The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: sciborg2 on February 12, 2014, 01:12:40 am
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Want to get people's thoughts about the Weird in real life. As this is a side hobby of mine feel free to say you think it's all bullshit. ;D
So some time ago I came upon this article (http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-04-25/news/the-grateful-dead-parapsychology-dream-telepathy-joe-eskenazi/) about Krippner in the SF weekly.
The part that piqued my interest was:
The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."
Now I didn't have much knowledge about this stuff though I felt like I'd heard of Child before. Strangely enough I later met a former grad student of Krippner's, and I asked him why Krippner's attempts at replication had all resulted in failure.
Said student actually passed along a message from the man himself:
First of all, our original dream telepathy results were repeated several times in our own laboratory. We published both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications. All of these articles are referenced at the end of our book DREAM TELEPATHY (http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Telepathy-Experiments-Extrasensory-Consciousness/dp/1571743219/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391951699&sr=1-1&keywords=dream+telepathy) (by Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan). A meta-analysis of all the studies produced high significant results and was published in a 1985 article by Irvin Child in The American Psychologist, flagship journal of the American Psychological Association..
Several other researchers attempted to replicate our work. Both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications have been published in the chapter by Roe and Sherwood in ADVANCES IN PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, VOLUME 9 (http://www.amazon.com/Advances-Parapsychological-Research-Extrasensory-Perception/dp/1461590949/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391951736&sr=1-1&keywords=ADVANCES+IN+PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL+RESEARCH%2C+VOLUME+9) (edited by Krippner and Friedman). A meta-analysis of all these studies produced highly significant results. They were not as strong as the Maimonides data, probably because they used "home dreams" instead of "laboratory dreams," the latter involving psychophysiological recordings. In the lab, participants can be awakened once they have been in REM sleep for a while. For home dreams, participants are usually awakened randomly by telephone, hence many dreams are lost.
I'm thinking of buying the book, doubt I'll get Volume 9 of something I'm not really sure is real.
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Waiting for this Dream Telepathy book, in the mean time what's up with those Hessdalen Lights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessdalen_light)?
"In spite of ongoing research there is no convincing explanation of the origin of these lights. However, there are numerous working hypotheses."
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Stanley Krippner [with Christopher Ryan] on Joe Rogan Experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_k_AM2aljg
Great dialogue on a variety of topics. Shamans and medicine plants, environmentalism, psychic powers, history of drug culture and some other interesting stuff. :)
One thing that impressed me was that Krippner managed to stop having claims of dream telepathy be a case for mental disorder.
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Why ghosts are good for you: Patricia Pearson at TEDxTucson 2012 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eneB6u3kGu4)
Patricia shares her latest research for an upcoming book about mysteries of consciousness around death and dying, to be released in 2013. Patricia Pearson is an award-winning novelist and journalist whose most recent book is the critically acclaimed memoir Brief History of Anxiety...Yours and Mine, assigned "major points for wit and flair" by the New York Times.
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1) Clairvoyant chemistry: (http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/03/occult-chemistry-clairvoyant-besant-leadbetter-theosophy)
"A strong contender for the strangest book ever written about chemistry is Occult chemistry by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater published in 1909. It offers an element-by-element account of the form and structure of atoms, with astonishingly rich substructure and detail – some like ornate frozen splashes, others resembling the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals. Far from being unsplittable – this was eight years before Ernest Rutherford astonished the world by ‘splitting the atom’ – these atoms are composites of more fundamental particles, of which hydrogen is composed of 18 and nitrogen of no fewer than 290.
You’re wondering, no doubt, how on earth the authors knew all this in the days before x-ray diffraction, electron microscopy and high-energy particle physics. The answer is that they saw it with their own eyes....
...So far, so deluded. But this was a strange time, and one can’t quite just dismiss Besant and Leadbeater as mad fantasists. They were connected with several leading scientists of their age, some of whom read the book (with varying degrees of scepticism). Like it or not, Occult chemistry is a part – a bizarre, even unsettling part – of chemical history."
2) Sayana supposedly calculates speed of light from the Vedas: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayana#Speed_of_light)
"Strictly speaking, Sayana here attributes a (fantastically high) speed to the Sun (Surya), not to light itself. Depending on what values one assumes for a yojana and for a nimesha, this speed corresponds to about 186,000 miles per second, roughly equal to the speed of light. This was pointed out by P.V. Vartak in his Scientific Knowledge in the Vedas (1995, p. 95)....
...Kak points out that the Vayu Purana (ch. 50) has a comparable passage, where the "speed of the Sun" is exactly 1/18th of Sayana's value. While he is also susceptible to assuming "scientific foreknowledge" by mystical means, he also accepts that "to the rationalist" the proximity of Sayana's value to the physical constant is simply coincidence.[4]"
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Great dialogue on a variety of topics. Shamans and medicine plants, environmentalism, psychic powers, history of drug culture and some other interesting stuff. :)
I heard this podcast when it came out actually(I used to listen to JRE a lot awhile ago). So this is the Krippner fellow you are referring to? He is such a fresh old guy, and really fascinating and interesting to listen to.
You should check out The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast if you like this kind of conversation.
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Thanks for the rec!
The paranormal, in scare quotes or not, as long been an interest of mine. I find even when the explanations are grounded in known science there's still a lot of ethnography and psychology at work that can say something to about human beings.
The prevalence of possession - willing or unwilling - among the downtrodden is an example of that.
I also liked this retrospective on John Mack by his stepdaughter. (http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/wasnt-i-special-enough-to-be-abducted-by-aliens/)
...To his enemies, he was a crackpot, fraud, and a cheat. And to his patients, and many of his friends, he was a source of support, an open listener, a sage and protector.
Dr John E Mack was many things to many people. A Harvard-trained psychiatrist, tenured professor, and one of the founders of the Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry (a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University), John held an impressive command and was respected in his field. After an early career spent working on issues of child development and identity formation, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his psychoanalytic biography of Lawrence of Arabia, entitled A Prince of Our Disorder (1976). Then, in the late 1980s, John put his reputation on the line when he started investigating the phenomenon of alien abduction...
...But if I reflect on the impact of my childhood experience, I think it left me with a profound openness, and a generous ear. John taught me the power of listening; really hearing people out and having the courage and resilience to question established orthodoxies. I still remain entirely agnostic about the existence of aliens. I have a commitment to preserving unknowns, and I thrive on ambiguity and complexity in my work and my relationships. John’s legacy has also left me with a certain reverence for misfits, for outliers and challengers of the status quo: for the type of person who walks the line between delusion and insight.
John, too, remains immortalised in my mind as someone with great courage and empathy...
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Here's a new take - bring the paranormal directly into the humanities:
http://chronicle.com/article/Embrace-the-Unexplained/145557/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
"...I suggest a way out of our present impasse: We should put these extreme narratives, these impossible stories, in the middle of our academic table. I would also like to make a wager, here and now, that once we put these currently rejected forms of knowledge on our academic table, things that were once impossible to imagine will soon become possible not only to imagine but also to think, theorize, and even test. I am betting, in other words, that we actually need these so-called impossible things to come up with better answers to our most pressing questions, including the biggest question of all: the nature of consciousness..."
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A Nonbeliever Tries To Make Sense Of The Visions She Had As A Teen (http://www.npr.org/2014/04/08/300520210/a-nonbeliever-tries-to-make-sense-of-the-visions-she-had-as-a-teen)
To make her new book an even more unlikely subject, Ehrenreich describes herself as a rationalist, a scientist by training, and an atheist who is the daughter of atheists. Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything draws on her journals from 1956-'66, and on the extensive reading she's done in the past decade about the history of religion. She never discussed these mystical experiences before writing the book — and she suspects she's not the only one keeping such things to herself.
"People have these unaccountable mystic experiences," Ehrenreich tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Generally they say nothing or they label it as 'God' and get on with their lives. I'm saying, 'Hey, no, let's figure out what's going on here.' "
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Do Humans Have the Ability to Sense the Future? This Study of Experiments So Far Says....Yes! (http://www.dailygrail.com/Mind-Mysteries/2014/4/Do-Humans-Have-the-Ability-Sense-the-Future-Study-Experiments-So-Far-SaysYes)
Hmmm, will have to keep up with the skeptical response. I don't know if meta-analysis is going to be enough for a paradigm change.
...The meta-analysis paper, co-authored by Daryl Bem, Patrizio E. Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan, began with a search for all potential replications of Bem's method between the year 2000 and September of 2013. The experiments were then categorized according to the type of effect tested for, the number of participants involved, the statistical techniques needed to measure the effect, whether the study was published through peer-review, and the type of replication (exact, modified, or independently-designed). They found that 51 of the 90 experiments (56.6%) had been published in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings.
But could the positive results have been an outcome of the 'file drawer effect', where mostly positive results were published but negative replications were not - put in the file drawer, so to speak, due to no interesting findings? The authors of the paper did the math, and found that the number of 'missing' experiments needed to reduce the overall effect size to a trivial value was (conservatively) 520. This seems unlikely...
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The Control Group Is Out Of Control:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
Interesting retrospective/critique on Bem's recently published results that purportedly demonstrated precognition as real. It shows why this stuff can be interesting even if there's nothing going on, with good discussion in the comments between Alexander and Psi proponent Johann:
Schiltz is a psi believer whose staring experiments had consistently supported the presence of a psychic phenomenon. Wiseman, in accordance with nominative determinism is a psi skeptic whose staring experiments keep showing nothing and disproving psi. Since they were apparently the only two people in all of parapsychology with a smidgen of curiosity or rationalist virtue, they decided to team up and figure out why they kept getting such different results...
..The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.
Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYJqhMAgOcs
Terence Mckenna on UFOs. He kind of presents a Jungian view towards this phenomena, that they are projections from the unconscious. Like an archetype.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYJqhMAgOcs
Terence Mckenna on UFOs. He kind of presents a Jungian view towards this phenomena, that they are projections from the unconscious. Like an archetype.
I kind of like the idea that the unconscious is the firmament. Idealism sort of gets us to the same place as materialism since most people act without consideration for either paradigm. So whether Mind comes Before or After everyone pretty much acts the same.
But Idealism lets me think UFOs and ghosts are real, so I figure it's more entertaining. ;-)
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Can Science See Spirits?
http://dailygrail.com/Guest-Articles/2014/5/Can-Science-See-Spirits
"...Spirit mediumship is a complex, near universal phenomenon (see Talking With the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds for a cross-cultural snapshot of just a few of the world’s mediumship traditions), which, despite over 130 years of investigation from psychical research and the social sciences more generally, continues to evade scholarly attempts to pin it down and neatly explain it. Countless attempts have been made, however, from the debunkers who suggest that all mediumship is a mixture of fraud and delusion, to the social anthropologists who argue that spirit mediumship is a purely social phenomenon, performing specific social functions, and certain parapsychologists who suggest that spirit mediumship offers proof of survival after death. And yet, none of the theories that have been put forward quite seem able to offer a fully satisfying explanation for what is going on.
In this series of short articles I would like to highlight some of the reasons why spirit mediumship is such a difficult phenomenon to get a grip on through outlining some of the research that has been conducted, and pointing out gaps in our understanding of the underlying processes. This first article will present an overview of the, really rather sparse, neuroimaging data on spirit mediumship, and will briefly discuss what it does and doesn’t tell us about the phenomenon..."
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Interesting to see this in Psychology Today:
Do Psychic Phenomena Exist? (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-darkness/201404/do-psychic-phenomena-exist-0)
Other psychologists and academics are often surprised when I tell them that I'm willing to accept the possibility of psychic phenomena such as telepathy and pre-cognition. For many intellectuals, these things are seen as superstitious nonsense, remnants of an irrational view of the world which has been superseded by modern materialistic science. Here I will explain my reasons for believing that some "paranormal" phenomena are genuine—in particular, telepathy and pre-cognition, since these are the ones I feel there is most evidence for, and the ones I have experienced myself. (Other types of psychic phenomena—mediumship, ghosts, or faith healing—I’m more doubtful about.)
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I'd not realized that Maaneli, who believes in some psychic phenomenon, was actually a student of the skeptic Massimo:
An alternative take on ESP (http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/12/alternative-take-on-esp.html)
On many past occasions, I have heard Massimo publicly claim that ESP has been refuted, such as in a Skeptiko podcast interview last year in which he said “... research on the paranormal has been done for almost a century. We have done plenty of experiments, say on telepathy or clairvoyance or things like that, and we know it doesn’t work.” And in his recent book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, Massimo even implies that parapsychology is a pseudoscience on par with astrology.
It would be reasonable to expect, especially from someone as learned as Massimo, that these bold claims about research on telepathy and clairvoyance, and the status of parapsychology as a discipline, were derived from a thorough assessment of the parapsychology literature (a literature which includes informed skeptical criticisms of parapsychology experiments). However, in my assessment of the parapsychology literature, I have been unable to find an evidenced basis for Massimo’s claims. Not only that, my study of the literature has turned up evidence that strongly supports a conclusion contrary to Massimo’s. Here’s why.
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I've always found that stuff with the monks controlling their body temperature and withstanding great amounts of pain and physical trauma with no injury to be very interesting, and though it's been a while, I don't remember seeing much focused scientific research on it (I may be totally ignorant to it though, like I said I haven't looked into it in a while).
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I've always found that stuff with the monks controlling their body temperature and withstanding great amounts of pain and physical trauma with no injury to be very interesting, and though it's been a while, I don't remember seeing much focused scientific research on it (I may be totally ignorant to it though, like I said I haven't looked into it in a while).
I think a lot of this came down to regulation of the body via specific breathing exercises. There might've been something in there that remained an open question of possible mind o'er matter but I can't recall it now.
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This seems like an odd nugget in Academia.edu? ->
The Science of Life Discovered from Lynnclaire Dennis' Near-Death Experience:
https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Near-Death_Experiences
"Elsevier publishes an academic/scientific textbook about a new mathematical discovery found in a near-death experience. This new geometric structure matches the dynamics of living and life-like (social) systems with applications in general systems theory, a universal systems model, human clinical molecular genetics modelling, medical informatics, astrophysics, education and other areas of study. A unique near-death experience happened to Lynnclaire Dennis during an accident while racing a hot air balloon across the Austrian Alps in 1987. She saw a complex geometric structure – a knot of Light she recognized was life itself, light spinning time and space; transforming energy into matter. In specific terms, it is a dual polyhedra: one polyhedron inside another. The inner most polyhedron is diamond-like; has 144 triangular faces and grows to 300. In its dynamics, light emerges from 48 vertices. The outer polyhedron is watery, akin to a bubble; it has 120 triangular faces and grows to 180 faces. In the space between the two polyhedra, the energetic interconnection between the two, ties into multiple pattern knots. With no knowledge of mathematics or geometry, Lynnclaire Dennis was able to provide a detailed description of this dynamic structure. According to the University of Illinois Chicago knot theorist, Dr. Louis H. Kauffman, the knot discovered by Dennis is a previously unknown version of the Trefoil knot. It is geospherical and polarized. In 1998, the relationship between the knot and the geometry was verified by Robert W. Gray, a protégée of renowned geometer R. Buckminster Fuller. Because of this, the scientific interest in this unique structure captured the attention of top scientists around the world when its prime frequency derived by the mathematics - a "rational" golden ration - generated the entire Matrix in the natural medium of water using a CymaScope. Dennis' structure provides a sequential process generating a coherent link to living and non-living systems whether they are physical, mathematical, philosophical, or social."
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I had an old VHS cassette as a kid that had some monks balancing on swords and spears and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Some of that definetely looked mind over matter.
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I had an old VHS cassette as a kid that had some monks balancing on swords and spears and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Some of that definetely looked mind over matter.
I've seen those as well, but I think it can be explained via mundane means.
I know there's some Robert Anton Wilson fans around, thought this quote was interesting:
Those who reject even telepathy have reached the point where they are impugning either the honesty or the sanity of several thousand scientific researchers on all major continents over a period of decades. Such expedient ways of disposing of data are shared only by the most ardent anti-Evolutionists among the Fundamentalist sects.
—R.A. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger
But then RAW was known for his fondness of parapsychology. More interesting to me is this section of Turing's COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE (http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html):
(9) The Argument from Extrasensory Perception
I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.
It'd be interesting to see what evidence was so convincing. Was it genuine? Was it merely parlor tricks that fooled unwary scientists?
I prefer to be agnostic about such things, because it seems unfair to appeal to the authority of scientists only when they say things in line with our modern conception of reality. For example, how many of us can really refute the arguments of the Intelligent Designer without recourse to shaming tactics of the "Only stupid people believe in that!" variety? That kind of tactic, IMO, may be pragmatic but ultimately is beneath my sense of intellectual integrity.
Far better, IMO, to point out that even if ID were true it would not mean Yaweh was real, or any deity was responsible. The Nobel winning physicist Josephson has a theory that involves Wheeler's idea that the observer in QM has an effect on determining reality, and that this produces physical laws as well as natural selection. (See here (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.4860v4.pdf) + here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIlcqE4p74).)
In the case of ESP, I prefer to just wait and see if anyone can find a smoking gun for this sort of thing.
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Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal
http://paranthropologyjournal.weebly.com/
Established in 2010, “Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal" is a free on-line journal devoted to the promotion of social-scientific approaches to the study of paranormal experiences, beliefs and phenomena in all of their varied guises. The journal aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on issues of the paranormal, so as to move beyond the sceptic vs. advocate impasse which has settled over the current debate, and to open new avenues for enquiry and understanding.
Paranthropology holds no standard position on these issues and all views expressed are those of the each particular author. Paranthropology is devoted to an open-minded and exploratory perspective on a wide range of experiences, beliefs and phenomena often called paranormal, supernatural or anomalous.
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A Conversation with Shannon Taggart: Photographer of Séances, Spirits and Ectoplasm
http://therevealer.org/archives/19370
He was seated in front of a low red light,” she said. The room was dark, otherwise. After twenty minutes, the medium’s wife announced that spirits were going to begin working with his hands. Taggart remembered the next moment very clearly: “He just brought out his hand. What I saw, with my eyes, was this regular hand just very gently and instantly —skip gigantic.”
“I screamed out loud,” she continued. “Which is very impolite in a séance situation.”
Taggart’s photographs have appeared in outlets such as Readers Digest, Discover Magazine and the New York Times. She’s captured dance auditions and artists’ portraits. Her approach is often unusual, and frequently relies on long exposure times, producing hallucinatory doublings, strange auras and smears of motion as her subjects move. When she photographed Garforth, the long exposure was mostly done to compensate for a lack of light. The resulting images are jittery and blurred — Garforth moved around. They also show the medium holding up a single, grotesquely inflated hand.
“I had that experience of seeing that hand get large,” she explained. “I don’t know how it happened. Whether it’s a hand actually getting large in front of my face and I was creating a photograph that documented it, or whether it’s that I was tricked somehow or I had a hypnotic experience and then my camera, through its dysfunction, mimicked that experience… I mean, all of those are interesting perspectives. I love that they’re all there.” She’s been catching similarly ambiguous situations for over a decade.
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Journal of Nonlocality (http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonlocality/index.php/jnonlocality/issue/view/1/showToc)
The Journal of Nonlocality has been set up to address an experimental and conceptual impasse in understanding the nature of nonlocality and observer effects in quantum mechanics. In conjunction with ICRL’s Mind-Matter Mapping Project, we hope to create a research venue where cutting-edge experimental tools in physics, biology and parapsychology can be combined to design more revealing protocols; to bypass the experimental difficulties identified by Wheeler and Bell; and to cast new light on the role that these effects play in genetic regulatory systems, placebo, anomalous perception and retrocausality.
This is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
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Tuning In - Spirit Channelers In America (Full Length) (http://tuninginmovie.com)
Tuning In is a truly unique spiritual documentary, the result of 10 years of inquiry into the phenomenon of spirit channeling by Los Angeles filmmaker, David Thomas. Channeling is a practice dating back to antiquity wherein an individual, usually in a trance state, makes a psychic connection with a spirit being. The channeler is then able to act as a dimensional go-between in bringing other humans in contact with the entity, as well as interpreting messages from the entity.
For the very first time, six of North America's most prominent channelers are featured in the same film. Viewers gain a rare glimpse and insight into the phenomenon, as well as the information being received by these channelers. The entities coming through each have a strong and distinct personality and were interviewed at length by the filmmaker. The result is truly remarkable. The messages cross through space and time, and it appears the entities are speaking as one, delivering a clear and profound message of empowerment for humankind.
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Apparently by professional skeptic Michael Shermer:
Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/)
At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.
Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.
What does this mean? Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning. In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.
Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.