Science News: Is River's ESP Real?
POSTED BY: two
UPDATED: Sunday, June 17, 2012 21:33
VIEWED: 22646
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The lines from Safe seem like a huge stretch. However, you're right that unless the Crystal story is ditched I think we have to accept it as canon for now. I just don't like the way it sounds like it's presented.
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It's actually not too bad. River does touch on Wash and Book's fate, but is misunderstood and unclear in ways that makes it so the crew couldn't have anticipated or tried to prevent some of the tragedies that come later. It's also not done in any way that suggests River was withholding the information. More like she didn't know specifics, or she didn't know how to tell them, or she didn't believe anything could be done to stop it.
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Interesting, thanks for posting this. I think the porn was probably a good idea lol. The results ought to be replicable imo though, I'm not convinced by the excuses, so we'll have to see...
I can remember hearing a theory like this from my uncle (who's a physicist, slightly eccentric): the idea that the future 'echoes' back in time, and human brains being able to sense it. And I have personally flirted with my own little theory that human beings can influence their own luck... Take for example choosing a random prize. If people can very slightly and subconsciously sense all/some of their possible futures - and then if they feel positive, or 'lucky' when they make their pick, they can maybe subconsciously 'tune into' that better future :-/
It's not personal. It's just war.
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If the future echoes back through time then we might know what's about to happen but it's still going to happen. It would be fixed. Otherwise it isn't the future and wouldn't be able to echo back. So, if we can't change what's going to happen then seeing or sensing it isn't much use.
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Quote:
If the future echoes back through time then we might know what's about to happen but it's still going to happen. It would be fixed. Otherwise it isn't the future and wouldn't be able to echo back.
It would take something like parallel universes and being able to sense the different futures that progress from a single decision :-/ I admit it's theoretical.
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So, if we can't change what's going to happen then seeing or sensing it isn't much use.
Perhaps not in the sense of tuning into future 'lucky' paths. Premonition could still be useful in influencing our response to what's coming though.
It's not personal. It's just war.
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Yeah. Predestination only occurs if time is strictly linear. It might not be.
Look at it this way: we know (intuitively) three dimensions of space (length/width/height) and one of time (linear duration). Physics suggsts other dimensions of space that we can't immediately perceive (but we can reason out mathematically). It's possible that time also has multiple dimensions, roughly analogous to width/height.
Imagine time on a quantum level, like an infinitely branching cascade. Every decision point becomes a divergence. Flip a coin and one universe becomes "heads" while another comes up "tails."
Trouble is, if our five senses are inextricably tied to linear time, how could we possibly perceive these other timelines, except as flashes of intuition or sense "memory" --seeing/smelling/hearing/tasting/feeling things that (to our normal perceptions) are not happening/have not happened/will not happen.
This could also explain why so many prophecies fail to come true --they do come true, we just managed to miss that particular timeline.
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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I like how you guys start talking about whether ESP is/isn't happening in firefly and end up discussing alternate universes and timelines in our own world.
Nice to see life out here.
Setting Crystal aside (haven't read it yet), I don't think that you could specifically say that the canon examples are precognition. Maybe some telepathy. Maybe.
1. "Safe"--shooting guys.
I think the scene more than anything was to establish the until-then 'harmless babbling waif' as really REALLY scary with a gun.
However it's been proposed that she got there-- precognition, gun kata, mental calculus--doesn't seem to figure much in the scene.
It's just enough to make the audience go "ooooh, spooky!"--like their conversation about River being a "Reader". Presumably short for mind reader. But (except for two possibilities), it's not their minds she's reading. It's their emotions, and then her(easily demonstrated)'logical and observant mind takes it from there.
What is clear multiple times(attacking Jayne, Simon is shot, Hands of Blue chase) is that River is extremely empathetic--she certainly feels other people's emotions...which maybe 'translate' to 'conversations' like in Objects in Space.
This would seem to argue for enhanced senses, since at least in levels found in non-modified humans (again, who knows what they did to her?) they go together.
She could cold-read Badger, but I don't know which side of the line Early falls on--the story about his mother and the dog.
The only other example I can't figure out is the little girl who won't speak to anyone in Safe. River tells a plot summary of her sister's murder by their mother. Anybody explain that one yet? Seems to stick out. Maybe telepathy, maybe not.
Anybody noticed the trance she goes into whenever she does anything violent though? I want an explanation for that--her face is always so blanked-out.
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Going for a ride.
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Quote:Either River was damn lucky she was not wounded in War Stories. Or she knew the bullets would not hit her. I call that second option River's precognition.
Originally posted by AnotherSky:
. . . I think the scene more than anything was to establish the until-then 'harmless babbling waif' as really REALLY scary with a gun.
However it's been proposed that she got there-- precognition, gun kata, mental calculus--doesn't seem to figure much in the scene.
It's just enough to make the audience go "ooooh, spooky!" . . .
River was standing in front of 3 gunmen, she had no protective cover, no bullet-proof vest, the gunmen had machine guns. And after the shooting was over, River says, "No power in the Verse can stop me." I don't think River was parroting what Kaylee had said earlier when she took away River's apple. And I believe River was showing much more than that she is an excellent marksman. She was showing precognition -- she knew beforehand that she will not be hit by bullets.
We might never know what Joss Whedon really designed River to do. Joss will keep secret the specific skills he gave River so he has more room to write stories about her. As always, somebody watching Firefly can imagine what they please about River: that she was a Jedi Knight who can shoot down bullets aimed at her. Or River can fire her pistol faster than 3 guys can shoot back with rifles on full automatic. Or River was tactically idiotic and lucky no bullets hit her. Joss Whedon left much about River to the viewer's imagination. My imagination says that River had precognition -- she did not take cover from return fire because she knew it was not necessary: Niska's gang can't shoot straight.
The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity", where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two
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I would agree Joss left it purposely vague, Two.
But whether River knew Niska's men couldn't shoot, knew they didn't know where she was or that she'd be a threat, or just knew the 'outcome' of not getting shot, or knew she was faster or where they would move to...we could come up with even more possibilities as an audience, and I agree the vagueness is part of the fun of interpretation.
What I'm really interested in is OiS and Safe--those seem almost telepathy to me, especially Safe with the little girl. What do you think?
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Going for a ride.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Cybersnark:
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.
And we're getting there:
http://io9.com/5712142/pinpointing-the-telepathy-center-in-the-brain
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Some believe in the power of telepathy. Some believe in the power of fMRI. And putting the two together led a team of experimenters to perform "probably the first fMRI study to analyse the neuroanatomical correlates of telepathy."
Interesting result, though as the paper notes:
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". . .examination of just one control subject is a limiting factor."
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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