No, many self-identified psychics claim that everyone posseses such abilities. Think of it as being a skill, like playing the piano. Anyone can sit at a keyboard and make noises. Virtually everyone could learn to make pleasing noises with practice. However, some people will be more naturally adept than others.
As far as the usefulness goes, I must disagree. Whether or not exists is unrelated to whether or not it is of use.
Many "psychics" actually only recognize that a dream predicted a future event after that event already occurred. Of course, they forget or ignore all of the dreams that didn't come true. This is not a phychic ability at all since it is true of all people (every once in a while a dream will come true).
I must disagree again. This is NOT a universal experience, though it does seem to be relatively common. Twice in my life I have been in a room where the question was asked "Who here has experienced a dream that later came true." In both cases, less than half the people present raised their hands.
But let's say that a psychic "knows" when a dream they've had is going to come true. Simply comparing the psychic's selected dreams against random dreams of a large number of people who don't claim any psychic abilities would determine whether the psychic's dreams were more useful at predicting the future than the average person's. If the psychic consistently performed significantly better (statistically speaking) than the non-psychics this would indicate that the psychic might have a useful ability, at least moreso than the average person.Of course you would not want the person being tested to keep their own journal or make determinations about how closely dreams matched reality. There would also have to be some third-party documentation of events that the psychic claims to be a "match," which might be difficult. Difficult, but not impossible.
I'm afraid that there are some serious practical implementation problems with this suggested testing scenario. Difficult is an understatement. There are many many practical problems in running such a study. It would be very expensive and take years. Who would do it? Who would pay for it? How would subjects be recruited? How would 'matches' be determined and verified? And until such a study has been done, the person who has experienced such dreams must decide what to believe without such helpful data.
In your example above, the psychic could carry around a camera and take pictures of things that were predicted in the dream journal. Things become even easier if the psychic is willing to make very specific predictions that could later be validated (this would also demonstrate a more useful kind of psychic ability). Psychics are tested all the time (and always fail at what they themselves claim to believe they can do).Your example isn't a very good one because it's testable (most claims of that type are testable).
If the person cannot control the ability of what they will foresee and doesn't have any knowledge of when the foreseen event will occur, it's essentially impossible to make specific predictions that could be validated. Again, if one's experience is that such things happen, but cannot be controlled, testing becomes impossible on a practicable level even if theoretically possible through the use of large samples and statistical analysis. In the meantime, the person is left with a set of experiences that indicate the existance of some sort of psychic ability.
It might be possible to come up with an example that somehow isn't testable, and then I would probably say that if you have valid reasons for believing in it, then you can still be a skeptic and believe in it. That doesn't mean that I would also believe it. I might not find your reasons to be compelling enough to believe in it, or I might have my own reasons for not choosing to believe in it, but the very nature of something being untestable is that it might actually be true.
-Bri
Thanks. That's a nice concluding statement. Certainly, it's understandable that personal experiences would not be convincing evidence to others. But I think it's reasonable to acknowledge that otherwise unexplanable personal experiences are convincing evidence to those who have them, whether they be related to the existance of God or the existance of psi and grant that people could believe that either are possible without violating the principles of skeptism. It is, after all, about how you come to conclusions, not about what conclusions you come to.
