My experiences that suggest an intelligent force exists

[excreationist]

I thought that the Connect 4 and upside-down Bible things showed that God had a sense of humour. This is also the case in post #280 - and I think it's related to God because that's mostly what the Reverend and I talk about.

 

[Sarpedon]

Dude, we talked about this. Smiley faces are extremely common. Coincidences happen all the time, especially where free, popular, low res .bmps are involved.

And doing elaborate back checks of people you meet online is creepy. Take a step back and think.

 

[excreationist]

Dude, we talked about this. Smiley faces are extremely common. Coincidences happen all the time, especially where free, popular, low res .bmps are involved.

If you do a web search for "smiley" there are dozens of popular styles. Mine is the second one and says it comes from Wikipedia. It would be a minimum of a 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 chance that she'd choose one that looks the same, except that the shading and outline is completely different. Also she chose it as a cover photo in the past 30 days and kept it for 6 days. It has been my YouTube/Google avatar for many months. And I only looked back in her history for about 1 month...

And doing elaborate back checks of people you meet online is creepy.

I've been seeing her in person about 2-3 times per week. Once at a group dinner, then at a Bible study, then often in a private meeting. I posted about the smiley before I was her friend on Facebook - so I requested to be her friend. This morning she accepted so then I made a post about the smiley with her name linked in the post. She gave a laughing smiley as a response. So it seems like it is going well. BTW she is going away for 2 weeks and she wasn't at the dinner the night before - so it was good she still was able to accept my Facebook friendship (and laugh at my smiley post)

Take a step back and think.

I did. BTW I don't consider this "proof" that an intelligent force is involved - but like all of the other cases it is associated with God or the big questions. I haven't ever had any coincidences related to my wife, relatives or other friends.

 

[excreationist]

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but there was another coincidence - and it involves a god. About 7 years ago, me, my wife and two other people were looking for somewhere to rent. One particular place seemed perfect - it was a couple minutes walk from my mother in law, major bus stops, other important places, it was a good price, and it had lots of storage, 4 bedrooms, etc. I said to people that if I got the place I'd believe in god. Then we got it and I replied "I didn't say which god I'd believe in". That is about the only time I'd made a statement like that - well during the first Maundy Thursday service I put god to the test then eventually the "I am the bread of life" song played.

 

[excreationist]

A further look into my Connect Four experiences....

https://www.lifesplayer.com/instagram.php#connect4

In the science fiction comedy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the answer to "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" took millions of years for a supercomputer to calculate - and it was 42.

While in a mental ward I realised that Connect 4 sets also involve 42 pieces. This special set was the first time I'd ever tried counting the pieces. There were exactly 42 pieces but there should be 21 pieces of each color because it is possible to have a tied game. I think "God" (an intelligent force) might have a sense of humor. It seems my life is not as balanced as it should be.

In the movie "Contact" an intelligence communicates its presence using a sequence of prime numbers. The Connect Four set involved two consecutive prime numbers - 19 and 23.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#42_Puzzle

The 42 Puzzle is a game devised by Douglas Adams in 1994 for the United States series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. The puzzle is an illustration consisting of 42 multi-coloured balls, in 7 columns and 6 rows

Connect Four is also a kind of "42 Puzzle".

https://imsdb.com/scripts/Hitchhiker's-Guide-to-the-Galaxy,-The.html
From the 2005 movie:

ARTHUR (CONT'D) You want the question that goes with the answer "42" How about "What's six times seven?

Note that in the original story the question was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phras...n_of_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything_is_42

Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"

"Six by nine. Forty two."

"That's it. That's all there is."

So it is 6 x 7..... it could involve the combination of man/creation ("6") and God/creator ("7"). Playing "hide and seek" with God could involve 6 and 7....

And it is two sets of 3x7.... in my case it usually involved 3x7 red and 3x7 yellow. 3 involves a trinity and 7 is God's number....

Yes officially according to Douglas Adams the 7 within 42 doesn't relate to God but this is my own interpretation (perhaps it involves a "gradual revelation")

Though of course to a skeptic this just involves a coincidence though remember this is the first time I've counted the pieces and I've never seen a picture of that special set again - it seems to involve an expensive looking frame.

 

[excreationist]

More about the 42 Puzzle
https://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolismusic/2696287097

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#42_Puzzle

Adams has described the puzzle as depicting the number 42 in ten different ways. Six possible questions are:

(1) How many spheres are in the diagram? (six rows of seven is 42)

(2) What position in the grid does the Earth occupy? (42)

(3) The barcode on one of the spheres is the number 42 as an Interleaved 2 of 5 barcode

(4) Considering red-hued spheres (red, purple, orange, black) as a '1' and those without as a '0', what number does each line represent in decimal form? (In binary, each line reads '0101010', or '42' in decimal form.)

(5) What number do the blue-tinted spheres (blue, green, purple, black) spell out? (Similar to a colour blindness test.) (42)

(6) What number is represented by Roman numerals spelled out by the yellow-tinted spheres (yellow, orange, green, black) in the first three rows? (XLII = 42)

I find these things very arbitrary....

For (3) I currently don't understand the bar code yet....

(4) I think white should be considered to have redness (red channel) and black has none. But for the answer black involves red and white doesn't involve red.....

(5) I don't think green or black is blue tinted....

(6) I don't think black is yellow-tinted.... yellow is red+green.... so if that includes green then perhaps it should also include red?

So I'm a huge critic of this....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#42_Puzzle

....So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved it. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant....

I'm not surprised after looking into it.....

 

[excreationist]

Here is (5) "42"

And (6) "XLII"

 

[OLDMAN]

Jesus, this shit makes my head hurt. Pick a tree, count the leaves multiply by 4....whatever. You can do this with pages in the bible or Moby Dick, or the sonnets of Shakespeare. You are giving the numbers some significance and then looking for things that give you the number. None of it means anything or could mean anything except in you head.

 

[excreationist]

Jesus, this shit makes my head hurt. Pick a tree, count the leaves multiply by 4....whatever. You can do this with pages in the bible or Moby Dick, or the sonnets of Shakespeare. You are giving the numbers some significance and then looking for things that give you the number. None of it means anything or could mean anything except in you head.

So that's your response to the Connect Four incident? Basically when I was looking at the Connect Four set in the mental ward I remembered that the answer to the ultimate question joke was 42 - so I counted the pieces.... and I got a very unlikely result....

In this same stay in the mental ward I was reading a Gideon's Bible upside down - I was reading the 6th chapters, trying to annoy God.... then a sealed NIV Bible I got from my sister a day or two later had the contents upside down. I see this as also an example of God having a sense of humour....



Though like I said skeptics would obviously think these are just coincidences....

 

[excreationist]

Jesus, this shit makes my head hurt. Pick a tree, count the leaves multiply by 4....whatever. You can do this with pages in the bible or Moby Dick, or the sonnets of Shakespeare. You are giving the numbers some significance and then looking for things that give you the number. None of it means anything or could mean anything except in you head.

I think 7 is said to be God's number. Even though the hitchhikers guide talks about God (with humour) it never seems to point out the 7 in 42 being connected to God.
In fact in post #285 it avoids 7 and instead talks about 6 times 9.

About 6 and 7 again:
https://steppesoffaith.medium.com/w...the-bible-and-why-you-should-care-60b81243788

According to Bible scholars, just as the number 7 typically signifies completion or perfection especially of God, the number 6 is one shy of that, which means it signifies imperfection. More specifically, it refers to the imperfection of man and the sin and weakness he has.As we all know, Adam went on to eat the forbidden fruit in the garden and broke the connection between heaven and man allowing sin to enter the earth. Man’s weakness is why number 6 is called the “number of man.”

I think it fits the "hide and seek" concept and an interaction of God and man.... so it suits the "ultimate question" though it is a joke and I think "God" could have a sense of humour.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Here's the fancy word for this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

 

[excreationist]

Here's the fancy word for this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Yeah according to Douglas Adams 42 has no hidden meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Why_the_number_42?

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.

Adams described his choice as "a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents."

I'm asking about it on reddit but so far it seems no-one has thought there being a connection between God and 42..... even though God is mentioned in his books/shows....

That link I gave earlier
https://steppesoffaith.medium.com/w...the-bible-and-why-you-should-care-60b81243788

talks about 6 and 7.... so these meanings aren't just arbitrary....

I think it makes a lot of sense for the joke "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" to involve God.... after all God exists in some sense in Douglas Adam's stories....

BTW Christianity reinterpreted the Old Testament in a fresh way.... and I'm doing the same thing for Douglas Adam's Ultimate Question.....

So I connected Connect Four with "The Ultimate Question" (42) and do you think the pieces do involve a highly unlikely result (42 total but different numbers of colors) is just arbitrary? I've counted many sets after that but they either had 21 pieces each, 22 pieces each (on a non-genuine set) or lots of missing pieces (see post #263)

I'm not saying that the objective answer for the ultimate question is 42 - I just see it as a joke between an intelligent force and myself.....

 

[DrZoidberg]

Yeah according to Douglas Adams 42 has no hidden meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Why_the_number_42?

Adams described his choice as "a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents."

I'm asking about it on reddit but so far it seems no-one has thought there being a connection between God and 42..... even though God is mentioned in his books/shows....

That link I gave earlier
https://steppesoffaith.medium.com/w...the-bible-and-why-you-should-care-60b81243788

talks about 6 and 7.... so these meanings aren't just arbitrary....

I think it makes a lot of sense for the joke "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" to involve God.... after all God exists in some sense in Douglas Adam's stories....

BTW Christianity reinterpreted the Old Testament in a fresh way.... and I'm doing the same thing for Douglas Adam's Ultimate Question.....

So I connected Connect Four with "The Ultimate Question" (42) and do you think the pieces do involve a highly unlikely result (42 total but different numbers of colors) is just arbitrary? I've counted many sets after that but they either had 21 pieces each, 22 pieces each (on a non-genuine set) or lots of missing pieces (see post #263)

The point with Pareidolia is that our brains are predisposed to be pattern seeking. That's how we can make sense of what other people are saying when having conversations. That's why you and your wife so often misunderstand each other. It's a communication system that's a compromise where a lot of accuracy is sacrificed for speed. It's also what makes us understand and enjoy art.

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

But it also has some entertaining weird side effects. Like this. Seeing meaningful patterns in what is just randomness.

It's important to understand that rare events are normal. In whatever outcome you get, no matter the combined input, there has to be some outcomes or another and that specific combination will be a rare event. If you do a proper statistical analysis it'll just be random. That's why statistics is so hard to do.

 

[excreationist]

.....But it also has some entertaining weird side effects. Like this. Seeing meaningful patterns in what is just randomness.....

So I was trying to communicate with God by reading a Bible upside down for the first and only time then about a day or two later I was given a sealed upside down Bible - and it is the only upside down printed book I know about... (though of course it has happened to people that I'm not aware of). I find it very meaningful though some pastors think it was just a coincidence.... though this agrees with my beliefs that the game of hide and seek involves an intimate relationship rather than scientific-type consensus.

 

[excreationist]

About a non-obvious God and "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/God

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

 

[excreationist]

.....If you do a proper statistical analysis it'll just be random. That's why statistics is so hard to do.

I think it is still fits the statistics... like how in the "Imitation Game" movie they broke the codes but used statistics to make sure it seemed to just involve chance rather than having any extra information....

https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/scripts/the-imitation-game-2014.pdf

ALAN TURING
While we develop a system for
determining how much intelligence
to act on. Which attacks to stop,
which to let through. Statistical
analysis. The minimum number of
actions it’ll take to win the war,
but the maximum number we’re able
to take before the Germans get
suspicious.

STEWART MENZIES
You’re going to trust this all to
statistics? To maths?

ALAN TURING
Correct.

JOAN CLARKE
And then MI-6 can come up with the
lies we’ll tell everyone else.

ALAN TURING
We’ll require a believable
alternate source for each piece of
information we use.

JOAN CLARKE
A false story that exlains how we
got that information, that has
nothing to do with Enigma. And then
you’ll need to leak those stories
to the Germans.

ALAN TURING
And the rest of our military.

Again this fits the quote of "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7e05pClKM

 

[excreationist]

I find it interesting that my suggestion of 7 and God possibly being involved is almost universally hated by Douglas Adams' fans. They say he was an atheist and there is absolutely no meaning in the number 42... well I can think for myself.... I think it is compatible with the stories.

A response:

I don't see how it is compatible with the series at all.

The author was a self described radical atheist who spoke out against religion and superstition throughout his life. Pretty much any time religion is mentioned in any of the books it is mentioned in a mocking or negative way.

To force christian numerology onto it is pretty much the opposite of compatible. It's like giving Marvin a job as a lapdancer.

Perhaps this is another example of hide and seek.... me finding "God" within an apparently very anti-God author/stories....

 

[excreationist]

Here's the fancy word for this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

I think here is the most extreme example of this (finding meaning in numbers, etc) - from "A Beautiful Mind"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLj8WCO-2QI&t=55s (go to 55 seconds)
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLj8WCO-2QI&t=55s[/YOUTUBE]
What makes it even more extreme is that the numbers were a hallucination....

Though it seems this word is usually used to talk about recognising images (like faces) or auditory hidden messages....

 

[excreationist]

About 6x7 and 42 from recent posts....

That's from my eBay account.... obviously that is just a coincidence..... I found many of the other things to be more meaningful....

edit:
About my "LineNum" system:
https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...quot-finding-a-number-for-any-symbol&p=941358
https://linenum.com/


Looking at the eBay screenshot: (circle = 1 line)
"Positive" - 3 lines and green (cross(2) + circle(1))
"Neutral" - 5 lines and very dark grey (square(4) + circle(1))
"Negative" - 2 lines and red (dash(1) + circle(1))

I think the closest colour to dark grey is white ("5")



The color of the dark grey is #555555 - which is exactly #555 in CSS short-hand....

Note the green is #5ba71b and the red is #dd1e31

I think at the moment I'm fairly safe from being "sick" since I'm not strongly believing the connection is from an actual intelligent force.... hopefully that's not seen as a dare for it to try harder....

 

[excreationist]

Lately my wife has been watching "Hardcore Pawn" on Youtube on TV. She just told me that she saw a guy who said he was the devil...

I found it:


I thought it was pretty funny.

Then I remembered I had also told people that I was the devil in January 2007:

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-satan-at-the-moment/389912

Hi, I’m Satan at this point in time and I know the secrets of life.

THE LAW OF REALITY
EVERYTHING happens for a Good logical reason.

The secret of eternal life on earth is to not break any commandments in the Bible, tempt others, be selfish, don’t pay for things with money, don’t manipulate people, be imperfect and believe and preach the LIE of materialism.

Anyone want to be my servant or be another Satan?

I was at an Internet cafe and while posting in that thread a nurse came and got me. On my trip to the hospital I lost my memory for about two days.... that's related to:
"Multiple "personalities" and split-brain experiments, etc"

https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...nalities-quot-and-split-brain-experiments-etc

(BTW lately I'm trying to spend more time learning how to make video games)