Travels

by Michael Crichton

  I would suggest to you that the scientific study of creativity has fared no better in the last century than the scientific study of psychic activity, and for much the same reasons. Yet nobody would deny that creativity exists. It is merely very hard to study.

  Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say that the wonders of real consciousness far surpass what conventional science admits can exist. For example, suppose I told you that, while a group of huge men charges at you with the intention to maim you, you were required to throw a ball seventy meters to strike a one-meter target that you can’t see just before you are slammed to the ground and crushed to a pulp. I doubt there is a single person in this room who could do such a thing, or would even dare attempt it. Yet we can observe this unlikely event performed every Sunday afternoon on television, during football season.

  The change in consciousness necessary to execute a downfield pass in a professional football game is ordinary to us and hence unremarkable, but it at least suggests that other trained changes in consciousness, arising from other cultures and traditions, may also yield surprising results.

  I earlier attempted to cover, in an informal way, some of the scientific objections to so-called paranormal phenomena. It is true that many of these beliefs are superstitions, but so are many beliefs in the more scientific world, such as the world of high-tech medicine.

  It is true that many practitioners are frauds, but a proportion of working scientists are also frauds.

  It is true that progress in the paranormal investigation is slow, but so is progress in many scientific fields, particularly when they are poorly funded.

  It is true that some paranormal phenomena seem to be state-dependent and consciousness-related, but so are many everyday phenomena that lead to such unremarked wonders as a new painting, or a Sunday touchdown pass.

  Thus, to my mind, none of these traditional scientific complaints about the paranormal seems adequate to dismiss the field from legitimate study. In looking at the matter more closely, I find three other reasons that are much more powerful grounds for dismissal.

  The first is the quasi-religious discomfort these phenomena evoke in a hard scientist. In the early years of this century, Freud and Jung ended their close friendship over the issue of occult phenomena:14 Jung was openly interested in the paranormal;15 Freud was not. Before the split, Freud wrote Jung: “My dear son, keep a cool head, for it is better not to understand something than make such great sacrifices to understanding.”16 And Jung’s enthusiastic interest in astrology, which he studied as a system of psychological projection and not as a physical reality, caused Freud to reply, “I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall not do so gladly.…”17

  The question is, why not? What was Freud’s reluctance? Freud himself studied mythology and art without hesitation. But the occult made him uncomfortable in a way that is recognizable yet difficult to identify precisely. One can argue that the discomfort has fundamentally religious origins—origins so deep as to be untraceable except through lengthy argument, which is not relevant here.

  In addition, paranormal phenomena provoke a related discomfort, which has at its core an intellectual prejudice. I would venture to say that nearly everyone here tonight has an advanced degree. We have all survived a great deal of schooling, and we are skilled in rational, linear thought. We have been trained to value such thought and the products of such thought. Thus we turn with palpable uneasiness to the occult section of the bookstore, which contains writing by all sorts of illiterate and uneducated people. These people don’t share our thought systems or our sentence structures, and we are likely to see ourselves as slumming when we consider their work.

  Whether we admit it or not; any person of academic standing holds certain criteria that govern the kinds of references he will cite in his writing, and for that matter the kind of subjects he will write about in the first place. I suggest that these criteria represent a powerful prejudice that has colored all formal academic consideration of the paranormal—as the unsavory reputation of Mesmer colored the assessment of his claims for hypnotism.

  A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted.

  Indeed, the primacy of theory is conveyed by scientific history. Bronowski notes: “Charles Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution: that was known to his grandfather. What he thought of was a machinery for evolution: the mechanism of natural selection.… Once Darwin had proposed this [mechanism], the theory of evolution was accepted by every one; and it was thought the most natural thing in the world to call it Darwin’s theory.”18

  In other words, data to support the idea of evolution—such as the fossil record—were long known; but a convincing theory to explain the data was lacking. Once Darwin provided the theory, the data were accepted.

  Now consider so-called psychic phenomena, such as clairvoyance, remote-viewing, and psychokinesis. On the face of it, all these phenomena seem to be contradicted by physical theory. At least, there is no immediately available theory to account for them. And that, it seems to me, is a major reason why data to support these phenomena are denied.

  What data? you may ask. Many scientists deny there are any data at all—that there is no incident or event that is properly documented, properly controlled, and therefore not subject to fraud and trickery.

  Yet there are, in fact, well-studied subjects who appear to defy scientific explanation—in particular the famous medium of the last century, Mrs. Piper, who was championed by William James, professor of psychology at Harvard. Mrs. Piper was subjected to intense scrutiny for nearly a quarter of a century, but no skeptic was ever able to demonstrate fraud or trickery.

  Yet the claims of fraud persisted. James wrote rather irritably, “The ‘scientist’ who is confident of ‘fraud’ here, must remember that in science as much as in common life an hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed; and a fraud which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply ‘fraud’ at large, fraud in abstracto, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of specific concrete facts.”19

  As for other scientists who continued to claim as-yet undetected fraud, James retorted, “I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.”20

  Beyond the narrower question of whether an isolated phenomenon, such as clairvoyance or telepathy or seeing auras, actually occurs, there is a broader issue affecting science in the modern day. I refer to a certain fixity of viewpoint among scientists, a certain tendency to confuse contemporary scientific theories with the underlying reality itself.

  Jacob Bronowski, one of the most eloquent commentators on the relationship of science to other human activities, always reminded us that scientific theories are a fiction. “Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.”21 Science offers a picture of the world, but its picture is not to be confused with the underlying reality itself.

  Yet we all tend to confuse our fictional views with reality. I think most of us have glanced out of an airplane window while crossing the United States, and have been surprised not to see lines dividing the states, as those lines appear on a map. I myself remember the shock I felt when I first looked at live human tissue under a microscope, and found it colorless; I expected to see pink cells with purple nuclei. Yet those colors are artifacts that come from microscopic stains. Real cells have no color.
r />   Of course I knew better, just as we all know there are no lines on the land to demarcate the states. But we forget. And, in fact, we forget with a surprising ease.

  I was educated in a twentieth-century, Western, scientific-rational tradition. I was raised to think that the scientific view of the world was the correct view, and that every other view was pure superstition. I agreed with Bertrand Russell when he said, “What science cannot tell us mankind cannot know.”

  I had few formal experiences to contradict this view. But my later experiences have broken out of that scientific-rational perspective. I still find the scientific view useful, and I live happily within it much of the time. But I now regard science as providing an arbitrary and limited model of reality.

  Because reality is always greater—much greater—than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.

  Let’s review why, with a simple thought experiment.

  * * *

  Think of a person you know well.

  Now make any correct descriptive statement about that person.

  George is an even-tempered man.

  Now consider that statement. Is it really correct?

  The chances are, as you consider it, you’ll begin to remember times when George lost his temper, or was upset about something, or in a bad mood for some reason. You’ll think of the exceptions.

  So you must admit the statement is not quite accurate. You could modify it to say, George is often an even-tempered man, but that is actually just evasive. That word “often” merely says the statement is sometimes correct but sometimes not. And since it doesn’t tell when the statement is not correct, it isn’t very helpful.

  So you’d have to be more explicit, to give a fuller statement.

  George is usually an even-tempered man, except on Mondays when his favorite football team lost the day before, or when his wife had a fight with him, or when he gets tired and cranky—usually late in the week—but not always—or when his boss gives him a hard time, or when he has to rewrite a report, or when he has to go out of town … or when … or when …

  Pretty soon you see that your descriptive statement is turning into an essay. And you still haven’t covered all the things you know. It’s still not complete. You could write pages and pages and you would still not be finished. In fact, it’s hopeless to try to make a complete statement about George’s ever-changing temper. The subject is too complicated. It was doomed from the start.

  So let’s start all over.

  Let’s make a different statement.

  George is neat and orderly.

  That’s unquestionably true, you think. George is always neatly dressed, and his desk is always tidy.

  But have you ever seen the workbench in his garage at home? What a mess! Tools scattered all around. His wife is always after him to clean it up. And what about the trunk of his car? All kinds of junk in there that he never bothers to clean out.

  George is usually neat and orderly.

  But by now you can see where this modification is eventually going to end up—in another essay.

  So let’s make a different statement, one that is both concise and complete.

  George has gray hair.

  That does it, you think. He has gray hair and there’s no question about it.

  Of course, not all of his hair is gray. Most of it is, though, especially around the temples and the back of the neck. So there’s some simplification here, but it’s not objectionable.

  Then, too, even if George has gray hair now, he didn’t a few years ago. And at some time in the future, he will no longer have gray hair, he will have white hair. So this is only a correct description of George’s hair right now, at this moment in time. It isn’t a description of George in some universal, invariant way.

  Let’s try again.

  George is six feet tall.

  Again, true, within the limits of measurement. He’s probably not exactly six feet. He’s probably somewhere between five eleven and six one. And of course he wasn’t always six feet. At an earlier time he was much shorter. So this statement is only approximate, too.

  George is a man.

  Well, yes. But “man” is rather unspecific; it’s really a culturally determined word, when you get right down to it. At birth he was not considered a man. You have to attain a certain age and position in society to be considered a man.

  George is a male.

  Now, that’s unarguable. George is, and always was, a male. There’s no way to dispute that. It is a true statement about George, both now and in the past. It is an eternal verity. It is an accurate description of the reality of George.

  Of course, by “male” we mean that he has an X and a Y chromosome. But we don’t know that for sure, do we? George might have an extra chromosome. He might only be apparently male.…

  And so on.

  There are two points about this exercise in making statements about George. The first is that every single statement we make about George can be contradicted. Why is that?

  It’s because our statements about George are only approximations, simplifications. The real person we call George is always more complicated than any statement we have made about him. Thus we can always refer to that real person and find in him a contradiction to what we have said.

  The second point is that the statements about George that are most securely held are also the least interesting. We can’t say anything comprehensive about his moods or his neatness or his complex behavior. We are on much safer ground describing the simplest aspects of his physical appearance: hair color, height, sex, and so on. There—with some qualifications of measurement error and changes over time—we can be sure of what we are saying.

  But only a tailor would take pride in this fact. And, indeed, a tailor might. After making many fittings for George, and adjusting the patterns at each fitting, the tailor might eventually be able to cut a suit of clothes for George entirely in his absence, and when George came in for a final fitting the finished clothes would fit him perfectly!

  This is a triumph of the art of measurement, but the clothes that fit so wonderfully are draped over a creature whom the tailor may not know at all. Nor is the tailor interested. He couldn’t care less about other aspects of George. It’s not his job.

  On the other hand, what interests us most about George is not his measurements. We are most interested in precisely those other aspects, which the tailor, by definition, doesn’t care about. We find it far more difficult to define those other aspects of George than the tailor does to define George’s measurements.

  The tailor can do his job of description perfectly. We, on the other hand, can’t really describe George at all.

  Now, since the tailor is so good—so clearly successful—at what he does, we might be tempted to ask the tailor, “Who is George?”

  The tailor will answer, “George is a forty-four long.”

  And if we protest that this answer isn’t really satisfactory, the tailor will reply with assurance that he is unquestionably right about George, because he can cut a whole suit of clothes that will fit George perfectly the moment he walks in the door.

  This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something—reality—that may not be understood at all.

  Science is very good as far as it goes. It has certainly produced powerful benefits. It would be crazy to abandon science, or to deny its validity.

  But it would be equally crazy to think that reality is a forty-four long. Yet it seems as if that is what Western society has done. For hundreds of years, science has been so successful that the tailor has taken over our society. His knowledge seems so much more precise and powerful than the knowledge offered by other disciplines, such as history or psychology or art.

  But in the end one can be left with a nagging sense of emptiness about the creations of science. One may even suspect that there is more to reality than m
easurements will ever reveal.

  Let’s return to the earlier problem: describing a person named George. When we looked at anything except his physical measurements, we found that it was extremely difficult to make any statement about George that could not be immediately contradicted by other statements, equally true.

  Now, we might struggle with this problem for a while longer, and keep searching for incontrovertible statements about George. But eventually, after repeated failures, we may begin to suspect that there is no way we can succeed at this undertaking. The reality of George keeps slipping away from us. Whatever we say is wrong.

  At that point someone who says, “Existence is beyond the power of words to define,” may not sound so esoteric. This seems to be exact

  y what we have discovered on our own. However, this statement was made by Lao-tzu, a Chinese mystic, twenty-five centuries ago. Lao-tzu was adamant on this point, repeating it again and again: “Existence is infinite, not to be defined.”

  But if that is the case—if reality will always elude our definitions, just as George does—what can we do?

  There is no need to run outside

  For better seeing,

  Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide

  At the center of your being;

  For the more you leave it, the less you learn.

  Lao-tzu argues that it is necessary to turn inward, toward an inner sense of reality, instead of looking outward. This would appear to be a criticism of academic undertakings, and indeed he is elsewhere explicit:

  Leave off fine learning! End the nuisance

  Of saying yes to this and perhaps to that,

  Distinctions with how little significance!

  Categorical this, categorical that,

  What slightest use are they!

  Lao-tzu makes many similar statements, which seem to be opposed to scholarly learning, even to knowledge. Why does he think this way?

  People through finding something beautiful

  Think something else unbeautiful,