A Third Path: On Science and the Paranormal

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A Third Path: On Science and the Paranormal Joel C Knoll mindarson@live.com

“To confine one's investigations to phenomena about which one already knows could not be more contrary to the spirit of discovery.�


Introduction If you‟re like me, ghosts are not a big part of your life. In fact, if you‟re like me, you‟ve never experienced anything more ghoulish than a holey white sheet. Due to this lack of personal experience, you may dismiss the idea of the paranormal (which roughly translates into “outside the rules”) as the fantasies of hysterics, hippies, and other yarn-spinners. If you start asking around, though, you will find that a large percentage of the people you know (even aside from the hysterics, hippies, and chronic fibbers) have had experiences best described as unexplainable, or else they know people who have had such experiences. I‟m not sure why, but these remarkable stories seldom make their way into conversation. Maybe they intersect too closely with religion (off limits for almost everybody), or maybe people want to “keep it light” (a story about being visited by your long-dead grandmother can be a buzz-kill for some people), or maybe people just don‟t know what to do with things that cannot be explained with the tools currently at our disposal. In any case, whether paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, aliens, and cryptids (Bigfoot, Nessie, etc.) exist or not, here is a fact you can take to the bank: millions of people throughout history have claimed to experience such things more or less directly. The same goes for deities, spirits, angels, and demons: the idea that the world is not


densely populated with such entities is relatively recent and still rare, confined mostly to Euro-America. (Of course, even in America, such beliefs are not exactly rare, as Gallup polls consistently show some 80% of Americans believing in God and Jesus Christ. But of course, a superstition as popular as that goes without the stigma attached to less widespread ones.) How can we go about explaining this incontrovertible fact? That‟s what this little essay is all about. Obviously, I cannot give a wholesale explanation. Instead, I just want to clear the philosophical ground a bit, to at least analyze and evaluate the assumptions we often bring to questions of the paranormal. Specifically, I will argue that when confronted with a purportedly paranormal experience, there are two paths we can take: the Path of Charity and the Path of Skepticism. Among our society‟s experts – that is, scientists – the Path of Skepticism is most popular. I will argue that, although the Path of Charity is fraught with dangers, the Path of Skepticism is still not to be preferred. Finally, I will propose a third option, the Path of Discovery. The Path of Charity and Its Dangers Pop psychologists sometimes like to divide people into Sheep and Goats. The “Sheep” are those people who are drawn or pulled into experience of the paranormal. They are "open" to the possibility of experiences and phenomena which science, as currently practiced, either cannot explain or will not take seriously. The "Goats", on the other hand,


are those people who dismiss the very notion of the paranormal on various scientific grounds, e.g. neuroscientific, physical, etc. In the language of this essay, Sheep take the Path of Charity, while Goats take the Path of Skepticism. I will start by examining Sheep and Charity. First, what do I mean by “Charity”? This is a very simple principle: give people the benefit of the doubt by assuming that what they tell you is true. Even the most hard-nosed skeptic abides by this principle in a thousand ways every day. If my wife says she loves me, I believe her. If a stranger tells me that bread is on sale at the store, I believe him. Indeed, life would be difficult, if not impossible, if we insisted on having incontrovertible proof of every claim that is made to us. Suppose your neighbor calls you while you‟re at work to tell you your house is burning down. Are you going to say, “Work is very important, Neighbor. And before I give up my pay and go home, I need some hardcore proof that my house is in fact burning down as we speak.” Obviously not. In this case, you‟re better off assuming that your neighbor is telling the truth. That is, you‟re better off being charitable. Of course, the principle of Charity only goes so far. After all, you should be much less charitable to someone with a history of lying than to someone who is known to be honest. And even honest people can make ridiculously implausible claims; for many people, stories about ghosts and alien abductions are just such claims. But the most fundamental objection to the Path of Charity is that it can


lead to what is called a “slippery slope”. This idea is best expressed by the old adage, “Give „em an inch, they‟ll take a mile”. The idea here is that you simply cannot believe everything you hear. Instead, you have to separate claims into categories. First, you separate the possible from the impossible. Then, you separate the plausible from the implausible. Then, you separate the probable from the improbable. Finally, you separate the true from the false. At every step of this process, you separate claims using reason and evidence. If a claim is not in harmony with rational thinking, you can dismiss it. Furthermore, even if a claim is in harmony with rational thinking, if there is no observable, measurable evidence that it is true, toss it in the dustbin. After all, if we‟re ready to believe anything without sufficient evidence, what is to stop us from believing everything, no matter what the evidence does or does not say? This is the Goat‟s first and best line of attack. The Goat will say: “Suppose we believe your little ghost story. Where does it end? Shall we believe in leprechauns and unicorns, too? Shall we believe someone when she claims to have seen a 4-sided triangle, also?” The point is well taken. Given any experience that may or may not be of a paranormal phenomenon, it is best to err on the side of conservatism. That is, the most responsible policy is to choose the explanation that requires the least stretching, bending, or other deformation of our established assumptions and knowledge about the world.


For example, suppose you claim to have seen a ghost at the foot of your bed last night. We can take the Path of Charity and believe you, or we can take the Path of Skepticism and demand incontrovertible proof. Charity seems inadvisable here. After all, hallucinations, delusions, nightmares, night terrors, plain old vivid imagination, and a host of other dubious psychological propensities of human nature are well-documented to be legion. Moreover, consider what you ask of us when you ask us to believe that you saw the spirit of a departed person. Essentially, you're asking us to scrap the accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and experience of humankind, the attitudes and methods that have led us to differential equations, space travel, the germ theory of disease, and supercomputers. And for what? To save your face? We don't think so. (It should be noted here that "the accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and experience of humankind" would never conclude that ghosts, spirits, demons, etc. do not exist. Most cultures throughout history have believed strongly in the existence of such entities. Of course, this is not enough to demonstrate that they do, in fact, exist.) This attitude I‟ve been describing – a dim view of the Path of Charity – is in fact the Path of Skepticism. Skepticism is essentially a conservative force. Confronted with a paranormal claim, the skeptical Goat‟s position is this: “Because your claim makes enormous demands on our worldview (in fact, demands which our worldview cannot


meet without undergoing fundamental changes), we will try to explain your experience by referring to our worldview. This way, everyone wins: your experience gets explained, and our worldview remains intact. If - and only if - nothing in our worldview can possibly explain what can be verified to have happened, then we will take the notion of the paranormal seriously. Even if it requires a drastic „paradigm shift‟ in our worldview.” At its best, this sort of skepticism is just good old-fashioned caution. The Path of Skepticism and Its Dangers Skepticism, however, is not always at its best. It can quickly turn into a reactionary force opposing the forward march of discovery. This has happened countless times in the history of science. To take only the most prominent examples, Galileo was put under house-arrest by the Roman Catholic Church for his heliocentric tendencies. Isaac Newton was opposed, by clergymen and fellow scientists, for espousing “action at a distance” (gravity, of all things, was the offender here). To this day, Charles Darwin is demonized by influential and politically motivated conservative factions. Nothing about such reactionary, stultifying forces indicates that they cannot come from within the scientific community itself. I propose that this is exactly what is happening today in the field of the paranormal. While it is true that many scientists - even some respectable ones take paranormal claims seriously and even investigate


them, these people are still regarded as a "lunatic fringe": underappreciated, underrated, and perhaps most importantly, underfunded. To understand the dangers of the Path of Skepticism, it‟s essential to understand what worldviews are and how they work. Every individual, family, organization, culture, nation, and even civilization carries around with it a complex set of values, methods, assumptions, and parameters of possibility. This set is a worldview. Worldviews can and do vary drastically. For example, one person might value relationships above all else, while another might value wealth above all else. As another example, one society may rely on faith and revelation as the source of its truths, while another may trust in the scientific method alone. To take a final example, one culture might regard transcendence of death – in the form of a spirit, a god, a fairy, or a reincarnation of some kind – as the norm, while another culture might regard death as absolute annihilation of personhood. The question is: Between two people or groups of people whose worldviews clash so fundamentally, whose worldview is right? Which comes closest to the truth? Due to the nature of worldviews, this question is impossible to answer. The reason for this is that “reality in itself” is not available to us. No person can experience the world except through the lens of a worldview. This is a problem, since reality appears differently through your lens than through mine! Therefore, it is useless to consult “reality” to decide


between worldviews, because to “consult reality” is really just to consult your own worldview. And of course, if you‟re measuring claims against your own worldview, then all the claims that agree with your worldview will automatically turn up true. Imagine that. To make this more clear, let me elaborate on the “lens” metaphor. Suppose you're wearing a pair of scientific goggles that makes everything a shade of gray. Meanwhile, I'm wearing scientific goggles that make everything look a shade of red. So when I say something is red, you will tell me that I'm wrong. "It cannot possibly be red," you say. "I'm looking right at it, and it is obviously slate gray." In this situation, neither one of us will ever convince the other. You see what you see, I see what I see, we don't see the same thing, and neither of us has access to the other's inner mental states. Worldviews are like the goggles in the example. They determine what we can and cannot see when we look around us, and they are different for different people. However, the story does not illustrate the most important thing about worldviews. Unlike goggles, a worldview cannot just be "taken off" to see the world as it really is. In the illustration, you and I could have removed our goggles and seen that we both perceived the world in a dreadfully incomplete way; once we both saw the whole picture, we would agree. With worldviews, this cannot really happen. An evangelical fundamentalist Protestant and an extremist Muslim terrorist are not going to remove their goggles, see


that they have been worshipping the same God in incomplete forms, and exchange a tearful embrace of reconciliation. Sorry. To choose the Path of Skepticism when confronted with the paranormal is very much like donning the goggles in the example. It is a categorically exclusionary worldview. What does this mean? Essentially, it means that, by taking on a specific worldview, you automatically exclude the possibility of experiencing certain things, no matter how real they may be. Resorting to the goggles again, when putting them on, I guaranteed that I would not see anything that was not some shade of gray, while you guaranteed that you would not see anything that was not some shade of red. Therefore, we guaranteed that we would disagree as to the general colors of the world. The upshot of all of this is that when a scientist or skeptic (e.g. Richard Dawkins or Michael Shermer) approaches the world, he does so wearing a pair of metaphorical goggles that categorically exclude the possibility of certain experiences. Such excluded phenomena are then referred to as "paranormal" or "supernatural" or "theistic". Here is what happens. Wearing the goggles, the scientist chooses the Path of Skepticism. "Well," he says, "your claim that the sun is yellow is at odds with my assumptions and knowledge of the world, in which everything - the sun included - is a shade of gray. So I will examine your claim, and if it cannot be explained in terms of shades of gray, then I will admit the possibility that the sun is in fact


yellow." You should already see the problem here. If the scientist keeps the goggles on, the conclusion is foregone! He will have no choice but to find some explanation, however tenuous, of the fact that you see a yellow sun. Two things are certain: First, the explanation he gives will not be that the sun is, in fact, yellow, but since he's wearing special goggles, he missed that fact. Second, the explanation will include an account, in terms of the grayness of the world, of the fact that you somehow mistook the sun as yellow. Here, the scientist condescends from a position of authority: "I cannot possibly be wrong. I disagree with you. Therefore, you are certainly wrong. To emphasize how wrong you are, here is an explanation - in terms of what I believe, which is right - of (more or less) exactly how and why you went wrong." The scientist's exclusionary worldview guarantees, prior to the investigation, that those things which his worldview excludes will show up, in his analysis, as delusions, illusions, or some other form of error. To show how this happens in real life, consider two aspects of the paranormal: 1) things like aliens and ghosts, and 2) God. First, aliens and ghosts. There are many, many people who claim to have had direct, immediate, and sometimes intimate experience of extraterrestrial intelligent life and of various forms of apparitions of departed persons. These claims are refuted with the usual host of objections: sleep paralysis; lucid dreams; mass or individual hallucination; stress; lack of a sense of control; right-brain dominance; evolutionarily adaptive propensity to attribute


agency; etc. Rarely is the idea even entertained that the most elegant and economical explanation of reported experiences of aliens and ghosts is that aliens and ghosts actually exist. I have already given the reason for this: if you hold a certain worldview, elegance and economy require conformance to that worldview and preservation of it. Now let's look at the other example, God. In recent years, prominent authors such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Pascal Boyer, James E Wilson, and David Sloan Wilson have penned forbiddingly heavy tomes attempting to give "natural explanations of religion". Notice what "natural" really means here. It is opposed to "supernatural". Specifically, a "natural explanation of religion" means "an explanation of religion which assumes that there is no such thing as the supernatural". In other words, these theorists set out to explain religion beginning with the assumption that religion is centered on a fundamental error about the world. The explanations of theism are similar in nature to the explanations of alien and ghost stories, with most of them centering on cognitive science, evolutionary adaptation, and good old-fashioned psychology. As with aliens and ghosts, the idea is not even entertained that the most elegant and economical explanation of theism is that it is a real response to a real divine presence. Because the scientific worldview categorically excludes the possibility of such a divine presence, theism must be explained (or rather, explained away) as rooted in some fundamental


misapprehension of reality. In both cases, a worldview already in place predetermines the outcome (at least the parameters of the outcome) of an investigation. This is bias, plain and simple. To understand what is going on here, consider a mundane case which is very similar. Among the many facts about our world that requires explanation is that people around the world behave as if the Eiffel Tower exists. They speak about it, plan to go see it, look up at it, sketch it, photograph it, etc. How to explain this global cult of the Eiffel Tower? Obviously, it is best explained by referring to the fact that the Eiffel Tower actually exists. But here is the important point: What if your method of investigating the "cult" was based on the categorical assumption that the Eiffel Tower does not exist? In this case, the most elegant, economical, and powerful explanation - that the Tower exists - would be off limits to you. You would be forced to contrive something else. My goal here is not to argue that God, the devil, ghosts, poltergeists, or aliens actually exist. Instead, I am arguing that science, as we currently practice it, is inveterately and intensely biased against the conclusion that such entities exist in any sense of the word. And because science, by its very nature, is incapable of giving the paranormal "a fair shake", perhaps scientists should not be the ones to cast the final judgment upon it. After all, would you want to appear in court before a judge who had given you reason to believe that he would find a way to convict you no matter


what the accumulated evidence did or did not say? Absolutely not. Furthermore, the argumentum ad absurdum which Goats love to use against stories of the paranormal works both ways. If the Path of Charity often leads us to believe things that are probably not true, it is at least as likely that the Path of Skepticism leads us to reject important truths simply because they don‟t fit our narrow scientific mold. Actually, in the limit, Skepticism is probably much more harmful than Charity. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as incontrovertible proof. Every “proof” is derived from premises, which are derived from earlier premises, which are derived from earlier premises, etc. Eventually, we have to cut this process short with postulates, statements which cannot be proved but which we must nevertheless grant as true if the “proof” is to get off the ground at all. This means that every “proof” essentially rests on thin air. It is not hard to see, then, that even the Path of Skepticism ultimately cannot rescue us from believing things without hard proof. We have no choice. (For example, try to prove scientifically that other people have inner mental lives; if you can do it, you will have solved humankind‟s oldest mysteries in the process. Good luck!) So the Sheep‟s counter to the Goat‟s argument would be as follows: “Suppose we believe the entire body of mathematical theory. This theory is based on fundamental definitions and postulates which have not been proved. So if we‟re


expected to believe all of mathematics without proof, why canâ€&#x;t we believe in things like ghosts and aliens without proof? Consider Euclidean geometry. The entire science would fall apart without the notion of a point as a dimensionless object. But surely the existence of a physical object without dimensions, or of a dimensional object made up of smaller objects each of which is without dimension, is at least as suspicious as the existence of a ghost!â€? An important part of the scientific, positivist attitude toward the paranormal is the (usually unspoken) assumption that science would take paranormal phenomena more seriously if only it had more evidence. The idea here is that science is not categorically opposed to the idea of the paranormal. Under the right conditions, a scientist might admit that such things as ghosts and aliens are to be reckoned with. This, however, is a deception based on a thorough misunderstanding of the nature of scientific investigation. As a rule, genuine science requires that the object of investigation be publicly observable and measurable and that all experiments be repeatable and reproducible under varying conditions. What this means is that, while science will indeed take seriously anything for which it has sufficient evidence, what counts as evidence is severely restricted. Phenomena, even if they are as real as real gets, which do not provide these conditions of evidence cannot be studied scientifically. (Consider again the problem of whether or not people have inner mental lives.)


In one sense, these conditions are science's greatest strength and the source of their immense service to humankind. In another sense, however, they constitute a severe shortcoming. The danger here is that we will come to believe - as many people already have - that whatever science cannot study is ipso facto not real, instead of seeing that oftentimes nature simply cannot be straitjacketed into the requirements of our science, that the scientific method is incapable of yielding the whole picture. In fact, I will go so far as to say that anyone who dismisses the idea of the paranormal on the basis that science excludes their possibility is guilty of a disservice both to humankind generally and to the scientific community in particular. To confine one's investigations to phenomena about which one already knows could not be more contrary to the spirit of discovery. The case of ghosts illuminates all this very well. If ghosts do exist, they do so in ways that defy what science understands. In fact, if ghosts exist they do so at the borders of realms of which science knows very little. Time, mind-body relationships, death, and energy are very much still mysteries to even the most sophisticated scientific minds and instruments. Perhaps the best example of this is the startling fact that the scientific community hasnâ€&#x;t reached anything like a consensus as to what life itself actually is. The Path of Discovery In every field, science progresses in pretty much the same broad way. First, there is the experience of phenomena.


Second, situations arise which lead people to believe that there is either more or less to the phenomena than what appears in bare experience. That is, appearances present us with contradictions and paradoxes. This leads to active speculation, investigation, and experimentation in an effort to straighten things out. Third, this initial speculation and investigation leads to gross errors about the phenomena. From here, practice, experience, and accumulated trial and error lead to continuous refinement of measuring devices, experimental structure and process, and hypotheses, as well as to fresh insights concerning the methods of investigation and new conceptual tools. Any familiarity with the history of science shows this to be true. In physics, this was the process that led from Aristotle's rudimentary observations and speculations to Newton's comprehensive laws to Einstein's even more general theories of motion. To take another example, consider mathematics. The earliest number systems did not include such enormously useful concepts as negative numbers, positional notation, or the number zero. The achievements of the Greeks in mathematics were largely motivated by such intolerable discrepancies as "incommensurable distances" such as the square root of 2 (the length of the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle with leg-length 1). Pythagoras and company were led to ask, "How can a real-world distance be expressed by an irrational number? Doesn't this mean the world itself is somehow irrational?" (Actually, the Pythagorean community made sure that no one asked this kind of


question. The story goes that the poor soul who pointed this out was tossed out at sea!) In the biological sciences, the germ theory of disease, the cell theory of organisms, and the theory of natural selection were new conceptual tools which could be used to organize accumulated biological knowledge into a more sensible and selfconsistent whole. These examples illustrate the third Path which we may take when confronted with the paranormal: the Path of Discovery. Rather than Skepticism, Discovery characterizes the true spirit of science as it has been done by its most honest, consistent, and successful practitioners. The person who takes the Path of Discovery is charitable enough to press on into the realm of the paranormal as worthy of investigation, but skeptical enough to do so with caution and care. In this sense, Discovery is an Aristotelian mean between the extremes of Sheepish gullibility and Goatish prejudice. As great Discoverers such as Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Darwin, Einstein, etc. demonstrate, science is often best preserved by the destruction of those parts of it which are incomplete or otherwise inadequate. Then again, it may be that science - because of the shortcomings discussed above - simply cannot deal with any paranormal phenomena there may be in the world. Perhaps the paranormal is too elusive and unpredictable to be pinned down in the ways that science requires to perform its tests and build its theories. Be that as it may,


for the reasons that I have given, the paranormal must not be dismissed out of hand simply because it does not accord with our established body of knowledge. As important as it is to be scientific, it is perhaps even more important to be fair. Indeed, as long as our eyes are fixed on the true spirit of science as inquiry that is both curious and cautious in equal measure, we will see that “scientific” and “fair” are one and the same.


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