My last post was partly about the impossibility of psychic phenomena — especially telepathy. That is, the impossibility of thought to travel between minds in any other way than by a physical signal receivable and readable ultimately by the private machine language of the brain. In other words, I was taking a firmly materialist assumption of thought. Mind exists in matter, and cannot exist apart from it. But even as I was putting that argument into words, I felt uneasy, even (dare I say) “dirty.” I wasn’t sure if I actually believed what I was writing.

Do I actually think thoughts can only be material? Do I really not think that consciousness could have any kind of existence outside of physical neurons or circuits? Why do I think this?

The part of me that adheres to such a view is the product of Enlightenment rationality and psychology. Science has never questioned that the brain was the seat of thinking. The study of anatomy and observation of people with brain injuries since time immemorial has made clear the brain’s special role in thought—if only as some kind of transducer. It is possible even the ancient Egyptians knew about the special functions of certain of the brain’s lobes. By Freud’s time, even though neurons were not yet understood, he could create a theory of how the brain was essentially a machine for thinking. (The metaphor he used was hydraulics, because electricity was still new.)

Now, more than ever before, science is able to actually show us “thinking” as it occurs in the brain. We can map out what kinds of thoughts, what parts of our mental life, arise from activity in which areas and involve which specific circuits. It is even possible to record the firing of individual neurons and know their function in the organism’s behavior. From a rationalistic point of view, these advances put the material basis of thinking beyond question. They make it easy to dismiss the notion that a person’s mind, memories, sense of self, etc. – their “soul” – could depart the body, or survive beyond the decay or destruction of the body. The brain is more than a transducer, it seems: It’s where thought is born and lives, and where it has to stay. This makes most who study the matter of the mind dismissive of the notion of anything like the soul.

Why, then, do I feel like some kind of resentful spoilsport when I follow suit? I have no counterargument or alternative explanation for the self-evident materiality of mind, so why do I feel a twinge of guilt when I argue against psychic phenomena or disembodied thoughts in a blog post? Why do I feel like I have diminished myself ever so slightly? I’ve written before about the “rudeness of science,” but I don’t think my reaction was just guilt at being impolite or arrogant at dismissing what other people believe. I really think it is because this rationalistic/materialistic part of me is just that – a part of me, but not the entirety. I know that the brain is in the mind as much as the mind is in the brain.

“Diminishing oneself” is a real thing: pretending to be smaller than you are, crouching down to fit inside the cramped box of an identity (such as “rational skeptic”) – rather than standing tall within the fullness of your possibilities as a human. This kind of “crouching down” means restricting your vision, narrowing your gaze to only include some segment of what lies within your larger purview or field of awareness. Because any identity box is just an idea, it’s apparent limitations don’t really exist, so to make them convincing to ourselves and others they must be “mimed.”

I think we are all, even the wisest of us, to some extent like mimes doing the “trapped in a glass box” thing. It’s more than just playing or acting out our social roles; I’m referring to something inner, an inner sense of oneself. A banker who thinks that his identity as a businessman exhausts his possibilities as a human, is really just miming a reduced model of himself. A depressed person who keeps trying to fit every fact about their life into their diagnosis is likewise caught up in a mime act. Same with any identity: Black, White, Woman, Man, Gay, Straight, Christian, Jew, Atheist… When I, even in the privacy of my own head, put on the pompous airs of a scientist who can explain why the soul doesn’t exist, I am really miming a constraint in my thinking that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. I’m pretending to be smaller or more limited than I really am.

There are certain “glass boxes” we have a hard time questioning. Science, because it is so persuasive and powerful, is one of them. But the more a thing seems self-evident, the more it should be questioned and challenged. In this way, we make ourselves bigger. (That kind of fundamental skepticism should help sharpen science, too.)

All this is to say, I suppose, that I’m going to try to be more open minded.

“We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions.” –Jacques Vallee

I’d be the first to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. But of all things paranormal, I have the hardest time bringing myself to believe in telepathy and other “psychic” phenomena. Yet such phenomena are a mainstay of alien contact and abduction reports, and have led many researchers—even rigorously scientific ones, like Jacques Vallee—to accept them as an important aspect of many UFO experiences.

The problem as I see it is this: Thoughts take the form of neural activity in the form of activated associations among groups of neurons that encode basic symbols, concepts, and schemas. Effectively, thought at its most basic level is like a language, built from the sequential activation of arbitrary linguistic signs and private and idiosyncratic associations, cascading through our neural architecture. This must be true even of universal or “archetypal” symbols. Thought, in other words, is not something vague and ‘airy.’ It has to be instantiated in material form. This makes me skeptical of the notion of an immaterial “soul” as well. (Spirit is different, but that’s another story.)

Because they arise only in the form of a private language, there is no possibility of thoughts “traveling” outside the brain other than through some form of physical expression (words, gestures, pictures) using symbols. Even a simple symbol could not directly enter the brain except via sensory stimulation—a word or graphic image.

But even if actual thoughts cannot enter or leave an individual’s head, there is another possibility that could, in theory, explain many of the experiences reported by UFO contactees.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a technique now being studied and used by neuroscientists and psychiatrists to induce very specific changes in the cortex. Through rapidly alternating magnetic pulses delivered to the scalp, weak electrical currents can be generated in the brain, and depending on the area stimulated, it can produce sensory effects such as flashes of light and other hallucinations, enhanced creativity and genius-level thought, enhanced perception, religious experiences, as well as distortions of time and memory. It is easy to imagine that, with greater refinements, TMS or something like it could be used to stimulate specific areas of the brain to produce hallucinations of entities and voices and even more specific types of experience.

Unusual electromagnetic effects are very commonly reported in connection with UFOs, and high-power electromagnetic fields are generally regarded to be somehow the basis for their propulsion. What if these objects, or their inhabitants (if there are inhabitants), deliberately or even inadvertently stimulate the brains of witnesses via some sort of remote TMS? It could theoretically explain common aspects of the experience like amnesia, missing time, light effects, strange physical sensations like floating, motor paralysis, and frightening or benevolent entities that take a variety of forms that are sometimes totally bizarre but other times culture-specific or “archetypal.” Not to mention the sensation of psychically receiving thoughts or verbal commands in the contactee’s own tongue.

Hallucinations are very convincing, and seem to arise externally, even though they are produced within the individual’s cortex. TMS could theoretically explain how such experiences could be remotely stimulated but still be the unique product of an individual’s private symbolic and associative language. It would also potentially explain why abduction experiences often involve exactly the experience of sleep paralysis but include a richness of other experiences that are not covered by that rubric.

Again, such effects could be deliberately induced as a form of thought control or manipulation, but they could also be somehow an inadvertent byproduct of proximity to some kind of electromagnetic field having an unrelated purpose like propulsion—who knows. TMS seems at the very least an intriguing possible explanation for the commonality yet uniqueness of abduction experiences, and for “psychic” phenomena, without having to invoke actual thought transferrence and other of the more hard-to-believe aspects of the UFO experience.

Or maybe I’m just being a pedestrian materialist.

The weird and sort of shady neighborhood of the blogosphere I haunt was lately abuzz (a-twitter?) about a new book called The Big Brain, by neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s an account of the evolution of the large human neocortex. It is making news, however, for reviving interest in a paleoanthropological anomaly that had been forgotten since the first few decades of the last century: the Boskop race (or species) of hominids that supposedly inhabited part of South Africa for about 20,000 years.

The Boskops were thought to be remarkable because their brains were 25-35% larger than those of modern humans, indicating a significantly superior intelligence. They also possessed pedomorphic (childlike) facial features: large eyes, small mouth, etc. Pedomorphia in human evolution has been taken as indicating “advancement”: Adult humans look like overgrown baby chimps, the same way the Boskops looked a bit like overgrown baby humans. It suggests they were smarter, perhaps “more evolved,” than us—that is, more removed from our nearest great ape ancestors.

According to those early paleoanthropologists, this population of baby-faced, big-headed hominids went extinct only about 10,000 years ago. That’s an eyeblink ago—practically within cultural memory.

Lynch and Granger have already been criticized for ignoring the fact that subsequent paleontologists discredited the existence of Boskops altogether. These people were not a separate species, those critics argued, but were just a subsection within the normal human range of variation. The paleontologists who first described them were actually just arbitrarily separating them from the normal human remains found in the same region. Boskops were held to be a statistical fiction, in other words, and not paleontological reality. And thus, until The Big Brain, the whole Boskop question went into the dustbin of discredited science and was forgotten for 80 years.

I certainly don’t know enough to give an opinion on the science behind Boskops, but the whole question of a possibly more intelligent variety of human that once walked the earth alongside Homo sapiens sapiens is really, really interesting. It has already been suggested on a number of blogs (including Cabinet of Wonders) that Boskops, if they were real, could be the evolutionary origins of “alien” Grays: The big brains and big eyes certainly suggest such an idea. It’s fun to think about, if you like thinking about such things.

But what interests me as much as the possible hominid, “cryptoterrestrial” origin of aliens is the nature of our resistance, or even abhorrence, of the idea of more advanced hominids sharing our planet. I don’t think it can be chalked up merely to an inferiority complex. I think it has to do with a major cultural—and especially scientific—imperative of our times: to think of the human race as singular and undifferentiated when it comes to intelligence. The very possibility of slightly more intelligent hominids reopens the door to seeing mental endowments as unequally distributed, the basis of scientific racism.

Past centuries were dominated by racist thinking. Variations in intelligence between human groups were accepted as obvious fact by the European imperialist societies, and this idea legitimized all forms of exploitation and injustice. The scientific racism of early anthropologists is still a bitter memory in academe, linked inextricably to the worst excesses of European Fascism. No one wants to go down that path again. As a result, there is a tacit imperative in the social sciences to chalk up apparent differences in intelligence to variation in culture and environment. Whenever a maverick scholar bucks this convention and puts forth a view of racial differences in intelligence, as the authors of The Bell Curve did in the mid 90s, it causes a furore. No ink is spared in the effort to discredit the idea.

The political reasons are sound and obvious, and the scientific argument that all modern humans have the same innate cognitive endowment is one that I have always been persuaded by. But I’m open minded enough to think that political correctness could be biasing the science. Scientists absolutely do not want to face the possibility that the world’s peoples might not be equally endowed with mental ability. We may not want that to be true — but preferring a certain picture of reality doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Could the Boskops’ fate in 20th century anthropology have been linked to the basic reluctance to consider a scalar rather than categorical nature of inherited intelligence? To answer such a question, I think it’s useful to consider the other cryptoterrestrial that enjoys equal disrepute among modern scientists: Bigfoot.

I’ve often suspected that the scientific establishment’s dismissal of the possibility of “less intelligent” bipedal hominid cryptids is related to its resistance toward the idea of more intelligent beings like extra- or crypto-terrestrials. Imagine what would happen if it were to be established that there were slightly less intelligent hominids living in the world today: not slightly less intelligent in the sense of apes or dolphins, but slightly less intelligent in the sense of children or impaired adults: that is, within but at the extreme low end of normal human variation. What if they turned out to be essentially primitive humans, but lacking our linguistic capabilities and thus having inferior cultural capacity?

Chimps are sometimes said to possess the intelligence of 3-year-olds. What if there were creatures in the forest that basically look like big hairy versions of us, and that possess the intelligence of 8- or 10-year-olds?

No one wants to face such a possibility. While we concede an amazing range of biological difference throughout the animal kingdom, living humans are the exception: We don’t want any dangerous gradations, any continuity with lesser or higher forms that would make the distinction blurry. We need a buffer between us and our nearest ancestors. Sasquatch would obliterate that buffer.

The political dangers are real, not only because it would pose an ethical conundrum about what rights to grant Sasquatch, but because it would by extension reopen the question of intelligence variation in human populations. Are blacks perhaps really inferior to whites (as The Bell Curve argued)? Could they be somewhere on a continuum between whites and Sasquatch? It’s an abhorrent idea, but proof of Sasquatch would reopen the door to that kind of thinking.

Are Asians perhaps really smarter than everyone else? Are they a missing link between blacks and whites, on the one end, and alien Grays on the other? Again, the discovery that there are advanced cryptoterrestrials among us, a smarter offshoot of humanity, or even a past race of super-gifted South Africans, would, again, encourage such ideas.

I suspect that keeping that door shut is part of the reason scientists and other respectable people don’t even allow the “cryptid” question to be raised, and why it is consigned to certain disreputable neighborhoods of the blogosphere.