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Originally posted by Neo_Serfhehe im not sure if you cleverly threw in 'The Philosopher' to sway me after judging from my sig that i love the 'Stoltle'. but he also believed in the gods of his day, as did the religious people you site believe in their own gods, and so i honestly cant take the word of the ancients as binding on this most potentially profound matter.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
If this phenomenon is real, it should be testable and repeatable.
Originally posted by Neo_SerfThe ability to become conscious and control ones dreams (and the few times i have experienced it, it was AWESOME!) does not violate the known laws or properties of matter and energy. Consciousness projecting and effecting outside of the mind does. This is not to say it is impossible. It would just require unquestionable proof, repeatability, and some theory to describe it in order for a layman such as myself to accept this fundamental rewriting of out collective understanding of reality.
Originally posted by Neo_SerfSo far I havent seen that.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
Have you designed a testable hypothesis to confirm or deny your opinions? Have you honestly explored the possibility that you may be self selecting positive results and discarding or ignoring negative ones?
Im curious!
Originally posted by Neo_SerfI have no way of either validating of rejecting the claims of this person you mention, or the experiment you site. Even if you linked me to it, i dont posses the scientific or technical knowledge to even being to evaluate these claims. my only guide posts can be logic, the general consensus of experts with far greater expertise than me (and yes i know the inherent flaws in an appeal to authority, im an anarchist ffs~) and my own sensual experience which is based on free will. if my behavior was predictable with any high degree of accuracy, i would have to reject the idea of free will and all the implications that would logically follow from that. (mainly the loss of any kind of moral responsibility for my actions, or anyones)
Originally posted by Neo_SerfSo ill admit i have an emotional stake in this game, not that that means anything. if my actions were indeed predictable, that would imply that i do not posses the capacity to change my future and thus the cornerstone of my entire philosophical world view, which i hold to be logically sound, and empirically verified, would be shattered to dust.
Originally posted by Neo_SerfThat im uncomfortable with that notion does not, of course, invalidate what youre saying. Im just saying that it flies contrary to every rational first principle ive been able to salvage from the wreck of the mind that is considered 'normal' human thinking. So perhaps youll get more of a fight out of me than if you were instead proposing the existence of some new particle, or some other theory of matter and energy that had no bearing on the way we should behave as humans.
If the future is predictable, it cannot change.
Originally posted by Neo_SerfDoes reality exist without an 'observer', in your view?
Originally posted by Neo_SerfIf it could be shown that the universe is indeed a 'hologram' of some kind, and not by some elegant but fundamentally mad mathematical equation, but instead incontrovertible physical evidence...what would this imply? how would your behavior change?
Originally posted by Neo_SerfMany years ago I read a book called 'whos afraid of schrodingers box' which turned me onto all of the seeming paradoxes of quantum physics. i only 1/4 understood it of course, and i still take a laymans interest in reading up on the latest quantum findings.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
im just not sure i see the link between 'quantum weirdness' and this dreamscape you describe.
the dots im connecting currently are the ones i can see, touch and understand. perhaps my scope is limited.
Originally posted by Neo_SerfI honestly know none of these names, and perhaps i should if i want to be able to discuss this topic competently. But i dont. Im still hung up on your claim of future predictability. Surely, if it is at all possible, bright minds like these could design some sort of triple blind, gold standard peer review study to prove or disprove the phenomenon youre describing. The incentive to do so would be incalculable - the first person to bring forth a theory of extra - cranial mind influence would go down in the annals of human achievement with no peer.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
theyd win a million bux from the amazing randy heheh~
Originally posted by Neo_SerfThese wouldnt be equal to me and would go in order from cause to effect:
1:the reality > 2: the observer > 3: the dream
Originally posted by Neo_Serfso the hallucination, and the dream, exist *only* within the mind?
Originally posted by Neo_SerfSo the experience youre describing is 100% subjective and exists only in the mind of the experiencee?
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
This would seem to conflate the distinction between the words 'fantasy' and 'reality'. Fantasy is described as that which exists solely in the mind, while reality is defined as that which exists independently of our minds. If the two are not the same thing, the proper term might be something like 'cognitive fantasy'.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
to say that which has opposing properties to reality is the same as reality is to say that no distinction exists between that which is imagined and that which is measured.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
to me, this is a fundamentally mystical approach and is inherently self contradictory. unless you redefine 'cognitive reality' as 'cognitive fantasy'.
Originally posted by Neo_Serf
youre toootally speaking my nerd language now which is awesome. but dreams, i think, like games, are pure fantasy of the mind.
Originally posted by Neo_Serfhehe the last time i had a lucid dream, many years ago now, one of the first things i did was to ask someone from my dream 'do you realize that i dreamed you up?' to which he responded 'do you realize i dreamed *you* up?'
upon further reflection, it seems i was right.
Originally posted by R3KR
I think its "real" because of persistence of time.
Originally posted by R3KR
If a car drives by you, and you look away for second, you know it will be where it should be when you look back. This persistence of "things" that are constantly there are what makes it real. Granted its a collection of impossibly small things traveling in a pack, or a packet of energy or waves (depending how you look at it) it will always persist. Things that we dont believe are real are, coincidentally not visible to us. Once we see something with a device or our own eyes and it persists we believe it to be real.
Originally posted by R3KR
Basically, something is real when a group of humans decide it to be real. We cant think about something we cant think about, or know something we cant know, so... we only say things are real when we can quantify something's persistence.
Originally posted by R3KR
Interesting how things change when you look at them. Ive always wondered if you discover something new, is it really a discovery, or did you just create it by thinking about it. Order from chaos using your consciousness as a tool. I've had some personal experiences... little ones where things would kind of..well... work out because I wanted them to. I dont believe in coincidences either.
Originally posted by R3KR
A moment should be taken to define the word "persist". What I mean by that is something that can be measured or predicted with some accuracy. Sometimes even random persistence like waves or wind.
The fact is, either all these people claiming to have precognitive dreams are lying, or they are in fact having them.
Because dreams also are anecdotal; then they are automatically invalidated scientifically thus not subject to scientific inquiry.
Dr. Art Funkhouser I think had done some breaking work by exposing age, frequency research into precognitive dreams and his paper “The frequency of déjà vu (déjà rêve) and the effects of age, dream recall frequency and personality factors” archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de...
There are dream-databases that have over 6,000 reported precognitive dreams and studies such as Dr. Daryl Bem's precognitive research that is in peer review.
However, having the precognitive dream experiences simply sealed the deal with enough personal evidence to validate this as a matter of fact, and not fiction as many would want to believe.
Can it stand up to the Randi Challenge? I've discussed this in length on their forum and the attitude is that it's not testable because it's spontaneous and not something that one could setup an experiment for.
After all, how can I even know if a dream is precognitive until after it comes true?
Hardly fitting within the confines of the scientific method. That doesn't mean however that what I am dreaming of in the future tense isn't happening. I've had my share enough to swathe through all the “arguments” against this being possible.
... it could be an issue of entanglement and part of fourth-dimensional information processing.
Hence why I am convinced of the MRI dream-recording as being the next technological breakthrough that will satisfy this phenomena in the same way that skeptics were proven wrong once science had the technology to record lucid dreaming feedback empirically.
Yet, I don't need to wait for science to tell me what I already know. I've had precognitive dreams, and they are absolutely fascinating, mind-boggling and worthy of a science unto themselves. They might shift our paradigm yet once again if we have a breakthrough in capturing these elusive dreams.
That's great, be skeptical. If you do not have any first-hand experience, how could you even begin to have a framework to accept the reality of it other then that it seems like a wild story? I certainly wouldn't believe anyone if I hadn't experienced it first-hand. I mean, why should I? It goes again the current scientific paradigm.
In lay terms, the changes I made in the dream happened in reality when the dream came true. An outstanding event which certainly bridged the subjective/objective barrier between dreams and reality.
The International Association for the Study of Dreams runs dream telepathy experiments and have gathered a body of evidence over the years. Again, I have first-hand experience with it so it's self-evident that this potential along with precognitive dreams still await science to catch up and capture them via the scientific method.
The MRI dream recording technology that is slowly evolving makes these two events less exclusive from observation should this ever evolve into dream recording technology. However, it may be 20, 40, 100 more years before science finally has the evidence; so I'm left sounding like a woo when I simply state it as I've experienced it to be.
“Either you will have it or will not.”
This makes setting up a control and testing a spontaneous event nearly impossible does it not?
I'm happy enough just to have the personal experience to have this objective view on these two interesting aspects of dreaming.