ESP and the Other Guy’s Zombie Army

 

simpsons-you-and-what-armyHow much evidence would it take to get you to believe in ESP? Most of us who are skeptical would say it would take a lot of evidence to convince us – that the reason we’re unconvinced is that we haven’t seen such evidence. And yet, were we presented with such evidence, chances are good that we’d still disbelieve it. That’s irrational, right?

Well, not necessarily.

Our lived experience supplies us with initial impressions of how plausible various claims might be, plausibilities that can be estimated as prior probabilities. If we suppose our brains reason correctly in a Bayesian way, then finding a claim extremely implausible amounts to assigning it a very low prior probability. Not exactly zero, since assigning a prior probability of exactly zero is equivalent to asserting no amount of evidence, however good, could change the reasoner’s mind, and that’s not what implausible (as opposed to impossible) means. But close enough to zero to be treated as such for most purposes – except, of course, one would hope, when we’re asked to re-evaluate evidence of the claim itself.

Classical statistics makes fruitful use of cleverly dividing hypotheses up into the null hypothesis and one alternative hypothesis. However, the human imagination is capable of entertaining multiple alternative hypotheses at once, with an intuitive sense, based on experience, of how plausible each is even before new data is presented to it. Nor, Bayesians claim, is the human imagination irrational for doing so. Indeed, the faculty of drawing prior probabilities from experience and correctly updating them in light of new evidence is the essence of Bayesian rationality.

Different experiences lead to differing prior estimates, and because of this, it should not be surprising that different people require differing amounts of evidence to be convinced of a claim. When a claim is supported by evidence that already comports with our experience, we are naturally – and rationally – more inclined to lend it credence based on that evidence. When a claim seems extraordinary to us in some way, we trot out the line “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and demand more. The seeming paradox – and evidence of our gross irrationality to the one trying to convince us – is that we may persist in our disbelief even in the face of that extraordinary evidence. Life teaches us the sad lesson that different people’s beliefs do not necessarily converge when presented with the same evidence, but may in fact diverge further! Irrational! Identity-protective cognition! Motivated reasoning! Human perversity!

Well, not so fast. As physicist and Bayesian scholar ET Jaynes points out, it is possible for this divergence to be entirely consistent with correct Bayesian reasoning on differing priors. As he notes, when we’re presented with evidence, we’re usually not experiencing the evidence directly, but hearing a report of it, and one hypothesis likely lurking in the back of our minds somewhere is that the evidence presented to us contains reporting errors. Has the evidence reported been filtered through some other guy’s cognitive biases, or perhaps through publication bias or some other form (however unintentional) of cherry-picking? Might we suspect that the extraordinary evidence is only extraordinary because of experimental error? Might we even sometimes suspect deliberate deception?

Not only may we, but the more extraordinarily the evidence that supports an extraordinary claim seems, the more we might suspect chicanery. These are our alternative hypotheses for explaining the data presented to us, and even where trust is high, and we’re willing to believe reporting error is unlikely, if the extraordinary claim we’re asked to believe on this evidence strikes us as even more unlikely than reporting error, all the evidence does is convince us of reporting error rather than the claim!

Jaynes calls such reporting errors “deception,” on the grounds that it does not matter whether the deception is completely inadvertent. But for many of us, deception implies intent, so I prefer calling it “reporting error” instead. In “Queer uses for probability theory”, perhaps one of the most entertaining chapters ever of an applied math book (the mathematically curious can follow along starting p 149 of this PDF), he discusses the famous Soal experiment in ESP and why “this kind of experiment can never convince [Jaynes] of the reality” of a person’s telepathic powers

… not because I assert [the probability of telepathic powers] = 0 dogmatically at the start, but because the verifiable facts can be accounted for by many alternative hypotheses, every one of which I consider inherently more plausible than [the hypothesis of telepathic powers], and none of which is ruled out by the information available to me.

Indeed the very evidence which the ESP’ers throw at us to convince us, has the opposite effect on our state of belief; issuing reports of sensational data defeats its own purpose. For if the prior probability of deception [reporting error] is greater than that of ESP, then the more improbable the data are on the null hypothesis of no deception and no ESP, the more strongly we are led to believe, not in ESP, but in deception. For this reason, the advocates of ESP (or any other marvel) will never succeed in persuading scientists that their phenomenon is real, until they learn how to eliminate the possibility of deception [reporting error] in the mind of the reader. As (5.15) shows, the reader’s total prior probability for deception by all mechanisms must be pushed down below that of ESP.

In claiming extraordinary evidence to support an extraordinary hypothesis, the claimant may inadvertently resurrect “dead hypotheses” members of his audience already regard as so implausible as to have likelihoods near zero – but still not, in their minds, as close to zero as the extraordinary hypothesis his evidence is claimed to support. You might call these zombie hypotheses, for their propensity to spring back to life in seemingly endless numbers and feast on people’s brains.

As Jaynes notes, an attack of zombie hypotheses can happen even in high-trust environments, and even when the extraordinary claim is true and the evidence supporting it is valid. Indeed, such things have happened to him in his work as a physicist. Such zombie attacks, he notes, have

… made us aware of an important general phenomenon, which has nothing to do with ESP; a person may tell the truth and not be believed, even though the disbelievers are reasoning in a rational, consistent way.

If such zombie attacks can occur even in high-trust environments among people (like scientists) who share a great deal of common background experience, how much more likely are they to occur in politics, where trust is lower and people routinely suspect “deception” not only in the form of innocent reporting error, but also in the sense of intentional, deliberate deception?

It is no accident that political debate so often devolves into resurrecting the other guy’s zombie hypotheses, then concluding from the sheer number of zombies that seem to exist in his mind, that he must be crazy, flagrantly and deliberately rationalizing, or both, for continuing to attack our own truthful reasoning with so many mythical creatures. That he may also be reasoning correctly, given his experience, and his zombie army might be evidence of this, is almost too horrible to think about.

“You and what army?” we’re often tempted to think of an opponent. His zombie army – the army of all the hypotheses our opponent may quite reasonably, based on his prior experience, find more plausible, according to the evidence we present him, than our claim — that’s who. For evidence cannot be interpreted except in light of prior beliefs. And because two people’s prior beliefs can differ

… probability theory appears to allow, in principle, that a single piece of new information D [D for “data”] could have every conceivable effect on their relative states of belief.

So unfortunately for us, even when everyone involved is reasoning perfectly, data never absolutely supports or refutes any claim, but only supports or refutes it relative to all the other (“prior”) information we have. When experience leads us to sufficiently differing prior beliefs, the same data that supports a claim for one of us may refute it for another – maddeningly, without either of us being in logical error!

We see that divergence of opinions is readily explained by probability theory as logic, and that it is to be expected when persons have widely different prior information.

Although we hope (and aren’t always disappointed) that the more data we share with one another, the more our beliefs will converge, it’s also logically possible for holding ever more data in common to drive two people’s opinions ever farther apart without either being in logical error. Now, logically possible isn’t the same as likely, and many of us, I’d guess, would find this possibility rather implausible. There is something too morally lazy – or simply too horrifying – about believing this logical possibility actually happens often enough to account for any significant portion of the disagreement in the world.

I know we have reasonable people on Ricochet on both sides of the ESP debate. I would be surprised if we had many on the side of “zombie hypotheses are often a good explanation for political disagreement” debate. Most of us, I think, have higher hopes for democracy than that, and would like to believe that “open discussion of public issues would tend to bring about a general consensus on them” whenever people are willing to be reasonable (thus preserving the inference that if consensus is absent, it’s because someone somewhere is being unreasonable). But – and perhaps it’s just because Halloween just past – I’ve been seeing a lot of zombies lately. What about you?

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  1. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    I don’t think you can understand practice unless you understand theory. I don’t mean practice needs theory. I mean, this is a matter of understanding, which is naturally theoretical.

    So mathematics is the highest study available to man except philosophy. If your inquiry is not in some eccentric way centered on being, the highest aspirations is mathematics.

    The old Socratic joke is that mathematicians don’t seem to understand how funny it is to say that putting one & one together is two…

    But that does not deny the remarkable resemblance of mathematics to philosophy. Luxury is a political & a polemical term. If you were instead to say privilege, if you prefer political terms, I’d agree with you. But without a sense of the orientation of reasoning–demonstration–to the question of being, there’s no way to make sense of human understanding.

    Applied math is, in my reasoning, the servant, not the master of theoretical mathematics. It depends on theory not merely for its instruments, but for its understanding of being, so it can do its work. Theory-blindness is not theory-freedom, in short…

    • #31
  2. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    I thought philosophy was just a minor branch of mathematics.

    • #32
  3. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Arahant:I thought philosophy was just a minor branch of mathematics.

    Well, at least you were thinking… Do more of that & who knows what may come of it!

    • #33
  4. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Titus Techera:I don’t think you can understand practice unless you understand theory. I don’t mean practice needs theory. I mean, this is a matter of understanding, which is naturally theoretical.

    Agreed.

    Applied math is, in my reasoning, the servant, not the master of theoretical mathematics. It depends on theory not merely for its instruments, but for its understanding of being, so it can do its work.

    I agree. I think most mathematicians would agree. Not all who regularly do applied math for a living would agree, though.

    Theory-blindness is not theory-freedom, in short…

    Definitely agreed!

    • #34
  5. Sabrdance Member
    Sabrdance
    @Sabrdance

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake:

    Titus Techera:If logic ends up making people’s daily dose of insanity seem logical, it’s worthless.

    I’m not sure if I can hunt Bayesians down one by one, or there’s some other way to do it, but they’re now on my list.

    I might suggest hunting down all mathematicians if you’re concerned about people who allow daily doses of insanity to be considered logical ;-P

    The being of the human being is not really that rational or that consistent & it is an attack on humanity to try to prove otherwise.

    A distinction between logical, reasonable, and right may be valuable.  Logic presupposes known truth values and a complete set of axioms.  In life, none of those are givens, so we reason from uncertain premises and we don’t even know if we have all the premises we need in order to reason.  And we haven’t even allowed for the possibility that the truth values may be contingent or variable.

    Thus a person may be reasonable given the information they have, but not logical because the preconditions for formal logic do not exist.

    This is basically the argument for bounded rationality arguments.

     

    • #35
  6. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Something like that.

    I think that we begin from the way our political community understands the world. Understanding that there is a way the community understands the world is the first step. Examining the dominant opinions in the community is the next step. That’s how to think about what people abstractly call ‘priors’ or ‘givens.’ Or whatever else…

    At the same time, there is a different question about how we face up to our mortality & our longings, which do not really fit together.

    The classical distinction there is between love & law, articulated at greatest length in the ancient comedies; but it is also sometimes understood, as in Plato, as the conflict between philosophy & law.

    That would be the poise of the human being.

     

    • #36
  7. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    This is very interesting:

    https://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/

    • #37
  8. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Sabrdance:

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake:

    Titus Techera:

    The being of the human being is not really that rational or that consistent & it is an attack on humanity to try to prove otherwise.

    A distinction between logical, reasonable, and right may be valuable. Logic presupposes known truth values and a complete set of axioms. In life, none of those are givens, so we reason from uncertain premises and we don’t even know if we have all the premises we need in order to reason. And we haven’t even allowed for the possibility that the truth values may be contingent or variable.

    Thus a person may be reasonable given the information they have, but not logical because the preconditions for formal logic do not exist.

    Well, the interesting part is that, if you accept the desiderata of Cox’s theorem (here’s one blogging mathematician’s aeroplane’s-eye view of Cox’s theorem, for the curious), then probability theory itself can be formalized into rules of inference which have Boolean or Aristotelian logic as its limiting case – hence Jaynes calling probability theory “the logic of science”. Bayesian programming deals with this, and started with Jayne’s thought experiment:

    How would you program a robot to quantify plausibilities in a manner consistent with Boolean logic (and the rest of Cox’s desiderata) – that is, how would you “design an inference engine to automate probabilistic reasoning”?

    Programming such a robot would be formalize the reasonable inference process, though obviously it isn’t what is usually called formal logic. Putting all the following together (a list a friend of mine in AI and I compiled once),

    1. “Information” is a quantifiable physical property. (Shannon)
    2. Given a probability, there is a simple equation to compute a new probability given new information. (Laplace/Cox/Jaynes)
    3. There is a consistent universal prior probability distribution you “should” use when you have no other information. (Solomonoff)
    4. Too bad it’s only semi-computable. (Everyone in the field)
    5. But we can resort to inductive methods (like Maximum Entropy, Transformation Groups, or Marginalization) that are computable approximations of Solomonoff‘s method. (Legg)

    sketches how it might be done.

    This is basically the argument for bounded rationality arguments.

    Certainly, if an inductive heuristic proves good enough and cheap enough, that would be a reason to use it in many circumstances, even if other, less-wrong ones were available. There’s rational irrationality, too.

    What heuristics we use, and what we’re using them for, gives pretty wide scope to what human beings might be doing being human even if our brains share the characteristics of such a robot – it’s not soulless materialism to note that as embodied souls, what’s going on in our brains has something to do with what’s going on in our minds.

    Certainly, being “rational” in the sense (many senses?) it’s usually meant is not all there is to life!

    • #38
  9. Tzvi Kilov Inactive
    Tzvi Kilov
    @TzviKilov

    Holy cannoli, this is a great post! It formalizes what I have felt intuitively for ages, that merely adding more facts, statistics, studies, etc. is not going to change anything in any of our arguments one whit. Amazingly, this is not because we’re unreasonable, but because we’re eminently reasonable.

    In fact, I have a growing suspicion that unless we hold certain (possibly axiomatic) fundamental first principles in common, we will never all come to believe in all of the same things.

    Perhaps the best we could hope for is using principles of logic and elegance to aim for a sort of metastructure that might explain why we all believe different things…

    • #39
  10. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Tzvi Kilov: It formalizes what I have felt intuitively for ages, that merely adding more facts, statistics, studies, etc. is not going to change anything in any of our arguments one whit. Amazingly, this is not because we’re unreasonable, but because we’re eminently reasonable.

    I know a medical intuitive who was working with several doctors back in the 60’s. They would test her in various ways, sometimes where she would be in an office and the patient in a room on another floor of the hospital, and she would work through remote viewing. Other times, they would bring her in to see the patient.

    One day, they brought her into an examination room where a gentleman was sitting.

    She accurately diagnosed his condition and suggested a non-invasive and non-medical treatment for it.

    The man piped up, “She could tell that by the way I walked.”

    There were two doctors in the room, one who was working closely with the intuitive. The other was the patient’s doctor.

    The former said, “She hasn’t seen you walk. She came in and you were sitting there. You’re still sitting there.”

    The patient’s doctor  said, “What the ____ do you mean? It took me six months and dozens of tests to diagnose your problem, and you think she can do it by the way you walk when you aren’t even walking?”

    It turned out the patient was another MD and very skeptical of the experiment.

    • #40
  11. Muleskinner Member
    Muleskinner
    @Muleskinner

    michael johnson:

    Muleskinner: I once argued that economists were down playing strength of econometric tests, because over time, they were becoming stronger advocates of neoclassical theory, which says (among may other things) that returns to all sectors of the economy must be equal over time

    I always took shelter in the now obviously false belief that all academics where leftist trash.

    If you thunk I are one, you’d be mistaken. Not sure what that does to you posterior, but that’s for a different post.

    • #41
  12. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Arahant:

    Tzvi Kilov: It formalizes what I have felt intuitively for ages, that merely adding more facts, statistics, studies, etc. is not going to change anything in any of our arguments one whit. Amazingly, this is not because we’re unreasonable, but because we’re eminently reasonable.

    I know a medical intuitive who was working with several doctors back in the 60’s. They would test her in various ways, sometimes where she would be in an office and the patient in a room on another floor of the hospital, and she would work through remote viewing. Other times, they would bring her in to see the patient.

    I admit I’ve always found “observation-based inferences we’re not even aware we’re making” the most plausible explanation for that part of what we call “being psychic” that’s not simply exploitation (conscious or unconscious) of our own or other people’s cognitive biases. This strips away the paranormal aspect, but does give a great deal of credit to intuition. Even a patient just sitting contains a lot of information. It’s less clear how remote viewing would work, although whoever tells her of a patient also bears information in doing so – who’s the messenger, how worried, is he carrying a thick file, what time of year, and so on?

    As a child, I used to dream of horrible storms before they happened. That I could have easily forgotten even very vivid storm dreams if no storm happened within a few days is certainly very plausible. But I also was absorbing a lot of information – the local weather forecast, the seasonal rhythms of the time of year, having a condition commonly observed to be sensitive to barometric pressure…  quite possibly, I dreamed of storms because of these things, doing “better than chance” with my dreams, but for mundane reasons. As a child, I also found it rather “spooky” how often I could guess the next note or phrase even in music I’d never heard, but later I found out that all it meant is I was sensitive to those patterns composers use to write fulfilling music.

    Tacit knowledge – “we know more than we can tell.” (And even when we can tell it, we’re not obligated to use scientific wording to tell it.)

    • #42
  13. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Muleskinner: Not sure what that does to you posterior,

    Haha!

    • #43
  14. Muleskinner Member
    Muleskinner
    @Muleskinner

    Titus Techera: I don’t think you can understand practice unless you understand theory. I don’t mean practice needs theory.

    As the great American philosopher Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

    • #44
  15. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: Tacit knowledge – “we know more than we can tell.” (And even when we can tell it, we’re not obligated to use scientific wording to tell it.)

    That is certainly possible in some cases. But a case where a doctor took six months and many tests to diagnose it?

    But here we have the situation we are speaking of. The doctor who was the patient refused to believe it even when he saw it. He tried to rationalize it. It is what most people do with their own psychic phenomena. Are all reported psychic phenomena actual psychic phenomena? No. Should they be investigated more thoroughly? Yes. If some investigator is dead set against the existence of any psychic or non-corporeal phenomena, are they ever going to believe? No. A healthy dose of skepticism is needed, but it should not be combined with willful blindness and stupidity.

    • #45
  16. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    I remember one haunting was traced to vibrations from a fan. It was making the eyes vibrate in a way to induce visual hallucinations.

    • #46
  17. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    My mom had eerie episodes of ESP, but always only where one of her children was concerned. I posted some of them in a thread of Trink’s a while back. Mom made me a believer.

    • #47
  18. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Arahant:

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: Tacit knowledge – “we know more than we can tell.” (And even when we can tell it, we’re not obligated to use scientific wording to tell it.)

    That is certainly possible in some cases. But a case where a doctor took six months and many tests to diagnose it?

    Such a scenario seems plausible to me – to notice intuitively what doctors missed because they were busy chasing down the wrong rabbit hole.

    I spent years obviously hypermobile without anyone informing me that it might be a risk factor for not just occasional injury, but degeneration from daily wear and tear. I have yet to locate an available specialist to authoritatively rule in/out EDS, but if it’s ruled in, that will be decades of periodic exams and labs versus one observant friend in nursing.

    While I don’t consider my own experience usual, six months, even with tests, does not strike me as a particularly long time to miss what it would take subtlety or just the right approach to see.

    Obviously on such a matter, my personal zombie army contains not only reasonable (to me) speculation, but personal experience – although equally obviously, questions of comparability also come to the fore (e.g, the ratio of info my nurse friend had on me to info thought unsuggestive over the decades strikes me as comparable to an intuitive’s versus “a mere” six months, but my friend certainly had more absolute info).

    Perhaps perversely to you, the high value I set on intuitive faculties makes paranormal explanations less “necessary” to me, even though I know you also place high value on intuitive faculties. On the other hand, valuing intuition is also an area of agreement, even if we disagree on the source. And I am not particularly bothered by folks calling intuitive things “psychic” in order to describe the uncanny presentation of intuitive leaps, even though I look at it differently. They can be uncanny.

    • #48
  19. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: And I am not particularly bothered by folks calling intuitive things “psychic” in order to describe the uncanny presentation of intuitive leaps, even though I look at it differently. They can be uncanny.

    Perhaps I am a bit more precise. We agree that intuition from sensory data can look like psychic, but I don’t want that called psychic. The psychic is when it is not from observable data. The psychic is when there is some other connection, some other source. Psychic is when you have a dream where a spiritual figure tells you, “Go talk to so-and-so, she will take care of you,” and so-and-so is someone you met once years ago and know almost nothing about, but so-and-so had the same dream from her perspective on the same night.

    • #49
  20. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: I spent years obviously hypermobile without anyone informing me that it might be a risk factor for not just occasional injury, but degeneration from daily wear and tear.

    Understood. That is a connecting the dots thing. When I broke my back, the hospital knew I was on the gluten-free diet, (Which they made worse than anything I have ever had. BLECH!) But did the orthopedic surgeon look at that and say, “These two things could be related, why are you on this diet?” Nope. I only later figured out what was going on a few years later when another problem cropped up. They were all related to having had untreated celiac disease for several years and not absorbing nutrients properly. And someone who knows the person well might very well be able to connect the dots that doctors had not. This would be intuition based on observation. Tests still need to be connected.

    But that is still not the same as walking into a room with no information and being able to diagnose a man who is just sitting there with a non-visible problem. This is psychic intuition, and something very different.

    • #50
  21. Owen Findy Inactive
    Owen Findy
    @OwenFindy

    Arahant: That actually made a lot of sense, which probably means that you misstated it

    Burn?

    • #51
  22. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Owen Findy:

    Arahant: That actually made a lot of sense, which probably means that you misstated it

    Burn?

    When Titus starts making sense, we start to worry.

    • #52
  23. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    ESP is when your sister runs away from home as a teenager, and your mom has a dream that she is in a house in Tempe, Arizona, dreams the street address, and flies from Chicago to Tempe and finds the house and brings your sister home. This happened.

    • #53
  24. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Arahant:

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: And I am not particularly bothered by folks calling intuitive things “psychic” in order to describe the uncanny presentation of intuitive leaps, even though I look at it differently. They can be uncanny.

    Perhaps I am a bit more precise. We agree that intuition from sensory data can look like psychic, but I don’t want that called psychic. The psychic is when it is not from observable data. The psychic is when there is some other connection, some other source. Psychic is when you have a dream where a spiritual figure tells you, “Go talk to so-and-so, she will take care of you,” and so-and-so is someone you met once years ago and know almost nothing about, but so-and-so had the same dream from her perspective on the same night.

    Am I right in inferring you also exclude internal rumination as a source – for example, finally solving a puzzle that’s been bugging you for years, despite receiving no new data on it? That there must be an external source, but that source can’t be perceived in any observational terms, conscious or unconscious?

    I’m not surprised this is hard to test for conclusively – it does require pretty scrupulous sealing off of information.

    I’ve had “spooky” things happen to me, because life is weird and so’s my brain. But nothing, however fantastic, where imaginative or observational powers – or just coincidence – didn’t provide a plausible explanation. And I include religious visions in this – haven’t had one in a while, but I remember what they’re like, and whatever Godly (or other) insight is communicated during those times, the medium of communication appears to be a vivid imagination, educated in a particular way of thinking.

    • #54
  25. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    RightAngles:ESP is when your sister runs away from home as a teenager, and your mom has a dream that she is in a house in Tempe, Arizona, dreams the street address, and flies from Chicago to Tempe and finds the house and brings your sister home. This happened.

    You do see, though, how to other people it might seem like your mom was maybe incredibly good at picking up some clue? That whatever reason spurred her daughter to flee to Tempeh might have been a reason she was aware of at some level? I realize that, “If you had witnessed it, you would have believed – I cannot describe to you how we knew it couldn’t have been clues,” or “I’m sure if my mother thought about it long enough, she could rationalize it away, but that would be a rationalization,” are two cogent retorts to the “Maybe it was clues?” question. But then, that’s rather the point: these are two different ways of seeing the world, different enough that even a shared uncanny experience might be interpreted differently.

    • #55
  26. Tzvi Kilov Inactive
    Tzvi Kilov
    @TzviKilov

    On this whole recent discussion, I’ll just note that I think it’s hilarious the way the brain must be made into a more and more brilliant machine on rarer and rarer occasions and on more and more of a subconscious level, until it basically achieves a level of understanding utterly inexplicable by anything else we know about the brain except that these strange things sometimes happen…

    • #56
  27. Tzvi Kilov Inactive
    Tzvi Kilov
    @TzviKilov

    In other words, if you have no systematic way of explaining it but rather must resort to, “sometimes the brain just does things that are seemingly impossible,” you are essentially resorting to a supernatural explanation, it seems to me.

    • #57
  28. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: Am I right in inferring you also exclude internal rumination as a source – for example, finally solving a puzzle that’s been bugging you for years, despite receiving no new data on it?

    Generally, yes. We can have insights without ESP. We can have intuition without ESP.

    That there must be an external source, but that source can’t be perceived in any observational terms, conscious or unconscious?

    Right. ESP is something that you should have no natural way of knowing, like with Right Angles example of her mother and sister. That one is a strong story. I have some stories, but they are not as strong, such as having a friend come to “visit” just after his death and knowing that he had died. I knew he was going through a dangerous operation and that he might not survive, so one could say it was an inference. He had no corporeal form when he “visited.” I just knew he was there to say hello and he was laughing at me for what I happened to be doing when he visited. Does anyone besides me know that I knew before I went and logged on to see the note from his brother? Nope. So, it’s not as strong a story as RA’s. I have others, too, but most could be assigned to “coincidence” by outsiders.

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  29. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake:

    RightAngles:ESP is when your sister runs away from home as a teenager, and your mom has a dream that she is in a house in Tempe, Arizona, dreams the street address, and flies from Chicago to Tempe and finds the house and brings your sister home. This happened.

    You do see, though, how to other people it might seem like your mom was maybe incredibly good at picking up some clue?

    No. It turned out my sister was trying to hitchhike to San Francisco for a Grateful Dead concert. It was 1969. We had never even heard of Tempe, AZ.  My sister merely ended up there by hitching rides, not by a plan. She was going to start hitching again after resting there for a day or two. There is no explanation for how my mom found her. And this wasn’t the only instance of Mom’s ESP either. And quit bein’ such a STEM person!

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  30. Kay of MT Inactive
    Kay of MT
    @KayofMT

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake: But then, that’s rather the point: these are two different ways of seeing the world, different enough that even a shared uncanny experience might be interpreted differently.

    I was driving from Norwalk CA one evening to San Fernando Valley with my two children, when a voice out of nowhere ordered me to “go to Margrit” who lived in Hollywood about halfway between the two areas. It was about 10 or 11 at night and I’m arguing with myself about where the order came from. When I looked up again, I was in front of her house with no recollection of driving there. Kay, she states, “what are you doing here, you never come at night.” I couldn’t tell her why I was there. She gave me a cup of coffee and about 15 minutes later the phone rang. It was the police dept.,  her husband had been in a terrible auto accident on the Hollywood Freeway. I’ve told this story before, and have had 3 separate ESP incidences with this friend. There is no way any preexisting knowledge could have prepared us for this night. She is still alive and lives in Zurich if anyone wants to check it out. She was 80 years old on the 27th of October.

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