Weekend sendoff: The open-mindedness of skepticism

Deepak Chopra and I go way back. I am single-handedly responsible for keeping Alan Pakula from having to read his book The Return of Merlin, which I read in galleys as a development associate and nixed before any higher-up had to sit through it. (To be fair, can you imagine the director of All the President’s Men making a movie out of something by Chopra? Well, neither could I.)

Now Chopra’s written a post about the evils of skepticism which has already been dutifully excoriated by the usual suspects. It’s not surprising that a man whose brand depends on his followers being ignorant of science should be so fearful and dismissive of it. When I received an unexpected response from him after accusing him on Twitter of being closed-minded — hypocrisy gets up my nose is my only excuse — he dismissed me and my subsequent offer to explain how skepticism has opened up my world. (What my handle has to do with it is anyone’s guess.)

I have no further interest in alleviating the man’s terror of that which threatens his income, but I kept thinking about one of his quotes: “It never occurs to skeptics that a sense of wonder is paramount, even for scientists.” How backwards that is. Let’s take a favorite New Agey-type subject: intuition. I believe strongly that I am an intuitive person, and that listening to my intuition (which it took me many years to trust myself to do) has usually steered me in the right direction. I don’t exactly know how it works, but I’ve even freaked people out with my observations that almost appear to be psychic in nature.

Now for some people, that’s the end of it. They believe they have a sixth sense and it’s just magically marvelous somehow. But a skeptic can’t leave it at that. What’s really going on here? Well, obviously I am not psychic. If I get a strong intuitive flash about someone or a situation, it’s because on some level I am noticing all kinds of things that my conscious brain doesn’t see. A person gives many signals, physically and vocally, that mentalists and cold readers are able to detect and use in their acts (or their scams). People like Derren Brown train themselves to recognize and make use of these signals. I have not, so where Brown can control his talents in fascinating ways that seem like magic, all I do is get a strange, visceral sensation whose information I can hopefully interpret correctly. That’s “intuition” — and it has nothing to do with being female, either.

(As an aside, Derren Brown’s blog is always full of interesting tidbits from a skeptical point of view, and I highly recommend it as a good example of how that point of view is nothing close to conflicting with a sense of wonder.)

And then there's this.

But does knowing this make it any less cool, any less amazing that the human mind is able to perform this feat? Isn’t it more cool and more amazing than “I’m psychic” or “it’s magic,” which immediately put an end to the discussion? I know intellectually that I am empathetic — I connect strongly with other people’s emotions, which is not magic or “telepathy” — and that due to either nature (my mother claims to be very intuitive as well) or nurture (as in the kinds of study I’ve done) I’m also pretty good at reading people. It doesn’t make it any less interesting to me when my brain seems to act on its own as a kind of investigative reporter, and further when its report is delivered to me via a physical reaction, like random butterflies in the stomach. Having an understanding of how this works, even just a basic layperson’s understanding, neither eliminates the phenomenon nor diminishes it.

This is why the idea that skepticism is joyless and closed-minded is so ridiculous to me. How can the passion and interest that skeptics show in unravelling the mysteries of the universe, from one’s own mind out to the cosmos, be interpreted as negativity? I understand that there are personalities and rhetoric and everything that sometimes gets in the way of skeptics coming across as nothing more than naysayers. However, anyone who truly makes an effort to understand the skeptical approach cannot possibly screw it up as spectacularly as those who are scared of it.

On Monday I plan to address a few common “alternative” treatments and suggestions for CFSers and other chronically ill people. These range from the controversial to the purely pseudoscientific, and I will also suggest alternatives to these alternatives that can actually do you some good. And now I send you off with something you’ve doubtlessly seen by now, but I can’t think of a better coda to this post than Carl Sagan, the scientist who instilled a sense of wonder into so many skeptics, and still does.