From: Jeff Davis (jdavis@socketscience.com)
Date: Tue Aug 29 2000 - 16:15:24 MDT
Extropsensorians,
"Driftin' into darkness,
Pretty soon you'll drift away."
Folks who are inclined to mystical explanations of reality tend to take
anything that is not yet explained--or not explained fully or with great
confidence--by the methods of science, and attribute its features to
mystical agencies, and to claim that it cannot now, cannot ever be
explained by science, and that therefore science is--hurray!! we
win--inferior to faith and mysticism. Well, I want people to be happy. I
don't want to rain on anyone's parade, to deprive them of the warm feeling
of celebratory ebullience or the pleasures of self-confidence or the sense
of self-importance or superiority which they derive from their faith, but
neither do I bother to spend any significant amount of time in microscopic
analysis of their foolishness. The discovery of scientific truth requires
time and effort, intellectual talent, discipline, and diligence. Mysticism
on the other hand, springs from intellectual rigidity, insipidity, and
laziness.
>The Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception
>I assume that the reader is
>familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the
>four items of it, viz.
>telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and
>psycho-kinesis.
I'll deal with these four in a moment.
>These disturbing phenomena seem to deny
There is "seeming", and then there is "being". "Seeming" is the gift of
perception and its (sometimes noble and capable, sometimes fawning and
inept) co-conspiritor, intellect. "Being"--simply "is": egoless,
dispassionate, unconscious, and unselfconscious.
>all our usual scientific ideas.
Today's usual, tomorrow's trash. Get over it. Or at least stop the
incessant whining.
>How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the
>statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.
My God!, telepathy could be--no, it IS-- real?! How shocking! And we
don't understand it! How unprecedented! We don't understand everything?!
Oh, the pain! How devastating to our sense of self-importance! Oh, the
ignominy! We had all that twisty glassware, all that stainless steel, the
white crisply-starched lab coats that seemed almost magically to renew
themselves (though we knew of the agency of their renewal: peons, a lower
order of humanity, with servile obeisance and hushed reverence, shuffling
through the hallowed halls in the dead of night, collecting the barely
wilted raiment of the scientific priesthood for transport to some fetid
cell, where, aided by an underclass of merely *industrial* (pthtoowie!)
machines, they would perform the venal and offensive--but nonetheless
necessary--process of cleansing and restoration), and all those nifty
dials, guages, and flashing lights. And then to be unmasked and degraded
by the condemnation--the stain--of the existence something as yet unknown
to us. Oh, Death, please, come and take me now, life is naught but shame
and despair.
>It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts
in.
Everything's hard till you know how to do it. Do it, or accept the
undeniable fact of your INADEQUACY!!! And, please, stop your whining.
>Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in
ghosts and
>bogies.
And the tooth fairy, and the Easter bunny, and the Devil, and Santa Claus.
The canonical premise that ignorance proves mysticism, proves something
alright. It proves that he who believes should not engage in a battle of
wits with a turnip, lest the turnip prevail by the application of superior
strategy, to wit, prudent, parsimonious, and sagacious SILENCE!!!
>The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of
>physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar,
>would be one of the first to go.
Start with nonsense, and all that follows will be corrupted. The Greeks
had a word for it: logikos.
>telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and
>psycho-kinesis.
(1) telepathy. The turnip is wise. It knows its limitations. It will
never offer a funky theory to explain telepathy. It will never suffer
embarassmnent. It will never be proved wrong. The turnip is a very down
to earth fellow. It will have no truck with mysticism.
The human organism is shot through with neural tissue, which conducts
electrical currents. When electrical charges are accelerated they emit
electromagnetic radiation. The structure which transmits is also apt to
receive, thus the antenna which is the human body and which transmits is
the antenna which is the human body which receives. This may not be the
final word regarding explanations of telepathy, but it is quite adequate to
demonstrate my point: only the impatient and hysterical unterturnip
intellect would despair/declare that the answer to this question is beyond
the reach of science.
(2) clairvoyance: (definition)The supposed power to see objects or events
that cannot be perceived by the senses.
The gross and obvious sensory capabilities are quite familiar. Is there
not room for more subtle--perhaps the term "second order" is
apt--perceptual capabilities? Why is this so hard? There are radio waves,
and infrared, and magnetic fields whizzing all about us. Invisible
phenomena which, despite their invisibility, are well known to us,
manipulable, useful, and much used.
Probably those who defined and delimited that which constitutes sensory
perception, were just limited in the depth and detail of their
understanding. They were new at it. That was then, this is now. Perhaps
there's nothing "extra" about it. Time for a revision then.
He who has his head up his ass knows only dimly lit colonic vistas. Does
this confirm the nonexistence of more aesthetically uplifting visuals?
Also, the tree in the forest falls without a sound. Right.
(3) Precognition. Doesn't the Einsteinian plasticity of space and time,
and the as-yet-unresolved weirdness of quantum,...er,...weirdness., give us
plenty of wiggle room here? No need to drag out that greasy and tattered
fudge-factor cum security blanket called mysticism. The darkness and
uncertainty of primevil night may have been terrifying to our wild
progenitors. The modern "darkness" and uncertainty of
that-which-is-yet-unknown is, by contrast, our personal and sacred
invitation to explore and discover all that lies beyond the veil of maya.
The adventure of awakened consciousness. That's the surprise in the
Crackerjack box of life. If you're reading this, you're a winner!
Alternate answer: er,... I don't know. Did that kill me? Nope. In fact,
it didn't hurt a bit. (But then, you knew that ahead of time, didn't you?)
(4) Tele-kenesis. Magnets do it. Masses do it with gravity. Radio waves
do it. Action at a distance mediated by an unseen, perhaps-yet-undetected,
but presumably material agency. That was easy. Next.
------------------------------------------------------
We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when,
But I'm sure we'll meet again some sunny day.
Best, Jeff Davis
"Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
Ray Charles
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