On Other Ways of Knowing, part 2
Continuing on the subject of my doubts about the presence of ESP in human beings, I’ve come up with three basic categories that the various psychic senses fall under. Each one needs to be validated a little differently — if it can be validated at all — so I wanted to address them one by one.
ESP of the Commonly Accessible
Most claims of ESP seem to be of this sort. The psychic has access to additional information about something in the physical world that an average person doesn’t. Abilities that fall into this category include aura reading, precognition, psychometry, dowsing, and remote viewing...
Testing Aura Reading
Many psychics claim to be able to gain information about your health and your emotional state by clairvoyantly examining your aura, a subtle energy field radiating from your body.
The first step in testing this claim is to confirm that the psychic is seeing something at all. We can worry about whether or not his diagnosis is accurate later on.
One might be tempted to do this by gathering a group of psychics and comparing what they describe; if they all independently see a sky blue aura around you, then perhaps we have a real phenomenon on our hands. However this approach isn’t as dependable as we’d like. In observing your face and demeanor they’re each gathering information about you, consciously or subconsciously...
On Other Ways of Knowing
One who claims that he’s achieved some level of ESP faces an interesting dilemma. He must now convince the rest of the world that he has a legitimate new stream of data being fed to his consciousness, a wholly subjective experience which the rest of the world has no access to and no frame of reference for.
If he could only flip a switch in our brains that activates that stream we’d all have an immediate change of heart. Instantly ESP would be validated and we’d wonder how humanity had been so blind to it all this time. Because he can’t do this, a psychic will often argue that he can only hope to spur people down the path to their own awakening. Neophytes cannot possibly understand these strange new cognitive faculties until they already have them, thus the psychic cannot be expected to prove that he possesses an alternative way of knowing the world...