17 replies to this topic

[Luna]

http://www.redorbit....ture/index.html

[Live Forever]

"SHORTLY after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage. It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease."

Oh good gosh. Our minds are evolved to find patterns in things. When will people quit looking back on things that happen every day as proof of something when a major event occurs? People happening to change plans or a "feeling of unease" is proof of absolutely nothing. If humans could really predict the future like that, then nobody would have gotten on the planes, and all those people wouldn't have died. This article is pure speculation, there is no evidence or experimentation results actually presented.

[Luna]

Yes, I am usually very skeptic about it, but alot of things about it:
http://www.nps.gov/h...n/html/al4.html

But in this case I belive he knew about plans to kill him so he just dreamt about it.
While I'm not so sure about premonition, I do belive there is a place for telepathy. our thoughts work on waves, we should be able to catch some details from stuff..

Time dosen't really exist, I believe.

[niner]

Oh good gosh. Our minds are evolved to find patterns in things.

Yeah, I agree, the items like this cited in the article are the usual BS. Typical lousy science reporting.

BUT... How do you explain the experimental results? Very different story there. The apparatus they described doesn't leave a lot of room for loose controls, assuming it was not implemented idiotically, like a lack of investigator blinding. The fact that it's been reproduced in a number of labs lends a lot of credence to it as well. This is one of those things that no matter how much proof is given, no matter how rigorous the experiments, many people will refuse to believe it. Sort of like radiation hormesis. Our minds are not ready.

[Liquidus]

Man being able to see into the future is about as valid as Santa Claus, Miss Cleo the Psychic, Jesus, Buddha, and the Easter Bunny. If you honestly believe any of that, you have to re-examine your psyche as a person and ask yourself what is logical and reasonable.

There is a difference between making a decision based on data which might be beneficial to your outcome, and just being fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.

I would be insulted if I was a scientist to have any part of the word science associated with this crap.

Obviously this is just my opinion, but I feel strongly against people who claim in supernatural stuff, and being able to 'see into the future'.

[niner]

See, there ya go.

[luminous]

Coincidences are bound to happen, given the random thoughts and events that continuously occur just as a consequence of being human. One day last week, I felt a bit queasy and couldn't decide whether I should miss work or not. Ultimately, I opted to stay home. Now what if some lunatic happened to pick that very day to shoot everyone in the office? Maybe I'd think, WOW, I must have KNOWN something awful was going to happen. Well, I'd never think that, but lots of people would. They ignore all the times that nothing remarkable happens and then get all excited when an amazing coincidence occurs...or a particular guess comes true.

[modelcadet]

I'd like to see more details of the experimentation... I get the feeling the experiment itself is flawed: Subjects wince before bad pictures because they anticipate gross/sexual pictures. Depending on what the accuracy is of these winces, it's just more likely that they're expressing reactions to the pictures themselves or have developed, at least subconsciously, a prediction pattern for wince-prompting stimuli.

People are already mentioning self-confirming bias, hindsight bias, etc, etc. Of course people can predict the future: Often times subconsciously. I just read the recent national geographic article on swarm psychology. Perhaps notions of 'ESP' or whatever can result from the subtle cues of others?

Anyway, I'm growing increasingly interested in human sensation/perception, particularly body/mind -hacking to give a person or swarm additional environmental information. I've thought in the past that it might be cool to have an electrical stimulation array (like people have done to 'see' with their tongue) for computer resources, 'perfect' pitch, high pitched tones, etc. I saw this TED talk on We Feel Fine, a project which crawls the web to find out how bloggers are feeling at the moment. It'd be difficult to acquire such a sense (because you don't have direct influence on such sensory data), but I think it'd be pretty cool to just be able to literally feel how the world feels (or a subset thereof... I guess once you learned the interface, you could switch between groups rather easily).

After all, some people can already predict the future: They know when it's going to rain!

[Luna]

hehe, funny thing is, my cousin is a neurolog (spelling?) and lives in amsterdam.
He says Dick Brieman needs to get some mental care..

[Ganshauk]

I have several theories about this.
1) We have senses that are as yet undefined. For instance, bats have the ability to use active radar to see where they are going. We probably have this same ability, but it is latent since we dont rely on it for survival. There have been many documented cases of blind people having such an ability. To see what is coming before it can be seen. How many other senses do we possess that we have yet to discover?
2) Pheremones. We all excreet them. All the time. Once again, we dont hone the ability to smell pheremones because it hasn't been needed for survival for a long time. But we can still do it, the same way a dog can "smell" fear. IMHO, I think the subtle transmission of pheremones is the basis for Carl Jung's "Collective Unconscience" theory.
3) Logic. There are huge parts of your brain analyzing data without you ever knowing it. Most of the time all this goes on in your subconscious. Sometimes it might resurface as a dream or some other outlet. This is how Paul Atreides looked into the future : He could consciously analyze the vast streams of data pouring in from the senses and compute them into probabilities of what can possibly happen. The upshot is : given enough information, the brain will calculate what is probably going to happen, whether you are conscious of it or not. Sometimes, the output may rise to the frontal lobe is some way. This is called "instinct".

[Luna]

Paul Atreides is a fiction character @@..
Sure you can sense thing in real time which can give you an illusion of premonitions, we also do know how bats sense things, it's called sonic waves.

We do know humans can do it too.
That's nothing mysterius.

Ask fighters from Kung Fu or Jujitso..

[Reno]

This reminds me of ghostbusters and Bill Murray zapping people who guess wrong on his flash cards.

[Luna]

I must add.....
Poll says about 34% of americans.. who took the poll.. believe in paranormal.
Another poll says about 36% believe in ghosts........
another says around 34% believe in angels......................................
Another says around 80%?? believe in god........................

So yeah.. uhhh.. either there is something really strange going on or our planet really IS the institue of the universe for crazy people.

[Live Forever]

or our planet really IS the institue of the universe for crazy people.

I think it is more just the US, and not the planet. )

Edited by Live Forever, 06 August 2007 - 07:35 PM.

[Luna]

I did say america.. but yeah, meant usa

[Liquidus]

I'd like to see those same poll numbers for a country like Holland or Japan.

[Live Forever]

I did say america.. but yeah, meant usa

Yeah, I was meaning the planet part at the end, being the institute for crazy people for the universe, haha. It isn't the whole planet. )

[suspire]

This is a fluff article. No hard data on the experiments they conducted, no real discussion about all these other scientists that "rushed out" to replicate the experiment, constant reference to the "Nobel Prize" winners who supposedly are interested in the topic--as if a Nobel Prize is an automatic stamp of approval in the topic, despite the fact that Josephson's Nobel Prize was awarded for something not at all tied to the topic at hand, quoting Einstein out of context, etc. All the usual tell-tale signs of a fluff and deceptive piece.

My girlfriend is a bit of a believer in the paranormal. Unsurprisingly, she is also a bit religious. The same applies to my best friend--both have been prone towards both religion and paranomal beliefs through most of their life. I attribute this not to the fact that most of the planet is crazy, but rather the idea of the "God gene", which has been mentioned before--some people are simply more prone, biologically, to believe and/or need in something beyond the physical universe. I suspect this may be a survival mechanism(of the social/mental/emotional type) of sorts. I am neither religious nor believe in the paranormal.

In any case, my girlfriend gets these "uneasy" feelings from time to time. She said whenever she got them, something bad was going to happen. At first, I was a little surprised, because there were a couple of incidents that did happen around the time she got these "uneasy" incidents. However, as time progressed, I noticed she was just as likely to get these "uneasy" feelings and have nothing happen as something occur. Moreover, she definitely had a number of "bad" incidents, without getting the "uneasy" feeling.

With me, it is closer to "gut instinct"--I get gut instinctual responses to things. Sometimes I am dead wrong, sometimes I am on the mark. I've noticed I am much more likely to be on the mark...when my brain has data to process and make an accurate decision as opposed to making a blind guess. I am not "predicting the future"--I'm just making an educated guess based on information.

Back to the experiments: I'd be willing to bet money that the experiments were conducted in a shoddy fashion--either they were setup in a pattern that allowed the subject to guess what image might come next, or maybe they read the body language of the person conducting the experiment(body language, apparently, being much more powerful in communicating than the spoken tongue), etc.

Let me see some credible research, let me see it observed under controlled conditions by skeptics like Randi or Shermer, etc, and I'll be much more willing to give it some credence.