Psychics?

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I mean intuition and tarot card reading.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

I believe we are all here to experience mind.

God alone knows the future, because He's not bound by time.

I think you completely missed the point of what Fnord is saying.

I have found my intuition to be quite accurate at times.

More times than not, when I depend on my intuition, I'm wrong.

I use my intuition to ferret stuff out. Sometimes I am incorrect but not always.

I use my intuition too, sometimes it is correct sometimes it is incorrect, however I don't associate anything mystical or psychic to it, it is simply a case of letting the intuitive side of my brain speak up and be heard over the logical side of my brain. Sometimes the intuitive / pattern recognition side of my brain notices something that has escaped my logical side so I've learned to cultivate a collaboration between the two hemispheres of my brain and to check out my intuition and sudden insights. My intuition and spontaneous insights suggests things to investigate and my logical side does the investigation.

Same applies for everyone else. We are right sometimes and wrong other times.

Just because one remembers the positive stuff more doesn't mean he/she is some psychic.

Intuition is natural, not "super-" natural. It's nothing more than non-conscious thought. By "non-conscious", I mean that you don't consciously reason to a conclusion, but instead you reach a conclusion based on past feelings under similar circumstances. Intuition bypasses reason entirely, which is why is seems so unreliable - 10% accuracy is good for an intuitive conclusion - it's the confirmation bias that deludes us into believing that our intuitive accuracy is anywhere near or above 50% - the level at which the toss of a coin would be just as accurate.

Don't delude yourselves; you have no special abilities, only a (slightly) better-developed and purely natural ability that is based on experience and emotion (not learning and reason), which is where mere superstition has its roots.

There are no real psychics, only people who can fool others ... and themselves.

What you say is often true, but isn't always true.

Yes, there is cold reading. Yes, there are all sorts of tricks. There are stacks of charlatans - by your own admittance, you were one. But not everyone is a charlatan.

And not everything has to be proved or provable to make it true.

Agree with the last statement. But if we can't know if something is true, then we can't know. That's why evidence is important for justification of what we believe/know.

We can know - as knowing can be entirely personal - but we cannot hope to always 'justify' to another that what we know is true if we cannot give to them their idea of what evidence is. So, I mostly agree with you.

First off, what some call psychic is just normal intuition.

The brain is amazing in it's ability to construct things from minimal information, for example when I was younger I could describe people I never met, if I was able to talk to someone who knew them. Face to face. By my early 30's I lost much of my talent, and now in my 40's I no longer can really do it like I once could.

I once described a toy (a stuffed dog) to my wife that she had as a kid without ever hearing her mention it...it's part of cold reading and I believe it's an unconscious action of the brain as an artist. As an artist, I think in 3d imagery and I know how faces go together... Artistic talent decreases with age...perhaps my artists brain was just really good at educated guesses with faces and things. Not supernatural, though.

When I was a child my mother would have me describe what she was drawing without looking at it in the 70's, at the time it was curious. Today it's less curious as I have half her DNA and must have had a similar way of looking at things...and it was never 100%. Again me and her are both artists, similar DNA and can be explained by similar thinking. Not supernatural it's just nature.

When some people look at a rock, they see a rock...I see dozens of potential sculptures within its form. When I go to build something, I often first build it within my minds eye. I can then rotate it and look at it at every angle as that's how an artists brain works. Perhaps all a "psychic" is someone good at paying attention and reconstructing the missing pieces.

It end's up making you very manipulative, as you can use it for other avenues of exploitation. It's how I made it, it certainly was not because of my own "hard work" but it's not supernatural. One man's psychic is another man's trained observer.