Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Halloween: Paranormal Treat or Narcissist’s Trick? (The Nerve with Maureen Callahan)

1. 00:02 for the leadup to our very special first ever Halloween edition of The Nerve. We
2. 00:08 are exploring issues of the paranormal and the unexplained.
3. 00:16 And I’m so happy that Sam Vakn, one of your favorites and mine, has agreed to join us to talk about the very human impulse. no matter how educated one may
4. 00:27 be, no matter what irrationalist one may be to search for greater meaning. Sam as
5. 00:33 we know is an author of multiple books. He is a professor at Caps
6. 00:40 of uh professor of psychology. We are so happy to welcome you back Sam. How are you doing today? Thank you for having me. I’m I’m okay. Thank you. You’re coming to us from Paris, I understand. Yes, I’m in Paris. very Parisian backdrop. I’m very jealous. How is it
7. 00:58 over there? Well, it’s uh it’s like intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold.
8. 01:05 Yeah, you’re not missing much. It’s the It’s the same we we here on the East Coast are having the same. Um I’m so
9. 01:11 glad you were up for this discussion. I wasn’t sure you would be because I would bet as a as a as a man of letters, uh you would consider yourself a rationalist. Um, and I’m hoping that you can talk to
10. 01:24 us a little bit about, you know, it’s a it’s a it’s a large subject, but could you speak to us about since the dawn of
11. 01:31 humanity, it seems we have searched for greater meaning, whether it’s in the cosmos or invented gods of the Greeks
12. 01:39 and Romans. Can you sort of talk to us about the origins of this? Yes. I think the problem is that logic and rationality
13. 01:50 fail to provide meaning and hope. So when you’re confronted for example with grief, when you’re confronted with loneliness and isolation, existential,
14. 02:01 rationality is not going to help you much. Logic is going to lead you nowhere. You need other things. And
15. 02:08 these other things regrettably are irrational and they are grouped under the label
16. 02:15 supernatural or paranormal or even religious. These are beliefs that are not grounded in in either reality or in facts. These are
17. 02:27 counterfactual beliefs. But their strength is the narrative.
18. 02:34 They provide a narrative. Because they provide a narrative, they become organizing and explanatory principles. They allow us to make sense of life and
19. 02:45 reality, to imbue them with meaning, however artificial, and to provide some some sense of
20. 02:53 direction, purpose, so we feel more at home in the universe
21. 02:59 with these kinds of explanations and and stories and narratives.
22. 03:05 we feel more at home. Logic and rationality are alienating.
23. 03:11 They they they render us strangers in in reality. It’s in what way? In what way do they render us strangers? They’re neutral. They’re neutral.
24. 03:22 They’re objective. And the main lesson of rationality and logic is that the universe is essentially random and it
25. 03:29 does not care about us. There’s no element of caring.
26. 03:35 It’s inexurable. The universe is inexurable. It’s a machine and that makes us cogs and wheels in this machine. You know, it’s so interesting you say
27. 03:46 that because one of the most common uh concepts of the modern age, and you hear
28. 03:52 this all the time, particularly in American daytime television, is the universe. The universe has guided you here. The universe has heard you. The universe has made it so the universe has some become sort of this plugin for the secular notion of an all-seeing god. Why
29. 04:10 do you think that’s happening right now? It’s a combination of grandiosity and magical thinking. The belief that the universe cares sufficiently about you to guide you.
30. 04:21 I find it delusional to use a British understatement.
31. 04:27 And also it involves magical thinking. Magical thinking is the infantile belief that your thoughts or wishes if they’re
32. 04:33 strong enough, powerful enough, can affect change in reality. Oh, this is the other this is the other
33. 04:40 concept we now call secularly manifesting. Yes, you wish hard enough for it, it will become true. attraction, law of attraction, the secret, all these things, they imply that your internal
34. 04:52 reality has external outcomes that by wishing or by thinking or by willing,
35. 04:59 you could affect change in in reality. You could rearrange it to cater to your needs and promote your ambitions and and so on so forth. But with your kind permission,
36. 05:10 um, I would like to delve a bit deeper into the psychology of the of the paranormal. Oh, yes, please.
37. 05:16 If I would love it. Okay, Sam, I would love nothing more.
38. 05:22 You’re speaking my language. Let’s do it. I mean it. I’m not being facitious. Please go.
39. 05:28 First of all, historically, the distinction between normal and paranormal
40. 05:34 would have shocked men of science well into the 19th century. Okay. They didn’t see any they didn’t see any difference or any distinction between the normal and the paranormal.
41. 05:46 Yeah. I mean, Newton was an astrologer and an alchemist. I did not know that. I did not know
42. 05:52 that. Yeah. He spent he spent most of his career as an alchemist and astrologer. Actually, physics was a by by line, a hobby. Wow. And and this is only one example. Well into the 19th century, the there was a
43. 06:08 separation between science and all the rest. And both realms of existence were
44. 06:15 considered equally valid and equally important to the meaningful and full and rich life of an individual. Only with the rise of scientism which is
45. 06:26 the religion of science. Only with the rise of scientism did we come to disparage and and kind of mock and
46. 06:33 ridicule the paranormal, the religious, the the irrational, the as if they have
47. 06:39 no role in human life or as if their only role is to corrupt the human mind.
48. 06:46 That is expressly untrue. religion, parasychology, the paranormal,
49. 06:52 the supernatural, spiritualism. I mean, uh the esoteric,
50. 06:58 um all these are there because they’re needed and they’re needed because they cater to specific psychological functions and and needs. Having said that, they reflect highly
51. 07:12 specific psychological processes. First of all, anyone who believes in the paranormal
52. 07:18 has some kind of difficulty to tell apart internal objects from external
53. 07:24 objects. There’s a confusion between what’s happening internally and what’s happening externally. And this of course
54. 07:30 is is why we see apparitions and ghosts. They exist in our mind, but we perceive
55. 07:37 them as external. This is an element in psychotic disorders. People with psychosis have
56. 07:43 this problem. So, so Sam, so are you saying that anybody who says they have had a brush
57. 07:49 with the paranormal, who has had a brush with the unexplained has experienced some manner of temporary psychosis? No, what I’m saying is that certain types of paranormal experiences reflect a problem, a confusion between
58. 08:07 internal and external objects. And that is also a clinical feature of psychotic disorders. It doesn’t mean that these people are psychotic. No, I’m not saying they are psychotic, but it sounds like you’re saying it can
59. 08:18 be a temporary situational phenomenon. It’s a temporary break with reality. Absolutely. Yes, it’s a valid
60. 08:25 experience. The person is not lying. They did see a ghost, but we know um that this is a
61. 08:34 hallucination. An oper an operation is a hallucination. We know that there is a breakdown of the boundary between
62. 08:40 external reality and internal reality which leads to the confusion of the two the two territories.
63. 08:46 Sam, let me ask you a question because this is a case that we are going to talk about and delve into on our Halloween
64. 08:53 episode. And this is an isolated case, but there is a documented story and uh
65. 08:59 video, audio, literature, what have you, of a young girl, I believe in the 1980s.
66. 09:05 So this is before the internet and before one could have their fantasies augmented by such a thing. Who uh at
67. 09:13 about the age of 5 years old reported uh playing with um older a couple of men who were in their 50s. She could name them. She could explain what they looked like. Uh nobody else saw them. It turned out these men were deceased. They had
68. 09:28 lived in the house next door. uh she she had all of all of the uh the factual
69. 09:35 biographical details of their of their lives correct. How would you explain such a thing?
70. 09:41 Can science explain such a thing? I don’t know the particular case. Um but I can say I can make two general comments. Okay. Most most children have imaginary friends,
71. 09:52 right? These imaginary f friends disappear disappear in adulthood but they fulfill very important roles. uh they are known as transitory objects.
72. 10:03 H these imaginary friends allow the child to develop social skills and and to feel protected and safe in
73. 10:09 environments which are less than stable and so on so forth. But most children have them. That’s point number one.
74. 10:16 Point number two, there have been multiple projects in academia and in science where we have attempted to study exactly such stories
75. 10:27 over decades. And I’m not talking about a single project. We have Stephenson’s project. We have the Princeton
76. 10:33 laboratory. We have, you know, we have I can I can enumerate at least 20 major
77. 10:40 projects. Mhm. Which lasted for 30 years. Each of these projects has studied anywhere between
78. 10:46 5,000 and 10,000 cases. Mhm. In the totality of this endeavor, we succeeded to come across a single unexplained case. Really? One. All the others. Can you can you talk a little bit about what that one unexplained case entailed?
79. 11:02 Yeah, that was a case um described by Stephenson who was a serious um and rigorous academic year. Stephenson was in United States. Yes. and
80. 11:13 Stephen. Okay. I’m sorry. 1960s you said. Yes. Okay. And Stephvenson Stephenson described a case of a young girl who who came up
81. 11:25 with a recollection perfect recollection of her previous life in India.
82. 11:31 Um there was an American young girl. Yeah. A previous life in India. She described her relatives. She named them. She described a house and she described a buried treasure, a treasure she herself had buried prior to her demise.
83. 11:47 She died in childbirth, I think. And then the only way to verify this was
84. 11:53 to travel to India. And so the whole circus traveled to India and they found,
85. 12:01 she named them correctly, they found the house and they found the buried treasure exactly where she pointed it out.
86. 12:08 And that’s the only unexplained case in the entire history of the field which is now at least 150 years old. I would say though that case is beyond
87. 12:20 tantalizing. Well, that’s precisely what people like William James and I was going to get to William James with
88. 12:27 you. Exactly. Precisely what William James and Arthur Conand Doyle um said. These were
89. 12:33 hyperrational people. William James is arguably the father of psychology and other let’s just explain to anyone who may be
90. 12:39 unfamiliar with William James brother of the famous novelist 19th century novelist Henry James he was a physician
91. 12:46 he taught at Harvard he was an expert in anatomy a rationalist who later in life wrote one of the most famous books on the subject up until that point called the variety of religious experience
92. 12:58 and I remember reading that book maybe in my 20s and thinking this was blowing
93. 13:04 blowing my mind because I felt like I was experiencing a rationalist working through his own resistance to
94. 13:11 the idea of other dimensions or other understandings of human nature that were
95. 13:17 beyond our own recognition. There’s also James, the father of psychology, um who is a more an even more interesting case.
96. 13:29 Um and he um he suggested that paranormal phenomena are real are real. He developed this uh belief or belief
97. 13:40 system following the death of his of his only son Herman.
98. 13:47 And very often these conversions on the way to Damascus take take place after a
99. 13:53 period of grief in the wake of some grief. So we have Arthur Conand Doyle who’s lost his who lost his son in in
100. 13:59 the first world war the father of Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And Arthur Conand Doyle became a spiritualist in the wake of this experience the loss
101. 14:10 of his son. So did James. And uh James said that if there is a
102. 14:16 general maxim that all swans are are white and then there’s a single black
103. 14:22 swan that is enough to falsify the maxim. Now I’m I’m mentioning this because you
104. 14:28 ask me about this single case. Yeah. This single case has not been explained
105. 14:34 and I find it difficult to think of a way to explain it to be honest and in
106. 14:41 itself it’s sufficient to f falsify the paradigm that the paranormal is wrong. Thank you. I was thinking the same thing but I didn’t want to say it. I was thinking the exact same thing. It’s a curious case which challenges many many underlying assumptions
107. 14:56 regarding many many things. Well, you know, I just want to say you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation and
108. 15:03 I love this phrase, the religion of scientism. The idea that scientism, this idea that
109. 15:10 we explain everything through known laws of physics and medicine, biology, the
110. 15:16 known world is in itself a religion. Even if said uh adherence consider
111. 15:22 themselves atheists. No, no, no. They do belong to a religion. I want to show a clip of the very famous neurologist
112. 15:29 Oliver Saxs who has since passed being asked about what he thinks about the
113. 15:35 paranormal and the idea of dualism. The idea that the body houses the soul and
114. 15:41 those two things live together for a time but are separate entities that divide upon death. Let’s take a look. Do you find I mean is is there a a mindbody
115. 15:52 dichotomy or are we just one set of physical organisms?
116. 15:58 Um I’m uh I feel strongly that we are just
117. 16:04 one set uh and I think the dichotomy is is partly
118. 16:11 uh because we don’t know enough about the body and and it’s wonder which is
119. 16:17 which is what Spininoza was was saying in 1650. Um uh many many physiologists are are
120. 16:24 dualists. Uh um Sharington who was the greatest physiologist of all was a was a
121. 16:31 complete dualist. And uh but I
122. 16:37 I um tend to think that there will be one day a a biology of consciousness and
123. 16:43 of sensibility which which will not be redactive and will will will allow all the all the
124. 16:51 fullness of life as we know it and will explain all um well will illuminate all I um there’s
125. 16:59 maybe there’s something always reductive about explanation.
126. 17:06 So what struck I’ll talk about what struck me about that interview and then I’ll give it to you. Oliver Saxs
127. 17:12 indisputably a brilliant man. Uh if you haven’t seen Awakenings that was his
128. 17:18 discovery and his research uh is struggling to my mind. He is saying I
129. 17:24 absolutely am not a dualist. I believe that there is one temporal existence and upon death we become nothing. But to me,
130. 17:32 you know, and he references Spininoza who thought differently as early as 1650. He seems to be struggling. And
131. 17:38 that to me humanizes him. That to me says, I may be a man of medicine,
132. 17:44 but I cannot in my in my delivery and my comportment say I 100% believe this to
133. 17:51 be the case. What are your thoughts, Sam?
134. 17:57 Science is a method of inquiry. Science is not about finding answers.
135. 18:03 Science is about asking the right questions. All the answers of science are false and
136. 18:10 will always be false. That’s why science constantly improves
137. 18:16 upon itself. That’s why we no longer adhere to theories which were, you know,
138. 18:23 the best of trade or best of trade. I love that. or the state-of-the-art in in in the 17th
139. 18:30 century or the 18th century. They’re no longer valid yet they were highly scientific at the time. The belief that science is about coming up with life and so on is a a complete
140. 18:47 misunderstanding of science. The process of science is querying the universe
141. 18:55 in a way which would tantalizingly provide temporary answers which would then be disproved. This is not San Vaknim. This is KL Poer who came up with the idea of falsifiability. He said that scientific theories
142. 19:11 cannot be verified. They can only be falsified. It was right of course. And so whatever
143. 19:18 it is that Newton has said is still valid. But there is a theory which is
144. 19:24 much more valid which is Einstein’s which will be 100% falsified in 100 years time. You think so? No doubt about this. Not the beginning of a doubt about this. It’s already
145. 19:35 partially falsified by which theory are you speaking of? Are you thinking of the theory of relativity? What are you thinking of?
146. 19:41 Yeah, his theories. all his theory. There’s no scientific theory that’s that survives the test of time. Science is a
147. 19:48 succession of falsehoods, not a succession of truth or facts.
148. 19:55 It’s a common mistake. Layman think this way. Layman say, “Ah, science is going to give us the answer.” No way. However,
149. 20:01 science can teach you what questions to ask and which questions are not legitimate. So science is about legitimizing discourse
150. 20:13 and delegitimizing other forms of discourse. Science is about language, not about reality. I love that you’re
151. 20:20 saying this because I feel that we as lay people, no matter how much we we read or how much we listen to minds such
152. 20:27 as yourself, the message we get from the scientific establishment and anybody who’s had dealings with the medical establishment, 99% of the time you’re going to be dealing with someone who
153. 20:38 says, “I know best. This is factual. This is settled science. Settled
154. 20:44 science.” Y and we live in an age right now where questions are being asked and people are being people who are asking questions are being told you’re an idiot. This is settled science. You say not so
155. 20:58 settled science is an oxymoron. There is no science that is ever settled
156. 21:04 and the essence of science is to unsettle itself. The essence of the scientific method,
157. 21:11 scientific inquiry and the scientific mind is to challenge, undermine and falsify everything we think we know. This is not Wikipedia. This is not
158. 21:22 crowdsourcing. [Music] So no, we are not never going to end up with a stable article as Wikipedians call it. We’re never going to have a stable article. But I want to with your permission, I want to Yeah. because I I was beginning to
159. 21:37 explain the the psychological underpinnings of the pursuit of of the paranormal, but I want to kind of re
160. 21:44 revert to something you have raised. Arthur C. Clark, the famous author,
161. 21:50 science fiction. Yes. Yes. 2001. An inventor by the way in amaz. Yeah. He invented the satellite among
162. 21:56 other things. Really? So Arthur Clock said that a science which is sufficiently advanced would be
163. 22:03 indistinguishable from magic. And and that is a very astute
164. 22:10 observation. It means that what we consider today to be the paranormal may well be 100 years
165. 22:17 time. Maybe not all of it, but a sliver of it, a fraction of it will with absolute
166. 22:24 certainty become science in due time. It is just that our science is imperfect
167. 22:30 and reflects our limitations right now. and to assume otherwise is hubris. It’s
168. 22:36 it’s grandiose. The paranormal is a set of experiences.
169. 22:42 And we are confusing the question of validity. While it is legitimate to challenge the
170. 22:50 objective external ex existence or external validity of the of these
171. 22:57 experiences. For example, it’s it’s legitimate to say ghosts don’t exist
172. 23:03 experience of having seen a ghost. That is a valid real life phenomenon.
173. 23:13 So the paranormal is real. The only question is where is it taking place?
174. 23:19 Out there or in here? But it’s absolutely real. as real as this table
175. 23:25 or this laptop or whatever, you know. So, there’s this question of magic versus science.
176. 23:31 Yeah. No, I I I love your marrying of that. Yeah. Go on. Maybe one more one more comment and then a suggestion. The next comment I want to make and I’ll try to be as brief and as as uh as colloquial as I can. The next
177. 23:47 comment I would like to make is that there are some questions the answers to which we are never going to find because in principle these questions are unanswerable and they are known in mathematics as
178. 23:59 undecidable propositions or undecidable theorems. Let me give you two examples of such questions and why it is a colossal waste of time to discuss them even. Does God
179. 24:10 exist? And the other question is what is consciousness? These are the kind of questions that in principle cannot be answered. Therefore, any discussion of these questions is nonscientific.
180. 24:26 That means that science the ability of science to generate temporary false
181. 24:32 answers. Mind you, we call them asytoic answers. The ability to generate these kind of answers is highly limited. There are things that science cannot query, cannot help us with. The meaning of life, does God exist? What is
182. 24:49 consciousness? Is it real? You know, these are questions science can never in
183. 24:55 principle answer. So these are undecidables. I would like to inject an idea into the
184. 25:01 conversation. There is something called misattribution of arousal. Misattribution of arousal is a
185. 25:08 psychological phenomenon where something is happening in your body. For example, your blood pressure goes up or your
186. 25:15 heartbeat accelerates developed takardia and so on and then you are kind of
187. 25:23 asking yourself unconsciously why is this happening to me and you come up with an answer and the answer is often
188. 25:29 wrong. We have had we have conducted experiments with the classical guinea
189. 25:35 pigs of psychology, college students, and we induced in them a speedy
190. 25:41 heartbeat. We we gave them illicit substances without their knowledge. Horrible things, horrible things are happening in psychology.
191. 25:52 Don’t ask. And so they had like an increase in blood pressure and heartbeat and so on so forth. And obviously they
192. 26:00 didn’t they they were not aware that they have consumed a substance which made this happen. So they came up with a
193. 26:07 with a an explanation when we asked them why do you feel this way? They said I think I’m falling in love.
194. 26:14 They they were presented with photographs of appealing young women. They said I think I’m falling in love or
195. 26:21 I’m finding her attractive. I’m aroused and so on. Nothing to do with it. It’s a misattribution of arousal. I think this is an excellent explanation for the paranormal
196. 26:33 because we know that the paranormal observations and experiences are intimately linked to grief, loneliness,
197. 26:40 stress, tension, anxiety, a preceding traumatic event,
198. 26:47 abuse and so on. In all these situation, suddenly people experience paranormal
199. 26:53 phenomena. Anything from telepathy to remote viewing to ghosts, I mean you
200. 27:00 name it, they’re all associated with kind of stress. Even when we study such phenomena in the laboratory, that’s a stressful situation. There are expectations of performance. There is
201. 27:12 the unknown and so on. I think all these situations involve physiological arousal
202. 27:20 that is then misattributed to paranormal phenomena. People ask
203. 27:26 themselves why is this happening to me? Why, you know, why is my heart pounding in my ears and why am I why is my face
204. 27:33 flushed and so on? And they say it’s because something paranormal is happening to me. I know my mother died.
205. 27:40 I just know it, you know. Okay. Okay. I’ve got a couple of questions for you with this with this
206. 27:46 new turn the conversation’s taken which I love. Misattribution of arousal this experiment in which you in which I’m not
207. 27:53 saying you in which college students were given without their knowledge drugs which increased their blood pressure,
208. 28:00 heart rate, what have you. Would you not say that that is not giving the subject all of the information? Because without the knowledge of that drug in their system, what are they to do? but react
209. 28:12 to stimuli that is deliberately placed in front of them and attribute that
210. 28:19 physiological reaction. Number one. Number two, my question would be is there an argument to be made that when one a human being is in a state of crisis perhaps the veil between our
211. 28:32 temporal world and what may be beyond our earthly knowledge somehow reveals
212. 28:38 itself. And thirdly, what do you make of just curious as to your own suppositions of those who would
213. 28:46 be in otherwise a state of rest? There are there are records of this all over
214. 28:52 the world where an individual wakes up out of a dead sleep at the moment that a loved one has died. Could be thousands
215. 28:59 of miles away. You take it. I’ll start with the third one.
216. 29:05 Coincidences happen. Of course, those would be a lot of coincidences though. Not a lot. Actually,
217. 29:11 you don’t think so? If you look at the numbers, it’s not a lot. The reported ones, we don’t have millions of documented
218. 29:18 cases or billions documented. That’s I think is the key word. I’m just going to push back. Even if we have missed a few, I I don’t
219. 29:25 think that’s a widespread phenomenon. Okay. And it’s definitely within the confines of statistical random probability.
220. 29:32 Definitely. Regarding the second question, I agree with you that the brain needs to be in
221. 29:39 an unusual state. So does Oliver Zach, by the way. So does Christopher Hitchens.
222. 29:45 We’ll get to him in one second. Yeah, we all agree with you that the brain needs to be in an aroused state, in an
223. 29:52 unusual state in order to experience paranormal phenomena. The difference
224. 29:58 between me and Hitchens and and Saks and others is that it is wrong to I think it
225. 30:05 is wrong to say that paranormal phenomena do not exist.
226. 30:12 They absolutely 100,000% exist. I have no doubt about this because they’re being reported by people. That makes them real. The only question then is do
227. 30:23 they happen outside the body or do they happen inside the body? Are they brain artifacts or are they real objective things that are happening in reality? And there is a way to to rephrase this.
228. 30:36 If we remove the observer, would we still have a ghost? That’s the way to look at it. Someone
229. 30:43 who has seen a ghost, a ghost, if we remove the observer, would we still have a ghost? We have a similar question in quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, we have a school, a dominant school of
230. 30:54 interpretation known as the Copenhagen interpretation. I’m a physicist, by the way. I have a PhD in physics. So, the
231. 31:01 Copenhagen interpretation says that um it is the observer that determines
232. 31:07 whether a certain particle comes into existence or not. And then the question becomes, if we were to remove the observer, would the particle ever come into existence? Is this a version of if a tree falls?
233. 31:19 Sam the philosophical question it’s the if the tree falls you know or
234. 31:25 one and nobody’s there to see it did it fall yeah so yeah in a way what is the role of the observer let’s put it this way I think what what is good for the gander
235. 31:36 is good for the goose but it’s good for quantum mechanics should be good for the paranormal studies of the paranormal the
236. 31:43 dependency on the observer it’s it’s in science it’s already In
237. 31:49 science, we can’t we can’t rebottle the genie. Mhm. The genie is out. And now in physics, we
238. 31:56 having we’re having debates which sound a lot like the debates spiritualist societies used to have in the 19th century. A lot metaphysical debates. And
239. 32:07 one of them is what’s the role of the observer? And so for example in the 19th century there was a concept of ectoplasm where the observer was able to manifest
240. 32:19 a deceased person a ghost a spirit manifest the spirit convert it into
241. 32:25 visible energy. Mhm. And that was called ectoplasm. That’s not much different to the basic
242. 32:32 interpretation of quantum mechanics that the observer creates the world in essence creates elementary particles. I
243. 32:39 don’t belong I don’t subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation. Let it be clear. I completely disagree with it. But it’s the dominant school. That’s the orthodoxy. It’s a mainstream.
244. 32:50 So um I think that uh
245. 32:56 if we go back to if we go back to the basics of psychology, Ziggman Freud
246. 33:02 described something that he called oceanic feeling. He said he and many others Anna Freud
247. 33:08 Mara I can give you a long list. They suggested that the infant is immersed in
248. 33:16 a symbiotic phase a kind of merger and fusion with the mother and the infant exits the physical womb when the infant is newborn but exits the
249. 33:29 mental womb only two years later. really it takes the infant another two years to
250. 33:35 exit the symbiosis with the mother and to individuate to separate and individuate. That is how a certain
251. 33:42 school of psychology um looks at it. And so I think there’s a lot of it in in the
252. 33:48 paranormal. I think people need to go back to the womb. They need this oceanic
253. 33:55 feeling of connectedness of being one with others, being one with
254. 34:02 reality, being one with the universe. There’s a need to merge and to fuse. There’s a need for symbiosis because
255. 34:10 when you’re in a symbiotic state, all your needs are taken care of. there is the afterlife because if you’re part of
256. 34:17 the universe and the universe is part of you if you are inextricable if you’re indistinguishable cannot you’re not you’re one and the same then you will never die obviously you will never die and so there’s the
257. 34:29 afterlife there’s a lot of comfort it’s it’s a form of self soothing and it you
258. 34:35 feel very it makes you feel very safe it affords a narrative stability
259. 34:41 and it renders your life a lot more meaningful Even I would say to some extent grandiosely meaningful because
260. 34:47 you are part of a cosmic scheme and the cosmic fabric. So I think it has a lot to do with this oceanic feeling. So you
261. 34:55 are predestined or preconditioned to experience paranormal phenomena. Then you experience a state of arousal and
262. 35:02 you misattribute it to the paranormal. That’s how I see it. There’s a it’s a
263. 35:08 trigger. Yeah. So, this this is before we uh play Christopher Hitchens because I really want to talk to you about him. One of my all-time favorites. You’re you’re talking about the need to go back to the womb and to birth and the experience we all share. You know, in in
264. 35:23 study in studying comparative religion, you know, many all of the myths, all of the symbolism, it all lines up. And one
265. 35:31 of the theories regarding in Christianity and Judaism the the story of Noah’s ark is that Noah’s arc is
266. 35:38 really and and similar myths in other religions it’s the collective unconscious of the trauma of being born
267. 35:46 the great flood is the experience of being born of exiting the birth canal in
268. 35:52 fluids and the afterbirth and all of that. What are your thoughts about that and how religion and either the
269. 36:00 paranormal or mysticism can converge or layer upon themselves?
270. 36:07 It was Carl Sean who suggested that near-death experiences are actually a reexperiencing of birth. Really? Yeah. He said, you know, the light at the end of the tunnel is the light at
271. 36:18 the end of the birth canal. Just people reexperiencing the birth.
272. 36:24 Um I think there’s another trauma in life early very early in life which is
273. 36:30 substantially more traumatic than than being born. Okay. And that that is the trauma of realizing that you and mother are not one.
274. 36:41 the trauma of the breaking of the world. There the huge schism when suddenly you
275. 36:47 realize that you’re not one with mother and the world
276. 36:53 that there is something out there which is not you that you are separate from the world that there’s a boundary between you and the world and that you’re pretty helpless to do anything about it or about the world. The minute
277. 37:07 as a newborn, as an infant, the minute you see yourself in your mother’s gaze,
278. 37:13 that very minute you realize your separateness and externality because her gaze is the outside world. You see yourself in it. Again, there
279. 37:25 were there was a guy called Lakan, a psychologist. By the way, we are identical twins. like
280. 37:32 he’s my we are like absolutely you know anyhow Lakan suggested what he called
281. 37:39 the mirror the mirror phase in in human development he said when the infant sees
282. 37:45 himself in the mirror or herself in the mirror that’s a major break a major schism I agree only I think it’s not the
283. 37:53 mirror not physical mirror because in his in his work it’s physical mirror but we know that it would happen even without in the absence of physical mirrors I don’t think there’s anything to the physical mirror. I think the first mirror is the mother. That’s the
284. 38:05 first mirror. Mother when I say mother, a caregiver, a maternal figure could be the father if the mother is not there.
285. 38:12 Yeah. So the person who is providing the gaze and I think what happens at that
286. 38:18 moment we divorce the world. The trauma is immense because then you
287. 38:24 experience a solistyistic existential all-consuming solitude
288. 38:30 which cannot be remediated and cannot be soothed and comforted and which is a
289. 38:37 life-threatening is dramatically ominous and you are two years old 18 months to
290. 38:44 be precise. Like what can you do about it? Not much. So what do you do? You
291. 38:50 develop superstition. You develop an alternative world. You develop paranormal beliefs,
292. 38:57 fantasy, paracosm, imaginary friends. And in case the environment is abusive
293. 39:04 or truly traumatizing, you become a narcissist. You develop the false self.
294. 39:10 At any rate, you develop some kind of fantastic narrative that allows you the escape from reality because reality has instantaneously became threatening through the mother’s gaze and the information conveyed that you’re all on your own.
295. 39:26 That’s it. You’re alone, all alone. And so I think we want to go back back
296. 39:33 there. We want to go to this to the pre-traumatic phase when we were one with mother and one with the world. It felt so safe. Mother Earth.
297. 39:44 Sorry, mother earth. We talk about mother earth. There are many maternal metaphors. Absolutely. And of course paternal metaphors. I mean that would be God or whatever. We want to go. We want to we want to infantilize. We want to regress. We want back to the
298. 40:02 womb. And of course, the Latin word for womb is the matrix. I did not know that.
299. 40:08 Yeah. So, we want to go to the matrix. And one way of of reverting to the matrix is denying everything adults.
300. 40:21 and whatever else you have to say about science and I’m I agree with many of the criticisms definitely I I’m a harsh
301. 40:28 critic of scientism but whatever else you say about science it’s definitely an
302. 40:34 adult pursuit because science rejects illusions delusions uh insists on randomness on objectivity
303. 40:47 on neutrality you need to be a very strong person to never ever consider the
304. 40:53 possibility of a god. I’m proud to say I have never ever considered it.
305. 40:59 Really? I haven’t felt the need for it. I haven’t felt the need for it ever. Did you grow up with any form of religion as a child or were your parents atheists? Yeah, my my parents were well, they were
306. 41:11 on the verge of atheism, but they were kind of observant. Observant. Okay. Jews. But I I I never felt the
307. 41:18 need for a religion or for the paranormal or I never felt the need for anything except rationality and logic. But it takes a very strong personality to do that. I’m praising myself, of
308. 41:29 course. It’s of course you are. Yeah. Of course you are. So to to that point, I want to I want to look at two clips of Christopher Hitchens. The the first is he was dying famously of cancer and he
309. 41:41 he made it a point to give many many interviews and write extensively about the experience of living while dying as
310. 41:49 we all are. But Christopher knew his time was closer than than most of us do.
311. 41:55 Um, and one of the philosophical arguments he um continued to make was
312. 42:02 that he was dying as he lived as an atheist and that he considered it the
313. 42:08 pro, now this is Hitchens himself, the province of a a kind of a coward who
314. 42:14 would suddenly find God or find religion upon the diagnosis of a terminal
315. 42:20 illness. Let’s look at this interview with NPR from eight years ago, part one. I’m here as a product of process of
316. 42:28 evolution. Um, which doesn’t make very many exceptions and which rates life relatively cheaply. I mean, most human beings who’ve ever been born would have been dead long before they reached my age. And I would think in the most the rest of the world
317. 42:43 that well, I know it’s still true. So to have been relatively healthy till 62 is to have been dealt a pretty good hand by
318. 42:50 the cosmos which doesn’t know I’m here and won’t notice when I’m gone. So um
319. 42:58 that seemed the only properly stoic attitude to take.
320. 43:05 Now he says, as you said at the earlier part of the conversation talking about the universe and and our conversation
321. 43:12 about this current vogue of the universe has brought you to this place you have manifested. Christopher Hitchens plainly
322. 43:19 says the universe doesn’t know I’m here and extrapolating even if it did it
323. 43:25 would not care. And here next he goes into his and I thought this was really smart. You know on the face of it you might say this is
324. 43:36 a this is a harsh reaction. This is anger misdirected anger at his own
325. 43:42 terminal diagnosis directed towards those who say they are praying for him. And he says,”I want to
326. 43:49 understand exactly why you are praying for me. And what is the point? If you
327. 43:55 are praying for my illness to somehow heal itself, that is a wonderful wish. It’s lovely. It’s irrational, but that I can accept. If you are
328. 44:06 praying for another outcome and he’s going to outline it here, I reject it and I kind of love it. Here we go.” or a
329. 44:13 wish that I reconcile myself with the supernatural or the divine. Um, which is
330. 44:20 a large part of it. I mean, I wrote back to some of the people, some of them in holy orders or running religious organizations. I said, when you say you’re praying for me, do you mind if I ask what for? And a number of them said
331. 44:31 quite honestly, not really for your recovery, but that you see the error of your ways that you find God. Yeah. Now, I find that not as easy to be um graceful about
332. 44:45 because though it’s put in a nice way, it’s it’s it’s part of a phenomenon that I’ve always thought of as very
333. 44:51 disgusting, which is the belief of the religious that which they keep expressing and have done for centuries, that surely now you’re dying, your fears will overcome your reason. I hope I don’t have to
334. 45:03 underline what’s horrible about that. There’s an element of blackmail to it. and an element also of tremendous
335. 45:09 insecurity, I think, on their part. I mean, they don’t they don’t seem to feel they’d win the argument so easily with someone who was mentally and physically
336. 45:16 strong. By the way, I think they’re right.
337. 45:23 What’s your reaction to that, Sam? I don’t I don’t berate people who are
338. 45:31 weak. I regard religion as a form of uh mental illness, but a mental illness that is adopted by people who or as a last resort because
339. 45:43 they’re weak. I don’t think they’re cowards. I don’t regard what they’re doing as
340. 45:49 coercive. I’m not angry at them. I understand that we are not all blessed
341. 45:56 with the kind of fortitude and resilience that allows us to not need
342. 46:03 anything except reality. And so he’s an angry person. I highly
343. 46:10 respect him, of course, but he’s an angry person. He’s also a bit of an activist or was a bit of an activist. Atheism, especially the strong form of atheism, is a religion. Agreed.
344. 46:23 Because it makes a claim based on belief or on faith. Agreed.
345. 46:29 While I’m for example not an atheist at all. I’m I’m an agnostic which is a major that yeah the agnostic says I don’t the question can never be answered. It’s undecidable.
346. 46:41 There’s a humility to that. Exactly. I want to say that that being a
347. 46:47 rational person or or or adhering to rationality is implies modesty or humility. Not my
348. 46:55 strong suits mind you but we would never know. But when it comes to the intellect I am
349. 47:02 humble intellectually I am humble. I’m a very vain glor vain and and narcissistic
350. 47:09 person obviously but otherwise when it comes to the intellect I am humble in the face of the universe in the face of
351. 47:15 reality I accept that the universe is indifferent inexurable
352. 47:21 random uninterested in me I don’t I don’t apply to myself any
353. 47:28 privilege or special status I don’t think I can interact with the universe in any meaningful way whatsoever I can
354. 47:36 query the universe. Nor do I think that I will ever be able to obtain the correct answer as opposed to vain glorious hubristic scientists
355. 47:48 who are bad scientists. If you’re vlorious, if you have hubris, if you make absolute claims about your discoveries and about science, you’re a seriously bad scientist. Science is a philosophy. It’s a way of life is not a practice.
356. 48:06 And one of the major problem with scientists is that they conflate and confuse science with technology.
357. 48:13 Technology does provide answers. And these answers are always true. How do I
358. 48:19 know that technology works? But science never provides true answers.
359. 48:27 And science and technology are not the same things. You can convert science to technology and is often done, but they’re not they’re not the same thing.
360. 48:38 They’re not commenurate. They’re not co co-extant. You could practice science that can
361. 48:45 never ever be converted to technology. And you could come up with technological inventions even if you’re a college
362. 48:51 dropout and you’ve never studied science. These are not the same things. And yet
363. 48:58 scientists conf conflate them, confuse them, and say, you see, science works.
364. 49:04 No, science always fails. Technology works, and they’re not the same thing.
365. 49:12 Therefore, the question to settle the question of the of the alleged paranormal phenomena, their objectivity,
366. 49:19 for example, their existence in reality is not science is something that science
367. 49:25 can declare on. It’s not something that science can answer right now. We need to
368. 49:32 be humble in the face of the diversity of reality. We need to really be humble.
369. 49:39 That is not to say that telepathy exists or clairvoyance or or ghosts exists.
370. 49:45 That’s not what I’m saying. But what I am saying is people have been reporting
371. 49:51 these phenomenon. We need to study them. They are as real as any smartphone.
372. 49:58 More real even they preceded the smartphone, you know. M and that’s where
373. 50:05 science the hubris of science and scientism in my view the scientific endeavor because they say no we don’t
374. 50:17 need to study this phenomenon they are the equivalent of declaring that the moon is made of green cheese. No they
375. 50:23 are not the equivalent of such a statement. They’re not because to say that the moon
376. 50:29 is made of green cheese is a counterfactual statement that is not based on a single experience. No one has
377. 50:38 visited the moon and came back with green cheese. Unfortunately, I like it. But to say that you have seen a ghost is
378. 50:46 a qualitatively different kind of statement. Assuming of course that you’re not a fraudster and you’re not, you know, right that you are. So it’s it’s a qualitatively different statement
379. 50:57 because it does report something about reality. It could be a single individual’s
380. 51:04 reality. It could reflect a brain abnormality. Um misattributed arousal. I don’t know.
381. 51:11 I don’t know what it could reflect because no one studies it is studying it. And no one is studying it because
382. 51:17 it’s taboo. Princeton closed down its laboratory in 200. Yeah. in 2007 and that’s it. There is no other to the best of my knowledge there
383. 51:28 is no other serious academic institution institution of higher education that is
384. 51:34 studying these millions of reports by people in all cultures in all periods in
385. 51:40 all societies in all continents of essentially identical phenomena.
386. 51:47 And that is shocking to exclude such a vast forest of experiences
387. 51:54 just because it’s green cheese or because again there is a lack of humility. There’s an intellectual snobbery there. What we’re talking about is something that has been part of the
388. 52:05 human experience since humans were able to document human experience. And to
389. 52:11 excise that as a valid inexplicable part simply because we cannot answer the
390. 52:17 question to me makes it one of the most tantalizing questions there is. That is a field of study I think any academic
391. 52:24 could chew on for the rest of their living days. Yes. And I and and the irony is I do
392. 52:30 think we can provide a temporary answer. I don’t think I I proposed a few answers in this in
393. 52:36 this podcast. There may be the wrong answers. There probably are, but I did attempt at least to provide answers. You
394. 52:43 know, arousal, misattributed arousal, this these are these need to be studied. If I suggest a hypothesis that it’s
395. 52:50 misattributed arousal, we need to check that. Mhm. We can put people in laboratory conditions, people who claim, for example, to be able to to talk to ghosts, mediums. We can put people who
396. 53:01 claim to have experienced telepathy or able to turn on and off telepathy. It will there are such people and so on.
397. 53:08 And we can then test their physiology for signs of arousal again with the best of our knowledge thus far and the best of our technology thus far. We we do have to for example fMRI
398. 53:20 functional magnetic resonance imaging should demonstrate if there are is unusual activity in the brain but that will only prove as far as we are able to right now that there is
399. 53:31 unusual activity in the brain. We know about as much about the human brain as we do about the vastness of the ocean and what goes on beneath. Well, we did this with meditation. By
400. 53:42 now it’s true. That’s true. Now it’s well established and it’s part of mainstream to say that meditation
401. 53:48 induces changes in in brain activity and in the long term even brain structures, pathways and so on. So we’ve done that with meditation and there was a long period where this even
402. 53:59 this has been resisted. People were saying meditation that’s you know that’s corn artistry. We we
403. 54:06 that’s new age BS. Yeah, new age BS and we should never study this. A waste of time, resources and so on. And by the way, a thousands of year old practice. Yes. And now we are dis discovering and
404. 54:16 that’s established that’s mainstream. We teach it in university. Now we know that definitely we can use meditation to alter specific uh activities in the brain and so on so
405. 54:27 forth even physiology physiological responses such as heartbeat and reduce blood pressure and so on so forth. So we
406. 54:35 know that meditation can be beneficial and and we we have missed out on it for
407. 54:41 like 60 years because we absolutely refuse to study the phenomenon because it came from the east and yogis don’t
408. 54:48 look like academics you know most most yogis don’t look like academics you know and they sit they sit very strangely and
409. 54:55 they contort that’s to westerners to westerners yes yes yes so you know it’s I think we need to
410. 55:03 be more humble. I think we do need to study what is today called paranormal phenomenon. Maybe the phrases are
411. 55:10 unfortunate, paranormal, supernatural, this that these are reports by millions of people about something that is undoubtedly happening.
412. 55:22 Same applies to uh UFOs. There are reports by hundreds of thousands of
413. 55:28 people about something that may be happening. My inclination is to believe that these are brain artifacts. This
414. 55:37 reflects some problems with processing and so on. That’s my inclination. I do not believe in the existence of ghosts
415. 55:43 or um UFOs, not even remotely. Fascinating. But uh I may be wrong. I may be right. Well, you and I should pick up UFOs
416. 55:56 after we we talked to some some uh you know, I’m fascinated. There’s a documentary coming out, but by ex-military fighter pilots, people who have been trained to the teeth, ultra rationalists, understand physics, aerodynamics, as you said, these reports I saw we saw
417. 56:15 aircraft that could not be humanmade. You know, it’s it’s wild stuff. It used to be the province of conspiracy theorists, tin foil hats, and now it’s part of real sophisticated discussion.
418. 56:28 And I love it. I it just makes life more interesting. It’s to be studied. We should never ever
419. 56:34 exclude anything human from study. There was a Roman saying, you know, u
420. 56:44 nothing human is is alien to me. We should wow we should expand science to include
421. 56:52 everything humans report, everything humans observe, everything humans can measure, everything they cannot measure.
422. 56:59 We should expand science this way because only then we will become cognizant of the boundaries and
423. 57:05 limitations of science as long as we pretend that science has all the answers for
424. 57:12 everything and that when science does not have an answer there is no question
425. 57:18 then of course we will have failed. Science through the pursuit and through
426. 57:26 the study of other realms and other you know territories science may come to
427. 57:32 realize its own limitations and boundaries and thereby rendered much horrifications.
428. 57:38 But right now science says right now scientists say if we cannot answer this
429. 57:44 then the question itself is not legitimate. Mhm. And that is a highly a misinterpretation
430. 57:52 of the scientific spirit and I think anti-intellectual when when people first came up with quantum mechanics bore bourne all these scientists Einstein rejected quantum mechanics although he he was the philosophical and
431. 58:10 mathematical and phys and physical father of quantum mechanics he disowned his intellectual progeny He rejected quantum mechanics and he said I can’t believe this this is true. I
432. 58:22 can’t believe this is true because God wouldn’t be playing dice. And he rejected quantum mechanics and he excluded it from his studies. Consequently, Einstein spent the last 40 years of his life pursuing nonsensical
433. 58:35 theories that led nowhere. Wow. And he wasted the greatest genius that
434. 58:41 has ever walked the earth. He wasted his brain. He wasted his mind because he would not countenance another theory which to him appeared to
435. 58:52 be a kind of paranormal or supernatural theory because it implied action at a distance. It implied all kinds of things which he absolutely considered nonscientific.
436. 59:03 So Einstein said if they come up with these ideas and these ideas are
437. 59:09 non-scientific the ideas are not legitimate and the very query and quest are not legitimate and I’m not going to participate. What did he do except ruin himself as a
438. 59:21 scientist today? We know that quantum mechanics is by far the most precise
439. 59:27 scientific theory to have ever walked the earth. We have no idea what it means
440. 59:33 or what it says. None. But it works. And so there’s a lot there are many debates and so on and they’re highly metaphysical debates and but it it’s it’s a theory that works
441. 59:46 well. I can think that of no better object lesson and sort of place to leave
442. 59:52 it as that because that really I think is the heart of the conversation we have been having. We don’t know how it works, but it works. And we don’t know how some of these phenomena can possibly be
443. 60:09 explained, but they’re there. And so, we need to inquire within. Let me finish with a sentence. The Yes, please. The worst way to tackle or consider a
444. 60:22 problem is to deny that it exists. Mhm. That’s the least efficacious way of
445. 60:28 dealing with it. And that’s precisely what we are doing today with paranormal. Mhm. Say we we deny that it exists but it
446. 60:36 exists. Of course it exists. Not in the real objective sense but in people’s experiences.
447. 60:43 Thank you Sam. And uh I don’t know if they c celebrate Halloween over in France but happy Halloween and happy all
448. 60:51 souls day. See it transcends cultures. It’s human. It’s human. It does. Uh, thank you, Sam. And we will see you soon back on the nerve. Enjoy Paris.