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King Croesos and Extra-Sensory Perception
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| A truth spoken before its time can be quite dangerous. (From a Greek proverb) |
The king confidently set out to war. However, the kingdom he destroyed was his own. It happened about 546–540 BC.
BEING ABLE to foretell future happenings is hankered after today as well, because "forewarned is forearmed", as the proverb says, and besides there can be other gains too, including winning in some sorts of lotteries. Some strive by statistics-based prognoses for it (they can be good), others strive in others ways (below).
Contents
- Croesus, a man of coin treasures
- Telling something important in advance can be risky business
- To speak the truth is risky business at times
- Hunting for good cues
- The Voice of a Sceptic
| Supporting reservations are presupposed throughout: |
A man of coin treasures
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| The best is far from getting outsmarted. |
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| The Apollo temple ruins at Delphi. |
The center of Delphi was and is the sanctuary of Apollo on the southern tip of the mountain slope. The walls of that Doric temple were inscribed with wise words such as "Know Yourself", "Nothing in Excess", and "Don't take any Wooden Drachma".
In the temple lived he priestess Pythia, who seated on a tripod above a deep crevasse that fumes got up from, pronounced many prophesies.
Map of ancient Greece
Telling something important in advance looks like a risky business
HERODOTUS writes that King Croesus - he reigned about 560-546 BC and was the last king of the ancient country Lydia of Asia Minor - dispatched several of his men to test seven oracles to see if any of them could divine what the king was doing on the day of the test. Only Pythia, priestess of Apollo at Delphi, was able to divine correctly that the king was making a lamb and tortoise stew in a bronze kettle.Convinced of her powers, Croesus then posed the question that really interested him: If he attacked the rival kingdom of Persia, would he be able to defeat its army? Pythia replied,
"When Croesus has the Halys crossed, a mighty empire will be lost."
Croesus was not well enough alerted to the ambiguity of the prediction. He crossed the river, attacked, and lost his mighty empire. And even worse, Greeks in Asia Minor lost their independence due to that war. [From the ancient Greek historian Herodotus]
Evaluating "psychic" data can be a risky business unless we're rather careful and up to date.
What is fit is fit, no matter what. And did you know Jesus read the minds of others and could do more than that - and asked the follower to do even better? [Cf. Matthew 9;4 and John 14:12]
THE GREEK philosopher Solon once visited King Croesus and wanted to teach him sound
moderation. He warned Croesus that insensibly much prosperity could offend. Solon also
decreed,"Call no man happy till he's dead."
It has been used as a proverb later.
"Always look to the bright side of life"
Croesus enjoyed his wealth as best he could in spite of Solon till he was defeated by the Persian king Cyrus, who attacked and captured King Croesus' capital, Sardis. The historians, Heredotus and Xenophon, say that Cyrus condemned Croesus to death by fire.The pyre was prepared and Croesus tied to a stake at the top. Cyrus ordered a torch to be applied and with barbaric cruelty watched it mount towards the man in the middle. Money couldn't help him at that point. But then there came a sudden, heavy rainstorm which put out the fire. And since Croesus at that moment uttered the name of Solon, the Persian king who allegedly admired the Athenian lawgiver, had Croesus cut down and set free. The ancients say it was the sun god that sent the rain. Can you understand that?
If ample rain goes against harsh treatment, let it do it.
The oracle, dedicated to the sun god Apollo
DELPHI was the place of the oracle of the sun god Apollo. He foretold the future through his priestess. She was known as the Pythia, and responded to questions of visitors while in a trance over rising sulphur damps or something like that. Her quizzical cries at the time were interpreted and written down by an official interpreter. In earlier times it was done in hexameter verse, then later in prose.The oracular responses were notoriously ambiguous, and their interpretation was often 'deduced' only after the event they referred to. That didn't deter visitors from journeying to Delphi from all over the Mediterranean.
Apollo shared the sanctuary at Delphi with Dionysus. Every fall Apollo departed for his winter quarters in the land of the Hyperboreans, the fabulous land far away in the North. In his absence the Pythia did not deliver oracles, and Dionysus ruled over Delphi. That's what they tell.
During the 8th and 7th centuries BC, the sanctuary grew in prestige as it received splendid dedications from legendary kings such as Midas.
Its cultural role expanded in the 7th century BC, when the Pythian games attracted athletes and musicians from all over the Greek world for games or competitions. This festival, which originally took place every eight years, was expanded after the first Sacred War and held every four years on a scale that rivaled the Olympic games. By these things Delphi sustained the idea that it was the navel (omphalos) of the Greek world, a place where ancient visitors could ritually cleanse themselves to go to the sanctuary of Apollo by climbing a zig-zag Sacred Way lined with treasuries and monuments till they got to the temple where Pythia sat on Apollo's tripod to deliver her oracle responses.
In spite of much plundering by Roman emperors, much of the splendor of Delphi survives.
One has to survive and be counted on to flourish by adamant responses of whatever kind - is the bet.
To speak the truth is risky business at times
THEY SAY the Greek story-teller Aesop found favour at the court of King Croesus in Lydia, the ancient kingdom in West Asia Minor. Aesop told stories for men and women, and not everyone liked to be demasked by animal portrayals of that kind. But King Croesus freed him because he liked his stories, and later used him as an envoy.We don't have to believe old Greek tales, yet they often contain nice lessons for men and women today as well. Vienna doctors like Sigmund Freud saw that. So even though people didn't always speak truth in antiquity, and even if they often wrote more than one version of this and that story, there are often good points to decode still.
Some persons learn to "speak the truth" by giving hints through metaphors. They can be interpreted in many odd ways too.
Hunting for solid clues
Fit American ESP research was wanting
Your source will be an article by Professor Daryl Bern, "Does Psi exist?". Better be forewarned: The answer to that will be yes, and even a lot for some people. Artistic individuals and other playful persons may get good at it.However, see the Skeptic's Dictionary's entries too. They are good, and they tend to lead into "well-well" too. [Check]
Psi, from "psychic phenomena", denotes not quite common processes of information or energy transfer. The processes include:
- EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION (ESP): getting information without using the known senses;
- PSYCHOKINESIS, the ability to affect physical objects or events without the intervention of any known physical force.
- TELEPATHY: transfer of information from one person to another without the mediation of any known channel of sensory communication.
- CLAIRVOYANCE: getting information about places, objects, or events without the mediation of any of the known senses (for example, Pythia's knowledge that the king was making stew).
- PRECOGNITION: getting information about a future event that could not be anticipated through any known inferential process. Pythia's prediction about the loss of an empire, although dubious, can be used as an example.
Parapsychic phenomena exist - let us not forget it.
ESP Exists, Says Dr. Jessica Utts
Extracts
It is clear to this author [Professor Jessica Utts, 1995] that (ESP) is possible and has been demonstrated. This conclusion is . . . based . . . on commonly accepted scientific criteria. The phenomenon has been replicated in a number of forms across laboratories and cultures.
We have progressed very far in understanding the mechanism . . . Senders do not appear to be necessary at all; feedback of the correct answer may or may not be necessary. Distance in time and space do not seem to be an impediment. Beyond those conclusions, we know very little.
I believe that it would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date. Resources should be directed to the pertinent questions about how this ability works.
If appropriate resources are targeted to appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade. - Professor Jessica Utts, Division of Statistics, University of California, Davis [emphasis added] [Link]
Ganzfield studies
LET US not beat about the bush, but cite Daryl J. Bem, professor of psychology at Cornell University between the boldface, red-coloured pointers for each paragraph below. He writes:ONE RELAXES TO HAVE A GOOD TIME. In a ganzfeld telepathy experiment, one subject (the receiver) rests in a reclining chair in a soundproof chamber. Translucent ping pong ball halves are taped over the eyes and headphones are placed over the ears. A red floodlight is directed toward the receiver's eyes and white noise is played through the headphones. (White noise is a random mixture of sound frequencies similar to the hiss made by a radio tuned between stations.) This homogeneous visual and auditory environment is called the Ganzfeld, a German word meaning "total field." To quiet "noise" produced by internal bodily tension, the receiver is also led through a set of relaxation exercises at the beginning of the ganzfeld period.SO: There are signs that many people could benefit from learning to evolve some Psi figuring prowess themselves, for example before a next visit to Monte Carlo and its casinos. But we should never get cramped and nervous at it. To the contrary, just as winning in the casino should be great fun, so should the training that lets some of us win fairly easily by tapping higher sources and outlets fit for men and women.
CONTROL STIMULI HELP US TO SEE THE GOINGS IN A TRUE LIGHT, WHEREAS PLATITUDES HARDLY DO IT. While the receiver is in the ganzfeld, a second subject (the sender) sits in a separate soundproof room and concentrates on the "target," a randomly selected picture or videotaped sequence. For about 30 minutes, the receiver thinks aloud, providing a continuous report of all the thoughts, feelings, and images that pass through his or her mind. At the end of the ganzfeld period, the receiver is presented with several stimuli (usually four) and, without knowing which one was the target, is asked to rate the degree to which each matches the thoughts and images experienced during the ganzfeld period. If the receiver assigns the highest rating to the target, it is scored as a "hit." Thus, if the experiment uses judging sets containing four stimuli (the target and three control stimuli), the hit rate expected by chance is one out of four, or 25 percent.
YOU SHOULD FEEL WELL IF YOU CAN BE ALLIED WITH 42 STUDIES FROM 10 US LABORATORIES, BUT WHAT HAPPENS? In 1985 and 1986, the Journal of Parapsychology devoted two entire issues to a critical examination of the ganzfeld studies, featuring a debate between Ray Hyman, a cognitive psychologist and a knowledgeable, skeptical critic of parapsychological research, and the late Charles Honorton, a prominent parapsychologist and major ganzfeld researcher. At that time, there had been 42 reported ganzfeld studies conducted by investigators in 10 laboratories.
TO SUCCEED BY GOING AGAINST ODDS THAT ARE GREATER THAN A MILLION TO ONE - THAT NEEDS FAR MORE THAN TACT AND OUTFIT. Across these studies, receivers achieved an average hit rate of about 35 percent. (This might seem like a small margin of success over the 25 percent hit rate expected by chance, but a person with this margin of advantage in a gambling casino would get rich very quickly.) Statistically this result is highly significant: The odds against getting a 35 percent hit rate across that many studies by chance are greater than a billion to one. (...)ELEVEN MORE STUDIES WERE EVEN MORE RIGOROUS. In 1983, Honorton and colleagues had initiated a new series of 11 ganzfeld studies, studies that complied with all the guidelines he and Hyman later published in their joint communiqué. They are called autoganzfeld studies because a computer controlled the experimental procedures, including the random selection and presentation of the targets and the recording of the receiver's ratings. These studies were published by Honorton in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1990, and the complete history of ganzfeld research was resummarized by Bem (the author of this article) and Honorton in the January 1994 issue of the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association.
THE RESULTS WERE EVEN BETTER, AND DRAMATICALLY BETTER FOR ARTISTRY-BENT INDIVIDUALS. The autoganzfeld studies confirmed the results of the earlier, less sophisticated studies, obtaining virtually the same hit rate: about 35 percent. These studies also reconfirmed several other findings from other research. For example, it has often been reported that creative or artistically gifted persons show high psi ability. The autoganzfeld studies tested this by recruiting twenty students from the Juilliard School in New York City to serve as receivers. Overall, these students achieved a hit rate of 50 percent, one of the highest hit rates ever reported for a single sample in a ganzfeld study. The autoganzfeld studies also found that significantly higher hit rates were obtained when the targets were videotaped film sequences than when they were still pictures.
The Voice of a Sceptic
PROFESSOR Robert Todd Carrol is the author of The Skeptic's Dictionary (online): [Link]
One should be able to refute sceptics by sound procedures if publicly known
validation of ESP is wanted. Statistics is for that too.
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