176. Dr. Jeffrey Kripal On Science Fiction As a Trojan Horse For the Paranormal (Podcast)

[alextsakiris]

Interview with author and professor of religious studies examines how paranormal experiences have fueled the work of famous science fiction and comic book authors.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Rice University professor [...]

Click here to read more ...

[paqart]

As a former comic book artist and creator, I can say that the comic book creators I have known like science fiction and the paranormal as an idea, but that science fiction is fundamentally atheistic. One long-time friend of mine has been writing comics for over thirty years and he is as antagonistic to psi as one can get without losing his other good qualities. The culture of comics is based on the idea that 'science' explains everything in much the same way that the Scooby-Doo TV show never featured a single real ghost. Every episode was about the unmasking of a faker of some kind (I should know, I had to watch every episode to get reference for a Scooby-Doo video game I art directed in 2000.) The fakers, incidentally, mirrored the fantastic motives that skeptics often assign to fraudulent mediums, and are just as ludicrous.

This is one of the reasons I find comics so much less interesting as stories than when I was an atheist. Now, I still like the art, but wish that the stories didn't all support the same materialistic worldview. Even when they supposedly deal with spiritual or religious subjects, they explain the paranormal with scientific-sounding materialistic theories. Here is a funny example of psi that is related to the comic I am most closely identified with, 'Harsh Realm': Before I had met my co-creator, Jim Hudnall, I had a dream about working on a comic with someone named 'Ridgway'. My next job was with Jim, who hired John Ridgway, a British artist I'd never heard of, to ink my pencil art. Naturally, this was recorded in my journal before being introduced to Jim and before learning who Ridgway was. Was this name luck of the draw? If so, it is interesting because he is the only person with that name that I have ever met, let alone worked with, let alone worked with in comics, and that isn't counting the short amount of time between the dream and its realization (it was a matter of weeks, IIRC.)

AP

[Kamarling]

Paquart, I agree completely that SF is now dominated by the atheist worldview. I find it amusing that Dr. Who episodes will have the good Doctor following ludicrous storylines but nevertheless make a point of dismissing suggestions of ghostly or paranormal happenings as hokum. Not really surprising in the episodes written by Russel T. Davies - he is a disciple of Dawkins.

I'm not sure, however, that it was ever thus. My favorite SF book is "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon. It was written in the 1950's and includes, without apology, psi phenomena as the central theme. And even Spock, in the early days of Star Trek, performed telepathic "mind melds".

As for comics, I have a couple of books here by Alvin Schwartz. His "An Unlikely Prophet" is described as "A Metaphysical Memoir by the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman." Again, Schwartz wrote these comic book stories duing the 1940's and 50's.

By the way, I have not yet had chance to listen to this interview so I hope I'm not speaking out of turn.

[anonymous]

Alex Tsakiris: “We are essentially locked-in and chained down to a worldview that does not seriously question itself. That by definition cannot question itself. How, after all, can one experience beyond matter in a world that claims there is nothing outside matter? And how can one step out of a worldview that says it cannot step out of a worldview? Hence these sorts of paranormal experiences which violate both our materialism and our contextualism can only elude our grasp and frustrate our cognitively primitive attempts to understand them.”

Tell us about that.

Dr. Jeff Kripal: Basically what I’m trying to get out there is that the thoughts we think and the worldviews we inhabit are determined by our cultures. The reigning culture is this scientific materialism that essentially argues that we’re only matter and that we can never get outside of our bodies and the particular historical context in which we find ourselves. What happens to human beings all the time is that they have these sorts of extraordinary experiences that do seem to take them outside of their context, outside their bodies, even outside of space and time which is how my artists and authors talk about it today.

So I’m simply pointing out that those sorts of experiences are dismissed or ignored because there’s no way to fit them into the reigning paradigm. But once we just open up the paradigm, then they make actually a good deal of sense. They actually become really interesting and powerful experiences to take into consideration. You can’t think yourself out of a box with the terms of the box. You have to find some other way to get out of the box.

The problem is not that "we" are locked into a paradigm. The problem is that people who are attached to materialism intentionally and deliberately lock themselves into a paradigm. They define science to fit within materialism. This is not some kind of accident, it is a deliberate, intentional choice. People who are not attached to materialism don't define science that way. So simply telling skeptics their paradigm is self limiting to is not going change anything - they limit the paradigm intentionally and consciously and don't want to change it.

The book claims to be a trojan horse, but it won't work. People who are not open to the paranormal won't be converted by somehow "tricking" them into learning about the evidence. Their problem is their world view not ignorance.

I’ve heard Whitley say pointblank that if we had better science fiction movies, people would have better abduction experiences. The reason his experiences were initially so negative had something to do with the Cold War era in which he was raised.

Yes, and if we had better ghost stories people would have better paranormal experiences. People interpret a friendly spirit trying to contact them as a threat because of the prejudice against spirits spread by our cultural mythology and by the entertainment media.

I am also very certain that some UFO accounts are purely fraudulent, made up for disinformation reasons or people just screwing with us. Who knows? All of that stuff gets thrown into this grab-bag called the UFO and it all gets confused and it all mixes around and it all influences each other.

This is why hoaxers who try to discredit believers are not helping anything. It also is why science should accept and investigate these phenomena rather than reject and ignore them - so that science can help sort out truth from fiction.

I know how institutions work. I just find it truly impossible that an institution as large as a nation-state can keep such things under wraps for so long. I’m suspicious of that.

I think he's locked in to a paradigm and limiting what he can conceive of.

[Sandy B]

Originally Posted by Kamarling

Paquart, I agree completely that SF is now dominated by the atheist worldview. I find it amusing that Dr. Who episodes will have the good Doctor following ludicrous storylines but nevertheless make a point of dismissing suggestions of ghostly or paranormal happenings as hokum. Not really surprising in the episodes written by Russel T. Davies - he is a disciple of Dawkins.

I'm not sure, however, that it was ever thus. My favorite SF book is "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon. It was written in the 1950's and includes, without apology, psi phenomena as the central theme. And even Spock, in the early days of Star Trek, performed telepathic "mind melds".

As for comics, I have a couple of books here by Alvin Schwartz. His "An Unlikely Prophet" is described as "A Metaphysical Memoir by the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman." Again, Schwartz wrote these comic book stories duing the 1940's and 50's.

By the way, I have not yet had chance to listen to this interview so I hope I'm not speaking out of turn.

A favorite SciFi book of mine is A.E. van Vogt'ss Slan, about a race of telepathic beings evolved from the human race. But I agree that most SciFi tends to not include paranormal abilities. There are exceptions of course, such as the XMen's professor Xavier who has telepathic abilities.

Fantasy books tend to allow more for paranormal references. The Canadian author Charles de Lint has written a number of urban fantasy books that mention psychic functioning and survival of consciousness.

[Sandy B]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

Interview with author and professor of religious studies examines how paranormal experiences have fueled the work of famous science fiction and comic book authors.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Rice University professor [...]

Click here to read more ...

This might be kind of a silly thing, but it got my attention:

We could get down to really concrete stuff like hey, eat sugar when you’re having these kinds of experiences because it will ground you.

Where does that idea regarding sugar come from, Alex? Or were you just joking?

[Michael Larkin]

Just thought I'd post the questions Alex posed at the end of the interview for consideration in the discussion:

1. Power and value of the narrative. Hard science's tendency to dismiss or undervalue narratives that pervade all cultures.

2. The crazy line. We all draw one. How do we as individuals set up crazy lines?

[Michael Larkin]

Originally Posted by Michael Larkin

1. Power and value of the narrative. Hard science's tendency to dismiss or undervalue narratives that pervade all cultures.

2. The crazy line. We all draw one. How do we as individuals set up crazy lines?

First, let me say I thought this interview very thought-provoking, and that I found a kindred spirit in Jeffrey Kripal. He expresses very well a lot of my own--what shall I call them--uncertainties, perhaps; or maybe, a kind of reluctance to commit to hardened views. I like to keep myself mentally open to ideas that the rigid, egoic part of my nature might want to block.

With regard to the power of narratives, I very much agree that it can be enormous. The scripts we carry around inside our minds, which dictate how we think and act, are often least visible to ourselves, if sometimes transparently obvious to others. However, narratives exist on all sides of an issue. For example, there are “Skeptiko” narratives, just as there are narratives on forums that take contrary views; and whilst I’m broadly sympathetic to the former rather than the latter, I often sense that I may be a bit more detached and open than are some of the contributors here, and perhaps also, Alex.

I won’t say that there is no such thing as an actual conspiracy in life. Sometimes there really is. But my guess is that very often, the conspiracy is part of the narrative. I can’t say I know where all the crazy lines are for me. Moreover, I wonder if anyone who can isn’t actually, de facto, caught up in their own narrative.

When my narrative matches your narrative, then we have the germ of a group of conspiracy theorists. The more of us there are, the more it seems we must be right. Look at us, there are thousands, maybe millions, of us. Surely we must be right, yes? Well, it could be so if we can adduce enough concrete evidence--such as confidential correspondence between a group of financial fraudsters, or bent coppers caught on tape as they frame an innocent man. For me, this kind of evidence allows my conclusions to fall on one side of the crazy line, the one marked “it ain’t crazy at all”.

Then there’s all the Roswell stuff, UFOs, mediumship, clairvoyance, and so on. I don’t know quite where to stand on a lot of stuff like that. There’s a certain amount of documentary evidence, but I haven’t drawn in a firm crazy line. Call me like Schroedinger’s cat if you like--leaning neither one way nor the other. In so many things, my probability wave hasn’t collapsed because I haven’t yet taken the conscious decision to look at things this way or that.

The strongest influence is that which one has personally experienced. Hence for me, it isn’t crazy to think that in some sense we are all one (which is also why I think NDEs are genuinely spiritual experiences). But even so, different narratives in explanation of what that means are possible, and my probability wave hasn’t yet completely collapsed on those, though naturally enough I do have leanings (but I know they are leanings rather than facts).

Some people here have mentioned experiences on Skeptiko that I myself haven’t had - clairvoyance, lucid dreaming, telepathy and so on. I have no reason to disbelieve them, and can’t think why they would make it up, so there has to be something that informs their reports. So I can’t allow the probability wave to collapse there, either.

It’s a terrible handicap, in my view, to live in a world where most possibilities have collapsed into seeming certainties. Not a few sceptics exist in such a world, but also, let us not forget the possibility that a fair few believers might, too. And once a wave has collapsed, it can be extremely difficult to retrieve proper awareness of the degree of one’s true ignorance. Which is another way of saying, the more certain one feels about more and more things, the more likely it is that one’s ego is too big, and the more likely it is one will never get a better glimpse of the way things really are.

[gabriel]

Originally Posted by paqart

As a former comic book artist and creator, I can say that the comic book creators I have known like science fiction and the paranormal as an idea, but that science fiction is fundamentally atheistic.

I completely agree. I admire Alan Moore's work but he willingly shares a platform with New Atheists and remember Richard Dawkins married a Doctor Who girl. In my experience most strident atheists are sci-fi fans.

[Michael Larkin]

I agree a lot of Sci-fi fiction leans towards materialism, but for me a particularly notable exception is Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos sequence of 5 books.

Lessing became a student of Idries Shah, and the sequence is heavily influenced by his brand of Sufism.

Not long after finishing it, I had my strongest spiritual experience, which lasted around a fortnight. I can't say that Canopus was the cause, but I've often wondered. Not least, if so, how and why.