Came across a list of pseudosciences and was fun seeing where im woo woo.
Lunar effect – the belief that the full Moon influences human and animal behavior.
Ley Lines
Accupressure/puncture
Ayurveda
Body Memory
Faith healing
Anyway, list too long to read. I guess Im quite the nonscientific woowoomancer. How about you? What pseudoscience do you believe? Also I believe nearly every stone i find was an ancient indian stone. Also manifesting and or prayer to manipulate via subconscious aligning the future. oh and the ability to subconsciously deeply understand animals, know the future, etc
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It’s hard resisting the power of the moon.
Especially if you work on a boat, by the coast.
The moon haunts you.
Or in the case of Destiny and FFXIV:
Uff, i have a lot:
Life on earth is a huge organized organism. It created intelligent humans deliberately sothat we can spread life to other planets. Living beings (plants, insects, other animals, fungi) could not do that otherwise.
All life is sentient. Sentience doesn’t come from the brain, rather it comes from the hormones in your bloodstream. When we sweat, these hormones enter the air (apparently within the fraction of a second) and other people can smell them. That is how we can instinctually know how others are feeling.
Also i have a lot of mythology:
Heaven (realm of all ideas, knowledge and forms) and Earth (origin of mass and material) are a love pair. Because they couldn’t easily meet (there was an insurmountable gap between them), they created a bridge, which is life. This way, heaven supplies the shape (genes), and Earth supplies the body, and these two can be together in this way.
Viruses are books. They have a cover (shell) and contain scripture (RNA/DNA). We humans let them in because they are nature’s messengers and have a specific purpose, which is to exchange some information.
ask for more and i will give.
More plz
sry i’m too tired rn
maybe another time :D
here’s a short summary:
plants produce life out of the four elements (water, air, sunlight, earth), so they are producers of life. animals/fungus are consumers of such life (they eat fruit) and decompose it into urine, air, shit, and heat/energy. so it goes full-circle.
what, however - you may ask -, is in it for the plants? why produce food only for animals to eat it? it is because the plants get something for it, and that is that animals transport the seed in the fruit around and drop it somewhere far away. so plants get movement or transport from the animals. and that advantage is, in fact, large enough for the plants for it to even bother producing food in the first place. so quite big. that’s not really pseudoscience btw, more real biology done by real biologists, but still interesting :D
I think that currently society is too polar about this issue. A lot of so-called pseudoscience have a lot of anecdotal evidence that should be taken into consideration and don’t have a lot of science to deny them. On the other hand a lot of them do have that so there is an issue where there’s a lot of people who believe a lot of different pseudosciences because some of them genuinely seem to have results but the people who go explicitly by scientific research sometimes can group all of these together. For example, homeopathy is obviously bullshit, and there is a ton of scientific research that shows that. But, for example, a lot of Chinese medicine, which has no scientific backing, does seem to have a lot of anecdotal and historical evidence that suggests that if science does look into it, they might find some actual results.
I don’t know what lunar effect is, but the description you gave sounds very plausible. Like, why wouldn’t a full moon affect the behavior of humans and other animals? How it affects them? To what degree? Sure, that’s debatable. But generally affecting them, that sounds reasonable. It’s a significant change in the night. It lights up the night more and It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that some animals might use it as time management indicators that might relate to biological cycles.
Right. There’s a mix in lots of ideas, of interpreting real evidence and experience, and of making up rubbish to sell things. And just of building too big of a theory off minimal data and putting too much trust in it.
So, moonlight being a major factor to change your behaviour to evil or crazy, is presumably nonsense. But, as you say, moonlit nights affecting human behaviour, such as having social events on a moonlit night, or even working later in the fields those nights, is obvious.
And the phase of the moon causing programming bugs? Absolutely real. There’s one or two documented cases.
The only pseudo science I believe is that one day I’ll be happy. Even though I know i ll never be happy.
That is neither science nor pseudoscience. I don’t know your story, but there are scientific and pseudoscientific ways that might be able to make you happy one day.
Feng Shui, though I mostly credit it to the Dear Modern channel breaking the concept of qi and energy down into stuff like human traffic flow, activities, scenery, and noise, and using that to optimize spaces for comfort. It’s mostly psychology, and some of the superstitious stuff I’m not really into.
I kind of a little bit believe that dreams have some weird predictive ability. The scientist in me knows it’s likely a mix of confirmation bias and information synthesis, but like… my family has a pretty strong history of dreaming about deaths and births a week or two prior to pregnancy announcements and right before/after deaths. My mom has had several dreams where a loved one has come and chatted with her in a dream and said goodbye, then later that day we learn they passed, for example. It’s happened enough that I have a lot of trouble brushing it off. I’ve had a similar dream myself and it felt quite different from a normal sleep dream. That one was less paranormalish though, it was a friend who died a few years ago and showed up to give me some life advice. Just… hit me in a specific, indescribable way (it was good advice too).
Can’t explain it. Don’t really believe it’s paranormal I guess, but I also don’t disbelieve.
Oh I believe in precognitive dreams, because I used to write down my dreams and had some that happened later. And I don’t mean big things like deaths or pregnancies. I mean piddly details that meant nothing and can’t have been foreseen. Once dreamed that I was at the local bank, three people were in line, I got on the scale they had there to weigh myself but the dial went backwards then I turned around and saw this girl Joann that I’d not seen since middle school. Wrote all this in the dream journal.
Couple of weeks later went to the bank. 3 people in line. I got on the scale but it was broken and said I weighed 30lb. I got off the scale and turned around, and yep, Joann from middle school, turns out she’d moved away but had moved back to town.
That’s the one I remember and I would have just thought I had dejavu if I’d not written that dream down.
And honestly it pissed me off pretty bad. I want to believe in free will, that we can choose, that the future has not happened yet. The dreams kind of broke that.
i have that too, a lot. not just when people die though. it is quite different than just a random hallucination, because i get the feeling that an organized intelligence is actually having a plan and giving me specific information.
like, sometimes, i will have a dream that conveys something important to me, and then i will deliberately wake up in the middle of that dream in a way that makes me remember what i dreamed about, so i can write it down.
to make an example, just yesterday. i dreamed that an old school colleague of mine is in some sort of deep trouble. today, for the first time in 6 years, i get a text message from a close friend of his that asks me to meet up.
Yeah, that kind of stuff exactly. Good to know it happens to others.
It’s not impossible that for some reason you and your family have some sort of strong subconscious indications in your dreams. So maybe things that your subconscious has picked up manifest in dreams and if we’re talking about predicting things that have been developing for a while like someone’s death (old age or sickness) or pregnancy, it’s not impossible that you subconsciously already knew it to a degree.
But confirmation bias abd memory synthesis is probably more likely.
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Maybe like a limited Gaia hypothesis. The whole planet is a conscious thing, we are its braincells and its hands.
why not go full panpsychic it actually makes even more sense and has been seriously studied for millenia
I guess fundamentally I see the mind as arising out of physicality and emergent constructs within that physical system rather than being fundamental. The reason the Gaia hypothesis appeals to me then is because it is just an extension of that emergence idea but across the whole world
In that theory we’d more be the cancer-cells rather than braincells 😏
Love is a physical force, not just a human emotion.
Did I get that from Interstellar? Yes. Do I care? No.
Human life has meaning because we decide it does. That decision and that meaning are influenced by love, and the ensuing actions we take affect our physical environment.
Love takes energy and invokes acceleration of matter one way or the other. It’s a force.
but then it’s a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that’s a different conversation.
Body Memory
I mean, cellular memory and muscle memory exist.
Mind-body. That you can think yourself sick, or well. Not like magic, but a lot of the time. Like how people won’t get sick until vacation a lot of the time, they say “don’t have time to get sick” so then on the day off, the mind tells the body “ok now you have time!”. All of my kids were born on a day off or weekend, same thing in a way. And once I read a book where the protagonist’ hands were burned, very vividly described, and got blisters on my fingertips.
I just really believe a lot of physical illness, and health, comes from thinking.
Before she passed my Nan had chronic arthritis. She had many joint replacements (both hips, a knee, shoulder, pins in her wrists etc) and without medication life was a misery.
One thing she said gave her genuine relief was acupuncture, and she wasn’t into pseudoscience at all. Maybe is was a placebo effect and it was expensive but it was worthwhile for her.
I’ve heard a few people say acupuncture has helped them. And saw an interesting thread on Lemmy or Reddit sometime with people citing papers against each other that it’s evidenced or not.
My guess so far is that it genuinely helps sometimes - perhaps via the nervous system, which is something scientific medicine still knows little about (compared to many other areas of medicine) - but some practitioners do it well and others not, and sometimes it works and sometimes not, and without scientific analysis and regulation it’s hard to know which.
I believe that literally every esotheric and nonesotheric bullshit is more trustworthy than everything a politician says at any given moment.
Not sure either of these counts fully as what OP is looking for, but -
The idea of the technological singularity feels right to me. There’s a whole section on the wikipedia page about scientific objections to it, and I get that, but if we don’t kill ourselves before then, it seems like an event that almost has to occur at some point, to me. And maybe it zigs instead of zags and we get star trek. Or maybe it zags and we get terminator. But probably neither of those I’m guessing, and these days it’s hard to imagine that it would put humanity on a worse trajectory than we seem to be on today.
Similarly, but less seriously (for me) I like to consider the whole “maybe we’re in a simulation” theory.
Yeah I kinda adhere to the simulation thing too. As a videogames programmer, every time I try to learn about quantum mechanics I learn about some new quirk that really makes it sound like some game engine limitation
when I like to gain perspective and imagine how useless we are on this meaningless little planet in a massive galaxy universe etc I just imagine the lonely little Boltzmann brain that’s actually just imagining the whole thing for a few nanoseconds before it returns back to quantum foam
On the surface, it does seem like there is a similarity. If a particle is measured over here and later over there, in quantum mechanics it doesn’t necessarily have a well-defined position in between those measurements. You might then want to liken it to a game engine where the particle is only rendered when the player is looking at it. But the difference is that to compute how the particle arrived over there when it was previously over here, in quantum mechanics, you have to actually take into account all possible paths it could have taken to reach that point.
This is something game engines do not do and actually makes quantum mechanics far more computationally expensive rather than less.
I thought you were going to say
As a videogames programmer, it is natural to me to consider myself as a character in some video game.
Definitely the lunar effect, but that is still under study. There’s a documentary called “The Shark Side of the Moon” which follows a scientist trying to prove a lunar effect on sharks. There’s also some inconclusive evidence of a lunar effect on people with bipolar disorder; the full moon might trigger mania, probably due to excess light during nighttime. Context: >!People with bipolar disorder (known as ‘manic depression’ years ago) are very sensitive to light, substances, and many other things that can trigger manic or depressive episodes for them. The possible mania under the full moon may be a reason behind myths like werewolves and terms like ‘lunatic’.!<
I’ll edit if I find more.
Edit: I found another one which I would easily try or suggest to others if evidence-based therapies have failed.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy in which the person being treated is asked to recall distressing images; the therapist then directs the person in one type of bilateral sensory input, such as side-to-side eye movements or hand tapping. It is included in several guidelines for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some clinical psychologists have argued that the eye movements do not add anything above imagery exposure and characterize its promotion and use as pseudoscience.
I really want to believe the Assassin’s Creed concept that our DNA holds memories from our ancestors.
Epigenetics. But that’s not as cool as whatever Assassin’s Creed is.
