Unit 11, Lesson 11.2, Exercise B≤2.16
Part 1 Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here today. My name is Dr Elizabeth MacDonald and I’ve been researching parapsychology for over 20 years. Today, I am going to present some of the main arguments for and against the existence of paranormal phenomena, that is to say, events and experiences that seem to have no scientific explanation, like seeing ghosts or being able to predict the future.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not going to try to
convince you that either of these actually happens. No … I’ll be looking at a few contrasting beliefs and presenting a reasoned argument, which should help you decide for yourselves.
All the views I’m going to discuss are part of
a long-standing debate about dualism and materialism. Just to remind you … dualism is the belief that the mind and the body exist separately. Materialism, on the other hand, maintains that there can be no division between body and spirit; not only that, but only the physical exists.
First of all, I think it’s fair to say that there are
four main views on the existence of paranormal events. At one end of the scale, we have the spiritualists, who believe in the supernatural, and are convinced that ghosts and spirits exist. The next group, which includes parapsychologists, holds the view that the paranormal or psi (that’s spelt P-S-I) may exist, but can only be perceived by certain individuals, as in the case of clairvoyance. The third group, sceptics, take the view that, because out-of-body experiences, for instance, are subjective, it is to some degree impossible to prove or disprove their existence. Turning to the other end of the scale, the fourth group – the scientists – we find the most radical, materialist view that, for example, all experiences are no more than the result of neurological processes. In an attempt to present a balanced view, I’m going to summarize each of these views in turn.
Unit 11, Lesson 11.2, Exercise C≤2.17
Part 2 Let’s start with spiritualism. Spiritualism is based on the belief that there are superior forces we don’t understand. So spiritualists believe in the existence of the supernatural and events that are beyond our control. They also claim that communication between the supernatural and the physical world is made possible by the intervention of sensitive
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individuals. Like in the film The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, the little boy who said, ‘I see dead people’… Have any of you seen it? Well, in the spiritualist community, there are quite a few mediums, that is, people with psychic powers, who claim to communicate with the dead during meetings known as seances. A phenomenon associated with seances is the production of ectoplasm, a slimy substance which is said to be the physical manifestation of spirits. If you saw the film Ghostbusters, you might remember it. And one more example of inexplicable events … Has anyone heard of poltergeists? Poltergeists are invisible forces that some people believe can move objects around the room.
Of course, the question arises … what proof
do we have of psychic events? Well, as I’ve just mentioned, because they’re so subjective, it’s very difficult to establish their authenticity. With respect to ectoplasm, it must be said that scientific experiments have not supported its existence.
Now let’s turn to parapsychology … the scientific
study of paranormal experiences. Since its beginnings in the 1930s, most research into parapsychology has focused on the phenomenon of extrasensory perception, that’s E-S-P. There are several forms of ESP, one of which is telepathy, the ability to read minds and transmit information without seeing or speaking to the other person. Another form is clairvoyance – being able to describe places, objects and events the clairvoyant has not visited or witnessed in person. Describing places the clairvoyant has never seen before is known as ‘remote viewing’. A third kind of ESP is precognition, the ability to predict the future. In the ’30s, J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa carried out experiments to prove the existence of ESP. The Rhines’ experiments involved placing two individuals in separate rooms. One person, the sender, would have a set of cards with symbols on them. They would look at the cards while the other person, the receiver, guessed which card they were looking at. Although the Rhines claimed that the results proved the existence of ESP, there were strong objections from the scientific community, which insisted that the experiments were not controlled carefully enough. More recent experiments have introduced the free-response method, in which the receiver doesn’t even know what the target image or object might be. These days, the most widely accepted technique for testing telepathy and clairvoyance in laboratory conditions is the ganzfeld procedure, in which the receiver is placed in a kind of sensory isolation
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