Travels (57 page)

Next I pointed out the trends and fads of science, which affected scientists at every level. It was perfectly acceptable for dozens of the world’s most distinguished scientists to propose that our society engage in a costly search for extraterrestrial life,
¹¹
despite the fact that the study of extraterrestrial life is, in the words of the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “a study without a subject.”
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A belief in extraterrestrial life is a speculation indistinguishable from pure faith. Few if any of those great scientists would sign their names to a proposed study of psychic phenomena, because the paranormal is not fashionable in the way extraterrestrials are. Yet there is arguably more evidence for psychic phenomena than there is for extraterrestrials.

So I was saying that, from where I stood, the enterprise of science did not look so different from other human enterprises. There was institutionalized superstition; there was fraud; there were missteps and errors; there was conservatism and plain pigheadedness; and there were fashionable trends. Observed Marcello Truzzi, a former editor of the CSICOP journal, “Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, open-mindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.”
¹³

I was reminding the audience of this, not to discredit science, but to place the workings of science in a more realistic perspective with regard to unaccepted phenomena.

Next I said I wanted to address one of the most difficult stumbling blocks in the scientific approach to disputed phenomena. In many cases, such as so-called psychic activity, researchers came up against the argument by so-called practitioners that they couldn’t reliably produce results on demand; that they couldn’t work in a laboratory setting; that they were inhibited by the frowning skeptics around them; and so on. It seemed that the practitioners were defining a state-dependent phenomenon. Practitioners had to be “in the mood,” and the mood was easily shaken. Traditionally, scientists found this position hard to accept. Mystical states, meditative states, trance states, were all hard for scientists to accept.

Yet everyone has firsthand knowledge of activities for which you must
be “in the mood”: for example, sexual intercourse, requiring lubrication in the female, erection in the male. Creative work is another state-dependent activity that cannot be reliably performed on demand, as the vast literature devoted to “courting the muse” testifies.

We know from subjective reports and from our own experience that these state-dependent phenomena are accompanied by a change in consciousness. There may be a perceived or a real change in energy and concentration; there may be a change in perception of time, and so on. Such changes vary from day to day, from person to person, and from experience to experience within the same person. The highly variable nature of the experiences, and the subjectivity of the experience, make state-dependent phenomena a difficult challenge to scientific investigation.

I would suggest to you that the scientific study of creativity has fared no better in the last century than the scientific study of psychic activity, and for much the same reasons. Yet nobody would deny that creativity exists. It is merely very hard to study.

Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say that the wonders of real consciousness far surpass what conventional science admits can exist. For example, suppose I told you that, while a group of huge men charges at you with the intention to maim you, you were required to throw a ball seventy meters to strike a one-meter target that you can’t see just before you are slammed to the ground and crushed to a pulp. I doubt there is a single person in this room who could do such a thing, or would even dare attempt it. Yet we can observe this unlikely event performed every Sunday afternoon on television, during football season.

The change in consciousness necessary to execute a downfield pass in a professional football game is ordinary to us and hence unremarkable, but it at least suggests that other trained changes in consciousness, arising from other cultures and traditions, may also yield surprising results.

I earlier attempted to cover, in an informal way, some of the scientific objections to so-called paranormal phenomena. It is true that many of these beliefs are superstitions, but so are many beliefs in the more scientific world, such as the world of high-tech medicine.

It is true that many practitioners are frauds, but a proportion of working scientists are also frauds.

It is true that progress in the paranormal investigation is slow, but so is progress in many scientific fields, particularly when they are poorly funded.

It is true that some paranormal phenomena seem to be state-dependent and consciousness-related, but so are many everyday phenomena that lead to such unremarked wonders as a new painting, or a Sunday touchdown pass.

Thus, to my mind, none of these traditional scientific complaints about the paranormal seems adequate to dismiss the field from legitimate study. In looking at the matter more closely, I find three other reasons that are much more powerful grounds for dismissal.

The first is the quasi-religious discomfort these phenomena evoke in a hard scientist. In the early years of this century, Freud and Jung ended their close friendship over the issue of occult phenomena:
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Jung was openly interested in the paranormal;
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Freud was not. Before the split, Freud wrote Jung: “My dear son, keep a cool head, for it is better not to understand something than make such great sacrifices to understanding.”
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And Jung’s enthusiastic interest in astrology, which he studied as a system of psychological projection and not as a physical reality, caused Freud to reply, “I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall not do so gladly.…”
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The question is, why not? What was Freud’s reluctance? Freud himself studied mythology and art without hesitation. But the occult made him uncomfortable in a way that is recognizable yet difficult to identify precisely. One can argue that the discomfort has fundamentally religious origins—origins so deep as to be untraceable except through lengthy argument, which is not relevant here.

In addition, paranormal phenomena provoke a related discomfort, which has at its core an intellectual prejudice. I would venture to say that nearly everyone here tonight has an advanced degree. We have all survived a great deal of schooling, and we are skilled in rational, linear thought. We have been trained to value such thought and the products of such thought. Thus we turn with palpable uneasiness to the occult section of the bookstore, which contains writing by all sorts of illiterate and uneducated people. These people don’t share our thought systems or our sentence structures, and we are likely to see ourselves as slumming when we consider their work.

Whether we admit it or not; any person of academic standing holds certain criteria that govern the kinds of references he will cite in his writing, and for that matter the kind of subjects he will write about in the first place. I suggest that these criteria represent a powerful prejudice that
has colored all formal academic consideration of the paranormal—as the unsavory reputation of Mesmer colored the assessment of his claims for hypnotism.

A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted.

Indeed, the primacy of theory is conveyed by scientific history. Bronowski notes: “Charles Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution: that was known to his grandfather. What he thought of was a machinery for evolution: the mechanism of natural selection.… Once Darwin had proposed this [mechanism], the theory of evolution was accepted by every one; and it was thought the most natural thing in the world to call it Darwin’s theory.”
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In other words, data to support the idea of evolution—such as the fossil record—were long known; but a convincing theory to explain the data was lacking. Once Darwin provided the theory, the data were accepted.

Now consider so-called psychic phenomena, such as clairvoyance, remote-viewing, and psychokinesis. On the face of it, all these phenomena seem to be contradicted by physical theory. At least, there is no immediately available theory to account for them. And that, it seems to me, is a major reason why data to support these phenomena are denied.

What data? you may ask. Many scientists deny there are any data at all—that there is no incident or event that is properly documented, properly controlled, and therefore not subject to fraud and trickery.

Yet there are, in fact, well-studied subjects who appear to defy scientific explanation—in particular the famous medium of the last century, Mrs. Piper, who was championed by William James, professor of psychology at Harvard. Mrs. Piper was subjected to intense scrutiny for nearly a quarter of a century, but no skeptic was ever able to demonstrate fraud or trickery.

Yet the claims of fraud persisted. James wrote rather irritably, “The ‘scientist’ who is confident of ‘fraud’ here, must remember that in science as much as in common life an hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed; and a fraud which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply ‘fraud’ at large, fraud
in abstracto
, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of specific concrete facts.”
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As for other scientists who continued to claim as-yet undetected fraud, James retorted, “I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are
impossible.
”
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Beyond the narrower question of whether an isolated phenomenon, such as clairvoyance or telepathy or seeing auras, actually occurs, there is a broader issue affecting science in the modern day. I refer to a certain fixity of viewpoint among scientists, a certain tendency to confuse contemporary scientific theories with the underlying reality itself.

Jacob Bronowski, one of the most eloquent commentators on the relationship of science to other human activities, always reminded us that scientific theories are a fiction. “Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.”
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Science offers a picture of the world, but its picture is not to be confused with the underlying reality itself.

Yet we all tend to confuse our fictional views with reality. I think most of us have glanced out of an airplane window while crossing the United States, and have been surprised not to see lines dividing the states, as those lines appear on a map. I myself remember the shock I felt when I first looked at live human tissue under a microscope, and found it colorless; I expected to see pink cells with purple nuclei. Yet those colors are artifacts that come from microscopic stains. Real cells have no color.

Of course I knew better, just as we all know there are no lines on the land to demarcate the states. But we forget. And, in fact, we forget with a surprising ease.

I was educated in a twentieth-century, Western, scientific-rational tradition. I was raised to think that the scientific view of the world was the correct view, and that every other view was pure superstition. I agreed with Bertrand Russell when he said, “What science cannot tell us mankind cannot know.”

I had few formal experiences to contradict this view. But my later experiences have broken out of that scientific-rational perspective. I still find the scientific view useful, and I live happily within it much of the time. But I now regard science as providing an arbitrary and limited model of reality.

Because reality is always greater—much greater—than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.

Let’s review why, with a simple thought experiment.

* * *

Think of a person you know well.

Now make any correct descriptive statement about that person.

George is an even-tempered man
.

Now consider that statement. Is it really correct?

The chances are, as you consider it, you’ll begin to remember times when George lost his temper, or was upset about something, or in a bad mood for some reason. You’ll think of the exceptions.

So you must admit the statement is not quite accurate. You could modify it to say,
George is often an even-tempered man
, but that is actually just evasive. That word “often” merely says the statement is sometimes correct but sometimes not. And since it doesn’t tell when the statement is not correct, it isn’t very helpful.

So you’d have to be more explicit, to give a fuller statement.

George is usually an even-tempered man, except on Mondays when his favorite football team lost the day before, or when his wife had a fight with him, or when he gets tired and cranky—usually late in the week—but not always—or when his boss gives him a hard time, or when he has to rewrite a report, or when he has to go out of town … or when … or when …

Pretty soon you see that your descriptive statement is turning into an essay. And you still haven’t covered all the things you know. It’s still not complete. You could write pages and pages and you would still not be finished. In fact, it’s hopeless to try to make a complete statement about George’s ever-changing temper. The subject is too complicated. It was doomed from the start.

So let’s start all over.

Let’s make a different statement.

George is neat and orderly
.

That’s unquestionably true, you think. George is always neatly dressed, and his desk is always tidy.