Post by auntym on Jul 20, 2012 18:47:45 GMT -6
blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/07/20/brilliant-scientists-are-open-minded-about-paranormal-stuff-so-why-not-you/
Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?
By John Horgan | July 20, 2012
In last week’s post on the Turing Test, I mentioned a fact I stumbled on in the Alan Turing exhibit at the Science Museum in London. The pioneering computer theorist was a believer in telepathy, or mind-reading. (Turing was apparently impressed by the card-guessing experiments of J.B. Rhine.) Then, last weekend, I learned that a prominent scientist whom I once interviewed had had a vivid vision of the violent death of his child shortly before it happened, an example of clairvoyance. Serious scientists aren’t supposed to believe in paranormal phenomena, sometimes called “psi,” and yet some serious scientists do. I thought it would be fun to list a few, starting with ones who, like Turing, have passed into the great beyond.
Psychologist William James served as the first president of the American Society for Psychical Research, which investigated paranormal phenomena, including ghosts. In his essay “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” published in the late 1890s, James called a ghost-channeling medium, Leoanna Piper, a “white crow” who had shaken his skeptical materialism.
“I cannot resist the conviction,” James wrote, “that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the ‘rigorously scientific’ mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.”
I love James, who throughout his career achieved a rare balance between skepticism and open-mindedness. (By the way, he eventually became disenchanted with Piper.) The psychiatrist Carl Jung was a much more aggressive proponent of occult phenomena, notably “synchronicity,” which consists of coincidences that aren’t really coincidences, that hint at the existence of a hidden reality imbued with profound meaning, where the mental and physical realms interact in ways that conventional science cannot explain. Or something along those lines.
CONTINUE READING: blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/07/20/brilliant-scientists-are-open-minded-about-paranormal-stuff-so-why-not-you/
Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?
By John Horgan | July 20, 2012
In last week’s post on the Turing Test, I mentioned a fact I stumbled on in the Alan Turing exhibit at the Science Museum in London. The pioneering computer theorist was a believer in telepathy, or mind-reading. (Turing was apparently impressed by the card-guessing experiments of J.B. Rhine.) Then, last weekend, I learned that a prominent scientist whom I once interviewed had had a vivid vision of the violent death of his child shortly before it happened, an example of clairvoyance. Serious scientists aren’t supposed to believe in paranormal phenomena, sometimes called “psi,” and yet some serious scientists do. I thought it would be fun to list a few, starting with ones who, like Turing, have passed into the great beyond.
Psychologist William James served as the first president of the American Society for Psychical Research, which investigated paranormal phenomena, including ghosts. In his essay “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” published in the late 1890s, James called a ghost-channeling medium, Leoanna Piper, a “white crow” who had shaken his skeptical materialism.
“I cannot resist the conviction,” James wrote, “that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the ‘rigorously scientific’ mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.”
I love James, who throughout his career achieved a rare balance between skepticism and open-mindedness. (By the way, he eventually became disenchanted with Piper.) The psychiatrist Carl Jung was a much more aggressive proponent of occult phenomena, notably “synchronicity,” which consists of coincidences that aren’t really coincidences, that hint at the existence of a hidden reality imbued with profound meaning, where the mental and physical realms interact in ways that conventional science cannot explain. Or something along those lines.
CONTINUE READING: blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/07/20/brilliant-scientists-are-open-minded-about-paranormal-stuff-so-why-not-you/