Thread: Crazy Reoccurring Girl IRL

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.