Incidentally, talking of psychic powers, not everyone who shows an amazing ability is necessarily deliberately deceiving others (though most are).
Funnily enough I discovered this myself, doing a silly card trick with two friends. My first friend and I set up a "mind-reading" situation where he would ask the colour of the next card and I would guess. The clue was he'd say "right" or "ok" depending on whether it was black or red. We appeared to start doing it just mucking around, when we had in fact carefully rehearsed. We made sure we included a few mistakes to add credibility. We were curious to see how long it would take before our other friends rumbled us.
One other friend was amazed, so we tested her. And she found she could do it too. She got more and more excited as she got card after card right - apparently using her own "psychic powers". She was subliminally reading the same clues, of course. Her disappointment on discovering how she was really doing it was, of course, huge. I felt quite guilty.
Funnily enough I discovered this myself, doing a silly card trick with two friends. My first friend and I set up a "mind-reading" situation where he would ask the colour of the next card and I would guess. The clue was he'd say "right" or "ok" depending on whether it was black or red. We appeared to start doing it just mucking around, when we had in fact carefully rehearsed. We made sure we included a few mistakes to add credibility. We were curious to see how long it would take before our other friends rumbled us.
One other friend was amazed, so we tested her. And she found she could do it too. She got more and more excited as she got card after card right - apparently using her own "psychic powers". She was subliminally reading the same clues, of course. Her disappointment on discovering how she was really doing it was, of course, huge. I felt quite guilty.
Comments
enigman, leave the explanations until after the phenomenon has been demonstrated to exist in the first place. It has not. Roughly a century of experimental research in parapsychology and spiritualism, and it is so far a history of charlatans, frauds, victims and the self-deluded.
Stephen, I have seen the same in my students--some phenomenon seems extraordinary (and is, in truth, pretty damned cool), but has a mundane explanation... and they are disappointed. Why? Why not rejoice in the discovery that you are able to detect the fact that you have been fooling yourself?
I'm pretty sure that the nonexistence of psychic abilities should be a prety good argument against property dualism (although the folkiness of the latter might explain the common credence in the former), but that nonexistence is hardly established by testing star psychics and finding out that they are in show business, or even by testing such sad people as want to be laboratory rats.
Maybe your guess is better than mine, cuttlefish, but guesswork isn't fieldwork; and postulation (of explanations) precedes predictions (and verifications), even in science.