[extropy-chat] Precognition

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 3/19/07, gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:45:52 -0400, Stathis Papaioannou
> <stathisp at gmail.com > wrote:
>
> I'm a skeptic about this subject too, but I'm afraid I don't find your
> argument above very convincing. It is at least conceivable that ESP is a
> brand new experiment of evolution.
>
> ESP *might* be present now but at such low frequency that we can't yet
> determine it to be real with p < .05 or with p < .01 (or with p at
> whatever is your preferred threshold of statistical significance, which is
>
> after all only a matter of convention).


Everything has to start somewhere, and maybe as Ben says there are physical
limitations to the strength of ESP. Nevertheless, unless it has just started
sporadically appearing in humans in the last few decades, we should have
noticed a trend of increasing prevalence, and increasing strength if this
does not contravene some physical limit, in historical times. It would
actually be easier to accept that ESP is possible, but simply hasn't evolved
yet in humans, if there were no claims that people today have it. It's not a
knock-down argument, but arguments from evolution rarely are.

Stathis Papaioannou
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