Rational explanations

When something strange or miraculous happens to us, not wishing to appear superstitious, we may attempt to search for a 'rational explanation' for whatever just occurred. Thus, if we saw an apparition from the corner of our eye, or a strange light in the sky, we may feel that the only rational thing to conclude, is that we had ‘hallucination’ or otherwise fell victim to a 'trick of the light'. Theoretically speaking, there would be nothing wrong with putting forward these suggestions - both in fact, would count as rational explanations in as much as we could construct valid arguments from their premises. Where people have generally gone wrong however, is in assuming that rational explanations by definition must be prosaic in order be rational. Although certainly not incompatible with the concept, contrary to popular opinion, rationality has at no point been synonymous with the commonplace. We do not have to say that the creaking on the landing was the wind, or the apparition in the sky a shooting star. In harmony with rationalism, we could equally claim that the creaking on the landing was a ghost, or the ufo a flying saucer. All that counts is that the argument have some sort of logical form, which is valid, and hopefully sound.

Recognising that rational explanations may just as well be extra-ordinary as ordinary in character, it is still unlikely however that many of us would wish take the risk in putting forward the extraordinary one. We may find that in practice, it is much safer to stick with the prosaic argument where circumstances and events baffle us, and if we do ever happen to venture into the world of outlandish argument, it will probably only be because an overwhelming body of evidence has suddenly rendered it safe for us to do so. Although perhaps a little cautious or timid, there is nothing particularly wrong-footed in this approach - caution in fact, is almost always preferable to eagerness where our explanation has little evidence going for it - to explain things ‘ordinarily’ should be our first reflex. What is perhaps a little stubborn and wrong-footed though, is to cling to our ordinary explanations, far past the point where the ordinary or prosaic can adequately explain anything. As already pointed out, timidity, or perhaps even fear of ‘public ridicule’ may partly excuse this tendency, but given that people who are not otherwise undeterred by public opinion often shy away from outlandish arguments, this cannot be the sole motive at work.
Assuming that we are inspired by what passes for common opinion however, the motive in this particular instance may not be particular difficult to discern. Without consciously registering it, we may have been impressed by the general bias which says that whatever things are stable, static and regular are real, while whatever things are irregular, fleeting or transient are unreal. And since paranormal phenomena are almost always ethereal in appearance, it is not difficult to see by extension, why we might dismiss such phenomena as 'unreal' so quickly and without reason. If any actual proof were needed of the extent of this latent bias, and it is reasonable to ask for it, we perhaps need only look towards the guiding beliefs and practices of our social institutions for additional support. Within the scientific community especially, what is transient has long been synonymous with speculative fantasy, since unlike regular constant things, transient phenomena are generally too elusive to be collected, counted and studied -  thus for the scientist, reality is a simple matter of what can be measured. Inspecting the universe from a slightly loftier, spiritually elevated view, the man of religion has also felt transient things to be untrustworthy, however from his uniquely transcendental vantage, the sage recognises that all phenomena are essentially transient, and thus that the material world contains no stable ground for man to build his spiritual home.

Although it may be clear enough from this, that both science and religion have been dually influenced by the common prejudice against transience, what this does not show however, is where and when this particular prejudice arose in the first place. In looking for its origins though, we may find that it began at no more mysterious a place than our formative years; where if not taught, this particular bias was perhaps at the very least implied. After all, if we think back, it would probably not be too difficult to remember a time where our parents dismissed some strange experience we might have had - the strange flicker in the garden or the fleeting glow at the fringes of the horizon, we were likely told, was simply the result of too much day-dreaming, too many story books, or else staring into the sun for too long; and from here the journey to the adult who will hear nothing of ghosts or spirits is obviously not a long one. Yet all the same, It is doubtful that all adults will have been similarly influenced. Some of us may in fact feel that there was no real justification at all to the suggestion that all fleeting phenomena are hallucinations, and that to this extent, our parent's remonstrations were little more than a convenient means of curbing our curiosity. But as wise as it might be to cast doubt over the lessons of the cradle sometimes, in this case, there may be more to this lesson than is worth throwing away: In reality hallucinations often are fleeting or transient in character, and so the apparition that suddenly appears then vanishes on the stair may well be just a figment of our imagination for exactly the reason we have been taught. It is just that since actual things are also sometimes fleeting in character (sprites, comets, etc) it may just as well be that they are not. Prejudices, our parents should have perhaps stipulated, often get the generalities right at the expensive of details.  

Whether our parents put forward their views in enough detail or not, it would be superficial however, to assume that every spooky event that is discounted, is discounted because of its transience and our taught prejudice against it. Sometimes anomalous events are widely acknowledged as real and concrete, it is just that when witnessed in their fleeting passage, the non-sceptical amongst us, tend to mistakenly believe they have seen something fantastic: Bigfoot glanced through the trees is merely an ape if it would stay still. A ufo is simply a meteorite which we have caught on its journey to the soil. In both these cases, the suggestion that the anomaly in question is really something prosaic at high-speed may well be correct, and we should certainty not assume that we have witnessed something abnormal by alternative default. It is only, much as before, where the prosaic explanation is stretched beyond the limits of the facts, that these arguments begins to lose their credibility. Thus, if we claimed (as in the second example) that a ufo which makes darting movements left and right, is no more than a ‘meteorite’ heading towards earth, we should not be surprised if other the equally unobservant take us seriously.The widely-accepted description of a comet after all, does not include any ability to change its flight path at ad-hoc intervals, so to offer it up as one, is to ignore the facts presumably for the greater good of ‘solving the riddle’ by any available means. Never the less, otherwise honest and intelligent may put forward just these types of arguments, but if they do, it is perhaps that just as some intelligent people cannot bare for anything to be mundane since it robs the world of its mystery, the person who will have a commonplace explanation at any cost, operates according to the inverse dogma: Everything in the world must have its place, even if it is not an exact fit.  

In the present age, where scientific thought is widely regarded as near infallible, many people may similarly feel there is nothing which cannot explained. And if they do, it may be because they are very sure there is nothing which science cannot presently bend into discernible shape. Where the average person embraces this sort of view, there is not much reason to find offense - It is perhaps only natural in fact to assume that the dominant system of thought of any age has “all the answers” especially when the current one has proved so much in its name. It is really where scientist falls into this error that criticism is justified, since to assume that science, can explain anything at all, is to misunderstand the scope and basis of ones own method - science, for all its history, has always been defined by its continuous progress; seeking out new riddles to solve and new facts to uncover. Therefore for the scientist to assume finality in her method, with no more things left to discover, would render her own enterprise not a science, but a religion. But given that her enterprise has not yet succumbed to absolutism and is only happy to embrace its own incompleteness, there should be nothing mysterious about a world which still contains mysteries: This in all truth, is just a natural consequence of the fact that there are still uncharted areas into which science has not yet traveled. To deny this and assume the opposite would just be to resurrect the old expanding universe-style conundrum; if science is expanding; what is it expanding into?

Leaving questions of scientific scope to one side, it should never the less be pointed out that even if the scientific programme were able to complete its journey one day, there would still be some phenomena forever beyond its reach A good example being ‘psi-phenomena’. What is frequently overlooked in studies that investigate this type of phenomena, is that no amount of observational evidence alone, would ever be sufficient to validate or disprove clairvoyance or telepathy's existence alone. In order to prove or disprove the existence of psi-phenomena, unlike other paranormal events, we would primary, need a clear categorical distinction between a chance event and a fully determined one. To illustrate by example, how many times would a person have to predict the roll of a die and get it right, in order for a ‘lucky guess’ to transform into ‘prior knowledge’? “once, twice, five times, four?” A clear answer seems almost impossible to give. The reason is because since we have no precise demarcation between random chance and prior knowledge, we have no meaningful, non-arbitrary way to distinguish between the two. Admirably, psychical researchers and professional sceptics alike have never the less tried to find ways around this - in experiments, both parties usually agree upon a statistical limit, and beyond this limit, agree to measure random chance as something more determine. But whatever these agreements add up to, they do not amount to a proper conceptual distinction. In reality they are as arbitrary and artificial as the decided boundary sovereign state and a rouge nation, and much in the same way; equally unable to tell us anything about the difference between either.  

For the sake of charity however, let us assume that there was some meaningful way to separate what is genuinely chance-like from what is determined, or has been foreseen in advance. Would this make any difference? The answer is that it probably would not. The reason for this is that psi-research would still operate under the mistaken belief that any capacity to predict future events amounts to a ‘skill’ which the test subject should be able to call upon at will. Not only is this belief presumptuous towards the extent of the subject’s capabilities, it is presumptuous towards the notion of skill on two separate counts. On the first, the psi-researcher should not assume, as is so often the case, that consistent accuracy is a necessary condition of skill. History clearly testifies to the fact that some of the most skilful artists who have walked the earth, have generally produced mediocrity to a small handful of masterpieces. We should not necessarily assume that skill is synonymous with the style of steady yet banal production that the artist by the Thames knocks out for $10 a go. The capacity to be skillful in all walks of life, may in practice be closely related to inconsistency or sudden flashes of genius; producing detail an accurately in one single moment, and then nothing at all for several straight years.  

Secondly, it is probably the biggest and worst assumption of all, to assume that a lack of skill infers anything over and above the capabilities of the individual. In reality, a person who is unable to accurately predict any symbols from a hand of zener cards, demonstrates nothing beyond the extent of his or her powers of prediction, and even then, only at a particular date and time. There is no more reason to declare telepathy a sham on observing a group of people who seem to have no aptitude for it, than there would be to declare archery hokum the basis of a handful of people unable to fire a single shot on target. It would only be once we had sufficiently tested the vast majority of the world’s population that we could otherwise declare either skill probable bunk. Although even then, this would not completely rule out its possibility - men 10,000 years ago may well have thought it impossible for a person to cut wood with his bare hand. Now there are any number of individuals who can and so few doubt it.

In either case, from all these examples it should now be clear that psi-phenomena, in contrast with supernatural phenomena, presents us with its own unique set of difficulties. The assumption that psi-phenomena amount to skills rather than latent features, has clearly been one of the biggest hurdles to psychic testing in practice - with the related assumptions that skillful feats should be consistent in nature, and that a lack of skill in one person infers a similar lack of skill in all the rest, only serving to multiply these difficulties even further. It may always be possible in the future that these assumptions will be corrected, although even assuming that they were, this would do little to improve the situation in practice - without any proper way to distinguish a prediction that was correct 'intentionally' and one correct purely by ‘chance’ we would still have no way to meaningfully analyse any data we collected. In this regard it is really our conceptual limitations that prevent us from rationally explaining this sort of phenomena; we would need to know what a chance or determined event was, before we could argue for the presence or absence of either.

Thankfully, within the opposing investigation of supernatural phenomena, conceptual issues like these are rarely to be found. In attempting to rationally explain anything from ghosts, ufos, to strange creatures, all that is required (assuming we wish our explanation to be sound) is that we stick to the basic principles of observation. Although in practice researchers have often found these difficult to follow, In essence these rules are very simple: Firstly, as with studying anything ‘in the field’, we must always time the frequency of our visits to coincide with the frequency of the phenomena. Thus, if we heard that the ghost of the Duke of a stately home appears in his old drawing room twice yearly, we would be planning our visit very poorly if we turned up for a weekend on the expectation that we might see something. In this case we would be much better advised to set up camp, whether remotely or in person, for the entire year.
Additionally, In the same way that the animal behaviourist always ensures that her own behaviour is consistent with the known habits of the animal she wishes to track, it would probably be a good idea to apply the same technique to tracking down anomalous phenomena as well. In practice then, if the paranormal phenomenon we were investigating was known to be shy and nocturnal, we should probably pretend that our habits were likewise, with the inverse rule obviously applying if the phenomena was known to be attracted by noise and attention. Although these rules may not necessarily guarantee the abolishment of these types mysteries, we may in following them, at least increase our odds of eliminating them, and we will have almost certainly succeeded in rendering our method clear and straightforward, rather than confusing and mysterious. We can only hope that the person who investigates mystery neither seeks to obliterate it by any means, because he hates it, nor seeks to escalate its presence by any which way, because he loves it.