Past, Present and Future

[kandrathe]

This is "objective open minded skepticism"? This sounds like unadulterated crankery - connecting up various dots with tenuous theorizing, without any rigorous testing or even internal consistency. Look at the laundry list - Mayans? Aboriginals? Thomas Aquinas? Why not add Nostradamus - he sounds like he'd fit right in.

The method described in the wiki article, essentially a dream journal, screams "confirmation bias". It sounds like Jung's synchronicity, which is also just an exercise in "predicting" the future by making spurious connections. The left-brain is a powerful tool for finding patterns, but it is well-documented that it will find patterns whether they exist or not. It is incredibly easy to generate a plausible, but wrong, theory to explain just about anything. Mysticism relies heavily on this function.

Open minded would be to read his book. Why the kerfuffle? You said, "Sounds like" three times, which screams to me "prejudice". His theory, as many are in the mostly untestable metaphysical realm, may very well be wrong. But, as has been the case in science for centuries, wrong theories often steer us closer to better wrong theories.

In referencing Aboriginals, Mayans, and St. Thomas Aquinas, I was actually contrasting, not comparing. I was merely stating that other people have had perceptions about space-time, that differ from the Newtonian/Lagrangian linearity as was main stream physics not even 100 years ago. The contrast was that J.W. Dunne documented his work and kept detailed dream journals to attempt to understand IF he was experiencing precognition. This is a testable, scientific approach to creating a falsifiable hypothesis. Did his dreams contain sufficient details about future events as to indicate precognition? Read his book to find out.

Point me to where he actually offers a repeatable, properly controlled test of this stuff. From where I sit, this looks like mystical navel-gazing. We have no reason to suspect that human consciousness, wonderful and complex though it may be, has any kind of privileged access to spacetime. Remote viewing, prophecy, and the like have never passed any well-constructed scientific test.

No, I don't need to point to anything other than his written work. It stands or fails on its own accord. If you were open minded, you'd read it as at least an interesting opinion on a theory that may contradict your own. This is not a mystical or religious book, so don't be afraid. It's entirely secular. I'm sure your local library has a copy. The two questions I would ask of myself before cracking the spine would be, does this author seems credible and is this author believable? Or, more simply, is he a crackpot or a liar? The burden then for you would be to either read the book with those questions unanswered, or determine them and then decide whether his work is unbelievable or rubbish. He wouldn't be the first, or last to have developed an incorrect or flawed theory, but an objective open minded skeptic might know the difference. I'm also a big fan and have read everything Lovecraft as well, but it hasn't warped my world view... too much...

P.S. Also, you might know that "Brains" and understanding them are a hobby of mine. In that end, if you wanted to be very brave, you might also check out "Irreducible Mind" by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson. I'm grounded enough to learn and speculate about the "What might be", without losing track of the "What we can prove". In many endeavors in my life I'm a philosopher, and not merely a scientist. If I limited my reading to only what is verifiable TRUTH, then I'd be a mathematician, and even then I'd be frustrated by the preponderance of falsity in the literature. Certainly NOT, a historian, and followed closely by any number of sciences. Science is merely unique because they have a peer reviewed method for generating their BS. :D