Superstition, Intuition, and other inexplicable fealings

Started by Ryex, August 17, 2012, 11:16:55 am

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Ryex

First things first, I'm NOT one to believe in supernatural events, I'd rather search for a answer that makes sense inside natural laws than accept that "strange things sometimes happen"

well for a guy who thinks like that I sure have a collection of inexplicable things to account for.


for example

I'v been checking the online registration for a Statics class for about a week and a half nearly every 3 hours to see if a spot had open in the 86 student class and it would let me in.
this morning just as I was logging in I had the feeling that this time it would be open. I of course immediately started bashing my self for having a stupid feeling and thinking that I could guess the future like that ect.

The class was open.

It's also very common for me to have incredibly powerful De ja Vu that I can link to dreams I've had multiple times and can remember in detail.  for example I had a dream had when I was 5  that I had at least three times until I was 12 of hiking a trial at the Grand Canyon but I never visited or seen the place until I was 15. every detail of the landscape was the same down to the lightning struck tree at the tip of the cliff that the trail looped around. and It's not like I had seen a picture of the place and then put it in my dream either. the PERSPECTIVE of how I saw the place was even the same.

Now, I don't honestly believe I can predict the future with the few dreams I can remember or have gut feelings that tell me when soothing has happened hundreds of miles away inside a computer. but such events make me question my grasp on reality.



so, question for all of you out there. what's your standing and experience with such events? do you seek answers or do you ignore them and move on. or, perhaps you already have your answer?
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Blizzard

Ask yourself this: How many times did you have that kind of feeling and it was wrong? Probably more than you can count. Fact is that people don't remember the times they were wrong because they were insignificant, but they do make a big deal out of it when they are right. It's something that's called "scumbag brain" in slang. The idea is that in retrospect our brain only remembers the good stuff and discards the bad stuff in order to protect the subconscious from irrelevant information. It also discards the stuff that wasn't important at the time. If you started writing down every time you have that feeling, you would notice that you will be wrong much more often.

Ever thought after an emotionally intense event how "it wasn't so bad after all"? Guess what, it was. That's just scumbag brain at work. Or ever thought "Wow, my ex and me had a great time, why did we break up anyway? We should get back together!" Scumbag brain at its finest.

Everybody had these kind of experiences. Also, dejavus are actually errors in the brain. The brain connects the wrong stuff together and fools itself into believing it's true or happened before. When something happens that I really dreamed about, I don't have a dejavu, it's a different kind of feeling. If stuff just gets misconnected, it's a dejavu.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

Ryex

but that's just it, I don't get those feelings often be cause I DO keep track I get them about five times a year and I'm right about 80% of the time. however I usually go back and do some analysis and it turns out that it's usually because the outcome I guess has an absurdly high probability, and I'm so far convinced (as it seems most likely) I have a subconscious ability to analyse and quantify probability on the fly. wish I could control it...
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winkio

My friend used to have these a few times a month.  One of his most convincing ones was a dream that he had a few months before the start of college, of him talking with some random girl in this place with a bunch of tables.  He recorded it in a dream journal, and sure enough, it happened during a meeting with his student academic advisor, a person he had never seen before except in his dream.

I myself have had a few similar dreams, although they are always wrong on a few details.  The best one in my mind was a dream I had exactly one time when I was in middle school.  I was alone in a college library, walking past study booths, but the main lights were off.  Suddenly, I get to a line of yellow arrows on the floor that point towards a door.  This happened before I even knew what college I was considering, and I had never been inside my college library before.  The first week though, I was exploring the library with some friends, and we walked past the study booths, and I realized that it was exactly the same thing as in the dream, except I wasn't alone and the lights were on.  Then we came to a line of yellow footprints on the floor, which pointed to a door, exactly like the yellow arrows.  While there are some details that are different, other parts were exactly the same, with no prior knowledge.

The brain is one of those things that the scientific community hasn't completely figured out yet, so I think this may be answered by knowledge we don't have right now, not knowledge we do have.

Blizzard

You could also look at it in this way: How likely is one of thousands of dreams to happen with some "minor" details changed? Very likely. We dream a lot of dreams over the years and we visit many places over the years. Furthermore, among millions and billions of people, there have to be some people who have their dreams line up with actual events 100%, the chance of that happening is simply that high. So it's likely that some of these things simply coincide.

Don't get me wrong, I am very open-minded and winkio is right about brain still being largely a mystery. But some things happen because of pure chance and it's sometimes hard to accept that some things aren't as magical as they may seem. Of course, it's also possible there is a combination of these two scenarios at work, but generally I believe that pure chance is a much likelier factor here if only because of the incredibly high likelihood of it happening. Think of rolling 100 dice. The chance of at least one of them rolling 6 is very high.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

This is less like rolling a hundred dice and getting a six, and more like tossing 100 coins at a wall and having 80 of them land on top of each other in a neat stack.

Blizzard

How about tossing 7 billion coins every day once for 30 years and expecting 2 to end up on top of each other?

EDIT: Oh god. :naughty:
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

Right, it's conceivable that two or three end up perfectly aligned, but when it goes up to 50, or 500 details that are the same, random coincidence doesn't explain it, no matter how many times you try.

Blizzard

If you want 50 details, that would be 350 billion coins. Get the idea?
I'm not trying to explain it, I'm trying to show how likely it is with metaphoric examples. If I went up and started to count that a person usually has at least 5 different dreams per night (5 REM cycles), that would make over 1700 dreams per year, which would be around 35000 dreams around the age of only 20. Among 7 billion people, one dream has to stick, seriously.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

no, it doesn't.  Getting coins to land on top of each other is much different than a 50/50 coin flip.  This has the same probability of randomly occurring as the majority of the atoms of a coin and the ground aligning, causing the coin to move through a solid object.  350 billion is an insignificant number for the probability.

For example, let's say that everyone dreams about opening a desk drawer.  Inside the drawer in my dream, there are 5 black pens, 5 blue pens, 3 red pens, 2 #2 pencils, 7 mechanical pencils, 5 different colored highlighters.  That is 23^10 = 41 trillion different random states, just for determining the 23 possible objects in the drawer from the 10 choices.  This ignores the possible arrangement and positions, how much in has been used in the pens, how much lead has been used in the pencils, etc.  Considering these dreams take into account images, positions, materials, colors, etc., there is too much data that coincides to be explained by random chance.

ForeverZer0

I am failing to understand how utter randomness has anything to do with this.
Dreams are not based on utter randomness, but usually on "real" things. Although dreams can be very abstract, they are not so random as a flipping a coin or possible combinations of pens in a drawer. This is comparing apples to oranges, and is just a plain non-sense analogy for occurrences in a dream. Using the theory of total randomness, the most extraordinary thing that would happen would be seeing someone you know in real life within the dream. As you know this happens all the time, because dreams are NOT based on total randomness. Sure, there are plenty of random things, but even if you are in an "unknown" place, it is still a projection of your mind. You may be in "some random library" within your dream, but you know its a library because you know, even awake, roughly what constitutes a library. You don't have to have ever seen something to have an idea of what it may be, especially in an imaginative state. I am sure I could picture the interior of an office building in my mind, completely made up, and it would take me only a few minutes searching Google Images to find something that was almost exactly like what I pictured in my mind.  
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winkio

You still aren't accounting for the details.  You can easily image an office with carpet, and a hallway with a corner at the end.  You could find that online, I agree.  But can you imagine, in your mind, the exact pattern of the carpet as you walk around a corner?  Will you find that online?  No, you won't, unless it's from someplace you have been to or seen before.  There is an absurd specificity linked to these occurrences, and no amount of forecasting or association will make the probability of deja vu frequent enough to be explained by coincidence.

Ryex

oh boy I sparked something.

I rarely experience something I have dreamed before. but when I do there is not a single dercernable detail off from the dream. considering I almost never remember my dreams in the first place any dream that sticks I can recall in about as much detail as if I lived the event.

in the grand canyon dream? the details of the landscape were spot on. of course the people and the actions we took were completely different. but the path we traveled and the landscape were exactly the same. from the dead lightning struck tree and the pattern of it's branches to the little ranger station you could see across the canyon with the radio tower. when I was there the feeling that I had been there before was so powerful that I could predict what was around the bend in the trail despite never having been there before.

you know how they claim to be able to build a computer large enough to surpass the processing power of the brain? well in linear logical processes yes, but if your talking simulating the organic leaps of logic and conceptual connections that the brain can do in it's sleep I call bullshit.

I make the claim that the subconscious mind can process information and make connections far faster than is believable and sometimes sees fit to pass this information along in the form of random thoughts or urges.
as for the dejavu feelings I have form time to time. they are always about a series of events in the context of a location, and I never cna explain them.
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Blizzard

August 18, 2012, 05:24:25 am #13 Last Edit: August 18, 2012, 05:33:15 am by Blizzard
Actually I agree with F0.

Quote from: winkio on August 17, 2012, 09:00:13 pm
You still aren't accounting for the details.  You can easily image an office with carpet, and a hallway with a corner at the end.  You could find that online, I agree.  But can you imagine, in your mind, the exact pattern of the carpet as you walk around a corner?  Will you find that online?  No, you won't, unless it's from someplace you have been to or seen before.  There is an absurd specificity linked to these occurrences, and no amount of forecasting or association will make the probability of deja vu frequent enough to be explained by coincidence.


You said yourself that some details were actually off so it means that you didn't get it right after all. What I was trying to explain is not complete randomness of every single possible combination but chance that two things (in this case a dream and reality) line up. It happens all the time. I recently saw the movie National Treasure and there was also some sort of library. Guess what, it looked very familiar to me. Why? Because I probably saw a similar library in another movie and it was similar enough to trigger the feeling of familiarity in me (now that I think of it, it may actually have been some kind of office with similar colors). And when I look back at both of those, they both seem to me now like a dream. In the long run the brain cannot distinguish between actual memory, memory of a dream or imagined memory (constructed image). You can't build a library that will be different from every other library in every aspect. There are things that will be similar, similar enough for the brain to register and use as a general pattern which it then applies everywhere for recognition (associative memory). I have been to many places that looked awfully familiar to me (almost none of them even in nature!), but only because I have either seen something similar, I have dreamed about something similar or I have imagined something similar. And with "something similar" I am talking about something that was similar enough, but also generic enough to fool me into believing that I have seen exactly the same thing.

How do you know it was exactly that pattern on the carpet? Has it ever happened to you that you were talking with a friend and something came up where you disagreed and you were 100% sure that you were right while he was 100% sure that he's right and then you made a bet to see who's right? Our mind easily fools us. Also, it's not impossible that you saw a similar (or even the same) carpet somewhere else and your mind simply fabricated that library from pieces of other places and part of your imagination. That doesn't automatically make it a forecast.

@Ryex:

There have been plenty of movies that have recorded the Grand Canyon. It's not impossible that you saw one of them and saw the place beforehand. I'm not saying you have, I'm just offering an alternative explanation.

Yeah, CPUs don't have shit on the brain yet. They may surpass the brain's processing power in linear processing, but the brain processes stuff parallelly. Plus CPUs don't have the necessary "software" for that. Fun fact is that each neuron only works at around 1 kHz if I remember right, so it's not that difficult to create an artificial brain (except that there are so many different types of neurons). And it would still lack the software.

I agree that the subconscious can process information faster because it is a lower level of thinking. The subconscious has to process tons of information that the conscious mind simply ignores. But the subconscious also learns and changes very, very slowly compared to the conscious mind. How long did it take you to learn walking or talking or riding a bicycle or driving a car? In comparison, how long did it take you to learn a song by memory? The subconscious may be able to process things with an incredible speed (e.g. reading body language is an incredibly complex process if you take into account all body parts and the face itself), but it does not remember so quickly.
But the subconscious isn't perfect either. It only feeds the brain with "feelings" and "emotions" for a certain feedback from processed information (notice how you always describe dejavu as a feeling). Have you noticed when talking to somebody and you say something bad, how the body language of the other person changes and suddenly you "feel awkward"? That's your subconscious processing the information and feeding it to your conscious brain as the negative emotion of "feeling awkward" so that you don't repeat that mistake again. Have you ever felt awkward for no real reason or what turned to be out a misconception? That's because your subconscious was trying to assess the situation from what information it was able to gather which can be sometimes incorrect because you never have all the information.

This here is the same. Your subconscious feeds you with the feeling of familiarity even though it may be wrong. Next time something like this happens, try to predict what's the next thing you're going to see (e.g. like you mentioned the lightning struck tree or the radio tower) instead of seeing it first and then thinking "oh yeah, I saw that". You'll notice that you can't, but it will still feel familiar when you actually see it. If you actually can predict, then it's also not impossible that you saw this place before either on TV or somewhere else. Of course it's also possible that your brain fabricated everything which is rather unlikely, but not impossible. And of course, there's the alternative that you and winkio are actually right. Just keep in mind that if people want to believe, they will believe so don't fall into that trap.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

In the library, I predicted the layout of tiles, the locations and orientations of the yellow symbols on the floor, the size, shape, and design of the door, all before walking around the corner and putting them into view.  The only things different were footprints instead of arrows and the lights were on.

Blizzard

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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

Lobstrosity

I have dreams like this on occasion. The dreams are usually pretty regular, just me going about my daily routine, but the conversations that I have and the actions that I make are spot on to when it happens to me in reality. I never remember these "deju vu" dreams until something similar actually happens. At that point, I actually know what someone is about to say in a conversation and I have never been wrong or able to alter what it is that they say.

However, I don't believe these dreams are anything special. I don't exactly know how these dreams occur, but everyone I've talked to about them say that they occasionally experience the same thing. So it's pretty normal. The only thing I wonder about is how I know what people are going to say before they say it.
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Blizzard

Have you ever noticed how simple it is to finish somebody's sentence, even if you don't really know the person? I don't think that it's so difficult to predict what somebody's going to say if the context is simple. I've been able to predict what somebody's going to say without anything dream or dejavu related, even in an on-going conversation about a specific topic. But that's only because I have experience with that topic and depending on the body language so I knew what was coming next. I didn't know word for word, but I had an idea.

I just wanted to add this on the side, it's not really that relevant to the topic at hand. Predicting what's gonna happen next and actually precisely knowing what's gonna happen are two different things.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

G_G

Predicting what someone is going to say doesn't have to be a mystery. After you get to know people for awhile, you can start to guess what they're going to say before they say it. It's easy to predict friends and their actions that you've gotten to know over a period of time. I'm gonna take my friend Sally for example. She's one of the most random girls I know (it's what I love about her). She has a very small attention span 95% of the time. She'll be talking about something sad/depressing/serious and all of a sudden, "Oooh! A squirrel!" Not even joking. After awhile, I was able to predict when she was going to have a random moment. I'd take notice of our scenery and look for things that would easily divert her attention. She's also not one for using curse words a whole lot, but I can predict when she's going to say one. She'll start to frown a bit, you'll notice her shoulders tense up slightly, and bam! She just cussed.

Blizzard

That's why I mentioned predicting what strangers are going to say. As I said, it's not that difficult either if you are familiar with the topic at hand since you can expect somebody to have similar experiences. Of course, predicting someone you know beats that by far.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.