Response to William Briggs on Psychic Sheep and Goats
Uncharacteristically, you are off base with this essay, which is built on a false premise. Those who believe in psychic phenomena are under no obligation to prove its reality to scientists. That they attempt to do so and cooperate with laboratory ordeals devised by clever rationalists is on them. What isn’t on them is the absurdity of challenging whether or not psychic phenomena and abilities exist and if they are to be taken seriously, must be proven to exist quantitatively in a controlled experiment.
Edgar Cayce is all the yes/no proof needed. The anecdotal evidence in support of yes is incredibly vast. Incidents of amazing telepathic links between twins, mothers and children, husbands and wives are too numerous to be counted. But counting is what myopic skeptics are best at. Counting playing card IDs, counting failed attempts at directed psychic performance, and counting poseurs out of the running based on their own narrow, boobytrapped criteria, because that’s when you get to flash that superior grin. Which is the whole point of the laboratory research. The need to make unusual people feel like fools or dupes or phonies. Which makes the testers feel better about themselves.
Not hard to find documentaries about psychics who really have helped solve crimes, cops who resisted mightily, and then, finally, admitted that the case wouldn’t have been solved without the crazy woman who timidly left a message on voicemail. What you learn from looking for such documentary accounts is that the laboratory test is a doomed and backward approach to researching the phenomenon. It’s almost never a directed activity but a spontaneous dream, a vision, a flash of information received, or response to a focus made sharp by an emotional investment in the situation or persons involved. The ways psychics do what they do ranges across the senses, from smell to touch to hearing, both remotely and in specific locations, and the psychic is the recipient not the seeker. Nothing about it can be counted, measured, disciplined, or scheduled. It’s the stuff that happens in between the counted numbers and almost always outside the lab.
About your sheep and goats. True in this sense. The researchers are goats from the word go. They design ridiculous experiments that are designed to be failed in sterile, emotionless cubicles, and then they pronounce their findings as if they’ve just proved no mother has ever awakened in the middle of the night knowing her child was dead. The only sheep are the psychics who naively take the bait and walk into the trap. Some things can’t be tested for. Things that happen in between the numbers.
Me? I’m sick of the grin. I’m also tired of the propaganda that everyone who experiences something extraordinary or improbable is necessarily mistaking a Japanese lantern for a UFO, a bear for a Bigfoot, or his own heartbeat for footsteps in the upstairs hall of an empty house. Small minds. Reminds me of the technical whizzes who have convinced themselves that a complicated enough arrangement of zeroes and ones in a computer can approximate and even outperform a human brain inside the vast interconnected receiver system of a human body. Zeroes and ones can’t do consciousness. Never have, never will. Although they may one day be able to imitate the pedestrian thought processes of the grinners.
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