Once again, thank you for a fair and even-handed treatment of this.
"I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad."
Hoo-boy, Crazy (And Heretical) Mariology could be an entire post of its own. When Catholics go nuts, it tends to be in the "mystical visions and revelations" side (rather than things like the Satanic Panic of Evangelical American Protestants). One of the objections to Lourdes (I am recalling off the top of my head) was that there had been previous, small-scale, similar alleged apparitions which must have primed St. Bernadette to see something similar.
Medjugorje itself is *very* controversial; apart from the turf war between the local Franciscans (who backed the visionaries) and the local bishop (who very much did not), it's highly unusual, to say the least, for apparitions to take place over so long a period. The Vatican has currently split the difference by saying "yes you can go there on pilgrimage, no we're not saying anything supernatural happened there".
No apocalyptic predictions, it only lasted one evening, and while it's a pilgrimage site it's nowhere on the same level as Lourdes or Fatima. It's unusual too in that it was a silent apparition - no messages, no speaking to those who saw it.
That too has been the subject of attempted debunking, with one claim that the entire thing was a magic lantern show (possibly hoaxed up by the parish priest). On the other hand, if you've ever been to Knock (and I got dragged there on pilgrimage during the 80s by my mother), it rains. A lot. Good luck trying to keep a magic lantern alight, in the evening/night, during rain and wind, while you remain hidden enough to secretly project images on the wall of the church in the hopes someone will be passing along and see them:
(That's one of the times the explanation for a miracle makes less sense than the miracle itself, like my personal and long-standing favourite, Ice Floe Jesus for the walking on water).
Human physicist: the Mie scattering point is correct. It does indeed skew forward. Generally, scattering phenomena in the atmosphere are very complicated, especially in mesoscopic regimes (Object size many, but not TOO may wavelengths) where the very large and very small approximations break down.
Astrophysicist, agreed. The argument being made is that while Ethan is correct that there are many scatterings in the cloud, those scatterings won't go in a random direction but will preferentially have the light go out in the same direction that it came in. As a result, you'll have a somewhat resolved, disk-like Sun produced by lots of scattered photons that just didn't change direction much.
Relatedly, I have also regularly seen the disk Sun through clouds, although I never stared at it much. I associate those observations most with Utah in the winter, when presumably the clouds are somewhat icy and the particles are somewhat large.
The problem is that either it wont attenuate by enough to get below the threshold for discomfort OR it will blur/obscure the disc. I dont deny that you can get a “somewhat resolved, disc-like Sun” through clouds with optical depth less than 4-5. Look up nimbostratus and you’ll see what kind of clouds you need to attenuate by 10^6 cd/m2
Didnt Scott explain this though? You are correct that if you assume a simple Beer’s law attenuation, e^-α, of the light, then the reduction factor you state has α=14. But, according to the testimonies of a bunch of people above, they are able to stare at the sun with markedly less cloud cover than this implies. Thus, the details of the atmospheric scattering are not so important, instead the assumption that you REQUIRE α=14 appears to be contradicted by testimony. Something’s wrong with this estimate.
Edit: Ah, sorry one other thing. The point about Mie scattering was that the scattering also does not have to destroy the coherence of the light in the Mie regime, allowing you to preserve the sharp disk while also attenuating the absolute brightness.
I doubt the veracity of the testimony. I think you can get this effect when Sun is near the horizon + thin clouds or fog, and I dont expect people to be good at remembering the details of solar elevation + they seem to be primed and strongly motivated to commit a memory error.
Idk, that seems like it undermines your broader point that relies entirely on testimony being reliable. But would you agree that if I have dominantly single scattering events only, then i can attenuate the light as much as I want, and the sharpness of the image is completely unchanged? This is what the Mie regime point is about.
But my point doesnt “rely entirely” on testimony being reliable - I dont know how anyone who read my posts could say that. And not all testimony is created equal - there are ways to discriminate between reliable/unreliable testimony (e.g, multiple attestation to a specific event, statement against interest/bias, coarse detail rather than fine detail, temporally proximate to event, etc…) You have to overturn much more credible testimony than specific details reported about unspecific recollections in Scott’s discord polls to reject the miracle, so it is weird that you put so much stock in this kind of anecdote.
Physically realistic scattering from clouds with optical depths >9 will inevitably disturb (probably extinguish) the solar disc… perfect forward scattering is not realistic and is what you need for the multiple scattering not to blur/smear the light… of course, it is strongly forward - but that isnt what you need.
you distinctly remember seeing the Sun near its zenith as a pale, moonlike disc that was painless to stare at without squinting?
photos are totally believable - but no glare in iphone camera doesn't mean no glare in the naked eye (the discomfort glare is driven by scattering within the human eye - with the right filters, you can take a no glare photo of the sun in a clear sky)
I think this insistence really weakens your case. I myself have seen this phenomenon a dozen times or more, primarily in the high mountain West in winter.
Interesting that you mention Utah - I must've seen this a dozen times a year when I was working as a ski bum out in Colorado, enough that I distinctly noted it as a cool phenomenon in its own right.
It's *more* obvious if the sun is low in the sky and right in front of you on the horizon, *easier* if you're wearing polarized goggles, etc. But it's also something that very definitely occasionally is visible to the naked eye at ~2pm!
I think Utah is a bit farther south than Portugal - do you remember what month it would be? Maybe October in Portugal and February in Utah are similar midday elevation of the sun.
I'm pretty sure that this case is a simple matter of a good fraction of the light getting scattered zero times, which explains the sharp boundary instead of getting convolved with something.
I vaguely remember sometimes seeing a slightly brighter splotch in the clouds where the sun is when it was too overcast to see the sun as a disk with a distinct outline, this is probably what the forward bias in scattering looks like.
Is your point that if it were explained by forward scattering, then that would noticeably blur/distort the disc?
Can you weigh in on my point about the tradeoff between attenuation and optical depth. If I am right that the optical depth has to be 11-14 to get the attenuation you need, I feel like the debate is over.
I feel like e^11 is a lot. Attenuating by enough for the unscattered light to be maybe 1x the brightness of the clouds would be enough. Which would by definition not hurt since looking at the clouds doesn't hurt and so 2x the clouds shouldn't hurt either.
Optical depth would be something around ln(angular area of sun) or something like that. I also live on the east coast and like looking at clouds, so I see this effect every couple of days...
I also live on the East Coast. There is zero chance that you see the midday Sun as pale, moonlike disc that is painless to gaze at “every couple of days”
Also, that isnt how optical depth/cloud attenuation works. See my NASA reference in my original post.
Reading your original post more closely I think you are making a unit error.
The point is that the sun is big enough that you can see it as a visible disk. Therefore, the correct measure to use is brightness. An object that takes a larger visual area with the same cd/m^2 would be easier to look at. (Otherwise your calculation would say that a white piece of paper that occupies the same visual area as the sun would be too bright to look at [sun is ~1e-2 radians, so going by your numbers a square piece of paper 1m away of sun size would get 1e-4*1e9 = 1e5 cd, going into a 2 pi m^2 area gives a bit over 1e4 cd/m^2])
But yes, this is somewhere around 1e3-1e5 attenuation by the clouds, which would mean that that the cloud would look pretty opaque but the sun is bright and that's how much is needed to bring the sun down to the same order of magnitude as the surrounding clouds.
What is the unit error? Luminance is brightness per area per unit solid angle. That is directly related to perceived brightness/comfortable viewing.
Your paper calculation mixes up quantities. You first convert luminance (cd/m²) to luminous intensity (cd) by multiplying by area; that’s irrelevant to visual comfort, which depends on luminance. Then you “spread” that intensity over a hemisphere and write 2π m², conflating solid angle (steradians) with area. That’s a dimensional error. Luminance concerns radiance per solid angle in the viewing direction; hemispheric averaging can’t be used to recover a meaningful cd/m² for what the eye sees.
I think you are right that the optical depth must be in a 11-14 sweet spot
Below is a PRBT4 simulation file of a spherical "sun" and scattering layer of optical depth=10, SSA=0.9, g=.877 that nevertheless produces a crisp disk. (it's a little more absorptive and thin than I'd prefer, but more scattering == more compute so have mercy)
The key point is that at these optical depths, the "blur filter" is maxed out and the whole cloud is lit. At which point the contrast is between the ambient brightness of the cloud and the directly-transmitted, zero-scattering, lottery-winner rays.
Similarly, if you use a point-source you will never get a "halo" on the other side of the cloud in these conditions. Scattered light gets completely distributed
Make the cloud thinner and then you can get a halo, but then the sun would be too bright
Solar eclipse glasses are advertised on multiple sites as having an OD of 5+.
Also I've noticed that the experience of discomfort from glare (at least when emerging from a dark cinema) can like that from cold be readily suppressed.
I'm wondering if the discrepancy from 5+ to 11-14 is a log base ambiguity. OD is defined as a base-10 quantity, but converting to natural log would bump 5 to 11.5.
Having read further in the responses, I see that you are talking about the OD in the clouds required to reduce intensity by 10^5 when looking at an angle through them. Fair enough, but it seems more likely to be ice crystals than droplets and orientation effects can complicate the angular dependence.
Another consideration is the dynamic range of the cones. If this is exceeded by the intensity of the aureole near the solar disk then the observer could perceive a fake but very sharp limb at the boundary of the cone-saturating region (at least according to Claude). The "sun" would look sharp but have a larger angular extent
Nope, got my angular thickness effect the wrong way round. The most you need is OD 5 at normal transmission through a layer. For oblique you need less - we all agree the effects of scattering are stronger closer to the horizon.
Yes, optical density of 5 is an attenuation factor of 10^5 (which is an OOM below my 'tolerance ceiling' of 10^6). Attenuation factor of 10^5 corresponds to a slant optical depth of 11.5. It seems that, due to individual variability, the minimum attenuation for individuals with high tolerance to comfortably fixate is closer to 10^4 than to 10^6. However, 10^6 is good estimate for the minimum attenuation for everybody in a large crowd to comfortably fixate (and 10^5 is a good estimate for minimum attenuation for the average member of the crowd to comfortably fixate).
As I was driving to work this morning I looked up and saw it too! A perfect solar disk, hard edges, through a break in dense cloud cover, was able to stare at it for 30 seconds with no trouble at all! About 8 AM, near San Jose CA. By the time I’d gotten my phone out it had become a little more occluded by the clouds, but I got a (kinda bad) picture!
Thanks for checking out our poll from ACX Discord.
For people unfamiliar with Discord, I think it would help to clarify that it's a different server (not channel) from the one you featured in the last post, with different people voting.
> Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on.
I don't agree. Surely the chance of you blacking out briefly, and someone taking your pen; or simply you personally hallucinating (I know you're not entirely convinced of mass hallucination as a phenomenon, but you certainly do believe in single-person hallucination) is larger than the probability of a miracle.
I admit the Pope blowing up mountains needs some explanation and is worth thinking about, although I still wouldn't want to leap to divinely-inspired miralcle, even then.
But what if "tangible evidence" is available afterwards? I once ended up with a case-hardened steel file that was bent at the tip of the tang. I can't, however, guarantee that the bend hadn't been there previously...but I've never seen one before or since. (I got this while investigating a "spoon bender" friend, who on being presented with the evidence quit the activity. [Rumors had said that sometimes other things would bend in the presence of the "spoon bender" activity...so I went looking.]) I ended up convinced that the friend was a fake, but unable to explain the bent file.
So does anyone know of case-hardened steel files that are manufactured with a bend at the tip of the tang? (It might be done to enable a handle to be molded around the tang, so I can invent a good reason...I've just never seen another.)
I'm not an expert on file manufacturing specifically. But from a little research it appears they undergo multiple hardening and tempering processes, some of which involve quenching by dipping, presumably by the tang. It seems possible that the tang is not subject to the full hardening process. Indeed a very hard tang doesn't seem desirable, being prone to breakage, so it might intentionally be preserved in an annealed state.
If a file is e.g. stepped on while resting against the tang, it seems like the overall stiffness would place a large bending moment towards the tip. If the tip is less hard than the rest of the file, a bend there would not be surprising.
Well, it didn't *look* different and it didn't feel different. And it was about 1/8 inch thick, so it would need a lot more force than that to bend it. But if hardened steel looks exactly the same as unhardened steel, that would be a possible explanation, but one that was quite unsatisfactory. It would be much more satisfactory if someone could point to files that were made that way.
Normally hardened files are more likely to break than to bend. And I believe that the hardening process changes the color of the metal.
Also, the word miracle comes with extra religious baggage. If the pen disappears, it suggests that some unexplained phenomenon is happening, but that may not have anything at all to do with religious miracles, prophets, and whatnot.
Lately, I've mostly jokingly been considering all the little unexplained phenomena signs of glitches in the matrix. Maybe the Fatima people just accidentally triggered the deep fire kasina meditation code loop? Maybe it's just a little perceptual bug that is hard to reproduce consistently. That seems at least as likely as a random religious miracle.
Yeah the sentence itself asserts more objectivity than it had. If it's a real phenomenon, there's always a score of unlikely things that together may result in the same thing, and while all of those independently occuring makes astronomical chance, it never drops down to zero.
Assorted thoughts and musings on how I find myself relating to this miracle report:
1. From my memory of the description many of the people (especially the children) had been meditating together in some sense for many days or weeks straight. With the large crowd and the spiritual atmosphere it's easy to imagine many people there in quite an altered state, which makes the fire kasina angle seem more likely to me personally.
2. I'm sympathetic to something like "indirect realism" as a metaphysical position. That is, we each live inside a personal simulation built by our nervous system/ brain, which is usually strongly coupled to external reality but not always (better explanation with pictures here: https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/cartoon-epistemology-by-steven-lehar-2003).
A way to get an intuition for this perspective I find helpful is the look at the sky and imagine it being such that "Behind the sky is my skull". When I do this there's a shift, and a sense that everything I have direct access to is inside my simulation and "me" in some sense. This way of seein is particularly palpable with things like fire kasina.
I find indirect realism a useful frame for understanding both fire kasina and miracles like this where reality itself seems to change in ways that physics does not allow for.
3. The notion that they were all meditating / in an altered state and the indirect realism frame fails to explain the shared aspect though (and utterly fails re the reports of nearby villages experiencing the miracle, or random lawyers showing up to witness. I imagine they were not pseudo meditating for days?).
I remember Dr Ingram on a podcast mentioning that while on retreat (in a castle if I remember correctly) he drew a neon orange shape in the air with his finger (having meditated enough such that this was as real to him as anything) and his friend absently remarked on the orange colour (and maybe the shape also? I don't recall) without having been told by Daniel at all.
Embarrassingly through other tidbits I've picked up and some personal experiences I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of cross emination happening on what some people might call a "group field" or "telepathy". I have no good models or justification for this and acknowledge it sounds crazy if you're not already sympathetic to such things being possible.
I guess the way I interpret the miracle is "a fire-kasina-like experience that spread via the vibe".
4. Lastly, I was struck by people saying things like "I didn't see it, but just being there (just being exposed to the vibe) was enough for me to believe".
This resonates for me with a sense of what I understand miracles to be "about". That is "coming into direct contact with the mysterium tremendum, updating some hyper prior related to reality being more deeply subject to our preconceptions / shared preconceptions than we thought".
"Encountering the unexpected power to shared belief to deeply alter how we experience the world"?
"An unexpected update that something very different is possible" maybe.
If something as stable as "my experience of the sun" can alter so drastically on account of prayer and belief (and not just for me but everyone around me) then maybe "I can't possibly love my intolerable neighbour / forgive my ex / accept that my son died and it's ruining my life" could also change.
This sort of shifts the perspective on miracles from "God did something that defies physics thus he must be real" to "When we congregate and pray in earnest we can common knowledge a direct experience of an enchanted world where the impossible becomes possible" (the kingdom of heaven).
Indirect realism and miraculous vibes are not how many (most?) believers understand miracles, but they're currently the lenses that come up for me :)
+1 for qri and indirect realism. You can experience some very interesting and somewhat fun mental states while thinking about "behind the sky is my skull" while on psychedelics. Especially in a hammock on a beautiful day 😏
just... make sure going into it that you have a strong grasp on epistemology, and have a deep understanding why indirect realism doesn't mean there is no reality outside your mind, and why even if solipsism is true you should be a good person. Idk, to me it was fun and interesting, but after writing it I realized it could easily send someone in a bad direction. Be careful before taking psychedelics
This is a cool idea, but I suspect it’s applying a very intense-Buddhist-insight-meditation frame to a religion that contains very little like that. Catholicism is really not very mystical for the vast majority of adherents, certainly for Gilded Age peasants, and it’s violently opposed to insights like “behind the sky is my skull.”
Yes it’s entirely possible to see the sun through cloud at a comfortable light level and still see a clear disk. I’ve seen this multiple times (indeed on one occasion I saw an unusually large sun-spot group, and verified this by looking at online images from a solar telescope that day). Now this does depend on the cloud — so presumably on the size of the water droplets.
If I recall the elevation was about 30 degrees, and, yes, there was no discomfort or glare, owing to the attenuation by cloud (such conditions are rare, and again this is presumably to do with droplet size, but they do occur.
Droplet size is just an input to optical depth. I have yet to see someone address the paradox of depth - you wont get the attenuation you need without an optical depth that would disturb the disc (and I found a mathematician that made same argument as me in context of Fatima).
It’s not just optical depth. For starters, as the above GPT-5 quote suggests, droplet size affects whether it is in the Rayleigh scattering regime or the Mie scattering regime. And if we were talking about high-altitude ice crystals then their shape (as well as size) becomes relevant.
The scattering angle also matters, whether it is isotropic, or forward scattered, or whatever (and if we’re considering ice crystals, that might have non-spherical shapes, it’s not straightforward).
I've also seen this. There is someone who took a photo of the sun through fog (saying that they could see sun spots with the naked eye) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/naYged4a7M This photo reflects well what I remember seeing: that the clouds look almost like black smoke in front of the sun and that you can see movement in the clouds.
Now, the picture is through fog, not clouds, which might change the physics, but I'm not really sure why it would.
I associate this phenomenon with a relatively low sun though, as in winter time.
The attenuation from fog is more absorptive than the attenuation from clouds (scattering dominated), which is why the effect is way more common from fog. But you can sometimes get the effect with clouds, but only when the sun is low on the horizon.
Seconded. I grew up in an area with heavy fog in the winter and I would regularly be able to painlessly see the disc of the Sun when the fog had burned off the right amount. Well maybe not *regularly* but I definitely have clear childhood memories of being able to look at it and forcing myself not to because I thought it was harmful.
Strongly agreed. I’ve seen it myself during the one time I bother to occasionally stare at the sun, solar eclipses. (Though in those cases it’s a crescent and not a disk.)
That blog post of mine contains images from two partial solar eclipses obscured by clouds: the 2017 eclipse in the SF Bay Area, and the 2024 eclipse in the suburbs of Dallas. Both show very sharp, clear crescents and were possible to look at with the naked eye without much discomfort.
I won’t claim that they were constantly like this: these were moments in time when the cloud cover was thick enough to obscure a damaging amount of light but thin enough that it didn’t obscure it entirely. But longer periods of time with that specific amount of cloud cover seem very possible, and I roughly recall 2017’s eclipse being kind of like that, with long stretches where I didn’t even bother with eclipse glasses.
(I had eclipse glasses at hand, naturally. During those moments the sun was impossible to see through the glasses.)
I think I basically agree with John Schilling: UFOs in the original sense are a label for a steady stream of both culturally-mediated mass observation events as well as isolated observations with impeccable tools and credentials. Many of these will get post-hoc probable explanations, like the now-frequent drone panics or Petrov's detections. But we know that quite a few won't even get that much and that's just something we have to live with. At the end of the day, no number of UFOs have yet converted into a single First Contact situation; I leave it to the reader to tweak their Bayesianism to be able to distinguish those qualitatively different forms of evidence.
*Yes*, this is a nearly-fully generalized way to dismiss sightings without having to put much thought into it. But I'd argue whether or not that strikes you as convenient or extremely aggravating points to different forms of engaging with the problem: is this something to argue about over the internet, or are we trying to predict reality? If on a regular basis I fire up my telescope, or my Mk. 1 eyeball, or my cutting-edge early warning radar, as a pragmatic question: how much effort do I need to put towards screening out false positives?
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Actually, speaking of AESA ghosts that reminds me of something unrelated - what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant? I'm comparing this to how I would feel about one (1) scientist who tells me about three (3) meta-analyses covering (100) one hundred studies between them with 70,000 patients. It seems to me that you have to let the thinnest part of the chain of evidence dominate your belief in the strength of evidence, but I'm not sure I've seen a thorough approach to that sort of meta-credibility.
>what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant?
Eye color. Brown eyes protect you against intense light. So there's easily a couple of orders of magnitude difference in how much light will cause discomfort.
The argument about luminance given by Ethan is an instance of Eulering: trying to dazzle with a sciency-sounding explanation. The argument itself boils down to: Nu-uh.
Keep in mind that light perception is logarithmic. 10^3 vs 10^9 isn't as big of a jump as Ethan is trying to imply.
i'm one of the testimonies from "the latter witnesses" (number 6) and i've got very blue very light eyes, lol. overall awareness to discomfort is very different between people also! stated not as a refutation to eye color being significant, but that it isn't required.
I know from experience that you can have cloud cover so intense that you can’t locate the sun at all, so I think there must be something wrong with Ethan’s analysis.
ETA: I see from other comments that I have been unfair to Ethan’s analysis. I can’t say I understand even now why it should be so impossible for cloud cover to give you a perceptible disk but protect you from pain, but it’s not like Ethan just ignored the possibility.
I disagree with the premise of Ethan's argument that for this to be a "Miracle" it must not have been the actual Sun that moved. As a "believer" in general (though not in particular about Fatima) I think this point misunderstands the nature of miracles.
God created natural things and is capable of acting through his creations. There is no need to invoke unnatural false Suns. He can manipulate the actual Sun, or at least the light from it or the air through which the light passes. This may be supernatural in the sense that things we consider miracles are unlikely to occur naturally, but they still make use of natural things.
Almost analogous is the old argument with fundamentalists about evolution. The fundamentalists posit convoluted stories like the Earth is very young and dinosaur bones are red herrings to test peoples faith. Catholics are generally fine with the idea of evolution - God created the world and evolution was a means to doing that. You don't even need to invoke the idea that God "guided" evolution, he's smart enough to set things up to end up where he wanted them to go. Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument.
My point is only - you don't need bizarre nonphysical objects to account for the Sun miracle.
In my view, even if the Fatima miracle was the result of something like the Kasina meditation, the miracle of Fatima may be that so many believers saw it at the same time. It is less supernatural, but they still had a profound religious experience that changed many of their lives.
In the Bible Jesus fed thousands of people with the loaves and fishes. Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?
Where did I assert that premise? I think we have specific evidence that favors a localized emitter as the explanation for Fatima, but I never said that, in principle, a miracle couldnt be implemented by manipulating light from the Sun.
I am sorry if I have misunderstood your point. I admit that I have read your arguments only second hand through Scott's blog. I will have a look at the source.
"Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument."
...no? That seems to be the heart of the argument. The Universe exists and the forces within it interact in certain predictable ways. Sometimes those forces are created by conscious creatures like us: we can use fans to create an updraft that lifts things, or we can apply evolutionary pressure to breeding organisms. Other times, those forces are "natural" (i.e., not human), like wind and natural selection. It's fundamentally non-falsifiable to say that *the entire thing* is a miracle and a creation (billions of years ago) by an external eternal consciousness.
Clearly when ordinary people use the term in ordinary language they're talking about the idea that that consciousness is named "God" and interferes *today*, putting its thumbs on the scales of its creation to produce certain outcomes at certain times and places. So the crucial question is, "does this action accord with natural processes [or natural processes under the influence of human force] or does it require the hand of God?"
When ordinary people debate the existence of God, it's not whether a conscious entity introduced the original Big Bang energy, it's whether that consciousness is still guiding our lives today and responds to our prayers and resurrects our consciousness after death. So yes, it matters whether it was a natural phenomenon or whether God himself produced that light in that way at that time, by "hand".
"Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?"
Yes, of course it would. It would be great; but it would not involve any kind of suspension of the laws of physics, or of sociology, or anything else. People share food all the time. A charismatic prophet pushing people toward the altruism side of their behavior distribution for an afternoon would be far, far less of a miracle than his making a few loaves and fishes suffice to feed 5000.
I am not sure how they can be impressive as they would be to someone who believes they are more or less impossible in principle. I am not talking about your personal emotional reaction.
Well, I said "as impressive as can be," not "as impressive as can't be." True, I believe miracles can happen. But there's still nothing that would be more awe-inspiring. How could it be otherwise? You're seeing the God who made the universe intervene directly in a way that no mere human possibly could.
On the other hand, a charismatic leader convincing people who came a long distance for him to act nice for an afternoon? I believe I could probably arrange to see that by next weekend if I really wanted to.
(You say Jesus was not well liked, but remember this was a crowd that came specifically to hear him.)
"In the Bible Jesus fed thousands of people with the loaves and fishes. Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?"
Yes, it would obviously and clearly make it less of a miracle.
(I think multiplying the loaves and fishes happened, for what it's worth: I think miracles happen in many religious traditions).
If you are secular, you're right, it's less of a miracle.
If you're Christian- why would it be less of a miracle? If anything, it might be a greater miracle, because it involves diverting many (something God does much more rarely) than merely creating one adept magical spell (something God does much more often).
There is a similar reasoning in Islam that Muhammed had no need for miracles (except that on time), because the greatest miracle came later, with the fall of Persia.
I'm certainly not a secularist, but I'm not a Christian either, and your entire comment strikes me as completely wrongheaded/. Of course it's less of a miracle to convince people to share their food. People share things all the time! Overriding the laws of physics and chemistry, on the other hand, is something big and attention-grabbing.
I don't know what your definition of a miracle is, but whether you go either with the "violation of the laws of nature" or "accomplishing something that nature doesn't do when left to itself", or the definition that I like, from Wallace, which is "any event that implies the existence of a supernatural intelligence", it's clear that multiplying loaves and fishes qualifies, convincing people to share doesn't. If all Jesus did was convince people to share, nobody would remember him today.
Of course, it's less of a miracle to convince two people to share food as such. That isn't even the example.
I was thinking of it probabilistically. Shock and awe depends on your framework in the first place. Under a Christian framework, how amazing a miracle is, I assume, one of, or the combination of two factors: its probability under the laws, and the probability that God would do it.
In a secular world, for example, the probability of loaves magically multiplying is lower than a lot of people sharing food.
However, in a Christian world, God more often does physical stuff, and the probability of thousands getting together just because a random preacher said so is on its own unlikely & a divine intervention is unlikely. At the very least, the odds are flipped after a certain point- for example, if it was 2 billion people.
As a non-believing teenager, I once promised to myself/God that if He put a mark on the back of a street sign I was looking at, then I would believe in his existence. I thought of that since I knew that marks, stickers, graffiti were relatively common on signs and so it would be a discreet enough of a sign that God might stoop to doing it for me. Lo and behold, there was writing on the back of the street sign. Of course this striking miracle caused a big updates in my belief: I was wrong that I would believe in God after seeing this and should never have told myself otherwise.
· In my childhood, when I'd close my eyes for a while (e. g. trying to fall asleep), I'd see afterimages of light and just various random shit, and I could totally make it do stuff without anyone prompting me, I was just a lil guy like that. I have not tried it recently, though, because I've been preoccupied with other things outside of the tiny world of childhood "where things were so much themselves". (Okay, I tried just now, with the afterimage of the laptop screen; I had lousy control, but the afterimage definitely changed shape to something circular. I think I need to, like, relax and focus to make it work better, right now it was kind of hurried. Unless memory fails me, I used to be able to make it bright, make it move as I like...)
· I now sleep in a quiet room, but when I used to fall asleep to some monotone noise, I had hypnagogic hallucinations where the noise changed to unintelligible voices. I don't think I had anything visual like that ever, but I guess seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky in the Moon is the next level of difficulty.
· See the story of looking for Trotsky's face, swastikas and other dangerous magical things drawn by enemies on regular objects like matchboxes etc.: https://spokus.eu/en/urban-legends-ussr-soviet-russia/ (one source I could find in English).
There is no other way about it. I think we need to start a post-ironic meme egregore to get hundreds of people to go to a specific place at a specific time to see if mass psychology + staring at the sun is sufficient to replicate the miracle
Unironically yeah. I appreciate the ethics are a little dodgy but surely Scott has enough clout to get a couple dozen weirdos to go try this in a park or something. Not me though.
The best I can do here is emailing the Georgia Skeptics and asking about the telescope thing, but at this point I'm not sure who is still around. The author of that article did pass away, but I was able to find Long's email. There's almost no chance she replies but It's a curious enough story that it's worth trying.
If people in a religious vision see something similar to what expert mediators see in their spiritual visions, that does not make for a good argument against both being valid.
It suggests they're really experiencing something, but it also suggests that one or both groups are fundamentally mistaken in their interpretation of the meaning and origin of the experiences.
> the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Doesn't seem that way to me. Meditation is clearly subject to environmental factors: stimuli such as loud or erratic noises can make it more difficult, deliberately arranged rooms make it easier. There's lots of random variation in natural environments, so a particular place and time might have been multiple standard deviations better for cultivating the relevant mindset. That doesn't make everyone who benefited from those rare conditions an expert, any more than trying to juggle during a once-per-century windstorm turns someone into a world-class baseball pitcher.
I commented on the original post - I do meditation that mostly involves closing my eyes or staring at statues, but I've had similar experiences to what the kasina meditators described.
Quick point -
The Fatima phenomenon was either:
1. A physical phenomenon
2. A mental phenomenon
3. A supernatural phenomenon
In the Three Body Problem adaptation, when the stars blink, Saul concludes that hypothesis A (a real physical phenomenon) is impossible as an explanation. A mental phenomenon - where our perception is changed - is the only answer.
But isn't that analogous to a physical phenomenon?
My unprovable opinion: events like this do not involve supernatural physical events. That is why they are supernatural mental events - the association of the Virgin Mary with this event and the Christian idea of Grace (that God can just kind of randomly seek you out) is suggestive to me. Not saying the children literally spoke to the Virgin Mary, but if we suppose that there were some sort of entity that was perceived as such ... My suggestion would be there was "something" involved, but that the "something" would not in any way be physically measurable. Sad!
Sorry, but the whole fire kasina saga of "I tried it out and didn't experience Fatima, so probably this couldn't be it" is a complete non-proof for me! Are you really saying that the failure of a 21st century Bay Area Rationalist who crams a 5 minute meditation sesh of alone time into his busy schedule to finally cross "explaining Fatima" from his To Do list is a strong piece of evidence against a phenomenon experienced in the midst of an excited crowd in a rural area in the early 20th century?
I would strongly expect members of a vast crowd of thousands of mostly pious and devout Catholics from the early 20th century Portuguese country side who believe in the reality of miracles and the Virgin Mary and spend part of their leisure time in semi-meditative prayer sessions and who are in a heightened state of frenzy, maybe even in a trance like state after hours of communal praying and hymn singing and ready to experience and be showered in the power of the Almighty to have a slightly higher perceptiveness for uncommon phenomena as me and you while living our day-to-day life.
I mean, do you ever listen to the Beatles and conclude that, given that you neither started shrieking, sobbing and peeing your pants, Beatlemania might be only explicable by divine intervention as you could not satisfactory conjure the state of hysteria by listening to the Beatles by yourself? No, because obviously there was more to it as "just" the music. So I would assume that there was more to it in Fatima as well. The mere fact that not everybody can conjure the described images up willy-nilly does not disprove that given the right circumstance a good chunk of people out of a huge group would experience the phenomenon. But as usually big groups of people do not stare at the sun simultaneously, it simply feels odd because we do not have enough evidence to conclude with certainty that yes, 18%, 36%, 72% of the population would experience Fatima-like phenomena when starring in the sun under certain metereological conditions while being in a kind of religious semi-trance.
No, you cannot assume that Portuguese peasants in the twenties were doing anything sufficiently related to fire kasini meditation for the comparison to be relevant.
My point us rather that not being able to recreate something by yourself does not dismiss that a handful of people in an excited crowd might have experienced it. People are different and some might have experienced something similar to fire kasini while in a trance-like state. Pretending otherwise you become like the guy who insists you cannot see the silvery sun through the edge of light clouds (which I can vouch is absolutely a thing, as I have experienced it several times). Not being able to experience something does not disprove other people's experiences.
OP did not claim they were doing fire kasina in their spare time. However, prayer can also be meditative, etc, and they were certainly doing many similar activities.
There is clear photographic evidence of a sharply defined, yet completely harmless to look at sun disk, when it's behind light clouds or smoke. Personally I've seen this maybe a dozen times over my life, and I don't even go out that much. I always thought this was a somewhat rare but otherwise completely normal phenomenon, and to see someone argue against the very existence of it with the dead-certainty of math bewilders me.
This was the point at which I formed a strong prior that Ethan is more interested in winning debates than seeking truth. Also:
"In a private conversation, Ethan continued to assert that I was misremembering, and that all the Discord users and commenters who agreed with me had been contaminated by my testimony and become victims of suggestibility. I think this is a pretty crazy point to suddenly convert to the doctrine of eyewitness fallibility, contamination, and suggestibility - but I leave further discussion to people who understand optical physics."
I havent seen credible evidence that you can get the conjunction of (i) high solar elevation, (ii) comfortable fixation, (iii) no blurring/distortion. Physical reasoning leads me to doubt that the conjunction of those effects is possible, but I am willing to abandon that claim if a credible counterexample is found or someone shows a flaw in my reasoning.
You infer from this that I am not seeking truth? It seems that you are more interested in discrediting me than charitably engaging with my arguments (which is also consistent with the rest of your behavior).
If my quoting Scott seems like an effort to discredit you, then we are similarly impressed with the quote.
How have you updated from the direct testimony in this thread? From the explanations by people who apparently understand the physics? From the linked pictures which directly illustrate the phenomenon at issue? A little? A lot?
So Ethan and everyone agrees that it's totally possible to see the sun appear like this (I've seen it a few times too), we're only disagreeing about how common it is at midday, high in the sky -- with a thicker amount of cloud/foglsmoke than would be necessary in the morning? That doesn't seem like a very sharp amount of disagreement!
I think “how common” is an understatement. The question is whether you can *possibly* get comfortable fixation + no blurring from mundane cloud dimming when the Sun is at the known solar elevation during the Miracle of the Sun.
For the April 2024 solar eclipse, I was in Liverpool, NY. There was heavy cloud cover that varied in intensity, but never really cleared. Leading up to the eclipse I spent awhile staring up both with and without solar viewing glasses, trying to locate where the sun might show up during the eclipse. Most of the time it just looked like really bright clouds. At various points I did see a circular sun through the haze for awhile. Not for minutes, and I didn’t stare at the sun when I found it for long out of an abundance of caution, but i could look for seconds without pain/discomfort, where normally I squint instantly as a reflex, and it was definitely a circle.
To round out the story: during the actual eclipse the cloud cover was similar. Totality was still a good experience (darker, cooler), but I never got a good view of the sun itself, even though I knew where it was in the sky.
Anyway, it was afternoon, I forget the time, and when I saw it pre-totality, it was already in some state of eclipse, but I couldn’t really see details through the haze aside from an occasional hazy white circle.
To be clear, I’m not sure if this qualifies as an example for you given the eclipse involved, but it’s the closest I will ever get: I never try to look at the sun, especially overhead, and I hope to have no cloud cover for any future eclipses.
I have seen the sun through clouds while lower in the sky many times (as mentioned by others), and my experience in Liverpool was similar in clarity, but generally in those cases there is more color on the sun (yellow/red), while this was white.
To clarify, are you saying there was a circular bright patch that contrasted with a diffuse glow in the surrounding clouds? Or are you saying that the circular bright patch contrasted with dim clouds/clear sky?
The fact that it was being attenuated by a partial eclipse helps, but I am curious about why it would have a circular outline rather than crescent outline if it was in partial eclipse. Though perhaps there is an obvious explanation that Im missing - I’ll think about it a bit more.
I saw it too. And there was cloud cover, the sun appearing and disappearing. Sadly I don't remember what all combinations of phenomena there were vis-a-vis disks, pain, and blurriness in the leadup.
I never really got clear sky. It was always clouds, but sometimes more dense and sometimes less dense. When it was more dense it was just bright clouds. When it was less dense I sometimes could see a circular outline.
I just checked timestamped pictures from the day, and we got to our spot at 2pm, and I have attempts at taking pictures of the sun at 2:10 and 2:26pm, and while they didn’t come out great, it does look circular at that point. Then pretty much cloud cover and nothing until 3:16 pm, at which point you can see a thin crescent. A very brief glimpse of the ring during totality at 3:23pm, and then some more crescent at 3:26pm. All still through some clouds.
If I get motivated I’ll post online somewhere and link here, but they’re bad phone camera photos, so I’m not sure how much seeing them will help.
About circular vs crescent: I could see it more frequently and easily earlier in the eclipse, when it appeared round through clouds, and that's closer to the phenomena under discussion, so I focused on that part.
Later, while the sun was more eclipsed, I mostly couldn't see it (maybe the clouds got worse, maybe the decreased light from the eclipse didn't penetrate as well). The glimpses I did get were crescent at that point, and then a ring. I still never got a direct view without clouds in the way :(
Ive always been worried about credibility of eyewitness testimony. That’s why I build my arguments on multiply attested, sworn testimony that can be independently corroborated. I would never base my arguments on reddit anecdotes, discord polls, etc… because I know from experience they are highly unreliable.
I dont think they are worthless, but I also hesitate to accept them when there is reason to doubt the details. If you are willing to unflinchingly accept reddit anecdotes and discord polls, then it should be very easy for me to convince you of miracles, ghosts, ufos, etc… since those can be massively supported by anecdotal testimony from people online
The thing is, multiply attested, sworn testimony is not that much better. Especially when heavy emotions are involved. This is why investigations are a must in modern trials. So it's still largely a double standard.
But I don't think anyone is claiming (some) people haven't seen what they think are miracles, ghosts, UFOs, etc. They are merely rejecting the interpretations. What is it that people saw in these cases, in your opinion? That they are all mistaken about the position of the Sun? Furthermore, why is it, do you think, that noone has noticed the issue with this before you (as far as I can tell)?
"Double standard" doesn't refer to any standard that draws a principled distinction in a way that you happen to disagree with.
And it depends on the context. When you have lots of independent testimony about a specific event, you have statements against interest, you can corroborate lots of the details of the testimony, there are features that indicate credibility, etc… you can have much more confidence than when all you have is a report of a vague recollection about an event that supposedly took place in the distant past from a poll respondent.
I think people saw a pale, moonlike Sun in the early morning or the late afternoon. People that claim to have seen it when the Sun was high on the horizon are either misremembering that specific detail or are remembering a fuzzy Sun that was attenuated compared to normal Sun but was uncomfortable to stare at. Also, some people are probably just Mandela effect, since that happens a lot in these contexts.
if it is winter, then Sun is low on horizon. and smog attenuation is more absorptive than cloud attenuation (which is more scattering-dominated), so you can see it higher
What's your definition of 'low' on the horizon? Even on winter solstice the sun is ~40 degrees from the horizon. The rest of winter is substantially higher. And on many days the sun is a sharp disk.
I googled and it says 14-28 degrees on winter solstice in Delhi.
Btw, it is not just about sharp disc. It is about sharp disc that is perfectly comfortable to stare at. With smog that should be easier than with clouds (because more absorption than scattering).
There is a big difference between discomfort glare and camera glare.
But, I agknowledge that it is possible when the Sun is low on the horizon. I am not convinced it can happen when the Sun is at a high angular elevation.
The most credible testimony that I have found is about sun is low on the horizon + dense fog. It is not clear that the solar elevation at the tome is salient to the people replying to these polls.
I certainly wasn't arguing that miracles are an exception to Bayesianism. To put it in Bayesian terms, it seems to me like your model for how we update our priors given a strange event is maybe a little naive, because it is not sufficiently taking into account the relevant background knowledge we have accumulated about strange events. Given our background information, Pr (Naturalism) | (some magic trick) is unchanged, since we know magic tricks are natural phenomena. Given that UFO's, ghost sightings and purported miracles have a long history of being debunked when they are investigated carefully, any change to our Pr(naturalism) should be very small, since the hypothesis 'they have some natural explanation' is the best explanation of them, given our background knowledge.
Of course, this is defeasible. If the Pope starts blowing up mountains on demand, or we see Words of Fire blazing in the sky spelling out the Lord's Prayer, by all means update our confidence in naturalism. But the Miracle of the Sun isn't like that. It's more interesting than the vast majority of miracles, but (without going into a long explanation of why), I was I think justifiably convinced even before I read your article that if someone smart looked into it, a natural explanation would end up appearing plausible. And, hey, that's what happened. That will also be the case for the next purported miracle, unless it is clearly on its face something pretty different from the sort of things we are used to (visions, suggestible crowds, items of dubious provenance).
If the Pope announced a high-level policy change related to the miraculous healing of amputees, and shortly afterward, all over the world, patients in Catholic-backed hospitals started making extremely well documented appearances with limbs that were medically unremarkable apart from having been missing the day before, that'd be a lot more persuasive than blowing up mountains on demand. I mean, there are fairly straightforward ways to blow up a mountain using existing tech - hydrogen bombs can be scaled to arbitrarily high yield with only a small fission primer.
I mean, there's lots of really good miracles that would be persuasive to a naturalist like me. Weird that we only ever get these shitty ones that have natural explanations, like crowds of convinced Catholics seeing something weird and saying it was Jesus. At least give us a crowd of convinced Muslims seeing the virgin Mary and converting, something that's a LITTLE harder to square with normal human psychology and the propensity for weird stuff to happen sometimes.
If Mary appeared to a crowd of Muslims and matter-of-factly announced a list of small, fiddly, but highly significant transcription errors in popular-consensus versions of the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon, then resolved the Sunni/Shia split by clarifying that the current rightful Caliph is some day-laborer's kid in Brazil whose only previous claim to fame was a few mediocre TikTok videos, that would be both broadly consistent with the larger belief framework, and shockingly unlikely from a mob-psychology standpoint.
Thank you! I thought your post was exactly right, and was clear about all this, and Scott was misreading it. Basically, his Pr (Naturalism) should be extremely high - virtually unflappable - but he's writing as if it isn't, and reported strange observations are the sort of evidence that could cause notable updates to his prior when they really shouldn't.
I think people experience a lot of “supernatural” phenomena, even skeptics. I never heard the Imam on the Moon story before, and I think it’s charming that the woman who had that vision first also found one of the Prophet’s hairs in her Quran. Some people live in a world of wondrous miracles and I kind of envy them.
The paper example was set up to send exactly the same pattern of light into the eye as an attenuated sun. Surely they can't be different if what the eye sees is the same?
I haven't read Hume's original and I agree with your criticism of the "strong" version of Hume-ism, but I'd put forward a modified version.
Which is that, if you're questioning whether some event was a miracle or some natural phenomenon, oftentimes people dismiss the natural explanation as being unlikely. But, in line with Bayes, our prior for miracles should usually be *even lower* than our prior for the unlikely thing.
E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I would submit the above is true even if it's a random street corner is on the other side of the globe! So strong should our prior be against telepathy, even "IDK man I just wanted to bop into this random spot in Kaga-Bandoro, Central African Republic" is more likely.
Relatedly, by Bayesian view of the original article is that there are lots of claimed sun miracles, vast majority have natural explanations, that raises my prior that a particular sun miracle is not a miracle.
>E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I agree: but what if you asked your friend why he knew to meet me there, and he told you that at the exact same time you were trying to communicate telepathically to him he had an experience of hearing your voice telling him to go to that particular street corner at that particular time?
Hume argues that we should still assume it wasn't telepathy. In fact, argues that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments". In other words, even if you have testimonial evidence in favor of a miracle that is so unimpeachable that it would be impossible for it to be wrong, you should still consider it 50:50 odds at best that the miracle happened. And that's just silly!
No, Hume's argument is that, if that happened, you should expand your scope of natural phenomena to include telepathy! But then you have to take the good with the bad: telepathy is now a natural phenomena subject to investigation by the usual scientific means; it's not just a once-off exception to the rules of nature
If, instead of trying telepathy, you prayed to God that you would meet your friend, and when you met he he told you that he heard the voice of God telling him to be there, would you then agree that you should expand your scope of possible phenomena to include the existence of a God who answers prayers?
If yes, then Humes argument fails to do the job people set it to: arguing against the existence of miracles.
Only if that explanation can itself be characterized as a lawlike, regular phenomenon: it works X% of the time; praying in such and such a way yields better results; etc.
Hume's point is that whatever you replace your old law with is a *new law*, not just a... thing that happens once. It's subject to analysis the way all other natural phenomena are. We can ask questions like, "how come it doesn't work sometimes?" and expect better answers than just, "God works in mysterious ways"--it's true that there are plenty of natural questions where our best answer at the moment is "physics is hard and the universe is subtle", but in the naturalistic framing that's not an *answer* so much as an explanation of why it's hard to find an answer.
"Only if that explanation can itself be characterized as a lawlike, regular phenomenon: it works X% of the time; praying in such and such a way yields better results; etc."
Why? If God is real, would we expect to find that praying to him works a certain percentage of the time? And if God did answer exactly 22% of prayers, would you be fine believing in him, when you wouldn't be fine believing in him if he answers 10% of prayers one year and 77% the next?
For one thing, if God being real is the explanation for a highly coincidental meeting between you and your friend, it should happen at a rate higher than chance.
The point is, if God intervening in the world is to be explanatory, if it's to be a part of our model of how the world works, it has to be actually modelable--it has to be a theory that makes definitive predictions, ideally with some quantitative aspects that we can use to refine our understanding. "Event E happened because of reason R" is much more compelling when we can make use R to make predictions about when events like E will occur: how often E occurs is the simplest, most basic kind of prediction, but I'm not fussy.
If you can never use R to predict when E will happen, if R gives you no constraints on how likely E is to occur, or in what circumstances, or whatever--if all it ever offers is retroactive justification, then it's not a good theory of how the world works.
I suppose at some point you can string together enough unlikely pieces to the story to make the telepathy explanation plausible, and we can argue about when you get to that point.
But to get back to the original argument about the alleged "sun miracle" - if in the last several hundred years, there was one (1) story of a seeming telepathic communication, that based on the available evidence seemed to defy any other explanation (combined with many, many others that fell apart upon trivial examination), then that would shift it back in the direction of thinking it wasn't a miracle.
Is it more likely? I think that telepathy is nonsense, but my prior for it existing is definitely not below 1/1,000,000,000. A bit of epistemic humility is called for, here - it is not the case that 1 billion concepts roughly as implausible as telepathy have been believed in by a comparable fraction of the human population and subsequently been disproved. (I know this isn't quite right - many forms of these beliefs are difficult or impossible to falsify, which throws off the data on that thought experiment - but it gets you into the right state of mind).
Meeting the friend who I tried to communicate telepathically with, at a randomly selected street corner in the entire world might not cause me to be highly confident that telepathy exists - I would want to run a lot more tests, and if none of them showed anything interesting I would reluctantly admit that the original incident was probably a coincidence - but it would certainly be really, really good evidence.
I attend a Quaker meeting and, while this is not a universal or even majority view among unprogrammed Quakers, some people describe Quaker meetings as like a group meditation that unlocks more than solo meditation. That isn't exactly how I'd describe it, but it does provide a good analogue to how a giant crowd of people doing fire kasina meditation would get more dramatic results than a single person doing fire kasina meditation.
My grandmother and grandfather have experienced the Miracle of the Sun about a month ago in Medjugorje. My grandmother is a devotee of Medjugorje, and I consider her gullible and biased on this topic, but my grandfather is not; he is a very rational person and not given to sentimental devotions. So I asked him specifically about the phenomenon, and he corroborated my grandmother's testimony: the Sun "dancing" in the sky, spinning, pulsating, and changing color.
He also corroborated that the crowd around him saw the same thing. Note also that the crowd gathered there (early in the morning) because one of the seers announced the day before that the Virgin Mary would work miracles there. So this is a phenomenon very similar to Fatima, where a seer predicted the exact time and place of an anomalous phenomenon.
>We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it.
Something that you gloss over: just because we have decent understanding of many extremely rare/weird natural phenomena, it doesn't follow that this well has been exhausted. To me it's quite obvious that there's plenty of obscure stuff still out there, which isn't supernatural in the least. On these priors, it doesn't seem that Fatima-like stuff is particularly good evidence for supernatural, certainly not anywhere near Pope armed with super-nukes.
>The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m².
This part of Ethan's rebuttal struck me as giving off fishy vibes, so I checked the original source. As I predicted, the actual claim made by the source is much narrower and more qualified than Ethan's summary.
Ethan's citation goes to "Video Displays, Work, and Vision: National Research Council (US) Panel on Impact of Video Viewing on Vision of Workers". These numbers appear to come from Table 5.1, titled "Borderline Between Comfort and Discomfort (BCD) Luminance for Intermittent Directly Viewed Glare Sources". Note the "intermittent" -- the numbers in the table are about the effects of staring into a *flashing* light, and the book explicitly says that they cannot be safely generalized to a stable light source (which is what we're interested in). Quote:
>These values are glare source luminances. Values above the BCD values in the table would induce discomfort. (Note, however, that Guth used a flashing glare source. It is not clear how much the BCD values from steady sources in natural settings would differ. Eye movements and blinks would interrupt the retinal images of steady sources.)
Even under the conditions actually tested, the book is also careful *not* to claim that the thresholds reported will be universally valid for all observers. The comments on the table say: "Assuming that these data accurately represent discomfort glare thresholds for **at least some** VDT operators, it can be seen from Table 5.1 that some situations would induce discomfort" (emphasis mine). So it could just be that those reporting being able to look without discomfort have higher-than-average thresholds for it.
I was treating this a Fermi problem - my conclusion is robust to extreme error in my estimate of the tolerance for luminance.
But I think my estimate of the tolerance is definitely in the ballpark. Here is another study that I think settles it:
"Finally maximum luminance on the workplane, a proxy for direct sunlight, also correlates noticeably with subjective discomfort (R2 = 0.208). For the typical range of vertical eye illuminances observed in this study (~500 to 2500 lx), **workplane luminances greater than 1000 cd/m2 consistently identify reported subjective discomfort.**" (https://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/publications/BS2015_VisaulComfortFramework.pdf)
You say "So it could just be that those reporting being able to look without discomfort have higher-than-average thresholds for it."
-We are trying to explain phenomenology of the crowds in and around the Cova, where we are getting uniform reports from a large, diverse cross-section of people - so what is of interest is actually the floor for tolerance rather than the ceiling for tolerance, but I am using the ceiling to be charitable.
> The Medjugorje witness who I interviewed said the sun was spinning instantly, the moment he started looking at it, which is troublesome for explanations that rely on retinal bleaching, near-blindness, and other complicated entoptic phenomena. The same witness understood what normal afterimages look like, and was very convinced it wasn’t just normal afterimages.
I don't find this particularly credible, because it happened so long before the interview. Human memory is highly suggestible over long periods, and especially to someone who was a believer at the time and thus ascribed this event significance, of course they're going to remember it as being more vivid than their more recent, non-supernatural occurrences.
I think that the very concept of miracles is a logical trap, or a "brutal self-own" as the kids these days say. Assuming that miracles occur, they do so either in a somewhat predictable fashion, or completely at random.
If miracles are predictable to some extent, then, a la Hume, their existence is governed by some kind of rules; and we have developed mental tools that help us model these hidden rules with some degree of accuracy. For example, we can model gravity to some extent, even if we know that our model does not give the right answers in most cases. We can even model the behaviour of intelligent agents, such as humans, well enough to e.g. perform actionable market research.
On the other hand, if miracles are a priori unpredictable and thus effectively random, then no amount of clever tricks will allow us to model them (except perhaps in aggregate, and likely not even then). But if that is the case, then we cannot extract any information from a miracle, other than perhaps "God is great". We cannot interpret any miracle as a sign or a message or anything else; at least, not absent personal revelation (in which case we don't even need the miracle).
Theologically speaking, both horns of the dilemma are problematic. In the latter case, miracles are essentially pointless; in the former case, they are on the slippery slope to being "trivialized" in the theological sense (I use "scare quotes" here because it sounds odd to call phenomena like gravity or the electromagnetic force "trivial"). I do understand that the canonical response to such dilemmas it to say "you must have faith", but that is just an oblique way to invoke personal revelation once again -- a perfectly respectable move, but not one that is likely to convince any heretic or unbeliever.
If the evidence of miracles allows you to attempt to predict the behavior of God with a reasonable degree of accuracy, then great! You believe in God, and a God who performs miracles! So do I, so does the Catholic Church, so does more than half the world. Glad you could join us. So where is the first horn of the dilemma?
As I'd said (in agreement with Hume), it reduces miracles to yet another predictable phenomenon, like gravity (or perhaps ice cream flavor preference). On the plus side, it opens the path to many new areas of "theological engineering": now that we have uncovered a new force of [super-]nature, we can apply it, perhaps ushering in the next technological revolution. On the minus side (theologically speaking), miracles cease to be special and unique messages from God to his believers (and unbelievers alike, perhaps). In a world where miracles are predictable, something like the event we're discussing (the Miracle of Fatima) would still be front-page news, but it would share that front page with volcano eruptions, supernovae, hurricanes, and other such events -- for a short while, until the next remarkable event comes along. This is AFACT close to what Christians mean when they say that definitive proof of God would override human free will: yes, everyone would believe; but what would they believe in ?
Tell me, if you got to know your neighbor Steve well enough that you could generally predict what he's going to do, would that open up the path to many new areas of "Steve engineering"?
It's called "Theology" when we do it to God, and we've been working on that longer than we've worked on any scientific field. Believing in God and believing that understanding God will allow you to better predict miracles is not a problem for believing in miracles! If anything it's a bonus. So I still don't see where your "first horn" is coming from. There's no problem in studying theology in order to better predict when God will intervene in nature.
Theology is absolutely nothing like studying miracles to know more about God. It's arcane debates about how to interpret dogmatic texts most of the time. In fact, if a miracle contradicts some dogma of God, you just reject it as fake lmao
I think a good exercise with these types of arguments is to imagine how it would apply if tomorrow the stars in the sky rearranged themselves so that, when viewed from Earth, they read (in Demotic Egyptian, which turns out to be the divine tongue) “God made the universe, and the Seventh-Day Adventists are correct about His nature.” Is that predictable? No. Is it possible to extract any information from it? The answer has to be yes, right?
Maybe; at the very least, we can conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty that there's an incredibly powerful being out there with a twisted sense of humor. However, exactly none of the purported miracles throughout human history -- such as the Fatima one -- are anywhere close to being so clear-cut. Instead, it's all mysterious lights and weeping statues...
It's not that you can't extract information from one-off miracles *a priori*; rather, if the one-off miracles are truly and completely unpredictable, then they carry no useful information (although they do arguably carry maximum information in the theoretical sense). As per my reply to @Reginald K. above, even if the miracle rearranges the stars to say e.g. "Seventh-Day Adventism is the true faith", you do not have sufficient reason (based on the miracle alone) to pick "God" over "alien teenage pranksters" or "whimsical fae" or "simulation glitch" or whatever else as the more likely cause. And that's in the ideal case; in practice, miracles are never that obvious, but involve mostly things like dancing colors in the sky -- which are significantly harder to pin down.
"It's not that you can't extract information from one-off miracles *a priori*; rather, if the one-off miracles are truly and completely unpredictable, then they carry no useful information (although they do arguably carry maximum information in the theoretical sense"
Well, which? One off miracles cannot provide a basis for scientific laws, but that's not the only kind of information.
>. As per my reply to @Reginald K. above, even if the miracle rearranges the stars to say e.g. "Seventh-Day Adventism is the true faith", you do not have sufficient reason (based on the miracle alone) to pick "God" over "alien teenage pranksters" or "whimsical fae" or "simulation glitch" or whatever else as the more likely cause.
> One off miracles cannot provide a basis for scientific laws, but that's not the only kind of information.
I don't know what you mean by "scientific laws", as distinct from other predictive models. For example, a statement like "every time you eat a shrimp, there's an 85% chance God will turn your hair purple" is arguably not a scientific law, yet it is still a viable model.
One off events can communicate information, even if they can't communicate with certainty. Every ordinary act of communication, in a ordinary language, like this one, is a one off act that communicates information.
If you demand certainty, you are not going to get it from natural laws either
No, of course no one demands certainty. But one-off events that are by definition completely unpredictable cannot communicate information, since doing so would make them predictable to at least some extent.
This act of communication is (arguably) a one-off event that is to some extent predictable. For example, you can be reasonably certain that I will respond in English, using coherent grammar, at least somewhat on topic, and in opposition to your stance -- plus a myriad of other details. In fact, to the extent that my reply communicates any information, it does so precisely because of these details.
Reading through some of the bits about how difficult kasina meditation is, something is bugging me. Isn't meditation noticeably more difficult for the type of person who wants to meditate? The intention is to quiet the thoughts in your head, and come to a sort of inner peace, right? This is primarily desirable to people who constantly have thoughts running through their heads. Difficulty with meditation might be the same as difficulty with exercise. The people who reap the greatest benefits are also the people that struggle the most to perform the task. Your average joe doesn't struggle nearly as much, but they also don't need it in the first place, so why struggle at all?
Correct me if I'm misguided, of course. But I am a bit worried that ACX is misunderstanding why meditation is difficult, and accidentally using that misunderstanding to bump the credibility of the miracle.
Many years of research have proven that people who are dedicated to meditating find it much easier to meditate. Confirming my priors. Nor is it clear to whether they have more or less need of meditation.
I think you sidestepped my actual point, there. I'm not talking about the amount of experience someone has with meditation, I'm talking about the "personality type" (not sure if this is the perfect term for it) that meditation tends to attract.
Yeah, exactly. Because the crowd at Fatima contained many personality types, but meditation attracts a certain, specific personality type, there's a discrepancy here. Fatima may have shown different, "miraculous" results because most of the people who are attracted to meditation also happen to struggle with meditation. That's the hypothesis, anyway.
And chill a bit, yeah? I'm trying to have an open conversation here, not dictate mine will of truth to the world.
Eh, maybe it's just the way I'm reading your messages. Not aggressive, but very brusque. Doesn't feel like you're actually engaging with me, just trying to find the quickest way to say that I'm wrong. Sorry if I'm putting something there that isn't.
I'm guessing you aren't too keen on my hypothesis, do you have a particular reason why?
Something like this fits my observations. I've seen a fair amount of people who were very susceptible to meditation when they tried it, and got quick spectacular effects. The same people also dropped off from doing meditation very soon, because the spectacular experiences got too uncomfortable and scary.
And there is the paradox that when you intentionally strive to achieve meditative states they become much harder to reach. I believe that explains the common experience that you try a new technique and get a really strong effect, but then when you try it again, grasping after the same effect, you cannot reach it.
I also have the impression that people that stick with a disciplined meditation practice tend to be more the striving, intentional kind of person - which has a harder time of achieving certain states. But after enough practice they can overcome this, in part by reducing the striving.
Yeah, it's almost like meditation has beginner's luck baked in, makes it a really interesting practice. Difficult to pin down. That's part of what makes me nervous, when it's being used as evidence for supernatural events.
Isn’t “falling to earth” what you would see if the sun was too bright, you dropped your gaze and possibly shut your eyes, and the afterimage stayed in the middle of your vision?
I appreciate the fair-mindedness as others do but I think you're frankly being a little TOO charitable here. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that it's not only been reproduced when there's no veridical referent, but that some people have been able to reproduce it at will (including people who were at the ACTUAL MIRACLE) is game, set, and match. The rest is detail. Do we know EXACTLY why it happened? No. But the probability of anything remotely supernatural goes way way down with that in mind. IMO, healing miracles like the one Bentham's Bulldog posted a few weeks ago are harder to explain than this.
PS, if you're interested in other miracle accounts which are reasonably well-attested, I've just written an essay on one (https://substack.com/home/post/p-176774210) and mean to do a few more, time permitting.
EDIT: like others in the thread, I'm skeptical it's even fair to speak of "70,000 witnesses." I think we actually have only a little over a hundred testimonies, yeah? And I just counted the testimonies in your doc on the OP and just over half of them weren't even taken down until at least a year after the alleged miracle. I know you didn't include EVERY extant testimony in that doc, but it it seems like really we might only have 30 - 50 testimonies from within hours/days/weeks of the events. It's easy to imagine someone ten, twenty, forty years later remembering they'd seen the miracle with everyone else when in fact they hadn't. So how do we know those other 69,950 people actually saw anything? I'm not saying a lot, maybe even most, didn't, but...you state that "the original investigators looked extra-hard for negative statements to record" but...is that actually true? I mean, maybe they say they did, but how do we verify that?
Yeah, it seems to me that there’s a really interesting question of precisely what conditions give rise to this experience, but it really seems like a replicable thing, if we can just figure out how.
Yes, we know there are psychological phenomena like the ones experienced in Fatima (Kasina, more direct replications). We just don't know under what conditions they occur, because we dont know a lot about psychology. This is similar to how we couldn't explain natural phenomena before the natural sciences were well developed. And the conditions at Fatima seemed ripe for mass psychological contaigon (like the khomeinei moon, or various cases of mass psychosis) at a high level, even if we don't know the exact mechanisms.
I'll just address the comment you made regarding me, as I'm pretty uncertain about Fatima.
//If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided.//
But the various Y questions are not independent. There is one basic fact: there are natural laws that operate without concern for value, and these--barring exceptional circumstances at least--are universally adhered to, rather than violated in cases where it would be good. If you can give an explanation of why God would allow that, then you answer all the why questions. As an analogy, if there's a guy who shows up at his neighbors house every day at 7 am, there's some sense in which you have a new why question every day, but obviously explaining the first few days will probably explain the rest. Same here.
In contrast, atheism's explanation of how there's fine-tuning does not carry over the consciousness or anthropic stuff or moral knowledge.
What if a guy shows up at his next door neighbor's house every day at 7 am for ten days, then on day 11 he shows up at the house across the street instead? You could say that that's still one question—on all 11 days, he showed up at some house at 7 am and we don't know why. But when he was just showing up at one house, we thought we saw a pattern, even if we couldn't explain the pattern. Now that the pattern has been broken, the number of possible explanations has multiplied. Similarly, a world in which God never (let's say, never since the Resurrection) intervenes in supernatural ways to demonstrate His existence or address some evil is hard to explain, but it at least is a consistent pattern. A world in which God almost never manifests but sometimes chooses to raises more questions and admits of more possible explanations, so incurs a complexity penalty.
It's true that this shifting pattern will have a lower prior. But the same is true on atheism. Any specific apparent miracle pattern is unlikely. And to explain it as a theist, you just need a third explanation: God rarely performs miracles and small ways. That theory predicts the data as well as atheism and isn't extremely improbable conditional on the other 2.
But this seems ad hoc. I think it's not quite foldable into the Problem of Evil, because while there's a moral question (why does God do good things for some and not others?) there's also just the amoral question of "why does God sometimes 'violate' his own laws but usually not?" which seems separate. You can always appeal to "he has sufficient reasons" but again, I think it's pretty ad hoc that God always has sufficient reasons to do whatever weird thing we observe, especially since it has 0 predictive power for when a miracle will occur.
I agree it's a bit surprising. But a lot of things are true and surprising. It's surprising, a priori, that the world is mostly populated by invisible dark matter, but I believe that.
Any theory has little predictive power for the specific distribution of miracles. Neither a theist or atheist would have guessed a priori that, say, Barbara Cumiskey would be healed or people in Portugal would see a moving solar disk.
I guess the underlying assumption here is "miracles (roughly defined as weird things that seem to violate natural laws as we understand them) are more probable in a theistic universe than an atheistic one." And that certainly DOES seem true intuitively but I'm not sure it is.
Miracles so-defined aren't IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, just super unlikely. Let's say Jesus' resurrection for example. I've argued a lot about that one and I have been regularly told that IF your prior for theism is 0, then the evidence for Jesus' resurrection can't overcome it ofc, but if your prior for theism is HIGHER than zero, then the evidence for the Resurrection is really good*. But a resurrection isn't actually IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, in the sense that A = not-A is impossible. Surely there's some weird one in several quadrillion quantum fluctuation or whatever that would just happen to reorganize the atoms in Jesus' body in such a way to restore him to life.
On the flipside, maybe the probability of miracles in a THEISTIC universe is 0. You know how they say God, despite being omnipotent, can't do evil because it would contradict his character, and if he could do evil he wouldn't be God? Maybe God would never, ever violate the laws he established, never, ever raise somebody from the dead or heal somebody from an otherwise completely incurable disease. He set those laws for a reason, after all. Is there any reason that couldn't be the case?
So it actually seems possible to me that probability of miracles COULD be HIGHER on atheism than on theism. Worth considering at least.
I think you've argued in the past that in an atheistic universe where weird stuff just happens sometimes, we wouldn't expect the weird stuff to have specifically religious content. But I think it's unestablished that "weird stuff" actually happens in a religious context at a higher rate in a religious than non-religious context. When you take into account not usually categorized as "miraculous" but still paranormal phenomena like ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psi, etc. is that really the case? Someone (not me) would have to collect data I guess.
I wonder if somebody could make an ATHEISTIC argument from miracles. Something like "if there really was an omnipotent Supreme Lawgiver, we would expect all his laws to hold at all times. But since we sometimes observe weird breakdowns, there probably isn't a Supreme Lawgiver." I'm not going to make or defend such an argument (at least not right now) because I'm sure it has a thousand. holes in it but maybe somebody could.
*I actually think that conditional on benevolent theism the evidence is still not very good, but that's another story
I don’t think “rarely” has any explanatory or predictive power! We have no way of saying when it is likely to happen, what form it is likely to take, or why it happens. And the point I was making is that the “why” is more difficult when the explanation is “rarely” than when it’s “never.”
Of course rarely has predictive power. It predicts there would sometimes be miracles but they wouldn't be too common. It doesn't predict which specific miracles there'd be reported--say, whether there'd be a disk in the sky--but neither does atheism.
I think conditional on God existing and being able to do miracles, the odds he'd do them rarely isn't much different from the odds he'd do them never.
Are we talking about odds? I thought we were talking about whether theists have one question to answer, or several. If God never intervened, then "why didn't God heal my aunt?" would truly only have one answer: "Because God doesn't do that." Even though we would still have the question of WHY God doesn't do that, that is still one question. But if God intervenes to heal some people (you mention Cumiskey), but not others, now "why didn't God heal my aunt?" has a much wider range of possible answers: "Because Cumiskey was more pious," "Because healing Cumiskey created more utilons," "Because healing Cumiskey was more likely to lead to a broader increase in faith," etc. But while each of those possible answers might distinguish between Cumiskey and my aunt, we would then have to see if they applied to every other case, so you've got "Why didn't God heal Aunt-1," "Why didn't God heal Aunt-2," "Aunt-3," etc. And any time you find that, say, Aunt-3 was even more pious than Cumiskey, you're back to the drawing board on possible explanations.
Under atheism the explanation is just, random variation. Atheism doesn't need to explain it any more than it needs to explain the exact pattern of a series of coin flips; but if your explanation is "God willed these specific coin flips" then you do need to say something about those specific ones
Yes, in fact, "[p]eople are extremely suggestible and have terrible memory. There are as-yet-barely-plumbed psychological phenomena where sometimes a very suggestible person can cause many seemingly-careful observers to make correlated errors. Historians constantly exaggerate and bury negative evidence, so all of these errors and confabulations come down to us as seemingly-ironclad evidence of the paranormal."
The only problem with all these recent religion-themed posts is now I've got Marian hymns rattling around my noggin, and we Catholics do not have hymns as good as the Orthodox for this.
> and look for the miracle themselves in various contexts - what questions would you want them to ask, and what experiments should they perform?
If you meet a divine-looking being, the first question to ask is about a few still-undiscovered digits of some well-known mathematical constant: <https://www.skytopia.com/project/knowledge/knowledge.html>. I guess it might get tricky to specify that you mean pi, rather than tau, or short-scale septillionth (increase as necessary to make it a still-undiscovered digit) as opposed to long-scale septillionth, or even that you want base-ten digits.
Oh, I should have remembered that. Did you actually get all those digits in a dream, and keep them in your head long enough to write them down after waking up? Or did you already know the answer?
It can’t hurt to get more people to try, can it?
My ignorant impression has always been that only people like Francisco and Jacinta get out of the car. Though I’m not sure they got to know cars.
I will never understand calling the event at Fatima "creepy." That's kind of incredible to me. Whether divine intervention was involved or not, I can only ever see the event as joyous and life affirming. I thought everybody liked pretty colors.
I guess it has to do with how one was raised and how one relates to miracles and Christianity. I rejected Christianity and miracles in a flat, non-affective way. It was not an emotional process. I did not feel relieved or freed. If anything, it left me with a slight feeling of disappointment and yearning. I would absolutely be thrilled to find definitive evidence of the religion I was raised in.
You theory might be true given that I, indeed, was raised Catholic and I rejected it pretty emotionally, but I don't quite see what was your reasoning process here/how you connected these.
I would hate to learn that there is an all-powerful being who has no problem torturing people who don't obey its dumb opinions about what's right for eternity and I would feel obligated to fight against it (and, obviously, I'd probably lose given that it's all-powerful)
I think the biggest mistake in Christianity was deciding that God was all-powerful. This must have been an asset during a more hierarchical time, but it was a poison pill that would ultimately backfire.
Regardless of God's hypothetical power level, the morality of the bacteria does not apply to the human being. When I scrub my countertops, I have little regard for the death and suffering of microbes. (Nor does it matter to me that the bacteria is deemed by us to be incapable of autonomy, intelligence and self-reflectiveness. I can imagine a being with such vastly superior faculties that in comparison, humanity's cognitive abilities are infinitesimal and irrelevant)
Fair enough. I guess it is natural some people would see the whole story as a package deal. I was thinking of the actual psychedelic phenomenon in the sky, and if that was confirmed to be a miracle, it wouldn't follow that everything the child-seers reported was true.
It may have been scary in the moment but seems almost everyone that came away with the sense of awe and wonder. It sure seems like in the long-term, almost everyone was satisfied and enriched by the experience.
With respect to Hume, his argument wasn’t actually that miracles are definitionally impossible (though I agree that’s how Kenny Easwaran characterized his argument). You can read his argument (in appropriately antique type) at https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10, but the gist of it is much closer to the comment from Jefferson you quote earlier about how he has known Yankee ministers to prevaricate more often than he has seen rocks drop from the sky. As Peter van Inwagen points out (even quoting the same story about Jefferson!), it’s a little hard to tell exactly what Hume’s argument is, but one fair reading of him is that whether or not miracles actually happen, you shouldn’t ever (or hardly ever) believe in them because the existence of miracles is more “contrary to experience” than that the people reporting the miracles are wrong (whether because they’re lying, or sincerely mistaken, or exaggerating, or something else). Then he also makes a bunch of garden variety criticisms of actually-existing miracle reports.
Van Inwagen makes the reasonable point that it’s hard to give content to the term “contrary to experience” in a way that preserves the argument: https://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Of_Of_Miracles.pdf But Hume isn’t making the facile point that the laws of nature can never be violated because any supposed violation would itself be part of the laws of nature.
I’m not saying Hume says miracles are “impossible” - the one step in Scott’s characterization I dispute is the idea that a law is something that can’t be violated. Hume doesn’t believe in objective laws! For Hume, “law” is a *subjective* term, not an objective one. For *you* to *call* a generalization a law is for you to be inclined to doubt any particular observation that claimed to violate it, rather than doubting the generalization. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong - with enough new observations you could give it up. But you would no longer treat it as a law, and you would no longer treat the violation as a miracle.
If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
(Hume would be hypothetically open to someone proving that there is a god by finding the psychological laws of this being.)
You seem to be treating the word “miracle” as synonymous with “visible violation of the laws of nature,” but that’s not how Hume defines it. He provides an express definition in the text itself: “A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” That’s why he can say that something is a miracle even if no one realizes it’s miraculous (as when God causes a feather to rise a bit more than the wind, unaided, would have done).
He’s pretty clear, for example, that if Elizabeth I were to be resurrected through divine interposition, that would be an honest-to-Hoyle miracle. He just says that even the unanimous agreement of historians would be insufficient evidence that it occurred. He does *not* say that the conclusion you should draw from the unanimity of historians is that there’s no law that everyone who dies stays dead. And he certainly doesn’t say more generally that a miracle *definitionally* can’t occur because seemingly miraculous observations should simply cause you to revise your notion of what the laws of nature are.
>If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
From my post:
"The reason why people cite Hume’s argument against miracles is to say that God does not exist, or if He does exist He does not do such things. If your argument against miracles allows for the existence of God actively making things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, then it’s a pretty weak argument against miracles!"
That "contrary to experience is hard to give content" is in itself is a part of the critique- that miracles are something contrary to experience (of laws of nature) is a classical, scholastic definition of miracles. The reason for this that Hume believes there is no observation that can plausibly be connected to "so it is caused by God", based on probabilistic reasoning of experiences, when we assume there is such a thing as laws of nature. More generally, that there can never be a science of miracles.
Van Inwagen doesn’t say it’s hard to give content to full stop. As he points out, there are various possible meanings that can be given to the phrase (Hume doesn’t specify which one he’s using), but none of them is such that Hume’s argument works.
> By far the biggest problem with this theory is that fire kasina meditation is hard and time-consuming.
Why is that a problem.
Lets say there exists some underlying mechanism. Some, as yet unspecified, neurochemical detail and specific circumstances that trigger the effect.
Ancient meditation practitioners found some way to trigger the effect. But maybe not the easiest way.
Maybe the fire kasina meditation is easier under conditions of high air pressure, or when you have an unusually salty diet, or something.
If the people of fatima had unusually salty diets, and salt helps the effect trigger more easily, and most kasina meditators aren't eating that much salt, then this all fits. And it doesn't need to be salt, it could be any unknown variable.
You're kind doing this thing that Scott has condemned multiple times in this series. You're doing "There must be some logical explanation so what's all the fuss about? There's nothing to see here." Until you present a specific explanation that 95 percent of us can get on board with, there's something to "see here."
I agree that we shouldn't circularly dismiss paranormal phenomena as impossible on the grounds that paranormal phenomena are impossible, but in this particular case I think Scott and others have marshaled enough evidence that there's a plausible naturalistic explanation for this "miracle," even if all the details aren't exactly known. I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect an explanation that accounts for every point of detail; historical events are not repeatable after all.
The point is "blah neurotransmitters blah optic nerve" is a potential scientific explanation.
But the theory "fire kasina" isn't itself about neurotransmitters. So we need to understand what this theory is saying.
It's saying that whatever currently unknown neurochemical thing is happening, the same thing is happening in fire kasina and in sun miracles.
It's the difference between "scurvy is caused by lack of vitamin C". And "I don't know what causes scurvy, but whatever the mechanism is, the same thing happens in humans and in these hamsters"
The fact that kasina is hard to achieve isn't a major strike against this "kasina=fatima" theory.
Sorry for misunderstanding you. I guess you're basically saying, "Calm down, everybody, it's definitely not God," and forgive me if I find that prosaic in is it's own way. We have such limited data to go on out that I wouldn't count out a supernatural explanation..
I think that our data is limited and confusing, and it's almost certainly not god.
But that wasn't the main thing I was saying.
I'm saying that the hypothesis "fire kasina and fatima have the same underlying biopsycochemical explanation" isn't significantly weakened by the observation that fire kasina is hard to achieve.
Yeah, and I think the case is stronger than this. Meditation phenomena are strongly affected by psychological states - and the Fatima witnesses had a lot of relatively relevant psychological properties. Like strong faith, expectation that something spectacular would happen and some degree of group trance.
The descriptions of the moments when a light of a specific color appeared to be temporarily bathing the entire scene seem to explicitly state that the shadows were of an identical hue. ("Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground.")
Had the incoming light been actually purple-colored (so either a mixture of red and blue wavelengths or something violet+; Perception of purple is weird in humans in general...) the shadows should appear complementary - i.e. greenish-brown. Typical example: Shadows turn progressively blue as sunlight shifts from white, to yellow, to red, during a sunset. Shadows are the *unilluminated* places. There is still some reflection from surrounding surfaces, but to the degree that the shadows actually appear darker, they *subtract* the hue shift of the incoming light from the background.
This suggests the perceived changes in color may be an internal phenomenon downstream of the retina, rather than something happening objectively in the external world. Color perception is surprisingly weird, the eye cones are very low res and most of your qualia originate from neural post-production that auto-corrects for hue and luminosity all the time. If your eyes are a bit tired and a perhaps temporarily overloaded all throughout the spectrum (meaning all three cone types overstimulated and sending in static), the processing system could conceivably become unmoored and start wandering.
That's a really interesting point, but I'm not sure I really understand what you mean. For example in the scene in the thumbnail of this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9jR5SGR7FI - everything is blue, and the shadows also look blue.
Purple might be a bad specific example for its odd behavior, as mentioned, but the witnesses seem to be claiming that all colors were having the same effect, uniformly covering everything. And yellow light certainly does not create yellow-tinted shadows.
Does fighting antisemitism, a worthy goal, demand that we unilaterally absolve the Rothschild family of their documented evils? Seems like the kind of thing one would only do if they lived in a narrow information bubble.
Nothing, really. For-profit banking is just incredibly heinous and destructive. And this is true regardless of the ethnicity of the banker. Hindu and Christian bankers have destroyed countless lives.
My interpretation of Hume’s central argument on miracles is just the combination of the semantic point (the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle, even if you want to call it a shmiracle when staff raisings part seas) and the Bayesian point. And Bayesian points tend to be somewhat trivial anyway - there’s nothing that tells you what the right prior to have is, it’s just that things go predictably bad for you if you predict you’ll update your bets in ways that violate conditionalization.
>the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle,
There's only no miracle if you define miracle in a way contrary to how people use the word, and to how it's normally defined. If God parted the Red Sea when Moses raised his staff, that's a miracle. You can only say it's not a miracle if you define miracles as "Things that don't happen."
Hume is using the scholastic, classical definition of "miracles are something that break the laws of nature", so you're wrong that it's contrary. A large part of why you think otherwise, ironically, is probably due to Hume's critique.
I'm arguing that if God parted the Red Sea, most people would use the word "miracle" to describe that. If Kenny defines miracle such that God causing a sea to part so his chosen people can pass is not a miracle, then he's not arguing about the kind of miracles people care about.
In this case, it’s obviously something about atmospheric lensing, rather than something about the neurophysiology of eyes in bright light, but I don’t think anyone has figured out why it’s common here, and not in other locations, and how it gives rise to the particular strange patterns of lights that it does.
Oh, I've had fire-kasina like stuff happen since I was a kid, I figured it was a normal thing. It happens sometimes at night when it's totally dark, or I have my eyes closed, and I have some kind of not-an-external-image thing in my visual field. That can be an after-image, or the kind of blotches you get if you poke your closed eye with your finger, or anything like that. If you focus your visual attention very intently on that kind of thing, it will move around, change colors, generate strong colors that spread out and fill the visual field, and sometimes have weird spinning or scintillating patterns. Wild I didn't make the connection when reading the first post. This just happens pretty reliably for me when I strongly focus my visual attention on a vision artifact. I never trained this as a mediation technique or anything, it's just something I've often done while bored and looking at the inside of my eyelids while waiting to fall asleep.
Those are closed-eye hallucinations. In fact, what you're describing seems to be only level 2 out of a possible 5 levels according to the en-Wikipedia classification at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
Presumably somehow related, but not the same thing as fire kasina.
I think we need more info on the newspaper strike. First I think we should significantly discount something if it just happened during an interlude when record keeping was harder, secondly it seems odd even if there was a complete newspaper strike in Iran that Iraqi, Lebanese, French or American newspapers didn't seem to report on it all of whom would have journalists on the ground.
This afternoon there was a nice smattering of various cloud types at about sun-height. I was able to observe a round sun through more wispy clouds twice. The first time it was only for a fraction of a second before I looked away. The second time it was more obscured and I looked for a few seconds before looking away out of caution. Both times, when I closed my eyes, the after image was circular. I'd seen the sun in this way before, but it was nice to confirm that my memory wasn't tainted. I don't understand how someone could claim it's impossible.
For my money, Scott's theory that the colors were created by just the right cloud cover is quite primitive. I'll give him an A for Effort but if that's all I had to go on, I'd keep it close to the vest.
The simplest explanation to me is the kids saw a real UFO then lied about what they saw.
All it takes is one popular kid with an overactive imagination and desire to be at the center of something special for him to start exaggerating, then all his friends start exaggerating, and now if you're the one holdout who says, "All I saw was a smudge in the sky", everyone will make fun of you for being a party-killer.
Sixty might be an unusually high number of kids to all go along with it, but still falls well within my expectation of human behavior, and unusual cases do happen.
You propose treating the Khomeini moon vision as your control group, but if we consider miracles as a form of divine communication, then it makes sense that Allah would show believers the rightful ruler of Iran. Why would the Christian God put on a light show? There's no message in it other than "Hey, check out what I can do with the sun!" and even the connection to Catholicism is only circumstantial.
Don't let the implications of this for you as someone associated with the Great Satan bias your judgement.
The kids who predicted the sun miracle also had other visions, such as of people burning in hell. The light show may have served to certify these visions as being divine in origin.
An offhand comment on a podcast I was listening to just yesterday mentioned aphantasia. This resulted in me being deeply confused about what it means to “imagine seeing” or “daydream”.
I’m actually still quite confused, and reading more about it didn’t help.
But I’m *less* confused about the Fatima event. I think it’s quite possible “seeing” is much more… squishy than immediately obvious. People without aphantasia (which is the vast majority of people?) apparently report they actually see a visual of what they are imagining. I still don’t know how to interpret this, but there’s a confusion there for me which makes the Fatima event feel more likely to be explainable by something like fire kasina.
I can imagine it’s possible certain visual inputs, combined with the right suggestions, can lead *most* people to confusing their imagination with their actual visual inputs. This isn’t something I would have so easily believed without my current confusion around aphantasia.
Ah, I have a friend with aphantasia. The stage where you discover its existence and learn that a lot of language that you thought was purely metaphorical is not is apparently quite strange. He's doing fine, though.
Most people cannot see a visual in their field of view, even those without aphantasia. Even for those more skilled at mental imagery, it's very faint, and requires practice for something a little more concrete. For it to be at the level of 'seems like just normal, real life', you probably need an extraordinary case of hyperphantasia.
It's important to note how differently various people distinguish between *imagining* things and *seeing* them. In dreams and narcotics-induced states (including general anesthesia), it certainly seems like I've been seeing images, but I distinguish between this type of vivid imagery and seeing that actually comes from my eyes.
In my life, I can only recall at most one second of waking hallucination that I'm actually seeing something (I once swore I saw a split-second light flash, in a place where I strongly believe there was no flashlight or device that could make a flash present). Of course I've seen afterimages, and the line between those and visual hallucination is a blurry one, but I've attended a workshop on seeing auras, I've stared for 30 seconds into my cellphone flashlight, I see the detailed clouds of color float when I close my eyes... but I've simply never seen anything that wasn't obviously just an artifact of my eyes.
I think it's likely that the phenomena we're taking about is an artifact of many people not being good at distinguishing between these kinds of perception, much like people who feel God is communicating to them. It can be a beautiful, meaningful, socially connecting experience -- so of course it makes sense to interpret it as objectively and externally occurring, rather than being an artifact of your own mind. Story and social identity are powerful, and is the scheme of the scope of types of human, really it's only a handful of (beautiful) weirdos who resist believing that they experienced what their friends say they experienced -- and thus, retroactively actually experiencing it!
> I think it's likely that the phenomena we're taking about is an artifact of many people not being good at distinguishing between these kinds of perception.
I just left a comment pointing to something similar, but this says it better.
I recently found I'm aphantasic. Before learning this, I would have have leaned towards agreeing with Scott's skepticism: "the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle."
But now I agree your take is more likely the explanation of this gap.
Thank you for this deep dive, I feel more confused than before I read the first post on the subject, but confused in a more *nuanced* way, which is always better. If nothing else, it's nice to see that we live in a world where truly strange things seem to occur- I prefer that to the alternative.
Aside, this post has also reminded me to add the Necedah Shrine to my list of weird things in Wisconsin that I want to visit (it's a longer list than one may expect for a state few outside the Midwest think about).
Excellent analysis, this kasina connection is a realy smart explanation for something so historically baffling. It makes me think how much our brain's interpretation layers onto basic optical phenomena, especially when there's a strong cultural narrative at play.
Could eye conditions like colorblindness or such affect what a person sees or doesn't see with these phenomena? Are there any colorblind sungazers that can offer their perspective?
Rather than push one towards an ultra-conservative flavor of Catholicism, I'd consider the actual theology proclaimed by the children to be a very strong point against a miraculous explanation, or at least against a "Catholicism-is-true" origin of the miracle. (And I say this as a skeptic, but also as someone who doesn't mind the Catholic church at all.)
We do know quite a bit about how the New Testament developed, which theologies ended up winning out, and how Catholic doctrine developed many centuries later, often in response to societal practices and politics.
Conservative Catholicism of the early 20th Century consisted of a mountain of teachings that simply can't be traced back to scripture to to the 1st Century: a powerful role for the Virgin Mary, sainthood itself, the concept of Hell as a place of torment, very contemporary notions of modesty, etc. Catholic theology a magnificent and fascinating edifice, but you need a church to develop and teach it (something the church itself wouldn't dispute at all).
Fatima as a potential Marian miracle is support for exactly one particular version of doctrine - as it was in 1917. Not the one of 70 CE. Not the one of 312 CE. Not the one of 1517 CE. Not the one of 1815 CE. Not the one of 2025 CE (which notably doesn't include Hell as a place of eternal torment, and doesn't consider bare arms to be the worst kind of immodesty). If extreme purist 1917 Catholicism is the only path to salvation, that damns essentially every Catholic ever, even if they piously followed their current doctrine to the letter. They stood no chance until centuries later.
Yes, papal inerrancy and all that - itself a very late addition - but that still suggests that either God is constantly updating His teachings, or that popes can literally set criteria for who is saved and damned.
TL;DR - I'd have no trouble completely discarding the hypothesis "maybe 1917 Catholic theology is literally true in its purest form" out of hand. This is simply because that particular theology only applied and was only practiced and known in a very narrow temporal and cultural window. It's not a "back to basics, just read the scriptures literally" doctrine, but an involved and baroque thing that grew over millennia.
I found your whole comment interesting, but due to personal interests of my own, am electing to follow up on (and push back on) just two small points that are completely tangential to your point (if you don't mind).
1) Do you have any sources for hell as a place of eternal torment not being dominant in first-century(ish) theology? This is of interest. I am not disagreeing, but asking.
2) On the other hand, I would somewhat disagree that hell as a place of eternal torment is no longer taught in the modern Catholic church. They certainly de-emphasize it, and the torment as *physical* torment is -- and has always been -- optional, but I'm not sure it's quite gone away altogether.)
1) What actual 1st Century theology was - or if it was even a unified thing at all - is apparently a pretty big question mark, but I keep reading that the whole idea of Hell as an actual place and not just something like "cast off" or "destroyed" is a much later thing, probably because OT "sheol" (also unclear if it's a literal "place" or not) kept getting rendered as "Hades" into Greek. I think this covers some of that:
2) My (European) Catholic upbringing decades ago already never included the word at all, it existed exclusively as a caricature in comics and cartoons. Not just "this an embarrassing topic we'd rather avoid", just completely absent and unmentioned. Then you had Pope Francis say "I'd like to think of Hell as empty", and various archbishops redefining Hell as "eternal separation from God" (can't find the original source, but it's become almost a cliche).
It's likely that Hell was never formally removed from the Cathechism, but a reigning pope essentially implying "you probably won't be going there" (even if that isn't what he literally said) really undermines the 1917-style fire-and-brimstone stuff.
"What experiments should they perform?" Well - how often does the Medjugorje phenomenon appear? Someone, who knows the right settings and specs, could buy a sufficiently sophisticated camera... And set it up to track the sun in the sky every day, for long enough, that the phenomenon is eventually reported. Then there'd be better video evidence of whether there's something there.
I feel like the fact that similar effects have been produced in other places casts a lot of doubt on the pro-miracle side. You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to try to explain this away
I think you give somewhat short shift to the omne bonum point, which is partly that there are mathematical constraints on the likelihood ratio for any miracle on theism compared to atheism given a uniform probability for miracles and given that some miracle occurring is likely given atheism.
I think there are places to push back. On more specific religious views the probability of different miracles will not be uniform, if God can perform an infinite range of miracles then uniformity doesn’t make sense, and a lot of miracles involve sequences of events such that once we background the earlier events happening, the probability of the later events becomes much higher on theism than atheism. However, your comment made the point seem like was just the banal observation that it is likely that some improbable events will happen occasionally, which was only the first part of his argument.
At this point I'm putting some weight on the hypothesis that we're all hyper logical autists talking about this, that less autistic people just have hallucinations all the time, and we're the weird ones who can't trick ourselves into seeing the face of the Virgin in the sun.
I don't understand the meta-game here of pretending the fatima sun miracle is at all worth dedicating all this attention to. I plain don't believe Scott actually believes there's even a 0.001% chance of this being actually miraculous. What remains is some combination of physiological, psychological and sociological phenomena, and the only thing that remains to investigate is what precise combination of these three factors is at play here. Sure, it's kinda neat there is a connection to meditation techniques here, but that's about it.
Maybe someone who's more "in tune" can enlighten me on the point of this whole endeavour?
(PS I add this hesitantly because it implies a somewhat adversarial relationship, but I vaguely recall Scott saying something to the effect of "I only care about AI x-risk and will thus try to boost blog popularity through whatever means just so I can later tell more people about x-risk". I might even be completely misremembering this but at least it explains.. something...)
Cf: a new type of celestial object is discovered. We know that it's almost certainly merely a new natural composition of matter and there is only 0.001% chance that it's aliens, but people will still be interested in researching and discussing it.
Or more directly: what the specific explanation for a mystery is is still an interesting topic, even if the supernatural/extraordinary explanation has insignificant probability.
I meant to comment on the original Fatima post, because it meant a lot to me, but I didn't get around to it. So I'm going to take the opportunity to comment now.
First, I want to express my gratitude to Scott for calling out how *horrible* some of the alleged revelations to the children were. I am Catholic, although I like to joke that I'm a practicing Catholic and maybe someday I'll be good at it. One of the things I've been working through lately in therapy is the idea that suffering is good, and therefore I'm supposed to suffer. The first Fatima post (specifically, the discussion of the children "doing penance") helped me identify more precisely where that idea came from. My Catholic school teachers didn't tell us all of the penances the children inflicted on themselves, but they did tell us some, and in a context of "these children were holy and what they did was holy." The post also led me to reflect on how at Fatima those penances were linked to predictions of societal catastrophe, and how biblical prophets also often predicted societal catastrophes and called on people to do things...and then I realized that biblical prophets consistently call for repentance (stop doing bad things to other people), not penance (do bad things to yourself). So for the last few weeks I've been repeating to myself "Repentance, not penance" and that has helped me a lot.
Second, like a few of the other commentators, I came away from the original Fatima post convinced that the miracle of the sun at Fatima was almost certainly not miraculous, but as much for theological reasons as scientific ones. My first thought when I read the description of the alleged miracle of the sun was how *meaningless* it was. Like, suppose you're almighty God and you want to send a message of love and care (or hellfire and damnation, whatever) to your faithful people. Why, out of all the uncountable things you could possibly do, why would you make the sun appear to spin around and turn colors? There's no message there! Or at least none beyond "I can make weird shit happen." What's the point?
Also, as a Catholic, I was aware that the Church hierarchy is very cautious about accepting private revelations (no Catholic is ever required to believe in one), and that some alleged apparitions have been condemned by the bishops, but I was not aware of how many had been condemned or how similar the phenomena associated with them were to the miracle of the sun at Fatima. That's definitely something that makes me lean towards thinking "Yeah, probably all of the popular Marian apparitions are best explained by misinterpreted natural phenomena and social expectations." I do think it's important to recognize the sincerity of the pilgrims. Even though I doubt the origin stories of the pilgrimage sites, I don't doubt that some people have experienced spiritual benefits from their visits. I just now think the pilgrims make the site holy, rather than the other way around. And that's pretty much what the bishops' current position on Medjugorje boils down to, in my understanding.
Speaking of misinterpreted natural phenomena, apparently I am less skeptical about skepticism than Scott, because after reading about the sungazing idiots on reddit, the sungazing experiences of ACX commentors, and the kasina fire meditation, I am quite willing to accept that the visual phenomena of the sun moving, expanding, changing color, etc. are just what happens (at least to some people some of the time) if they stare at the sun. As for the more detailed imagery of the Virgin Mary, the cross, etc. that some people at apparition sites report, I wonder if that could be explained by something as simple as pareidolia? Wikipedia defines pareidolia as "the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual." The participants in these experiences were receiving a visual stimulus (they were staring at the sun). The stimulus was probably nebulous (they were staring at the sun, and human eyes are not meant to do that). Also the afterimages would have provided another visual signal of sorts for their brains to interpret, and depending on how they moved their heads while staring at the sun, the afterimages may have had a more complex shape than the sun itself. They were definitely primed to "impose a meaningful interpretation" on the stimulus, and not just any meaningful interpretation, but a particular sort of interpretation. Pareidolia seems like it could explain both the similarities and the differences among the "visions" some participants reported. A first hand account of the apparition at Zeitoun certainly sounds like pareidolia to me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ6oeCMZk_k; start at 4:45 for the first hand account or around 4:00 for the full story).
Apologies if someone has already said this, but I have a fairly convincing explanation for how afterimages produce a "dancing" phenomenon. I've experienced something like this in darkness with a small bright light.
First, an example you may know that has one part of the explanation but not the other: eye floaters. These are spots that are generally fixed relative to the retina but often seem to move, and the explanation is simple: if a floater is just off-center, then if you try to pay attention to it, your eye will wander in its direction. But the floater moves with your eye, so it always stays just ahead of the optical center, and your eye keeps chasing it, giving it the appearance of motion.
If you're looking close to but not precisely at the center of the sun, you might look towards the center, trying to keep the sun centered in your vision. But if your eye is tracking the *afterimage*, then you will keep chasing it, overshooting the objective sun. But now the sun is off-center in the *other* direction, causing the afterimage to gradually move to the other side of your optical center (actually, one edge of the afterimage will fade while the opposite edge will appear to extend).
The net result of this, assuming some simple linear acceleration response, is an acceleration toward the optical center proportional to the sun's distance from the optical center. If everything works out exactly right, this could be a sinusoidal oscillation along one axis, but more likely is circular or ellipsoidal motion around the center. Of course it's possible to *stop* this motion if you're firm about tracking the light source and ignoring the afterimage, but if you had some expectation that the sun was moving, you might not make an effort to stop it.
Dear sceptical people, please stop pushing me to believe in the miracle of the sun! Because all the huffing and puffing about "well it couldn't be a miracle because miracles just don't happen (look, I just pulled something similar to the Drake Equation out of my... memory... to back that up)" is moving me towards well, dagnabbit, now I have to stand up for the supernatural.
And I don't want to defend the Fatima miracle because I don't care about it!
Anyway, in a less controversial (I hope) take, a lot of the "miracles aren't miracles, if things do happen well it may be improbable but not impossible" (that's not too unreasonable a positoin to hold) and "if it really is demonstrated that this thing happened, then it's clearly not a miracle - because miracles don't happen - it's just some natural phenomenon we didn't understand before" explanations remind me a lot of Spiritualism/psychic research from the early 20th century, and how some proponents of it put forward that it *wasn't* supernatural, there was no such thing as supernatural; these were natural laws that we were now only discovering. Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge were very popular here:
(Stop me if you've heard examples like these before).
In previous centuries, we had no idea of what electricity was. Some animals can see colours or hear sounds we can't. New scientific discoveries, such as X-rays, are expanding our range of what is perceptible every day. It's all vibrations, you see, vibrations in matter which we will learn the laws of as we learned the laws of physics up to now.
To quote one such rationalist (fictional) psychic, from short story collection published in 1919:
‘You can’t go far in any direction if you stick to so-called common sense,’ Vyse rejoined; ‘we should still be in the Stone Age if the dreamers hadn’t flouted “common sense” through all the ages. Common sense said iron couldn’t float, that man could never fly, that every new invention or discovery outside the range of his comprehension must come from the devil. Common sense has done a lot of climbing down in its day—and is going to do a good bit more.’
‘All matter—so called—is vibrating, from the electron upwards; that is the conclusion of the most modern of scientists quite apart from the “hidden knowledge”. The differentiation of matter is merely a question of the varying rates of vibration. Our five senses are tuned to receive, and to respond to, vibrations within a certain limit at both ends of the scale. Your sense of touch, for instance, records the fact that ether vibrating at a certain rate results in what we call water, fluid and unstable; that at a lower rate it becomes solid in the form of ice; at a higher rate it eludes your sense of touch altogether. Can you not imagine a more sensitive sense than yours might still register vibrations to which your own are unresponsive? It would be no less unbelievable than the sense of smell in a dog as compared with that of a human being.’
‘Besides the physical senses, we also have latent the more subtle senses belonging to the inner bodies; most of us can develop them if we adopt the right methods, but we can’t go into that now. For ordinary psychometry it is sufficient to suppose a brain with nervous centres so delicately poised as to be sensitive to vibrations too rapid for the normal brain to receive. It is extremely difficult to say where the actual transition in sensation of any kind from the physical to the super-physical takes place; the point must lie in the individual. In the case of the past history of an object, the brain, through the sense of touch, is responding to vibrations with which the object in question has come into contact and stored—so to speak. Intimate or prolonged contact will affect the respective rates of vibration of the objects contacting—the proverb about touching pitch and consequent defilement is the result of the inner knowledge of this truth. Everything automatically records its own history.’
...‘What sort of things? Of course, you understand the laws connected with the next plane, and the more subtle form of matter that exists there, are just as orderly and as inexorable as the laws relating to physical matter. Nothing can be accomplished except through obedience to them. Nor can those on the other side interfere with the laws of this.’
‘Then it would seem their powers must be pretty limited,’ Hawthorn objected gloomily. ‘I fancied their help, if they could give any, would consist of interference with events threatening disaster.’
‘So it does, but they have to fall into line with natural law. My dear chap, think for a moment what the other would mean. Nothing short of chaos. Bad enough if the Maker of the Universe were to work against His own ordained laws. But that every well-meaning busybody on the next plane should be able to do so—why, it is unthinkable. No, they can help us right enough, but they can’t perform so-called miracles.’
‘Then I don’t see how they are vastly superior to ourselves.’
‘They are not,’ was the quick reply. ‘Why should they be? They are just one upward step further on the planes of evolution. They have a wider vision, and therefore a wider power of judgment; and, as they can to a certain extent read people’s minds, they have a very limited power of prediction.’
...‘The spiritual and the psychic are not at all the same thing; you shouldn’t bracket them like that,’ Vyse urged. ‘The psychic has to do mainly with the plane next our own, a state of matter vibrating just a little more rapidly than the physical. The spiritual is in touch with things far higher and nearer the essence of all things. Physical phenomena come under the former head.’
‘You mean table-turning, banging tambourines, and so on?’
‘Don’t throw contempt on what are merely the readiest means of communication,’ the other laughed. ‘You remind me of Naaman, in the Bible, and his chagrin when told to cure his leprosy by bathing in the Jordan when he expected some highly dramatic ceremonial. You don’t ask to be assisted by pomp and ritual when speaking on the telephone. If you take the trouble to train for clairvoyance and clairaudience, you will be independent of such instruments.’
...‘Mlle Gourget was a medium,’ Vyse said abruptly.
Swinnerton laughed. ‘I have no doubt that ought to be very enlightening, but I am not sure I know what a medium really is. I have always associated the word with fraud and credulity.’
‘Most people do,’ Vyse replied, ‘who have never taken the trouble to try and understand. A medium is—a medium—literally, between physical matter and the more subtle, less tangible matter of the next plane. He—or she, as the case may be—has a superfluity of etheric substance in their composition. This etheric matter vibrates—and, as you doubtless know, all differentiation of matter is merely a question of the rate of its vibration—at a rate to which our five senses can barely respond, and forms the link with vibrations to which our physical senses cannot respond at all; without that link no physical phenomena can take place; they on that next plane are as hopelessly cut off from physical matter as the physical is from them. “
The view - and hope - was that investigation by trained observers and men of science would clear away the accretion of superstition and fantasy over the centuries, record the phenomenon, and then derive laws of the super-normal/preternatural for them, just as we had done for other natural phenomena. This would explain telepathy, all kinds of psychic and mediumistic activity, ghosts and so forth.
Of course, we haven't done that and indeed are even more firm in our belief that 'such things cannot be'. I think the same will hold for materialist explanation of miracles: there will be natural phenomena open to natural explanation, and for the rest - those who do not wish to believe will not be convinced by anything: "He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
Oh I don't know, maybe I like the mystery and I don't want anyone to solve it. There's something deeply alluring to me about an impossible enigma. I have gotten obsessed to with places like the Sultanate of Utetera and the Jewish Kingdom of Beta Israel, solely because they are so mysterious.
This thread has been interesting so I'm primed with sun miracles and fire kasina information, but have never seen any of either before in my life. Here's what happened last night:
I was awakened from slumber in a dark room, and after a few seconds of warning, someone turned on the overhead light. I caught in my view near the center for less than a second. I immediately closed my eyes and in the afterimage I experienced:
Stained-glass-like patches of vivid red and orange, streaming out from a central cross shape into the visual field, occupying more and more of the visual field for about 15 seconds. The outside of the central cross started more gray but then took on more blue and greenish hue. The streaming pattern continued, with red starting to predominate, then orange. It was very beautiful. No spinning or anything. Then after say 15-30 more seconds they turned out the lights (my eyes were closed this whole time). There was then a spectacular and beautiful vision of the red and green collapsing in a kind of slow motion stained glass sacred geometry effect that took maybe 1.5s, and the blue and green stained glass patches then started streaming towards the center, which now wasn't a cross but more a point. This continued another say 15 seconds after which the visual effects faded over maybe another 10s.
So: zero prior experience seeing or cultivating these effects, but primed with descriptions of the effect and possible triggers
Stimulus: dark room, then 500ms bright light upper left visual field, then lighted-room-closed-eyes for about 45s or so, followed by darkened room again
Visual effects: as above. Some color experiences pretty reminiscent of what's reported for fire kasina meditation on essentially zero cultivation of the skill, but not having the open-eyes-bright-stimulus trigger, no spinning. Some growing/shrinking, some vague symbolic content, some “Catherine wheel” flavored effects, full-visual-field effect, color changes in the range described.
I'm impressed and this was an experience I'd like to repeat. It came so readily in a circumstance that seems like it's happened to me 100s of times and likely to billions of people. I feel like this should be really well known as an effect but perhaps a bit of priming is critical? I've had some visual hallucinatory experiences in other circumstances so I have some prior experience with noticing such effects, but this took zero mental effort to notice and very little effort to maintain once initiated.
I had estimated that low-prep kasina effects were pretty unlikely to be a contributing factor but this changes me to thinking that is more plausibly part of what's going on.
I suspect the truth is a combination of your 1 & 2 (individualized & generalized natural explanations).
Disparate phenomena have disparate physical processes generating them which, when observed, trigger the same unreliable psychological effects.
>"…a very suggestible person can cause many seemingly-careful observers to make correlated errors."
This in particular reminded me of the 2011 OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly), in which particle physicists with precise instruments nevertheless observed superluminal speeds with greater than six sigma confidence. It took CERN et al. several months to identify the previously-overlooked sources of measurement error.
If such a "miraculous" event could be observed in spite of both very strong priors that the speed of light is unbreakable and nanosecond-precise sensors, any hypothesis with more degrees of freedom and less reliable recording should be considered less probable than superluminal neutrinos.
I just realized that the Problem of Evil is not just about evil
Even without the claim that God is "perfectly good", it's still weird to be like "let me explain some stuff using intentional-stance/fitness-maximizer language, but don't ask me about any intention, fitness function or maximisation mechanism"
"there’s so much weirdness that we should be less willing to take any given example of weirdness on its own terms."
Exactly this, amplified by the fact that humans who are primed to see a particular sort of extreme weirdness (whether an alien spaceship or a divine miracle) will often observe a lesser weirdness and misperceive a great deal of detail to make it match the weirdness they were expecting. And in the specific case of weirdness visible in the sky, we have a lot of experience in how that process plays out.
With Fatima, we have a bit of modest weirdness - probably the sun behind a high cirrus layer, weird mostly because people almost never focus on the sun at all. We definitely have a crowd that was primed to see a divine miracle of the Sun. And we have a bunch of detail that is generally within the range of detail that we know from past study often finds its way into objectively-that-was-just-a-fixed-light-source weirdness with a bit of priming.
That calls for a high prior on the explanation being misperception of a minor weirdness due to collective priming.
First of all, we must consider the fact that one in a million events do, in fact, happen. In a world without miracles we would indeed expect to have some weirdness. Just as in a world without aliens we have UFOs and crop circles. The randomness and complexity of humans means that we'd expect a handful of human experiences to be far outside normal bounds.
These highly unique experiences get signal-boosted due to their novelty. Even if it takes a truly odd combination of group psychology, culture, weird/biased reporting, and mixed/hazy recollections you'd still expect to have a few very odd bits of history. Not least because you probably haven't heard about all the group hallucinations that were easily disproved. If Fatima was happening bi-weekly around the world and ONLY to Catholics I think we'd be forced to have a real serious discussion. But as it stands, it seems like it's a one in a million event in a world that's throwing billions of dice at once.
Secondly, the people of the past had fundamentally different cultures. We tend to adjust our belief in eyewitness testimony based on how much we trust the people involved. Some rural conspiracy theorist's claim about a cigar shaped craft lifting off from a cornfield can be easily dismissed, but a group of highly educated professionals all claiming that they saw the same thing would stick a lot harder.
But the people of the past tended to be far more credulous and were far deeper believers in their faiths. Witnesses of the past had far more avenues by which they could be manipulated, engaged in a lot more motivated reasoning, weren't as skeptical, had deeper social bonds through with group truths were enforced, and information gathering as a whole was of a far lower standard. There is a difference between a group of people claiming to see the sun swing around the sky in 1917 and a similarly sized group of people claiming the same in 2025.
I find it likely that quite a few people saw nothing or very little, it just wasn't reported on. Many of the people involved engaged in motivated reasoning, many of the reporters and researchers immediately after the fact engaged in motivated researching. I think many people could've seen minor illusions, could've thought they saw the sun move due to the lack of reference when looking up, things like that. When reporting was done on the subject the most extreme tales got the most attention from reporters and most people had seen enough that nobody was willing to commit social suicide by loudly denying the whole thing (or if they were they didn't get very far).
This isn't a well thought out argument, but it serves to demonstrate the point that an intersection of old culture and plain good (or bad) luck could result in a one-in-a-million event in which there are no real good explanations. Not because they don't exist, but because they were destroyed by time, never preserved because everyone involved found it more interesting and profitable to preserve the magic.
"But the people of the past tended to be far more credulous and were far deeper believers in their faiths. Witnesses of the past had far more avenues by which they could be manipulated, engaged in a lot more motivated reasoning, weren't as skeptical, had deeper social bonds through with group truths were enforced, and information gathering as a whole was of a far lower standard. There is a difference between a group of people claiming to see the sun swing around the sky in 1917 and a similarly sized group of people claiming the same in 2025."
"There is a difference between a group of people claiming to see the sun swing around the sky in 1917 and a similarly sized group of people claiming the same in 2025."
Dear sir or madam, before you strain your arm patting yourself on the back for your superiority, I am willing to state that if you got a bunch of random people together in 2025, you could get every bit as much credulity as the benighted peasants of 1917. QAnon? r/somethingiswrong2024?
In 1917, there were people turning up at the site ready to poke fun at the credulous stooges and they ended up seeing something. I'm not saying it was a miracle, but the people who said "Hey, I can't believe it, but I did see the colours/the sun moving" are not all of them "Yes, I wanted to see this, I was prepared to see this!"
As to "it just wasn't reported on", there was at least one atheist newspaper which was dying to have reports of "nothing happened, the credulous stooges are all credulous stooges". O Século, a newspaper that was pro-the anticlerical Republican party, founded by someone who was:
"A defender of republicanism with a tendency towards utopian socialism , he was part of the so-called Generation of 70 and was for many years grand master of Portuguese Freemasonry , presiding over the organization's destiny during the Coup of May 28, 1926 and the outbreak of persecutions that would lead to its subsequent illegalization during the Estado Novo regime .
The historian Maria Rita Lino Garnel draws our attention to the fact that the defense of a republican ideal and anti-dynastic and anti-clerical propaganda are evident in his written and journalistic production, as well as in his cultural and civic action."
Let me remind you that Continental Freemasonry was not simply a bunch of guys getting together to dress up and be a charitable fraternal organisation, it was very much anti-Catholic Church and the sentiment was reciprocated by the Church.
So this paper sent a reporter to cover the events, and they did report on what they saw happening, and I don't think you can claim the reporter was "engaged in motivated reasoning, [un]willing to commit social suicide by loudly denying the whole thing (or if they were they didn't get very far)" - if you're a reporter for a Republican, anti-clerical newspaper, you're already committing as much social suicide you want:
"The hour advances…The miraculous manifestation, the announced visible sign is about to produce itself… And then a spectacle makes itself present, unique and unbelievable to anyone not a witness to it. From the summit of the road, the entire immense multitude is seen turning towards the sun, which presents itself free from the clouds, in its zenith. The star resembles a plate of opaque silver and it is possible to stare at the disc without the most minimal effort. It doesn’t burn; it doesn’t blind. It may be said to be an eclipse in progress. But a colossal uproar suddenly arises, and the spectators that are closest are heard to yell:
Miracle, miracle! A marvel! A marvel!
To the amazed eyes of those people, who, pale with astonishment and with heads uncovered, face the blue sky, the sun trembled, the sun had never-before-seen brusque movements beyond all cosmic laws – the sun “danced”, according to the typical expression of the peasants. And, later on, some ask others if they saw it, or what they saw. The majority confesses to have seen a trembling or dancing of the sun, but others declare to have seen the smiling face of the Virgin herself, and swear that the sun spun around like a wheel of fireworks, that it descended almost to the point of burning the earth with its rays… There are those who say that they saw it successively change color…
...It still remains for the competent ones to apply judgment to the macabre dance of the sun that, today in Fatima, made hosannas explode from the chests of the faithful and left people naturally moved – this is what reliable people assure me, freethinkers and other people without concerns for religious nature, about those who flocked to this already celebrated shrubland.
Avelino de Almeida"
I'd appreciate if anyone can dig out the original text of the newspaper report, I'm only able to get translations on Catholic sites and those could indeed be accused of cherrypicking.
Surely it would be possible to set up a 24/7 video stream from Medjugorje with an appropriately filtered camera that could track the movement of the sun.
Regarding the various visual effects: when I was a child I would cause optical hallucination by pressing firmly on my upper eyelids, pushing my eyeballs both back and towards my nose. I just confirmed that this still works - one first goes immediately cross-eyed, and then a few seconds later tunnel vision begins, and by the time the visual field is completely obscured there is a kaleidoscopic effect of various colors (mostly purple and grey, but others as well), dancing about. After releasing pressure the darkness quickly abates, but the kaleidoscope continues, faintly, for perhaps a minute. I've seen similar patterns when using hallucinogens.
I'm not sure if the underlying effect is caused by pressing on the nerve, or restricted blood flow. It's certainly different from merely wearing a blindfold or closing my eyes, but I can imagine that much of it is my brain struggling to interpret what signal it has.
I am writing this as a "quick start" instructional guide that will allow anyone to begin practicing thogal effectively and safely.
Thogal means "over the skull", "over the crest". It actually means to arrive instantly without jumping to get there, like a quantum leap. Thogal practice makes it very easy to experience, know and differentiate rigpa from all other mind states, in its purest form.
Rigpa is our primordial Buddha Mind that is intrinsically perfect, permanently. Because it's permanent, it's always present. But it is not our experience, rather our experience is other coarser states of mind as content, which are appearing within the space of changeless rigpa awareness.
By practicing thogal, rigpa itself becomes its own self-experience. What is experienced is its own penetrating transparency, insightful clarity, wisdoms, and absence of a "me" egoic identity, as well as the absence of the sense of an "external" universe. Eventually the physical body will dissolve into pure Light as the practice comes to perfect fruition.
Thogal focuses on the visual apparatus. That means we use our eyes as our path.
Traditionally we use the sun by looking towards the sun in early morning and late afternoon. One does not look directly at the sun but slightly underneath it or off to the side, and with sun glasses on. I find using one eye at a time works best. One squints so that the ball of the sun is no longer visible but only a diffraction pattern of colored rays and a background tapestry of circles as though similar to looking at a peacock's feather. Within that diffraction pattern you can see little round spheres that may have little circular rings within them as well. At first they may just look like this but completely round: @
They get larger over time with consistent practice. They are called "thigles" in Tibetan. (Pronounced: teeglay)
One then begins to focus on one little sphere by not moving the eyes. You just gaze at it. So do just this much for several sessions. I recommend a safer and easy way to do thogal:
Use your iPhone or similar phone with only the black screen. Hold it down toward your waist, angle it so you can look down and see the reflection of the sun. Squint your eyes until the ball disappears into the light refraction and continue as described above. This allows practicing throughout the day, even at noon. But be sure to wear sun glasses. Between the UV absorption in the phone's black glass and your sun glasses, no harmful UV rays should be entering your eyes. It's only the UV rays that damage the eyes. I recommend 20 minute sessions. 10 minutes with each eye. Start with one session per day and add a session later in the day if desired. But practice everyday. The effects will last and are cumulative.
If sun is not available you can flip the phone around and use the flashlight feature as though looking at the sun, but no sunglasses are necessary. You can also use an ordinary light bulb.
There are specific recommended postures for during thogal practice but I have not found them necessary and Namkhai Norbu stated that once the practice is working the postures are no longer necessary. I have taught dozens of people this approach in my retreats and it works for everyone without exception.
Once you are a little familiar wth the inner landscape and can focus on these thigle spheres easily, then while looking at the spheres ask your self "who or what is doing the looking?". "Where exactly is the observer?" Is there a "someone" looking or is there just empty perception?".
Also from time to time notice the empty space between the thigle and the place from where you are observing. Notice that completely clear and transparent space. Sense that space behind you and all around you and through you.
Also notice your state of inner empty clarity, transparent and vividly awake; from time to time.
Pay less attention to the condition of the thigles than to your empty awareness that is looking.
After you finish, look closely at various textures and surfaces close up and notice the sharpness of detail. Sometimes you can actually feel the textures by sight alone. Vision will become amazingly clear along with a sense of transparency and absence of selfness. It's this transparency (zangthal) and absence of selfing that transforms the mind completely into its own vivid emptiness. There is nothing to think about or workout. The practice does it all automatically.
There are many more aspects to all of this. To learn more and for additional support please join our thogal group here at FB, Dzogchen Thogal.
I am posting this on the general Dzogchen group to encourage those interested to practice. There is currently lots of misinformation out there regarding thogal and I would like to keep this technology available in an easy and workable format that can bring infinite benefit to any competent practitioner that wants to learn.
There are several lineage authorized books on the open public market now that explain thogal in complete detail. Now the traditional lineage Lamas have allowed these thogal teachings to be propagated broadly for everyone's benefit also out of a fear that these precious teachings may disappear eventually.
I received the thogal transmission and practice instructions privately in 1985 through the Yeshe Lama text as presented to me by a Nyingma Lama who was taught by Dudjum Rinpoche. I later received the detailed Bon transmission of Shardze Rinpoche's text "Heart Drops of the Dharmakaya" trekchod and thogal instructions personally from the Bon Menri Lopon. Shardza Rinpoche attained the "rainbow body of light" in the 1930's. Neither of my teachers asked me to keep these teachings secret, nor have I pledged any samaya regarding not sharing any of the Dzogchen teachings with others.
Please share your successes and insights in our thogal group as well as your practice issues.
I recommend reading my book and gaining familiarity with all the practices in the appendix before commencing thogal practice: "The Natural Bliss of Being", as well as attending one of my thogal retreats.
I'm a hobby meditator who totally buys that something fire kasina-esque could happen really fast. A few days before the original Fatima post I was in the woods on a sunny day and decided to briefly focus my attention on a tree about 20 yards away. When I do this in a forest, I can really quickly, like within a few seconds, get this effect where its like I'm looking at one of those magic eye books. My whole field of vision becomes dramatically different, and things seem to be shifting around quite a bit.
During this particular event I clearly saw shafts of light on the tree trunk forming a cross. The cross was not there when viewing the tree pre-magic eye effect. I thought about how a religious person could easily take this as some sort of profound sign from God. But hey, maybe it was and I am unfairly dismissing the most important two minutes of my life.
I don't know if this is good Bayes, but it struck me while reading the original post - were you at all surprised to learn about Fatima? Because, when I read about it, I thought "That's a very interesting story, and I'm happy I've now heard of it."
Even before reading your decent explanations of many of its features, I felt no need to update my priors because, I think, my prior understanding of the natural, rules-based world included an allowance for really interesting stories that look kind of like supernatural events and haven't been fully explained even if some smart people tried really hard. I was aware of the likely fact that I hadn't heard about many of those, and Fatima is probably the best example of the above I've ever encountered, but I don't think I would be particularly surprised to be told about 10 more well-evidenced events with similarly bizarre characteristics, so long as they weren't consistent with *each other* or geographically or temporally linked.
My gut is telling me that that's okay, and that models for absurdly complex things like "the entire earth" should include a relatively small amount of fuzzy space where things that don't fit your understanding of smaller rules go, without challenging your overall model. I think that space has to be capable of being overwhelmed, by a surprising enough event or a sufficiently high number of them, but Fatima feels like it does not rise to that level. It is not explained, but it appears to be plausibly explainable - I would not be remotely surprised to check its wikipedia page in 10 years and learn that some physicist and psychologist had teamed up and conclusively explained everything in accordance with existing science.
How many times would I have to hear about a Fatima-level event - unexplained but plausibly explainable, well attested and dramatic - before I started updating my priors for the genuinely supernatural? I'm not really sure - the earth is big, there are a lot of humans, history is long, and our understanding of science is imperfect. Maybe 50-100? I'm curious if others have different intuitions for that number.
"[M]y prior understanding of the natural, rules-based world included an allowance for really interesting stories that look kind of like supernatural events and haven't been fully explained even if some smart people tried really hard"
I looked for the source of the following but couldn't quickly find it...nevertheless: I read something by I think either Martin Gardner or Douglas Hofstadter (so thinking of the SciAm column they both wrote at different times) about a James-Randi kind of skeptic who would do a presentation for school kids about magic and how it was all tricks, and not psi. He'd show a few things with explanations, and then conclude by showing a trick and NOT explaining it. His point was "I want you to experience knowing that something IS a trick even though you don't specifically know WHAT trick."
Whether it is meditative or not, I don't think Catholic prayer is close enough to fire kasini meditation for the comparison to be relevant to this discussion.
I appreciate the follow up, but I don't think you seriously addressed the major criticisms of your attempt at a naturalistic explanation from the original post. First, positing an "unknown optical illusion" is ad hoc and circular. "There must be some rare natural event to explain this rare natural event." If you assume metaphysical naturalism is true, then sure, but typically the Fatima miracle is used to destabilize that assumption.
Second, the brushing off of non-Catholic and distant witnesses as "contaminated" feels like cherry picking. Yes, priming is a real phenomenon, but I think you are taking it to the extreme to suggest that anybody who even heard of the children's premonition can be totally dismissed.
Third, and probably most problematic, is the attempt to square sungazing (sustained focus on the sun for several minutes) with what witnesses report at Fatima: near-immediate sensation that was so out of the ordinary that people screamed and fainted. That undercuts the idea of an optical illusion triggered by retinal fatigue.
So, I don't think you have provided a satisfying natural explanation and I think it still wide open that perhaps something beyond naturalism is here. Or at minimum, we simply don't know and it is ok to be uncomfortable with that.
So, one thing that I kept thinking in your original article was that every time you said "complexity penalty" I still didn't feel like it overcame the mother of all complexity penalties that is God. (see Yudkowski on Occam's Razor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor)
And with this, I think I have further thoughts. I think, with all the evidence presented, there is little to none that convinces me to attache God to this. Like, I'm still in the camp that there's probably a reasonable explanation that we haven't found (Pyramid and the Garden style https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/), but I'm way more willing to believe that this is a miracle than I am to believe God did it. I don't think these are the same.
I'm not a theologian, or anything else, so my knowledge is scant here. And maybe you know enough that this is obvious (or I missed it in my read through). But if this is God, then... what? Are we to believe that God spends His effort by providing corroboration to some kids about Hell 100 years ago by making the sun be weird, and then also does the same thing in a random place in Bosnia semi-regularly for no reason? *That*'s what He spends His days doing? Is there a God described in any religion that makes that feel right?
You have some question on God's motives with "Why would God do the same miracle 3 different ways?" but I think it kinda misses the bigger "Why would God do any of this?"
And you seem to throw the word "God" around next to "miracle" as if they're one in the same! If this was proven 100% to be unable to be natural phenomenon, what would you do? Convert to Catholicism? Even though you note that the kids' stories are only "a rounding error" in difficulty to explain? Apollo drives the sun and likes giving prophecies, are we sure it wasn't his doing?
If it was a miracle, what we'd know about God is that He can do some stuff with the Sun, and He sometimes tells people about it beforehand. Possibly the kids stories aren't just extra detail, informed by their own culture, so we might also know that God cares about people within news range of Fatima 108 years ago dressing immodestly, and a scattering of other things in other places, but by absence of regular miracles that the average person has seen, not too much else? This seems a very weird purview.
One guy in the comments in an open thread recently said he was disappointed both in the very existence of this kind of post, and the Joan of Arc review that took some miracles seriously, but to my mind this is proper science, sceptical but open minded. Testing the hypothesis. Deciding there is no conclusion if necessary.
The only other thing I can add is that I have definitely seen the sun as a pale disk in my time, generally behind some layer of high white clouds, and I get the impression that this is more likely when it’s cold. When it happens it’s mostly when there’s a “break” in the lower darker clouds (I’m no expert on cloud types) and the sun appears as a visible disk that can be started at behind some lighter clouds.
> Against this, what is the base rate for the sun changing color and dropping out of the sky, at the precise time that child-seers prophesied a miracle would occur? Seems lower than one in a million. Impossible things should never happen. Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on - or that I’m crazy, or dreaming, or something other than just “well it was a coincidence”.
I assume that you mean, of course, "What is the base rate of it looking like this happened to the people who went to observe it?", but this is still overstating the case quite a bit. The question isn't, "What is the base rate for this specific event occurring?", but, "What is the base rate for apparent miracles at least as convincing as this one occurring?" The latter is difficult to determine, but if you consider Fatima to be the most convincing miracle that has ever happened, we would need to establish that the expected base rate on naturalism is less than once in all of presently recorded history for Fatima to be good evidence for the supernatural. In fact, we would need to do more than that - we would need to argue that the observed rate of Fatima-like miracles (i.e., miracles at least as convincing as Fatima) is more expected on theism than on naturalism. But it's really hard to argue that the exact rate we observe is even expected on theism - the most obvious expectation is that we should see miracles all the time on theism (that's why the problem of divine hiddenness is a thing). Even if you want to factor out the problem of divine hiddenness from the discussion (though it's kind of hard to separate the question of how often we should expect to see miracles from the problem of divine hiddenness), it's not clear why theism would predict a rate of one Fatima-like miracle in all of currently recorded history, rather than some higher rate or a rate of exactly zero (the latter would occur if God *really* wants to stay hidden).
The Miracle of the Holy Fire that Melias showed videos of doesn't seem the least bit miraculous. In those videos, they are moving the candles. I do this all the time where I put my hand into a fire, and-as long as I keep moving my hand-I don't get burned. I can do this for a very long time, at least a few minutes though I think honestly indefinitely, and I've even done it with large fires like campfires (though this requires larger movements including turning my hand because it heats a larger area on my skin). If I stop moving, a candle will burn me in a second or two, but with the kinds of movements shown in these videos, it's entirely ordinary.
I think in your choice hierarchy you overweight extremely powerful beings being benevolent. Imagine for example we live in some kind of exclusion zone, maybe a nature preserve, policed by a more advanced civilization. But that civilization is made up of a large number of independent beings with free will. Some of them will probably be antisocial psychopaths who may delight in confusing humans and causing general chaos. If the zone is well policed, but not perfectly so, every once and a while they slip through and cause mischief by exploiting the local belief structure. Or who knows, perhaps these are distraction campaigns of similar provenance to cover for extraction of resources that we don't realize are there, like poaching.
I don't think this is the most likely explanation. But I don't think it's implausible either.
Adding to the experiences of people who looked at the sun:
I was recently in Tucson, and while on a walk close to sunset (maybe 5 or 5:30 PM?) I looked at the sun as it approached the horizon in a clear blue sky. After an adjustment period of some seconds, I was able to see the well-defined disc of the sun. It appeared as pink tinted, with a corona-like border (as in an eclipse) that was more whitish in color and that was somewhat larger/expansive on around the disc's upper hemisphere. The "corona" appeared in places tangential to the disc in a way that could plausibly be interpreted as appearing "flung off" the sun as from angular momentum, but the sun appeared static/fixed to me; it looked more like a drawing of a disc with a Catherine-Wheel-type border than one in motion. My view of the sun did vibrate a bit; I felt this movement physically in my eyes and attribute it to the twitching of my eyes. Looking away, I noticed a hazy yellowish “after-glow,” significantly larger than the size the actual disc of the sun took up in my visual field while staring. This appeared curiously static, in that it didn't perfectly trace the movement of my eyes across the landscape; I rather felt that I could "look at it." (This as distinct from the after-image of the sun that I also experienced, which I saw as a sun-sized “dot” in my visual field that tracked with the movement of my eyes). Aside from this, I did not have the experience of colors tinting my overall visual field. However, in looking at the purse that my companion was carrying, I had the odd experience of seeing the colors in that purse's pattern "jumping around." The bright yellow aspect of the pattern, especially, was hard to resolve. My vision returned to normal within a few minutes.
I have not had my eyes checked in some years, but I have good vision (In high school I had excellent 20/10 vision which has gotten a bit worse, but is still good, maybe 20/20?). My eyes are pale blue. I have no real experience in meditation generally or with fire kasina practice specifically (though the night before looking at the sun, having read the original SSC post and follow-up comments highlights post, my companion and I did look into a candleflame to see if we noticed anything interestingly kasina-like; we each saw/described the same sort of afterimages appear in the dark of our closed eyes, but neither of us had a particularly interesting or novel visual experience).
I have lived/worked outside quite a bit as a guide, and also with various land agencies, and I have seen a lot of cool sun stuff before, including a total solar eclipse, the defined disc of the sun seen through wildfire smoke (many times –I used to work as a wildlands firefighter), the clearly defined silvery disc of the sun through clouds (also many times before, including a recent occasion where I pointed out the same to my wife, who was with me and also noted it), and once I even saw a partial solar eclipse tinted nearly blood red through wildfire smoke. I have vague memories of laying in grass and staring at the sun as a child, though no specific remembrances of what I noticed/saw at the time.
I wonder if some people’s eyes are better-suited to looking at the sun without terribly ill-effect? I suppose this must be true to some degree.
Really just seems like a rare atmospheric phenomenon that's warping lots of people's view of what the sun usually looks like.
The interview you conducted around the Medjugorje sun-spinning sighting immediately locked in for me that he was experiencing a similar, ultra-rare atmospheric ripple/bubble that does some pretty wild warping of sunlight.
Scott - my respect for you has sky-rocketed with your Fatima articles (and it was darn high before!). That is some impressive dedication to seeking the truth you are showcasing here.
Re: colorful afterimages of the sun: I didn't submit any testimony on your original article because seeing blue-ish splotches on the sun after a few seconds of staring has got to be ubiquitous ... right? My own experience with this is looking at the setting sun (not for spiritual or ~stupid~ scientific reasons, but simply because it's beautiful), and always getting really annoyed with those darn afterimages ruining the view! It's just what happens when you look at a bright light source, no way anybody's surprised by that and thinks it's a miracle (so I thought; to be fair, depending on how literally the other testimonies are to be read, my experience might well be at the "boring" end of the spectrum).
This is my concern: The more common weird afterimages/borderline hallucinations are when looking at the sun, the more mysterious it gets that it would be blown way out of proportion and touted as a miracle in this way. Surely some school kid would've said, "wait, you guys don't know your eyes do this when you stare at the sun?"
On the other hand, this now seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. If it's a never-seen-before visual phenomenon, bam, clear-cut miracle; if there's an extremely common, well-known phenomenon that might fit the description -- well, it can't be that, otherwise 70 000 people would never have thought it worth fawning over.
Is there a sweet spot where a phenomenon is common enough to not be unheard of, but rare enough that in 70 000 people only a negligible handful would have first-hand familiarity with it? It seems like fire kasina is as close to this as you can get, but that in turn raises the question of how several thousand untrained people simultaneously and accidentally achieved master-level meditation results. "Heads I win, tails you lose, edge my bank account gets the money."
A second, unrelated point that's been confusing me: all the articles recapping the miracle say, "a miracle was announced to occur at Fatima on that day and time...", but never add, "... it was supposed to involve the sun in some way!" Yet all articles (skeptical and believing) seem to assume that everyone was staring at the sun already, as if that had been part of the expectation.
Am I missing something? *Was* the sun/sky part of the prophecies? Why were people already looking up?
I think that perhaps you misunderstood the point I was making.
My point wasn't that the occurrence of apparent miracles might be in line with the background rate and that we should therefore dismiss miracles as mere coincidences. Rather, when considering to what extent an apparent miracle is evidence (in the Bayesian sense) for a theistic hypothesis, we need to consider the ratio of the probability of an apparent miracle (in general) given that hypothesis to the probability given the negation. Although initially, it might seem intuitive that some specific miracle is much more likely given theism, this intuition relies on thinking that apparent miracles in general are much more likely given theism, rather than the specific sort of miracle we are considering. But it is unclear that apparent miracles in general are significantly more likely given theism than atheism, because there are so many things that would count as an apparent miracle (where _apparent miracle_ is, roughly, something extraordinary -- both uncommon and impressive to humans -- that happens in a religious context).
I don't think that anything in my reasoning suggests that we must simply dismiss apparent miracles as mere coincidences.
When considering whether apparent miracles are evidence for a theistic hypothesis, what is relevant are quite general features of the event (like the fact that it occurred in some religious context), but if we are merely considering possible explanations for some specific apparent miracle, we can consider specific features that are not especially predicted by the theistic hypothesis. When considering the Miracle of the Sun, it makes sense to offer the explanation of an optical illusion that occurs when looking at the Sun in certain contexts -- unlike religious hypotheses, this would predict the specific data, and so does not suffer from the same fallacy that the defenders of miracles are relying on. When considering apparent miracles insofar as they are supposedly evidence for theism, the background rate of apparent miracles is relevant, but when simply considering them as unusual events that might have some explanation, the background rate of apparent miracles is irrelevant (although the background rate of the specific apparent miracle will be relevant).
It seems that your interpretation of what I said was more along the lines of a simple publication bias. Incidentally, I do think that some presentations of miracles probably rely on that (like in the case of some supposed Eucharistic miracles where the relevant data could be explained by false positives); but that is a separate point from the one I was making, and I don't think that that point alone would be enough to dismiss arguments from miracles in general.
> I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Oh so that's what it's called. For the record, I've accidentally immediately became an expert in it from looking at streetlights when walking home and coming down from smoking a little weed a couple of hours earlier. I could reproduce it at will since then using any bright light afterimage, though not in very spectacular detail, just keeping the afterimage alive and evolving into new shapes (and tbh I was a bit nervous about experimenting with it more). I suspect that quite a lot of people can accidentally do that, you just need undivided attention on the afterimage.
I've seen various warnings about looking at the sun that point out that the sun emits a wide range of wavelengths, and just because the visible light is dimmed by e.g. cloud cover doesn't mean that invisible UV isn't still coming through and potentially causing eye damage.
It seems possible to me that there could be situations with just enough clouds for the sun to be comfortably visible, but still letting through other wavelengths strongly enough to trigger entoptic phenomena. The human eye is weakly sensitive to IR and UV*, and of course the mechanism could involve direct physical effects rather than vision per se. If there isn't enough visible light to trigger the iris to contract, you could conceivably end up with more invisible light coming in than you would get from looking at the sun on a clear day.
MPI in one paragraph (why psi can be real but not a “force”)
Walter von Lucadou’s Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI) treats alleged psi not as new energies but as non-causal correlations that can emerge inside a temporarily “closed” meaning-system—a tight network of people, expectations, symbols, and feedback. When that system becomes emotionally coherent and self-referential, you can get improbable alignments (in perceptions and sometimes devices) without any usable signal being sent. Try to harness it as a signal and it collapses—the Non-Transmission axiom. This also predicts familiar meta-patterns in the literature: strong first effects that decline on repetition, effects that “displace” to unmonitored variables, and only post-hoc detectability (no practical messaging).
Is there any empirical support? (short, honest version)
MPI doesn’t predict big lab miracles; it predicts small statistical structure that appears when meaning is high and control is low. That’s roughly what several lines of work have reported:
• Correlation-Matrix Method (Lucadou; Freiburg): when participants interacted with random systems while many psychological/physical variables were logged, experimental sessions showed an excess of significant cross-correlations vs. controls (replicated in independent labs, small effects but unlikely by chance).
• Field REG / Global Consciousness Project (PEAR and successors): portable RNGs at coherent group events (rituals, concerts, collective vigils) and global networks during shared emotional moments show tiny departures from randomness aggregated over long runs.
• Modern dual-RNG studies: independent random streams sometimes become slightly more correlated during group meditation/ritual peaks.
All of these are acausal, non-informational anomalies (you can’t use them to send a message) and they wane under tight instrumentalization—which is exactly MPI’s constraint. Skeptics fairly note the effects are small and interpretation is debated; MPI’s point is that if psi exists at all, this is what it should look like.
MPI’s take on Fatima
If you want a framework that keeps both the sincerity of witnesses and the limits of physics intact, MPI gives one. It says Fatima looks like a short-lived meaning field: thousands of believers focused on one promise (“a sign in the sky”), producing a brief, emotionally saturated closure in which the crowd’s perceptions (and possibly local physical noise) aligned in improbable ways—reports of sun distortions, motions, dazzling colors—without violating optics or energy conservation, and crucially without yielding a repeatable, usable signal. Once the event was institutionalized and opened to analysis, the closure dissolved, which is why nothing quite like it repeats on demand.
So MPI doesn’t declare “the miracle happened” or “mass hysteria.” It says a real, collective correlation occurred inside a unique psycho-cultural system—and its very uniqueness is what the model predicts. The moment you ask for another Fatima next Sunday at 3 p.m., the firefly goes dark.
Scott - you might check out Lucadou MPI take on Fatima (from Chat):
MPI in one paragraph (why psi can be real but not a “force”)
Walter von Lucadou’s Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI) treats alleged psi not as new energies but as non-causal correlations that can emerge inside a temporarily “closed” meaning-system—a tight network of people, expectations, symbols, and feedback. When that system becomes emotionally coherent and self-referential, you can get improbable alignments (in perceptions and sometimes devices) without any usable signal being sent. Try to harness it as a signal and it collapses—the Non-Transmission axiom. This also predicts familiar meta-patterns in the literature: strong first effects that decline on repetition, effects that “displace” to unmonitored variables, and only post-hoc detectability (no practical messaging).
Is there any empirical support? (short, honest version)
MPI doesn’t predict big lab miracles; it predicts small statistical structure that appears when meaning is high and control is low. That’s roughly what several lines of work have reported:
• Correlation-Matrix Method (Lucadou; Freiburg): when participants interacted with random systems while many psychological/physical variables were logged, experimental sessions showed an excess of significant cross-correlations vs. controls (replicated in independent labs, small effects but unlikely by chance).
• Field REG / Global Consciousness Project (PEAR and successors): portable RNGs at coherent group events (rituals, concerts, collective vigils) and global networks during shared emotional moments show tiny departures from randomness aggregated over long runs.
• Modern dual-RNG studies: independent random streams sometimes become slightly more correlated during group meditation/ritual peaks.
All of these are acausal, non-informational anomalies (you can’t use them to send a message) and they wane under tight instrumentalization—which is exactly MPI’s constraint. Skeptics fairly note the effects are small and interpretation is debated; MPI’s point is that if psi exists at all, this is what it should look like.
MPI’s take on Fatima
If you want a framework that keeps both the sincerity of witnesses and the limits of physics intact, MPI gives one. It says Fatima looks like a short-lived meaning field: thousands of believers focused on one promise (“a sign in the sky”), producing a brief, emotionally saturated closure in which the crowd’s perceptions (and possibly local physical noise) aligned in improbable ways—reports of sun distortions, motions, dazzling colors—without violating optics or energy conservation, and crucially without yielding a repeatable, usable signal. Once the event was institutionalized and opened to analysis, the closure dissolved, which is why nothing quite like it repeats on demand.
So MPI doesn’t declare “the miracle happened” or “mass hysteria.” It says a real, collective correlation occurred inside a unique psycho-cultural system—and its very uniqueness is what the model predicts. The moment you ask for another Fatima next Sunday at 3 p.m., the firefly goes dark.
It’s surprising to me that seemingly no one has yet brought up the similarity to ball lightning. The characteristics seem quite similar in a lot of ways.
Of course, if it’s even real, it’s an extremely rare event that would be quite remarkable to happen on cue, but the overall nature of the phenomenon seems to line up pretty well.
Several religious rituals involve participants who appear insensitive to pain. I remember, during Muharram in India, people claiming that an old woman could drink boiling water without pain, and some children showing impressive body marks while saying it was easy, behaviors I would never have expected from children who would normally faint. Researchers point to trance states, endorphins, and collective pressure. Such altered states could partly explain why some witnesses at Fatima reported looking at the sun without feeling pain.
And even I am among those who believe that, under certain cloud conditions, one can look directly at the sun and see a defined disk.
Scientific examples of reduced perceived pain through group effects or through the belief that one is suffering for a good cause can be found in Laurent Bègue, Psychologie du bien et du mal, pp. 85–86, 2011.
Once again, thank you for a fair and even-handed treatment of this.
"I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad."
Hoo-boy, Crazy (And Heretical) Mariology could be an entire post of its own. When Catholics go nuts, it tends to be in the "mystical visions and revelations" side (rather than things like the Satanic Panic of Evangelical American Protestants). One of the objections to Lourdes (I am recalling off the top of my head) was that there had been previous, small-scale, similar alleged apparitions which must have primed St. Bernadette to see something similar.
Medjugorje itself is *very* controversial; apart from the turf war between the local Franciscans (who backed the visionaries) and the local bishop (who very much did not), it's highly unusual, to say the least, for apparitions to take place over so long a period. The Vatican has currently split the difference by saying "yes you can go there on pilgrimage, no we're not saying anything supernatural happened there".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medjugorje#The_Medjugorje_pilgrimage_site
As for other accepted but minor Marian apparitions, there's one in Ireland: Our Lady of Knock:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_Shrine
No apocalyptic predictions, it only lasted one evening, and while it's a pilgrimage site it's nowhere on the same level as Lourdes or Fatima. It's unusual too in that it was a silent apparition - no messages, no speaking to those who saw it.
That too has been the subject of attempted debunking, with one claim that the entire thing was a magic lantern show (possibly hoaxed up by the parish priest). On the other hand, if you've ever been to Knock (and I got dragged there on pilgrimage during the 80s by my mother), it rains. A lot. Good luck trying to keep a magic lantern alight, in the evening/night, during rain and wind, while you remain hidden enough to secretly project images on the wall of the church in the hopes someone will be passing along and see them:
https://curator.ie/knock-apparition-or-slide-show/
https://www.shrineknock.com/knockmagiclant.html
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/an-apparition-or-a-magic-lantern-what-happened-at-knock-140-years-ago-1.3992756
(That's one of the times the explanation for a miracle makes less sense than the miracle itself, like my personal and long-standing favourite, Ice Floe Jesus for the walking on water).
Human physicist: the Mie scattering point is correct. It does indeed skew forward. Generally, scattering phenomena in the atmosphere are very complicated, especially in mesoscopic regimes (Object size many, but not TOO may wavelengths) where the very large and very small approximations break down.
See Fig 5.46 at (this random textbook chapter) https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128053577/basic-optics
Astrophysicist, agreed. The argument being made is that while Ethan is correct that there are many scatterings in the cloud, those scatterings won't go in a random direction but will preferentially have the light go out in the same direction that it came in. As a result, you'll have a somewhat resolved, disk-like Sun produced by lots of scattered photons that just didn't change direction much.
Relatedly, I have also regularly seen the disk Sun through clouds, although I never stared at it much. I associate those observations most with Utah in the winter, when presumably the clouds are somewhat icy and the particles are somewhat large.
The problem is that either it wont attenuate by enough to get below the threshold for discomfort OR it will blur/obscure the disc. I dont deny that you can get a “somewhat resolved, disc-like Sun” through clouds with optical depth less than 4-5. Look up nimbostratus and you’ll see what kind of clouds you need to attenuate by 10^6 cd/m2
Didnt Scott explain this though? You are correct that if you assume a simple Beer’s law attenuation, e^-α, of the light, then the reduction factor you state has α=14. But, according to the testimonies of a bunch of people above, they are able to stare at the sun with markedly less cloud cover than this implies. Thus, the details of the atmospheric scattering are not so important, instead the assumption that you REQUIRE α=14 appears to be contradicted by testimony. Something’s wrong with this estimate.
Edit: Ah, sorry one other thing. The point about Mie scattering was that the scattering also does not have to destroy the coherence of the light in the Mie regime, allowing you to preserve the sharp disk while also attenuating the absolute brightness.
I doubt the veracity of the testimony. I think you can get this effect when Sun is near the horizon + thin clouds or fog, and I dont expect people to be good at remembering the details of solar elevation + they seem to be primed and strongly motivated to commit a memory error.
Idk, that seems like it undermines your broader point that relies entirely on testimony being reliable. But would you agree that if I have dominantly single scattering events only, then i can attenuate the light as much as I want, and the sharpness of the image is completely unchanged? This is what the Mie regime point is about.
But my point doesnt “rely entirely” on testimony being reliable - I dont know how anyone who read my posts could say that. And not all testimony is created equal - there are ways to discriminate between reliable/unreliable testimony (e.g, multiple attestation to a specific event, statement against interest/bias, coarse detail rather than fine detail, temporally proximate to event, etc…) You have to overturn much more credible testimony than specific details reported about unspecific recollections in Scott’s discord polls to reject the miracle, so it is weird that you put so much stock in this kind of anecdote.
Physically realistic scattering from clouds with optical depths >9 will inevitably disturb (probably extinguish) the solar disc… perfect forward scattering is not realistic and is what you need for the multiple scattering not to blur/smear the light… of course, it is strongly forward - but that isnt what you need.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/150ox56/fog_this_morning_was_so_dense_that_the_sunspots/
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i8dl0n/no_glare_photo_of_the_sun/
Not my photos so no guarantees on non-manipulation, but count me as another unreliable witness who saw this exact phenomenon several times in my life.
you distinctly remember seeing the Sun near its zenith as a pale, moonlike disc that was painless to stare at without squinting?
photos are totally believable - but no glare in iphone camera doesn't mean no glare in the naked eye (the discomfort glare is driven by scattering within the human eye - with the right filters, you can take a no glare photo of the sun in a clear sky)
I think this insistence really weakens your case. I myself have seen this phenomenon a dozen times or more, primarily in the high mountain West in winter.
what time of day? winter helps because sun is lower. and what is it that you have seen? pale, moonlike disc that is perfectly comfortable to stare at?
Interesting that you mention Utah - I must've seen this a dozen times a year when I was working as a ski bum out in Colorado, enough that I distinctly noted it as a cool phenomenon in its own right.
It's *more* obvious if the sun is low in the sky and right in front of you on the horizon, *easier* if you're wearing polarized goggles, etc. But it's also something that very definitely occasionally is visible to the naked eye at ~2pm!
I think Utah is a bit farther south than Portugal - do you remember what month it would be? Maybe October in Portugal and February in Utah are similar midday elevation of the sun.
Another physicist:
I'm pretty sure that this case is a simple matter of a good fraction of the light getting scattered zero times, which explains the sharp boundary instead of getting convolved with something.
I vaguely remember sometimes seeing a slightly brighter splotch in the clouds where the sun is when it was too overcast to see the sun as a disk with a distinct outline, this is probably what the forward bias in scattering looks like.
Is your point that if it were explained by forward scattering, then that would noticeably blur/distort the disc?
Can you weigh in on my point about the tradeoff between attenuation and optical depth. If I am right that the optical depth has to be 11-14 to get the attenuation you need, I feel like the debate is over.
I feel like e^11 is a lot. Attenuating by enough for the unscattered light to be maybe 1x the brightness of the clouds would be enough. Which would by definition not hurt since looking at the clouds doesn't hurt and so 2x the clouds shouldn't hurt either.
Optical depth would be something around ln(angular area of sun) or something like that. I also live on the east coast and like looking at clouds, so I see this effect every couple of days...
I also live on the East Coast. There is zero chance that you see the midday Sun as pale, moonlike disc that is painless to gaze at “every couple of days”
Also, that isnt how optical depth/cloud attenuation works. See my NASA reference in my original post.
Reading your original post more closely I think you are making a unit error.
The point is that the sun is big enough that you can see it as a visible disk. Therefore, the correct measure to use is brightness. An object that takes a larger visual area with the same cd/m^2 would be easier to look at. (Otherwise your calculation would say that a white piece of paper that occupies the same visual area as the sun would be too bright to look at [sun is ~1e-2 radians, so going by your numbers a square piece of paper 1m away of sun size would get 1e-4*1e9 = 1e5 cd, going into a 2 pi m^2 area gives a bit over 1e4 cd/m^2])
But yes, this is somewhere around 1e3-1e5 attenuation by the clouds, which would mean that that the cloud would look pretty opaque but the sun is bright and that's how much is needed to bring the sun down to the same order of magnitude as the surrounding clouds.
What is the unit error? Luminance is brightness per area per unit solid angle. That is directly related to perceived brightness/comfortable viewing.
Your paper calculation mixes up quantities. You first convert luminance (cd/m²) to luminous intensity (cd) by multiplying by area; that’s irrelevant to visual comfort, which depends on luminance. Then you “spread” that intensity over a hemisphere and write 2π m², conflating solid angle (steradians) with area. That’s a dimensional error. Luminance concerns radiance per solid angle in the viewing direction; hemispheric averaging can’t be used to recover a meaningful cd/m² for what the eye sees.
I think you are right that the optical depth must be in a 11-14 sweet spot
Below is a PRBT4 simulation file of a spherical "sun" and scattering layer of optical depth=10, SSA=0.9, g=.877 that nevertheless produces a crisp disk. (it's a little more absorptive and thin than I'd prefer, but more scattering == more compute so have mercy)
The key point is that at these optical depths, the "blur filter" is maxed out and the whole cloud is lit. At which point the contrast is between the ambient brightness of the cloud and the directly-transmitted, zero-scattering, lottery-winner rays.
Similarly, if you use a point-source you will never get a "halo" on the other side of the cloud in these conditions. Scattered light gets completely distributed
Make the cloud thinner and then you can get a halo, but then the sun would be too bright
https://imgur.com/a/tOTfavj
https://imgur.com/m1qdIZb (thin cloud (optical depth=2) halo)
```
Integrator "volpath" "integer maxdepth" [10000]
Sampler "sobol" "integer pixelsamples" [131072]
Film "rgb"
"integer xresolution" [64]
"integer yresolution" [64]
"string filename" "sun_disk.exr"
#Reverse X axis.
Scale -1 1 1
LookAt
#Eye
0.0 900.0 0.0
#Target
0.0 100.0 0.0
#Up vector
1.0 0.0 0.0
# Actual sun in 0.5 degrees, but I don't want the numbers to be too extreme
Camera "perspective" "float fov" 5
WorldBegin
# The sun as a spherical light source
AttributeBegin
AreaLightSource "diffuse" "rgb L" [ 100000 100000 100000 ]
Translate 0 -1000 0
Shape "sphere" "float radius" [50]
AttributeEnd
AttributeBegin
AttributeBegin
MakeNamedMedium "cloud1" "string type" "homogeneous"
# Scattering albedo ~0.9
"spectrum sigma_a" [200 0.1 900 0.1]
"spectrum sigma_s" [200 0.9 900 0.9]
# Anisotropy parameter
"float g" [0.877]
AttributeEnd
# Cloud top boundary
AttributeBegin
Rotate 90 1 0 0
Material "interface"
MediumInterface "" "cloud1"
Shape "disk" "float radius" [1500]
AttributeEnd
# Cloud bottom boundary
AttributeBegin
Translate 0 -10 0
Rotate 90 1 0 0
Material "interface"
MediumInterface "cloud1" ""
Shape "disk" "float radius" [1500]
AttributeEnd
AttributeEnd
```
This is awesome, thanks for this.
Also, point of clarification - do you agree the sun would look like a diffuse bright patch to a human observer in your optical depth 10 simulation?
Solar eclipse glasses are advertised on multiple sites as having an OD of 5+.
Also I've noticed that the experience of discomfort from glare (at least when emerging from a dark cinema) can like that from cold be readily suppressed.
I'm wondering if the discrepancy from 5+ to 11-14 is a log base ambiguity. OD is defined as a base-10 quantity, but converting to natural log would bump 5 to 11.5.
Having read further in the responses, I see that you are talking about the OD in the clouds required to reduce intensity by 10^5 when looking at an angle through them. Fair enough, but it seems more likely to be ice crystals than droplets and orientation effects can complicate the angular dependence.
Another consideration is the dynamic range of the cones. If this is exceeded by the intensity of the aureole near the solar disk then the observer could perceive a fake but very sharp limb at the boundary of the cone-saturating region (at least according to Claude). The "sun" would look sharp but have a larger angular extent
Nope, got my angular thickness effect the wrong way round. The most you need is OD 5 at normal transmission through a layer. For oblique you need less - we all agree the effects of scattering are stronger closer to the horizon.
Yes, optical density of 5 is an attenuation factor of 10^5 (which is an OOM below my 'tolerance ceiling' of 10^6). Attenuation factor of 10^5 corresponds to a slant optical depth of 11.5. It seems that, due to individual variability, the minimum attenuation for individuals with high tolerance to comfortably fixate is closer to 10^4 than to 10^6. However, 10^6 is good estimate for the minimum attenuation for everybody in a large crowd to comfortably fixate (and 10^5 is a good estimate for minimum attenuation for the average member of the crowd to comfortably fixate).
Sighting report: 0753am, Fri 31 Oct, in Brisbane QLD.
I've seen the Sun as a perfect disk through a cloud. Was able to look at it just fine, naked eye, no pain, for over 20 seconds.
So now I can confidently declare any models and calculations showing the impossibiltiy of this "full of shit".
You wouldnt happen to have a picture? I know cameras != eyes but i would still love to see it and see if i can tell whats going on
Alas, no photos, wish I had taken one.
As I was driving to work this morning I looked up and saw it too! A perfect solar disk, hard edges, through a break in dense cloud cover, was able to stare at it for 30 seconds with no trouble at all! About 8 AM, near San Jose CA. By the time I’d gotten my phone out it had become a little more occluded by the clouds, but I got a (kinda bad) picture!
https://share.icloud.com/photos/02cFUP_et7ZzUG2XMUsHyh6hg
Thanks for checking out our poll from ACX Discord.
For people unfamiliar with Discord, I think it would help to clarify that it's a different server (not channel) from the one you featured in the last post, with different people voting.
There's also an invite link: https://discord.gg/6nHJ4u4ByT
> Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on.
I don't agree. Surely the chance of you blacking out briefly, and someone taking your pen; or simply you personally hallucinating (I know you're not entirely convinced of mass hallucination as a phenomenon, but you certainly do believe in single-person hallucination) is larger than the probability of a miracle.
I admit the Pope blowing up mountains needs some explanation and is worth thinking about, although I still wouldn't want to leap to divinely-inspired miralcle, even then.
But what if "tangible evidence" is available afterwards? I once ended up with a case-hardened steel file that was bent at the tip of the tang. I can't, however, guarantee that the bend hadn't been there previously...but I've never seen one before or since. (I got this while investigating a "spoon bender" friend, who on being presented with the evidence quit the activity. [Rumors had said that sometimes other things would bend in the presence of the "spoon bender" activity...so I went looking.]) I ended up convinced that the friend was a fake, but unable to explain the bent file.
So does anyone know of case-hardened steel files that are manufactured with a bend at the tip of the tang? (It might be done to enable a handle to be molded around the tang, so I can invent a good reason...I've just never seen another.)
I'm not an expert on file manufacturing specifically. But from a little research it appears they undergo multiple hardening and tempering processes, some of which involve quenching by dipping, presumably by the tang. It seems possible that the tang is not subject to the full hardening process. Indeed a very hard tang doesn't seem desirable, being prone to breakage, so it might intentionally be preserved in an annealed state.
If a file is e.g. stepped on while resting against the tang, it seems like the overall stiffness would place a large bending moment towards the tip. If the tip is less hard than the rest of the file, a bend there would not be surprising.
Well, it didn't *look* different and it didn't feel different. And it was about 1/8 inch thick, so it would need a lot more force than that to bend it. But if hardened steel looks exactly the same as unhardened steel, that would be a possible explanation, but one that was quite unsatisfactory. It would be much more satisfactory if someone could point to files that were made that way.
Normally hardened files are more likely to break than to bend. And I believe that the hardening process changes the color of the metal.
This prompted me to inspect one of my files with a removable handle, and in fact a distinctive color change is evident partway up the tang. See here:
https://imgur.com/jWt0qr0
I can accept that your file had that color change. The one I'm referring to did not.
Noted, and I'm not trying to extrapolate to all files. But it is supporting evidence for the theory!
Also, the word miracle comes with extra religious baggage. If the pen disappears, it suggests that some unexplained phenomenon is happening, but that may not have anything at all to do with religious miracles, prophets, and whatnot.
Lately, I've mostly jokingly been considering all the little unexplained phenomena signs of glitches in the matrix. Maybe the Fatima people just accidentally triggered the deep fire kasina meditation code loop? Maybe it's just a little perceptual bug that is hard to reproduce consistently. That seems at least as likely as a random religious miracle.
Yeah the sentence itself asserts more objectivity than it had. If it's a real phenomenon, there's always a score of unlikely things that together may result in the same thing, and while all of those independently occuring makes astronomical chance, it never drops down to zero.
Assorted thoughts and musings on how I find myself relating to this miracle report:
1. From my memory of the description many of the people (especially the children) had been meditating together in some sense for many days or weeks straight. With the large crowd and the spiritual atmosphere it's easy to imagine many people there in quite an altered state, which makes the fire kasina angle seem more likely to me personally.
2. I'm sympathetic to something like "indirect realism" as a metaphysical position. That is, we each live inside a personal simulation built by our nervous system/ brain, which is usually strongly coupled to external reality but not always (better explanation with pictures here: https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/cartoon-epistemology-by-steven-lehar-2003).
A way to get an intuition for this perspective I find helpful is the look at the sky and imagine it being such that "Behind the sky is my skull". When I do this there's a shift, and a sense that everything I have direct access to is inside my simulation and "me" in some sense. This way of seein is particularly palpable with things like fire kasina.
I find indirect realism a useful frame for understanding both fire kasina and miracles like this where reality itself seems to change in ways that physics does not allow for.
3. The notion that they were all meditating / in an altered state and the indirect realism frame fails to explain the shared aspect though (and utterly fails re the reports of nearby villages experiencing the miracle, or random lawyers showing up to witness. I imagine they were not pseudo meditating for days?).
I remember Dr Ingram on a podcast mentioning that while on retreat (in a castle if I remember correctly) he drew a neon orange shape in the air with his finger (having meditated enough such that this was as real to him as anything) and his friend absently remarked on the orange colour (and maybe the shape also? I don't recall) without having been told by Daniel at all.
Embarrassingly through other tidbits I've picked up and some personal experiences I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of cross emination happening on what some people might call a "group field" or "telepathy". I have no good models or justification for this and acknowledge it sounds crazy if you're not already sympathetic to such things being possible.
I guess the way I interpret the miracle is "a fire-kasina-like experience that spread via the vibe".
4. Lastly, I was struck by people saying things like "I didn't see it, but just being there (just being exposed to the vibe) was enough for me to believe".
This resonates for me with a sense of what I understand miracles to be "about". That is "coming into direct contact with the mysterium tremendum, updating some hyper prior related to reality being more deeply subject to our preconceptions / shared preconceptions than we thought".
"Encountering the unexpected power to shared belief to deeply alter how we experience the world"?
"An unexpected update that something very different is possible" maybe.
If something as stable as "my experience of the sun" can alter so drastically on account of prayer and belief (and not just for me but everyone around me) then maybe "I can't possibly love my intolerable neighbour / forgive my ex / accept that my son died and it's ruining my life" could also change.
This sort of shifts the perspective on miracles from "God did something that defies physics thus he must be real" to "When we congregate and pray in earnest we can common knowledge a direct experience of an enchanted world where the impossible becomes possible" (the kingdom of heaven).
Indirect realism and miraculous vibes are not how many (most?) believers understand miracles, but they're currently the lenses that come up for me :)
+1 for qri and indirect realism. You can experience some very interesting and somewhat fun mental states while thinking about "behind the sky is my skull" while on psychedelics. Especially in a hammock on a beautiful day 😏
just... make sure going into it that you have a strong grasp on epistemology, and have a deep understanding why indirect realism doesn't mean there is no reality outside your mind, and why even if solipsism is true you should be a good person. Idk, to me it was fun and interesting, but after writing it I realized it could easily send someone in a bad direction. Be careful before taking psychedelics
This is a cool idea, but I suspect it’s applying a very intense-Buddhist-insight-meditation frame to a religion that contains very little like that. Catholicism is really not very mystical for the vast majority of adherents, certainly for Gilded Age peasants, and it’s violently opposed to insights like “behind the sky is my skull.”
My grandpa used to say the moon looks like Stalin. He had been a teenager in Eastern Europe during the postwar Soviet occupation.
Yes it’s entirely possible to see the sun through cloud at a comfortable light level and still see a clear disk. I’ve seen this multiple times (indeed on one occasion I saw an unusually large sun-spot group, and verified this by looking at online images from a solar telescope that day). Now this does depend on the cloud — so presumably on the size of the water droplets.
the sun was near its zenith? you didnt experience any discomfort glare at all? you didnt squint?
If I recall the elevation was about 30 degrees, and, yes, there was no discomfort or glare, owing to the attenuation by cloud (such conditions are rare, and again this is presumably to do with droplet size, but they do occur.
Droplet size is just an input to optical depth. I have yet to see someone address the paradox of depth - you wont get the attenuation you need without an optical depth that would disturb the disc (and I found a mathematician that made same argument as me in context of Fatima).
It’s not just optical depth. For starters, as the above GPT-5 quote suggests, droplet size affects whether it is in the Rayleigh scattering regime or the Mie scattering regime. And if we were talking about high-altitude ice crystals then their shape (as well as size) becomes relevant.
optical depth results from the scattering regime and is the parameter of interest for this discussion
The scattering angle also matters, whether it is isotropic, or forward scattered, or whatever (and if we’re considering ice crystals, that might have non-spherical shapes, it’s not straightforward).
I've also seen this. There is someone who took a photo of the sun through fog (saying that they could see sun spots with the naked eye) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/naYged4a7M This photo reflects well what I remember seeing: that the clouds look almost like black smoke in front of the sun and that you can see movement in the clouds.
Now, the picture is through fog, not clouds, which might change the physics, but I'm not really sure why it would.
I associate this phenomenon with a relatively low sun though, as in winter time.
The attenuation from fog is more absorptive than the attenuation from clouds (scattering dominated), which is why the effect is way more common from fog. But you can sometimes get the effect with clouds, but only when the sun is low on the horizon.
Seconded. I grew up in an area with heavy fog in the winter and I would regularly be able to painlessly see the disc of the Sun when the fog had burned off the right amount. Well maybe not *regularly* but I definitely have clear childhood memories of being able to look at it and forcing myself not to because I thought it was harmful.
Strongly agreed. I’ve seen it myself during the one time I bother to occasionally stare at the sun, solar eclipses. (Though in those cases it’s a crescent and not a disk.)
In fact, I can do you one better and provide pictures: https://www.kronopath.com/blog/total-eclipses-are-cosmic-horror/
That blog post of mine contains images from two partial solar eclipses obscured by clouds: the 2017 eclipse in the SF Bay Area, and the 2024 eclipse in the suburbs of Dallas. Both show very sharp, clear crescents and were possible to look at with the naked eye without much discomfort.
I won’t claim that they were constantly like this: these were moments in time when the cloud cover was thick enough to obscure a damaging amount of light but thin enough that it didn’t obscure it entirely. But longer periods of time with that specific amount of cloud cover seem very possible, and I roughly recall 2017’s eclipse being kind of like that, with long stretches where I didn’t even bother with eclipse glasses.
(I had eclipse glasses at hand, naturally. During those moments the sun was impossible to see through the glasses.)
I think I basically agree with John Schilling: UFOs in the original sense are a label for a steady stream of both culturally-mediated mass observation events as well as isolated observations with impeccable tools and credentials. Many of these will get post-hoc probable explanations, like the now-frequent drone panics or Petrov's detections. But we know that quite a few won't even get that much and that's just something we have to live with. At the end of the day, no number of UFOs have yet converted into a single First Contact situation; I leave it to the reader to tweak their Bayesianism to be able to distinguish those qualitatively different forms of evidence.
*Yes*, this is a nearly-fully generalized way to dismiss sightings without having to put much thought into it. But I'd argue whether or not that strikes you as convenient or extremely aggravating points to different forms of engaging with the problem: is this something to argue about over the internet, or are we trying to predict reality? If on a regular basis I fire up my telescope, or my Mk. 1 eyeball, or my cutting-edge early warning radar, as a pragmatic question: how much effort do I need to put towards screening out false positives?
---
Actually, speaking of AESA ghosts that reminds me of something unrelated - what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant? I'm comparing this to how I would feel about one (1) scientist who tells me about three (3) meta-analyses covering (100) one hundred studies between them with 70,000 patients. It seems to me that you have to let the thinnest part of the chain of evidence dominate your belief in the strength of evidence, but I'm not sure I've seen a thorough approach to that sort of meta-credibility.
>what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant?
Seconding this question
Eye color. Brown eyes protect you against intense light. So there's easily a couple of orders of magnitude difference in how much light will cause discomfort.
The argument about luminance given by Ethan is an instance of Eulering: trying to dazzle with a sciency-sounding explanation. The argument itself boils down to: Nu-uh.
Keep in mind that light perception is logarithmic. 10^3 vs 10^9 isn't as big of a jump as Ethan is trying to imply.
i'm one of the testimonies from "the latter witnesses" (number 6) and i've got very blue very light eyes, lol. overall awareness to discomfort is very different between people also! stated not as a refutation to eye color being significant, but that it isn't required.
I know from experience that you can have cloud cover so intense that you can’t locate the sun at all, so I think there must be something wrong with Ethan’s analysis.
ETA: I see from other comments that I have been unfair to Ethan’s analysis. I can’t say I understand even now why it should be so impossible for cloud cover to give you a perceptible disk but protect you from pain, but it’s not like Ethan just ignored the possibility.
The exchange with Daniel Ingram gives me strong yes-Socrates-I-suppose-it-must vibes.
If you get spaceX to install the right hat on the moon, you may have better luck seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky's face there.
I disagree with the premise of Ethan's argument that for this to be a "Miracle" it must not have been the actual Sun that moved. As a "believer" in general (though not in particular about Fatima) I think this point misunderstands the nature of miracles.
God created natural things and is capable of acting through his creations. There is no need to invoke unnatural false Suns. He can manipulate the actual Sun, or at least the light from it or the air through which the light passes. This may be supernatural in the sense that things we consider miracles are unlikely to occur naturally, but they still make use of natural things.
Almost analogous is the old argument with fundamentalists about evolution. The fundamentalists posit convoluted stories like the Earth is very young and dinosaur bones are red herrings to test peoples faith. Catholics are generally fine with the idea of evolution - God created the world and evolution was a means to doing that. You don't even need to invoke the idea that God "guided" evolution, he's smart enough to set things up to end up where he wanted them to go. Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument.
My point is only - you don't need bizarre nonphysical objects to account for the Sun miracle.
In my view, even if the Fatima miracle was the result of something like the Kasina meditation, the miracle of Fatima may be that so many believers saw it at the same time. It is less supernatural, but they still had a profound religious experience that changed many of their lives.
In the Bible Jesus fed thousands of people with the loaves and fishes. Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?
Where did I assert that premise? I think we have specific evidence that favors a localized emitter as the explanation for Fatima, but I never said that, in principle, a miracle couldnt be implemented by manipulating light from the Sun.
I am sorry if I have misunderstood your point. I admit that I have read your arguments only second hand through Scott's blog. I will have a look at the source.
"Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument."
...no? That seems to be the heart of the argument. The Universe exists and the forces within it interact in certain predictable ways. Sometimes those forces are created by conscious creatures like us: we can use fans to create an updraft that lifts things, or we can apply evolutionary pressure to breeding organisms. Other times, those forces are "natural" (i.e., not human), like wind and natural selection. It's fundamentally non-falsifiable to say that *the entire thing* is a miracle and a creation (billions of years ago) by an external eternal consciousness.
Clearly when ordinary people use the term in ordinary language they're talking about the idea that that consciousness is named "God" and interferes *today*, putting its thumbs on the scales of its creation to produce certain outcomes at certain times and places. So the crucial question is, "does this action accord with natural processes [or natural processes under the influence of human force] or does it require the hand of God?"
When ordinary people debate the existence of God, it's not whether a conscious entity introduced the original Big Bang energy, it's whether that consciousness is still guiding our lives today and responds to our prayers and resurrects our consciousness after death. So yes, it matters whether it was a natural phenomenon or whether God himself produced that light in that way at that time, by "hand".
"Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?"
Yes, of course it would. It would be great; but it would not involve any kind of suspension of the laws of physics, or of sociology, or anything else. People share food all the time. A charismatic prophet pushing people toward the altruism side of their behavior distribution for an afternoon would be far, far less of a miracle than his making a few loaves and fishes suffice to feed 5000.
Yes, but if you're a Christian, suspensions of laws of physics are not as impressive as to secular people.
Jesus is purported to not have been exactly well-liked at the time.
I am a Christian. Suspensions of the laws of physics are extremely impressive to me. As impressive as can be!
I am not sure how they can be impressive as they would be to someone who believes they are more or less impossible in principle. I am not talking about your personal emotional reaction.
Well, I said "as impressive as can be," not "as impressive as can't be." True, I believe miracles can happen. But there's still nothing that would be more awe-inspiring. How could it be otherwise? You're seeing the God who made the universe intervene directly in a way that no mere human possibly could.
On the other hand, a charismatic leader convincing people who came a long distance for him to act nice for an afternoon? I believe I could probably arrange to see that by next weekend if I really wanted to.
(You say Jesus was not well liked, but remember this was a crowd that came specifically to hear him.)
Miracles are precisely a suspension of laws of nature. They ought to impress, they are meant to impress.
If they didn't impress they would mean nothing to believers.
"In the Bible Jesus fed thousands of people with the loaves and fishes. Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?"
Yes, it would obviously and clearly make it less of a miracle.
(I think multiplying the loaves and fishes happened, for what it's worth: I think miracles happen in many religious traditions).
It depends on your prior beliefs, I would think.
If you are secular, you're right, it's less of a miracle.
If you're Christian- why would it be less of a miracle? If anything, it might be a greater miracle, because it involves diverting many (something God does much more rarely) than merely creating one adept magical spell (something God does much more often).
There is a similar reasoning in Islam that Muhammed had no need for miracles (except that on time), because the greatest miracle came later, with the fall of Persia.
I'm certainly not a secularist, but I'm not a Christian either, and your entire comment strikes me as completely wrongheaded/. Of course it's less of a miracle to convince people to share their food. People share things all the time! Overriding the laws of physics and chemistry, on the other hand, is something big and attention-grabbing.
I don't know what your definition of a miracle is, but whether you go either with the "violation of the laws of nature" or "accomplishing something that nature doesn't do when left to itself", or the definition that I like, from Wallace, which is "any event that implies the existence of a supernatural intelligence", it's clear that multiplying loaves and fishes qualifies, convincing people to share doesn't. If all Jesus did was convince people to share, nobody would remember him today.
Of course, it's less of a miracle to convince two people to share food as such. That isn't even the example.
I was thinking of it probabilistically. Shock and awe depends on your framework in the first place. Under a Christian framework, how amazing a miracle is, I assume, one of, or the combination of two factors: its probability under the laws, and the probability that God would do it.
In a secular world, for example, the probability of loaves magically multiplying is lower than a lot of people sharing food.
However, in a Christian world, God more often does physical stuff, and the probability of thousands getting together just because a random preacher said so is on its own unlikely & a divine intervention is unlikely. At the very least, the odds are flipped after a certain point- for example, if it was 2 billion people.
As a non-believing teenager, I once promised to myself/God that if He put a mark on the back of a street sign I was looking at, then I would believe in his existence. I thought of that since I knew that marks, stickers, graffiti were relatively common on signs and so it would be a discreet enough of a sign that God might stoop to doing it for me. Lo and behold, there was writing on the back of the street sign. Of course this striking miracle caused a big updates in my belief: I was wrong that I would believe in God after seeing this and should never have told myself otherwise.
I hope you get another sign!
· In my childhood, when I'd close my eyes for a while (e. g. trying to fall asleep), I'd see afterimages of light and just various random shit, and I could totally make it do stuff without anyone prompting me, I was just a lil guy like that. I have not tried it recently, though, because I've been preoccupied with other things outside of the tiny world of childhood "where things were so much themselves". (Okay, I tried just now, with the afterimage of the laptop screen; I had lousy control, but the afterimage definitely changed shape to something circular. I think I need to, like, relax and focus to make it work better, right now it was kind of hurried. Unless memory fails me, I used to be able to make it bright, make it move as I like...)
· I now sleep in a quiet room, but when I used to fall asleep to some monotone noise, I had hypnagogic hallucinations where the noise changed to unintelligible voices. I don't think I had anything visual like that ever, but I guess seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky in the Moon is the next level of difficulty.
· See the story of looking for Trotsky's face, swastikas and other dangerous magical things drawn by enemies on regular objects like matchboxes etc.: https://spokus.eu/en/urban-legends-ussr-soviet-russia/ (one source I could find in English).
There is no other way about it. I think we need to start a post-ironic meme egregore to get hundreds of people to go to a specific place at a specific time to see if mass psychology + staring at the sun is sufficient to replicate the miracle
Unironically yeah. I appreciate the ethics are a little dodgy but surely Scott has enough clout to get a couple dozen weirdos to go try this in a park or something. Not me though.
No!
The best I can do here is emailing the Georgia Skeptics and asking about the telescope thing, but at this point I'm not sure who is still around. The author of that article did pass away, but I was able to find Long's email. There's almost no chance she replies but It's a curious enough story that it's worth trying.
If people in a religious vision see something similar to what expert mediators see in their spiritual visions, that does not make for a good argument against both being valid.
What do you mean by "valid" in this context?
Seeing things that are mystical rather than tricks of biology.
I agree with your original point, I was tired and I read your meaning exactly backwards. 🫠😂🤮💀
It suggests they're really experiencing something, but it also suggests that one or both groups are fundamentally mistaken in their interpretation of the meaning and origin of the experiences.
It would be weird if they were correct enough to agree in their interpretations.
> the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Doesn't seem that way to me. Meditation is clearly subject to environmental factors: stimuli such as loud or erratic noises can make it more difficult, deliberately arranged rooms make it easier. There's lots of random variation in natural environments, so a particular place and time might have been multiple standard deviations better for cultivating the relevant mindset. That doesn't make everyone who benefited from those rare conditions an expert, any more than trying to juggle during a once-per-century windstorm turns someone into a world-class baseball pitcher.
I commented on the original post - I do meditation that mostly involves closing my eyes or staring at statues, but I've had similar experiences to what the kasina meditators described.
Quick point -
The Fatima phenomenon was either:
1. A physical phenomenon
2. A mental phenomenon
3. A supernatural phenomenon
In the Three Body Problem adaptation, when the stars blink, Saul concludes that hypothesis A (a real physical phenomenon) is impossible as an explanation. A mental phenomenon - where our perception is changed - is the only answer.
But isn't that analogous to a physical phenomenon?
My unprovable opinion: events like this do not involve supernatural physical events. That is why they are supernatural mental events - the association of the Virgin Mary with this event and the Christian idea of Grace (that God can just kind of randomly seek you out) is suggestive to me. Not saying the children literally spoke to the Virgin Mary, but if we suppose that there were some sort of entity that was perceived as such ... My suggestion would be there was "something" involved, but that the "something" would not in any way be physically measurable. Sad!
Sorry, but the whole fire kasina saga of "I tried it out and didn't experience Fatima, so probably this couldn't be it" is a complete non-proof for me! Are you really saying that the failure of a 21st century Bay Area Rationalist who crams a 5 minute meditation sesh of alone time into his busy schedule to finally cross "explaining Fatima" from his To Do list is a strong piece of evidence against a phenomenon experienced in the midst of an excited crowd in a rural area in the early 20th century?
I would strongly expect members of a vast crowd of thousands of mostly pious and devout Catholics from the early 20th century Portuguese country side who believe in the reality of miracles and the Virgin Mary and spend part of their leisure time in semi-meditative prayer sessions and who are in a heightened state of frenzy, maybe even in a trance like state after hours of communal praying and hymn singing and ready to experience and be showered in the power of the Almighty to have a slightly higher perceptiveness for uncommon phenomena as me and you while living our day-to-day life.
I mean, do you ever listen to the Beatles and conclude that, given that you neither started shrieking, sobbing and peeing your pants, Beatlemania might be only explicable by divine intervention as you could not satisfactory conjure the state of hysteria by listening to the Beatles by yourself? No, because obviously there was more to it as "just" the music. So I would assume that there was more to it in Fatima as well. The mere fact that not everybody can conjure the described images up willy-nilly does not disprove that given the right circumstance a good chunk of people out of a huge group would experience the phenomenon. But as usually big groups of people do not stare at the sun simultaneously, it simply feels odd because we do not have enough evidence to conclude with certainty that yes, 18%, 36%, 72% of the population would experience Fatima-like phenomena when starring in the sun under certain metereological conditions while being in a kind of religious semi-trance.
No, you cannot assume that Portuguese peasants in the twenties were doing anything sufficiently related to fire kasini meditation for the comparison to be relevant.
My point us rather that not being able to recreate something by yourself does not dismiss that a handful of people in an excited crowd might have experienced it. People are different and some might have experienced something similar to fire kasini while in a trance-like state. Pretending otherwise you become like the guy who insists you cannot see the silvery sun through the edge of light clouds (which I can vouch is absolutely a thing, as I have experienced it several times). Not being able to experience something does not disprove other people's experiences.
OP did not claim they were doing fire kasina in their spare time. However, prayer can also be meditative, etc, and they were certainly doing many similar activities.
>Ethan says I must be mis-remembering, because my claimed experience is physically impossible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i8dl0n/no_glare_photo_of_the_sun/
There is clear photographic evidence of a sharply defined, yet completely harmless to look at sun disk, when it's behind light clouds or smoke. Personally I've seen this maybe a dozen times over my life, and I don't even go out that much. I always thought this was a somewhat rare but otherwise completely normal phenomenon, and to see someone argue against the very existence of it with the dead-certainty of math bewilders me.
This was the point at which I formed a strong prior that Ethan is more interested in winning debates than seeking truth. Also:
"In a private conversation, Ethan continued to assert that I was misremembering, and that all the Discord users and commenters who agreed with me had been contaminated by my testimony and become victims of suggestibility. I think this is a pretty crazy point to suddenly convert to the doctrine of eyewitness fallibility, contamination, and suggestibility - but I leave further discussion to people who understand optical physics."
Daaaamn!
I havent seen credible evidence that you can get the conjunction of (i) high solar elevation, (ii) comfortable fixation, (iii) no blurring/distortion. Physical reasoning leads me to doubt that the conjunction of those effects is possible, but I am willing to abandon that claim if a credible counterexample is found or someone shows a flaw in my reasoning.
You infer from this that I am not seeking truth? It seems that you are more interested in discrediting me than charitably engaging with my arguments (which is also consistent with the rest of your behavior).
If my quoting Scott seems like an effort to discredit you, then we are similarly impressed with the quote.
How have you updated from the direct testimony in this thread? From the explanations by people who apparently understand the physics? From the linked pictures which directly illustrate the phenomenon at issue? A little? A lot?
So Ethan and everyone agrees that it's totally possible to see the sun appear like this (I've seen it a few times too), we're only disagreeing about how common it is at midday, high in the sky -- with a thicker amount of cloud/foglsmoke than would be necessary in the morning? That doesn't seem like a very sharp amount of disagreement!
I think “how common” is an understatement. The question is whether you can *possibly* get comfortable fixation + no blurring from mundane cloud dimming when the Sun is at the known solar elevation during the Miracle of the Sun.
For the April 2024 solar eclipse, I was in Liverpool, NY. There was heavy cloud cover that varied in intensity, but never really cleared. Leading up to the eclipse I spent awhile staring up both with and without solar viewing glasses, trying to locate where the sun might show up during the eclipse. Most of the time it just looked like really bright clouds. At various points I did see a circular sun through the haze for awhile. Not for minutes, and I didn’t stare at the sun when I found it for long out of an abundance of caution, but i could look for seconds without pain/discomfort, where normally I squint instantly as a reflex, and it was definitely a circle.
To round out the story: during the actual eclipse the cloud cover was similar. Totality was still a good experience (darker, cooler), but I never got a good view of the sun itself, even though I knew where it was in the sky.
Anyway, it was afternoon, I forget the time, and when I saw it pre-totality, it was already in some state of eclipse, but I couldn’t really see details through the haze aside from an occasional hazy white circle.
To be clear, I’m not sure if this qualifies as an example for you given the eclipse involved, but it’s the closest I will ever get: I never try to look at the sun, especially overhead, and I hope to have no cloud cover for any future eclipses.
I have seen the sun through clouds while lower in the sky many times (as mentioned by others), and my experience in Liverpool was similar in clarity, but generally in those cases there is more color on the sun (yellow/red), while this was white.
Thanks for this.
To clarify, are you saying there was a circular bright patch that contrasted with a diffuse glow in the surrounding clouds? Or are you saying that the circular bright patch contrasted with dim clouds/clear sky?
The fact that it was being attenuated by a partial eclipse helps, but I am curious about why it would have a circular outline rather than crescent outline if it was in partial eclipse. Though perhaps there is an obvious explanation that Im missing - I’ll think about it a bit more.
April 2024 was a total eclipse.
I saw it too. And there was cloud cover, the sun appearing and disappearing. Sadly I don't remember what all combinations of phenomena there were vis-a-vis disks, pain, and blurriness in the leadup.
He says he saw the phenomenon pretotality.
I never really got clear sky. It was always clouds, but sometimes more dense and sometimes less dense. When it was more dense it was just bright clouds. When it was less dense I sometimes could see a circular outline.
I just checked timestamped pictures from the day, and we got to our spot at 2pm, and I have attempts at taking pictures of the sun at 2:10 and 2:26pm, and while they didn’t come out great, it does look circular at that point. Then pretty much cloud cover and nothing until 3:16 pm, at which point you can see a thin crescent. A very brief glimpse of the ring during totality at 3:23pm, and then some more crescent at 3:26pm. All still through some clouds.
If I get motivated I’ll post online somewhere and link here, but they’re bad phone camera photos, so I’m not sure how much seeing them will help.
Here are some x posts with photos and time stamps on the alt text:
https://x.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1981958131602403489
https://x.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1981959455035007098
https://x.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1981960340666826776
Again, they're bad phone camera photos.
About circular vs crescent: I could see it more frequently and easily earlier in the eclipse, when it appeared round through clouds, and that's closer to the phenomena under discussion, so I focused on that part.
Later, while the sun was more eclipsed, I mostly couldn't see it (maybe the clouds got worse, maybe the decreased light from the eclipse didn't penetrate as well). The glimpses I did get were crescent at that point, and then a ring. I still never got a direct view without clouds in the way :(
It’s very interesting that you’re now suddenly worried about the credibility of eyewitness testimony and how it aligns with what’s physically possible
Ive always been worried about credibility of eyewitness testimony. That’s why I build my arguments on multiply attested, sworn testimony that can be independently corroborated. I would never base my arguments on reddit anecdotes, discord polls, etc… because I know from experience they are highly unreliable.
I dont think they are worthless, but I also hesitate to accept them when there is reason to doubt the details. If you are willing to unflinchingly accept reddit anecdotes and discord polls, then it should be very easy for me to convince you of miracles, ghosts, ufos, etc… since those can be massively supported by anecdotal testimony from people online
The thing is, multiply attested, sworn testimony is not that much better. Especially when heavy emotions are involved. This is why investigations are a must in modern trials. So it's still largely a double standard.
But I don't think anyone is claiming (some) people haven't seen what they think are miracles, ghosts, UFOs, etc. They are merely rejecting the interpretations. What is it that people saw in these cases, in your opinion? That they are all mistaken about the position of the Sun? Furthermore, why is it, do you think, that noone has noticed the issue with this before you (as far as I can tell)?
"Double standard" doesn't refer to any standard that draws a principled distinction in a way that you happen to disagree with.
And it depends on the context. When you have lots of independent testimony about a specific event, you have statements against interest, you can corroborate lots of the details of the testimony, there are features that indicate credibility, etc… you can have much more confidence than when all you have is a report of a vague recollection about an event that supposedly took place in the distant past from a poll respondent.
I think people saw a pale, moonlike Sun in the early morning or the late afternoon. People that claim to have seen it when the Sun was high on the horizon are either misremembering that specific detail or are remembering a fuzzy Sun that was attenuated compared to normal Sun but was uncomfortable to stare at. Also, some people are probably just Mandela effect, since that happens a lot in these contexts.
Dude. Come to Delhi in smoggy winter. You can look at a sharp disk-like sun all day.
if it is winter, then Sun is low on horizon. and smog attenuation is more absorptive than cloud attenuation (which is more scattering-dominated), so you can see it higher
What's your definition of 'low' on the horizon? Even on winter solstice the sun is ~40 degrees from the horizon. The rest of winter is substantially higher. And on many days the sun is a sharp disk.
I googled and it says 14-28 degrees on winter solstice in Delhi.
Btw, it is not just about sharp disc. It is about sharp disc that is perfectly comfortable to stare at. With smog that should be easier than with clouds (because more absorption than scattering).
I've never seen the sun like that, so I can believe Ethan, but then, I live in the Caribbean, maybe sun's too bright here.
There is a big difference between discomfort glare and camera glare.
But, I agknowledge that it is possible when the Sun is low on the horizon. I am not convinced it can happen when the Sun is at a high angular elevation.
The most credible testimony that I have found is about sun is low on the horizon + dense fog. It is not clear that the solar elevation at the tome is salient to the people replying to these polls.
I certainly wasn't arguing that miracles are an exception to Bayesianism. To put it in Bayesian terms, it seems to me like your model for how we update our priors given a strange event is maybe a little naive, because it is not sufficiently taking into account the relevant background knowledge we have accumulated about strange events. Given our background information, Pr (Naturalism) | (some magic trick) is unchanged, since we know magic tricks are natural phenomena. Given that UFO's, ghost sightings and purported miracles have a long history of being debunked when they are investigated carefully, any change to our Pr(naturalism) should be very small, since the hypothesis 'they have some natural explanation' is the best explanation of them, given our background knowledge.
Of course, this is defeasible. If the Pope starts blowing up mountains on demand, or we see Words of Fire blazing in the sky spelling out the Lord's Prayer, by all means update our confidence in naturalism. But the Miracle of the Sun isn't like that. It's more interesting than the vast majority of miracles, but (without going into a long explanation of why), I was I think justifiably convinced even before I read your article that if someone smart looked into it, a natural explanation would end up appearing plausible. And, hey, that's what happened. That will also be the case for the next purported miracle, unless it is clearly on its face something pretty different from the sort of things we are used to (visions, suggestible crowds, items of dubious provenance).
If the Pope announced a high-level policy change related to the miraculous healing of amputees, and shortly afterward, all over the world, patients in Catholic-backed hospitals started making extremely well documented appearances with limbs that were medically unremarkable apart from having been missing the day before, that'd be a lot more persuasive than blowing up mountains on demand. I mean, there are fairly straightforward ways to blow up a mountain using existing tech - hydrogen bombs can be scaled to arbitrarily high yield with only a small fission primer.
I mean, there's lots of really good miracles that would be persuasive to a naturalist like me. Weird that we only ever get these shitty ones that have natural explanations, like crowds of convinced Catholics seeing something weird and saying it was Jesus. At least give us a crowd of convinced Muslims seeing the virgin Mary and converting, something that's a LITTLE harder to square with normal human psychology and the propensity for weird stuff to happen sometimes.
>Muslims seeing the virgin Mary
I'm pretty sure that this is entirely in accordance with Islamic dogma, they are just more excited about stuff that's unique to them.
Ok, fair. Substitute Jews or Hindus.
If Mary appeared to a crowd of Muslims and matter-of-factly announced a list of small, fiddly, but highly significant transcription errors in popular-consensus versions of the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon, then resolved the Sunni/Shia split by clarifying that the current rightful Caliph is some day-laborer's kid in Brazil whose only previous claim to fame was a few mediocre TikTok videos, that would be both broadly consistent with the larger belief framework, and shockingly unlikely from a mob-psychology standpoint.
Well, unfortunately she seems to prefer appearing as weird Sun-related visual glitches, which don't clarify any doctrinal disagreements.
That would be a miracle worth investigating, no cap.
Thank you! I thought your post was exactly right, and was clear about all this, and Scott was misreading it. Basically, his Pr (Naturalism) should be extremely high - virtually unflappable - but he's writing as if it isn't, and reported strange observations are the sort of evidence that could cause notable updates to his prior when they really shouldn't.
I think people experience a lot of “supernatural” phenomena, even skeptics. I never heard the Imam on the Moon story before, and I think it’s charming that the woman who had that vision first also found one of the Prophet’s hairs in her Quran. Some people live in a world of wondrous miracles and I kind of envy them.
The paper example was set up to send exactly the same pattern of light into the eye as an attenuated sun. Surely they can't be different if what the eye sees is the same?
I haven't read Hume's original and I agree with your criticism of the "strong" version of Hume-ism, but I'd put forward a modified version.
Which is that, if you're questioning whether some event was a miracle or some natural phenomenon, oftentimes people dismiss the natural explanation as being unlikely. But, in line with Bayes, our prior for miracles should usually be *even lower* than our prior for the unlikely thing.
E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I would submit the above is true even if it's a random street corner is on the other side of the globe! So strong should our prior be against telepathy, even "IDK man I just wanted to bop into this random spot in Kaga-Bandoro, Central African Republic" is more likely.
Relatedly, by Bayesian view of the original article is that there are lots of claimed sun miracles, vast majority have natural explanations, that raises my prior that a particular sun miracle is not a miracle.
>E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I agree: but what if you asked your friend why he knew to meet me there, and he told you that at the exact same time you were trying to communicate telepathically to him he had an experience of hearing your voice telling him to go to that particular street corner at that particular time?
Hume argues that we should still assume it wasn't telepathy. In fact, argues that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments". In other words, even if you have testimonial evidence in favor of a miracle that is so unimpeachable that it would be impossible for it to be wrong, you should still consider it 50:50 odds at best that the miracle happened. And that's just silly!
No, Hume's argument is that, if that happened, you should expand your scope of natural phenomena to include telepathy! But then you have to take the good with the bad: telepathy is now a natural phenomena subject to investigation by the usual scientific means; it's not just a once-off exception to the rules of nature
If, instead of trying telepathy, you prayed to God that you would meet your friend, and when you met he he told you that he heard the voice of God telling him to be there, would you then agree that you should expand your scope of possible phenomena to include the existence of a God who answers prayers?
If yes, then Humes argument fails to do the job people set it to: arguing against the existence of miracles.
Only if that explanation can itself be characterized as a lawlike, regular phenomenon: it works X% of the time; praying in such and such a way yields better results; etc.
Hume's point is that whatever you replace your old law with is a *new law*, not just a... thing that happens once. It's subject to analysis the way all other natural phenomena are. We can ask questions like, "how come it doesn't work sometimes?" and expect better answers than just, "God works in mysterious ways"--it's true that there are plenty of natural questions where our best answer at the moment is "physics is hard and the universe is subtle", but in the naturalistic framing that's not an *answer* so much as an explanation of why it's hard to find an answer.
"Only if that explanation can itself be characterized as a lawlike, regular phenomenon: it works X% of the time; praying in such and such a way yields better results; etc."
Why? If God is real, would we expect to find that praying to him works a certain percentage of the time? And if God did answer exactly 22% of prayers, would you be fine believing in him, when you wouldn't be fine believing in him if he answers 10% of prayers one year and 77% the next?
For one thing, if God being real is the explanation for a highly coincidental meeting between you and your friend, it should happen at a rate higher than chance.
The point is, if God intervening in the world is to be explanatory, if it's to be a part of our model of how the world works, it has to be actually modelable--it has to be a theory that makes definitive predictions, ideally with some quantitative aspects that we can use to refine our understanding. "Event E happened because of reason R" is much more compelling when we can make use R to make predictions about when events like E will occur: how often E occurs is the simplest, most basic kind of prediction, but I'm not fussy.
If you can never use R to predict when E will happen, if R gives you no constraints on how likely E is to occur, or in what circumstances, or whatever--if all it ever offers is retroactive justification, then it's not a good theory of how the world works.
I suppose at some point you can string together enough unlikely pieces to the story to make the telepathy explanation plausible, and we can argue about when you get to that point.
But to get back to the original argument about the alleged "sun miracle" - if in the last several hundred years, there was one (1) story of a seeming telepathic communication, that based on the available evidence seemed to defy any other explanation (combined with many, many others that fell apart upon trivial examination), then that would shift it back in the direction of thinking it wasn't a miracle.
Is it more likely? I think that telepathy is nonsense, but my prior for it existing is definitely not below 1/1,000,000,000. A bit of epistemic humility is called for, here - it is not the case that 1 billion concepts roughly as implausible as telepathy have been believed in by a comparable fraction of the human population and subsequently been disproved. (I know this isn't quite right - many forms of these beliefs are difficult or impossible to falsify, which throws off the data on that thought experiment - but it gets you into the right state of mind).
Meeting the friend who I tried to communicate telepathically with, at a randomly selected street corner in the entire world might not cause me to be highly confident that telepathy exists - I would want to run a lot more tests, and if none of them showed anything interesting I would reluctantly admit that the original incident was probably a coincidence - but it would certainly be really, really good evidence.
I attend a Quaker meeting and, while this is not a universal or even majority view among unprogrammed Quakers, some people describe Quaker meetings as like a group meditation that unlocks more than solo meditation. That isn't exactly how I'd describe it, but it does provide a good analogue to how a giant crowd of people doing fire kasina meditation would get more dramatic results than a single person doing fire kasina meditation.
My grandmother and grandfather have experienced the Miracle of the Sun about a month ago in Medjugorje. My grandmother is a devotee of Medjugorje, and I consider her gullible and biased on this topic, but my grandfather is not; he is a very rational person and not given to sentimental devotions. So I asked him specifically about the phenomenon, and he corroborated my grandmother's testimony: the Sun "dancing" in the sky, spinning, pulsating, and changing color.
He also corroborated that the crowd around him saw the same thing. Note also that the crowd gathered there (early in the morning) because one of the seers announced the day before that the Virgin Mary would work miracles there. So this is a phenomenon very similar to Fatima, where a seer predicted the exact time and place of an anomalous phenomenon.
So, did he stare at the sun for a while before it started happening?
He did not specify that, but I can ask him to elaborate on his experience, if you want.
Seems worth interrogating. Next best thing to going back and interviewing the Fatima witnesses directly. Maybe tag Scott for Questions he might have?
Good idea.
>We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it.
Something that you gloss over: just because we have decent understanding of many extremely rare/weird natural phenomena, it doesn't follow that this well has been exhausted. To me it's quite obvious that there's plenty of obscure stuff still out there, which isn't supernatural in the least. On these priors, it doesn't seem that Fatima-like stuff is particularly good evidence for supernatural, certainly not anywhere near Pope armed with super-nukes.
>The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m².
This part of Ethan's rebuttal struck me as giving off fishy vibes, so I checked the original source. As I predicted, the actual claim made by the source is much narrower and more qualified than Ethan's summary.
Ethan's citation goes to "Video Displays, Work, and Vision: National Research Council (US) Panel on Impact of Video Viewing on Vision of Workers". These numbers appear to come from Table 5.1, titled "Borderline Between Comfort and Discomfort (BCD) Luminance for Intermittent Directly Viewed Glare Sources". Note the "intermittent" -- the numbers in the table are about the effects of staring into a *flashing* light, and the book explicitly says that they cannot be safely generalized to a stable light source (which is what we're interested in). Quote:
>These values are glare source luminances. Values above the BCD values in the table would induce discomfort. (Note, however, that Guth used a flashing glare source. It is not clear how much the BCD values from steady sources in natural settings would differ. Eye movements and blinks would interrupt the retinal images of steady sources.)
Even under the conditions actually tested, the book is also careful *not* to claim that the thresholds reported will be universally valid for all observers. The comments on the table say: "Assuming that these data accurately represent discomfort glare thresholds for **at least some** VDT operators, it can be seen from Table 5.1 that some situations would induce discomfort" (emphasis mine). So it could just be that those reporting being able to look without discomfort have higher-than-average thresholds for it.
I was treating this a Fermi problem - my conclusion is robust to extreme error in my estimate of the tolerance for luminance.
But I think my estimate of the tolerance is definitely in the ballpark. Here is another study that I think settles it:
"Finally maximum luminance on the workplane, a proxy for direct sunlight, also correlates noticeably with subjective discomfort (R2 = 0.208). For the typical range of vertical eye illuminances observed in this study (~500 to 2500 lx), **workplane luminances greater than 1000 cd/m2 consistently identify reported subjective discomfort.**" (https://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/publications/BS2015_VisaulComfortFramework.pdf)
You say "So it could just be that those reporting being able to look without discomfort have higher-than-average thresholds for it."
-We are trying to explain phenomenology of the crowds in and around the Cova, where we are getting uniform reports from a large, diverse cross-section of people - so what is of interest is actually the floor for tolerance rather than the ceiling for tolerance, but I am using the ceiling to be charitable.
> The Medjugorje witness who I interviewed said the sun was spinning instantly, the moment he started looking at it, which is troublesome for explanations that rely on retinal bleaching, near-blindness, and other complicated entoptic phenomena. The same witness understood what normal afterimages look like, and was very convinced it wasn’t just normal afterimages.
I don't find this particularly credible, because it happened so long before the interview. Human memory is highly suggestible over long periods, and especially to someone who was a believer at the time and thus ascribed this event significance, of course they're going to remember it as being more vivid than their more recent, non-supernatural occurrences.
I think that the very concept of miracles is a logical trap, or a "brutal self-own" as the kids these days say. Assuming that miracles occur, they do so either in a somewhat predictable fashion, or completely at random.
If miracles are predictable to some extent, then, a la Hume, their existence is governed by some kind of rules; and we have developed mental tools that help us model these hidden rules with some degree of accuracy. For example, we can model gravity to some extent, even if we know that our model does not give the right answers in most cases. We can even model the behaviour of intelligent agents, such as humans, well enough to e.g. perform actionable market research.
On the other hand, if miracles are a priori unpredictable and thus effectively random, then no amount of clever tricks will allow us to model them (except perhaps in aggregate, and likely not even then). But if that is the case, then we cannot extract any information from a miracle, other than perhaps "God is great". We cannot interpret any miracle as a sign or a message or anything else; at least, not absent personal revelation (in which case we don't even need the miracle).
Theologically speaking, both horns of the dilemma are problematic. In the latter case, miracles are essentially pointless; in the former case, they are on the slippery slope to being "trivialized" in the theological sense (I use "scare quotes" here because it sounds odd to call phenomena like gravity or the electromagnetic force "trivial"). I do understand that the canonical response to such dilemmas it to say "you must have faith", but that is just an oblique way to invoke personal revelation once again -- a perfectly respectable move, but not one that is likely to convince any heretic or unbeliever.
I wish this forum had “likes” for comments.
The app has likes for comments!
If the evidence of miracles allows you to attempt to predict the behavior of God with a reasonable degree of accuracy, then great! You believe in God, and a God who performs miracles! So do I, so does the Catholic Church, so does more than half the world. Glad you could join us. So where is the first horn of the dilemma?
As I'd said (in agreement with Hume), it reduces miracles to yet another predictable phenomenon, like gravity (or perhaps ice cream flavor preference). On the plus side, it opens the path to many new areas of "theological engineering": now that we have uncovered a new force of [super-]nature, we can apply it, perhaps ushering in the next technological revolution. On the minus side (theologically speaking), miracles cease to be special and unique messages from God to his believers (and unbelievers alike, perhaps). In a world where miracles are predictable, something like the event we're discussing (the Miracle of Fatima) would still be front-page news, but it would share that front page with volcano eruptions, supernovae, hurricanes, and other such events -- for a short while, until the next remarkable event comes along. This is AFACT close to what Christians mean when they say that definitive proof of God would override human free will: yes, everyone would believe; but what would they believe in ?
Tell me, if you got to know your neighbor Steve well enough that you could generally predict what he's going to do, would that open up the path to many new areas of "Steve engineering"?
Yes, absolutely. Politicians and salesmen do this all the time, as do hackers. It's even called "Social Engineering" when they do it.
It's called "Theology" when we do it to God, and we've been working on that longer than we've worked on any scientific field. Believing in God and believing that understanding God will allow you to better predict miracles is not a problem for believing in miracles! If anything it's a bonus. So I still don't see where your "first horn" is coming from. There's no problem in studying theology in order to better predict when God will intervene in nature.
What then is the principal difference, if any, between miracles and e.g. gravity or electricity ?
Theology is absolutely nothing like studying miracles to know more about God. It's arcane debates about how to interpret dogmatic texts most of the time. In fact, if a miracle contradicts some dogma of God, you just reject it as fake lmao
I think a good exercise with these types of arguments is to imagine how it would apply if tomorrow the stars in the sky rearranged themselves so that, when viewed from Earth, they read (in Demotic Egyptian, which turns out to be the divine tongue) “God made the universe, and the Seventh-Day Adventists are correct about His nature.” Is that predictable? No. Is it possible to extract any information from it? The answer has to be yes, right?
Maybe; at the very least, we can conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty that there's an incredibly powerful being out there with a twisted sense of humor. However, exactly none of the purported miracles throughout human history -- such as the Fatima one -- are anywhere close to being so clear-cut. Instead, it's all mysterious lights and weeping statues...
I don't see why you can't extract information from a one off miracles: you can interpret one off messages.
It's not that you can't extract information from one-off miracles *a priori*; rather, if the one-off miracles are truly and completely unpredictable, then they carry no useful information (although they do arguably carry maximum information in the theoretical sense). As per my reply to @Reginald K. above, even if the miracle rearranges the stars to say e.g. "Seventh-Day Adventism is the true faith", you do not have sufficient reason (based on the miracle alone) to pick "God" over "alien teenage pranksters" or "whimsical fae" or "simulation glitch" or whatever else as the more likely cause. And that's in the ideal case; in practice, miracles are never that obvious, but involve mostly things like dancing colors in the sky -- which are significantly harder to pin down.
"It's not that you can't extract information from one-off miracles *a priori*; rather, if the one-off miracles are truly and completely unpredictable, then they carry no useful information (although they do arguably carry maximum information in the theoretical sense"
Well, which? One off miracles cannot provide a basis for scientific laws, but that's not the only kind of information.
>. As per my reply to @Reginald K. above, even if the miracle rearranges the stars to say e.g. "Seventh-Day Adventism is the true faith", you do not have sufficient reason (based on the miracle alone) to pick "God" over "alien teenage pranksters" or "whimsical fae" or "simulation glitch" or whatever else as the more likely cause.
They are generically similar.
> One off miracles cannot provide a basis for scientific laws, but that's not the only kind of information.
I don't know what you mean by "scientific laws", as distinct from other predictive models. For example, a statement like "every time you eat a shrimp, there's an 85% chance God will turn your hair purple" is arguably not a scientific law, yet it is still a viable model.
> They are generically similar.
I don't understand what this means, sorry.
One off events can communicate information, even if they can't communicate with certainty. Every ordinary act of communication, in a ordinary language, like this one, is a one off act that communicates information.
If you demand certainty, you are not going to get it from natural laws either
No, of course no one demands certainty. But one-off events that are by definition completely unpredictable cannot communicate information, since doing so would make them predictable to at least some extent.
This act of communication is (arguably) a one-off event that is to some extent predictable. For example, you can be reasonably certain that I will respond in English, using coherent grammar, at least somewhat on topic, and in opposition to your stance -- plus a myriad of other details. In fact, to the extent that my reply communicates any information, it does so precisely because of these details.
Reading through some of the bits about how difficult kasina meditation is, something is bugging me. Isn't meditation noticeably more difficult for the type of person who wants to meditate? The intention is to quiet the thoughts in your head, and come to a sort of inner peace, right? This is primarily desirable to people who constantly have thoughts running through their heads. Difficulty with meditation might be the same as difficulty with exercise. The people who reap the greatest benefits are also the people that struggle the most to perform the task. Your average joe doesn't struggle nearly as much, but they also don't need it in the first place, so why struggle at all?
Correct me if I'm misguided, of course. But I am a bit worried that ACX is misunderstanding why meditation is difficult, and accidentally using that misunderstanding to bump the credibility of the miracle.
Many years of research have proven that people who are dedicated to meditating find it much easier to meditate. Confirming my priors. Nor is it clear to whether they have more or less need of meditation.
I think you sidestepped my actual point, there. I'm not talking about the amount of experience someone has with meditation, I'm talking about the "personality type" (not sure if this is the perfect term for it) that meditation tends to attract.
Found
It sounds like the crowd at Fatima contained many personality types.
Yeah, exactly. Because the crowd at Fatima contained many personality types, but meditation attracts a certain, specific personality type, there's a discrepancy here. Fatima may have shown different, "miraculous" results because most of the people who are attracted to meditation also happen to struggle with meditation. That's the hypothesis, anyway.
And chill a bit, yeah? I'm trying to have an open conversation here, not dictate mine will of truth to the world.
I'm hardly being verbally aggressive. I feel chill.
Eh, maybe it's just the way I'm reading your messages. Not aggressive, but very brusque. Doesn't feel like you're actually engaging with me, just trying to find the quickest way to say that I'm wrong. Sorry if I'm putting something there that isn't.
I'm guessing you aren't too keen on my hypothesis, do you have a particular reason why?
Something like this fits my observations. I've seen a fair amount of people who were very susceptible to meditation when they tried it, and got quick spectacular effects. The same people also dropped off from doing meditation very soon, because the spectacular experiences got too uncomfortable and scary.
And there is the paradox that when you intentionally strive to achieve meditative states they become much harder to reach. I believe that explains the common experience that you try a new technique and get a really strong effect, but then when you try it again, grasping after the same effect, you cannot reach it.
I also have the impression that people that stick with a disciplined meditation practice tend to be more the striving, intentional kind of person - which has a harder time of achieving certain states. But after enough practice they can overcome this, in part by reducing the striving.
Yeah, it's almost like meditation has beginner's luck baked in, makes it a really interesting practice. Difficult to pin down. That's part of what makes me nervous, when it's being used as evidence for supernatural events.
Isn’t “falling to earth” what you would see if the sun was too bright, you dropped your gaze and possibly shut your eyes, and the afterimage stayed in the middle of your vision?
I appreciate the fair-mindedness as others do but I think you're frankly being a little TOO charitable here. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that it's not only been reproduced when there's no veridical referent, but that some people have been able to reproduce it at will (including people who were at the ACTUAL MIRACLE) is game, set, and match. The rest is detail. Do we know EXACTLY why it happened? No. But the probability of anything remotely supernatural goes way way down with that in mind. IMO, healing miracles like the one Bentham's Bulldog posted a few weeks ago are harder to explain than this.
PS, if you're interested in other miracle accounts which are reasonably well-attested, I've just written an essay on one (https://substack.com/home/post/p-176774210) and mean to do a few more, time permitting.
EDIT: like others in the thread, I'm skeptical it's even fair to speak of "70,000 witnesses." I think we actually have only a little over a hundred testimonies, yeah? And I just counted the testimonies in your doc on the OP and just over half of them weren't even taken down until at least a year after the alleged miracle. I know you didn't include EVERY extant testimony in that doc, but it it seems like really we might only have 30 - 50 testimonies from within hours/days/weeks of the events. It's easy to imagine someone ten, twenty, forty years later remembering they'd seen the miracle with everyone else when in fact they hadn't. So how do we know those other 69,950 people actually saw anything? I'm not saying a lot, maybe even most, didn't, but...you state that "the original investigators looked extra-hard for negative statements to record" but...is that actually true? I mean, maybe they say they did, but how do we verify that?
Yeah, it seems to me that there’s a really interesting question of precisely what conditions give rise to this experience, but it really seems like a replicable thing, if we can just figure out how.
Even the laziest skeptic who only knows how to say "God of the gaps" was basically right all along.
Yes, we know there are psychological phenomena like the ones experienced in Fatima (Kasina, more direct replications). We just don't know under what conditions they occur, because we dont know a lot about psychology. This is similar to how we couldn't explain natural phenomena before the natural sciences were well developed. And the conditions at Fatima seemed ripe for mass psychological contaigon (like the khomeinei moon, or various cases of mass psychosis) at a high level, even if we don't know the exact mechanisms.
I'll just address the comment you made regarding me, as I'm pretty uncertain about Fatima.
//If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided.//
But the various Y questions are not independent. There is one basic fact: there are natural laws that operate without concern for value, and these--barring exceptional circumstances at least--are universally adhered to, rather than violated in cases where it would be good. If you can give an explanation of why God would allow that, then you answer all the why questions. As an analogy, if there's a guy who shows up at his neighbors house every day at 7 am, there's some sense in which you have a new why question every day, but obviously explaining the first few days will probably explain the rest. Same here.
In contrast, atheism's explanation of how there's fine-tuning does not carry over the consciousness or anthropic stuff or moral knowledge.
What if a guy shows up at his next door neighbor's house every day at 7 am for ten days, then on day 11 he shows up at the house across the street instead? You could say that that's still one question—on all 11 days, he showed up at some house at 7 am and we don't know why. But when he was just showing up at one house, we thought we saw a pattern, even if we couldn't explain the pattern. Now that the pattern has been broken, the number of possible explanations has multiplied. Similarly, a world in which God never (let's say, never since the Resurrection) intervenes in supernatural ways to demonstrate His existence or address some evil is hard to explain, but it at least is a consistent pattern. A world in which God almost never manifests but sometimes chooses to raises more questions and admits of more possible explanations, so incurs a complexity penalty.
It's true that this shifting pattern will have a lower prior. But the same is true on atheism. Any specific apparent miracle pattern is unlikely. And to explain it as a theist, you just need a third explanation: God rarely performs miracles and small ways. That theory predicts the data as well as atheism and isn't extremely improbable conditional on the other 2.
>God rarely performs miracles and small ways.
But this seems ad hoc. I think it's not quite foldable into the Problem of Evil, because while there's a moral question (why does God do good things for some and not others?) there's also just the amoral question of "why does God sometimes 'violate' his own laws but usually not?" which seems separate. You can always appeal to "he has sufficient reasons" but again, I think it's pretty ad hoc that God always has sufficient reasons to do whatever weird thing we observe, especially since it has 0 predictive power for when a miracle will occur.
I agree it's a bit surprising. But a lot of things are true and surprising. It's surprising, a priori, that the world is mostly populated by invisible dark matter, but I believe that.
Any theory has little predictive power for the specific distribution of miracles. Neither a theist or atheist would have guessed a priori that, say, Barbara Cumiskey would be healed or people in Portugal would see a moving solar disk.
I guess the underlying assumption here is "miracles (roughly defined as weird things that seem to violate natural laws as we understand them) are more probable in a theistic universe than an atheistic one." And that certainly DOES seem true intuitively but I'm not sure it is.
Miracles so-defined aren't IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, just super unlikely. Let's say Jesus' resurrection for example. I've argued a lot about that one and I have been regularly told that IF your prior for theism is 0, then the evidence for Jesus' resurrection can't overcome it ofc, but if your prior for theism is HIGHER than zero, then the evidence for the Resurrection is really good*. But a resurrection isn't actually IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, in the sense that A = not-A is impossible. Surely there's some weird one in several quadrillion quantum fluctuation or whatever that would just happen to reorganize the atoms in Jesus' body in such a way to restore him to life.
On the flipside, maybe the probability of miracles in a THEISTIC universe is 0. You know how they say God, despite being omnipotent, can't do evil because it would contradict his character, and if he could do evil he wouldn't be God? Maybe God would never, ever violate the laws he established, never, ever raise somebody from the dead or heal somebody from an otherwise completely incurable disease. He set those laws for a reason, after all. Is there any reason that couldn't be the case?
So it actually seems possible to me that probability of miracles COULD be HIGHER on atheism than on theism. Worth considering at least.
I think you've argued in the past that in an atheistic universe where weird stuff just happens sometimes, we wouldn't expect the weird stuff to have specifically religious content. But I think it's unestablished that "weird stuff" actually happens in a religious context at a higher rate in a religious than non-religious context. When you take into account not usually categorized as "miraculous" but still paranormal phenomena like ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psi, etc. is that really the case? Someone (not me) would have to collect data I guess.
I wonder if somebody could make an ATHEISTIC argument from miracles. Something like "if there really was an omnipotent Supreme Lawgiver, we would expect all his laws to hold at all times. But since we sometimes observe weird breakdowns, there probably isn't a Supreme Lawgiver." I'm not going to make or defend such an argument (at least not right now) because I'm sure it has a thousand. holes in it but maybe somebody could.
*I actually think that conditional on benevolent theism the evidence is still not very good, but that's another story
I don’t think “rarely” has any explanatory or predictive power! We have no way of saying when it is likely to happen, what form it is likely to take, or why it happens. And the point I was making is that the “why” is more difficult when the explanation is “rarely” than when it’s “never.”
Of course rarely has predictive power. It predicts there would sometimes be miracles but they wouldn't be too common. It doesn't predict which specific miracles there'd be reported--say, whether there'd be a disk in the sky--but neither does atheism.
I think conditional on God existing and being able to do miracles, the odds he'd do them rarely isn't much different from the odds he'd do them never.
Are we talking about odds? I thought we were talking about whether theists have one question to answer, or several. If God never intervened, then "why didn't God heal my aunt?" would truly only have one answer: "Because God doesn't do that." Even though we would still have the question of WHY God doesn't do that, that is still one question. But if God intervenes to heal some people (you mention Cumiskey), but not others, now "why didn't God heal my aunt?" has a much wider range of possible answers: "Because Cumiskey was more pious," "Because healing Cumiskey created more utilons," "Because healing Cumiskey was more likely to lead to a broader increase in faith," etc. But while each of those possible answers might distinguish between Cumiskey and my aunt, we would then have to see if they applied to every other case, so you've got "Why didn't God heal Aunt-1," "Why didn't God heal Aunt-2," "Aunt-3," etc. And any time you find that, say, Aunt-3 was even more pious than Cumiskey, you're back to the drawing board on possible explanations.
Under atheism the explanation is just, random variation. Atheism doesn't need to explain it any more than it needs to explain the exact pattern of a series of coin flips; but if your explanation is "God willed these specific coin flips" then you do need to say something about those specific ones
Yes, in fact, "[p]eople are extremely suggestible and have terrible memory. There are as-yet-barely-plumbed psychological phenomena where sometimes a very suggestible person can cause many seemingly-careful observers to make correlated errors. Historians constantly exaggerate and bury negative evidence, so all of these errors and confabulations come down to us as seemingly-ironclad evidence of the paranormal."
The only problem with all these recent religion-themed posts is now I've got Marian hymns rattling around my noggin, and we Catholics do not have hymns as good as the Orthodox for this.
Former Episcopalian here to hook you up with a few good ones you may or may not have heard. In chronological order of composition:
Nova, Nova, Ave Fit ex Eva
https://open.spotify.com/track/2gqUw7wUrlMIkOsZ6D1aeo?si=PmqrrNUaQ_2zaGTvG8nE-w
Sing We to this Merry Company, Regina Celi, Letare
https://open.spotify.com/track/06bi1RKEDLbC8HNqQUaHhe?si=sEz9cjelRZOTOgCtR-R4cg
The Cherry Tree Carol (apocryphal but charming)
https://open.spotify.com/track/4qYTfrackPC7j2h7m0q5dE?si=6eejUE9tS6euHR3fNYB5Aw
Mary the Dawn
https://open.spotify.com/track/2rORq75yUCAP4SK4TZWWML?si=zCi0r40YS_e6NcRjoSs4HA
Breath of Heaven
https://open.spotify.com/track/6fmYoJZsJzUbHPjfTyhhTz?si=xNW86tXRQXmO6K-1a8RfqA
Mary's Song
https://open.spotify.com/track/7k2HxR6E7t81Y818ksNtFt?si=zZtlGeg3SvesQz-2ZUaJSw
Still My Little Boy
https://open.spotify.com/track/7pH0SM8tsclIBgRX7Al1zm?si=bHPIjNIiRXWVWybZz0n6fQ
This site has good commentary on the lyrics of Christmas songs, some of which are about Mary:
https://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/index.htm
Anything Orthodox can also be Eastern Catholic, so no worries.
> and look for the miracle themselves in various contexts - what questions would you want them to ask, and what experiments should they perform?
If you meet a divine-looking being, the first question to ask is about a few still-undiscovered digits of some well-known mathematical constant: <https://www.skytopia.com/project/knowledge/knowledge.html>. I guess it might get tricky to specify that you mean pi, rather than tau, or short-scale septillionth (increase as necessary to make it a still-undiscovered digit) as opposed to long-scale septillionth, or even that you want base-ten digits.
Last time I tried that it got really weird and I'm not sure I ended up learning anything useful - https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/
One of my very favorites, which I still sometimes use to introduce people to your blog.
Oh, I should have remembered that. Did you actually get all those digits in a dream, and keep them in your head long enough to write them down after waking up? Or did you already know the answer?
It can’t hurt to get more people to try, can it?
My ignorant impression has always been that only people like Francisco and Jacinta get out of the car. Though I’m not sure they got to know cars.
I will never understand calling the event at Fatima "creepy." That's kind of incredible to me. Whether divine intervention was involved or not, I can only ever see the event as joyous and life affirming. I thought everybody liked pretty colors.
Sure, but I like my basic conception of reality even more.
I guess it has to do with how one was raised and how one relates to miracles and Christianity. I rejected Christianity and miracles in a flat, non-affective way. It was not an emotional process. I did not feel relieved or freed. If anything, it left me with a slight feeling of disappointment and yearning. I would absolutely be thrilled to find definitive evidence of the religion I was raised in.
You theory might be true given that I, indeed, was raised Catholic and I rejected it pretty emotionally, but I don't quite see what was your reasoning process here/how you connected these.
I would hate to learn that there is an all-powerful being who has no problem torturing people who don't obey its dumb opinions about what's right for eternity and I would feel obligated to fight against it (and, obviously, I'd probably lose given that it's all-powerful)
I think the biggest mistake in Christianity was deciding that God was all-powerful. This must have been an asset during a more hierarchical time, but it was a poison pill that would ultimately backfire.
Regardless of God's hypothetical power level, the morality of the bacteria does not apply to the human being. When I scrub my countertops, I have little regard for the death and suffering of microbes. (Nor does it matter to me that the bacteria is deemed by us to be incapable of autonomy, intelligence and self-reflectiveness. I can imagine a being with such vastly superior faculties that in comparison, humanity's cognitive abilities are infinitesimal and irrelevant)
We don't condemn bacteria to eternal torment though.
Neither do all Christians believe in eternal torment. Some regard that as a literary device while accepting the overall divinity of the Bible.
Well purportedly the Virgin showed the children visions of human souls being tormented by demons in hellfire forever I’d say that’s pretty creepy
Fair enough. I guess it is natural some people would see the whole story as a package deal. I was thinking of the actual psychedelic phenomenon in the sky, and if that was confirmed to be a miracle, it wouldn't follow that everything the child-seers reported was true.
But what's so cool about a deity scaring and trucking people with a fake sun? That makes him seem potentially scary and untrustworthy.
It may have been scary in the moment but seems almost everyone that came away with the sense of awe and wonder. It sure seems like in the long-term, almost everyone was satisfied and enriched by the experience.
Mobs are terrifying, and the idea that some random meteorological phenomenon could turn a crowd into a mob easily clears my bar for "creepy".
What did the crowd do that was so offensive to you? Glorify the Virgin Mary? They didn't do any dangerous mob like behavior.
"Creepy" ≠ "offensive"; don't put words in others' mouths.
Mob behavior would go beyond creepy into outright scary.
Hundreds-to-thousands of people spontaneously losing themselves to religious fervor is creepy as fuck.
Only if you think religious fervor is inherently creepy. you must think that humanity itself is creepy.
An individual falling into religious fervor would evoke only pity.
A large group doing so deliberately is merely contemptible.
A large group abruptly shifting into it is downright Lovecraftian.
I think religion and spirituality add spice to life and help make it worth living. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
With respect to Hume, his argument wasn’t actually that miracles are definitionally impossible (though I agree that’s how Kenny Easwaran characterized his argument). You can read his argument (in appropriately antique type) at https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10, but the gist of it is much closer to the comment from Jefferson you quote earlier about how he has known Yankee ministers to prevaricate more often than he has seen rocks drop from the sky. As Peter van Inwagen points out (even quoting the same story about Jefferson!), it’s a little hard to tell exactly what Hume’s argument is, but one fair reading of him is that whether or not miracles actually happen, you shouldn’t ever (or hardly ever) believe in them because the existence of miracles is more “contrary to experience” than that the people reporting the miracles are wrong (whether because they’re lying, or sincerely mistaken, or exaggerating, or something else). Then he also makes a bunch of garden variety criticisms of actually-existing miracle reports.
Van Inwagen makes the reasonable point that it’s hard to give content to the term “contrary to experience” in a way that preserves the argument: https://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Of_Of_Miracles.pdf But Hume isn’t making the facile point that the laws of nature can never be violated because any supposed violation would itself be part of the laws of nature.
I’m not saying Hume says miracles are “impossible” - the one step in Scott’s characterization I dispute is the idea that a law is something that can’t be violated. Hume doesn’t believe in objective laws! For Hume, “law” is a *subjective* term, not an objective one. For *you* to *call* a generalization a law is for you to be inclined to doubt any particular observation that claimed to violate it, rather than doubting the generalization. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong - with enough new observations you could give it up. But you would no longer treat it as a law, and you would no longer treat the violation as a miracle.
If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
(Hume would be hypothetically open to someone proving that there is a god by finding the psychological laws of this being.)
You seem to be treating the word “miracle” as synonymous with “visible violation of the laws of nature,” but that’s not how Hume defines it. He provides an express definition in the text itself: “A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” That’s why he can say that something is a miracle even if no one realizes it’s miraculous (as when God causes a feather to rise a bit more than the wind, unaided, would have done).
He’s pretty clear, for example, that if Elizabeth I were to be resurrected through divine interposition, that would be an honest-to-Hoyle miracle. He just says that even the unanimous agreement of historians would be insufficient evidence that it occurred. He does *not* say that the conclusion you should draw from the unanimity of historians is that there’s no law that everyone who dies stays dead. And he certainly doesn’t say more generally that a miracle *definitionally* can’t occur because seemingly miraculous observations should simply cause you to revise your notion of what the laws of nature are.
>If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
From my post:
"The reason why people cite Hume’s argument against miracles is to say that God does not exist, or if He does exist He does not do such things. If your argument against miracles allows for the existence of God actively making things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, then it’s a pretty weak argument against miracles!"
Yes, this is my impression of the core of Hume's argument against miracles too, after studying philosophy.
That "contrary to experience is hard to give content" is in itself is a part of the critique- that miracles are something contrary to experience (of laws of nature) is a classical, scholastic definition of miracles. The reason for this that Hume believes there is no observation that can plausibly be connected to "so it is caused by God", based on probabilistic reasoning of experiences, when we assume there is such a thing as laws of nature. More generally, that there can never be a science of miracles.
Van Inwagen doesn’t say it’s hard to give content to full stop. As he points out, there are various possible meanings that can be given to the phrase (Hume doesn’t specify which one he’s using), but none of them is such that Hume’s argument works.
Science cannot address the unique; it can only assess the replicable.
> By far the biggest problem with this theory is that fire kasina meditation is hard and time-consuming.
Why is that a problem.
Lets say there exists some underlying mechanism. Some, as yet unspecified, neurochemical detail and specific circumstances that trigger the effect.
Ancient meditation practitioners found some way to trigger the effect. But maybe not the easiest way.
Maybe the fire kasina meditation is easier under conditions of high air pressure, or when you have an unusually salty diet, or something.
If the people of fatima had unusually salty diets, and salt helps the effect trigger more easily, and most kasina meditators aren't eating that much salt, then this all fits. And it doesn't need to be salt, it could be any unknown variable.
You're kind doing this thing that Scott has condemned multiple times in this series. You're doing "There must be some logical explanation so what's all the fuss about? There's nothing to see here." Until you present a specific explanation that 95 percent of us can get on board with, there's something to "see here."
I agree that we shouldn't circularly dismiss paranormal phenomena as impossible on the grounds that paranormal phenomena are impossible, but in this particular case I think Scott and others have marshaled enough evidence that there's a plausible naturalistic explanation for this "miracle," even if all the details aren't exactly known. I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect an explanation that accounts for every point of detail; historical events are not repeatable after all.
If we don't strive for clarity in most cases, we will find clarity in no cases.
I never said "so what's all the fuss about".
The point is "blah neurotransmitters blah optic nerve" is a potential scientific explanation.
But the theory "fire kasina" isn't itself about neurotransmitters. So we need to understand what this theory is saying.
It's saying that whatever currently unknown neurochemical thing is happening, the same thing is happening in fire kasina and in sun miracles.
It's the difference between "scurvy is caused by lack of vitamin C". And "I don't know what causes scurvy, but whatever the mechanism is, the same thing happens in humans and in these hamsters"
The fact that kasina is hard to achieve isn't a major strike against this "kasina=fatima" theory.
Sorry for misunderstanding you. I guess you're basically saying, "Calm down, everybody, it's definitely not God," and forgive me if I find that prosaic in is it's own way. We have such limited data to go on out that I wouldn't count out a supernatural explanation..
I think that our data is limited and confusing, and it's almost certainly not god.
But that wasn't the main thing I was saying.
I'm saying that the hypothesis "fire kasina and fatima have the same underlying biopsycochemical explanation" isn't significantly weakened by the observation that fire kasina is hard to achieve.
Yeah, and I think the case is stronger than this. Meditation phenomena are strongly affected by psychological states - and the Fatima witnesses had a lot of relatively relevant psychological properties. Like strong faith, expectation that something spectacular would happen and some degree of group trance.
A point on shadows and color:
The descriptions of the moments when a light of a specific color appeared to be temporarily bathing the entire scene seem to explicitly state that the shadows were of an identical hue. ("Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground.")
Had the incoming light been actually purple-colored (so either a mixture of red and blue wavelengths or something violet+; Perception of purple is weird in humans in general...) the shadows should appear complementary - i.e. greenish-brown. Typical example: Shadows turn progressively blue as sunlight shifts from white, to yellow, to red, during a sunset. Shadows are the *unilluminated* places. There is still some reflection from surrounding surfaces, but to the degree that the shadows actually appear darker, they *subtract* the hue shift of the incoming light from the background.
This suggests the perceived changes in color may be an internal phenomenon downstream of the retina, rather than something happening objectively in the external world. Color perception is surprisingly weird, the eye cones are very low res and most of your qualia originate from neural post-production that auto-corrects for hue and luminosity all the time. If your eyes are a bit tired and a perhaps temporarily overloaded all throughout the spectrum (meaning all three cone types overstimulated and sending in static), the processing system could conceivably become unmoored and start wandering.
That's a really interesting point, but I'm not sure I really understand what you mean. For example in the scene in the thumbnail of this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9jR5SGR7FI - everything is blue, and the shadows also look blue.
Post-produced and color-corrected video is not a good representation of the phenomenon. This photo is also unfortunately shopped, but it points to something that should be recognizable: The buildings are white, but the parts not illuminated by the orange lamps read as comparably blue - https://greeceinsiders.travel/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Santorini-sunset_greece-sunsets_feature-scaled.jpg
Purple might be a bad specific example for its odd behavior, as mentioned, but the witnesses seem to be claiming that all colors were having the same effect, uniformly covering everything. And yellow light certainly does not create yellow-tinted shadows.
Here is perhaps a better example, with direct, orange-faded sunlight - https://greeking.me/images/all/santorini-oia-sunset-Mila-Atkovska-shutterstock.jpg
The shadows shift blue as the illuminated parts shift red.
Thank you!
Does fighting antisemitism, a worthy goal, demand that we unilaterally absolve the Rothschild family of their documented evils? Seems like the kind of thing one would only do if they lived in a narrow information bubble.
What were the Rothschilds doing in the 1950s that was worse than other big bankers?
Nothing, really. For-profit banking is just incredibly heinous and destructive. And this is true regardless of the ethnicity of the banker. Hindu and Christian bankers have destroyed countless lives.
My interpretation of Hume’s central argument on miracles is just the combination of the semantic point (the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle, even if you want to call it a shmiracle when staff raisings part seas) and the Bayesian point. And Bayesian points tend to be somewhat trivial anyway - there’s nothing that tells you what the right prior to have is, it’s just that things go predictably bad for you if you predict you’ll update your bets in ways that violate conditionalization.
>the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle,
There's only no miracle if you define miracle in a way contrary to how people use the word, and to how it's normally defined. If God parted the Red Sea when Moses raised his staff, that's a miracle. You can only say it's not a miracle if you define miracles as "Things that don't happen."
Hume is using the scholastic, classical definition of "miracles are something that break the laws of nature", so you're wrong that it's contrary. A large part of why you think otherwise, ironically, is probably due to Hume's critique.
I'm arguing that if God parted the Red Sea, most people would use the word "miracle" to describe that. If Kenny defines miracle such that God causing a sea to part so his chosen people can pass is not a miracle, then he's not arguing about the kind of miracles people care about.
As I said before, I think the Marfa Lights are a similarly replicable not-fully-explained luminous phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights?wprov=sfti1
In this case, it’s obviously something about atmospheric lensing, rather than something about the neurophysiology of eyes in bright light, but I don’t think anyone has figured out why it’s common here, and not in other locations, and how it gives rise to the particular strange patterns of lights that it does.
Oh, I've had fire-kasina like stuff happen since I was a kid, I figured it was a normal thing. It happens sometimes at night when it's totally dark, or I have my eyes closed, and I have some kind of not-an-external-image thing in my visual field. That can be an after-image, or the kind of blotches you get if you poke your closed eye with your finger, or anything like that. If you focus your visual attention very intently on that kind of thing, it will move around, change colors, generate strong colors that spread out and fill the visual field, and sometimes have weird spinning or scintillating patterns. Wild I didn't make the connection when reading the first post. This just happens pretty reliably for me when I strongly focus my visual attention on a vision artifact. I never trained this as a mediation technique or anything, it's just something I've often done while bored and looking at the inside of my eyelids while waiting to fall asleep.
Those are closed-eye hallucinations. In fact, what you're describing seems to be only level 2 out of a possible 5 levels according to the en-Wikipedia classification at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
Presumably somehow related, but not the same thing as fire kasina.
I think we need more info on the newspaper strike. First I think we should significantly discount something if it just happened during an interlude when record keeping was harder, secondly it seems odd even if there was a complete newspaper strike in Iran that Iraqi, Lebanese, French or American newspapers didn't seem to report on it all of whom would have journalists on the ground.
This afternoon there was a nice smattering of various cloud types at about sun-height. I was able to observe a round sun through more wispy clouds twice. The first time it was only for a fraction of a second before I looked away. The second time it was more obscured and I looked for a few seconds before looking away out of caution. Both times, when I closed my eyes, the after image was circular. I'd seen the sun in this way before, but it was nice to confirm that my memory wasn't tainted. I don't understand how someone could claim it's impossible.
For my money, Scott's theory that the colors were created by just the right cloud cover is quite primitive. I'll give him an A for Effort but if that's all I had to go on, I'd keep it close to the vest.
Scott's theory is a little more elaborate than what you're recounting...
Re UFOs in Zimbabwe:
The simplest explanation to me is the kids saw a real UFO then lied about what they saw.
All it takes is one popular kid with an overactive imagination and desire to be at the center of something special for him to start exaggerating, then all his friends start exaggerating, and now if you're the one holdout who says, "All I saw was a smudge in the sky", everyone will make fun of you for being a party-killer.
Sixty might be an unusually high number of kids to all go along with it, but still falls well within my expectation of human behavior, and unusual cases do happen.
Make me the pope and I’ll blow up multiple mountains by pointing my staff at them
You propose treating the Khomeini moon vision as your control group, but if we consider miracles as a form of divine communication, then it makes sense that Allah would show believers the rightful ruler of Iran. Why would the Christian God put on a light show? There's no message in it other than "Hey, check out what I can do with the sun!" and even the connection to Catholicism is only circumstantial.
Don't let the implications of this for you as someone associated with the Great Satan bias your judgement.
The kids who predicted the sun miracle also had other visions, such as of people burning in hell. The light show may have served to certify these visions as being divine in origin.
Sure enough, but a more obvious method seems to be... more visions of Hell.
An offhand comment on a podcast I was listening to just yesterday mentioned aphantasia. This resulted in me being deeply confused about what it means to “imagine seeing” or “daydream”.
I’m actually still quite confused, and reading more about it didn’t help.
But I’m *less* confused about the Fatima event. I think it’s quite possible “seeing” is much more… squishy than immediately obvious. People without aphantasia (which is the vast majority of people?) apparently report they actually see a visual of what they are imagining. I still don’t know how to interpret this, but there’s a confusion there for me which makes the Fatima event feel more likely to be explainable by something like fire kasina.
I can imagine it’s possible certain visual inputs, combined with the right suggestions, can lead *most* people to confusing their imagination with their actual visual inputs. This isn’t something I would have so easily believed without my current confusion around aphantasia.
Ah, I have a friend with aphantasia. The stage where you discover its existence and learn that a lot of language that you thought was purely metaphorical is not is apparently quite strange. He's doing fine, though.
Being a human is odd.
Most people cannot see a visual in their field of view, even those without aphantasia. Even for those more skilled at mental imagery, it's very faint, and requires practice for something a little more concrete. For it to be at the level of 'seems like just normal, real life', you probably need an extraordinary case of hyperphantasia.
It's important to note how differently various people distinguish between *imagining* things and *seeing* them. In dreams and narcotics-induced states (including general anesthesia), it certainly seems like I've been seeing images, but I distinguish between this type of vivid imagery and seeing that actually comes from my eyes.
In my life, I can only recall at most one second of waking hallucination that I'm actually seeing something (I once swore I saw a split-second light flash, in a place where I strongly believe there was no flashlight or device that could make a flash present). Of course I've seen afterimages, and the line between those and visual hallucination is a blurry one, but I've attended a workshop on seeing auras, I've stared for 30 seconds into my cellphone flashlight, I see the detailed clouds of color float when I close my eyes... but I've simply never seen anything that wasn't obviously just an artifact of my eyes.
I think it's likely that the phenomena we're taking about is an artifact of many people not being good at distinguishing between these kinds of perception, much like people who feel God is communicating to them. It can be a beautiful, meaningful, socially connecting experience -- so of course it makes sense to interpret it as objectively and externally occurring, rather than being an artifact of your own mind. Story and social identity are powerful, and is the scheme of the scope of types of human, really it's only a handful of (beautiful) weirdos who resist believing that they experienced what their friends say they experienced -- and thus, retroactively actually experiencing it!
> I think it's likely that the phenomena we're taking about is an artifact of many people not being good at distinguishing between these kinds of perception.
I just left a comment pointing to something similar, but this says it better.
I recently found I'm aphantasic. Before learning this, I would have have leaned towards agreeing with Scott's skepticism: "the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle."
But now I agree your take is more likely the explanation of this gap.
Thank you for this deep dive, I feel more confused than before I read the first post on the subject, but confused in a more *nuanced* way, which is always better. If nothing else, it's nice to see that we live in a world where truly strange things seem to occur- I prefer that to the alternative.
Aside, this post has also reminded me to add the Necedah Shrine to my list of weird things in Wisconsin that I want to visit (it's a longer list than one may expect for a state few outside the Midwest think about).
I'm outside the midwest. Wisconsin's awesome.
(Not disagreeing with your assertion, just complimenting your state.)
Excellent analysis, this kasina connection is a realy smart explanation for something so historically baffling. It makes me think how much our brain's interpretation layers onto basic optical phenomena, especially when there's a strong cultural narrative at play.
Could eye conditions like colorblindness or such affect what a person sees or doesn't see with these phenomena? Are there any colorblind sungazers that can offer their perspective?
Rather than push one towards an ultra-conservative flavor of Catholicism, I'd consider the actual theology proclaimed by the children to be a very strong point against a miraculous explanation, or at least against a "Catholicism-is-true" origin of the miracle. (And I say this as a skeptic, but also as someone who doesn't mind the Catholic church at all.)
We do know quite a bit about how the New Testament developed, which theologies ended up winning out, and how Catholic doctrine developed many centuries later, often in response to societal practices and politics.
Conservative Catholicism of the early 20th Century consisted of a mountain of teachings that simply can't be traced back to scripture to to the 1st Century: a powerful role for the Virgin Mary, sainthood itself, the concept of Hell as a place of torment, very contemporary notions of modesty, etc. Catholic theology a magnificent and fascinating edifice, but you need a church to develop and teach it (something the church itself wouldn't dispute at all).
Fatima as a potential Marian miracle is support for exactly one particular version of doctrine - as it was in 1917. Not the one of 70 CE. Not the one of 312 CE. Not the one of 1517 CE. Not the one of 1815 CE. Not the one of 2025 CE (which notably doesn't include Hell as a place of eternal torment, and doesn't consider bare arms to be the worst kind of immodesty). If extreme purist 1917 Catholicism is the only path to salvation, that damns essentially every Catholic ever, even if they piously followed their current doctrine to the letter. They stood no chance until centuries later.
Yes, papal inerrancy and all that - itself a very late addition - but that still suggests that either God is constantly updating His teachings, or that popes can literally set criteria for who is saved and damned.
TL;DR - I'd have no trouble completely discarding the hypothesis "maybe 1917 Catholic theology is literally true in its purest form" out of hand. This is simply because that particular theology only applied and was only practiced and known in a very narrow temporal and cultural window. It's not a "back to basics, just read the scriptures literally" doctrine, but an involved and baroque thing that grew over millennia.
I found your whole comment interesting, but due to personal interests of my own, am electing to follow up on (and push back on) just two small points that are completely tangential to your point (if you don't mind).
1) Do you have any sources for hell as a place of eternal torment not being dominant in first-century(ish) theology? This is of interest. I am not disagreeing, but asking.
2) On the other hand, I would somewhat disagree that hell as a place of eternal torment is no longer taught in the modern Catholic church. They certainly de-emphasize it, and the torment as *physical* torment is -- and has always been -- optional, but I'm not sure it's quite gone away altogether.)
Not an expert by any means, but:
1) What actual 1st Century theology was - or if it was even a unified thing at all - is apparently a pretty big question mark, but I keep reading that the whole idea of Hell as an actual place and not just something like "cast off" or "destroyed" is a much later thing, probably because OT "sheol" (also unclear if it's a literal "place" or not) kept getting rendered as "Hades" into Greek. I think this covers some of that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBA2aFpcqUU
2) My (European) Catholic upbringing decades ago already never included the word at all, it existed exclusively as a caricature in comics and cartoons. Not just "this an embarrassing topic we'd rather avoid", just completely absent and unmentioned. Then you had Pope Francis say "I'd like to think of Hell as empty", and various archbishops redefining Hell as "eternal separation from God" (can't find the original source, but it's become almost a cliche).
It's likely that Hell was never formally removed from the Cathechism, but a reigning pope essentially implying "you probably won't be going there" (even if that isn't what he literally said) really undermines the 1917-style fire-and-brimstone stuff.
Thank you!
"What experiments should they perform?" Well - how often does the Medjugorje phenomenon appear? Someone, who knows the right settings and specs, could buy a sufficiently sophisticated camera... And set it up to track the sun in the sky every day, for long enough, that the phenomenon is eventually reported. Then there'd be better video evidence of whether there's something there.
I feel like the fact that similar effects have been produced in other places casts a lot of doubt on the pro-miracle side. You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to try to explain this away
I think you give somewhat short shift to the omne bonum point, which is partly that there are mathematical constraints on the likelihood ratio for any miracle on theism compared to atheism given a uniform probability for miracles and given that some miracle occurring is likely given atheism.
I think there are places to push back. On more specific religious views the probability of different miracles will not be uniform, if God can perform an infinite range of miracles then uniformity doesn’t make sense, and a lot of miracles involve sequences of events such that once we background the earlier events happening, the probability of the later events becomes much higher on theism than atheism. However, your comment made the point seem like was just the banal observation that it is likely that some improbable events will happen occasionally, which was only the first part of his argument.
At this point I'm putting some weight on the hypothesis that we're all hyper logical autists talking about this, that less autistic people just have hallucinations all the time, and we're the weird ones who can't trick ourselves into seeing the face of the Virgin in the sun.
Diffraction by moving clouds.
I didn't have time to mention this in the first thread, but a very common experience that I have is :
- Clouds are moving fast, and the sun goes in and out of the clouds
- I watch the shadow of tall-ish trees on the ground (~15m tall)
- Each time the sun goes behind a cloud, the shadow moves by 5-10cm, and reappears at an unpredictable position
I haven't gazed at the sun much, but I would expect it to also move a bit every time it goes behind a cloud.
Surely more accounts of miracles should make you more inclined to believe in the supernatural, not to confirm you in your skepticism, right?
I don't understand the meta-game here of pretending the fatima sun miracle is at all worth dedicating all this attention to. I plain don't believe Scott actually believes there's even a 0.001% chance of this being actually miraculous. What remains is some combination of physiological, psychological and sociological phenomena, and the only thing that remains to investigate is what precise combination of these three factors is at play here. Sure, it's kinda neat there is a connection to meditation techniques here, but that's about it.
Maybe someone who's more "in tune" can enlighten me on the point of this whole endeavour?
(PS I add this hesitantly because it implies a somewhat adversarial relationship, but I vaguely recall Scott saying something to the effect of "I only care about AI x-risk and will thus try to boost blog popularity through whatever means just so I can later tell more people about x-risk". I might even be completely misremembering this but at least it explains.. something...)
Cf: a new type of celestial object is discovered. We know that it's almost certainly merely a new natural composition of matter and there is only 0.001% chance that it's aliens, but people will still be interested in researching and discussing it.
Or more directly: what the specific explanation for a mystery is is still an interesting topic, even if the supernatural/extraordinary explanation has insignificant probability.
Hi!
I meant to comment on the original Fatima post, because it meant a lot to me, but I didn't get around to it. So I'm going to take the opportunity to comment now.
First, I want to express my gratitude to Scott for calling out how *horrible* some of the alleged revelations to the children were. I am Catholic, although I like to joke that I'm a practicing Catholic and maybe someday I'll be good at it. One of the things I've been working through lately in therapy is the idea that suffering is good, and therefore I'm supposed to suffer. The first Fatima post (specifically, the discussion of the children "doing penance") helped me identify more precisely where that idea came from. My Catholic school teachers didn't tell us all of the penances the children inflicted on themselves, but they did tell us some, and in a context of "these children were holy and what they did was holy." The post also led me to reflect on how at Fatima those penances were linked to predictions of societal catastrophe, and how biblical prophets also often predicted societal catastrophes and called on people to do things...and then I realized that biblical prophets consistently call for repentance (stop doing bad things to other people), not penance (do bad things to yourself). So for the last few weeks I've been repeating to myself "Repentance, not penance" and that has helped me a lot.
Second, like a few of the other commentators, I came away from the original Fatima post convinced that the miracle of the sun at Fatima was almost certainly not miraculous, but as much for theological reasons as scientific ones. My first thought when I read the description of the alleged miracle of the sun was how *meaningless* it was. Like, suppose you're almighty God and you want to send a message of love and care (or hellfire and damnation, whatever) to your faithful people. Why, out of all the uncountable things you could possibly do, why would you make the sun appear to spin around and turn colors? There's no message there! Or at least none beyond "I can make weird shit happen." What's the point?
Also, as a Catholic, I was aware that the Church hierarchy is very cautious about accepting private revelations (no Catholic is ever required to believe in one), and that some alleged apparitions have been condemned by the bishops, but I was not aware of how many had been condemned or how similar the phenomena associated with them were to the miracle of the sun at Fatima. That's definitely something that makes me lean towards thinking "Yeah, probably all of the popular Marian apparitions are best explained by misinterpreted natural phenomena and social expectations." I do think it's important to recognize the sincerity of the pilgrims. Even though I doubt the origin stories of the pilgrimage sites, I don't doubt that some people have experienced spiritual benefits from their visits. I just now think the pilgrims make the site holy, rather than the other way around. And that's pretty much what the bishops' current position on Medjugorje boils down to, in my understanding.
Speaking of misinterpreted natural phenomena, apparently I am less skeptical about skepticism than Scott, because after reading about the sungazing idiots on reddit, the sungazing experiences of ACX commentors, and the kasina fire meditation, I am quite willing to accept that the visual phenomena of the sun moving, expanding, changing color, etc. are just what happens (at least to some people some of the time) if they stare at the sun. As for the more detailed imagery of the Virgin Mary, the cross, etc. that some people at apparition sites report, I wonder if that could be explained by something as simple as pareidolia? Wikipedia defines pareidolia as "the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual." The participants in these experiences were receiving a visual stimulus (they were staring at the sun). The stimulus was probably nebulous (they were staring at the sun, and human eyes are not meant to do that). Also the afterimages would have provided another visual signal of sorts for their brains to interpret, and depending on how they moved their heads while staring at the sun, the afterimages may have had a more complex shape than the sun itself. They were definitely primed to "impose a meaningful interpretation" on the stimulus, and not just any meaningful interpretation, but a particular sort of interpretation. Pareidolia seems like it could explain both the similarities and the differences among the "visions" some participants reported. A first hand account of the apparition at Zeitoun certainly sounds like pareidolia to me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ6oeCMZk_k; start at 4:45 for the first hand account or around 4:00 for the full story).
Lastly, if you found Fr. Stanley Jaki's arguments interesting, you might also find this post by Deacon Steven Greydanus intriguing: https://greydanus.substack.com/p/what-is-a-miracle-it-depends-partly
Apologies if someone has already said this, but I have a fairly convincing explanation for how afterimages produce a "dancing" phenomenon. I've experienced something like this in darkness with a small bright light.
First, an example you may know that has one part of the explanation but not the other: eye floaters. These are spots that are generally fixed relative to the retina but often seem to move, and the explanation is simple: if a floater is just off-center, then if you try to pay attention to it, your eye will wander in its direction. But the floater moves with your eye, so it always stays just ahead of the optical center, and your eye keeps chasing it, giving it the appearance of motion.
If you're looking close to but not precisely at the center of the sun, you might look towards the center, trying to keep the sun centered in your vision. But if your eye is tracking the *afterimage*, then you will keep chasing it, overshooting the objective sun. But now the sun is off-center in the *other* direction, causing the afterimage to gradually move to the other side of your optical center (actually, one edge of the afterimage will fade while the opposite edge will appear to extend).
The net result of this, assuming some simple linear acceleration response, is an acceleration toward the optical center proportional to the sun's distance from the optical center. If everything works out exactly right, this could be a sinusoidal oscillation along one axis, but more likely is circular or ellipsoidal motion around the center. Of course it's possible to *stop* this motion if you're firm about tracking the light source and ignoring the afterimage, but if you had some expectation that the sun was moving, you might not make an effort to stop it.
Dear sceptical people, please stop pushing me to believe in the miracle of the sun! Because all the huffing and puffing about "well it couldn't be a miracle because miracles just don't happen (look, I just pulled something similar to the Drake Equation out of my... memory... to back that up)" is moving me towards well, dagnabbit, now I have to stand up for the supernatural.
And I don't want to defend the Fatima miracle because I don't care about it!
Anyway, in a less controversial (I hope) take, a lot of the "miracles aren't miracles, if things do happen well it may be improbable but not impossible" (that's not too unreasonable a positoin to hold) and "if it really is demonstrated that this thing happened, then it's clearly not a miracle - because miracles don't happen - it's just some natural phenomenon we didn't understand before" explanations remind me a lot of Spiritualism/psychic research from the early 20th century, and how some proponents of it put forward that it *wasn't* supernatural, there was no such thing as supernatural; these were natural laws that we were now only discovering. Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge were very popular here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crookes#Spiritualism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Lodge#Paranormal_investigations
(Stop me if you've heard examples like these before).
In previous centuries, we had no idea of what electricity was. Some animals can see colours or hear sounds we can't. New scientific discoveries, such as X-rays, are expanding our range of what is perceptible every day. It's all vibrations, you see, vibrations in matter which we will learn the laws of as we learned the laws of physics up to now.
(1/2)
(2/2)
To quote one such rationalist (fictional) psychic, from short story collection published in 1919:
‘You can’t go far in any direction if you stick to so-called common sense,’ Vyse rejoined; ‘we should still be in the Stone Age if the dreamers hadn’t flouted “common sense” through all the ages. Common sense said iron couldn’t float, that man could never fly, that every new invention or discovery outside the range of his comprehension must come from the devil. Common sense has done a lot of climbing down in its day—and is going to do a good bit more.’
‘All matter—so called—is vibrating, from the electron upwards; that is the conclusion of the most modern of scientists quite apart from the “hidden knowledge”. The differentiation of matter is merely a question of the varying rates of vibration. Our five senses are tuned to receive, and to respond to, vibrations within a certain limit at both ends of the scale. Your sense of touch, for instance, records the fact that ether vibrating at a certain rate results in what we call water, fluid and unstable; that at a lower rate it becomes solid in the form of ice; at a higher rate it eludes your sense of touch altogether. Can you not imagine a more sensitive sense than yours might still register vibrations to which your own are unresponsive? It would be no less unbelievable than the sense of smell in a dog as compared with that of a human being.’
‘Besides the physical senses, we also have latent the more subtle senses belonging to the inner bodies; most of us can develop them if we adopt the right methods, but we can’t go into that now. For ordinary psychometry it is sufficient to suppose a brain with nervous centres so delicately poised as to be sensitive to vibrations too rapid for the normal brain to receive. It is extremely difficult to say where the actual transition in sensation of any kind from the physical to the super-physical takes place; the point must lie in the individual. In the case of the past history of an object, the brain, through the sense of touch, is responding to vibrations with which the object in question has come into contact and stored—so to speak. Intimate or prolonged contact will affect the respective rates of vibration of the objects contacting—the proverb about touching pitch and consequent defilement is the result of the inner knowledge of this truth. Everything automatically records its own history.’
...‘What sort of things? Of course, you understand the laws connected with the next plane, and the more subtle form of matter that exists there, are just as orderly and as inexorable as the laws relating to physical matter. Nothing can be accomplished except through obedience to them. Nor can those on the other side interfere with the laws of this.’
‘Then it would seem their powers must be pretty limited,’ Hawthorn objected gloomily. ‘I fancied their help, if they could give any, would consist of interference with events threatening disaster.’
‘So it does, but they have to fall into line with natural law. My dear chap, think for a moment what the other would mean. Nothing short of chaos. Bad enough if the Maker of the Universe were to work against His own ordained laws. But that every well-meaning busybody on the next plane should be able to do so—why, it is unthinkable. No, they can help us right enough, but they can’t perform so-called miracles.’
‘Then I don’t see how they are vastly superior to ourselves.’
‘They are not,’ was the quick reply. ‘Why should they be? They are just one upward step further on the planes of evolution. They have a wider vision, and therefore a wider power of judgment; and, as they can to a certain extent read people’s minds, they have a very limited power of prediction.’
...‘The spiritual and the psychic are not at all the same thing; you shouldn’t bracket them like that,’ Vyse urged. ‘The psychic has to do mainly with the plane next our own, a state of matter vibrating just a little more rapidly than the physical. The spiritual is in touch with things far higher and nearer the essence of all things. Physical phenomena come under the former head.’
‘You mean table-turning, banging tambourines, and so on?’
‘Don’t throw contempt on what are merely the readiest means of communication,’ the other laughed. ‘You remind me of Naaman, in the Bible, and his chagrin when told to cure his leprosy by bathing in the Jordan when he expected some highly dramatic ceremonial. You don’t ask to be assisted by pomp and ritual when speaking on the telephone. If you take the trouble to train for clairvoyance and clairaudience, you will be independent of such instruments.’
...‘Mlle Gourget was a medium,’ Vyse said abruptly.
Swinnerton laughed. ‘I have no doubt that ought to be very enlightening, but I am not sure I know what a medium really is. I have always associated the word with fraud and credulity.’
‘Most people do,’ Vyse replied, ‘who have never taken the trouble to try and understand. A medium is—a medium—literally, between physical matter and the more subtle, less tangible matter of the next plane. He—or she, as the case may be—has a superfluity of etheric substance in their composition. This etheric matter vibrates—and, as you doubtless know, all differentiation of matter is merely a question of the rate of its vibration—at a rate to which our five senses can barely respond, and forms the link with vibrations to which our physical senses cannot respond at all; without that link no physical phenomena can take place; they on that next plane are as hopelessly cut off from physical matter as the physical is from them. “
The view - and hope - was that investigation by trained observers and men of science would clear away the accretion of superstition and fantasy over the centuries, record the phenomenon, and then derive laws of the super-normal/preternatural for them, just as we had done for other natural phenomena. This would explain telepathy, all kinds of psychic and mediumistic activity, ghosts and so forth.
Of course, we haven't done that and indeed are even more firm in our belief that 'such things cannot be'. I think the same will hold for materialist explanation of miracles: there will be natural phenomena open to natural explanation, and for the rest - those who do not wish to believe will not be convinced by anything: "He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
Oh I don't know, maybe I like the mystery and I don't want anyone to solve it. There's something deeply alluring to me about an impossible enigma. I have gotten obsessed to with places like the Sultanate of Utetera and the Jewish Kingdom of Beta Israel, solely because they are so mysterious.
This thread has been interesting so I'm primed with sun miracles and fire kasina information, but have never seen any of either before in my life. Here's what happened last night:
I was awakened from slumber in a dark room, and after a few seconds of warning, someone turned on the overhead light. I caught in my view near the center for less than a second. I immediately closed my eyes and in the afterimage I experienced:
Stained-glass-like patches of vivid red and orange, streaming out from a central cross shape into the visual field, occupying more and more of the visual field for about 15 seconds. The outside of the central cross started more gray but then took on more blue and greenish hue. The streaming pattern continued, with red starting to predominate, then orange. It was very beautiful. No spinning or anything. Then after say 15-30 more seconds they turned out the lights (my eyes were closed this whole time). There was then a spectacular and beautiful vision of the red and green collapsing in a kind of slow motion stained glass sacred geometry effect that took maybe 1.5s, and the blue and green stained glass patches then started streaming towards the center, which now wasn't a cross but more a point. This continued another say 15 seconds after which the visual effects faded over maybe another 10s.
So: zero prior experience seeing or cultivating these effects, but primed with descriptions of the effect and possible triggers
Stimulus: dark room, then 500ms bright light upper left visual field, then lighted-room-closed-eyes for about 45s or so, followed by darkened room again
Visual effects: as above. Some color experiences pretty reminiscent of what's reported for fire kasina meditation on essentially zero cultivation of the skill, but not having the open-eyes-bright-stimulus trigger, no spinning. Some growing/shrinking, some vague symbolic content, some “Catherine wheel” flavored effects, full-visual-field effect, color changes in the range described.
I'm impressed and this was an experience I'd like to repeat. It came so readily in a circumstance that seems like it's happened to me 100s of times and likely to billions of people. I feel like this should be really well known as an effect but perhaps a bit of priming is critical? I've had some visual hallucinatory experiences in other circumstances so I have some prior experience with noticing such effects, but this took zero mental effort to notice and very little effort to maintain once initiated.
I had estimated that low-prep kasina effects were pretty unlikely to be a contributing factor but this changes me to thinking that is more plausibly part of what's going on.
I suspect the truth is a combination of your 1 & 2 (individualized & generalized natural explanations).
Disparate phenomena have disparate physical processes generating them which, when observed, trigger the same unreliable psychological effects.
>"…a very suggestible person can cause many seemingly-careful observers to make correlated errors."
This in particular reminded me of the 2011 OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly), in which particle physicists with precise instruments nevertheless observed superluminal speeds with greater than six sigma confidence. It took CERN et al. several months to identify the previously-overlooked sources of measurement error.
If such a "miraculous" event could be observed in spite of both very strong priors that the speed of light is unbreakable and nanosecond-precise sensors, any hypothesis with more degrees of freedom and less reliable recording should be considered less probable than superluminal neutrinos.
I just realized that the Problem of Evil is not just about evil
Even without the claim that God is "perfectly good", it's still weird to be like "let me explain some stuff using intentional-stance/fitness-maximizer language, but don't ask me about any intention, fitness function or maximisation mechanism"
"there’s so much weirdness that we should be less willing to take any given example of weirdness on its own terms."
Exactly this, amplified by the fact that humans who are primed to see a particular sort of extreme weirdness (whether an alien spaceship or a divine miracle) will often observe a lesser weirdness and misperceive a great deal of detail to make it match the weirdness they were expecting. And in the specific case of weirdness visible in the sky, we have a lot of experience in how that process plays out.
With Fatima, we have a bit of modest weirdness - probably the sun behind a high cirrus layer, weird mostly because people almost never focus on the sun at all. We definitely have a crowd that was primed to see a divine miracle of the Sun. And we have a bunch of detail that is generally within the range of detail that we know from past study often finds its way into objectively-that-was-just-a-fixed-light-source weirdness with a bit of priming.
That calls for a high prior on the explanation being misperception of a minor weirdness due to collective priming.
A few thoughts on the whole Fatima thing:
First of all, we must consider the fact that one in a million events do, in fact, happen. In a world without miracles we would indeed expect to have some weirdness. Just as in a world without aliens we have UFOs and crop circles. The randomness and complexity of humans means that we'd expect a handful of human experiences to be far outside normal bounds.
These highly unique experiences get signal-boosted due to their novelty. Even if it takes a truly odd combination of group psychology, culture, weird/biased reporting, and mixed/hazy recollections you'd still expect to have a few very odd bits of history. Not least because you probably haven't heard about all the group hallucinations that were easily disproved. If Fatima was happening bi-weekly around the world and ONLY to Catholics I think we'd be forced to have a real serious discussion. But as it stands, it seems like it's a one in a million event in a world that's throwing billions of dice at once.
Secondly, the people of the past had fundamentally different cultures. We tend to adjust our belief in eyewitness testimony based on how much we trust the people involved. Some rural conspiracy theorist's claim about a cigar shaped craft lifting off from a cornfield can be easily dismissed, but a group of highly educated professionals all claiming that they saw the same thing would stick a lot harder.
But the people of the past tended to be far more credulous and were far deeper believers in their faiths. Witnesses of the past had far more avenues by which they could be manipulated, engaged in a lot more motivated reasoning, weren't as skeptical, had deeper social bonds through with group truths were enforced, and information gathering as a whole was of a far lower standard. There is a difference between a group of people claiming to see the sun swing around the sky in 1917 and a similarly sized group of people claiming the same in 2025.
I find it likely that quite a few people saw nothing or very little, it just wasn't reported on. Many of the people involved engaged in motivated reasoning, many of the reporters and researchers immediately after the fact engaged in motivated researching. I think many people could've seen minor illusions, could've thought they saw the sun move due to the lack of reference when looking up, things like that. When reporting was done on the subject the most extreme tales got the most attention from reporters and most people had seen enough that nobody was willing to commit social suicide by loudly denying the whole thing (or if they were they didn't get very far).
This isn't a well thought out argument, but it serves to demonstrate the point that an intersection of old culture and plain good (or bad) luck could result in a one-in-a-million event in which there are no real good explanations. Not because they don't exist, but because they were destroyed by time, never preserved because everyone involved found it more interesting and profitable to preserve the magic.
"But the people of the past tended to be far more credulous and were far deeper believers in their faiths. Witnesses of the past had far more avenues by which they could be manipulated, engaged in a lot more motivated reasoning, weren't as skeptical, had deeper social bonds through with group truths were enforced, and information gathering as a whole was of a far lower standard. There is a difference between a group of people claiming to see the sun swing around the sky in 1917 and a similarly sized group of people claiming the same in 2025."
This seems a very ironic paragraph, to me.
"There is a difference between a group of people claiming to see the sun swing around the sky in 1917 and a similarly sized group of people claiming the same in 2025."
Dear sir or madam, before you strain your arm patting yourself on the back for your superiority, I am willing to state that if you got a bunch of random people together in 2025, you could get every bit as much credulity as the benighted peasants of 1917. QAnon? r/somethingiswrong2024?
In 1917, there were people turning up at the site ready to poke fun at the credulous stooges and they ended up seeing something. I'm not saying it was a miracle, but the people who said "Hey, I can't believe it, but I did see the colours/the sun moving" are not all of them "Yes, I wanted to see this, I was prepared to see this!"
As to "it just wasn't reported on", there was at least one atheist newspaper which was dying to have reports of "nothing happened, the credulous stooges are all credulous stooges". O Século, a newspaper that was pro-the anticlerical Republican party, founded by someone who was:
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebasti%C3%A3o_de_Magalh%C3%A3es_Lima
"A defender of republicanism with a tendency towards utopian socialism , he was part of the so-called Generation of 70 and was for many years grand master of Portuguese Freemasonry , presiding over the organization's destiny during the Coup of May 28, 1926 and the outbreak of persecutions that would lead to its subsequent illegalization during the Estado Novo regime .
The historian Maria Rita Lino Garnel draws our attention to the fact that the defense of a republican ideal and anti-dynastic and anti-clerical propaganda are evident in his written and journalistic production, as well as in his cultural and civic action."
Let me remind you that Continental Freemasonry was not simply a bunch of guys getting together to dress up and be a charitable fraternal organisation, it was very much anti-Catholic Church and the sentiment was reciprocated by the Church.
So this paper sent a reporter to cover the events, and they did report on what they saw happening, and I don't think you can claim the reporter was "engaged in motivated reasoning, [un]willing to commit social suicide by loudly denying the whole thing (or if they were they didn't get very far)" - if you're a reporter for a Republican, anti-clerical newspaper, you're already committing as much social suicide you want:
https://www.bluearmy.com/astounding-things-how-the-midday-sun-danced-at-fatima/
"The hour advances…The miraculous manifestation, the announced visible sign is about to produce itself… And then a spectacle makes itself present, unique and unbelievable to anyone not a witness to it. From the summit of the road, the entire immense multitude is seen turning towards the sun, which presents itself free from the clouds, in its zenith. The star resembles a plate of opaque silver and it is possible to stare at the disc without the most minimal effort. It doesn’t burn; it doesn’t blind. It may be said to be an eclipse in progress. But a colossal uproar suddenly arises, and the spectators that are closest are heard to yell:
Miracle, miracle! A marvel! A marvel!
To the amazed eyes of those people, who, pale with astonishment and with heads uncovered, face the blue sky, the sun trembled, the sun had never-before-seen brusque movements beyond all cosmic laws – the sun “danced”, according to the typical expression of the peasants. And, later on, some ask others if they saw it, or what they saw. The majority confesses to have seen a trembling or dancing of the sun, but others declare to have seen the smiling face of the Virgin herself, and swear that the sun spun around like a wheel of fireworks, that it descended almost to the point of burning the earth with its rays… There are those who say that they saw it successively change color…
...It still remains for the competent ones to apply judgment to the macabre dance of the sun that, today in Fatima, made hosannas explode from the chests of the faithful and left people naturally moved – this is what reliable people assure me, freethinkers and other people without concerns for religious nature, about those who flocked to this already celebrated shrubland.
Avelino de Almeida"
I'd appreciate if anyone can dig out the original text of the newspaper report, I'm only able to get translations on Catholic sites and those could indeed be accused of cherrypicking.
Surely it would be possible to set up a 24/7 video stream from Medjugorje with an appropriately filtered camera that could track the movement of the sun.
Regarding the various visual effects: when I was a child I would cause optical hallucination by pressing firmly on my upper eyelids, pushing my eyeballs both back and towards my nose. I just confirmed that this still works - one first goes immediately cross-eyed, and then a few seconds later tunnel vision begins, and by the time the visual field is completely obscured there is a kaleidoscopic effect of various colors (mostly purple and grey, but others as well), dancing about. After releasing pressure the darkness quickly abates, but the kaleidoscope continues, faintly, for perhaps a minute. I've seen similar patterns when using hallucinogens.
I'm not sure if the underlying effect is caused by pressing on the nerve, or restricted blood flow. It's certainly different from merely wearing a blindfold or closing my eyes, but I can imagine that much of it is my brain struggling to interpret what signal it has.
Thogal theory and Practice
By Jackson Peterson
I am writing this as a "quick start" instructional guide that will allow anyone to begin practicing thogal effectively and safely.
Thogal means "over the skull", "over the crest". It actually means to arrive instantly without jumping to get there, like a quantum leap. Thogal practice makes it very easy to experience, know and differentiate rigpa from all other mind states, in its purest form.
Rigpa is our primordial Buddha Mind that is intrinsically perfect, permanently. Because it's permanent, it's always present. But it is not our experience, rather our experience is other coarser states of mind as content, which are appearing within the space of changeless rigpa awareness.
By practicing thogal, rigpa itself becomes its own self-experience. What is experienced is its own penetrating transparency, insightful clarity, wisdoms, and absence of a "me" egoic identity, as well as the absence of the sense of an "external" universe. Eventually the physical body will dissolve into pure Light as the practice comes to perfect fruition.
Thogal focuses on the visual apparatus. That means we use our eyes as our path.
Traditionally we use the sun by looking towards the sun in early morning and late afternoon. One does not look directly at the sun but slightly underneath it or off to the side, and with sun glasses on. I find using one eye at a time works best. One squints so that the ball of the sun is no longer visible but only a diffraction pattern of colored rays and a background tapestry of circles as though similar to looking at a peacock's feather. Within that diffraction pattern you can see little round spheres that may have little circular rings within them as well. At first they may just look like this but completely round: @
They get larger over time with consistent practice. They are called "thigles" in Tibetan. (Pronounced: teeglay)
One then begins to focus on one little sphere by not moving the eyes. You just gaze at it. So do just this much for several sessions. I recommend a safer and easy way to do thogal:
Use your iPhone or similar phone with only the black screen. Hold it down toward your waist, angle it so you can look down and see the reflection of the sun. Squint your eyes until the ball disappears into the light refraction and continue as described above. This allows practicing throughout the day, even at noon. But be sure to wear sun glasses. Between the UV absorption in the phone's black glass and your sun glasses, no harmful UV rays should be entering your eyes. It's only the UV rays that damage the eyes. I recommend 20 minute sessions. 10 minutes with each eye. Start with one session per day and add a session later in the day if desired. But practice everyday. The effects will last and are cumulative.
If sun is not available you can flip the phone around and use the flashlight feature as though looking at the sun, but no sunglasses are necessary. You can also use an ordinary light bulb.
There are specific recommended postures for during thogal practice but I have not found them necessary and Namkhai Norbu stated that once the practice is working the postures are no longer necessary. I have taught dozens of people this approach in my retreats and it works for everyone without exception.
Once you are a little familiar wth the inner landscape and can focus on these thigle spheres easily, then while looking at the spheres ask your self "who or what is doing the looking?". "Where exactly is the observer?" Is there a "someone" looking or is there just empty perception?".
Also from time to time notice the empty space between the thigle and the place from where you are observing. Notice that completely clear and transparent space. Sense that space behind you and all around you and through you.
Also notice your state of inner empty clarity, transparent and vividly awake; from time to time.
Pay less attention to the condition of the thigles than to your empty awareness that is looking.
After you finish, look closely at various textures and surfaces close up and notice the sharpness of detail. Sometimes you can actually feel the textures by sight alone. Vision will become amazingly clear along with a sense of transparency and absence of selfness. It's this transparency (zangthal) and absence of selfing that transforms the mind completely into its own vivid emptiness. There is nothing to think about or workout. The practice does it all automatically.
There are many more aspects to all of this. To learn more and for additional support please join our thogal group here at FB, Dzogchen Thogal.
I am posting this on the general Dzogchen group to encourage those interested to practice. There is currently lots of misinformation out there regarding thogal and I would like to keep this technology available in an easy and workable format that can bring infinite benefit to any competent practitioner that wants to learn.
There are several lineage authorized books on the open public market now that explain thogal in complete detail. Now the traditional lineage Lamas have allowed these thogal teachings to be propagated broadly for everyone's benefit also out of a fear that these precious teachings may disappear eventually.
I received the thogal transmission and practice instructions privately in 1985 through the Yeshe Lama text as presented to me by a Nyingma Lama who was taught by Dudjum Rinpoche. I later received the detailed Bon transmission of Shardze Rinpoche's text "Heart Drops of the Dharmakaya" trekchod and thogal instructions personally from the Bon Menri Lopon. Shardza Rinpoche attained the "rainbow body of light" in the 1930's. Neither of my teachers asked me to keep these teachings secret, nor have I pledged any samaya regarding not sharing any of the Dzogchen teachings with others.
Please share your successes and insights in our thogal group as well as your practice issues.
I recommend reading my book and gaining familiarity with all the practices in the appendix before commencing thogal practice: "The Natural Bliss of Being", as well as attending one of my thogal retreats.
May all beings benefit! Emaho!
I'm a hobby meditator who totally buys that something fire kasina-esque could happen really fast. A few days before the original Fatima post I was in the woods on a sunny day and decided to briefly focus my attention on a tree about 20 yards away. When I do this in a forest, I can really quickly, like within a few seconds, get this effect where its like I'm looking at one of those magic eye books. My whole field of vision becomes dramatically different, and things seem to be shifting around quite a bit.
During this particular event I clearly saw shafts of light on the tree trunk forming a cross. The cross was not there when viewing the tree pre-magic eye effect. I thought about how a religious person could easily take this as some sort of profound sign from God. But hey, maybe it was and I am unfairly dismissing the most important two minutes of my life.
I don't know if this is good Bayes, but it struck me while reading the original post - were you at all surprised to learn about Fatima? Because, when I read about it, I thought "That's a very interesting story, and I'm happy I've now heard of it."
Even before reading your decent explanations of many of its features, I felt no need to update my priors because, I think, my prior understanding of the natural, rules-based world included an allowance for really interesting stories that look kind of like supernatural events and haven't been fully explained even if some smart people tried really hard. I was aware of the likely fact that I hadn't heard about many of those, and Fatima is probably the best example of the above I've ever encountered, but I don't think I would be particularly surprised to be told about 10 more well-evidenced events with similarly bizarre characteristics, so long as they weren't consistent with *each other* or geographically or temporally linked.
My gut is telling me that that's okay, and that models for absurdly complex things like "the entire earth" should include a relatively small amount of fuzzy space where things that don't fit your understanding of smaller rules go, without challenging your overall model. I think that space has to be capable of being overwhelmed, by a surprising enough event or a sufficiently high number of them, but Fatima feels like it does not rise to that level. It is not explained, but it appears to be plausibly explainable - I would not be remotely surprised to check its wikipedia page in 10 years and learn that some physicist and psychologist had teamed up and conclusively explained everything in accordance with existing science.
How many times would I have to hear about a Fatima-level event - unexplained but plausibly explainable, well attested and dramatic - before I started updating my priors for the genuinely supernatural? I'm not really sure - the earth is big, there are a lot of humans, history is long, and our understanding of science is imperfect. Maybe 50-100? I'm curious if others have different intuitions for that number.
"[M]y prior understanding of the natural, rules-based world included an allowance for really interesting stories that look kind of like supernatural events and haven't been fully explained even if some smart people tried really hard"
I looked for the source of the following but couldn't quickly find it...nevertheless: I read something by I think either Martin Gardner or Douglas Hofstadter (so thinking of the SciAm column they both wrote at different times) about a James-Randi kind of skeptic who would do a presentation for school kids about magic and how it was all tricks, and not psi. He'd show a few things with explanations, and then conclude by showing a trick and NOT explaining it. His point was "I want you to experience knowing that something IS a trick even though you don't specifically know WHAT trick."
Whether it is meditative or not, I don't think Catholic prayer is close enough to fire kasini meditation for the comparison to be relevant to this discussion.
I appreciate the follow up, but I don't think you seriously addressed the major criticisms of your attempt at a naturalistic explanation from the original post. First, positing an "unknown optical illusion" is ad hoc and circular. "There must be some rare natural event to explain this rare natural event." If you assume metaphysical naturalism is true, then sure, but typically the Fatima miracle is used to destabilize that assumption.
Second, the brushing off of non-Catholic and distant witnesses as "contaminated" feels like cherry picking. Yes, priming is a real phenomenon, but I think you are taking it to the extreme to suggest that anybody who even heard of the children's premonition can be totally dismissed.
Third, and probably most problematic, is the attempt to square sungazing (sustained focus on the sun for several minutes) with what witnesses report at Fatima: near-immediate sensation that was so out of the ordinary that people screamed and fainted. That undercuts the idea of an optical illusion triggered by retinal fatigue.
So, I don't think you have provided a satisfying natural explanation and I think it still wide open that perhaps something beyond naturalism is here. Or at minimum, we simply don't know and it is ok to be uncomfortable with that.
So, one thing that I kept thinking in your original article was that every time you said "complexity penalty" I still didn't feel like it overcame the mother of all complexity penalties that is God. (see Yudkowski on Occam's Razor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor)
And with this, I think I have further thoughts. I think, with all the evidence presented, there is little to none that convinces me to attache God to this. Like, I'm still in the camp that there's probably a reasonable explanation that we haven't found (Pyramid and the Garden style https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/), but I'm way more willing to believe that this is a miracle than I am to believe God did it. I don't think these are the same.
I'm not a theologian, or anything else, so my knowledge is scant here. And maybe you know enough that this is obvious (or I missed it in my read through). But if this is God, then... what? Are we to believe that God spends His effort by providing corroboration to some kids about Hell 100 years ago by making the sun be weird, and then also does the same thing in a random place in Bosnia semi-regularly for no reason? *That*'s what He spends His days doing? Is there a God described in any religion that makes that feel right?
You have some question on God's motives with "Why would God do the same miracle 3 different ways?" but I think it kinda misses the bigger "Why would God do any of this?"
And you seem to throw the word "God" around next to "miracle" as if they're one in the same! If this was proven 100% to be unable to be natural phenomenon, what would you do? Convert to Catholicism? Even though you note that the kids' stories are only "a rounding error" in difficulty to explain? Apollo drives the sun and likes giving prophecies, are we sure it wasn't his doing?
If it was a miracle, what we'd know about God is that He can do some stuff with the Sun, and He sometimes tells people about it beforehand. Possibly the kids stories aren't just extra detail, informed by their own culture, so we might also know that God cares about people within news range of Fatima 108 years ago dressing immodestly, and a scattering of other things in other places, but by absence of regular miracles that the average person has seen, not too much else? This seems a very weird purview.
Re: Khomeini moon miracle.
I think you quoted the answer
“that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see"
I am filing under emperor's new clothes
One guy in the comments in an open thread recently said he was disappointed both in the very existence of this kind of post, and the Joan of Arc review that took some miracles seriously, but to my mind this is proper science, sceptical but open minded. Testing the hypothesis. Deciding there is no conclusion if necessary.
The only other thing I can add is that I have definitely seen the sun as a pale disk in my time, generally behind some layer of high white clouds, and I get the impression that this is more likely when it’s cold. When it happens it’s mostly when there’s a “break” in the lower darker clouds (I’m no expert on cloud types) and the sun appears as a visible disk that can be started at behind some lighter clouds.
> Against this, what is the base rate for the sun changing color and dropping out of the sky, at the precise time that child-seers prophesied a miracle would occur? Seems lower than one in a million. Impossible things should never happen. Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on - or that I’m crazy, or dreaming, or something other than just “well it was a coincidence”.
I assume that you mean, of course, "What is the base rate of it looking like this happened to the people who went to observe it?", but this is still overstating the case quite a bit. The question isn't, "What is the base rate for this specific event occurring?", but, "What is the base rate for apparent miracles at least as convincing as this one occurring?" The latter is difficult to determine, but if you consider Fatima to be the most convincing miracle that has ever happened, we would need to establish that the expected base rate on naturalism is less than once in all of presently recorded history for Fatima to be good evidence for the supernatural. In fact, we would need to do more than that - we would need to argue that the observed rate of Fatima-like miracles (i.e., miracles at least as convincing as Fatima) is more expected on theism than on naturalism. But it's really hard to argue that the exact rate we observe is even expected on theism - the most obvious expectation is that we should see miracles all the time on theism (that's why the problem of divine hiddenness is a thing). Even if you want to factor out the problem of divine hiddenness from the discussion (though it's kind of hard to separate the question of how often we should expect to see miracles from the problem of divine hiddenness), it's not clear why theism would predict a rate of one Fatima-like miracle in all of currently recorded history, rather than some higher rate or a rate of exactly zero (the latter would occur if God *really* wants to stay hidden).
The Miracle of the Holy Fire that Melias showed videos of doesn't seem the least bit miraculous. In those videos, they are moving the candles. I do this all the time where I put my hand into a fire, and-as long as I keep moving my hand-I don't get burned. I can do this for a very long time, at least a few minutes though I think honestly indefinitely, and I've even done it with large fires like campfires (though this requires larger movements including turning my hand because it heats a larger area on my skin). If I stop moving, a candle will burn me in a second or two, but with the kinds of movements shown in these videos, it's entirely ordinary.
I think in your choice hierarchy you overweight extremely powerful beings being benevolent. Imagine for example we live in some kind of exclusion zone, maybe a nature preserve, policed by a more advanced civilization. But that civilization is made up of a large number of independent beings with free will. Some of them will probably be antisocial psychopaths who may delight in confusing humans and causing general chaos. If the zone is well policed, but not perfectly so, every once and a while they slip through and cause mischief by exploiting the local belief structure. Or who knows, perhaps these are distraction campaigns of similar provenance to cover for extraction of resources that we don't realize are there, like poaching.
I don't think this is the most likely explanation. But I don't think it's implausible either.
Adding to the experiences of people who looked at the sun:
I was recently in Tucson, and while on a walk close to sunset (maybe 5 or 5:30 PM?) I looked at the sun as it approached the horizon in a clear blue sky. After an adjustment period of some seconds, I was able to see the well-defined disc of the sun. It appeared as pink tinted, with a corona-like border (as in an eclipse) that was more whitish in color and that was somewhat larger/expansive on around the disc's upper hemisphere. The "corona" appeared in places tangential to the disc in a way that could plausibly be interpreted as appearing "flung off" the sun as from angular momentum, but the sun appeared static/fixed to me; it looked more like a drawing of a disc with a Catherine-Wheel-type border than one in motion. My view of the sun did vibrate a bit; I felt this movement physically in my eyes and attribute it to the twitching of my eyes. Looking away, I noticed a hazy yellowish “after-glow,” significantly larger than the size the actual disc of the sun took up in my visual field while staring. This appeared curiously static, in that it didn't perfectly trace the movement of my eyes across the landscape; I rather felt that I could "look at it." (This as distinct from the after-image of the sun that I also experienced, which I saw as a sun-sized “dot” in my visual field that tracked with the movement of my eyes). Aside from this, I did not have the experience of colors tinting my overall visual field. However, in looking at the purse that my companion was carrying, I had the odd experience of seeing the colors in that purse's pattern "jumping around." The bright yellow aspect of the pattern, especially, was hard to resolve. My vision returned to normal within a few minutes.
I have not had my eyes checked in some years, but I have good vision (In high school I had excellent 20/10 vision which has gotten a bit worse, but is still good, maybe 20/20?). My eyes are pale blue. I have no real experience in meditation generally or with fire kasina practice specifically (though the night before looking at the sun, having read the original SSC post and follow-up comments highlights post, my companion and I did look into a candleflame to see if we noticed anything interestingly kasina-like; we each saw/described the same sort of afterimages appear in the dark of our closed eyes, but neither of us had a particularly interesting or novel visual experience).
I have lived/worked outside quite a bit as a guide, and also with various land agencies, and I have seen a lot of cool sun stuff before, including a total solar eclipse, the defined disc of the sun seen through wildfire smoke (many times –I used to work as a wildlands firefighter), the clearly defined silvery disc of the sun through clouds (also many times before, including a recent occasion where I pointed out the same to my wife, who was with me and also noted it), and once I even saw a partial solar eclipse tinted nearly blood red through wildfire smoke. I have vague memories of laying in grass and staring at the sun as a child, though no specific remembrances of what I noticed/saw at the time.
I wonder if some people’s eyes are better-suited to looking at the sun without terribly ill-effect? I suppose this must be true to some degree.
Really just seems like a rare atmospheric phenomenon that's warping lots of people's view of what the sun usually looks like.
The interview you conducted around the Medjugorje sun-spinning sighting immediately locked in for me that he was experiencing a similar, ultra-rare atmospheric ripple/bubble that does some pretty wild warping of sunlight.
Scott - my respect for you has sky-rocketed with your Fatima articles (and it was darn high before!). That is some impressive dedication to seeking the truth you are showcasing here.
Re: colorful afterimages of the sun: I didn't submit any testimony on your original article because seeing blue-ish splotches on the sun after a few seconds of staring has got to be ubiquitous ... right? My own experience with this is looking at the setting sun (not for spiritual or ~stupid~ scientific reasons, but simply because it's beautiful), and always getting really annoyed with those darn afterimages ruining the view! It's just what happens when you look at a bright light source, no way anybody's surprised by that and thinks it's a miracle (so I thought; to be fair, depending on how literally the other testimonies are to be read, my experience might well be at the "boring" end of the spectrum).
This is my concern: The more common weird afterimages/borderline hallucinations are when looking at the sun, the more mysterious it gets that it would be blown way out of proportion and touted as a miracle in this way. Surely some school kid would've said, "wait, you guys don't know your eyes do this when you stare at the sun?"
On the other hand, this now seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. If it's a never-seen-before visual phenomenon, bam, clear-cut miracle; if there's an extremely common, well-known phenomenon that might fit the description -- well, it can't be that, otherwise 70 000 people would never have thought it worth fawning over.
Is there a sweet spot where a phenomenon is common enough to not be unheard of, but rare enough that in 70 000 people only a negligible handful would have first-hand familiarity with it? It seems like fire kasina is as close to this as you can get, but that in turn raises the question of how several thousand untrained people simultaneously and accidentally achieved master-level meditation results. "Heads I win, tails you lose, edge my bank account gets the money."
A second, unrelated point that's been confusing me: all the articles recapping the miracle say, "a miracle was announced to occur at Fatima on that day and time...", but never add, "... it was supposed to involve the sun in some way!" Yet all articles (skeptical and believing) seem to assume that everyone was staring at the sun already, as if that had been part of the expectation.
Am I missing something? *Was* the sun/sky part of the prophecies? Why were people already looking up?
Thanks for mentioning my blog (Omne Bonum).
I think that perhaps you misunderstood the point I was making.
My point wasn't that the occurrence of apparent miracles might be in line with the background rate and that we should therefore dismiss miracles as mere coincidences. Rather, when considering to what extent an apparent miracle is evidence (in the Bayesian sense) for a theistic hypothesis, we need to consider the ratio of the probability of an apparent miracle (in general) given that hypothesis to the probability given the negation. Although initially, it might seem intuitive that some specific miracle is much more likely given theism, this intuition relies on thinking that apparent miracles in general are much more likely given theism, rather than the specific sort of miracle we are considering. But it is unclear that apparent miracles in general are significantly more likely given theism than atheism, because there are so many things that would count as an apparent miracle (where _apparent miracle_ is, roughly, something extraordinary -- both uncommon and impressive to humans -- that happens in a religious context).
I don't think that anything in my reasoning suggests that we must simply dismiss apparent miracles as mere coincidences.
When considering whether apparent miracles are evidence for a theistic hypothesis, what is relevant are quite general features of the event (like the fact that it occurred in some religious context), but if we are merely considering possible explanations for some specific apparent miracle, we can consider specific features that are not especially predicted by the theistic hypothesis. When considering the Miracle of the Sun, it makes sense to offer the explanation of an optical illusion that occurs when looking at the Sun in certain contexts -- unlike religious hypotheses, this would predict the specific data, and so does not suffer from the same fallacy that the defenders of miracles are relying on. When considering apparent miracles insofar as they are supposedly evidence for theism, the background rate of apparent miracles is relevant, but when simply considering them as unusual events that might have some explanation, the background rate of apparent miracles is irrelevant (although the background rate of the specific apparent miracle will be relevant).
It seems that your interpretation of what I said was more along the lines of a simple publication bias. Incidentally, I do think that some presentations of miracles probably rely on that (like in the case of some supposed Eucharistic miracles where the relevant data could be explained by false positives); but that is a separate point from the one I was making, and I don't think that that point alone would be enough to dismiss arguments from miracles in general.
> I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Oh so that's what it's called. For the record, I've accidentally immediately became an expert in it from looking at streetlights when walking home and coming down from smoking a little weed a couple of hours earlier. I could reproduce it at will since then using any bright light afterimage, though not in very spectacular detail, just keeping the afterimage alive and evolving into new shapes (and tbh I was a bit nervous about experimenting with it more). I suspect that quite a lot of people can accidentally do that, you just need undivided attention on the afterimage.
I've seen various warnings about looking at the sun that point out that the sun emits a wide range of wavelengths, and just because the visible light is dimmed by e.g. cloud cover doesn't mean that invisible UV isn't still coming through and potentially causing eye damage.
It seems possible to me that there could be situations with just enough clouds for the sun to be comfortably visible, but still letting through other wavelengths strongly enough to trigger entoptic phenomena. The human eye is weakly sensitive to IR and UV*, and of course the mechanism could involve direct physical effects rather than vision per se. If there isn't enough visible light to trigger the iris to contract, you could conceivably end up with more invisible light coming in than you would get from looking at the sun on a clear day.
* http://amasci.com/amateur/irgogg2.html#IRnot
MPI on Fatima (from Chat):
MPI in one paragraph (why psi can be real but not a “force”)
Walter von Lucadou’s Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI) treats alleged psi not as new energies but as non-causal correlations that can emerge inside a temporarily “closed” meaning-system—a tight network of people, expectations, symbols, and feedback. When that system becomes emotionally coherent and self-referential, you can get improbable alignments (in perceptions and sometimes devices) without any usable signal being sent. Try to harness it as a signal and it collapses—the Non-Transmission axiom. This also predicts familiar meta-patterns in the literature: strong first effects that decline on repetition, effects that “displace” to unmonitored variables, and only post-hoc detectability (no practical messaging).
Is there any empirical support? (short, honest version)
MPI doesn’t predict big lab miracles; it predicts small statistical structure that appears when meaning is high and control is low. That’s roughly what several lines of work have reported:
• Correlation-Matrix Method (Lucadou; Freiburg): when participants interacted with random systems while many psychological/physical variables were logged, experimental sessions showed an excess of significant cross-correlations vs. controls (replicated in independent labs, small effects but unlikely by chance).
• Field REG / Global Consciousness Project (PEAR and successors): portable RNGs at coherent group events (rituals, concerts, collective vigils) and global networks during shared emotional moments show tiny departures from randomness aggregated over long runs.
• Modern dual-RNG studies: independent random streams sometimes become slightly more correlated during group meditation/ritual peaks.
All of these are acausal, non-informational anomalies (you can’t use them to send a message) and they wane under tight instrumentalization—which is exactly MPI’s constraint. Skeptics fairly note the effects are small and interpretation is debated; MPI’s point is that if psi exists at all, this is what it should look like.
MPI’s take on Fatima
If you want a framework that keeps both the sincerity of witnesses and the limits of physics intact, MPI gives one. It says Fatima looks like a short-lived meaning field: thousands of believers focused on one promise (“a sign in the sky”), producing a brief, emotionally saturated closure in which the crowd’s perceptions (and possibly local physical noise) aligned in improbable ways—reports of sun distortions, motions, dazzling colors—without violating optics or energy conservation, and crucially without yielding a repeatable, usable signal. Once the event was institutionalized and opened to analysis, the closure dissolved, which is why nothing quite like it repeats on demand.
So MPI doesn’t declare “the miracle happened” or “mass hysteria.” It says a real, collective correlation occurred inside a unique psycho-cultural system—and its very uniqueness is what the model predicts. The moment you ask for another Fatima next Sunday at 3 p.m., the firefly goes dark.
For more on mpi see: https://ejhong.substack.com/p/entangled-minds-and-pragmatic-information
Scott - you might check out Lucadou MPI take on Fatima (from Chat):
MPI in one paragraph (why psi can be real but not a “force”)
Walter von Lucadou’s Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI) treats alleged psi not as new energies but as non-causal correlations that can emerge inside a temporarily “closed” meaning-system—a tight network of people, expectations, symbols, and feedback. When that system becomes emotionally coherent and self-referential, you can get improbable alignments (in perceptions and sometimes devices) without any usable signal being sent. Try to harness it as a signal and it collapses—the Non-Transmission axiom. This also predicts familiar meta-patterns in the literature: strong first effects that decline on repetition, effects that “displace” to unmonitored variables, and only post-hoc detectability (no practical messaging).
Is there any empirical support? (short, honest version)
MPI doesn’t predict big lab miracles; it predicts small statistical structure that appears when meaning is high and control is low. That’s roughly what several lines of work have reported:
• Correlation-Matrix Method (Lucadou; Freiburg): when participants interacted with random systems while many psychological/physical variables were logged, experimental sessions showed an excess of significant cross-correlations vs. controls (replicated in independent labs, small effects but unlikely by chance).
• Field REG / Global Consciousness Project (PEAR and successors): portable RNGs at coherent group events (rituals, concerts, collective vigils) and global networks during shared emotional moments show tiny departures from randomness aggregated over long runs.
• Modern dual-RNG studies: independent random streams sometimes become slightly more correlated during group meditation/ritual peaks.
All of these are acausal, non-informational anomalies (you can’t use them to send a message) and they wane under tight instrumentalization—which is exactly MPI’s constraint. Skeptics fairly note the effects are small and interpretation is debated; MPI’s point is that if psi exists at all, this is what it should look like.
MPI’s take on Fatima
If you want a framework that keeps both the sincerity of witnesses and the limits of physics intact, MPI gives one. It says Fatima looks like a short-lived meaning field: thousands of believers focused on one promise (“a sign in the sky”), producing a brief, emotionally saturated closure in which the crowd’s perceptions (and possibly local physical noise) aligned in improbable ways—reports of sun distortions, motions, dazzling colors—without violating optics or energy conservation, and crucially without yielding a repeatable, usable signal. Once the event was institutionalized and opened to analysis, the closure dissolved, which is why nothing quite like it repeats on demand.
So MPI doesn’t declare “the miracle happened” or “mass hysteria.” It says a real, collective correlation occurred inside a unique psycho-cultural system—and its very uniqueness is what the model predicts. The moment you ask for another Fatima next Sunday at 3 p.m., the firefly goes dark.
For more on mpi see: https://ejhong.substack.com/p/entangled-minds-and-pragmatic-information
It’s surprising to me that seemingly no one has yet brought up the similarity to ball lightning. The characteristics seem quite similar in a lot of ways.
Of course, if it’s even real, it’s an extremely rare event that would be quite remarkable to happen on cue, but the overall nature of the phenomenon seems to line up pretty well.
Several religious rituals involve participants who appear insensitive to pain. I remember, during Muharram in India, people claiming that an old woman could drink boiling water without pain, and some children showing impressive body marks while saying it was easy, behaviors I would never have expected from children who would normally faint. Researchers point to trance states, endorphins, and collective pressure. Such altered states could partly explain why some witnesses at Fatima reported looking at the sun without feeling pain.
And even I am among those who believe that, under certain cloud conditions, one can look directly at the sun and see a defined disk.
Scientific examples of reduced perceived pain through group effects or through the belief that one is suffering for a good cause can be found in Laurent Bègue, Psychologie du bien et du mal, pp. 85–86, 2011.