[extropy-chat] Precognition on TV.

[Sondre Bjellås]

I have great respect for you and your work Damien, but I don't know you like the other people here. I threw in my comments earlier as I'm an heartly atheist and think it's scary how easily people can naivly believe. That's not directed to you or anyone on this alias, but more what I see in the general public and amongst my friends and family.

I'm sure you already know about James Randi's work on the subject:
http://www.randi.org/

I love reading and learning about AI, nanotechnology, radical life extensions and the rest of topics that involves self-improvement and future possibilities. But I don't feel anything for psi stuff, other than in hollywood movies. I'm sure we can one day do things like elevation and remote viewing thanks to technological advances. But I strongly doubt that biological humans that have evolved through natural selection of evolution, have any psi abilities.

I'm having a hard time figuring out the evolutionary basis for remote viewing (or other weird abilities that some people claim to possess). I can't see how it improves the survival or reproduction ability of humans.


Regards,
Sondre - who applies current knowledge to aggressively improve and extend life.


-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 8:20 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Precognition on TV.

At 01:40 PM 3/16/2007 -0400, John K Clark wrote:

>If I were to follow your links and read this
>stuff it would take hours, be very unpleasant, and at the end of the day I
>would not be one bit wiser than I am right now

John, I regard you as a pal (although we've never met except via 
electrons), and a smart, sarcastic and funny guy. But on this topic I 
no longer care what you think. I understand your attitude; it's a 
very safe and cautious one that in many instances optimizes available 
time and energy investment. It also inevitably misses the boat with 
drastic novelties.

Since I and some others on the list enjoy playing with such off the 
wall possibilities (which is presumably why we mostly also like 
thinking about other topics such as MNT, AI, cryonics, radical life 
extension, astrobiology, and other "sciences without content (yet)" 
reviled by most sensible, cautious people), how about you just leave 
us to our follies and we'll cease prodding you with evidence you 
won't look at. (I immediately seem to breach that condition, below, 
but I'm speaking to others now.)

>I'll tell you one thing, if I could foretell the future I sure as hell
>wouldn't be wasting my time making documentaries about myself,
>valuable time that I could be spending with my stockbroker and bookie.

I understand there are people who do that. But my own interest in psi 
(at this point, as noted, I'm writing to anyone else who's still 
gives a shit) is closer to the intrigued bafflement of people looking 
at odd behavior like prodigious autistic calculation or, on a 
different scale, detection of neutralinos. Obviously if psi were the 
sort of thing anyone could turn into an engineering application, it 
would have been done already. That tells us something about it, but 
sheds no direct light on results such as the presentiment data. This 
sort of data is not interesting to John, but it did intrigue Nobel 
laureate Kary B. Mullis (Polymerase Chain Reaction), who sat in Dean 
Radin's lab and saw aggregated presponse data he'd just generated 
himself ( 
http://discovermagazine.com/web-exclusives/25-greatest-science-books-intro/ 
). Once again--this is not an argument from Authority (I could only 
lose, at the moment, attempting such a move); it's an indication that 
you don't have to be a fool to accept the available evidence. I now 
await the character assassination this will attract to Mullis, as it 
has already to Josephson.

Damien Broderick 

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