Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  If the universe doesn’t seem quite weird enough for you yet, consider the matter of time, a particularly sticky wicket: Einstein himself called time a “stubbornly persistent illusion” because, from the perspective of a physicist, there seems to be no obvious explanation for why we experience time in the linear fashion that we do. To explore the subject, physicists Yakir Aharonov and Jeff Tollaksen devised an incredible experiment, in which the act of measuring a particle at, say, 3:00 P.M., predictably changes the value of the same particle at, um, 2:30 P.M.—a half-hour earlier. Numerous labs around the world have been successfully conducting and replicating the experiment, which seems to indicate something awfully wild about reality: an action taken in the future can affect what happens in the present, at least at a subatomic level.

  Aharonov and Tollaksen aren’t sure precisely what to make of their own findings. But this is precisely the spot at which we can use a real, scientific mystery to understand something about ourselves and how we react to the paranormal. Most likely, you rebelled, internally, during this last paragraph. You balked at the idea that what we do at 3:00 P.M. can effect what happened at 2:30 P.M. But without belaboring the nature of time, there is a part of your brain that probably sent you a tremulous message to watch out when I wrote something that seems so nonsensical. Maybe you furrowed your eyebrows, your pulse quickened, you momentarily held your breath or even felt angry or dismissive, as if what I had written must be false and I must be stupid or even craven to write it. But here’s the thing: that wasn’t you, or at least not the rational, reasonable you. That was your brain talking—most dramatically, your amygdala, a necessary but frustrating part of the brain that we’ll meet throughout this book. The amygdala is the spot in the brain I accuse of making us seem to lack humility—the part of our brain that can cause us to haughtily dismiss information we find threatening or don’t understand.

  When our place on the food chain was not so secure, and we had to deal with predator cats on a regular basis, the amygdala—a pair of almond-shaped structures near the base of our temporal lobes—did great work. Our brain processed visual images of a shadow moving in the grass, and our amygdala shouted, “Danger!” In response, we froze. Our more logical information-processing centers kicked in, quickly trying to determine: Is this shadow a crouching tiger or a hidden rabbit? If the shadow was big enough, our logical frontal lobes responded, Close enough to a tiger for me, our amygdala sent a stronger signal of abject fear in return, and we ran.

  Millions of years later, Homo sapiens is here—and we brought our amygdalas with us. Some of us, like kids in the inner city, or soldiers in the battlefield, still need them a lot. These are people who worry on a daily basis about potent threats to their health—about a lump in a stranger’s pocket that might mean he is carrying a handgun; about a mound of dirt on the side of the road which might cover a bomb. But for most of us, the amygdala (along with other parts of the brain responsible for mediating emotion and processing conflicting information) is responding to far less grave mysteries and instead sending us messages of anxiety and fear whenever necessary and much of the time besides, including when the boss says something harsh to us at work, a coworker cuts us a nasty look, or when we hear an idea that conflicts with our worldview.

  This has profound implications for all of us, and our conversations about the paranormal, and means oftentimes our first reaction, even if it is about an intellectual subject, is an emotional one: We react to the ideas we hear not only with our rational frontal lobes but with this primitive part of our brain. And when we feel emotionally committed to a position, that is precisely the time we’re in the greatest danger of reacting—not from our frontal lobes, like enlightened human beings, but from our amygdalas, like angry or frightened monkeys. Believers sometimes consider those of no or different faith downright unholy. Nonbelievers, of late, take great delight in openly deriding believers as irrational and childlike. And too often the rest of us wind up listening to people letting their amygdalas inspire far too much of the talking.

  There is intriguing research that backs this up, including not just brain scan technology but terror management theory. It seems that both religious and irreligious people see death and threats to their worldviews as of a piece; in other words, he who threatens my life and he who threatens my way of looking at the world are, on a psychological level, related. That is a dangerous way of thinking, but it seems we’re built for it—machines constructed to fight.

  As we’ll see late in this book, mystics have come up with some great ways of taming the more unruly, emotional centers of our brain, including the amygdala. And of course science helps in particularly dramatic fashion. If anxiety is our response to mystery, then discovering the truth and eliminating the mystery not only gives us more information about the world, it helps to soothe us. Calm down there, amygdala. And trust in science. The problem is that we often lack real answers. At that point, our own psychology can’t help but get in the way. The anxiety we feel at confronting a real mystery encourages us to supplant the unknown with an answer that fits our preexisting worldview. For mystics, that means injecting God or some similar force into all the explanatory gaps; for materialists, it means maintaining faith that some prosaic explanation, far from mysticism, will ultimately emerge.

  Science is often typified as a perfect, self-correcting system that compensates for our faulty wetware by gathering and totaling up evidence. Mystics, with their reliance on subjective experience, can’t make the same claim. I find this standard analysis to be devastatingly accurate—to a point. My critique is that while we might look over the long haul and see a “perfect,” self-correcting system, we aren’t looking at today from the perspective of a decade, a generation, or a century from now. This means we might be looking at a completely laughable model of reality and calling it the most likely one—just because this is the time we live in and this is the best information our science has yielded to date.

  Modern neuroscience provides a fantastic example of this: scientists are examining brain function at the level of the neuron to try to explain how consciousness is produced. Yet no one has figured out why neuronal firing and the interactions of neurochemicals produce thought, your feelings of being you, with your specific set of wishes and wants and fears, who feels a particular sensation upon perceiving the color red or enjoying the flavor of a good steak. There is a whole level of activity going on below the level of the neuron—a level we can’t investigate so well because we don’t yet have the instruments to do the job properly. And so, modern neuroscientists, for all their advancements, could prove to be just like the drunk looking for his misplaced car keys under the lamppost.

  Where, we ask the drunk, did you last see your keys?

  About three blocks away, he replies, a little man on his hands and knees.

  Then, why are you looking here?

  Because, he replies, this is where the light is.

  In short, I’m not so much critiquing science as calling for more of it, particularly in areas derided as paranormal. The placebo effect was entirely disregarded for decades, a blip in the system, until the past ten or fifteen years. Now we know the placebo effect seems to depend on everything from the bedside manner of the doctor to the color of the pill. We’re learning to manage belief so it works for us. But for years, the idea that what people believed could affect their health was just too far outside mainstream scientific thinking to be embraced as a field of study. Why would this be so? Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions remains a kind of bible for those who would seek to understand science not just in its idealized form, but as it’s actually practiced. The act of rigorously gathering and methodically analyzing data isn’t carried out by idealized beings, after all, but people. And these people get invested in their findings and the theories they’ve signed their names to, and they protect the dominant way of looking at things—the current worldview science has built. So, at times, we not only have to wait for technology to catch up, bu
t literally, for fallible scientists to accept all the data that science has amassed.

  Science will eventually yield up all kinds of delicious truth—over the decades and centuries. The thing is, we’re alive right now—not millennia from now—and so we have, as we’ve always had, a science that is doing the best it can with today’s knowledge and technology base. The perfect aspect of science is its method, not the given set of information it’s yielded to date. That store of information will change, and if history is any guide, it will continue to change dramatically—in ways we haven’t even dreamt of. Look at the way science has dealt with quantum mechanics. By now, most people are familiar with the basic weirdness of the quantum universe, where particles regularly perform impossible feats: appearing in two places at once; communicating information across distances; blinking out of existence in one spot and reappearing suddenly in another.

  Those strange subatomic operations underpin our every day reality, mainstream physicists long maintained, but do not manifest themselves up here at the macro-scale. In fact, in the realm of the paranormal, skeptics have long laughed at the way believers resort to quantum explanations for everything from the afterlife to consciousness and telepathy: Quantum phenomena are so small and require such cold and stable environments, they chortled, that they could never persist long enough to be of any real importance in the operations of warm, wet biological systems. But just in the past five years biologists have been discovering possible interactions between the micro-and macro-scales—interactions thought impossible till we found them. I discuss a few of these in chapter 3, but I am arguing that, given this state of affairs, we should be alert for and wary of dogmatism of any kind—be it religious or scientific. And I am further arguing that, before the evidence is in, many of us presuppose the answer that will best fit our worldviews—and soothe our overheated amygdalas.

  What this means, in practice, is that professional skeptics deny any thought that validation for mysticism might arise from the quantum realm, while many modern believers go on seeing the quantum as the heavenly land we’ll journey to when we die. I’d like to see these two sides in the debate start collaborating—or at least start taking each other seriously, and occasionally, there are signs such a thing might be possible. I’m a fan of the skeptic Brian Dunning, an atheist without an attitude, who runs a podcast on critical thinking called Skeptoid, which I highly recommend. And I’m perhaps even a bigger fan of the semi-retired entrepreneur Alex Tsakiris, who runs a podcast called Skeptiko. Tsakiris doggedly attempts to bring proponents of the paranormal and skeptics together for productive conversations—and sometimes he even succeeds. The brightest spot on the horizon, however, might be David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and author who has become the de facto leader of a new way of looking at the world, dubbed possibilianism. The creed of the possibilian is, I think, best summed up by Eagleman himself in an interview with the New York Times: “Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position—one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.”

  In most respects, I applaud Eagleman. We live in a world of false certainties, a world in which a fundamentalist minister like Pat Robertson claims to know God, and Richard Dawkins claims with near-equal certainty and no less passion that no such God exists. The media, of which I am a member, foments this kind of debate all the time, in which only two polarized views are presented. We suffer through this in political coverage, too, listening to the most strident Republicans and Democrats and no one with an alternative point of view. And I think, as a people, our grip on reality itself is diminished. We are always being presented with binary choices, when reality is far more complex.

  This book isn’t going to provide a lesson in epistemology, the study of knowledge, which has gone on for millennia. It’d take a lot more space than I have to do that. But this is a book that asks the reader to recognize that there is a difference between knowledge and belief, and the bar for what constitutes true knowledge is set awfully high—far higher than we can attain throughout our society. So in court, for instance, we rely on eyewitness testimony when we also know, by scientific study, that eyewitness testimony is shockingly unreliable. What this means is that, as human beings, we traffic largely in belief. I think this fact could set us free if we let it. In not only admitting we don’t know but acting on it, we open a door to conversation—as opposed to debate—and the exploration of new ideas, a good-faith sifting through of the facts we have. I think, theoretically, most religious people can at least grope their way toward accepting this: in theological terms, doubt is often seen as a necessary part of real faith. Skeptics might have a harder time, because they usually profess that they deal only in facts. But as we’ll see throughout this book, the arch-skeptic is as capable of seeing things according to his or her biases as the believer.

  The result is that we don’t merely live in a world of false certainties; we live in a world in which people at either extreme try and get those of us in the middle to buy into their particular fairytale version of reality.

  This line of argument is normally waged solely against believers—the “old man with a beard” who takes away the sins of the world and greets us all in heaven with a sweetie. Psychologists also often talk in terms of the emotional or real-world payoff people receive in exchange for what we do—from the actions we take to the beliefs we hold. And for a long time, this sort of transactional aspect of belief was most evident in, well, believers. Those who believe in God or even a Godless afterlife have long been examined in terms of the benefit they receive for holding that belief: faith in the paranormal as a panacea for knowing death awaits us all, for instance. But if the New Atheists have succeeded in anything, it is in crafting a materialist fairy tale. Known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have created a similar payoff for believing there is no God. In their view, the only immortality available to us is the legacy we leave behind; and because they are right they will be remembered and judged well by history. And here on Earth, while they’re alive, they get to feel smart while stupid goes on doing as stupid does.

  Religion tries to scare people into believing its tenets. Follow our rules or burn in hell. Dawkins declares a kind of intellectual fatwa against belief itself, swaying fence sitters to his position through fear of ridicule. Forswear belief or be called a superstitious dullard, a dangerous fool? Atheists shall be known as “brights,” and believers “dulls.” Is this an improvement? It all works out the same. Believers and unbelievers alike operating as mean, petty bullies. It also betrays a startling ignorance of human psychology. When people are attacked, they become defensive, stop listening, and cling to their views more aggressively. In this respect, Richard Dawkins isn’t fighting fundamentalism. He’s calcifying it. And so the New Atheists have succeeded in pointing out the sandy foundation of dogmatic religious belief; they have lent succor and courage to the secular humanists too long confined to our cultural closet. But their cartoonish one-liners have also brought the same sense of polarized opposites to our discussion of faith and spirituality that already dominates and demeans our politics.

  In the end, then, I’m not arguing for or against religion or atheism. What I’m trying to do is illuminate their common ground. Each side claims to have worked out a way of looking at the world that holds the ultimate claim on truth. Neither side seems likely to change its position. So in light of this, it seems we had all better do one thing in particular: learn to get along. I’m arguing that we learn to talk about so-called paranormal issues productively, so that beli
evers and disbelievers alike gain a better understanding not only of how the world works but of themselves and each other. The way I see it, we’re all land-based mammals on a planet with a greater surface area devoted to things that swim. We are all trapped on this same unforgiving rock, floating through space, with no rulebook for living other than the one we discover and write together. Under such circumstances, are we better off approaching each other in a posture of debate—or conversation?

  I’m not alone in thinking this way. I should point out that among the New Atheists, Sam Harris seems to clearly understand the difference between a paranormal claim, or ideas related to spirituality (for lack of a better term), and supernatural propositions, or the kind of thinking codified into a religion. “The question of what happens after death (if anything) is a question about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world,” writes Harris. “It is true that many atheists are convinced that we know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith know that I am not convinced of this. While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us.”

  I suspect that most of us are reasonable enough to realize that systems of thought, whether religious or scientific, that have survived for centuries and for millennia must necessarily contain truths that are ours for the taking. What gets too little play, at least in our public discourse, is any sort of middle or integrated view in which both political parties have valid points to make, or both rationalists and mystics have something to teach.