You have continued to misinterpret my statements and use your interpreted version in your argument. If you cannot understand my logic after the following post, I don't think anything will make you see it.
No, they are not all on equal degrees, but they are still unknown. It is like this:
We are standing on a hill. Our location represents total belief. That means if something is proven, like whether water exists, it is on this hill. There is a mountain in the distance. The mountain represents non - belief. If we can prove something doesn't exist, it is there.
Between here and that yonder mountain, there are several things. First, we have B, which is here in my hand. Then we have C, which I know is on the top of the mountain. Then there is A. A is exactly between here and the mountain because we have literally no experience, reason, or evidence on whether it is real. D is also somewhere between here and the mountain. Let's just say we have reason to believe in D, like personal experience or something. So that means it is somewhere between here and halfway to the mountain, or between here and A. So it is still more likely to believe than A, but we don't know HOW likely. It might be 25% of the way to the mountain, but if we don't know the distance to the mountain it doesn't matter.
If you cannot definitively prove or disprove something it puts it in a grey area because how can you calculate how likely it is to exist with a fact like "it really really seems like it works". If you don't have data from a controlled environment, you have no scale with which to judge the probability of the concept existing. Which is where you are wrong on your statement that it isn't real because "it isn't proven by the world". That is not what I mean. What I mean is if there is no evidence WHICH WAS TAKEN FROM A CONTROLLED SCENARIO USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD, it is put in a grey area with no scale, meaning that you cannot possibly know how likely it is that it exists. And if that is true, there is no reason to believe it because it is just the same as A.
For the sake of diversity and repetition, I will give you another analogy. There is a box full of extremely murky water. You cannot see what is in the water at all because of how murky the water is. You have B which is in your hand. This is because you reached into the water (an analogy for trying to find out if something is real) and found it. You not only found it, but verified its existence using the scientific method. Then you have C. You are sure C is not in the box because you found C outside of the box (this is an analogy for disproving something. It is fitting because you don't disprove something by a lack of evidence of its existence, but evidence of its lack of existence). Then there is A. You can't be sure if A is real, because you put your hand in the water and didn't find A, but you didn't find it outside the box either. So A has exactly a 50/50 chance of being in the box. Then there is D. You reached into the box to look for D, and you brushed something that felt like D (sounds like an innuendo, not intended.. also this represents doing research NOT under a controlled environment, NOT using the scientific method. It would be something like "usually it works" or any other justification you could have for its existence that is not solid evidence). Now you can be MORE sure that D is real, but you still have no index. It is in a box of murky water, just like A. So there is still no reason to believe it any more than you would believe in A.
Now I will supply a counter-argument because I thought of this:
What if from personal experience you decide it is more likely than not that, for example, Sasquatch is real. Say you have the following facts:
- You saw a large two-legged non-human simian-looking creature in the forest.
- It definitely was not a human in a costume
If these two facts are true, it would be reasonable to say that you believe in Sasquatch because it is "more likely than not" that it is real. Then I realized that this is because what you observed was so close to a controlled environment that it might as well be. It was within the realm of human error. Which basically means that it was a controlled experiment, but the instruments were your senses, which are flawed. The same thing would be if you go outside on an absolutely windless day and practice aerokinesis. Say every time you try to make the wind blow it happens within 2 seconds, and stops within 2 seconds every time you stop trying to make it blow. This would be an example of it being "good enough".
So I revise my previous statement:
There is no reason to believe something unless you have either definite proof from an experiment using the scientific method in a controlled environment, OR the same thing but with an extremely small margin of error.
If you have either of these please present them.
Edit: Typo. Also I mentioned psi as I am currently holding another argument which is now basically the same argument as this one on the following thread: http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...es-skills.html
This is exactly correct but I have not found one such instance of this in any post on dreamviews. Many people just say they proved it from their dreams, which is completely counter-intuitive.
Actually, me and my friend are both doing an ongoing experiment with shared dreaming. Once we get good enough lucid dreaming, we are going to attempt shared dreaming. For the sake of entering the same dream, we will both know the scenario of the dream before-hand. Then once we are both there we will exchange pieces of information. I will say a word and he will say a word. Then we will promptly wake up and verify that those were the actual pieces of information that we shared. If it is correct, it will be reasonable to believe shared dreaming is real.