Skeptics’ Disease
“I have some friends who are skeptics,” I said. “They’re in that Skeptics Society. I think they’d tear you apart.”
“Skeptics,” he said, “suffer from the skeptics’ disease—the problem of being right too often.”
“How’s that bad?” I asked.
“If you are proven to be right a hundred times in a row, no amount of evidence will convince you that you are mistaken in the hundred-and-first case. You will be seduced by your own apparent infallibility. Remember that all scientific experiments are performed by human beings and the results are subject to human interpretation. The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.”
“Skeptics know that human perceptions are faulty,” I argued. “That’s why they have a scientific process and they insist on repeating experiments to see if results are consistent. Their scientific method virtually eliminates subjectivity.”
“The scientific approach also makes people think and act in groups,” he countered. “They form skeptical societies and create skeptical publications. They breathe each other’s fumes and they demonize those who do not share their scientific methods. Because skeptics’ views are at odds with the majority of the world, they become emotionally and intellectually isolated. That sort of environment is a recipe for cult thinking and behavior. Skeptics are not exempt from normal human brain functions. It is a human tendency to become what you attack. Skeptics attack irrational thinkers and in the process become irrational.”
ESP and Luck
“Do you believe in extrasensory perception—ESP?” I asked.
“That depends how you define it,” he said. “Skeptics try to make ESP go away by defining it so narrowly that it can’t be demonstrated in controlled experiments. Believers hold a more expansive view of ESP, focusing on its utility in daily life.”
“So you’re a believer?” I prodded.
His expression said no. “There are billions of people on earth. Some of them will have miserable lives from the time they are born until the day they die. Others will have incredibly good fortune in every facet of their lives. They will be born to loving parents in well-to-do homes. Their brains and bodies will be efficient, healthy, and highly capable. They will experience love. They will never be shy or fearful without reason. Some might win lotteries. In a word, they will be lucky over their entire lives, compared to other people.
“Luck conforms to normal probability curves. Most people will have average luck and some people will experience extra good luck or extra bad luck. A handful will have good luck so extraordinary that it will be indistinguishable from magic. The rules of probability guarantee that such people exist.”
He continued. “And luck will be compartmentalized in some people, confined to specific areas of their lives. Some people will be extraordinarily lucky gamblers and some people will have amazing business luck or romantic luck.
“Now imagine that you find the one person on earth whose specific type of luck involves the extraordinary ability to guess random things. Such a person is very likely to exist somewhere on earth. What do you think the skeptics would conclude about this person’s ESP?”
“If they tested him with controlled experiments and he repeatedly passed, I think they would conclude he had ESP,” I said.
“You’re wrong. They would conclude that their tests were not adequately controlled and that more study needed to be done. They would say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And they would keep testing until they either got a negative result or lost interest. No skeptic would take the chance of declaring someone to have ESP if there were any risk of later being proven wrong. Their cult does not promote that sort of risk.
“To be fair, in all likelihood, the skeptics have never been wrong when debunking claims of alleged extraordinary powers. They believe their methods to be sound because, excluding missteps in individual tests, their methods have never provided a wrong result in the long run, as far as anyone knows. But never being wrong is no proof that the method of testing is sound for all cases.”
“Then you think luck is the same as ESP?” I asked.
“I’m saying the results are indistinguishable.”
“But it’s different because ESP is caused by thoughts traveling through the air or something like that. ESP has to have some cause.”
“If you define ESP narrowly to include only the transfer through the air of information, then skeptics will never detect it,” he said. “But if you accept luck as being the same as ESP, then ESP exists and it can be useful, though not reliably so, since luck can change in an instant.”
“I think scientists have proven that thoughts don’t travel through the air because they can’t detect anything coming from people’s heads when they concentrate,” I said, trying to agree. I should have known it would be a waste of time.
“But your thoughts do travel across space,” he said. “The question is whether another person can decode the information.”
“How do thoughts travel across space?”
“When anything physical moves, it has a gravitational impact on every other object in the universe, instantly and across any distance. That impact is fantastically small, but it is real. When you have a thought, it is coupled with a physical change in your mind that is specific to that thought, and it has an instant gravitational ripple effect throughout the entire universe.
“Can people decode these fantastically weak signals, mixed with an unbelievably large amount of other gravitational noise? No. But the signals are there.”
ESP and Pattern Recognition
“What about remote viewing?” I asked. “You’ve heard of that. It’s when a psychic draws a picture of some distant place without being there. How’s that done? Is that luck too?”
“Sometimes. But pattern recognition is a big part of it too.”
“How? There’s no pattern if you’re sitting in a room in one part of the world and the object is someplace else.”
“Everyone has a different ability to recognize patterns in their environment,” he said. “It is a skill, like music and math and sports. The rare geniuses in those fields seem downright supernatural. It is as if they possess special powers. In a sense they do, but it would be more accurate to describe their skills as an abundance of a natural ability as opposed to something supernatural.
“Consider a typical math prodigy. Math geniuses often report knowing the answers to problems without being aware of having made a calculation. The top geniuses in every field report the same experience. At the highest levels of performance people are not aware of the processes they are using.
“There is nothing mystical or magical about the performance of geniuses just because they are unaware of how they do what they do. The subconscious calculations of their minds happen so fast that they don’t register as memories. It seems as if the answers just arrive.
“Some apparent psychics, the ones who are not intentional frauds, are geniuses at pattern recognition, but they are not necessarily aware of the source of their abilities. Like math geniuses, so-called psychics don’t know how they do it. They only know that it works.”
“Okay,” I said, momentarily accepting his explanation so I could test it. “How does pattern recognition explain a psychic who predicts where a murdered person’s body will be found? Where’s the pattern?”
“Most of the reports about psychics who locate bodies are false. Reporters usually get their information by talking to people and writing down what they are told, but the stories are only as good as the reliability of the people inter viewed. Psychics can make vague predictions and later claim credit for anything that was near the mark. The media tells the story of the fascinating successes and ignores the failures as being not newsworthy. The public gets the impression that psychics can locate dead bodies with regularity. In fact, such cases have been rare and probably a result of genius–level pattern recognition, or luck, or simple exaggeration.