On the Question of Psychics
About seven years ago I was on a beach for a late-night bonfire in Santa Barbara with my girlfriend at the time and many of her friends. One of her friends, I had been told in advance, was in the process of coming to terms with the fact that she seemed to have a high attunement to the thoughts and feelings of others. I don't recall if she was described as a "psychic", but in the absence of that particular word, the description brought that word to mind.
I remained skeptical of this claim until I had a brief conversation with this friend that evening. She told me some things about myself, and reassured me about some personal difficulties I was facing at the time, that I had never told anyone about. She didn't get too specific, but it was sufficiently on the nose that I was taken aback by what she said.
I wonder, to what extent, do psychic powers really manifest themselves in individuals in the world. The answer to this may well be not at all. The late James Randi offered a million dollar prize for several decades to anyone who could demonstrate, under scientific and controlled conditions, psychic abilities. This prize, though sought after by many a charlatan eager to claim it, was never dispensed to anyone. (Last time I checked.)
J. B. Rhine was a botanist who founded parapsychology as a department within psychology at Duke university early in the 20th century. Rhine was known for doing experiments in extrasensory perception with the so-called Zener cards, which are probably familiar to people now only because they feature so prominently in the early scene in Ghostbusters, in which Bill Murray's character uses them to woo a young girl who has come in for a research experiement. Duke has long since divested its primary campus and serious research facilities of this department, which is another indication that science has failed to vindicate the reproducibility of ESP.
I recall reading Paul Dirac's classic introductory text on quantum mechanics. In the very first chapter he details how when a stream of photons hits a partially transparent pane of glass, some of the photons go through and some are absorbed by the molecules in the crystal lattice of the glass. I was very surprised that he wrote, almost verbatim: "To try and determine which individual photons will pass through, and which will be absorbed by the lattice, is a question that is unanswerable and should be considered outside the scope of science." This surprised me because it was being written by a scientist in the midst of one of the largest scientific revolutions that physics, and perhaps all branches of science, had ever seen. Couldn't one have just as easily said that solving the ultraviolet catastrophe was "outside the scope of science" prior to Einstein detailing the photoelectric effect? (Perhaps these are clearly distinguishable to someone who's a physicist, which I am most certainly not.)
Don't misunderstand me: unlike Deepak Chopra I'm not one of those people who puts the word "quantum" in front of something mystical and thinks that this somehow gives it scientific credence. I'm not trying to prove by juxtaposition. My point is that the boundaries of the "scope of science" are fluid. Many things will always exist outside of these bounds, no matter how much scientific frontiers advance.
Here's what I think might be possible: consider the unconscious, the part of the brain to which we do not have direct conscious access, but which hums along autonomously, always producing, always influencing, even as we remain unaware of it. Try as we may, this part of the brain has always, without fail, resisted any efforts to come under our conscious control.
Now consider something that has happened to all of us, at least once: some evening, a person from your past pops into your head, someone that you have not thought about in many, many years, seemingly at random. Then the next day, you get a phone call from that very person, or a letter arrives in the mail from them, or you find that they've sent you a friend request on Facebook.
Coincidence? Maybe not. Any proper rationalist is apt to say this is confirmation bias. Random people from your past pop into your head all the time, they'll claim, and you only remembered this particular incident because this very person happened to contact you shortly afterward.
I don't assert the certainty, but also don't dismiss the possibility, that the unconscious is tapped into something that may send psychic impulses up to our conscious minds, when and if it feels like it. If anything like this were going on, if you consider that the unconscious refuses to be servile to our conscious will, then the generation of these psychic impulses could never be at our beck and call, and so therefore would be outside the domain of what could be established scientifically. This isn't scientific, because it isn't "falsifiable", the term coined by the great Karl Popper. But nor can all unfalsifiable claims can be said to contain no truth.
I remained skeptical of this claim until I had a brief conversation with this friend that evening. She told me some things about myself, and reassured me about some personal difficulties I was facing at the time, that I had never told anyone about. She didn't get too specific, but it was sufficiently on the nose that I was taken aback by what she said.
I wonder, to what extent, do psychic powers really manifest themselves in individuals in the world. The answer to this may well be not at all. The late James Randi offered a million dollar prize for several decades to anyone who could demonstrate, under scientific and controlled conditions, psychic abilities. This prize, though sought after by many a charlatan eager to claim it, was never dispensed to anyone. (Last time I checked.)
J. B. Rhine was a botanist who founded parapsychology as a department within psychology at Duke university early in the 20th century. Rhine was known for doing experiments in extrasensory perception with the so-called Zener cards, which are probably familiar to people now only because they feature so prominently in the early scene in Ghostbusters, in which Bill Murray's character uses them to woo a young girl who has come in for a research experiement. Duke has long since divested its primary campus and serious research facilities of this department, which is another indication that science has failed to vindicate the reproducibility of ESP.
I recall reading Paul Dirac's classic introductory text on quantum mechanics. In the very first chapter he details how when a stream of photons hits a partially transparent pane of glass, some of the photons go through and some are absorbed by the molecules in the crystal lattice of the glass. I was very surprised that he wrote, almost verbatim: "To try and determine which individual photons will pass through, and which will be absorbed by the lattice, is a question that is unanswerable and should be considered outside the scope of science." This surprised me because it was being written by a scientist in the midst of one of the largest scientific revolutions that physics, and perhaps all branches of science, had ever seen. Couldn't one have just as easily said that solving the ultraviolet catastrophe was "outside the scope of science" prior to Einstein detailing the photoelectric effect? (Perhaps these are clearly distinguishable to someone who's a physicist, which I am most certainly not.)
Don't misunderstand me: unlike Deepak Chopra I'm not one of those people who puts the word "quantum" in front of something mystical and thinks that this somehow gives it scientific credence. I'm not trying to prove by juxtaposition. My point is that the boundaries of the "scope of science" are fluid. Many things will always exist outside of these bounds, no matter how much scientific frontiers advance.
Here's what I think might be possible: consider the unconscious, the part of the brain to which we do not have direct conscious access, but which hums along autonomously, always producing, always influencing, even as we remain unaware of it. Try as we may, this part of the brain has always, without fail, resisted any efforts to come under our conscious control.
Now consider something that has happened to all of us, at least once: some evening, a person from your past pops into your head, someone that you have not thought about in many, many years, seemingly at random. Then the next day, you get a phone call from that very person, or a letter arrives in the mail from them, or you find that they've sent you a friend request on Facebook.
Coincidence? Maybe not. Any proper rationalist is apt to say this is confirmation bias. Random people from your past pop into your head all the time, they'll claim, and you only remembered this particular incident because this very person happened to contact you shortly afterward.
I don't assert the certainty, but also don't dismiss the possibility, that the unconscious is tapped into something that may send psychic impulses up to our conscious minds, when and if it feels like it. If anything like this were going on, if you consider that the unconscious refuses to be servile to our conscious will, then the generation of these psychic impulses could never be at our beck and call, and so therefore would be outside the domain of what could be established scientifically. This isn't scientific, because it isn't "falsifiable", the term coined by the great Karl Popper. But nor can all unfalsifiable claims can be said to contain no truth.