Force Powers

Fyxe wrote: fictional accounts are based on real life much of the time. look at the Jedi Knights! They have super powers and are based on real life people that have similar abilities.

Uh... thats literally and factually not true, man.
The Jedi were imagined and created drawing heavily on the iconic imagery of (heavily romanticized) old west characters and samurai films...

This is common knowledge to even the most casual fan of Star Wars, Fyxe, you can't not know this...

You can apply whatever mysticism you like, that's your interpretation of Jediism and The Force, but what you just said? That is legitimately a fantasy or an outright lie, there is no sugar coating that.

I have nothing against your interpretations, but you shouldn't have to lie to support them, and I won't ignore it simply to be polite.

People are often inspired by fiction, but fiction is not always inspired by reality, and rarely is it true to the inspiration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnLj8DMqaC8

Ok, so imagine watching this footage. Dramatic short cut shots, ominous music, clichée expressions on all characters. So far so good, gotta sell a show, I suppose. Then the setup happens. The monk sits down, crosses his legs, you can see his right shoe looking out to the left from underneath his robes. Long robes at that, too, but that's traditional attire, so fair enough. They too are convenient, but let's not be too cynical yet.
Anyway, the man starts chanting. Dramatic shots, tension rises. This continues for a few cuts, and then before the shot where the monk lifts off the ground he is suddenly closer to the curtains behind him and further away from the candles by a few inches, roughly as much as one of those tiles the floor is made of, maybe a bit less. His robes now cover the shoe. Well, maybe his concentration was broken by natural urges and he needed a quick pee break. Of course the chanting footage before was already captured, so I guess one might as well keep it, not waste any film on recording the restarted procedure from the beginning.
Then the monk at last lifts off the ground. What a breathtaking moment. Camera is shaking, quick cuts between the host and the monk, zooms in and out, even a shot of the camera man by another auxiliary camera man. "Come, get this!" All very dramatic.
A few seconds later after the host and his teammate have established that they see no mechanism holding the monk up in the air from below, the old man starts descending again, the curtains behind him slightly moving once the motion begins.
And then the film ends.

What is the purpose of those curtains? Do they aid the monk's energy channeling, or is it possible to perform the same feat without them? Why do they move? There is slight air motion as we can see from the candle flames, but is that quite enough wind to disturb the curtains so much? And if yes, why aren't they gently swaying in the wind occasionally during any of the rest of the time?
Why did the crew stay strictly in front of the monk and did not film behind him during the levitating phase when they could so easily capture the patch of ground behind him before the break? Even when they film slightly from the side during levitation, the viewing angle carefully avoids capturing any of the space behind the monk. You'd think this would be an obvious part of the film to include in the final cut, even if only to convince the sceptics watching.
What medium was this footage shot on that it would have been so prohibitively expensive or un-rewriteable that they couldn't afford re-filming the meditation after the pee break? They could have filmed him approaching the spot again, sitting down again, the whole ordeal anew from the start. Instead they chose to conceal the break in a cut. If an innocent break is all it was, this raises many many questions the producers could have easily avoided but chose not to.
If however the break was to position the monk on something like a shovel that would later lift him up, the cut is perfectly easy to explain: They could not have re-shot the approach and sitdown as the shovel would be blatantly obvious, but they couldn't not reposition the monk once he sat because otherwise they couldn't produce the illusion. The better proximity to the curtain makes more sense, as does the curtain's slight but sudden movement once the monk changes from hovering to descending.
In a word, everything falls into place and makes perfect sense if this is a trick and the film crew was in on it. If this is genuine, though, many things seem rather odd filming and setup choices.

Pay attention to the details, think about what you are seeing and what you are being shown and how you are being shown those things. The "Look, it's magic!" conclusion may be precious to you, but if honesty with yourself is of any value to you, you must recognize that bias, set aside your passion, and patiently work at combatting the ignorance before you proclaim that you know what you just saw. Gather as much information as you can harvest before passing the judgement, and if your favoured one succumbs to the scrutiny of your own intellect, then so be it. Better to have been fallible and correct errors once made, than think oneself infallible and stay wrong no matter what.
The Jedi-y thing to do is not to just accept and believe all claims at fictional Jedi-like powers. The Jedi-y thing to do is have the humility to recognize and admit one's own fallibility, let go of one's ego, one's urge to jump to the conclusion without the argument, one's emotional attachment to one conclusion over all others, and instead seek out knowledge where it is lacking, and make the best call after how ever much time you can afford investing into the search. Being a thinker and a doubter is not a mark of cynicism or of darkness, or of bitterness or anger. Carefulness and humility - aside from being virtues in their own right, in my opinion - can be fully justified by the Code, too.

Thank you Gisteron for at least not calling me a liar... ONCE AGAIN! I dont really know how anyone would expect me to respond to that. beyond that I think you are trying very hard to come up with reasons why this was not real. Its like extraordinary claims to prove that evidence right in front of your eyes, is not real. I dont see where he moved anywhere and curtains are curtains, they move sometimes with gusts of wind, just like the candles. maybe it was just a bit stronger then. why would these people lie? what do they get out of that on tv?

Really?

REALLY??

an easily staged/faked trick popular with STAGE MAGICIANS is your argument, now?? Against my specifically calling out your assertion that "Jedi were inspired by real people with similar powers"? A statement that any one of us can look up and disprove in under 5 minutes?

I don't care about your interpretations, but what you have said about THAT topic is verifiably not true, and it is wrong for you to misrepresent information to fit your views and potentially mislead others (that last part is purely speculative and hypothetical at this point in time and I in no way accuse you of deliberate deception or misconduct, nor do I accuse you of devious or otherwise underhanded motivations)

Fyxe wrote: ... I think you are trying very hard to come up with reasons why this was not real. Its like extraordinary claims to prove that evidence right in front of your eyes, is not real.

No, not at all. I don't need reasons to dismiss it. My profile picture is a CGI rendering of a Jedi Holocron like object hovering above a fuzzy mirror. I have experience with graphical effects and I understand enough physics to say that genuine hovering the way the monk alleges to is pretty much impossible. I don't need "reasons why this was not real", I have very strong expectations that it likely wasn't and I could have faked a film like that myself, though I would have done it in graphical processing rather than with the far more convincing practical effects employed by this team.

I also do not need to try hard, nor to make any extraordinary claims. All I need is pay attention to the film and notice the continuity break. This is not wishful thinking, the man's shoe was not covered by the robes in the shots before the final liftoff and it was covered in the shots where levitation commenced. You can see it, I can see it, there is no disagreement between us about that continuity break being part of the film. Interesting is what comes of it next: You ignore it because you want to believe no matter if it's fake or not. I do not ignore it because I want to know what I'm looking at, no matter if it's fake or not. That's the difference between you and I in this case. I'm being honest with myself, you are being deceptive with yourself.

why would these people lie? what do they get out of that on tv?

Ratings. Hence money. They produce sensationalist entertainment for those who enjoy it and they get to continue their show and thereby their jobs by making good watchable content.
Don't get me wrong, the production here is quite alright. The hand-held camera makes it feel spontaneous and authentic, there is definitely worse acting to be found on TV, the lighting is smooth, the costumes look good. The editing I find somewhat overdone, but the editor knew what they were doing, and the sound scape is creepy and tense and sets the mood effectively. It looks like a very decently made show, but a show is all it is, and the motivation behind it is a showman's motivation behind any show they film.

so if I understand you gist, you are saying that:

First off this is just impossible because your a genius physics guy and you just know.

Your an expert film maker with CGI who could have faked this better and because of that you have strong expectations that this must be faked.

There is editing breaks in it so they must be decieving us.

The man covered his shoe with his robe before he levatated and so this PROVES he faked it! I mean obviously you cant levitate if your shoe is covered!

Oh and money and conspiracy are obvious in this show even though there is ABSOLUTELY no proof of this, you just get to assert thais because... why again?

I think the idea, Fyxe, is that what is more realistically likely to be true has more ways and reasons to be true than what is less likely. Because of this, it is wiser to more sincerely consider that which supports the more likely scenario, otherwise, we risk falling to gullibility.

Fyxe wrote: so if I understand you gist, you are saying that:

First off this is just impossible because your a genius physics guy and you just know.

No. I didn't say it was "just impossible", I said it was "pretty much impossible". Learn to read.

Your an expert film maker with CGI who could have faked this better and because of that you have strong expectations that this must be faked.

Wrong again. I never said I was any sort of film maker, let alone an expert one. I never said I could have faked it a better way, only a different way. Learn to read. My expectation that this is fake stems from the fact that it is pretty much physically impossible. I am not saying the film footage itself was tampered with through CGI techniques, but had it looked convincing in the first place, there would still be reasonable doubt due to the existence and quality of even TV grade CGI at the time of the show's airing.

There is editing breaks in it so they must be decieving us.

Cuts in editing are normal. Very rarely do we find film makers publishing all of their recorded footage unedited. There is however a continuity error which is almost completely inexplicable under the model whereby the levitation was real and almost completely trivial to explain under the model whereby it was fake. Combine it with the fact that levitating like this is pretty much physically impossible whilst doing a parlor trick is easy and inexpensive, and already a strong case is on our hands. This is an inference to the simplest explanation, not a proof.
Maybe you have a model that is even simpler than that the man stood up and sat down on a shovel in the middle of the procedure and was lifted by a handle reaching behind the curtain, by all means, I'm all ears. If your model can account for the inconsistencies and oddities and for why the producer didn't choose to re-shoot or re-edit the footage such as to fully conceal it - like the part where the monk covered his shoe with the robe as you assert in a second. It must have happened on the other camera and the editor decided to show us instead the host's face during that moment, presumably so you and I can debate it or so, let's hear it.

My model accounts for all of the oddities and is compatible with physics as we know it: It proposes the shovel to explain the robe displacement, and the shovelstick to explain the robe's motion. Notice, that while the crew were filming all around the monk back when we could see the shoe, once the levitation phase started, there is not a single shot showing us any of the space directly behind him. My model explains this by saying that the crew wouldn't want to risk breaking the illusion even more than it already has by outright showing the mechanism of levitation.
Your model, meanwhile, has to propose highly contentious magical powers and is yet to account for all of the sloppiness on the film makers' part. So far it already accounts for things like curtain motion by introducing a sudden gust of wind that didn't blow out any candles we get to see and came from a direction we have no footage of. And it accounts for the robe displacement by proposing the monk's interrupting his deep otherwise almost fully unmoving meditation at some point when we don't get to see him do it, only to cover a shoe for reasons unstated.

The man covered his shoe with his robe before he levatated and so this PROVES he faked it! I mean obviously you cant levitate if your shoe is covered!

No. Learn to read.

Oh and money and conspiracy are obvious in this show even though there is ABSOLUTELY no proof of this, you just get to assert thais because... why again?

I didn't assert conspiracy, I asserted money. Because that is what shows are made for, believe it or don't. There was no way the crew wouldn't have been in on it if it was a deception, but if it wasn't, their goal is still to get you to tune in next time. It's not about informing you about the wonders of the universe, that's what literature, philosophy, and science educators are tasked to do. These people are entertainers first, that's why they filmed it, and that is why they aired it, whether it was real or not.

Fyxe wrote: so if I understand you gist, you are saying that:

First off this is just impossible because your a genius physics guy and you just know.

Your an expert film maker with CGI who could have faked this better and because of that you have strong expectations that this must be faked.

There is editing breaks in it so they must be decieving us.

The man covered his shoe with his robe before he levatated and so this PROVES he faked it! I mean obviously you cant levitate if your shoe is covered!

Oh and money and conspiracy are obvious in this show even though there is ABSOLUTELY no proof of this, you just get to assert thais because... why again?

What he's saying is that this is an ancient trick used to fleece people out of money. It's been done for centuries, nearly unchanged.