Conference hydra::dejavu

1172.0. "Spontaneous coincidences?" by CADSYS::COOPER (Topher Cooper) Fri Nov 17 1989 15:04

    This note continues a thread started in 1171.3 (by me) and continued in
    1171.10 (by Scooter).  In the first note I described veridical crisis
    apparitions and described them as some of the very best evidence for
    spontaneous psi phenomena.  Scooter asks:
    
    > Besides being well-documented in terms of success-rate, are there
    > also well-documented cases of "misses"?
    
    I've started a new note since this is really quite beside the point of
    the original.
    
    Scooter, I'm going to answer the implication of your question more than
    the specifics.
    
    The specific answer is "yes", such occurances are commonplace, but...
    
    First off, let me make something clear.  There are intrinsic problems
    with control in dealing with spontaneous phenomena such as this. 
    Science really has not developed any good methods for dealing with
    rare, spontaneous, erratic short-term phenomena.  That goes for these
    phenomena as well as, for example, UFOs.
    
    Although the case collections for crisis apparitions stand, as I said,
    as some of the very best evidence for spontaneous psi, I *do not* claim
    that they are necessarily sufficient to convince someone of the
    existence of psi -- it would be very, very hard for this kind of
    evidence to reach that standard.  There is a degree of reasonable
    subjective probability evaluation here that means that I cannot
    criticize either those who find it sufficient for them, or those who
    do not.
    
    Given, however, the independent, much better controlled studies
    demonstrating less ambiguously the existence of non-spontaneous psi
    phenomena, I think that these may be taken as evidence that psi
    *also* occurs spontaneously and as evidence about one form which it
    occurs in.
    
    Logically the existence of false cases does not have any intrinsic
    bearing on the question of whether there are true cases.  That there
    are a 100 processes which simulate has no bearing on whether or not
    it in fact occurs.  The problem is distinguishing the purported real
    from the unreal.
    
    The truth is people -- *all* people -- are unreliable observers.
    Misperception and even hallucination are *normal* occurances for normal
    people.  People have a hard time coming to terms with that; especially
    that they are, like everyone else, subject to hallucination given the
    right (not necessarily apparent) situation.
    
    The answer is to look at veridical cases: those cases (unlike the one
    that started this thread) in which there at least seemed to be
    information transmitted, such as time or manner of death, which there
    was no obvious or reasonable way for the person to have learned the
    information otherwise.  This doesn't mean that cases that don't have
    this property are not "real" (how often could you prove that a brief
    conversation took place by relating information which you could not
    otherwise know or guess at?), but only that the veridical ones are
    the only ones which we can clearly objectively distinguish from the
    "simulations".
    
    This is where these cases separate from the UFO cases collections. 
    There are, as near as I can tell, very, very few unambiguously
    veridical, well documented (well documented means that there are
    objective records in existence which demonstrate who learned what when
    from what conventional source) UFO reports.  There are, at the very
    least, several hundred such cases for crisis apparitions, frequently
    involving quite a priori unlikely true details, independent correlated
    visitations.  The tight evidence demands (e.g., the existence of a
    reliable record of the event made *before* confirmation occured), the
    fear of ridicule, and the desire for privacy, makes it likely that
    only a tiny percentage of the cases are actually recorded.  All this
    stretches the liklihood of coincidence.  Whether it stretches it too
    far is something each of us must judge for ourselves.
    
    I suggest you see if you can find a copy of "Phantasms of the Living"
    by Gurney, Meyers and Podmore (first published in 1886 and reissued
    most recently in 1970), and make your own judgements.
    
    						Topher