Post No.: 0942
Furrywisepuppy says:
The way our brains – more than our sensory organs – do much (and sometimes all) of the heavy lifting when it comes to seeing, hearing and other (apparently) sensory experiences could explain much of what some claim are the supernatural experiences they’ve felt i.e. hallucinations or misinterpreting ambiguous sensory information.
If someone claims to have experienced something like an ‘out-of-body experience’ – ask them what happened next? Then what happened after this? Could they see anything else? What did it actually look like? What was their emotional state at the time? The aim is to ground them onto what really happened and what they saw without the baggage of trying to ‘interpret its meaning’. They’ll oftentimes think of all sorts of other stuff they hadn’t thought about that might contradict their initial interpretation.
These phenomena, like ‘seeing a light at the end of a tunnel’, are things happening inside the brain e.g. one might ‘see’ phosphenes or flashes in one’s vision that have nothing to do with any external stimuli. Environmental silence can be deafening if you have tinnitus. Virtual reality can make you feel unbalanced even though you’re just standing still. Some chemicals/drugs can cause hallucinations. Household mould has also been implicated (less convincing are electromagnetic fields or infrasound). So it all has a physical basis but not from sources you may surmise.
It definitely feels vivid and real to us but it can be an illusion. And it can be important for people to understand that it’s alright and they’re alright. A fear of phantoms may feel real to someone, for example, and we’re not denying they felt those feelings if they felt them – the query is whether they really did see ghosts or was it too ambiguous to be sure? So talk with them about their experiences, which will often lead them to commence with their own enquiries to uncover the truth.
A critical thinker doesn’t just settle on the first hypothesis that sounds plausible or immediately dismisses out of paw any alternative possibilities no matter how controversial, but ponders all potential explanations (e.g. neurological bases, cultural influences). They then seek to test them all despite this being effortful and risky because it might question their intuitions and uproot all they thought they knew and believed in.
But it’s sometimes like if we don’t test our hypotheses to check their falsity, and we stick to our echo chambers, we can continue to convince ourselves they could be true. (Related is believing we’re better than someone else but refusing to compete against them in case we lose, which means we can continue to believe that we could/would beat them!)
We can be reluctant to surrender the sunk costs of our investment of time, energy and heart into a worldview. We simply don’t like admitting to being wrong either, especially if we’ve declared our stance publicly. It may appear like a loss of credibility to reverse our minds. But being able to renounce our beliefs if there’s a strong reason to is a precious life skill.
We might reject other people’s research or suspect confounds, yet not present better research of our own. Biases can make any belief persist despite any amount or quality of evidence.
Beware of some biases or effects with our own research, like protecting our self-interests or stakes in a desired conclusion. The ‘experimenter-expectancy effect’ is when the experimenter’s cognitive biases can influence the design and conduct of experiments or the interpretations of results (seeing what you want or expect to see). The ‘Hawthorne effect’ or ‘observer effect’ is when participants modify their own behaviours because they know they’re being observed. We can also influence the behaviours of participants, including other animals, without realising it, via the ‘clever Hans effect’, like via our subconscious body language or subtle ideomotor effect – hence the value of double-blind studies. (The ideomotor effect is the influence of a physical action by a mental idea even if one is totally unaware of it – like when a group of people are playing with an Ouija board.)
A possibility of a conclusion being correct doesn’t prove that conclusion – just like a non-zero chance of you being Wimbledon champion won’t necessarily mean you have or ever will.
And we need to present some unambiguous proof of phenomena. It’s the ambiguous nature of many, especially fleeting, stimuli that allows one to be able to interpret something as what we think, want or expect it to be. So we may think that we’ve fleetingly glimpsed a wraith in the shadows but we cannot stare at a supposed ghoul in plain sight in broad daylight because we’d be able to check that it’s definitely not one! It mightn’t have been a personal experience but based on someone else’s anecdote or an urban myth (perhaps a deliberate hoax) that’s circulating around too.
Through confirmation bias, we’ll prejudge and interpret more ambiguous events as proof of what we believe in. So if you believe that a house is haunted, your mind will be primed to anticipate ghosts and you’ll interpret more ambiguous visual phenomena, ambiguous sounds or ambiguous movements of objects as caused by ghosts. You might work yourself up into a state of on-edge fear in preparation of encountering a ghost that you’re literally a hair-trigger away from screaming if any ambiguous incident can be interpreted as potentially paranormal. Sleep paralysis can be interpreted as an external force. The greatest fears often come from our own imagination.
If you believe that your partner is hiding something then you’ll interpret every ambiguous thing you pick up in the context of them hiding something. You’ll also ignore, downplay or more easily forget all the things that contradict your prejudgements; and this happens so naturally that you could genuinely honestly deny that these things ever happened or were ever said. We’ve only limited attentional resources for all the information that’s available at any one time, and we fill in the gaps with our own minds. This can consequently lead to disputes between people who fail to account for the way different people can experience or interpret the exact same events differently!
We assume that whenever we see/hear something, we see/hear all of it objectively. But we don’t – we’re quite selective. So we cannot always trust what we remember. That’s how opposing fans can perceive fouls in sports differently. The solution is to seek more concrete proof and mutually-agreed metrics because arguing over what we remember we saw is fruitless. Now if only we had slow-motion action replays of claimed ghost sightings. Well whenever we do, we can usually quite clearly realise it wasn’t a ghost!
Politicians and businesspeople often speak in a vague, ambiguous and double-meaning, sometimes contradictory, way, in order to surreptitiously appease multiple sides of an issue, to not formally admit any responsibility for a fault, or to avoid actually answering a question that was asked. And we tend to focus on and cherry-pick what we want to hear according to whether we wish to support or criticise a point.
People read between the lines according to their own biases. So if you tell someone who doesn’t welcome any advice to not overcook the pork, they may retort that you’re saying they should undercook it – but you never said that.
A magician’s banter can work to fool us into believing in physics-defying supernatural explanations for their tricks e.g. ‘it’s a connection of the souls, which we can see through people’s eyes’ or ‘it’s mind over matter’. Some contend that lifting the veil ruins the wonder of magic – but how the universe really works is amazing too, and understanding a magician’s ingenuity, skill and showmanship can still be awe-inspiring and entertaining.
Ambiguous prophetic or psychic statements are like casting a wide net. And when a big fish gets caught in this net, they’ll claim that they caught it with a targeted harpoon. But pure chance would explain that a wide net will occasionally snare a big fish e.g. a vague premonition that could involve any older male with any kind of health problem at any point in time.
Our pattern-recognition heuristics kick in, but what we perceive as a pattern may just be a coincidence. So it’s not always the case that we’re deliberately trying to deceive others – we’re often being deceived by our own intuitions. The doorbell doesn’t always ring when you’re in the shower even though you can think of a few saliently annoying and therefore memorable times that’s happened. Sometimes it rings when you’re not there and doesn’t ring when you’re there but these non-events are downplayed when we make a one-sided analysis. Where do the data points that confirm our conclusion stand in the fuller set of data? For all the furry dreams we have, some will appear to come true just by coincidence.
Many people perceive physical and intentional causality as separate (the material world versus the ‘immaterial soul’) and describe their ‘free-willed soul’ as the source of their actions rather than because of a chain of physical causation. The innate readiness to separate physical and intentional causality – to perceive the world of objects as separate from the world of minds – could explain the natural inclination to believe in religious phenomena, in immaterial divinity as the ultimate cause of the physical world, and in incorporeal souls that temporarily possess these corporeal bodies while we live and leave them when we die.
We should become more cynical about things like miraculous births or curses. Yet beliefs in gods, ghosts, etc. won’t likely ever disappear due to our over-firing mind-body dualism, hyperactive agency detection and promiscuous teleology intuitions. These propensities did evolve – but like many of our evolved instincts, they’re crude and often fallible, like the way we form stereotypes or react with ‘fight or flight’ to even non-life-threatening scenarios. Not that in all cases does ‘fallible’ or ‘irrational’ necessarily mean harmful, like people finding many non-human animal babies cute gives them more opportunities to release beneficial dopamine and oxytocin, and religious beliefs can sometimes help people cope better with life.
Our feelings and beliefs are extremely important to us because they’re our very perceptions of reality at a personal level. They affect our identity and well-being. Love and pain, for instance, are real to us, and that’s all that essentially matters. But it can be dangerous territory if our feelings and beliefs aren’t backed by falsifiable and empirical support because we could then believe in all sorts of things that are contradicted by the reality. (Post No.: 0927 reviewed unfalsifiable hypotheses.)
It’s not to say that different scientists can’t hold different hypotheses concerning the nature of reality – some propose that we may be projections from a two-dimensional surface according to the holographic principle borne from string theory. But it’s down to them to experimentally prove their hypotheses are fundamentally true. Scientists don’t get special treatment – they’ve had to e.g. experimentally prove that empty vacuum space isn’t truly empty but full of quantum fluctuations and energy; or experimentally prove the Pauli exclusion principle in quantum mechanics and the way that probability patterns of electrons and other fermions aren’t easily changed hence why objects feels solid, even though they’re mostly empty space, because of dancing electrons or clouds of waves. Scientists have even built quantum computers that take advantage of the probabilistic nature of quantum physics.
The inexactitudes of our current understanding of the universe are becoming ever more exact. The Higgs boson slotted into the Standard Model of particle physics nicely and therefore reinforced it. The overall consensus can always be challenged though, like muons potentially not behaving as expected. But proponents will need to empirically prove that an alternative model explains the universe even better.
Science adjusts its views based on evidence hence why it’s not like a faith. It allows for evolution and improvement thus is a messy process full of successes and failures – but better for it.
Woof!
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
