Science and Intuition, or, knowledge of the future at least
How easily I am swayed! I have been saying nasty things about science now for a while, and then along comes this bright little article (which can be viewed in its entirety here) and I swoon with love for science!
The title first seduced me. ‘Many scientists are convinced that man can see the future‘. Now doesn’t that make you want to jump up and down with joy?
Apparently, scientists and paranormal researchers agree that they are
Amongst other things, this article speaks of something which has been hard to find out; whether people ‘had a feeling’ about 9/11. In all the media hype, there has been little talk of this predictive aspect. Yet the paper (the Daily Mail in the UK, if you’re interested) says:
SHORTLY after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage. It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease. It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ’something’ was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.
One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center. She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them off as coincidences. But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.
If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future.
Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what happens.
The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually empty.
All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four?
Then the paper goes on to speak of other examples, particularly the Concorde crash of 2000 and train crashes in general. It also points out the military interest in this (surprise, surprise!) and how that led to experiments with people hooked up to lie detectors. These showed a premonition about the future (about 3 or 4 seconds ahead, that is). This developed further with a professor Bierman using MRI’s to find out which parts of the brain are involved in such premonitions (which, all agree, are something which everyone can have).
‘I believe that we can “sense” the future,’ says the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Brian Josephson. ‘We just haven’t yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.
‘People have had so called ” paranormal” or “transcendental” experiences along these lines. Bierman’s work is another piece of the jigsaw.
The fact that we don’t understand something does not mean that it doesn’t happen.’
Ooooh!! That last sentence gives me goosebumps!! If only other (let’s not call them narrow-minded) scientists would take this on board.
Of course, predicting the future opens up all sorts of interesting philosophical twists about altering it, having free will and so on.
In which case, it could be argued that the future is having an effect on the present. If, after all is said and done, ordinary people are, everyday, using their intuition, or at least their intuition is happening to them (even if they are not listening to it), then it’s just a matter of time before science catches up with us.
I’ll leave the last word to the article from the Daily Mail:
Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the U.S. military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions. ‘I think we’re doing it all the time,’ she says. ‘We’ve looked at the data and it does seem to happen.’ So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’
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