I am interested in the topic you have raised but didn't respond to the actual poll because I am not sure about the terms paranormal or supernatural.

I remember having deja vu experiences in childhood and this developed more into premonitions in adolescence and beyond. The premonitions were mainly of an unpleasant nature because I experienced vivid premonitions about 8 times before certain people died. I have experienced some premonitions since but not recently. One thing I do experience sometimes is when walking down the street, I think I see someone I know and realise that I have made a mistake. Shortly afterwards, I really encounter the person I had imagined seeing earlier.

One idea which I find helpful in thinking about deja vu and premonitions is Jung idea of synchronicity, which is about 'meaningful coincidences'. It is about patterns arising in the natural world and life.

Generally, I think that life is a lot more complex than most people believe and I believe that parapsychology has become a neglected area within psychology.

knowing exactly what was gonna happen in the next scene — BARAA

Scene? Pardon? :grin:

Premonitions aside, which do seem rather intriguing.. absent of anything "spooky", deja vu is more than likely just a quirk of the human mind. Similar to pareidolia (seeing faces such as on an electrical outlet). The mind is constantly looking for shortcuts, that's what causes hallucinations with hallucinogenic substances, they block certain senses/receptors in a unique way and your mind frantically tries to connect the dots absent of normal receptors. Saves time, and if you ask me is responsible for inventions and innovation. Cognitive dissonance is somewhat similar, being that if your mind is in an altered state (either physically, sensory, or argumentatively in something like a debate) it doesn't like being confused or otherwise "feeling that somethings wrong" so will default on what it's used to/knows/what has worked in the past.

What if what you "knew" was going to happen, didn't. You'd have just shrugged it off and probably never gave it a second thought let alone post about it. But it did. So it got your attention.

Here is my deja vu theory: your future self is sending memories back to you so that you are better able to pick your path into your preferred future, so the deja vu feeling is a triggered future memory that you have yet to make. Cool eh? I cover it nicely in my book, but that is pretty much it in an nutshell.

I do believe that you have an important idea in connecting premonitions with the future. I think it also raises the question whether the past determines the future, or could the future determine the past and present too?Perhaps, time is an illusionary construct.

Exactly. Time is a construct created by people to allow us to track the moments of our lives. It usually works fairly well, let's us stay organized and all that. However, as it is essentially a tracking process in it's current use/definition, there is no reason that memory cannot move in what would be considered a backward direction, if the event which created the memory were strong enough. Telling you perhaps to not cross the street, giving you a moments pause, and avoiding getting struck by a truck. The future you did not pause, was struck, and in that moment sent back "Don't step out" which the now you listened to, and avoided the injury or death which followed, and you then carried on your quest for a morning coffee, after having a strong sense of deja vu.

: your future self is sending memories back to you — Book273

Nice science fiction movie :wink:

Do you support that what I and many others have experienced is paranormal? — BARAA

It is not paranormal but it is for sure extraordinary as it is not how we experience normal life.
Thomas Metzinger has done very good studies into these phenomena but I guess you have read him and you're not satisfied.
Let me put it this way, if I and a team of researchers would be able to induce you the feeling of the deja-vu would you believe it is just our unconscious cheating us? Unconscious activity is the one that has the power :cool: , our consciousness raises from it.
A good proof to this is the fact that feelings take 200ms to reach consciousness (Libet) and it has been proven as well that we can read in your brain when a decision is made before you become conscious of it. We can basically read you mind before you do it :gasp: One example, we can visualize activity in your cortex, ask you to decide to push a red button or a blue one and we see in the screen your decision before you become conscious of it. There're very solid and universally accepted experiments about this. Of course this is not the case with all the kind of decisions we made, but it works for certain types of decisions.

There're other experiments that show that a deja-vu and other experiences like out-of-the-body ones are altered states of consciousness.
For example we can induce body movements using electromagnetic field in certain areas of your brain without telling you. And you will absolutely say it was you who moved it while the researches know very well they were the ones inducing it. If we ask you why you moved it, you would not know.

The same way with deja-vu. Try the following, next time you will have one, try to write what will happen in the future right before it happens. You will see you're not able to do it. You have the strong feeling you know what will happen and then it happens, but you're not able to externalize it. It is basically becase the reality is that you don't know what will happen next but you just feel you know it.

Psychotropic drugs as well are a good example for producing altered consciousness states where the subject experience and narrative can be that he has kind of paranormal experience but we know from the outside that this is not the case.

Of course we don't know everything about how brain and our consciousness works but there're quite solid experiments that dissolve the idea of any paranormal activity and show that this is more us, humans, being too anthropocentric, thinking our brain contains something ontologically special.
Capgras syndrome as well is very interesting to better understand how our consciousness and experience of the world works and the power of unconsciousness.

All this is what Dennett calls... heterophenomenology!

It's not always the right choice to defend the material side by making any thing that doesn't seem very related to a material interpretation eitther a not-eplained-yet by science or a coincidence in the worst cases.... because even if you don't believe in God,soul,a religion or a non-physical world, don't at least forget the logical possibility of something beyond-matter to exist...
So,in the end of your reply you suggested the phenomenon to be a coincidence,thanks for your opinion

You've put a lot of effort to make an explanation for deja vu which isn't what I asked about its explanation in the first place,the phenomenon which I asked about was knowing and remembering what was going to happen after a few seconds which isn't what's commonly known by "deja vu"....my question is how can the brain remember a memory seconds before it actually happens and then waits for it to happen and then it happens?
reading your reply, your answer to this question seems to be "science doesn't know yet but it has to be some sort of a hallucination, illusion or a biological defect"...thanks very much for your opinion

It's not always the right choice to defend the material side by making any thing that doesn't seem very related to a material interpretation eitther a not-eplained-yet by science or a coincidence in the worst case — BARAA

I agree. I'm open to the possibility it's something metaphysical, supernatural, or divine. Just as much as I'm open to the possibility it's a trick your brain is playing on you. I'll be the first person here to suggest that humanity and the human consciousness is the result of divine action. Nevertheless, in a material world where we've been placed, it's our first thing to work with and so need not be ignored- completely at least. Beyond that, this is a forum where we prove or at least offer justification to our beliefs with logic and philosophical discourse first and foremost.

So,in the end of your reply you suggested the phenomenon to be a coincidence — BARAA

I suggested both are possible, yet I did mention more often than not, it can easily be explained by what you deem "material" reasoning. Like many forums, individual case stories and situations are fundamental to many discussions, but the resulting discussion should not be limited to them.

It very well could be something divine, supernatural, or otherwise outside of the realm of this world and its logic- hence no longer philosophy.

Thanks for the clarification....now I understand your point of view, thanks

My understanding is that deja vu occurs when your brain glitches and processes the same thing twice, meaning that the second time you process it it feels familiar, but you can't pin down why. This is called 'split perception'.

The simplest explanation is that you misremember the event.

....I think it's not very safe and sound to say that I can misremember such a huge, very unique, shocking and extraordinary event which I would never ever have expected something like it to happen to me in my life...nope, It isn't something that can work for me(although I know false memories exist)....I think many people are putting a huge effort to try making any material explanation for the phenomenon possible... they're dealing with any beyond-material explanation like a ewww thing (you're not necessarily one of them)

I've heard all scientific explanations for deja vu but in fact I'm asking about another phenomenon.... it's how can the brain remember a memory seconds before it actually happens and then waits for it to happen till it happen in real life?

The soul we are made of lives on forever, and the future can catch up to us in many ways,
One of which ways looks like deja vu
That voodoo is made by being in such welcoming states of minds and with that future being well intertwined you can then acknowledge the fact of a future ahead of you without being aware of it,
This can be in the form of a daze, dream state, light headedness, well awareness of every bit of thing around you, in some cases you can even predict the future right before it happens, or lesser likely when it happens later on.

Deja vu of the past is a thing of physical phenomena, future deja vu is of this spiritual phenomenon

Do you believe a future event - an event that hasn't happened yet - can cause something in the present?

I mean, I take it that if you think you sometimes see the future, that's what would need to have happened, right? An event that hasn't yet happened, would need to have caused a mental event in you...in the present. So, if you take what you think happened literally, then we have something that hasn't happened, causing something that has. That's surely nonsensical.

A future event can't cause a present event, yes?

So if a future event can't cause a present event, then you didn't perceive the future. It just felt like you did.

Why did it feel like that's what happened? Because when you experienced the event in question, for some reason your mind created another experience as well, namely the experience of thinking you remember the event you're experiencing. Thus, introspectively it felt to you as if the event you experienced is one that you had previously anticipated, whereas in fact the event you experienced is one that your mind created a false memory of you anticipating. Note, it didn't create the false memory 'prior' to you experiencing the event, but either simultaneously with it or later than it.

I think it's not very safe and sound to say that I can misremember such a huge, very unique, shocking and extraordinary event which I would never ever have expected something like it to happen to me in my life...nope, — BARAA

Your conviction is not going to convince anyone else.

Memory is hopelessly unreliable; especially so when it serves mythology.

Didn't someone post this same thread before?

I've heard all scientific explanations for deja vu but in fact I'm asking about another phenomenon.... it's how can the brain remember a memory seconds before it actually happens and then waits for it to happen till it happen in real life? — BARAA

Your assumption appears to be that the brain is a reliable and high fidelity piece of equipment such that if it says you remembered a thing before it happened, you can be quite sure that's what you did. This, especially if you know about deja vu or anything else about fallibilities of the brain, seems a rather biased assumption.

I would take it for granted that you didn't remember the future, and consider why your brain could be mistaken about it. But given the above, I'd be dubious about the way you remember and interpret that moment in time.

Your conviction is not going to convince anyone else.

Memory is hopelessly unreliable; especially so when it serves mythology. — Banno

"hopelessly"?!!!....... "Serves mythology"?!!!

Hmmmm..... honestly,those words seem to express your emotions more than your thoughts..... you have all rights to believe and express your interpretation...you have all rights to believe it's just a false memory..... but it looks like it isn't the case...... you're trying to dismiss any logical possibility for a non-material explanation to be true,let alone calling it and presupposing it's a myth.the case is you refuse to consider any chance at all for something not materialist-biased
to come true.

I have no idea, I'm new to the forum.

For the physicalists of the forum, the stakes are high. If you are correct, their whole world-view collapses. So they want a lot more evidence than just you saying. If people could deja vu the results of the roulette wheel on a fairly regular basis, they might be at least interested, but a world shattering phenomenon that has no practical results - I'm afraid you will just be made fun of, more or less gently.

you're trying to dismiss any logical possibility for a non-material explanation to be true,let alone calling it and presupposing it's a myth.the case is you refuse to consider any chance at all for something not materialist-biased — BARAA

Yep. I'm looking for the most reasonable explanation. But you want to believe an unreasonable explanation...

Yep. I'm looking for the mot reasonable explanation. But you want to believe an unreasonable explanation... — Banno

Let's talk about reason...the probability of misremembering a specific event is inversely proportional to the importance, remarkableness and hugeness of that event and therefore an event that's very important,very unique, very remarkable and very huge(let alone its psychological impact) is very unlikely to be misremembered....
And again, you've shown that just not being material is enough for you to consider it "unreasonable".... materialism-biass is detected.

the probability of misremembering a specific event is inversely proportional to the importance, remarkableness and hugeness of that event and therefore an event that's very important, — BARAA

Rubbish. You're making this up as you go along. Memory is reconstructed, and notoriously unreliable. Moreover, your memory is the only thing here that you can take as evidence.

That this might be enough to persuade anyone with even a bit of critical capacity is ludicrous.

reason...the probability of misremembering a specific event is inversely proportional to the importance, remarkableness and hugeness of that event and therefore an event that's very important,very unique, very remarkable and very huge(let alone its psychological impact) is very unlikely to be misremembered.... — BARAA

There's an error here. Yes, a remarkable event is likely to be remembered, but you're not assessing the event: you're assessing the memory. The converse isn't true: the remarkableness of the memory is not a measure of its fidelity. It isn't difficult to people to remember things that never happened, such as in memory implantation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation

I will ignore the fact that you've gradually started to utter words that don't belong to a philosphical forum or at least an open-minded debate.

In order to avoid any chance for anything against the modern materialism belief system:
1)You've tried to make memory look like it's not even 80% trusted,not even 70%
2)you've even tried to make it can't be trusted even if world-wide witnesses have experienced the same shocking phenomenon (are they all having false memories about the same phenomenon?this can't work,dude)
3) you've stated that I have only my own memory but you've said nothing about how can I have a false memory of something that many people have said it happened to them too(unless you believe there is a good probability that all of them are misremembering their events too)
4) beside all that you used expressions like "hopelessly unreliable" and "this might be enough to persuade anyone with even a bit of critical capacity" which verifies you're taking the debate personally and as a must-win war.
5)let alone saying that just being non-material is enough to make something unreasonable in your opinion.
6)let alone that you've never provided a source verifying your claims about the memory being very untrusted to the point of "hopelessness" according to your words.

I just have one question for you:
Would you have reacted the same if the topic was about anything that doesn't have a chance of refuting materialism ideology?I don't think so.