What is the force?

Gisteron, well actually magickal powers HAVE been discovered and many wiccans/witches practice it. I was saying maybe those powers could be true but it has a scientific explanation we don't know yet.


“Your Ancestors Called it Magic, but You Call it Science. I Come From a Land Where They Are One and the Same.”

― Thor Odinson

Carlos.Martinez3, a church with no real solid definition of the base of their philosophy kinda falls apart (yes the Jedi philosophy revolves entirely around the force)
So you telling me "it can be whatever you want" doesn't actually answer the question.

Alethea finally a real answer i wanted peoples opinions about what it is. not dodging the question by saying "we don't know" i wanted to hear what people believed it was

Kazat0 wrote: magickal powers HAVE been discovered and many wiccans/witches practice it.

No. What wiccans/witches practice are rituals. Those have been invented aplenty, for sure. Woo-woo has been asserted, too, and, somehow, the better ways we find to document events the fewer instances of sorcery do we record. We have discovered so much at this point, that what room is left for the magical powers asserted back in the day is so small as to demonstrably be of no significance to our daily lives.

I was saying maybe those powers could be true but it has a scientific explanation we don't know yet.

No, they really couldn't. We would have long modelled them by now if they could. "Explanation" may mean a lot of things, but the least we would have at this point is the postulation of their existence and mechanisms by which they can be manipulated so as to fix the magnitude of their influence on observable events. What we have instead is an ever more refined model of nature the gaps in which are so small at this pont as to leave no room for anything of daily significance.

“Your Ancestors Called it Magic, but You Call it Science. I Come From a Land Where They Are One and the Same.”

― Thor Odinson

Friendly reminder that not every comic book out there is an accurate record of real people or events...

I've been having an.. experience.. as of late.. like a sort of "tapping in".. it's almost the same feeling I use to get during deep meditation.. but slightly more.. pervasive.. something like a universal living flow.. as if everything is connected and energized by the same Force.. from people to events.. everything just seems to flow into everything else.. it all feels alive and conscious..

Mind and Heart, Masculine and Feminine, Adam and Eve.. what difference is there?..

What is "The Force".. it's everything.. It Is.. material and beyond material.. Fullness and the cause of It..

As far as telekinesis, or other supernatural concepts in general, it'd be better to ask why it wouldn't exist.. or why do we start from the position that these things are definitively false?.. which isn't truly a neutral position..

Personally, I'm certain these things are possible and is merely a different science.. though in the "Age of Two Fish".. the Natural and Supernatural are seen as opposites instead, and the unified reality goes unseen..

Uzima Moto wrote: As far as telekinesis, or other supernatural concepts in general, it'd be better to ask why it wouldn't exist.. or why do we start from the position that these things are definitively false?.. which isn't truly a neutral position..

If we were only now starting to investigate the question, starting from either position would be slightly unfair, admittedly. I say slightly, because there is a case to be made for employing the null hypothesis until further notice. Alas, we are not only now starting to investigate claims of telekinesis or the supernatural more broadly, and the evidence against such things has been piling up for quite some time now, to a point where even "reasonable doubt" is becoming increasingly laughable. It is not the "things themselves" that are false, mind you, only about every claim made to them. The simplest explanation to why all these claims keep consistently failing so far seems to be that there is no substance to them, but it may of course in principle be some convoluted nefarious trick the universe is playing on us all to deceive us into thinking that it is all nonsense when it really isn't. I for one choose to go with the simpler explanation and wait for the data set to grow more consistent with an alternative one...

To be fair, if you believe in the force as some sort of literal power that lets you do things that break the laws of nature, there would be no way of scientifically proving it, so the point is moot. If you think it is coherent with science, you're necessarily arguing that science just isn't quite there yet for some reason.

Science works not by necessarily proving something is right, but by making explanatory mechanisms that have predictive power and testing that against experimental evidence. Because of that reliance on experimental evidence, it isn't objective in the same sense as math: I mean you can't find the pure number 5 in nature. I've yet to hear any well-conceived experiment involving magic that falsifies the current scientific understanding. This doesn't necessarily preclude magic (the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence), but practically it does (I mean, I don't believe in the tooth fairy)

Gisteron wrote:

Uzima Moto wrote: As far as telekinesis, or other supernatural concepts in general, it'd be better to ask why it wouldn't exist.. or why do we start from the position that these things are definitively false?.. which isn't truly a neutral position..

If we were only now starting to investigate the question, starting from either position would be slightly unfair, admittedly. I say slightly, because there is a case to be made for employing the null hypothesis until further notice. Alas, we are not only now starting to investigate claims of telekinesis or the supernatural more broadly, and the evidence against such things has been piling up for quite some time now, to a point where even "reasonable doubt" is becoming increasingly laughable. It is not the "things themselves" that are false, mind you, only about every claim made to them. The simplest explanation to why all these claims keep consistently failing so far seems to be that there is no substance to them, but it may of course in principle be some convoluted nefarious trick the universe is playing on us all to deceive us into thinking that it is all nonsense when it really isn't. I for one choose to go with the simpler explanation and wait for the data set to grow more consistent with an alternative one...

Fair enough, however, I'm not sure all claims that could be made have been, nor that all claims made have been debunked for certain yet..

Kazat0 wrote: Alethea finally a real answer i wanted peoples opinions about what it is. not dodging the question by saying "we don't know" i wanted to hear what people believed it was

I for one did not "dodge" your question. Why is "I dont know" not an acceptable answer? Is your goal here to listen to different explanations and then just pick one that sounds good to you to believe? If so that is an incredibly lazy and inefficient way to gain knowledge.

With Vixen on this "I don't know" should be an acceptable answer. Otherwise you force conjecture witch arguably can be more harmful than no answer.

Serious question : ready - what if a model of the Force is what no one ELSE believes ? Or can not believe ?
We never have to agree on things all the time - no one will ever have the same “Force” not will there ever be two fingerprints the same. Why must every answer be aligned with something we think is ok ? For some one else ? Hmmm when we define the Force - do we remember it only apples to is as individuals ? Hmm

That is a very interesting point: What if the nature of reality itself is entirely dependent on the individual?

rugadd wrote: That is a very interesting point: What if the nature of reality itself is entirely dependent on the individual?

Mine is ... smiley face !

Mine is a stone in the river. It has many colors, and tumbles a bit when the weather raises the water, but otherwise still and happy.

If that is the case then why cant you put a blind person in a house he has never been in an he be capable of walking through the walls? It's because reality is not based on simple subjective perception.

Obviously. But we have to live there. Everything one can pursue to understand better leaves countless others unexplored.

rugadd wrote: Obviously. But we have to live there. Everything one can pursue to understand better leaves countless others unexplored.

Well, they do say one never stops learning lol

Sorry for late response Kazat0. Busy day at work. I supposed one could say that. I myself have never seen low level magic or force powers in real life, but I would equate them. Granted, I wouldn't be able to get a firm understanding of said magic/force powers till I actually witness them myself.

Rex wrote: the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence

If I may briefly address this very common point - may it be up to moderation whether this had better be a separate thread or not - this is a very pretty saying that barely ever works in practice.

If there are any platonists around here, we may read some disagreement with this, but I would assert that propositions don't "just exist out there" in isolation. They are instead things people believe or believe not. And likewise, beliefs, too, aren't just idle items in peopls's minds, they inform their actions. So a statement that may sound like "Frank is cheating at poker" is really saying "If we were to perform a thorough search of Frank's body and seat we are likely to find hidden cards on at least one of the two.". If we do perform that search and find no evidence of Frank's cheating, it doesn't of course mean necessarily that he didn't, but it is evidence that he didn't in the sense that the prediction made from the proposition failed to at least within the thoroughness with which we had conducted the search. Likewise, if Frank were to claim clairvoyant or telekinetic powers, hardly any other means to judge those claims' accuracy is available to us than to interpret them as meaning that Frank could predict the future at a better rate than chance guesses or manipulate objects beyond what is accounted for through other physical forces. If then Frank consistently fails to demonstrate such abilities under even mildly controlled conditions, we are justified in rejecting his claims. We have evidence of their falsity because evidence of their accuracy failed to manifest when we had reason to expect that it would. The absence of evidence is in plenty a case just as well evidence of absence.

Gisteron wrote: We have evidence of their falsity because evidence of their accuracy failed to manifest when we had reason to expect that it would. The absence of evidence is in plenty a case just as well evidence of absence.

Actually I would beg to differ with this conclusion. It is simply an argument from Ignorance. All you are really saying is that you cant find a way he cheated therefore its evidence that he did not cheat and that is just not accurate. Take a court of law as an example. The burden of proof is on the prosecutor to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If the prosecutor does prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant is declared guilty. If the prosecutor does not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant is declared not guilty. This does not mean he was declared INNOCENT, only not guilty. The defendant could have still committed the crime, its just that it could not be proven he did and that lack of evidence, no matter how heavy or slight, has no bearing on the defendants innocence only their ability to prove his guilt.