No Such Thing as Paranormal

Humans are easily hunted and destroyed, though they can’t see their aggressors. They can see the evidence of their movement through grasses and brush, hear them coming, but can see nothing. The aliens that have arrived on Earth are invisible to humans because the wavelength of light that their bodily substance reflects can’t be perceived by the human eye…

This is a story by Ray Bradbury that I vaguely remember, having read it nearly 25 years ago in 5th grade or so. I can’t locate the title, even over all my searching on the wide world of the interwebs. Please let me know if you know it!

A fascinating concept, it makes me wonder: what types of experiences are considered to be fake or hallucinatory, simply because not everyone can perceive them?

We know there are people, mostly women, super rare, who can see colors the rest of us can’t. They’re called tetrachromats and they have different receptors in their eyes, more of them, and a different structure in their brain for processing color. If we didn’t understand the material science behind these people’s abilities, we would consider them super-human, perhaps.

(Image: “Rainbow Gully, Mission Hills, SD” ConcettaAntico.com . Concetta is a tetrachromat painter.)

Long confusing scientists, birds can navigate across vast terrains, even after huge upheavals to the area or to their starting points, and always find their way to where they are supposed to be. Butterflies can navigate across thousands of miles to find the one tree where all of their mates meet up. Salmon can find their way back to the exact river of their birth, no matter their starting point. Now, we have finally begun to understand how this happens. Having thought perhaps there was a literal compass of some kind in these animals’ bodies, we now know, at least for birds, that they can see, visually see, changes in magnetic fields.

What else can be perceived by some, but not by others?

Recently, I heard a discussion by a psychiatrist, Jerry Marzinsky. After decades of working with Schizophrenic patients, Jerry came to see strange patterns. The voices these patients heard often knew more than was possible, from a materialist standpoint. The patient’s, for example, would be told where to find drugs and weapons they couldn’t have known existed, then would be told how to sell these items to get money. Another patient was told what time to sneak out to avoid guards in their ward, how to travel through the hallways undetected, where to go on floors they had never otherwise accessed, and how to break into certain areas, all without detection. These feats, seen over and over again by Jerry, led him to wonder whether or not there were actual intelligences talking to these patients.

After all, just because many can’t perceive a thing, does that make it not real?

This idea is going mainstream, as evidenced by the nypost.com’s article about aliens possibly existing in ways we “can’t even imagine”. It is good that our imaginations might be stretching! There is a middle ground, to be sure, that includes a materialist standpoint and also allows for the concept that we don’t yet know everything, that we can’t yet perceive everything, and that we might not yet have the instruments necessary to document everything that exists.

It’s a vast universe, after all.

Long lamenting the materialist viewpoint that what can’t be perceived and measured does not exist, I hope perhaps we can get to the point where we say, instead, “what can’t yet be perceived and measured does not yet have evidence for existence.”