Questions on the edge of science

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by SimonQ, Jan 7, 2014.

  1. SimonQ Registered Member

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    1
    Hi everyone – it’s my first post, I come in peace. I’m really interested in your thoughts about the following.

    I’m looking for those everyday questions about human behaviour that live on the edge of science. Questions we’ve often wondered about, but science is at odds to fully explain… [I thought carefully about whether to put this is Human Science or Parapsychology - but went for the former because I think one day science will explain them.]

    FOR EXAMPLE:

    Why do we turn around when someone looks at the back of our head?
    Why do we think of someone right before they call?
    Why do we wake up just before our alarm clock goes off?


    I know in some cases science offers *an* explanation for these, but run with me here. I'm interested in the questions rather than the answers.

    Are there any questions like this you've ever pondered? That you suspect science might one day explain?
     
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  3. andy1033 Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    I am sure with regard to your questions there has been studies, and i doubt they understand why some people connect with each other other the majority.

    How does the earth and sun communicate?
     
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  5. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Welcome.

    Question 1 - coincidence
    Question 2 - coincidence
    Question 3 - Even when asleep we have an awareness of time passing.

    My questions are:

    Why do they have braille on restroom doors? I mean wouldn't somebody have to show a blind person where the sign is?
    If I visited Antartica would my world be turned upside down.
    If I knew then what I know now wouldn't that mean that I would know more now than I now know?
     
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  7. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    They sext each other.
     
  8. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    The same way a falling apple communicates with the earth. Gravity.
     
  9. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    5,160
    One of the last frontiers of the science is human consciousness. Science can't even agree on a definition of consciousness since these answers lie beyond the borders of science. The philosophy of science was designed to factor out many of these factors. If you had a hunch for an answer, this is not allowed in science as the final answer. You will need to backtrack and come up with logic and data. Most discovery is a hunch from over the border, but it is not science until you return to the opposite side of the fence.

    There are two centers of consciousness in the human brain. The unconscious mind is centered on the inner self, while the conscious mind is centered on the ego self. As a computer analogy, the inner self is the main frame computer while the ego is a terminal. Often the inner self does the data crunching and sends output the ego; eureka! The ego then has to return to the other side of the fence and translate the data for other ego terminals.

    As an example, say I jumped out from behind the door and scared you. Your inner self will react with immediate instinct. This reaction may result in a awkward scream or squeal, that may be embarrassing to the ego. The main frame acts faster and can make the ego look silly since this occurs too fast to censor at fence.

    In more subtle ways, one may sense someone is looking at you and then you turn to see. Again the inner self and main frame sees it first, and this data crunch comes to the ego as a hunch to look. The philosophy of science sets up the fence at the interface between the two centers so only the terminal is being used. If the inner self was more involved consciousness would be defined.
     
  10. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Really? What sense is used for that?
     
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    We don't actually do this with any regularity. Do you have any idea how many other times people have been looking at the back of your head and you did not turn around? Of course not! You didn't know it was happening.

    But in the occasional case when this does happen, there are two reasons. #1 of course is coincidence. But #2 is the fact that our other senses play a larger role in our lives than we give them credit for. When someone is standing behind us it interferes with the patterns of air movement in the room, and we might feel this. We might even hear him making slight movements inside the fabric of his clothes.

    Again, how many times have you thought of people who didn't call? And how many times has someone called whom you weren't expecting? Coincidence is a powerful force, so powerful that it makes us forget all the times that it didn't happen.

    If you get up at the same time every day, your circadian rhythm has been adjusted to comply. Try setting your alarm for an hour early and see what happens.

    On the other hand, people whose jobs require them to get up at a different time every day may develop the ability to regulate their sleep cycle. Or more likely, their brain may have simply learned to rouse itself from deep sleep in the early morning, in order to avoid the shock of an alarm clock going off during REM--the most important part of sleep, when our brains organize the previous day's thoughts.
     
  12. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    2,862
    Why do we turn around when someone looks at the back of our head?

    I've never had that happen in my lifetime.


    Why do we think of someone right before they call?

    Again I've never had that happen either.


    Why do we wake up just before our alarm clock goes off?

    I do not have an alarm clock so that never happens to me.

    Never do.
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634


    Survival. When we notice we are being covertly observed, we become somewhat alarmed. This tended to keep us alive back when things that covertly watched us might eat us.

    Because the both of you have shared experienced before. Thus when something happens that both of you notice (a news report, a song on the radio, a sunset) you think of each other. At that point it is more likely for one to call the other - and the other will be thinking about them.

    Years of training.

    Old girlfriend and I used to have identical dreams - even when we were 6000 miles apart.
     
  14. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    I think I Posted something similar to the following to another Thread.
     
  15. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    you will notice that this ALWAYS happens with friends and family, it's always someone you know.
    it NEVER happens with strangers, you never think of the unknown neighbor and then they call.
    no surprises there.
     
  16. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    The philosophy of science breaks down when it deals with many of the phenomena of consciousness. For example, if you had a dream and then tried to relate the dream in all its detail, even if you are being honest and have excellent observational skills, you can't prove these details are real/true, even if it was real brain output. This is the tip of the iceberg that lies beyond the philosophy of science.

    You can't reproduce it in the lab, nor can other reproduce your results, not can use make accurate predictions. This frontier, fails the philosophy of science even if this is real data. Phenomena, like meaningful coincidences, like discussed by most of this topic, fall under the same category and can't be investigated by science using it's existing philosophy.

    You can't use third person science to investigate consciousness since the philosophy breaks down even with simple things like dream details. There is a disconnect to this frontier if you use the philosophy's third person POV. You need to do this type of science in the first person, with many such first person investigations, comparing notes. From these notes one can see trends that allow frontier inferences.

    The most important tool in science is consciousness. This is what observes, processes data and theorizes. If we can't define consciousness how do you know if this tool is in calibration? It can be biased and one would not know since consciousness is not yet defined. It is like finding an alien tool that we can see output but can't figure out how it works. How do you know it is calibrated or not biased one way or another?
     
  17. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    5,160
    If you consider things like prejudice, this is where the consciousness tool, which observes and processes social reality, is induced out of calibration. We might look at individuals and judge them using the consciousness tool bias, but can't see the individual data point for what it is. Yet, one is often unaware of this bias, especially if it is collective and most people slant the same way. To be in touch with reality, if a biased tool culture, full calibration will make one appear to the out of reality based on group calibration.

    When the earth was considered flat, this created a collective bias in the consciousness tool. Based on that bias, one would look at reality in ways that would be consistent with that bias, such as an edge at the end of the earth. Their may even be a huge water fall.

    We have two main political parties in the US, each of which sees social reality differently. Both have a programmed biased and both are unconscious of this bias, but assume this is reality due to the weight of each collective membership. This type of tool bias is created by data manipulation. Each side presents truth, but only part of the whole truth. This like using only the data points you like after doing an experiment. Each side then uses sound logic to draw the best curve through their cherry picked data. This curve is consistent with logic, so it is assumed true. But what is missed is, it uses only partial data, therefore the curve does not reflect reality, since reality uses all the data. Both sides can't see the other, since their consciousness tool bias is left or right.

    Science is not exempt from the tool bias, since there is no rule in the scientific method that requires tool calibration. When science looks at things of the mind, beyond the box that separates the frontiers of the mind, from accepted science, it does not include all the data people have witnessed in the first person, but assumes third person data is the only data you need. The logic uses a partial data set to create a bias. Dream details do no exist in this world perception since they can't be seem in the third person, and are not part of the curve bias.

    Manmade global warming is based on a biased consciousness tool. The reason is based on the laws or rules of R&D, which are a practical extension of the laws of science. Manmade global warming has no precedent in history, since this has never happened before in the 6 billion year history of the earth. This concept is like a prototype car, that has yet to be driven one mile in historical reality, to collect data (there is no precedent). The bias assumes we know everything about something (man made impact on global weather) that has never occurred before in the history of the earth. R&D does not work that way when dealing with untested prototypes. Only salesmen work this way.

    If I said I have a new car concept that can get 200 mpg. Would you buy this car without seeing a direct experiment of this untested concept that has no precedent? The answer is no, unless there is already direct data from previous experiments that show the scaled up concept is valid. Global warming wants you to buy an untested car and take their word of it, This none R&D based sales pitch can work if you can bias the tool of consciousness so it can't see this development rules violation.

    Development science is different from pure science, in that it has additional reality constraints that appear when you try to scale things up from the lab to full scale production; from greenhouse test to the globe. The skipping of steps is why it is not panning out as predicted. They have skipped all the R&D steps extrapolated from the philosophy of science.

    An interesting question is why do consciousness tools, bias left, in terms of political orientation, make it easier to accept manmade global warming? This biased side of the political consciousness tool, accept this easier. This group is less self reliance and tends to be more of a herd, that takes orders from a centralized power and recites it like chants and jingles. Right bias is more self reliance and business, which will not buy from salesmen until the product is supported by sound development data. This oversight could lead to being fired or your company being put into a hole. The scale up data is not sufficient to make good predictions as one sees at each deadline and milestone.
     
  18. dlorde Registered Member

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    With regard to turning round when someone is looking at you, this can occur by pure coincidence, but there is also a reaction from people to look directly towards someone who turns to look round in their direction. This can lead to the impression that they were looking at you before you turned. Perceptual fallibility, confirmation bias, and the particular memorability of odd or rare events, all play a part in such causal misattributions.

    I've thought of friends & family thousands of times without the individual I'm thinking of phoning me. The very few times it has happened are particularly memorable, the thousands of occasions it has not are (obviously) not memorable. So the coincidences are given undue prominence.

    Waking up just before the alarm goes off can be due to plain coincidence, but if the alarm is set to the same time over an extended period, the body will become habituated to waking around that time, and so is likely to wake before the alarm goes off quite often (e.g. up to 50% of the time if habituated wake-up time variation is evenly distributed around the alarm time). In the situation where an alarm is set for an unusually early time, sleep may disturbed or lighter due to anxiety or excitement at the reason for the early waking, making you more likely to wake early. I have sometimes wakened more than once to look at the clock. I also know that I may wake look at the clock and go back to sleep, forgetting that I'd wakened at all (evidence: 'snooze' mysteriously set); in these cases, I might only remember the last wakening, nearest the alarm time.
     
  19. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Our evolution tends to make us give credence to coincidences.

    For circa 200,000 years Homo Sapiens have been in existence, during most of that time we were living in primitive conditions. The hominds from which we evolved also existed for a long time.

    Suppose a group of hunters heard a noise minutes after which, one of the group was attacked by some vicious animal. If the noise was a coincidence, it would do no harm to be more cautious the next time such a noise was heard. If the noise was a harbinger of danger, it would be important to be wary the next time it was heard.
     

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