BROO!!
Recently my friend Steve Streisguth and I were watching (though I hate to give this movie oxygen) 'Paranormal Activity', and having a conversation about the paranormal. It made me realize how glad I am to not believe, even in the slightest bit, the supernatural. Steve was shocked when he found that I am rigidly anti-superstitious. I guess I owe it, in a large way, to my recently reading of 'Unweaving the Rainbow' by Richard Dawkins. The central argument of the book is that it only enhances the beauty of a concept to fully understand it. A lot of people think a world without fantasy, angels, miracles and holy intervention in our affairs is bleak and depressing. The message in the book is that not only do literally amazing things happen frequently in a rational reality, but that they are more amazing than anything dreamed up by the superstitious. Even more, there are no boogiemen, demons, monsters, or anything else truly evil. A universe where possession by spirits is possible is, to me, the definition of both bleak and depressing.
But this is an illustration of the chapter 'Unweaving the Uncanny' from the book. It's about deciphering improbability, or just unweaving the uncanny. Most of the following ideas are being paraphrased from the book:
We, like all other animals are at the very least amateur statisticians. Statistics are a big factor in the intuition that helps every animal survive by its ability to weigh risks and rewards. Naturally, humans inherit this trait, and use it frequently. But something that is sort of unique to humans is self-worth, esteem and image, or in short – ‘ego’. Ego permeates our judgment, and in time this once laudable phenotypic quality, becomes a tangible rift, which evolves further into a serious obstruction of judgment. The obstruction I'm talking about is superstition. Superstition is allowed to jeopardize real facts, because of its status as a ‘belief’. This is where the Dawkins’ ability to 'unweave the uncanny' comes into importance.
We have a lot to gain from the ability to keep a reserved approach to thinking through seemingly significant occurrences - when practiced, this procedure will help dissolve our belief in our own unconditional significance, and also benefit our minds through gaining a true understanding of what is happening beneath in a situation veiled by circumstance and improbability. I don't mean to say that all people are always insignificant. But I do mean to say that when someone believes everything 'happens for a reason' it can become harmful, influencing you to alter the way you live and the way that you invest in your own life. When beliefs have a significant tangible effect on our reality, they deserve to be analyzed - and just look how tangible superstition has become.
My quarrel with superstition is that it causes a lack of investment in our only reality. Science is our only way of understanding our reality. To make an effort to understand reality is to invest in it. Superstition is a lack of investment, and the superstitious believe that science offers no real ultimate answers – that it in itself is a matter of faith. But science is not about trust; it’s a guarantee. And it’s the only one we have. For whatever reason, it’s not very commonly known that science does offer answers to questions like ‘does everything happen for a reason’ and ‘why do we exist’. They are not mathematically sound answers, but rather the implication of theories that have been accepted as fact. And these theories are nothing new. They have been out there, the first of which since 1859, just waiting to be learned. So my point is not that ‘investing in your life’ means choosing science or superstition, it just means taking advantage of the tools that will give a safe grip on reality, so as not to misunderstand the value of this life.
Let me cut to the chase and write off any testament which calls into question physics, i.e. a ghost, a statue bleeding from the eyes or 70,000 people witnessing the sun moving around in the sky, or something else absolutely insane. Though massive amounts of people witnessing a supernatural event sounds as compelling as it gets, the tactics up ahead should sort it out for you, so that I don’t have to spell it out multiple times. For now we’ll focus on minor supernatural events i.e. an eerie presence, a cool room, an uncanny coincidence interpreted as a message from above. These kinds of things I do believe are sometimes actually perceived, and they are important to discuss because they are, I think, usually not lies or frauds. In fact, they are the closest anyone has ever come to a real supernatural occurrence. And yet, think about how commonplace something like this is. Have you ever met anyone who has never had something seemingly unexplainable happen to them? Chances are everyone you know has occupied a role within the any of the many populations subject to coincidence, just because of the sheer volume of possible oddities that will occur in our universe. Focusing on a bigger picture, there are a lot of other factors to consider that contribute to an individual phenomenon. We could lump them under these main points:
- Everything has an explanation, even if at the time, explanation seems unfathomable.
- Establishing whether or not something supernatural has really occurred or not should be, ideally, an objective balance of probabilities. (The probability that it has happened for a reason vs. the probability that it has just happened anyway)
- There is no testament that can be made that is capable of debunking our laws of physics, this is because a testament is a witnessing of a single occurrence, and a scientific law is scrutinized and tested relentlessly.
To apply these criteria to an example- Steve told me a story about a girl he knows, whom works at Eastern State Penitentiary. He mentioned that late at night, she had seen areas of the penitentiary lit up where she knew that there was no electricity. Creepy, right? But stop and realize that in every instance that left you awe-struck with improbability, you've probably been able to decode in later years, when the shock wore away and you put some critical thinking behind it. This happens to me all the time. Don't let your gullibility get the best of you and dissolve the superstition with skepticism. After all, it is most likely not the fault of your friend. If a trustworthy friend tells you sincerely that they saw something supernatural, it doesn't mean they are lying through their teeth, or that they are dumb. It just means they really believe in what they told you. And in their defense, they may have really perceived it, but that doesn't mean it really happened. The thing about testimonies is that perception is just not a totally accountable reference. The brain is known to literally warp audio and visual signals into recognizable shapes. The science of perception entails that what you sense is a lot less of pure reality than it is a diluted mixture of reality and association. Hundreds of leaves falling off of a tree seen from many feet away should in reality just look like green shapes moving around - but your brain fills in the blanks, and you are left with a sensation mostly fabricated with the familiar association of something you've seen many times before. This is why eyewitness testimony is the weakest form of evidence in a court of law.
In balancing probabilities it is easy to see that it is much more probable that some one who you love and trust has recently gone insane and/or is making up stories for attention, than it is that he or she has seen ghosts in the doorway at night, or that Jesus has presented his own face to him or her in the form of pea mush on his or her dinner plate. All that is required to establish an event’s insignificance is that you work out the mathematical probability. Probability equations are really hard, so I don't expect anyone to do them precisely, but if something odd happens, it takes just a few seconds to make some educated guesses and come up with a vague approximation.
Getting away from math I want to say something about the implication of probability, or actually just implications in general. Some things have huge implications that we fail to realize. During the book Dawkins coins the acronym PETWHAC for Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental. What it means is the group of individuals who are amongst the population of those affected by a coincidental event. Intuition tells us that we should not be able to be included in the PETWHAC, but for no apparent reason. We habitually have troubles understanding how something unlikely could happen to us. What I’m trying to make a point of is that in most instances there is no reason to believe that you should be excluded from the PETWHAC, yet your belief persists. The implication of probability means that if you are eligible to be included in the PETWHAC - then should you become included in the PETWHAC, the insignificance of the event is not debatable.
The important thing is not how low the probability is, it's just that it has a probability. In fact, the fact that an event has any probability is actually the only matter of significance. When I said that, "The probability that it has happened for a reason vs. the probability that it has just happened anyway" what I mean by 'just happened anyway' is that it can happen in a world totally lacking any sort of divine intervention. Mathematics strictly exclude the supernatural. That's the power of implication that people overlook. When discussing existence, people overlook the idea that it has a probability, and what that means altogether, and only fixate themselves on the improbability. The big bang had an infinitesimal p value. But who are we to say that the amount of time and chances necessary where not given, so that the event could come into fruition? Even stranger - the concept of the ‘Multiverse’ might shed some light on the possibility of an infinite regress of singularities, each one establishing, despite unfathomable odds and due to amounts of time so large our words are not fit to describe them, the laws that would render the next singularity possible - each regressing singularity having an exponentially more infinitesimal p value in comparison to the proceeding singularities. Yet, here we are, in spite of those amazing odds. Probability implies that anything with a non-zero probability (mostly, literally everything) will happen given the necessary amount of time. The implications of this are huge because it basically says that when something with a non-zero probability happens, if you cannot establish scientifically that some portion of the PETWHAC should have been excluded from the PETWHAC (which is mostly impossible), its insignificance is a fact, not a matter of belief. The math behind it implies that in a natural universe, this event will still happen, and there is absolutely nothing supernatural about it.
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