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There is no better venue than the internet message board to show that we
are inundated with a multitude of ideas in our freely communicating
society. On these paranormal boards we have vampires, and remote viewers,
psychics, spell-casters, demon-summoners, and all manner of agents of
spiritual entity. We have alien abductees, alien ships in our skies,
bigfoot running wild in the Pacific Northwest, and crop circles proffered
as messages from the stars. We have people verbalizing their fright over
far-reaching conspiracies perpetrated by arcane secret organizations
hellbent on world domination, while overhead our skies are being chem-trailed
to achieve some hidden nefarious goal. Bloodsucking goat-killers roam our
fields and forests, while succubi and incubi haunt our dreams. Free energy
has been achieved, but the discovery is held down by one or more of the
aforementioned grand mal conspiracies. We haven't really been to the moon
and homo sapiens originated as an alien lab experiment. These are just a
few of the ideas you will encounter in a given afternoon cruising the
message board circuits. They all share one thing in common -there isn't
any reliable evidence that any one of these many ideas is true. They are
believed to be true, but they are not demonstrably true.
Skepticism tries to discover the core reasons for believing an idea so as
to tease out the good ideas from the bad or downright silly ideas, towards
the end of discovering useful, reliable knowledge. Skepticism recognizes
that it is not the out and out lies that cause us harm so much as it is
those unfounded notions that are believed to be true.
On these message boards, the various ideas are presented in a more or less
finished form, encapsulated anywhere from within a couple paragraphs to a
couple posts -very efficient and easy to consume. Unfortunately we are
swamped by the sheer number of ideas and to complicate things further,
these ideas often conflict with one another. They may well all be false,
but they cannot all be true.
Skepticism recognizes the human need to cope with ideas individually, as
well as the practicality of accepting only the good ideas while weeding
out and abandoning the poor ideas. Humans suffer what might be called
'collective cognitive dissonance' -we produce multitudes of conflicting
thoughts and ideas. Skepticism evolved as a method of dealing with all
these conflicting ideas.
Skepticism is by no means the only way to sort among ideas. Some defer to
the opinion of authorities, while others may follow the dictates of
tradition. A certain common sense -street smarts -can be valuable in the
assessment. Still others seek the counsel of spiritual leaders, while
others unknowingly react to their inner prejudices. We might cast chicken
bones in a drawn circle and 'read' their random placement, or follow the
vague directives in our daily horoscope. There is no doubt that some
approaches are more efficient and more accurate than others. All methods
employ rationality, varying only in degree. All methods, including
skepticism, are fallible and prone to some degree of inconsistency.
Skepticism attempts to apply rationality to systematically get to the core
of why people believe these ideas they offer to others, and it does so in
pursuit of the oldest and most noble of human endeavors: the search for
reliable knowledge.
Skepticism examines the claimed idea and attempts to discover the core
reasons for belief in the proffered claim. If those core reasons are
acceptable and compatible with our set of existing knowledge, and the
reasoning that leads from the experienced event to the claim is likewise
acceptable and compatible with our set of existing knowledge, then the
claim is acceptable.
One method of establishing that a claim is acceptable for further
examination is that it be independently corroborated by another person,
but it is important to then subject that claimant's testimony to the same
rigorous scrutiny. Errors can occur individually or communally.
The most commonly made error in paranormal claims occurs when the
experiencer or observer jumps to conclusions in his interpretations of
what it is he has experienced, and in the overwhelming majority of such
claims the validation that led to the belief occurred entirely within the
same person, quite without any independent corroboration. In the largest
share of the minority of claims that do offer corroboration, the
corroborating witness(es) fail to survive critical scrutiny of the core
reasons and chain of reasoning that led to their validation of the event
or experience. The devil in all this is subjectivity. Skepticism
recognizes the essential human capacity for wish fulfillment and
confabulation as the primary components in claims of paranormal powers and
events, i.e., the heart clouds the eye.
We have confirmation of this high prevalence of subjective validation as
the primary causative in paranormal claims in the fact that whenever a
claim is removed from the claimant and is placed under independent
scrutiny outside the subjective framework of the experiencer's
interpretations, it simply disappears and cannot be replicated. So vexing
has this become for proponents of the various paranormal claims that a
special theory was concocted to explain away this disappearing act. It is
suggested that paranormal powers and events won't work and won't occur
whenever the 'negative energy' of a skeptic is present. Since any 'test'
is inherently skeptical, this certainly provides a handy excuse for the
total record of failure of paranormal testing. Over and again, when
paranormal claims are scrutinized, they fail at either the core reasoning
stage or at the conclusion stage.
Core Reasoning
"I know what I saw!" Well, I wouldn't be too sure about that. No
reasonable person is ever so certain. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously
inaccurate and vulnerable to confabulation. Confabulation refers to the
innate human practice of augmenting memories. We all do it, and we cannot
stop ourselves from doing it. When we recall past events from memory, we
add and subtract details in accordance to all sorts of internal motivators
and promptors, and otherwise alter the facts of the recalled event. If you
believe you are accurately remembering an event that runs against common
sense and the laws of physics, you must entertain the virtual certainty
that you have made an error in memory, or you have made an accurate recall
of an error in interpretation of what occurred.
Conclusion Reasoning
"I was thinking about my mom and right then the phone rang -and it
was my mom! What else could that be but a psychic connection?" It
could be pure coincidence. We don't count or remark upon those times when
we think of our mothers and they don't call. We also fail to acknowledge
that if these two actions: 'thinking of my mother' and 'my mother
telephoning me' are frequently repeated, then sooner or later it is
inevitable that the two will converge. Coincidence is misinterpreted as a
psychic connection.
Examples of unreasonable core ideas and conclusions in the paranormal or
ufological fields are legion and are best addressed by attaining a working
knowledge of the logical fallacies of reasoning.
Now, allow me to stipulate that no one is compelled to follow skeptical,
critical thinking processes at all. There are other methodologies, each
with its own degree of accuracy and reliability. But, if you value
trustworthy, reliable, applicable knowledge, you won't find a better
method for uncovering it from amid the dregs and drivel of message board
paranormal claims, and its value transfers quite handily to all other
realms of empirical inquiry.
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