Tales of the Parodyverse - "Bigfoot Made My Jockstrap

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Visionary

Subj: "Bigfoot Made My Jockstrap - One Fake Man's Shocking Confession"
Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 at 05:02:19 am EST (Viewed 3 times)

Reply Subj: And I thank them for their support.
Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 at 11:15:51 am EST (Viewed 1 times)

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... Then I suspect that they're affected greatly by both their perceptions and our own.

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Surely though, once a phenomenon is shown to be dependent on the expectations of the observer, it raises severe doubts as to whether the entire thing isn't simply a trick of the mind altogether.

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One thing that I've always found interesting is the suggestion that our brains are constantly making educated guesses about what reality is, based on the fact that our senses are too slow for us to actually be observing it in the present. Basically, we should have a lag between what is actually happening in reality and our brain's ability to take in and process that information. Our reflexes should be crappier than they are... but then, if that remained the case, then we'd likely be killed by predators and/or really suck at sports.

This lead to some quite cosmic discussions at school in the cosmic 70s, such as "Like, how do we know that the colour we both call red, right, you don't see as what I'd call green." In fact we only have language as a common frame of descriptive reference for any of our sensory input, so the consensus reality we share is based on a rather fragile set of assumptions. Language itself can define reality; it's no mistake in the Genesis story that the first thing Adam does to assert his authority over the creation he's been given charge of is to name everything.

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We're only talking about fractions of a second here, but still it would mean that what we see as the present is really an illusion created by our brains based on the last information it had... It's a guess. Optical illusions are accomplished when you are able to make the brain guess wrong. It's possible that stop-motion animation as well as "uncanny valley" creations look "creepy" because they aren't following the nuances that the brain anticipates based on real life... they're constantly slightly at odds with our perception of what reality should be.

Also factor in our hardwired basic face-recognition programming (second only to our nipple recognition programming) and it's clear that we're biologically predisposed to make "sense" out of patterns and to detect when patterns don't quite make the sense we think they should - and maybe to come up with a "solution" for that discrepancy.

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Add to this the brains ability to do something as common as working real world stimuli, such as an alarm clock or ringing phone, into the narrative structure of a sleeping person's dreams, and you begin to realize how hard the brain is constantly striving to create a reality around us based on our preset expectations. When the brain becomes a bit less rational, it can create totally believable hallucinations in people (if you've ever visited a patient on morphine or other strong drug you've probably heard bizarre tales from them. My father was totally convinced that the nursing staff was rehearsing a big broadway show at nights in the hallway outside his room.)

Altered mind states seem to be a core component of the shamanic experience, whether provoked by drugs, sex, pain, exhaustion, or eating the yellow snow.

I once knew a functioning schizophrenic who strongly resisted treatment for his condition (all his personalities agreed on this), arguing that in former ages he'd have been revered as a gods-blessed shaman for the wise voices he had counselling him. He/they pitied the rest of us who couldn't access those aspects of our mind.

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So really, at that point, one has to wonder if all of this stuff isn't completely in the mind... or at the very least, isn't just some set of environmental conditions that are triggering some mental reactions in people.

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By the way, here's an article on the whole "seeing a fraction of a second into the future" theory:

To push that a step further, though, all physical and sensory experiences are in the mind. The question is whether perceptions of apparently paranormal phenomena are entirely self-derived or whether they're our minds trying to report things beyond the usual register of regular outside stimuli.

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That said I love the story of the Cock Lane Ghost, a very old genuine English court case in which a man was tried for the murder of his vanished wife based upon the alleged haunting perceived by his next door neighbours in which the woman accused her husband of her death. Google the details sometime.

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I just read the account of the Cock Lane stuff on wikipedia. It is kind of amazing that something so simple as supposed "mysterious scratching" would be blown up to such a great degree. I don't think it's a coincidence that it was tied to public disapproval of a man having a relationship with his dead wife's sister, however. Never hurts to take something that's just this side of scandalous and add that missing piece that makes it clearly over the line... even if the evidence of that missing piece is as flimsy as "ghostly testimony".

I'm a fan of incidents where legislative procedure and ghosts clash. The last use of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 in the UK took place around 1941 to imprison a "medium" who had allegedly foreseen the sinking of a British warship. Her supporters claimed the government felt her powers made her too dangerous to be allowed loose spilling secret defence information. The judge imprisoned her for "alleging the use of supernatural powers", so her guilty verdict was based on the jury deciding that she actually didn't have supernatural abilities.

Another case that didn't predate Cock Lane by long was the last trial of accused witches in England that ended in their execution. Two women in Lowestoft, East Anglia, were tried by the future Lord Chief Justice, the highest judge in the land. Sir Matthew Hale is one of the pillars of modern legal precedent and is still taught in UK law degrees; they rarely mention this bit of his history. In a properly conducted and very serious and fair trial Hale had to decide whether to admit "dream evidence" - visions allegedly given by God to local victims of the witches to reveal their identities - and reluctantly decided to allow it. It was on this basis that the witches were condemned. There are online accounts at http://www.lowestoftwitches.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_St._Edmunds_witch_trials I'm contracted to write a novella about it by 2011.

The Hale precedent was cited by Cotton Mather at Salem (if it was good enough for the Lord Chief Justice of England it was good enough for the colony of Massachusetts) and became the major factor in admitting subjective and hysterical testimony that led to the executions there thirty years later.

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Kind of the way immigrants used to be rumored to be vampires or ghouls or spread plague... it's a good excuse to lash out at a group the public wanted to lash out at anyway, but needed a "reason", no matter how unreasonable.

Examples would be the massacre of Jews at York in the 12th Century http://ddickerson.igc.org/cliffords-tower.html and the execution of around 100 Jews at Lincoln in 1255 after a Christian boy was found drowned in a Jew's cesspool; in the latter case it was widely rumoured that the boy had been sacrificed to be used in the unleavened bread of the Jewish passover ritual.

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