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.

This class of ESP is the most easily tested (and the most easily debunked) because a person’s individual senses don’t exist in a bubble, isolated from the others. I can perceive most things with all five of my senses and there’s usually a great deal of information overlap. How do I know an apple is rotten? Well, it will smell rotten. But it will also look wrinkly and blackened, as well as feel soft and mushy. I don’t know what a rotten apple tastes like but I’m sure “rotten” is what you’d conclude if you put it in your mouth. In this example, even though each experience is unique, four of my senses have all given me the same piece of information about an object: rottenness.

If someone has the ability to gain information about an object psychically, shouldn’t he be able to psychically ascertain that the apple is rotten? A person with no sense of smell could tell me the apple is rotten by its appearance. A blind person could tell me it’s rotten by touch. Why couldn’t a psychic do the same when his other five senses are taken away?

Perhaps this test is unfair. I doubt I could recognize the rottenness of an apple using only my ears, so maybe his particular psychic sense is also unsuited to the task. But certainly he could suggest a test that his sense is suited for.

The test that James Randi conducted on an aura reader in the previous post is an excellent example of a test that bridges the senses. A person’s physical location is information that’s available to both physical sight and psychic sight. It’s hard to even conceive of how someone could see an aura but not be able to pinpoint it in space. An aura reader should easily be able to determine the location of a person by the sight of his aura alone. Even the psychic being tested by Randi thought so.

Conclusive demonstrations of such abilities should be simple and straightforward for anyone who possesses them, and yet psychics routinely fail the tests for them — even in cases where passing guarantees them fame and fortune, as well as elevating the global psychic community to new plateaus of public esteem.

Until someone comes forward who can pass even a basic scientific test of his alleged abilities (a very meager demand), claims for this category of ESP have ceased to impress me.

ESP of the Exclusively Accessible

The next category of ESP is the perception of something otherworldly — something the average person has no access to whatsoever. Channeling falls into this category.

How can a channeler verify that the information he’s receiving is coming from a genuine source? Especially if that information pertains to inaccessible things like the metaphysics of the afterlife or the spiritual practices of beings living in another galaxy? The object of perception in this case cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. How could the average person be convinced that there’s something at work here beyond the psychic’s imagination?

It might seem that this psychic sense exists in a bubble, but it doesn’t. A blind person could carry a paint swatch from the hardware store around with him for a day and ask sighted people at random what color it is. After hearing “blue” over and over again from family, coworkers, and strangers on the street, the reality of vision (if he had any reason to doubt it) would be personally confirmed for him. And at no point in this process would he need to know anything at all about the experience of blue. He has verified that a communally accessible perception called “blue” does exist despite having no grasp of what sensing blue is like.

Channeling works the same way. Even though I can’t experience what the channeler experiences, two channelers could independently receive the same information about this world or the next and I can compare what comes through. Via one medium an entity might introduce himself to me as “Hilarion” and tell me all about a civilization on a planet in the Vela constellation. If a different medium (who had never even met the first) opened with, “Hello again. This is Hilarion. I have more to tell you about the Velans,” I’d have pretty good confirmation that the mediums are perceiving something genuine, even if the sensation itself is inconceivable to me.

I’ve already written about devising tests for channeling and evaluating information from spirit guides, and again I have yet to encounter anyone who can give me verifiable — or at least mutually accessible — information via channeling that he couldn’t have easily acquired more mundanely.

ESP of the Solely Accessible

This category of ESP actually does exist in a bubble, and this is its undoing.

There are people who claim to have a personal connection to some supernatural entity or realm that’s shared by no one else on the planet. For example, through some sort of astral travel or shamanic dreaming a person might make regular visits to some other-dimensional plane where things obey different metaphysical laws and where the inhabitants communicate through a telepathy of raw sensation. He comes back from these trips reporting that these beings have given him insights into consciousness that are so profound that trying to reduce them to crude English would be like trying to push a bowling ball through a funnel.

There’s no way this person can corroborate this experience. Even if he could bring others on the journey, how could we compare descriptions of indescribable experiences? We outsiders have no choice but to trust — simply because he says so — that this experience has some external reality.

This is something I’m not inclined to do, because there’s nothing about his experience that distinguishes it from dream, delusion, or mental illness — even for him. As I’ve said before, experiences don’t necessarily correspond with events.

Does this person use drugs to facilitate his journeys? An experience like this one would sound quite familiar to the average psychonaut, but most psychonauts would agree that the source of the experience is his own brain. Does he use sleep deprivation or sensory deprivation to trigger the experience, akin to a vision quest? Or is he asleep when it happens and he’s having a lucid dream? Could he even suffer from some kind of latent schizophrenia which periodically thrusts him into alien realms?

These are details which are often left out in conversations with psychics who are reporting such experiences. You have to do some extra probing to uncover them. However, even if there’s no obvious hacking of the brain going on, the brain is completely capable of producing profound mystical experiences like this one given the right circumstances. Since our experiences don’t let us in on whether or not they have an external source, I’m not convinced that our subject can intuitively know that the beings he visits are real. Until we’re provided with some sort of evidence it’s prudent to not take on the belief that something special and otherworldly is going on here.

If our subject wants us to accept his claim he has some work to do. His perceptions must first be shown to fall under one of the previous two categories (with further exploration it’s possible for us to discover we were mistaken about this other realm being inaccessible to others), and then it must pass the appropriate tests. Otherwise, there’s very little that we outsiders can actually do with the ineffable, even if we wanted to.

This blog has so far been concerned with perceptions of the first two categories. This makes sense because only the first two categories can be tested, but I feel there’s still much more to be said about the third. A subject for future posts.

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. The only proof that we, the uninitiated, will accept is hopelessly bound to criteria borne out of our naivety. Justification for the experience is inextricably embedded within the experience itself, so an attempt to judge the experience before actually having it would be misguided and futile.

Arguments like this one always intrigued me. They lead to an important philosophical question: do we put so much faith in our collective empirical understanding of the world merely because we all happen to have similar perceptual and cognitive faculties?

Imagine a group of individuals who each have access to a unique channel of sensory data: one has only eyes, one has only ears, one has only touch, etc. Would it be so simple for these people (assuming they could even communicate) to justify their impressions of the world to each other? Or a group with unique cognitive strengths: one is a savant in math, one is a savant in music, one is a savant in art, etc. Each would be constantly frustrated by the others’ inability to share in a conception of the world which, to himself, is utterly self-evident.

My alchemist friend Polymathicus often says (paraphrased) that the work of science only does half of the job. In any given experiment there is strict and extensive preparation done on the object being studied. What is neglected is the strict and extensive preparation of the subject doing the studying. I don’t wish to put words in his mouth (and he may correct me), but I believe his point is that revelations in knowledge cannot come to a person not already tuned to perceive them. The breadth and sophistication of one’s worldview must grow in parallel with the volume of new information he gathers, or else that information is largely wasted on him. The paths of subject and object must be synchronous; as one effects development in the object, the object effects development in him.

I wouldn’t personally suggest that science is unaware of this need for the holism of subject and object, as Thomas Kuhn famously made a similar argument, but it’s a wise observation.

This friend directed me to David Lindsay’s alchemy-disguised-as-bad-science-fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus. In it the main character travels across an alien landscape and with each individual he meets his body is given a new organ — a new perceptual or cognitive faculty — matching that of the giver, usually in place of the organ he previously received. The effects these organs have on him are profound. With each he isn’t merely given access to new sensations; he is literally given a new worldview. Things that once made perfect sense to him become absurd; absurdities come to make perfect sense. Conclusions about the world that were once rock solid are found to be flimsy and hollow in the face of new impressions. And with every metamorphosis, his previous self could never have been convinced of his new revelations because he didn’t yet have access to their justification. Each organ reveals the ultimate truth that shatters all truths that came before — that is until the next organ takes hold.

As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Could we be so intent on exploring every millimeter of the universe through a single set of common lenses that we’re neglecting the vast perceptual frontiers spoken of by prophets and mystics over the centuries? Could there exist a sense so alien to common human experience that we couldn’t possibly conceive of it or identify it until we possessed it ourselves?

Whether something can exist and whether something does exist are two very different discussions. Though I have no reason to doubt that such senses could exist, I’m unconvinced that there are humans endowed with them.

The first source of my doubts is the fact that there’s no known physical mechanism by which we might receive this mysterious sensory data. For vision we have eyes, for hearing we have ears, for taste we have tongues. What is the organ or organs that facilitate ESP? And what sort of stimulus is such an organ being triggered by? What is it pulling out of the ether and how does the ether interact with flesh?

If there are people who are capable of ESP and people who aren’t, then there must be brains out there with different structures than other brains — or at least brains that are doing something that other brains aren’t. But even psi researchers haven’t been able to pinpoint such activity. They’ve retreated to the spookiness of the quantum realm citing things like particle entanglement in their arguments for ESP, which is a red flag for a belief that’s on its way out. The nice thing about genuine, life-affecting phenomena is that you don’t have to dig quite so deeply to find a single bit of solid evidence for them. They tend to make their presence a little more apparent, which is what allows us to notice them in our daily lives in the first place. As a rule, things that are hidden from the most specialized of scientists will probably also be hidden from the average Joe.

Since there’s still a lot we don’t know about the brain and since only a tiny fraction of all the brains in the entire world have ever been directly observed, this is only a secondary criticism. My main criticism of appeals to other ways of knowing could fill a post all its own, so I’ll leave it for the future.

The honest reaction would be to admit one’s own ignorance — to oneself as well as others. It’s perfectly ok to say, “I really don’t know either way. I’ll think about it, do some research, and get back to you.” But somehow it just feels better to have an opinion, any opinion, no matter how unfounded, than to have none. In absence of knowledge and evidence our brains will even go so far as to manufacture the experience of certainty to tide us over.

You can blame our evolution for this compulsion to believe. If a member of your clan gets eaten by a bear, you’re going to form a belief that bears are dangerous. But do you really know anything concrete about the next bear that crosses your path? Maybe bears are gentle, but the first one you saw happened to be rabid and crazed. Maybe there’s another animal that looks very much like a bear but has no interest in you as dinner (e.g. a panda). Maybe bears are avatars of the gods who dole out rewards or punishment based on a person’s character — the tribe member was just an evil person and deserved his fate.

Even though any of these things could be true, this wait-and-see mentality would have put you in an early grave. Those who jumped to conclusions about bears and who were overcautious were more likely to survive encounters with them.

Observe your average neighborhood bird or squirrel. They’re scared of everything. A noise or movement too close will send them in a mad dash even if the source is harmless or benevolent. And this strategy has served them extremely well over the millennia despite how many meals it’s cost them. The odds remain in their favor because the penalty for being wrong is far greater than the reward for being right.

It’s a very strange quirk of evolution that those who perceive reality most accurately are often at a disadvantage. Clear-sightedness and survival have surprisingly little to do with each other. As intelligent as we are it’s natural to assume that our window to the world is spotless, but the truth is that a dash of delusion is not only useful but necessary for a sentient species to come this far. In light of this, many of humanity’s problems suddenly make more sense.

In civilized society we need to temper our inclination to believe or disbelieve by reflex because it often does more harm than good. We need to cultivate a tolerance for uncertainty.

This is accomplished by recognizing that the belief dilemma offers a third choice which is frequently more appropriate: no belief at all.

There isn’t a belief in history that has influenced humanity more than belief or disbelief in a deity, so I’ll use it as an example to illustrate what I mean. The term “atheist” can have a number meanings, but in the minds of the general public to be atheist is to have a disbelief in God — in other words, to believe that a deity does not exist. This particular flavor of atheism (sometimes referred to as “strong atheism”) comes under attack for being an untenable position because proving a negative is so problematic, especially when dealing with universals. I could verify that there are currently no elephants in my bedroom easily enough, but to verify that a deity doesn’t exist anywhere within or outside of the universe simply isn’t possible. One would have to be extremely exact about the definitions of “deity” and “exist” to even hope to pull it off. Sometimes disbelief in the supernatural is as fundamentally flawed as belief in it, as it turns out.

And this is where the null belief comes in. What belief and disbelief have in common is that they are both positive positions; each position says something about the universe. Disbelief is just belief of a different sort. “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist” are both statements that need to be justified by the claimant. But the null position requires no defense. To have no belief is to refrain from embracing a claim in the first place. It’s the position of having no position.

Someone with a null belief about God (the term “agnostic” sometimes fits the bill) remains in the state he was in before the notion of a deity ever entered his mind. He isn’t “on the fence” because that arbitrarily presupposes that there are only two choices to consider and that those two choices have a roughly equal chance of being true. He is simply open to evidence of God (or Samulayo, or Lei Gong, or Gnowee, or Ba’al, or Sedna, or an entity not yet conceived of) and lives in comfortable uncertainty about the subject until evidence shows up, if ever. To form any kind of belief in the meantime, including disbelief, is just unnecessary.

Skeptics sometimes seem uncomfortable with the null position, even though it’s the most honest (and the most scientifically sound) position to hold when faced with arguments for the paranormal. For many, to reserve judgement about a claim that they think is most likely bogus just feels too passive, wishy-washy, and soft. They fear that it ultimately encourages the people who are intent on deceiving themselves and others — that it gives those people an inch from which they will surely take a mile. So they resort to the sort of kneejerk disbelief that garners skeptics their reputation as curmudgeonly naysayers.

I disagree with this attitude, and I think it arises in part from the biological urge to pick a side. Lacking belief doesn’t require you to be the least bit soft on disseminators of bunk. As I’ve said before, you can reveal errors in someone’s chain of reasoning without ever making claims about the truth of his conclusions. If you stick to his ideas rather than the reality those ideas describe then you’re free of the burden of providing evidence to the contrary, which, in the case of ideas lacking evidence either way, you just won’t have. You’re merely pointing out the fact that he lacks it too.

It also doesn’t leave you more susceptible to falling prey to a baseless claim, as some skeptics might suggest. Being open but unconvinced isn’t wishy-washy. With every claim I’m presented with I can keep replying indefinitely, “Show me why I should believe this.” If the evidence is solid and the argument follows, I’ll become convinced; if not, I won’t. Starting from a position of disbelief won’t change that. If anything, disbelief without reason acts as a cognitive barrier. It makes it harder to accept a genuine claim that may come along because I’ll already have a subtle bias against it.

By jumping from a null position to disbelief about a claim that I’ve seen collapse under scrutiny a hundred times (assuming it lacks evidence to the contrary) I gain nothing except relief from the itch in my brain that compels me to make a choice. But belief and disbelief aren’t dichotomous opposites. There is only belief and null belief. Convinced and unconvinced.

With every sasquatch sighting that turns out to be a hoax, we don’t gain certainty that sasquatches don’t exist. But it doesn’t matter. Someone who has no belief about sasquatches lives effectively the same life as someone who’s convinced that they don’t exist. Neither will believe in sasquatches until he sees one, but the former has a position that’s more intellectually honest and more easily defended.

It’s a tragedy that the English language is so ambiguous on this matter. When I say, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” what do I mean? Do I disbelieve? Or lack belief?

Try in the future — at least in your own mind — to respond instead with, “I have no belief about that,” and see how it feels. In my case it alleviated a nagging epistemological tension that I hadn’t been able to shake otherwise.

If you ever manage to get used to it, uncertainty is an excellent place to be.

One of the reasons for this is the route a person often takes when formulating a belief for which evidence is lacking. He’s already started on a backward path by deciding to believe something before the truth of it is sufficiently demonstrated, and he has to continue backwards when he tries to force the belief to fit into his understanding of the rest of the world. It’s a top-down approach — starting with the conclusion and seeking evidence that supports it. To believe it, ambiguities and elaborate excuses are needed to substitute for the undergirding that evidence normally provides.

This approach allows a lot of errors, contradictions, and gaping holes to go completely overlooked by the believer. His imagination is given a very tiny yard to play in. Because he’s already assumed that the phenomenon in question is true and that the world we live in today is the result of it being true, countless possible consequences of his belief that may very well invalidate it go unconsidered. His chain of reasoning can only arrive at the world as it is, when the belief may demand a different world entirely.

The popular description of God is an excellent example of a belief that suffers from backwards thinking. People start with a human being as their template (it being the only model of sentience they’re familiar with) and grant it superhuman knowledge, abilities, and influence. They ascribe emotions to it out of reflex, but why should a being lacking brain chemistry have anything like emotions in the first place? They say it exists outside of time and space, and yet they assume that it acts, communicates, thinks, creates — all necessarily temporal if not also spatial behaviors. Rather than envisioning true, alien divinity, they’ve merely dressed a man up as a god. The top-down approach has failed to reveal the extent to which this picture misses the mark because no other god but a conscious, personal, human-esque god was a viable endpoint.

Spinoza’s Ethics is one of my favorite works of philosophy because in it Spinoza begins with the universally accepted assumptions about God and meticulously carries the reader through to their logical consequences. He creates a deity from the ground up based on the qualities everyone says a deity should exhibit — infinitude, perfection, causelessness — and discovers that the result doesn’t resemble anyone’s conception of God much at all.

I recommend doing the very same. Forget about what the world looks like today. Start with a blank slate. Build the world from scratch as if the paranormal claim you’re evaluating had been true from the very beginning of time. What sort of society would it lead to? How would history have unfolded? Where would we all be today?

Constructing a completely accurate picture would be impossible, but you’ll find that problems with a claim — problems the top-down approach never would have led you to — will become obvious very early in the process. If the claim isn’t backed by reality, you’ll probably find that the world you fashion and the world we live in are two very different places.

Let’s try a quick exercise with one of the oldest paranormal claims in the book: the ability to see into the future.

Someone who could predict the future in an unambiguous, statistically significant, actionable way (which is the only kind of prescience that matters, really) shouldn’t find it too hard to verify his ability. He doesn’t have to be right all the time; he merely has to be on par with a financial analyst or a meteorologist. His tendency to yield accurate information much more often than not would give him all the validity he’d need.

So what would a world containing such people look like? Assuming they were rare, they’d be some of the most highly paid consultants around. They’d be hired by major corporations to get a peek at the nation-sweeping must-have products of tomorrow (especially those developed by their competitors). Insurance companies would use them to determine the approximate risk of major natural disasters in any given year and adjust their premiums accordingly. Disaster relief organizations would make additional preparations based on psychic forecasts just as they would in anticipation of hurricane seasons. World governments would be engaged in psychic arms races, clamoring over each other to gather the best of the best for remote reconnaissance. The entire political landscape would change with every politician carrying an oracle in his pocket. Decades of research (for which there would be an avalanche of funding) might even lead the scientific community to identify the precise mechanism by which foreknowledge is possible and replicate it technologically, giving the gift of prescience to all.

Our preliminary draft does contrast a bit with today’s world already. And we’re barely scratching the surface. Going all the way back to the dawn of civilization, you might find that the world should have taken a different course entirely. And this is without even touching on the harder problems of future sight, like determinism vs. free will, temporal paradoxes, etc.

Now let’s try another exercise. Let’s envision a world where the ability to predict the future doesn’t exist and never did. What would the world look like if fortune telling was all in our heads?

Well, it would look a lot like our world, actually. There’s nothing about a total absence of prescience that I can think of that would steer human society off of the course it’s already taken. The most glaring discrepancy might be the fact that people believe in it at all. Could a world devoid of psychic foresight produce such widespread belief in it in the first place? Could there be so much smoke without fire?

My first instinct might be to say no, but then I’m reminded of all the other things that millions of people have been dead wrong about like geocentrism, Martian canals, homeopathy, Zeus, and creationism. Poorly founded belief is neither rare nor difficult to sustain.

This experiment isn’t really a claim-buster all by itself since it leaves the door wide open for bias and wishful thinking; it’s just another handy tool for our toolboxes.

Reading science fiction, especially hard science fiction, is a good way to condition your brain to take a bottom-up approach to paranormal claims. Science fiction writers tackle a very similar problem: as the human race gains new capabilities, what sort of world can we expect to be ushered into? And these authors have to live up to standards of rigor and accuracy which are frankly nonexistent in the New Age section. Exposure to world-building of this caliber will make the holes in backward chains of reasoning stand out for you that much more.

For starters, the burden of proof lies squarely on this person’s shoulders. You aren’t on the defensive here; it isn’t your responsibility to disprove that there are unicorns on Tau Ceti. His attempts to slowly shift the burden onto you — a tactic that people making claims they can’t support often fall back on — shouldn’t be yielded to. When considering all the random, nonsensical statements you could possibly pull out of thin air right now, like “Genghis Khan was a Martian,” it becomes obvious that statements aren’t automatically true until proven false. Unless he can demonstrate to you why you should become a believer, the conversation is over before it began.

But let’s ignore the burden of proof for a minute and pretend that you now have a genuine dilemma: to believe or not to believe.

Fortunately, you don’t have to know a single thing about Tau Ceti or about unicorns to decide whether or not his claim has merit. Expertise in astronomy and unicorn physiology aren’t required, and arguing about them is actually the long road toward making your determination. All you have to do is analyze his chain of reasoning.

“So you’ve traveled to Tau Ceti before?” you might ask him. It’s a valid question; no one would be more justified in making this claim (especially so confidently) than someone who’s been there. Unsurprisingly, he replies that he hasn’t.

“Then you’ve read the reports of xenobiologists who’ve returned from an expedition there?” Admittedly I haven’t browsed the latest biology journals, but it’s probably safe to say his answer to this will also be, “No.”

“Then you’ve been observing the surface of the planet by telescope?” Since astronomers haven’t even been able to discern whether Tau Ceti has planets, again, a “no” is the likely response.

As you keep drilling down to uncover his reasoning for this belief, you may find that it isn’t at all compelling. Maybe he stumbled onto a website where “secrets NASA has been hiding are revealed!” Maybe he had a psychic vision of life under Tau Ceti. Maybe he was just told it was true by someone he trusted. The point is, if his chain of reasoning turns out to be inadequate then you know it would be inappropriate to adopt his belief without more evidence. You don’t have to counter his argument with facts about Tau Ceti and unicorns because his argument is insubstantial in the first place.

On pages 171-3 of a book that everyone interested in the supernatural should read right away, The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan does a much better job of describing such a scenario than I. An excerpt can also be found online: The Dragon in My Garage.

The line that stands out for me is: “Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?” In other words, of what value is a completely arbitrary belief? What distinguishes having a belief that possesses no real content from having no belief at all?

The average day-to-day claim you’ll hear in New Age circles won’t be quite so outlandish as these two, but it can be addressed the same way. This approach helps you quickly weed out the claims that have little to no basis — if their proponents don’t even know why they believe them, why should you join in?

We may be astonished someday to discover that there are unicorns on Tau Ceti and dragons in our garages. My goal here isn’t to assert that there aren’t; technically this claim would be equally baseless. But without evidence or reasoning, we do ourselves a great disservice to adopt any belief whatsoever about these things — even if they ultimately do exist, as counterintuitive as that might sometimes seem.

Unfortunately our beliefs only start out that way. As time goes by, many of our beliefs end up floating free of support unbeknownst to us. The reasoning changes out from under the belief or it’s forgotten entirely, but the belief still persists. Like the coyote in the cartoons we find ourselves mentally wandering right off a ledge and not falling until we finally look down.

A little algebra is the best way I can think of to illustrate this subtle and sneaky process.

Say you have the following equation needing a solution:

X + Y = Z

And it’s provided for you that X is 36 and Y is 64:

36 + 64 = Z

A quick calculation will reveal that Z is equal to 100. Problem solved.

36 + 64 = 100

Now suppose you find out you were mistaken about X and Y. You were given bad information about their values and must revisit the problem. So you insert the symbols X and Y back into the equation and are left with this:

X + Y = 100

There’s something wrong with this picture. X and Y added together may indeed total 100; we have no reason to doubt this possibility. A lot of numbers add up to 100 and this equation could still be perfectly accurate. But, not knowing X and Y, is it appropriate to have any preconception whatsoever about the value of Z? Or do we need to put the symbol Z back in its place and approach the equation from the very beginning, as if we had never solved it in the past?

The answer of course is that we have to start fresh. The mistake in reasoning is obvious when presented as a simple math problem. But when it comes to real life, everyday conclusion-making, we commit this error all the time.

For example, years ago I was interested in magnet therapy, which has become one of many billion dollar pseudoscientific New Age industries. You can find any number of explanations by proponents for why magnet therapy works, but the explanation that snared me had something to do with magnetic fields interacting with the iron in the blood and forcing the capillaries to gradually organize themselves into more efficient matrices or configurations, leading to better blood flow and thus better health all around. If you haven’t done any study on the matter it sounds vaguely plausible. It has the illusion of scientific authority which makes so many therapies in this vein financially successful.

I learned later that the iron in the body isn’t ferromagnetic — that is, it will be unaffected by magnetic fields, at least in any way that matters in this context. The truth of this becomes blatantly obvious when you consider an MRI exam. The magnetic fields an MRI scanner produces are stronger than any magnet used in magnet therapy by many, many magnitudes. To undergo an MRI you must be screened for anything metallic beforehand because it becomes a projectile when the machine is turned on. If the iron in the body could be at all affected by these therapeutic magnets, an MRI scan would be horrifically fatal.

So for a (mercifully) short time I was actually left with the belief that magnetic therapy works, but not for the reasons I first thought. But why did I retain this conclusion when the solution to my equation depended entirely on the truth of this particular variable? If I’d been presented with the MRI argument at the same time as the magnetic therapy argument, would I ever have had any reason to believe in magnetic therapy in the first place? Why did knowledge of the absence of ferromagnetism not instantly nullify my conclusion upon discovering it?

Our faulty human brains are the answer, and once again it’s something we have to stay vigilant about.

The brain is very susceptible to retaining unsupported beliefs out of habit. Deep cognitive grooves are cut by long-held beliefs that can’t always be filled in overnight. The mere lifespan of the belief has a way of masquerading as additional confirmation and support, in our perception. We can go on for years believing something one day simply because we believed it the day before, and for no other reason.

One of the best ways I can think of to test whether the chain leading to a belief is intact is to forget I believe it. Any given belief should be rediscoverable; if I woke up with with amnesia tomorrow I could still be led back to the belief in a natural, open-ended manner. If I had to learn math all over again I would find that, given X is 36 and Y is 64, Z would still equal 100.

If you discover a new fact that may alter a belief you have about the world, try rebuilding your belief from scratch. Recompile it, so to speak. See where the links in the chain lead. Ask yourself, “Given my current understanding of the world, is this the belief I would come to today if pondering it for the first time?” If your belief is solid and in line with your understanding, you’ll be led to the same place you were before. New information isn’t a threat to a solid belief, and if the belief isn’t solid, what good is it to you?

“What do I believe today?” is the question to ask yourself. Maybe the answer will match what you believed yesterday and maybe it won’t. If you’re genuinely interested in truth, either outcome is a step in a clearer direction.

There are those who use their desires as an epistemological compass; whichever idea about the universe sounds the most appealing is deemed to be the most accurate. They judge the quality and validity of tests against their beliefs by whether or not the results give them the answers they want to hear. New information is evaluated on the basis of its alignment with the reality they favor rather than on its inherent strength or merit.

You’ve probably guessed that I don’t think such people really have much interest in truth, as vehemently as they claim to. What they’re after rather is one very specific and exclusive truth, and if it doesn’t hold up they’ll bolster it as needed.

But we can’t be too hard on them. I do this, you do this, and everyone else does this. The question is, how bad do we let ourselves get about it?

This is one of many cases where our neurology is working against us and a measure of self-discipline is required. Cognitive bias is an adversary that we never rid ourselves of. I know of no way to subdue it completely and still possess a human brain, but, life does get easier when we begin to gain some control over it.

The second approach — the appropriate approach — to truth seeking is to not care in the least what the answers to your questions will be. All possible realities should remain equally acceptable to you.

We’re eternal souls created by a divine intelligence? Great. We’re deterministic automata that will one day be reduced to fertilizer? Great. We’re self-aware nodes in a colossal computer simulation? Great. The universe is just the dream of a sleeping dragon and we’ll all blink out of existence when he wakes? Great. All great.

How you feel about any one of these realities should have nothing to do with your willingness to accept it as true, if that happens to be what all the evidence eventually points to. The moment you favor one over the other, you awaken that bias. You start to slip into the trap of overvaluing the information you like and undervaluing the information you don’t, and that’s a very bad place to be.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. At first, it feels wrong to stop caring. A voice in the back of your head keeps saying, “If you stop caring, you’ll believe anything! You’ll be lead astray!” But you find that it’s the exact opposite that happens. You discover the beauty and purity of a bottom-up approach to knowledge rather than top-down. You allow your experiments to do what they were always meant to do: reveal, not confirm. You let conclusions naturally and neutrally form from evidence rather than looking for evidence that supports the most seductive conclusions. You stop putting the cart before the horse.

And it should be clear that desire adds no productive value to the acquisition of truth. Using an example above, if it’s true that I don’t have a soul, would my desire to have one influence its presence or lack thereof? Will I gain any extra eternalness by believing in it over someone who doesn’t? Desire can lead me to a belief that’s more comforting or uplifting, and if I was satisfied with false beliefs that would be fine. But to someone who sees veracity as worthwhile in its own right, desire seems to just create more problems than it solves and should probably be put aside in this endeavor.

In the future, try paying attention to how you come to your own beliefs while keeping these two approaches in mind. Be aware of how you assimilate new information that caters to your beliefs and desires versus information that doesn’t. Do you jump to conclusions before the evidence leads you there because the conclusions are indicative of a universe you prefer to live in? Do you dismiss evidence against your conclusions because you want to hold on to the universe they grant you? If so, what do you really gain from this?

You’ll be surprised how often you catch yourself doing it if you really watch for it.

Truth is discovered, not preordained.

I don’t have any more important message to convey with this blog than that one.

While I don’t disagree at all with this response, I think the word “evidence” can be problematic. It’s technically the right word to use, but in common language it conjures up images of CSI investigators and people in white lab coats. The word has physical, material connotations, so it immediately triggers protest from someone with a metaphysical stance. The true definition of the word accommodates both physical and rational convincers, and it’s perfectly appropriate to come to a belief through reason alone; many argue this is the only way one comes to a belief.

So what these people are asking for is simply a reason to believe.

This isn’t a lot to ask. In fact, this is demanded by me, you, and everyone else when introduced to a new idea.

Try as I might, I can’t think of a single occasion where something is ever believed without reason. The process of adopting the belief may happen so quickly and automatically that the reason for it never bubbles up into conscious awareness, or the belief may have a vast web of reasons behind it and a single one can’t be pinpointed. But a reason is always present. The birth of a belief always occurs on the effect side of the equation rather than the cause. It comes from somewhere; it’s a result.

So until someone shows otherwise, I feel comfortable making the following statement:

1. No one ever believes something without a reason.

The quality of a reason can vary a great deal. I can believe something because it has overwhelming evidence supporting it and zero evidence against it. I can believe something because it makes me feel good. I can believe something because my friend’s sister’s coworker remembers reading about it in the paper a few years ago. Good or bad, valid or invalid, these are all reasons to believe.

In other words:

2. Some reasons to believe something are better than others.

The truth of these two statements seems self-evident to me, or nearly so. They may come across as so elementary and obvious that they aren’t worth mentioning, but it’s when these things are forgotten that the trouble starts, and they’re forgotten often.

When you’re no longer aware of your reasons for a particular belief, that belief is at risk of turning into dogma. A belief you know the reasons for can be changed suddenly in the face of new and contradictory reasons. It remains open to future development or dissolution, as any belief should be. But a belief that you believe without knowing or remembering why can appear (falsely) to have an existence external to you. It can become something that you feel you can’t help but believe; believing it is outside of your control.

I can remember a lot of conversations I’ve had in the past about personal beliefs where this “reason-blindness” presented itself. My beliefs would be criticized for owing their existence to reason, because any one of the reasons in the chain could be weaker than I realized and would break under the stress of future information. I had no problem with this criticism because that’s exactly how belief should work. To me belief is merely a step beyond speculation. All beliefs are subject to change.

What was odd was that the arguers were apparently unaware that their own beliefs suffered the same affliction mine did. They often seemed to be genuinely ignorant of what happened in those moments between having the lack of the belief and having the belief. Not remembering their reasoning, the belief floated free of any sort of undergirding or support in their minds, which was ultimately what gave the belief its power. They were tricked into thinking that because of this independence the belief somehow transcended reason. Its own buoyancy would protect it from the danger of ever being cut down. It had become untouchable.

If it’s true that no one ever believes something without a reason, then we’ve identified an intellectual trap. Losing sight of their own reasoning rendered the foundations of their beliefs invisible and consequently frozen in time — in other words, dogmatic.

My point here is, if you have a belief that’s without reason, how do you even know you believe it? Again, it’s a simple notion, but often forgotten.

In my opinion, this is the boiled-down definition of a skeptic. Any human being (by default) needs a reason to believe something. A skeptic needs a good reason to believe something.

Which leads me to my third statement which is much harder to demonstrate the truth of and I’ll only be able to scratch the surface of it in future entries:

3. The quality of any given reason to believe something can be evaluated to a sufficient degree.

This is really the point where knowledge comes into the discussion. Belief graduates to knowledge when the reasons supporting it are sufficiently (a relative term) robust. Some would argue that all knowledge is really belief masquerading as something more concrete. Whether or not this is the case is the problem being tackled in the field of epistemology, and greater strides have been made in this effort than most people realize. I don’t claim to have a wholesale answer to this problem, but I can’t recommend doing some epistemology research highly enough. There are many resources out there relevant specifically to the contemporary forms of occultism, and I’ll post what I’ve found in time.