But surely not ‘psychokinetics’ you must be thinking, surely real objects don’t levitate at will (unaided by biological amplification). Nonetheless even that obvious fact raises some interesting questions; e.g. why do we call such beliefs ‘facts’? I’m not suggesting that they aren’t facts, but I am wondering how we can be so sure that they aren’t.
Cf. how scientists were once sure that space was Euclidean and 3-dimensional, so that it was quite reasonable to believe that reasonable people would always consider space to be Euclidean and 3-dimensional, whereas it actually took relatively little evidence (alongside a relatively complicated theory) for us to change to a relativistic view of space-time. So although that world-view may itself be superseded eventually, as it does after all conflict with our better-verified (and intuitively more plausible) quantum mechanics, nonetheless we are unlikely ever again to rely so much on our intuitions, in physics—excepting, of course, for some reason, such things as psychokinetics.
I suspect that such knowledge as that real objects don’t levitate (via pure will-power, so to speak) is indeed justified, and largely on the grounds of our direct, nonverbal knowledge of natural laws, about which we actually know far more than any of us could ever say (even had we forever to say it). Our public, empirical knowledge has, it seems to me, such private, pre-propositional foundations, which may only be expressible rather vaguely (in our ordinary object-orientated languages) but are directly knowable by us because they are shown to us (not told to us) through our individual experiences of the world of which each of us is a part, a world from which none of us are apart.
E.g. such directly known epistemic foundations would seem to facilitate the common sense resolution of the Cartesian and Humean sceptical threats to our scientific knowledge (as I argue in a 2006 essay here), via the necessarily rather vague hypothesis that micro-psychokinetic (mpk for short) processes give rise to such knowledge. For us to act micro-psychokinetically we need only affect chance phenomena in the external world directly (we don’t have to levitate objects at will), so that sort of psychokinetics is relatively plausible—it would be (if it exists) relatively unimpressive, operating at precisely that underlying, pre-propositional layer of our lives. Presumably most mpk effects would therefore be occurring (if at all) at a pre-conscious level, but even so there seems to be some empirical evidence for some such process (e.g. this and that). Of course much that is said about psychokinetics is clearly hogwash, but nonetheless (and indeed, partly for that very reason) it may be that much that might be said about mpk is not being said because if one observed some evidence for mpk one would surely, to the extent that one was rational, be very tempted to keep it to oneself.
To mention such evidence would be to associate oneself, in the minds of those to whom it is mentioned, with whosoever had previously mentioned such evidence, whereas one might well not wish to be associated with such a class of people, not by those whom one considers to be worth informing. Very roughly, the more rigorous one is, the less highly one will think of (the overwhelming majority of) those who have already mentioned such evidence, so that to mention such evidence would be (to the best of one’s knowledge) to become bogged down in all sorts of issues that one would prefer (to the extent that one was being rational) to ignore.
Several analogies are possible here, e.g. seeing (evidence for) UFOs, or indeed God (under the hypothesis that they exist); but for a story that is grossly simplified, and which will therefore not tempt us to consider too closely its distracting superficialities, consider a medieval peasant who sees a black swan, blown in from Australia via some freak storms. He might know it to be a swan, a black swan, but should he say anything of it? Being a good Christian, he knows that he ought to tell the local Scholastic priests who believe (falsely) that all swans are white but who would (hypothetically) say that they would want to know the truth.
But they would not actually believe his story, it being known (upon considerable empirical evidence) that all swans are white; or rather, if some priest were to claim to believe him, then that would probably be because his story could be interpreted (profitably) as a sign of something or other—our peasant would have no control over what his story was taken to be a sign of, and what is worse he would then become only a dangerously small part of the associated politics.
His fellow peasants might believe his story, but to tell them would serve no purpose (it would not even make a very interesting story, whereas meeting mermaids might have). And he couldn’t catch or kill the swan, to show it to the more philosophical priests (as proof of his words) if to do so would be, let us say, to have hunted royal fowl (a crime punishable by a horrible death). In short, he must keep this (private) knowledge to himself, however interesting he (alone) knows it to be. He could only say, to any priest who asked him about all swans being white, that he’s (privately) sure that he wouldn’t know (since between seeing and science falls a shadow).
That story made some sense because we now know that black swans and freak storms are possible, and analogically what I need are some equally realistic reasons for expecting something rather than nothing in the region of mpk. And since our existing world-views determine how we interpret strange evidence, I will therefore need to address some more basic metaphysical issues next. Only in such a way could we could begin to separate the scientifically interesting wheat, within the existing public observations (which might include observations that we would not now associate with the paranormal, but whose best explanation would involve mpk processes had we a good theory of mpk), from the more sociologically explicable chaff, because the development of any realistic theory of mpk would surely rely upon our having already separated those two out in roughly the right way (in the presence of actual evidence for mpk).
So I will begin with dualism—very roughly that the human brain is essentially the physical medium for (rather than the physical cause of) the human mind. By ‘dualism’ I therefore mean something like Descartes’ mind/body duality, although by ‘mind’ I mean any individual subject (e.g. a dog’s mind, if a dog is not just a biochemical mechanism; cf. Aristotle’s earlier organism/organ-aggregation distinction). Unfortunately I’ve yet to research this area properly (so I can merely recommend Chalmers as state-of-the-art, if too materialistic for my tastes) but I’ve sketched an intuition-pump for (strong) dualism below (whence I would welcome feedback)—it is hardly an original argument, but although it occurred to me about 30 years ago now (it being just the sort of thought that occurs to school-kids who are thinking about plausible world-views, especially if they read a lot of science fiction) I still find the images generated by it compellingly paradoxical. (This was written in 2006; since then I've been considering a more holistic metaphysics, in which a substantial dualism is most naturally part of an Open-theistic worldview, e.g. via my 2008 theodicy here
Of course, the details of the mind-brain interaction (if there is one) ought to derive from empirical science, e.g. public observations of mpk (where they are valid). Descartes himself (rather implausibly) located the mind-brain interaction in the human pineal gland, without describing its mechanism, but since the brain’s biochemistry is fundamentally quantum-mechanical there are now various possibilities for such a mechanism, some of which would allow mpk. About 15 years ago I stumbled across a suitably ubiquitous sort of mpk, which I’ve since been investigating pre-theoretically, although the relatively obvious sociological problems (cf. II above) with speaking of such things in a straightforward manner imply, so far as I am concerned, that I ought to present the matter relatively obliquely.
The first thing to do is therefore to argue that, since dualism is probably true, there is probably some sort of mind-brain interaction (to be investigated further). So for the sake of argument, suppose that we (or if that is too implausible, that aliens in the distant future) have a materialistic theory that explains everything about the world (as observed by scientists) in terms of fundamental physics. When you drink a cup of coffee, for example, all those physical movements, and all of the chemical reactions involved in that action, are accommodated by our theory. What could not be accommodated, of course, is the fact that there are such observations, rather than merely interactions—that you taste the coffee, having chosen to drink it, and then feel its warmth in your guts. Even if all the functioning of the brain had been accommodated by our theory, and even if a plausible story of how such structures could evolve by natural selection was also included, where and how (in our theory) would our awareness of the world arise?
Now, maybe sensory organs could evolve within a purely material world (if such a world is possible). And biochemical structures might well be selected for behaving (e.g. for computing neurologically) as though they were individual subjects (with social consciences, and religious beliefs etc.). But why would such structures also be subjects, be individual beings with subjective experiences?
Why would they need to be subjects, as well as (collections of) objects? Not in order to enhance their fitness if, as our theory says, all their behaviour could be explained in terms of what their neurones do, and thence what the underlying particles do. But furthermore, how could such an option be available in the first place, to be selected for?
But our minds certainly exist, as every scientist (and non-scientist) knows in an incontrovertibly direct way. So the problem is that while our theory (hypothetically) explains everything that our minds do, insofar as those things might be observed and spoken of, our theory says nothing about the bare subjectivity that (as we know more directly) underlies them.
So the question arises, what in the world could not be associated with something of the sort of (superficial and ineffective) subjectivity that remains unexplained by our theory? Would plants have, not minds, and perhaps not even perceptions (as we have them), but something like primitive individual sensations or feelings? Would amoebae?
Maybe not, but since our brains are composed of interacting neurones (which presumably also lack minds like ours) why should a forest, for example, not have something akin to a mind? Are we really sure that there is nothing that it is like to be a forest (or a plant, a cell, an electron, a fact, a language, etc.)? In other words, if our feelings of choosing to drink coffee, for example, are only a superficial companion to biochemical processes in our brains, then why should some of the biochemical processes within such ecosystems as forests (or indeed, whole biospheres) not be similarly accompanied by subjective feelings of choosing to do whatever occurs?
Indeed, why would something akin to our own (directly known) subjectivity not be associated with everything and (such subjectivity being superficial and ineffective) every subset of everything? Although we naturally draw some sort of line at the conscious human brain (or primate, mammalian, vertebrate, and so forth) and consider minds to be absent beneath it, our materialistic theory will presumably explain such delineations in terms of our social and linguistic evolution—the problem is that no objective line will be indicated by our theory. That is indeed a problem because there clearly exists one especially complex and well-defined physical individual, i.e. this Universe (see V below).
There may well be other problems with our theory saying nothing about subjectivity itself, of course (since subjectivity is clearly not nothing), e.g. if primitive subjectivity is indeed associated with every subset of everything then telepathic communication ought to be a lot more common that it appears to be.
Anyway, even if we were to consider subjectivity to be absent beneath the level of the brain (assuming that there was such an appropriately ontological line during the evolution of the brain), still our theory does not make it implausible (and indeed, it actually indicates) that there would be, above that line, something that was (to put it analogically) to us much as we are to our neurones—something that might know itself to be choosing all that occurs (much as we would choose to have a cup of coffee), which would be everywhere (much as we are where our brains are) and which might even know everything, about this Universe (since we know so little, while our neurones know nothing), and so forth. In short, materialism seems to amount to an unjustified belief about an existing God, as follows.
A way of doing science that was more agnostic about its primitives (e.g. the working hypothesis of dualism) could accommodate no less tidily the same physical observations. So the materialism of our (or the aliens’) theory seems to manifest entirely in the different statement about God—and note that ‘God’ was indeed the right word (despite its other connotations, or rather because of the wide variety of them) because, for an analogy, what you drink out of is clearly a cup even if our concept of a cup is of a classical object in Euclidean space while the object being drunk from is more likely to be a fuzzy set of wavefunctions in more than three relativistic dimensions. And that belief (about God) is unjustified because we could not have had a scientific reason for supposing that our hypothetical theory could amount to our most realistic theory of subjectivity (quite the converse given all our unanswered questions), let alone God.
And if the motivations of materialism and of atheism are sufficiently akin, as they seem to be, then our materialistic theory of everything is essentially incoherent. Of course, thus far my argument has been pretty sketchy. So there is no actual inconsistency for any materialist to worry about. But the underlying problem here is not the incompatibility of materialism and atheism. After all, the idea that this Universe has a Creator of some sort is slightly more sensible once we are dualists, with the need to explain the origin of immaterial minds (which would be more than mere subjectivities, if they existed). Basically, we have set the materialist the problem of explaining how any sort of structure, of any sort of material objects, could have such properties as would amount to the subjectivity of an individual subject (which surely exists).
Insofar as she chooses to ignore that problem (as any physical scientist could reasonably do, given the current state of our physical knowledge), at best only agnosticism about dualism (not materialism) would be justified.
Personally I find that I know too much about myself to be profoundly agnostic on that basic metaphysical point; although as far as our sciences go, and maybe as far as propositions in our public languages generally go, I would concede that an explicit agnosticism is to be preferred, because agnostics seem to be intrinsically more receptive to, and interested in, new evidence, and its real implications, even though the philosophical debates tend to be between believers in pairs of opposing options. Such debates do clarify the facts (via our natural language clarification procedures), and believers are often more efficient at working within world-views (whence they tend to take over hierarchical structures, even scientific ones), but whilst they can change their minds in the face of new evidence they tend to do so more catastrophically, if at all (and then via agnosticism).
Anyway, following the success of such arguments for dualism we might wonder, what else can we know about minds? I’m sure that materialistic psychology (e.g. neuroscience) will take us a long way towards answering such questions, even if dualism is true (just as the structure of the eye can tell us a lot about why we see the colours we see, even though colours are subjective). But beyond a certain point materialistic reductions would take us away from the most realistic explanations.
Of course, regarding where the mind/body division should be made, such metaphysical arguments (or intuition-pumps) as the above could tell us little. By themselves they only show that there ought to be something, rather than nothing, on each side of the division. Nonetheless in conjunction with observations metaphysical arguments may become thought-experiments that might indicate the most plausible avenues to follow, in search of more substantial results—in particular, of course, I’m thinking of how investigating mpk properly might help.
So such thoughts bubble away… In their defence note that in this Universe, with its myriads of galaxies, the importance of having thought realistically about what kinds of thinking things are physically possible is most likely to go beyond what such thoughts could tell us about ourselves (although that is a good enough motivation in itself, in my opinion). Materialism, in its most plausible forms (e.g. property dualism), implies that something like micro-psychokinesis should be observable, via the likelihood of Gaia as a self-aware wielder of such of its parts as us, self-aware and language (and other tool) using as we are. If we are purely material, if matter is such that amongst its properties it includes those that give rise to us as we are—much as sunlight is such that amongst its properties it includes those that allow lasers to blast rocks to smithereens—then it is surely indicated, by our existence, that a more complex and unitary structure such as the Earth’s ecosphere would be more like the goddess Gaia, than a crystal or a car. Similarly theism, in its most plausible form (e.g. as indicated by the most plausible theodicy), indicates that something just like micro-psychokinesis would occur within living brains, if not elsewhere. Reports of such things as micro-psychokinesis are therefore most interesting philosophically, because their empirical details should have, or so one might expect upon reflection upon what we know pretty well nowadays, the potential to discriminate between the most plausible materialisms (e.g. not Humean supervenience) and theisms (e.g. not Islamist fundamentalism). It is therefore even more interesting that there is so little professional interest in making rigorously objective observations of such things.