Seraphim

Oh Oooook ... thanks ...

I will read and TRY to understand it when my headache fades away ...

Time to leave.

Oolon Colluphid

Yup. The horse was known as Clever Hans. And his trick was unmasked by a couple of clever experiments, iirc: getting the answer wrong when his owner was given the wrong answer, and by simply having the horse out of sight of his owner (though I think Hans could do it with other people too, not just the owner). See eg Hines’s book I mentioned above.

Cheers, DT

Lobstrosity

Tabula Rasa posted [url=http://www.marketplace.org/play/audio.php?media=/2003/03/06_mpp&start=00:00:20:43.0&end=00:00:27:30.0]THIS[/i] on the first page of this thread. If you listen to it you will see it answers your very question. You could probably google the names of researchers to find out more information. In short, the answer is yes, there is such a machine.

Honestly I have no idea what you're talking about anymore. You're not making any sense to me at all. We went from talking about predicting how a die would roll to talking about "human events" and emotions? You stated that making such a prediction isn't mathematical. So when I ask how it's not mathematical you start talking about emotions? Where is the connection? I don't have any clue what's going on.

Then stop simplifying things. You're just being confusing and failling to make sense.

Yes, everything I've heard has been processed by my brain. Dude, no matter how you communicate, whether it be by reading minds or by listening or by looking you will always have to interpret the data you're getting. Your brain is not identical to the brain of any other person. You can't just transfer a "thought" from one brain to another by duplicating specific neuronal firing. It's not a one-to-one correspondance.

If you need more information then you get the person to whom you're talking to elaborate. It's really not that hard.

First off, you need to learn some basic physics. Wires and cables aren't any more "physical" than photons. Why can't you see this? I don't understand what's wrong with you. TVs communicate via physical means. If one guy get's satellite TV and another gets cable, they're both physically receiving data! For the love of god please understand this. I wire communicates information by allowing an electric field to propagate over a distance. A photon communicates information by allowing an electromagnetic field to propagate over a distance. The two are both as physical as it gets. Sound, light, electricity...they're all physical communication. Now that we have this out of the way, allow me to emphasize something: THOUGHTS DO TRAVEL THE SAME WAY. We communicate our thoughts via photons and phonons, something you claim is not physical. Here's how it works. We have a thought. Our brain decides how to verbalize it. The verbalized thought is then sent to our vocal cords which produce phonons. These phonons propagate to the ears of some receiver individual. His ears convert the phonons into input for his brain, which then decodes the message. Bam, you have transmitted your thoughts. This is the same way a telephone operates, for example. You have a specific device that converts phonons into electrical signals, these are then passed over a distance to another device that converts them back to phonons. In between you might have some sort of processing that decreases noise or filters out certain things.

Where did this come from? You never asked me this question, and if you did I thought it was rhetorical. See above. The answer is yes. What that has to do with my relativity comment I have no idea. Relativity is useful in that it tells us that the signal cannot be transmitted by your "tracing paper" analogy. It tells us the information actually has to leave one person's skull and that the communication of information cannot exceed the speed of light.

Once again (and for the very last time): this is physical. For sound air is the medium...it is the means. For photons no medium is required. This does not make them unphysical. I think if you studied even some basic physics you might understand this. If you transmit information it's physical. There's no reason to make a distinction between using a wire or using photons. I have no idea why we're even talking about this.

Shadowy Man

Well, since you weren't satisfied with the EEG, which would do what you ask, how about a Functional MRI? That will also measure the change in the brain while someone is fully awake and doing something like reading a book.

Yes, these things can be measured. Believe it or not!

Ensign Steve

The day that science does bring forth some evidence is the day I start paying attention to said evidence. My mind is not closed to the possibility. I just said all the "evidence" I've seen so far is bogus. I would love to see some good, scientific evidence for it, because that would be awesome.

Quote:

My reply : I did actually, to another person ... I think he too brought the same matter as you did. I told him that it maybe true that mothers do attend to worry about their children all the time (evidence is my mother as well, she too constantly worry about me), but the actual question is WHY does she rush home ON THAT VERY DAY her child was indeed has something life-threantening? I mean the odds of something like that happening once a day is 1/365 (days), she should be rushing home EVERYDAY or calling one an hour.

Oops, sorry I missed that. I am going to go ahead and still call it coincidence. It's like I already said, billions of events happen to everybody every single day, and we ignore most of them. Then, when two coinciding events happen at the same time (which is bound to happen every once in a while, considering the amount of events happening) we see the connection and find it amazing. Maybe coincidences are amazing, but that is still not even close to evidence for anything supernatural.

Jen

Corona688

There are machines/technologies, like PET(positron emission topology) and MRI(magnetic resonance imaging), and of course the electromyogram that can detect differences between brain states... but even the most sophisticated of them, like PET - which can display which parts of the brain ar getting a workout nearly realtime - don't truly reveal WHAT is going on in the brain. At best, they can reveal information on a sort of phrenological level, like 'When reading books, people with ADD have a slightly different brain pattern in this area than average people...' and 'deep concentration is associated with these brainwaves' and such and such. There certainly isn't enough information coming out of these devices to deduce one's THOUGHTS.

Answerer

Come on guys, give him a break. Do all of you seriously believe that he can take in all those knowledge within a day?

openeyes

Psychic, schmychic. I don't believe it such powers.

Went out with a guy for awhile that thought he had ESP. He revealed this to me the night I said I thought we should break up. He just KNEW I was going to say something about our splitting, because of this ESP he had. My coolness on the phone that week and my exasperation at his repeated lateness after asking him to choose a time he could manage apparently didn't register as forebodings of my dinner topic.

Ensign Steve

LOL, that is classic! That's much better than saying "I'm so dysfunctional I knew it had to happen eventually. More likely sooner than later."

echidna

Maybe his ESP also enlightened him that your reason might be his flattulence problem and BO ? That'd be just too uncanny.