Deja vu...?
The deja vu phenomenon has always fascinated me since I was a kid...and as someone who has experienced this phenomenon more than anyone else I guess....I have a lot of memories of from childhood and teenage that's quite interesting.....I can still remember when I was in elementary school I was in class then had a deja vu of my mate pointing to something on the floor but unlike most of my deja vuS I knew what exactly was gonna happen after that and it happened the same as I remembered(I was scoked for about 3 minutes).....years passed...then someday I watched a YouTube video talking about deja vu and was mentioning some scientific explanations and theories about deja vu (most revolved around it being a brain trick or a brain lag),but I knew those explanations weren't going to work for me since none of them could explain what I experienced in that day (knowing exactly what was gonna happen in the next scene).....I then found a lot of people on reddit that have experienced the same thing)....so...it seems like no physical/material explanation can explain this....
So........
So........
Comments (55)
I am interested in the topic you have raised but didn't respond to the actual poll because I am not sure about the terms paranormal or supernatural.
I remember having deja vu experiences in childhood and this developed more into premonitions in adolescence and beyond. The premonitions were mainly of an unpleasant nature because I experienced vivid premonitions about 8 times before certain people died. I have experienced some premonitions since but not recently. One thing I do experience sometimes is when walking down the street, I think I see someone I know and realise that I have made a mistake. Shortly afterwards, I really encounter the person I had imagined seeing earlier.
One idea which I find helpful in thinking about deja vu and premonitions is Jung idea of synchronicity, which is about 'meaningful coincidences'. It is about patterns arising in the natural world and life.
Generally, I think that life is a lot more complex than most people believe and I believe that parapsychology has become a neglected area within psychology.
Scene? Pardon? :grin:
Premonitions aside, which do seem rather intriguing.. absent of anything "spooky", deja vu is more than likely just a quirk of the human mind. Similar to pareidolia (seeing faces such as on an electrical outlet). The mind is constantly looking for shortcuts, that's what causes hallucinations with hallucinogenic substances, they block certain senses/receptors in a unique way and your mind frantically tries to connect the dots absent of normal receptors. Saves time, and if you ask me is responsible for inventions and innovation. Cognitive dissonance is somewhat similar, being that if your mind is in an altered state (either physically, sensory, or argumentatively in something like a debate) it doesn't like being confused or otherwise "feeling that somethings wrong" so will default on what it's used to/knows/what has worked in the past.
What if what you "knew" was going to happen, didn't. You'd have just shrugged it off and probably never gave it a second thought let alone post about it. But it did. So it got your attention.
I do believe that you have an important idea in connecting premonitions with the future. I think it also raises the question whether the past determines the future, or could the future determine the past and present too?Perhaps, time is an illusionary construct.
Nice science fiction movie :wink:
It is not paranormal but it is for sure extraordinary as it is not how we experience normal life.
Thomas Metzinger has done very good studies into these phenomena but I guess you have read him and you're not satisfied.
Let me put it this way, if I and a team of researchers would be able to induce you the feeling of the deja-vu would you believe it is just our unconscious cheating us? Unconscious activity is the one that has the power :cool: , our consciousness raises from it.
A good proof to this is the fact that feelings take 200ms to reach consciousness (Libet) and it has been proven as well that we can read in your brain when a decision is made before you become conscious of it. We can basically read you mind before you do it :gasp: One example, we can visualize activity in your cortex, ask you to decide to push a red button or a blue one and we see in the screen your decision before you become conscious of it. There're very solid and universally accepted experiments about this. Of course this is not the case with all the kind of decisions we made, but it works for certain types of decisions.
There're other experiments that show that a deja-vu and other experiences like out-of-the-body ones are altered states of consciousness.
For example we can induce body movements using electromagnetic field in certain areas of your brain without telling you. And you will absolutely say it was you who moved it while the researches know very well they were the ones inducing it. If we ask you why you moved it, you would not know.
The same way with deja-vu. Try the following, next time you will have one, try to write what will happen in the future right before it happens. You will see you're not able to do it. You have the strong feeling you know what will happen and then it happens, but you're not able to externalize it. It is basically becase the reality is that you don't know what will happen next but you just feel you know it.
Psychotropic drugs as well are a good example for producing altered consciousness states where the subject experience and narrative can be that he has kind of paranormal experience but we know from the outside that this is not the case.
Of course we don't know everything about how brain and our consciousness works but there're quite solid experiments that dissolve the idea of any paranormal activity and show that this is more us, humans, being too anthropocentric, thinking our brain contains something ontologically special.
Capgras syndrome as well is very interesting to better understand how our consciousness and experience of the world works and the power of unconsciousness.
All this is what Dennett calls... heterophenomenology!
It's not always the right choice to defend the material side by making any thing that doesn't seem very related to a material interpretation eitther a not-eplained-yet by science or a coincidence in the worst cases.... because even if you don't believe in God,soul,a religion or a non-physical world, don't at least forget the logical possibility of something beyond-matter to exist...
So,in the end of your reply you suggested the phenomenon to be a coincidence,thanks for your opinion
You've put a lot of effort to make an explanation for deja vu which isn't what I asked about its explanation in the first place,the phenomenon which I asked about was knowing and remembering what was going to happen after a few seconds which isn't what's commonly known by "deja vu"....my question is how can the brain remember a memory seconds before it actually happens and then waits for it to happen and then it happens?
reading your reply, your answer to this question seems to be "science doesn't know yet but it has to be some sort of a hallucination, illusion or a biological defect"...thanks very much for your opinion
I agree. I'm open to the possibility it's something metaphysical, supernatural, or divine. Just as much as I'm open to the possibility it's a trick your brain is playing on you. I'll be the first person here to suggest that humanity and the human consciousness is the result of divine action. Nevertheless, in a material world where we've been placed, it's our first thing to work with and so need not be ignored- completely at least. Beyond that, this is a forum where we prove or at least offer justification to our beliefs with logic and philosophical discourse first and foremost.
Quoting BARAA
I suggested both are possible, yet I did mention more often than not, it can easily be explained by what you deem "material" reasoning. Like many forums, individual case stories and situations are fundamental to many discussions, but the resulting discussion should not be limited to them.
It very well could be something divine, supernatural, or otherwise outside of the realm of this world and its logic- hence no longer philosophy.
Thanks for the clarification....now I understand your point of view, thanks
I've heard all scientific explanations for deja vu but in fact I'm asking about another phenomenon.... it's how can the brain remember a memory seconds before it actually happens and then waits for it to happen till it happen in real life?
One of which ways looks like deja vu
That voodoo is made by being in such welcoming states of minds and with that future being well intertwined you can then acknowledge the fact of a future ahead of you without being aware of it,
This can be in the form of a daze, dream state, light headedness, well awareness of every bit of thing around you, in some cases you can even predict the future right before it happens, or lesser likely when it happens later on.
A future event can't cause a present event, yes?
So if a future event can't cause a present event, then you didn't perceive the future. It just felt like you did.
Why did it feel like that's what happened? Because when you experienced the event in question, for some reason your mind created another experience as well, namely the experience of thinking you remember the event you're experiencing. Thus, introspectively it felt to you as if the event you experienced is one that you had previously anticipated, whereas in fact the event you experienced is one that your mind created a false memory of you anticipating. Note, it didn't create the false memory 'prior' to you experiencing the event, but either simultaneously with it or later than it.
Your conviction is not going to convince anyone else.
Memory is hopelessly unreliable; especially so when it serves mythology.
Your assumption appears to be that the brain is a reliable and high fidelity piece of equipment such that if it says you remembered a thing before it happened, you can be quite sure that's what you did. This, especially if you know about deja vu or anything else about fallibilities of the brain, seems a rather biased assumption.
I would take it for granted that you didn't remember the future, and consider why your brain could be mistaken about it. But given the above, I'd be dubious about the way you remember and interpret that moment in time.
"hopelessly"?!!!....... "Serves mythology"?!!!
Hmmmm..... honestly,those words seem to express your emotions more than your thoughts..... you have all rights to believe and express your interpretation...you have all rights to believe it's just a false memory..... but it looks like it isn't the case...... you're trying to dismiss any logical possibility for a non-material explanation to be true,let alone calling it and presupposing it's a myth.the case is you refuse to consider any chance at all for something not materialist-biased
to come true.
I have no idea, I'm new to the forum.
Yep. I'm looking for the most reasonable explanation. But you want to believe an unreasonable explanation...
Let's talk about reason...the probability of misremembering a specific event is inversely proportional to the importance, remarkableness and hugeness of that event and therefore an event that's very important,very unique, very remarkable and very huge(let alone its psychological impact) is very unlikely to be misremembered....
And again, you've shown that just not being material is enough for you to consider it "unreasonable".... materialism-biass is detected.
Rubbish. You're making this up as you go along. Memory is reconstructed, and notoriously unreliable. Moreover, your memory is the only thing here that you can take as evidence.
That this might be enough to persuade anyone with even a bit of critical capacity is ludicrous.
There's an error here. Yes, a remarkable event is likely to be remembered, but you're not assessing the event: you're assessing the memory. The converse isn't true: the remarkableness of the memory is not a measure of its fidelity. It isn't difficult to people to remember things that never happened, such as in memory implantation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation
I will ignore the fact that you've gradually started to utter words that don't belong to a philosphical forum or at least an open-minded debate.
In order to avoid any chance for anything against the modern materialism belief system:
1)You've tried to make memory look like it's not even 80% trusted,not even 70%
2)you've even tried to make it can't be trusted even if world-wide witnesses have experienced the same shocking phenomenon (are they all having false memories about the same phenomenon?this can't work,dude)
3) you've stated that I have only my own memory but you've said nothing about how can I have a false memory of something that many people have said it happened to them too(unless you believe there is a good probability that all of them are misremembering their events too)
4) beside all that you used expressions like "hopelessly unreliable" and "this might be enough to persuade anyone with even a bit of critical capacity" which verifies you're taking the debate personally and as a must-win war.
5)let alone saying that just being non-material is enough to make something unreasonable in your opinion.
6)let alone that you've never provided a source verifying your claims about the memory being very untrusted to the point of "hopelessness" according to your words.
I just have one question for you:
Would you have reacted the same if the topic was about anything that doesn't have a chance of refuting materialism ideology?I don't think so.
1) what if other people world-wide verified the same experience? isn't that enough for reducing the probability of it being a false memory?
2) Remembering something that hasn't happened yet and then witnessing it happening is a remarkable event by itself.
Leave your mind too open and folk will fill it with garbage.
What were you expecting on a philosophy forum? Applause? Philosophy is not just whatever made up rubbish you want; it involves your critical and rational capacity.
You've come here stating that you "Strongly disagree with materialists", and that's how you are seeing each discussion in which you have been involved. You really, really want the argument here to come out in your favour, so that's how you see it.
Look at the results of your own survey, in the OP. If you crave agreement, you are in the wrong place.
Look at the evidence around memory, from psychological studies. Do your own reading.
"I then found a lot of people on reddit that have experienced the same thing" is not research. Nor is "I watched a YouTube video"
Your conclusion is that "it seems like no physical/material explanation can explain this'. You have been handed an alternative explanation, one that is far more reasonable than your hoped for precognition.
You are upset that people don't agree with you. You can be irrational and double down, or rethink your position, like a human being.
Surely, the whole point of joining a philosophy forum is to explore other angles of views. I come with the whole idea of embracing other new ways of seeing. If anything, I am more disappointed when I have been engaging in a thread discussion for a week, and in spite of listening to other's points of view, I still come away with the similar outlook I had.
I wrote a thread on material reality and I would have been very interested if I had really become convinced of determinism . I am not a religious person, but have inclined towards non materialist thinking, but it is not without openness to an alternative way of thinking. If we are only wishing to affirm what we already believe it is hardly worth stepping outside the comfort zone and interacting with others who think differently.
Couldn't you say from the beginning that you're materialist?
Now I see why you're forced to believe that I'm having a false memory.you just need to believe so.
One of The points of a philosophy forum is to discover how others think and make their arguments?yes of course....you can see that I didn't utter any bad word on the forum and didn't reply to words like "garbage","rubbish"... etc
I just said that these words shouldn't belong here on the forum and I'm right about that according to the forum rules.... I'm interested to view your thread by the way.
Well, no, because I am not.
But you have to think that I am. Contemplate that for a bit.
The evidence is there that memory is unreliable. All you have is an anecdote and a few folk from Redit to support you. Your own survey shows very few of the folk here who took an interest in your thread agreed with you.
The evidence that convinced you of precognition is insufficient to convince your audience here. What do you do next?
but
If you scroll back a couple of pages you will find my thread on is the material the absolute reality. You might find some ideas to think about. I don't think anyone has written on it for about 4 or 5 days, but you could add to it. It might even spark off some interesting debate from some hard materialists which would be interesting indeed as so many threads are being started by those from a religious persuasion.
Yes, consensus is encouraging. This is why it's important to have e.g. scientific consensus so that you can't have people just making stuff up.
However you also have to consider contrary evidence. When thousands of pilgrims and the Pope all swear that the Sun danced around before crashing to the earth, yet no one of the other billions of inhabitants of the earth saw it, the Sun remains in the sky, and the Earth remarkably unscorched, you have to conclude that thousands of people can be wrong at once.
Quoting BARAA
And is itself a statement about a memory, which is not compelling.
Your title is dejavu and this is what I responded, as I say science have clear explanation for it.
To your question quoted here, stated this way, is capacious :worry: because you're assuming that the brain remembers a future memory what is not possible. :smile:
Again, try to write the "future memory" down on a paper before it happens. You will never be able to do it. I experienced this myself several times.
If you really want to know what happens read the professionals I mention above and learn how the sense of agency is produced by the unconscious brain :wink:
Have you ever experienced it? If so, try to do the following, next time try to write down on a paper the future that you're sure is about to come.
You will see it is impossible! I experienced it myself.
So, while there was hope when I was younger for a spiritual explanation, this hope vanished when I understood how the brain works.
Dejavu could be induced from the exterior. A neuroscientist could induced you this feeling from the outside using drugs or electromagnetic fields. You would swear you felt you knew the future... but from the outside scientists would know they were the ones inducing it to you.
Unfortunately our consciousness is fallible and cheats us many times... like dreaming is another good example.
Look at heterophenomenology, it helps showing the limits of our sense of agency.
:up:
Yes! A sensation is not sufficient to establish subject-predicate...
The problem is that the future can't cause the present or the past. Genuinely to perceive the future - which is what you think happened - an event that had not yet happened would need to have caused an event that was happening.
So, what actually happened is that your mind (not your brain - I'm not assuming you're your brain) created a false memory of you anticipating the event that you experienced. That event - the event of your mind creating that false memory - will either have happened at the same time as your experience (just as a mirror simultaneously reflects what is in front of it) or a short while after it, like an echo. Either way, introspectively it would seem to you as if you saw the future.
Many here are going to give you materialist explanations and see in this some kind of support for materialism, but that's because they're horribly confused. The problem is, so are you.
:up:
Of course immaterialism is true. This is a scientific evidence since Maxwell and Einstein. Matter is not everything. You dualists keep using the world materialist as if we were in the middle age.
Science describes the world beyond matter, no need for spiritualism or dual views of the world.
The debate nowadays is between naturalism and dualistic... but of course naturalism is well ahead in the race :wink:
Note, whether materialism or immaterialism is true is a philosophical matter, not a matter of scientific investigation. Science investigates the 'sensible world'. But whether that place is material or immaterial is not itself something science takes a stand on (many scientists do, of course, but that's because nothing stops scientists from overstepping the bounds of their expertise and doing incompetent metaphysics......then people like you (and many others on this board) think that science investigates metaphysical matters and that what a scientist says about a philosophical matter establishes the truth of it).
Personally I'm looking forward to when the baking age begins and it is bakers, rather than scientists, who start to be seen as authorities on all things metaphysical. Yes, that maybe what philosophers think time is, but what does Paul Hollywood say?
Of course it is a philosophical matter but scientific as well, at least this is what think those contemporary philosophers that go hand-by-hand with science. This is why I mention naturalism, that it is evident you don't know as it is not one of those main-stream stereotyped schools of thought. Read Daniel Andler or Sandro Nannini, they re philosophers.
Today you should not do philosophy without understanding science.
By the way, meta-physics, or meta-anything is a mental construction with no epistemological value. I call it the philosophical meta-fever. Even Aristotle did not ever mention the word metaphysics and it is well accepted even among continental philosophers that each philosopher that has tried to deal with metaphysics (Kant, Hegel, ....) have tried to reinvent the wheel with a new system of metaphysical words and meanings. No epistemological value other than solipsistic statements that will die with humans once the Earth gets burned by the Sun or destroyed in a dystopian future. Science though is universally accepted and makes solid epistemological progress. Slowly but keeps moving.
Don't get me wrong, all of us in Europe have studied continental philosophers as it core of our basic graduate and I even went further... I respect the metaphysical views very much though. It is mystic experience to read them (the Dasein, the categorical imperative, the immanence, ...) but it is like it is to listen to Mozart piano concerto no.21. Great intellectual massages but, again, with no epistemic value.
Quoting Bartricks
You're looking forward to living in the 4th century BC again and be a friend of Aristotle? Good luck! Stay healthy...
I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, seriously. I'm not a bad person but I'm not a diplomat either :grin:
But if you, metaphysicians, are right, those 2 minutes didn't passed because only the present exists. Or maybe you do not adhere to a-theory presentism? :joke:
To what duration was your "prediction"? What happened after lasted for how long, that you knew before time so to speak?
That is "paranormal" for sure.
Clicked on the results and thats what I got. Creepy..
There are plenty of very fascinating mental phenomena. Deja vu is one of them, it's kind of surreal and strange. Doesn't mean it's true, in the sense of you actually experiencing the same situation again. In fact, it's likely false. However, just because the experience isn't true, does not take away from its power or impact. We should appreciate such experiences, as they aren't too common.
As for the supernatural stuff, I mean, if we're still not clear as to where the natural stops being natural, why go on to postulate something beyond? We can only speak of "super" or "extra" or "meta" naturalism once this domain has been exhausted. Seems to me we are very far from exhausting it.