Telepathy, Precognition or… not?

I still read John Scalzi’s blog, and I suppose I’m still blogging a bit myself, so I might as well write a response to his note last week about Strange Experiences. In it, Mr. Scalzi says As a practical matter, I don’t believe in things like ghosts or alien visitations or psychic powers, and I have a distinct bias toward rational answers to events.

The thing for me, as a rationalist myself, is not just that I don’t believe in ghosts and psychic powers and whatnot—in general, I don’t—but that many times, when people tell me stories of ghosts and psychic powers and whatnot and demand my acquiescence that there is no rational explanation, that in fact there is no possible explanation other than the spirit of the dead or someone’s psychic ability. And of course in conversation, I nod and agree: wow, that’s spooky. But almost always, I either immediately come up with some perfectly plausible explanation that doesn’t involve the spirit world, or I can come up with such an explanation with a little effort. And it seems to me that the spirit-world explanation most often lacks imagination—the person accepts one of the least imaginative sequences of events, using the spirit world (or psychic powers) to turn a really interesting sequence of events in to a boring and typical story that does not challenge their world view.

Let me, Gentle Reader, tell you the strangest thing to ever actually happen to me.

I was playing Hamlet in college, in the scene with the Gravedigger, IV,vii. I gave him the cue: How long will a man lie i' the earth ere he rot? and he responded I' faith, if he be not rotten before he die—as we have many pocky corses now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in—he will last you some eight year or nine year. And then he paused, and went up on his line. And I stared at him, on stage in front of some dozens of people in the audience, and I remember very clearly thinking He’s blanking on the word tanner. He’s going to say potter. And he looked at me, blankly, and said A potter will last you nine year.

What possible explanation could there be for my sudden and absolute certainty that he would say potter instead of tanner five seconds before he actually did it? Was this not evidence of either precognition or telepathy?

Well, it could have been either precognition or telepathy, but those are the boring explanations, aren’t they? Neither of them actually explain anything about the way precognition or telepathy work.

Here’s one alternative explanation: perhaps we were both responding to the same outside stimulus. We, for instance, both knew a fellow with the last name Potter, and it’s possible that we had caught sight of him in the audience, enough to stick his name in our minds. This was before the J.K. Rowling books, so that wasn’t the thing, but perhaps there was a pot or a vase on stage that our frantic minds both seized on. Or perhaps it was only the similarity of sound to pocky that did it. Completely plausible, anyway, and the way two people can go from an obscure stimulus to the same response is much more interesting than my reading his mind.

Another possibility: I was so thoroughly focused on this fellow in that moment of panic, I was able to interpret the subtle cues of his expression more accurately than I normally do. After all, it’s not all that unusual that I (or anyone) can predict how an ordinary sentence will end, using the various cues of the person, the situation and the beginning of the sentence. The whole thing is surprising only because potter is such a surprising word for him to stick in to the script. He may have pursed his lips just so, or darted his eyes in some telling way, or something about his posture that I would not ordinarily have interpreted correctly was sufficient, given the circumstances, my intense concern about what would come out of his mouth and how I should respond in character on stage (and keep in mind that this was no ordinary performance but the fulfilment of an actor’s ambition, my opportunity to play Hamlet, and opportunity I probably was already aware would not come again) I made an unlikely but correct guess. Which would be fascinating! Humans have a remarkable ability to put clues together and draw conclusions, and sometimes they can do it with remarkably few clues!

Another explanation is the probability one: Most times when I am absolutely certain I know that someone is going to say some specific and unlikely thing, the person does not say it and I forget all about it nearly instantly. Perhaps that has happened thousands of times! The one time that I was correct and the response was really surprising is in fact improbable, but it isn’t so improbable that a one-in-a-million thing happens over a lifetime of millions of opportunities, or at least many, many opportunities. This is also a remarkable explanation, and the workings of probability and the human difficulty in understanding large-n situations is much more interesting than precognition.

Another possible explanation: It never happened! Or not the way I remember it. Perhaps I did not, in fact, think that my castmate was going to say ‘potter’ before he said it, but my brain, in an attempt to make sense of the word ‘potter’ coming out of my castmates face so unexpectedly, instantly made a more plausible story out of it. We know that the brain fills in lots of gaps in our perception with plausible stories, and while I remember the experience of certainty as happening before he said the word, that’s just my brain talking. This story got stuck in my memory in the instant of it occurring, and my recollection of it is in fact the recollection of the story my brain was telling me. This is another thing humans do! Isn’t that more interesting than telepathy?

Or yet another possibility: It never happened at all! At some point in the time after I played Hamlet, my brain simply invented the entire story—perhaps my castmate never actually went up on his lines in the first place, or he did but in some unremarkable way. It’s even possible that it was a dream—I have had other theater dreams where odd things happen when the script is departed from. Either way, the only evidence that I have of the event is my memory, and my memory has certainly been found to be inaccurate on occasion. The idea that humans have memories of things that never occurred at all is preposterous, and that we can remember (or think we can remember) things that only occurred in dreams is even more wild, and it’s all true.

I don’t mean to denigrate any Gentle Readers—or anyone—who interprets their own experience as evidence of witchery, angelic intervention or haunting. It would be tremendously arrogant, even for me, to claim that my interpretation is correct and yours is not. But there is still a hell of a lot of wiggle room inside the stuff that isn’t supernatural, and that means the supernatural doesn’t demand belief. And my point really is that humans, within the natural world of ordinary perception and without telepathy, precognition or spirit communication, are plenty interesting enough.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.