Defending Psychic Experience

For the record,

1) I don't believe in any one model, map or metaphor to explain reality. I remain agnostic.

2) I think there is a high probability that most people claiming to be a psychic, specifically those attempting to gain a lot of publicity and make a lot of money, are probably charlatans or frauds.

Having said that, I'm going to defend psychic experience as something that should not automatically be discounted.

Lets start with this basic argument. Can you prove with absolute certainty to someone besides yourself that you have a waking, conscious inner experience? In other words, how do you prove to someone else that you are not a simulacra (zombie)? The point is you can't. The best you can do is convince people that since they experience an inner life of their own, and since you are much like them, that you too have an inner experience. For all intents and purposes, this is precisely how most of us assume that everyone we know has an inner experience. But it still lacks objective scientific proof. No amount of complexity research, neurological scanning and analysis, or neurocomputational cleverness can prove otherwise. All it can do is prove that all this complexity results in a system capable of complex behavior and reaction. It does not prove that the inner experience itself actually exists. We only know it does, because we have it! It's internally, subjectively verifiable by those of us with an inner life, but objectively unverifiable.

However, since objective reductionist science has served us so well, so unbelievable well, it's become an addiction we can't let go of when it fails. Rather than blame objectivity itself, we instead say that anything that cannot be objectively verified is false. Which is why it comes as no surprise that many leading thinkers in the fields of cognitive and neuro-science actually believe that inner experience is an illusionary falsity that doesn't exist!

This is where most often any further dialog on the subject comes to a grinding screeching halt. Because now they are resting on dogma. And once dogma enters the picture, there is no way to have a reasonable discussion going forward. The basic assumptions are so different (i.e those who say they have an inner experience versuse those saying it is doesn't exist), that further dialog becomes impossible. It's the same as if you were to argue about if God exists or not with a fundamentalist Christian. For those of you who've tried, you will understand what I mean by this.

But how can otherwise really intelligent people fall prey to dogma? That's a good question I'll leave for another thread.

Ok, so if you agree that you have an inner experience and that it is real in it's own right, then on to the next part of my argument.

Most people I have personally known that claimed to have psychic experiences were people describing the internal workings of their mind. They were describing what they experienced subjectively. Since this was something they experienced subjectively they have no way of proving to you that what they experienced is real, anymore than they can prove they are conscious and not walking zombies. You can either choose to believe them or not believe them. Like sharing an inner life, lends credence to other peoples claim of their own inner life, if you have also had a psychic experience it will probably help you lend some modicum of credence to another person’s similar claims. Like believing that other people have an inner experience, you can choose to believe this person to whatever degree suits you, but you still can't prove a damn thing about any of it.

And so it comes as no surprise that almost all people who are convinced that all psychic experience is delusionary hogwash have never had any experience themselves they could not explain scientifically. So the real divide is an experiential one, rather than an intellectual one.

I have no doubt that quite a bit of psychic experience could be explained away by science, things like deja-vu are getting some cognitive scientific explanations, as are some "intuitive" leaps that seem extra-sensory but are in fact subconscious sensory experiences.

But after filtering all of that out, there are still a large set of "psychic" experience that have not (yet) been explained by current scientific understanding. The problem remains that people, so addicted to the current framework of science are willing to discount all of these experience because of a current lack of explanatory power. This is just dogma in action. Scientist no matter how well trained or astute are capable of falling prey to these base emotions. Science is replete with case after case of dogma getting in the way of theoretical advancement. It was once joked (by Thomas Kuhn I think), that science only advances when the last generation of scientist die off, and the new generation without preconceptions is ready to embrace the new scientific framework. Even Einstein fell prey to this problem when he said, "God does not play dice with the universe".

Ok, so what am I getting at? All I'm getting at is that people have had genuine inner experiences that were so profound and compelling (myself included!), that have yet to be explained by science. I can say that the chance that my own experiences are just coincidence are a close approximation of zero.

The experiences I had, and I have now had several of these, is that I had the subjective experience of leaving my body, flying out of the building I was in and traveled far away from where I was, and in one case traveled over a mile away. In two of these instances, when I awoke I rushed to these places to see if anything I saw while "out of my body" could be verified. When I got to the scenes, there were at least a dozen intimate details which matched precisely what I saw in my dream, including the faces of people sitting on benches in the area, the makes and models of the cars in the parking lot nearby, the shape of the clouds in the sky, and even a piece of garbage in an ally way.

Coincidence? I choose to apply Occam's Razor, which aims to find the simplest explanation, and coincidence is definitely not the simplest. It's far easier to say that I had some kind of clairvoyance or OBE, perhaps explained within the quantum mechanical non-locality framework, or something else. But the odds of it being a coincidence are trillions to 1.

Sure, you could say I'm making all this up, and there isn't a darn thing I could do to repeat this event or prove it to you, so we are left right where we started.

I love reductionist science and empirical materialism, but I also know that the current framework of science cannot explain my experiences (yet). Until it can it will remain incomplete.

Related Links:

On Materialism as Science Dogma - Thanks sauceruney for the link.

Posted by paul at March 22, 2004 05:24 PM | TrackBack