Thread: Crazy Reoccurring Girl IRL

I had dreams like this too! What so they mean though???

We don't know, that is why I had you PM me. We might be able to figure something out together.

Originally Posted by ixsetf

No, sivason is suggesting you have ESP which lets your subconscious see the future. I highly doubt precognition is possible, considering that an effect cannot occur before its cause. Precognition would violate this basic scientific principle.

Science shouldn't be in the business of dismissing things a priori like you suggest. Lots of "basic scientific principles" have been violated over the centuries. Science has to submit to the real, not vice verse; if precognition happens then it happens and science needs to do the work required to understand it.

Originally Posted by rrrrocketrick

Science shouldn't be in the business of dismissing things a priori like you suggest. Lots of "basic scientific principles" have been violated over the centuries. Science has to submit to the real, not vice verse; if precognition happens then it happens and science needs to do the work required to understand it.

Has there been any credible evidence that it happens?

@dark matters.
I think every single person has had déjà vu in some form or another. I have it quite often. It is a phenomenon which means science can't explain it. We all just pass it off as déjà vu... Every time. I have had severe cases of déjà vu through my whole life. I have seen a movie where I have quite literally known what would happen for the next 5 minutes. It is the craziest thing ever.

So your "proof" is that it happens to almost everyone.

I started having it when I was 5. I started telling my parents that I had seen the pair of shoes that i had just bought. I was so confused. I told them the dream I had of it before that, but the shoes were not something I had pointed out because it didn't seem important. I had just told them that I had a dream that we were leaving a mall I hadn't seen before. We couldn't find me shoes at the normal mall, we went to one we had never been. My parents told me that it happens to everyone. I just thought it was weird that me seeing the future was something that happens to everyone!

Oh sure, I've experienced deja-vu many times, but I always just thought of it as the brain misfiring and creating the idea (Or the feeling) that I've experienced this before. It can't be taken as evidence of actual precognition if somebody says (while something is happeneing or afterwards) that they already knew it would happen like that. By that point it's too late - they'd need to accurately predict exactly how it would happen - BEFORE it happens!

it can't be proven, but you are telling me you haven't had prolonged déjà vu where you knee exactly what would happen next?

Next time you're feeling deja-vu, tell everybody you're with that you have it, and tell them what happens next. Then see if it happens.

But I suspect you can't actually say what's going to happen next. It's been a long time since I've had it and it's hard to remember if this is true or not, but I *think* you don't actually know what's going to happen - I think it's more of an ongoing feeling of intense familiarity so that, each time something does happen you feel like "Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what happend - EXACTLY!! OMG!!!" and you continue to feel that way until it wears off. But if you were to try to say what's going to happen next before it actually happens, I doubt you can. If you do have an idea of what's going to happen and you tell everybody what it is, then they can make it not happen that way, so there's no testing that.

Unfortunately it mostly seems to only apply to small events, like the family playing monoply or something - nothing that would allow you to predict something external to your own situation (like the stock market for instance, or a horse race).

We know the brain has glitches - optical and auditory illusions etc, and we know it has small circuits for certain things, like facial recognition, danger, whatever. There's probably a mental circuit for familiarity - which would kick in when we see someone or someplace we know. And like many mental circuits, why wouldn't it be able to misfire sometimes, kick in strongly when you're experiencing something that actually isn't familiar? What is paranoia but the Danger circuit getting stuck on full? I think deja-vu is just the Familiarity circuit getting stuck on full for a while.

I hope I experience deja-vu soon, so I can test predicting what's going to happen.

I agree. I think that most of the time it is just chemicals in the brain. Because sometimes it is just that feeling, and for some reason everything that pops up seems like I have seen it before.

Story time!

I was playing basketball with my dad and both brother in laws. I thought it was weird since I had had a dream about it the previous night. I started playing, and for the first while nothing happened, but after about 30 min my oldest brother in law stood at one spot in the driveway. It clicked, I knew what he was gonna do because I had seen it. He jumped up and I blocked him. I was getting ready to run after the ball, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to race my younger brother in law there. He ran across and as soon as he got the ball I was there in his blind spot and popped the ball out of his hand.

So I used déjà vu to stuff someone and steal the ball, but there is no way to prove it, because these are things I do quite often.

So I think that it is sometimes precog, sometimes just brain misfiring.

If you want more deja vu, get better recall.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Has there been any credible evidence that it happens?

Credible to whom? Credible to you? Maybe not. But maybe you haven't really looked very hard for it either. Credible to other people? Well, yes, obviously. There are lots of people on here who claim to regularly experience unambiguous instances of precognition. Some of them even claim to have been keeping dream journals for years in which both their precognitive dreams and the real-life coming-to-pass of those dreams are recorded. It may be reasonable to doubt their reports, as you do, but if they've honestly experienced it and have carefully recorded it in their journals then there certainly is credible evidence that it happens--credible to them, I mean. Credible to me? Well, yes, mostly. I'm not fully persuaded of it, but I do seem to have had several experiences with precognitive dreams. Two of them were quite stunning, except the dreams happened so long before the events that I can't be positive that I didn't make the dreams up post hoc. (Unfortunately I've only been keeping a dream journal for a short time now.) I'm troubled by the idea, because I don't like the determinism it might be taken to imply, but I know it's a mistake to just dogmatically sweep aside all the reports of it along with my own experiences.

But all of this is beside the point I was trying to make in my previous post. The point was that it's a mistake to think that scientific inquiry can prejudge a reputed phenomenon just by appealing to "basic scientific principles" or the like. Not that it's never done by scientists; in fact, there is waaaay too much of this sort of thing being done in the name of "science." But Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and any other world-changing scientific thinker you can name is famous precisely for showing that what everyone else thought was a "basic scientific principle" isn't.

I meant scientifically credible.

I don't dogmatically sweep aside everything that doesn't agree with my preconcieved notion - that would be hard since I don't really have a preconcieved notion, I'm just skeptical.

Not that it's never done by scientists; in fact, there is waaaay too much of this sort of thing being done in the name of "science." But Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and any other world-changing scientific thinker you can name is famous precisely for showing that what everyone else thought was a "basic scientific principle" isn't.

Completely agreed - and I'll add LaBerge to that list. However until each of those thinkers were able to produce some crdible evidence there was no reason for science or the community in general to believe the claims they eventually turned into theories. If we're going to just go ahead and assume precognition is real before there's any decent evidence for it, then where do we stop? Unicorns - the Flying Sphagetti Monster? Is every idea now assumed true until disproven?

If you do have good reason to believe it might be possible then fantastic - if I had had some experience that made me feel that way then obviously I would. But so far I haven't heard anything that can't be pretty easily reasoned away through skepticism. And for the most part of course dream journals aren't valid as evidence, unless someone writes something in their DJ that then demonstrably happens for real at a later date. If they write something and later write that it happened, unless there's some proof it really did we can't accept it just on their word. We also need to factor inthat many predictions are highly likely to come true if we just wait long enough - if I dream there's a huge bus crash and watch the news eventually it'll happen. It would need to be something more specific than that.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I meant scientifically credible.

I don't dogmatically sweep aside everything that doesn't agree with my preconcieved notion - that would be hard since I don't really have a preconcieved notion, I'm just skeptical.



Completely agreed - and I'll add LaBerge to that list. However until each of those thinkers were able to produce some crdible evidence there was no reason for science or the community in general to believe the claims they eventually turned into theories. If we're going to just go ahead and assume precognition is real before there's any decent evidence for it, then where do we stop? Unicorns - the Flying Sphagetti Monster? Is every idea now assumed true until disproven?

If you do have good reason to believe it might be possible then fantastic - if I had had some experience that made me feel that way then obviously I would. But so far I haven't heard anything that can't be pretty easily reasoned away through skepticism. And for the most part of course dream journals aren't valid as evidence, unless someone writes something in their DJ that then demonstrably happens for real at a later date. If they write something and later write that it happened, unless there's some proof it really did we can't accept it just on their word. We also need to factor inthat many predictions are highly likely to come true if we just wait long enough - if I dream there's a huge bus crash and watch the news eventually it'll happen. It would need to be something more specific than that.

I don't strongly disagree with anything you're saying here, and I appreciate your caution. I also think you offer good reasons for doubting precognition. But I nevertheless think your position is overly simple and too-quickly drawn, and I think I know why it is. I think you find claims for precogition implausible a priori, and I think you find them so because they seem to conflict with with your worldview--a worldview that you think is coherent, consistent with experience (including experimental experience), pleasing, and in other ways successful. I suspect that your worldview might be characterized as a sort of materialism, because most scientific sorts today (theoretical physicists excluded, perhaps) are materialists, and because you seem a scientific sort. (And I am too, but of a different sort). Precognition is very surprising relative to materialism. It even seems that materialism is false if precognition is true. And I think that's why you find precognition implausible a priori.

But in my judgment, materialism, though highly successful in certain respects, is a horrible failure when it comes to helping us understand anything that's particularly human. Materialism predicts and helps us investigate phenomena like human evolution and the localization of brain function (etc.), and those sorts of things are relevant to helping us understand ourselves. But it's completely stuck when it comes to understanding phenomena like consciousness, knowledge, experience in general, qualia, selfhood, responsible free agency, and the like, and these phenomena are vastly more important to our understanding of ourselves. There are heaps of philosophical literature devoted to addressing these problems, so I'm not saying anything that should be controversial when I say that materialism is a terribly unsatisfactory (or at least very problematic) worldview.

But if materialism is a terribly problematic worldview--if it can't plausibly account for human essentials like consciousness, qualia, responsibility, knowledge, and the like--then it's a non-starter as a theory of reality as a whole, even if it is very helpful in certain other respects. So it needs to be superseded. But perhaps precognition isn't implausible relative to what should replace it. Maybe precognition is even a really important bit of data without which we can't find an ultimately satisfactory worldview.

In my judgment, better theories of reality than materialism exist. (I don't mean dualism.) If any of these are favorably inclined toward precognition, then anyone who holds to those views would rightly find precognition unsurprising.

An illustration might help. My mother finds claims about fossil human ancestors unbelievable because they conflict with her fundamentalist Christian worldview. But if she had a different worldview, she might find claims about fossil human ancestors plausible. I doubt you have any trouble with claims that fossil human ancestors have been found because I suspect that those claims fit nicely with your worldview. But I suspect that precognition is to your worldview as fossil humanoids are to my mother's: it conflicts, and therefore you find it implausible a priori.

My point isn't that precognition is true or that you should believe it. I'm not even sure I believe it (nor even that I want to). I'm merely pointing out what I suspect is a significant factor in your thinking about precognition--worldview bias--and suggesting that without it you might be more favorably inclined toward precognition (etc.).

And I'm not trying to be a smartass either. Sorry if it comes across that way.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

I agree. I think that most of the time it is just chemicals in the brain. Because sometimes it is just that feeling, and for some reason everything that pops up seems like I have seen it before.

Story time!

I was playing basketball with my dad and both brother in laws. I thought it was weird since I had had a dream about it the previous night. I started playing, and for the first while nothing happened, but after about 30 min my oldest brother in law stood at one spot in the driveway. It clicked, I knew what he was gonna do because I had seen it. He jumped up and I blocked him. I was getting ready to run after the ball, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to race my younger brother in law there. He ran across and as soon as he got the ball I was there in his blind spot and popped the ball out of his hand.

So I used déjà vu to stuff someone and steal the ball, but there is no way to prove it, because these are things I do quite often.

So I think that it is sometimes precog, sometimes just brain misfiring.

If you want more deja vu, get better recall.

That's a really interesting story. I've never even heard of anything like that. You're saying this happens to you often? I hear you saying though that you can actually influence what's happening to change the course of events. So then things come out in the end unlike the dream. How is the event still recognizable as the dream then?

No, you don't sound like a smartass at all. I appreciate the very well-reasoned and well-explained post.

I think you're largely right - I do tend towards rational materialism, but I try not to be dogmatic about it, and I also am open-minded toward other views. In fact I've spent a good deal of time exploring other worldviews - looked into Buddhism and did meditation for a few months (but it didn't take), messed with chakras and Kundalini yoga, I've read all of the Castaneda books and really wanted to believe some of it was possible. I suppose eventually though, I always do reject the alternate worldviews because I can't accept the more supernatural claims they make (though I've gained some great benefits from each in other respects).

All that said - I am not adamantly opposed to ideas like precognition, astral projection, telepathy and the like. In fact I want to believe they're possible. But I don't take things on faith alone - that's a good way to get fleeced. I believe a strong skeptical approach is actually the best way to approach these things - if a group of people believe firmly in something that's not scientifically accepted and they haven't subjected the phenomenon to even the slightest testing and they say that the very presence of a skeptic destroys the possibility that it can work, then they're quite rightly seen as crackpots who are entirely too accepting.

And I know - the kind of skepticism I'm talking about isn't about a personal belief in something - nobody's skepticism can destroy a person's belief in something they've actually experienced. My knowledge that I've had lucid dreams isn't phased in the slightest when people scoff and laugh at me (though it might piss me off). I also understand that my type of skepticism renders it unlikely that I'll ever experience anything metaphysical and accept it as such. (People who refuse to believe in lucid dreams could even experience one and still deny it).

In fact, now that you've got me thinking about it - when I started reading Castaneda it was in hopes that it could help me achieve lucidity (and before I found Dreamviews or ETWOLD). But I found it did just the opposite - if I accepted the existence of all these crazy frightening entities and things, then I was afraid to enter into dreams where I might actually encounter them. So for me personally, I think my increasingly skeptical approach helps me toward lucidity. I also read a lot of Freud and Jung before my lucidity quest and now find that it's very helpful to disregard a lot of it - if I analyze my dreams too much they start to take on troubling psychological dimensions and don't lend themselves well to lucid adventuring. So I think I'm closing up my mind to make it more mobile and defensible sort of like a soldier carrying only the essentials on bivouac. Or a better analogy - I once likened the mind to a parachute - you want to be able to open it when necessary, but you don't want to go walking around through your daily life with an open parachute trailing behind you everywhere - would be hell on a windy day or getting on the bus! So I suppose I've been packing my mind up tightly for mobility in my lucidityquest. I've also made the decision I need to stop messing with incubating hot women in my dreams - that works against lucidity too in the beginning. I think once I've made it and can start becoming lucid on a pretty regular basis then I can loosen up my grip on my mind a bit again and then it'll be time to bring on the hotties and start exploring those ideas I'm more closed off to now.

Though you may be right - rational materialism might just be my core belief system and maybe there's no changing that as much as I'd like to. Though I don't think it's strictly materialism - there's definitely a bit of secular humanism in there too.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

No, you don't sound like a smartass at all. I appreciate the very well-reasoned and well-explained post.

I think you're largely right - I do tend towards rational materialism, but I try not to be dogmatic about it, and I also am open-minded toward other views. In fact I've spent a good deal of time exploring other worldviews - looked into Buddhism and did meditation for a few months (but it didn't take), messed with chakras and Kundalini yoga, I've read all of the Castaneda books and really wanted to believe some of it was possible. I suppose eventually though, I always do reject the alternate worldviews because I can't accept the more supernatural claims they make (though I've gained some great benefits from each in other respects).

All that said - I am not adamantly opposed to ideas like precognition, astral projection, telepathy and the like. In fact I want to believe they're possible. But I don't take things on faith alone - that's a good way to get fleeced. I believe a strong skeptical approach is actually the best way to approach these things - if a group of people believe firmly in something that's not scientifically accepted and they haven't subjected the phenomenon to even the slightest testing and they say that the very presence of a skeptic destroys the possibility that it can work, then they're quite rightly seen as crackpots who are entirely too accepting.

And I know - the kind of skepticism I'm talking about isn't about a personal belief in something - nobody's skepticism can destroy a person's belief in something they've actually experienced. My knowledge that I've had lucid dreams isn't phased in the slightest when people scoff and laugh at me (though it might piss me off). I also understand that my type of skepticism renders it unlikely that I'll ever experience anything metaphysical and accept it as such. (People who refuse to believe in lucid dreams could even experience one and still deny it).

In fact, now that you've got me thinking about it - when I started reading Castaneda it was in hopes that it could help me achieve lucidity (and before I found Dreamviews or ETWOLD). But I found it did just the opposite - if I accepted the existence of all these crazy frightening entities and things, then I was afraid to enter into dreams where I might actually encounter them. So for me personally, I think my increasingly skeptical approach helps me toward lucidity. I also read a lot of Freud and Jung before my lucidity quest and now find that it's very helpful to disregard a lot of it - if I analyze my dreams too much they start to take on troubling psychological dimensions and don't lend themselves well to lucid adventuring. So I think I'm closing up my mind to make it more mobile and defensible sort of like a soldier carrying only the essentials on bivouac. Or a better analogy - I once likened the mind to a parachute - you want to be able to open it when necessary, but you don't want to go walking around through your daily life with an open parachute trailing behind you everywhere - would be hell on a windy day or getting on the bus! So I suppose I've been packing my mind up tightly for mobility in my lucidityquest. I've also made the decision I need to stop messing with incubating hot women in my dreams - that works against lucidity too in the beginning. I think once I've made it and can start becoming lucid on a pretty regular basis then I can loosen up my grip on my mind a bit again and then it'll be time to bring on the hotties and start exploring those ideas I'm more closed off to now.

Though you may be right - rational materialism might just be my core belief system and maybe there's no changing that as much as I'd like to. Though I don't think it's strictly materialism - there's definitely a bit of secular humanism in there too.

This is an excellent post. Thanks a lot for it.

A few quick things in response. Maybe I'll write more another time, but I should get back to work now. First, naturalistic theories come in varieties other than materialism. So alternatives to naturalism don't have to be religious or supernaturalistic. A very interesting alternative to materialist naturalism is what I call relationalist naturalism. Relationalism makes fundamentally different conceptual moves concerning the nature of being, and as a result it has a different take about every other topic of interest too: identity, causation, the natures of space and time, value, etc. Important relationalist authors include Alfred North Whitehead and Robert Cummings Neville. I'm a big fan of both. (Check out Neville's Recovery of the Measure. It's extremely heavy, but also really great stuff. Neville, by the way, is a sort of an atheist and doesn't believe in ghosts, goblins, hells, or the afterlife--though his philosophy could acknowledge them if he found reason to do so. I don't think his sort of naturalism would easily accommodate precognition, however.)

Second, a naturalistic worldview is a conceptual system of the greatest possible generality that tries to be adequate to all experience without reducing any actual experiences away (as materialism has to reduce selfhood and responsible free agency down to mere appearances, for example). Since they're conceptual systems that concern the world as a whole, we think with them and have a very hard time imagining how or even that they could be mistaken.

Third, when our conceptual systems are found to be partly adequate and partly inadequate--as I think materialism is--then it's a sign they need to be superseded/fixed. If materialism can't account even for knowledge--as I think it clearly can't--then it's irrational to embrace it as is and necessary to supersede/fix it. In other words, in my judgment materialism is very badly wrong--a real non-starter. So we should at least be on the lookout for a more adequate theory of nature.

I really know what you mean when you say that belief in strange things blocks your pursuit of lucid dreams. I sure don't want to believe some of the shit lucid dreamers report on these pages, the least troubling of which is precognition. My suspicion that much of that weird shit is nevertheless true certainly does get in the way of my dreaming. But my hope is that acknowledging it will be good for me in other ways--that it might help me discover the meaning of life I've been looking for, for example.

Wow, great stuff! I hope you do write more when you can - I'd love to see it.

I don't know what all the tenets of materialism are - I just keep getting told that I'm a materialist because of my skepticism, but Ive never looked into what all it encompasses. I really don't like the idea of being boxed into a belief system - especially if some parts of it don't agree with what I really think is true. You make it sound like materialism requires determinism. If that's the case then screw materialism - I don't believe I have no free will or that everything is already predetermined.

But I'll definitely look into the isms you mentioned and mabe a few more. I at least want to have a decent understanding of what they're about. Still don't want to label myself or distort myself to fit into an ism, but it is interesting stuff and can really inspire a lot of thinking about what we do and don't believe.

Withtopics like this, I think we will never be able to 'prove' anything to others. Those who have convincing experiences 'know' the reality of it, but that is as far as it goes. And that is OK, I think first hand experience is the only proof there can be.

I one time had a crazy dream, in which I was afraid and laying helpless on a field of white. I could not stand up, because the ground was shaking real bad. I thought it felt like being in the back of a pick-up truck going 50 on a bumpy dirt road. The dream then switched to people looking around at cracked buildings and plumbing. I sat up in bed and then fell over, still dreaming. My head crashed into a window seal (IRL), but I could barely wake up. I pressed my hand to the bleeding cut, but passed back out. I woke up with a scabby gash about 2 inches long on my forehead. I did not watch TV for the rest of that day.

I went to work the following day and was asked about the cut. All the workers stared open mouthed at me, and I had to ask "What?" It turns out that only about 6 hours after the dream, the large quake that collapsed the Oakland bridge had hit Cali.

Originally Posted by sivason

Withtopics like this, I think we will never be able to 'prove' anything to others. Those who have convincing experiences 'know' the reality of it, but that is as far as it goes. And that is OK, I think first hand experience is the only proof there can be.

I think you're right sivason - at least when it comes to subjective experiences. Of course many things can be proven objectively, but not inner experiences. It was a stroke of incredible luck (well ok, actually it was good solid deductive reasoning and work) that the eye test was able to objectively prove lucid dreaming, and it was only then the science world reluctantly (very reluctantly to say the least) accepted it. If I had an exprience like you describe, I would of course believe it was real beyond a doubt. But as an outsider just reading what you wrote and not knowing you aside from an online presence, I'm more apt to wave your experience off since I can't know if you're reporting it accurately or if maybe your memory was wrong or possibly you were able to sense the coming quake the way animals apparently can. Not calling you a liar of course, and on a personal level I'm going to go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it did happen exactly the way you say it did - but I can't truly believe just from anecdotal evidence.

Originally Posted by sivason

Withtopics like this, I think we will never be able to 'prove' anything to others. Those who have convincing experiences 'know' the reality of it, but that is as far as it goes. And that is OK, I think first hand experience is the only proof there can be.

I one time had a crazy dream, in which I was afraid and laying helpless on a field of white. I could not stand up, because the ground was shaking real bad. I thought it felt like being in the back of a pick-up truck going 50 on a bumpy dirt road. The dream then switched to people looking around at cracked buildings and plumbing. I sat up in bed and then fell over, still dreaming. My head crashed into a window seal (IRL), but I could barely wake up. I pressed my hand to the bleeding cut, but passed back out. I woke up with a scabby gash about 2 inches long on my forehead. I did not watch TV for the rest of that day.

I went to work the following day and was asked about the cut. All the workers stared open mouthed at me, and I had to ask "What?" It turns out that only about 6 hours after the dream, the large quake that collapsed the Oakland bridge had hit Cali.

Very interesting story.

I agree of course that experience is important. But even experiences need to be interpreted. If you were unwilling to grant the possibility of precognition you could invoke coincidence to account for your dream before the quake. If you're willing to grant precognition, then you can invoke it. One of those explanations might become increasingly strained with further experience, but the fact remains that even experiences need to be interpreted. And I think this is where a critical awareness of the theories through which we interpret and of the way in which interpretation works can be of help.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Wow, great stuff! I hope you do write more when you can - I'd love to see it.

I don't know what all the tenets of materialism are - I just keep getting told that I'm a materialist because of my skepticism, but Ive never looked into what all it encompasses. I really don't like the idea of being boxed into a belief system - especially if some parts of it don't agree with what I really think is true. You make it sound like materialism requires determinism. If that's the case then screw materialism - I don't believe I have no free will or that everything is already predetermined.

But I'll definitely look into the isms you mentioned and mabe a few more. I at least want to have a decent understanding of what they're about. Still don't want to label myself or distort myself to fit into an ism, but it is interesting stuff and can really inspire a lot of thinking about what we do and don't believe.

I'm glad you appreciate the post. I'm still worried about coming across as a smartass though.

Different sorts of materialism exist and not everyone agrees on all of the implications of any particular version. So there's disagreement over whether materialism entails determinism or not. There's also disagreement over whether determinism is incompatible with free agency and responsibility or not and if so in what sense.

As I understand them, theories of reality are built of metaphors. So what we're doing when we construct a theory of nature is employing metaphors: we're using terms from things better known to us to model the big picture. So when someone says, "materialism implies X," what they're doing is explicating the metaphors. This is part of why there's room for disagreement. Of course, another reason is that different materialists employ different sets of metaphors.

If materialism is taken to imply that all phenomena are to be explained by an appeal to antecedent causes (maybe plus a bit of chance)--and I think it should be so taken and almost always is so taken--then, in my own judgment, materialism clearly implies determinism. Determinism very clearly implies, I think, that we are not responsible free agents (and I think those who claim to think otherwise are just playing games with words). I think much or most of the disagreement over these issues of interpretation comes from those who don't know how to entertain worldview alternatives, who have trouble thinking at such high levels of abstraction as entertaining competing theories of nature requires, who confuse theoretical with empirical considerations, and/or who misunderstand the proper relationship of empirical evidence to worldview-level theories.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

In fact, now that you've got me thinking about it - when I started reading Castaneda it was in hopes that it could help me achieve lucidity (and before I found Dreamviews or ETWOLD). But I found it did just the opposite - if I accepted the existence of all these crazy frightening entities and things, then I was afraid to enter into dreams where I might actually encounter them.

Darkmatters, I really appreciate the FR. I've tried to accept it, but this is my first experience with a forum and I've only been on here a short time, so I'm not sure I've done it right. Let me know if it doesn't take. Also, I don't really know what it involves, so forgive me if I just wait around to find out.

I've only heard of Castaneda. I came across references to him in some other reading and thought he sounded interesting, so I looked into him a bit. I found that he's widely disregarded because of a paper someone published which seems to prove that he was in a particular library during the time he claims to have conducted certain key interviews 1000 miles away--or something like that. So I never looked into him. But was Castaneda into astral travel, etc? Because if so, then perhaps the person who wrote the expose on him simply wasn't willing to grant the possibility of astral travel.

Anyway, I'm interested in learning more about him, but I'm not sure where to start. If you were to recommend one small book by him to a curious, critical, and somewhat skeptical reader, which would it be?

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

@ ixseft

Hey, what are your thoughts on shared dreaming? Do you think that it is possible? I have a scientific theory behind it and I want to know what someone scientific thinks.

In my opinion, you're asking the wrong question. If shared dreaming is actual, then it's possible. If it's actual, then science simply needs to acknowledge it as such. If it doesn't, then science is simply mistaken. Science shouldn't be used to embrace or dismiss conclusions a priori. So far as I know, shared dreaming hasn't even been subjected to scientific investigation (if anyone knows otherwise, I'd like to hear about it). If that's right, then no scientist is currently even qualified to have a (scientific) opinion on the subject. But more seriously, it seems that it would be very hard to impossible to subject shared dreaming to scientific investigation. But in that case no scientist could have a scientific opinion on the subject. But that doesn't even remotely suggest that shared dreaming isn't real. Science has limits. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that doesn't always want to acknowledge that, but it's obviously true that science has limits nonetheless.

I feel like we have gone one way with science, and we are far advanced in that, but we are basically in the dark ages with other types of science. Things like lucid dreaming could be some of the most advanced sciences ever, and expand our minds. If every scientist learned how to LD I feel like we would have more breakthroughs then ever in all feilds ilof science and technology.

It is good to see a discussion going well on here.
. ark matters do you have a link to Castaneda's books? I Have never heard of him before. Sounds interesting.

Sivason. I think that doing something like this is proof enough. Look at gravity. Newton was thinking about how for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when he got hit in the head, he started thinking about how there had to be an action. After a while gravity came to be known. We know that all objects have a gravitational pull proportional to their size. but... That is as far as we know. It exists because it does. No one can say otherwise (flat earth theorist aside). So we know it exists because it effects all of us. I think things like precog among other things will be the same in the future.

rrrrocketrick, yeah, we're friends now. If you click on your name at the very top of the screen it takes you to your homepage or whatever it's called, and in the sidebar on the left a little ways down it lists your friends. Don't worry - no strings attached and no obligations - it's just a handy way to keep track of people you might want to communicate with in the future.

Last night I read up a bit on wikipedia about naturalism and relationalism, then I downloaded the kindle version of a book about whitehead's philosophical writings with the very dry title Process Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. This agrees with things I've thought about - the idea of everything being in constant flux rather than unchanging forms existing eternally.

About Castaneda, a lot of people refuse to even consider his writings because of the allegations of fakery, but I accept that he couched his writings in a fictional form which actually makes them far more accessible to the reader. He was a student of anthropology and doing field work in Mexico researching this stuff, so it's quite likely that as many say he actually did get his information from Yaqui indian sorcerers or at the very least Yaqui indians who were intimately familiar with it.

My first introduction to his work came from finding this page, with long excerpts from all of his Don Juan books (these are the centerpiece of his writings, before he tried to become a guru of sorts and started up his own cult): Carlos Castaneda's don Juan's Teachings