Summerlander,
I listed some potential explanations that can be tried when analyzing experiences. It wasn't an exhaustive list, and I didn't attempt to go through a long list of experiences and argue where those potential explanations succeed or fail in relation to those examples. The primary reason I didn't do that is I have had hundreds of relevant experiences, and over a thousand fairly long posts on this forum already. I don't have time to rehash everything. I realize that just saying that I'm aware of such and such explanations isn't much of an argument. But hopefully its enough to suggest that I might have thought through some of this stuff in a sound manner, even though it isn't anywhere near enough to demonstrate that I did.
In your response, you doubled down on a couple of points as if assuming that other people haven't considered these adequately. For instance, you ask "how many equally impactful dreams or visions are recorded but never come to fruition?" That was the third point I listed. In my words, "someone has a lot of premonitions, but ignores the ones that don't come true, and waits indefinitely for a suitably close experience before declaring one true". It was important enough in my mind that it was the first point I brought up after the "random coincidences" and "extrapolation" points, which were more directly in response to your earlier comments. Are you arguing with us as if we're other people you used to know? For all you know, I've thought about all of these points at least as long and as incisively as you have.
As another example, you say "So when we reckon past experiences are insufficient predictors of future events, we need to think again." I've "thought again" thousands of times. How much is enough? I've spent a large portion of my adult life critically analyzing this, and testing ambiguous cases by generating further premonitions which are specifically designed to show whether potential explanations work or not. I gave you one example, out of many, many possible examples, albeit without very much detail. I maintain that you can not plausibly predict a jet engine failure an hour before it happens based on past experience when you're 2000 miles away. There are other possible explanations and fallacies to be considered also of course, but that's why I listed more of them besides that one.
In science, after you form a hypothesis, and test it, you move on if it doesn't work. You may go back to it and resurrect some part of it that still seems to be potentially of value, or if you find evidence that suggests a flaw in your previous experiment. But you don't keep going back to the same failed hypothesis over and over and over as if unable to accept reality. So in that spirit, no I don't have to continue to "think again" when I reckon past experiences are insufficient predictors of future events. In fact I've been over that ground so many times I'd be an idiot if I continued to keep going over it.
There's an asymmetry in our arguments here. If you tell me that in your view extrapolation from past experience is a plausible explanations for premonitions you have had or other people have told you about, I don't have any disagreement with that at all. They're your experiences, and you know far more about them that I do. But if you tell me that extrapolation from past experience remains a plausible explanation for my experiences, that's another matter, because you have very thin information about what my experiences have been. This brings us back to the point Sivason made about power. Some people seem to resent the possibility that other people might have knowledge which they lack and have no reliable means to gain. People who suck at objective reasoning tend to want to dismiss science as a waste of time. People who suck at psychism tend to want to dismiss it as bogus. I'm not trying to put you in either category, you clearly fall at least partway outside of both, I'm just pointing out the dynamic.
Earlier I said "In some cases, there's no plausible way an event can be classically predicted from past experiences." The reason I put the world "classically" in there, is I'm hypothesizing that the future is entirely defined by the present. Classically, there are myriad random events in the future. But if present quantum states are included, maybe the future is already completely defined. There's still the issue of alternative projections from the present state, which amounts to a kind of freedom. So I'm not saying the future is utterly fated. But the information necessary to make any of those projections is in the present, according to this idea, and it is a lot more information than is available classically. (I realize I haven't defined this idea of a projection at all clearly, but I can't define it clearly in this context.)
If you want to lump in the present with the past, then you could say that this is a type of learning from 'past' experience. But it is learning from experience that is not merely extracted from past sensory information. And it is a very different kind of learning than would be recognized as real by materialist skeptics. What I'm ruling out, with a reasonable degree of confidence, is the possibility that the classical, sensory information based training is adequate. If the classical sensory information is adequate for such extrapolation, then there's still something else going on which falls well outside of generally accepted physics. Because no such patterns are present in the current model. If I can predict the flight of a bird 2000 miles away in detail, then there's something else going on that's not electromagnetics or gravity.
Here's another example of when its appropriate to rule out a hypothesis. Looking back at past records, there's a pretty high correlation between when I have premonitions and where the gas and ice giants are relative to the earth. Some possible hypotheses would be:
1. I've looked at planetary positions before in the past, and am subconsciously remembering them when I create the premonitions, even though I pay no attention to astrology consciously and don't remember where anything is.
2. Other people pay attention astrology, and their actions are subtly influencing me in ways that influence my experiences.
3. Other people pay attention to astrology, and they are psychically influencing my experiences.
4. Gravity from the planets is influencing my thoughts.
5. Gravity from the planets has captured some kind of dark matter, and it's position relative to the earth is influencing my thoughts.
Of those five wild conjectures, I think I can safely rule out '4', because it makes no sense. Direct gravitational influences on my brain are strongly dominated by massive objects in my immediate vicinity. And if we consider inertial mass to be the same as rest mass, then the acceleration from me moving my head around, and other vibrations in my environment, also dwarfs the gravitational influences from faraway planets. Only the sun and the moon have a large gravitational impact, and the correlations I'm talking about are with the most massive planets, which gravitationally speaking are also very far away.
My point is that in order to make progress with this kind of analysis, a person has to rule some things out that don't seem to work. Otherwise we spend all of our time checking things we have already checked, rather than focusing on more fruitful avenues where we seem to be making some headway.
A couple more comments in regards to your last post....
Since you don't want any private information, I think you should also be more willing to give the benefit of doubt on conclusions I've drawn from experiences which I haven't shared with you.
Yes, wanna-be gurus are a sorry lot. In one way I can't judge them, since the most part I don't really know what they're capable of or how much psychological weight they've had to carry. But from another objective standpoint, they've betrayed us.
I doubt you'll stop being an atheist after you die. It never made much sense to me that having a brain should be such a severe impediment to knowing The Truth that we'll learn everything as soon as we're dispossessed of it.
Ironically, the only experience I've ever had with what seemed to be a dead person was with an atheist. He seemed to be vaguely aware that he was dead, but in a dream-like state and not questioning his atheism. I don't see why he would question it in any case. The idea that atheism is a serious problem for dead people is a theist position that is not shared by either of us.
In regards to your 'great river' anecdote....Most people seem to regard paranormal or otherwise miraculous experiences as proof of the ideas which accompany the supernatural phenomena. That's never made any sense to me. If 1000 psychics think something, and you start thinking it too without talking to them, that might prove you're psychic, but it doesn't that what they think is real or true.
Your dream also reminds me of a Masonic themed community called Paradise Park that I stumbled into while hiking. It was like your dream, but a physical place. Funnily, I was trying to follow Enoch Lane, which is essentially The Way in occult lore. I found that although it was shown as leading to the ocean on my iPhone map, in actual fact it dead-ended in a thicket.
Years ago, every night I would have at least one dream that was an interesting parables. Over time, I started getting fewer and fewer dreams but encountering more and more funny and appropriate symbols in waking life like that.
I'm highly skeptical of electomagnetics as a medium for shared dreaming. Trying to get information in dreams that way would be like trying to see your reflection in a shag carpet, except a gazillion times harder. Yes there's information there in principle, but there's no plausible way to get it out.
Here's an experience I had years ago. I'm sure I've posted about this more than once previously. I was thinking about history as if it were a braided rope. It is causally connected, and there are interrelations between the numerous threads within the rope. But the rope itself can float around. Since we're a part of the rope, we can't tell objectively if it is moving, because when it moves our memories move with it. But it would be possible to objectively know that movement is possible, if one of the threads can move relative to another thread in a sharp enough way that we can see the relative change in position. While I was thinking about this, an object that I was holding in my hand suddenly appeared somewhere else, as if it had been somewhere else.
In contrast to other experiences like premonitions and 'telepathy', I have not tried to test that experience by reproducing it over and over in different ways. It's chaos, potentially, and I don't want to risk much more of that kind of disruption. But that's one of the experiences that informs my thinking about these other subjects, because I see it to be the same kind of phenomena again but in a different form.
Here's another experience. I'm dreaming, and I have magic dice. I toss the dice, and they bounce around and come back to me. Hypnotized by my dice, a girl dives into a pool and swims across. I'm compelled to follow, but I sink halfway across. I call to my dice to save me, but when they do, I feel I am changed, and I lose something of my power or intelligence.
In the next scene in the dream, I am walking around the pool. The water is magical, and dangerous. There is a body floating face down in the pool.
Someone has one of my magical dice, and is trying to pry it open, to get at what is inside. To prevent him, to save the die, I project the other, remaining die at his head, like a weapon. It goes into him, and accomplishes my aim. But when it does, I also feel it going into my head, and I lose something of my power or intelligence again.
The dice represent the lies that a philanderer tells girls to gain their affection. The dice also represent Valium-like drugs, which amount to chemical lies. And the body is a Valium addicted philanderer named Richard who later drowned in Lake Washington. (Leaving out names doesn't help anything. The dream is unique.)
I think the 'dice' also represent my ability to manipulate the 'projections' into the future of the states that I feel, to produce outcomes that resonate with my desires. I think that's the primary meaning actually, though the other meanings are real also. This kind of dream always has many interrelated meanings like that. That is one reason why I suggest there's a neural network involved in the generation of both the dream and the events that are connected to it.
The girl swimmer would be somebody Richard lied to. And it would also be anyone whom I influenced to their detriment by showing them ideas or experiences which I shouldn't have shown them.
What I'm saying here doesn't assume superior innate wisdom or power on my part. Sharing a dangerous drug is like this for example: it requires no special ability. They say that 'information is power'. It is also true that some ideas are like drugs.
Seduction isn't entirely a matter of deception. If you present someone with a temptation, they might not be able to resist it, even if you're up front with them about what the consequences will likely be. It's still your fault if you can reasonably guess that they won't be able to resist the temptation, and that the consequences are likely to be harmful. Saying that they did it of their own free will, without coercion, is a cop-out. If you knew what would likely happen, you're still responsible.
One of the disturbing things about this "magic dice" dream is that Richard actually died. In principle I might have helped him, but I was blind and did not. If anything, I unwittingly pushed him over the edge by saying exactly the wrong things to him at the end. Moreover, I have fairly significant reason to believe, from many other similar experiences, that I do psychically influence events in subtle ways for my own benefit, and that this does have at least some real impact on other people, intended or not.
It's like when you rearrange a Rubic's cube for the sake of rotating a particular block. You can't do that without putting some other block in a different orientation also, even if you don't care about that other block and it does not appear to be directly connected to the one you do care about. Of course, everybody else is busy scrambling the worldly Rubic's cube also, not just me, so my culpability tends to be small. But small as it may be, it isn't absolutely zero.
If I had no awareness of such things at all, my culpability would be even smaller, but it still would not be zero. To some extent, you're responsible for the consequences of what you do, even when you don't have complete knowledge or control of what you're doing, such as if you're intoxicated for example. And if you're capable of affecting things in the manner that's related to precognition, then it isn't just what you do or even what you think that matters, but also who you are.
That's one example of a precognitive dream. It probably doesn't pass very many it's-probably-just-a-coincidence-or-has-some-other-explanation tests. But I have many, many other examples, some of them a lot more direct, including a dozen more that foreshadow violent events that I had no physical connection to, including multiple deaths. One of those wasn't a dream, it was a near-miraculous symbolic foreshadowing of another event in waking life. Most of them were dreams a couple of hours before the corresponding event. The 'magic dice' dream occurred a lot earlier, though there's more in the dream and more context that connects the dream to the life events. I left a lot of that out, mostly for brevity. Can you see what I don't want to have a public, evidence based argument about this stuff? Almost anything that follows in discussion is likely to be both uncomfortable and a waste of time. And yet, you care about this subject, and so do I. So if you're interested I want to say something. I'd rather keep to abstractions though, even though many abstract arguments are to me ridiculous in the face of more concrete examples.
I need to work. In any case, thanks for your thoughts. I've been making fairly rapid progress in my understanding in some ways lately, and for that I am somewhat in debt to other people who care about these same kind of things. That's part of how the telepathy/shared-identity/precognitive/fate thing works.
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