On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 mdoctorow@comcast.net wrote: (...)

My own opinion is that what some people interpret as Precognition is probably more Telepathy or Clairvoyance (respectively receiving auditory versus visual mental images in one's mind which originate from others' minds). (...) I'll ignore the exakt definition of precognition, much like I do with a few (maybe too few) English conventions. To me it's synonymous with both fore-thought and experience.

I'm not really clear on the definition of telepathy. To me, though, there must be a wealth of information about people that I'm normally only subliminally aware of. The classic experiment (no, actually I don't hav references other than Reader's Digest, but I've seen the numbers elsewhere--they're credible) puts the non-verbal component of communication above 90%. The major component (70%) is composed of things like posture, genetics, clothing, and stature (house of lords, nobel laureate, etc). I've been in several situations where it would've been to my advantage to wear my white sport coat. It would've affected me and my audience (I hadn't predicted that an audience would be accessible), you see. Even if merely putting it on didn't change my state of mind very much, the way in which people treated me would. Now, as regards prediction, it just about goes without saying that this is a matter of magnitude. Predicting that something on my computer will fail is easy. Predicting what or when is useful. Knowing why ^J won't work, now, would hav some rather immediate application (ah...telnet wasn't binary). For another example, in this field of mathematics, it is not easy by any means to predict the results. For that reason, I'm pleasantly surprised with how well my last image will suit my latest song, and prediction of the real world is naturally much more difficult, because we are missing so much more information about it. It's like Sting's song "You may know my credit cards from Ay to Zee, but you still know nuthin' 'bout me". The mystery of sleep, though, is a major consideration here, and I for one do not _want_ to remember my dreams, because I firmly believe that their evident purposes (learning and dealing with harsh reality) would be impaired with inspection. It is much the same with my computer. I will occasionally be compelled to understand internals, but most of the time I'm happy with considering how I would make a program work if I'm in a speculativ mood at all. It lets me occasionally get something useful done. Speculation...we hav a market based upon the idea that a few million people are less likely to be wrong about their predictions. The figurative reality of Lemmings comes up once in a while, especially with regards to human impact on the Earth, and whether we can let the dollar rule in stead of politicians, but it's not likely to be a permanent condition. Clairvoyance? No one has been able to demonstrate any kind of direct image transmission from mind to mind. And such a thing would beg many of the same security concerns that plague today's network computing. In a manner of proof, a lot of self-professed clairvoyants are also mental patients, which says nothing about the probability of fraud. That doesn't exclude body language and tone. You might hav been told that English isn't tonal, but if you believe it, that would make you tone-deaf (or at least make you ignore tone in English to some degree). The projective ability of speakers certainly varies from RainMan to Robin Williams. This is where I do allow a path in my mind toward the possibility of unlikely knowledge of events past and present. On occasion, I've been bothered with suggestions from classical radio announcers that a certain piece of music is colourful, or scenic or vivid. Is it just metaphoric praise through a lack of terms for audio? Or is something in the back of their mind rendering this music in video as a parameter file with some personal formula? Other adjectives these people use would involve dynamic video like a screensaver. One thing is quite portable, and that's when announcers describe the mood that the music evokes. Another portable element of tone is convention that lets some of it enter print. It's a skill to pull the sense of a word in its context from the page and voice it in much the same way as the writer. (It's also a skill to screen it to sound like a computer). In person communication offers even more information than either the words or the tone, because facial expressions hav a degree of content that's hard to measure. It's also difficult to analyze this information, because much of it is innate or so common as to be universal. In an example, I can occasionally match relatives. In one case, I saw a very good ringer in a corrections-Canada officer with a nurse. I told her where she could find someone that would pass for her sister, and she voiced the intention of meeting a stranger. So, on this category alone, I'm talking about expressions that extend to shape genetics and career, some of them my own. That's some of the most sophisticated philosophy I've done, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is cloudy. Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we are meaning to move the stars to pity. (Sorry, but I'm too lazy to look up who said that, but I think he was a famous French short-story writer). An important note is that this perspective keeps me open to the possibility that people can know obscure things about you or even your future without having experienced you or the company you keep, while remaining skeptical that it's supernatural. The explanation is in there somewhere among things that we can perceive, but that even the incredibly fast, self-correcting, self-maintenant, sophisticated human brain can't completely process. Worth noting is that we don't hav verbose logs in our brains, and it's hardly a rare occurance that the process involved in arriving at a conclusion has long been forgotten and relegated to the brain's equivalent of a black box. Bill Gates predicted that computers would be able to see and hear by now, but there was money involved, and he hadn't learned to hedge his bets. He was also ignoring touch, heat, balance, sweet, sour, salty, bitter and hot (among a few general categories for chemical analysis that the nose is capable of, too). (What moron counted five senses? Even if you put a wealth of information into taste and smell, they were ignoring balance and heat.)