I think I understand your point. Please excuse me if I don't.
I would say that something unknowable is possible. But I am not satisfied with that answer. I am a research scientist in my professional life, and trying to understand and simulate complex phenomena is how I make a living.
Passing this off as something only I, God and maybe another can know is the effective equivalent of the posts I see here that mock the study of unexplained phenomena and having never had an experience like this, these people claim that it does not exist and trying to study it is a waste of time and resources.
Both egocentric and religious zeal have impeded the progress of understanding the world we live in many times throughout history. I hope it does not continue to dominate this area of understanding as it has for so many years.
I will say your idea of using the concept of a demon to understand something is not particularly new. And not without merit. Since in 1867 James Maxwell use the concept of a sorting demon to understand the concept of heat transfer and entropy. As the mechanism of these thermodynamic effects were unknown at the time. They saw something happen, but could not say HOW or WHY it happens.
Good thing that Maxwell and his little demon didn't give up. It took a series of people over many years grappling with the second law of thermodynamics to understand it(Maxwell, Smoluchowski, Einstein, Feynman, Zurek and many others) The demon was born in 1867 and was finally retired around 1992. It took years to understand this and new concepts to be born; Brownian motion, Quantum Mechanics, etc. But people kept at it and eventually understood it.
I hope that is the case for ESP, Precognition, etc... Maybe it is nothing mystical at all... Maybe it is a product of quantum effects on synaptic gaps, maybe some kind of temporal distortion wave, or possibly something only God understands and doesn't want us to know about.
I don't know, but I would love to find out for sure.
What I am talking about is not as simple as your examples.
But if I modify your example about the coin toss a little it would be closer to what I am talking about.
You have a dream that you are talking to a friend and that the two of you decide that the only way to settle a dispute is with a coin toss. And in your dream you say to your friend... "If I flip this coin 42 times and if all of them are heads then I am right and you are wrong." Then in your dream you flip the coin 42 times and every toss is heads and you both agree the dispute is settled.
Now you wake up from this dream and tell a friend for yours about your weird coin toss dream and all the details about what kind of coin it was and what the dispute was about, etc. every detail you can remember.
Later that day you and your friend are sitting in a cafe and next to you are two guys having a discussion. You and your friend begin to listen in because the topic is similar to the topic you discussed in your dream. Then one guy says to the other... The only way to settle this is with a coin toss... and if I flip 42 heads in a row, I win. He does and your friend looks at you and says... Wow, that was your dream.
That is similar to what happened to me. Only mine had to do with a certain section of highway with a certain kind of car (color, model, etc.) an exact number of police cars, a very specific crash sequence, etc. So many details that seem to take it outside the realm of coincidence.
I am not sure that what "ESP" is can be tested in such a straightforward manner. I am thinking of a number between 1 and 1,000,000, what is it? Does not seem to me to be the right kind of test.
My experience with this kind of phenomenon is that it is very paradoxical.
I will not go through the whole story here, but I will say that I have personally experienced something that I still cannot explain. It was too specific to be chance and fortunately for me, I had communicated the premonition to a friend who was a witness to the event as it happened later.
The paradox is that in my precognitive vision, I was the actor in the event, but in the real time manifestation I was an observer of the same event. In my vision, I made decisions to perform specific actions based on reasons I thought out during the event. In the "real time" version, I was a very close bystander observing the same set of specific events unfold as I had determined them to be in the vision. So, if in real time, I was the observer, but in the vision, I was the actor. Then "Who" made the decisions to act out the sequence of events as they happened? There were two time lines, the first when I was deciding what to do and doing it in my vision. Then the second when I was watching it happen. So which should be measured, and how would you connect the perception with the manifestation.
I suppose that precognition is more of a subset of ESP. But maybe this is part of the problem with formulating tests to capture this kind of behavior. ESP is not one type of behavior or even measurable at a single instant in time. Things are separated in time and unpredictable. Not only did I not have any indication that I was going to have the vision... I was equally surprised when the actual "real time" event took place. But once it began to, there was no doubt that what I was seeing was real. My witness and I just sat there, in shock and her first words were... "That was your dream."
This has only happened to me once that I am aware of in 32 years and happened when I was about 19 years old. So with that kind of frequency, how would someone have been able to "measure" that. I have had many dreams since, some seemed as vivid and "real" as the one that I call a vision. But I have not been the observer of them happening at a later date. Does this mean that they never happened? Or, was I not in the right place at the right time to observe it manifest? I will not know and they seem like difficult questions to answer.
I experienced something that was very real, and not just a vague sense that I had seen this before, but a very specific sequence of events that took place with an impossible level of correlation to a previous vision of them. If it didn't happen to me, I would never believe it was possible.
I would like for someone to figure out how and why something like this happens. But it seems that in my experience it would be very difficult to capture this kind of phenomena in a lab setting. But just because it is hard to capture, does not mean we should quit trying to understand it. Imagine how mysterious electrical effects were to our ancestors. Lightning was some strange power of the gods. But we have been able to figure it out more and more over time, and we are still learning how to harness it and make good use of it in our daily lives.
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I think I understand your point. Please excuse me if I don't.
I would say that something unknowable is possible. But I am not satisfied with that answer.
I am a research scientist in my professional life, and trying to understand and simulate complex phenomena is how I make a living.
Passing this off as something only I, God and maybe another can know is the effective equivalent of the posts I see here that mock the study of unexplained phenomena and having never had an experience like this, these people claim that it does not exist and trying to study it is a waste of time and resources.
Both egocentric and religious zeal have impeded the progress of understanding the world we live in many times throughout history. I hope it does not continue to dominate this area of understanding as it has for so many years.
I will say your idea of using the concept of a demon to understand something is not particularly new. And not without merit. Since in 1867 James Maxwell use the concept of a sorting demon to understand the concept of heat transfer and entropy. As the mechanism of these thermodynamic effects were unknown at the time. They saw something happen, but could not say HOW or WHY it happens.
Good thing that Maxwell and his little demon didn't give up. It took a series of people over many years grappling with the second law of thermodynamics to understand it(Maxwell, Smoluchowski, Einstein, Feynman, Zurek and many others) The demon was born in 1867 and was finally retired around 1992. It took years to understand this and new concepts to be born; Brownian motion, Quantum Mechanics, etc. But people kept at it and eventually understood it.
I hope that is the case for ESP, Precognition, etc... Maybe it is nothing mystical at all... Maybe it is a product of quantum effects on synaptic gaps, maybe some kind of temporal distortion wave, or possibly something only God understands and doesn't want us to know about.
I don't know, but I would love to find out for sure.
What I am talking about is not as simple as your examples.
But if I modify your example about the coin toss a little it would be closer to what I am talking about.
You have a dream that you are talking to a friend and that the two of you decide that the only way to settle a dispute is with a coin toss. And in your dream you say to your friend... "If I flip this coin 42 times and if all of them are heads then I am right and you are wrong." Then in your dream you flip the coin 42 times and every toss is heads and you both agree the dispute is settled.
Now you wake up from this dream and tell a friend for yours about your weird coin toss dream and all the details about what kind of coin it was and what the dispute was about, etc. every detail you can remember.
Later that day you and your friend are sitting in a cafe and next to you are two guys having a discussion. You and your friend begin to listen in because the topic is similar to the topic you discussed in your dream. Then one guy says to the other... The only way to settle this is with a coin toss... and if I flip 42 heads in a row, I win. He does and your friend looks at you and says... Wow, that was your dream.
That is similar to what happened to me. Only mine had to do with a certain section of highway with a certain kind of car (color, model, etc.) an exact number of police cars, a very specific crash sequence, etc. So many details that seem to take it outside the realm of coincidence.
I am not sure that what "ESP" is can be tested in such a straightforward manner.
I am thinking of a number between 1 and 1,000,000, what is it? Does not seem to me to be the right kind of test.
My experience with this kind of phenomenon is that it is very paradoxical.
I will not go through the whole story here, but I will say that I have personally experienced something that I still cannot explain. It was too specific to be chance and fortunately for me, I had communicated the premonition to a friend who was a witness to the event as it happened later.
The paradox is that in my precognitive vision, I was the actor in the event, but in the real time manifestation I was an observer of the same event. In my vision, I made decisions to perform specific actions based on reasons I thought out during the event. In the "real time" version, I was a very close bystander observing the same set of specific events unfold as I had determined them to be in the vision. So, if in real time, I was the observer, but in the vision, I was the actor. Then "Who" made the decisions to act out the sequence of events as they happened? There were two time lines, the first when I was deciding what to do and doing it in my vision. Then the second when I was watching it happen. So which should be measured, and how would you connect the perception with the manifestation.
I suppose that precognition is more of a subset of ESP. But maybe this is part of the problem with formulating tests to capture this kind of behavior. ESP is not one type of behavior or even measurable at a single instant in time. Things are separated in time and unpredictable. Not only did I not have any indication that I was going to have the vision... I was equally surprised when the actual "real time" event took place. But once it began to, there was no doubt that what I was seeing was real. My witness and I just sat there, in shock and her first words were... "That was your dream."
This has only happened to me once that I am aware of in 32 years and happened when I was about 19 years old. So with that kind of frequency, how would someone have been able to "measure" that. I have had many dreams since, some seemed as vivid and "real" as the one that I call a vision. But I have not been the observer of them happening at a later date.
Does this mean that they never happened? Or, was I not in the right place at the right time to observe it manifest? I will not know and they seem like difficult questions to answer.
I experienced something that was very real, and not just a vague sense that I had seen this before, but a very specific sequence of events that took place with an impossible level of correlation to a previous vision of them. If it didn't happen to me, I would never believe it was possible.
I would like for someone to figure out how and why something like this happens. But it seems that in my experience it would be very difficult to capture this kind of phenomena in a lab setting. But just because it is hard to capture, does not mean we should quit trying to understand it. Imagine how mysterious electrical effects were to our ancestors. Lightning was some strange power of the gods. But we have been able to figure it out more and more over time, and we are still learning how to harness it and make good use of it in our daily lives.