Does anyone else experience psychic abilities

You’ve perverted the meaning of “Psychic” to include anybody and everybody. Are animals psychic? Are children psychic? Everybody is psychic? Then it doesn’t mean anything.

Here’s a question, if Psychic powers were real, then why haven’t Psychics walked into Casinos and cleaned them out, making millions of dollars by foreseeing cards and gambles? It hasn’t happened because the common definition of a “psychic”, does not exist. It is fantasy, child’s play. Children dream about psychic powers, telekinesis, telepathy, etc. It’s a fun imagination and fantasy. But adults must grow out of those childish fantasies, and end the charade of Santa Clause. Do you believe in Santa Clause too?

Changing definitions of ‘psychic’ won’t help. Almost everybody has intuition and “feeling”, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate or that semi-valid predictions mean anything special. They’re not special. They’re common. People have “bad feelings” about events, other people, experiences, dreams, all the time. Why is your experience special and unique, but the rest of humanity, is not? Why are you a psychic but nobody else is?

I understand the premise. Some individuals are so attached to childish-fictions and fantasies, that they are unwilling to let them go and give them up. Magic must exist. Santa Clause must exist. And some people will simply never overcome these, living lives of sheltered protection, make-believe, privilege. Eternal children, never confronting a “less magical” real-world. I understand all of this. You want to keep your “magic”, your children’s fantasies. You’re in luck, because, much of humanity is regressing and devolving to eternal-children. Adherence to reality, “hard facts” and “hard truths” are becoming rarer. Philosophy is becoming more difficult in this regard, as idealists filter in and overflow the philosophical avenues.

But, at least, your arguments are unconvincing. They won’t convince anybody worth convincing. “I had a bad feeling, and then a bad thing happened” does not make you a “Psychic”, by any reasonable account. That’s not enough, not even close.

Rationality beats you by a long shot. Why do people have intuitions, good feelings, bad feelings, if not mere predictors of behaviors and future events? The more intelligent an individual is, well reasoned, and wise, then this person will have a vastly superior sense of predictions than most others and especially over “psychics”. No walking on water. No levitating. No guessing a number between 1 in a billion with accuracy.

No “Psychics” can ever produce or reproduce these actions, therefore, no reason to believe in fantasy and fiction. Although many children seem to be holding out hope, for magic, for a world “better than” the real world, a fantasy world where everything is possible.

These children obviously don’t have car loans and mortgages to pay off. Are you using your psychic abilities to pay for your house? No. Why not?

If every time I met a new person, I said “I’m having a vision: your birthday is September 26”, I’m eventually going to meet someone whose birthday is September 26th, and that person is going to be blown away. But that’s not impressive at all, right? It’s just a matter of time and numbers.

The same is true if you’re having “plenty of vivid dreams”, or if you tell your friends and family about all your dreams (Maia, just guessing, but probably not the only dream you’ve told your friends about?). Eventually you’ll have a dream that is vivid, prediction-like, was told to a friend, and vaguely resembles something that happened later. [EDIT: Silhouette makes a similar point above.]

That’s especially true where, again, “recall[ing] and mak[ing] the match” really involves imperfectly remembering and unconsciously tuning up the memory to match the subsequent event – literally fabricating a match. That’s not a knock on anyone personally, that’s how human memory works. It isn’t trustworthy, especially for the content of dreams. It feels trustworthy, and that’s why we get people insisting that Nelson Mandela is dead and the Berenstain Bears used to be spelled Berenstein. But it’s demonstrably unreliable.

If I don’t respond to all points made above (three posters) just know I read them.

Do I believe in Santa Clause, too?

Yes and no. Not in any way sober way. Not if I was applying for a job and I had to convince you of, among other things, my sanity. However, if I asked you, an adult beyond such foolishness, to describe what Santa Clause looked like, we would describe the same appearance, “Close enough”. You don’t believe in Santa Clause and yet if I told you to rid your brain fully of the Santa Clause description you couldn’t actively do it. Just the same, I can’t rid myself of the memories of when I felt my intuition pull at me about some random event.

The philosophy I adhere to down deep is that everything, even concrete things that slap you across the face, even things that people uniformly agree on, possess some aspect of a Santa Clause description. Things that exist on your doorstep of your perception also don’t exist.

I do believe that anyone can access the same abilities. I don’t think anyone is special for any reason. While I believe there are false memories, I also believe every single memory you’ve ever had is recoverable, if given the right prompt, even the ones you don’t remember remembering.

What is the significance of these experiences? I don’t know. But I don’t know what the significance of the the so-called common experiences are either.

I believe that for every loss there is equal gain, and the reverse. A compensation. But I have to be careful here, because my words can be twisted. This compensation isn’t controllable, and it might also sound like a desperate recalculation. This being my belief, gain for loss, I have admitted much of the rest of my life is very boring. Is fantasy the compensation? Maybe, but the loss or the missed opportunity to become an adult skeptic surely has a gain. I don’t expect the adult skeptic to appreciate the measure of it. The biblical God said, be as children, but I guess a paycheck is more important, validation from other serious, but brittle as a dry leaf, adults. Don’t worry they won’t tell you what it was like to live as children at the cookout. You won’t be out of the promotional loop. That would be scary.

If I asked myself how many of these vivid dreams didn’t pan out, there would be a lot. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve still made use of them. I don’t need to convince myself. If I was the one being convinced I probably couldn’t shake the disparity of the numbers either. Lucky for me I don’t ask people to convince me of much, especially not on majority appeal. I’ve never seen bigfoot but if someone told me they did, I’d probably go with their tale. I’m aware people lie about much smaller things.

Just know this, If I asked you to prove that you have thoughts, you couldn’t prove it to me. You could simulate the behavior of thinking just fine. Just imagine the frustration of yours, saying things like, “But I really do have thoughts, look at my language now used to express them.” That’s great, but that’s not proof. I would actually have to be you, have your actual thoughts to experience that as truth.

Big. Fat. Red suit.

So I’ll ask again, Does anyone else experience psychic abilities?

What still seems rather extraordinary to some of us is that existence went from this…

[b]1] The very early universe, from the Planck epoch until the cosmic inflation, or the first picosecond of cosmic time; this period is the domain of active theoretical research, currently beyond the grasp of most experiments in particle physics.

2] The early universe, from the Quark epoch to the end of the Photon epoch, or the first 380,000 years of cosmic time, when the familiar forces and elementary particles have emerged but the universe remains in the state of a plasma, followed by the “Dark Ages”, from 380,000 years to about 150 million years during which the universe was transparent but no large-scale structures had yet formed.

3] The period of large-scale structure formation, including stellar evolution, galaxy formation and evolution and the formation of galaxy clusters and superclusters, from about 150 million years to present[citation needed], and prospectively until about 100 billion years of cosmic time; The thin disk of our galaxy began to form at about 5 billion years. The solar system formed at about 4.6 billion years ago, with the earliest traces of life on Earth emerging by about 3.5 billion years ago.[/b]

…to matter not only able to reconfigure into life, but into a life form that was then able to reconfigure into consciousness. A self-consciousness able to grasp all of this and then discuss it with others in venues like this one.

This reality in and of itself would seem to be, among other things, profoundly mind-boggling. We’re still groping about in an effort to understand how this all came about. Imagine then how long it will be before we are able to grasp why?

If that can even be grasped at all by our own species. Perhaps the evolution of life on earth will produce a species far into the future with a brain that is able to.

On the other hand, where will we be then?

I’ll say it again, no and and neither do you.

You really have no way of knowing what I’ve come across in my life. I don’t assume to know what makes life a mystery for you either.

I never realized how much this sort of thing threatens other people’s belief systems.

Has anybody watched Long Island Medium? Seems real to me.

Unknowing basically admitted to stretching the meaning of ‘Psychic’ to include everything, and therefore is a meaningless description and term. Having “bad feelings” means that you’re a psychic, apparently. Unknowing also admitted to believing in Santa Clause. I hope that Unknowning is under the age of 18 because it’s embarrassing otherwise. As an adult, lots of respect will be lost and philosophically, your views lose almost all credibility. You cannot be taken seriously with such a childish outlook on life and existence.

I’m allowed to stretch meaning. Meanings change whether I’m the prime agent of that change or not. It didn’t become too slippery, unless you are dedicated to denial.
Bad feelings are akin to intuition which is sensing and extra sensory perception in general. Your gut is your second brain.

I used philosophy as a way to show that Santa Clause while not physically existing, can exist in the mind. So crucify me over at I love CommonSense.com.

Urwrongx basically called for a lynch mob witch hunt.

Without a very specific meaning and intention behind the word ‘Psychic’, I believe people are fooling and deluding themselves, giving into childish notions and fancies, for fantasy and myths. Some people so strongly yearn for, or need, such myths in their lives. It’s very petulant and immature, but I understand it completely. Unfortunately though, this is a philosophy forum and such fancies must be doused with cold water.

As I mentioned, if there is any magic in existence, then it is at the highest ends of rationality.

Teleport somebody from the 11th Century to modern times. Wouldn’t an elevator seem like ‘magic’ to them? A cellphone? So what then is magic and mysticism, except a level of science and intellect that far exceeds the norm?

But that’s not what you meant. If you don’t grow out of childish delusions then you will suffer long and hard with philosophy.

Ignorance is bliss. At what cost, falsity? And to what great untruths do people devote their lives to? To want something that is not, true, to become so? To force falsity into truth if need be? As if it were easy, or had no costs?

Put your psychic abilities to the test, at a roulette table. Are you ready to spend $100,000 on them? And even if you won, how would you know whether it was luck or ability?

No need answering these questions, I’m done with the thread, thank you.

Here again is an experience that I don’t know first hand, but I believe that others experience it. For me, strong desire and strong internal compulsion seem to describe the same internal state.

In any case, I have to think that an internal compulsion can arise in just the same ways as any feeling: by the relevant brain network being triggered in any number of ways, whether by another adjacent area of brain, by psychoactive chemicals in the blood, or by out-of-network stimuli like electric fields, radioactivity, or cancer. Granted that I don’t know what the distinction between these subjective experiences feels like, it still does not seem to me that the story’s weight as evidence depends on whether you did it for desire or compulsion. The distinction may mean a great deal to you, but meaning and evidence are different things.

What about this is impervious to mundane, non-psychic explanations? You decided not to buy a dream catcher, then waited around until someone who did want to buy the dream catcher bought it.

Is it that you thought you wanted a dream catcher and then upon seeing it decided not to buy it? Have you never had that experience before?
Is it that you stepped away from the shopkeeper after telling her you didn’t want to buy it? Or that you then took another step some minutes later?
Is it that the lady stood in the same spot as you did to speak to the shopkeeper? You can’t deny that was a good spot to stand in when speaking to the shopkeeper, since, after all, that’s where you stood.

There isn’t anything extraordinary going on here such that the only or best explanation is an extraordinary one. Ordinary explanations do just fine. What am I missing?

Those beliefs seem irreconcilable to me. Just in terms of deciding what it means to “recover” a memory, if we can elicit false memories or true memories depending only on the way we ask, in what sense is a memory that better reflects reality more there than the false memory? Both are apparently equally “recoverable”, which suggests that they’re both equally manufactured by an unreliable process.

I don’t actually disagree with this, though perhaps I’m just misunderstanding you. I agree that there are truths about Santa Claus (so called “intersubjective” truths). I also agree that we cover the world in intersubjective concepts, so that all of our concepts have an intersubjective quality.

But I don’t think it follows from this that we can believe anything we want. There are also intersubjectively false things we can say about Santa Claus. And it also seems to me that the statement, “Santa Claus doesn’t really exist” is true in a different way from the statement, “Santa Claus has a beard”. There must also be true and false statements we can make about the things “on your doorstep of your perception”, and true and false statements of both types.

In any case, I don’t agree that what you’re saying about psychic phenomena is true in the way that “Santa has a beard” is true. There is no intersubjective truth to psychic experience, and from the intersubjective truths we do share it seems that claims about psychic experiences are false.

It only threatens anyone’s belief systems in the same way and to the same degree as you saying “I am a cow from outer space”, or “I have seen a square circle, u have no way of knowing what I’ve come across in my life so you can’t tell me I haven’t”.

Well, yes, there are certain things that we can tell you that you haven’t come across, and things we can tell you are not the case. Some things cannot physically exist by definition and some things are misinterpretations of what does exist. Whilst I have no doubt whatsoever that your experiences happened, an interpretation of them as psychic is as challenging to philosophy and the beliefs of others as experiencing your existence but then concluding that your existence is that of a cow from outer space. I’ve had plenty of experiences that I entertain with comments to myself or others such as “wow I must be psychic”, so it’s not like I don’t know what you’re basing your belief on. I just know what to do with such thoughts and why.

You can expect just as much of a response to any obviously wrong understanding.

That’s not to say you can’t utterly convince yourself you have seen a square circle, there’s no limits it seems to the stubbornness of some people, especially if their identity or any other emotional attachment is challenged. In fact I expect you to be this way, from the way you’re acting. It’s just ridiculous that your display is all going on in a philosophy forum, but at least its resulted in all the rationality you’d ever need to ween you off your beliefs from at least some of the people responding.

People think that the way they “see” isn’t “psychic ability”.
Unbelievable.

This is th 21st century folks.
I like your terms, MagsJ.

A few prophetic dreams which turned into deja vus. Loads of deja vus throughout my life and the occurrences were quite amped up when I first started to really communicate on ILP in 2016, but the well’s run dry as of late. Do deja vus tell you that your life is on track? Well, that’s what I’ve always told myself or is it a “wake up dummy!” marker?

It is unrealiable as a rule: iow all people can trust their ability to…You assumed in the above that in all cases the people who think they have certain abilities or certain things are happening are judging poorly statistically. On what basis did you universalize what, I do think, is often the case?

You are, here, basically, making a psychic claim. “I have had certain experiences that I have concluded are the same as the experiences of all others who think they have psychic experiences.” Further you assume that you know what the whole set of their cognitive processes are when they evaluate their experiences. You know you can rule out any exception to your experience, since, presumably, people cannot have different skill sets, have learned different things, must be exactly like UP TO THAT POINT where you rationally dismiss and they naively believe. Since you argue that it is ridiculous he presents his ideas in a philosophy forum you might want explain how you have overcome the problem of other minds, which you seem to be implicitly claiming to have done, since you know with such certainty what is going on in his mind.

It says a lot the aims of this community. And not just about the psychic topic.

What is the ratio of skeptics here about all matters? Does anybody seek agreement on anything? What do you wish to arrive at in your thinking here? Do even want to arrive at anything?

Do you consider yourself an open minded person or is it somewhat closed?

How do you benefit openly sharing doubt?

Somewhere between classic philosophy and modern day logic is idealism. Do you dismiss idealism?

If something doesn’t exist in this world, does that mean you exclude parallel worlds where purple unicorns roam? I’m aware that is an extreme example. Do I have to strain to display that awareness to fit in?

The benefit of being nice is that you smooth over conflict and sometimes conflict goes away if isn’t met with resistance. Peace is the highest value. Better than dominant submissive sexual positions. Who the fuck doesn’t want utopia?

Whoops, I meant this for the rant house thread of mine.

I think unreliability universalizes fairly easily. If something is “often” unreliable, then it is unreliable simpliciter.

We can get into some quasi-math analysis, e.g. “there is some probability (S) (whatever counts as “often”) that there is some probability (P) (whatever counts as “unreliable”) that a thing will give false results, so the best we can hope for is truth with probability (1-(S \times P))”.

But I’m not speaking mathematically when I say that memory is unreliable. Rather, the mundane explanation for why someone remembers a dream that very accurately predicted an experience is that their memory is imperfect. We know that’s at least often the case, so it is mundane to suggest that it’s the case here.

Nice try. You want to claim that using logic is or can be psychic?

You don’t need to know the whole set of someone’s cognitive processes if they amount to something invalid: you can have a deeply nuanced and layered argument that square circles exist, but you don’t need to know it inside out to know it’s wrong. Have I solved the problem of other minds? No, but reason can bypass it to a knowable extent - hence why we can communicate meaningfully - it only works due to the use of logic, which I guess is some magical way of reading minds to you if you want to claim that I am making a psychic claim?

Effects occurring before their cause is not the way things work. We know this because they consistently follow causes and whenever they might be interpreted as appearing to precede them, there is no consistency beyond random chance.
Likewise the notion that the conception of the effect preceding the cause is in fact the cause of that effect in itself - this does no better than random chance either. All evidence points one way, zero evidence points the other - and this evidence or lack thereof applies to everyone who tests it - it bypasses the problem of other minds just like communication. Logically you conceive as reality that which is evidenced by reality, and that which isn’t evidenced you logically conceive as not real. Nothing “psychic” is needed.

I can easily turn this around by asking why you aren’t demonstrating skepticism of your skepticism and showing some consistency with your affirmation of skepticism?

Even more obviously I could ask why you aren’t being skeptical of psychic abilities instead of just being skeptical that the people who are showing skepticism of psychic abilities aren’t being skeptical…

I mean, did you really think this through?

Considering yourself to be open minded is closed to the consideration of your being closed minded. Unfortunately you can’t say anything, you can’t even “say” without something being affirmed and closing your mind to what you are saying and to the accepted language of saying it to at least some degree. Closed mindedness is inevitable, this is why the Buddha famously didn’t respond to certain questions - that’s the best a maximally open minded individual can do.

I have tried to doubt pretty much everything there is, demonstrating closed-mindedness is not in fact a completely reliable indication that you are not open minded:

I am in many ways an idealist, as I mentioned before… I am not dismissing Idealism at all. I’m just treating it rationally. When it comes to philosophy, I am closed to dealing with that which cannot be falsified - because otherwise you are just playing an aimless guessing game that gets nowhere. There’s nothing wrong at all with the consideration that there are parallel worlds where purple unicorns roam, but there’s literally nothing you can do with that - no philosophy can be gained from such a consideration so it is most loving of wisdom to leave it there. Imagination and creativity such as entertaining the possibility of psychic abilities is great… and then there’s also philosophy.

Why would a person believe him or herself ‘psychic’ or capable of ‘psychic’ abilities?

Firstly, psychic abilities spawns almost entirely from fiction, fantasy, and children’s stories. It’s a popular myth. In reality, psychics are never proven, never replicated, therefore improbable enough to be ruled out completely. If it has never done before then why, all of a sudden, would it be possible now? Thus the first reason for psychic belief is immersion into fantasy. And this is the plight of the modern world, of Modernity. Idealism and fantasy is blurred with, mixed into, reality. Thus modern people cannot tell apart fact from fiction, idealism from realism. A child’s fantasy with waking life. More and more people across the world are succumbing to these seductive and degenerative tendencies. Reality is pushed further and further away by common humanity.

Secondly, there is a simple misnomer and case of mixed up language. The believers here are replacing ‘intuition’ with psychic abilities. By doing this, they are casually switching between meanings, to bolster their case. Because without intuition, the believers really have nothing at all to go on. Thus believers must base psych-ism entirely in the subconscious, the area of ‘feelings’ and premonitions. Psychic ability is not really claimed as a brightly aware, conscious effort of prediction. Rarely or never would you hear a psych-ist claim that psychic powers come purely from intelligent, rational, wise thought. Rather they claim that it comes from ‘unknowning’, “it just felt this way”. Thus a person who is consciously aware, makes predictions based on reason, and gets a large amount of those predictions correct, would not be a ‘psychic’ opposed to somebody who “feels” premonitions and gets them correct only a fraction of the time, or never at all. Thus psych-ists are obsessed with the rarest premonitions, the one in a million occurrences, where somebody gets a wild fabrication semi-accurate. They then focus on this one in a million occurrence that “see, we were right, psych-ism does exist”.

Thirdly, psych-ists, and other believers, those of the religious sort too, cannot be proved wrong. And this is perhaps the most important point. They are so detached from reality that they make it literally impossible to be proved wrong. And because this is so, psych-ism along with other religious belief, dogmatism, fanaticism, puritanism, are all anti-philosophical. When a conclusion is taken as 100% true from the start (psychic abilities must exist) then these believers are working backward from that conclusion. The conclusion is fixed. They are looking for evidence or premises, confirmation, backward. They are starting from the end, and looking for a beginning, to make a case. Philosophically, even amateurs can recognize and its error. Since it is backward, it is irrational. Philosophy almost always starts from ‘unknown’ premises and works toward the known, instead of working from ‘known’ premises (the conclusion) and working toward the unknown.

You don’t know anything in philosophy. And so psych-ists, believers, dogmatists, puritans, must all be doubted. Your claims will not be taken at face value. You are probably lying. You could be stupid. That has yet to be decided. But it will be decided in time.

Fourthly and finally, even if you did have a “psychic claim” and a “psychic ability”, how would you be correct in anyway? These testimonies for psychic experiences are based on correlations. However correlation doesn’t mean much, in reality. Cognition exists to perceive, recognize, and predict patterns. Even children can intuit and recognize patterns, non-verbally. The brain does so naturally, without help, as it has evolved to do. That is the function of the brain and mind. The ‘problem’ then is a matter of description. A child encouraged to call his or her experiences “psychic experiences” are using fantastical terms, mythological, instead of rationally. A non-psychic person could just as well have the same premonitions, same predictions, similar dreams, similar deja vu, but rule out ‘psychic’ experience by matter of the connotation. Just because you have a dream, and it turns true, or you have a unique and special intuition, still doesn’t prove you’re psychic. That is because of the stringent demand implied by the connotation. ‘Psychic’ implies something super-natural, unnatural. Thus if somebody did have ‘psychic’ abilities then it would be apparent, easy to prove, and easy to replicate.

So what do ‘psychic’ people claim? Predictions about future events? Here is a tarot card? Here is a red ribbon? Therefore something will happen within 30 days involving red ribbons. That doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t prove anything. Rather psych-ists, dogmatists, believers, want to believe, and are willing to stretch the truth, bend reality, as far as possible to convince others that they have a semblance of legitimacy, when they don’t.

Keep your bibles…I’m not interested in false gods and false claims. It’s dishonest at the very least. You’re straight lying at the most.