Iron Mantis wrote:Fascinating video.
Although his story was for illustrative purposes, I believe there are indeed higher forms of life & intelligence existing in a higher dimension that overlaps ours; we simply cannot readily access, or even point to it, to investigate it, much like Sagan explained.
It's presumptuous to claim everyone who's had experiences with the supernatural, whether of divine nature or of the malevolent sort, are all crazy. In fact, there are real estate laws in place to protect buyers from unwittingly purchasing haunted houses.
Nearly 1 in 5 americans claim they've seen the manifestation of a spirit.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/30/18-of-americans-say-theyve-seen-a-ghost/Although I don't believe "ghosts" are actually dead people back alive in another form, it's interesting to consider another plane of existence within ours, and how life in it affects us.
That is a cool video.
I want to say from a scientific perspective, based on scientific rules, you can't make a scientific argument for something that's never been measured - that is, spirits, 4th dimensional intelligences, you name it.
If a 4th dimension exists, . . . interesting, but the scientist asks "how can we find it or test for it?"
Believing in what is unmeasurable is perfectly fine, but it's not science. Think of science as like a courtroom and a courtroom has rules and guidelines. You have to line-up your witnesses, you can't badger the witnesses. The lawyers can't make arguments, they can only ask questions. Science is like that. It's only about what can be observed, tested, demonstrated or modeled. Scientists have their hands tied when it comes to speculation, like lawyers have their hands tied with making arguments when a witness is on the stand.
Science is very cool, and it's lead to some amazing discoveries, but science isn't good at speculating on what hasn't been measured, which seems to be what you're doing, and again, that's perfectly fine, but it's not science to say there's a more intelligent 4th dimension out there. To the scientist, that's an unknown. You're arguing that something out there exists. The scientist can't make that argument, they can only make models for what might exist and design tests to measure it.
There were some models to explore extra dimensions at quantum levels at CERN, but those tests came up negative. The extra dimensions folded up so we can't see them model didn't work. The Higgs boson model did work. Scientists primarily have to work with what the evidence shows them, not what might be out there, which they can't see yet.
Lets say your 4th dimension proposal is accurate. The scientist would first need to identify said 4th dimension - and I'm not sure how they'd go about that. As Carl Sagan noted, we can look for curvature in space, and scientists have done that and found none, not on large scales. Obviously small scales, space is curved by gravity. But measures looking for a curved universe have so far come back negative. The universe appears flat. It might be so large that we can't measure the curvature, or, there may be no curvature. Scientists don't like to speculate, or, maybe they do on their own time, but they don't speculate in what they publish.
But OK, lets say they find a 4th dimension - step two would be communication, to see if there's anything like the apple looking to talk to us. For now, as I understand it, there's no looking for a 4th dimension because nobody knows how to do it. We can't, in 3 dimensions, point a device to the 4th dimension and start studying it.
As a sidebar, I have no problem believing in spirits. I've even heard the occasional spirit myself, here and there. Not very often, but more than once.
And, I hope what I said doesn't sound condescending. It's just that science has rules and requirements and speculation is generally not encouraged. Now, speculation in philosophy or general discussion - 100% OK. I by no means want to discourage what you believe. But when you tie it to science, it invites the inevitable response "but that's not science", and if that bothers you, think of science as like the a courtroom, and that there are restrictions in what can be said and who can speak in a court of law.
I also, love this video. I suggest people watch it.
https://www.ted.com/talks/carrie_poppy_a_scientific_approach_to_the_paranormal?language=en
