The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens. - Persi Diaconis
Late last Friday evening I woke up in the middle of the night terrified by a dream. I explained to my girlfriend the extreme realism of this nightmare. I was on airplane but I wasn't in a seat, but sort of just hovering about watching people calmly talking and resting. Suddenly a loud noise and powerful suction came over the cabin of the plane and people began to scream and panic as the plane started to twist and bend from side to side. I was watching it happening and was helpless to save anyone. It was terrifying as I watched the plane literally rip apart. The tail end of the plane fell back and I could see the top half of the plane and people falling to their death. It was absolutely horrific. I was sweating and panicking when I woke up telling my girlfriend all the details I vividly remembered.
So it was a very realistic bad dream, and a few days later I get a text from my girlfriend asking if I heard about the Russian airplane that broke apart midair the same night I had my dream. I hadn't so I immediately looked up the details. It was a Russian Airbus (A321). It came apart 31,000 feet in the air above Egypt and its 224 passengers were all killed. I was shaken. See, I'm a skeptic. I try to model my viewpoints through skepticism first instead of just accepting any intuition I have or bias I find inviting. I question extraordinary claims and expect extraordinary evidence for these claims. If I "remote viewed" a horrible event doesn't it prove something?! Seems like an extraordinary thing.
In the excellent book by mathematician David J. Hand The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day David writes,
... Here's another striking incident, this time from the book "Synchronicity" by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He writes: "The writer Wilhelm von Scholz... tells the story of a mother who took a photograph of her small son in the Black Forest. She left the film to be developed in Strassburg. But, owing to the outbreak of war, she was unable to fetch it and gave it up for lost. In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt in order to take a photograph of her daughter, who had been born in the meantime. When the film was developed, it was found to be doubly exposed: the picture underneath was the photograph she had taken of her son in 1914! The old film had not been developed and had somehow got into circulation again among the new films. (Hand pg. 4)
or from another passage in book...
... Take Major Walter Summerford, who was knocked from his horse by a lightning bolt in Flanders in February 1918, and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. After that experience, Summerford moved to Canada, where he took up fishing - only to have the tree he was sitting under struck by lightning in 1924, paralyzing his right side. He recovered, until he was completely paralyzed by yet another lighting strike in 1930, while walking in the park. He died two years later, in 1932 - but not from a lightning strike. But just to rectify the oversight, in 1936 his gravestone was struck by lightning. (Hand, pg.160)
... There's no getting away from it: sometimes events occur which seem so improbable, so unexpected, and so unlikely, they hit that there's something about the universe we don't understand. They make us wonder if the familiar laws of nature and causality, through which we run our everyday lives, occasionally break down. They certainly make us doubt that they can be explained by the accidental confluence of events, by the random throwing together of people and things. They almost suggest that something is exerting an invisible hand. (Hand, pg. 5)
Ah, so this is the cue for that "Uncaused Cause", that "Mind controlling the cosmos" to enter the scene. This is the cue for the New Age "force" at play. The mysteries of energies effecting this or that. This the cue for a karma ideology to step forward. This is the soul of superstition. This is the heart of all things related to antiquated thinking. This is at the heart of prayer of "willing" things of books like "The Secret" promoting "wish boards" of dream prophecies and remote viewing.
The improbability principle according to David J. Hand is defined as extremely improbable events that are commonplace. The improbability principle manifests itself in: 1. Law of Inevitability, 2. The Law of Truly Large Numbers, 3. The Law of Selection, 4. The Law of Probability Lever, and 5. The Law of Near Enough. These come together to form the basis for his book. When we assign meaning to special *rare events or coincidences we are committing a fallacy of human error in misunderstanding the fundamental ways in how the universe operates.
Hand continues to explain,
Borel's law says that we simply should expect (sufficiently) improbable events to happen. But we've seen countless examples of situations where such events /have/ happened - and the Improbability Principle tells us why. It tells us we see them because we've failed to take account the fact that /something/ must occur (the law of inevitability), or the fact that we explored a great many possibilities (the law of truly large numbers), or the fact that we chose what to look at after it had happened (the law of selection), or indeed any of the other strands of the principle. The Improbability Principle tells us that events which we regard as highly improbable occur because we /got things wrong/. If we can find out where we went wrong, then the improbable will become probable. (Hand, pg. 221)
In my situation with my "remote viewing" of the Russian airplane breaking apart in midair it seems I failed to apply the law of selection. The law of selection, according to David J. Hand is, .. you can make probabilities as high as you like if you choose /after/ the event. Also, I failed to take into account the law of truly large numbers which says that, with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. (David J. Hand) And the law of inevitability which says that something must happen. This one seems clearest to me and Hand mentions it's one of the most easily ignored.
Now, scientists know that we each have at least four to six periods of dreams a night and that we forget most of them. We're much more likely to recall a dream if something happens the next day which reminds us of it. This is simply an aspect of how the brain works, linking and connecting disparate events. So it's not a case of having one dream which has a precursor of the one event in question. We have many dreams, and each is followed by many events, and we notice those which happen to match, tending to forget all the others. After all, why would we remember them? They're just part of the random background fluctuation of dreams, memories, and events, with nothing special to mark them out. It's the rare "concurrence" of dreaming that something would happen and then it actually happening which is striking. (Hand, pg. 123)
Also, of all possible dreams I have every night I am bound to not just remember one of them and be able to describe it, but one of these dreams is going to be of a nightmarish plane crash. I don't remember every specific detail of images I saw on TV or online in the recent past. I may have came across an image like that earlier and my unconscious picked it up and regurgitated it later in a dream. Planes crash very often and the improbable becomes probable when we realize one of these crashes might at some point coincide with a dream that I happen to remember about a plane crash. Even on the same day. (Law of Inevitability)
I recently had another similar "mysterious" experience in how I went about choosing a winning lottery ticket. I won a few hundred dollars by picking 4 out of 5 numbers correctly. I am aware that playing the lottery is illogical but I do it anyways from time to time with my girlfriend and her family. The odd thing was that when my girlfriend asked me for my numbers I was in my mineralogy lab and picked numbers right in front of me. I glance down at the graph I was looking at. It was a graph charting the various temperature/ mole % of K-feldspar minerals. The % numbers I saw were the exact numbers I texted my girlfriend. She used them. The only number I missed was the number in which I just chose myself because the other % number was too large a number to be chosen for a lottery ticket. Strange, huh?
It gets stranger...
My girlfriend's father picked the /exact/ same numbers I did minus one number and we both won a few hundred dollars (the same amount). So we are inclined to view this through our local intuitions. This is akin to saying the Earth sure looks flat from my viewpoint. The Earth is flat when we are talking about our local view, our subjective viewpoint, through our eyes. These four numbers were not special numbers I "tapped into" magically. They were just numbers in a sea of possible numbers. The law of truly large numbers helps us understand that highly unlikely things will happen often given big enough number selection to play with. We are living in a sea of numbers. Improbable events like picking the right string of numbers happens all the time. Improbably events like dreaming of a plane crash the same night a tragic plane crash happens. Rare events happen all the time.
I understand that this seems like a killjoy. I know, I know .. I'm a buzzkill with all this probability talk. Why destroy the mystique of life? - the fun! It's the same sort of eye roll I get when I am skeptical in ghost-story conversations. I wrote about this in a past blog. It's like pulling the veil off of a magic trick. The magic trick of a universe with a purpose, the magic trick of prophetic dreams and cosmic connections. In the light of mathematical probability laws things like prayer make no sense. We can say this when we know these laws of probabilities and finally understand that there is no "magical-celestial-father-hand" moving about, guiding things in this physical world we find ourselves in.
But this is OK because we are intelligent adults and we should try to understand the way the world /actually/ works. My dream was not "remote viewing", my lottery ticket win was not a magical prophetic event. Laws of probabilities tell us rare events happen all the time. Read this book! There are few books that I say are necessary for living a life aligned with proper thinking (skepticism) A few being - Demon Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer and this book are on a very short list of must-reads.
*Originally posted 11/10/15 on my blogger account: https://godsaiditibelieveitthatsettlesit.blogspot.com/
Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/10/31/russian-plane-crash-egypt/74934010/
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/middleeast/egypt-plane-crash/
The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day by David J. Hand:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-improbability-principle-david-j-hand/1115382497?ean=9780374535001