Those who claim psychic powers: true believers, or clever charlatans out for the money?

I personally think it’s all hooey but I’m sure there are both sincere and non-sincere practitioners of the “art.”

I’m a true believer. I predict @ETpro will ask a sexual question some time tomorrow.

I predict Coloma is going to talk about marijuana!

Charlatans.

I predict @Dutchess_III is going to make a funny retort.

I think, like many things, that there are some gifted people with advanced minds, but, mostly they are all frauds.
@ETpro Heh….you psychic you!
@Dutchess_III LOL no, not this morning, I am on allergy pills, not nearly as much fun.

Predators mostly. I am not discounting a few true psychics though.

My kids still think I’m psychic. But I don’t charge them for reading their minds.

I’ve had a couple of strange psychic moments. Once, when I was about 14, very tall and lanky, I stood up from a chair and I felt like one of those wooden block things that fold and unfold…you know, then, when it’s done, you turn it around and do it again (Ok, old school!) My dad was standing by the door and he said, “When you stood up you looked like one of those wooden toy things that fold and unfold.” That was weird.

Another time I was grocery shopping. I bought some toaster strudels for the kids to make for breakfast (it was summertime, and I went to work before they got up.) When I picked up the toaster strudels I had an image of the toaster catching on fire…..I froze for a second, then shrugged it off. Guess what….. Yeah. My son had a BLAST cutting loose with the fire extinguisher all OVER the kitchen the next morning, even tho the toaster was the only thing on fire! It was mess! scary too…He thought to unplug the toaster before he cut loose with the fire extinguisher. Smart boy.

I’ve had people that can read me like a book. One sentence and they know what I’m thinking. So I supposed if someone really honed that ability and they looked at enough history they could come close to appearing to have some psychic abilities. But the one’s that do it for the publicity are fakes.

Yeah, and above, to tell someone their child is DEAD…..I mean, OMG.

@Dutchess_III That’s a pretty safe bet in most cases. She was just playing the odds.

Safe bet or not, how could anyone live with themselves after saying something like that?

@Dutchess_III Her desire for the spotlight was more than her care that she really hurt a mother. It’s hard to believe anyone could be that cruel, but it happens all too often.

People like that should be put in jail.

Can’t disagree with you, but that’s expensive. Or we can look at them and vow to never let ourselves do that to anyone.

I wonder if any of them are real? This is an interesting article.

(http://www.psychic-experiences.com/psychic-articles/genuine-fraud-psychics.php)

@KNOWITALL There’s got to be some amid this large of a population. Is it 7 billion people on earth now?

@Adirondackwannabe I don’t know, I live in the “Show Me State” baby, I need proof. My faith in God is about as far as I’ll go without it. :)

Hmmm, I don’t know if they have ever proven psychic ability. I’ll look around.

I use a medium who is the real deal. She charged me for the first reading but hasn’t since for any follow up.

@KNOWITALL There’s the $1,000,000 Paranormal Challenge that nobody has ever won since 1996. All they have to do is demonstrate their powers under controlled conditions. When I learned about this, I stopped believing in the possibility of paranormal stuff.

What kind of stuff did she tell you @serenade? And why are they always women?

@Dutchess_III My grammy told me that she’d come back and haunt me, or appear or something if it was possible, I gave up when it didn’t happen. She loved me more than anything on earth.

That is so sad, @KNOWITALL. I wish I could believe that I could see my Mom again.

@Dutchess_III Why don’t you? Atheists (not saying you are or are not btw) like Thomas Jefferson (I know he’s my favorite this week- lol) believe they’ll see there loved ones again. It’s very comforting isn’t it? I imagine my grammy and grampa and all my old dogs, and friends up there at a big poker game in the clouds, hootin and hollerin’ and havin a blast, it’s one of the visuals that gets me through really tough times when I’m missing them badly.

Because all evidence and logic points away from it. :(
Faith is a very powerful thing. The most intelligent can believe what they were taught as children.
What I really want to believe in is reincarnation.

@Dutchess_III Yeah, buddhism is pretty cool.

My favorite fortune telling trick is to write a prediction and seal it in an envelop, then open it when the prediction comes true. The trick is to predict several different things and only open the one that wins.

I did recently have two strange coincidences. On Sunday I asked my Mother-in-Law about my youngest nephew, since I rarely hear anything about him. He was fine and looking forward to an upcoming camping trip. On Monday he was rushed to the hospital with acute gallstones and pancreatitus.

On Wednesday I dreamed that a helicopter crashed in the street, and today I read that it really happened.

Attention seeking, delusional loser types out to fill a massive void in their lives.

I think it depends on the psychic, and what their own thoughts and beliefs are. There are charlatans who chose all sorts of professions to pretend to be competent in, so finding a fake doesn’t invalidate everyone. Psychic skill is more of a natural to fake, though, and more of a grey area of what people are talking about. Some are honest about providing an entertainment service, or about being good at reading body language and other signs in order to provide insights, over-represented as magic powers.

However, there are also many others who profess psychic powers of various sorts, who do believe in them. What each one believes in exactly varies, as there is no central authority everyone agrees on. Some actually do embrace an invoke science, and will start talking to you about the latest research in quantum physics, which invalidates conventional understandings of time and causation, and shows evidence that what we think can and does effect what happens and what exists and what we know and intuit. Others talk about and believe in psychic energy, senses and communications. Others point to subconscious cause and effect and deductions. Others don’t profess to understanding, but know that even if psychic language and ideas are only metaphorical, they are nevertheless extremely useful for many things – and far more useful than making fun of psychics and denying our feelings and intuitions.

I totally agree with @janbb, and I predicted I would.

I honestly don’t believe in psychic powers, but I’m sure there are people who peddle it who truly do believe.

—Poor Harry Houdini. He wasted years and dollars searching for a psychic who would help him contact the Beyond.—

I think a lot of people who claim to have the power of vision are charlatans, but I have seen amazing predictions happen. I think many have moments of vision, but cannot utilize it on day to day dealings.

I don’t believe in psychics. I’d venture to say that most of them are charlatans. Some of the psychics probably believe in their own psychic powers.

Sylvia Browne gets called out on her BS, or another medium likely used cold reading tactics, so according to the pseudosceptical mindset this makes all mediums frauds?! So we’ll just ignore the cases where missing people were found, bodies were found, crimes solved, etc, etc, etc and then just assume that because another self-proclaimed medium was found to be a fraud that mediums like Leslie Flint, Helen Duncan, Anthony Borgia, Rita Goold, etc must be frauds themselves.

Interestingly I’ve been researching about the tactics of self-proclaimed sceptics for a couple of years now, and from what I’ve read about many of them I suppose I could call most of them (sceptics) charlatans and frauds as well. Here a sceptic talks about ‘guerilla’ tactics which they frequently use. Here is a banned TEDx youtube video featuring Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and here Dr. Sheldrake talks about his censored video.

Whether the enlightened on fluther want to hear this or not, a fair amount of paranormal phenomena has been scientifically proven beyond a reasonable doubt, including the validity of mediumship. Even several hardcore sceptics such as Wiseman and others have made comments that under the scope of science a good deal of paranormal phenomena has been reasonably proven, but that it’s still not accepted because despite the evidence ‘mysticism’ does not fit in with established theories.

@Paradox25 No need to be so defensive. I never suggested that all psychics are just like Sylvia Browne. In fact, quite the opposite. I noted why she might be a particularly poor example of the group. It just so happened that reading about her prediction being debunked led me to ask the question. But the question isn’t prejudicial in any way. And I’m sure the honest answer is some are true believers and others are charlatans out for some easy money. I imagine that at least on that, you and I agree.

I read the full text of Wikapediatrician Susan Gerbic discusses her Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. I see nothing there that points to her skepticism being unfounded or designed to cover up the truth with some sort of nefarious guerrilla tactics. She was clearly using the word tongue in cheek. I urge all that care to actually read the full article instead of reacting to the word “guerrilla” taken out of context.

There are very good reasons why Rupert Sheldrake’s TEDx talk was taken down. There is no massive thing called Materialism which has made science a wholly owned subsidiary of itself. Instead Sheldrake is selling a book in his talk. And for that book to sell, his audiences must be convinced that science is a belief system at odds with reality. That is simply and demonstrably not true. Science has given us medical miracles, communications and connection like humanity has never before dreamed of, the ability to gaze at the wonders of the Universe all the way to the event horizon of the big bang, global positioning satellites, and this Internet you and I are using to discuss this. In contrast, what contributions has the whole of woo-woo given that have predicted that if we just looked here, or there, we’d find a way to do something new and useful.

I do want to hear what supernatural phenomenon have been scientifically proven. But fair warning. I actually know what scientific proof requires. Given that warning, if you have proofs to share, post links. I promise to give them due consideration.

Very sorry for the late reply. The only thing that I can say about the Sheldrake being unfairly attacked by sceptics for allegedly condemning science is that the sceptics are wrong. Sheldrake, like other scientists who’ve come out of the closet in support of paranormal phenomena, are attacking scientism, reductionism and materialism. Sheldrake was not attacking science itself though others see it that way. Obviously we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one concerning Sheldrake’s comments over the years.

I’ll briefly address the issue with ‘guerrilla’ scepticism, and why I’d decided to post that link about Susan Gerbic as well as the tactics of many other sceptics/sceptical organizations. Let’s face it, information that is more readily available whether it’s faulty or not will have a very powerful influence on those who find it and read it. Many people will read these sceptical arguments and rely on those behind them to post the truth and to be unbiased, even if at times they aren’t. I’ve already posted a couple of examples of sceptics misrepresenting what really occured in psi experiments which reported repeatable results above chance on other threads. I won’t post these again unless you want me to. There are other problems that I have with sceptics like Gerbic and their tactics by refusing to post anything that hints of verifying paranormal phenomena.

Yes, like Gerbic I think that evidence is cool too. The problem is that people like her refuse to accept any evidence that hints of potentially verifying that psi is a real and natural phenomenon, so people like her get to snuff out any counterarguments that threaten her views. There are other problems that I have with this type of guerrilla scepticism too, and it wasn’t because I’d seen the word ‘guerrilla’ in the title.

I have a few different links concerning verifying mediumship. Before I post these links I want to address your question about what qualifies as scientific evidence concerning supernatural phenomena. However, before I do that I need to write what the difference between a psychic and a medium is. A medium is a person who can allegedly communicate with ‘deceased’ entities, so a legit medium would not claim to be able to predict the future. A psychic is a person who can allegedly tell certain things about people without knowing anything about that person beforehand. The evidence in these links did pass the scientific method because the results were repeatable and well above chance. No sceptic has denied this, including even hardcore sceptics such as Wiseman and Hyman. The only thing that is questioned about the scientific research which yielded proparanormal results is the protocol used during the experiments, and whether it was trustworthy or not. Here are a few links about the evidence, the protocol used during the experiments and the percentages of hits and misses concerning mediumship: 1, 2, 3, 4. These are peer reviewed papers about mediumship. I have papers concerning strong evidence for telepathy as well, but I’m concentrating on mediumship for this thread.

I’m going to be honest here, there are many dishonest people on my side of this issue as well. Trying to access truthful information from the proparanormal side of the fence has been extremely difficult, and with me being one of the more sceptical proparanormal individuals out there finding reliable information has been very difficult. I only limit myself to certain types of proparanormal individuals and websites. I still appreciate the sceptical viewpoint and I’ve learnt a great deal from them. Believe it or not there are some sceptics I have much more respect for than many on the proparanormal side.

There are commercials our for some new psychic show, Long Island Medium, or something like that. Just watching the commercials leaves me shaking my head. She keeps evincing total awe and disbelief when someone confirms something she hinted at. She’ll say, ”REALLY?! No WAY” Like she just can’t believe herself.

What a joke.