Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑July 3rd, 2020, 10:40 am
Premonitions are an example of these mysteries. Surely there might be a 'rational explanation', and perhaps the most obvious of these is that a premonition is a simple mistake or misrembering, as you observe. But I would hesitate to leave it there. Telepathy is plausible, I think, whether or not we can 'prove' it. Temporal perception might be possible too. The possible explanations are limited only by our imaginations. And I think this is one of those topics where there is no clear way to prove or disprove anything, so speculation is the order of the day, and all we have to do is to remember that the gap between speculation and proper knowledge is pretty big....
A couple things I'll add:
I think the first thing above points at a couple dynamics that are at loggerheads. The first dynamic is the belief that the current state of physical science as squashed all 'spooks', that all they ever were were just primitive anthropology and or a plug in for lack of science, and the pushiness of certain western religions both switch people off and cause them to bundle them all together as 'Science has killed magic, spooks, and the belief in the paranormal and you disagree it must be because you want to believe whatever you do more than you want to know the truth'. On the other side of this you have people who can say 'Yeah that's great but - I've had to sit with experiences you haven't which upturn that apple-cart' and unfortunately for those people there's nothing they can bring to the outside world directly to triangulate in order to explain what it is they think they saw in a way that doesn't get shoe-horned into mistaken identity, sloppy thinking, or crypto-religiosity.
This is part of why I beat on the political angle when explaining what I think is happening here. Looking at politics here in the US, which seems to be now an expansion of the stuff that was happening at Evergreen, Bret Weinstein actually said something quite concise that I can't find at the moment and am likely paraphrasing badly - 'A small number of people lead witch hunts, a large number of people follow, and equally large number put their heads down and stay silent, and a small number of people have a way of becoming the next witches!'. The pattern we seem to have, either as a stochastic result or as something in our DNA, renders us generally dogmatic and I can see where it's highly likely that there would be members of a tribe who set their face against reality in some way, the tribe couldn't survive internal conflict, and so that person's views would be 'poison' and it could be that the person has terrible ideas that embrace naivety, it could also be that the person had great ideas but that it would have given them too much social power or would have remade that tribes structure in a way that no one would understand but them which would be equally dangerous.
I think the best way to get around the sociological hurdle though is look at mysteries in nature for some degree of support:
- Someone can damage crows nests while wearing a certain outfit or mask, several generations later they'll still remember this person and attack them. Building a nest is a good example of a phenotype, remembering a predator doesn't seem to fit that description well and needless to say - genes seem to be much more like generator functions, Robert Sapolsky's had lectures on bifurcation of nerves, blood vessels, bronchial tubes, etc. and a generator function would code for that not by folding the complete map up in DNA but setting parameters and letting those parameters unfold.
- It's been suggested that starling, when making their flying formations, react to movements of the flock faster than their visual centers could process the movement of other birds in order to imitate their movements.
- Jim Al Khalili gave a presentation on the suggestion that there is quantum biology involved in certain birds being able to gain information on where magnetic north is and use that as a tool for migration (something in the eye or optic nerve allows this).
- Ant colonies are haploid/diploid and there's some question as to whether some degree of their organization is based on chemical signals but it seems like there's a degree to which above three or four ants they seem to just know what to do even if their numbers have diminished significantly and old roles have vacated.
That last piece makes me think about how trillions of neurons come together to render 'us'.
I increasingly hear now mainstream philosophers of science talking about information, either almost or completely, joining energy as not getting destroyed in the universe. There's a 'no-hiding theorum' which suggests information goes into a sort of subspace.
A lot of this is making it sound like Rupert Sheldrake isn't as crazy as many in the 1980's biology may have lead us to believe, plenty heretical and dangerous no doubt but clearly looking at things that were valid mysteries and coming away with what are at least provisionally sensible interpretations. This is where I think we're going to find that our relationship with information in the world is much more complex than we would have expect it and that there is more to be encountered of varieties that we wouldn't have expected.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me