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Waiting for his owner (Getty)
Steven Pinker likes to portray himself as an exemplar of science fighting against a rising tide of unreason. But in relation to phenomena that go against his own beliefs, he is remarkably irrational himself: he asserts that evidence is not required to assess the reality of phenomena he does not believe in, because they cannot possibly be true. How can a champion of rationality adopt such double standards?
In his new book Rationality, Pinker is adamantly opposed to telepathy and other kinds of extra-sensory perception (ESP). His position is that they do not happen because they cannot happen. He freely admits that he pre-judges the evidence by claiming that these purported phenomena are extremely improbable, assigning them an infinitesimal “prior probability”, in the language of Bayesian statistics. He acknowledges that “believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality”, but he justifies his refusal to look at the evidence by classifying these phenomena as “paranormal’, lumping them together with seemingly unrelated topics like homeopathy, astrology and miracles.
He then invokes an 18th-century argument against miracles by David Hume. As Hume put it, either miracles are impossible because they “violate the laws of nature” or because “no testimony is sufficient to establish” they contradict what has “frequently been observed to happen”. In Pinker’s paraphrase: “Which is more likely – that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?”
To clinch his argument, Pinker invokes physics. He is not a physicist himself, so he relies on the authority of Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist who claims that the laws of physics rule out ESP. Other physicists disagree. Pinker rounds off his discussion by quoting Carl Sagan’s mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
In a recent interview in the Harvard Gazette, Pinker explains why he rejects the “primitive intuitions” that lead most people to believe in ESP. He and his fellow rationalists “unlearn these intuitions when we buy into the consensus of the scientific establishment — it’s not as if we understand the physiology or neuroscience or cosmology ourselves”. Instead, they buy in as an act of faith.
For readers wondering how acts of faith might bias our judgements, Pinker helpfully identifies “the Myside bias” as “probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe”. This surely applies to himself.
Is Hume’s argument against miracles relevant to ESP? Hume was writing about descriptions of biblical miracles. He was right that they are not frequently observed. But is telepathy a unique miracle that is said to have happened far away and long ago? No. It is frequently observed today.
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SubscribeIf I remember correctly, years ago Rupert Sheldrake argued that once one population of tits learned how to peel the tops off milk bottles left on doorsteps that knowledge spread through an as-yet undefined mental ether to other populations of tits who thereby learned how to access the milk. Again, if I recall correctly, he was roundly criticized for his theory.
I don’t think Mr. Sheldrake ever identified the proposed ether but I was never willing to entirely reject his theory, nor reject fields such as parapsychology or the paranormal. I began my career as a chemist/biochemist and was left with several strong impressions about how science works and its limits: scientific culture is inherently deeply conservative; the scientific consensus can easily be wrong and sometimes represents little more than group think; and we do not have an explanation that comes close to explaining how complex biological systems, such as individual mammalian cells, function without degenerating into chaos.
With respect to the first two observations, we’ve all seen how the scientific establishment has behaved (to their great shame) during the pandemic. Dissenting voices have been silenced and distinguished scientists cancelled, all in the name of ‘science’. Some might argue that this behavior was an aberration induced by the pandemic, but there are plenty of more mundane examples in the history of science.
Consider Lamarckism which is basically the theory of acquired, genetically-transmissible characteristics: giraffes develop long necks over generations because each generation of giraffes spends its time stretching its neck to reach leaves high in a tree, and the tendency to have a long neck is transmitted to subsequent generations. This theory was debunked by Darwin’s natural selection that works on units of inheritance aka genes, and Gregor Mendel described how genes are inherited in predictable patterns. But evidence began to mount in the mid-twentieth century that some characteristics acquired during the life of an organism are transmitted to subsequent generations and the acquired characteristic is not inherited in a simple Mendelian pattern. Later research showed that chemical modification (principally methylation) of DNA switched some genes on or off in response to environmental stimuli and that methylation pattern was heritable. The field of epigenetics encompasses this type of phenomenon and is now part of mainstream science. But for a long time you’d be branded a fool or worse for endorsing any form of genetic inheritance other than Mendelian genetics.
The main reason, however, that I’m still willing to be open-minded about ‘alternative’ scientific theories is because the more we explore the molecular workings of even simple, unicellular organisms, the less clear it is how these entities continue to function. The complexity of even a single-celled organism is astounding. DNA chips now permit us to see most of the changes in gene expression in a cell in response to a simple stimulus such as adding glucose to a cell culture medium. Advances in mass spectrometry and other physical techniques allow us to visualize changes in the expression and physical form (chemically modified or not) of most proteins in a cell in response to a simple stimulus. The complexity of constantly changing biochemistry and gene expression is huge and begs the question of how a cell, and an organism composed of millions of cells, regulates all these genes and proteins in a way that is consistent with life. In other words, how does biology work? The relatively new field of systems biology attempts to address these questions, for example by applying the same type of mathematics used to control the flight of advanced jets which are inherently unstable, but we’re only at the beginning of that journey.
I’m not saying most claims based on an alternative view of how the world works are correct, and I agree with Sagan’s assertion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but I do argue that the scientific consensus is often deeply flawed and much too sure of its own opinions, and that the world may work in ways that are so far poorly understood.
The margins of science are fluid and strange; our intuition will serve us at least as well as logic and rationality. Scientists with the soul of an artist are what we need to really push the boundaries of knowledge.
‘Scientists with the soul of an artist are what we need to really push the boundaries of knowledge.’
Liked that. Thank you.
All very sensible. But on Lamarckism: It is stil not true that giraffes got their log neck buy each generation stretching theirs a bit and passing on the improvement. The original Lamarckism remains disproved. Epigenetics is a different mechanism, with different pootential and different effects. Epigenetics may have been delayed because its critics as a way of reintroducing a discredited theory – but, then, some of the early proponents may have seen it as exactly that.
But note: epigentics did eventually prevail despite being on some levels a special case of a dreaded Lamarckism process – albeit at very, very, short time spans and designed to be reversible as ‘learnt behaviour’ from an evolutionary perspective. Not that this should be surprising, brains and genetic reaction potentials are all ways in which genes increase their fitness by being adapatable to different environmental conditions, they are special cases under the Darwinian umbrella. In optimisation algorithms there is a similar example of this strategy in the use of memetic algorithms that have short term learning capacities as opposed to more simplistic genetic algorithms.
Regardless, it prevails because even if the short term sociology of science creates walls of hostility again mavericks, as Planck once said:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.”
Indeed.
Good post.
But I think a distinction should be made. Acquired characteristics and Mendelian genetics are part of the same wider theory, and now that we know more are complementary, even built off each other. A similar occurrence could be seen with Newtonian law and Einstein’s theories – for example the prediction/calculation of the existence of Uranus.
In both cases, they either built on what was there before or refined the knowledge. In the genetics case acquired genetic characteristics do not render Mendellian genetics incorrect.
In the case of telepathy, it is not suggested or supported by anything, and for it to be true it would render a lot of what we assume about the world untrue, incorrect. This distinction is not insignificant.
Err “In the case of telepathy, it is not suggested or supported by anything,” other than the experimental evidence that sheldrake refers to eg about predicting who is ringing you. Accounting for the phenomenon is the problem, not the fact of it.
You are missing the point, here. The problem is whether those observations are real, or just a matter of coincidence and bias. If your observations have a theoretical explanation, and/or fit with reasonable expectations, you need less good data tbefore you decide that they are real. If your observations, were they real, would require you to invent a completely new theory and reinvent a lot of biology and physics, you need a lot more.
Good biochemical summary, J.
But who decides what is and isn’t an ‘extraordinary claim’? If someone doesn’t like a claim they can simply say it is extraordinary and demand unrealistic levels of evidence.
Good question, actually. It is indeed part of the landscape that different people can have wildly varying ideas about what is likely, possible, or extraordinarily unlikely. I can see two partial answers.
If one side can make reliable predictions and confirm them by experiment, you can accumulate enough evidence that people who disagree can eventually be won over. Quantum mechanics was a pretty extraordinary claim, and Einstein notoriously hated it, but eventually he had to accept that their formulae gave the correct answers` – even if he continued to believe that the real principles of the universe were still undiscovered and quite different.
Failing that, there will just be two groups who cannot convince each other, and you can choose your favourite or just ignore the debate. If neither group can make useful predictions you could argue that it would not matter too much. In practice most people would probably stick with the most boring or most well-established alternative. And why not?
One could add that for serious, ill-understood problems like COVID or climate change the question is moot. You cannot *not* decide what to do, and there is no default option you can fall back on if you cannot prove anything else. All you can do is to sum over alternative viewpoints and what uncertain data you have, come up with some kind of list of alternatives with rough probabilities attached, and then take some decision on that basis.
Would evolutionary scientists admit to having souls? Surely a priori materialism automatically disavows such nebulous, unscientific entities? Perhaps most artists would deny having a soul for the same reason. What is actually required is scientists who look at raw data without imposing their own biases and ever elaborate interpretive ‘stories’. Which isn’t going to happen any time soon as they are committed to the status quo – those who step out of the consensus are silenced.
Pinker, Dawkins and their various co-helmets all suffer, I suspect, from a personality disorder that’s somewhere on the narcissism spectrum. Essentially, its pathology is something like “I am clever, therefore I am right, and anyone who disagrees with me must be too stupid to understand this, so cannot have any arguments worthy of being engaged with”. They thereby give themselves permission to dismiss opinions they disagree with without further ado, but nobody else buys it.
The problem arises because ‘clever’ is both self-defined and self-conferred as a distinction. The Pinker conceit proceeds to assume nonetheless that people clever in the way he sees himself as clever are necessarily always right.
This assumption fails empirically because we have all encountered ‘clever’ people in one sphere who were quite extraordinarily stupid in another. One thinks of Bill Clinton, who thought it was a good idea to to receive fe11atio in the Oval Office and then lie about it. Or there was Jeff Skilling of Enron, who thought you could steal billions and nobody would notice. Closer to home there is Giles Fraser, who comes across as exceptionally suggestible and naive – stupid, really – in everything he writes even though he can actually write quite well.
Pinker would not understand what he is doing here, because his a priori position – that he’s clever – for him rules out the possibility he might ever be wrong. He thus feels he needn’t marshal an argument for why he’s right, because unless you’re stupid, it’s obvious that he’s right.
This degree of self regard seems to me to pretty unambiguously on the personality disorder spectrum.
It’s remarkable how easily the populace lets public academics get away with blatant sophistry – then again, in saying this I am equally guilty of dismissing the opinions of certain people because they are (according to me) less clever than I am… the same sin that I accuse Dawkins, Harris, Pinker, Shapiro et al. of.
Mr. Wilson–thank you for modelling the self-awareness that is so often lacking in all of us.
yeah but you probably listen to them for a period first before dismissing their views as insufficiently informed…
Nonetheless, I think Pinker is right on this one. As for cats. Well i have had cats all my life. They have far superior hearing to a human and are extremely atuned to body language cues. Spotting your human is even easier than catching a mouse – If you are a cat.
I recommend “When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow” by Dan Rhodes – a little satirical romp you might enjoy.
True but a natural reaction. Last week on UnHerd there was a book review of a biography of a British empire-builder in the early 20th century. I read this book after the review and it demonstrated that the British were the good guys (with the odd bit of well-meant ineptitude).
But I have read another book called Empireland which shows that the British were just evil.
Empireland barely quotes anything good about the British and the newer book barely quotes anything bad (except that the army commanders were stupid and this was quite important). So we have two academic writers who don’t do a good job. They don’t try to be fair and they don’t research well enough. I have read a couple of Dawkin’s book and he just knows that he is right. He tries to sell this idea with the sheer energy of the writing. He is a bad (but rich) academic.
This is why you should read multiple sources and not regard any one author as an infallible source of truth. It is human nature to do this, I suppose as history and social media seems to suggest (as it is a shortcut) – and certainly the circus that is the publishing industry would prefer you stick to their approved list of fashionable writers. But the only way to properly understand anything is to read widely, think and come to your own conclusions.
Euclid once said to Ptomely there was no royal road to geometry, and this remark obtains in many other fields of human endeavour.
I mean I always assume I may be wrong. I am fairly certain I have only scratched the surface of what is known. I don’t understand General Rekativity and I never will. On profound philosophical and historical questions great minds have written and thought on these matters for millenia. Who, even the most knowledgeable and intelligent among us, can seriously claim without ill-advised arrogance to know everything?
And yet I don’t think this entails relativism. It means us poor finite beings must continually strive to know a little more, to tease out truth – for among the mist of complexity ot exists in rare veins, delighting when one stumbles upon it – and listen with a sense of humility.
..yet most of their scientific tittle tattle is sold to us as rock solid truth; nothing most definately got hot/cold/big/small enough to explode/collapse into a multiverse causing chemicals to evolve by blind, random, pitiless chance mutations over eons of time into chemists
I have read neither book so I cannot comment on what you say about them, but I can affirm that this type of “scholarship” is becoming more and more widespread. I often wonder if they are in cahoots, because you have to buy two books, one pro and one anti, on any issue to get anything near a complete picture; so both authors get a sale. Such antics are so far from what I was taught about writing an article – that you should always address arguments contrary to the one that you are putting forward and demonstrate why they are wrong or do not really contratct what you are saying.
You have obviously never read of word of Stephen Pinker’s work if you think that his position is that he is clever and so just believe him! And your resort to name-calling within two lines is unfortunately not any comment against Pinker or Dawkins but says a great deal about you! I heartily recommend Pinker’s book ‘ Rationality’.
Human beings are subject to very many well-understood cognitive biases, and to self-delusion. We are ‘wowed’ by coincidences, although consideration that millions of events occur, it would be more surprising if we didn’t experience ‘uncanny’ coincidences from time to time. Of course all the myriads of times coincidences do NOT occur are not of any interest and we don’t even recall them.
We’d expect some positive results from tests on telepathy just through chance. But isn’t it rather interesting how poor this power actually is, even in the most positive results? Let us say 80-90% of the population recognise the colour ‘red’ using the universally recognised and well-understood (but nonetheless complex) power of ‘sight’. (Why isn’t it 100%? -well there may be some cultural differences between the names of colours and the boundaries between them, plus there is the well-understood and biologically explained condition of red-green colour blindness. We could exclude the latter group and get even better results). Just nothing remotely like this is even claimed by the pro-telepathy lobby – the ‘telepathists’ get it wrong loads of times. Not a very useful power, how would it have evolved? There is also the obvious fact that the vast majority of us have never even experienced anything like telepathy, though most of us unless impaired have sight, hearing, sensation, smell, heartbeats, brain activity, intestinal movements etc. The true sceptical question arises as to why only a few people are so blessed.
Scientists are also subject to these biases as individuals, but unlike new age / alternative thought the discipline aims to disprove its theories and not simply pile up confirmatory examples and ignore everything that contradicts their beliefs. If they do, despite some famous cases (Piltdown Man etc) other scientists should and will often pounce and use rational arguments and evidence against the case being made. Their own reputation depends on being good scientists and not true believers so there is a correcting mechanism, unlike in parapsychology etc. There are issues of publication bias in science journals (positive studies favoured, but all results positive and negative should be of equal validity) and the replication crisis (interestingly mainly in fields of social psychology rather than the physical sciences) but this is now well understood.
New age and alternative science on the other hand resemble much more religions whose practitioners are completely committed to the belief system, and, just as Sheldrake and you do here, are much more likely to simply try and discredit critics and have never got any of their ‘studies’ accepted as valid in any reputable scientific journal.
Boring old narrow minded conventional science has achieved wonders. As Carl Sagan said, technology is indistinguishable from magic when sufficiently advanced. No doubt you use much of the this without thinking as we all do. Meanwhile, believers in astrology, telepathy, spoon-bending at a distance etc cannot show any convincing evidence that their theories are correct. James Randi offered big rewards to be proved wrong and never was. No one has somehow ever become rich by predicting the future, which is what we’d expect if such telepathic powers were founded in any fact. ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ – is it on balance more likely that the whole of established science is fundamentally wrong, or that perhaps true believers are more likely to be misguided?
But sadly, the preference of human beings for magical thinking is strongly engrained so to some extent it is a losing battle. However, interestingly, we are rational in most ways in our everyday life and the closer the issue comes to our own interests and well-being. Not many people who engage in paranormal musings immediately consider on finding their house trashed that it might not have been a burglar that did it but a poltergeist! And I suspect that not too many security services in the world would be impressed that a suspect had some illicit information because he was ‘telepathic…’
That’s more or less what the article says he does here.
Eh? I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do note a tendency in public life to insist that we should “follow the science”. I’m sure you can think of examples. And before inflicting the colossal consequences of “the science” it’s a good idea if there is some.
Sheldrake’s theories seem harmless to me, but Pinker’s apparent refusal to contest them other than via the arguments from authority and from personal incredulity is explained only by what I postulated. Even when you’re obviously right, asserting that you’re right because it’s obvious that you are is poor thinking.
He did not say that. Arthur C Clarke said it.
Yeah
“Scientists….the discipline aims to disprove its theories and not simply pile up confirmatory examples..”
I agree with this and I am a scientist. BUT I am an old scientist and, ultimately, my research was paid by the government through the university system, a system which was very, very unbiased. The idea was that whatever I published, someone else would try to disprove.
Today is not the same and academics get paid by the weight of publication, with marks for different journals. Today, the main thing is not about being right but only about publishing something. I am reminded of the recent book by Dalrymple, who followed a year of publications in the New England Journal of Medicine; he found about 50 papers which came to bad conclusions, didn’t follow correct methods, applied the stats in the wrong way etc. The pressure to publish has never been stronger.
I have not read Pinker’s book but I have read others by the author. Basically, he takes pages and pages of words to try to explain a simple thing. I can read it but can think of much more productive things to do. As Mr Redmond says, he comes over as trying to be clever for the sake of cleverness.
“, he takes pages and pages of words to try to explain a simple thing.” – ha! There is truth in that, made all the more ironic by the fact he wrote a book on ‘clean writing style’.
Credit to James the Amazing Randi in discrediting charlatans, but I suspect that if telepathy exists it won’t be proven by those who want others to think that they have it.
So far as I can tell, we have two main reasons for wanting to discredit telepathy:
1. insufficient evidence
2. untrustworthy claimant
Scientists/sceptics will always be especially wary of ESP claims, I guess because of a compound of how many claims have failed combined with how much those making such extraordinary claims have wanted them to succeed. This amounts to the opposite of the search for truth. In most cases we witness true believers who either want to feel special or charlatans who prey on others’ vanity or loss for their own financial gain.
But to Sheldrake these are strawmen. There will always be bad actors, especially when there is so much desire/disappointment about and the field is murky enough to shine illusory lights within it.
It’s not ‘what makes me special?’, necessarily. In most cases, telepathy isn’t about having some ‘power’ as you say; it’s not for the sake of controlling others, it’s for the sake of knowing them and feeling closer to them, the evolutionary advantage of which seems obvious. This needn’t be the case 100% of the time: we live our lives in parallel. In some sense, I would say telepathy occurs when those lines are closely aligned, but they are not joined, or if they ever are, certainly they couldn’t be so 100% of the time.
It is true that if one has a rare bond with another person, one might want to feel that the bond is special and mysterious and so be primed to stoke any flickering proof that this is the case. That makes me wary. All the same I know there are people whose psychology I can’t help but recognise as very similar to my own and whose general and specific intuitions and attitudes are close to mine. Sometimes we have texted each other, after a matter of days of having not talked, at the same time and on the same incidental subject. I suppose telepathy does not need to exist for things such as this to have occurred, and I wouldn’t get hung up about it, but if it did exist I’d say it was more likely to be in cases such as these and the ones Sheldrake talks about than in the ones you mention.
Agreed – that narcissism is ,of course, merely a more extreme version of the norm coupled with a degree of grandiosity . What disturbs me is that people actually listen to and respect these people – I guess maybe because that group have never investigated their own a priori assumptions either – something most practically intelligent folks do early on in their educative process ( mine during counselling training).
Democratic Party Disorder
There are limits to what is reasonable and sensible to try and prove or disprove – see also disproving the existence of god/gods. Bertrand Russell’s teapot explains this.
In this case you cannot possibly take the time and effort to fully disprove.
But instead look at what it would mean if it were true – that significant proportions of what we know to work and be true (or as true as can be) are in fact under question.
And look at what there is as evidence for its existence – self-reported incidents of pets knowing when owners are coming home is not good enough. Anyone with a pet will know the countless times that they move and sit thinking owners are coming home when they are not at all. I am sure these are not considered in this ‘data’.
Furthermore, most of those who claim expertise in this field are shown time and again to be quacks – whose training amounts to paraphrasing pseudo-historical manuals or clairvoyant organisations.
We cannot prove 100% for certain that telepathy does not exist, no, but so much more would be unexplainable should it be true. And it just isn’t.
Exactly!
Except for the part about God. But then religion is not science. ESP is claimed to be.
Yes, this was pointing out by Pierre Duhem – an interesting figure who was both a physicist and historian of science looking at the origins in certain medieval studies.
He noted that you cannot understand theories in isolation. If a theory contradicts other empirical theories that form a network of knowledge. ESP would contradict a wide range of well attested physical phenomena and more importantly there is no a priori empirical contradiction that needs to be explored by it. Newton wanted to explain how the motions of the planets was linked to the terresitial phenomena one sees. Einstein in special relativity wanted to unravel the logical problems thrown up by the contradiction between Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism that defined a constant speed for light and Newtonian mechanics. Theories built on theories then subjected to empiral evidence. Not fishing for random correlations in a mess of empirical phenomena.
Unfortunately the modern system of academic science, mainly in the social and medical sciences where p-hacking and dubious statistical analyses on ill-defined hypotheses that run rampant it is not surprising people are confused on this point.
Exactly!
I am a logical, left-brained person who had a corporate career. At a point I went looking for God on the basis that there is so much unknown/unexplained by science and also because it begged the question – are all the spiritual or religious people stupid and/or wrong? That isn’t possible.
I found organized religion not a natural home for me for many reasons.
In my quest I came across ‘spirituality’ and asked that I be given proof. This seemed like unreasonable demand, because having faith is also at the heart of spirituality. Maybe I am lucky, because I was given concrete proof so many times that it changed my life forever. I was also called on to have faith for a long time that something would happen – in the face of this seeming impossible. I held the faith and the impossible happened.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy (science).
Others of us are on a similar path – and it should be added that it is a path/journey vs a destination where all is made clear. Attempts towards needing surety or even clarity should be rejected because we are rather limited in our ‘macro’ perspective abilities . There are plenty of clues though – ‘divine’ inspiration knocks quietly if only the human ego can be contained – not something that humans do well. I am warming to the ‘onion skin’ model of reality/spirituality glimpsed at via Michael Newton’s work – absolutely fascinating if one can put one’s defensive ego drama to one side for a while……..
Oh <SupremeBeing>… Not this again. Sheldrake accuses a prominent skeptic: “Pinker is a practitioner of pseudoscience. He makes statements that claim to be scientific and factual but which violate the scientific method by ignoring the evidence.”
Believers can draw patterns around events – and dogs often go to windows. Rupert Sheldrakes psychic dog story has been disproved. Not least by Professor Richard Wiseman (https://barenormality.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/rupert-sheldrake-and-the-psychic-dog/)
Interesting that there is nothing about the above in the article. Rupert will not change his beliefs, But Unherd should’nt give him a pulpit.
EDIT: add Skeptics Dictionary on RS http://skepdic.com/morphicres.html
Doing science is harder than it looks. Particularly when statistics are involved.
Sheldrake did respond in detail: https://www.sheldrake.org/reactions/richard-wiseman-s-claim-to-have-debunked-the-psychic-pet-phenomenon and: https://www.sheldrake.org/reactions/a-response-to-richard-wiseman-s-article-how-much-is-that-doggie-in-the-window
Anyone who knows about Wiseman’s background and past record knows he is a crank skeptic, uninterested in anything other than being a guard-dog for reductive materialism.
When it is used to preach, yes!
I yield
I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that “science” never works the way scientists say it does, or the way it’s supposed to work. Max Planck identified this problem way back in the 1920s. If, for instance, a theory is universally accepted as fact within the scientific community, it takes years, even decades to shift it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, mainly because too many scientists have too much career capital invested in the theory. Thus, if Scientist A posits a new theory which overthrows the old, it will almost certainly be rejected regardless of data. It will then be quietly examined in the universities, not by the faculties but by the students, many of whom will surreptitiously accept it but will keep their belief quiet until they fan out into the career structure and enough of them rise high enough to make it safe for them to “come out”.
I’d say that is not a bug but a feature. In other words, that *is* how science is supposed to work (up to a point at least), whether people say so openly or not. The goal of science is understanding. If a community has spent decades of hard work and reached a very good understanding of some field, it would be a waste if they just disregarded all that and ran up the nearest blind alley every time someone came up with an unproved revolutionary idea. If you want to make a huge shift in the way everybody sees the world, it is not only reasonable, but necessary, to demand some solid evidence and some benefit over the old view. otherwise we would be constantly flitting from one fashionable but unproven idea to the next. The truth is stubborn, as they say. If the new idea really is better, it should get there eventually.
Let me tell you a story:
My wife and I were touring in France and stopped at a rest area. I sat at a picnic table while she went for a wee.
I got to thinking about France in the war. Then thought of a German friend called Brigitte and her rape by Russian soldiers at war end. Then thought that in France the name Brigitte is spelt the same but has a soft ‘G’ rathern than a hard one. Then of the English name spelt Bridget with a sound somewhere between the French and German.
My wife came back to the table and put a small metal disc on the table she found in dry mud thinking it was a coin. I cleaned the mud off and saw a dog tag with a European telephone number. The name on the tag was BRIDGET. I still have it.
Did I see the disc and read the name subconsciouly ? It was several yards away and covered in mud. Why did I not start with BRIDGET ?
Maybe telepathy is far fetched but it is only an attempt to explain an observed phenomenon we do not understand. They thought fire was an element once. Quantum physics appears to tell us that something can exist in two places at once.
Or does it ? Is time linear, lumpy an illusion ….
I am sensing that you are actually Julie Bindel. Tell me I am right!
Ummm…. I am sensing that you are a man… yes!
why not ‘explain’ this as a simple coincidence?
Fabulous anecdote. We’ve probably all had similar experiences. It’s too dramatic, unique, distinct to be explained by a simple coincidence. It does nothing to preserve the integrity of science to act as if they never happened, but the randomness, the unpredictability of the experiences make them almost impossible to test. The fact that you know the experience was real is not evidence of the phenomenon’s existence. That’s sort of a bug. If it can’t be tested it can’t be proven and therefore isn’t real. And maybe that’s the problem. Do we really need affirmation from scientists on these matters? I experienced what I experienced, you experienced what you experienced. The confirmation of scientific endorsement won’t make it more or less so.
I have seen a lot of stuff in my life and I cannot remember any conclusive ESP, but then I think it too mundane a thing – too close to the physical reality of the chemical body and normal physical world, so it would come under rules of physics for the very greater part, and they are mostly just what you see.
Till subatomic, then there are a great many things which defy particle and mass physics.. ‘Quantum Entanglement’ is the easiest one to look up – called ‘Spooky’ by Einstein, Schrodinger, of the Schrodinger’s Cat, figured out and named this phenomenon. Entangle particles, separate them by miles, change one and the other one changes with no time delay at all.
And then I think supra-atomic exists as well, that which is past the physical, but not one we can use, only maybe believe and see some of its ways, like Religion, as it also cannot be proven to the like of Pinker. (‘Pinker – ‘give me a hammer, if I can hit it with a hammer I’ll believe in it’.)
“Quantum entanglement is one of the uber-bizarre phenomena seen when things get itty-bitty, or inside the quantum realm. When two or more particles link up in a certain way, no matter how far apart they are in space, their states remain linked. That means they share a common, unified quantum state. So observations of one of the particles can automatically provide information about the other entangled particles, regardless of the distance between them. And any action to one of these particles will invariably impact the others in the entangled system.” https://www.livescience.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement.html
Anyway, quantum physics is full of this stuff – just try ‘String Theory’ to get really weird…
So, no, I do not think ESP is prevalent, or have an opinion of if it happens – but go a stage higher up the non-mundane ladder and things begin to not be so down to earth. Like I always say, I have been to a lot of weird places and situations, and I have come to believe in Karma, and Jungian Synchronicity for two examples – not to bore you with the why, but out there away from every day, normal, life things are not so nailed down into reality/non-reality. Where the physical world begins to cross with the ‘Spiritual’ World (although I hate that word as it has all these occult, magic, connotations – and those I do not believe in for another reason I will not bother you with.).
Religions are not to be blanket denied – that is too presumptuous for us tiny creatures. I have always disliked Pinker, I think he is a smug a**, and that he is wrong, like Dawkins, to persecute Christianity. But whatever..
“Hamlet:
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.
Ghost:
[Beneath] Swear by his sword.
Hamlet:
Well said, old mole, canst work i’ th’ earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.
Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
‘Persecute christianity’ is an interesting way to put it. Or do you wield the sword of irony? You make many interesting points, there is no getting away from quantum entanglement, so to speak. Can they be summed up as the more we know the less we know? I dont believe in ‘god’ is a trite phrase but its the best I can do at this time. I dont rule out any of the article’s examples but maintain what I see as a healthy requirement of ‘proof’ before I can take any next step. Dawkins et al are great fun to read and discuss but I alway see them as knowingly chained to the precept ‘until something better comes along’. How could they not be? As for Pinker, I read Better Angels but have avoided him since, the coiffured Barnet is an image too far.
Does science have to investigate every crackpot hypothesis? I could probably dream up one before breakfast
Science (actually scientists, because science is a method and not an active actor) can investigate whatever it pleases. What it cannot, or rather should not do, is dismiss a hypothesis, without investigating it scientifically. Sure, you, I and the scientist have intuitions about what is worth investigating, but that is not scientific either, just a practical necessity.
Rodney Foy is right, unfortunately. The number of possible hypothese is infinite – and investigation takes time and effort. You not only can dismiss lots of hypotheses as too unlikely to bother about, you *have to*. You would drown in exotic hypotheses if you took them all seriously. As for ESP, it has been investigated repeatedly over a century or more. People have tried to come up with proof, but the best they ever got was some promising results that never were good enough to convince. If Rupert Sheldrake thinks ESP is proved he is very much in a minority. You get similar results in all branches of science – including physics. Something looks intriguing, maybe only to a few, there are some prelimiary results from noisy data that look promising, and the thing never gets better than that. In the end you learn to recognise repeat performances – and dismiss them unless there is some new and unusually rigorous evidence attached.
Those who make claims must provide the evidence, not the other way around. Discrediting Steven Pinker for wanting to see real evidence and not just theories that can’t be verified is a cheap and simplistic attack on someone who is trying to stick to the facts. This article seems out of place, but that’s understandable because many people can’t accept that you can’t always explain something. But that doesn’t mean it’s right to come up with an answer to explain something. If you don’t know, you may have to accept that you don’t know. Not knowing means being honest. That’s a hard pill to swallow for those who just don’t want to hear the truth.
I wonder if the lead image isn’t also misleading, since looking into a crystal ball has nothing to do with telepathy, or have I missed something?
When my eldest son was 17 months old and was playing with coins tipped into my lap, he put one in his mouth. When I gently reprimanded him, he said: “only on eyes”. I was flabbergasted and asked him to repeat what he had said but he didn’t seem to know that he had spoken. (In past centuries, people put coins on the eyes of the dead to keep them fully shut)
Also, haven’t you noticed dogs or cats sitting on fireside rugs and suddenly lifting their heads and looking at a part of the room where there is no one? .
I am convinced that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in (Pinker’s) philosophy.
Isn’t it likelier this was just a pre-school mumble? When she was two, my then neighbours’ kid used to “answer” the phone. She would pick it up and mumble a bit and then you could distinguish “hi yeah we’re fine the kids are fine yeah bye” and put it down again. She had no idea what she had just said.
They are listening, probably, and they have to look somewhere. So they stare intently into space, but without seeing anything. They may “look” around; this is because if you move your ears around, you can sometimes triangulate onto the source of a noise.
I do this when I’ve lost my phone. I ring it so it will make a sound, even it’s just the vibrate sound. By direction-finding in this way, you can usually work out which sofa cushions it is stuck down.
It’s a plot point in Red Dragon. The killer has kidnapped a blind girl. For some reason he has to take her outside his house. She knows she has to run away, so she claps her hands and is able to tell by the echo and the lack of one which way the house is, and which way the open is.
It’s an explanation that doesn’t require anything unknown to be invented. The resistance to ideas like telepathy as explanations of things is that they replace one inexplicable thing – how does your dog know you’re coming home – with another equally inexplicable thing. As such they don’t work well as explanations.
Allow me to cite an indisputable observation which is completely inexplicable in current scientific terms: migration. Many species of birds, animals, fish and insects migrate. Take the Emperor butterfly which migrates from Southern Canada to a specific valley in Mexico. The course to be flown is completely different for a butterfly from British Columbia from the course flown by a butterfly from Ontario. The butterfly is quite short lived, so it is the fourth generation which returns to it’s original starting point. How does a caterpillar hatched en route know if it on the outward or homeward leg? Since all Emperors do this, it must be genetic, but how is this information written in the ACGT language of genes?
True that !
I remember seeing a documentary, some years ago, in which various dog owners claimed that their pets had pointed out to them that they had early cancers by continually staring at, or licking the affected part before any symptoms had appeared.
A couple of scientists were asked to comment and they could hardly contain their derision and patronisation of the dog owners. To a man and woman they were utterly sure that no such thing was possible and it was all for to the romantic delusions of the owners.
Many studies have now revealed that, indeed, dogs can smell many diseases before they manifest, including cancer and covid.
They were probably idiot savant scientists, who knew a lot about their own field – disease or whatever – but nothing about dogs. Some dogs’ sense of smell is so acute that they they can tell from a scent left in the air which direction its source was travelling in. Some can detect concentrations of one part per trillion. They have this ability for a reason and one obvious possible reason is to identify healthy versus unhealthy mates. It would almost be odd if they couldn’t smell that you have cancer or COVID.
You wanna see that debate. Few understand the scientific method better than Rupert Sheldrake, imho, not from the theoretical outside but the practical inside.
Setting up a good (ie valid) experiment for things like this requires a lot of controls. Statistics is always catching out the casual observer who pays more attention to the things they want to see, than to what is actually happening statistically. Consequently there are lots of potential hidden sources of bias and mis-inferences.
From my glance through of the papers, there is a lack of control, and a desire of the scientist to find the result he wants. Recruitment of participants is not randomised. The experiments are not controlled to prevent cheating. We don’t know how many experiments were tested before a result was obtained. There’s a lack of blinding of participants – both of the researchers and monitors, and of ‘those with the powers’. There’s a tendency to report things that worked and not necessarily all the data – for instance reporting individual cases from ‘best’ to worst. Statistically some things will work by chance, and others not – you can’t just pick the ones you wanted to see and claim an effect.
The low number of ‘friends’ who might be calling makes it easier that a guess matches the caller – if it’s real, then as the number of potential callers goes up the effect should still remain if it has any meaningful impact – so if you get 45% accurate with 4 people, you’d also expect 45% accurate with say 10 people, or a strong association between two people out of the ten participants. Merely being a statistical oddity probably means you got the statistics wrong.
If it’s genuine, and going to be useful/valid for study, then it needs to be an effect that occurs reliably and replicably – a few things that pop up statistically now and then gives no ability for any proper study. That, in the first place, means that all the experiments need to be proven to be replicable by a critiquing party. Given the difficulty that the ‘solid’ field of psychology has had with replicability, I think this handful of ad hoc studies would struggle enormously. Just because something creates a seemingly statistical effect isn’t science – you have to be able to reliably repeat the effect, otherwise there is nothing to study but the rolling of dice, waiting for all the 6’s to turn up now and then.
Absolutely. Thanks for taking the trouble
My challenge to all telepaths out there who wish to prove their credentials beyond any doubt is this. Take yourself into any casino in Las Vegas, play any game you chose and walk out three hours later with $50 million in your pocket. Do it again at the casino across the road and once more at another casino just to rub it in Pinker’s face.
Feel free to take your telepathic dog with you and have him yap out the number which is to come up next on the roulette wheel.
Until one of you X-Men has broken Vegas, stop wasting my time.
Seriously, if this nonsense was doable someone would have converted it into cold, hard cash. I guarantee it.
You have dismissed Bayesianism without actually understanding it. No hypothesis exists in a vacuum. This is common sense. If there was a murder in your street and there lived a convicted armed robber you would be more likely to assume he was the murderer even if there was evidence linking a 95 year old woman who had lived an otherwise peaceable life.
If the writer believes that telepathy can occur, it is presumably incumbent on him to say something about the mechanism behind this phenomenon. Just how is it, for example, that someone might know who is calling before lifting the receiver. It is because there is no known mechanism behind this alleged phenomenon that Steven Pinker dismisses it. I accept that the means of transmission might yet to have been discovered, but at least something might be said about that. Otherwise, it seems more than reasonable to think there might be more natural explanations for the data he observed.
The last decade in the philosophy of mind has seen an intense focus on theories of pan-psychism and other forms of Idealism which address the problem of transmission. It never really gets covered outside of the field though, apart from the occasional popular science mag article here and there.
All the known inputs to a brain are caused by something that moves causing a conformational change in a transmembrane protein in an input cell. This can give an intensity for the input but cannot give a description of the information in the source of the movement. All the brain can know is that a cell with a particular specialisation has responded to its stimulus. I do not see how this limitation can permit panpsychism or telepathy so either they are impossible or a totally new functionality has to be discovered in the inputs to a brain. I think exploring the known inputs to see if they can fully account for the information a brain can discriminate is time well spent. Speculating on something else needs some inkling on its causality if time spent on it is to be productive.
Vertical causation as opposed to horizontal causation (Wolfgang Smith) is probably part of the answer to the causation issue. Ain’t going to be solved in only 3 spatial dimensions with classical chains of causation (which never really survived Hume’s criticism anyway).
On that basis wouldn’t Pinker have dismissed Edward Jenner?
Exactly.
Some physicists believe in “entanglement”, which implies existence of a parallel universe. This could explain examples of communication that defy logic and normal scientific test standards.
Personally, I have had a number of experiences that could not be explained in any way other than they defied logical explanation! These occurred long before I’d heard of entanglement.
“…If Steven Pinker is prepared to defend his views on telepathy in a public debate, chaired by UnHerd, I would be happy to argue…”
Aw, look, if there’s time, can we fit in an argument on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin please, in that public debate? Only if there’s time of course.
The Russian military has proved telepathy, beyond a shadow of doubt, but of course we do not want to talk about our competition.
So also, the American Military has proved it, but of course we do not talk about competing militaries with advanced science as that would reveal what we are capable of to our adversaries.
How do I know this? Answer: because I have read the books documenting this – that have since been pulled off the shelf.
And oh by the way, Pinker, et al, are idiots, but they do have cushy jobs that require them to sound educated and important – which of course means that they are extremely insignificant.
I believe you, having been married to a White Witch for 44 years. Although from a large ‘Tribe’ of Methodists her mother and grandmother were known to be Seers and so are our children. Some (Many?) people on here have little or no idea of the ‘other’ world. Telepathy is real so is forsight (and ghosts). Let the others laugh – one day they might find out for themselves but few of them will admit it.
Agreed – I have a friend who has had the ‘burden’ of psychic abilities foisted on her from wherever that comes from. It does not make for an easy life .I have communicated with 3 dead people through her that I beleive to be authentic – but what upsets the general public is that the lotto numbers are never available etc. They obviously assume a certain ‘kind’ of psychic / spiritual world and that is the problem – including most of this discussion on Unherd. Spirits ‘on the other side’ do not automatically become ‘all knowing’- see my comments above. It seems that we have to continue the journey in a kind of onion skin scenario that continues through many (?) lifetimes in the space time continuum (not always this planet ???). Again – it is prior assumptions that are usually the product of anxious defensiveness t hat are usually the unexplored cause of the anti- any- kind– of- spiritual- realm stance. After all it is damn scary to think that maybe one does actually NOT know much about “reality’ (been there)……….As an aside true spirituality is the only antidote for the ***** ups that humans make due to the primitive drives that dominate their existence ….Not a religious thing rather an appreciation of WHAT THE POINT OF EXISTENCE IS !!!
I like others (probably) read this article because it headlines Steven Pinker, who I greatly respect as having contributed much sensible scientific research and rational commentary on matters of important (to me) public controversy. I read it to the end searching for anything concrete actually disproving anything important Pinker has said, since I hope I am rational and I am always open to arguments which might challenge things I currently consider as (for practical purposes) true. After reading the article, and many comments, my conclusion is that Pinker like me does not consider the issue of whether ESP is scientifically true to be particularly important. It is of marginal importance, at best. The evidence put forward for it is dubious, at best. Who cares, let’s get on with life.
Is Unherd running an equal oportunities program for delusional people this week?
No one is looking to cancel anyone. We just want better quality articles than this, which is what we come to UnHerd for. It’s either that, or I’ll have to renew my Daily Star subscription….
I think we need a new generation of physicists who have played enough online multiplayer games as kids to observe that mathematical formulas hold no special place in describing a form of reality. Despite a world working most of the time according simpler rules (e.g. mathematical formulas), they can be hacked and made to misbehave – therefore miracles exist in the online world. There’s no good reason to deny they can exist in the “real” world either.
“…If Steven Pinker is prepared to defend his views on telepathy in a public debate, chaired by UnHerd, I would be happy to argue that it is more rational and scientific to look at the evidence than to ignore it…”
MAJIKTHISE (“…I mean, what’s the use of our sitting around half the night arguing whether there may or may not be a God, if this machine only goes and gives you his phone number in the morning?…”) and VROOMFONDEL (“…We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty…”)
DEEP THOUGHT: …it occurs to me, that running a program like this is bound to cause sensational public interest.
VROOMFONDEL: Oh yes.
MAJIKTHISE: Oh you can say that again.
DEEP THOUGHT: And so any philosophers who are quick off the mark, are going to clean up in the prediction business.
MAJIKTHISE: ”Prediction business”?
DEEP THOUGHT: Obviously. You just get on the pundit circuit. You all go on the chat shows and the colour supplements and violently disagree with each other about what answer I’m eventually going to produce. And if you get yourselves clever agents, you’ll be on the gravy train for life.
MAJIKTHISE: Bloody ‘ell! That’s what I call thinking! Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?
VROOMFONDEL: Dunno. Think our minds must be too highly trained Majikthise.
Attacking ‘science’ displays a stupid misunderstanding of science.
OK now let’s have UnHerd give a voice to Ross Coulthart.
let’s hope!
Several years back I read The Sense of Being Stared At, but I didn’t find it very convincing. I guess scientists have limited time to reproduce studies. Didn’t the US military spend a lot of time staring at goats?
If you ask any experienced Warrior (lets say an Infantry NCO) they may tell you how to become invisible when setting an ambush. An experienced Hunter will also know. I was taught by Marines and Ghurkas in Malaya before being let loose in Sarawak and Sabah (then British North Borneo). You have to listen without using your ears and look without using your eyes. I later used similar senses as an Officer regularly leading an armed boarding-party and even later as a Shipmaster looking for stowaways. My ‘targets’ did not know how to “Switch themselves off,” again like any good “Hunter” can. Laugh, scoff and snigger all you like but I know how to stay alive in any “Jungle”.
Good article and I applaud your investigative work.
For me psychology as a science is limited. It appears to comprise of a series of schools adopting different approaches to the understanding of the human mind/brain each school trying to address the limitations or dead ends of the previous schools of psychology. The comprehension of the human mind/brain of psychology today is superficial and patchy having few answers. If I were a psychologist the state of infancy of the science would be a huge frustration to me and this would stem from my appreciation that psychology is dependent or interdependent on so many other fields. No wonder Pinker is trying to shuffle sideways to escape psychology by becoming a populist thinker preaching rationalism to the world but the irony is that rationalism is actually failing in application to his own science.
When asked by Stephen Fry in an interview why he had moved from the more academic sphere, psycholinguistics and neuroscience into the cultural sphere Pinker replied “I made the crossover when people asked what I did for a living and I answered that I study language, how it develops in children, how it works and people would say “Wow that is really interesting!”. I thought that there was a market for bringing ideas about language and mind to a broader understanding.”
However, I bet that when he stated “I study language” people probably just tried to appear interested and then changed the topic of conversation. It is ever this way with charlatans or peddlers who often posit the opposite of what is actually the case to disarm (Tony Blair is another excellent silver tongued exponent of turning tables with half-truths). We also had an American druid writing an article recently on Unherd regarding magic who I believe put forward half-truths to disarm when he was really transparently an apologist for the US establishment and probably a darling of the rainbow alliance representing the druid fraternity.
The best work on this is Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable powers of the Human Mind.
It would look better on Sheldrake’s CV than Pinker’s. And ‘looking at the evidence’ is certainly worthwhile as long as you can propose a natural mechanism behind that evidence, which can be tested… otherwise you are proposing ‘supernatural’ or magic mechanisms and no-one need be distracted by your interpretations of evidence.
excellent analysis of Pinker and co thanks – The double standards that many ‘experts’ display is truly disturbing – and is it any wonder that the proclamations of ‘experts’ are so poorly respected in this day and age. The situation is common – I have a anthropology professor brother who’s a priori assumptions are similar to Pinkers – and I find the arrogance of that astounding given that academics , in theory, are trained to follow the ‘truth’ !!
Many pet owners have discovered that their animals respond to their thoughts and intentions.
Kind regards,
Dr. Howard Katz
https://dentox.com