Today in PhiloPsycho Freedom, I shall be discussing that little area of consciousness between waking and dreaming! It's a peculiar area where weird psychological effects can come about. The brief area you experience between waking and sleeping has been labeled as the Hypnagogia (AKA Hypnogogia) and can lead you to have a wide array of experiences – including seemingly supernatural ones.

Supernatural Phenomenon?

Some of the seemingly supernatural phenomena that can manifest in this threshold of consciousness can be out of body experiences, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and lucid dreaming. Out of body experiences have often been thought of as spiritual experiences, or some sort of psychic experience, but have been attributed to this particular part of consciousness. They also have been connected to Dissociating from reality.

For this post, allow yourself to envision a sterile, lab environment. You're sitting in a hard, uncomfortable chair in front of a stainless steel table, all of which is in a room with white walls. The walls are barren, with a desk in the far left corner of your field of vision. A few moments pass and an experimenter comes in with a sheet labelled "Personality Test", which you are expected to fill out. You comply and wait a while longer for your results to come back. The experimenter returns and hands you a form that reads the following specifically tailored personality description:

Worked in the morning, drank most of the rest of the day to celebrate the solstice. Fireworks in Windsor at the night.

The running soundtrack of my life had his pause last Tuesday and finally resumed as of today to celebrate the solstice. It's not the same to hang by the pool without music. This is why I've excused the use of an iPod and speakers.

You know that Ke$ha song? Yeah, you know it. See if you can guess which one I mean. Phenylethylamine (PEA) is what we associate with the feeling of love. It is a neurochemical which quite literally gets us high. My friend and I got to wondering about it: if it's a drug, it'll act like a drug - addiction, capacity, tolerance, withdrawals, and all. Thinking like that, I realized the addictive capacity for different forms of relationships. With functioning long-distance relationships, you get a quick, strong fix, then a long break between exposures in comparison to their non-long distance counterparts. This would keep the strength of the dose relatively constant and not dwindle in intensity over time. In contrast, close-distance relationships should dwindle quickly due to overexposure of the drug, and probably build dependence.

As I previously mentioned, I'm afraid of falling into the old habits of overindulging in entertainment. As an article I read asked: are we raising citizens or consumers? Our culture encourages discomfort, dissatisfaction, and the lack of a critical mind. Equipped with this mind set, we are fully prepared to "buy this car to drive to work; drive to work to pay for this car." Even I, someone who likes to think that they regularly embrace in the practice of meta-cognition, have bought into this set and had not fully comprehended the extent of it until I've removed myself as best I can fathom.

The experience of driving is evolving; It started as a boring, silent burden and is slowly  becoming a near-meditative state, both outwardly and inwardly focused. It toggles back and forth. Today, I saw a herron flying and smelled the fields as the wind whipped through my hair at 80km/h - all of which I would have missed if I'd been listening to music or the radio.

•  10: Wake up
• 10:30: Renew health card
• 10:45: Buy new chess board from value village to replace the missing one ($2.00!)
• 11-3: Bum around, read, play chess, lift weights.
• 3:30-6: Leave house, hang out with a friend at a coffee shop. Play chess. Walk around town for a bit, then head home.
• 6:15: Hang out with relatives
• 6:45: Swim
• 7:00: Pick up food
• 8-10:30: Eat, play piano, read, play more piano, journal this. 

• 6:45: Woken up by co-Digital Detoxer (co-DD), went back to slept since I didn't have to get up for another hour and a half
• 8:20: Got up
• 9:00: Left for Windsor
• 9:30-12: Attended University of Windsor convocation (Co-DD was graduating)
• 12:30-2: Cora’s for brunch
• 2:30-4:10: Mall (this time frame is a bit off, and I mostly hung around outside the mall since I didn't want all the advertisement exposure and had no money)
• 6-9: Work

When you're busy, you don't' have time to sit and dwell. This is a widely used approach to distressing situations, which can vary widely. To compare what I'm doing to distressing situations in people's lives is ridiculous, so I'll stop the comparison there. Today, I decided that I would continue with this digital famine until I could have one pure day - One day where I can live truly digital-less. I'm hoping, desperately, that that day will be tomorrow since I have no plans and work won't be able to force the usage of things on me. Starting to crack a little bit, really craving Facebook, Reddit, and e-mail. I feel a little bit of pressure from ignoring my e-mail in case something important comes up, but I then realize that they'll probably get in contact with me by some other means if it's that important. Typical craving, though: grows until it comes to a head, then it terminates.

The general upside of this is that I'm forced to have a more normal sleep schedule because I'm too tired to read at night and I wake up with the sun. Getting a lot of reading done, though.

Cheated:

• Mall Adverts
• Texted Co-DD (he allowed the use of his cell phone for work purposes) during his convocation to tell him he should shake Peter Mansbridge's hand (who was an honorary grad for this convocation)
• cell phone as camera
• One phone call that I promptly ended

• 10:30 - Woke up naturally, without an alarm (curtains open, somehow I was able to sleep for almost 5 hours with sunlight)
• 11:00-2:00 - Got out of bed, ate breakfast, read, played piano and guitar for my bird. I obviously have a lot to do with my time (I'm not getting many hours at work)
• 2:00-5:15 - Worked out, read more. Tried to find the chess board, but it seems to have been misplaced
• 5:30 - Left for work after beating my dad at makeshift chess (using pocket change and checkers on a (checkers board)
• 11:30 - Made a test run of sangria
• 12:30 - Beat my co-Digital Detoxer at chess
• 1:30 - Slept on co-DD's floor among the articles littering his floor

I'm starting to learn to cope with the lack of constant electronic entertainment. The most difficult thing is time spent driving because I'm driving in silence, sans radio. to fill the void, I either get lost in thought or experiment with beat boxing. I find that I'm having more and more diverse songs popping into my head, from "Don't stop me now" by Queen to "Immigrant Song" by Zepplin. I'm not sure if theses songs are occurring at a higher frequency from before or it it's just more noticeable due to the lack of actual music (aside from what I've played, myself). I also find that I keep dreaming about the internet, which is particularly abnormal because I normally don't dream (Yes, yes! We all dream every night for most of the night. I mean that I don't remember them, fool!).

A little over a week ago, I came into contact with the idea of doing a digital detox. The thought process seems to be something along the line of seeing what effect these devices have on our daily lives, experiences, and our sense of self. I've heard of people doing something similar when they attempt vegetarianism. I thought I'd give it a go and started it a day after hearing about it.

The Details of the Digital Detox:

• No cell phone
• No Ipod or car radio
• No computer
• No TV
• Deactivating Facebook
• Avoiding digital devices whenever possible (had to switch to an analog clock for this, too)

Note that it’s digital, and not technological. I considered technological, but that would be quite impossible due to work, transportation, and the like. I quickly recruited my friend, who isn't that digital to begin with, to join me on my endeavor for support and to help work out the kinks of what should and should not be allowed, why exactly we were doing this, and what we were hoping to gain from it.

Like, I said, When I started, I began in the same vein to when people decide to do a trial run of vegetarianism; Do you feel any different from eating meat? is there a difference in living costs? Does eating meat affect energy levels? Similarly, I decided to see if there were any effects on how I live in and experience the world. The idea was brought to my attention through a magazine known as Adbusters (which is extremely worthwhile, by the way).

One thing you'll notice is that the style of each day's entry does not remain consistent, as I either got lazy, forgot, didn't like the previous format, or an assortment of other reasons. I'm going to put up what I wrote untouched just so you can see the progress through a week (which takes a different direction somewhere in the second half of the week). I decided to keep my thoughts on a pad of paper during the week in the absence of a computer to record it on. Here's the first day:

Up at ten, bored by one-thirty. I had an interview at noon that was a half hour drive away. The trip there and back was not interesting, to say the least; No radio, mildly sleep deprived, entirely rural surroundings (which means windows up due to wind from driving speeds, and to cut down on the smell of manure).

At home, I played some piano and started collecting various liqueurs that might mix well in the sangria I was planning on making, particularly for the solstice. I started considering getting drunk, but what the hell is the point of being drunk, alone, in silence? My parents have left town for the day and I'm trying to avoid using my cell phone, even if it's just as a phonebook.

At this point, It makes me reminisce about the many other times I've done things to test my will for some end: eating right, exercise, lent, etc. Stage one: withdrawal that creates an intense yearning for what you currently cannot have, which will eventually brake way for stages 2 and 3: indifference, then seeing your connection to the forsaken thing for what it is (a crutch, an addiction, the benefits and detriments, etc.)

I tried to read, but ended up falling asleep until four, with brief interruptions for the phone (I allowed the phone, but tried to avoid cordless ones). I dreamt that I was on the computer, going automatically to Facebook and reactivating my account. I got mad at myself, reshut it down, and repeated the process again. Bizarre dream.

Went out for the rest of the night with friends, which distracted me from the lack of tech. Bed early, as there is nothing to do at night by myself.

Cheated:

• Calculator for the interview
• Text received, but not answered

Afterthought: At this point, I didn’t really have a clear definition of what I was planning on doing, or trying to achieve. So I was clear cutting certain technologies which don’t make sense to cut by my later definition.

Lately I've been thinking about Thomas Huxley's idea of infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters for an infinite amount of time. As the theory goes, they'd eventually recreate Shakespeare's works in their entirety simply due to random hitting of the keys. Don't argue this point, it's true. In fact, they'd not only recreate Shakespeare's works once, but would do so an infinite number of times. The same goes for every other literary work, supposing that they phonetically write out other scripts (like oriental, Cyrillic, Sanskrit, etc.)) and ignore accents that aren't available.

An easier way to wrap your head around this problem is to envision a keyboard that has pebbles being dropped on it, hitting only one key at a time and no others. Given that each key has an equally probably chance of being struck, it will produce every work if left doing this processes for unlimited time. The reason I find this example to be clearer is because most people seem to think the monkeys would have some sort of intent behind their actions, as if they're actually trying to recreate Shakespeare or whatever. This isn't the case - they're simply mashing keys and accidentally making novels.

Expanding from this, I realized that secular reincarnation is capable of happening. It is entirely possible that one or all of three things are infinite: time, space, and/or alternate dimensions. As long as one of these is unlimited, it's quite possible that when we die, our consciousness in its exact form could re-manifest somewhere else. This pulls a lot of things into question, of course. Where does consciousness rest? Is it possible to transmit it? Even if something is structurally identical, will you, as you are now, be part of it? What about a/the soul? Too many questions, really. But, it is promising for any non-religious person who's despairing at the afterlife.

To clarify where I'm coming from, probability theory states that nothing has a 0% chance of happening (aka everything has a chance greater than 0). Even if it's infinitesimally small, it will express itself somewhere in an unlimited number of trials. The real mindfuck here is if you consider omnipresent beings. If every possible combination of things must happen, then somewhere an omnipresent god must exist, and in another place it must not, which violates the first one's power. This clearly demonstrates that there is a limit to the probability curve in practice - we don't have gods walking among us and intervening, as some interventionist religions would believe.

Thus, we should refine the statement to be:

In an infinite universe, anything that is possible must happen.

Note: Do not attempt to actually create the monkey's on typewriters. Only a fucking idiot would expect to see similar results when comparing an infinite sample and an extremely small, finite sample.

Somewhere at sometime you've probably heard the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20". For those of you who haven't, this phrase is describing how much clearer events are once they're over with. We have the ability to gain some distance between us and the problem or choice of the time. This is all descriptive of something called "hindsight bias" which is how we're biased to think that things were obviously going to turn out as they did when they may not have been at the time. Enron's huge success that eventually ended the utter downfall of the energy giant? Obviously that was doomed! Their hiring description was basically the DSM-IV-TR's criteria of a sociopath. The people in the 2nd tower on 9-11? They should have expected another plane coming! The bay of pigs? Clearly JFK should have known better than to go through with such a shoddy plan! In fact, none of these cases would have been easily identified as a failure from the perspective of the decision makers (stockholders, people in the 2nd tower, JFK and staff, respectively). From our cushy position right now, it is quite obvious that these things would happen, but at the time, you can never be certain how things will work out.

There are too many factors at any given moment to clearly see everything that's relevant to a given circumstance.

I came across this post the other day and thought it was a great analysis of the habits we gravitate towards, namely genres of video games for you gamers out there. I fully support the following message:

It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Some people see them as opportunities to perform - to demonstrate their talent or intellect. Others see them as opportunities to master - to improve their skill or knowledge.

Alright, this post is going to be a reaction to an article published my Cracked.com. Cracked is known to do many lists similar to this. Usually I'll just read them, letting them slide if I disagree with them. This time is not such a case because it's so very frustrating to read this because they make such a faulty conclusion based on these studies. The article is titled 5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed.

The introduction is equally ridiculous as the rest of it: "Psychologists know to be careful ... because [they're] never sure what [they'll] find in there." Right. Specifically Psychologists? Not biologists, chemists, physicists, environmental sciences, economics, nor sociology? Oh, that's right. Psychology is somehow set apart because it studies people directly and can come across scary things that apply directly do us (unlike the rest just listed).

Experiment #5. The Asch Conformity Experiment

This experiment, if anything, proves that humanity will be more likely to survive. As much as we don't like to admit it, conformity is a good thing for a species' survival. Think about it: humans are communal beings who rely on one another to survive. If this weren't true, we would all be doing whatever we damn well please, and there would be no society or group to speak of. That kind of framework would ultimately lead to our destruction and we would be picked off by more organized groups of predators, or ones that were physically stronger. Sure, if we did that from the get-go, we could've become lone predators, but then we wouldn't be humans, would we? Furthermore, some participants did hold out given the immense social pressure for this experiment, despite the obvious signs of anxiety that manifested. If you're so anti-conformity to think that conformity equates to doom, your hope lies within these people.

Experiment #4. The Good Samaritan Experiment

Alright, this one may prove their case a bit more than the last one. Here, though, the study was most likely run in western society. Why does this matter? We're very individualistic in the West. Generally speaking, people believe that we get what we deserve; hard work and perseverance wins out no matter what! Plainly speaking, this is a load of shit, but that's another post altogether. My point here is that people with such a worldview will be less likely to help someone in need when they don't have the luxury of time to spare, despite being seminary students (not that priests-in-training are especially moral, anyway). A cross-cultural study of this has probably been done, but I don't feel like digging through archives to find it. Needless to say, people don't feel responsible for things that they aren't directly involved in.

This is related to the old moral dilemma: You're standing at a switch in a railway station. If you don't throw the switch, 10 people are going to die; If you throw the switch, only 1 person will die because it'll change the track that the train will go on. When presented with this problem, the majority of people will flip the switch. Now we change the situation: 10 people are still on the tracks,  but instead of standing at a switch you're standing by a really large fat man. You can guarantee that this fat man will stop the train enough to save these 10 people; Do you push him onto the tracks? Most people say no, despite the same outcomes present are the same as last time.

Experiment #3. Bystander Apathy Experiment

This study also has some merit to their conclusion, but education about this should be able to bring it more under control. Like they teach in First Aid training: take charge, assign specific people to do certain things. If you need someone to call 911 (and you probably will if you're using your mad first aid skillz), you don't yell out "someone call 911!", you say "You! In the Blue shirt! Yeah, you! Call 911!" By doing this, you're assigning 100% of the responsibility on this poor sap, dramatically increasing the chances of the job getting done. Also, you may notice that this experiment was based off of something I covered earlier: the Kitty Genovese tragedy. Bottom line for this experiment: Discovery is the first step to mastery; knowing about this problem is a major step in fixing it. I find their conclusion that we're all seeking reasons to not step in to be faulty. As discussed in the Kitty Genovese post, there are alternative explanations other than people being self-centered assholes who live and let die.

Experiment #2:  The Stanford Prison Experiment

This experiment also gives some merit that we're screwed, but it falls into a similar category as experiment #5: It's simple in-group, out-group views where we conform to what we think we need to do to satisfy, and remain in, the group we're part of. Yes, it got out of hand because power corrupts, but this isn't anything new that this experiment had brought to light. It's not like we're often given absolute power with no checks or balances to keep us from doing whatever we please, is it? Unless you're a sociopath, you'll still follow social norms. Ironically, the very fact that we conform to social norms will stop us from doing things like this, generally speaking, because it's not socially acceptable to abuse others in such a way.

Experiment #1: The Milgram Experiments

They come to a faulty conclusion, yet again, due to the fact that conformity is actually a good thing! Sure, when put to use for perceived evil acts, this is be a bad thing. But consider the flip side: when under the rule of someone with good intentions, people will be more likely to do good things instead of evil. As with the prison experiment, social norms will actually stop us from acting like assholes.

By the way, I question the credibility of the puppy torturing experiment they reference at the very end; Doesn't seem like it would get ethics clearance, and would likely get the full wrath of PETA. It's overly simplified to say that "all it takes to get 8 out of 10 people to torture a puppy is to wear a lab coat and ask them to."

Hey! Want to torture a puppy? Right..

My main reaction to this: Even if every experiment they sited showed the darkest sides of humans (and believe me, there are worse ones than these), it wouldn't prove anything. It's all up to interpretation, as any experiment is. Though, you could also say that science doesn't prove anything, it just disproves things and makes certain conclusions more likely.

Humans are pretty crazy things, aren't they? They can take random events and patterns and force order and meaning onto it. We not only want order; we need it. This is no better illustrated than in a study I referenced in another post (last paragraph of it). Participants needed to take back some of that control and meaning in their environment, so much so that they saw a pattern in a randomly changing arrangement of black and white pixels.

We also feel a need to attribute performance to people's abilities when it may be entirely independent of such factors. This has been illustrated by looking at Hollywood production companies, stock brokers, coaches, and basketball players. Statistically analyzing the data collected from each of these groups has shown that a person's performance was more controlled by random factors than by the people themselves: The producer didn't influence the success of the studio; the stock broker who has chosen the correct stock enough times in a row is lucky, more than anything; coaches had little influence on the ability of the team; basketball players on "hot streaks" didn't perform significantly better than average.

There's a basic stats principle called "regression", or "regression to the mean", which says that people will vary around their average performance, but won't stray too far from it. In the above cases (not including the stock broker), each group was performing around their mean. The producer who got fired for lack-lustre choices in projects may get fired, but it simply could've gone from one extreme (the high side of the mean) to the other (the low side of the mean), making it appear like he's a terrible chooser. When the next hot shot comes along and performance does better, it's a simple regression to the mean, meaning that it went from the low side back to the average. Same for the coach, and basketball player.

The stock broker is slightly different though. Say there are 10 stock brokers and they all pick random stocks to invest in. Let's give them a running chance and say that they all have a 50-50 chance of gaining or losing money. From the first pick, 5 will appear to be good brokers. Replay this again, 2.5 appear to be better choosers. Run again, and now it's 1.25. It may seem ridiculous to be looking at 1.25 stock brokers,  but if we take a much larger number, it becomes more clear. Of all the hundreds of thousands of stock brokers, a few are going to be consistently successful in their stock ventures. People will look at them in amazement saying "they must have talent! They've been successful for years and never picked a bad stock!", but that isn't the case. These people aren't psychic.

Of course, people are going to argue with me saying that players really do go on hot streaks, or that producers play a huge part in the companies, but in reality we're just creatures who are terrible at intuitively analyzing statistical principles and need to impose meaning and order on "patterns" we see. The performance of these companies or groups is more a sign of the overall workings of the company and less about the leader, deal with it.

When I say Free Will, I'm taking a purely secular stance on the idea. I'm not taking into consideration any God(s) or Goddess(es), I'm looking at it entirely from a non-religious stance.

In a previous post I briefly covered how the determinism works, but I feel that there's more to say on the subject. I used to take the stance that everything is simply action-reaction (or stimulus-response, for you behaviourists), but I've come to realize that it doesn't really change anything. There is always a factor of chance in the world and, supposing things have some uniformity to them, we could see exactly what is going to happen at any given point. This is a very strenuous burden to pose as a possibility because we will likely never be able to figure out exactly how everything works. As Richard Dawkins puts it:

"What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don't feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, 'Oh well he couldn't help doing it, he was determined by his molecules."

Though he's right that people rarely, if ever, take that stance, it could be strongly argued in favour of that. But as he said, we need to believe that events are within our control or else we'll develop cases of learned helplessness, and have an entirely external locus of control. I've recently had a radical change in my approach to things, gaining a feeling that whatever comes my way is manageable and within my control to handle. It's a very empowering feeling to be sure, but from a deterministic stance, this was meant to happen because of how things were put together; I was determined to gain this new perspective from the beginning of time. Be that as it may, it doesn't take away any of the perceived freedom I've derived from my environment. I would like to close by calling upon Sartre, yet again, with one of my new favourite quotes:

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you"

For more information on Determinism, here is an interesting video.

A couple days ago, I struck up a conversation with a stranger and it lasted well into the two hour range. While talking to them, we covered a broad range of topics, and one of them was regarding marriage and relationships. I told them that, in my first year of university, I challenged everything I had previously assumed would happen in my life as well as large number of my views. I attacked them viciously to see if I believed them for what they were or because it had always been impressed on me to hold these values, believing them without any merit of their own. Among these was, as I segued in from, marriage and relationships: whether I'd ever want to get married; whether it'd be traditional; the possibility of polygamy; sexual orientation, etc. Some came more automatically than others, but when I mentioned to my conversation partner that I'd given thought to the possibility of polygamy/open-relationships, they were surprised that I'd ever considered that and wondered why I was even thinking about that.

One common response that most people throw at me when they hear that I've considered obscure or often unrelated-to-everyday-life things is that I have too much time on my hands and/or that I think too much. I don't understand the concept of thinking too much unless the person doesn't act. But I act! Oh baby, do I ever act! Sorry, that's another can of worms altogether. I answered their query about why I was thinking about such a topic by referencing a philosopher I'd recently been introduced to (though, he's never going to meet me): Sartre.

Sartre believed firmly in a person's freedom and was adamant about people asserting said freedom. We cannot choose whether to participate or not; we are still a part of everything was a sentiment often expressed by Sartre. He felt that in every activity, we have a choice to act and respond in any of an infinite number of ways. It was not only an option to act, it was forced upon us, condemned to the freedom of choice where inactivity was still an activity. In many ways he is right, which may be surprising to hear me say considering I am a determinist. He believed that we had the responsibility and ability to choose how to react even to things that were inevitable to happen. Take the most inevitable thing possible: our own death. He held that we could choose, at least to some degree, how we would die (e.g. through how we lived, suicide, etc.). It is through this theory through which I explained why I was thinking about polygamy; It is our responsibility to consider our view on something and how we may act in the face of it, or else be surprised when we act in a way we'd never before considered. In such a circumstance, you could surprise even yourself with a reaction that could betray your intentions or give away information about yourself you'd prefer you hadn't. I'd liken it to saying things in anger.

Now, I don't want to hear anyone whining and complaining about how "Oh, but I didn't have a choice! I had to do it!"; I'm not condemning you for anything, but Sartre would have held that we had the choice to go against what we did, and whatever consequences that came with such actions. We have ultimate choice, regardless. We can still choose to kill someone, do drugs, stand up for someone despite a huge mob, scream obscenities in the street at 3am, and the like. Despite what can come from it, the option is still open to us. That's all I'm taking from what he's saying at this time at least, and it's the very reason I like to weigh my opinions on obscure matters.

Now, what can you take away from this? Well, who am I to tell you that? I suppose that if you truly buy into Sartre's theories, it's an ultimately freeing way to think of things. You have the choice to act in any way you want, so take that and run with it.

So this post isn't going to be entirely along the subject matter of my other posts, but I figure it falls into the area of philosophy. What doesn't really fall into some area of philosophy, at least in part? The topic is, as the name implies, about Gym Etiquette, or Etiquette at the Gym if you prefer.

What spurred such an occasion? Well, I was just at our school gym, and it was utterly packed. Not surprising, considering the top two new years resolutions are to get fit and to lose weight, respectively. So, I'm in there looking for a seated bike machine, and there is a lineup for most every cardio machine in the joint (this particular gym is cardio focused). So, I'm next in line to get a bike and I notice this girl, who has been there from the start, biking incessantly slowly and studying. She's not sweating, and the bike she's on is urging her to go faster because it can barely register any activity. I wait ten minutes, and decide my time is better spent doing a rowing machine until someone finishes. Five minutes later, someone gets off and I get a bike directly behind this girl. Any cardio machine in this place has a thirty-minute time limit. So here I am, behind her, reading my book while pedaling very hard and getting a good sweat on. She's continuing her nonchalant workout/studying, emphasis on the studying, causing me to start fuming behind her as I realize beyond a doubt that she's not only wasting a machine during a really busy time, she's also going over the time limit. So I finish up, get off the machine, and someone who was waiting takes mine. I was ready to walk away,  but this shit has got to stop here.

Over this Christmas break, I was in the mall and saw a decorative wall-block that had Only those who believe in miracles will find them inscribed into it. So, upon reading this I began thinking about the validity of such a claim. Ultimately, I broke it down to multiple psychological processes attempting to explain it, though I'm not entirely - though generally - against the idea of miracles.

For starters, such a claim is unfalsifiable - one of the requirements for any theory to have any value for it. It's in the same realm as one of Freud's defense mechanisms known as denial: If we think you have something wrong with you and you disagree.. Denial! Essentially, if you are labeled with something and you don't agree, well, you still have it (according to the diagnoser), you just don't want to admit that unpleasant little fact. Same goes for this little stone-inscribed gem: something good happens to someone who believes in miracles: Hey! It could be a miracle!; Something good happens to someone who doesn't: Hey! Something good happened! But, no miracle. The main problem with this is that it applies to everything, which makes it have no value. Seems kind of counter-intuitive that a theory which is so encompassing is worthless, but it's because it doesn't tell us anything new or of use. Everyone has undetectable parasites in their body? Great, nothing we could do about that, then. Right?