[matt cardin]

Quote Originally Posted by Trau

There's no evidence to even remotely suggest the existence of such a special sense or a form of training.

I think you're wrong about that. As I say this, I'm also thinking in terms of the paranormal / supernatural in its broadest possible meaning, encompassing things like religious experience, so please bear in mind that this is involved in my response to your claim.

Quote Originally Posted by Trau

I'm open to solid evidence, but until such evidence is presented, I'll live my life without any assumptions that anything "paranormal" or "supernatural" exists.

What would you accept as evidence of, say, the survival of personality or entity (or whatever you want to call it) beyond the physical body? What about evidence of, say, a spiritual enlightenment or an angelic (or otherwise supernatural) visitation that arrives in someone's life as an apparent irruption "from beyond" and imparts a supernatural wisdom or vision or message? This gets tricky. The edges of the interpretive playing field grow hazy, especially when one considers that A) purported events and encounters of this very type have driven the development of human cultures and civilizations since prehistory; B) such events and realities, if they're real in some sense beyond the boundaries of individual human subjectivity, might well elude, intrinsically and categorically, the possibility of observation, investigation, and confirmation or disconfirmation by scientific or other empirical means; and C) it's impossible to say the question of the reality status of such events and encounters is trivial or unimportant, because of point A above.

You haven't claimed this, but just in case: If a person wants to dispute point B on the grounds that nothing is real that cannot be investigated empirically, this simply opens another wing of the conversation, beginning with the question: Why do you assume that? What philosophical presuppositions stand behind such an assertion?

Quote Originally Posted by Trau

But there's plenty of evidence for the unreliability of human perceptions and the unreliable interpretation of the same, and there's plenty of evidence for human beings tricking, defrauding, etc. other human beings. You can find examples of all of that in this very field of study.

Yes, this is incontrovertibly true. The question thus becomes whether there's any actual, substantial value in continuing to inquire into the possibility of the paranormal. I think the answer is yes, although I'm not necessarily thinking of laboratory parapsychology or psychical research or any such thing. What if there's something involved in the question of the paranormal that cuts directly and immediately to the heart of the human condition? Then it would categorically be worth knowing about, regardless of the fraud and exploitation and sensationalism that have long been associated with the whole thing.

Then of course there's the Fortean-type spin on that final point, which insists that the fraud and sensationalism may not be extraneous but intrinsic. According to this line of thought, since anomalous experiences have happened to humans throughout history and continue to happen today with pretty much the same frequency and distribution across human populations, it might not be unreasonable to attribute a kind of mythic trickster-ish quality to the essence of reality itself. Human chicanery and hoaxing in association with paranormal matters would then be interpretable as just one deranged aspect of a deranged universal game. And now I think I've unexpectedly talked my way into an oblique invocation of something akin to the Ligottian cosmology and ontology of Great Chymists and Clown Puppets.