That Mad Feeling

Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics came in the post today, and I'm looking forward to reading it. I'll review it in a while, but today I just want to mention something that struck me while I was dipping into Rupert Sheldrake's introduction. It's that extraordinary episode that occurred eighteen months ago, when Sheldrake and others were invited to present papers at a science festival and were furiously denounced in the press by leading scientists like Peter Atkins, who said there was no reason to suppose telepathy was anything more than a "charlatan's fantasy".

It's the sheer heat of sceptics' responses that gets my attention. I've often wondered about it, and just recently I got a sense of why people react so fiercely to what they can't explain. It was while spending Easter with my father, now pushing 92. While I was there my sister called, asking me to look for a business letter that she had left there on her last visit. I put off looking for it as long as possible, and then took the plunge.

The problem is, my Dad doesn't do filing. Never has. Thirty or so piles of paper are distributed around the house, on the kitchen and dining room tables, around his armchair in the living room, in his bedroom, on the table in the hall, on chairs, on the floor, behind desks... So if you want to find a piece of paper all you know is: it's in one of those piles.

The first pile I tried contained, more or less in this order, two recent bank statements, a letter concerning a hospital appointment next month, a speech given by Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s, a very old bar of Swiss chocolate, a restaurant menu, an invitation to a wedding in 1973, a letter warning that the car insurance is about to expire, a Christmas card from people who died ten years ago, two sheets of blank paper, junk mail for kitchens, a clipping from a 1960s fashion magazine, a maintenance manual for an old food processor, and last month's phone bill.

Note the distribution of recent and possibly relevant material - bank statements, bills, hospital appointments, etc - evenly spread through the detritus of the past. Even more fascinating: every single pile of paper is exactly similar. There is the same anarchic spread of current business mail with personal correspondence, clippings, photos, etc. If you want to gather all the phone bills or bank statements together - as we sometimes do - you will have to hunt through all the piles to collect them.

Now, you may say, that happens with elderly people - get over it. But it's not that at all. Not only is Dad quite normal in every other respect, he is mobile, mentally sharp, and has an active social life. It's not because he's lazy or forgetful, he likes it this way. My sister and I once spent an afternoon filing the statements and bills, and on our next visit he had turned everything back to the way it was before.   

Of course it's my problem, not his. But it really is a struggle. It provokes me - there's something creatively mad about it. When I was searching for this letter I found myself simultaneously clutching my head and groaning. I'm sure a psychologist could come up with some neat explanation of why he does it, but I'm not convinced it would really satisfy me.

That night I lay awake anxiously trying to fathom it, and completely failing.  Then I recalled Kant's odd image of one man milking a billy goat and the other holding a sieve underneath to catch the milk - it comes in the Critique of Pure Reason to illustrate the idea of complete nonsense.

I also remembered where I first came across it, mentioned in With the Eyes of the Mind, a book about out-of-body experiences by two psychiatrists, Gabbard and Twemlow. It's their response to reports of accident victims and hospital patients having consciousness of events around their bodies when by every normal indicator they are unconscious. Up until this point the authors had done a competent job of researching the OBE, but this aspect of it completely stumped them. They then struggled rather inefectually to explain it away, for instance by accusing hospital doctors of being bamboozled by deviant patients or of doctoring their own data.

I realised then that I entered that strange state of mind that militant sceptics occupy when they contemplate paranormal claims. They are reacting to something which is impossible, inexplicable, and makes no sense. It really is a deeply uncomfortable feeling. So when they reject ESP or out-of-body awareness it's not just an ideological act, a commitment to scientific orthodoxy, but a cry of anguish. Of course I know this perfectly well on an intellectual level, but it was salutory to be reminded of just what it feels like.

Comments

[The Major]

A very interesting article. I guess you could say that sceptics getting angry suggests that they fear something may come true.

After all, if someone was to put forward a truly ludicrous claim - for example, dogs are really the master race and have merely tricked us into believing we own them (don't ask me how I came up with that)- it would be merely be dismissed with a laugh and a sneer.

People get angry when they are threatened. First they ignore you, then they fight you. Then you win.

By the way, your blog is superb.

[Topher Cooper]

I don't think that their anger implies that they fear that its true, as satisfying as that would be to us in the other camp. No I think that the emotional energy that boils out is frequently because of intense cognitive dissonance.

The ideas don't fit well within their mental framework -- they just don't make sense. But to treat them seriously -- even in order to summarily reject them -- requires some degree of integration with existing ideas be attempted -- much more so than if the ideas are treated as purely fictional. But they just don't fit, and trying to make them fit is cognitively disruptive. The defense is rejection and anger. As the main note indicates, this is a natural reaction that we are all subject to when we are faced with what doesn't fit our mental constructs.

Once upon a time, the concept of "fear of psi" was a hot topic in parapsychology (mostly pushed by Charles Tart). At that time, I speculated (privately) that fear of psi by scientists (even, in subtle ways, among parapsychologists)the following hypothesis:

When we are young we believe in "magical thinking" -- that people can just know our thoughts, distant things and future events; that thoughts can change the world directly, and that there are ghosts and strange kinds of beings out there in the world (hiding under our beds, for example). Much of our cognitive development takes place with these processes as part of them. As we get older everyone in our society needs to put aside these ideas to some extent, and to deal with scientific thinking, scientists must put them aside quite strongly. But the construct of our cognitive structures are predicated on these ideas so we can't simply throw them away. Instead, we must build cognitive shields around them so they don't interfere with adult/scientific thinking.

There are, however, different ways that those shields might be structured. Some of us, by chance (not any intrinsic superiority) have built shields that allow easy ways to circumvent some of them (though with limits). For others, though, any attempt to present something too similar to these "childish" views as something to be taken seriously, is felt to be an attack on their carefully constructed, honestly necessary, shields, and they react appropriately.

They may not be particularly rigid people or hostile or whatever, in general. You're just hitting them at a point that, for them, is below the belt.

Pure speculation, of course -- but I thought I would pass it along.

[Robert McLuhan]

Major – thanks for that :-)

Topher – interesting idea. There’s obviously a lot going on here. It’s ironic that sceptical psychologists speculate endlessly about the psychology of believers (eg David Marks, Zusne and Jones, etc), but in ways that perfectly illustrate some rather questionable thought processes of their own, eg. ignoring key evidence, making ad hominem attacks, specious reasoning, and so on. I’m sure that one day, when psi is less controversial, psychologists will find quite a lot to say about the thinking of their sceptical colleagues in this regard.

[jack]

Interesting blog. I find it "frustrating" to get my mind around someone who "apparently" either can't keep things in order or who uses a system that to me loks just like chaos. (My son!)
Now a question. Your site,and many others, places a line before (above) the name of the author of a comment. It seems to me that the line,as a separator, should be after the name.
What is the logic of your system?
thanks

[Ronnie]

Topher, what you said is why I almost never listen to psychological explanations of unexplained phenomena. What's there is there regardless of whether you want to believe it or not. That's my take on the mysteries of life.

[Robert McLuhan]

jack, quite right. Can't find a way to change the position of the line, so let's lose it altogether.

[Topher Cooper]

Recently (March 28th, to be precise) added numbers 6-8 of Marcello Truzzi's Zetetic Scholar to those (1-5) he has made available on line:

http://www.tricksterbook.com/truzzi/ZeteticScholars.html

I was reading there (#6 p53)a response by the noted philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend to an article by Ray Hyman. I thought one thing he said apropos to this discussion:

"Blinded by the myth of the Right Way they
feel constrained to give 'objective'
reasons for their choice: the excluded
alternatives - all excluded alternatives -
were not just omitted, they did not deserve
being considered. ... What scientists do
in such circumstances is the following:
they interpret the discomfort they feel
in the presence of unusual ideas as a
clear perception of the worthlessness
of the ideas and so transform their own
personal or group idiosyncracies [stet]
into 'objective"criteria of excellence."