Subtitle: “Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation”
(Basic Books, Jan. 1996, 244pp, including 20pp notes and index)
(Chatto & Windus, 1995, as Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief)
Here’s a book I read when it came out, back in 1996 — I think I was intrigued by the “search for supernatural consolation” part, which appealed to my impression that religion is more about psychological need that consideration of what is actually true — and picked up again last week to reconsider in light my current ideas of how basic human nature is reacting to the modern world, an environment so different from the one our minds evolved in.
I’ll summarize the key themes here:
- First, Humphrey proposes that interest in paranormal phenomena — which can be grouped as either psychokinesis (PK) or extra-sensory perception (ESP) — is driven by the need to replace the comforts of traditional religious beliefs, which have been discredited by science. Thus the paranormal ‘project,’ as it were, is about trying to discredit the materialist view of the world. People want the consolations of their religions back, with their assurance that the future holds something to look forward to.
- Second, this project has failed. It *could* have worked, but the evidence is too scattershot. A key argument against is that “from unwarranted design,” i.e. why paranormal phenomena only occur in circumstances that seem restricted in ways not required but their premise. (E.g. why telepathy or telekinesis aren’t used in daily life — only for shows.) And how this argument applies to the miracles of the Bible.
- Third, so why does the public still believe? A mixture of personal experience, external authority, and a priori reasoning. But there are logical reasons why these explanations fail, namely “prescriptive inefficiency,” that too little information is present for such large effects.
- Finally, there’s a larger reason a world infused with paranormal phenomena would not exist — they would short-circuit evolution, and the very forces that brought about our species. (And how Asimov explained this in 1982.)
My observation, considering my big theme, is that these ideas undermine one of the key premises of traditional science fiction. All the notions of telepathy and premonition and telekinesis. They are taken for granted in modern media “sci-fi”, but they have gradually fallen away from consideration by the more honest sf writers.
I’ll clean up my notes, adding some key bolding, and have some further comments at the end.
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- That Hypothesis
Laplace stated he had no need of ‘that hypothesis’, meaning God, in his explanation for the solar system. By the end of 18th century this attitude spread throughout science, and by our day has wildly succeeded. There is no scientific need for a deity, for elan vital, etc. Yet most people think in the earlier ways of thinking (3.3), by belief in the soul, in God, in survival after death, as well as phenomena like telepathy, precognitive dreams, ghosts, and so on. (Examples p3-4.) More women think like this than men. Even some respected scientists promote paranormal ideas, p4-5.
Certainly the fabric of Western culture celebrates the paranormal—architectural monuments, national holidays, children’s literature. P5-6. News stories about weird events are commonplace.
Have people simply not heard what science has accomplished? Not at all, they have, but they ignore it.
Why? Because—scientific materialism is unsatisfying, demeaning, dispiriting. It doesn’t answer our broad anxieties and questions.
Book has three parts: how people have sought supernatural explanations for big questions; how they continue to search as faith has weakened; and then to critique parapsychology and psychic claims.
[[ 2025 comment: we can frame this now as the a reflection of the conflict between the basic human nature that evolved over a million years, with the modern environment, including our new understanding of the universe. The old intuitions don’t work, and people are unsettled, even offended. ]]
- Who Needs It?, p10
People need explanations of where we came from, and what we are, and they want reassurance that things will be all right in the future. We need the last to assure ourselves that life is worth living; otherwise we might as well be dead. (Camus; Gauguin.) And so the philosophies they adopt, to live by, tend to minister to the desire for an idealized parent figure who can answer these questions. Many believe life is only worth living because God exists. Examples: Barrett, Kierkegaard, Burns. Thus belief in the supernatural occurs most highly among the marginalized, and in times of stress. Yet irreligious people have poorer mental health. Just as young birds can be tricked by super-stimuli phony superparents, so religious satisfy the needs for explanations and assurances.
[[ 2025: also: people project the protocols of human life onto the universe: thus there must be a father figure to tell us what to do. ]]
- Preparing for the Best, p17
Of course believers claim truth, not just the art of satisfying needs. In a sense most religious systems are quite rational: an explanation E explains the present state of the world P in such a way as to assure an agreeable future F. More commonly these systems merely assure that F is possible. In practice people usually conceive of a desirable future, and work backwards to develop the sufficient explanation; we live for the future. So religions and quasi-religious systems adopt a kind of reconstructive strategy, rewriting facts and history to deliver the desired prognosis. This is, of course, begging the question…
Example of Plato’s Republic and people knowing their places. Like psychotherapy. Bible rewriting 21.3. –“we know that the text was in fact revised continually so as to bring earlier chapters into line with changing idealizations of the future.”
But science should not do this; it should be prepared to discover truths other than what are sought.
[[ 2025: thus people reject or ignore science because it doesn’t tell the story they want to hear. It’s never about honestly disputing evidence or reason. The stories that were told to enhance the tribe – indirectly, for survival, not apprehension of the nature world. ]]
- A Ministry of Science, p23
Scientists like Newton and Bacon believed that their studies would confirm their religious beliefs, not undermine them. What went wrong? A little knowledge is dangerous. Science did not reveal an immaterial soul, a divine designer, or the existence of material spirits. It could have worked, as evidenced by the claims of a few who say it has: Sheldrake, Tipler. But it hasn’t. So what went wrong?
- The Howling Storm, p29
One split between science and religion is over the question of what premise we ‘have to’ adopt in order to explain something. A rational method employs frugality, elegance, probability; in short, Occam’s razor. But a religious method will choose the alternative that makes the world a nicer place. Santa Claus vs. parents.
Descartes started it with his materialism (everything is about the impact of things against each other), which he excepted only in the case of the human soul. His contemporaries reviled him. More, Derham, Newton.
Science went on, showing in many instances that nothing was in control, only chance, contrary to religions which have always assured people that everything has a cause, a deeper meaning. Folk wisdom that there was a reason for everything, p35. (A statue of Mary was taken to trial for falling off a church top and killing a person.)
But science’s view refutes the idea that there is anything to ourselves other than our own physical bodies, that there is no communication with others except through our bodies. No magic powers, prayers and spells ineffective. And we’re all in the same situation. Bertrand Russell quote. And what Jonathan Swift’s hero discovered about his mistress.
- Jam Today, p39
Author recalls being lonely at a boys’ school, where one day a week the boys were allowed to eat the jam they brought from home.
Religion brought together knowledge and love (explanation and assurance), but science tore them apart. Which do people cling to first? Like the monkeys, they want love (1950 experiment with infant monkeys; wires and cloth). Some tried a half-measure called Deism, in which God was the prime mover but not an active intervener. Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau. This started an anti-science backlash. (Blake.)
Maybe science could simply be ignored. Or refuge could be taken in resisting any explanation of the human psyche. Let science explain the brain, and what matters science to men, said Tennyson.
- Another Think Coming, p45
People want a future other than what science easily provides them. Cannot science simply be faced down? A few writers try to claim that rationality itself is invalid, that anything goes, that there are no right answers; but they do not convince. Feyerabend. Science has a terrific record of providing better predictive explanations than anything religious. (47.8 “In general, every time religious and scientific explanations have met on the same field, history shows that it has been the scientific explanation that has come off best.”)
But perhaps science can be beaten at its own game; perhaps the scientific picture can be revised by finding new facts, or non-standard facts. New evidence might force a revision, as does sometimes happen in science (Newton gave way to quantum theory). Maybe even non-scientists might perceive such new facts, just as primitive cultures have sometimes been thought to be able to perceive abnormal facts, like ‘spirits’, which physical science has ignored. So a way to beat science at its own game would be to uncover facts and prove the current doctrine wrong.
P45.3: “Anyone who cares to do so can read up on creation, nature, life and death, any day they please. And they will get a much fuller and better understanding than has ever been available before.” [[ This reflect my comments in this 2020 post. ]]
[[ So a key thesis here is: the attraction of the supernatural is to undermine the science that took away religion. Beat science at its own game. ]]
- Uncommon Sense, p52
Despite claims that science is itself an unnatural way of thinking—inhumane, or a later infection of a mind designed to impose symbolic meaning on the world—science actually is just a formalization of the common sensical ways most people have always thought of the world. (Refs to Wolpert, Ridley, and anti-science Appleyard.) People understand that you can’t walk on water, that people’s flesh is like animals’, and so on (54t), because it would be impractical and stupid to do otherwise. All flesh is the same; Catch-22. Even people who say they believe in telepathy, or whatnot, do not rely on it for everyday affairs.
Even primitive cultures are not as different as was once thought; when extraordinary events are believed, they are still recognized as extraordinary. Ref Boyer.
Thus common sense, not just the new science, has always challenged people’s hopes for their future; people have always known what they were up against. This is why evidence of exceptional events has always been eagerly sought.
Thus do religions entail miracles; it wouldn’t be much of a religion for one not to. Many modern believers profess to eschew vulgar miracles, to act as if a materialist; but deep down they are being disingenuous. Deep down everyone, at least, would ‘think it pretty’ (Hemingway) for paranormal phenomena to be so.
9 The World of a Difference, p60
What people most want is verification of their souls—not to be merely human machines. The existence of a soul would make no difference in this world, Descartes’s followers said. There would be a difference, claim some, between an ordinary watch, and one with a soul.
Turing proposed, for example, that a computer would not be like a human, because a computer could not exercise the telepathic powers that he believed were evident in human beings. The ‘imitation test’ would reveal this…
So paranormal powers are what we seek, as evidence of a soul, because otherwise the soul would make no difference; the two phenomena are equivalent.
So even if this evidence is scanty or unreliable, it would make an essential difference. The very unreliability might be evidence that the soul works differently from the repeatable realm of material physics.
[[ this is remarkable, both the author’s equation of the search for the soul with that for paranormal powers; and his revelation of the actual nature of Turing’s proposed test. Turing believed in telepathy..!
10 Breaking the Law, p67
Rather paradoxically, the early efforts to find paranormal laws sought regularity, some sort of laws beyond those already known; while recent research into parapsychology more likely insists on defying scientific analysis. A positive urge on the one hand, a negative one (to refute science) on the other. These two motivations might lead to different research strategies; the confirmation of new realities, vs. the tearing down of the apparent physical one.
In the Bible, St. Paul decided only a few miracles were significant for a positive message; but many Old Testament miracles are of the other type.
It’s also true that it’s easier to wage a negative campaign; there are many more potential ways of proving a conventional theory wrong, than of proving an alternate theory right.
- Anything Goes?
Parapsychology has gone from the search for new realities to a grasping for any evidence against the conventional one. But to do so is to lose control. If you allow that the soul may exhibit itself in an erratic, unpredictable matter, then you admit that your evidence is essentially no different from what could be accomplished by a con-man, or by self-deceit, etc.
Since we already know that such deceit or self-deceit is possible, then we’ve gained nothing for the soul by allowing it to exhibit itself in this way.
But perhaps we needn’t concede this in advance. We need to be careful not to presume evidence false merely because it appears paranormal. Hume proposed that by comparing relative miracles, one should always choose the alternative of human deceit, as less improbable than the overturning of natural law. Still, this is only an argument of probabilities; we cannot use it to absolutely rule out a paranormal event. (Analogous example of a ball drawn from two bags of black and white balls.) Similarly, people have been so sure of their knowledge of the world that they have disbelieved true facts—of meteorites, continental drift, Nazi exterminations, etc.
So we can rule out only logical impossibilities. Otherwise, we can only suspect, and ask, if a paranormal event is valid, what else might we expect to be evident?
- Designed Too Far
So the clue to whether we are dealing with the soul, or the paranormal, might be in what it does *not* achieve.
Formalizing this strategy as the ‘argument from lack of design’ or the ‘argument from unwarranted design’ we look for ways in which a phenomenon appears to be restricted in some way that is not accounted for by our theory of its underlying cause. If this seems to be the case, we look for another explanation.
Simple example: Clever Hans, the horse, who could only perform when others were present, especially his owner. If the horse were truly calculating, there is no reason this restriction should exist. Therefore, some other explanation must be so. (Namely, that the horse is responding to subtle clues from the audience or owner that it has reached the correct answer.)
This argument provides good reason for rejecting a proposed (paranormal) explanation even if no alternative explanation is available. Skeptics (e.g. James Randi) sometimes get themselves into trouble by claiming that every paranormal phenomenon can be explained by normal means. We don’t have to do this.
Not all limitations are appropriate here; those that are are material constraints (why one thing and not another) and psycho-social constraints (why under some conditions and not others?).
Still, some would argue that built into the soul or the paranormal is just the pattern of constraints we are seeing. There is no way around this. (Maybe 6000 years ago the world was created with apparently ancient fossils.) Some find such arguments paradoxically convincing.
13, The Art of the Possible
We can bring the Argument from Unwarranted Design to bear on the miracles of the Bible, especially those attributed to Jesus. First we ask Question 1, what is the hypothesis to explain the phenomena? Question 2 is, If this hypothesis is right, what form would you expect in advance that the phenomena would take? And Question 3 is, Given what has occurred, or not, are there signs of inexplicable constraints?
We are to presume from the record of Jesus’ miracles that he was capable of diverting nature from its course; he could affect matter at a distance, cause physical changes, transform it.
Then considering questions 2 and 3, it’s odd to consider that the pattern of Jesus’ miracles was just that of conjuring tricks of that time in history. Compare that to the thought of what *you* would do with paranormal powers were they suddenly granted you (say, by a fairy godmother). Why mimic common conjurers? (Also note p97 how the Gospels may have been edited to leave out the most obvious feats of conjuration.) Is it possible that Jesus genuinely believed he could exert supernatural powers?
14, Behold the Man
Despite this, is it possible that Jesus really believed he had paranormal powers? Or that he did exert them on occasion?
First of all consider that Jesus was born into circumstances that seemed to fulfill ancient prophesies, p101. It is not surprising that someone should have done so, and the person in this position would have been treated very specially. This would in turn affect a child’s psychological development. A child believing himself special might imagine how his special powers worked, and once in a while, perhaps due to chance, the powers might seem to actually work! (Comparison to astrology, p103, how people behave according to expectation.)
Beneficent conspirators might have collaborated to confirm this impression. (Compare anecdote of father and ‘psychic’ son. Father sometimes cheated for boy; boy sometimes cheated to not disappoint father. Net result, each believed there was some actual psychic powers there in the middle.)
The case of Uri Geller offers similarities; the possibility of conspirators. How fans grant that they might cheat some of the time, but some of is surely real.
As for Jesus’ healing ability…this is no longer even an effect attributed to the paranormal. The general aura of mysticism would have been sufficient to convince some people they had been cured, at least for a while. (And anyone can warm a watch in one’s hands, like Uri Geller, and ‘fix’ it some of the time.)
15, Into the Light
Author’s opinion is that *all* paranormal phenomena are similarly explainable. There’s never been any evidence to pass muster. We reach that conclusion using the argument from unwarranted design. (Smry 114b) Paranormal phenomena can be roughly divided into action at a distance (psychokinesis, PK) and extra-sensory perception (ESP).
16, P? K?
Most cases involve living people affecting matter at a distance; but spirits of the dead (eg poltergeists) or even gods or angels (causing floods, etc) are sometimes involved.
What constraints might be involved? Those for normal physical actions include physical (limits to strength); cognitive (inabilities); and volitional (unwillingness). We would presume only the last would apply to PK. In practice no one believes this is the case. In fact, the range of supposed PK powers is erratic and preposterous, irrelevant to anything anyone might need or want. No psychic ever offers to perform as an audience member suggests.
Well then, perhaps the ‘theory’ of PK must be modified. Perhaps an intermediate, phantom ‘body’ is involved in performing PK actions, and this introduces additional constraints. Or perhaps an intermediary agent is involved–perhaps God–who has his own volitional constraints.
But these approaches solve nothing; the evidence is still a mess.
- E?S?P?
The range of arguments is similar. ESP describes cases when someone’s mind comes under the influence of distant events, rather than vice versa. Cases are often divided into clairvoyance–contact with the world–and telepathy–contact with another mind.
Of the possible constraints, physical, cognitive, and attentional, only the last should apply. The actual evidence is impressive in aggregate, but very hit-and-miss throughout. There is lots of suggestive evidence of limited powers of ESP in many people; but the evidence never carries over from one situation to other comparable situations. Performances typically resemble parlor tricks, couched in riddles. As with PK, practitioners seem only to perform for public consumption; one never hears of them using it to perform mundane tasks for themselves. The powers only seem good for proving they exist in stage shows.
Laboratory cases all seem to fall into two groups: those where there is no independent confirmation of what is reported; and those where, by bad luck or bad design, the results might have been due to something other than ESP. (Example: a telepathy experiment involving a ‘ganzfield’ done in the 1980s.)
- Need You Ask?
Anyway, even the experimenters would agree that paranormal phenomena never seem to occur except when being tested for. That in itself is a sign of unwarranted design. Nor has evidence of ESP every showed up in tests for other things–sensory perception limits, for example. (Or asking students about the phase of the moon, for example.) Scientists all along have been testing for ESP without realizing it, by testing for conventional things with the assumption that no secret communication, etc., was possible.
- Keeping the Faith
It could have worked, but it has not; the evidence has been too shabby; it has been, in fact, a disaster for the parapsychology campaign. The parapsychologists’ very diligence has undermined their campaign, by exposing the spottiness of their data. They’ve lost all credibility.
The parapsychologists talk as if they have been winning all along; and the public still believes. Why?
First, the argument strategy described here is not the way most people think. Rather, most people will assume a strange phenomenon is paranormal unless proved otherwise. This is of course faulty logic.
There is also the circular reasoning used to verify that Jesus must have performed miracles because he was the son of God, because… And childhood indoctrination. Give me the child until age seven… p149
One simple counter-explanation in most cases, of course, is that the purported phenomenon simply did not occur; and this is something many are unwilling to allow. We know, of course, how easy it is for people to exaggerate, dissemble, even deceive themselves; but most people are unwilling to admit that *they* might have been deceived.
Another factor is the rewriting of history to embellish dubious cases, to preserve reputations even after exposure as frauds. This effect is so strong some people persist in believing paranormal explanations even after performers admit they’ve used trickery. Houdini, Randi. Talk of fakery has a way of implying that something real does in fact exist, just as an elaborate terminology for various types of effects has a way of conferring respectability.
Beyond all these factors is a sort of paranormal fundamentalism, a belief that whatever the record has been so far, eventually psychic phenomena will be proven.
But what is it that makes them so committed?
Ch 20, Three Givens
Such refusal to accept defeat is not necessarily unjustified (in general). One might believe something from logical deduction of other principles.
What are the arguments that are sufficient for most people?
- The argument from personal experience.
- The argument from external authority.
- The argument from a priori reasoning.
One could imagine how these would work in the case of rainbows, for instance. These are examined in the next three chapters.
Ch 21, Being There
The first one comes first because it is widely accepted that personal experience is the most persuasive influence in establishing belief in something. Philosophers have allowed it; eyewitnesses are given special credence.
Even intelligent and critical people can be persuaded—even by Uri Geller, or ‘near death’ experiences; and sometimes they become indifferent to any rational argument otherwise. Similar stories come out of the popular surveys quoted earlier; people believe because of some slender [often laughable] incident. (p163 examples, e.g. “I called someone on the phone and they said they were about to call me.”)
On the other hand, the statistics suggest that *most* people who believe do so for reasons other than personal experience. The most common reason, from the survey, seems to be evidence that paranormal events have happened to someone else.
Ch 22, Inside Stories
Psychologists are not surprised by so-called psychic experiences; they are understood as phenomena that occur due to the vagaries of perception and memory and the mind’s capacity for imaginative reconstruction; they are analogous to visual illusions.
Thus it is not surprising that many people should have such experiences. Why don’t *more* people have them?
More detailed survey results show surprisingly low figures for personal experiences of common psychic events. The explanation must be that in most cases, people actually tend to be over-cautious about their perceptions. They know how their senses can trick them. Children learn many obvious things about how the world works at early ages. People understand there is a difference between how things seem, and how they are. (Piaget was wrong.)
Then why are people, apparently, *less* dismissive of reports from others about paranormal phenomena?
Because to some extent strangers are immune from the critical examination people can direct at themselves. Familiarity makes us skeptical; a prophet is less honored in his own house.
And of course we *like* hearing these stories; so we allow the benefit of the doubt.
23, On Good Authority
From the survey, about half of all believers are relying on what other people tell them. Cultural authority is a second factor.
People tend to believe things because other people believe them. Of course there are good reasons that people grow up learning to believe in authority; our knowledge of the world is mostly based on second-hand reports. We start with our parents; later allow as authorities professionals and statesmen and TV reporters…not blindly, because what these people say usually is true.
Further, numbers are persuasive to many. Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong. In experiments, people are often persuaded to accept outrageous statements if those around them agreed with them. (Solomon Ash, e.g.)
Of course this doesn’t mean that the crowd is always right. Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Delusions…. But overall, the dangers of listening to other people do not outweigh the rewards. Life is too short to go around doubting all the time; it would be to deny culture. p180.
Then there are metalinguistic conventions throughout culture—contexts in which what is said is more likely to be believed, or not (see examples p180m).
Combine all these factors—a large number of authority figures stating some claim and swearing to its truth—and you get the rituals of most religions; irresistible persuasion for most people.
And yet, even outside religion, most public figures express a belief in the paranormal ethos. Believers in common sense usually have the sense to keep quiet about it. Since two-thirds of ordinary people believe in psychic powers, their opinions are the ones most likely heard over lunch.
But the greatest influence is the mass media. Paranormal stories sell. It’s a ‘story’ whether or not objective facts support it. Reputable journals, to avoid appearing as rationalist killjoys, often give too much credence to dubious stories. Media stories often employ ‘truth frames’ such as assurances of credibility that it would rude, at best, to not accept. Stories gain an aura of holy respectability. The idea that it is ungrateful in the extreme not to believe in a supernatural parent of some sort gets extended so that belief in the supernatural carries a certain moral virtue, as if rubbed off from the religious idea that a supernatural parent figure watches over them.
24, It Stands to Reason, p188
Finally there is the possibility of a priori reasoning for concluding that something might be true, as in the case of sun and raindrops to deduce rainbows. Does such reasoning apply to psychic powers? Apparently not—such reasoning isn’t included as an option in the surveys. Unless everyone simply takes it for granted.
Two sets of facts would have impressed people throughout history: the difference between a living body and a dead one; and the appearance of human shapes in dreams and visions. An obvious conclusion might be the existence of some animating principle that can leave the body; the soul. These ideas have been criticized, but author thinks they may be too cautious: such thinking should be common among everyone, even children.
Moreover, the evident fact of human consciousness, self-awareness, might be the even more impressive experience that leads people to such conclusions. As Descartes concluded; the dualist conclusion.
The alternative, physicalism, is simply unthinkable even to some philosophers. Cultural assumptions reinforce dualist thinking.
Scientists these days mostly assume that a monist theory of mind-brain relationships will be found—but there’s very little agreement on what kind of theory is sufficient.
Commonplace dualist belief therefore encourages all sorts of paranormal belief; in fact psychic events can be seen as pretty trivial compared to the dualist belief in mind over matter.
Parapsychologists, in fact, are mostly explicitly dualist.
And so the belief in dualism supports belief in the paranormal…which we need to justify our belief in the soul.
25, Beyond the Limits
Aside from these arguments—there are firm reasons author has for being certain the parapsychologist quest is a wild goose chase.
First, there are logical reasons why psychic explanations are impossible for the phenomena they are attributed to.
Logic cannot tell us what in fact is true or false. But it can help us with interpretation of facts; explanations. Some explanations *can* be logically ruled out (e.g., a man was hit by lightening six times because his name was Bernard).
Consider the case of the words in Psalms that seem to anticipate Shakespeare’s birthday. The problem in thinking that the first *caused* the second is that of ‘prescriptive insufficiency’—too little information for too large an effect. You can’t get out more than what you put in. The same logic applies to psychic phenomena.
Theologians distinguish between miracles by the means they are produced, and miracles in substance—events that are miraculous either because of how they were caused, or because of what they are in the first place. Psychic phenomena are always the former, and it is *assumed* that the means employed to produce a miracle is in fact the cause. It is here that the logical argument applies.
26, Nothing for Free
Consider this argument against the commonly believed phenomena of PK and ESP. In the language of communications theory, these are explained by some signal in an unknown medium from the source to the receiver; input to output. Consider the case of a die being thrown in New York, and a student being tested for psychic powers in England. To be PK or ESP, there must be not just a correlation, but a resemblance, between the die, and either the wish or the perception of the student.
The trouble with an analogy to TV or telephone is that they depend upon the receiver being a particular kind of device, receiving a particular type of signal. Without knowing this, the signal would have no effect.
Now some psi theorists argue that there is no physicalist explanation for how the mind works; it works on some other level. But as information theory, the same objections still apply. So the conclusion about psi communication is that it just does not happen.
How is it such goal-oriented, wish-fulfillment notions arise? Because we have such goal-oriented control over our own bodies. But such a close relationship can never exist between a human being and an object, or even between a human being and another human being.
27, On the Wings of a Dove, p218
Then the conclusion is that we are only bodies; the ‘I’ is the body entirely, and ‘soul’ is nothing more than a word for some part of the body.
In fact, we can show that the real world, without the soul-power, is unsurpassably rich; and that the world with soul-power would be only a snare and delusion.
We must set aside all the wishful thinking, the idea that ‘it would be pretty to think otherwise.’ Instead we can see that the normal world does have, in fact, all the best tunes; that in the paranormal world, life itself might be impossible.
The basis for this claim is the premise that life has evolved by means of natural selection. And one of the basic conditions for natural selection to occur is that living organisms should be highly discrete—in space, in time, in independence of goals—because natural selection depends on competition between *individuals*. Immortality and universality would be the enemies of natural selection. Paranormal powers would short circuit natural selection. Universal life would be no life; universal mind would be no mind.
What are we to make of this? That the real world is liberating and empowering. The dove might think that flight would be easier in empty space (p223.8) It is religion and the paranormal that promise the vanity of a paradise that confuses life and death. It is not that we have no need of the hypothesis; it is that if it were true, we would probably not be here.
[[ 2025: Of course, I’d guess most people who “believe” in paranormal powers *don’t* “believe” in evolution. They’re different ways of “thinking.” ]]
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Finally, the author’s final argument recalls an essay by Isaac Asimov from years ago, about how the world doesn’t make sense if telepathy exists. I summarized the essay at the end of this post about one of Asimov’s books of essays. That essay, called “Don’t You Believe?”, was first published in 1982 in Asimov’s Science Fiction.
From my earlier post:
1, If telepathic ability existed, it would have great survival value; “Telepaths would be better off, would live longer, and would have more children (who would also be telepathic, most likely)”;
2, The mere fact that we are trying to find out if telepathy exists is strong evidence that it does not exist — because if it did, it would be an overriding ability we would take for granted.;
3, Or perhaps telepathy requires advanced brains that have only recently begun to exist, such that initial efforts are only barely detectable in some people;
4, But if telepathy is possible and has survival advantage, it should have developed far earlier;
5, Yet if it does require advanced brains, might it explain how leaders in politics, business, religion, and science came to be such leaders?
6, Yet there are so many examples of such leaders who have been fooled, deceived, and betrayed. Julius Caesar; Napoleon; Hitler
