The Paranormal (Where is it now?)

by dhw, Saturday, January 24, 2009, 14:07 (5780 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GEORGE: What DHW calls "quantitative evidence" for paranormal events is mere statistics of opinion polls. - I don't recall seeing any statistics or opinion polls on this subject, but in any case that is certainly not what I mean. Of the five people who have submitted posts on this thread, three have had experiences which they cannot explain in terms of normal perception. You don't need me to tell you that such examples can be multiplied thousands of times over. "Quantitative" = relating to the amount or number of something. A large number of similar personal experiences, eye-witness accounts, communications subsequently confirmed by third parties do not, I agree, constitute "scientific evidence", but I would still call them "quantitative evidence". - GEORGE: If the move hadn't happened, and nothing in the story had matched the reality, would the boy's fanciful dream have been remembered? - Of course not. But that is the whole point. The dream did match reality, as have countless other experiences (NDEs, OBEs, ESP, strange encounters) in which unknowable information is somehow passed on. The question is how such information enters the mind in the first place. - DHW: The little boy dreamed of something he could not possibly have known beforehand.
GEORGE: That's because he didn't know it beforehand. Some dreams come true, some don't. We remember those that do. - That seems a strange reason for having a dream. And yes, we remember things that are out of the ordinary, which again is at the heart of the discussion, since that amounts to a definition of "paranormal". The dream is out of the ordinary because of the accumulation of unknowable factors (the move, the landscape, the colour of the house). A near-death experience is out of the ordinary when you meet someone who has just died, are yourself revived, and then learn that the other person's death has indeed taken place. You can, of course, say that all the scenes or deaths or locations described by Pim van Lommel's patients or BBella's niece or David's wife are sheer coincidence, but I'd say that such an explanation requires a lot of faith in chance.