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.