I considered going anonymous for this because I know I'll be decimated here among you guys, but I decided to be bold because I think it's an argument worth making.
I have a world view that's very similar to many of you here, with reductionism as one of the center pieces.
So now to queue the lamentation and ridicule which I bring willingly: I am a psychic as well.
Many, many wishful people come at this from the fairy tail perspective of wishing paranormal things to exist, and therefore convincing themselves that they do.
I came from an opposite perspective.
I began with the assumption that it couldn't be true because of my reductionist beliefs, but am faced with a body of evidence so overwhelming that I cannot deny it.
I do not WANT to believe in psychic phenomena, but I am forced to as a result of the evidence I've been exposed to.
How can I explain the improbably accurate and precise information I know about people and the future? How can I explain the images that come into my mind that have such a crushingly high correlation with the images in the minds around me? How can I accurately guess the history of the occupants of particular building?
I mean, seriously, I hardly believe it -- why in the hell would someone occupying some arbitrary location in space, that happens to be surrounded by a building, leave some kind of information there after his body is gone? What is the mechanism by which the information is stored? It flies against my entire world view, and my concept of how the universe is fundamentally organized. Yet there the information is, and on the occasions I'm able to get corroboration on the information I receive, I'm right about it the overwhelming majority of the time.
If I say to you, Eli, that as an experiment to rule out this nonsense, I had my wife imagine an arbitrary object, and that I was able to tell her what that object was within a minute, then you would have no reason to believe me. But imagine, hypothetically, that it was you who had done such a thing, and had done it often, with a high degree of success. You might not be able to compel others in your circle to believe you, but you yourself would HAVE to take notice. Even if you couldn't explain how it worked, you'd have to acknowledge that it worked, or at least try hard to find the trick your mind was playing on you.
I do not pretend to know the mechanism by which this works, but I am confident that it does, in fact, work, and that the mechanism is natural, not supernatural.
To those skeptics, I ask: why are you confident at all that your map matches the territory in anything more than a fleeting, superficial way? If the territory is so much more complex than we're capable of mapping, then why can't there be entire apparati built into our brains or other constituent parts that we have no basis for detecting or understanding at this point? Parts of our mind that despite our ignorance, can deliver accurate perception to those parts that we currently DO understand?
Most people here would answer: why would we try to hypothesize some extra constituent part that do not constrain our expectations in any way?
To that I answer: I am one who has observed evidence for which I have no explanation, which may in fact require those extra constituent parts.
I know psychics exist because I've worked hard to debunk my own abilities but I've failed. I'm also sure reductionism is correct, and therefore I'm sure reductionism and psychic abilities are not mutually exclusive.
Benja Fallenstein commented:
Well, that's a very intelligent argument, Benja Fallenstein. But I have a crushing reply to your argument, such that, once I deliver it, you will at once give up further debate with me on this particular point:
You're right.
Alas, I don't get modesty credit on this one, because after publishing yesterday's post I realized a similar flaw on my own—this one concerning Occam's Razor and psychic powers:
If beliefs and desires are irreducible and ontologically basic entities, or have an ontologically basic component not covered by existing science, that would make it far more likely that there was an ontological rule governing the interaction of different minds—an interaction which bypassed ordinary "material" means of communication like sound waves, known to existing science.
If naturalism is correct, then there exists a conjugate reductionist model that makes the same predictions as any concrete prediction that any parapsychologist can make about telepathy.
Indeed, if naturalism is correct, the only reason we can conceive of beliefs as "fundamental" is due to lack of self-knowledge of our own neurons—that the peculiar reflective architecture of our own minds exposes the "belief" class but hides the machinery behind it.
Nonetheless, the discovery of information transfer between brains, in the absence of any known material connection between them, is probabilistically a privileged prediction of supernatural models (those that contain ontologically basic mental entities). Just because it is so much simpler in that case to have a new law relating beliefs between different minds, compared to the "boring" model where beliefs are complex constructs of neurons.
The hope of psychic powers arises from treating beliefs and desires as sufficiently fundamental objects that they can have unmediated connections to reality. If beliefs are patterns of neurons made of known material, with inputs given by organs like eyes constructed of known material, and with outputs through muscles constructed of known material, and this seems sufficient to account for all known mental powers of humans, then there's no reason to expect anything more—no reason to postulate additional connections. This is why reductionists don't expect psychic powers. Thus, observing psychic powers would be strong evidence for the supernatural in Richard Carrier's sense.
We have an Occam rule that counts the number of ontologically basic classes and ontologically basic laws in the model, and penalizes the count of entities. If naturalism is correct, then the attempt to count "belief" or the "relation between belief and reality" as a single basic entity, is simply misguided anthropomorphism; we are only tempted to it by a quirk of our brain's internal architecture. But if you just go with that misguided view, then it assigns a much higher probability to psychic powers than does naturalism, because you can implement psychic powers using apparently simpler laws.
Hence the actual discovery of psychic powers would imply that the human-naive Occam rule was in fact better-calibrated than the sophisticated naturalistic Occam rule. It would argue that reductionists had been wrong all along in trying to take apart the brain; that what our minds exposed as a seemingly simple lever, was in fact a simple lever. The naive dualists would have been right from the beginning, which is why their ancient wish would have been enabled to come true.
So telepathy, and the ability to influence events just by wishing at them, and precognition, would all, if discovered, be strong Bayesian evidence in favor of the hypothesis that beliefs are ontologically fundamental. Not logical proof, but strong Bayesian evidence.
If reductionism is correct, then any science-fiction story containing psychic powers, can be output by a system of simple elements (i.e., the story's author's brain); but if we in fact discover psychic powers, that would make it much more probable that events were occurring which could not in fact be described by reductionist models.
Which just goes to say: The existence of psychic powers is a privileged probabilistic assertion of non-reductionist worldviews—they own that advance prediction; they devised it and put it forth, in defiance of reductionist expectations. So by the laws of science, if psychic powers are discovered, non-reductionism wins.
I am therefore confident in dismissing psychic powers as a priori implausible, despite all the claimed experimental evidence in favor of them.