Science News: Is River's ESP Real?
POSTED BY: two
UPDATED: Sunday, June 17, 2012 21:33
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In my experience (I said experience) ESP is directly linked to empathy and emotion. ESP is strongest between people with strong emotional ties
I disagree, or at least I have a different experience. What happens to me, I call it future flashes, it's most often completely unrelated to family, and more related to events happening in the immediate vicinity. You see a girl getting off a bus step on an insect you've been watching, then she does. You see a little girl you don't know accidentally pull a rosebush off a shelf at the garden center, and then she does. You see a black cat walk by, and then it does.
The initial visual flash is often very vivid, and reinforced by the event then happening. My guess is this is largely a product of hallucinations and/or over-active imagination probably combined with a form of near PTSD-anxiety, pattern recognition, and logic. Nothing supernatural about it.
However, though I have no strong emotional ties, you are most likely correct that empathy does play an important role in anticipating and understanding emotions and actions of people in the vicinity. Seeing something happen to someone else can trigger a psychosomatic response of feeling what they are feeling. Knowing someone well can also sometimes improve prediction, like the day I was able to predict my mom had gotten a cat from the shelter. To most everyone else it seemed out of nowhere and uncanny, but I had my reasoning, and I turned out to be right.
But everything else, I'm more dubious about. The day my grandfather died, I saw a dead robin while walking home from the bus stop, that made me think about my grandfather and worry about him. But he had cancer at the time, and it's unlikely the two events are related.
I doubt sexuality has much to do about any of it, unless the shock of seeing the pictures induces such an "yuck" response that additional effort is made to AVOID them. No one likes to unexpectedly see pictures of two people having sex; this is why pop-up porn ads on the internet generate such negative reactions. It might be different if someone is intentionally looking for it, but I find I don't want to examine that possibility too closely.
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Either way I'm not so sure River has precognition. She reads other people's minds. She doesn't see the future. At least I can't recall any indication that she can.
She actually does. Out of Gas she predicts the fire. It's pretty clear that while Kaylee is nervous, she did not expect a fire or explosion from the engine and so River could not have gleaned that possibility from her.
Similarly, Ariel is potentially a neat episode about self fulfilling prophecies. Did River stab Jayne because of the Blue Sun shirt, OR did she stab Jayne because she knew he was going to sell her out, which made him then decide to sell her out?
The above image in Downtime suggests River's precognition, I believe there's another instance in The Other Half, and the short story Crystal in Still Flying pretty much confirms that River is precognitive.
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I always just assumed the "fire" line was because River has heightened senses and could hear what was going on with the engine. I thought the slashing of Jayne's shirt had everything to do with the blue sun logo. Just like her smashing the food packets and tearing the labels off the cans. She's not a big fan of their logo.
Haven't read Still Flying. So, not sure what is shown in there. As for the series I still don't see any evidence.
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There's no indication that River has heightened senses of eyesight, hearing, or smell. There is indication that she can "sense" other people's feelings and pick up information about their past. In the series there's potentially indication that she can also obtain knowledge about the future, and this possibility is more strongly suggested in the comics, and is outright confirmed in Still Flying.
Would you like me to post or send you some sample paragraphs from Crystal?
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Originally posted by Bytemite:
There's no indication that River has heightened senses of eyesight, hearing, or smell. There is indication that she can "sense" other people's feelings and pick up information about their past. In the series there's potentially indication that she can also obtain knowledge about the future, and this possibility is more strongly suggested in the comics, and is outright confirmed in Still Flying.
Would you like me to post or send you some sample paragraphs from Crystal?
Sure. But how can you say the "fire" line is more evidence of precognition than heightened senses? Both are possible. Hearing something in the sounds from the engine that indicate it is going to explode is the simpler explanation IMO. Occam's Razor says we should take the simplest explanation.
It's also supported by River's intelligence. She could easily have learned the working of the engine by Out of Gas. Enough to know what different sounds indicate.
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But didn't other characters hear the engine shut down? River could've just been the first to figure out what that meant (and it's possible Kaylee was thinking "no, it's not a fire. It can't be a fire. It's just a loose connection somewhere. Please, God, don't let it be a fire.")
And I can think of a few different ways of how ESP/precognition/telepathy could work, based on what we know/theorize about how reality/the brain works, but none of them are testable with modern technology (and, more importantly, modern budgets).
Trouble is that none of these phenomena really lend themselves to (ethical) controlled experiments, so all the "evidence" we can gather is anecdotal, which no respectable (i.e., tenured, well-funded) scientist will touch with a 10-foot cattle prod. (And in a lot of cases, funding is dependent on not studying certain things.)
When we reach the point of being able to do full realtime electroencephalograms during a test for telepathy, then we can set up controlled tests.
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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1) "more evidence of precognition than heightened senses?" I didn't say the "fire" line was more evidence of precognition than heightened senses, I said that precognition is consistent with other suggestions in the series and supplemental material, and heightened senses is not.
2) "She could easily have learned the working of the engine by Out of Gas. Enough to know what different sounds indicate." The engine has never exploded in her experience. Maybe she could have gleaned some knowledge from Kaylee, but then again, Kaylee never even gave any indication of knowing that going TOWARDS the engine at that point of time was unsafe. She's worried, but her "I'll check it out" is cheerful.
3) "Occam's Razor says we should take the simplest explanation." Occam's Razor has been Jossed.
This will have to do for now, my book is at home.
http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/stillflying.html
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Brett Matthews wrote the episode "Heart of Gold" and co-wrote the Firefly comics Those Left Behind and Better Days. His story "Crystal" is, in some ways both the most and least satisfying of the three stories in Firefly: Still Flying. It presents a day in which River Tam has had a vision of the fates of all of the other characters aboard Serenity as she goes around to share them. Those whose futures are known through the film Serenity, clearly match up. Others are as enigmatic as Matthews could make them. The satisfaction is having a glimpse into the characters' futures, while the lack of satisfaction is based on the amount of prior knowledge the reader needs for the story, or perhaps vignette, to fully work. Without knowing the characters, "Crystal" is simply a few pages of inscrutability.
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Trouble is that none of these phenomena really lend themselves to (ethical) controlled experiments, so all the "evidence" we can gather is anecdotal,
This is true and problematic. As I've said, I don't believe in precognition. I believe it's completely explainable with ordinary science and psychology.
When I recount my predictions, I know I am not precognitive because, like I said before, I am wrong just as often as I am right.
My future flashes are a weirder thing, as they don't happen UNLESS the event happens immediately afterward. But again, I'm sure that's just logic and an over-active imagination.
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Originally posted by Bytemite:
1) "more evidence of precognition than heightened senses?" I didn't say the "fire" line was more evidence of precognition than heightened senses, I said that precognition is consistent with other suggestions in the series and supplemental material, and heightened senses is not.
2) "She could easily have learned the working of the engine by Out of Gas. Enough to know what different sounds indicate." The engine has never exploded in her experience. Maybe she could have gleaned some knowledge from Kaylee, but then again, Kaylee never even gave any indication of knowing that going TOWARDS the engine at that point of time was unsafe. She's worried, but her "I'll check it out" is cheerful.
3) "Occam's Razor says we should take the simplest explanation." Occam's Razor has been Jossed.
This will have to do for now, my book is at home.
http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/stillflying.htmlQuote:
Brett Matthews wrote the episode "Heart of Gold" and co-wrote the Firefly comics Those Left Behind and Better Days. His story "Crystal" is, in some ways both the most and least satisfying of the three stories in Firefly: Still Flying. It presents a day in which River Tam has had a vision of the fates of all of the other characters aboard Serenity as she goes around to share them. Those whose futures are known through the film Serenity, clearly match up. Others are as enigmatic as Matthews could make them. The satisfaction is having a glimpse into the characters' futures, while the lack of satisfaction is based on the amount of prior knowledge the reader needs for the story, or perhaps vignette, to fully work. Without knowing the characters, "Crystal" is simply a few pages of inscrutability.
She doesn't have to experience the engine causing an explosion to know what will cause one. All she needs to know is what in the engine is flammable and what sounds indicate it's leaking into an area with a spark. That could be as simple as hearing the hissing of a flammable gas escaping.
That comic may be canon but it seems like pretty cheesy canon to me. More like the author felt like finding a way to tell the stories they'll never get a chance to get around to. The easiest option was "we'll just throw this into river's bag of tricks so we can get to the story we want to tell". Not a big fan of that type of writing.
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My understanding is that Brett has worked fairly closely with Joss on the comic books, as Joss didn't want certain things spoiled before their time.
It's likely precognition was always something intended for River. A lot of people see her line as a kid in "Safe" about the Independents riding dinosaurs and cannibalism as possibly foreshadowing the events in the movie, when the crew (Independents) goes up against the Reavers (cannibals), and what happens to Wash (dinosaurs).
It's also still possible that Joss may un-Joss precognition, and in the future go with a different explanation, and in that case the Still Flying short stories will cease to be canon. Until then, River appears to be both an Empath and a Precognitive.
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