demagogue on 14/5/2025 at 16:05
There's a classic book by Andy Clark, "Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied". To boil it down, most or a lot of the things that happen in the mind are feedforward predictions. Perception itself is largely a feedforward hallucination that doesn't get vetoed by the incoming experience.
But anyway, these kinds of effects are built into that kind of architecture. The mind gets really good at reading the future from the slightest cues and then building it into its present experience. So I wouldn't say they're necessarily mystical, but I wouldn't say that they're just quackery either, since I think our experience of the world is weirder than the vanilla story that we see the world objectively as it is.
heywood on 14/5/2025 at 16:08
I can often predict what people are going to say. Likewise, I've experienced momentary hesitation before clicking on links that redirect to ******.cx. When events match our expectations, we think we have predictive powers. When they don't, we ignore it.
heywood on 14/5/2025 at 16:26
AI is sometimes surprisingly good at predicting what I'd like to listen to or watch next, or serving up an ad related to what I was thinking about in the back of my head even though I'm currently watching or browsing something else.
Tocky on 15/5/2025 at 03:52
This discussion has suddenly turned into my high school term paper, "The Reality of Reality". I swear I went through these same permutations of reasoning. I always fall back to hard science and the agreed upon limits of experience but every so often there has been the outlier. I love the term "feedforward hallucination" though micro time loops feels safer somehow. What feels scary to me is the branching aspect of time. No going back if you get on the wrong branch. Yet that seems to be where the biggest feeling for choice is located.
Let's say you are happy with your current situation but wish you had a bit more money. Then again you worry that were you to have more it would mess up your current situation. It's a bit of a "Monkey's Paw". I believe you are not likely to choose the correct lottery numbers, even if you have the inkling for what they are, should the next branch be a weak one. You see the overall map and seeing the overall map is the biggest part of the game. It's not like knowing when your car will break down or even that it will be fixable within hours. It's knowing that the change will make you reroute to a better outcome overall.
So many small things you can have a feel for but it's those branches you really have to watch out for. And just when you think you have it all figured out and the guard rails of science are in place a tight fitting door squeaks open as if it was pushed and you want to blame it on your pets though they are all with you on the couch and your wife is asleep in another room and you have to make an excuse so it fits with logic and what we have all agreed upon can be. I mean, it fits so tight you have to lean against it to close, but humidity, right? Expansion and contraction combined with house settling. That keeps you safe from other thoughts. You certainly don't want to think about control or no control.
And all that doesn't take into account what you don't want to see down the road or at the time. Well that's enough of that. I never came to any conclusion on the term paper either except to trust what can be repeated and agreed upon.
Starker on 15/5/2025 at 15:27
In this instalment of Some More (not) News, a curious case of how a US department (not actually a real department) tasked with finding fraud has wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars failing to find even a single instance of fraud:
[video=youtube;eJQDpOCXJ1o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJQDpOCXJ1o[/video]
heywood on 15/5/2025 at 17:03
It's like "pedo guy" on a much bigger scale
Nicker on 15/5/2025 at 17:32
Quote Posted by demagogue
There's a classic book by Andy Clark, "Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied". To boil it down, most or a lot of the things that happen in the mind are feedforward predictions. Perception itself is largely a feedforward hallucination that doesn't get vetoed by the incoming experience.
But anyway, these kinds of effects are built into that kind of architecture. The mind gets really good at reading the future from the slightest cues and then building it into its present experience. So I wouldn't say they're necessarily mystical, but I wouldn't say that they're just quackery either, since I think our experience of the world is weirder than the vanilla story that we see the world objectively as it is.
This is why and where the study cited went awry, by conflating cognition with action.
Our perceived present is actually the extremely recent past, so mind tricks where we think we thought something before it happened are entirely understandable.
Humans rely on pattern matching and predictive thinking so it is no surprise that some people have an amplified ability to "see into the future", especially if they can willingly suspend our usual blocks and filters.
Those two are very different from remotely but directly affecting events, before or while they actually happen, as telekinesis alleges.
Of Interest: Decades ago I attended a session by a "channeler". He didn't claim to be inhabited by some disembodied, exterior intelligence (e.g. Seth Speaks). He said he was able to suspend his filters, allowing him to access virtually all of his knowledge (conscious and subconscious) and to observe relationships between things normally blocked by his normal limitations and prejudices.
SD on 15/5/2025 at 23:33
With sufficient information about the present, I wondered if it would be possible to predict anything. The issue here is that the further away you get from a future event, the sheer quantity of information you would require is impossible. For instance, if you see a car speeding down a street towards a lamp post, you know it is going to hit that lamp post shortly before it happens. The further back you go, the less confidence you can have that such an event will occur; multiple other events are possible, until eventually only one outcome remains. I've always been intrigued by a deterministic view of the universe, in which case, perhaps only one outcome was ever possible. It's an unpleasant thought though, the idea that we are spectators to our own reality, playing out a pre-ordained script.
Cipheron on 16/5/2025 at 04:03
That reminds me of another thought experiment. Imagine an omniscient God deciding what universe they want to create. Now, in the process of thinking about it, this God thinks up a universe, then steps through the outcomes of giving it a specific set of rules and starting conditions. God then sees the final results, before deciding which universe they want to create: for all possible universes they could create. Like think about it logically: if such a God created any specific universe with a specific goal in mind, they must have run a simulation to see what would have happened if they made a different decision, to know what the outcomes would be.
Now think about what it would be like to be inside the mental simulation God is running. Like if you or me imagine a clockwork clock we're only imagining a rough approximation of the clock, but such a God imagining the clock is imagining it in detail, down to the level of subatomic particles. So the God-created simulation and the thing couldn't be told apart, whether you're inside or outside it.
So the point is an infinite omniscient God wouldn't need to actually create any universes, just by thinking about the problem they would invariably have to simulate all possible universes to be able to decide which one they "like" the best. And just like in the Simulation Hypothesis, the odds that you're in God's favorite universe vs one he just ran through as a simulation and rejected is effectively zero.
Also saying they need to also be "omnipotent" as in able to create physical universes is superfluous: merely being omniscient solves the problem, so Occam's Razor suggests that if an "all knowing" God even exists then this is the more plausible scenario, that God just wonders about universes in general, and invariably must simulate all possible universes in doing so. Perhaps, such a God couldn't prevent itself doing that.
demagogue on 16/5/2025 at 04:55
If inflationary multiverse theory is correct, and there are (
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/scientists-think-multiverse-fiction/) respectable (
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/why-do-physicists-say-a-multiverse-has-to-exist-454605821f3d) arguments in favor of it, then there are a never ending series of bubble universes decaying out of the runaway inflaton field, each one having its own Big Bang from there. And from what I understand, well, if the string theory version of it (a la Vafa) is on to something (or some unknown theory that anyway works like it, setting the fundamental parameters dynamically at spawn time), then the virtually infinite decays of new bubble universes are going to dynamically set the fundamental interactions--basically the physics and starting state of that universe--through every configuration possible, and they say there's something like at least 10^500 of them, each one a different physics. And if each bubble universe runs through a different possible history, then the multiverse is going to have represented every possibility that even God could possibly imagine, and not just abstractly in thought, but they'll actually be manifested under the theory.
Just assuming it's right arguendo for the purposes of this thread, is there any real difference between the actual manifestation of all possibilities and the omnipotence of God as a Being of infinite possibilities?
