Authority, inference, experience: Beischel excerpt #3

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition: 

Knowledge by authority happens when claims made by trusted authority figures are accepted as true. Because we can’t learn everything through direct experience or even through logical inference, knowledge conveyed by authoritative figures is often required. Trusting that Mrs. Gustafsen was correct in saying to my kindergarten class that three follows two and N follows M was probably a valid pathway toward knowing. This can become problematic, however, when sources are inappropriately trusted simply because they, say, attended a prestigious university, are on TV, published a book, or have a Twitter following.

One step up from authority, when we can’t observe or experience things for ourselves, is knowing by inference, by using logical reasoning (also called rationalism; think Sherlock Holmes). For example, because I know how peristalsis of the digestive tract works (through knowledge conveyed by the authority of physiology professors and textbooks), I can infer that it is impossible for swallowed gum (or swallowed anything) to stay in the gut for seven years. If everything in the pantry is askew or upside-down when I open it in the morning, I can infer that my husband did some late-night stress eating. If my welcome mat looks more threadbare than it did yesterday, I can infer that some neighborhood birds are making nests and need building supplies. Knowing through inference, however, can be problematic if the assumptions used in the reasoning process are incorrect. Maybe I, myself, recently developed sleep-eating or sleep-door- mat-larceny habits and didn’t know it. That’s still logical (though not probable).

As stated above, the evidence that brain produces consciousness (materialism) is circumstantial and relies on inference. Moreover, because we can’t repeatedly experience consciousness after death (short of a Flatliners scenario), a lot of the evidence for survival is based on inference. Survival researchers “cannot send expeditions of scientists to the next world to report on their findings and return with specimens susceptible to analysis in human laboratories, but inference is a perfectly acceptable scientific tool”.

Direct personal observation or experience (also called empiricism) is another method of knowing. Early on in the evolution of our species we most likely had to do most of our learning about how the world worked through observation. Perhaps we learned which berries were safe to eat by watching the birds and animals. Most likely, we learned that leaves changing color meant that the cold season was coming.

In the modern era, by the time we reach adulthood, we’ve each already learned a sufficient number of facts through knowledge by authority (and hopefully less so through tenacity) and have developed the critical thinking skills necessary to use inference to collect others. Therefore, knowledge gained through individual experiences in contemporary society is primarily about ourselves and those close to us, rather than about the world in general.  

Once I know I am capable of, say, lucid dreaming, remote viewing, mentally controlling the timing of my menstrual cycle, or feeling physiologically connected to someone at a distance, I can never un-know that those things are possible for me. However, knowledge by experience cannot be generalized as applicable to others. This limits its usefulness.

Two faces      

In addition, the physical senses that humans use for observation and experience are tremendously fallible. In a novel I happened to be reading while writing this, a character named Dr. Marconi made this observation:

“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks Nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum... We can’t see heat or cold. We can’t see electricity or radio signals... It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it. Yet, we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ’I’ll believe it when I see it.’”

Similarly, my husband worked in a science museum where a colleague had a sign in his office that read, “Seeing is the brain’s best guess.” And so, I choose to believe, many perceptual cognition experts. Because personal experience often cannot be generalized as being true for others, and our human sensory perceptual apparatuses are so limited, empiricism falls short of being a truly valid method for knowing about the natural world in general.

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).