karin valis on Mercurial Minutes

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I know what you mean, and the link you shared is very understandable. I am obviously coming from a different perspective - ESP research is not the main pillar of my career. I am sure I would not be able to lean into that with full conviction, and I'm not even sure I am fully convinced of it being possible to handle with the current model of natural sciences. However, what I'll never forgive to the likes of Dawkins is his religious bigoted materialism, dismissing existence of any phenomena outside of his limited world view. I really recommend Jeff Kripal's last book "How to Think Impossibly" as a wonderful philosophical step aside from the materialist thought, really solidified a lot of my thoughts on the topic! Aaaaand when it comes to the evaluation - i would consider, under almost any previously used methodologies for such experiments, those mountains to be a hit. If we verbally described (or algorithmically tagged) the content of the image, it's a match. Pixel overlay of the images would probably yield high similarity too, especially if we took into account depth maps (composition). And if we used the most ordering method used in such research - and took 20 random images from the model, and ask to match one of them, I can with full confidence (having some feel for the random distribution of the outputs) this will be the answer. There were literally 2-3 pictures of a mountain in 1000 generated images. There are so many fuzzy edges, and one might argue that's related to our fuzzy perception of concepts - it's really quite uncanny considering we talk *all possible constellation of the 1024x1024 pixels* But obviously, the retro-causal evaluation is rather convoluted - the seen images affect our perception of them, so we are more likely to search for them in the real world - and there is on way to evaluate probability of generating a hit when we're constantly flooded by perceptual stimuli. Especially with a stream consisting of 100 of them, we will most likely find *something* But then again, divination and magick, spirit communication and all that jazz - it's about the feeling of meaningfulness rather than mathematical probabilities of the coincidence occurring. Here we get into the domain of metpahysical interpretations of synchronicities and I'm sure we could talk about that for a very long time :) maybe we should sometime! And wow, so cool with the Ghost/ Spirit Box! This was the first time I used it, and the original experimental setup was basically for spirit communication through two-fold channel (AI image stream + ghost box) seeing if they complement each other somehow. As you've seen, nothing to support anything conclusive, yet weird enough to leave me curious for more. I don't know much about the story, might try to get hold of the book, thanks! Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, 🦉🦉🦉