Malice in Wonderland: Science and the psychology of belief in the paranormal.

‘Do you believe in miracles?’ asked Alice. ‘Well, of course! I try to accomplish at least six before breakfast’ said the Queen.” Alice in Wonderland

Why do we believe in the nonsense of the paranormal and this hocus pocus of the supernatural that is a flaming cauldron that overflows with mediaeval superstition and what the American sceptic, magician and debunker James Randi calls ‘flimflam’; astrology, numerology, poltergeists, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, spirits, UFO’s, crop circles, alien abduction, the Loch Ness monster, rheumaton bracelets for arthritis … This list is endless and demonstrates the intractability of the desire to believe in things beyond the pale and the sheer extent of human gullibility. Should we not perhaps take this hoard of irrational, illogical beliefs, unproven superstition and conjecture and drop it in Loch Ness to drown the monster of credulity once and for all? Why do we have this apparently irresistible need to believe in the invisible?

In the preface to his collected poems (1934-1952) Dylan Thomas writes of meeting a farmer dancing in a fairy ring and when Thomas asked him why he would do this the farmer explained it ensured a good crop ‘ . . . and I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t’. In a similar vein, the great American psychologist William James relates an anecdote about his meeting with an old lady who told him the Earth rested on the back of a huge turtle.

‘But, my dear lady, ‘Professor James asked, as politely as possible, ‘what holds up the turtle?’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.’
‘Oh. I see,’ said Professor James, still being polite. ‘But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?’
‘It’s no use Professor,’ said the old lady, realising he was trying to lead her into a logical trap. ‘It’s turtles-turtles-turtles, all the way!’

This story demonstrates the intransigence of apparently illogical beliefs and, while the old lady’s world may be a bit stranger than most, all minds operate on fundamentally similar principles. Dr. Leonard Orr accounts for such beliefs by suggesting that the mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts; the Thinker and the Prover. The Thinker can conceive of absolutely anything – that the Earth is flat, that an endless chain of turtles supports it, or that the moon is made of green cheese. The Thinker can conceive of itself as mortal or immortal, or both; it can think that it lives in a Christian universe, a Hindu or Buddhist universe, a Marxist universe or any one of innumerable possibilities. Psychology has amply demonstrated, to the dismay of the medical profession, that the Thinker can think itself sick and, equally, think itself well again.

The role of the Prover is simply to demonstrate that what the Thinker thinks is true. What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. If the Thinker thinks that warts can be charmed away, the Prover will set about the task of organising and motivating the necessary physiological mechanisms to remove them. Whatever evidence is presented the Prover will prove that the evidence is in line with what the Thinker thinks. And scientists are by no means immune. They can be as subjective and as passionately neurotic as fundamentalist bigots about pet theories, worldviews and any threat posed to them.

There is in psychology a vogue for a ‘catch-all’ explanation of development; the biopsychosocial model, the social science equivalent of the ‘superstring-theory-of-everything in contemporary theoretical physics. This model sits astride the purely biological, psychological and sociological explanations of behaviour and seeks a compromise between them so that, for example, not so long ago one of the burning questions in psychology concerned the origin or development of intelligence – whether it is innate i.e. genetic or a result of an enriched early environment, i.e. nurture. The so-called nature-nurture debate spawned endless academic debate between theorists of mutually exclusive theoretical and practical points of view. The pure reductionists on the one hand think that every facet of behaviour can be reduced to a purely biological explanation in terms of the workings of the central nervous system (CNS), the action of hormones or endocrine imbalance and a Pavlovian model of simple stimulus-response conditioning while on the other side were those who favoured an equally narrow model in terms of purely environmental factors and social learning. Inexplicably, it took almost a decade to realise that these models were perhaps not as mutually exclusive as had previously been thought and that maybe human factors like intelligence were a product of both genetic inheritance and social environment. Both sides agreed to agree on the shaky compromise that yes there is a genetic predisposition but this inheritance could be modified by the environment, by learning so the debate then evolved from one of either/or into how much of each, with purists of each side tipping the balance in their favour: The reductionists claiming 75 per cent genetics and 25 per cent learning while the sociologists and social psychologist wagered the opposite. Such is the stuff of science – argument, debate, pet theory and, perhaps, there is a little objectivity in there somewhere.

The relevance of this is simply to demonstrate 1) that most behaviour can be accounted for in terms of this broad biopsychosocial model and 2) the problem for credibility in paranormal research lies not so much with science but with scientists. I hope to illustrate that science is a broad enough church to accommodate all theoretical persuasions and the problem lies with an unwarranted prejudice by certain sections of the scientific establishment who refuse to remove their blinkers to consider possible alternatives.

Since the late seventeenth century and the rise of rational, empirical methodology, science has done its utmost to demonstrate the fragility of the supernatural and paranormal phenomena and one would think that 300 years of science is almost long enough to have all but disposed of superstition, cheap mystery and mysticism and yet these ideas and beliefs are as strong now, if not more so than ever before. Despite the logic and rationality of science we may be genetically and biologically hardwired to believe in the invisible and while this may be a primitive vestige of early evolution or a sign of advanced evolution, our irrational beliefs emerge during psychological development and are fuelled by social hypnosis and conditioning.

Since the dawn of human civilisation shamans have communed with the spirit world, priest magicians developed the sciences of astronomy, astrology, alchemy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, architecture and so on. Throughout the pre-classical epoch the priest magicians of Assyria, Babylonia, Chaldea, Mesopotamia and Egypt laid the foundations of human knowledge and science; alchemy (later revived and popular in Europe during the mediaeval period). They observed the movement of the planets and stars, developed methods of marking time and calendrical systems based on their knowledge of astrology and astronomy. They foretold the future and practised divination by numerology, augury – the reading entrails or patterns in the clouds; they directed the building of temples and pyramids.

The knowledge of these earliest of sciences developed by the priest magicians continues to spread throughout the classical period of Greece and Rome modified to suit local conditions and religious beliefs and enters into our own Celtic heritage as a tradition upheld by the high caste of priest magicians or sun-worshipping Druids of our native Celtic ancestors. The knowledge of our ancient forebears somehow survives the dark age of ignorance and forgotten learning, probably as an oral tradition in isolated communities continues into the mediaeval period; Isaac Newton, astrologer and freemason, the physician and esoteric philosopher Paracelsus, Dr John Dee who received the angelic language of Enoch (the Enochian keys), Count Cagliostro, aristocrat and alchemist in search of the Philosopher’s Stone – the ultimate elixir of life.

We should not forget either that during the 19th Century it was the most eminent and respected individuals of science who continued the traditions of Freemasonry, who were the self-appointed guardians of the Rosicrucian heritage and the secrets of Gnosticism, the Illuminati and the Knight’s Templars, who founded the numerous secret societies that flourished during the Victorian era, the most well known of which is probably the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – a society which exists to the present day .

Given such an illustrious and sometimes notorious heritage, why then does modern science find the paranormal beyond probability? Well, as indicated earlier, it doesn’t – the problem is not with science which itself quite happily demonstrates, measures and quantifies the invisible, science happily accepts the inferred and its postulates. Science tells us that apparently solid objects are not in fact solid, table and chairs are material = molecules = atoms = subatomic particles = energy = nothingness. The problem lies with our limited perception – we do not have the cognitive apparatus to directly see the truth of this, we rely on hypothesis, experiment, testing, evidence and theory. Kirlian photography apart (?), the problem is that science has not quite yet developed instruments capable of measuring so called psychic abilities and phenomena, we cannot directly measure thought or thought waves, or subtle energies and so some scientists suggest we ought to abandon the venture before it even starts. And what would have happened if Edison, Marconi, Tesla, Curie and Fleming had abandoned their neurotic obsessions – we would be in the dark, without radio, x-rays or antibiotics. And if Logie-Baird had given up we may not have had television; ‘come on John, put away those biscuit tins and wires, pictures through the air – are you mad?’

However, things may be changing the development of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of consciousness drawing on expertise in physiology, cognitive psychology, perception, computer science and so on has brought the study of the mind back into vogue, long fallen into disrespect since the rise of Behaviourism based on the work of Pavlov, and subsequently pioneered by Watson and Skinner in the 1940’s and 1950’s. The rise of transpersonal psychology demonstrates increasingly a return to the philosophical and experiential roots of psychology as a result of the failure of the essentially pure reductionism of B to address the fundamental philosophical problem of consciousness. Individual experience is valid, subjective and qualitative data is useful and scientific. It is now OK again to talk about ‘mind’ and to validate the experiential and to address the issues raised by the problem of consciousness.

Science is not at fault but scientists, or at least some scientists – those who refuse to even entertain the notion of parapsychology as a discipline despite, for example, that modern theoretical physics suggests there is every reason to believe that remote viewing (RV) anomalous cognition, extra-sensory perception, (ESP), psycho-kinesis (PK) are possible. Apparently, the theorems of quantum physics, which I don’t pretend to understand rest on logical impossibilities yet modern solid state electronics (i.e. digital electronics) would be impossible without them so we live in a world of technology that operates on impossibilities, a world that like Alice’s ‘Wonderland’ is not so much ‘illogical’ but one that has a curious fuzzy logic of its own. There are, it seems, no reasons to doubt the possibility of time-travel or bilocation (appearing to be in two places at the same time). Anecdotal and qualitative evidence taken along with the results of a large body of research undertaken over the last 60 years – the work of JB Rhine in the 1940’s, the CIA’s 20 year mind-control and RV project – MKUltra, etc. and the postulates of quantum physics combine to suggest that the evidence for ESP, PK, RV etc. is so overwhelming that we are now in a position to propose that we should accept such things as not only possible, but probable and even (dare I use the word) ‘proven’.

We should spend less time in trying to ‘prove’ or not the existence of paranormal abilities and devote more effort and resources in developing and applying heuristics to distinguish between the genuine and the artefact, that is between phenomena which is real and that which is perceptual distortion, illusion, self-delusion, hallucination, hoax and disinformation.

In conclusion, there is no problem for science but, paradoxically, in the irrational and illogical intransigence of scientists who refuse to accept an essentially qualitative paradigm and the validity of the experiential data it generates as sufficient scientific evidence. If we can overcome this hurdle we may suggest that our biopsychosocial programming drives us to believe in the ‘invisible’ and the ‘impossible’ and there are good arguments and evidence for the existence of psychic abilities and experiences. It seems that like Dylan Thomas and the old lady who firmly believed that an infinite regression of turtles supports the earth we need to believe. Why? Because we have to! In short, we should believe and in the words of Dylan Thomas – we are damn fools if we don’t!