It’s such an easy to test theory as well. Everybody has a phone camera, high quality, good pictures. Okay. Now you get one task and it’s very simple. Take a picture of the first wild bird you see. That’s it. No second chances, no matter how far away, if you missed your chance you missed it. Literally the next bird after reading this is your task. Let’s see how useful your phone camera really is in determining the existence of elusive wildlife. How useful is this going to be to determine the existence of a yellow throated warbler? A bird we definitely know exists…
People need to stop overstating the fact that we carry cameras around. It’s not really a point against the existence of a creature. Taking high quality pictures is difficult, you have first to go to the place where the creature is found, takes a lot of practice, patience and luck. If we’re dealing with a rare highly intelligent creature that does not want to be found, knows how to remain hidden, buries feces, buries bodies… All we will get is glimpses and tracks, it is to be expected. But boy do we have an awful lot of those.
The quality of the evidence of footprints is so high, it’s far more convincing. We have prints to the resolution of dermal ridges, half prints on slopes that can only be done by a flexible foot. Scars healing over time. Like, this isn’t some dude who stuck some planks to their rubber boots. You want quality of evidence? Check out what prints are actually found, cast and researched. It’s not something you can just brush aside.
The reason people all can get behind high quality pictures is because it gives everybody what they want. Believers to say I told you so. Skeptics to say that it’s photoshop. And everybody lives happily ever after.
Isn’t Bigfoot supposed to be a giant ape? It’s supposed to be some kind of protohuman right, I think that’s the idea, so presumably they’re quite a lot easier to take a picture of than a small bird. Also here is a picture of a squirrel I took, to rather prove your point that it is possible to take pictures of fast moving animals.
A better comparison would be can you take a picture of a cow.
Also, home CCTV cameras are more common than ever now. Including near and in remote woodlands. There are literally initiatives where if you live in or near ecologically important areas, you can give universities and research groups access to your outdoor camera footage to allow them to track the movement of wildlife, basically as an expansion of existing trail cam systems. It has been used to track everything from hummingbirds to feral cats to bears and moose. The fact that not a single one of those programs have ever verifiably caught a cryptid at best casts doubt on their existence.
Birds are awfully small and fast, so it puts us at quite a disadvantage vs a larger creature. Which is to say you have to get closer to the smaller, quicker creature to get a decent snap vs the bigger slower one.
Maybe a better test is snapping a pic of a rare car or something.
Anyway.
There’s footprints?? Source? How is that not news everywhere?
But birds are abundant and require a good quality capture. It should be easy to get pictures if the skeptics are to be believed. We want as many pictures as possible of an elusive creature that evades humans. This should at least come up with some pictures, right. Cars don’t blend into the background.
There are hundreds of footprints, and more photos of tracks. There is high quality capture on video as well. It has been on the news and in the papers multiple times. There is not one source there are hundreds. Anybody who is interested can find it with basic research skills. And anybody with a brain can filter out hoaxes on one hand (not a lot) and bad debunking jobs on the other (lots of knee jerking). In between there is a wide array of alleged evidence for the phenomenon, from dash cam footage to eye witness reports to prints to audio recordings.
Why is it not in the news? Because it isn’t an acceptable opinion and is a detriment to your credibility. (and vice versa debunkers think that it enhances credibility). There are many subjects like this, so I’m always a bit annoyed when people say that it isn’t on the news. Taboos exist and we all know that it is a taboo. That’s why, it isn’t particularly complicated.
Do yourself a favour and become a big foot enthousiast for a week, try to find out as much as you can and from as many people, places, libraries as you can. You will be left with two impressions. First that as a phenomenon big foot is real and exists in the imagination of many. Second that debunkers aren’t really good at there job and fall in a lot of pitfalls having no trouble shoving expertise aside.
(The same holds for believing in abductions by ETs, ghosts, chupacabra, Slenderman, the Jersey Devil, the moon Mona Lisa, religion, superstition, mental telepathy, or really anything at all).
So if you are willing, perhaps we could discuss how you determine what to believe using bigfoot as an example? I am not interested in debunking or proving, but rather how strongly you believe and why.
How sure are you about Bigfoot? On a scale of 0-100%
What constitutes evidence to you? What is the threshold above which you feel a thing is proven to a reasonable degree?
Well sure but I don’t do percentages. Things are either explained or they aren’t. But forgive me for sounding evasive because of it. And also you’re dragging a lot of things into this. Luckily fringe science is my jam.
Also I would like to start by making a distinction between fringe phenomenon and fringe ideas. It should be obvious but since the skeptics love to poison the well by lumping all manner of things together, santa Claus, UFOs, conspiracy, theism, ghosts. Bigfoot, flat earth, etc. as part of their propaganda. Phenomenon are things experienced in our shared reality. They are not the ideas about things. And since we’re defining words; fringe is an expression of cultural acceptance, not rarity. Some fringe phenomenon are very frequently reported. And even though flat earth is a popular fringe idea, it is not a fringe phenomenon. Important distinction.
I think that there is no denying that the most obvious explanation for most phenomena is because people experience them. I don’t think these people are mistaken, or have false memories, or lying. It would be a great affront to epistemology (and science) when we start denying experience a priori. I don’t, in fact I like a phenomenological and fortean approach, and I think the skeptics make a metaphysical mistake.
So, let’s start with the skeptic, and I classify them as metaphysical naturalists with unwavering adherence to scientism, immediately search for an object in the world. Since this, in their worldview, is the only thing that exists. Experience, in this world view, is a direct consequence of the object. Experience without object is immediately and swiftly denigrated to the land of illusion.
So let’s look at a list of things that has strong skeptic denial, scientific taboo but strong cultural presence… Miracles, afterlife, ghosts, higher beings, telekinesis, mediumship, etc… These things (many more) have as a common thread that they are experiences of either non-objects or non physical intelligence. The list is getting shorter all the time, (meditation, hypnosis, acupuncture, placebo.) even when they are still without any physical explanation and hinge almost exclusively on belief. And to be abundantly clear, belief is not an object.
Okay, so while a skeptic can say… ‘Ah no object, no real phenomenon. You are all idiots for believing in that shit’. I think that position is the laziest and most devoid of intelligence. (let alone within the spirit of scientific exploration. ) But of course without an object in our shared reality to point to I can not give you any information about the object. Also I can’t adhere to the rules set up by the naturalist approach to science. And I’m not saying this to as a get out of jail free card. I’m saying this to let you know that I have a deeper understanding of this problem than skeptics will claim.
There are many people who swoop in, claim everything is fake and swoosh away in a puff of smoke… Who are very aggressive about the protection of scientism and its worldview, they also kidnapped the cultural perception of science and what constitutes as intelligent discourse. They have actual magazines and focus groups, to keep the taboos in place. I can’t overstate the active nature in which these topics are denied and ridiculed. Seriously, it is rather extreme in some cases.
Of those, there have been exactly zero skeptics (and I’ve been around for a few decades) that understood that their beliefs were a direct consequence of their metaphysics. While in the intellectual philosophical discussion in that space there is an absolute immediate acknowledgement of the problem(s) of metaphysical naturalism that have been there since the start and nobody came close to solving for the past thousand years or so. Skeptics still double down on their position by gesturing at the fact that the same problem exists in physicalism, and that’s what every scientist believes. Reasoning in circles until they have buried themselves in certainty. So, if you’re searching for certainty that’s the camp that has it in spades, it’s unwavering and never questioned.
Anyway, the problem for me, for anybody who desires a scientific approach to the fringe phenomenon. Is that as soon as you accept that one of the things is true, the whole paradigm of physicalism and by extension m-naturalism can’t be upheld. There is no object, no measurable force in many of these fringe phenomenon. So there can only be indirect evidence of the phenomenons’ influence on the world, and in some cases only an influence on our experience. That type of evidence is certainly there for many of the fringe phenomenon. But it requires a lot of good quality evidence to be able to overcome the causal jump to an indirect influence. As you can hopefully understand.
I can tell you about my beliefs and certainties of all the things I read, but in the end for a lot of my beliefs about the fringe phenomena, the threshold for the causal jump differs from person to person. And there is, in most cases, no real established consensus. Yes, between the few scientist working on the topic . But these topics are complicated, nuanced, highly contested, extremely scrutinized and of course professional suicide. You have to actually and actively do your due diligence in finding the scientific exploration in the fringe topics. It is absolutely there and high quality scientific research is always being done. Despite all of the problems associated with the topics because there is in many cases something there.
Okay, so… There is a class of phenomena that are on the edge of physicalism, perhaps outside of it. Nevertheless are incorporated into mainstream. And clearly opening a path away from physicalism, (to subjectivism, idealism, whatever.) instead of the hard physicalism of metaphysical naturalism. I think this will just grow naturally as more and more scientific evidence is being found. The scientific method is the best at producing facts about the world. So to answer your question about how we can know what is or isn’t fact: Do the fucking science.
But actually do it, actually read it and search for it. Llet go of the bias inherently present in proceeding from a physicalism and especially m-naturalism perspective. The science that you can do when you’re not beholden to some religiously skeptical protection of what science can or cannot or isn’t allowed to do, is fantastic.
I implore you to for example go subscribe to JSE journal. It’s free (for past issues) and allows all topics. It’s wonderful.
Another free journal I enjoyed was ‘paranthropology’, although discontinued you can still find the publications online.
If you are interested in bigfoot in particular you can find interesting things over at sasquatch genome project.
It’s such an easy to test theory as well. Everybody has a phone camera, high quality, good pictures. Okay. Now you get one task and it’s very simple. Take a picture of the first wild bird you see. That’s it. No second chances, no matter how far away, if you missed your chance you missed it. Literally the next bird after reading this is your task. Let’s see how useful your phone camera really is in determining the existence of elusive wildlife. How useful is this going to be to determine the existence of a yellow throated warbler? A bird we definitely know exists…
People need to stop overstating the fact that we carry cameras around. It’s not really a point against the existence of a creature. Taking high quality pictures is difficult, you have first to go to the place where the creature is found, takes a lot of practice, patience and luck. If we’re dealing with a rare highly intelligent creature that does not want to be found, knows how to remain hidden, buries feces, buries bodies… All we will get is glimpses and tracks, it is to be expected. But boy do we have an awful lot of those.
The quality of the evidence of footprints is so high, it’s far more convincing. We have prints to the resolution of dermal ridges, half prints on slopes that can only be done by a flexible foot. Scars healing over time. Like, this isn’t some dude who stuck some planks to their rubber boots. You want quality of evidence? Check out what prints are actually found, cast and researched. It’s not something you can just brush aside.
The reason people all can get behind high quality pictures is because it gives everybody what they want. Believers to say I told you so. Skeptics to say that it’s photoshop. And everybody lives happily ever after.
Isn’t Bigfoot supposed to be a giant ape? It’s supposed to be some kind of protohuman right, I think that’s the idea, so presumably they’re quite a lot easier to take a picture of than a small bird. Also here is a picture of a squirrel I took, to rather prove your point that it is possible to take pictures of fast moving animals.
A better comparison would be can you take a picture of a cow.
Also, home CCTV cameras are more common than ever now. Including near and in remote woodlands. There are literally initiatives where if you live in or near ecologically important areas, you can give universities and research groups access to your outdoor camera footage to allow them to track the movement of wildlife, basically as an expansion of existing trail cam systems. It has been used to track everything from hummingbirds to feral cats to bears and moose. The fact that not a single one of those programs have ever verifiably caught a cryptid at best casts doubt on their existence.
Birds are awfully small and fast, so it puts us at quite a disadvantage vs a larger creature. Which is to say you have to get closer to the smaller, quicker creature to get a decent snap vs the bigger slower one.
Maybe a better test is snapping a pic of a rare car or something.
Anyway.
There’s footprints?? Source? How is that not news everywhere?
The footprints are very obviously fake, but the “History” Channel keeps using and repeating them as proof anyway
Wow. How surprising. /s
But birds are abundant and require a good quality capture. It should be easy to get pictures if the skeptics are to be believed. We want as many pictures as possible of an elusive creature that evades humans. This should at least come up with some pictures, right. Cars don’t blend into the background.
There are hundreds of footprints, and more photos of tracks. There is high quality capture on video as well. It has been on the news and in the papers multiple times. There is not one source there are hundreds. Anybody who is interested can find it with basic research skills. And anybody with a brain can filter out hoaxes on one hand (not a lot) and bad debunking jobs on the other (lots of knee jerking). In between there is a wide array of alleged evidence for the phenomenon, from dash cam footage to eye witness reports to prints to audio recordings.
Why is it not in the news? Because it isn’t an acceptable opinion and is a detriment to your credibility. (and vice versa debunkers think that it enhances credibility). There are many subjects like this, so I’m always a bit annoyed when people say that it isn’t on the news. Taboos exist and we all know that it is a taboo. That’s why, it isn’t particularly complicated.
Do yourself a favour and become a big foot enthousiast for a week, try to find out as much as you can and from as many people, places, libraries as you can. You will be left with two impressions. First that as a phenomenon big foot is real and exists in the imagination of many. Second that debunkers aren’t really good at there job and fall in a lot of pitfalls having no trouble shoving expertise aside.
I will look into it.
The root question here is one of epistemology.
(The same holds for believing in abductions by ETs, ghosts, chupacabra, Slenderman, the Jersey Devil, the moon Mona Lisa, religion, superstition, mental telepathy, or really anything at all).
So if you are willing, perhaps we could discuss how you determine what to believe using bigfoot as an example? I am not interested in debunking or proving, but rather how strongly you believe and why.
How sure are you about Bigfoot? On a scale of 0-100%
What constitutes evidence to you? What is the threshold above which you feel a thing is proven to a reasonable degree?
Well sure but I don’t do percentages. Things are either explained or they aren’t. But forgive me for sounding evasive because of it. And also you’re dragging a lot of things into this. Luckily fringe science is my jam.
Also I would like to start by making a distinction between fringe phenomenon and fringe ideas. It should be obvious but since the skeptics love to poison the well by lumping all manner of things together, santa Claus, UFOs, conspiracy, theism, ghosts. Bigfoot, flat earth, etc. as part of their propaganda. Phenomenon are things experienced in our shared reality. They are not the ideas about things. And since we’re defining words; fringe is an expression of cultural acceptance, not rarity. Some fringe phenomenon are very frequently reported. And even though flat earth is a popular fringe idea, it is not a fringe phenomenon. Important distinction.
I think that there is no denying that the most obvious explanation for most phenomena is because people experience them. I don’t think these people are mistaken, or have false memories, or lying. It would be a great affront to epistemology (and science) when we start denying experience a priori. I don’t, in fact I like a phenomenological and fortean approach, and I think the skeptics make a metaphysical mistake.
So, let’s start with the skeptic, and I classify them as metaphysical naturalists with unwavering adherence to scientism, immediately search for an object in the world. Since this, in their worldview, is the only thing that exists. Experience, in this world view, is a direct consequence of the object. Experience without object is immediately and swiftly denigrated to the land of illusion.
So let’s look at a list of things that has strong skeptic denial, scientific taboo but strong cultural presence… Miracles, afterlife, ghosts, higher beings, telekinesis, mediumship, etc… These things (many more) have as a common thread that they are experiences of either non-objects or non physical intelligence. The list is getting shorter all the time, (meditation, hypnosis, acupuncture, placebo.) even when they are still without any physical explanation and hinge almost exclusively on belief. And to be abundantly clear, belief is not an object.
Okay, so while a skeptic can say… ‘Ah no object, no real phenomenon. You are all idiots for believing in that shit’. I think that position is the laziest and most devoid of intelligence. (let alone within the spirit of scientific exploration. ) But of course without an object in our shared reality to point to I can not give you any information about the object. Also I can’t adhere to the rules set up by the naturalist approach to science. And I’m not saying this to as a get out of jail free card. I’m saying this to let you know that I have a deeper understanding of this problem than skeptics will claim.
There are many people who swoop in, claim everything is fake and swoosh away in a puff of smoke… Who are very aggressive about the protection of scientism and its worldview, they also kidnapped the cultural perception of science and what constitutes as intelligent discourse. They have actual magazines and focus groups, to keep the taboos in place. I can’t overstate the active nature in which these topics are denied and ridiculed. Seriously, it is rather extreme in some cases.
Of those, there have been exactly zero skeptics (and I’ve been around for a few decades) that understood that their beliefs were a direct consequence of their metaphysics. While in the intellectual philosophical discussion in that space there is an absolute immediate acknowledgement of the problem(s) of metaphysical naturalism that have been there since the start and nobody came close to solving for the past thousand years or so. Skeptics still double down on their position by gesturing at the fact that the same problem exists in physicalism, and that’s what every scientist believes. Reasoning in circles until they have buried themselves in certainty. So, if you’re searching for certainty that’s the camp that has it in spades, it’s unwavering and never questioned.
Anyway, the problem for me, for anybody who desires a scientific approach to the fringe phenomenon. Is that as soon as you accept that one of the things is true, the whole paradigm of physicalism and by extension m-naturalism can’t be upheld. There is no object, no measurable force in many of these fringe phenomenon. So there can only be indirect evidence of the phenomenons’ influence on the world, and in some cases only an influence on our experience. That type of evidence is certainly there for many of the fringe phenomenon. But it requires a lot of good quality evidence to be able to overcome the causal jump to an indirect influence. As you can hopefully understand.
I can tell you about my beliefs and certainties of all the things I read, but in the end for a lot of my beliefs about the fringe phenomena, the threshold for the causal jump differs from person to person. And there is, in most cases, no real established consensus. Yes, between the few scientist working on the topic . But these topics are complicated, nuanced, highly contested, extremely scrutinized and of course professional suicide. You have to actually and actively do your due diligence in finding the scientific exploration in the fringe topics. It is absolutely there and high quality scientific research is always being done. Despite all of the problems associated with the topics because there is in many cases something there.
Okay, so… There is a class of phenomena that are on the edge of physicalism, perhaps outside of it. Nevertheless are incorporated into mainstream. And clearly opening a path away from physicalism, (to subjectivism, idealism, whatever.) instead of the hard physicalism of metaphysical naturalism. I think this will just grow naturally as more and more scientific evidence is being found. The scientific method is the best at producing facts about the world. So to answer your question about how we can know what is or isn’t fact: Do the fucking science.
But actually do it, actually read it and search for it. Llet go of the bias inherently present in proceeding from a physicalism and especially m-naturalism perspective. The science that you can do when you’re not beholden to some religiously skeptical protection of what science can or cannot or isn’t allowed to do, is fantastic.
I implore you to for example go subscribe to JSE journal. It’s free (for past issues) and allows all topics. It’s wonderful.
Another free journal I enjoyed was ‘paranthropology’, although discontinued you can still find the publications online.
If you are interested in bigfoot in particular you can find interesting things over at sasquatch genome project.
I really appreciate the detailed response! Thanks. I will ponder and brush up on some things before I try to continue the discourse.
We have hd shots of wild birds. I’m not reading the rest but I assume it’s just as dumb.