Are dogs and cats the same?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by paqart

The point I'm trying to make is this: regardless of how complex, dramatic, simple, or pedestrian, one of these psi events may be, when it happens to you, you will know that these questions of cold-reading, selective memory, improper double-blinds, etc, are not a factor. Until it happens to you, it will be difficult to believe, because the events themselves can be so bizarre or alien to your own experience. And I haven't even come close to describing some of the stranger incidents in my files, so far, this is all run-of-the-mill stuff.

I think one's reaction to an event like depends on the way one approaches evidence. To say that I would believe it once it happened to me is too easy. In particular, if someone doesn't believe, you can simply say they must never have had a "real experience." You can dismiss the possibility that they had experiences just like yours but interpreted them differently.

For me, it's a question of probability. If I can't calculate the probability of a dream matching a future event, then I will simply assume it's coincidence, or possibly that I had knowledge that I forgot I had. People are going to have dreams matching future events purely by coincidence. How do we decide which ones are coincidence and which ones are premonitions?

~~ Paul

[paqart]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I think one's reaction to an event like depends on the way one approaches evidence. To say that I would believe it once it happened to me is too easy. In particular, if someone doesn't believe, you can simply say they must never have had a "real experience." You can dismiss the possibility that they had experiences just like yours but interpreted them differently.

For me, it's a question of probability. If I can't calculate the probability of a dream matching a future event, then I will simply assume it's coincidence, or possibly that I had knowledge that I forgot I had. People are going to have dreams matching future events purely by coincidence. How do we decide which ones are coincidence and which ones are premonitions?

~~ Paul

Paul,
With all due respect, and I am serious here, probability may come into it at first, but the concept is inadequate. It works in large samples of minor events happening to other people, but in a spontaneous event that happens to you, whether or not it is the first thing that enters your mind, you will know in your gut that a probability calculation is secondary to the fact you are already convinced. When you do make the calculation, if it is even possible, that will be convincing also.

The idea that random dreams will match random events might sound good if you never look closely at them, but it doesn't hold water if you do. The problem with many dream studies is that they cover a large number of dreams by different people instead of a single large collection of records from one person. The difference is that one may easily assume a large number of available dreams, when no comprehensive list exists. This is what happens when a random population is asked to submit a handful of examples. No one knows what wasn't submitted, and usually, there aren't any records anyway. Therefore, it becomes easy to imagine an infinite number of possibilities. If you look at large collections by one person (or a group of them, like Nancy Sondow's diaries, or Alan Vaughan's) you'll see that there is not an infinite variety of subjects. At this point the large number correspondence theory breaks down because large numbers aren't involved.

When I was an artist at the video game company SquareUSA, I had a falling out with a friend, who told me he never wanted to speak to me again. I then had a dream where I had hired him (a much more experienced artist than I was) to work on a Scooby-Doo video game. The idea was laughable, and I laughed as I told my wife about it. But then, a couple years later I was an art director at a different company, in charge of a Scooby-Doo project. I needed some work done, and this artist was the only guy I could think of to do it. I hesitated to call at first, wondering if he would even take the call. He did though, and he took the assignment.

It cost my company about five million dollars to get the Scooby license. That is not the kind of thing I could have arranged to make my dream come true. I did make the offer of a position to this guy, but he didn't have to take it. When I took the job I knew it would be on a Scooby project, but I had three competing offers. My choice was made on the basis that it was the only job that wouldn't require moving to a different city or state (one was in Texas, one in San Diego, and another in Milpitas). Now that I think of it, I had already decided to take the San Diego job, but then I ran into an old colleague I'd worked with before. He invited me to lunch but I told him I wasn't interested in a job. He talked me into the lunch, and then the job as well. When I took it, I wasn't thinking of the dream, and if I had, it would have been ridiculous to factor it in. I didn't know at the time that I would later be in a situation that required the expert help of this senior artist I knew, or that I would be able to afford his rate.

That is just one of many. More importantly, it isn't like I've dreamed twenty-five variations of this that account for a number of different possibilities. As I see it, the random dream/random event theory comes from people who know very little about these things. The theory makes sense if you haven't got anything to base it on, but if you go to the trouble of testing it, it doesn't work very well.

AP

PS: I should note, in the interest of full disclosure, that the Porgy dream I mentioned earlier is a dream that I did write off as coincidence for many years. It was one of the most powerful dreams I'd ever had, and the timing of Porgy's death and the dream was very close, but I wasn't about to believe something as silly as that the two were related. Another dream of being mugged in Amsterdam that may have saved my life was similarly written off as coincidence, as was an uncanny string of called dice rolls in a backgammon game (every roll, both players, until out of frustration my opponent tossed the board into a plate glass window). All of those things were "coincidence" to me, and many others as well, things that I do think might have turned the head of someone slightly less skeptical than I was. It took two dreams, one right after the other, one of lottery numbers, and the other of the Ramstein airshow disaster to convince me that it was worth looking into. You may think you are less prone to flights of fancy than the believers in this forum, but what you don't know is exactly how skeptical we may have been at one time ourselves, perhaps even more so than you.

Assume this hypothetical: psi is real and you are confronted with an unquestionably genuine example. Never mind asking what kind, it's genuine and it's obvious. That is the hypothetical. What do you do? Pull out a calculator to run probability calculations? Deny it? I never thought I'd ever see something like that myself, and when I did, I denied it myself. Not once or twice or even three times, but many times. My skepticism held out for years, and I had the benefit of first hand experience, something that is quite rare. However, there were too many things, too many many unequivocal examples. Just because I'm a believer now doesn't mean I wasn't a tough guy skeptic once. Personally, I think I could have wiped the floor as a skeptic with anyone, but then, I had these experiences and saw that I was wrong. Sometimes life is like that.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by paqart

With all due respect, and I am serious here, probability may come into it at first, but the concept is inadequate. It works in large samples of minor events happening to other people, but in a spontaneous event that happens to you, whether or not it is the first thing that enters your mind, you will know in your gut that a probability calculation is secondary to the fact you are already convinced. When you do make the calculation, if it is even possible, that will be convincing also.

But if I was instantly convinced, I would also be instantly skeptical of my own conviction. My ex-wife thought she was the second coming of Christ for three months: I've seen people with conviction who were simply whacked.

The idea that random dreams will match random events might sound good if you never look closely at them, but it doesn't hold water if you do. The problem with many dream studies is that they cover a large number of dreams by different people instead of a single large collection of records from one person.

This is because no experimenter would trust a single person.

The difference is that one may easily assume a large number of available dreams, unlisted in the documentation from which the "successful" dreams are chosen. When everything is available from the same source, as each dream is validated, it is no longer available to be matched with anything else, and the total number of dreams is known to be smaller than an assumed extremely large number.

Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying here.

Assume this hypothetical: psi is real and you are confronted with an unquestionably genuine example. Never mind asking what kind, it's genuine and it's obvious. That is the hypothetical. What do you do? Pull out a calculator to run probability calculations? Deny it?

Even if we knew that psi was real, we would still have to rule out mundane explanations for any given event. I know murder is real, but that doesn't mean that every event that seems obviously a murder is in fact a murder.

~~ Paul

[paqart]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

But if I was instantly convinced, I would also be instantly skeptical of my own conviction. My ex-wife thought she was the second coming of Christ for three months: I've seen people with conviction who were simply whacked.

This falls into the category of just because some things are counterfeit doesn't mean they all are. By this standard, you might as well throw all your money away right now.

This is because no experimenter would trust a single person.

Some experimenters will, and for good reason. For example, Leonore Piper back in the early days of the British SPR.

Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying here.

I don't blame you, it isn't written very clearly. This is what I get for writing way past my bedtime. I just rewrote it to fix it up a bit, but have to get to sleep, so that's it for now.

Even if we knew that psi was real, we would still have to rule out mundane explanations for any given event. I know murder is real, but that doesn't mean that every event that seems obviously a murder is in fact a murder.

~~ Paul

Here you'd be wrong. If a horse canters up to you, you don't have to rule out that it is a monkey, a cartload of bananas, or a spaceship before accepting that it is a horse. This example won't make sense until you've had an unequivocal experience, but that is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Because you have a hard time imagining true psi, you think of it as something that will always be subject to first proving itself, without taking into account that it may be self-evident immediately.

AP

[David Bailey]

I agree with Paul that probability is important here for the purpose of evaluating evidence - a rather cold, but important task. As I have already mentioned, I had one seemingly informational dream that turned out not to connect with reality. If that dream had turned out to be true, it would have been hard not to be convinced.

However, it is a bit too easy to just wave the word probability around whenever somebody reports something strange. How often did Paqart (or anyone else) get rebuked by his cat in a dream? My guess is that this might only happen once in a lifetime, and when you couple that with the fact that the dream conveyed the fact that the cat was dead, and coincided with the time when his cat had to be put down, I would say the probability of that happening by chance is very low indeed.

David

[paqart]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

I agree with Paul that probability is important here for the purpose of evaluating evidence - a rather cold, but important task. As I have already mentioned, I had one seemingly informational dream that turned out not to connect with reality. If that dream had turned out to be true, it would have been hard not to be convinced.

However, it is a bit too easy to just wave the word probability around whenever somebody reports something strange. How often did Paqart (or anyone else) get rebuked by his cat in a dream? My guess is that this might only happen once in a lifetime, and when you couple that with the fact that the dream conveyed the fact that the cat was dead, and coincided with the time when his cat had to be put down, I would say the probability of that happening by chance is very low indeed.

David

Exactly. For the sake of thoroughness, I'll verify now that your suppositions are correct. This was the only dream I ever had where Porgy referenced death, and is one of only about four dreams where he appears at all.

I would also like to make this point, just because I don't consider probability to be as important a factor as Paul does, doesn't mean that events cannot be judged that way, or that the examples I have haven't been looked at from that perspective either. It just means that at a certain point, after you've run into the same bizarrely high odds several dozens or hundreds of times, it's time to appreciate the fact that you know what a horse looks like on sight, and don't have to pull out all the measuring tools every time you see another one to verify it.

As a lecturer in 3D graphics, I teach my students to measure everything, to a very high level of accuracy. A one millimeter variation across a two-meter span of a smoothly curved surface is enough to send it back to be remade. When they graduate though, and work in industry, they will find they do not have to measure things as often, or to the same level of accuracy, because their estimates will be accurate enough due to the low tolerance for error during their training. In my own work, I once had to lay out complex perspective grids in order to make a proper perspective drawing, but now I can make drawings of almost exactly the same accuracy without measuring because my sensitivity to measurements is so strong. On the few occasions I've checked, they've been exact, but assume I've made small errors on others.

When you apply this to all this testing that Paul is advocating here, all I'm suggesting is that there will come a time when it is no longer necessary. In a world with GPS, complex navigational calculations are no longer as necessary as they once were, nor are they applied in as many ways as before satellite navigation.

AP

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by paqart

This falls into the category of just because some things are counterfeit doesn't mean they all are. By this standard, you might as well throw all your money away right now.

You need a more apt analogy. There is plenty of objective evidence that my money is real.

Here you'd be wrong. If a horse canters up to you, you don't have to rule out that it is a monkey, a cartload of bananas, or a spaceship before accepting that it is a horse. This example won't make sense until you've had an unequivocal experience, but that is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Because you have a hard time imagining true psi, you think of it as something that will always be subject to first proving itself, without taking into account that it may be self-evident immediately.

So you say. But you are assuming that a "true psi experience" will be self-evident to the subject. If so, then either most people don't have any psi experiences or they are too stupid to see how self-evident the experiences are. My ex-wife was self-evidently the second coming of Christ. But she was wrong.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

However, it is a bit too easy to just wave the word probability around whenever somebody reports something strange. How often did Paqart (or anyone else) get rebuked by his cat in a dream? My guess is that this might only happen once in a lifetime, and when you couple that with the fact that the dream conveyed the fact that the cat was dead, and coincided with the time when his cat had to be put down, I would say the probability of that happening by chance is very low indeed.

Perhaps, but do we have all the facts? How often did he dream about Porgy? Did he have any suspicion that Porgy was sick, consciously or otherwise? To what extent are his recordings of his dreams distorted by his waking consciousness as he writes in his log?

One problem with this sort of thing is that there is no way to enumerate what you knew but did not remember that you knew. We discussed this problem while we were talking about Snow's search for Beckwith: Did Snow know that Beckwith had translated The Hunchback of Notre Dame? There is no way to find out.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by paqart

When you apply this to all this testing that Paul is advocating here, all I'm suggesting is that there will come a time when it is no longer necessary. In a world with GPS, complex navigational calculations are no longer as necessary as they once were, nor are they applied in as many ways as before satellite navigation.

I agree that if we could establish beyond a reasonable doubt that people have premonition dreams, then we could accept some dreams as premonitions without doing the homework. Others would not be so obvious and would need investigating anyway, just like murders. However, we have not established this fact, and no amount of "well, I just know" is going to convince me. Why? Because there will always be coincidences, so we have to have some way of distinguishing them from true premonitions. Without any theory of how premonitions might work, this gets New Agey real fast.

~~ Paul

[paqart]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I agree that if we could establish beyond a reasonable doubt that people have premonition dreams, then we could accept some dreams as premonitions without doing the homework. Others would not be so obvious and would need investigating anyway, just like murders. However, we have not established this fact, and no amount of "well, I just know" is going to convince me. Why? Because there will always be coincidences, so we have to have some way of distinguishing them from true premonitions. Without any theory of how premonitions might work, this gets New Agey real fast.

~~ Paul

Here is where we get to the problem of your level of experience. I don't need to go the same trouble you do, because I've already verified the material for myself. Because I was a first hand witness/participant, I know deception isn't an issue, and was able to focus on other factors. After checking out the possibilities, I'm satisfied. You cannot accept any of this on faith just because I say so, and that is why I think that for any person to overcome their skepticism, they must see psi in their own lives.

No matter how much documentation is provided, if it supports a claim that is impossible by a skeptical standard, then the skeptic is forced to assume deception, even in the total absence of proof of it. A negative cannot be proven, so at this point no amount of evidence, regardless of quality, will accomplish the job. This is why I think it is pointless to debate with skeptics so long as the goal is to persuade them. If persuasion is not an issue, then it is no longer a debate. Then, it is sharing information, and that is where I think skeptics and believers can have a meaningful dialogue.

Fighting it out in a "hard-hitting" debate sounds nice, but when the rules are rigged, it isn't much of a debate, even if it looks like one.

AP