I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking":
Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist?
To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way?
Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
But don't you see? My two invisible things with no evidence support each other, giving each other evidence! Hey, what are you doing... put down that razor!
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is troubling.
But more importantly, mainstream scientists have the "obvious agenda" (well documented by now) to avoid ridicule and mockery. So if you're willing to weaponize ridicule and mockery, you can successfully suppress scientific investigation into whatever areas you choose.
Let's not forget, the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory" to suppress investigation into illegal intelligence activities.
> For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. ... I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community.
It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end. It's a show about the paranormal and it appeals to people that want to learn about the paranormal.
The fact the the author has this 'revelation' about the true appeal at the end is strange. it'd be like having a big breakthrough that "i though people were watching The X-Files because they were all interested in learning about FBI bureaucracy, but it turns out people are interested in aliens!"
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.
It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
What I don't like is that these things ignore the individual. Rather than dealing with "this is a nonverbal person, they likely have limited understanding" people that believe this garbage think "oh, this is a magic guru with super powers and wisdom beyond comprehension".
That becomes dangerous when it comes to watching these individuals. No, they really don't know to not play in the street. They don't know not to eat the berries. They aren't connected with animals and don't know some can hurt them.
They do care to push back though! It's just that there's much more of a market for wishful pseudoscientific bullshit than for careful, history and evidence based sceptical bashing of hopes. Just another example of how broken our information ecosystem is.
I learned about TT from my favorite podcast the SGU, where it was placed in the historical context of the FC controversy and then roundly debunked.
I listened to the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, but then I read this article[0] and watched this video[1] of someone using a spellboard with their child and felt like Telepathy Tapes had deceived me.
I hope the people facilitating communication in the podcast aren't faking the communication as obviously as in that Instagram video, but the rest of the article showed specifics of the podcast where it feels like the host is using "sleight of hand" to present evidence in an overly strong way.
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.
They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.
They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.
A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.
I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
I haven't watched the TT but anecdote. One of our friends has an autistic child, but fairly high functioning. When he was about 6 or 7 one morning this child complained he didn't want to go to a weekly playground and told his mom the slide was broken and it wouldn't be fun. Mom said what are you talking about - when they arrived, the slide was literally broken. The friend said there was no possible way he should have known that (I don't know the details) but this child does not have a phone and is under non-stop supervision.
There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.
Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?
I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.
Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.
Selection/confirmation bias. Think of all the times the child told their mother some other random things which turned out not to be true. Those incidents don't stick out because children say nonsense all the time.
I am shocked that I cannot comment that we are not alone in our own minds. That an entire culture exists among us who can network our minds and meddle in our thoughts.
Or that conventional society is cognitively dissonant for ignoring this prevailing truth, even if the examples are confused and unscientific.
Science is not ultimate truth.
Science is constrained ignorance in pursuit of existential truths.
We are not alone in our own minds and an entire long standing culture exists among us who can mess with our thoughts.
I also remember when hating Apple was cool you could not say one single good thing about the iPhone Mac etc they would just pile on you like it's high school all over again.
Remember the cool people are out and about, the un-cool will always be over-represented in internet discussion.
I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
Enter: the enduring appeal of superheroes.
Notably, entering as our supernatural folk heroes started to fade in the mass communication age.
> ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴᴇᴅ ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴅɴ'ᴛ sᴀᴠᴇᴅ ʜɪᴍ?
> "Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
> ɴᴏ
> "Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."
> ᴛʜᴇ sᴜɴ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ɴᴏᴛ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʀɪsᴇɴ
> "Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"
> ᴀ ᴍᴇʀᴇ ʙᴀʟʟ ᴏꜰ ꜰʟᴀᴍɪɴɢ ɢᴀs ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɪʟʟᴜᴍɪɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
That need is not a cause, it's a reason. The cause is mental variation we have as a species and which is never openly talked about.
I enjoy mythologies and partake in magical thinking. Religion is a tool, you can use on yourself.
I don't mind 3. Two is a bit over the top, I feel. When I was atheist I didn't need such tools or believe everything would fail.
A different data point.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
Is a game of poker magical thinking?
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking": Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist? To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way? Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
But don't you see? My two invisible things with no evidence support each other, giving each other evidence! Hey, what are you doing... put down that razor!
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
[1] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-210-facilitatin...
[2] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-242-the-telepat...
A podcast manages to convince you, but you cannot tell what exactly the issue is that renders "anything even adjacent" logically impossible?
What about the possibility of being fooled the other way around, along with the majority? Truth isn't decided by majority vote after all.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is troubling.
But more importantly, mainstream scientists have the "obvious agenda" (well documented by now) to avoid ridicule and mockery. So if you're willing to weaponize ridicule and mockery, you can successfully suppress scientific investigation into whatever areas you choose.
Let's not forget, the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory" to suppress investigation into illegal intelligence activities.
Of course Koko could communicate. The beef is over whether she engaged in true use of human language.
Reminds me of how in the early 1980s we used my great-grandmother's Ouija board to spook ourselves to no end.
It was telling us names, giving us addresses, and all sorts of serious stuff you wouldn't expect adolescents to make up.
I was interested to learn recently that Alan Turing believed telepathy was a real thing. At least that is what someone wrote.
> For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. ... I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community.
It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end. It's a show about the paranormal and it appeals to people that want to learn about the paranormal.
The fact the the author has this 'revelation' about the true appeal at the end is strange. it'd be like having a big breakthrough that "i though people were watching The X-Files because they were all interested in learning about FBI bureaucracy, but it turns out people are interested in aliens!"
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.
It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
What I don't like is that these things ignore the individual. Rather than dealing with "this is a nonverbal person, they likely have limited understanding" people that believe this garbage think "oh, this is a magic guru with super powers and wisdom beyond comprehension".
That becomes dangerous when it comes to watching these individuals. No, they really don't know to not play in the street. They don't know not to eat the berries. They aren't connected with animals and don't know some can hurt them.
> skeptics generally don’t care to push back
They do care to push back though! It's just that there's much more of a market for wishful pseudoscientific bullshit than for careful, history and evidence based sceptical bashing of hopes. Just another example of how broken our information ecosystem is.
I learned about TT from my favorite podcast the SGU, where it was placed in the historical context of the FC controversy and then roundly debunked.
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/
I am eternally grateful for the SGU.
Our escape to reality indeed
I listened to the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, but then I read this article[0] and watched this video[1] of someone using a spellboard with their child and felt like Telepathy Tapes had deceived me.
I hope the people facilitating communication in the podcast aren't faking the communication as obviously as in that Instagram video, but the rest of the article showed specifics of the podcast where it feels like the host is using "sleight of hand" to present evidence in an overly strong way.
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-...
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_-ln0iO6i6/
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.
They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.
They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.
A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.
I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
I haven't watched the TT but anecdote. One of our friends has an autistic child, but fairly high functioning. When he was about 6 or 7 one morning this child complained he didn't want to go to a weekly playground and told his mom the slide was broken and it wouldn't be fun. Mom said what are you talking about - when they arrived, the slide was literally broken. The friend said there was no possible way he should have known that (I don't know the details) but this child does not have a phone and is under non-stop supervision.
There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.
Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?
I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.
Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.
Selection/confirmation bias. Think of all the times the child told their mother some other random things which turned out not to be true. Those incidents don't stick out because children say nonsense all the time.
Or, perhaps the slide was cracked the previous week and now had completely failed.
PSA the appeal is the only perplexing part,
and ITT many of us agree, it's not perplexing, it's just humans engaging in the same magical thinking and coping strategies we always to.
The "telepathy" is 100% a fabrication of parents desperate to believe their situation and kids are something other than they are.
I am shocked that I cannot comment that we are not alone in our own minds. That an entire culture exists among us who can network our minds and meddle in our thoughts.
Or that conventional society is cognitively dissonant for ignoring this prevailing truth, even if the examples are confused and unscientific.
Science is not ultimate truth.
Science is constrained ignorance in pursuit of existential truths.
We are not alone in our own minds and an entire long standing culture exists among us who can mess with our thoughts.
Sounds like schizophrenia.
It is very like schizophrenia.
In fact, I doubt most accounts of voices in our minds could be technically considered schizophrenia by any scientific measure of the brain.
This place has always been babylon central.
I also remember when hating Apple was cool you could not say one single good thing about the iPhone Mac etc they would just pile on you like it's high school all over again.
Remember the cool people are out and about, the un-cool will always be over-represented in internet discussion.
I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. One might say existential reality peering back upon itself.
Awareness is merely a temporal feedback in the higher order cognitive biotechnology.
Awareness is the tip of consciousness. Consciousness is programmable, can be manipulated, augmented, even inhibited. All with or without awareness.