Loosely Assembled » spiritualism

Thurlow’s Poltergeist

fekaylius — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:29:12 +0000

also, his blue bag video is well worth watching, if you feel like letting your anxiety level rise

Shape Shifting Criminals in Lagos, Nigeria

fekaylius — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:14:09 +0000

The metro police department in Africa’s largest city claim that a car thief SHAPE SHIFTED INTO A GOAT to avoid being caught. It didn’t work, the cops got him, and paraded him around in front of news media (having trouble finding a clip).

Imagine the NYPD officially saying that a murderer had his sentence reduced because the victim was raised from the dead.

My thoughts and questions on this:

are they holding tho goat still? will he go to trial? be fined? be imprisoned?
if that goat actually belongs to someone, how will they convince the cops to give back their property?
i realize i hold a naive assumption that urbanization reduces superstition
religiously based world views of reality are insanely tenacious

Looks like the government is all creeped out by black magic already, this story tells of a related event. Apparently this is Islamic black magic as well, certainly a new concept for me.

Lawmakers in the Nigerian State of Ekiti are recruiting “prayer warriors” to assist them in their fight against Black Magic assailants.
The voodoo plot is alleged to centre around Ekiti State House of Assembly speaker Femi Bamisile who was impeached on the 9th July after being found guilty of the theft of 18 fire extinguishers from a university in 1989.
On Wednesday this week chaos ensued when a Juju act took place in the assembly chamber. Despite the chamber being securely locked a fetish substance was left on the seats of the lawmakers in what is believed to be an attempt to pervert the course of justice.
“We were jolted by the reports that marabouts had invaded the Assembly chambers to plant fetish substances on the seats diabolically to harm legislators who might be too strong to break.” Said a spokesman for the assembly.
“The intention of the hatchers of this heinous plot was to sacrifice not too few honourable members as eternal ransom to an ousted legislative leadership that had expired in morals, virtues and value.”
Some of the 26 lawmakers that attend the assembly have vowed never to step foot in the chamber until they are certain of their spiritual safety, and others are in fear of their lives.
A prayer session was held on Thursday to try to nullify the fetish, one lawmaker gave this comment,
“we believe with the prayer, whatever the juju was meant for would not come to pass, because the power of God is above all other powers,”

Mind Reading-ish

fekaylius — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:10:41 +0000

Scientists extract images directly from brain: “

Pink Tentacle reports that researchers at Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed a system that can ‘reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor.’

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

“

Body Swapping

fekaylius — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:19:47 +0000

“In the olden days, we used to do this kind of stuff and call it art.”

The mannequin swap seems most interesting. Partly because it seems like a harder jump (the stiff POV seemingly like a monstrous hurdle), and partly because of the material/surface exchange (getting “out of body” is so sfai, but alchemy of the self, actually mutating and changing the material interface that you think you have with the world, is really out there).

My extension of this experiment

Body Swapping:

from mannequin

to scarecrow

to huge billboard image

to panicky wild animal

to pile of mud

to the great pyramids

to the earth itself.

update: watch the video

Telekinesis Gene (erm. placebo gene) Found

fekaylius — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:17:33 +0000

If some people have a propensity to benefit from medical treatment that is bogus (placebo effect), while others don’t, and if this is a genetic difference, then I’d like to propose that it’s really a “mind over matter” gene which makes that difference. These people (everyone among the group raise your hands proudly) truly have the ability to manipulate physical reality simply with their beliefs/ideas/visualizations. I know I consider myself to fall slightly into this category (having some pretty intense visualization experiences becoming immediately real), yet have always just kind of assumed it’d be available to everyone.

Anyway, here is the article.

Virgin Birth – Parthenogenesis

fekaylius — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Who needs men anyway?

Story.

space collective gallery

fekaylius — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:18:12 +0000

just found a stimulating new thing to look at, scroll through, and share:
http://spacecollective.org/gallery/

Truman Show Disorder

fekaylius — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:37:44 +0000

Truman Show Disorder: “Montreal psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold are studying the Truman Show Delusion, a mental illness they’ve identified where individuals are convinced that they are the stars of imaginary reality TV shows. By the way some people act on Flickr and YouTube, I’d say that this disorder, with varying severity, may be more common than we realize. From Canada.com:

While (Joel) Gold says they could have easily called their new disorder the EDtv Delusion or the Matrix Delusion — both films that refer to an unreal existence– three of the five patients he treated at the storied mental health hospital directly likened their plight to The Truman Show, the 1998 film about Truman Burbank, an affable suburbanite who slowly becomes aware that his every movement is broadcast 24/7 to voyeuristic viewers around the world.

The five patients Dr. Gold treated were white men between the ages of 25 and 34, the majority of whom held university degrees. ‘I realized that I was and am the centre, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people,’ explained one patient, an army veteran who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing.

‘My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world’s attention….’

‘The wish for fame is a form of grandiosity, and the fear of threats such as surveillance can bring about paranoia,’ said the Montreal-based (Ian) Gold, 46, who specializes in delusion.

‘New media is opening up vast social spaces that might be interacting with psychological processes.’

Truman Show Delusion (Canada.com, thanks Lyn Jeffery!)

“

(Via Boing Boing.)

Bilingual Multiple Personality Disorder

fekaylius — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:15:40 +0000

If someone lives actively in the two cultures of their bilingual repertoire, they gain the added possibility of hosting divergent (not really independent) personalities. This doesn’t really come as much of a surprise to me though. I wrote a paper years ago showing dramatic personality shifts from relationship to relationship, interaction to interaction, proposing a model that would define individual names to each relationship a person had, a hybrid being comprised of both parties’ traits, needs and expectations.

If someone acts and feels and responds differently when they are in different situations, does that make them a different person? Is their interaction with you any less or more valid? At what threshold of difference would we declare them to be a fully different person ready for psychiatric help?

the link: How switching language can change your personality – being-human – 25 June 2008 – New Scientist

Fractal Universe or Optical Illusion?

fekaylius — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:46:26 +0000

A new study points out the possibility that the universe might spiral out and out and out to much farther reaches than conventional models. The fractal nature of this model could also be thought of as some kind of optical illusion, or quantum mirroring effect, where a small handful of galaxies are replicated infinitely across space, relying on the existence of an observer.

Breeding a Human Ape

fekaylius — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:56:25 +0000

Alex the Intelligent Avian

fekaylius — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:06:35 +0000

Rad

Cool Robot

fekaylius — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:54:14 +0000

brain chip

fekaylius — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:02:19 +0000

Jedi Church

fekaylius — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:29:42 +0000

“They say their services will include sermons on “the Force,” light sabre training, and meditation techniques.”

from the BBC

El Dia

jason — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:24:32 +0000

Steampunk Treehouse

jason — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:50:15 +0000

Indoor Treehouse

The Neuroscience of Consciousness, Perception and Self

fekaylius — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:24:37 +0000

A video from the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival : The Neuroscience of Consciousness, Perception and Self

Are you Living in a Computer Simulation?

fekaylius — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:46:34 +0000

Nick Bostrom: ”

Are you Living in a Computer Simulation?

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. Are you Living in a Computer Simulation? by Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University.

‘Why the Matrix? Why did the machines do it? (Human brains may be many things, but efficient batteries they are not.) How could they justify a world whose inhabitants are systematically deceived about their fundamental reality, ignorant about the reason why they exist, and subject to all the cruelty and suffering that we witness in the world around us?’ From Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be In One: by Nick Bostrom.

Also see: Simulism is a concept that deals with the possibility that we are living in a simulation.

“

(Via networked_performance.)

You are already a Virtual Being

fekaylius — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:05:08 +0000

Mark Baard of The Register has a terrifying article published this week about technocratic totalitarian dystopia.

the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.

“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.

This is gnarly!

Here is some info from the Simulex website:

Our simulations are built upon the SEAS (Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation) technology. Originally designed for military war-gaming applications, SEAS has been expanded to factor in research from the fields of management, economics, and psychology. The result is a revolutionary new technology, blending easy-to-use visual interfaces and complex artificial intelligence: half simulation, half interactive war-game, and better than either alone. Senior decision makers have used SEAS to solve problems ranging from business strategies to disaster management.

Government Clients

United States Department of Defense

United States Department of Justice

United States Army Recruiting Command

United States Joint Forces Command

Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center

Private Sector Clients

Eli Lilly

Lockheed Martin

Other Fortune 500 companies