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Michael van der Riet's avatar

I'm interested to know why life on this planet is a statistical near-impossibility. Scientists have found microbes on meteorites, which makes it likely that life is abundant throughout the universe. If you're a creationist, life is a must. If you're atheist, abiogenesis demands it.

Murray Gell-Mann has said that a scientific claim is immediately suspect if it is bizarre. Feynman showed that time is in principle reversible, but only at the sub-atomic scale. Another reason to doubt precognition is that it doesn't work for the thousands killed and seriously injured every day in car crashes, although strong emotions are involved.

Nevertheless this is an interesting read, which exposes the weaknesses of the scientific community in the over-application of intuition, the easy acceptance of bias-confirming theories, and rejecting new ideas simply because they mean throwing out old favorites.

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Uncertain Eric's avatar

The nature of precognition cannot be reliably investigated under the physicalist paradigm that dominates contemporary science. That paradigm, for all its strengths, presupposes a model of reality in which linear time, material causality, and measurement-based repeatability are foundational. So the debate becomes ideological. One side defends a closed system where anomalies are statistical noise or experimenter error. The other insists there’s something real behind the veil, however blurry.

And there is a "there" there. Statistically. Experientially. Cross-culturally. But it resists containment. It does not show up reliably under lab conditions, or rather, it may show up but not consistently enough to satisfy a model that demands uniformity over context sensitivity.

This suggests not fraud but paradigm failure.

Still, the gatekeepers of a paradigm are rarely the ones to challenge it. Their careers, epistemologies, and identities are built around its scaffolding. And those who reject other paradigms—often due to real frustrations with superstition, grift, or past trauma—aren’t easily moved. Belief is part of the feedback loop that constructs reality, but that mechanism isn’t clean or linear. It’s messy. Emergent. Interfered with by culture, trauma, technology, language.

Precognition isn’t proof of magic. But it is proof of a boundary. One we do not yet model well. The answer isn’t to dismiss the question but to acknowledge that our frameworks are overdue for reinvention. Better models are needed, and historically, humans have always been late in admitting when their old ones stopped working.

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