saw a Bigfoot. Now you only have four places you can go with that. Number one is they’re delusional… suffering from a delusion. Number two is mistaken identity. It was a bear. But again, this is someone who’s very experienced in the bush, knows animals, and they’re saying they were 15 feet away from a Bigfoot. Number three is they’re lying. And number four, the final one, is they’re giving you an accurate representation of what they saw.
So that’s a neat little compartmentalized way to react to somebody...
...she told me she saw them twice, he closes it off with– and this is probably going to be familiar to you– he closes it off with “ehh y’know eh I don’t know if they exist.” And when he does that I stop him immediately and go:
“Hang on, hang on a second here. You’re not sure they exist?”
“Yeaaaa, I don’t know, y’now?”
“Ok, so then your friend… well, she’s a liar.”
“Whoa, whoa no, she’s my friend.”
“Oh no. She’s a liar, isn’t she? If you’re saying after the fact that you trust her, and she’s telling you from 15 feet away with her experienced woods eyes that she saw a Bigfoot, and you’re saying you still don’t know if they exist, is you’re saying that she’s a liar. I want you to tell me.” And I’ll do this...
Stroud seems to me to be trying to emotionally manipulate the person he's talking to into a position where he either says he believes in the existence of bigfoot or insults his friend. Not wanting to insult his friend, he's more apt to say what Stroud wants him to say. "Journalists" are professionals at playing that game, at steering people they are interviewing towards saying things the "journalist" wants said, and Stroud is a media guy who has had his own TV show. Lawyers are paid to do it. It angers me when I see it happening and intellectually it isn't very convincing.
I don't think that Stroud has eliminated all the possibilities apart from 3. ("they're lying") and 4. ("they're giving you an accurate representation of what they saw".) I personally think that there's a huge middle ground between accusing somebody of lying and treating them like an always-veridicial human camera. All kinds of interpretive and memory mistakes are possible when people say they saw something. Just waving your hand by saying "this is someone who is very experienced in the bush" doesn't eliminate the possibility of interpretive error and it certainly doesn't eliminate the possibility of memory errors, both of which are very common.
When somebody experiences an event in the objective physical world, he/she sees light, hears sound, perhaps feels things by touching them or smells them. All those sensory modalities have to be combined together somehow into an experience of a single object. Then all kinds of judgments are made, How big was it? How far away was it? What was it? And conclusions are drawn. My point is that there's lots of cognitive processing involved in perceiving something, which opens up the possibility of error. Errors at this stage are exceedingly common and can't simply be dismissed as "delusion" as Stroud so blithely does (with his alternative number 1.), suggesting (no doubt intentionally) that perceptual error is indicative of psychiatric pathology. Nobody wants to accuse a friend of having psychiatric problems, but perceptual errors can happen to anyone and needn't be pathological.
And what's more, human memory isn't just storage of the whole event in some neural hard-drive. Psychological research suggests that what's stored are clues or hints, that are used to imaginatively re-create the experience in the mind's-eye (whatever that is) when needed. That's why people can be induced to "remember" things that never happened, by use of suggestion. The externally suggested hints and the internally suggested hints get confused. But again, that isn't the same thing as lying. There's no intent to deceive.
Hunters commonly wear Ghillie suits. Perhaps a hunter was lying low, awaiting the approach of game, when another human barged into the area, scaring off the game and making discharge of the firearm dangerous. So the hunter arises and moves off. Leaving a witness who reports seeing a shaggy humanoid creature suddenly arising some distance away and moving off through the woods.
There are so many accounts that involved multiple sensory experiences and attendant details that misperception is ruled out immediately. Many accounts of large rocks being thrown from bushes with grunting sounds. The smell of rotten eggs or sulfur.
The banging on trees and distinctive howls in remote wooded areas far from humans. The footprints! 18 inch tracks showing massive weight in their depth and massive height in their length. And then there's the seeing of the bipedal form of the hairy hominid--very distinct from a bear or a deer in its silouette, stride and arm movements. And always gigantic--about 8 feet tall. The fact that these details recur again and again in different sightings by different people who aren't fruitcakes but capable hunters and rangers and hikers and country folk confirms that this is a real creature with typical traits and behavior patterns. Just review some of the sightings from this list. You will be convinced.
It is in the mind, where all the different sensory experiences are processed, that bias, expectation, and vagary all mix together in an imperfect synthesis. It's naive to think that multiple senses in concert somehow magically cease to suffer from the liabilities of the individual senses.
It magically fails to show up in the fossil record, nor have any remains been found. Lemme guess, does bigfoot ascend to the skies? Wait, is bigfoot really an alien? That would at least explain the heavy crossover of believers.
The breeding population size to account for the number of reported sightings makes the lack of actual evidence even more suspect.
Anecdotal reports are not evidence.
Well-funded, well-equipped, and sustained scientific searches (you know, people who could accurately document a sighting) for known species in the areas of bigfoot reports don't ever stumble across one. And new species are discovered every year...mostly microorganisms and insects (with no large animals discovered in the last century).
Without a match to a known sample, no one can say what any particular footprint belongs to.
10. Scientific uncertainty is no more a reason to believe in bigfoot than it is a reason to believe in god. Bigfoot of the gaps?
9. Historical precedence tells us that no large animals have been discovered for the last century (which has seen unprecedented human encroachment into once remote ecosystems), there's no fossil record, and no remains to evidence living "side-by-side" with a completely unknown large primate.
8. We actually have more evidence (fossils) for gigantopithecus than the supposedly contemporary bigfoot. And that's only teeth and mandibles.
7. We haven't discovered any more large animals since the modern gorilla and panda, over a century ago.
6. How does the land bridge migration lead to no fossils? Oh right, it doesn't.
We obtained radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils, and metagenomic DNA from lake sediment cores in a bottleneck portion of the corridor. We find evidence of steppe vegetation, bison, and mammoth by approximately 12.6 cal. kyr BP, followed by open forest, with evidence of moose and elk at about 11.5 cal. kyr BP, and boreal forest approximately 10 cal. kyr BP. Our findings reveal that the first Americans, whether Clovis or earlier groups in unglaciated North America before 12.6 cal. kyr BP, are unlikely to have travelled by this route into the Americas. However, later groups may have used this north–south passageway. - https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/...nd-bridge/
5. Native American legends that arose independently are similar to the concept of god, except god is a world-wide legend. Are you looking to convert too?
4. Eyewitness anecdotes are not evidence...learn the difference.
3. Small number of unidentified hair samples? Not evidence of bigfoot.
2. Footprints believed out of an appeal to incredulity with how far a hoaxer would go.
1. One shaky, unfocused video of a man-sized creature doing man-like things.
Quote:Historical precedence tells us that no large animals have been discovered for the last century (which has seen unprecedented human encroachment into once remote ecosystems), there's no fossil record, and no remains to evidence living "side-by-side" with a completely unknown large primate.
Forested areas are not good areas for fossil formation OR hunting.
"Fossils only form in very specific situations. Animals that die in damp forest environments aren’t likely to fossilize due to the quick decomposition described above. Erosion may play a part in the preservation of fossils from mountainous areas.
Since Bigfoot seems to live in both dense forests and mountainous areas, and since we’ve already established how few Bigfoot must die every year, it appears a fossilized Bigfoot would be highly unlikely."-=--https://exemplore.com/cryptids/If-Bigfoo...-the-Bones
Quote:We actually have more evidence (fossils) for gigantopithecus than the supposedly contemporary bigfoot. And that's only teeth and mandibles.
Kinda destroys your "why are there no fossils argument" if all we have of gigantopithecus are teeth and jaws.
Quote:We haven't discovered any more large animals since the modern gorilla and panda, over a century ago
So what? There are lots of unexplored forested areas remaining. And if Bigfoot is a nocturnal intelligent hominid, it explains why we haven't discovered him yet.
Quote:How does the land bridge migration lead to no fossils? Oh right, it doesn't.
How did it lead to just teeth for Gigantopithicus? Fossilization is a rare process. There are probably tons of species that we have never found fossils of.
Quote:Native American legends that arose independently are similar to the concept of god, except god is a world-wide legend. Are you looking to convert too?
God was a Great Spirit for native americans. Saskwatch was a real animal to native americans alongside wolves and deer and
buffalo and ravens.
Quote:Eyewitness anecdotes are not evidence...learn the difference.
Eyewitness accounts are excellent evidence and convict criminals everyday.
Quote:Small number of unidentified hair samples? Not evidence of bigfoot.
Hairs of no known species equals hairs of a species yet to be discovered. Hence bigfoot.
Quote:Footprints believed out of an appeal to incredulity with how far a hoaxer would go
No..footprint casts numbering in the hundreds studied by primate experts and confirmed to have been made by a real animal.
Quote:One shaky, unfocused video of a man-sized creature doing man-like things.
Nope..one clear footage of a tall furry hominid whose gait and anatomy defy anything known or a man in a ape suit. It even has breasts. It's a mother! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKUwdHex1Zs
Dec 26, 2017 07:47 AM
(This post was last modified: Dec 26, 2017 07:52 AM by Magical Realist.)
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