When I was a young boy my family would be visited maybe once a year by a beloved aunt, who my mother called Aunt Laura. Old and frail but still a great story teller, Aunt Laura would have a very distinctive "calling card." Whenever she arrived she would be carrying boxes of maple sugar candies. Each of the children in my mother's large family would get a separate little box of maple sugar candies. To the best of my memory, she brought the candies each and every time she visited. She died in 1979, living to her nineties.
Today I was very busily completing a post for my philosophy of mind blog, and while typing rapidly, writing about some new scientific paper, there suddenly popped into my mind "out of nowhere" an image of a little piece of maple sugar candy, a piece just like the candies that Aunt Laura would give me as a boy. This immediately led to a fond recollection of Aunt Laura's visits. But a few seconds later I found myself very puzzled by how this recollection had popped into my mind at the instant it did. I wasn't thinking at the time or any time today about my childhood or Aunt Laura or anyone deceased. The recollection seems to have occurred without any preceding cause. And it happened when I was typing rapidly about an entirely different subject: some new scientific paper about a survey of neuroscientists. So I was like: how on Earth did I remember at such a time those maple sugar candies from more than 50 years ago? I hadn't thought of Aunt Laura in a long time.
In the world of computers there is a utility called "Ping" that is used to test whether a connection exists. One computer can "ping" another computer (maybe one very far away) without sending any words, and the receiving computer can "ping" back, without sending any words. Maybe events like that I describe above are a kind of "ping" from the Great Beyond.
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