I've met a few people over the years who believe in psychics and I am always bemused and astounded by the veracity and closed mindedness with which they defend a concept with no empirical scientific evidence to support it. Here I will attempt to outline the reasons why psychics and psychic phenomenon could not possibly be real. I'm talking here specifically about the type of psychic who claim to be able to read people's futures. As with all things I would be happy to revise my opinion if someone could present me with hard evidence confirming that these abilities are indeed real. For the record, by evidence I mean actual proper verifiable evidence gathered through well designed repeatable experiments not evidence like "my uncle totally went to one and everything they said came true".
Knowing things:
I think that we can all agree that the concept of "knowing something" is defined by an arrangement of neurons within a person's brain. For a psychic to have knowledge of the future and to be able to voice that knowledge they must have an arrangement of neural connections that represent the events they are "predicting".
Acquiring that knowledge:
So that brings us to question of how these neural connections pertaining to future events were formed inside the brain of the psychic. Given that the events of which they supposedly have knowledge occur in the future then we must assume that some particle or energy has travelled backwards through time in order to influence these neurons to create the appropriate connections in order for them to know the specific details of these events. There are some fairly big assumptions that need to be made for this to be true:
1. That abstract concepts such as "meaningful" life events are encoded in such a way that they are generic enough that the a set of neurons being influenced in a particular person's brain would result in the same knowledge in the brain of another psychic if exposed to the same stimulus.
2. There would need to be some explanation as to why certain events seem to be more strongly predicted than others, for example why would the particles or energy representing the knowledge that "you will find true love" be any more likely to travel backwards through time than "you will have toast for breakfast"
3. That particles or energy can travel backwards through time(this is a pretty big one).
4. There is also the possibility that the universe is entirely deterministic and that the psychic has knowledge of the position, state and velocity of every particle in the universe and can therefore extrapolate all future events based on the current state of the universe. This however is obviously an impossibility for many reasons - like how would this knowledge be obtained, stored and extrapolated? Also given that the psychics brain is part of the simulation and would need to also model itself and is just simply not large enough to store that quantity of information.
The "What if it's some other thing?" question:
I've had someone pose this as a response to my aforementioned arguments. If it is "some other thing" then what? To have any credibility you would need to provide some explanation as to what that "other thing" was. This would include direct physical evidence. A reasonable and consistent hypothesis as to what this "other thing" is. Predictions made by this new theory and experiments designed to test these predictions. Some solid mathematics to back it all up. Unless some or all of these criteria can be met there is no point even bringing this argument up, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The "You can't disprove it" argument:
Well first off I think it has been fairly soundly dis-proven but in my experience people that believe such unlikely things are rarely swayed by logic, facts or evidence. So my only response to this can be that it is not my job to disprove the existence of psychics to you as the onus of proof is always on the person making the claim. ie. If you want to claim psychics are real and want other people to take you seriously it is your responsibility to provide the proof to back up your claims, it is not the responsibility of everyone else to assume that what you are saying is true unless they can prove otherwise.
The "What if Physics and science generally are wrong?" argument:
Well they may well be but again given the overwhelming evidence that they are correct I would need to see equally compelling evidence that they are incorrect to be persuaded. One of the behaviours that I find most perplexing is that some people will doubt Physics and science but then go and use their phones, computers, GPS devices etc. that would simply not work if the known laws of Physics were incorrect. Therefore any arguments that claimed that these laws were incorrect would also need to include watertight explanations of the mountains of observed physical evidence to have any chance of being taken seriously.
The "You're just being closed minded" argument
Quite the contrary, being open minded doesn't mean believing everything you hear, it means being open to the evidence and facts. In fact I would argue that believers in things like psychics are being exceptionally closed minded as they are rarely willing to abandon their beliefs when presented with facts and reasoning which contradict their point of view. If you genuinely think I am being closed minded ask yourself this - Would you be willing to change your opinion and admit it was wrong if presented with sufficient evidence? I certainly would, but I'm willing to bet that most people who believe in psychic phenomenon would not.
I hope this clears things up, although I acknowledge that if you believe in psychics despite the complete lack of evidence of their existence then this post will probably do little to sway your opinion but it may at the very least give you insight into the looks of derision you receive when touting your unfounded theories and why most people don't share your belief.
Knowing things:
I think that we can all agree that the concept of "knowing something" is defined by an arrangement of neurons within a person's brain. For a psychic to have knowledge of the future and to be able to voice that knowledge they must have an arrangement of neural connections that represent the events they are "predicting".
Acquiring that knowledge:
So that brings us to question of how these neural connections pertaining to future events were formed inside the brain of the psychic. Given that the events of which they supposedly have knowledge occur in the future then we must assume that some particle or energy has travelled backwards through time in order to influence these neurons to create the appropriate connections in order for them to know the specific details of these events. There are some fairly big assumptions that need to be made for this to be true:
1. That abstract concepts such as "meaningful" life events are encoded in such a way that they are generic enough that the a set of neurons being influenced in a particular person's brain would result in the same knowledge in the brain of another psychic if exposed to the same stimulus.
2. There would need to be some explanation as to why certain events seem to be more strongly predicted than others, for example why would the particles or energy representing the knowledge that "you will find true love" be any more likely to travel backwards through time than "you will have toast for breakfast"
3. That particles or energy can travel backwards through time(this is a pretty big one).
4. There is also the possibility that the universe is entirely deterministic and that the psychic has knowledge of the position, state and velocity of every particle in the universe and can therefore extrapolate all future events based on the current state of the universe. This however is obviously an impossibility for many reasons - like how would this knowledge be obtained, stored and extrapolated? Also given that the psychics brain is part of the simulation and would need to also model itself and is just simply not large enough to store that quantity of information.
The "What if it's some other thing?" question:
I've had someone pose this as a response to my aforementioned arguments. If it is "some other thing" then what? To have any credibility you would need to provide some explanation as to what that "other thing" was. This would include direct physical evidence. A reasonable and consistent hypothesis as to what this "other thing" is. Predictions made by this new theory and experiments designed to test these predictions. Some solid mathematics to back it all up. Unless some or all of these criteria can be met there is no point even bringing this argument up, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The "You can't disprove it" argument:
Well first off I think it has been fairly soundly dis-proven but in my experience people that believe such unlikely things are rarely swayed by logic, facts or evidence. So my only response to this can be that it is not my job to disprove the existence of psychics to you as the onus of proof is always on the person making the claim. ie. If you want to claim psychics are real and want other people to take you seriously it is your responsibility to provide the proof to back up your claims, it is not the responsibility of everyone else to assume that what you are saying is true unless they can prove otherwise.
The "What if Physics and science generally are wrong?" argument:
Well they may well be but again given the overwhelming evidence that they are correct I would need to see equally compelling evidence that they are incorrect to be persuaded. One of the behaviours that I find most perplexing is that some people will doubt Physics and science but then go and use their phones, computers, GPS devices etc. that would simply not work if the known laws of Physics were incorrect. Therefore any arguments that claimed that these laws were incorrect would also need to include watertight explanations of the mountains of observed physical evidence to have any chance of being taken seriously.
The "You're just being closed minded" argument
Quite the contrary, being open minded doesn't mean believing everything you hear, it means being open to the evidence and facts. In fact I would argue that believers in things like psychics are being exceptionally closed minded as they are rarely willing to abandon their beliefs when presented with facts and reasoning which contradict their point of view. If you genuinely think I am being closed minded ask yourself this - Would you be willing to change your opinion and admit it was wrong if presented with sufficient evidence? I certainly would, but I'm willing to bet that most people who believe in psychic phenomenon would not.
I hope this clears things up, although I acknowledge that if you believe in psychics despite the complete lack of evidence of their existence then this post will probably do little to sway your opinion but it may at the very least give you insight into the looks of derision you receive when touting your unfounded theories and why most people don't share your belief.
