The Telepathy Tapes & the Recession of Our Modern Myth
The myth of modernity is coming apart and what we think we know, and how we think we know is shifting, radically.
[I’ve decided to repost this and open it up to anyone with a subscription since I think this series is so important. I’ve added some share buttons and subscribe buttons. I’d appreciate if you can share it — Kale]
All cultures and all societies have a story they tell about themselves. These stories can be understood as “originary” in so far as they are a story by which and through which it makes sense of the world and thus sense of itself. There is no opting out of these narrative structures. Thomas Kuhn famously wrote about “paradigm shifts” noting their distinctively revolutionary and scientific character. A paradigm is a consensus of what constitutes what is possible and impossible, typically amongst those in the know.1 I’d like to expand this notion to include not just scientific consensus as such but to include the ways in which we understand ourselves, see our purpose, and negotiate avenues by which we live our lives. Importantly, these are stories—narratives—which we exist in and find our meaning and purpose in. Remember this “by-which-and-through-which” dynamic. We need such stories, or what Charles Taylor calls our “Social Imaginary.”
Seeing Modernity as a Social Imaginary allows us to ask questions of our frame. In fact, I’d posit that we are required to ask questions of our frame. What does our frame allow us to see? What does our frame keep us from seeing?
The very fundaments upon which we construct our imaginary has been the belief that the physical world is what is. The physical world is the base reality upon which everything else rests. If you can taste it, touch it, hear it, feel it, or smell it, it’s REAL. If you can’t sense it or construct tools to measure it, then IT as such does not exist. It is not real.
So what if we witness the impossible? What if we experience what by definition we hold to be unreal, non-real, un-scientific, false? Such phenomenon would undermine the foundation upon which our modern world exists. Modernism replaced a much more different conception of reality, filled with spirits, angles, demons, sprites, and fairies. The robust and comprehensive medieval vision of the West was superseded by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It won, in part, because it worked. It unleased incredible and repeatable powers, the likes of which we underappreciate. But what if these victories, these powers, came at a price? What if we gave up in order to gain?
Filmmaker Ky Dickens recently released a podcast series called “The Telepathy Tapes” which explores the claims of some regarding extra-sensory perceptions amongst non-speaking children with autism. The series is nothing short of astonishing, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The stories and tests are fascinating and, well, unbelievable. She is painstaking in her dogged adherence to strict testing, since she knows what her audience’s reactions will be. She’s nothing if not “scientific” and super scrupulous. She calls herself a natural skeptic. She documents these kids and their parents (typically the moms) who are communicating in ways that defy the physical paradigm in which we believe.
Note the word “believe” in the above sentence. When you go through the series, you begin to recognize that all of us BELIEVE in the constraints of a physical reality. The presumptions of the immanent frame (even for those of us who mouth words and propositions in a various creeds to the contrary) are supreme. We are all “doubting Thomases” who will only believe when he says:
Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
He required physical observable proof, a position that most of us are quite sympathetic with.
At any rate, Dickens’s work is extraordinary in documenting a series of stories that belie what nearly all of believe to be possible. These kids have learned to communicate with their parents, teachers, and each other, and what they have to say is extraordinary. They are capable of “knowing” that which they shouldn’t be able to know. They are capable of communicating in non-physical ways. And even beyond the physical, they seem to be unbound by temporal constraints as well. You should really go listen or watch HERE and hear and see for yourself. I’ve been unable to think about much else the last week.
Many of these kids talk about “going to the hill” a place in which these non-speaking kids can “go to” in order to hang out, talk, commune…I’m not sure what to call it. It is not “physical” in any way we would consider compelling. It is like a virtual “hangout” spot, minus the computer and Wi-Fi and keyboard, and requisite software. These kids “go” there.
As compelling as the personal stories are, what really grabs me is the way in which they undermine the dominant paradigm of materialism. You should dive into episodes 4, 6, and 9 in particular. I will do separate posts on a few of these episodes.
What would it mean if our paradigm, the story of the world and our various explanations of how the world works, is inadequate and wrong? We are living amid a genuine recession of modernity. Re-enchantment is all the rage.
But our by-which-and-through-which is shifting radically. We are on the precipice of significant disruption, and how we negotiate our way out of this “iron box” will be the story of our time. Old sureties, old verities, old “terra firmas” are going to be disrupted. Perhaps notions of entanglement or “spooky action at a distance” manifest beyond (or above or below) the quantum.
The old paradigms seem weary and unsound. The new paradigm (if it is even “new”) is yet to emerge clearly. But as my friend Rod Dreher notes in the opening line of his new book “The world is not what we think it is.” Dickens’s work is a testament to what this new emergent paradigm might include. Our by-which-and-through-which is updating. Will this change be gradual or sudden? Will it be incorporated into our current model or will it displace it entirely?
I do not know. But I encourage everyone to keep your filters wide-open. What we think we know, and how we think we know is shifting.
Stay tuned for a follow up on this post.
There is so much to get into with Kuhn’s analysis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962, especially as regards the construction of consensus through a scientific community. Despite its unwavering belief in its own superiority, a scientific community only shifts with building (and thus unbuilding) existing belief structures. He invokes the term “revolution” to describe these shifts, and perhaps he is more true than even he believed. These shifts occur only when the existing paradigm is abandoned in lieu of a new one, adopted through consensus and agreement. Paradigms are, in the end, conventions, despite the bombastic claims of being “real” or “more real.”
Thank you for putting this out there for your readers! I was initially 100% skeptical but as I am listening I am amazed.
Isn’t it as much a trick of language that we tend to equate what we can measure, taste, see, hear, and smell as ‘real’ and what we can’t sense as something “less” than ‘real’?
I’m interested in exploring the difference between “tricks of language” - akin to the kinds of ‘hallucinations’ made by an AI chat box (but which all sentient humans are also subject to MOST of the time) from certain types of “stories”.
THEN AGAIN, humans do tend to grab onto certain types of “stories” the same way a chatbot might - without any deep critical or multi-dimensional analysis. But these types of stories are often vast simplifications of complex issues or phenomena. For example we continue to tell (and continue to be told) the story of an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head even though it explains nothing new about gravity that most children don’t already know. We continue to remember that story EVEN after we may learn that the tale was probably false from the beginning. We hear the story about Einstein scoffing about “spooky action at a distance” and perhaps imagine he was more hard headed than Newton, forgetting that Isaac was as disturbed as Albert about “influence without contact” and that Einstein’s own theories suggested even stranger examples of “spookiness” that have been confirmed (but NOT explained) by demonstrations.
Under stress or talking to children (which can also be stressful) and especially when we don’t want to think too much, we may resort to the comforts of certain simple types of stories. (We often do this in adult discourse when we don’t want to take social risks.) Those simple types of stories may also be “sticky” the way a pointless silly song can sometimes become a persistent earworm which we can decide is oppressively annoying — or divertingly silly and amusing — depending on our circumstances. But other types of stories (and other types of music) can be more captivating. These often contain mysteries or paradoxes that are difficult to put into everyday language. This is definitionally true of music and other art forms — and even of poetry which is often NOT composed in everyday ordinary language. But it is also true of certain stories even when the words and sentence structures are not particularly estranging.
I think the author here is building a case that there are truths and realities that cannot be communicated clearly via language any more than they can be touched, smelled, seen, or heard. She seems to be correctly insinuating that there are truths and realities that cannot be proven or disproven by mathematics, inference, or logic. In Timothy Snyder’s recent book “On Freedom” he devotes ink to addressing what Edith Stein and others have referred to as “The World of Values” which could be related to deep seated human intentions or to “The “World of Virtues” which could also be “naturalistic” needs and intentions of humanity — or something else. Whether of NOT “Virtues” are the same as “Values”, they are both often perceived as airy abstractions (and therefore dismissed as being without “substance”) but are still often experienced in galvanizing (sometimes horrifying, sometimes with awesome intimations of the sublime) ways that have lasting (empirically measurable) impacts on those who subjectively experienced them and even momentous historical and world shaking consequences when they become entangled with religious or political symbols — or when they inspire new such symbols that are part of the revolutionary creation of new religions or new movements.
Snyder refers “The World of Values” as a “Fifth Dimension” of reality. Others may call them “supernatural” or superNATURAL - or SUPER-natural to avoid letting their “spookiness” verge into conventional notions of divinity, paganism, or monotheism. The idea is that there is more to nature (or philosophy if we think of poor Horatio on the ramparts of Elsinore with Hamlet and his ghostly Da) than our everyday thinking can encompass. Others LEAP to use the commonly accepted notion that life and the cosmos are beyond normal understanding to justify every conventional folk belief of their particular world religion.
The idea that science can (and someday WILL) explain EVERYTHING is something of a sticky meme that we all may resort (or succumb) to in moments of distraction or when we don’t want to go against what we imagine to be acceptable discourse, but such an idea is only a matter of galvanizing faith to very few (and even fewer thoughtful people who know a lot about science whether they are actively engaged in creating new knowledge or not). And EVEN IF someone came up with a “theory of everything” that could be expressed as an equation to fit on a t-shirt, only very FEW adepts and charlatans would dare to assert that they were sure it was valid and complete even if they were justifiably confident that their assertions were safe from challenge. To the extent such a “theory” was valid, it would definitely open up new opportunities for advanced technology. It might even generate the kind of jargon that could be cleverly used to sell old fashioned versions of charms and snake oil. But so far, every theoretical advance that has had practical consequences has also opened up vaster new fields of research and allowed us to stand on the shoulders of giants to contemplate old and new mysteries from a fresher perspective.