Scientific explanation for precognition?

And exactly what “evidence or rational theor[ies]” support the so-called “existence” of “psi, ghosts, the afterlife, and other paranormal phenomena”?

And if you’re so opposed to the “reductionist-materialist worldview,” why the appeal to evidence and rationality, anyway?

The OP asked what a reasonable explanation of his experience might be, and that’s what’s been provided. As opposed to this post.

So you saying “we don’t understand how something works, ergo we have to trust any old theory about it?”

This is even worse: now you’re just presuming the conclusion is true and going from there. Maybe it’s “reductionalist,” but that’s not how science works. Or even common sense. Neither you nor anybody else has proven that ANY of those phenomena exist. But of course, if we just assume that they do, there’s an easy supernatural explanation for an event even Soapbox Monkey doesn’t seem to think is supernatural. Perfect. :rolleyes:

Been there, done that on the SMDB many times. No need to start that up again.

Oh dear. The reductionist-materialst worldview does NOT equate with logic and the scientific method. I believe in the existence of things beyond matter and energy. I also believe in logic and the scientific method. The same can be said of religious scientists, mathematicians, etc.

Neurology is not the way to deal with these questions. In neurology is the best answer we’ll get when our understanding of the brain gets better. Logic and math will suffice to explain why it is that events that have a quality of the bizarre are to be expected and are not indicative of secret order to the universe, or at least not the kind of secret order that lets you win lotto.

Allowing that there are incidents in which an individual has a sensory experience of events before the event occurs is not the same as saying precognition exists. The number of cognitive experiences one has is amazingly large. That one should occur that is later matched is not surprising. There need be no explanation beyond the fact that when all events are considered guesses the chance of one hitting is very, very high.

If an individual demonstrated such experiences with great frequency there would be some cause to talk about an actual effect to be explored. As it stands claiming a unifying explanation for all such incidents is a doctrine of faith and choice of an irrational world view. Some people are fine with this. Regardless, there is nothing to suggests any sort of para-scientific explanation for these events. There are times when our interior lives have eerie correspondence to the exterior world. These times stick with us. It does not mean they are clues to some hidden reality. When observed as part of the greater whole of events, taking into account the times when interior and exterior do not match, they are seen to be unlikely events that have occurred no more than expected.

As for as what we know about the mind at this point is that it is a product of a complex network of neurons. Consciousness is a very small part of what the brain does, an emergent property that still hasn’t been fully cracked open. Despite this the fluidity of memory, imperfect sense of time, bias towards meaning, and a number of other phenomena that are touched upon by the attempts at explanation are well documented. None of the explanations are a true explanation of the particular event. What could have happened that night to trigger the cells responsible for the images? Any number of things. The explanation of the science of the triggering, even if fully understood, couldn’t be supplied in absence of more information about the night. The general shape of the explanation, that immediate exterior stimuli and internal activations and connection weights colluded to produce the pattern of activation that correlates with what Soapbox Monkey experienced.

The world is not amazing because it is comprised of overarching meaning that casts shadows of base matter; the world is amazing because it is comprised of base matter that casts shadows of overarching meaning.

I suppose that depends on how you define “reasonable.”

Quite the contrary. If you don’t understand how something works, you shouldn’t make up any old theory about it. That’s what people in this thread have been doing.

I never used the term “supernatural,” did I? Ah, there’s the rub. To me there is nothing supernatural or paranormal about the experience of the OP whatsoever. It does not even strike me as being particularly unusual.

Those who adhere to a reductionist-materialist worldview have to play Twister[sup]TM[/sup] in order to explain such things. I don’t have to, as I recognize the existence of related phenomena. Does this mean that I am able to explain the phenomena in the OP adequately? The etiology and meaning of it all? No, it doesn’t. But I am able to say that precognitive experience are a real and ordinary part of human cognition, and the OP should not be eager to dismiss his experience as a brain fart.

Please give an example of something which is neither matter nor energy.

Even though it sounds like twister, it actually has a good deal of experimental backing. I mentioned Elizibeth Loftus in a previous post and many, many people have done similar work and confirmed what we know. We can effectively simulate many of the mechanisms of pre-condition in labotory conditions and it’s not much of a stretch to say that it’s far more likely for such a thing to occur in the real world rather than having to invoke the supernatural.

Theres a whole mish-mash of different effects happening here and it would take quite a while to work a comprehensive review of it but the two main events I see is selective bias of significant events and post-hoc fasle memory implantation.

Selective bias occurs because we tend to notice and remember significant events far more often than non-significant events, thus leading us to believe that certain events are far rarer than actual reality suggests. This is responsible for many of the “freaky co-incidence” type supernatural events where, for example, you think about a person you hadn’t met in a long time just before they call you. A related factor is that we also tend to build causal relations where none exist, thus, you believe that thinking about a person had an effect on whether they called you. If they didn’t call you but died the next day, you would then form a causal relation to that. However, we think about random people every day except we tend to forget about them very quickly after UNLESS something pops up to trigger that causal relation.

False memory is the other thing and a lot of people don’t like this at all because it strongly undermines their belief in the infallibility of memory. As I said before, Elizibeth Loftus has done some very significant work in this area and has shown just how easy it is for somebody to convince you that you had a memory of something that provably did not happen in reality (For example, she managed to get many people to generate an elaborate and detailed memory of seeing Bugs Bunny in disneyland even though Bugs is a Warner charecter). Again, laboatory experiments have shown that often, if anything is uncertain or vague in our memory, our mind usually fills out what it THINKS should have happened and then goes on to believe that as if it were a real memory.

I’m not at home so I can’t pull up any landmark papers as cites but if you check out either “Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan or “Unweaving the Rainbow” by Richard Dawkins, theres plenty of material for you to dive into. The fact is, all these supernatural phenomena have very mundane and rigourously proven roots in simple psychology and the only thing that remains uncertain is the nitty gritty details about your particular case.

Easy: patterns; information. The array of pieces on a chess board is neither matter nor energy. The pattern of words in a book, likewise.

Are these things mediated by matter and energy? Yes. But I would say that, at base, matter and energy are themselves pure pattern.

I have no doubt that a lot of the mechanisms you describe here are just as you say. Note, however, that I never said that precognition is “supernatural.”

Yep, certainly possible. I just wouldn’t assume that it must be possible.

Several weeks ago my unit was on the move in Iraq. I was in the passenger seat of a hummer and I turned to the driver and said “The hummer in front of us is going to blow a tire.” Not 5 seconds later the tire blew.

I do stuff like that so often that it doesn’t even surprise me anymore.

No, this doesn’t work. Patterns and information are not just carried or mediated by matter and/or energy, they are arrangements of either matter or energy or both. Information cannot exist on its own. Certainly information cannot be transferred without expending energy, in fact. So no, sorry.

Pffft. Ever hear of Plato? Come on, if he isn’t right no one is.

I believe that there are manifestations of matter and energy that are beyond our understanding-- but something beyond matter and energy? How could you possibly tell if it exists? By some “feeling”? Guess what-- your “feelings” are part and parcel of, that’s right, matter and energy.

Here’s a simple experiment. Some morning, grab a notepad and a pencil. Over the course of the day, whenever you or anyone you meet makes any sort of prediction, or whenever you have an odd thought, write it down. Better make it a large notepad; you’re going to end up with a lot of predictions. Then, go through and see how many come true.

Fact of the matter is, people often say things like “I bet the subway will be late today”, or “man, I’m sure the boss is going to ask for a status report on that project”, or “it’d be just my luck if it rained for the picnick next month”, or the like. Sometimes, those things actually happen, and sometimes, they don’t. But we tend to forget the ones that don’t happen, and remember only the ones that do. So it seems, in retrospect, like precognition, but isn’t.

If someone were able to provide evidence of precognition, then it would be very interesting to try to find out how it occurs. But nobody has ever yet provided evidence of precognition, so trying to explain how precognition occurs is as much a waste of time as trying to explain why purple twelve-legged lizards fly through brick walls while singing the third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner.

I think we can reply to Soapbox Monkey’s OP on two levels. On a humane and emotional level, the incident obviously involved strong emotions and feelings, and s/he felt that s/he had a precognitive experience, or something akin to precognitive.

On a more scientific level, we can set the emotive aspects of the incident aside (while maintaining due respect for the feelings of all concerned) and say simply that we have to make sure there’s something to explain before we try to explain it. And the story, as told, isn’t evidence of anything precognitive.

Human perceptual apparatus is wondeful in many ways, but it also has its flaws when it comes to accurate accounts of past experience. As an illusionist, I make a living out of exploiting these flaws. A simple summary:

  1. People don’t always observe things very well.
  2. Even if they observe well, they don’t always remember very well.
  3. Even if they observe and remember well, they don’t always describe things very accurately.
  4. What little they tend to describe well, they tend to simplify (and also modify in terms of what they want to be true, feel should be true etc.)

I make these points with no disrespect to Soapbox Monkey at all, and there is no implication here that s/he is in any way untruthful or trying to mislead. These flaws apply to us all, more or less equally. But there is every chance the version of events s/he thinks s/he honestly remembers is a tidied up version. There may have been other aspects of his/her precognition which did NOT match the actual events, but s/he will have forgotten these because they don’t fit.

We should also be aware of the danger of selectivity. Cars and car accidents are a common part of everyday life. Suppose there are 10,000 people who form an expectation of an accident similar to that in the OP. Suppose also that only 1 of those is actually then involved in such an accident. Viewed in isolation, the story told by that one person seems to require some strange explanation. But we aren’t hearing from the 9,999 people who formed a similar ‘precognition’ and nothing happened. From this perspective, it’s not so weird is it?

Trying to examine precognition scientifically is hard. We need the precognition documented BEFORE the event actually happens, and we need results that fall outside of what can be accounted for by selectivity and chance. I haven’t read everything, but I’m very familiar with most of the research done in this area, and I’ve met some of the key players. To the best of my knowledge, at the present time we just don’t have any good evidence of precognitive ability. It would be nice to have though!

As for the contributions of devilsknew and aeschines, these boards are ostensibly about fighting ignorance, not disseminating it.

Just to clerify, it wasn’t as simple as “Paul and Lil are going to be in a car accident.”

It was THE accident. The little flash in my mind was of his car, in the right lane, completely spun around so that it was facing on coming traffic (which happened because he started to spin out and hit the tree, which pivoted him the rest of the way around), and also the huge dent in the front of his car. I even recall vaguely seeing the smoke from the deflated airbags filling the interior, with Paul in a daze. In essence it wasn’t a quick flash of them in some random accident, it was exactly as the accident actually appeared.

I was spooked by what I had seen in my mind, so much so that before we came upon their crash, we passed a silver car that was parked along our side of the road, facing us, with its headlights on. As we passed by I made sure to check that it wasn’t my friends. And then…another mile down the road, there they were. Exactly as I had “remembered.”

The explanation that seems to make the most sense to me is how faulty the wiring of our memory is in our brains, and that much in the same way as deja vu occurs, I may have simply had a brain fart, where my memory becomes altered after the fact. Perhaps the trauma of actually coming upon the accident completely sent my mind haywire for a brief second and perceptions were skewed. But be that as it may, it definitely feels like I was entirely aware of what would happen long before we got there, and that this was not just a short term period where my mind was in a hazy state.

This is essentially backwards. If precognition exists, it ought to be demonstrable under controlled laboratory conditions. But so far, scientists have failed to do so. So the mere assumption that it exists doesn’t carry any weight.

The argument being implied in this thread is: “There is no other explanation for my experience, therefore it MUST be precognition.” To disprove such a statement, we only need ONE counter-example. If there is but one possible alternate explanation, it disproves the assertion that precognition MUST be the explanation. The counter-example can be “ad hoc” as you call it, and still do the job, as long as it is within the realm of possibility. Consider this example:

“This Coke is sweet - it must have sugar in it.”

I only need one possible alternate explanation in order to disprove that statement, e.g. “Perhaps it has aspartame in it.” The alternate explanation doesn’t have to be TRUE, it just has to be POSSIBLE. The Coke could have saccharin in it, and no aspartame - that doesn’t matter. The mere fact that a plausible alternate explanation has been presented is sufficient to disprove the assertion that it MUST have sugar in it.

The alternate explanations presented in this thread are in fact grounded in abundant ‘evidence’ and ‘rational theory’. Memory is a very tricky think, and we have copious examples of people having extremely clear memories that can be shown to be false. Nothing “lame-o” about it.

Without objective evidence, there is no rational reason to believe that such things exist.

I find this highly likely. This is admittedly a much more trivial example, but my brother and I often argue about an incident we both remember where a mutual friend made a rather inane comment while the 3 of us were watching a movie. We both remember the comment in exactly the same way, but we each will swear up and down that we were watching a different movie at the time. We even remember the precise scene in each of our respective movies where this took place. Since we can’t both be right, obviously one of us has fabricated an extremely detailed false memory.

No disagreement with you. BTW, to be clear, you can’t have matter without energy, but you can have energy without matter. You can’t have pattern without energy, but you can have it without matter (the radio waves running through your room right now are in a pattern).

The pattern itself is not material, nor is it composed of energy. Further, we can transmit patterns through a variety of mix-and-match methods that do not rely (directly) upon the transmission of energy into one form or another. For example, I could see a number written on a piece of paper and tell you the number over the telephone. Although the tranmission of pattern has required light, electrons, and sound (probably more), it does not rely on any particular amount of energy or matter (although one may argue that there is a theoretical minimum). That is, a billboard can transmit the same information as a tiny scrap of paper, whereas there is a theoretical (and large) minimum amount of energy required to move a car five miles down the road.

I think I would have to go with a bastardized verision of the Masters response to something like this.

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