[ExI] Paranormal activity?

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 1 21:57:53 UTC 2021


On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 6:09 PM Angel Z. Lopez via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Everything has a logical explanation.

Has anyone offered illogical explanations? This reminds me of TV shows
and films where there's a logical explanation for something -- the
logical explanation being the ghost or alien or whatnot is real and
not imaginary -- and what the character denying means is they want a
conventional or mundane explanation -- that is, one involving only
things conventionally accepted or part of the worldview now. (Don't
get me wrong here. I'm no believer in psi, but I think there's a
difference between a logical explanation and one based on, say,
current science or current accepted (by whom?) knowledge. I would
distinguish, too, between logical possibilities, nomological ones, and
contingent ones. For instance, it's logically possible that there
could be ghosts. It seems nomologically impossible or very improbable
though. It's also logically possible that Trump won the 2020 election.
It's also nomologically possible (his winning wouldn't violate any
physical laws), but it's contingently impossible or very unlikely.)

One thing I found interesting about psi is that people investigating
it often tend to adopt something like a lab science approach. That's
not true of many other paranormal stuff. In fact, it's like paranormal
stuff goes in different epistemic buckets. Psi investigators tend to
take a scientific approach -- whether they've found anything is
another matter. (Most scientific findings don't find anything
noteworthy and even ones that do can be overturned. Think of how much
of the science of a hundred years ago is still around now.) Astrology,
cryptids, and UFOs tend to take other approaches. Astrology seems to
have almost no one studying it scientifically (not that there's
anything to find aside from maybe stuff of psychological or
sociological interest), but takes a more commercial approach: bilking
people who don't think critically about it. Cryptids and UFOs tend to
be just collecting reports and sharing stories for the most part.
Perhaps there's a tiny amount of scientific type controls on it, but
it's nothing compared to psi.

Regards,

Dan
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http://author.to/DanUst


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