Treatise on the phenomenon of spirit voice manifestations in noise

[Andres Ramos]

I wrote this treatise a while ago. This is a paper that discusses the role of noise in ITC experiments and some effects related to it. Maybe you'll find it useful to read.

Treatise on the phenomenon of spirit voice manifestations in noise.pdf

[Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal]

11 hours ago, Andres Ramos said:

I wrote this treatise a while ago. This is a paper that discusses the role of noise in ITC experiments and some effects related to it. Maybe you'll find it useful to read.

Treatise on the phenomenon of spirit voice manifestations in noise.pdf 904.73 kB · 0 downloads

WOW, I just read the index and this seems very very valuable. You don't read this on wikipedia!!  Thank you!

[Andres Ramos]

2 hours ago, Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal said:

WOW, I just read the index and this seems very very valuable. You don't read this on wikipedia!!  Thank you!

Thank you Fernando! But better read it before you praise it, or dump it.

[Christine Brooks]

No dumping allowed!!

 

I found it fascinating Andres. How interesting that those on the other side have awareness of theCoronaVirus. The fatc that you hear and understand the voices is amazing..for you and them. I enjoyed learning...thank you!

 

[Andres Ramos]

Thank you so much Chris! It was a touching experience that first started as a sober meta analysis over my gathered data in order to categorize their messages in respect of their contents and information. However while doing this I more and more faced very personal revelations of those beings like being puzzled, amazed, sad, anxious, angry, going over their passed life's again and again and regretting.

For me the most important finding from these studies were that our personality, our character stays intact after dying. This was a most relieving thought.

[GISMO5367]

On 10/16/2020 at 6:35 PM, Andres Ramos said:

I wrote this treatise a while ago. This is a paper that discusses the role of noise in ITC experiments and some effects related to it. Maybe you'll find it useful to read.

Treatise on the phenomenon of spirit voice manifestations in noise.pdf 904.73 kB · 6 downloads

Thank you Andres very much for this excellent and clear-thinking article. I try to learn more about pink noise from germanium before starting my own experiments. This practical and theoretical overview based also on your personal experiences gave me many useful tips.

[Andres Ramos]

I am glad finally someone read it Gismo!

[sglanz]

Andres, great job with this paper, which I just got around to reading! I have not yet perused Varanormal for further discussion on this, other than comments here. You probably continue this discussion in the Coherer paper, which I will read next. I have a few initial reactions. 

First, have you thought about publishing this paper, other than on Varanormal? One place that has a lot of paranormal papers is Academia.Edu. It’s for reproducing papers that have already been published. I suppose you could count Varanormal as the source publication. However, I would recommend the document be copy edited, as there are some typos. 

Your findings are mostly replications of what other ITC researchers have found, approaching it with novel methods, which adds to its veracity. For example, the changing of messages on re-listening, the operator effect, the irrelevance of different pink noise sources, and enhancement by looping. Alexandre MacRae famously unhooked his radio setup and got the same results, so his radio electronics were not that important. Spirits PKed the microphone directly. However, your electronic genius is definitely at play, as your setups are very sophisticated and make a big difference. 

You have some original findings, like the deterministic and pseudo-random noise successes, improvements with hardware and sound processing, and the use of signal processing AI (with Michael’s help).  

I’m not sure if your reverse speech findings are original, but your theories about it are stimulating. What intrigued me most was your naivete about the field of reverse speech, which gave you a certain unbiased objectivity in the discovery of reverse speech messages. Other ITC experimenters have detected messages in reverse speech, but it’s not limited to ITC. It is found in regular human speech as well. It was reported in music tracks in the 1970’s, and David John Oates generalized it to all forms of human speech starting in 1987. Your one theory (of many) about time and consciousness probably comes close to an explanation. I believe Tom Butler has some thoughts about this phenomenon as well. 

I’m glad you credit Tom and his website AtransC for its contribution, especially for providing a forum for structured approaches to understanding ITC. AtransC is still active, but not heavily trafficked, and is being gradually archived as Tom moves into retirement. So I think Varanormal is now the happening place! 

You say that there are no social media sites devoted to serious ITC. That’s not true. They are not all “ghost” groups. Do a search on Facebook and you will see. (Thanks to Karyn for turning me onto this). 

Your views on the limitations of science are spot on. Scientism is the bane of all scientific fields, not just ITC. In parapsychology, it was quickly discovered the that normal methods of scientific method were inadequate, and unique models were developed. We should do the same with ITC. 

Your suggestions regarding future directions of ITC, especially on how to rebuild community, are excellent! I hope readers take note. 

Your categorizations and interpretations of the content of messages is important. I wish more people would do this. I cringe when a spirit reports that “failure counts” as it brings up my fear of karmic suffering on the other side. But my favorite, a consequence of my inner adolescent, is “Andres has flatulence.”

Edited October 11, 2021 by sglanz

[Andres Ramos]

Hi Steve and thank you so much for your reflections!

In fact this paper was my first and I today see its structure as a little cluttered since I tried to realize a very wide scope with it, which is the basic characteristic of a treatise, and it ended up in a little bit of this and a little bit of that. However I think it's ok so far if you consider it was my first paper and it was a huge one too.

I felt very early the need to not only document what we are doing but also to draw conclusions from our results since this is the basic method used in science. Regarding the issue of publications I must admitt that Varanormal so far was not the best place to publish papers. We started as a forum and are evolving slowly in what I would call a reseach community. We are not that far to discuss technical papers with a wider scope yet. In fact you are the first one who did an internal review of my paper. I hope Varanormal at least will become a place where we can pre-publish a paper in the closed area of the community to identify typos, logic fallacies and bad argumentation. Only after this refinement I would dare to publish a paper outside of Varanormal. This is the reason I appreciate your lines so much because this is the start of making our papers more professional. If we issue papers with a well structured content, proven facts and comprehensible argumentation and conclusions outside varanormal, scientist will raise their eyebrows and maybe start to think, "Hey those guys are taking seriously what they do! Let's have a look".

I would love if we would have some volunteers here with preferably academic background like you and Gismo for doing peer reviews. And then, after the papers were battle hardened this way we can fire them at the scientific community. Up to now I have only one comment or external review for my paper here,

https://www.paranormalstudy.com/treatise-on-the-phenomenon-of-spirit-voice-manifestations-in-noise/

I know that Michael Lee also writes great papers. If what we do will become successfull outside of Varanormal this will hopefully boost our motivation to write more papers.

Thanks for correcting my views on social media. I had some bad impressions from ghost hunting groups on FB here in germany and certainly my view was incomplete at least.

Regarding documentation there is another issue. I would like to develop an ITC standard protocol form either in Word, Excel or as editable PDF everyone can use to log his sessions. It should contain informations about techniques, setup, environmental conditions, the experimenters psychic profile, the datafile (audio/Image/Video), timestamp and lenth of spirit messages in the file, applied processing methods and interpretation. The confirmation of the interpretation from a listener panel could round off this document. Again we would be able to exploit our work deeper and to do meta-analysis or studies over the structured data later, even more if we would store the the data in a cloud. I think scientist would reward this work as another attempt to establish scientific methods.

One very simple approach without much additional data I made is here:ITC-Transcript Stream5_04.docx

Last but not least you addressed one of the issues that is making me sad frequently. In the quest for finding the perfect ITC technology we don't spend enough attention to the content of the spirit messages in my eyes. In most cases what the spirits say is degraded down to the question if it makes sense or not and can it be used to prove our techniques as usable. But there is so much more what they tell us about their emotions, fears, their world, our world and ourselves. We don't address those most intimate utterances appropriatly in my eyes. I hope once a good technique is established we can listen more to what they say and what this means for us.

Yoe see there is enough work to do.

 

[GISMO5367]

Your post is really interesting and thought -provoking as well as Steve Glanz's evaluation. Structural recording and standard protocols are very good ideas. Thinking EVP/ICT work and publication, (1) Electronic documents might be much more illustrative to the reader than mere paper prints. I mean that,  for example, if we are dealing with EVP, PDF documents where you use your audio files ( MP3-files) as "references" would be very informative ( = clicking a specific highlighted area /file name in the text, brings the real audio file on the screen with wave pad or some other audio processing software the reader has, and thereafter s/he can return to the original text and continue reading. In this way the reader can be convince of the reliability of the audio file and even test that. I know,  that this method works, but I have not seen that used in scientific writing yet. (2) Acceptance of the manuscript in an international journal: Is sometimes a line drawn in water. Based on some of my own experiences,  in one journal one  referees might fully accept the manuscript and two others not - it is probably rejected. In one journal all the referees say,  that your chosen statistical method is wrong and without changing anything, in some other journal surprisingly, everything is OK and they are ready publish your study. Sometimes statistician, who is one of the authors might have a different opinion about the statistical method used than the referee, who also happens to be a statistician. The other referees are not statisticians and don't understand anything related to statistics. This all means, that also in mainstream science nothing is  absolutely right or wrong and there might be different unjustified  "opinions", that decide. I think in EVP work statistics is not a priority to show evidence, because very much depends also on the experimenter and his "mind" and also on the "mind" of the communicators on the other side which also might behave in unpredictably. Thus , according to my opinion, descriptive and carefully documented studies are enough and  probably the best choice in EVP/ICT work. (3) Co-operation on Varanormal forum is very important: The best scenario -> Analyzing and processing "the best quality audio files" many people have been able to produce and then publishing these results, might give a lot new information and also clarify the nature of that reality, from where these voices come and which kind of entities are behind them  ( deceased humans / aliens/ robots or something else...) ? I hope to help you Andres in your efforts to publish your material, maybe some day also publish something related to EVP by myself. 

GISMO 5367  

[sglanz]

Andres and Gismo, thanks for your comments.

Andres, I plan to read your later Varanormal papers in the near future, and will comment on them as well. I like your idea of creating forms to help institute structure into ITC research on this forum, and beyond. Your ITC Transcript attachment is a good start. It would take some effort to create forms, and then attract experimenters to use them, but I think it's a good long term goal. I wonder if it has already been tried within the ITC community. We could search online. There are certainly forms and formats in the general scientific community that could be replicated. 

I agree with you that the process of getting studies into mainline academic journals is daunting, and will require a layered approach. First, lay persons on a forum like this could proofread a paper for typos and other small errors, as well as internal peer review and discussion. Then, we could hire an academic copy editor to convert it to professional format. Freelancers are easy to find on Upwork, and not very expensive. Or, we could utilize internal talent for this task. (I'm not an experienced academic writer myself.)  Next, submit the paper to a pre-print publisher (ie. arXiv) such as can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_publishers_by_preprint_policy where there is a low bar of acceptance, or no bar at all. Then, submit to reprint services like Academia.edu (though they might even accept a paper first published on Varanormal). And finally, submit to a mainline publisher if confidence is high. Needless to say, ITC studies, in part or full, can always be shared among other ITC websites, journals and social media. 

Besides original research, there is a need for meta-studies, where data from multiple papers and informal observations are consolidated. 

Gismo, thanks for your points about digital publishing, sound files, and the conflicting opinions of referees. You are right that there is a uniquely subjective side to ITC that must be taken into consideration, so putting structure into the reporting can compensate for an apparent lack of "objectivity." But there are also well-defined protocols in parapsychology for handling these subjective issues and expressing them in written studies. 

[Andres Ramos]

A very good plan Steve! What about constituting a review board with skilled people to do the proofreading (typos, grammar) and 1st level peer review (document structure, argumentation, logic fallacies)? I think you and Gismo would be just perfect board members.

[GISMO5367]

2 hours ago, Andres Ramos said:

A very good plan Steve! What about constituting a review board with skilled people to do the proofreading (typos, grammar) and 1st level peer review (document structure, argumentation, logic fallacies)? I think you and Gismo would be just perfect board members.

Thank you Steve  and Andres for your wise comments. I think, Steve's  idea sharing new information and discoveries between different platforms might be more productive and useful than repeatedly try to offer your work to  a greatly appreciated  international Journal and get frustrated because of that. One way might be  to create your/our  own on-line electronic  database, which is well protected but available for external researchers and interested parties ( see "research "for example in https://www.ipati.org or homepage WorldITC  ). I think proofreading is best suited for people whose native language is English. Thinking the content, evidence, methodology and general criticism, I am always ready to help . As far as methodology is concerned , according to my nopinion, the attached PDF document is a good attempt to improve these aspects i parapsychological research. 

GISMO5367

METHODOLOGY AND MEDIUMSHIP.pdf

[sglanz]

Andres and Gismo, these are good suggestions. We'd have to think about how to implement them, who can do it, and time-money involved. 

The Methodology article by Beischel and Shwartz is excellent! Here are two paragraphs at the end that caught my attention. 

"Through these methods, we are attempting to bridge the gap between the
qualitative aspects of a more postmodern, feminist, and human science (Krippner 1995,
White 1991, reviewed by White 1990, Irwin 1999) and more traditional quantitative
parapsychological methods. Historically, “holistic” methods (e.g., assigning a global or
summary score to a reading) and “atomistic” methods (e.g., item-by-item scoring)
evolved somewhat independently over the course of research regarding the objective
analysis of verbal statements (Burdick & Kelly 1977, p. 110). We find it important to
include both methods during the analysis of each reading."

       Should we, and can we, apply the hybrid method to ITC, or focus only on one or the other (atomistic or holistic)?

"Second, several of the suggestions involve phenomena that usually only occur
spontaneously, therefore creating difficulty in designing repeatable experiments
addressing them. Although drop-in communicators can be “asked for” (e.g., “during this
segment of the reading, we are open to drop-ins”), would their appearance then provide
the support suggested by this phenomenon? The same issue surrounds the appearance of
cross-correspondence. Because these phenomena, although impressive and evidential,
cannot be easily or repeatedly tested, they fail to meet the standard for “ideal” empirical
research."

     With ITC, isn't it the case that what we mostly get are "drop-ins." So does that make it a poor candidate for ideal empirical research? 

[Andres Ramos]

Very good thoughts Steve. It's really nice to follow your sharp and clean thoughts!

Isn't the problem we are facing at least partially that science deviated from it's original philosophical roots into a technical method for gaining findings and that it growed along the lifelines of physics and not metaphysics during the last 300 years?

Shouldn't we try to not only gain a holistic view on the ITC phenomenon but on science itself? What proof would science require from us as researchers if it would be a holistic view on the cosmos itself?

Shouldn't we try to remind scientists that their worldview once was a philosophy that naturally included what they now deliberately try to exclude?