Jim Henderson wrote:
> To this day, I know that I avoided a disaster that night.

No you don't. You just strongly believe it.  Had you opened the papers and 
the next morning found that a building had collapsed across that on-ramp, 
you still wouldn't have *known* it. You *still* would have only believed it. 
You had the true, and the belief, without the justification. (Unless, of 
course, you subconciously overheard a radio news station talking about 
demolition or something, in which case it's no longer really "instinctive.") 
And of course if you do it correctly and repeatedly, then it's worth looking 
into, but so far nobody has measured proper psi powers.

I know exactly what you're talking about, now.


Sometimes I wake from a dream, *knowing* I solved some problem while I was 
dreaming, but I just can't remember it now. Did I really solve the problem 
while I was dreaming, or am I just <ahem> dreaming?  How is your experience 
different?

> I suppose it's the sort of thing people who are more religious than me 
> would attribute to "the protection of God" or something like that, but I 
> don't.  I just instinctively knew that I needed to go home a different 
> route.

Sure. And when you read books about odd kinds of brain damage, with people 
who are neither blind nor sighted, with people who are absolutely convinced 
they had "out of the body" experiences yet can't see what's going on when 
you block something from their "body" eyes that their "soul" eyes could see, 
people who are utterly convinced that all their friends have been replaced 
with duplicates, etc, you realize no, you didn't know, you're just convinced 
you knew.

The very fact that you're convinced is what makes you think it's knowledge 
and not belief. Yet conviction is a state of mind. You're saying "because my 
brain has decided it's knowledge, that makes it knowledge and not just a 
hunch/guess/faith."

I really do believe there are faithful who have as much conviction about 
something as you did about your route home. I believe that's what a lot of 
the sudden unprompted "born again" stuff is about. I don't disparage that, 
but I don't count that as "knowledge" either.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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