The Paranormal (Where is it now?)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 08:58 (5778 days ago) @ dhw

On the blue house dream: - I asked: If the move hadn't happened, and nothing in the story had matched the reality, would the boy's fanciful dream have been remembered? - DHW replied: 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 claimed: The little boy dreamed of something he could not possibly have known beforehand. - I replied: That's because he didn't know it beforehand. Some dreams come true, some don't. We remember those that do. - DHW responds: 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). - This is all a case of "confirmational bias" in thinking. See for example: - http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.php?dir=articles&article=confirmation.php - http://skepdic.com/confirmbias.html - http://atheism.about.com/od/logicalflawsinreasoning/a/confirmation.htm - The idea that there has to be a reason for having a dream, or that all dreams predict subsequent events or match reality in some way is a bias of those who favour the reality of paranormal occurrences. - The causes of dreams are various. Some may be wish-fulfilment, like day-dreams, some may just be us churning over the events of the day and trying to make sense of them in some sort of order, some may be like nightmares, where we are trying to sort out our emotional reactions, fears, anxieties, desires and hopes. They may indeed succeed in sorting out our problems, and thus affect our subsequent behaviour (e.g. settling us down before a fearfully anticipated interview or exam). - But the fact that lots of people have experienced dreams coming true in a surprising manner does not imply that cause and effect (or its reverse, precognition) is in action. This fact has to be balanced against all those people who have experienced dreams that didn't come true. This is not "faith in chance" it is simple statistics.

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GPJ