Precognitive dreams, does this happen to others? [Archive]

mucat

2010-10-17, 08:47 PM

Ditto. It happens frequently enough that I've stopped dismissing them as coincidences and started calling them legitimate phenomenon.

A rather casual statement, given that you would be sitting on a discovery that would be worth multiple Nobel Prizes and then some...

I am reasonably certain that no one has ever had a precognitive dream.

This doesn't mean that people who think they have are crazy or dishonest. Memory is a funny thing, and memory of dreams, exponentially so. What happens is probably along these lines: a person has a dream. The details of the dream flit in and out of their memory as dreams always do: parts are clearly remembered, parts are forgotten, and a lot of the content seems tantalizingly just out of reach; it feels like we remember it, but it vanishes when we try to focus on specifics.

And then something happens in real life which is similar to the dream. In itself, this is nothing strange; we have lots of dreams, and lots of real-life experiences, and from time to time they will overlap.

The mind maps the real-life event onto the dream, and those amorphous dream memories suddenly become sharp: they were exactly like the real-life event that happened later. The person isn't being dishonest; that's exactly how the dream is now recalled in their brain. But the dream didn't really contain information about the future; the future rewrote the memory of the dream.

Now, if this is a scientific model, then there needs to be a way to test it. And there is. If someone were to record their dreams, and documented details of the dream predicted events which occurred after the record was made, in a way that couldn't reasonably occur by chance, and the events were unpredictable enough that they couldn't have been intuited in advance by the dreamer...then we've got something worth investigating.

Only that never happens.

If it does happen to you...start documenting it. Record your dreams in a clearly time-stamped way that can't be falsified, and then wait and see what future events they correlate with. If you are right, then you will have just made one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever. And in the face of something that cool, I will be absolutely thrilled to admit I was wrong. :smallsmile:

Partof1

2010-10-17, 09:39 PM

PopcornMage

2010-10-17, 10:11 PM

Yes, I've had Deja Vu moments too, from as simple as opening a desk to take some pennies out of a drawer.

It is...a bit weird.

Adumbration

2010-10-18, 07:31 AM

Been there, done that. Pretty much as others have described, only (surprise surprise) I don't remember the dreams beforehand - occasionally there just comes along a moment when something clicks into place, and I get the strong feeling that I've dreamt this beforehand.

Naturally it's just my mind playing tricks on me, but a funny old thing none the less.

onthetown

2010-10-18, 07:42 AM

I have them all the time. It creeps me out. I once dreamt of a house downtown catching on fire and a boy screaming in the bathroom, and then two weeks later I found out that the same house had caught on fire and a boy died in the bathroom of it.

All of the other ones have been trivial, though: scenes from the first day of high school, a particular moment in class in college, sitting in the car and talking about a certain subject to somebody, etc. Nothing too terrifying since the house.

Renegade Paladin

2010-10-18, 07:49 AM

Serpentine

2010-10-18, 08:49 AM

I would love to document stuff like that, but even immediately after awaking, i oftem forget dreams, so I couldn't, personally. Even the documents would be incredibly tedious to sift through, as my deja vu moments occur sometimes years afterwards.

Though I think it would be incredible to have conclusive evidence either way, I believe uncertainty may be necessary here.Laziness, nothing more. Uncertainty is not necessary, just easy. And until you* go to the effort to actually gather some evidence, I have absolutely no reason to believe that 1. what you claim happened did as you say, nor that 2. your interpretation of what happened is correct.

*general "you"

Yora

2010-10-18, 09:02 AM

It's a well known fact in the psychologists community, that our "memories" consists only of a few basic facts, and everything else we fill with images we're making up right now. Basically nothing we experienced happened the way we remember it now. If you can convince someone that you've been together in school many years ago, the other person will start to remember you, even though you have never met before and you made up all the stories of things you did together.
Even just a few minutes after an event, you can aks eye witnesses what happened and they will usually tell very different stories. Memories look like a movie in the mind, but they are not.

While the subconsciousness can make connections of things that are related, but you havn't realized consciously yet, the solutions to problems could possibly come to you in your dreams. It could possibly even allow you to have a good idea how certain things will work out, but only if your mind already has the neccessary informations that would allow it to come to that conclusion. Premonitions are usually just that. Your mind has all the neccessary informations to draw a conclusion, but your consciousness hasn't actively thought about it yet.
But if you see an event, and "remember" it happening in a dream some time ago, it's just a plain old deja vu.

Amiel

2010-10-18, 09:12 AM

I sometimes experience a weird sense of deja vu, "surely I had already lived through this day before?"

I can recall the exact actions committed on that day as well as the interactions with various others. It's happened only a few times, but those few times it has occurred is already far too many for my liking.

pendell

2010-10-18, 09:34 AM

Now, this has not happened for years (5th to 6th grade at best), but the dream threads here have brought a key portion back to mind, have others had prophetic dreams? The dreams themselves were fuzzy (literally, seen through a distroted haze, while everything was still comprehendable) and covering minutiae, had about 2 and I remember them vividly, others are in imemorable backwaters of my conscious mind.

Just want to know I'm not the only one who has had this happen, or am I one of the few "Oracles of Delphi", with watered down info mind you.

I get 'em. In the past 4 years, I have had about three or four.

My trouble is distinguishing between the ones that really are precognitive, and the ones that are just silly.

ETA: I note that a fair number of people on this thread do not believe in precognitive dreams. While there is no scientific proof at this time, there have been stories of such things since approx. 5000 BCE. Not just one tradition , either.

ETA: In my case , the dreams were not distorted or fuzzy. They felt real, solid. Like walking around in a parallel world. Usually I could wake up from a dream with a minimum of effort, but not these. I had to go through it until whatever happened happened. Then, and only then, could I wake up, usually very quickly.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Prime32

2010-10-18, 10:39 AM

ETA: I note that a fair number of people on this thread do not believe in precognitive dreams. While there is no scientific proof at this time, there have been stories of such things since approx. 5000 BCE. Not just one tradition , either. As has been said, all "traditions" have human brains, and it's hard to deny that your own brain is the best person at tricking you.

Deja vu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_vu) happens to everyone.

John Cribati

2010-10-18, 10:41 AM

Prime32

2010-10-18, 10:44 AM

I remember that when I was in eighth grade, there were two eight grade teachers: Mr. Thompson and Mrs. Thompson (no, they weren't married. Or related). Anyway, I was in Mrs. Thompson's class. One night I had a dream that Mr. Thompson was my teacher, and the entire class broke out into a musical. One week later, for whatever reason, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson switched classes. Fortunately, there was no musical to follow this.There's also some confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) here. If they hadn't switched classes, you wouldn't ever think about the dream again (certainly you wouldn't post to say "I had a dream in 8th grade about the Thompsons' and it didn't happen"). The majority of your dreams still don't match up with real events in any way.

Mando Knight

2010-10-18, 10:47 AM

It feels like it sometimes, but the realization that I "predicted" whatever it is usually doesn't strike until after it's at least started happening, making the phenomenon suspect due to the vagaries of the human brain.

Yep. I get this, too. I think I've even stopped noticing such dreams, since I've since subconsciously realized (consciously, it happened long before that) that there's enough pattern to my life that I can predict most occurrences, and my dreams are random enough that if I felt I dreamed of something entirely random that just actually happened, I could easily chalk it up to mere coincidence.

Telonius

2010-10-18, 10:49 AM

To the OP: No, but I've had quite a number of them that I've wished were prophetic.

pendell

2010-10-18, 11:24 AM

ArlEammon

2010-10-18, 11:29 AM

I've had what may be prophetic dreams about Heaven, but I don't know if they are really prophetic or not.

Helanna

2010-10-18, 12:32 PM

ETA: I note that a fair number of people on this thread do not believe in precognitive dreams. While there is no scientific proof at this time, there have been stories of such things since approx. 5000 BCE. Not just one tradition , either.

Well, yeah, but there have been a LOT of stories about stuff since 5000 BCE, and a lot about what constitutes a prophecy, so I really have no idea what your point is here. That dreams have been considered prophetic for a long time? That's not any type of proof.

This has not happened once, or twice, or three times or four times. It has happened MANY times. Enough so that I believe that these things happen, even if they can't be scientifically proven. I nonetheless respect the views of those who believe otherwise. It's a whacky, crazy world we live in and if everything was easily understandable -- therefore not subject to debate and argument -- life would be boring.

Stuff like this is actually pretty easy to amass evidence for, if not 'prove'. Like mucat said - start recording and timestamping your dreams in an unfalsifiable way, and then keep a record of which comes true. If you were serious about it, you'd have to be able to prove that the events actually happened, but if you had some sort of scientist running an experiment, they'd have a way of doing that, depending on how they were running it.

So . . . yeah, I don't really believe that dreams are or can be prophetic. Our brains are funny places, and they can do a lot of weird stuff to trick us, and of course simple coincidence can play a huge part. Even if it's a one-to-a-million chance of something happening, there are 7 billion on this planet. It's gonna happen somewhere, and probably with a lot more frequency than you'd expect.

Obviously, I intend no offense to anybody who does believe that they have prophetic dreams. I'm not calling you liars or anything, and you obviously have the right to hold a belief different than mine. I'm not even saying that there is no such thing as prophetic dreams, just that I don't think that there are. I'm just saying that if there's a natural reason for it, why assign it to something supernatural?

Kobold-Bard

2010-10-18, 02:07 PM

Not dreams exactly, but I can accurately predict what episode of the Simpsons will be shown on Channel 4 that night. Have done since year 7, it's really annoying that such a power is wasted on something so trivial.

Serpentine

2010-10-18, 11:19 PM

ETA: I note that a fair number of people on this thread do not believe in precognitive dreams. While there is no scientific proof at this time, there have been stories of such things since approx. 5000 BCE. Not just one tradition , either.A lot of traditions have believed in a lot of things for a long time. The only things it suggests include that human psychology is similar all-over, that people often experience similar things and ascribe similar explainations, that people believe those that came before them even if they had no more evidence than the later people, and so on. It does not suggest - or, at the very least, it is not significant evidence - that these stories are right just because they're old.
For example, there are many, many stories about creatures like succubi and incubi, terrifying creatures that sit on your chest or lean over you at night to suck away your blood/manliness/life/whatever. These sorts of stories can be found all over the world. Now we know that they almost certainly come from sleep paralysis - something that is experienced by people all over the world in remarkably similar ways. Their experience was real, but their explaination was not.

I keep a diary of my 'significant' dreams, as well as a list of which ones come to pass and which ones don't. I hope by doing so to learn to better distinguish 'real' from 'false'. Because I do make mistakes.Excellent. Continue to do so, analyze them critically, and please seek out someone who can properly examine your evidence. Because if you really can dream the future, then this is an absolutely amazing discovery that has huge implications for scientific knowledge.
It absolutely astounds me how so many people who believe in this sort of thing severely undervalue their beliefs... If it is true, it is amazing, and the scientific world needs to know.

Andraste

2010-10-18, 11:38 PM

I don't really remember my dreams, but I do sometimes have precognitive random thoughts. Things like me thinking of a word or idea, then it being mentioned in a sentence by someone else a few seconds later. It's kind of impossible to tell until afterward though.

Likely it's just a bunch of coincidences or some sort of psychological trick, but it's still weird.

Temotei

2010-10-18, 11:43 PM

Ditto. It happens frequently enough that I've stopped dismissing them as coincidences and started calling them legitimate phenomenon.

Same with me.

PopcornMage

2010-10-18, 11:48 PM

arguskos

2010-10-18, 11:57 PM

Excellent. Continue to do so, analyze them critically, and please seek out someone who can properly examine your evidence. Because if you really can dream the future, then this is an absolutely amazing discovery that has huge implications for scientific knowledge.
It absolutely astounds me how so many people who believe in this sort of thing severely undervalue their beliefs... If it is true, it is amazing, and the scientific world needs to know.
You know, as a kid (think I was around 13?), I did precisely this. I recorded every dream I had for something like 8 months and I checked every single day to see if any lined up with reality. Something like 40 of them had happened after 8 months of dreams. That's not a huge number, but it made me go "woah, that's neat". I wish I still had that dream journal, but I don't anymore. It was lost in a move at some point. :smallsigh:

Cue someone telling me it didn't happen or I remembered wrong. :smallsigh:

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 12:21 AM

Cue someone telling me it didn't happen or I remembered wrong. :smallsigh:I don't have to believe that what you* claim didn't happen to think that you* are mistaken in your explaination. In fact, it always makes me uncomfortable when people say things like "it's just your imagination" or "all those claims are lies". It's both insulting and unnecessary, and belittles something that, even if the original explaination isn't correct, could still be an amazing or at least very interesting discovery. e.g. Sleep paralysis again: it is foolish to insist that the people who had the experiences of paralysis, fear and a figure standing over them were lying, dreaming or deluded. But that doesn't mean we have to believe them when they say it was because of incubi/vampires/aliens, and in fact the true explaination is in itself extremely interesting.

*general "you"

mucat

2010-10-19, 12:25 AM

You know, as a kid (think I was around 13?), I did precisely this. I recorded every dream I had for something like 8 months and I checked every single day to see if any lined up with reality. Something like 40 of them had happened after 8 months of dreams. That's not a huge number, but it made me go "woah, that's neat". I wish I still had that dream journal, but I don't anymore. It was lost in a move at some point. :smallsigh:

Cue someone telling me it didn't happen or I remembered wrong. :smallsigh:

It didn't happen or you remember wrong.

I mean seriously, don't act like the decent thing to do would be for people to figure that if you say it happened, it happened. This would be a huge discovery and would mean we get to rewrite pretty much every branch of science from the ground up. If I say "I once came up with a unified field theory, and I wrote it down, but I don't have it anymore," the default assumption will be that it didn't really happen.

You are claiming that you made a discovery that ought to win you every Nobel prize, ever. You probably didn't. It isn't rude of me to simply tell you that. Hell, it would be rude and patronizing of me to pretend I did think you were right.

It is absolutely unreasonable for you to say "Cue the skeptics" with a yawning emoticon as if the skeptics were being unfair to you.

Amiel

2010-10-19, 12:29 AM

I think Shakespeare said it best
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy"

Humans are still very limited in their understanding of the world; for all we know, some of us may actually be psychics.

TFT

2010-10-19, 12:30 AM

So I've had this happen once or twice.

They were very very meta though. Like, I realized midway through in the "vision" that I had seen this before. Now, the reason why I don't believe this is just my brain playing some kind of trick is because with the thoughts there was a location, person, and situation that it started at, and the same exact situation happened the second time. Like, this isn't just me lying on a bed or something :smalltongue:.

That's not the weird thing, though. The weird thing is that I actually changed what happened from what I saw at the end because I knew what I was about to say. So, beginning is about exactly the same for ten seconds, then it veers off as soon as I realized this is what happened. It didn't affect anything more then thoughts, but still. If this isn't some kind of mind trick it is just about the coolest thing ever.

Edit: But, I realize I can't prove this, and thus I really don't care. Maybe the next time I'll write the stuff down beforehand and track the person down beforehand without giving them details.

TSGames

2010-10-19, 12:36 AM

A small addition: My dreams are significantly different -- the "real" ones, anyway -- from the dreams described elsewhere in this thread. They are real. I experience them at the time they happen, I do not forget them, and I ponder them for the rest of my life.

...

This has not happened once, or twice, or three times or four times. It has happened MANY times. Enough so that I believe that these things happen, even if they can't be scientifically proven. I nonetheless respect the views of those who believe otherwise. It's a whacky, crazy world we live in and if everything was easily understandable -- therefore not subject to debate and argument -- life would be boring.

Respectfully,

Brian P.
I'm with you on this one. I have had exactly 4 detailed prophetic dreams so far, and just like you described, they seem 'heavier'(for lack of a better word) or more real than normal dreams. For me, I had never once had a dream that could ever be confused for reality in any way, every dream I can ever remember has surrealism and horror as the absolute rule. However, 4 times there have been exceptions to this. Two of those dreams came to fruition, and the other two should not for a very long time.

The two times that the dreams have come true were each deeply personal moments, 'pivots' or focal points in the journey of life; once for myself and once for my best friend. Each time, as events began to occur, I remember an increasing feeling like a magnified deja vu, as the scenes unfolded and my mind focused more and more on the contents of the dreams, until I could focus on almost nothing else. The strange part was watching it all happen in reality was almost like watching a play from behind glass or watching a rerun of a TV show; knowing what was going to happen, knowing what I was going to do and what the others were going to say and do, but not altering events in any way, not being able to deviate, because in some way, on a purely subconscious level, my mind understood that the events that had unfolded in the dream were going to take place in reality and I could not alter it.

I understand if other people don't believe it, and that's fine. It just seems to me that there's a lot we don't understand about the mind, and between what little we do know and the vast amount we wish we knew, there is a lot of room for speculation. I am not willing to place the ability to simulate future events through dreams beyond the realm of possibility, not just yet. Maybe there is another explanation. All I know is that I studied both computers and the brain for many years, and the more I learned, the more I realized that even the greatest supercomputers in existence pale in comparison to a weak human brain. I may not be able to offer an suitable hypothesis for the phenomenon of prophetic dreams, and I certainly believe that most claims of such are quite false, but even still I can't, in good conscience, dismiss the phenomenon altogether.

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 01:17 AM

Humans are still very limited in their understanding of the world; for all we know, some of us may actually be psychics.There is a very, very big difference between that and "some of us are psychics". "It's possible" is not the same as evidence that it's true.

By the way, I reckon if prophesy is possible, it's something to do with those particles that go backwards through time.

(I also have a theory that auras might be like synthesesia, but with colour-electromagnetic fields from the brain, rather than colour-sound or whatever. Or maybe it's just like that shimmery shadow I get when I stare at something for a while.)

Amiel

2010-10-19, 01:23 AM

There is a very, very big difference between that and "some of us are psychics". "It's possible" is not the same as evidence that it's true.

{{scrubbed}}

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 01:34 AM

Someone else said it better, but just because we don't know everything doesn't mean you can insert any old thing you like into the gaps and expect it to be taken seriously.
You can believe anything you like, but until you have evidence - real, scientific evidence - to support it, you have absolutely no right to expect anyone to agree with you.
One of the greatest advantages, one of the greatest advances granted by the devolopment of modern scientific method is simply the ability to say "I don't know" and to leave it at that. Because often, that is the most honest and most credible answer. "I don't know" is not permission to make any claim you like, it is an invitation to suggest answers and supply evidence - or at least methods of testing - for those answers.
Open-mindedness doesn't mean believing everything anyone tells you (http://www.youtube.com/user/QualiaSoup#p/u/11/T69TOuqaqXI), and the power of coincidence can be impressive (http://www.youtube.com/user/QualiaSoup#p/u/16/98OTsYfTt-c).

Amiel

2010-10-19, 01:48 AM

Your first sentence is a logical fallacy; the insertion of knowledge in gaps in things we may know a little of does not mean that said insertion will lead us astray in totality. This is false.
You can only use this argument insofar where common sense fails. From gaps in knowledge will arise more knowledge in assisting our understanding.

"You have absolutely no right to expect anyone to agree with you[...]Because often, that is the most honest and most credible answer. "I don't know" is not permission to make any claim you like, it is an invitation to suggest answers and supply evidence - or at least methods of testing - for those answers."
Where are you pulling that from? It seems incidental to the topic at hand and needlessly antagonistic.

"It is an invitation to suggest answers" is going back on your claim that insertion in gaps in knowledge is a bad thing.

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 02:00 AM

It is the difference between these conversations:

"We do not know X."
"Well then, X is Y. You have no evidence that it is not Y, therefore you should accept/respect my belief that Y."

and

"We do not know X."
"Perhaps X is Y. Here is the evidence I already have for Y, and here are some ideas to more rigorously test and possibly reject Y."

Suggesting testable answers is not the same as inserting whatever you want as though it is fact.
Moreover (and somewhat unrelated to the current discussion though I already alluded to it), there is a difference between observation and explaination. I may observe that the sun moves across the sky, but that doesn't mean that my explaination that it's because the sun revolves around the Earth is correct. The observation may be accepted while the explaination is rejected, if the explaination is not supported by sufficient evidence. Or, to tie back to the above, the observation may be accepted and judgement of that or any other explaination legitimately put on hold until further evidence is gathered.

"I do not believe in Y" is not necessarily the same as saying "I believe that Y is wrong". It is also "I currently do not have any evidence to be convinced that Y is true, nor enough to be convinced that it is false."

Went on a bit of a tangent there, sorry.

Amiel

2010-10-19, 02:38 AM

The wording of possibility grounds it neither in evidence nor in unsubstantiations. It occupies the line where evidence and observation may intersect.

Where observation is conclusively proven, it can deemed be evidence; however, evidence arising from insufficient or inadequate testing is also burdened with proof. You have your conclusions, and it has been tested. But these conclusions may be wrong.
Observation can also formulate the evidence before explicit verification and validations need arise.

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 02:48 AM

Amiel

2010-10-19, 02:57 AM

Which brings us back to my original point: There is a very big difference between "for all we know, some of us may actually be psychics" (what you said) and "some of us are psychics" (what many others say).

Ah.

I think prejudices and biases are also in play; people seem to have innate biases that influence their perceptions of phenomena.

People who wish to believe and have experiences that prove this belief, will no doubt form a conclusion that is in support of their viewpoint.

People who do not wish to believe and have no experiences or proof, will no doubt draw from their own experience a negative correlation and link.

VanBuren

2010-10-19, 03:53 AM

I hope my dreams never come true.

One of them was a zombie apocalypse. We were winning too, until our mage teamkilled everyone.

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 03:56 AM

Nitpick: evidence, not proof; supports, not proves.
And I think you're undervaluing the evidence against - those who do not wish to believe*, can find far more non-anecdotal evidence supporting their inclinations than those who do wish to believe.

*and watch what you do with those particular words

Lioness

2010-10-19, 06:20 AM

Nah, I get these too. I see the dreams clearly, but they're of trivial things, mostly just single sentences, or images of settings, but I get a definite realization that I've done this before when the events happen.

I get this exact thing. Usually about once every 6 months or so. Except for once when it happened 3 times in a week.

Lillith

2010-10-19, 07:05 AM

I don't really have a lot of cognitive dreams. If any... The only times I dreamed something that also happened that very next day was when I dreamed I was late for martial arts, which happened because my computer fried itself that day. (Though I dream a lot that I am late so that might be a coincidence)

The other dream I had was that I found my boyfriends glasses on the nightstand while he was searching for it for five days (as did I). Then again I could have seen it before going to bed and not realizing it. (Seriously though I looked at that nightstand I don't know how many times, why didn't I see it?)

I do however have a LOT of deja vu's. That sometimes I am starting to wonder if I had certain deja vu's multiple times even. I get those at least once a month. (Maybe my life is just that routine?)

pendell

2010-10-19, 08:46 AM

Which brings us back to my original point: There is a very big difference between "for all we know, some of us may actually be psychics" (what you said) and "some of us are psychics" (what many others say).

And I have no conclusions. I usually believe people when they say they had such-and-such an experience, or they made such-and-such an observation. That is because I choose to believe that most people do not lie, and that most people are not deluded. However, that does not mean that I believe that most people are always right. Are you an expert in the paranormal, psychology, physics or any other applicable field? If not, then I have absolutely no reason to accept your explaination out of the many possibilities, especially when it carries incredible implications that therefore require incredible evidence. I do not know what the true explaination is, and that means exactly that: I do not know. You might be right. You might not.
If you believe you have real evidence to support your explaination, please, please, for the love of science, do something to give it academic credibility. I know there are credible paranormal researchers out there who are happy to gather all the evidence they can get.

(mostly general "yous")

Hello, Serpentine, I believe you deserve to be answered.

There are four reasons, from most important to least important, why I have not done what you suggest. Yet, anyway.

1) What happens in my head isn't always for public consumption. What I see is sometimes very private, either for myself or for other people. I am very loathe to share the contents of my head even with neutral, impartial scientists, both for my own sake and for the sake of others. If true, some of the things I see would be a gross violation of privacy to reveal. If false, it would be a slander.

2) Before I go to a scientist, I want to be sure *myself* the difference between a true dream and a normal dream. There are dreams that I have which come true. I also have normal dreams which are obviously not precognitive.

The difference is not always plain. Back in 1996 I was planning a vacation to Virginia Beach. Well, just before we traveled I had an extremely vivid, realistic dream of us driving down and getting into a truly awful car accident.

Well, we went anyway. And there was no accident.

There are many possible explanations, but the most likely one -- the one that I believe -- is that I was stressed, anxious, and worried about the trip, and it came out in my dream.

I'm not going to waste a scientist's time until I am sure myself that I can tell the difference and have something that can stand up. Like Darwin, I'm not interested in challenging the status quo until I've built such a strong case that it is near unchallengeable.

3) There is the lingering suspicion that , no matter what I said, it would not prove something that people would accept. There seems to be a common theme I have seen in many places that, if people don't have the experience themselves, that no one else possibly could either. People seem to have one of two approaches to situations like the above: They either cruise on in blissful ignorance that such things exist, and when forced to acknowledge that they do, they react with fear, horror, and envy.

Sometimes, possibly, it's best to do what you do and not bring yourself to the attention of others.

4) I have spent many years dealing with psychology, psychiatry, and counselors, and I cannot say I enjoyed it. I am also of the distinct opinion that the entire discipline is immature and subjective at this stage. I have experienced that you can go to three different psychologists and get three different opinions. It's partly due to the questions they ask, and partly how you answer. Even with the best will in the world to honesty on both sides -- and absolute, brutal, self-honesty is VERY hard, even to my self -- there's no brain scanner that can reveal everything about a person. My answers are subjective, and the person listening is listening subjectively, with the result that its not easy at all to get to the objective truth about what's going on inside a person's head.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 09:25 AM

Hello, Serpentine, I believe you deserve to be answered.Thanks.

1) What happens in my head isn't always for public consumption. What I see is sometimes very private, either for myself or for other people. I am very loathe to share the contents of my head even with neutral, impartial scientists, both for my own sake and for the sake of others. If true, some of the things I see would be a gross violation of privacy to reveal. If false, it would be a slander.Fine, but then there is no reason for anyone to accept your claims.

2) Before I go to a scientist, I want to be sure *myself* the difference between a true dream and a normal dream. There are dreams that I have which come true. I also have normal dreams which are obviously not precognitive...I'm not going to waste a scientist's time until I am sure myself that I can tell the difference and have something that can stand up. Like Darwin, I'm not interested in challenging the status quo until I've built such a strong case that it is near unchallengeable.Also fine, and respectable, but be aware that all the evidence you gather in this time is far less acceptable than if it were collected in more controlled conditions (inasmuch as they can be), en masse, with other people to confirm and back you up.

3) There is the lingering suspicion that , no matter what I said, it would not prove something that people would accept. There seems to be a common theme I have seen in many places that, if people don't have the experience themselves, that no one else possibly could either. People seem to have one of two approaches to situations like the above: They either cruise on in blissful ignorance that such things exist, and when forced to acknowledge that they do, they react with fear, horror, and envy.I fully admit that it would be very hard to get your evidence accepted - as well, probably, it should be, what with the whole "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" thing. However, I also know that there are a number of serious, credible people with experience, integrity and authority who are looking very hard for any solid evidence they can find. It's not "people" you need to convince, it's a person - a researcher, a scientist - with the necessary qualifications to put your evidence to use.

4) I have spent many years dealing with psychology, psychiatry, and counselors, and I cannot say I enjoyed it. I am also of the distinct opinion that the entire discipline is immature and subjective at this stage. I have experienced that you can go to three different psychologists and get three different opinions. It's partly due to the questions they ask, and partly how you answer. Even with the best will in the world to honesty on both sides -- and absolute, brutal, self-honesty is VERY hard, even to my self -- there's no brain scanner that can reveal everything about a person. My answers are subjective, and the person listening is listening subjectively, with the result that its not easy at all to get to the objective truth about what's going on inside a person's head.No comment on psychology, due to lack of information. I acknowledge they'd almost certainly have to be involved, though.

Helanna

2010-10-19, 09:26 AM

I had a lot of posts I was going to reply to, but then I watched Serpentine's videos and forgot everything I was going to ask. Cool videos though.

For everyone who says they have dreams in which they see/hear certain words/lines/sentences being spoken . . . is it just possible that you know these people so well that your subconscious can just occasionally predict what they're going to say? Even if you don't know them that well, it's not always very difficult to predict what someone might say to a certain situation.

The two times that the dreams have come true were each deeply personal moments, 'pivots' or focal points in the journey of life; once for myself and once for my best friend. Each time, as events began to occur, I remember an increasing feeling like a magnified deja vu, as the scenes unfolded and my mind focused more and more on the contents of the dreams, until I could focus on almost nothing else.

(Emphasis mine)

Again, there's a pretty rational explanation for this, that was also expanded on earlier I believe. As someone said earlier, you don't remember every single detail of your dreams, even if you think you do. Your mind can fill in details, or miss some.

My personal theory would be that you get deja vu, and while trying to remember where you've heard/seen this all before, your brain realizes that it's similar to a dream you once had. It then overwrites your memory of the dream to make it match exactly. Your brain can randomly re-write memories all the time.

For example, I once took my sister and her friend to a horror movie. Later that night, while we were all sleeping, my dog started barking out the window, very viciously - she'd never acted like that, before or since. And then my sister's friend screamed and claimed she saw a face outside the window, through the curtain. We ended up calling the police, just in case, and the friend repeated her story a lot, and every time she told it the details got more clear. First it was 'a shape'. Then it was a face. Then it was 'a guy's face'. Then it was a bald guy, and so on. The point is, if you think something is happening, your brain will re-interpret memories as needed, including those of dreams.

And just because nobody's posted it yet:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_data_so_far.png

Seriously, one of the major reasons I don't believe in psychics or anything is because there are MILLIONS of dollars in rewards for proving it . . . and yet nobody's won them yet. Frankly, if I thought I had any type of ability, I would be all over those contests, yet nobody seems to want to take them on . . .

SDF

2010-10-19, 09:45 AM

It never made sense to me, as it is a fatalistic philosophy mucked up by causality. If true, you are changing the result by measuring it. (or predicting it, whatever) Either, you can't change the outcome (which makes less sense because prior knowledge would have an effect on you, if even subconsciously) Or, you change the outcome, changing having ever predicted it in the first place. Not to mention all the other obvious holes in any theory about prediction. You'd totally need another sensory organ to receive and interpret the data as well. Plus, I don't believe in magic, so I'm probably not going to buy, "A wizard did it," on this one.

mucat

2010-10-19, 12:44 PM

3) There is the lingering suspicion that , no matter what I said, it would not prove something that people would accept. There seems to be a common theme I have seen in many places that, if people don't have the experience themselves, that no one else possibly could either. People seem to have one of two approaches to situations like the above: They either cruise on in blissful ignorance that such things exist, and when forced to acknowledge that they do, they react with fear, horror, and envy.

No, there is at least a third way that you have seen people react: with valid scientific skepticism, as Serpentine is displaying here. For a scientist to say "I need clear evidence before I accept this model" doesn't mean they're being fearful, close-minded, or blissfully ignorant. It means they're a good scientist.

4) I have spent many years dealing with psychology, psychiatry, and counselors, and I cannot say I enjoyed it. I am also of the distinct opinion that the entire discipline is immature and subjective at this stage. I have experienced that you can go to three different psychologists and get three different opinions. It's partly due to the questions they ask, and partly how you answer. Even with the best will in the world to honesty on both sides -- and absolute, brutal, self-honesty is VERY hard, even to my self -- there's no brain scanner that can reveal everything about a person. My answers are subjective, and the person listening is listening subjectively, with the result that its not easy at all to get to the objective truth about what's going on inside a person's head.

Fair enough...but the phenomenon of precognitive dreams, if it proved to be real, would not just be about psychology. It would revolutionize every field of science. Speaking as a physicist, for example, it would be the thrill of a lifetime to realize that information could somehow travel backwards in time, and we would all immediately begin scrambling to figure out how it could happen, and to reproduce that same backwards flow in situations that had nothing at all to do with human dreams.

In short, you're claiming to be sitting on a discovery that would rival those of Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Feynman combined. And Freud and Jung, I suppose, for the psychological implications...but frankly, your discovery might have a lot less impact on psychology than it would on biology and physics.

I really can't see it as reasonable for anyone to feel wounded or insulted if people say "I assume you're wrong, until I see clear evidence." That's how a scientist is supposed to react to a paradigm shift of that magnitude.

pendell

2010-10-19, 01:58 PM

No, there is at least a third way that you have seen people react: with valid scientific skepticism, as Serpentine is displaying here. For a scientist to say "I need clear evidence before I accept this model" doesn't mean they're being fearful, close-minded, or blissfully ignorant. It means they're a good scientist.

I personally am willing to accept models which can't be proven but seem to work ... but I agree that cannot be called 'scientific' nor scientifically proven by any stretch of the imagination. And I can fully understand the skepticism of scientists faced with this problem.

Now let's talk about the problem a bit. Part of scientific experiment is repeated, verifiable experiment. Correct?

All right. So how exactly am I supposed to repeat this? As I said, I am keeping a journal and trying .. slowly, painfully .. to distinguish real dreams and visions from false ones. The thing is, whatever abilities I have or don't have are not something I have under conscious control. I can't decide when to see something, or what to see. What happens, happens, on it's own timescale. I've mentioned that I've had a couple, but it's spaced out over months or years. And of course there are hundreds of other dreams which never pan out and I don't remember.

The best I could do is pick out a selection of things that I have seen, along with what I believe they mean, and hand them over to you. If it happens the way I think they did, it still doesn't prove precognition. It could mean A) that I'm simply good at figuring things out or B) we're back-fitting a meaning.

Case in point: A ... colleague of mine, back in ... let me see ... 21 APR 2007.
Heck, I'll just post it, Names withheld.

Posted 21 APR 2007

========
Person is chased first by a black bull, then the bull disappears and is replaced by a black horse. Person flees into a market -- supermarket? -- whose shelves are mostly empty, blacked out. Person looks for help against the thing that is chasing Person, but no one has anything that may help. There are no weapons of any kind, and no one is willing to try even if they had one.

1. Bull -- makes me think of "bull market". The addition of a market in the dream sort of adds to that. Bull and market = bull market, get it? It's amazing how much prophetic imagery is the art of Really Awful puns.

The fact that the bull is black contributes to that. I consulted with the person, and the person agreed, stating black = black ink (instead of red ink) = prosperity.

The bull is replaced by a horse. Well a "black horse" does indeed show up in the [the book], so we will take our cue for that bit of interpretation [reference withheld]

Quote:

And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
6And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

So. If bull = prosperity, black horse = famine, depression, recession.

So : We are currently in the midst of prosperity. After it will come a period of great adversity. Hence, the empty shelves in the market that Person saw. Further, no one will have the slightest idea what to do about it.

=====
Now here is where we diverge a bit. Person believes this refers to literal famine. Bull = Black Tuesday sort of economic crash followed by horse = famine. *I* am not convinced, because we didn't have that so much even during the Great Depression.

Economic ruin? Yes. Hardship? Yes. Famine? Not convinced.

I posted a warning on my church web site to buckle up, 'cause hard times were likely.

Since that time the Dow Jones went up to 14K, at which point I was convinced the above was not true. Then it tumbled straight down past 8000, and I changed my mind. We're slowly climbing our way out of a pretty bad recession.

Does this prove precognition? It does not. You didn't need to be a prophet or a psychic to see that the US economy was a bubble and was going to crash sooner or later. You just needed a room temperature IQ. It might be that my subconscious was putting 2 and 2 together and throwing up these intuitive images on my mental TV screen. No way to prove otherwise that I am aware of.

The kinds of things I see are not literal. If you've read The Book We Can't Discuss, you'll be familiar with the pattern -- people see things like seven fat cows and seven lean cows, or a big statue that gets smashed by a boulder, or a woman in heaven giving birth to a baby that a dragon tries to eat. Metaphors. The sort of thing where it's very ambiguous and arguable before it's fulfillment , and after it's fulfilled is subject to charges of backfitting. Give it a couple years, and people will even claim it was written AFTER the fact. How do YOU know, the reader, that I didn't write the above just now? Well, you don't. *I* know that I copied it out of my journal verbatim except some strategic snips to protect names and to comply with forum regulations. But all you have is my word on that. That's not scientific evidence. We'd need to sign it, notarize it, date it, and put it in a tamper-proof vault.

So: Serious question. How in the HECK are we supposed to prove something like this scientifically? It seems to me that it's too ambiguous. If I write something and it proves to be true, why can't a reasonable, objective scientist say 'that's not what it means'? How can I demonstrate that MY interpretation is the correct one and his is false?

Heck, I can't even satisfy myself yet, much less an impartial third-party objective observer.

I'm willing to consider the matter. But it seems to me that something like this is going to be subjective, very difficult to prove in an objective setting. At the end of the day, you're going to believe or you're not, but if you insist on scientific proof before believing, well, I suspect you won't be able to believe.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Helanna

2010-10-19, 02:33 PM

pendell

2010-10-19, 02:38 PM

Honestly, the way you're phrasing that makes it seem like you find it completely unreasonable that we would require some sort of proof.

That wasn't the way I meant it. Say rather, I'm not sure how I could provide the rigorously scientific proof any scientist with integrity would demand. There's a great deal of subjectivity in the equation I see no easy way to eliminate.

It is completely reasonable for any intelligent person to ask for proof of extraordinary claims. But at this point all I can offer is a handful of firsthand anecdotal examples, as well as a boatload of negative examples which I also recorded in my journal. I cannot offer scientific evidence at this time, and I'm not sure how to do so. As I said, there's entirely too much subjectivity in the setup for my taste.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2010-10-19, 02:56 PM

Pondering further ...

Fair enough...but the phenomenon of precognitive dreams, if it proved to be real, would not just be about psychology. It would revolutionize every field of science. Speaking as a physicist, for example, it would be the thrill of a lifetime to realize that information could somehow travel backwards in time, and we would all immediately begin scrambling to figure out how it could happen, and to reproduce that same backwards flow in situations that had nothing at all to do with human dreams.

Hmm ... I suspect that , if we ever prove scientifically that precognition happens, we'll have to do it from the tail end forward. First we'll have to establish physically that time travel (and, consequently, FTL travel) are possible in some fashion. Then, once proven, we would then have to demonstrate that human beings are able to sense this flow in some fashion.

In other words, it's possible that in time we'll prove time travel and from that demonstrate precognition. But I don't think we'll be able to do the reverse. Still willing to consider possibilities, though.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

mucat

2010-10-19, 02:59 PM

So: Serious question. How in the HECK are we supposed to prove something like this scientifically? It seems to me that it's too ambiguous. If I write something and it proves to be true, why can't a reasonable, objective scientist say 'that's not what it means'? How can I demonstrate that MY interpretation is the correct one and his is false?

Totally valid question.

It would have to go something like this: first, a person would record their dreams, datestamp them reliably in the public record (which wouldn't necessarily mean a violation of privacy, yet. For example, one could submit a strongly encrypted file containing dream journals, and not provide the password until later events showed that there was a reason to do so.)

If subsequent events matched the dream, in a way that was impossible to explain either by chance or by the dreamer's intuitive reasoning of future events, then that could grab the attention of researchers. To actually get data which could be evaluated quantitatively, they would need to try something more structured. Perhaps the dreamers are asked to "try" (however that might work) to focus their dreams on a specific, entirely random future event, such as the number that the researchers will generate via a random process.) The advantage: now you can unambiguously calculate the prior probability of dreams coming true. The disadvantage: even if precognitive dreams existed, they might not be "harnessable" in this way. However, it would be a start; other people could design different experiments and attempts could be made to reproduce any that showed interesting results...

So you're right that it isn't easy to investigate this kind of thing. My point -- and, I think, Serpentine's -- is that you also can't expect people to believe in it without attempts to gather evidence. On some topics, the polite and tolerant thing to do is to accept people's word that their experiences are genuine. But on topics which would require a revolutionary rethinking of current scientific understanding...we can't just say "you seem like an honest guy. I believe you." Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, even if gathering that evidence is a serious challenge.

Respectfully but skeptically,
- mucat

Fiery Diamond

2010-10-19, 03:46 PM

I'm in agreement with Pendell on this one. It would be highly difficult, if not impossible, to provide the level of rigorous evidence required by a scientifically minded* individual. Does this mean that all scientifically minded individuals are within their rights to dismiss it offhand? Well, sure, but that is neither very polite nor strictly necessary. Rather, it would be better, I think, for a scientifically minded individual to say "I am doomed to remain in a state of perpetual uncertainty with regards to this purported phenomenon. Therefore, I choose not to get myself involved in discussions about said phenomenon."

*Actual scientists, or those who require hard evidence before being willing to entertain the belief.

For the rest of us, we are also well within our rights and not at all unreasonable to say "These many situations have occurred. They may be precognitive." and follow that up by either "I believe it likely that they are." or "I believe it unlikely that they are." or "I am uncertain whether it is likely or unlikely that they are."

For a personal example of a dream that had potentially precognitive implications (I often refer to it as my "almost prophetic dream."):

The following dream occurred in the summer of ... 2001 or 2002, I can't remember for sure. I remember what we did that summer, just not which year it was. What's important about that summer is that it was the summer my older brother went to Math Camp in one of the northern states on the east coast of the US, and we (my mother, sister, and I) went to go pick him up. The dream occurred the night before the trip.

The Dream
My mother was driving the minivan. We were on a mountain for some reason (not particularly clear why). The road down split into two at one point - so there were two options for how to descend. I knew (instinctively knew, as happens in dreams) that one route was the route we "usually" took to go down the mountain, and that the other was not. For some reason (again, not clear) my mother opted not to go the way we usually went but to instead go the other way.

Suddenly, there was a drop-off, a sheer cliff. The road just sort of hung limply from the side of the mountain. We were pulled downward, despite attempts to back up. We saw one of those road blocking things that look like little gates that they place across the road so that you can't go there. We rolled right over it. Next, there was one of those personal planes, you know, the kind that can only fit a couple people. It was blue. We rolled over it. And then we tumbled downward toward the vast lake that was far below.

Then I woke up.

The Next Day
While prior to that dream I had not been consciously aware of any nervousness about the trip (though I wasn't looking forward to the ten hour drive), after I woke up I was a little bit weirded out. I mentioned to my mother and sister that I'd had a weird dream, but wasn't very specific to them. We got ready and got in the car.

Much later, during the drive, my mother started talking about how she was considering using a different route to get where we were going (my grandparents' house, since it was near to where the Math Camp was) than we had used the past few times. Immediately, I started to get apprehensive. I told her that something like that had happened in my dream and that I thought we should go the normal way. She didn't heed me, and we went the not-usual way.

After a while, we started seeing these signs for a detour. It wasn't clear what this detour was about/for, so my mother was unsure whether to keep going or whether to take the detour. Eventually, she decided to take the detour. We did. The further along we went, never getting back onto the road we needed to get on, the more sure my mother was that the detour was for something entirely irrelevant to our journey. I, of course, was seeing parallels to my dream, and said as much. She told me to shush. I was freaking out by now. I said that if we saw a plane that I was going to panic. Then, at about the spot my mother finally decided to turn around, there was a personal plane (white, not blue) in someone's yard - or at least what looked like one - (I pointed it out to my sister) and I got pretty hysterical. We returned to the main road and went on our merry way. We reached my grandparents' house safely.

It turned out the detour wasn't relevant to the road we were trying to travel on at all. It was relevant to a different road which was coming up soon. We found out later that the reason for the detour... was because there was a bridge that was out.

Needless to say, I was quite freaked out by the whole experience. I still have no idea whether the dream was anything but a series of astounding coincidences (I suspect it was, as it is the only such dream I've ever had) or not. Regardless, it has stuck with me as a very freaky event.

VanBuren

2010-10-19, 03:56 PM

I think what a responsible scientist would say, and indeed what has been said, is that while there isn't a good wealth of evidence in favor of the concept, here's a natural mechanism in how the mind functions that can serve to explain what happens.

As always, that is up for challenge and revision in light of new evidence. But without any, we're forced to work with what we have.

Deth Muncher

2010-10-19, 04:47 PM

Mm, I actually had one not too long ago. The difference between it and a truly precognitive dream is that I didn't predict an event, but rather gleaned information I had no way of obtaining. The story:

So I end up sleeping near a friend of mine one night. I "wake up" to him answering the front door, and his mother was there. (We were at a friends house, so this was not unusual, as he's 16.) I couldn't make out what my friend said to his mother (he seemed to still be sleep-ridden and not coherent), but I could clearly understand what his mother was saying to him. She handed him $25, and apparently he asked if she could take him somewhere because she said that she couldn't run him anywhere as she had to get a new cellphone. I then ACTUALLY wake up from my phone alarm blasting. Me and my friend get up, obviously startled, and he says "Damnit man, I was sleeping so well!" I look at him quizzically and ask "Uh...no? Didn't you JUST answer the door for your mother?" To which HE then says "Uh...no? What the hell are you talking about?" I then relay to him the dream. We both agree that it was pretty weird, and proceed to go about our day. Our other friend, at who's house we were, was still asleep, and we decide to go get food at Chick-Fil-A. When we pull up, my friend checks his wallet to see how much money he has. He opens it up...to find $25. He looks at me very scared and says, "Uh...this money wasn't in my wallet when I left my house last night." O_o Still, we dismiss this as a ridiculous coincidence, buy our food, and leave.

Days later, he contacts me on Facebook. He tells me that before he left to go to our friends house the other day, his mother slipped $25 into his wallet. Oh, and further? The same day as the dream, she got a new cell phone.

Eldritch Knight

2010-10-19, 04:52 PM

About 2 and a half years ago, someone related to me a dream which they had which applied to me.

She dreamed that she and her step-daughter, (At the time my fiancee, now... I dunno... it's complicated enough) were flying up north to visit me. Now, when I say north I mean NORTH, as in Northern Ontario. At the time, I laughed at it, but now I am working in a small place called Kapuskasing, which is about 2 hours north of Timmins, one of the northern most cities in Ontario.

Remains to be seen if the other half of the dream is going to happen, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Serpentine

2010-10-19, 10:43 PM

Now let's talk about the problem a bit. Part of scientific experiment is repeated, verifiable experiment. Correct?

All right. So how exactly am I supposed to repeat this? So: Serious question. How in the HECK are we supposed to prove something like this scientifically? It seems to me that it's too ambiguous. If I write something and it proves to be true, why can't a reasonable, objective scientist say 'that's not what it means'? How can I demonstrate that MY interpretation is the correct one and his is false?
...
Heck, I can't even satisfy myself yet, much less an impartial third-party objective observer.

I'm willing to consider the matter. But it seems to me that something like this is going to be subjective, very difficult to prove in an objective setting.You don't have to repeat anything. You would be a single replicate in a wider experiment involving as many people as possible, under the supervision of several objective scientists. I'm sure an expert with the necessary training and background could come up with something better, but off the top of my head an experiment might involve something like this:
A large number of people, who believe they have precognitive dreams and some who don't believe they do so, are selected as randomly as possible. They are each required to keep two journals, each either kept online, or signed off each day by one of the researchers to confirm the date. One journal would be the dream journal, in which every dream the subject can remember should be recorded. The subject may or may not be able make notes about whether they think an individual dream is a precognitive one, or what it means.
The other journal is of everyday events, in as much detail as possible. Again, the subject may or may not be able to make notes about whether they think a particular event is related to a dream.
At the end of a set amount of time (although it might be an on-going study), dreams and diaries are given, without dates or identifiers or notes, to a third party - probably, but not necessarily, fellow scientists. These people will go through the dreams and the diaries and try to fit the events to the dreams. Then the dates, notes and identifiers will be reattached to the dreams and events, and analysed: are connected dreams and events both attached to the same subject? Are there events that came before the attached dream? Are there events that came soon enough afterwards, or that would be predictable enough, that only intuition, not procognition, is necessary to explain the connection? How obscure, subjective and/or easily manipulated are the dreams to fit an event? Are there any dream-event connections that are distant, unpredictable and clear enough to suggest of a genuine precognitive event?

edit: I just thought of an extra bit of control that could be put in. Same diaries, but with totally made up dreams, given the same analyses. Do the results for the made-up dreams match the real dreams, or are there significant differences?

Like I said, that's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure an expert could come up with something much better. But just because it's hard, doesn't mean it's impossible, and nor is that an excuse to not even try and expect everyone to accept it anyway.

At the end of the day, you're going to believe or you're not, but if you insist on scientific proof before believing, well, I suspect you won't be able to believe.No. At the end of the day, I'm going to believe evidence. This is the foundation of the entire scientific method. If there is no evidence - I've said repeatedly that science does not deal in proof - then there is absolutely no reason for me to believe. Belief without evidence is not a virtue.

Does this mean that all scientifically minded individuals are within their rights to dismiss it offhand? Well, sure, but that is neither very polite nor strictly necessary. Rather, it would be better, I think, for a scientifically minded individual to say "I am doomed to remain in a state of perpetual uncertainty with regards to this purported phenomenon. Therefore, I choose not to get myself involved in discussions about said phenomenon."I believe I've already said the first part of this - except that I have urged everyone to take steps to remove this uncertainty. However, why should I not be involved in discussions just because I have no solid opinion either way? I find the whole topic very interesting, and frankly, I am the sort of person you might actually be able to convince. It's rude for me to dismiss it offhand?* Well, it's at least as rude for you to exclude me from the discussion.

*I don't, and nor should any "scientifically minded individual" in most circumstances.

For the rest of us, we are also well within our rights and not at all unreasonable to say "These many situations have occurred. They may be precognitive." and follow that up by either "I believe it likely that they are." or "I believe it unlikely that they are." or "I am uncertain whether it is likely or unlikely that they are."All I am saying is "these many people believe these situations have occurred. They believe they may be precognitive. I believe it unlikely that they are, but am uncertain." Do I have any less right to do so?

Milskidasith

2010-10-20, 12:50 AM

I strongly suspect that most of these precognitive dreams are due to a few ways our brain works:

Rewriting memories. A dream is similar to an event that happens, and the dream (hardly remembered well to begin with) is distorted to match near exactly.

Confirmation Bias: You have a dream most every night of good sleep. Eventually, one of your terrifying predictions is going to come true, especially if they don't provide a date; if, in the course of two years, you've dreamed you'd crash a car, get hit by a baseball, be chased by a vague wild animal, get into an argument with a loved one before they suffer a tragic accident, be near the site of a natural disaster, and other events, one of those is eventually going to come true and make it seem like your dreams are coming true... even though it's just coincidence. Speaking of which...

Coincidence: Coincidences happen a lot. One in a million coincidences occur fairly frequently; not the specific coincidence, but just a single really unlikely coincidence is likely to occur far more often than people would think.

Pattern recognition: People will recognize patterns/symbols/etc. that weren't there or read too much into things. The "bull market" dream is a pretty obvious example; it just as easily could have been a prophetic prediction about how a mounted police officer would be attacked by a bull during the running of the bulls and flee into a shop for safety, or a dream about how bull related products would become black market commodities, or it could have just been a random assortment of images.

I'm not going to say it's impossible, but with the sheer overwhelming lack of proof (compared to the number of disproven psychics), and the fact that we already know (or are reasonably sure) that the above mental disconnects happen to humans... I'm more likely to err on the side of " very probably untrue."

arguskos

2010-10-20, 01:48 AM

Aside to mucat.

It didn't happen or you remember wrong.
Bam, my precognition is justified! Lolatnoonegettingthejoke.

I mean seriously, don't act like the decent thing to do would be for people to figure that if you say it happened, it happened. This would be a huge discovery and would mean we get to rewrite pretty much every branch of science from the ground up. If I say "I once came up with a unified field theory, and I wrote it down, but I don't have it anymore," the default assumption will be that it didn't really happen.
See, that's not what I was claiming. I was saying, "Cue someone telling me that what I said I did is a lie", which by the by, I'm happy no one did, cause I probably would have flipped.

Also, why would you choose to disbelieve I did something I said I did? I wasn't claiming I'm a god or something, just that I kept a dream journal and that it lined up well, which I found curious.

You are claiming that you made a discovery that ought to win you every Nobel prize, ever. You probably didn't. It isn't rude of me to simply tell you that. Hell, it would be rude and patronizing of me to pretend I did think you were right.
No, I'm not, or I'd claim that. What I said is that I did something, then I wished that I still had the document SO I COULD SHOW IT TO PEOPLE. Is that bad? Do you think I didn't want to do that? Did you think I'm a gloryhound or some such? That's vaguely insulting, but I'm just thinking you misunderstood one line and are flustered about it. Benefit of the doubt and whatnot. :smallsmile:

It is absolutely unreasonable for you to say "Cue the skeptics" with a yawning emoticon as if the skeptics were being unfair to you.
Yeah, it would have been, if I had said "cue the skeptics". I didn't. I was expecting someone to call me a liar, since that's what always happens when this topic comes up (it's come up a few times before, not on this forum, but IRL, and I've been called a liar to my face about having kept a dream journal and checking it against real life). Like I said, I'm happy no one called me a liar, and I'm saddened that I no longer remember my dreams like I once did and that I no longer have that journal. I personally would love to help advance science, but that's not gonna happen.

Also, the hostility kinda hurts. I wasn't attempting to insult you, please don't insult me either. Let's keep it civil, thanks. :smallsmile:

pendell

2010-10-20, 10:38 AM

Like I said, that's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure an expert could come up with something much better.

Certainly a plausible methodology.

But just because it's hard, doesn't mean it's impossible, and nor is that an excuse to not even try and expect everyone to accept it anyway.

A couple things.

1) You seem to be under the impression that I am an evangelist here to persuade others to my point of view. That is not true. Opinions were asked for, and I offered mine. That is all.

2) My own beliefs on precognition are heavily correlated with my beliefs about the spiritual world and , consequently, my religious beliefs. When we discuss such things we run smack into an environment where it is very, very hard to do science. While in a perfect world scientists could do such a thing, I suspect that in the world we live in few such documents would be accepted unequivocally without triggering off literal holy war. I suspect most scientists will pull up short before crossing into such a controversial area, and if they do they'll have a hard time getting funding, unless it's from groups for whom the answer is already predetermined.

If the above comes across as somewhat cynical, it's because I spent 14 years building computer simulations for government operations research, and I got a good firsthand view at just what happens when people come back with study results different from those the funding source wanted. If (for example), your sponsor really wants to see a study demonstrating the need for the XQ-36 space modulator, and you come back with a study demonstrating that it really isn't necessary -- well, odds are good that study will never see the light of day. In an environment where, out of 12 action officers only 4 will continue their careers, that honest person will place no higher than fifth. The ones who do get promoted and honors will be the ones who gave their superior the results he wanted.

A true scientist would tell the truth without fear or favor and take the consequences. Such people do exist, but they seem to be fairly rare, at least in my experience. Those I knew tended to be weeded out pretty quickly. Possibly other people outside government service have had different experience.

But .. again, hitting forum regulations ... you may recall there was an email scandal involving scientists just a few months ago, scientists who stepped over the line from research into advocacy, so I know it happens in other environments than mine.

Because of that, I am perhaps a shade skeptical of scientific findings and scientific research, especially if it involves baring *my* soul.

No. At the end of the day, I'm going to believe evidence. This is the foundation of the entire scientific method. If there is no evidence - I've said repeatedly that science does not deal in proof - then there is absolutely no reason for me to believe. Belief without evidence is not a virtue.

Agree completely that belief without evidence is not a virtue. *I* believe based upon my own empirical experience and the anecdotal experience of others who have walked my path and had similar things happen. I have even compared notes with people from other ... paths ... and found that we experience much the same thing.

That is anecdotal evidence, good enough for my own personal life, but it's not scientific evidence by any means. Scientific evidence, as you say, would be statistical and show a statistical correlation.

I suspect, however, that we will find that the real gift is so rare that it will probably not show up statistically. It'll get cropped out of the picture as an outlier or a lucky coincidence. In the records I read, it is noted that for every one person who had this talent there were hundreds if not thousands of people on the government bankroll at the time who claimed to have the talent, and didn't.

For that matter, I don't know myself for absolute, dead certain that I have this talent. As has been ably pointed out upthread, there's very little that can't be explained by intuition or coincidence or faulty memory.

It may be that someone will eventually propose the study and it may be that if I have the opportunity I will participate. But I'll bet 10 zorkmids that such a study, once done, will show that statistically the ability doesn't exist. There will be a couple of true predictions, and possibly even a a person or two who is fairly accurate. These will be cropped as outliers, on the grounds that even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

And so the studies will continue to show that it doesn't exist, and there will be people who can make -- or seem to make -- true predictions. The result of this is that some people will believe their own experience, and some people will believe the studies, but nothing will be permanently decided, and our descendants will still be quarreling over the matter 500 years from now.

Because of this, I have a 'live and let live' policy. I believe that you and mucat are intellectually honest people with valid grounds for what you believe. I know what *I* believe, but I suspect that this belief will never be something I will be able to prove to the satisfaction of a scientist. This argument has been going on for thousands of years, and I doubt it will be solved in our generation.

The reason I am willing to believe that things are true even if I can't prove them is because I also believe Godel was right (http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~dale/godel/godel.html#FirstIncompleteness).

Any adequate axiomatizable theory is incomplete. In particular the sentence "This sentence is not provable" is true but not provable in the theory.

In any consistent axiomatizable theory (axiomatizable means the axioms can be computably generated) which can encode sequences of numbers (and thus the syntactic notions of "formula", "sentence", "proof") the consistency of the system is not provable in the system.

Put simply, the set of statements that are true and provable is a subset of the total set of true statements. There are statements that cannot be proven true within a system -- you need to step outside the system altogether. I suspect Precognition will be one of these things, although I would be pleased to be proven wrong. Pun intended.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Daimbert

2010-10-20, 11:45 AM

Well, I'll post my experience and then go on to say why I wouldn't try to test it any of the ways people are saying it should be tested.

I'd had a number of cases where I had that sort of deja vu feeling, where I'd seen and heard what was going on before and couldn't quite remember where, but I thought it was from a dream. All of these could fit in the standard answers, and so while I thought it mildly amusing I didn't think much of it.

Then. though, while I was finishing university I had a dream where I was sitting on my bed, at my desk from home, with a light coming from off to the left in an otherwise dark room, playing poker with a couple of people that I knew from the university. When I woke up, I noted -- for other reasons -- all the oddites: why were we playing on my desk from my parents place? I was living in a house at the time, and did play poker, but did it on the table downstairs. At least it should have been the desk in the room (the room was furnished). Why was there no overhead light on? Why was I playing with those people? I generally played with the other people in the house, and one of those people was someone that I actually didn't like all that much. Why would he be there?

I put it all aside. Then, not too long after (at least months, though), I graduated, got a job, and moved to a new apartment. There was no overhead light in the apartment (it was a bachelor with a separate bathroom and kitchen), but there was a light in the short hallway leading to the kitchen and bathroom. My parents gave me the desk from home, but I didn't have a table. And, as part of that, I invited the people from the dating group over for poker as a housewarming, and being polite I couldn't leave him out. So, we set things up with some chairs, the bed, and the sofa so that we could use the light from the hallway, and since in my dream I could only see two people -- one of whom was the guy I didn't like -- they all sat in the right places. And so, at one point, the scene happened, as I remembered it.

I find this sufficient evidence that it can only be rejected by appealing to you not believing that I'm telling you the truth; if this occurred as written, it would -- in my opinion -- be indicative.

For example, it seems to hold up against faulty memory or pattern matching complaints, because specific events were remembered, but not because they matched the case, but because they were odd in themselves, and if they were remembered it's hard to stuff the pattern matching into it. Confirmation bias or coincidence seems odd because of how specific it was and how unlikely it would be for my mind to invent this odd sort of dream -- and it was odd, as noted -- and just happen to have it come true. It's still possible, but doesn't seem likely.

But, clearly, such an experience would not win me a Nobel Prize. So why don't I get out all the dream journals and try to prove it? Because I have no idea how to PRODUCE these dreams, or identify them when they occur. While I generally can tell when I'm dreaming -- since my visualization is terrible -- I've had many dreams that looked "real" that I'm very sure won't come true.

So, here's the thing. To test it as things stand right now, I would have to write down all my dreams. And the problems are:

1) These dreams occur rarely. I'd have to keep this up for a long, long period of time, and keep comparing them to reality for a long period of time. I'm not interested enough in it to commit that much time (ie, to make it my life).

2) I'd never get any sleep; I can have 3 or 4 dreams a night, that could all happen. My sleeping is bad enough without adding all of this to it.

3) It would make me hyperaware of my dreams, which might make me "try" to make them happen, creating both false positives -- in that it looks like it matches my dream, but only because I made that happen -- and false negatives -- in that I change my behaviour and thus ensure that the event doesn't happen (there's no real reason to think that precognition means the future is set).

4) It's not just about my writing this stuff down, and proving it to myself, but about doing it in a way that others will accept, which means independent verification of various details. That's a lot of resources to spend on doing this, just to convince some skeptics. It's certainly rare and trivial enough that I don't care enough to do that.

Ultimately, the problem here for testing any of these things is that we really don't know enough about how they work in order to test them. In my personal case, to make this worthwhile would require my sitting down and trying to figure out how to make that happen, and none of the testing can help with that. In fact, formal science probably can't help with that either. And as for Serpentine's controlled experiment, the same thing applies: we don't know what will or won't matter, so how can you control anything? How can you do a statistical analysis on something that people explicitly admit they can't do at will? We don't know enough yet to say anything one way or another.

So, you can choose not to believe me, but you can't tell me that it is unreasonable for me to believe or to choose to believe someone else even based only on "I trust that this experience is real, and that this experience does indicate that". And you can't hold up failures of experiments as evidence unless you can show that we know enough to run proper experiments. An improperly run experiment does not provide evidence that the thing does not exist, but merely that it does not exist under those conditions. If you know under what conditions is should occur, that's quite good, but we don't know that. At least, in my opinion.

Helanna

2010-10-20, 12:24 PM

4) It's not just about my writing this stuff down, and proving it to myself, but about doing it in a way that others will accept, which means independent verification of various details. That's a lot of resources to spend on doing this, just to convince some skeptics. It's certainly rare and trivial enough that I don't care enough to do that.

"Just to convince some skeptics"? Proving that precognition exists would change the world as we know it! It's why I'm so surprised that so few people would consider offering to test/prove it - if I believed that such a thing was happening to me, I'd be trying my hardest to get a confirmation and let the rest of the world know.

Ultimately, the problem here for testing any of these things is that we really don't know enough about how they work in order to test them. In my personal case, to make this worthwhile would require my sitting down and trying to figure out how to make that happen, and none of the testing can help with that. In fact, formal science probably can't help with that either. And as for Serpentine's controlled experiment, the same thing applies: we don't know what will or won't matter, so how can you control anything? How can you do a statistical analysis on something that people explicitly admit they can't do at will? We don't know enough yet to say anything one way or another.

So we run tests until we do. I mean, we don't know how gravity works, but nobody says "Well, we don't know how it works, we shouldn't bother testing stuff about it". There are many, many people out there who are trying to figure out how gravity works right now, because that's what scientifically-minded people do. If we don't know how/if something works, we find out.

So, you can choose not to believe me, but you can't tell me that it is unreasonable for me to believe or to choose to believe someone else even based only on "I trust that this experience is real, and that this experience does indicate that". And you can't hold up failures of experiments as evidence unless you can show that we know enough to run proper experiments. An improperly run experiment does not provide evidence that the thing does not exist, but merely that it does not exist under those conditions. If you know under what conditions is should occur, that's quite good, but we don't know that. At least, in my opinion.

Nobody has said any of that. Nobody said that you shouldn't believe based on your own experience, just that you shouldn't expect others to believe it based on your testimony. And I don't think anybody's even said "Precognition does not exist" - mostly, it's just been "I have not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that it does". You can't prove that something doesn't exist, after all, but if current science/observations/evidence doesn't support what you're claiming at all, then it's up to you to prove it. You could claim that unicorns exist all you want because you think you saw one. Maybe you even did, but it would still be up to you to prove it to the world at large.

Daimbert

2010-10-20, 12:35 PM

"Just to convince some skeptics"? Proving that precognition exists would change the world as we know it!

I'm less convinced about that than you are ... especially if precognition is as unreliable as it seems to be.

So we run tests until we do. I mean, we don't know how gravity works, but nobody says "Well, we don't know how it works, we shouldn't bother testing stuff about it". There are many, many people out there who are trying to figure out how gravity works right now, because that's what scientifically-minded people do. If we don't know how/if something works, we find out.

It's not about how it works, but how to DO it. With gravity, we knew that when you dropped things, they fell. We eventually knew that things orbited each other. We knew that we didn't fly off the planet. So we had a set of reliable, repeatable instances where we knew the things that we were interested in occurred, and so from there we could start doing controls and tests to see the details and figure out what it is. We do not have any reliable way of generating the type of precognitive events that we're interested in, and unless you're willing to make it your life's work to test and test and test and test all possible combinations that could possibly lead to precognitive events testing isn't going to get you that.

Ultimately, we need to start outside of formal science with smaller scale, anecdotal evidence and once we accept that there might be something there worth studying and we have decent anecdotals giving initial test cases we can START thinking about testing it. But we could not conclude that if a test fails that that event does not ever occur, which a lot of skeptics do seem to try to do. See the cartoon given in this thread, for example.

Nobody has said any of that. Nobody said that you shouldn't believe based on your own experience, just that you shouldn't expect others to believe it based on your testimony. And I don't think anybody's even said "Precognition does not exist" - mostly, it's just been "I have not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that it does". You can't prove that something doesn't exist, after all, but if current science/observations/evidence doesn't support what you're claiming at all, then it's up to you to prove it. You could claim that unicorns exist all you want because you think you saw one. Maybe you even did, but it would still be up to you to prove it to the world at large.

I don't expect anyone to believe it, but I do want to distinguish from claims of "The experience doesn't support the claim" from "I don't believe you had that experience." If the experience would indicate precognition if it had actually occurred, then if you do believe the person telling you about that experience the fact that science hasn't reproduced it yet really shouldn't stop you from believing that it occurred. And if someone relies on the "I need scientific evidence first", I think it might be safe to call them out as perhaps being skeptical not because they're being skeptical, but because they don't believe that such things occur (ie they are biased against the proposition).

Take this case: imagine that we have a person who is noted for never, ever lying. They describe a particular incident that, if it occurred, would be explained best by appealing to them having precognition. Why would the fact that it has not yet been confirmed by science and may not ever be confirmed by science (because of its unreliability) mean that people should not believe that, in that case, precognition is the best explanation and therefore that precognition occurs?

Prime32

2010-10-20, 12:38 PM

Take this case: imagine that we have a person who is noted for never, ever lying. They describe a particular incident that, if it occurred, would be explained best by appealing to them having precognition. Why would the fact that it has not yet been confirmed by science and may not ever be confirmed by science (because of its unreliability) mean that people should not believe that, in that case, precognition is the best explanation and therefore that precognition occurs?Honesty =/= Infallibility

pendell

2010-10-20, 12:45 PM

Honesty =/= Infallibility

QFT. They can only relate their own subjective perception of what they experienced. That's why a minimum of two witnesses are needed in a courtroom proceeding. Established scientific theory requires a lot more than two witnesses before Nobel-winning minds will throw decades worth of research in the trash and rewrite all the textbooks.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Daimbert

2010-10-20, 12:53 PM

Honesty =/= Infallibility

I DID mention that the experience itself indicated that, if it were true, it would confirm precognition, at which point it's only honesty that is in question. Basically, if you could say "If that really happened, it was precognitive" all that's left is figuring out if it really happened, and in this case that's based on the honesty of the person you're talking to.

I'm not talking about vague claims that are open to interpretation, but claims that we could objectively agree would quite reasonably support the contention, so that "precognition" would be the most reasonable explanation if the experience had actually happened.

QFT. They can only relate their own subjective perception of what they experienced.

Since that applies to everything, I don't see why that's a problem. And your point about scientists is not at issue, because I'm going the other way, talking about what we SHOULD believe and pointing out that the fact that scientists don't accept it in these cases is not reason for us to not believe it, while your counter seems to only apply to the argument that science should not accept it just because we believe (and we should believe) it.

bluewind95

2010-10-20, 02:01 PM

Hm, I've seen my fair share of precognition.

Someone once dreamed that a sick family member said goodbye to them. Minutes later, they received the news that the family member had died. The family member that died had actually been stable for a while, and the dreamer had not enough information to predict that they'd die that very day.

Someone has a tendency to dream family members when something really bad is going to happen to other family members or acquaintances. The family members or acquaintances that get the problem are not always close so that the dreamer's subconscious would have ANY information to draw conclusions. The dreamer gets the news shortly afterwards(often from people the dreamer has not seen or heard from in years). This happens like 90% or more of the times the dreamer dreams family reunions.

Two siblings in different countries have a very similar dream in which a pet dies. A different pet is dreamed up by each, but it's the same kind of pet. Later that day, the cat they'd been feeding and had adopted as an outside cat pending getting the money to send it to a vet died, either hit by a car or being poisoned. There had been no real worry of that prior to this, for the cat was quite street-savvy, and had a healthy fear of cars.

Someone dreamed that their dead parent warned them that there was a tarantula in the baby's room. Sure enough, they looked for it and found it within a day or two. Cue the same dream again, but this time about a scorpion. Before the week was done, a pair of scorpions was found in the baby's room. Scorpions getting THAT far into a house is a rare occurrence there, and even MORE so with tarantulas.

NONE of these dreams left a deja-vu feeling in the person experiencing it.

Problem with these kinds of dreams is that they're rare enough in any given indiviual, and they're not quite windows into the future (in my experience) so much as, seemingly, some kind of perception of the event. Perception is not objective. How do you measure perception? Additionally, they're not 100% accurate, nor repeatable, nor 100% reliable. And from what I see here, everyone has a different experience of these things. Is it that we are tricking our mind all these times? Is it, perhaps, that we are dreaming these things and subconsciously altering the way we behave so that these things come to pass? Is it perhaps possible that we ARE getting a glimpse into what may come to pass? I don't think there is much we CAN objectively prove until we understand how the mind works and turns objective experiences into subjective ones. That said, it would be nice if a diary of these strange dreams would be kept like Serpentine said, until such time as we can make better use of whatever data they may give.

Helanna

2010-10-20, 02:41 PM

Long post is long, and now spoilered for your convenience! (Mostly it's just rebuttals).

It's not about how it works, but how to DO it. With gravity, we knew that when you dropped things, they fell. We eventually knew that things orbited each other. We knew that we didn't fly off the planet. So we had a set of reliable, repeatable instances where we knew the things that we were interested in occurred, and so from there we could start doing controls and tests to see the details and figure out what it is. We do not have any reliable way of generating the type of precognitive events that we're interested in, and unless you're willing to make it your life's work to test and test and test and test all possible combinations that could possibly lead to precognitive events testing isn't going to get you that.

So? All we knew about gravity once was that "When you drop things, they fall". We didn't even know that was attributable to gravity, nobody even thought science was necessary to 'prove' it, because it's just a part of our world, why would you even test it? Just because something is difficult to prove doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And I'm pretty sure there are people who are making it their life's work to test out precognition and other psychic stuff. I'm not saying that every person that has precognitive dreams should spend their life on it, I'm just expressing surprise that so few people really seem to care - the attitude is almost "Oh, by the way, I'm kind of psychic. What's for dinner?" It just surprises me is all.

Ultimately, we need to start outside of formal science with smaller scale, anecdotal evidence and once we accept that there might be something there worth studying and we have decent anecdotals giving initial test cases we can START thinking about testing it. But we could not conclude that if a test fails that that event does not ever occur, which a lot of skeptics do seem to try to do. See the cartoon given in this thread, for example.

Are you referring to the xkcd comic I posted? I agree that some skeptics do that. But again, without any specific evidence one way or the other, the default opinion for most people is going to be disbelief. If you test something again and again and again, and can't prove it, the simplest, most obvious solution is that it doesn't exist. Disbelieving in it isn't the same thing as declaring "This is absolutely non-existent and everyone who believes in it is either an idiot or a liar!" We're just saying no proof --> no belief.

I don't expect anyone to believe it, but I do want to distinguish from claims of "The experience doesn't support the claim" from "I don't believe you had that experience." If the experience would indicate precognition if it had actually occurred, then if you do believe the person telling you about that experience the fact that science hasn't reproduced it yet really shouldn't stop you from believing that it occurred. And if someone relies on the "I need scientific evidence first", I think it might be safe to call them out as perhaps being skeptical not because they're being skeptical, but because they don't believe that such things occur (ie they are biased against the proposition).

I think I'm really misunderstanding you. Are you saying that we should obviously all believe in this, because . . . some people claim to have experienced it? Because that's ridiculous.

Take this case: imagine that we have a person who is noted for never, ever lying. They describe a particular incident that, if it occurred, would be explained best by appealing to them having precognition. Why would the fact that it has not yet been confirmed by science and may not ever be confirmed by science (because of its unreliability) mean that people should not believe that, in that case, precognition is the best explanation and therefore that precognition occurs?

Like others explained, honesty has nothing to do with it. Nobody in this thread has called anyone else a liar. The only thing the skeptics have said is that there are many, many explanations for the phenomenon, all of which have a basis in science, unlike precognition.

I DID mention that the experience itself indicated that, if it were true, it would confirm precognition, at which point it's only honesty that is in question. Basically, if you could say "If that really happened, it was precognitive" all that's left is figuring out if it really happened, and in this case that's based on the honesty of the person you're talking to.

I'm not talking about vague claims that are open to interpretation, but claims that we could objectively agree would quite reasonably support the contention, so that "precognition" would be the most reasonable explanation if the experience had actually happened.

I can't think of a scenario in which precognition is THE ONLY solution. For one thing, sheer coincidence is always a factor, and as has been stated many times before (occasionally with cool videos) coincidence is a LOT more likely than you'd think.

Since that applies to everything, I don't see why that's a problem. And your point about scientists is not at issue, because I'm going the other way, talking about what we SHOULD believe and pointing out that the fact that scientists don't accept it in these cases is not reason for us to not believe it, while your counter seems to only apply to the argument that science should not accept it just because we believe (and we should believe) it.

You're not providing us with a reason to believe. You're providing us with a reason to not disbelieve, i.e., 'just because it hasn't been proven doesn't mean it doesn't exist.' Which I agree with. But you're just saying "Well, as long as it hasn't been disproven, you should believe it!"

Should we also believe aliens are real and are coming down and abducting yokels to perform terrible experiments? Or should we admit maybe it's a combination of night terrors, hallucinations, sleep paralysis, nightmares . . . on and on. Crops circles are caused by terrible supernatural/alien forces! Or a couple of college kids with rope and boards. Without any proof, I'm always going to go with the simple, scientific explanation, that DOES provide some sort of evidence for its views.

Fiery Diamond

2010-10-20, 03:09 PM

You're not providing us with a reason to believe. You're providing us with a reason to not disbelieve, i.e., 'just because it hasn't been proven doesn't mean it doesn't exist.' Which I agree with. But you're just saying "Well, as long as it hasn't been disproven, you should believe it!"

Whether or not this is the point the poster was trying to make, I think it is worth noting that:

1) If provided with a reason to not disbelieve (just because it hasn't been proven doesn't mean it doesn't exist)

AND

2) If provided with information from a person you believe is trustworthy
2A) That seems to strongly indicate the possibility of procognition
2B) While having only a few possible alternative explanations (such as unlikely coincidence)

THEN

It is not unreasonable to take that as evidence enough for belief.

Now, does this mean that we should force everyone to accept precognition when presented with those premises? Of course not. It does, however, mean that you have a preformed bias against the explanation of precognition if you do not believe. But here's the catch: in order for that to mean you have a bias against precog, you have to fully accept the premises to be true. If, for some reason, you don't accept the premises, then your skepticism is perfectly reasonable and logical.

I think the poster you were referencing was trying to say that there ARE situations where the premises are true - which, of course, you may disagree with - and that this implies a skeptic is biased against precog.

...

I refuse to say whether I think there has been a situation where the premises are true, but I will say I think that there have been situations where the premises have seemed to be true, which is enough to warrant entertaining the possibility that precog exists.

Daimbert

2010-10-20, 03:24 PM

I'll spoiler as well, just to keep up the tradition [grin].

So? All we knew about gravity once was that "When you drop things, they fall". We didn't even know that was attributable to gravity, nobody even thought science was necessary to 'prove' it, because it's just a part of our world, why would you even test it?

To figure out what, precisely, it was that made things fall.

Again, the point is that for gravity we had repeatable and testable phenomena that we wanted to figure out the underlying causes for. We don't have that for precognition. At all. We need to get that first, and starting with the sort of scientific experiments that have been proposed are the precise wrong way to do it. You can't do a statistical analysis that proves anything if you might be controlling for or running into conditions that impact the numbers.

Take an example: to test some precognition claims, they took people and made them predict what light would come on, and ran repeated experiments (usually in the same session) to get an appropriate statistical sample. Now, first, the people who claimed to be precognitive were not predicting when little lights would come on when they claimed that, and that it might reduce over time over a long session due to fatigue could contribute to them not being able to get statistically significant results. So, did the experiment show that those people didn't seem to have precognition, or that those conditions weren't suitable for testing their precognition? We have no clue. Those experiments rushed to testing without having any idea of a theory that you could use to design good experiments for precognition.

So the answer might be: start with conditions more closely related to those these things are working in. And my answer to that is: Great ... got any idea what those are?

Maybe we can do better, but it's not going to be experiments like seen in traditional science. I'd even go so far as to say that it'll be a lot closer to philosophy than any sort of science. And it'll be really hard to do.

My point is more that we really have no idea HOW to try. We need to figure that out first.

[QUOTE] And I'm pretty sure there are people who are making it their life's work to test out precognition and other psychic stuff. I'm not saying that every person that has precognitive dreams should spend their life on it, I'm just expressing surprise that so few people really seem to care - the attitude is almost "Oh, by the way, I'm kind of psychic. What's for dinner?" It just surprises me is all.

I can understand that. My claim is indeed more, though, that I don't really have any idea how to go about it and that it doesn't happen for me often enough for anyone to go about trying to test it. For people where it is more common, we'd have a start. But those cases are rare.

Are you referring to the xkcd comic I posted? I agree that some skeptics do that. But again, without any specific evidence one way or the other, the default opinion for most people is going to be disbelief.

So ... what counts as specific evidence? Recall -- and let me clarify -- what my hypothetical provides:

1) A conceptual reason to think that, if the experience was true, precognition would be the more reasonable explanation.

2) Good evidence that the person is being honest, and so that the experience likely happened as described.

That's clearly specific evidence for the experience, and under the ideal conditions -- no reason to doubt the experience, the experience is indicative, the person is almost certainly not lying -- the only reason I can think of to deny the contention is a bias AGAINST the claim. Most practical cases, obviously, are far from the ideal, but we should be able to determine what the most reasonable explanation is.

If you test something again and again and again, and can't prove it, the simplest, most obvious solution is that it doesn't exist.

Presuming that your tests are valid. If you test and test and test using a test that won't find it, then that's not any indication that you should take the solution that it doesn't exist.

Disbelieving in it isn't the same thing as declaring "This is absolutely non-existent and everyone who believes in it is either an idiot or a liar!" We're just saying no proof --> no belief.

Well, I'm not saying that you can't demand a certain standard of proof before you believe, but I am saying that I might be able to point out that that standard of proof might be too high.

I think I'm really misunderstanding you. Are you saying that we should obviously all believe in this, because . . . some people claim to have experienced it? Because that's ridiculous.

No. What I'm saying is that to a certain level of credibility from the witness and a certain level of the experience really seeming to indicate precognition, one really should believe in precognition even if that experience couldn't be tested or deemed credible by science. In short, because formal science, at least, has a fairly stringent methodology letting it guide all your beliefs and refusing to believe something that in all other cases would be credible without scientific backing only because this hasn't been confirmed by science yet might be, well, a bad idea.

Like others explained, honesty has nothing to do with it. Nobody in this thread has called anyone else a liar. The only thing the skeptics have said is that there are many, many explanations for the phenomenon, all of which have a basis in science, unlike precognition.

Again, return to my hypothetical, though. In that case, we presumably agree that if that had EVER occurred, we'd say that precognition happened (again, it's just a hypothetical). So, presuming we have that agreement -- and we can get that agreement independently of any actual experience -- the only way to doubt that precognition occurred in a case where that experience is claimed is to doubt that the experience actually occurred. Presuming that we can judge that the experience was under reliable conditions, all that would be left is the honesty of the experiencer. In short, I'm eliminating all the possible counters and saying that even if science couldn't study this -- because it's one unrepeatable experience -- what rational basis could you have for denying precognition? Again, noting that this is an ideal case that's far from the normal cases we have.

I can't think of a scenario in which precognition is THE ONLY solution. For one thing, sheer coincidence is always a factor, and as has been stated many times before (occasionally with cool videos) coincidence is a LOT more likely than you'd think.

If you set your standard of proof so that precognition has to be the ONLY solution, you are setting it far too high. Surely it only has to be the most REASONABLE solution, and that determination surely has to be made without biasing against precognition from the start. If you'll accept ANY other explanation, no matter how unlikely, just because it's precognition, it does seem that you'd take skepticism too far. You would, however, be in good company, since that's precisely David Hume's stance towards miracles. I think that totally wrong-headed.

However, for coincidence, take a look at what I considered to be a convincing example, that dream I had. I'll concede that coincidence MIGHT be an explanation, but because of all the details that had to align and how incidental they were, it seems to me to be unlikely that it is. Do you consider coincidence more likely than precognition in that case, and if so, why?

You're not providing us with a reason to believe. You're providing us with a reason to not disbelieve, i.e., 'just because it hasn't been proven doesn't mean it doesn't exist.' Which I agree with. But you're just saying "Well, as long as it hasn't been disproven, you should believe it!"

That's not what I'm saying at all. All I'm saying is that it may be the case that people should believe something even if a) science hasn't yet validated it and b) even if science could NEVER validate it. Again, the hypothetical was an ideal case, and I'm saying that in that ideal case science could not ever prove precognition (since the event is not repeatable) but that we should believe it ANYWAY, because of the evidence we'd have. So, are you saying that in the ideal case it should not be believed because science could never use that evidence to prove precognition could happen?

[snipped the last paragraph because it's clearly not what I'm saying]

Gortog, SRU

2010-10-20, 04:00 PM

Fiery Diamond

2010-10-20, 04:12 PM

pendell

2010-10-20, 04:29 PM

They've happened to me before, although most of the time they aren't anything significant. If I do something in the dream, then try it in real life, does it count? One of my hobbies is fencing or swordfighting, and I enjoy visualizing moves in my mind, though most of them I never try. Once I had a dream in which I was fighting somebody with something weird, like a three-foot long sandwich, or a toilet plunger, but there was this cool move I used, and later on, I tried it in a fight with my friend, and won because of it. Since I remembered it from my dream, though, does it count?:smallconfused:

Now that you mention it, I can think of two precog things that happened to me involving video games.

Item 1 involved the old game Pitfall 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall_II:_Lost_Caverns). This was the Atari 5200 version which had an entire second maze in addition to the standard version available on the 2600. Navigating the first maze was explained the manual, but the second cavern was a complete mystery.

This was before hint books and cheat sheets, so I had to puzzle it out myself. It took many days. I was tired and frustrated.

That night, I dreamed. I saw myself winning. I dreamed that I walked and walked and walked around the maze until I found the goal, then stepped across and won.

So next day I picked up the controller, and everything fell into place and I DID win. It didn't happen the way I saw, but happen it did, and I solved the puzzle.

There are four items in the maze -- a vase, a snake charmer, an oboe, and a golden rope. Bring these four items to a particular room which flashes a clue constantly at the bottom of the screen. Presto! Pitfall Harry, Niece Rhonda, Quickclaw and the Diamond all escape the dungeon to the surface. Cue ending screen and music. Very cool!

In any case, the dream worked as metaphorical precognition but not literal. I did indeed walk and walk around the maze, just as I saw, and I did indeed find my goal. But it wasn't the goal I saw in my dream and it was in a quite different location.

The other time I think of was while playing MGS 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_3). I was having a great deal of trouble with the last boss ... heck, this is spoiler rific so I'll spoil the whole thing.

I had only completed the game one time by lucking out. The problem is that the game requires you to beat The Boss in less than ten minutes. I was depending on firearms and kept running out of time.

Well, in my dream I saw my character getting the boss in a CQC grab and choke for an instant kill.

Well, I tried it, and while CQC choke does not work, CQC throw DOES, and it's almost the exact same move. I looked it up online and found out that this is the preferred method for fighting The Boss. Victory went from fluky to routine and I had no more trouble.

There are perfectly natural explanations for the above ... the first can be explained by too much game time spilling over into dream time, the second by intuition ... but it's still pretty weird.

ETA: For some reasons, my dreams hardly ever come true literally. I've come to trust the ones that are metaphorical, to some extent, but the ones that show specific events and places hardly ever take place in a literal sense. Perhaps there is true precognition at work. Or perhaps it is only my subconscious mind talking, putting together pieces I picked up while awake and sending these to me via metaphor in a dream. Intuitively putting pieces together in my sleep.

So there are plenty of alternative explanations besides precognition, but still an interesting thing, all the same.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

prufock

2010-10-20, 04:32 PM

One time I dreamed I woke up, then I really did wake up.

Prime32

2010-10-20, 05:03 PM

Again, return to my hypothetical, though. In that case, we presumably agree that if that had EVER occurred, we'd say that precognition happened (again, it's just a hypothetical). So, presuming we have that agreement -- and we can get that agreement independently of any actual experience -- the only way to doubt that precognition occurred in a case where that experience is claimed is to doubt that the experience actually occurred. Presuming that we can judge that the experience was under reliable conditions, all that would be left is the honesty of the experiencer. In short, I'm eliminating all the possible counters and saying that even if science couldn't study this -- because it's one unrepeatable experience -- what rational basis could you have for denying precognition? Again, noting that this is an ideal case that's far from the normal cases we have.That's circular logic there. You're basically saying "if we assume that it really happened then it really happened".

No one is claiming that people lie about their experiences. Simply that the mind functions on a more abstract level than most people realise, and can easily construct false images which the person believes to be true.

There have been experiments where people were asked to pick out letters from a series of lines. These lines were actually outlines taken from a series of photographs of various places - when the subjects were shown the photographs later, they remembered having been to those places even though they had not. These people were not lying, just mistaken.

Do you consider coincidence more likely than precognition in that case, and if so, why?Far more likely, for two reasons:

As I just pointed out, the human brain constructs false memories all the time, at the slightest of stimulus.
Confirmation bias.

VanBuren

2010-10-20, 06:51 PM

It seems as though I slightly misunderstood Daimbert. However, upon reaing the clarification, I would have to agree with Daimbert.

And I note: Occam's Razor. Extremely unlikely coincidences that require many highly precise conditions are NOT requiring fewer assumptions than precog. Saying that they are is indicative of bias against precog. Which you have every right to have, but should not claim are somehow "good" to have or inherently "correct" to have, even in comparison to bias for precog, let alone no bias either for or against.

At the same time, which is more likely?

1. That a set of unlikely, but perfectly feasible coincidences has happened?

2. Everything we know about physics and the nature of the universe is wrong?

Because if precognition is true, then it implies certain things about time and information that contradict what we currently know. That's why there's such a high level of skepticism involved with something this paranormal.

Helanna

2010-10-20, 07:07 PM

I'll spoiler as well, just to keep up the tradition [grin].

To figure out what, precisely, it was that made things fall.

Again, the point is that for gravity we had repeatable and testable phenomena that we wanted to figure out the underlying causes for. We don't have that for precognition. At all. We need to get that first, and starting with the sort of scientific experiments that have been proposed are the precise wrong way to do it. You can't do a statistical analysis that proves anything if you might be controlling for or running into conditions that impact the numbers.

Take an example: to test some precognition claims, they took people and made them predict what light would come on, and ran repeated experiments (usually in the same session) to get an appropriate statistical sample. Now, first, the people who claimed to be precognitive were not predicting when little lights would come on when they claimed that, and that it might reduce over time over a long session due to fatigue could contribute to them not being able to get statistically significant results. So, did the experiment show that those people didn't seem to have precognition, or that those conditions weren't suitable for testing their precognition? We have no clue. Those experiments rushed to testing without having any idea of a theory that you could use to design good experiments for precognition.

So the answer might be: start with conditions more closely related to those these things are working in. And my answer to that is: Great ... got any idea what those are?

Maybe we can do better, but it's not going to be experiments like seen in traditional science. I'd even go so far as to say that it'll be a lot closer to philosophy than any sort of science. And it'll be really hard to do.

Just because something is difficult to prove doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

My point is more that we really have no idea HOW to try. We need to figure that out first.

I can understand that. My claim is indeed more, though, that I don't really have any idea how to go about it and that it doesn't happen for me often enough for anyone to go about trying to test it. For people where it is more common, we'd have a start. But those cases are rare.

So ... what counts as specific evidence? Recall -- and let me clarify -- what my hypothetical provides:

1) A conceptual reason to think that, if the experience was true, precognition would be the more reasonable explanation.

2) Good evidence that the person is being honest, and so that the experience likely happened as described.

That's clearly specific evidence for the experience, and under the ideal conditions -- no reason to doubt the experience, the experience is indicative, the person is almost certainly not lying -- the only reason I can think of to deny the contention is a bias AGAINST the claim. Most practical cases, obviously, are far from the ideal, but we should be able to determine what the most reasonable explanation is.

Presuming that your tests are valid. If you test and test and test using a test that won't find it, then that's not any indication that you should take the solution that it doesn't exist.

Well, I'm not saying that you can't demand a certain standard of proof before you believe, but I am saying that I might be able to point out that that standard of proof might be too high.

No. What I'm saying is that to a certain level of credibility from the witness and a certain level of the experience really seeming to indicate precognition, one really should believe in precognition even if that experience couldn't be tested or deemed credible by science. In short, because formal science, at least, has a fairly stringent methodology letting it guide all your beliefs and refusing to believe something that in all other cases would be credible without scientific backing only because this hasn't been confirmed by science yet might be, well, a bad idea.

Again, return to my hypothetical, though. In that case, we presumably agree that if that had EVER occurred, we'd say that precognition happened (again, it's just a hypothetical). So, presuming we have that agreement -- and we can get that agreement independently of any actual experience -- the only way to doubt that precognition occurred in a case where that experience is claimed is to doubt that the experience actually occurred. Presuming that we can judge that the experience was under reliable conditions, all that would be left is the honesty of the experiencer. In short, I'm eliminating all the possible counters and saying that even if science couldn't study this -- because it's one unrepeatable experience -- what rational basis could you have for denying precognition? Again, noting that this is an ideal case that's far from the normal cases we have.

If you set your standard of proof so that precognition has to be the ONLY solution, you are setting it far too high. Surely it only has to be the most REASONABLE solution, and that determination surely has to be made without biasing against precognition from the start. If you'll accept ANY other explanation, no matter how unlikely, just because it's precognition, it does seem that you'd take skepticism too far. You would, however, be in good company, since that's precisely David Hume's stance towards miracles. I think that totally wrong-headed.

However, for coincidence, take a look at what I considered to be a convincing example, that dream I had. I'll concede that coincidence MIGHT be an explanation, but because of all the details that had to align and how incidental they were, it seems to me to be unlikely that it is. Do you consider coincidence more likely than precognition in that case, and if so, why?

That's not what I'm saying at all. All I'm saying is that it may be the case that people should believe something even if a) science hasn't yet validated it and b) even if science could NEVER validate it. Again, the hypothetical was an ideal case, and I'm saying that in that ideal case science could not ever prove precognition (since the event is not repeatable) but that we should believe it ANYWAY, because of the evidence we'd have. So, are you saying that in the ideal case it should not be believed because science could never use that evidence to prove precognition could happen?

[snipped the last paragraph because it's clearly not what I'm saying]

Ooooooooooh, okay. I figured I must've been misinterpreting you in a few parts there. I don't have time to go into anything full-depth here, but it's pretty much what VanBuren said anyway - precognition is going to involve re-writing several laws of physics, since if you can see into the future in any way at all SOMETHING weird is going on. I believe that everything in this universe has a scientific explanation - no matter how bizarre or magical it might seem at its base, and regardless of whether or not we know of it yet - and that's one of the reasons I've been so insistent on getting proof. When I say anything about science, I don't mean that I won't believe it until scientists in general accept it, I just mean that until it can be proved using a scientific basis, I find it far more likely that something that DOES have a scientific basis is the actual cause.

pendell

2010-10-20, 07:37 PM

I don't have time to go into anything full-depth here, but it's pretty much what VanBuren said anyway - precognition is going to involve re-writing several laws of physics, since if you can see into the future in any way at all SOMETHING weird is going on.

Indulge me. I know you don't have time, but do you know of a link that would discuss such things? Are they the same problems that occur with time travel and FTL?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Eldonauran

2010-10-20, 08:02 PM

I vividly recall one of these dreams I had (I do tend to have a lot of them and deja vu moments) and this one in particular stands out because I told someone about it and then it came true.

I am not a big football fan (American football, mind you) but i had watched a good deal of it with my step-dad in 2007-2008. Mid-way through the playoffs, I had a dream of the giants and patriots playing against each other. I had never seen the giants play the patriots prior to that dream but seen them play against others.

So, I tell my step-dad about the game. Patriots were on a hot streak and my step-dad loves the giants. He tells me that won't happen unless it is at the superbowl. I shrug and move on with my day. I believe it was giants vs the green bay packers game where my dream became reality. They end up tied and I just shake my head, knowing somehow that the giants were going to win. Game goes into overtime and giants win immediately.

BAM, giants vs patriots.

I am always mindful of those dreams that feel 'heavy' and 'too real'. Who knows. I might see some lottery numbers. My step-dad keeps telling me if I see lottery numbers in my sleep he is going to play them.

That's my story, believe as you will.

Helanna

2010-10-20, 08:36 PM

Indulge me. I know you don't have time, but do you know of a link that would discuss such things? Are they the same problems that occur with time travel and FTL?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Just doing a quick Google search brought up a couple of links - not really reputable sources, but they discuss the problems.

Precognition - as problematic as time travel (http://autisticphilosopher.blogspot.com/2010/05/precognition-as-problematic-as-time.html)

Although apparently this guy (http://sopranoascending.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/fantastico-physics-of-precognition-or-just-fuzzy-logic/) has some science-based theories on how it could happen.

Of course, if it's a deity or just 'magic' causing it, then all bets are off. Or maybe it's just echoes from parallel universes (I may have just finished reading Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, in which this is discusses :smalltongue:).

I'll look for some more tomorrow if I get any time.

Serpentine

2010-10-20, 10:57 PM

But .. again, hitting forum regulations ... you may recall there was an email scandal involving scientists just a few months ago, scientists who stepped over the line from research into advocacy, so I know it happens in other environments than mine.Ugh. Please do not use that absurdity as a means to undermine all scientific endeaver. Those emails were taken way out of context and, believe it or not, scientists, being human 1. have opinions, and 2. do not speak in science-talk every moment of every day :smallannoyed:

I suspect, however, that we will find that the real gift is so rare that it will probably not show up statistically. It'll get cropped out of the picture as an outlier or a lucky coincidence... There will be a couple of true predictions, and possibly even a a person or two who is fairly accurate. These will be cropped as outliers, on the grounds that even a stopped watch is right twice a day.This brings me to something I've been musing over the last few days: if, given the absolute ideal experiment that properly and truly measured procognitive ability, precognition was in every way indistinguishable from coincidence, how is it meaningfully different?
If, given enough time - and a few of these stories have involved spans of years - the probability of an event occurring that can be interpreted to fit an earlier dream approaches 1 (that is, it is a near-certainty, given enough time) regardless of whether the dream was precognitive or not, what is the real difference between a precog and a coincidental event?

I don't expect anyone to believe it, but I do want to distinguish from claims of "The experience doesn't support the claim" from "I don't believe you had that experience." If the experience would indicate precognition if it had actually occurred, then if you do believe the person telling you about that experience the fact that science hasn't reproduced it yet really shouldn't stop you from believing that it occurred. And if someone relies on the "I need scientific evidence first", I think it might be safe to call them out as perhaps being skeptical not because they're being skeptical, but because they don't believe that such things occur (ie they are biased against the proposition).You have said this sort of thing repeatedly, so consider this a response to all of them.
As I said before, I do not need to believe you are wrong or lying about the original experience in order to doubt your explaination of it. If your tap is dripping, should I believe you when you say that it's because of gremlins in the pipes? Your observation is quite correct - your taps are definitely dripping. Does the mere fact that you are the one who made that observation qualify you to explain it? Or should I ask a plumber who, through his long experience, is pretty sure that it's a worn nut? That isn't to say it definitely isn't gremlins - I'm sure the plumber himself would be quite excited to discover the outcome - but that doesn't mean the plumber can't be trusted.
You need to distinguish between observation and explaination. I have absolutely no doubt that most, if not all, of the people who have made these claims genuinely believe they had that experience, and that they probably did. But I also have absolutely no reason to think that they possess some amazing knowledge that no physicist in the world shares that qualifies them to explain their experience beyond all doubt or questioning.
To summarise:
Take this case: imagine that we have a person who is noted for never, ever lying. They describe a particular incident that, if it occurred, would be explained best by appealing to them having precognition. Why would the fact that it has not yet been confirmed by science and may not ever be confirmed by science (because of its unreliability) mean that people should not believe that, in that case, precognition is the best explanation and therefore that precognition occurs?The fact that they had an experience that they expained by precognition does not mean that their explaination is correct.

Honesty =/= InfallibilityOr, that.

I DID mention that the experience itself indicated that, if it were true, it would confirm precognition, at which point it's only honesty that is in question. Basically, if you could say "If that really happened, it was precognitive" all that's left is figuring out if it really happened, and in this case that's based on the honesty of the person you're talking to.A nice hypothetical, but nothing but a hypothetical.
1. Nothing that neat has ever come up.
2. Even if a story did meet those standards, a mere anecdote cannot have all the information necessary for someone else to make an informed judgement.
One or both of the videos I linked to before explains this much better - note, especially, the part about "It's fine for you to say "I cannot explain this", but it is foolish to then say "You cannot explain this", because I do not and can not have all the necessary information."

It does, however, mean that you have a preformed bias against the explanation of precognition if you do not believe.I disagree with this very strongly. But even if it's true, the reverse is also true: If you do believe, then you have a preformed bias for the explanation of precognition.

And I note: Occam's Razor. Extremely unlikely coincidences that require many highly precise conditions are NOT requiring fewer assumptions than precog. Saying that they are is indicative of bias against precog. Which you have every right to have, but should not claim are somehow "good" to have or inherently "correct" to have, even in comparison to bias for precog, let alone no bias either for or against.I was wondering if anyone would bring up Occam's Razor. Because, in fact, it does not support precognition.
For coincidence to be the answer, the conditions must be:
- that billions of things happen all the time and sometimes they happen to occur in a way that humans, with their pattern-seeking psychology, interpret as a pattern.
For precognition to be the answer, the conditions include:
- That at least some occurrances through time are predetermined (this has a big ol' slurry of its own conditions and questions that I, as neither philosopher, theologen nor physicist can think of).
- That it is possible for features of this predetermination to travel backwards through time.
- that there is some mechanism for this travel.
- That there is something in the human brain that allows for the reception of this mechanism.
- That only some people have this ability for reception, or are aware of it.
- That this travel is sporadic and unpredictable.
- Many more that I cannot think of.
Precognition requires much more to be true than coincidence. Thus, Occam's Razor supports coincidence, not precognition.

I know I was the first person to bring up the "people with evidence of paranormal phenomenon are holding world-changing discoveries" thing, but honestly I don't really mean precognition for this. Like I said, there are (at least theorised) particles that travel backwards through time, and time-travel is already considered a genuine possibility, so I think that the main implications, if precognition is possible, are physics and, to a lesser degree, brain physiology. Unless, of course, it can be developed and harnessed, in which case economics and the military are gonna get very involved.
Stuff like ghosts, on the other hand... Wow.

PopcornMage

2010-10-20, 11:15 PM

Ack! I just had a Deja Vu experience of posting on these forums.

Is that freaky or what?

Daimbert

2010-10-21, 07:10 AM

That's circular logic there. You're basically saying "if we assume that it really happened then it really happened".

Interestingly, that's exactly what I'm NOT saying. I'm saying that if we can agree that if a specific event occurred as experienced it would be an instance of precognition, if that event is described to you ALL you can say is that it didn't really happen.

No one is claiming that people lie about their experiences. Simply that the mind functions on a more abstract level than most people realise, and can easily construct false images which the person believes to be true.

True enough, but again under the ideal hypothetical we'd clearly be in a case that if I had to doubt the precognitive experience as being a false image we'd have to doubt pretty much any experience. See, this false image thing reflects a claim of RELIABILITY, either of experience or memory, and you can't challenge that willy-nilly without taking out all other experiences with it, because otherwise all you'd be saying is that for some reason we shouldn't trust experiences about precognition even though we'd have absolutely no doubts about that sort of experience if they presented something that was considered less doubtful. At which point I'd turn to Descartes and philosophy and general and say "Why SHOULD we think that we would have a false image of precognition more readily than that of anything?".

As I just pointed out, the human brain constructs false memories all the time, at the slightest of stimulus.
Confirmation bias.

You need to address the specific case, and not just toss these out in general. I maintain that in the specific case I mentioned, false memories are not likely because the key components were salient and just the sort of thing I should remember correctly. I maintain that to present that as an explanation should call into question pretty much everything I remember, which is as earth-shattering as calling into question the laws of physics. I also don't see how confirmation bias fits in here; I am certainly counting failures, but I'm not arguing that all or even most of my dreams count as precognitive, but only that that one does, and that that was, in fact, a one-time event that matches quite closely with the things I should remember correctly. So, why do you think they fit in that specific case?

I believe that everything in this universe has a scientific explanation - no matter how bizarre or magical it might seem at its base, and regardless of whether or not we know of it yet - and that's one of the reasons I've been so insistent on getting proof. When I say anything about science, I don't mean that I won't believe it until scientists in general accept it, I just mean that until it can be proved using a scientific basis, I find it far more likely that something that DOES have a scientific basis is the actual cause.

And I do think that that's where our major disagreement is, because considering that while I have a little scientific background I'm mostly into philosophy at the moment, and having done philosophy of science I can clearly think of things that science would have a really hard time studying -- and thus providing a scientific basis for -- that we would be justified in believing and that it would seem unreasonable to not believe just because science hasn't said so yet, and that if you'll take ANY scientifically based answer over one of those it seems like carving claims out just because science can't really address them. Thus, the ideal precognitive thought experiment: once you've eliminated all reasons to think that the experience didn't happen and once you've noted that the experience, if it occurred, would pretty much mean that precognition has happened in that case, the fact that it might not pass scientific muster -- such as, say, repeatability -- shouldn't make it unreasonable to believe that precognition exists, and I'd even say that it wouldn't even make it reasonable to think that it wasn't in such an ideal case. As I've said though, we don't have ideal cases, but we really should be able to determine how ideal is ideal enough.

If your tap is dripping, should I believe you when you say that it's because of gremlins in the pipes? Your observation is quite correct - your taps are definitely dripping. Does the mere fact that you are the one who made that observation qualify you to explain it? Or should I ask a plumber who, through his long experience, is pretty sure that it's a worn nut? That isn't to say it definitely isn't gremlins - I'm sure the plumber himself would be quite excited to discover the outcome - but that doesn't mean the plumber can't be trusted.

That's not the sort of experience I'm talking about, though. Looking at that experience, I can't say that it proves or disproves anything about gremlins, as a tap dripping doesn't directly relate to that answer. But imagine this: I tell you that my tap was dripping, and in order to work on it I opened the drain. When I did so, a small gremlin poked it's head out, smiled at me, and ran away. Surprised, I simply put the drain back on ... and the tap stopped dripping. Presume that other than seeing a gremlin there is no reason to think that I'm lying or that I'm hallucinating. In what way would the plumber's "worn nut" explanation be a better one for that actual experience?

Again, it's indicative ones, not vague ones that I'm talking about.

You need to distinguish between observation and explaination. I have absolutely no doubt that most, if not all, of the people who have made these claims genuinely believe they had that experience, and that they probably did. But I also have absolutely no reason to think that they possess some amazing knowledge that no physicist in the world shares that qualifies them to explain their experience beyond all doubt or questioning.

So, look back at my example. What better knowledge does a physicist have to explain my dream and the subsequent event than I do? A psychologist, perhaps, but that seems shaky to me. But, at any rate, I'm not appealing to any sort of explanatory privilege. I'm not asking you to accept my or a physicist's or a psychologist's explanation, but am just asking you to look at the events and judge it objectively, with all the best information from physics and psychology and whatever.

See, in my case I don't expect you to believe me. I consider that it would be quite reasonable for you to simply say "I don't believe that he really had that experience; he's an anonymous internet source and so is probably lying". Now, my best friend in the whole world probably doesn't have that excuse, but you do. But part of my comment was simply to make you make it clear what argument you have to be using to make it. If it's that sort of subjective claim, then that's fine. But if it's an objective claim, we have to be able to hash out whether your objective claim really holds water, because if you base it on an objective claim I would think that I should accept it, too. And then, yes, it does strike at whether or not I should believe it, whether that's your intention or not.

The fact that they had an experience that they expained by precognition does not mean that their explaination is correct.

But again, to highlight it, I'm talking about objective explanations, not just the one they advance. If you think that explanation incorrect or dubious, you have the right and obligation to put the objective arguments out there so that all can evaluate them.

A nice hypothetical, but nothing but a hypothetical.
1. Nothing that neat has ever come up.
2. Even if a story did meet those standards, a mere anecdote cannot have all the information necessary for someone else to make an informed judgement.
One or both of the videos I linked to before explains this much better - note, especially, the part about "It's fine for you to say "I cannot explain this", but it is foolish to then say "You cannot explain this", because I do not and can not have all the necessary information."

1) I actually accepted that explicitly a few times. My aim with the hypothetical was to demonstrate that sometimes anecdotes about things that science cannot study would be enough to demonstrate to a reasonable person that precognition existed.

2) In the case where there is insufficient information, the other person then should be able to present what information is missing, so that the claimant can either provide it or argue that that information is unavailable but not relevant (ie that you are demanding more information than one can reasonably demand before accepting it).

BTW, I think I've probably seen those videos (or ones like them) but in my experience they don't really get to the heart of the issues.

I disagree with this very strongly. But even if it's true, the reverse is also true: If you do believe, then you have a preformed bias for the explanation of precognition.

So, here's my stance: I think precognition possible but am skeptical about any specific claims. Note that as I said the vague deja vu experiences didn't convince me, but the one that seemed to be both better kept in memory and relied on a host of circumstances that were unrelated to the dream convinced me. Now, is that conclusion subjective or is the result of objective reasoning? Well, wouldn't we have to look at it objectively to see?

This brings me to something I've been musing over the last few days: if, given the absolute ideal experiment that properly and truly measured procognitive ability, precognition was in every way indistinguishable from coincidence, how is it meaningfully different?

In what way are you using "in every way indistinguishable"? If you mean statistical over time -- in that the number of dreams that come true are within the bounds of coincidence -- then my entire point has been that it's not about numbers, but about detail and specifics of each encounter. Most people could have precognitive dreams at random, which would probably fit into the statistical level of "coincidence", but they'd still be precognitive dreams. Note that I'm not actually claiming this occurs.

Serpentine

2010-10-21, 08:24 AM

That's not the sort of experience I'm talking about, though. Looking at that experience, I can't say that it proves or disproves anything about gremlins, as a tap dripping doesn't directly relate to that answer. But imagine this: I tell you that my tap was dripping, and in order to work on it I opened the drain. When I did so, a small gremlin poked it's head out, smiled at me, and ran away. Surprised, I simply put the drain back on ... and the tap stopped dripping. Presume that other than seeing a gremlin there is no reason to think that I'm lying or that I'm hallucinating. In what way would the plumber's "worn nut" explanation be a better one for that actual experience?But saying "I had a dream, and then something similar to it happened" is not "seeing a gremlin". It might be "my tap was dripping so I tapped the pipes and then it stopped".

So, look back at my example. What better knowledge does a physicist have to explain my dream and the subsequent event than I do?I'm not a physicist or anything, but just from the way you described it it sounded very much as though you set up the seating to match your dream. Even if you didn't do it conciously, it's not unreasonable to think you did it subconciously. Regardless:

2) In the case where there is insufficient information, the other person then should be able to present what information is missing, so that the claimant can either provide it or argue that that information is unavailable but not relevant (ie that you are demanding more information than one can reasonably demand before accepting it).we cannot have all the information, and the claimant cannot provide all of it because they cannot know all the questions another person might put to the situation.
See one of the videos I linked to before for an example of exactly this sort of thing (i.e. the moving lampshade), and what the problem with it is.

See, in my case I don't expect you to believe me. I consider that it would be quite reasonable for you to simply say "I don't believe that he really had that experience; he's an anonymous internet source and so is probably lying".But I am NOT SAYING THAT. Seriously, how many times do I have to say it? I believe you when you say that this thing happened. But that does not mean that I need to believe your explanation for what happened. Conversely, just because I do not believe your explanation, does not mean I therefore do not believe in the event.

But again, to highlight it, I'm talking about objective explanations, not just the one they advance. If you think that explanation incorrect or dubious, you have the right and obligation to put the objective arguments out there so that all can evaluate them.We have. And we're not experts, so we can't come up with all of them. Now, trained professionals who have far, far more information than mere anecdotes because concerned citizens such as yourself went to the effort to record all the details you could, on the other hand...

1) I actually accepted that explicitly a few times. My aim with the hypothetical was to demonstrate that sometimes anecdotes about things that science cannot study would be enough to demonstrate to a reasonable person that precognition existed.Why? An "anecdote" that perfect and pristine would, I suspect, count as scientific knowlege because it could only be found under incredibly controlled circumstances. And, thus, not an anecdote.
The plural of anecdote is not data.

pendell

2010-10-21, 09:53 AM

Ugh. Please do not use that absurdity as a means to undermine all scientific endeaver. Those emails were taken way out of context and, believe it or not, scientists, being human 1. have opinions, and 2. do not speak in science-talk every moment of every day
:smallannoyed:

I would not have mentioned the article except that I experienced the same thing for 14 years in operations research. I don't want to say EVERYONE I knew was corrupt ... there were some very honest people .. but careerists were not hard to find, either.

There are other horror stories from 20th century science such as Lysenkoism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism). This was a theory of biological inheritance in agricultural used to increase agricultural yields. Unfortunately, it far outlived its usefulness because it slipped out of the realm of pure science and became non-scientific dogma. It was nonetheless taught and published as fact for decades after it should have been disproven.

There are other, more obvious examples from the 30s which run smack into forum rules.

My point is that when you get away from things that are verifiable by obvious experiment (dropping weights off the tower of pisa, say) and you start touching on areas of fundamental human convictions, objective science becomes harder and harder to do. It's very hard to find funding for such research, and if you do odds are good that the funding will come from people who have already made up their minds about the outcome.

Since precognition touches on some of these very fundamental human convictions, I am skeptical that we will ever succeed in getting much actual objective scientific thought on the matter. Not when scientists are human and funded by humans. Not impossible, but very, very difficult.

This brings me to something I've been musing over the last few days: if, given the absolute ideal experiment that properly and truly measured procognitive ability, precognition was in every way indistinguishable from coincidence, how is it meaningfully different?

If you are able to predict coincidences reliably enough for it to be useful, to yourself or to someone else, it follows that there is value in finding out just what the mechanism is so we can use it more efficiently. It might not actually be precognition. It might be intuition. Or it might be something else.

And if coincidences happen reliably, it follows there may be some underlying theory to explain it, even if we don't yet have the means to actually measure it.

Here are two thought experiments that I am pondering while talking to you:

1) A possible metaphor for proving precognition may be related to proving something else about a human mind: whether a person is a genius or not.

How do you prove A) that genius exists and B) that a given person is a genius? IIRC, most geniuses are identified by their accomplishments after the fact. Beforehand, IQ tests are ambiguous -- people like Einstein were notoriously awful in school, and no one expected that he was anything but a third rate postal clerk until he produced a marvelous paper which upended the scientific community.

This follows a bit from the non-scientific issues I talked about earlier; it is possible one reason that Einstein was not recognized as a genius is because genius was a poor fit with the kind of schooling he went through. By contrast, this would imply that the ability to get straight As and graduate as class valedictorian has less to do with intelligence than it does with the ability to understand and play the educational game.

Every year, millions of students graduate number one in their class and hundreds graduate number one from our best schools. As a rule, they disappear without trace. Meanwhile you have people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or Freeman Dyson who make marvelous contributions to society but were above average at best in school.

Are these people 'geniuses'? Are they some superhuman with different brains from the rest of us? Or did they simply make use of the same things every other human has? We say there are geniuses, but is there really such a scientifically verifiable thing as a 'genius'? Is there a way to identify one BEFORE they write the world-shaking paper? And is it environment or biology that made them that way?

If we can prove or disprove the idea of 'genius', then possibly we may be on our way to proving something ELSE about the human brain, such as whether precognition is possible. In this case I'm considering 'precognition' to be a subset of 'genius' -- a genius or talent in one particular area.

2) The other thought experiment involves bacteria. Imagine we live in the age before microscopes. Imagine that we cannot see germs, but we are arguing about the theories of disease. How do we arrive at the conclusion that microscopes are necessary to prove the hypothesis that some diseases are caused by animals to small to be seen with the naked eye?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Serpentine

2010-10-21, 10:01 AM

Quick nitpick: Einstein was actually fine at school (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Early_life_and_education). He even wrote his first scientific paper at 16.

pendell

2010-10-21, 10:23 AM

Quick nitpick: Einstein was actually fine at school (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Early_life_and_education). He even wrote his first scientific paper at 16.

Noted. Also note from the same article that this was not universally true.

When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium

...

His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.

...

Einstein applied directly to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Lacking the requisite Matura certificate, he took an entrance examination, which he failed, although he got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics.

I stand corrected that Einstein's proclivity for math and physics was evident for an early age; he nonetheless failed his entrance examination. Thus I think it's fair to say that his educational record was mixed at best; he was not a straight-A student. Certainly neither his educator nor his patent office employer had the impression they had hired a world-class genius. Not when he was passed over promotion for insufficient understanding of electromagnetic technology :smallannoyed:.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Prime32

2010-10-21, 10:49 AM

IIRC, most geniuses are identified by their accomplishments after the fact. Beforehand, IQ tests are ambiguous -- people like Einstein were notoriously awful in school, and no one expected that he was anything but a third rate postal clerk until he produced a marvelous paper which upended the scientific community.Intelligence tests are not related to school results. Plus, one of the definitions of genius is based on IQ scores (either 140+ or 180+).

The problem is that if things come easily to you in the beginning, you don't really learn to work at them. Hence when you move on to more advanced subjects you will struggle, where others find less of a difference.

bluewind95

2010-10-21, 02:32 PM

This brings me to something I've been musing over the last few days: if, given the absolute ideal experiment that properly and truly measured precognitive ability, precognition was in every way indistinguishable from coincidence, how is it meaningfully different?

See, in my experience, there isn't really much of a difference. They're just coincidences you knew would happen. In my experience, the subjective experience brought by such dreams, and the short order in which what they refer to tends to happen (like the person who dreamed a relative was saying goodbye, the dreamer woke up in tears and it was a minute later that the phone call came with the news) leave little leeway in which to act and DO something to change the future. And if you saw a future possible outcome but changed your ways, you wouldn't notice you had some precognitive event, anyways, so it wouldn't count. So, really, the only "useful" thing is to see what IS going to happen no matter what. But then... what? You know it's going to happen, but can't change it, or else it's not precognition at all. So again... just coincidences that you know are going to happen, for all practical purposes.

So you guys that have never had one of these, you guys probably think that those of us that have are sitting on some huge discovery, but... honestly, it's something that I really see little practical use for. They're too erratic and other than lessening the shock when it comes, I honestly see nothing that could really be done with it. I certainly wouldn't spend years and millions studying that. There are other things that would be more useful that need studying too.

prufock

2010-10-21, 02:35 PM

Intelligence tests are not related to school results. Plus, one of the definitions of genius is based on IQ scores (either 140+ or 180+).

False. See Frey and Detterman 2004 or Deary et al. 2007. There is a significant correlation between IQ and other standardized tests. Also, the APA notes a .50 correlation between IQ and school performance.

Gortog, SRU

2010-10-21, 02:37 PM

I think that there is no way of determining what kind of connection dreams have to the real world, but I personally believe that there is no 'conscious', 'subconscious', or 'superconscious', but just our mind as a whole through which our focus fluidly shifts, sometimes drawing from one part, sometimes drawing from another, always interconnected and active.
If we have a dream, and then think the same thing happens in real life, it might be because our slight paranoia (you all have it, come one, admit it) and our shifting focus make it so that even if it's not the same, you get that feeling of deja vu, and realize that what happened in your dream was similar to what your dream was, though not necessarily 100% accurate.
If you have a dream of drinking juice in your kitchen, that doesn't mean it's precognitive, just that your mind works that way, and you might drink the juice in your kitchen later on because of that, even if you don't realize it.
You can all believe whatever you want to about it; you may not be right, and you choose to feel that way anyways, and in that way it says more about yourself than about precognitive dreams.
(Note: I do not mean to offend anyone with the above comment, I am just saying that you can never be completely sure of anything, especially something that is belief- based, with no 'conclusive' proof, not that no opinions are 'right', if there is a right.)

prufock

2010-10-21, 02:40 PM

Far more likely, for two reasons:

As I just pointed out, the human brain constructs false memories all the time, at the slightest of stimulus.
Confirmation bias.

Also, simple volume. 6.5 billion people in the world, say then 6.5 billion dreams per night. It isn't infeasible that a fraction of them end up being similar to reality over the next few days.

bluewind95

2010-10-21, 02:53 PM

Another thing that just occurred to me.

If we are going to accept that precognition exists, why does it *have* to follow that it's supernatural? So what if it's the subconscious mind reaching a fairly logical conclusion and presenting it? Consciously, you don't know it, and the subconscious is happily informing you before you "know" it. It's still technically precognition (knowing something beforehand, and not directly linked to the senses, but to mental perception of events) and perfectly natural.

Prime32

2010-10-21, 03:00 PM

If we are going to accept that precognition exists, why does it *have* to follow that it's supernatural?Supernatural is a rather poorly defined term. Does it mean "something that doesn't have an explanation"? Because "it was ghosts" is still an explanation. :smalltongue:

pendell

2010-10-21, 03:04 PM

Supernatural is a rather poorly defined term. Does it mean "something that doesn't have an explanation"? Because "it was ghosts" is still an explanation. :smalltongue:

What does the word mean, other than that we are dealing with phenomena we can't explain with current science? If you're living in AD 1400*, an electric motor may be 'supernatural', because your science does not encompass electricity or magnetism. It is literally outside the natural order as you understand it.

Arthur C. Clarke's line that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" comes to mind.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

*I am uncertain of the status of EM research in the 1400s. If that doesn't work, pick another epoch. There WAS a time when science didn't understand electricity and magnetism. -- BDP.

Fiery Diamond

2010-10-21, 03:16 PM

1) I think some people on this thread are understating coincidence
2) I think some people on this thread are overstating coincidence

The thing is, if you take Coincidence [Explanation A] as a more likely explanation for something (we'll call it Phenomenon) than [Explanation B] simply because we currently have no scientific grounding for [Explanation B], there is literally NOTHING you can attribute to [Explanation B] for any reason, regardless of what Phenomenon is, or how likely the Coincidence [Explanation A] is. This is pretty much what I would define as a bias against [Explanation B], because it starts with the assumption that [Explanation B] can't possibly be true (and let's face it, saying "I won't entertain the belief of [Explanation B] because [Explanation A] is possible" is pretty much the same thing as saying [Explanation B] can't be true, regardless of what pretty words you say to the effect of "likelihood") unless we somehow manage to gain scientific grounding for [Explanation B].

The plural of anecdote is not data, but unless you happen to be a scientist, I see no reason for one to disbelieve something merely on the basis that all we have are anecdotes.

Also, about "all science (regarding X number of subjects) as we know it being wrong" being such an unlikely thing as compared to coincidence? Heck, it's perfectly likely. It's happened many, many times in the history of science. Quantum physics, anyone?

As far as precog goes: I am willing to entertain the possibility that it exists. I have not had anyone I personally know come to me with stories of precog, but I have no reason to disbelieve some of the people who have told stories of precog, such as on this thread. That's why I have no particular belief one way or the other.

PopcornMage

2010-10-21, 03:36 PM

So maybe this ought to go to a spinoff thread?

SensFan

2010-10-21, 11:57 PM

However, for coincidence, take a look at what I considered to be a convincing example, that dream I had. I'll concede that coincidence MIGHT be an explanation, but because of all the details that had to align and how incidental they were, it seems to me to be unlikely that it is. Do you consider coincidence more likely than precognition in that case, and if so, why?
Option 1) You're a dirty rotten liar
Option 2) You're a psychic
Option 3) Your dream had very little in common with what happened

You're claiming option 2, and seem to think the skeptics are claiming option 1. In fact, what Serp and others (and myself) are saying is option 3; your brain is an incredibly complex object.

You woke up and had a hazy idea that you dreamed about the trip going badly, and that's about it. Then you took the alternate route. Now you 'remember' that in the dream the alternate route was the start of the problems, and you've known this since you woke up. Then the detour came up, and of course you've known all along that there was a problem with the road. Nothing else happens until you see a plane in someone's yard. Now you realize that you saw the plane in your dream, and of course you even warned your mother half an hour about it!

See how your brain works? See why many of us are hesitant to believe that you actually dreamed what you remember having dreampt?

Amiel

2010-10-22, 02:17 AM

Actually, Serp, you would need evidence and proof in equal measure to be able to say that the supernatural is definitively real.

I actually feel that if some mysteries are just left as mysteries, it would be infinitely better. There would remain a sense of wonder and awe at the universe and the secrets it holds.

Serpentine

2010-10-22, 02:24 AM

Actually, Serp, you would need evidence and proof in equal measure to be able to say that the supernatural is definitively real.Science Does Not Work That Way :sigh:
Science cannot even supply "proof" that reality is "definitively real", because science does not deal in proof*. So no. I would not.
Also, I think that the supernatural by definition cannot exist. Anything that exists or occurs in the universe is by definition "natural". It could be weird or unknown, but as soon as there's scientific evidence for it, it's Natural. Possible exceptions made for religious phenomena, but that's best left for a different discussion elsewhere.

I actually feel that if some mysteries are just left as mysteries, it would be infinitely better. There would remain a sense of wonder and awe at the universe and the secrets it holds.I have plenty of wonder and awe at what we already know or suspect about the universe, and look forward to finding out more about it. The universe is amazing, and the more we know the more amazing it is. It doesn't need made-up stuff to make it any more so.

*except maybe mathematics

Amiel

2010-10-22, 02:34 AM

Science Does Not Work That Way :sigh:
Science cannot even supply "proof" that reality is "definitively real", because science does not deal in proof*. So no. I would not.
Also, I think that the supernatural by definition cannot exist. Anything that exists or occurs in the universe is by definition "natural". It could be weird or unknown, but as soon as there's scientific evidence for it, it's Natural. Possible exceptions made for religious phenomena, but that's best left for a different discussion elsewhere.
I have plenty of wonder and awe at what we already know or suspect about the universe, and look forward to finding out more about it. The universe is amazing, and the more we know the more amazing it is. It doesn't need made-up stuff to make it any more so.

*except maybe mathematics

But I'm talking about proof that refers to the substantiation of facts; in essence, proof that deals in evidence to support the contentions made. Which is indeed how science works. Proof is, from thefreedictionary "any factual evidence that helps to establish the truth of something".

The supernatural more so refers to beyond the natural - outside the natural world, whether this be in scope or dimension. Ghosts are "unnatural" in the sense that they don't belong to the natural world; they exist outside the natural world and in spite of it.

I wouldn't exactly refer to the supernatural as made-up. There are still things out there that we probably find unable to understand.

Roc Ness

2010-10-22, 02:40 AM

Milskidasith

2010-10-22, 08:04 AM

They happen to me sometimes, where I get a weird dream, pseudo-forget it, and then have it all come back to me a week or two later when it happens. Usually I can't identify people though, just activities.

The most notable one was when I had a dream about somebody teaching me how to make a coiled snail-thing out of clay on a white-ish table. A week later a girl I knew was doing exactly that for me, and the only difference (aside from the identity thing) was that there was an electronic scale on the table in reality. :smallconfused:

I'm pretty sure this is just your mind playing tricks on you. You have a vague dream, don't recall it exactly, but then BOOM! A situation occurs, and you suddenly remember your dream was exactly that. Memories are mutable, so your memory of the dream changes to fit reality.

Serpentine

2010-10-22, 08:10 AM

I don't think it's necessary to debunk every single story that people wanna talk about. Especially when just about every possibility applies to just about every one.

Daimbert

2010-10-22, 08:27 AM

But saying "I had a dream, and then something similar to it happened" is not "seeing a gremlin". It might be "my tap was dripping so I tapped the pipes and then it stopped".

Yes, and so we have to look at the specific cases. When I had the deja vu feeling that I thought might have been in a dream, I didn't find that particularly convincing. When I had the dream that had specific odd components that I remembered because in ANALYSING the dream I was able to compare them to real life and wonder why in the world I'd dream that, and then they happened for reasons that didn't seem related to me, I found that far more convincing and suggest that objectively it should be more convincing.

I'm not a physicist or anything, but just from the way you described it it sounded very much as though you set up the seating to match your dream. Even if you didn't do it conciously, it's not unreasonable to think you did it subconciously.

Well, let's presume that the dream had never occurred. I'd explain the seating plan as being conscious reactions to the conditions of the apartment and things outside of my control (such as how the other people decided where they sat). And anyone who would question this would be considered unreasonable; there is no reason to posit any subconscious intervention since the conscious factors explain everything. So, why does that change just because I say "Oh, and that's how it was in my dream"?

we cannot have all the information, and the claimant cannot provide all of it because they cannot know all the questions another person might put to the situation.

I fail to see why ASKING is out of the question. Can't people interact?

But I am NOT SAYING THAT. Seriously, how many times do I have to say it? I believe you when you say that this thing happened.

I know. My point is that that is at least a reasonable reason for not accepting precognition. My opinion is that the other alternatives aren't all that credible in the conditions I described.

But that does not mean that I need to believe your explanation for what happened. Conversely, just because I do not believe your explanation, does not mean I therefore do not believe in the event.

It's not reasonable, though, to just say "I don't believe your explanation". I'm saying that that follows from the events as described. You have to have reasons to doubt that, and preferably reasons that are more than "I don't think precognition occurs". If you have a better explanation, we can talk about that and see if it really is better or not. But it's not reasonable for you to just say "I like this other explanation better" as if that settles things. It only settles it, perhaps, personally for you.

Why? An "anecdote" that perfect and pristine would, I suspect, count as scientific knowlege because it could only be found under incredibly controlled circumstances. And, thus, not an anecdote.
The plural of anecdote is not data.

The only circumstances I listed are the honesty of the reporter, so that's not all that controlled.

Daimbert

2010-10-22, 08:30 AM

Option 1) You're a dirty rotten liar
Option 2) You're a psychic
Option 3) Your dream had very little in common with what happened

You're claiming option 2, and seem to think the skeptics are claiming option 1. In fact, what Serp and others (and myself) are saying is option 3; your brain is an incredibly complex object.

I'm actually saying that under the conditions I described, option 3 is less credible than option 1. You may disagree, but you are then obligated to say why.

You woke up and had a hazy idea that you dreamed about the trip going badly, and that's about it. Then you took the alternate route. Now you 'remember' that in the dream the alternate route was the start of the problems, and you've known this since you woke up. Then the detour came up, and of course you've known all along that there was a problem with the road. Nothing else happens until you see a plane in someone's yard. Now you realize that you saw the plane in your dream, and of course you even warned your mother half an hour about it!

See how your brain works? See why many of us are hesitant to believe that you actually dreamed what you remember having dreampt?

Well, I never actually dreamed THAT; you have the wrong person [grin]. My dream was the poker night one. And again, my point is that to say that there's something in how my brain works in that case that is rewriting something or arranging something to make the dream work out, then we have seriously problems for more ordinary events as well.

Prime32

2010-10-22, 09:12 AM

Well, I never actually dreamed THAT; you have the wrong person [grin]. My dream was the poker night one. And again, my point is that to say that there's something in how my brain works in that case that is rewriting something or arranging something to make the dream work out, then we have seriously problems for more ordinary events as well.We do. It's widely recognised that witnesses in court cases can be tricked into remembering things a certain way depending on how they're questioned. Hence lawyers can get into trouble for what they ask.

IIRC there was some case where a woman had something in her house repaired, then later was assaulted. She confused the attacker and the repairman in her mind, and accused the latter of the crime. Even when the identities of the two were proven beyond doubt, she had trouble believing it.

Irbis

2010-10-22, 09:45 AM

How do you prove A) that genius exists and B) that a given person is a genius? IIRC, most geniuses are identified by their accomplishments after the fact. Beforehand, IQ tests are ambiguous -- people like Einstein were notoriously awful in school, and no one expected that he was anything but a third rate postal clerk until he produced a marvelous paper which upended the scientific community.

Erm... it's a myth. Einsten wasn't post office clerk, he was a high grade patent office bureaucrat, and even back then, he hold an extremely high degree for the era he lived in.

Every year, millions of students graduate number one in their class and hundreds graduate number one from our best schools. As a rule, they disappear without trace. Meanwhile you have people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or Freeman Dyson who make marvelous contributions to society but were above average at best in school.

Gates and Jobs + contributions to society? What? Ok, I guess Gates has his charity fund, and Microsoft recently really begun to study/fund a range of programs that offer a really exciting possibilities if they work, but all Apple "contributes" to society is a pile of badly designed, badly-recyclable consumer trash in nice looking boxes, that could have been produced by any number of their competitors.

I'm not saying Jobs and Gates are not intelligent, but being at right place at right time, having luck and good subordinates is most of there is behind their success, they're not superhuman.

Really, to be a hack who is good at selling people what they don't need for 200% of the price just because it comes in a nice box you don't need to be smart, you just need to be canny.

Science Does Not Work That Way :sigh:
Science cannot even supply "proof" that reality is "definitively real", because science does not deal in proof*. So no. I would not.

Um... no. Theories don't deal in proof. You can't 'prove' the law of gravity, or anything like that. But, science as a whole certainly deals with proofs. Is there anything that could confirm your theory? Any phenomena currently unexplained fitting into it? No? Then it is extraneous, bad science, or though experiment at best, thank you very much, next.

Note that you need only something fitting in - Dirac proposed the existence of anti-matter based on his theory that better explained regular matter - then tried to get rid of the anomaly in various ways until he accepted that he was onto something, and indeed, anti-electrons were discovered next year. But, he had something. Any theories about prophetic dreams have nothing.

And, to stay on topic, the mechanism of so-called "prophetic dream" was examined in detail in Richard Dawkins book, "Delusion", which is a surprisingly nice read, BTW, and I can really commend it :smallwink:

Helanna

2010-10-22, 09:55 AM

I'm actually saying that under the conditions I described, option 3 is less credible than option 1. You may disagree, but you are then obligated to say why.

Which conditions were these? And wouldn't it depend on the person? I have no doubt that some people who claim to have precognitive dreams are lying, but I think most of them really believe that they did, therefore making 3 more likely than 1.

Well, I never actually dreamed THAT; you have the wrong person [grin]. My dream was the poker night one. And again, my point is that to say that there's something in how my brain works in that case that is rewriting something or arranging something to make the dream work out, then we have seriously problems for more ordinary events as well.

As Prime32 said, this is not at all an unusual occurrence. Your mind is constantly re-writing and misremembering things. This Cracked article (http://www.cracked.com/article_18704_5-mind-blowing-ways-your-memory-plays-tricks-you.html) (No, I'm not suggesting anyone take it as a reputable source, but what it describes is true) describes a few of them.

Serpentine

2010-10-22, 10:21 AM

I'm actually saying that under the conditions I described, option 3 is less credible than option 1. You may disagree, but you are then obligated to say why.Lets work on this list, because this one is direly inadequate. So, here's an alternate one:
You tell me that you had a dream in which stuff happened, and then some time after that - hours or years - something similar to that dream occurred.
1. You're a dirty rotten liar, which requires humans to be capable of lying, and you to be willing. The first is certainly true, the second is well within the realms of possibility.
2. You do not remember all the events that happened perfectly, and your memory has rewritten them to fit your explanation. This requires human memory to be capable of this, and we know it is.
3. You did not remember the details of the dream as well as you think you do, and when something similar occurred, your memory filled in the details of the dream to make it fit. Again, we know human memory is capable of this.
4. Given enough time, something happened that was similar to the dream because of sheer probability. This requires the chance of something similar happening by mere coincidence to increase with time. It does (though I don't think I explained this one very well).
5. Your subconcious analyzed events and circumstances and the like, made predictions, and translated those predictions into a dream. Those predictions, generated from nothing but observation and analysis from your own mind, came true. This requires the subconcious to be able to assess data on its own without the knowledge of the person and for sleep to be involved in data processing. I believe both these things have been established.
6. Various other possibilities that I, as a mere biology/history student, cannot think of but which are no less valid, that are supported by information from other fields.
7. The dream was genuinely precognitive which, as I said before, requires the following:
- That at least some occurrances through time are predetermined (this has a big ol' slurry of its own conditions and questions that I, as neither philosopher, theologen nor physicist can think of).
- That it is possible for features of this predetermination to travel backwards through time.
- that there is some mechanism for this travel.
- That there is something in the human brain that allows for the reception of this mechanism.
- That only some people have this ability for reception, or are aware of it.
- That this travel is sporadic and unpredictable.
- Many more that I cannot think of.

I believe that any one of 1-6 are more likely than 7, because there is not only little or no evidence supporting the explanations of the individual observations, but there is little or no evidence for the reality in which that explanation must be founded.

And again, my point is that to say that there's something in how my brain works in that case that is rewriting something or arranging something to make the dream work out, then we have seriously problems for more ordinary events as well.As someone else said, we know that this does happen. See: the Daffy Duck at Disneyland experiment.
When I had the dream that had specific odd components that I remembered because in ANALYSING the dream I was able to compare them to real life and wonder why in the world I'd dream that, and then they happened for reasons that didn't seem related to me, I found that far more convincing and suggest that objectively it should be more convincing.Someone on the internet telling an interesting story about something they genuinely believe occurred to them with almost certainly flawed perception and lacking important information* with no way at all of verifying the events who has absolutely no qualifications in psychology, sleep research, time travel, parapsychology, physics or any other relevant fields might be enough to convince you, but that doesn't mean it should be enough to convince someone else, and certainly doesn't mean it should be enough to convince the scientific community.

*this is not a criticism of you, it is a fact of human reporting

Well, let's presume that the dream had never occurred. I'd explain the seating plan as being conscious reactions to the conditions of the apartment and things outside of my control (such as how the other people decided where they sat). And anyone who would question this would be considered unreasonable; there is no reason to posit any subconscious intervention since the conscious factors explain everything. So, why does that change just because I say "Oh, and that's how it was in my dream"?If you hadn't had the dream, then maybe people would've sat differently. Maybe it would've been more random, maybe the table would've been positioned properly, maybe maybe maybe anything. It boils down to something that does nothing to support your case: coincidence.

I fail to see why ASKING is out of the question. Can't people interact?Because unless you know the questions to ask, you will not know the answer because you weren't looking for it at the time. See: the example of the moving lampshade from the previously linked videos.

I know. My point is that that is at least a reasonable reason for not accepting precognition. My opinion is that the other alternatives aren't all that credible in the conditions I described.I disagree with your opinion, and have justified this repeatedly.

It's not reasonable, though, to just say "I don't believe your explanation". I'm saying that that follows from the events as described.You think it follows. That does not mean that it does. I observe that the sun goes up in the morning and down at night. I think it follows from that that the sun revolves around the Earth. Doesn't mean it's the most likely explanation, not if there's all sorts of other evidence outside of that observation that suggests otherwise.

But it's not reasonable for you to just say "I like this other explanation better" as if that settles things. It only settles it, perhaps, personally for you.I, at least, haven't said that. I have said "There are other explanations that would fit this observation better that the one you postulate and which require fewer conditons that don't appear to be true, and so I think your explanation is less likely than it being one or more of these others."
And again, the converse is also true: just because "precognition" settles the matter for you, that only settles it, personally, for you.

Um... no. Theories don't deal in proof. You can't 'prove' the law of gravity, or anything like that. But, science as a whole certainly deals with proofs. Is there anything that could confirm your theory? Any phenomena currently unexplained fitting into it? No? Then it is extraneous, bad science, or though experiment at best, thank you very much, next.Again? Really?
Science deals with evidence, not proof. It can be overwhelming evidence, which can be "rounded up" to proof, but it's still not proof. I presume that was the general "you", because I'm not actually putting forward any theories.

Dr. Qwerk

2010-10-22, 10:28 AM

This Cracked article (http://www.cracked.com/article_18704_5-mind-blowing-ways-your-memory-plays-tricks-you.html) (No, I'm not suggesting anyone take it as a reputable source, but what it describes is true) describes a few of them.

Oh, I wanted to bring up that article :smallfrown:

Anyhow, concerning deja vu, it really is merely a misfiring of a neuron in our brains, tricking us into thinking we are actually recollecting something.

You have to keep in mind that we are imperfect, and our consciousness even more so - our senses and our cognitive functions can be fooled (and are, everyday). E.g. at this very moment I'm staring into a sort of a plastic case within which there are millions of tiny colored dots. And here I am, thinking it's some kind of an "online forum" :smalltongue:

Milskidasith

2010-10-22, 10:31 AM

Oh, I wanted to bring up that article :smallfrown:

Anyhow, concerning deja vu, it really is merely a misfiring of a neuron in our brains, tricking us into thinking we are actually recollecting something.

You have to keep in mind that we are imperfect, and our consciousness even more so - our senses and our cognitive functions can be fooled (and are, everyday). E.g. at this very moment I'm staring into a sort of a plastic case within which there are millions of tiny colored dots. And here I am, thinking it's some kind of an "online forum" :smalltongue:

I'm not really sure if the last part counts as a mind trick, since, while reading, we are (presumably) all receiving the information that is there. Just because it's sent electronically doesn't mean our minds are making it all up.

Dr. Qwerk

2010-10-22, 10:35 AM

I'm not really sure if the last part counts as a mind trick, since, while reading, we are (presumably) all receiving the information that is there. Just because it's sent electronically doesn't mean our minds are making it all up.

Nope, but it counts as a bad example ^^

But again, it is a method of artificially creating something that actually is not there (an image of whatever), and it is possible due to the way our brain and our senses function. In this case, pattern recognition most of all.

VanBuren

2010-10-22, 12:02 PM

You have to keep in mind that we are imperfect, and our consciousness even more so - our senses and our cognitive functions can be fooled (and are, everyday). E.g. at this very moment I'm staring into a sort of a plastic case within which there are millions of tiny colored dots. And here I am, thinking it's some kind of an "online forum" :smalltongue:

Pssh, whatever. It's not like any of you exist anyway. You're all just projections I've conjured to entertain myself because nobody else is still alive after the Great Popcorn Wars of 2034.

Eldonauran

2010-10-22, 12:10 PM

You're a Dirty Rotten Liar

:smallannoyed:

We still have a long way to go.... :smallsigh:

VanBuren

2010-10-22, 12:17 PM

:smallannoyed:

We still have a long way to go.... :smallsigh:

To be fair, nobody is actually accusing him of that. It's just being listed as one of the possibilities, because... it is. That said, it isn't usually going to be the case, since we're aware of several mechanisms in the brain which can carry out this process without the need for any ill intent on behalf of the person, and I like to invoke Hanlon's Razor* whenever possible.

*Although this doesn't technically fit, since the culprit actually isn't stupidity here. My point is simply that while we're noting deception as a possibility, that's not the one that's been pushed.

Eldonauran

2010-10-22, 12:53 PM

Maxios

2010-10-22, 01:06 PM

pendell

2010-10-22, 01:08 PM

I once drempt the entire last level of a videogame. The next day, I bought it. I beat it in 1 day (it was a 3 or 4 hour game). The last level was just like my dream. Same characters, same enemies, same level layout...

Is that evidence of precognition or evidence of lazy game design? :smallbiggrin:

In all seriousness .. was the game particularly original or different? I mean, if you've played so many games you've got all of TVtropes' Video Game Tropes hardwired into your subconscious, it makes sense that you'd be able to foresee the entire last level of the latest final fantasy clone...

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Maxios

2010-10-22, 01:11 PM

Nah. It was some gamecube game, it was a sequel. I never even saw a video of it. I just saw it at a game store, and bought it.
I've never even really gone on TVtropes.
It was so crazy.

Eldonauran

2010-10-22, 01:16 PM

Nah. It was some gamecube game, it was a sequel. I never even saw a video of it. I just saw it at a game store, and bought it.
I've never even really gone on TVtropes.
It was so crazy.

In all honesty, I've had a similar experience before though it did happen only AFTER I had played a game for 8 hours straight, went to sleep and then woke up to finish it later. It wasn't a 100% match but it was eeriely close.

I blame the game designers and their subliminal messages. :smallamused:

pendell

2010-10-22, 01:16 PM

Another interesting thing not quite about precognition (http://www.businessinsider.com/million-dollar-idea-mind-lamp-that-turns-into-the-color-youre-thinking-about-2010-10), but in the same vein.

It'll be interesting to see if it works. My initial reaction is that this is another scam a la cold fusion because Electron Tunneling Does Not Work That Way. But if it does it would imply there are things to learn about the human mind along that vein.

I want to see the papers of the 'scientists' in a peer-reviewed journal where the claims can be analyzed. Or have they already been published? My cynicism says probably not.

Here is the company's link (http://www.psyleron.com/intention.aspx) describing their experiments. I shall e-mail them and ask them that very question.

ETA: They did produce a paper for IEEE (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/IEEE.pdf). There are some others listed under publications (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html). The article "Change The Rules " (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/Change_The_Rules.pdf) in particular addresses many of the same problems we've discussed here. In particular, Serpentine's concern about the factor being too minor, if real, to be of interest.

I remain skeptical. They were originally part of Princeton University and shuttered their doors in 2007. Possibly because Princeton cut them off.

Since some of these papers are indeed peer-reviewed, presumably there are peer comments and responses. Where can I find them?

Edited AGAIN: Here is Wikipedia's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab) article on the laboratory in question.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

musicalbookworm

2010-10-22, 01:22 PM

What I meant was, Humans have a long way to go as far as deception and believability is concerned.

I have experienced a sort of 'precognitive' dream (I detailed it earlier in the thread) and there was absolutely no way for me to mis-remember or have my memories altered somehow to explain it away (ie, I'm a Dirty Rotten Liar, :smallamused: Riiiight!).

But that's exactly the point; you have NOT provided convincing evidence that it could not possibly be mis-remembering it/having your memory altered. All you've done is say that you believe it to not be the above case. Just because you believe a thing to be true, doesn't mean anyone else does. In fact, several people have gone to some length to show that they DO believe it is some sort of memory alteration.

Or were you trying to say that the only possibilities are
1 you're a liar
2 you misremembered
Because Serpentine went to some length to outline other possible explanations (including one for explanations of which she is unaware)

I am completely open to the idea that these sort of dreams can 'occur' though I don't particularly believe they are truly seeing in the future. Lots of people in the word, lots of different things to see when you dream. There is bound to be some correlation with real life.

All I know. If I see lottery numbers in a dream that seems too real, I am picking up a newspaper, checking the date and running those damn numbers.
So you're saying that precognitive dreams do happen, but that they're not necessarily precognitive? :smallconfused: *scratches head* To me that sounds like saying "Oh, aliens from outer-space exist, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not from Earth"

Eldonauran

2010-10-22, 01:57 PM

But that's exactly the point; you have NOT provided convincing evidence that it could not possibly be mis-remembering it/having your memory altered.

No, I'm pretty sure that there was little room for me to mis-remember something like that. What other evidence do you require? Sworn testimonies? That would not be feasible. Whether or not the dream was precognitive is another story. Be it was a very interesting experience being able to 'know' what two teams played at the superbowl in 2008 (weeks before it happened).

So you're saying that precognitive dreams do happen, but that they're not necessarily precognitive? :smallconfused: *scratches head* To me that sounds like saying "Oh, aliens from outer-space exist, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not from Earth"

And, no again. I am saying that these 'dreams' happen but may not exactly be precognitive dreams in the exact meaning of the word. Or they may be. We don't know enough. I am, however, open to the idea that they are real.

Prime32

2010-10-22, 02:18 PM

Cracked article (http://www.cracked.com/article_18704_5-mind-blowing-ways-your-memory-plays-tricks-you.html)
http://www.cracked.com/article_17103_5-ways-your-brain-messing-with-your-head.html
http://www.cracked.com/article/199_5-horrific-ways-your-brain-can-turn-you-without-warning/
http://www.cracked.com/article/127_5-ways-to-hack-your-brain-into-awesomeness/

VanBuren

2010-10-22, 03:16 PM

musicalbookworm

2010-10-22, 04:52 PM

No, I'm pretty sure that there was little room for me to mis-remember something like that. What other evidence do you require? Sworn testimonies? That would not be feasible. Whether or not the dream was precognitive is another story. Be it was a very interesting experience being able to 'know' what two teams played at the superbowl in 2008 (weeks before it happened).
I apologize. Lack of sleep on my part caused me to confuse which one was your dream.:smallredface:
However, I would like to point out, its possible that your step-dad mis-remembered what you told him about what you remembered from your dream.

And, no again. I am saying that these 'dreams' happen but may not exactly be precognitive dreams in the exact meaning of the word. Or they may be. We don't know enough. I am, however, open to the idea that they are real.
Sorry (again). I thought you were trying to claim that your dream was precognitive. Although, I would like to know what your definition of "precognitive" is in this case. That much, at least, needs to be established before we can really effectively determine anything else. If precognitive simply means the events from the dream actually happened, then yours likely was. If there has to be some sort of supernatural involvement...I doubt it. But I suppose it is possible... however unlikely.

Roc Ness

2010-10-22, 05:58 PM

I'm pretty sure this is just your mind playing tricks on you. You have a vague dream, don't recall it exactly, but then BOOM! A situation occurs, and you suddenly remember your dream was exactly that. Memories are mutable, so your memory of the dream changes to fit reality.

Maybe. I have no idea what goes on in my head, sometimes.

golentan

2010-10-22, 11:29 PM

So, since this is the only thread on dreams I saw in close relevance, and I don't want to open a new thread, I figured I'd ask there.

I have what might mildly be called nightmares. They're usually the same, and many of them are tied into my peculiar mental illness that might not be a mental illness. Most of them. So, I was having one of my recurring nightmares, about WW1. It always goes the same way: the order comes to go over the top, we all charge, I make it to the opposite trench, get shot in the leg, and when I'm crawling away I get stabbed, waking up in a cold sweat yada-yada. 'Cept I didn't realize it when I woke up, because my leg kept hurting. Right where I had gotten shot, my leg had knotted up and my muscles were making a concerted and agonizing attempt to tear loose from the bone and strangle me. A few minutes of screaming later, I hobbled over to the bathroom and gave it a nice, long soak in hot water and a vigorous rubdown, finishing by downing some painkillers and making it through the rest of the day with only the occasional twinge.

It wasn't how I was sleeping, cuz I was in the same relaxed pose in which I had drifted off, and which I normally use without problem.

Is nightmares having physical symptoms normal? At all?

Dr. Qwerk

2010-10-23, 08:08 AM

pendell

2010-10-23, 09:00 AM

Well, I wrote to the company and this is the response I got:

There are several decades of peer-reviewed research. PEAR is the most prominent publisher. Here are a few of their publications:

You might be interested in the archives of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, most of which is available here.

Engineering Anomalies Research (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/jse_papers/1EA%20i0892-3310-001-01-0021.pdf) (1987). J. Scientific Exploration, 1, No.1, pp. 21- 50.

Engineering Anomalies Research (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/jse_papers/1EA%20i0892-3310-001-01-0021.pdf)(1987). J. Scientific Exploration, 1, No.1, pp. 21- 50.

Consciousness, Information, and Living Systems (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/CMBarticle.pdf)(2005). Cellular & Molecular Biology, 51, pp. 703-714.

You might be interested in the archives of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, most of which is
available here (http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/articles.html).

I would also like to point to Jerry Pournelle's mail page (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2010/Q4/mail645.html#Psi2), where I first learned of this company and its device. Some snipped comments of his are, I think , germane to the discussion of natural vs. supernatural:

Actually, I'll spoiler the paragraph because it is lengthy

By definition miracles are not reliable and repeatable. By definition there can be no "science of miracles" because by definition miracles are a suspension of the normal laws of nature ... and by definition they are rare. That does not mean they do not exist ... none of this is proof of miracles. Some of [them] may be, rather than an intervention in nature ... the manifestation of laws we do not yet understand -- or even of the limits of law and regularity and a demonstration of chaos. This is where philosophy and religion take over because science can't really get far in that game. For the most part science discovers the regularity of the universe and the laws that govern it. Its tools are such things as falsifiable hypotheses: precise statements that if you do certain things, certain other things will happen. Or that on a certain date at a certain time the Moon will pass between the Earth and the Sun, and cause an eclipse.

Science deals with the repeatable. It can show you that a "miracle" wasn't one, but was merely the application of knowledge. Your child's pneumonia was most likely cured by penicillin, not by [supernatural phenomena]. The nuclear weapon exploded because Einstein was right about the conversion of matter to energy, not by an arrow of Shiva. We know this because we can do it again, reliably.

Most psi events are not reliably repeatable. Explanations for why they don't work -- there was an unbeliever with negative thoughts -- tend to be ad hoc. There are no laws of psi, no reliable way to demonstrate distance viewing or mental message transmission or telekinesis. That is not to say that there has never been any successful distance viewing, or mental image transmission, or levitations; but until there are repeatable experiments with predictable results, we can only investigate, and those who want psi to be true can only hope. That doesn't mean they should give up.

The late Karl Pflock was a UFO believer. He died a believer, because of his personal experiences. I know others whose personal experiences make them believe in the possibility of psi powers. I know some of them well enough to have good reason to believe they are not liars, and that they witnessed the phenomena that has convinced them -- or sincerely believe they witnessed it and that they had ruled out all the possible "conventional" explanations. That doesn't mean that they didn't miss observing something important and there really is a conventional explanation. It doesn't even rule out the possibility of undiscovered physical laws that will one day be conventional. It does mean that they have no scientific evidence, because science deals with transparency, regularity, and repeatability.

Someone asked earlier whether it mattered whether precognition was supernatural or not; I think the above paragraphs explain why the question is important.

If precognition and psychic phenomena are part of our universe and subject to natural laws, then at some point we will discover those laws and they will be proven by science. Transparent, regular, repeatable, just as the good Dr. Pournelle says.

If we are dealing with supernatural phenomena, however, science is going to need an entirely different framework. Because we're dealing with something entirely outside the laws of nature, a meta-reality which operates according to what may be an entirely different set of principles and laws. I assume everyone here is aware of the theory of relativity and the principle of different observations in different frames. Well, in this case we're talking about a situation where not just observations but the very scientific laws themselves are different, or just completely inoperable.

If this should prove to be true, it's completely useless to try to prove anything about that other frame by reference to anything in this one. It'd be like trying to prove something about a baseball game when you're bound by the rules of football. We would need some way to enter that other frame ... and is there only one, or many? ... and do new investigations from the ground up.

And even if we were able to do such a thing, we will be unable to make these discoveries useful in our frame of reference -- the so-called "real world" -- if we cannot find some kind of universal constant, something that is true in both frames of reference such that we can relate them to each other.

Which brings me back to the "change the rules" paper I posted earlier.

That is going to be a very tricky challenge. And as others have observed, it might be more the domain of philosophy than science proper.

But until we find some way to meet that challenge, supernatural phenomena -- if it exists, I avoid the word "real" for reasons that should now be apparent -- is something that cannot be proven, only experienced.

Respectfully,
Brian P.

Asthix

2010-10-23, 09:52 AM

Wow. Serious verbage in this thread. Allow me to add to it.

Props to pendell for what I consider the most informative post, #63 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9593002&postcount=63).

Golantan: I have had physical symptoms from a nightmare that persisted as well as recurring drems of various kinds. Physical symptoms have never been painful for me though.

This is the part about the scientific argument -OR- The explanation that solves everything! (but is actually serious)
So. Preface by saying that I consider the assumption requiring precognitive dreams to utilize some form of time manipulation to be erroneous. Specifically Serpentine's assertion that, "at least some occurrences through time are predetermined".

Instead, consider her 6th point, "Various other possibilities that I, as a mere biology/history student, cannot think of but which are no less valid, that are supported by information from other fields."

Even though I will be eviscerated logically by the scientists, I submit that precognitive dreams in general have more to do with humanity's innate ability to affect one another on a subconscious level than time manipulation.

Instead of viewing precognition as a glimpse of the future, think of it as the action by which events are encouraged to occur. A practical analogy might be 'human magnetism' wherein a dream of sufficient lucidity can actually affect all the relevant parties' actions towards causing said interaction to come to pass. (Please no Inception references I haven't seen the movie)

It's very important to note that precognitive dreams, without exception in my opinion, refer to 'person to person' interaction of some kind and events resulting from (supposed) precognition are always a result of that person to person interaction. (Even a football game, Eldonauran:smallsmile:)

A word about lucid dreaming: I am of the opinion that the ability to have precognitive dreams is affected negatively by training in how to control ones dreams.
Lucid dreaming where you are not in control of things is described by most people who think they may have had a precognitive dream. (Those feeling 'more real' or 'heavier') If you are taught to be in control of your dreams, you aren't allowing your subconscious to make those unique connections. (See next spoiler for personal experience on my belief in the subconscious)
The personal technical preface to my personal anecdote:Now that we're in the personal experience section, we come to my belief in the subconscious.

As someone who performed complex actions while sleepwalking as a kid, (See this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9000173&postcount=34)) as well as having had the bizarre experience of regaining consciousness staring into a mirror, (and then being informed that I had been running around and responding to questions after being knocked out in a robbery attempt, -yes that's right I was knocked out by a sucker punch and somehow not robbed- I know not how) I genuinely feel that there is an aspect to me that is not accessible by my conscious mind. I feel I should stress that the previous really happened to me and was not a dream.

Now the completely optional part talking about my lucid dreams!

The dreams which have presented a pattern to me which I could not ignore have featured myself within a group of people, usually outdoors engaged in some recreational activity. Not all of these dreams are nightmares yet all present a feeling of lucidity upon waking that lends itself to remembering part of the dream vividly. Even mundane events will stand out in this fashion. Dialogue never stands out to me unless it's directly said by me or to me. Not all dreams of this nature stand out to me as correlating with real events.

Certain of these dreams have involved me kissing people I did not know at the time. Years later I would be struck by the remembrance of this dichotomy between kissing someone I did not know in a dream and kissing someone remarkably similar to them now in the present day. This forced me to consider the possibility, despite my skeptical nature, of precognition.

Skeptics will cite confirmation bias here but it is important to note that this dream stood out back when I had it (lucid) and I wondered at the time for an hour or two why I was kissing someone I didn't know. What I'm trying to say is that because the memory is recalled does not automatically mean confirmation bias.

Now that I am an adult I rarely remember my dreams anymore.:smallfrown:
My own personal anecdote (at last), because that's what the OP asked for.
The dream related below is the reason why I read The Whole Thread.

Last week (Tuesday night) my friend invited me to a tattoo convention at a popular hotel chain. That night I had a dream where I was with a group of random people, some strangers, some who I knew from different periods in my life.

An aside: The only ones who stood out to me upon waking were my first girlfriend, who I had not seen nor heard anything about in 8 years, and my friends' mom. My friend had just moved out of country, and I had agreed to occupy her mom in the intervening year she would be gone since her last offspring was flying the coop and she felt overwhelmed.

The dream was unrememberable in detail except for these two people until I happened to look over and see a plane crashing into the previously mentioned popular hotel chain. The ensuing fireball caused the expected panic reaction and I, in the dream said out loud, "I'm not going anywhere near that." and began to back away from it, distant though it may have been.

This is when the true nightmare began. People began falling out of the sky. It was very disturbing. I have never experienced something like that in a dream before. It went from that to the typical bolt upright in bed, panting for breath reaction where you realize it was all just a dream.

[For posterity / scientists I want to point out that I told the first person I knew about this dream about an hour after it happened and mentioned how it was a random group of people I was with, such as my first girlfriend and my friends' mom. These were the only two people from the group that stood out.

I did not attend the tattoo convention.

Four days after this dream, my friend's mom called me to say that she had moved to a new apartment in her same building and was feeling burned out on trying to unpack and organize it. I told her I would come over with ideas of things to do. When I arrived I asked if she had ever been to the art museum she had lived two blocks away from for over a year. She said no.

I told her we must go see the Japanese wall hangings on display because they're awesome and off we went. As we approached said wall hangings who should we run into but my ex-girlfriend who I have not seen or heard from in 8 years.

Suddenly we three were together in real life. Even though I was with one person from the dream, I hadn't considered that I could run into another. Despite this, there was no feeling of deja vu. There was no way I could forget that horrific dream and the realization that we were together in real life was more like being hit with a brick. I wasn't recalling and applying this memory to reality so much as I was being confronted by the reality of the people in my dream there before my eyes. Events from dreams that I have had to consider whether they were precognitive or not have always involved people in this way.

No there were no untoward happenings after this meeting. No nightmare scenarios. I know that events in dreams are largely allegorical.

I suppose a good analogy for the concept clumsily outlined in this monster post would be the process of Ta'veren in The Wheel of Time books whereby (quoted from wikipedia) "Any action that occurs to someone because of being in the proximity of someone who is Ta'vern is only what they might have done, however improbable. For instance, if said person would never have jumped off of a building, then being close to Ta'vern would not change it. However, if said person would have jumped off the building once in million times, then being near a Ta'vern might make the person jump off of the building because however improbable the action is, it is possible for such an event to occur."