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We're joined by special guest THE AMAZING CRISWELL to talk about predictions and why we love them!

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Anonymous

If you guys are gonna be dipping in sci-fi more, you can use that as an excuse to tackle more CAS later--perhaps his Mars stories, like "Eidolon of the Blind" and "The Vaults of Abhomi." They're good reads, and you said you were wanting more CAS anyway.

Anonymous

Is there a chance that you guys would cover True Detective in a future bonus episode? I just finished the first season last night and would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Anonymous

I predict that Chris and Chad will read some stories; they will like some and others they will not. Chad will like some that Chris doesn’t, and vice versa. They will travel to the moon with rocketship cats, but then forget to tell us about it. Manimal is renewed, but only behind an HBO paywall.

Anonymous

But for real, he was spot on about the organized orgies thing.

Anonymous

Sudden unexplained spike in Amazing Criswell album sales.

Anonymous

We had a reasonably famous parakeet astrologer here in Singapore. He got a lot of press when "he picked the correct winners for all of the 2010 FIFA World Cup quarter-final ties, as well as the Spain-Germany semi-final". He didn't pick the final correctly though.

Anonymous

I had one premonition dream July 15 1999. I woke up and told my husband that I dreamed that I took JFK Jr and David Duchovny to the airport in a bronco like OJ had. My husband said, "oh did he die in your dream? Because he died in a plane crash." I went out and got a lottery ticket but didn't win anything.

Jason Thompson

My favorite plot about premonition is in Alan Moore’s “From Hell” (SPOILERS), in which the apparently real (?) psychic confesses, at the end of his life, that all his true predictions were actually just things he made up and he was as shocked as anyone when they came true. That adds such an eerie twist to the whole idea of predictions, free will & agency, and I have never been able to forget it.

Jason Thompson

Also, in Julian Jaynes’ “The Development of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” he proposes that ancient forms of fortune telling were all just simile or metaphor. Not that the person making them didn’t believe them!! But the way it ‘worked’ was simply that you observed some random thing, like the rooster pecking corn, or a fish’s guts, or the way a bird flies, and then your mind leaps to a metaphorical way that it applies to the thing you’re trying to predict, the problem you’re facing. But to ancient-worlders, in Jaynes’ theory, this wasn’t made-up free-association but an actual revealed truth.

Evan

So, I’m not even going to pretend to be an expert here, I’m not even out of Uni, but I want to talk a bit about this because it’s fascinating. So, armchair philosophy/physics time. If time is actually non-linear, theoretically we could be able to see the future, or aspects of it. This would involve (most likely) finding a unified theory, which we have failed to do as of right now. Even if this were the case though, and people were unconsciously (or consciously) tapping into this phenomenon at some point, it’s possible that through absorbing information packets they subject them to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which right now only nominally applies to physical particles but could theoretically apply to information systems if I formation packets are transmitted through a wave system (I’m not smart enough to actually explain how any of that would theoretically work but the possibility is there). Alternatively, it could just be a larger example of the observer effect, which would most likely play out at a quantum level as particles appear to superimpose themselves across different states of time (since we perceive time linearly) while in reality they simply move through time as another dimension. This could result in a reality based Zenón effect, where quantum states which would normally decay are instead held constant by observation. Of course, all this stuff currently (at least as far as I know, there could be a few really interesting papers out there) only applies to quantum particles, and nothing as large as what we could perceive as “reality”. However, if, like I said before, people are accessing this information through some kind of discrete packet which operated like a quantum particle, it could be subject to the same effects and thus change by being observed, meaning that people could actually see the future but then change it by knowing it (a classic time travel paradox). Alternatively (and likely, in my opinion) they’re all just charlatans and we delude ourselves because the universe is really big and random and that’s super uncomfortable.

Evan

Ooooo yes please, if we’re going to start down this broader route

Anonymous

Have you ever seen the classic film Nightmare Alley? It's about a con artist with a mind-reading act who turns to phony spiritualism. Even though the people he's taking advantage of are actors, it's uncomfortable to watch. One of the most disturbing classic films after Freaks. Guillermo Del Toro's remake will hopefully be out later this year.

Tomas Rawlings

Enjoyed this themed special a lot! On prediction, I enjoyed the character in Good Omens who can see into the future, but of course being a medieval person, does not necessarily understand if what she's looking at 500 years hence is significant or not.

Anonymous

I'm a pretty skeptical person, but I confess that I find feelings of déjà vu particularly unsettling, because for a few moments, my brain thinks it's remembering something, almost, and is trying so very hard to remember - or predict - what's about to happen. Most of the time when I have déjà vu it's not a good feeling, like I'm going to find extra money in a pocket, it is a feeling of dread or almost knowing something dangerous is about to happen. Maybe that's my brain's anxiety showing and other people have good déjà vu experiences?

Anonymous

Awesome topic! I'm always really interested in the ways our brains trick us. Apparently the strict definition of necromancy is talking to the dead for the purpose of divination.

Anonymous

Was that about the dubious hypothesis that ancient peoples didn't recognize their internal monologue as coming from them but, instead, thought it was a sort of divine communique?

Anonymous

My brother had a coffee table book of paintings that we both enjoyed lingering over. Bruce Pennington's Eschatus: Future Prophecies from Nostradamus' Ancient Writings I'm sure those wonderous 70s Heavy Metal style visions are well implanted in my subconscious.

Anonymous

The physicist Dean Radin tells in one of his books that as a college student he tried to make money by becoming a stage mind-reader and soon stumbled across the craft's "dirty little secret". The more he did his act the more instances of his "intuition" suggesting facts about people he couldn't possibly know about began to occur. He confided in other stage magicians and mind-readers and they also admitted that after a while they had the niggling feeling that they'd also awoken some latent "psi talent".

Anonymous

Same here! I go through phases of deja vu and synchronicities. At its height I can have 20-30 instances a day of a random word or train of thought being mirrored in an external occurrence of the same. I'm aware of the suggestions that these words, trains of thought might be prompted by my subconscious anticipating them while listening to say, music in the background. e.g. a certain song contains a certain word and my mind primes my thought patterns to repeat this word in tandem with the song but on examination some of the occurrences revolve around external stuff that is pretty much impossible predict and unique to me.

Anonymous

Apparently Criswell predicted an outbreak of cannibalism would occur Pittsburgh during the 70s. Maybe he was foretelling Romero’s Dawn of the Dead?