Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 7/12/2009

Question
QUESTION:
       Does science believe in intuition and predictions.

Can a person foresee or predict ones future in a way that is explainable in science?

We know that time is considered as the fourth dimension after three dimensions of space.
So, can it be true that whatever has to happen in time till infinity has always existed i.e that all the future events that have to happen in future have already been fixed(destined to take place) or have already happened and we just travel through time to reach all events as we do in space by reaching from one place to another travelling in a specific direction.

If this is possible, don't you think some people who claim to foresee the future events can actually see them or feel them by a process which can be explained by the science.

What do you say about Nastradoomus.

ANSWER: Note: Numbers in square brackets refer to links at the bottom of the page.

OVERVIEW:
There is a fair amount of scientific support for limited human intuition. There is no scientific support for the idea that information from the future can travel backwards in time to humans or for human traveling through time and bringing back information with them. Doing so would violate the laws of physics (see bottom headings), but more importantly, there are explanations of the human phenomenon of apparent foreknowledge that are a satisfactory explanation. The Skeptic Society's Skeptic Magazine[1] and the Center for Inquiry's Skeptical Inquirer[2] are just two publications that regularly tackle the world's most extravagant paranormal claims and they have a rich body of literature that includes this subject. If you are looking for more information on this, the word "skepticism" or "debunking" are good leads to follow to get access to this kind of information.



HUMAN INTUITION:
The best work that I know of that provides an overview into the process of human intuition for people of a nonscientific background is a book called "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell[3]. I can understand if you don't want to buy a book on a curiosity, so I'll link you to a review that goes over a series of scientific studies presented by the book and the conclusion it makes[4]. Michael Shermer is the author of the review and also the head of the aforementioned Skeptics Society. The important thing to know is that human intuition is composed of:
A)drawing on associations, correlations, or stereotypes.
B)only needing a little bit of knowledge to realize something.
C)thinking subconsciously.
D)an early sense of how you feel about something is a good predictor of how you will feel about something later.

Very often human intuition is mistaken for psychic phenomenon. One particularly striking example (not included in the book above) is called cold reading. Cold reading is the art of appearing to tell a subject things about them that you could not know. Professional magicians and mentalists like James Randi and Banachek[5] can perform this and explain how there is nothing supernatural involved (there is a "how to" guide here[6]). TV psychics like Silvia Browne or Johnathan Edwards claim to do this by contacting the spirit world, but are really doing the same thing except fraudulently (Browne[7][8] and Edwards[9]). What is really interesting, however, is that it appears to be possible for individuals to perform a convincing cold reading without even being aware that that is what they are doing! (although we will never know for sure)



SCIENTIFIC TESTS OF PSYCHIC CLAIMS:
The James Randi Education Foundation (JREF) has an ongoing million-dollar challenge in which anyone who can pass their scientifically rigorous tests and demonstrate supernatural ability of any kind will be awarded $1 million dollars[10]. The participants are involved in the design of the experiment and sign to indicate that they believe the test will be effective in testing their claim before perfoming it. To date, over a thousand people have applied and not one has passed the preliminary testing.

"If someone says they have proven a fantastic claim to scientists, be sure they have a magician on board as well before you believe them."-paraphrase of Lynne Kelly[11]

The most comprehensive scientific testing that has been performed by believers (rather than skeptical scientists) was the autoganzfeld tests[12]. While the people who performed the tests will claim to this day that they achieved results, here are a couple of main criticisms of this research summarized from the link I cited:
A)The data is the result of meta-analysis which is vulnerable to cherry picking of data (counting only the hits).
B)It is impossible to have a control group.
C)There is a disconnect between the rigor of the procedure described in the paper and the one that the data is actually based on.
D)Even if the tests are accurate, a slightly larger than chance at guessing over a large number of people and trials does not equate to any practical psychic ability and is not sufficient to explain fantastic psychic claims (such as the ability to read minds or see the future).
E)There is no theory on how this would work, how it fits into other sciences, and where the boundaries of the ability begin and end. In other sciences, the same thing can be shown multiple ways.



PROPHECY AND NOSTRADAMUS:
This link is a good rundown of the different kind of logical fallacies used by people who claim to predict the future[13]. Here is a skeptical rundown of a couple of the more recently claims credited to Nostradamus[14]. Since you specifically asked about it, I'll also try to describe the concepts with my own words.

Nostradamus used vague wording which could fit any of a number of events. This pretty much guaranteed that something would come along and fit the description, even thought Nostradamus didn't actually know it before hand. This is called unfalsifiability. If there isn't actually anything that can prove a prediction wrong, than you haven't ruled out anything and therefore haven't told anyone anything they didn't already know (this is a consequence of the logical notion of the contrapositive). Nostradamus's works are translated from 16th century French, so there is a lot of creative interpretation that occurs as well.

It would be considerably more impressive if people could read the works of Nostradamus and actually glean some information about the future that would allow them to take counter-measures of any sort. So far, it has only been noted after something occurs that it matches something Nostradamus had once said. Accurate prediction or not, what good does that do anyone? More importantly, however, this gives people all of history to claim a success and they never call a prediction a failure no matter how much time it take produce results because they believe it will still occur in the future. Other times, Nostradamus' words have drummed up panic about some highly dramatic, more specific prediction which is said to occur soon and when it does not, it is the claimant who is blamed and not the technique of trying to make anything useful out of Nostradamus' words.

There was actually a large number of people in Nostradamus's day who made bold, but vague, predictions about the future-Nostradamus was just the most popular. Even if Nostradamus had actually made a fairly unlikely, falsifiable claim, that people found was actually an accurate prediction of the future at the time (he never did anything of the sort), than it would still be unremarkable because there were so many people claiming to do so that one of them would have to be picked up on. For a more in-depth explanation, Jim Holt's article in the New York Times (“Throw Away That Astrological Chart” April 29, 2004; Page D10) is a good one, but sadly I am unable to locate it on the web.

Nostradamus claimed to use astrology to come up with his predictions. Astrology is the idea that the movement of the planets tells us something about the future. During Nostradamus's time however, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto hadn't been discovered and neither had any moon other than our own. (Modern astrologers typically count Pluto, modern astronomers don't count Pluto in light of the discovery of Eris, Haumea, and Makemake[15]). Clearly, however Nostradamus's predictions work it is not how he thinks it works and modern astrological claims have to deal with the fact that the claims of the less credible Nostradamus have held just as much weight. In any event, here is an article by Phil Plait which refutes the notion of any sort logic behind astrology[16].

Finally we have to talk about confirmation bias. We are a pattern-finding species, it's one of the things humans do best, even compared to computers. The problem is that we have a tendency to generate false-positives (like the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast). When something interesting occurs, we remember it. When something that seems to be connected to a phenomenon we believe in, we remember it. So if you have a habit of attempting to predict the next song on the radio, you'll think you are psychic when you are right and shrug when you are wrong. The more unlikely you believe this chance to be and the more important you think the consequences are, the more likely you are to make something more out of pure chance. Behavioral psychologists refer to this as "intermittent reinforcement" and it is actually the hardest type of conditioning to break (it is the psychological explanation of destructive gambling). If you reward animals after a random number of bar presses and than stop, they will still keep pressing the bar for a much longer time than if it were a countable number of bar presses. If you reward animals at random intervals than they will actually repeat whatever actions they happened to be doing at the time because they have come to associate the unrelated action to the reward. While behaviorism has it's limitations, I think there is a clear parallel that can be drawn here between silly behaviors of animals and in humans.



TIME IN CLASSICAL PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY:
Why does time flow in one direction any not the other? Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is that certain processes occur only in one way (or more generally, different along one way than it would if you thought about the same thing backwards). For example, if you break a porcelain cup it can't easily be put back together. Entropy is the process of heat diffusing across a colder region, and it only spreads itself evenly. Most importantly for humans, chemical processes move towards an equilibrium of compounds that cannot be reversed without the expenditure of energy and outside knowledge of what state it needs to be reversed to. The brain is dependent on biology which is dependent on chemisty, and this is why our experience is "positive" and not "negative" in time - most importantly, our memories occur in this order.

It may actually be the case that the whole universe is already fixed (destined to take place), but we would never know. Our way of acquiring knowledge has to go through processes in the universe which move forward in time and would have occurred in the past by the time we are aware of them. Knowledge of future events in the past would require that either the events weren't really in the future or that time travel had occurred. The Wikipedia article actually covers the basic notions of scientific time travel pretty well[17]. Time travels usually seems to involve ridiculously powerful energies, highly speculative science, and/or only the ability to go back to the time when the time machine was created.

TIME IN EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY:
This is where we get the notion of time as a fourth dimension and "spacetime". The reason is that Einstein's insight was that time has constant speed no matter what speed you observe it from, which implies a special relationship between space and time which must always be upheld. The most obvious consequence of this is that no information, matter, or energy can travel faster than a speed of light so that one thing causes another very far away, very quickly. Time dilation does say that time moves more slowly for objects the closer they move to the speed of light. The only way for something to travel backwards in time is for it to move faster than the speed of light and if there was a particle that did that (tachyon) than it would be unable to transmit any information about it. Rather than the mechanism for access to future events, Einstein's relativity provides the explanation for why it does not occur. Time dilation and other spacetime curvature predictions have been experimentally verified a number of ways. In fact, GPS satellites have to account for relativity to be as accurate as they are.

TIME IN QUANTUM MECHANICS:
I'm not going to sugar-coat it, Quantum Mechanics is confusing to attempt to understand. We have no biological physical intuition with which to grasp it and when it comes to philosophical conjecture there is a lot of ways things can be interpreted. But that doesn't mean that it's all speculative. The physics is well understood (transistors which make up all of our modern electronics are based off of the QM understanding of atoms) for all but the cutting edge. Ultracold solid state physics is one of the most accurate science on the globe and that is because it obeys QM exactly. QM also follows something called the Correspondence Principle which states that in the classical limit, QM has to work like the rest of physics. So the extent to which unusual things can happen is pretty limited (and this doesn't have to be forced on QM, it is a natural consequence of Ehrenfest theorem and Virial theorem). If anyone tells you that QM has implications for their pet theory about the paranormal, supernatural, or religious which depart from what you'd ordinarily think on a macroscopic scale, than there is most likely a misunderstanding. For example, don't listen to anything Deepak Chopra says - he just throws the word "quantum" in front of a wild conjecture and hopes no one calls him on his bull.

The EPR paradox is the most commonly cited idea for why some notions we have about time might be wrong (but still no foreknowledge or time travel). Here is the simplest way I've seen it [18]. I warned you that the details can be hard to understand, but a more detailed explanation of the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality can be found here[19]. Essentially, two particles become entangled so that at one point both particles appear to have a range of possible spin values, but you measured the first one and the range of possible spin values for the second one suddenly becomes very limited and can be calculated from the first one. This occurs instantaneously, no matter how far the two are. But yet no matter which order you measure the two particles, they still follow the same probability distribution of spin values as they would if they were not entangled. It's just that there is a correlation between the one and the other. This isn't faster than light travel, because there would be no way for information to travel fast enough (by conventional means) for the first person to tell the second person of what happened and because second person wouldn't know the other person had measured it until the first person tells them.

One can get a similar paradox by an insect crawling across a projector and casting a shadow on the screen. While the insect is moving slower than the speed of light, the shadow of the insect on the screen appears to be moving faster (because the image on the projector is blown up to a larger size so the shadow covers more distance in the same time). However, any photon that hits the screen had to have done so by first passing through the projector, moving past the fly, and than hitting the screen after is traverses the distance at the speed of light. Similarly, anyone standing on the other side of the projector looking at the screen won't know about any particular image on the screen until light from the screen bounces off, travels the distance between the person and the screen, and hits that person's eye. For another example, imagine you are racing a friend who is 1000ft to your right. You race by running forward and touching a line on the ground and than running back to your original spots. You narrowly beat out your friend by 1 millisecond. So the wave of "individuals completing the race" travels 1000ft in 1 millisecond, neither of you ran that fast as 1 million ft/sec and you wouldn't know how close you were until you compared times.

SCIENCE AS PROPHECY:
In some ways, science is all about telling the future. We can tell you exactly when and where the next eclipse will be. We can tell you that if you put together certain minerals in a certain way thay you'll end up with a microwave that works when you plug it into the wall and press a button. We can often tell you why something will or not work beforehand. When there is a disaster, we can give you some degree of forewarning. Why is it that our society is organized around this kind of prophecy as opposed to 16th century musings? Because science works again and again, and we have a procedure for learning more and more. I hope I have inspired you to learn about all the interesting things in the world, rather than have the feeling that I took away something that you thought was neat but wasn't real.

LINKS:
[1]http://www.skeptic.com/
[2]http://www.csicop.org/si/
[3]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316172324/qid=1115397176/sr=8-1/r
[4]http://www.nysun.com/arts/you-can-judge-this-book-by-its-cover/7505/
[5]http://www.banachek.org/
[6]http://www.wikihow.com/Cold-Read
[7]http://hubpages.com/hub/Sylvia_Browne_is_a_Fraud__Plagiarist_and_Convicted_Felon
[8]http://www.stopsylvia.com/
[9]http://www.csicop.org/si/2001-11/i-files.html
[10]http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
[11]http://www.skepticality.com/p_g_lynnekelly.htm
[12]http://www.skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html
[13]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postdiction
[14]http://www.skepdic.com/nostrada.html
[15]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutoids
[16]http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.html
[17]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Time_travel_to_the_past_in_physics
[18]http://www.physlink.com/Education/askexperts/ae634.cfm
[19]http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/bells_inequality.html

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Great! you are wonderful. You explained everything in detail and i thank you for this.

However, i would like to ask you something about cold reading. One of my relatives, once went to Egypt and they met a women, who was known for her ability to tell about the future and the past of the people. She could also tell about the dead people. She could tell whether the dead person is in a happy state or is sad, where is he/she living and what message does he/she want to convey to his family members in Earth. She also claimed to be the messnger between the dead people and the living people. Could you please tell me how she could do that because many people including my relatives claimed that she was genuine and whatever she told was truth.

Please tell, was she using this cold reading art that you are talking about? And also tell me in detail what kind of methods do cold readers apply to foretell.

Thanks

Answer
This Egyptian women sounds like a cold reader to me. I've included more links to cold reading materials at the bottom so you can read up on the phenomenon yourself.

But before I get into the details about what I think happened, you have to think about how you and your relative would take information that the Egyptian women was not in fact speaking to the dead. For atheists and skeptics we would: A) Rather know the truth even if it hurts; B) Feel it is highly disrespectful to the memory of the dead to include false information; C) Feel that it is wrong when someone is paid for services (like speaking to the dead) that they did not actually provide. For other people, they would rather have a happy memory to affix to the deceased, some kind of fortune-cookie style guidance, and confirmation of the existence of an afterlife. It doesn't matter what the truth is if that isn't the highest priority and I've encountered more than one person who has disagreed with me on the value of figuring out what is reasonably true versus what wishful thinking.

Next you have to understand that cold reading works most effectively when the client wants to believe and when it does work the client typically ignores or forgets all the cold reading techniques that were used on them. So unless your relative went to Egypt in the past month, he/she would probably only be convinced that they might not have received messages from beyond by the fact that other people have been tricked by people who claim to do something similar and not from any particular memory that he/she has about his/her personal reading. The only way to settle the matter to the satisfaction of a "true believer" would be to go to Egypt, find the women, get another reading,record the audio, video, or transcript of the session, and analyze it line-by-line. To me however, people are deceived all the time and I see no reason to believe that this Egyptian women is not using the same technique as what cold readers do to others.

Like I said before, it may be that the Egyptian women isn't deliberately trying to deceive anyone. She might think that when she guesses the first thing to come to mind, puzzles it with the person she is speaking with, and the person she is talking to lights up happily, that what had happened was the Egyptian women was fed the answer by spirits. More likely than not however, the Egyptian women did it for money or for fame. The closer to a tourist location, the more likely this Egyptian women was trying to make an easy buck. The further from the urban areas, the more likely she was sincere but deceiving herself. In any event, the responsibility in understanding what is reality and what is not ultimately falls on the person being read.

So let's talk about what I know about this Egyptian women. "She could tell whether the dead person is in a happy state or is sad, where is he/she living and what message does he/she want to convey to his family members in Earth." Your relative has no means of confirming any information that the Egyptian women gives about the other side, because your relative cannot talk to the dead. But without knowing a thing about the Egyptian women or your relative, I can tell you things that she did or did not say. She said things that were plausible and comforting, but did not bring up anything specific that had not been mentioned before. She said that the relative was happy and was not in any pain from physical ailments that the relative had experienced while on this Earth. She may have said the person was there in the room smiling, that the person was living in some paradise on Earth, or that the person was in some nebulous state of peace. If the Egyptian women said that the deceased was roaming in some place of significance to the relative, that it was using one of the cold reading techniques I describe in the paragraph's below. If the message was not one of generic feelings of the deceased ("she wants you to know that everything is okay now", "he insisted that you know that he loves you", or "he is no longer in pain"), than it one of advice that would apply well to anyone in the situation that the Egyptian women knew about the relative at that point ("when you make that big decision, go with your heart", "you always were an impatient one, an opportunity will open up", or "you have your best friend to talk it over with"). The message most certainly not contain a favorite phrase unique to the deceased ("Ditto!","Well if that isn't the bees knees!"), advice that is risky ("You may have to commit a crime to get this to work out like you want"), feelings of lack of confidence ("Good luck, but I think you are just going to screw this up like you always do"), specific instructions/predictions about an upcoming event ("I know you trusted Claire Anne to bring the music for the junior prom, but you are going to have to do it yourself because she will get a speeding ticket on the way there."), or sudden unambiguous identification ("The painting we had on the mantle is by Andrew Bird", "I liked to eat my Applejacks in chocolate milk, remember?", "Can you still catch those red newts at my old farm in the springtime?").

"She also claimed to be the messenger between the dead people and the living people." This is the typical phrasing of a cold reader. Apparently, it is impossible to just locate the desired spirit and write down what is says verbatim without further questioning. Instead the "messenger" has to ask the living about what the dead people are saying in order to identify what dead person is speaking and verify that it is in fact that person. The line between a statement and a question is blurred, so the person seems to know what they are talking about when they are right but has plausible deniability when they are wrong. The living are prompted to ask questions about or express feelings about the dead people that reveal even more information, but the "messenger" only returns with ambiguous, plausible, or repeated information.

"who was known for her ability to tell about the future and the past of the people". Well we've already talked about how people are able to make is seem like they predict the future. The technique for the past and information about the deceased is not actually that different. This is where the links about cold reading will be most helpful, but I will try to describe it the best I can:

You start out with the same vague information we talked about with predictions, for example:
A)"a house with blue and white". (Very common house colors, if they are wrong about that than it can always be spun into "that's how she wants the house painted" or "write this down, you'll remember it")
B)"a name beginning with a J or G". (more common than you think, Notice the reader has yet to identify who exactly has this first initial)
C)"pains in the chest". (this includes heart attacks, trouble breathing through lungs, anything accompanied by nausea, any accident with bleeding in the chest - just about any cause of death)
Then the person being read will make this vague statement fit into something specific and volunteer confirming information in the process, for example:
A) "We sold grandmother's house two years ago".
B) "Yes. My brother-in-law, George died suddenly in a car accident".
C) "uhm...the upper chest?"
And the reader will use what they've just heard, add in an easy to figure out piece of information, and make it sound like that was the answer they had all along:
A) "Yes, that's right. There are some many memories in that house but you couldn't live there after your grandmother had left". (notice the reader said 'left' and doesn't actually say dead, although that is likely for an elderly person having their house sold - she could have gone to a nursing home or even moved. Notice this doesn't actually say how much time has passed if grandmother in between the events. Any grandmother's house that can be easily identified by the subject  is sure to have had a lot of memories)
B) "Yes, George is his name. He didn't feel any pain when he died". (This just repeats what the person had said and infers that the death was easy since it was a sudden one. Even if the person was referring to the surprise of the event, they didn't actually feel the pain so they will naturally believe the cold reader)
C) "Yes, he's saying that he couldn't breathe, but he's alright now". (This person apparently wasn't sure if the 'chest' included the lungs, and the cold reader transformed the guess into that answer. Of course, the reader also adds a nice assertion so that the person doesn't become too uncomfortable).

Some people speak about peace for the dead, I just want peace for the living.

RESOURCES:
*Rather good link on "amazingly accurate" vague statements: http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm
*Review of the mostly highly recommended book detailing how cold reading works with link to purchase at the bottom: http://www.lostaddress.org/2009/02/12/the-full-facts-book-of-cold-reading-by-ian
You may want to see if you can get it at the library or from ebay though first, because it is a little expensive.
*Here's a quick list of 'techniques' that give you an idea of how a cold reading is set up: http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/coldread.htm
*Here is another page describing the process: http://www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com/c/cold-reading/
*I'm sure you can track down more links or just check out a book from the library. If you can find time to watch some TV psychic, just count how many hits, misses, and questions they have and you will end up with all your marks in those last two columns.