Why are telepathy, precognition, and other psychic phenomena so often dismissed? If they’re real, what does that mean for our understanding of minds and the universe? Could rejecting them be science’s greatest blind spot?
Transcript
Dispelling the Dogmas of Science, Episode 10
Are Psychic Phenomena Illusory?
The standard materialist dogma is that all psychic phenomena, or so-called psychic phenomena, are illusory. They don’t happen, they can’t happen, they’re impossible. If the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain, as materialists assume, and it’s all confined to the inside of the head, as materialists assume and as we just discussed in the previous session, then it’s impossible for my thoughts or needs or desires to influence somebody at a distance, many miles away. It’s impossible for a dog to know when its owner’s coming home by picking up their intentions from 10 miles away or even hundreds of miles away if they’re flying home by plane. It’s impossible for somebody to see what’s happening in a different place in the world by remote viewing or clairvoyance. It’s impossible for someone to dream of something that hasn’t yet happened, as in so-called precognitive dreams. It’s impossible for animals to know when earthquakes or tsunamis are going to happen several days in advance when seismologists who are studying tremors in the earth don’t know when they’re going to happen.
All these things are impossible. Therefore, they can’t happen. Therefore, they don’t happen. Therefore, anyone who thinks they do happen is a charlatan, a fraud or a fool. This is the standard mentality of committed materialists. And in fact, this is the best litmus paper for someone who’s really committed to a dogmatic materialist worldview. If you mention a topic like telepathy, most people are mildly interested or curious or tell you about experiences they’ve had themselves. But for dogmatic materialists, it’s like a red rag to a bull. They’ll dismiss it, sneer at it, deny it, ridicule it, call it woo-woo, and try to denigrate anyone who believes in it, either as being stupid or uneducated or unscientific.
This is probably the most controversial of all the areas that I’ve discussed because it’s the one that touches our own lives so much more closely and about which so many people have their own experiences as they do indeed of the sense of being stared at. So what’s actually going on?
A history of psychical research
In 1882, in London, the Society for Psychical Research was founded as an attempt to investigate scientifically these seemingly unexplained phenomena. And ever since then, there have been a handful of researchers around the world who’ve done research on these subjects. Very often they’ve done so subject to enormous adversity, criticism, attacks from their colleagues. It’s destroyed many people’s careers to take an interest in these subjects because they’re very, very strongly taboo. And yet, psychic researchers and parapsychologists have accumulated an enormous body of evidence now.
