How many philosophies can handle premonition?
- Kate
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
Physicalism, Materialism and Methodological Naturalism are very limited and do not deal with the big issues such as the nature of human consciousness; they ultimately suggest that life is without meaning or purpose. But scientific progress is itself raising questions that reveal the limits of these secularist positions. Physicists and mathematicians theorize about multiple dimensions and the possibility of there being many universes and these ideas are not likely to be verified by scientific methodology any more than we can evaluate the claims that are made based on premonition.
Idealist philosophy argues for the central role of the ideal in the interpretation of experience. In this view the real world exists essentially as spirit or consciousness and sensory things are not the most fundamental aspects of reality. If we do allow the possibility of there being more than physical substance then premonition also becomes a theoretically possible.
I personally believe that there is more than matter and although premonitions may not be verifiable but scientific methodology I have to accept that they may be conceivable.
- Felix
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
- NickGaspar
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
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???"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.
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.
- NickGaspar
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
Papus79 wrote: ↑October 20th, 2019, 6:22 pmI think what you said to Kate actually makes more sense than this in that it only unpacks coherently if we take for granted that there's overwhelming evidence against it and that it's some sort of purely faith-based economy.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 20th, 2019, 6:01 pm
Physicalism or materialism are biased philosophical views, but the problem with premonition is not limited to those two positions, but with a far more important one...that of Methodological Naturalism and with logic of course.
The problems in this area are a bit different, and it's a lot of the same sociological and political strangeness that you have around the research of NDE's. Normally when you have real science facing down cranks, like with intelligent design promoters, the asymmetry of quality is painfully obvious. Here it seems like you have divided camps where neither seem to stand out as what you'd typically think of as cranks and you similarly notice an incapacity of commerce or reconciling differences of results. That seems like it's a cultural and political lacuna really preventing this from getting resolved, and with closed cases of that nature the number of professionals chasing after alternative hypotheses dwindles to nothing rather than inexplicably growing.
I haven't followed your discussion that closely so I can not really comment on the specifics of your post (NDE's, ID etc).
My comment is based on our current general understanding about intuition/premonition. We have mountains of evidence (and a Nobel Prize related to related studies) that prove intuition based speculations are not more trustworthy when they originate from an authority of a field. Further more if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable our premonition on it is irrelevant..since our standards of evidence are empirical and personal revelations do now qualify as such.
- Papus79
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
I think that does run a bit orthogonal. To recap some things this thread in no way is attempting to prove veridical perception in the way of premonition, it's asking the question - if someone had an experience that was powerfully persuasive enough for them to need to consider the idea that they can draw information from the future, what versions of cosmology and philosophy can accommodate for that.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 6:01 am I haven't followed your discussion that closely so I can not really comment on the specifics of your post (NDE's, ID etc).
My comment is based on our current general understanding about intuition/premonition. We have mountains of evidence (and a Nobel Prize related to related studies) that prove intuition based speculations are not more trustworthy when they originate from an authority of a field. Further more if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable our premonition on it is irrelevant..since our standards of evidence are empirical and personal revelations do now qualify as such.
A couple instances of what I meant by orthogonal - intuition-based speculation means going with your gut. If you perform an experiment, double-blind it and all of that, and get the result that the hypothesis anticipated it could be that the hypothesis was overloaded and it doesn't change the reality that the hypothesis did yield a result matching the hypothesis, I think a lot of the arguments against claims of having experienced premonition in this thread have been of that type (I might have been a bit too flippant in the analogy I used in the OP of 'I saw the number eight and - gasp - I saw it five months later! Deja Vu is real dawg!', to be fair though that type of flippancy tends to be common on the internet and I may have lost communication value in being that sarcastic upfront).
Now, as far as unfalsifiability, it's caught up in two zones. On one hand claims of extended mental phenomena can be researched, part of the problem is you do have results carving both ways and one of the places that it seems to at least hold somewhat consistent for both sort 'believing' and skeptic researchers is the Ganzfeld where random chance should yield .25 and the accumulated results over time have averaged something closer to .31 or .32, and they admit that they're still not sure what to do with that. It's not the only case but it's the one that's clearest cut. That's of course dealing not with information across time but information at the same time somewhere else, and what I think Felix mentioned earlier, ie. Everett Many Worlds interpretation might suggest in some way that we have combinatorial explosion on steroids with future events (ie. continual compounding of bifurcation), and that idea would explain something like veridical perception of the now being much more likely than veridical perception several months out. With Minkowsky spacetime, or eternal block universe, you don't have that sort of constant compound splitting but something much more like a very complex 4D crystal or really, as life is experienced, something like a really big blu-ray for analogy. Either way - seeing out three to six months, even with Minkowsky spacetime, doesn't seem like it's something your subconscious mind would be able to do very easily because it's built for Darwinian survival and we're obviously not living in Frank Herbert's world with sand worms and spice, whatever we have is our equipment and it all takes caloric input to function. In that sense though, if a person has a deal-breaking premonition that comes with enough load to force them to accept it as such and it's out that far that might strongly suggest that it did come from somewhere outside of themselves. I get that people would find speculation on metaphysical beings distasteful, particularly that they're nearly certain that any belief in such things is purely a result of bad anthropology, past tyranny, religious superstition, and current ignorance or fancy keeping it alive like a trick candle but it's worth mentioning that increasingly what's keeping that alive these days is not anthropology and bad cultural software but experiences that keep reaffirming these things for people.
From that perpsective though I have to take my own situation and my own experiences for what they are and also know that they're not portable, ie. that no one has any particular reason to take them as seriously as I'd have to, similarly if they'd had similar experiences they'd be the only ones who could vet or falsify them, which is why I'd agree that a person can't submit personal experiences as proof of anything. What personal experiences of that nature I think constitute is both a reason to explore areas that other people aren't and in a lot of ways, especially when the realm of ideas they're pushed to examine are in the discard pile they have that much more of an obligation to explore it as rigorously as they can and do whatever they can to cut back on fancy in the models - and they have to do that on their own very carefully because they have on one side people who'd tell them that everything they're thinking is confirmed fancy and that they should really throw it all away and on the other you have the crystal and bee pollen people who want to believe just about anything, so clearly in that case conforming to the expectation of either one group or another leads away from truth rather than toward it.
That's sort of where I'm at - I'm inquiring into something that I need to. At best if I run into people who are 99.99999% sure that I'm wasting my time on things that are pretty much proven to not be real I don't think it's realistic that anyone's minds are going to be changed, at a minimum though I might be able to point out assumptions they're making that could be structural blind-spots in their examinations of things they actually care about.
- NickGaspar
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
Papus79 wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 6:48 amNickGaspar wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 6:01 am I haven't followed your discussion that closely so I can not really comment on the specifics of your post (NDE's, ID etc).
My comment is based on our current general understanding about intuition/premonition. We have mountains of evidence (and a Nobel Prize related to related studies) that prove intuition based speculations are not more trustworthy when they originate from an authority of a field. Further more if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable our premonition on it is irrelevant..since our standards of evidence are empirical and personal revelations do now qualify as such.This is why I mentioned Daniel Kahneman's work which won the Nobel Prize on decision making. No matter of the authority or the specialist behind a gut-choice, the statistics are against it. But again the problem is far deeper than that. Sure we make choices based on unconscious cues (intuition) but that is not the way we distinguish knowledge from ordinary claims plus accepting claims only on those cues is irrational and we acknowledge that.intuition-based speculation means going with your gut.
- Felix
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
That's called dishonesty. As I said, "my mother had experienced the event directly, there was no other reasonable explanation."NickGaspar: 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!
I was not referring to vague feelings but detailed accounts of the events that turned out to be accurate, information that one could not have known unless one had been at the accident scene or whatever. And my mother received no phone calls or communication about the events when they occurred, she could not have because there was no way for the person to contact my mother, the incident occurred late at night, etc.
Generally I avoid talking about this subject because those who have never experienced such things, and who believe that consciousness is epiphenomenal and that one can only gather information through one's five senses, will claim such abilities are impossible - which in a sense is true because they don't seem to be possible for them.
- NickGaspar
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
Well it isn't "dishonesty". I only mentioned an example on a common misconception people have. As the years pass we tend to "add" things in our stories or when we are young we are gullible to what older people tell us.Felix wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 2:47 pmThat's called dishonesty. As I said, "my mother had experienced the event directly, there was no other reasonable explanation."NickGaspar: 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!
I was not referring to vague feelings but detailed accounts of the events that turned out to be accurate, information that one could not have known unless one had been at the accident scene or whatever. And my mother received no phone calls or communication about the events when they occurred, she could not have because there was no way for the person to contact my mother, the incident occurred late at night, etc.
Generally I avoid talking about this subject because those who have never experienced such things, and who believe that consciousness is epiphenomenal and that one can only gather information through one's five senses, will claim such abilities are impossible - which in a sense is true because they don't seem to be possible for them.
I am not dismissing your claim at all, I only state that I found other explanations far more probable than someone being able to foresee the future or to sense things and I only do that because you can not back up your claim with evidence. I am open for any claims if evidence are provided but I can not lower my standards because I need to be sure about the truth value of the claims I accept.
Now consciousness is not an epiphenomenal since its a mind property which affects and been affected by the physical world. Its nor right to use extreme positions in order to make our ideas sound "better". Conscious states are states of the mind by which enable us to direct our attention to organic or environmental stimuli of interest.Its an essential capability of the human brain and an ingredient of success...evolutionary speaking.
"that one can only gather information through one's five senses, will claim such abilities are impossible - which in a sense is true because they don't seem to be possible for them."
- Sure.....are there any objective, sufficient evidence? that 's all you need and you got my attention!
- Papus79
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
You pretty much completely evaded everything I said (congrats) and found a way to crow-bar this back in even though it had little or nothing to do with any of the content of my response.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 2:14 pmThis is why I mentioned Daniel Kahneman's work which won the Nobel Prize on decision making. No matter of the authority or the specialist behind a gut-choice, the statistics are against it. But again the problem is far deeper than that. Sure we make choices based on unconscious cues (intuition) but that is not the way we distinguish knowledge from ordinary claims plus accepting claims only on those cues is irrational and we acknowledge that.
Can I take it that this is the limit of your involvement in the thread? If so public service announcement taken - Daniel Kahneman suggests that intuition comes from a given layer of the brain that generally operates below the inspection of our conscious minds and puts together a rather primitive and instinctual circuit for assessing reality which can be tapped into at times but isn't by default correct about many things (I think it can be informed to a greater degree through intellectual penetration but that's a slightly different topic). If that's the limited core deliverable it's probably a good time for us to hang our conversation up and do things we both find more interesting because it's on loop now and we've already gotten the message.
- NickGaspar
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
I would really like to address the rest of your comment , but you are using a "shotgun" approach by mentioning all king of different speculations from different fields that can be described by the following statement. "Humans have imagination and they come up with many different stories for the same phenomenon by using intuition as an excuse".Papus79 wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 8:04 pmYou pretty much completely evaded everything I said (congrats) and found a way to crow-bar this back in even though it had little or nothing to do with any of the content of my response.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 2:14 pm
This is why I mentioned Daniel Kahneman's work which won the Nobel Prize on decision making. No matter of the authority or the specialist behind a gut-choice, the statistics are against it. But again the problem is far deeper than that. Sure we make choices based on unconscious cues (intuition) but that is not the way we distinguish knowledge from ordinary claims plus accepting claims only on those cues is irrational and we acknowledge that.
Can I take it that this is the limit of your involvement in the thread? If so public service announcement taken - Daniel Kahneman suggests that intuition comes from a given layer of the brain that generally operates below the inspection of our conscious minds and puts together a rather primitive and instinctual circuit for assessing reality which can be tapped into at times but isn't by default correct about many things (I think it can be informed to a greater degree through intellectual penetration but that's a slightly different topic). If that's the limited core deliverable it's probably a good time for us to hang our conversation up and do things we both find more interesting because it's on loop now and we've already gotten the message.
I don't find it meaningful to analyze every single unfalsifiable hypothesis that is out there since this is not a philosophical endeavor!
Again the problem is that we don't have a way to say whose gut feelings are correct.
ie.This is why we have more than 10 conflicting quantum interpretations for ~100 years and we are favoring the one with the most advanced math work.
ok Sure...one of those could be the correct but what does that say about our ability to pick the correct one ? Nothing. We have different ideas based on different cues that are either cherry picked (personal biases) or missed and this is how we come up with our opinions and final judgments.
Your question was "How many philosophies can handle premonition?"
Before counting philosophies we need to define what premonition is, how people come up with this heuristic, why it is untrustworthy, why it says nothing about the truth value of the philosophy etc etc.
Its like asking "how many religions can handle more than one deity"...when they can not even prove deities' existence.
In my opinion this is not philosophy but an attempt to category philosophical views. In order to do Philosophy its essential to be informed about the limits of our heuristics and how they are informed by our vices.
- NickGaspar
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
Let me try a more meaningful approach by asking the following question.Felix wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 2:47 pmThat's called dishonesty. As I said, "my mother had experienced the event directly, there was no other reasonable explanation."NickGaspar: 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!
I was not referring to vague feelings but detailed accounts of the events that turned out to be accurate, information that one could not have known unless one had been at the accident scene or whatever. And my mother received no phone calls or communication about the events when they occurred, she could not have because there was no way for the person to contact my mother, the incident occurred late at night, etc.
Generally I avoid talking about this subject because those who have never experienced such things, and who believe that consciousness is epiphenomenal and that one can only gather information through one's five senses, will claim such abilities are impossible - which in a sense is true because they don't seem to be possible for them.
We agree that many philosophical positions are founded on intuition driven decisions. How does this practice promote the ultimate goal of philosophy,which is the construction of knowledge and wise claims about our world?
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
as if that explanation applies in the case of his mother.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 21st, 2019, 4:34 pm Well it isn't "dishonesty". I only mentioned an example on a common misconception people have.
And here you are mind reading, in the sense that you assuming this is applicable in his case.As the years pass we tend to "add" things in our stories or when we are young we are gullible to what older people tell us.
It is one thing to say 'I would need more to be convinced myself'. It is another to explain what is going on in his mother's case.
Sure, but at the same time you need to be careful about assuming that your model of 'these experiences' is corrent in any case that comes up. There is a middle path and one that is more rational. To assume your model applies here to his mother is mere speculation.I am not dismissing your claim at all, I only state that I found other explanations far more probable than someone being able to foresee the future or to sense things and I only do that because you can not back up your claim with evidence. I am open for any claims if evidence are provided but I can not lower my standards because I need to be sure about the truth value of the claims I accept.
- Papus79
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
That's not what I said, and it sounds like you're using a private definition of 'intuition' as anything you personally disagree with or don't believe. That's a great way to never learn much of anything but - some people are into that.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2019, 2:03 am I would really like to address the rest of your comment , but you are using a "shotgun" approach by mentioning all king of different speculations from different fields that can be described by the following statement. "Humans have imagination and they come up with many different stories for the same phenomenon by using intuition as an excuse".
I did talk about falsifiability, I did talk about what it is for people to perform scientific experiments on what's falsifiable, that you're repeatedly claiming is unfalsifiable, and I mentioned a particular research experiment where reductive materialists are getting results too far above chance right along side other researchers. Is it only the scientific method or falsifiable, and not intuition, when you agree with it?NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2019, 2:03 amI don't find it meaningful to analyze every single unfalsifiable hypothesis that is out there since this is not a philosophical endeavor!
You're repeatedly, and constantly, crow-barring in gut feelings. No one else is.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2019, 2:03 amAgain the problem is that we don't have a way to say whose gut feelings are correct.
... and agree with you on everything it seems.NickGaspar wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2019, 2:03 amIn my opinion this is not philosophy but an attempt to category philosophical views. In order to do Philosophy its essential to be informed about the limits of our heuristics and how they are informed by our vices.
- Papus79
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
The problem I have with that approach is that science is *constantly* tapping philosophy back in on its path, and very few of our purely intellectual speculations are ever correct because we're living in a world of such high complexity, what Vervaeke often brings up as combinatorially explosive, that our intellectual inklings and models will normally only ever touch on what we see. Part of why science has to get extremely specific in its claims is for the removal of variables.
That said - totalizing ontological worldviews, whether reductive materialist, theist, pantheist/panentheist, idealist, neutral monist, or whatever else tend to be private matters, some people will debate them with others to see whether the worldview they hold is as well-informed as they believe it is, others will try proselytizing but the problem I find with the later is that the quality of criticism is rarely of a useful quality.
That said though the question is a question, it is a specific question, how many philosophies can handle premonition. It can indeed be answered even by people who are flatly agnostic, or even antagonistic to the idea of premonition being real, because the concept of what it's claimed to be is pretty clear cut - ie. knowledge of the future, and so the question is which models of cosmology have the future or some coherent version of it already existing and potentially accessible.
- Felix
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Re: How many philosophies can handle premonition?
There is a mountain of evidence, but intuition is unruly and cannot simply be called up on demand. Conscious awareness is the mere tip of the iceberg of consciousness. Most of us are aware of only an infinitesimal amount of what is going on within or around us, but some people's sphere of conscious awareness is much greater than average. When awareness is highly refined and focused in a particular field such as art or science, we call it genius. There can also be a more general sort of psychological or intuitive genius that is more fluid and difficult to categorize.Felix: those who believe that one can only gather information through one's five senses will claim such abilities are impossible - which in a sense is true because they don't seem to be possible for them.
NickGaspar: Sure.... are there any objective, sufficient evidence? that's all you need and you got my attention!
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