This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 3, from 1991.
If someone suggested testing yeast organisms to see if they could respond to psychokinesis, would you be prepared to put up the money? If someone thought it would be a good idea to try with fruit flies, would you agree to drop everything and set aside part of your life to running a research programme? How about cockroaches – would you consider applying for a grant to acquire the equipment? Your pet cat – any offers to check out its ability to affect a random number generator merely by using its mind? How about checking out the mental powers of algae?
If not, why not? These experiments have not only been suggested, they have been carried out (by physicist Helmut Schmidt) and solemnly analysed and commented upon by others. In proposals like these, it is all too often the experimental setup that receives first attention. It has become a habit to begin by putting the fashionable question: ‘Is this claim falsifiable?’
I want to suggest that there is a question that takes priority: ‘Is this claim absurd?’
There is a notion doing the rounds that as soon as any proposal whatever is put forward in the psychic field, skeptics must immediately assume a straight face, and be prepared to give full and serious attention to absolutely anything. Here is Paul Kurtz (chairman of CSICOP) in the Spring 1984 issue of Skeptical Inquirer:
We can ask: Does sleeping under a pyramid increase sexual potency? Do plants have ESP and will talking to them enhance their growth? Do tape-recorders really pick up the voices of the dead? All of these claims have been proposed by paranormalists within the past decade. They should not be rejected out of hand.
But… why not?
Richard Gregory, Professor of Neuropsychology and Director of the Brain and Perception Laboratory at the University of Bristol, puts it like this: ‘Suppose that someone puts up the hypothesis: The moon is made of Danish Blue cheese. Would support be found for gaining knowledge by refuting this hypothesis? It would surely be given too low a priority to justify the cost of refutation…’ ‘Without a sense of the ridiculous,’ says Gregory, ‘there can hardly be persuasion, other than by force, and we cannot begin to distinguish between illusions and realities or agree on what is true.’
If you had a real-life problem, would you send for Indiana Jones? Would you invoke the aid of Apollo? Would you spend time experimentally examining the thesis that we are all actually fast asleep and merely pretending to be awake? Or that someone could change traffic lights to green by just making a wish as they approached a junction? Bill Boyd tells fortunes for teddy bears, does past-life readings for them, and reads their auras (Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1984-5); would you apply for funds to check it all out with a research team with statistical backup? In Martin Gardner’s opinion,
There’s nothing that one can’t research the hell out of. Research guided by bad judgement is a black hole for good money.
Skeptics have fallen prey to a strange phobia: an irrational fear of the accusation that they have closed minds. This dreaded charge is a weapon dreamed up by believers. It is a charge intended to define the issue in terms of the occultist – a tactic that Thomas Szasz warned us about long ago:
In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words: whoever first defines the situation is the victor: his adversary, the victim.
You might think that an expert in the arts of deception would not be fooled by the open-mind ploy. But David Berglas (now president of the Magic Circle) is of the opinion that most scientists have closed minds. He has insisted: ‘I still believe in the next medium I go to investigate. I still have a genuinely open mind…’ You would be hard put to find a more explicit misunderstanding of the null hypothesis.
I am well aware that absurdity is not precisely defined (what is?). So for the benefit of the faint-hearted, we can apply criteria that narrow the issue. ‘Is this claim meaningless?’ Much of the discussion in this field is of this quality:
Q: How do you manage to read minds?
A: By telepathy.
This reduces to:
Q: How do you manage to read minds?
A: By my ability to read minds.
Setting up an inquiry to elucidate this kind of claim would be sensible as making a study of bachelors to find out how many of them were married.
But occultism is riddled with such linguistic bogeymen. Back in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes washed his hands of this kind of nonsense.
And therefore if a man should talk to me of a round Quadrangle or accidents of Bread in Cheese; or immaterial Substances; or a free Subject; a free-Will; or any Free, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in Error: but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, absurd.
Hobbes would have groaned in despair at the number of immaterial substances still being peddled at the end of the 20th century. It was J. B. Rhine who invented ‘extrasensory perception’ and its abbreviation ESP in 1934. Eight years later, R. H. Thouless came up with psi, being under the impression that this label was an advance on ESP.
When the American Association for the Advancement of Science decided to allow parapsychologists an affiliate status in the Association, physicist John Wheeler warned against two fashionable ideas: that information can be transmitted faster than light, and there is any ‘quantum interconnectedness’ between separate consciousnesses. ‘Both’, he said, ‘are baseless. Both are mysticism. Both are moonshine.’
It was Wheeler who substituted the useful abbreviation SCESP (so-called extrasensory perception), but the term never caught on. More than half of the members of the Parapsychological Association hold doctorates in science, engineering, or medicine, but in 1980, 68% of them said they firmly believed that psi was a real thing. Alas in this area nothing remains simple for long: James Alcock warns us that ‘it now seems that one must differentiate between psi and parapsi.’
What is parapsychology anyway? A practitioner has defined it as the study of ‘the paranormal’. But what does that mean? Susan Blackmore asks, ‘So does the paranormal “really” exist?, and she answers herself, ‘I have no idea’. What does the question mean? What does the answer mean? I have no idea. Antony Flew makes the point like this:
I admit that the psychical researchers use phrases like ‘by paranormal means’: but I submit that, from their accounts of what happens, or rather from their lack of any account of what happens, they are not entitled to such phrases, or, if they are, can only use them in the same sense as the phrases ‘by unknown means, and ‘without means’.
He points out that extrasensory perception can only mean extra-perceptual perception. ‘So each phrase is just as much of a nonsense as the other’. Statements like ‘This was a paranormal event’ are of a piece with ‘There’s never a villain living in all Denmark but he’s an arrant knave’, or ‘Wagner’s music is better than it sounds’.
We are seeing a resurrection of the antique idea than any noun represents a thing; that if it is a thing, it exists; and if it exists, you can in principle go out into the world and look for it and find it. The notion has clearly also irritated the philosopher Richard Taylor, who kebabs it in his essay How to Bury the Mind Body Problem.
It is sheer redundancy to say that men think things called ‘thoughts’, sense things called ‘sensations’, ‘imagine’ images, and feel ‘feelings’. There are no such things.
In the Land of Labels, there are no experimental problems: needed entities are simply defined into existence. And minds are things with a life of their own, and can travel the world like invisible tourists, affecting what they will.
Meaningless questions (‘Was backwards causation at work here?’) are solemnly put to the test (let’s hear it for Helmut Schmidt again), without ever considering their implications. Is it really being suggested that yesterday’s car crash can be made to unhappen? Can the dead driver become alive again today? Does this mean that newspaper reports of the event are automatically expunged? Does this leave a blank space in the newspaper? Or is the page cunningly made up afresh by unseen hands, so as to fill in with other material? How? Who by?
Labels like ‘the paranormal’ are dreamed up to fill in the blanks in sentences such as ‘This happening must have been caused by —’. It is just as likely that puzzling events have been caused by the Average Taxpayer. It was Gilbert Ryle who made the observation:
So long as John Doe continues to think of the Average Taxpayer as a fellow-citizen, he will tend to think of him as an elusive insubstantial man, a ghost who is everywhere yet nowhere.
Ryle’s head-shaking was directed at people who make category-mistakes. ‘Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary’. Psychics, please note.
The mystically-minded get a great deal of mileage out of simply smearing the distinction between truth and belief. It achieves the peak of nonsensicality in Tolstoy’s A Confession: ‘All that people sincerely believe in must be true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means I have not understood it’. William James caught the bug: ‘The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’.
It takes us back to musty philosophical disputes about the pre-existence of the soul. (l’ve always liked Darwin’s dry comment ‘read monkeys for pre-existence’). Criterion one therefore amounts to ‘Is this subject bounded by the two covers of a dictionary?’.
The psychically-inclined need to be more often confronted by the kind of cussed person whose challenge is reported by Dr Rob Buckman:
I remember when I was a casualty officer at St Nissen’s a patient turned up and actually said that he had a red rash in circles that spread outwards and I looked it and said, Aha! this is erythema annulare centrifugum, and he said what does that mean, and I said a red rash in circles that spreads outwards, and he said I just told you that, what are you a doctor or a parrot?
