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interesting article on the numinous by Jeffrey Kripal

April 3, 2014

At the Chronicle here.*

Kripal argues that we don't have more empirical evidence for extra-sensory kinds of perception, because such perceptions usually involve trauma, often the death of a loved one. And of course we can't replicate these things in a laboratory. Two of his examples are Mark Twain and Swedenborg, the first involving a kind of mental telepathy where Twain vividly dreamed about his brother's death a week before it happened, in his dream getting a lot of odd details correct. Interestingly, Kant made fun of Swedenborg in his published works, but in a private letter to a friend, actually accepted one of the stories of his clairvoyance.

Even though nearly every philosopher I know is too naturalistically minded to take these things very seriously, I don't find Kripal's claims implausible. As he notes, for just about any interesting physical property we have to do a lot of violence to matter to be able to figure out what's going on.

One of the best books I've read recently is Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, which recounts his sister's dying from lung cancer and his decision to move back home to Saint Francisville, LA in the wake of her death. He describes a few numinous moments of the sort Twain worried about, and their depiction is both moving and plausible.

[*You have to hurridly scroll down to get past their irritating little box with job adds that constantly scroll in and out before it drives you nuts, or you can fight the good fight and nuke it with a firefox add-on like this.]

Posted in Jon Cogburn

5 responses to “interesting article on the numinous by Jeffrey Kripal”

dmf

April 3, 2014

“because such perceptions usually involve trauma” I find this hard to believe, does he provide some data?

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anon

April 3, 2014

Not sure whether you follow his blog at TAC, but Dreher has recent post up on the same CHE piece.

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Michael B

April 3, 2014

Given the number of human beings who have lived and the commonality of dreaming, I – genuinely – would be more surprised if something like Mark Twain’s anecdote does not happen more often. That someone or other in history had a dream that in some aspects, some time or other later not previously specified, occurred for real, is not to me evidence for ESP.
This is to say nothing of all the usual problems with these things e.g. what elements in the dream were missed out of the story, because the story is about those elements of the dream that occurred in reality, later? What colour was the floor, for example? If it was different, it probably wasn’t noticed or recorded, dismissed as unimportant, because even an honest report would be far too impressed with the bits that they did dream of. A florist told me a few years ago that red and white are the colours used together for funerals; whether this was the norm in Twain’s time and place? I don’t know.
Even if that paragraph is nonsense, this is all a bit like saying that a person who dreamed the lottery numbers one time, then picked them weeks later and won (while ignoring all those elements of the dream that did not occur in reality), shows evidence of ESP. No, it does not.

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Matt

April 3, 2014

A very large number of cases like this were investigated by Henry Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research. Despite Sidgwick’s great desire to find truth in such stories, he consistently came to the conclusion that there was no good evidence in them for belief in life after death or extra-sensory perception. I suppose that one could go read the voluminous published works of the society, though I doubt that anyone does that today. More enjoyable is to read the account in Bart Schultz’s great intellectual biography of Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe.

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David Wallace

April 4, 2014

I don’t have a lot to add to the criticisms of Kripal’s views of ESP et al (except to reference Jerry Coyne’s article in the New Republic), but the physics looks pretty dubious to me.
(1) It isn’t true that we only learn about interesting physical properties through violence. Galileo, Kepler and Newton learned about gravity by watching the movement of bodies under perfectly normal conditions. A bunch of iron filings thrown onto a white surface on which a magnet is sitting will teach you plenty about the form of the magnetic field. And Einstein’s argument for the existence of atoms based on Brownian motion just requires some pollen grains and a microscope.
(2) It is true that plenty of experimental physics (and chemistry) involves studying how materials change under changes of their external conditions. But that highly controlled, repeatable process doesn’t seem to have a lot in common with the one-off traumas being considered by Kripal: indeed, we know about how materials behave in one-off uncontrolled events (say, bombings or bridge collapses) precisely because we’ve studied them in careful controlled contexts. Furthermore, plenty of those changes of internal conditions aren’t in any sense “violent”: think of cooling substances down, for instance.
(3) It’s also true that contemporary experiments in particle physics are extraordinarily violent (again passing over the rather dubious analogy between violence in this sense and psychic trauma) and involve probing systems in extremely esoteric, difficult-to-reach circumstances. But the reason why contemporary experiments in fundamental physics are so difficult to do and so expensive is because fundamental physics has been so successful that no experiment done in conditions less violent than these is going to tell us anything we didn’t already know. Kripal writes “Because we’ve invested our energy, time, and money in particle physics, we are finding out all sorts of impossible things.” But to a large extent it’s the other way round: the case for continuing to invest all that energy, time and money is the superlative track record of that strategy in finding out all sorts of impossible things.

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