Gregg R Thomas

I have a tattoo of Urizen (You-Reason) on a shoulder blade.

From Chatgpt:

Urizen is a character created by the English poet and artist William Blake, who appears prominently in his series of prophetic books, particularly “The Book of Urizen” (1794). Blake’s Urizen is a complex figure representing law, reason, and order, but also the limitations…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
Is it reasonable to bend or ignore facts?

Do Republicans ever tell the truth these days?

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
you’re using reason to make your case

I think reason is the problem half the time.  There is something in propositional logic, that states that a set of propositions can have internal validity – they are logical – they follow reason – without being true overall.

The real issue is facts.  People can reason or rat…[Read more]

Thanks Reg!

Have a great week everyone! Did all y’all enjoy the game in Dublin 🙂

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you’ve already lost the argument, because you’re using reason to make your case. And no, this isn’t having “faith” in reason (in the same way that some people have faith in mi…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
That story expressed a belief in fate.

According to the 4-dimensional shape theory of the universe, all events and the space-time paths between them exist at one “time”, if “time” was dimension no. 5.

So, fate would describe that situation very well.  It’s all hard wired in, but most of us can’t see what is going to happen until it does.

_Robert_ wrote:
If a Galton board is tilted-off just a bit…well, a pinball machine will tell you.

Well, I’m sure a competent scientist would work hard to make sure the experiment was “on the level.”

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
…such experiments are viewed with skepticism and their results have not been reliably replicated, they are often relegated to the fringes of scientific discourse. This might explain why it’s challenging to find direct references to the specific experiment you recall.

JB Rhine’s claimed successes were eventually d…[Read more]

@Unseen – My A.I. returned this:

The experiment you’re describing sounds like a variant of a Galton board (also known as a Quincunx), which is a device invented by Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate the central limit theorem. In a Galton board, balls are dropped from the top and bounce through an array of pins, with the outcome forming a normal…[Read more]

I thought you could find anything on the internet, but I can’t find this.

I distinctly remember on one of NPR’s serious talk shows a discussion of psychokinesis, and they talk ended up centering on experiment that tended to suggest some such ability even if weak.

The experiment consisted of a glass-encased board with a square matrix of…[Read more]

I don’t know the name of it, unfortunately, but there was a sci fi novel or short story about a man who wanted to go back in time to “fix” something (the death of someone important to him) and while he succeeded in going back in time, no matter what he did or how he changed the antecedent circumstances, they would still die then somehow.

That…[Read more]

@strega – that way lies madness.  There are all kinds of things we could do recursively, but we don’t, because it’s too much effort.  To Babs, 12 hours and 2 miles away was like standing on top of a hill and looking around over the countryside.  Maybe the story was centred around me because I was there.

I don’t even think I could cope with a 2 minute clairvoyance talent, let alone a wide open future view.

10:00 – Sitting in my office, drinking coffee and dumbly gazing out the window, I see that at 10:02 a bird will smash into the window, scaring the crap out of me, causing me to spill my coffee all over my shirt.

10:01 – In order to avoid the p…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
I am skeptical. The multiverse is as elusive as god is so far.

I’m not talking about the multiverse.  I’m talking about the idea that the entire history of the universe, a 4-dimensional shape, was created simultaneously, in the Big Bang.  It’s not so far-fetched.  Subjectively, we experience a 3-dimensional world as we travel fo…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
all played out to the letter.

If Babs really was able to see twelve hours into the future, what would that tell us about the nature of space-time?  That from the point of view of the present, the future already exists.  After all, the future is a place as well as a time.