Memory does make a difference. According to Lumosity, my memory sits in the 89th percentile for my age, 62.
If I have a clear memory of something it's always associated with the sense perceptions of the time and place when I learned it. If that's there, I trust it. If it's not, I don't.
But I do think there's a lot about memory that's mysterious. It seems to be so highly variable in different people at all ages, that I think there must be an enormous range of factors that govern it. I can only think of a few. I know it's biological. It depends on growing dendrites, connecting experiences, knowledge and ideas to one another. Emotions seem to be a big factor. People often unconsciously sublimate or suppress painful memories, or selectively remember the experiences that reinforce their preferred world-views. How we interpret something at the time something happens can make a difference to whether we consider it significant enough to remember, and the specific bias or spin we give it. How others talk about an event can affect our own memories, especially is ours are not clear. Other factors: drugs, adequate sleep, physical health (esp. oxygen to brain), and the various causes of dementia.
One good thing, at any age memory can be trained and improved. Even in dementia, training can slow the process.
I lived with the existence of a ghost in a room I rented one time; confirmed by the landlady who told me the ghost began making its presence known soon after a guy committed isuicide in the place. So I came to the idea that the ghost is a residual force remaining of the deceased person but why does that happen for only very few people? Some other ideas as well.
Fascinating. How did you experience the ghost - sounds, sights, skin feel, smell? How did the ghost behave?
Suspending my own belief system for the sake of a hypothetical - let us suppose that a ghost is a residual force of the deceased person. Force is a physical phenomenon. What if consciousness is physical? What if consciousness is connected to will and desire? What if a person who commits suicide has unresolved issues or regrets about his or her action? Could such emotions cause a fragment of the consciousness to break off from the body that dies and drift in the area of the death to a create a frisson of sense perceptions and awareness in the consciousness of those who enter the space?
If this is so, could the living consciousness communicate with the dead one?
The only detectable evidence of my ghost was the clear distinct sound of footsteps walking around and coming within about 2 feet of me. I could not feel the presence of any living being or mysterious energy force so I did not feel any reason to be frightened. I got the idea maybe I should try talking to 'it' but declined because I thought I would feel foolish only talking to thin air and supposing I did talk that it might be opening a portal to some unknown realm.
I've heard some reliable ssounding stories about communication between living and dead. Was a WWII bomber pilot whose deceased mom would inform him about his safe return to base. I guess if was his fate to be shot down then there may not have been communication. He always told his co-pilot about hearing from his mom.
This post was edited by Kittigate at April 14, 2019 12:25 PM MDT
Interesting. I can think of alternate, simpler and more probable explanations for both yours and the bomber pilot's experiences. In general, I'd tend to go for the simplest explanation being the most likely. However there definitely are phenomena that we can't yet explain or even explore via theory and experiments - so I'd have to keep an open mind on your examples. Thanks, Kitty. :)
While most of my thinking is “original”, the only way to answer that honestly is to know every thought anyone has ever had. Since that isn’t remotely possible, I can say yes I have. Perhaps I just did.
Yes, lots of things and lots of times. Thinking is such a constant and ingrained aspect of life with hundreds of billions of instances of it taking place during our lives that it's impossible to assume that no original thoughts take place. For instance, I thought up this answer. ~
Something interesting could come across your mind and you keep it as your own pet idea for a while and find out it is unique and valuable concept or if someone else might have ever thought the same thing.
It takes quite a lot of work to find out if someone else has had the same idea and left a record of it.
For instance, I've recently had the idea that the reason the early colonialists and the British Empire were able to be so brutal to indigenous peoples is because they themselves were brutalised as children both at home (spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child type parenting) and the British "public" (meaning private) schools system. The first "public" schools were so called because prior to that all education had been private in the home via paid governesses or tutors. Those first public schools - like Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and Rugby - were only for boys and only for the aristocratic and wealthy. There was an idea in these schools that in order to train the future leaders of the country, the military, navy, and church, boys should be toughened. Ritual hazing and bullying of younger boys by older boys was a part of the process, accurately described in Tom Hughes's 1857 novel, "Tom Brown'sSchool Days." It included sadistic and highly damaging practices.
In the case of Australia, the early governors, their military officers and most of the free settlers had had these types of brutal school educations. America's colonial past may have been somewhat different due to the Pilgrims and similar people escaping religious persecution or poverty, though there are similar themes with the treatment of Native Americans and slaves brought from Africa. Most of these settlers probably did not go to the greater "public" schools of England; so was the cruelty merely symptomatic of the white supremacist attitudes of the time. Are my guesses flawed? Or was the brutality towards children endemic to the entire English-speaking and European society of the time?
I propose that it is this type of brutalisation has a high probability (say 5 out of 6 children) of creating psychopathological tendencies. If a child must learn to resist pain, he must learn to cut off from it. This then deprives him of the capacity to feel empathy for the pain of others. These would then make it easy for him to categorise some humans as "others", "not human", or "barely better than animals", and thus justify racial genocide, slavery, rape, denial of language and religion and dispossession of land and resources.
Is it an original idea to connect private and personal child abuse as causative of political, public and systematic cruelty on mass scales? Does anyone here have expertise in this aspect of psychology, sociology or history?
This post was edited by inky at April 14, 2019 4:44 PM MDT
In 1973, after taking a course in programming, I told everyone about a day that would come. In that day, I said, every common person in the US will have access via their home computer to the Library of Congress. We're almost there, 45 years later but it's clear many other people have had the same thought.
In 1973, after taking a course in programming, I told everyone about a day that would come. In that day, I said, every common person in the US will have access via their home computer to the Library of Congress. We're almost there, 45 years later but it's clear many other people have had the same thought.
But how do I know it has never been thought of or put into practice before? I don't know what people think or what they do. And if it works for me what does it matter anyway? Seems foolish to limit ourselves by concern for whether anyone has ever thought of something or done something before. How would we even know?
inky 