Building Bridges - The Arguments

Greetings, and welcome to the arguments thread. This is where I will post a series of thought experiments, metaphors and logical formulae that I use frequently as arguments against commonly held views which I perceive to be flawed and responsible for misunderstandings between skeptics and spiritualists.

Each one has been hand crafted from debating with countless people to create the most efficient and simplistic ways to get the message across in a manner that the opposition will understand and relate to. As ever, I am always willing to hear any criticism or feedback, and feel free to use these arguments yourselves.

The Terrible House of Cards.

Today I’ll be making an argument designed to deconstruct one of the more common fallacious arguments commonly made against the belief in paranormal phenomena, and that is as follows:

“If someone is psychic, then why can’t they just [insert wild achievement here]?”

Now, the claims used to fill the blank are varied wildly, ranging from the absurd to the incomprehensible, and nearly always relying on wild a priori conclusions drawn by the speaker which appear to have absolutely nothing to do with the matter being discussed. Such claims may be (and, sadly, have been):

“why can’t they locate bin laden?”

“win the lottery?”

“Predict global disasters”

“cure cancer?”

“live perfect lives?”

And of course; “why don’t they take the challenge?” – and if you recognize that particular refrain you have my deepest sympathies, but rest assured this is something I will be tackling in a separate, and substantially more detailed article at a later date.

Now, in response to these bizarre claims, as an analogy – (and I do like to analogize), I could use any conceivable example, from “if you can really cook, when why aren’t you a famous gourmet chef?” to “if planes can really fly, why can’t they travel to other planets?” but if I were to plant my flag in such an obviously satirical rebuttal it wouldn’t do much in terms of getting through to my target audience about the mistakes they are making.

As such, allow me to paint a picture that may be more relatable to the average person. My hope; to put you, the reader, no matter what persuasion your beliefs may be, in the shoes of someone who is stuck in this position, so that you can more clearly understand what the reality of it may be like. Hypothetically, of course.

There are in fact numerous flaws in this kind of setup, which I’ll be dealing with separately, but for the time being I’ll be approaching it in a more general way and pointing out how the question itself is inherently nonsensical. To do this I’ll be tailoring my approach specifically to the brand of claims that follow the general theme of:

“why hasn’t it been proved?”

And my response to this begins with something quire mundane. Consider the situation of building a house of cards. We’ve all probably done it at one time or another, and we can all probably grasp that it’s not an easy practise, requiring patience and concentration to get right. But what if you were expected to do this on cue? With people glaring at you?

Allow me to make that live for you,

Let’s imagine that you live in a world in which no one has ever conceived of the idea of building a house made from playing cards. One day, as your friend is shuffling them for a game of poker, in your boredom you begin fantasizing about stacking nearby objects on top of each other – as we sometimes do when bored.

Then it dawns on you. Maybe you could stack cards? Maybe by positioning them just right, you can balance them on each other’s edges and actually build a structure out of them? You suggest the idea to your friend, and he simply laughs at you assuming it to be a ludicrous joke. Feeling perhaps a little shot down, you bite your tongue and play your poker game.

Maybe a day or so later you find yourself alone, looking at the cards, and wondering if your idea could really work. So you begin. Carefully leaning cards together, trying to make them balance on the very tips, juxtapositioning several cards in parallel – you try every technique you can imagine but unfortunately the structure falls apart every time.

Skip ahead a week or two and then finally, after all your hard work, you are looking at your own two-tiered house of cards, slanted and locked together in a delicate arrangement. It falls over the moment you sigh with relief, but you know it can be done. So you begin practising more until you can do it again. Eventually your ability to build them becomes more and more improved.

You promise your friends that you can do this, making this crazy claim of being able to create a five-tiered house made of playing cards, and predictably no one believes you could do it. So you invite them to come watch you do it, or perhaps they invite themselves. If you get my meaning.

So the time comes for you to do it. You’re sat at a table surrounded by bemused expressions, you know you’re being watched, you know you have one chance (or a limited number of chances) to get it right, and that they won’t wait around forever to see something they do not believe will happen. Your hands are sweaty, your heart palpitates, your body flushed with a fever of stress and apprehension.

Your hands shaky with nerves, slip a glossy card from the pack along with one more, and begin to carefully lean them together. You can feel countless eyes on you, and then that unforgiving voice you dreaded lurches from the back of your mind, and fills you with doubt. What if you mess up? What if you drop them? Everyone’s watching, it would be humiliating. You can’t get this wrong, but what if you do?

We’ve all been in this situation. We’ve all been under pressure for one reason or another, and found that the mind just can’t cope with it. You become more prone to failure, the negative suggestion of failure is wedged in the back of your mind. Maybe you were trying to learn how to do a new job, you knew all the details, but when you’re put under the spotlight your mind just went blank? Maybe you’re a gamer, and when you find yourself under pressure one day you suddenly forget what all the controls do?

I believe this is a frame of mind that almost everyone can relate to, and yes, it does apply to “psychics” as well. If one is using an ability that is solely dependent on thought in order to control it, then mental variables such as stress, pressure, worry, doubt and fear will all be very real factors in your success. I mean, how many people reading this can tell me that they can control their own every thought at will? Who hear hasn’t had their legs occasionally feel like they turned to jelly when they become conscious of the steps they take when walking? Who could guarantee 100% success if their taste buds were put on trial?

The mind is a fragile and complicated thing, and there is no mental function which we can turn on and off like flipping a light switch. What I’m saying is that just because someone claims to have abilities which you may define as being beyond your understanding, that doesn’t mean they are messianic creatures with no limitations. Being put on the spot makes every single function harder, but that’s not even the worst of it.

You might be assuming that I used the house of cards metaphor purely to demonstrate how feeling pressured (such as during as test) will make an ability significantly harder to perform, and I was, but there’s another element of that situation which applies here as well. And that is chance.

Even someone who is good at building a house of cards (not counting professional competitors and such, since that does not parallel the potential of psychic ability) will generally need a few goes to get it right. Just think about that. What if the answer to the opening question: “why hasn’t it been proved”, isn’t just that when trying to prove it, it is harder to do, but ALSO that it is just plain and simply hard to do?

Building a house of cards is a complicated process, it’s not something that just happens or doesn’t happen the moment you decide to do it. It’s a long and facetted journey moving one card at a time, some cards fall, others stand, sometimes the entire structures fall, sometimes only parts of it do. Sometimes it takes ten tries just to get two cards to lean against each other, even when you’re half way through. The only evidence that it works is the finished product.

But when skeptics and anti-believers attempt to test psychic claims they use a more rigid methodology, one whose thoroughness I do not question or criticize, but the fact remains, some things just cannot have that kind of rigidity applied to. And if you were to look at that example as a short term statistic, counting every fallen card or failed attempt as a miss, that proves from a statistical point of view that it isn’t a real ability – at least if we follow the standards used by those who purport to test psychic phenomenon.

Now that doesn’t really make sense does it?

Again, I’m not criticizing the scientific methodology, I’m not saying it is wrong, I’m only saying that you need to adapt your approach to meet the limitations of whatever it is you are trying to prove or disprove. For decades we were unable to measure the subatomic level because any light we used to observe it would also disrupt it. And the same applies here.

If we bear in mind that psychic ability is every bit as difficult, complex, time consuming and random as building a house of cards, as well as the psychological factors of stress and impatience, it is clear to see that you cannot press this delicate practise into the cold, unforgiving mould of the rigid skeptic methodology. It just doesn’t fit.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that psychic ability is real. What it does mean, however, is that using the standards mentioned above, the truth about whether it is or is not real will never be known. When you find a flaw with the protocols used to test a hypothesis, you have to adapt your test to account for them. For the time being, I have no solutions on how to adapt them, all I have is the observation that from a logical point of view, they do need to be changed.

Change doesn’t come easy, but I would like to believe that those who are truly critical minded would be willing to make that change in order to pursue the truth, free of bias, and with the same patience that you would give an amateur, who is just trying to build a house of cards under very difficult circumstances.

This has been my house of cards argument, I invite you to share it with others should you find yourself in a debate along these lines. I realize the argument itself can be summarized into something much more simple, but this can be done easily by anyone, I wanted to create a clearer image of what I was trying to get across in this article.

Thanks for listening.

The Founder