of the matter of mind and matter: UFOs and 'psychical' effects
The answer to this question is, upon reflection, no simple
affair. Indeed, in answering it without deeper reflection, one is likely
to be reliant upon certain presuppositions, and extending largely tacit
paradigmatic assumptions, which have already determined the answer before it is
given. Yet, we have to start somewhere, and make some assumptions,
and see where that leads. When and where those assumptions break down—that’s
when we start to notice them, and are forced to reconsider. It is not all
a purely conceptual affair, after all. There is some there always there,
and it might not be exactly amenable to the assumptions we make about it. But science
works at least approximately well, to the extent that its presuppositions
and working hypotheses are adequate to the phenomena it investigates—to the
‘there’. We always expect science to be capable of abandoning those working hypotheses,
or of reevaluating its own presuppositions when they no longer seem to work out
quite well, or well enough.
But there is a kind of nested hierarchy of these presuppositions, assumptions and working hypotheses we have to consider. Perhaps the most general are those that characterize the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of what Thomas Kuhn would have called a “paradigm” (or the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos a “research programme”—although Lakatos’ concept sought to improve upon Kuhn’s). These are very specific and very historically determined conceptual items that effectively regulate the various operating procedures, methods, and even the very conduct of the sciences in general. It is these kinds of presuppositions (about what knowledge is and how to get it, and about what there is in the world that can be known) that has the most immediate impact on the actual work of the sciences. It tells them generally where to look (the valid ontological field), and how to look at it in order to make discoveries or to solve problems (the acceptable norms of coming to know things).
Very early in the development
of science—it was called at the time, wonderfully, the “New Science”, contrasting itself
with the “old” worn “sciences” determined by an ancient paradigm rooted in
Aristotelian philosophy—its basic guiding assumptions and general presuppositions began to be worked out. It all
centered around, ironically enough, the nature of the human being involved in
the investigation of the world it inhabits. It was almost inevitable: as the neatly
self-enclosed Aristotelian universe, displayed in the Ptolemaic geocentric astronomical
system, was found to be for various reasons deeply flawed, resting on a
number of questionable presuppositions of its own (as that, for example, one could divine
the “essence” of things by pure observation without direct engagement or
testing), Descartes takes a step back and asks: if all I knew of the world,
passed on to me by tradition, learned in school, and then repeated in taking up
that tradition for further study and research—if all this was rooted in some
system of knowledge that has not actually systematically inquired into, or even cared to account for, the
fallibility of human knowing itself, is there anything I could know which was,
in fact, reliably certain? What, after all, does human knowledge require for it to be at
least possible to know anything absolutely, and securely (even if it not
be attainable actually)? That is, Descartes had realized that the old science of the Schoolmen (as the theologically-centered intellectual authorities were called, given their origins in medieval scholasticism) had not yet attained to a self-aware, self-critical knowledge of method.
At this point of extreme doubt and uncertainty, Descartes comes to a realization that, in truth, had already been arrived at centuries before in the deeply reflective Confessions of St. Augustine, a realization beautifully and concisely stated by the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein: doubt—especially radical doubt—requires certainty. In other words, I must already be in order to be deceived. Try as they might, the “Evil Genius” cannot “cause me to be nothing, so long as I think that I am something”. That is: whenever I think, I exist. The Genius, if they exist, is trapped by their own deceptive plan for me: in deceiving me, they necessitate my existence! Otherwise, there would and could be no deception: nothing to deceive. This, according to Descartes, finally, is the necessary ground of all human knowledge, and it is an absolutely certain ground in the sense that even its doubt reasserts it as a presupposition supporting that doubt. Doubt has to come to an end somewhere; it cannot extend indefinitely.
In this way, Descartes returns knowledge to its origins in the act
of thinking which we must necessarily employ as we try to know anything.
If knowledge is to be certain, everything known must be linked to this
certain ground of knowledge in reflective thought. The “I think, I am” must
be at the root of it all. And if everything can actually be linked
to it, then, by a certain chain of logical-conceptual links from this certainty to
all subsequent knowledge flowing from it, the whole will be just as certain as its originating
ground. Descartes comes to think that this is possible, and the entire Meditations are an attempt to demonstrate this in detail. What we are concerned
with, however, is not his argument to that effect; rather, what we are
concerned with is what Descartes contributed to the most general aspects of the
nascent scientific paradigm that flourished in the decades and centuries following
Descartes’ philosophical reflections on human knowledge. It has to do with the
general distinction between “mind” and “matter”.
Descartes could not be certain about anything except the most
basic thing: that as he thinks (and surely it is self-evidently true that he
thinks!), he is certain that he exists—not, crucially, what he is
that exists, or, more troublingly, that anything else besides this
exists. It’s rather lonely in the beginning; but then again, I guess that’s just
how it goes when you are the creator of something very new (“Let us make man in
our image” was perhaps the cry of a lonely deity). This has a curious implication:
what we call “matter” (or, to use the preferred term of the day: “body”) has an
existence wholly suspect to the doubting “mind” which is now positioned in opposition to
it. And what is born in this gesture is the fraught distinction between “mind”
and “body”/“matter”. Following this philosophical method Descartes here institutes, we must arrive at something about this externality
which can be known with certainty, starting only from the position of a doubting
mind that knows only itself with absolute assurance. And here Descartes engages
in a bit of creative thinking: let’s closely examine how non-mind stuff (“matter”)
behaves when it undergoes all sorts of changes that we can imagine (or conceive) it undergoing.
Things can lose their qualities, their shapes, smells, colors ... even the sounds
they make might change under the right circumstances—all these identifying
characteristics can undergo sometimes very radical change. And yet, something
remains through it all. What is this something? Descartes hits upon it: the one
thing that, if a thing lost it, would annihilate it altogether, making it into nothing,
is its dimensionality. That is: “extension” (as he calls it). If a thing not
be extended, it is nothing. Gone. Out of existence—at least as an external
thing with which I can interact and about which I can think anything at all. Yet, when
we reflect on thinking itself: can it, too, be considered “extended”?
No, says Descartes: thought in itself has no such determination, because it can have neither
length, breadth, height, nor either weight or “shape”. None of these characteristics
apply to it (not literally, in any case), yet it most certainly exists by virtue of this whole exercise. It follows, Descartes concludes,
that, whatever else they may be (and surely there is much more to say about them both), “thought”
and “extension” constitute different “substances”—different basic kinds of thing
that are separate but nonetheless equally real.
The consequences are profound, of course. With this distinction it becomes clear in what sense we might have not just a science of the natural world—considered in terms of “extended” stuff, or matter—but an exact science. If matter is essentially “extended” in terms of its most elementary dimensionality (length, breadth, etc.), and other quantities such as weight or shape (which may be tracked by means of matter’s more primitive structural dimensions), then it is absolutely clear how mathematics can be used to very exactly represent this reality. If something is extended, it can be mathematically represented. Since all matter is extended, and doesn’t exist without it, all material realities can be exactly represented and therefore studied mathematically. What about “thought”? What about the most essential feature of a human being—their “mind”? Well, the logic here is fairly simple: mind is not extended (indeed, mind and matter are oppositional), and therefore not amenable to exacting description in terms of mathematically representable quantities like dimension, weight, etc. Of course, as Descartes himself was aware, “thought” is in a sense describable in terms that may have a mathematical representation: for example, duration or persistence in time. Surely it makes sense to understand “thought” in these terms, since it makes sense to say that it happens within a certain amount of time, and time can be given a mathematical representation. The problem from Descartes’ perspective, however, would seem to be monumental: how can we non-arbitrarily relate the one (the duration of thought) to the other (the extension of matter or body apart from all thought)? The physical world of matter (of material bodies), we can now say, is representable with both duration and dimension, but “mind” with only one of the two. Mind is independent of matter, and matter of mind. It would only be possible to unite the two in a consistent framework of mathematical description by their interaction—but can they even interact? Can a non-extended something “interact” with that with is extended and has dimension? Problems seem to be mounting quickly here for Descartes’ peculiar answer to the problem of human knowledge.
It would only take a few decades (from the 1640s to the 1680s) to at least philosophically resolve these apparent problems in Descartes’ philosophical system (Spinoza’s solution was to argue that mind and matter are not separate “substances” but two aspects of the many possible for a single undivided and infinite “substance”), but by that time is was too late. The mind/matter distinction (and ensuing mind/body problem) was already locked in. Science was “exact” and about what could be “measured”: matter was in, mind was out. Mind—well, that was just nothing the New Science had much of anything to say about. Spirits, souls, angels, demons, fairy dust—all the same dubious “stuff”. If it can’t be stuff (extended, or thinking.), it can’t be at all. And if it’s not matter, then, well, it can only be “mind”—for what else is there other than the two, as Descartes had (putatively, of course) shown? Angels, demons, faeries, … well, it’s all just thought in the mind. To repeat: there are only two realities: thought, and external matter. Anything that exists will be in one or the other category. And the will not overlap in nature, only by joined by association (a mind associated to a body).
This is where we are still pretty much in our thinking to
this day—in our conventional thinking, that is. We are very much
committed to this tenuous Cartesianism, and it is well-entrenched in the traditional
paradigm of science. It is reflected in both sides of the UFO controversy
that has existed since the dawn of modern UFO studies. It is a fundamentalism
that unites the seemingly opposed sides, despite their bickering and mutual antagonisms. The believers
take the UFO to be an “objective” reality; the skeptics want to stuff it back into
the minds of the believers (it’s all hoax, misperception, misinterpretation:
human, all-too-human foibles of the mind). By insisting on the “objective”
reality of the phenomenon, believers and UFO proponents accept the very same
basic framework which the skeptics then employ to refute them. They both operate
with the same naïve (and unexamined) Cartesianism.
The problem with this realization, however, is that, despite its subtlety, it
does not have the virtue of being stated against an accepted, competing
alternative to the Cartesian framework. While we can, from a purely abstract and
logical point of view, attack the dispute as misguided Cartesianism, the burden
is on this new skeptic—who recognizes and criticizes the common philosophical ground
shared between UFO proponent/believer and UFO skeptic alike—to supply a
concrete alternative with respect to which disputing the Cartesian standpoint
makes sense. If the mind/matter split has become so well-engrained in science (and even to an extent in common-sense thinking), then the burden of proof has to be on
the critic of this mindset. What is the simple, clear and practicable alternative?
It surely can be done—I have suggested it was done by Spinoza soon after Descartes himself expounded his system in the 1630s and 1640s; the problem was also taken up in various ways by Kant, then Hegel, then Husserl and the phenomenological tradition (and we’ll have occasion to return to these philosophers in future posts)—but what has not yet been achieved is a radically new and generally accepted scientific methodology derived from any of the alternatives which can also claim undeniable successes. You see, for all of its faults, flaws, stupidities, mistakes, and intellectual naivety, the general Cartesian paradigm of a mathematically representable world of measurable quantities evolving in time, objectively accessible to all by means of repeatable experiments and interactions capable of being intersubjectively experienced and encountered by anyone, anywhere has been quite successful within its restrictive epistemological parameters, with its most conspicuous failures cropping up of late in the so-called “mind sciences”. This relative success, however, does not in itself conclusively demonstrate the truth of the paradigm, of course—let’s not suddenly forget the underdetermination thesis, which applies not just to theories, but also to the paradigms within which theories are conceived. Surely there are different ways of conceiving of the world that are responsive to the same facts—with the important caveat being that the paradigm changes the manner in which facts are themselves conceived, so that relating them across paradigms is not and never a simple or straightforward affair. (One thinker who pointed this out—yet another unread but significant one—was Owen Barfield. His concept of “figuration” is crucial here.) But surely it can with significant effort be done: after all, Aristotle’s science was not entirely wrong relative to subsequent paradigms; one might even say that it remains to be seen the extent to which Aristotle was wrong or right, as our knowledge changes from epoch to epoch. Let’s not forget that the history of science teaches us, among other things, that we are getting some things right, others wrong, so that we are always in a process of approximation, testing, experimentation.
What remains to be seen, then, is an alternative paradigm to the naively Cartesian one with which we’ve been operating in science for centuries, one that also yields both method and model for prediction, control, experiment, hypothesis-testing, and so on, as well as a litany of successes to enshrine it in the pantheon of accepted scientific wisdom. In a Spinozan world, for example, we might ask: does anything crucial change in terms of scientific methodology? Is the terrain of phenomena altered such that quite new things are describable, and hence theorizable—and in new ways? What does this mean for mathematics, or for systems of representation more generally? Is our current system of mathematical representation and modeling tied inherently to Cartesian assumptions, or are they easily freed of them? Many have written on this question, and scholars far, far more gifted than I have weighed in. Yet, somehow, through all of it, the dominant paradigm plods along. (We should note that there are indeed many who are actively working to overturn this paradigm, and offering scientifically viable, complex and nuanced alternatives to it. For example, there is a new work that, boldly, calls itself “a treatise in twenty-first century natural philosophy”: Emergence In Context by Bishop, Silberstein (one of my own philosophical mentors), and Pexton. It is up to future historians to say whether we here in the twenty-first century are living during another time of great scientific change and upheaval. We may very well be. George Steiner’s conference and subsequent edited volume on the question as to whether science is nearing its limits is, perhaps, a telling historical clue.)
Finally, we come around to how this is relevant for a science
of UFOs. I think it is most clearly and immediately relevant whenever we must tackle
the very difficult challenge of “high strangeness” sometimes associated with UFO encounters. It is what Vallée tries to deal with (poorly in my view), as he separates
the UFO phenomenon into its “physical” and “psychological” or “psychical” aspects (that is: matter v. mind).
What we are suggesting is, of course, that this very dichotomy itself may be dubious,
especially if it is just the naïve Cartesianism all over again. And if this
dichotomy ends up coloring or determining the nature of our subsequent theorizing
of the phenomenon, then that theorization will suffer as a result: it will be
only as secure as the presuppositions upon which it rests. In other words, dubious
philosophical assumptions in, dubious philosophical conclusions out.
So, again: is there a there there when it comes to the
UFO phenomenon? It is surely something there when we have multi-channel corroboration
of the phenomenon. It is not just a thing seen; it is something present
for both human and non-human (which is to say human-made, instrument-based)
observers alike. But we surely can’t from here just jump to our
sophisticated position of critique, and take the position that, abstractly, it
is neither “out there” nor “in here”—that it is neither matter nor mind. Maybe
that is ultimately true, but at this level of analysis it would be a mistake to
bring in what could only be a metaphysical alternative which does not yet offer
a methodological or descriptive one. Precisely and exactly this is the outstanding challenge of a future UFO science.
Perhaps we should approach the problem differently. Perhaps we
might begin with the very naïve assumption: there is an object “out there”
which I, “in here”, witness as an independent observer. Does this assumption
break down in our investigation of the phenomenon? It possibly does. And let us
let the experience and engagement with the phenomenon itself guide us here…
What do we mean?
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the so-called “psychical”
effects on percipients of UFOs establishes a direct relation between the
subject and the object. Let us for example assume that there is a reliable and
strong correlation between the states of consciousness of the subjects/percipients
and the UFOs they perceive or otherwise come into contact with. Let us also
assume that no known energy or other influence can account for such a
correlation (although ufology is filled with such attempts to physically locate a supposed cause for the psychological/psychical effects). We may then say that we have an anomaly: a strong correlation between
subject/object that has no likely “physical” explanation. Under these circumstances,
we would be forced to posit a new kind of matter/mind relation that
evades a framework of explanation in terms of mediate or intermediate physical
causes. This would, then, constitute a clear breakdown of the naïve Cartesian presuppositions
of all conventional science. Or, in the very least, it would imply the existence of new heretofore unknown physical causes (energies, forms of matter) capable of generating this correlation. (Let us not forget that we are always able to extend any given paradigm by introducing auxiliary assumptions: in this case, we would have to hypothesize a new form of matter or energy to account for the directness of the relation about which we are here speculating. Either that, or, as we are suggesting, we ditch the attempt to posit causal relations between Cartesian pairs.)
Is this hypothetical “direct relation”, however, not already a
problem which science faces today quite apart from the UFO quagmire? We ourselves house this problem!
Let us not forget that, as a direct consequence of the naïve Cartesian
presuppositions of science, human subjectivity itself, “consciousness”, that
most basic and elementary aspect of our life, could not properly be
comprehended by science except in terms of its “physical” characteristics—despite
the obvious fact that when I see red or feel pain, it itself is no such physical thing to be found anywhere in or on the material body. When I look
at my own brain, even—the supposed seat of my whole consciousness—I look upon
it as if upon anything else in the world: it is still a mere object among
others. Examining it more closely, when I see or touch or hear, there is nothing
colored, touching (!) or audible there. Somehow, it happens in two ways: as an “experience”
and as an associated (we may say correlated) physical event somewhere throughout
my material body. Right here, with “consciousness” are we dealing with a direct
mind-matter relation. It is well-understood that this is a problem (the
so-called “hard problem” of accounting for mind in a purely materially conceived
world), and that some revision to at least the brain or “cognitive”
sciences is called for if consciousness is to be adequately accounted for. Or,
I should say more carefully: that this is an outstanding debate, with no
widely accepted solution available. It may even constitute a “crisis” in the relevant
sciences, if we take consciousness as a kind of (rather ironic) scientific anomaly.
What would be unique with the UFO case, when looking at a primary mind-matter anomaly,
would be that it is between consciousness and a (presumably) material object
external to it. The “body” is not exactly “external” to “us”; rather, body
and mind or consciousness plausibly form some kind of unity (albeit of a philosophically-metaphysically
contested sort). With the hypothetical case of a direct mind-matter relation between
human being (their consciousness, and possibly including their physical body
itself, as some cases show immobilization, burning, etc.) and UFO, we’d have an
even more profoundly anomalous possibility.
Now, of course, the immediate and justifiable reaction to this hypothetical case is that there must be some kind of physical explanation for this mind-matter relation. The thought here would be that, naturally, we’d find some radiation or other energy being emitted by the UFO, which would be the direct cause of the change in state of the consciousness of the UFO’s percipient. However, there may in fact be deeper structure to the correlations between object and subject that we cannot overlook (and there are some experimental and other research movements in this direction at the University of Cadiz in Spain, under the thoughtful direction of Prof. De la Torre).
For example, it is possible,
to begin with, that no energy or other physical influence is detectable—at
least in some cases—even though a mind-matter relation seems to nonetheless exist
between subject and object. But, let’s suppose there is some UFO energy
emissions that can be correlated with changes in a subject’s state of consciousness.
If there is such an energy-based cause for changes in consciousness of the
subjects, we might expect those changes to be random. But they needn’t be. We
might ask: what is the change in consciousness itself “about”—that is, does the
actual content of the consciousness feature in the correlation itself? Is there a consistent and coherent pattern of thought that is produced under
similar UFO encounter scenarios? Maybe there is a general “feeling” associated
with the UFO encounter; but maybe there is something much more specific going
on. A certain feeling would be one thing (and we’d expect there to be great variations
in this subjective affect across different subjects). But if there is something
more specific going on, then this suggests something much more anomalous: that
the consciousness of the subjects is very specifically and precisely being manipulated intentionally, or
otherwise affected by the perceived object. This, then, would approach the level
of directness we already and always experience when we do, feel or think anything:
I want to move my hand up, and, behold, it happens. I might want to say that mind
is “causing” the matter of the body to react and respond to it; Descartes
seemed to want to resolve this phenomenon in that way, but he made the mistake
of trying to resolve it on the side of a series of purely physical causes—except
for the initiating cause of the thought or desire itself. But we end up with inconsistencies and paradoxes if we were to do this. (We get an
intimation of Spinoza here: don’t split the phenomenon into two metaphysically distinct
parts, the one having to “influence” causally the other; rather begin with
understanding that the “mind” stands in an immanent rather than a transcendent
relation to “matter”: the one is already within the other, and vice versa. Both
are instead aspects of the same unified reality: “matter” is mind under this
aspect; “mind” is matter under that aspect.)
Now this exercise is meant to show where and how naïve Cartesian
presuppositions begin to fall apart as we try and put them to use in explaining
certain phenomena. This is how science proceeds: it models with an existing
toolkit of concepts, and in effect tests them against the behavior of things.
There are always going to be gaps, places where a concept doesn’t really fit
closely; but then there are ruptures, where the phenomena are simply recalcitrant,
showing us they just don’t care for our presuppositions. Witness the struggles
of a Kepler or a Planck, laboring for years with one set of assumptions, only
to eventually strike upon a few simple (but radically unconventional) concepts
to better fit with what the data were doing (Kepler’s ellipsoids for planetary
motion; Planck’s “quantum of action” for the energy states of so-called “blackbody”
thermodynamic systems). With the UFO, we should see it as being also caught up
in the existing problems with a science of consciousness—a rather “conventional”
problem (the irony quite well intended by that statement). But it might be far
worse, of course, for the problem of “high strangeness” extends beyond the
matter-mind relation we have so far considered.
Matter-matter relations would seem to be unproblematic—until
you begin to reflect more deeply even there. What is gravity? It is a kind of
energy or force, right? But energy is mediated by force-carrying particles—at least
we’d like to believe that, after our fairly successful reductions of the energy
of matter given off as radiation (that’s just stuff coming from the particles
of matter, hitting and bouncing off other stuff), or the energy represented as
electromagnetic radiation (that’s just photons—particles—of light bouncing
around). Force is carried by something. So, too, we would like to think,
of gravity. But what’s the particle? The “graviton”! Well, maybe. The problem
is that we have two ways of “reducing” the phenomena of energy, matter and so
on: the field and the particle concepts. Physics tries to marry them up, but it leads to
a number of inconsistencies, most pronouncedly in “quantum field theory”. So, matter-matter
relations are ok—up to a point. But then, not really.
And then there’s mind-mind relations …the most
anomalous and “strange” of the strangeness in the UFO phenomenon, and certainly
something that most will want to most definitely argue is not a there at
all. Let’s talk about that for a moment, as we draw these once again absurdly
long reflections to a close (of course, as Borges reminds us, endings are really
just arbitrary abandonments, for the turn of the mind is never-ending).
Such would seem to only be a problem of so-called “paranormal”
research. It is certainly one problem for it: telepathy for example would
seem to involve a direct mind-mind relation. But in certain reported UFO close-encounters,
thoughts are seemingly directly “transmitted” from one mind to another. We have
a very intriguing case of this with the Ariel School incident we have already mentioned in a previous post (mostly imagery was allegedly “transmitted” or at least perceived mentally by the children who, again allegedly, witnessed “beings” moving about a landed UFO in the back of their rural schoolyard one morning in 1994). But notice the
severity of the metaphysical and methodological problem that this and other
similarly “paranormal” phenomena face: it is entirely a “mind”
phenomenon (“mind-mind”, in our scheme)—something already a disputed or
problematic category in science (to say nothing of the science of consciousness,
to the extent it exists at all)! This, and exactly this, is why all such phenomena
remain not only controversial but a veritable ticket from serious science to dismissed
pseudoscience or quackery. By its very nature it eludes scientific confirmation
and testing precisely because it is wholly confined to the mind-mind domain, thus inaccessible
to the rigorously objectifying methods of the sciences (which, let’s be clear,
attempt to objectify the subjective in some fashion). When it comes to consciousness
itself all there are are correlations between “brain states” and “mental
states”—a framework, again, very much contested and doubted by those cognizant
of the metaphysical naivety it belies. With mind-mind relations, what is there
to objectify? In mind-matter relations, at least one half of the relation
is susceptible to objectification, just because a correlation between the one
and the reported/experienced states of the other can be established empirically
and therefore theorized as such (a correlation). When the correlation is itself
between two events which only may be correlated with the “matter” (the brains) of
each of the subjects independently of the other—there is no “direct measure” as
it were of the mind’s contents except by subjective reports of those
contents)—science is completely at a loss. Except, again, for the subjective
reports themselves: “I heard in my mind alone so and so saying x, y and z” or “I
saw these images given to me by x” and so on.
This is all not to disparage, of course, the actuality or veridicality of
these reported experiences (that is another matter entirely, one we should address in future posts). It is simply to highlight the epistemic hurdles
that must be overcome in order to even allow such phenomena to be admitted as
really existing, such that a scientific account is called for—not to dismiss
them, but to actually posit hypotheses in order to account for them: how and by
what means are they possible? Although those might turn out to be the
wrong questions to ask: as paradigms change, so do the phenomena and the
questions that can be asked (with old ones falling away as meaningless or
pointless or fruitless). Indeed, as the paradigm changes, this set of relations
characterized in terms of “mind” and “matter” will likely fall away to
something else entirely. But we can’t just say that and provide an
abstract argument recognizing the metaphysical difficulties or flaws inherent in
this way of thinking. Rather—and this is my dogma—any alternative must be
derived by means of an immanent or internal critique of existing concepts, and be motivated by
specific failures of the existing paradigm itself. It cannot be entirely an
external critique that gets us there—unless that external critique is done more
from methodological or even pragmatic than from exclusively metaphysical
premises. This, finally, is why it’s useful to pursue the problem of matter-mind
or mind-matter relations as they occur in the UFO problem; it is a way of pushing
the existing paradigm beyond itself, so that it fails on its own terms—where “matter”
is as challenged as “mind”.
The matter-mind anomalies, then, must be established with the statistical sciences we have available to us, so that we can at least posit a law of the phenomenon of matter-mind interactions that would then require an explanation which could potentially lead to hypotheses outside the standard repertoire of conventional science, but where it would be clear that this anomaly is certainly no worse than the one already encountered in our primary experience with mind and matter which we call “consciousness”. Only then could we countenance the more pronounced anomalies alleged by paranormal researchers, which find resonance with the “high strangeness” of some UFO encounters...
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