How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Papus79
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 3:43 pm Lets try to be in the same ball park, because this conversation is getting all over the place.
Should we accept unfalsifiable ideas based on intuition on face value, Yes or No?
No, but where I think we're going to continue to disagree and likely not change our stances - different people have different reasons to research things and may be coming at these topics from very different directions. If I've had a very strange life for example where a lot of my formative experiences had, at a minimum, intense flukes of luck that really don't vanish well under examination then that does set me up for strange interests, potentially a strange life, in a purely naive materialist universe one might consider that just really unfortunate luck but we're equally living on the coherence of our own lives and if you have a deep enough question the way you fix that is going equally in-depth with the material surrounding the issues that set you on that path of curiosity and inquiry. Admittedly with what I am interested in it's even harder to tack down than the messiness of the social science (ie. high-level emergence AND largely occluded to sensory probing). That just means I'll have to wrangle the material that much longer to take it back down the stack and figure out what kinds of meaningful experiments can be done but when I get there it would need to be as rigorous and falsifiable as anything else - otherwise I'd need to keep looking.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm - there aren't any experiments that can objectively support such existential claims ( psi ). The critique on those experiments is revealing of the quality of their standards.
Do you see any contradiction between on one level saying that self-aware experience is like the wetness of water, ie. that strong emergence can give rise to that, but layers and coils of nested conscious feedback loops in nature - that's just spiritualism and nonsense? It's not that you should believe everything and anything to play gentle with anyone's feelings, it's more like people's inferences about what the larger potted context of these things are. I had to look a bit longer but the video I mentioned before was 'Consciousness Live! Ep 15 -Discussion with Michael Silberstein' and the way they chased each other around for the last hour over the intuitions about consciousness, whether it's the wetness of water or something way more profound, they spun around like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson haggling the meaning of truth just that, well, Michael Silberstein and Richard Brown were a lot more revealing whereas with Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson it seems like the issue was more the question of pragmatism.
NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm -Well there is a huge difference talking about Quantum weirdness and Quantum woo. But I don't see the connection to the paranormal?? Can you elaborate?
What exactly is the 'paranormal' or the 'supernatural' though? I actually cringe when I hear people say supernatural these days because we consider everything that's real natural and it seems to say precisely 'not real' and it seems like people increasingly look at the word paranormal as synonymous to that.

I bring it up because it's a case-in-point of the scientific establishment feeling like their grasp on their own findings is often under siege by people who have interests in their findings quite diverse from their own. If people are going to start cults that way then the concern is quite well founded, at the same time it also straight-jackets some of the free range that scientists actually have for experiments on what might be deemed edgier content.
NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm - Is this sense you are getting a product of you studying our current epistemology? The unknown complexity of the world should provide excuses to ignore logic and its rules?
I don't think Occam's razor is for shaving off things that are real. Type 2 errors are bound to happen but that's part of why if people want to spend their own time looking at these areas and have enough push to do so - it's their lives, they should do as they please with their time even if other people might think it's a waste.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm - there aren't any experiments that can objectively support such existential claims ( psi ). The critique on those experiments is revealing of the quality of their standards.
Something I realized I really should have picked out of this and I didn't for the time being (thought the nested claim was too radical, now I'm coming back to it precisely because of that) - are you actually saying that the scientific method itself would be invalid if it were applied to psi or something of that sort? This is why I asked up front earlier whether you figured philosophic frameworks trumped the scientific method in particular cases.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Papus79 wrote: October 25th, 2019, 8:06 pm
NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm

Do you see any contradiction between on one level saying that self-aware experience is like the wetness of water, ie. that strong emergence can give rise to that, but layers and coils of nested conscious feedback loops in nature - that's just spiritualism and nonsense? It's not that you should believe everything and anything to play gentle with anyone's feelings, it's more like people's inferences about what the larger potted context of these things are. I had to look a bit longer but the video I mentioned before was 'Consciousness Live! Ep 15 -Discussion with Michael Silberstein' and the way they chased each other around for the last hour over the intuitions about consciousness, whether it's the wetness of water or something way more profound, they spun around like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson haggling the meaning of truth just that, well, Michael Silberstein and Richard Brown were a lot more revealing whereas with Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson it seems like the issue was more the question of pragmatism.
- I only stated that the quality of the standards of those experiments doesn't leave any room for any serious discussion or consideration. How is youw answer relevant to my statement?

NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm -Well there is a huge difference talking about Quantum weirdness and Quantum woo. But I don't see the connection to the paranormal?? Can you elaborate?
What exactly is the 'paranormal' or the 'supernatural' though? I actually cringe when I hear people say supernatural these days because we consider everything that's real natural and it seems to say precisely 'not real' and it seems like people increasingly look at the word paranormal as synonymous to that.
I bring it up because it's a case-in-point of the scientific establishment feeling like their grasp on their own findings is often under siege by people who have interests in their findings quite diverse from their own. If people are going to start cults that way then the concern is quite well founded, at the same time it also straight-jackets some of the free range that scientists actually have for experiments on what might be deemed edgier content.
- Again how is this paragraph relevant to my statement. What I said is that its ok to talk about Quantum weirdness, but I am not interested in quantum woo which usually uses distorted versions of our quantum observations. I am interested in conversation that respect our current epistemology and don't use epistemically failed philosophical principles (supernatural, idealistic ec).

NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm - Is this sense you are getting a product of you studying our current epistemology? The unknown complexity of the world should provide excuses to ignore logic and its rules?
I don't think Occam's razor is for shaving off things that are real. Type 2 errors are bound to happen but that's part of why if people want to spend their own time looking at these areas and have enough push to do so - it's their lives, they should do as they please with their time even if other people might think it's a waste.
Is Parsimony the only rule of logic? What is real is not defined by logic but empirical verification. Logic only can identify an irrational statement or belief.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Papus79 wrote: October 25th, 2019, 8:38 pm
NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm - there aren't any experiments that can objectively support such existential claims ( psi ). The critique on those experiments is revealing of the quality of their standards.
Something I realized I really should have picked out of this and I didn't for the time being (thought the nested claim was too radical, now I'm coming back to it precisely because of that) - are you actually saying that the scientific method itself would be invalid if it were applied to psi or something of that sort? This is why I asked up front earlier whether you figured philosophic frameworks trumped the scientific method in particular cases.
Let me first address your question about the Supernatural and the paranormal. The Supernatural is the arbitrary projection of mind properties in addition to Nature or more generally to claim that processes, agencies and entities can exist/manifest in any scale of the world without the need to obey known rules, laws and empirical regularities of nature.

Now I am not saying anything of that sort. I am only pointing out that claims about the Psi or experiments that support similar claims do not meet their burden of proof, they do not follow high standards so they can be declared "scientific" and the interpretations of those experiments use unjustified assumptions.
Now I don't know what your mean by saying "philosophic frameworks" trumped the scientific method. I only pointing out that Philosophical worldviews use incompatible principles to Methodological Naturalism (science) and to logic.
Those worldviews are irrational and pseudo philosophical since they do not advance our epistemology or produce wise claims about the world.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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NickGaspar wrote: October 26th, 2019, 7:57 am Let me first address your question about the Supernatural and the paranormal. The Supernatural is the arbitrary projection of mind properties in addition to Nature or more generally to claim that processes, agencies and entities can exist/manifest in any scale of the world without the need to obey known rules, laws and empirical regularities of nature.
I always wonder whether there are exact laws people have in mind when they say this or whether it's a framing an expectation problem. I could see, for example, the 2nd law of thermodynamics as being sufficient evidence for anyone who believed that Harry Potter magic could be a real thing to rest assured that it's impossible. If you have a more comprehensive list I would like to chew on them because this is something people generally always hint at but I haven't seen anything specific to date.
NickGaspar wrote: October 26th, 2019, 7:57 amNow I am not saying anything of that sort. I am only pointing out that claims about the Psi or experiments that support similar claims do not meet their burden of proof, they do not follow high standards so they can be declared "scientific" and the interpretations of those experiments use unjustified assumptions.
That's what I hoped you were saying, it was left somewhat ambiguous between that and the possibility that experiments that could support it were theorhetically impossible.
NickGaspar wrote: October 26th, 2019, 7:57 amNow I don't know what your mean by saying "philosophic frameworks" trumped the scientific method. I only pointing out that Philosophical worldviews use incompatible principles to Methodological Naturalism (science) and to logic.
Those worldviews are irrational and pseudo philosophical since they do not advance our epistemology or produce wise claims about the world.
You cleared that up in the above statement.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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NickGaspar wrote: October 26th, 2019, 7:23 am - I only stated that the quality of the standards of those experiments doesn't leave any room for any serious discussion or consideration. How is youw answer relevant to my statement?
At a minimum I think language use might be confusing the conversation a bit.

I'm looking at a Skeptoid article on the Ganzfeld, it discusses some of the review it went through back in the 1980's, that once the direct problems such as sound leakage were resolve the hit rate went from 35% to 30% (Caroline Watt from Koestler seemed to verify that 30% is about where it's still hovering) and the other remaining critique was actually a lack of homogeneity in participants - as in it suffered the sort of problem you might have if you get a bunch of randomized men and women from 8 to 80 and see if a person can willfully pick up a basketball and shoot a basket, personal capacity seems to vary considerably.
NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm - Again how is this paragraph relevant to my statement. What I said is that its ok to talk about Quantum weirdness, but I am not interested in quantum woo which usually uses distorted versions of our quantum observations. I am interested in conversation that respect our current epistemology and don't use epistemically failed philosophical principles (supernatural, idealistic ec).
I'll try clarifying this one a bit more - I'm actually agreeing with you that quantum woo is a reach, IMHO it's the closest analogy in reach for a lot of people and so it's what they tend to go for in a similar way to how we might have said during the industrial revolution that human beings or life are like machines or in the information age we'd say that brains are like computers.

My commentary has really been about the culture war, not just from the religious now but also the rather sloppy variant of the postmodernist left who rather than seeing postmodernism as something like an abrasive to remove instinctual a priori that have no real mapping to reality they've been using it to call science things as bizarre as white, male, patriarchal, etc. and it seems like to the degree that the tyranny of human physical limitation makes people miserable and they see anyone else having what they want and don't have facts, morality, social order, can all indeed be thrown out the window in support of satiating perceived needs. It's the sort of animalism that John Gray talks about in Straw Dogs and I'd say a lot of what Brett Weinstein talks about with respect to transfer horizon maps on to the notion that when growth slows down people start looking for who can't defend what they have to in turn take it from them. A lot of the insidious political games seem to be nature red in tooth and nail, clever fakes pushing the genuine article to the wall quite often, and to the degree that science as an institution is trying to survive in such a constantly corrosive societal situation it's also forced to think about what kinds of claims might diminish it's authority in the minds of the populace and that's where I think reductive materialism gets to be the standard and also part of why there's such a taboo against things that seem supernatural or spiritual when technically those words are slush funds, we really have no idea what they mean and I see where historical guilt by association makes certain avenues of inquiry very controversial but the actualities of what's being looked at are quite innocent of any religion, social movement, or deconstructionist philosopher, they're just states of nature.
NickGaspar wrote: October 25th, 2019, 4:16 pm Is Parsimony the only rule of logic? What is real is not defined by logic but empirical verification. Logic only can identify an irrational statement or belief.
What you said in that second sentence is where I think we have a permanent sticking point - ie. that what is real is not defined by logic but empirical verification. The problem isn't that I disagree with that statement, it's what's been empirically verified in my own life and experience that forces me to take the path that I am.

To take some of the vaguery out of this - there are some things that, if they happen to you, you'll be a bit different in how you think of the world. For example being in summer day camp when I was 10 or 11, spinning a jack on a table, it hit the edge of a hardbound book and vanished so fast that I assumed it must have flown across the room. I looked all over and couldn't find it. I examined all three edges of the book - nothing. Half making fun of myself and the situation I shook the book, and there's no credible explanation for a jack falling out of the pages.

There were a few other episodes in my late 20's where I saw things in human social behavior or knock-on effects that made me wonder. Had a dreamm about something like total humiliation on a given night. I was out of town a few months later with a friend, a girl he was dating, and her friend. It was the end of the night and his girlfriends friend decided to start a really harsh argument with some other patrons over sports (really stupid), it got heated enough to where everyone was going to have a sit-in and possibly have a fight. I looked at a lawyer, a high school teacher, and a girl going to law school behaving like this as so absurd that I walked out, and my friends had to leave because they lost their numbers. A couple days later, when I was back at work and hadn't slept well the night before I was with a client and I got pushed, like never before, to behave in such a manner that I could have lost my job - the good news, being on the autistic spectrum, my self-control was already built high enough that even that much push didn't send me over the edge and I really forced to ask.... wtf just hit me? It was like nothing that's ever happened before.

Another bizarre spate of social circumstances - chatting with a friend online, she wants me to meet her in another city where she lives. One thing lead to another, something of a surprise one-nighter and I think she had that more planned than I did. I came back to where I live and - one friend was getting kicked out of his appartment by another friend's sister, another friend was having a breakup, another friend who doesn't have any association with that group got in such a fight with his girlfriend that the police got called (and to be clear - she was beating him up).

The reason events like the one I described last seem to have any relevance is that life generally is very repetative and boring. Almost all of the time you can figure on Murphy's law accounting for the minor annoyances, people will generally take a lot of from you in terms of needing to be on your guard and they'll give very little in return, and in that sense life is very, very predictable. It's just that from time to time that equilibrium punctuates, and when it does it seems to punctuate quite hard, ie. a bit like the social geography of where you are goes from being a flat plane to hitting a range of mountains.

The other part - having had mystical experiences such as on occasion touch at a distance (a sphere of a few feet around me), having had a few provisional interactions with something that presented as a goddess (something like Isis/Sophia/Mary) where one vision in particular, with my eyes closed, I genuinely couldn't look at her because her garments were so bright that it was if my eyes were trying to focus on fresh-laid snow on a ski slope at noon time on a very sunny day and I'd ad that the emotional reaction in this encounter was profound. Trying to give this event a rating scale of intensity from 0 being none, 10 being a hypothetical maximum, 2 being day dreaming, 5 being tripping balls, this was an 8 and it was sitting down after a day of work - the only thing influencing my state was fatigue and the potential to easily slip into a border state. That event in and of itself could be nothing more than a very fascinating neurological binding problem but - it was far from being either mild or subtle and it's the sort of thing that would pretty much make anyone want to dig more.

Also on seeing synchronicities. You would expect that if someone is schizoeffective, schizophrenic, or just has some other sort of apophenia disorder they'd see them all of the time and they would probably have just as surprised a reaction all of the time. My exprerience with them has been very context-dependent. I generally don't see synchronicities, I see the standard boring world everyone else does. However if I decide on a given night, especially after several weeks of planning and accruing supplies, to do an intense Golden Dawn or Thelemic working or ritual - there's a good chance that I will wake up, once, that night at 3:33 AM and the same goes for heavy or intense work of any similar nature with a psychedelic. Could that be of purely material cause, even if its exactly what I'm saying is true, and that my biological clock knows that it's 3:33 AM and it's trying to tell me something without having the words to do so? Sure. Whether we're talking about different layers of brain functioning having different resources, whether that's from Daniel Kahneman's perspective or Iain McGilchrist's perspective, there's likely enough there for that to happen. It does get a lot more interesting, however, the synchronicity takes someone else actually doing something - and I have had that.

That's a large part of the context for where I'm at. Do I have any scientific proof that such things are real? No, as far as I'm aware I have zero. On the other hand I am up to my eyeballs in anecdotes of the sort that I don't get to dismiss them no matter how socially expedient it might be.

All of that really pins down the intuition that when people are dealing with the 'spiritual' or the 'occult', they're dealing with a grand-subjective side of nature that we really don't understand yet. Part of what really drives my interest further - we seem to have an absolutely terrible grasp on human psychological problems, ie. things people are permanently stuck with that they can't change. It's interesting that they're finding out lately that psychedelics can cure addictions and have so many other mental health benefits (clearly they have hazards - most notably for anyone with schizophrenia or certain types of color-blindness and they're not recreational party favors) and yeah, there is the problem with big pharma and the return on investment model but almost anything we've done so far to combat mental illness and addiction has been quite poor and it's very interesting that psychedelics would have such a positive effect. My take on that - a lot of what's getting clamped in people's mental and emotional functioning is not self-referential in any obvious way and seems to be pinned down to objects and relationships that we only seem to be able to start seeing and understanding more properly when we take a psychedelic and get to see how our own brains operate at much deeper layers than what we're used to in the day to day sense.


As for whether all of these experiences people have as far as mystical states, synchronicity, premonition, etc. are purely internal correlations in the brain and not objectively real or whether they're expansive outward networking into a broader subjective context of the universe - most of the results seem indistinguishable but there seem to be cloud, maybe 10 percent of the effects, that jump brain/outer reality boundaries in ways that don't make any sense under an identity-based model of consciousness.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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A quick tack-on, part of why I generally don't like 'quantum' explanations of these sorts of things is that they're speculating from the outside (ie. physical) in, and I think that's the cause for a lot of rather embarrassing guesswork. What I think is much more credible is paying attention to subjective experiences, their states, their architecture, the behavior and nature of anomalies, from within consciousness itself, and only then if luck should provide it do you find some direct tie-down to the material world. This is part of why I think things like IIT are interesting as well as the ideas Michael Sibertstein is kicking around about adynamic global constraints - ie. they're trying to size these dynamics up for behavioral matches in a much more meaningful sense than 'x is weird, consciousness is weird - it must be the same thing'. Even if consciousness is a quantum process and we do in some way pin that down that just becomes a category and we might be forced to ask - how may different kinds of quantum process might be looking at and what would distinguish a mental quantum process from a non-mental one. I generally frown on panpsychism as well because it's still trying to force an identity on matter and that seems like it's more cultural hand-holding than a step toward something more accurate.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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NickGaspar wrote: October 21st, 2019, 3:33 am
Felix wrote: October 21st, 2019, 3:21 am My mother used to have clairvoyant visions but they weren't premonitions because she would have them at about the time the events apparently happened, but we would not find out about them until much later (this was before cell phones and emails). For example, she'd have a vision about a relative being injured or dying, tell one of us about it, and then hours later we'd get a phone call about it. She had experienced the event directly, there was no other reasonable explanation.
My mother also had those "visions". When I was young I though she had special powers. Then I "met" Ricard Feynman who used to ask his colleagues everyday:" You won't guess what happened to me today....absolutely nothing! Isn't it odd in a universe of coincidences???"
Then while talking with my brothers we found out that "these powers" were more of a after statement. She usually claimed she knew that something was going wrong that day.....she had a feeling, but only after the phone call!
As we grow up we get to know life better and things may derail our well being, so its more than natural to have these thoughts. This is why we always have people having "hits" for bad things but not for good news.(many thoughts/many things that can upset us). On the days when our "prophecies" fail we just don't register those misses.
This is a well studied human behavior....there is nothing there to suggest some supernatural cause.
Feynman was a brilliant man, but no body knows everything -- not even Feynman. He also did not study consciousness.

What I find odd is that Feynman apparently met with his colleagues "every day" while nothing happened to cause him to meet with his colleagues. Did he just appear before them? Was it supernatural? :shock:

I have no idea if your mother had any abilities, but your above statements are a rationalization. They are not based on experience, logic, or training. I would also guess that you do not study consciousness.

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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Felix wrote: October 21st, 2019, 3:21 am My mother used to have clairvoyant visions but they weren't premonitions because she would have them at about the time the events apparently happened, but we would not find out about them until much later (this was before cell phones and emails). For example, she'd have a vision about a relative being injured or dying, tell one of us about it, and then hours later we'd get a phone call about it. She had experienced the event directly, there was no other reasonable explanation.
Felix,

What your mother experienced and you are describing is a form of bonding. I am going to take a guess here and state that she knew the people, whom she had "visions" about. Yes? This is much like ESP, but it is a little stronger so that there are visions. I have also experienced it a few times and always with a known person, not strangers.

I think one of the problems that many people have with this topic is that they take everything metaphysical and lump it all together under the "supernatural". It doesn't matter if the subject is ESP, clairvoyance, premonitions, NDE's, or the boogeyman. We don't analyze consciousness, we mystify it, and then we dismiss it because it is mystical. :roll:

If we went camping, neither one of us would throw metal, plastic, and silly putty on a camp fire and expect it to burn. Even though all of those things are physical and matter, they are not wood. If they burned like wood, that would be damned mystical.

Just as everything that is physical is not the same, everything that is metaphysical is not the same, and we should not expect it to be. Working on demystifying and analyzing consciousness would be more productive.

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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Gee: "What your mother experienced and you are describing is a form of bonding. I am going to take a guess here and state that she knew the people, whom she had "visions" about. Yes?"

You are correct... good point. Like the mother who had a sudden compulsion to move her baby's crib away from the corner of a room that a tree crashed through a few minutes later - it was not an act of reason.

"neither one of us would throw metal, plastic, and silly putty on a camp fire and expect it to burn."

True, but I have found that red-hot silly putty will ward off mosquitoes.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Felix wrote: May 31st, 2020, 8:23 pm Gee: "What your mother experienced and you are describing is a form of bonding. I am going to take a guess here and state that she knew the people, whom she had "visions" about. Yes?"

You are correct... good point. Like the mother who had a sudden compulsion to move her baby's crib away from the corner of a room that a tree crashed through a few minutes later - it was not an act of reason.
Agreed, but it was also not simple bonding. Time was involved, so it was bonding with the infant, but it was also premonition.

I have done a lot of thinking about premonitions and suspect that many philosophies that see reality as set and continuing on in a predetermined way are trying to accommodate the reality of premonitions. I can't see the future as predetermined or set, so I think of premonitions as forecasts. Just like the weatherman's predictions, if he has enough information, he can forecast very well, but if he does not have enough information, he will be wrong.

I suspect that is why premonitions are sometimes spot on, and sometimes completely off base -- enough information. And where does that information come from? The unconscious, or to be more exact, Jung's collective accumulative unconscious. We get the most information about people and things we bond with, then a little less about those in our own species as it is a lesser bond, then a little less about the other species and all life. Then one has to consider that the unconscious ignores time, so there is a lot to consider.
Felix wrote: May 31st, 2020, 8:23 pm "neither one of us would throw metal, plastic, and silly putty on a camp fire and expect it to burn."

True, but I have found that red-hot silly putty will ward off mosquitoes.
Good to know. (There is no chance that it could be poisonous to humans is there?)

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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

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Gee wrote: June 2nd, 2020, 1:26 pm I have done a lot of thinking about premonitions and suspect that many philosophies that see reality as set and continuing on in a predetermined way are trying to accommodate the reality of premonitions.
That's an interesting thought and, TBH, to a degree it's correct from the perspective that if we're in an eternal block universe our experience is just vectoring through something like a crystalline solid.

The reason I became something like a full determinist though came before these issues factored in, and maybe the best way I can put it - at a given moment my brain is in a given state with a given set of options meeting an equally fixed environment since we're dealing with a slice of time. I'd consider my feelings a kind of internal intertia, same for whether I'm walking, sitting, working, hiking, even doing martial arts. The very next slice of time is conceptually framed by the last and there doesn't seem to be a good reason to believe that if I played the previous frame back to the current or even the last five minutes in that sense back to the current that there's a number of times I could repeat that slide show and not get the same exact result. Some people like Brian Greene swear up and down by quantum indeterminacy, I heard a recent Portal podcast (35) where in the intro Eric makes the suggestion that the quantum is as fixed and lawful as the classical but for unknown reasons it's ammentable to bad questions (his example - having multiple currencies in your pocket going to another country, the customs check asks if you have all of one currency or all of the other, in the classical world that's a question that can't be answered whereas in the quantum that bad question would cause these to flicker back and forth between one currency and the other probabilistically). Both are interesting perspectives, I don't know the answer either way but even adding quantum noise we're all riding vectors that were started in childhood and lead us into adulthood and every slice of time orientated to the last the way that the last was oriented to the one before, and similarly the one that will form as a result (either full block universe or present-past) will be related to the present slice the way the current relates to the previous. Really thinking about time and states seems to make the free will vs. determinism question, for me at least, brutally simple, unless that is people start bifurcating the definition of free will as is wont to happen.
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

Post by Felix »

Papus79: "The reason I became something like a full determinist though came before these issues factored in, and maybe the best way I can put it - at a given moment my brain is in a given state with a given set of options meeting an equally fixed environment since we're dealing with a slice of time."

You speak of time as if it is an objective physical dimension, but it is only so from a sensory perspective. In fact the term extra-sensory perception implies an atemporal, nonsequential mode of cognition distinct from the more common forms of reasoning that depend upon sensory input. I'd say that time, and reality itself, is far more fluid than most people think, although by nature it tends to be cyclical and therefore predictable. I suppose that means that envisioning the big wheel is even harder than seeing the big picture.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?

Post by Papus79 »

Felix wrote: June 13th, 2020, 1:15 am You speak of time as if it is an objective physical dimension, but it is only so from a sensory perspective. In fact the term extra-sensory perception implies an atemporal, nonsequential mode of cognition distinct from the more common forms of reasoning that depend upon sensory input.
So I'll add - I'm pretty convinced that the future pulls us forward as much as the past pushes, and I've often found myself in moods before something bad happens at work when I first wake up or when I'm on my way to work (and to clear up the obvious - I don't do something to precipitate that outcome).

To put where I'm at a bit more clearly as well - lets even imagine that time isn't a direct arrow, it's just that I'm moving like a direct arrow through it, lets say I'm moving at y = 2x. I keep moving in that direction and pick up the history and mapping for y = 2x + 1 and everything I'm doing deals with that particular kind of inertia. It seems like the rest of humanity is, at least physiologically, moving at y = 2x + 1. If I have some degree of extrasensory outreach I might, at some subconscious level (whether this processing is happening when I'm asleep, awake or both) be able to see y = 1 - x coming in to clip my line, that it has an undesirable effect, and so I'm ready to duck it, and it's a bit like looking both ways before crossing the street. I'm still moving y = 2x + 1 and trying to find the most desirable navigation I can along that route (where I don't believe that logical consistency or seeking best outcome is free will of any sort, it's just the thing to do given the responsibility that we're given over our own bodies and the punishment we incur if we neglect that responsibility) and so other vectors of time, if they're slicing through my own hypothetically, are simply parts of the causal landscape that I may not be able to make sense of but they're there.

That said though, even outside that example, I really think most of what we're dealing with is some rendition of bottom up, top down, and recursive loops of causation. Heck, TBH when I look at occult phenomena I can't shake the sense that it is hierarchical, that it's functionalism with multiple realizability, where bigger aggregates have superior insight (at least generally speaking) to smaller aggregates, and I really like Donald Hoffman's modeling of functionalism with multiple realizability with the idea of contracts because it's like scaling these rubber-band like connections where a cell in my body could have a conscious experience, I have a conscious experience of it, but the two are mutually exclusive. Similarly one's right brain supposedly can't sense communication across the corpus collosum with the left and vice a verse but the super-ordinate contract which is the whole brain senses both. Similarly there may be a family egregore which is me and my parents, there could be a whole family tree egregore, a city egregore, and while I wouldn't lay claim that deities or 'angels' (the term messenger - the meaning of that word - sounds almost like a neurological function in a superorganism, which is what one would expect as an outcome of stacking layers of functionalism) are egregores it's quite likely that most experiences of the sublime or higher agencies, especially when they come with whisks of externally unexplainable events, means that you're seeing a top-down chain of events of something above you sending its agency down through the chain.

I guess that's where I'm not even sure of how I would distinguish some kind of causal bullet whizzing across my path on something like the y = 1 - x trajectory I mentioned above, ie. there's so much recursive top-down / bottom-up stuff going on in nature that it's tough to tell how much of that can't, itself, fire laterally in ways that might seem to be acausal or to be coming in from outside of the structure of time I'm familiar with but at the same time I have to just refer to that layer as 'dark' in that magnetism doesn't need to violate time that we know of, it's just a force caused by unequal charges where you can't visually see what it is by looking at it, and similarly I get the sense that there are other things which could be happening that we haven't figured out how to measure yet because the layers of reality that they're taking advantage of are either a few or several layers deeper than our current grasp of things allows us to examine for causation and transmission.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me
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