The Possibility of Psychic Precognition

Have you ever had any premonitions that came true? I've had dreams that seem to me to be premonitions of later events. Whatever your worldview is, the fact is there IS scientific evidence for precognition based on controlled experiments. (see video below). Usually it can't be controlled in terms of when it happens. But some people evidently do have the ability to willfully access that psychic part of themselves. Perhaps it takes practice. Here's a brief article on the phenomenon and actual personal accounts of premonition in people's lives..
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• People regularly report visions of future events, including sports matches. Some studies also report an ability to predict the stock exchange.
• Many scientists accept that there is a consistent, small but significant, effect in precognition studies.
• Across science, comparative "effect sizes" are commonly accepted as reliable evidence.

"In 1946, a man called John Godley – then a student at Oxford University – dreamt he was reading a list of horse race winners in a newspaper and saw the names Bindal and Juladdin. The following day he checked a newspaper and found that two horses with those names were running that day. He risked a bet with a group of friends; both horses won, and the group won large sums of money.


Godley had the same experience several times over the following years. The fourth time he had such a dream, he made a written statement of his predictions (again involving two horses), which was witnessed by several people, sealed in an envelope, stamped by a post office official, and locked away until the day of the race. When this prediction came true, Godley became famous.

The standard scientific reaction would be to explain this story in terms of coincidence, exaggeration, or fraud. Many scientists are convinced that psi phenomena such as precognition do not exist. However, I am open to the existence of such phenomena. This is partly because, on occasion, I have experienced them myself. I have also had a few precognitive dreams related to sport. It’s not as though I dream about sports matches regularly. I can only recall a few such dreams. But on most of these occasions, the details of my dreams have been correct."--- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/202107/the-possibility-precognition

https://www.buzzfeed.com/angelicaamartinez/creepy-premonition-stories

Magical Realist said:

Many scientists are convinced that psi phenomena such as precognition do not exist. However, I am open to the existence of such phenomena. This is partly because, on occasion, I have experienced them myself.

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Perhaps it depends on how you ask the question. Precognition or Prediction? Perhaps it may be as simple as that.
We know that the brain is a prediction engine, this is how we can relate to the present reality (Seth)
But I am sure that certain present conditions allow for longer-term prediction of future events from a subconscious assessment of probabilities.

And according to David Bohm, the "Implicate order" precedes the "Explicate order".
Perhaps sometimes we may be able to intuit the future from present conditions? And then we exclaim; "I just knew that was gonna happen!"

No,..it's not the mere prediction of events based on perceptions of the present. It is actual foreknowledge of the future.

"Precognition is often described as a form of extrasensory perception (ESP) where information about future events is perceived through means beyond the known human senses. It is often reported as spontaneous insights or visions that occur in dreams, waking states, or meditative states."

Magical Realist said:

No,..it's not the mere prediction of events based on perceptions of the present. It is actual foreknowledge of the future.

"Precognition is often described as a form of extrasensory perception (ESP) where information about future events is perceived through means beyond the known human senses. It is often reported as spontaneous insights or visions that occur in dreams, waking states, or meditative states."

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I understand the concept of precognition, but the way I see it, in a deterministic universe the future is already more or less determined, so any precognition is in fact a cognition of a future probability?

Write4U said:

I understand the concept of precognition, but the way I see it, in a deterministic universe the future is already more or less determined, so any precognition is in fact a cognition of a future probability?

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Not a probability,,..an actual event. Like you would know about a present event, only one yet to happen. Or as a strong hunch something is going to happen.

I do think that we can subconsciously perceive things in the present that can be an accurate assessment of a person or situation. Like when someone meets someone and says afterwards that they have bad feeling about that person. But that's unlike a premonition, like when someone cancels a flight because they had a bad feeling about it and it ends up crashing:

https://articles.listnr.com/hit-net...t-feeling-leads-to-last-minute-flight-change/

Magical Realist said:

Whatever your worldview is, the fact is there IS scientific evidence for precognition based on controlled experiments. (see video below).

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There were claims to show a positive result in experiments by Daryl Bem, but, alas, there has been failure to replicate any of them. As for the experiments being controlled, there were sufficient flaws in his methodology to question his results: https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2011/01...good-journals-can-still-get-it-totally-wrong/
You may also want to read this: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/01/daryl-bem-and-psi-in-the-ganzfield/
Or this: https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2023/03/...esults-are-in-so-where-are-all-the-headlines/

So, simply put, yes, individual experiments often claim to show ESP, or precognition, or any number of pseudoscientific or paranormal phenomena. But they aren't significant unless they can be repeated. And in this case none of them have been. The most interesting thing to come out of his experiments and his conclusions are more likely to be around the weaknesses of the testing, so that others can then learn from it.

It is thus disingenuous to say that "there IS scientific evidence", as, when you look at it more closely, it is really just an explainable and unrepeated anomalous result.

Usually it can't be controlled in terms of when it happens.

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Ah, yes, the great get-out-of-jail-free card used by all such purveyors of the paranormal.

Magical Realist said:

Have you ever had any premonitions that came true? I've had dreams that seem to me to be premonitions of later events. Whatever your worldview is, the fact is there IS scientific evidence for precognition based on controlled experiments. (see video below). Usually it can't be controlled in terms of when it happens. But some people evidently do have the ability to willfully access that psychic part of themselves. Perhaps it takes practice. Here's a brief article on the phenomenon and actual personal accounts of premonition in people's lives..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• People regularly report visions of future events, including sports matches. Some studies also report an ability to predict the stock exchange.
• Many scientists accept that there is a consistent, small but significant, effect in precognition studies.
• Across science, comparative "effect sizes" are commonly accepted as reliable evidence.

"In 1946, a man called John Godley – then a student at Oxford University – dreamt he was reading a list of horse race winners in a newspaper and saw the names Bindal and Juladdin. The following day he checked a newspaper and found that two horses with those names were running that day. He risked a bet with a group of friends; both horses won, and the group won large sums of money.


Godley had the same experience several times over the following years. The fourth time he had such a dream, he made a written statement of his predictions (again involving two horses), which was witnessed by several people, sealed in an envelope, stamped by a post office official, and locked away until the day of the race. When this prediction came true, Godley became famous.

The standard scientific reaction would be to explain this story in terms of coincidence, exaggeration, or fraud. Many scientists are convinced that psi phenomena such as precognition do not exist. However, I am open to the existence of such phenomena. This is partly because, on occasion, I have experienced them myself. I have also had a few precognitive dreams related to sport. It’s not as though I dream about sports matches regularly. I can only recall a few such dreams. But on most of these occasions, the details of my dreams have been correct."--- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/202107/the-possibility-precognition

https://www.buzzfeed.com/angelicaamartinez/creepy-premonition-stories

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A weird one for me. The year is 1972 I am 5 and watching and fascinated by the lovely Olga Corbet at the Munich Olympics on the TV set. I dreamt I was flying over the stadium and gun shots were fired.

People were hurt, a wake very upset from the nightmare.

Difficult to unpick now as I am aware of false memories and how they work and change from childhood, so I relied on my mother to verify details years later.

She said I did dream it but I don’t know how she remembers it either?


Did I dream of gun fire at Munich before black September?

Did I merge events on the news into my dream/nightmare after the events on September 5th 1972?

Or watch something horrible on the news followed by the Olympics and a dream did the rest?


My rational brain says no, premonition but the memory stuck whichever way it went.


Just say I did dream of gunfire, an omen, what would be the point of the universe, a god, fate, giving that nightmare to 5-year-old boy in Manchester over 900 miles away?

What could I do?

Could his mum could ring MI6? Get them to stop the Olympics?

I don't think premonitions are necessarily Godsent. If anything they are little winks from the universe that we are more connected to events than we have ever imagined.

Sarkus said:

There were claims to show a positive result in experiments by Daryl Bem, but, alas, there has been failure to replicate any of them. As for the experiments being controlled, there were sufficient flaws in his methodology to question his results: https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2011/01...good-journals-can-still-get-it-totally-wrong/
You may also want to read this: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/01/daryl-bem-and-psi-in-the-ganzfield/
Or this: https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2023/03/...esults-are-in-so-where-are-all-the-headlines/

So, simply put, yes, individual experiments often claim to show ESP, or precognition, or any number of pseudoscientific or paranormal phenomena. But they aren't significant unless they can be repeated. And in this case none of them have been. The most interesting thing to come out of his experiments and his conclusions are more likely to be around the weaknesses of the testing, so that others can then learn from it.

It is thus disingenuous to say that "there IS scientific evidence", as, when you look at it more closely, it is really just an explainable and unrepeated anomalous result.
Ah, yes, the great get-out-of-jail-free card used by all such purveyors of the paranormal.

Click to expand...

"What about Bem's findings and the crisis of replication? I noted that Bem opened his database and software and provided instruction manuals free to anyone who wished to rerun his experiments. As of July 2020, Bem's experiments (including the original trials) showed replication in a meta-analysis encompassing 90 experiments in 33 laboratories in 14 countries.13 Indulge my repetition of that figure. "To encourage replications," Bem and his coauthors wrote in the abstract of their follow-up paper, "all materials needed to conduct them were made available on request. We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect…greatly exceeding" the standard for "'decisive evidence' in support of the experimental hypothesis."

After a January 2022 talk in which I defended Bem's data, I heard from professional skeptic Michael Shermer who wrote on Twitter: "Dear @MitchHorowitz @RupertSheldrake et al. Bem's precognition experiment was NOT 'replicated 90 times' 72 studies revealed no effect, 18 were statistically significant. 'there is as of yet no compelling reason to draw the inference precognition exists'." He linked to a critique of the aforementioned meta-analysis.

After a degree of inconclusive back-and-forth (this being Twitter), I replied:

Michael, I do not believe you understand meta-analysis. "Statistically significant" refers to the p-value associated with a study. It does *not* mean the effect is real or not real. What you want to know is what is the size of the effect under study. If the effect is small (which is the case for practically all experiments in the behavioral and social sciences) then the results of any single study may well not reach statistical significance (because not enough trials in the study were run). But if the effect size per study is observed to be about the same over many replications, and the overall estimate of the effect is not zero, then you are dealing with a real phenomenon. That is the purpose of meta-analysis. The Bem meta-analysis shows that the effects are indeed repeatable over many replications, and that the effect is above zero (in fact, from a statistical perspective we have very high confidence that it is above zero). But even beyond this, one would expect that 5% of studies would be statistically significant at the p = 0.05 level purely by chance. But that's not what we have here. We see 18 out of 90 studies being significant. That's 20%, far more than the chance expectation of 5%. You have a naive understanding of how to properly evaluate replication of experimental effects. The 90 studies, meta-analyzed, show significant effect. I have—now for the third (and final) time—invited you to a formal, jointedly [sic] sponsored debate since Twitter is so limited a forum. I further review this material in my forthcoming book."---- https://boingboing.net/2022/08/17/is-precognition-real.html

What I do not understand about the concept of "precognition" is that it does not follow normal brain function of "controlled hallucination", where the brain makes a prediction which it must test against "sensory observation" for confirmation.

We can make "guesses", but that does not meet the definition of precognition.

Bem's meta-analysis of 90 experiments has been criticised for publication bias and other issues.
http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-meta-analysis-of-90-precognition.html?m=1
https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/
From the latter:
"Bem’s 2011 article “Feeling the Future” has had a profound effect on social psychology. Rather than revealing a supernatural phenomenon, the article demonstrated fundamental flaws in the way social psychologists conducted and reported empirical studies. Seven years later, awareness of bad research practices is widespread and new journal editors are implementing reforms in the evaluation of manuscripts. New statistical tools have been developed to detect practices that produce significant results by capitalizing on chance. It is unlikely that Bem’s article would be accepted for publication these days."

And as Bem has also stated:
“I’m all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it’s fun for some people—but I don’t have the patience for it. If you looked at all my past experiments, they were always rhetorical devices. I gathered data to show how my point would be made. I used data as a point of persuasion, and I never really worried about, ‘Will this replicate or will this not?” (Daryl J. Bem, in Engber, 2017)

Basically you're referring to a paper that has been used to highlight weak practices in psychology research, and that has actually led to subsequent improvements. Of course, if you only accept the paper at face value and then ignore what came after...

Basically you're referring to a paper that has been used to highlight weak practices in psychology research, and that has actually led to subsequent improvements. Of course, if you only accept the paper at face value and then ignore what came after...

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Actually I'm referring to a paper that has confirmed the reality of precognition previously shown in Bem's experiments.

"But if the effect size per study is observed to be about the same over many replications, and the overall estimate of the effect is not zero, then you are dealing with a real phenomenon. That is the purpose of meta-analysis. The Bem meta-analysis shows that the effects are indeed repeatable over many replications, and that the effect is above zero (in fact, from a statistical perspective we have very high confidence that it is above zero)."

I don't care how skeptic scientists have subsequently treated the paper over the years. The science is clear. If they can't deal with it oh well.

"What dogmatic skeptics like Susan Blackmore and Richard Wiseman tend to do is to find any possible means of refuting evidence from psi studies. For example, although experiments such as Bem’s have been successfully replicated many times, skeptics would highlight an unsuccessful replication and claim that an isolated failure invalidates a whole series of successful replications. But no other area of science has such a ‘one strike and you’re out’ policy. In fact, as you well know, there is a’ crisis of replication’ throughout science in general, and in comparison, the replication of psi experiments looks pretty good."--- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...5/do-psi-phenomena-exist-the-debate-continues

Magical Realist said:

Actually I'm referring to a paper that has confirmed the reality of precognition previously shown in Bem's experiments.

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And what paper would that be?

I don't care how skeptic scientists have subsequently treated the paper over the years. The science is clear. If they can't deal with it oh well.

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No, that's the point: the science isn't clear. The Bem meta-analysis has been shown to be flawed. It has even been used to help improve robustness of experiments, so quoting anything that uses that as reason to claim that psi is real is not going anywhere. As well as all the statistical issues with the test, he even included an experiment where the results had been deliberately manipulated.
But, sure, dismiss skeptics. Dismiss what they point issue at. After all, as with Daryl Bem, it's not important that the results might not be as legitimate as claimed, as long as the intended message gets out. "Psi is real!!". That's the clickbait. That's what the public will read. Don't worry that the results are flawed. Hey, it's what Donald Trump is very good at as well. Believers will believe, and will hook on to anything that asserts them to be correct, no matter how flawed it is shown to be.

Poor career skeptics. Desperately protecting their worldview by attacking Bem and other supporting researchers for showing precog to be a real phenomenon. Wouldn't want the Skeptical Inquirer to go out of business now would we? What a colossal embarrassment for skeptics worldwide--all those years of anti-paranormal claims and tireless debunkery suddenly shown to be wrong by a simple little experiment!

Meanwhile more studies keep coming out supporting Bem's work. Here's two more meta-analysises:

https://www.researchgate.net/profil...ion-Experiments-A-Meta-Analysis-1945-2016.pdf

"Previous research in parapsychology has not been particularly persuasive, in large part due to a lack of replicability of significant findings. To address these concerns and better understand which factors may be associated with stronger and more consistent effect sizes, all forced-choice precognition experiments analysing individual differences (e.g., personality traits) were aggregated to determine which factors might reliably predict psi performance. Overall, 55 studies published between 1945 and 2016, including 35 individual difference measures, were subject to meta-analysis. Six individual difference measures, namely, luck belief (the belief that luck is primarily controllable), perceptual defensiveness, openness to experience, belief in psi, extraversion, and time belief as dynamic, were found to significantly correlate with psi performance. Given the particularly straightforward nature of forced-choice precognition experiments, a promising future avenue would be to explore these factors in confirmatory studies. It is hoped that researchers can model their future experiments off these findings in conjunction with preregistration techniques, to ultimately create a more systematic and robust database."

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/docum...&doi=486da45c928af8af21f89ae6f31c032ed388336a

"The concept of precognition runs counter to accepted notions of causality and appears to conflict with current scientific theory. Nevertheless, over the past half-century a substantial number of experiments have been reported claiming empirical support for the hypothesis of precognition. Subjects in forced-choice experiments, according to many reports, have correctly predicted to a statistically significant degree the identity (or order) of target stimuli randomly selected at a later time. We performed a meta-analysis of forced-choice precognition experiments published in the English-language research literature between 1935 and 1987...There is a small, but reliable overall effect (z = 11.41, P = 6.3 x 10- 25). Thirty percent of the studies (by 40 investigators) are significant at the 5% significance level."

Here's an interesting observation regarding the taboo in mainstream science against studies such as Bem's. It all has to do with fundamental dogmatic beliefs about what science is and should be and how PSI studies are erroneously believed to threaten to undermine that:

"The interesting thing about the reply to Cardeña's paper by Reber and Alcock is that they explicitly say that they won't look at the statistical evidence, because the phenomena in question cannot possibly exist. That is just dogmatic thinking, more akin to religious fundamentalism than science, strikingly reminiscent of the contemporaries of Galileo who refused to look through his telescope. Every scientist would agree that science should be based on evidence rather than assumptions. And we have to be prepared to change our assumptions, if that is what the evidence suggests.

Psi are not incompatible with science, since they don’t contradict it. As I said earlier, precognition is completely compatible with many of the findings and theories of physics, as is telepathy (with the concepts of superposition and entanglement, for instance.) Note again that I’m not saying that quantum physics can explain the phenomena. I’m not sure that (like many other phenomena such as dark energy or consciousness) psi phenomena can be explained at present. We should also remember that science is open-ended. There is no final word on how the universe works.

You mention Randi's prize, which is actually a con—the whole thing is so rigged and biased against participants that no sane person would ever agree to take part. The whole thing is set up for failure. (There is an excellent book on this by Robert McLuhan called Randi's Prize.)

I'm not a parapsychologist, but a psychologist, and I find the fundamentalism of many scientists towards psi interesting—really the same phenomenon of dogmatic certainty which affects religious fundamentalists, conferring a sense of belonging, identity and control."---- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...5/do-psi-phenomena-exist-the-debate-continues

"Since the 1990s, parapsychologists have carried out research into an unconscious form of precognition termed presentiment. Using experimental techniques well-established in psychophysiology, subjects in controlled experiments have been found to unconsciously anticipate stimuli to which they are randomly exposed, to a degree that is highly statistically significant. The effect is small but the findings have been widely replicated."--- https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/presentiment