[extropy-chat] Precognition on TV

[scerir]

There are to my knowledge, absolutely no scientific research
and tests that validates that any person have or have had,
any extraordinary abilities. If it where the case,
we would have to rewrite our understanding of the world
and the universe.
/Sondre

Speaking about 'our understanding of the world
and the universe' (and not about ESP, at least
not necessarily about ESP) it is perhaps interesting
to point out an unexpected quote by K.Godel.

He thought - as J.Barrow reported - that intuition,
by which we can see truths of mathematics and science,
was a tool that would one day be valued just
as formally and reverently as logic itself.

'I don't see any reason why we should have
less confidence in this kind of perception,
i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense
perception, which induces us to build up
physical theories and to expect that future
sense perceptions will agree with them and,
moreover, to believe that a question not decidable
now has meaning and may be decided in the future.'
-K.Godel, 'What is Cantor's Continuum Problem?', 
Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. P.Benacerraf & H.
Putnam, p. 483, (year and publisher unknown).

All that (I mean 'our difficult understanding' 
and not necessarily the ESP) may have its roots 
in the very uncertain relations among information,
(platonic) scientific laws, and matter. 
P.C.W.Davies wrote about that recently here
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0703041 .
Note also that some no-go theorems and principles
seem to be contextual, or dependent on the physical
landscape. See, in example, the Malament-Hogarth
spacetime, and its implications.