Paranorma
It’s a shame that paranormal phenomena are most likely under-reported, because, really, there is no point.
I don’t think it is really because of ignorance, dogma or rigid beliefs, but probably due to the structure of our industrial society. Essentially, any phenomena that doesn’t “scale” might as well not exist. The ideas of science, especially the requirement that phenomena is objectively reproducible, were not merely adopted because they tended to find agreeable truths, but also because they facilitated industrial growth.
What use are profound subjective experiences, if you couldn’t mass produce them in a factory? What use are powerful prophets who can perform miracles, if there’s only one of them (#busfactor) and all they teach you is to curry favor with a deity instead of amassing power and wealth? What use is magic, if only 2% of the population can perform them 15% of the time?
The paranormal is subjective, probabilistic, and difficult to reproduce. It is, I begin to suspect, not necessarily due to a law of nature, but caused by the needs of industrial society. We simply defined the laws of nature to be of those phenomena that are objective and easily reproducible in a lab, and discarded the rest as useless, hence fake. As such, a disbelief in the existence of paranormal phenomena is not necessarily a belief of how the universe works, but a reflection of a value judgement of what the industrialized society we live in requires.
Of course, the suppression of such also follows the logic.
We don’t really object to “fake news” as such. This is plainly obvious given the crap information people are fed every day. What people are intuitively upset about are information that disrupt the established systems, even if they might be true, or, rather, because they might be true. Of course this happens with all information whether they be normal or paranormal. There’s probably no grand conspiracy whatsoever, but more like an emergent “collective will” that somehow manages to do the job rather effectively. (incidentally this emergent phenomenon is also one of those “subjective, probabilistic, non-reproducible” things…)
And thus we are left with information of dubious quality - personal anecdotes, rumors, purported fictional stories, and history texts. And this is where things get a bit dangerous. Most people can’t even tell whether some information is fake news, or recognize that the information doesn’t make sense at all. It unfortunately takes more than simple pattern recognition to discern whether something is genuine or not (contrary to what people in education would like you to believe!). I think I have dabbled in almost all the state-of-art tools available to humankind that helps in this endeavor, but I wonder whether that’s remotely enough.
There’s probably an argument to be made that given that the subjective experience is the only real thing by definition, whatever you truly believe subjectively must be true. Yet that doesn’t really hold given that “I” am not only the stuff within my body and skin, but also, in a sense, the whole universe. [1] So the subjective beliefs associated with “me” the physical human person must be compatible with the workings of the whole universe to be true, otherwise I must disengage with the universe (which might explain what people in asylums are doing… herein lies the “danger” I mentioned above[2]). This subject-objective-inter-subjective interaction of belief systems is the most interesting problem I’ve encountered so far, and as of this moment, I can’t really make much sense of it.
And if one cannot even tell where truth lies in that subjective-objective spectrum, how does one even proceed?
[1] “if i am my foot i am the sun” - Alan Watts [2] FWIW I’ve recently spent a surprising amount of time pondering how to make sure I don’t end up there…