Quote Originally Posted by TomOfSweden View Post
That film is just fiction. I don't think anybody in the team has claimed any of it is true. Like all good science fiction they take real science and change it a bit to make it more entertaining. Nothing wrong with that but you shouldn't confuse it with theories put forward by real researchers.
I saw it as an interesting "What if" question.

I supose this new "mockumentary" trend can get quite confusing for people who don't have experience from the academic world.
Indeed. Though I wish you had worded it as "the scientific academic world". I have plenty of experience with the academic world, just in humanities rather than science. You will note that I said I wasn't sure I agreed with it or not.

All it means to be an atheist is that one doesn't believe that there is a force in the world that can break the laws of nature.
Fascinating! Then, yes, I would be an atheist by your definition. As would a good number of pagans.

I hope you don't believe that the spirits can comunicate with us because even here there's been masses and masses of research and science have come up with nothing.
However, here you define "laws of nature" as something that can be proven by our scientific methods of today. I don't know what I think about spirit communication, but the one thing I believe is that IF it does exist, it's not something that can be commanded by the receiver for just anything. The spirit would likely only communicate if it had something important it wanted to say... which means that shyness would not be a reason for it not to show up under research conditions, but rather that research conditions would not be a reason for it *to* show up.

I think our understanding of the world is limited by our technology. Surely you don't think we've reached the end of discovery about the world? That science today is capable of understanding *everything*?

Without certain tools (i.e. the telescope), we would still be thinking that the Earth was in the center of the universe.

Personally, I hope that we never do learn everything, because then, there would be no point in living. Nothing new to discover. It would be terribly boring.

Assuming from this that all spirits are shy in the presence of scientists is a bit naive, wouldn't you agree? We do know how neurons send messages within the brain so we can measure any thoughts being transfered from an external source and it just doesn't happen. We just haven't figured out exactly how complex thought works mechanically or chemically.
But does this work if internal=external?

Human perception was part of my degree so I can pull research out my ass to back my shit up all day.
Cool. That must have been really fascinating! My degrees are, alas, in French and Russian, and therefore, not at all helpful in this debate. I wish I had more time to learn everything I want to learn, and this is one area that I'm definitely interested in.