Ha ha, how did I know someone was going to play the 'open your mind' card?

Unfortunately, the person who urges an 'open mind' is actually the more close-minded: http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/10/the_appeal_to_b.html

...coming from a 'Skeptics' site; written by 'Skeptics', based on sceptisism Clownfish! Your point is....skeptical...and permeated in your 'ha ha's', thats okay, what you do not know cannot hurt you; live in skepticism, for what can one possibly 'know' that one has not experienced; therefore a closed mind on these types of matters!

I live and experience my life often more intuitively and with common sense which has not let me down to date approaching 50. Scoff all you like at peoples experiences Clownfish, it does not affect or change peoples experiences. Sad you have not enjoyed any though.

I note, we are unique, that you do a nice line in pejoratives: 'insecure thinkers', 'sad you have not enjoyed any though', yet you don't even attempt to answer the substance of the skeptics' argument. I rather suspect that that is because you are simply unable to; hence you resort to insubstantial belittlement to hide your lack of a cogent argument.

You also use 'skepticism' as an epithet, rather than 'the application of critical thinking to evaluate truth claims' or 'the position that what cannot be proved by reason should not be believed.'.

Perhaps you don't actually know what 'skeptic' means, and simply confuse it with meaning some sort of mean ol' party-pooper, or perhaps you're simply the opposite of skeptical - gullible.

Jon J, oh ye of little faith! So let's get our facts correct then. You were not there in the cat story (unless you were the old man in the house), and although you were not there you disbelieve everything about what took place and you are demanding objectivity. Your rationale for this is because you are a skeptic, right? Well that all makes sense. How did you come to choose to be a skeptic JJ? Was it a personal choice? I guess a skeptic firmly believes that if you cannot see something then it must not exist. You're right. You didn't see it because you were not there. So, if you say so JJ.

And Deano also sang out from our television screens slurring effortlessly into the melody with his tie partly undone and his bedroom eyes "everybody loves somebody sometime". It was a love song, nothing deeper Clownfish. A Dean Martin sung song is a good example of scientific evidence. Thanks Clownfish, that was really helpful.

Hi we are unique. Thank you for sharing your lovely story about your cat Princess. I do trust my intuition and I also know (let's call it experiential evidence) that something has only got to happen to you once for you to know that it has happened. I don't automatically block all incoming out of the ordinary information because I've got a skeptic sign plastered across my forehead (as some may do). And speaking of intuition we are unique, I also listen to my gut feelings about things. I couldn't find the original article I read a few years ago, but this one's more recent anyway. If you haven't already seen this, hope you enjoy it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain

Dotto, I am at a complete loss to understand what your like to the Scientific American article has to do with alleged psychic ability at all. It would be ungenerous of me to think that it's simply an attempt to appear scientimatific by posting something, anything, from a science site.

If you want to proffer 'experiential evidence', by all means do so. However, that means that you must document EVERY time you had some intuition, premonition, vision, etc., WHETHER IT HAD A POSITIVE RESULT OR NOT.

Listing the ONE time you had a positive is not valid, it's simply argument by selective evidence - 'cherry picking'.

I could, after all, cite the fact that I won $5 on a scratchy as evidence that I am supremely lucky, but I would be guilty of ignoring the many times I bought one, and won nothing.

Or, more pertinently, if one tallies the number of times a 'psychic' like John Edwards makes a wrong guess, against the number of correct guesses, one finds that he has a hit-miss ratio of something around 20-80. In other words, he's a very poor guesser.

Oh, and the Dean Martin song was never intended as 'scientific evidence', it was an analogy, a simple rhetorical device. I thought it was fairly obvious, but I should know by now, never to underestimate the obtuseness of believers.