05-03-2010, 12:18 PM
(05-03-2010, 07:25 AM)MEAT Wrote: Which of course brings up the whole concept of seers, psychics, and general visions or feelings of the future - who hasn't had at least one experience where we avoided some type of serious danger simply because we "knew" something bad would happen if we did "such-and-such"? And I'm not talking about an objective that was obviously questionable, but something so simple as getting in the car to get the mail when suddenly, the feeling strikes so you hesitate in the kitchen a few minutes when BAM, your car outside gets totaled!This is a matter of hits, misses, and observation bias.
We remember when we had a bad feeling, and then something bad happened, because it seems exceptional. Do we remember when we had a bad feeling, and nothing bad happened? Are we tallying up the number of bad things that happen, with no "premonition" attached? I would suggest that we are not. We are also primed culturally to think of these things as "visions" or "premonitions". We confirm our ideas with examples, but we fail to test them with counter-examples.
In some cases, you may be intuitively picking up on things that are not consciously registering, giving you a justifiable feeling of unease. That is not the same thing, since it doesn't actually involve accessing future information.
Every time these phenomena have been put to rigorous tests, they have failed miserably. Nobody can predict the future, and there is no number of anecdotes which can overturn this conclusion, absent a successful, rigorous test.
-Jester