(November 19, 2018 at 5:20 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: You know Carl Sagan had a very interesting take on coincidences and how it leads into people inro creating a make-belief and then later whole industries like parapsychology, religion and what not in his book "Broca's Brain"
Quote:Many years ago I awoke in the dead of night in a cold sweat, with the certain knowledge that a close relative had suddenly died. I was so gripped with the haunting intensity of the experience that I was afraid to place a long-distance phone call, for fear that the relative would trip over the telephone cord (or something) and make the experience a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the relative is alive and well, and whatever psychological roots the experience, may have, it was not a reflection of an imminent event in the real world.
However, suppose the relative had in fact died that night. You would have had a difficult time convincing me that it was merely coincidence. But it is easy to calculate that if each American has such a premonitory experience a few times in his lifetime, the actuarial statistics alone will produce a few apparent precognitive events somewhere in America each year. We can calculate that this must occur fairly frequently, but to the rare person who dreams of disaster, followed rapidly by its realization, it is uncanny and awesome. Such a coincidence must happen to someone every few months. But those who experience a correct precognition understandably resist its explanation by coincidence.
After my experience I did not write a letter to an institute of parapsychology relating a compelling predictive dream which was not borne out by reality. That is not a memorable letter. But had the death I dreamed actually occurred, such a letter would have been marked down as evidence for precognition. The hits are recorded, the misses are not. Thus human nature unconsciously conspires to produce a biased reporting of the frequency of such events.
Sure, but suppose that the death did happen, and it happened repeatedly (with different individuals). Predictions of sudden death are made by one individual, and 75% of the time, the deaths occur. This would all still be a series of coincidences, but they would be remarkable experiences nonetheless. And there is nothing about this world (from what I can see) that may render this physically impossible, especially if it just so happens that multiple universes may be a thing, and in at least one of these universes even the very improbable may bound to happen.
