WRONG ABOUT ALMOST EVERYTHING

Alex Tsakiris. Why Science is Wrong About Almost Everything. Anomalist Books, 2014.

Alex Tsakris, who runs a podcast called Skeptiko, is basically the paranormalists’ version of the typical American shock-jock, who only invites people onto his show who disagree with him in order to sandbag them, berate them and grandstand to the audience. Like the other shock-jocks he is markedly less critical with those who espouse his world view.
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Indeed he shows, from this selection of his interviews any rate, no great critical faculty at all, as witness his treatment of psychic detectives, mediums and energy healing. Much of his venom is directed at academic psychologists, and his main agenda seems to be trying to show them up. This may or may not be connected to the fact that Alex never completed his PhD; it certainly suggests that he has had some pretty traumatic experience at college.

As I have argued before, the problem with many parapsychologists is that they are really not interested in investigating potentially interesting scientific anomalies for their own sake, but only in using them as battering rams against scientific modernity. Tsakiris takes this to extremes, with the usual prejudices against atheists and Darwin that are redolent of the American cultural right.

Thus Tsakiris really wants a world in which meaning and purpose is handed to him on a plate rather than having to be thought out for himself. There are the usual whines that in the absence of belief in an afterlife or “non-physical realities” life is meaningless. Needless to say most people do not think this at all, for many it is the very mortality of human life that gives it meaning. Think of how many people faced with imminent death from cancer and the like go on to do amazing things, not because they want to earn brownie points in the afterlife but because they want to make the greatest impact in this world while they have time.

Does belief in the afterlife actually function as a social good? The only such belief that I think could have genuine social utility would be in random reincarnation: help make the world a healthier, safer and more peaceful and prosperous place and you stand a better chance of your next reincarnation being a more pleasant one.

Otherwise the answer tends to towards then negative; the people who flew those planes into the twin towers believed in the afterlife, most of the young men who slaughtered each other in the trenches of the Great War did so also. As Julius Caesar remarked of the Gauls, a passionate believe in the afterlife makes for more reckless fighters, it makes it easier to die in battle. It also makes it easier to kill (kill them all, God will know his own), even to destroy the world in a nuclear war.

Furthermore belief in transcendental realms often has the effect of despising the joy and beauty of this world. Believers in such realms, especially those who aspire to abandon the mortal fleshy human condition for the purity of “smokeless fire” are the ones who end up condemning, art, music, dance, and joy in general. They are also the ones who inculcate negative views of the body and sex, and, it would appear, end up pretty twisted and abusive.

Tsakiris makes much of near-death experiences as evidence for some non-physical reality, but this is a contradiction. One can never get evidence of non-physical realities (if that phrase is not itself self-contradictory). If it leaves evidence, it is physical, it has impacted the environment. What impresses people about NDEs is that people describe events in the operating theatre. This however is a physical process however they acquire that information, and they have to do so with a process that interacts with the external world in order to gain information about it. If this information is acquired by the P factor, using the Q process, then both the P factor and the Q process are part of the physical world and the ordinary quotidian stuff of the physical world must interact with the Q process (or the Z field or whatever)

Furthermore if you think about it the hypothetical P factor must be physical because it interacts with the brain (it kicks the brain, the brain kicks it), and also because it is apparently summoned back from its transcendental realm by a series of physical processes associated with resuscitation. So the transcendental realm has to be part of physical reality. Not only that ascribing consciousness to a P factor doesn’t make the notorious “hard problem” of consciousness any easier, it just looks like it.

And if you want a ‘materialist’ biologically based theory of ethics that most people (at least those who should not be in madhouses) can agree on, it can start from the proposition that it is good to reduce the number of children who die before their parents to the barest possible minimum. It also makes sense for each generation to live long and prosper and from that we can rationally deduce that a world without war, hunger, poverty, oppression, bigotry and ignorance is better able to achieve those goals that one with them. We will disagree profoundly amongst ourselves as to how that happy state of affairs might be brought about, but only the mad or the malevolent would disagree about the aim.

The hated Darwinian evolution shows that all human beings are related to one another and in effect constitute a huge extended family, and that all living things on earth have, to the best of our knowledge, a common ancestor and are part of a great extended kindred. Darwin himself was a great champion of animal welfare and was often accused of unduly anthropomorphising animals. Most of us would think that is an improvement on Descartes view that animals were insensate robots that could be treated with careless brutality.

One can add just a few points: Tsakiris seems unaware that the most ferocious of all CSICOP skeptics, Martin Gardener was a devout theist, or that one of the most prominent supporters of dualism in recent years John Beloff was a noted atheist.

Ultimately reading this book left me with only one mystery, why do otherwise sensible people allow themselves to be sandbagged by this guy? Do they or their agents not have the nouse to look up Skeptico on the Internet and realise that this is someone at the intellectual level of Rush Limbaugh who is not remotely interested in genuine debate? They should ask him the simple question “Do you want to talk about my book/work etc., or just grandstand to the audience, if the latter I have nothing more to say” and slam the phone down on him. He thinks that Patricia Churchland’s embarrassed attempts to politely get off the phone, as she gradually realises that she is dealing with someone who, if not a crank with more than one chip on his shoulder, is giving a damn good impression of one, is confrontational and shows Churchland in a bad light. It isn’t and doesn’t. Confrontational is what you would get from me in those circumstances, sadly the laws of libel, the Malicious Communications Act and our concern for our readers delicate sensibilities mean that must be left to your imagination, it does however include the word “off”. 

• Peter Rogerson.