[extropy-chat] About ESP, etc.

[Mike Dougherty]

Can (should) precognition be explained as a subconscious assembly of
potentially non-obvious clues?  I could see a "hunch" coming up from
an intuitive impulse to hit when the card-counter says stand.  Is that
precog, luck, or an otherwise less-than-explicable good move?
(assuming this action leads to a win)

I wonder if this could be a form of learning by trial and error. Not
knowing how to play blackjack and betting with virtual money, I
learned the basics of the game just by doing it repeatedly.  After a
while, there's as much instinct to what is going on as any hard rules.
 (i was maybe 10 at the time, so i certainly wasn't doing a
statistical analysis of probability of winning on a 13 when the dealer
is showing a 6)

Did you ever watch Jeopardy and know the answer to questions only a
moment before they answer the question?  (ok, question the answer *g*)
 I was often suprised that I got Jeopardy questions with as high a
rate as I did - mostly without a conscious awareness of how or when i
learned the material being presented.  Is that precog, or lightening
fast random access to a lifetime of stored facts that had otherwise no
memory trigger?  I'll buy that scenario, it seems more likely than
precognition, right?  Then what about Card Sharks?  That's another
game show that I seemed to 'guess' correctly more often than maybe I
should have.  I'll also go with the idea of card counting for that
game show too, but it still seems weird.  As if the amount of language
required to state the cumulative subconscious knowledge required to
track the deck and probabilistically assess the current situation in
order to make the correct guess from moment to moment were too
difficult to express and therefor Occams razor seems to point to
precognition as a simpler explanation

just a few thoughts