New Evidence for ESP?

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a respected academic journal published by the American Psychological Association, will soon release an article by Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem, that supposedly demonstrates the existence of “extrasensory perception,” or ESP. A preprint of the paper is available at http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf.

ESP is a term used in popular culture for unexplained psychic effects. It is used exclusively, for example in the New York Times article of Jan 5, 2011 reporting on Bem’s paper (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?src=me&ref=general). Academics refer to such effects either as “paranormal,” “parapsychological,” or “psi” phenomena. These psi phenomena allegedly include a potpourri of unexplained effects, such as mental telepathy, remote viewing, clairvoyance, telekinesis, precognition, and communication with the dead, to name just a few varieties. Bem’s paper focuses on precognition, which is unexplained knowledge of the future, and premonition, which is the same thing only felt emotionally instead of known intellectually.

The paper reports nine experiments, only 4 in any detail, that were conducted over a decade, with a thousand people tested. In a typical experiment, participants make a prediction about where a picture, (called the “stimulus”) will appear on a computer screen. If the prediction is correct, then either it was a lucky guess or, the person had a premonition of where the stimulus was going to be. In a typical experiment, participants had to guess whether the picture would appear on the left or right side of a computer screen. Random guessing would produce a 50% correct rate, but the guesses were correct 53% of the time, a percentage greater than chance. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but since the test was run many times on each person, the finding is statistically rare enough that it is probably meaningful. Therefore, according to Bem, a slight, but scientifically proven result of precognition, or premonition of the future, was demonstrated.

Bem notes in his paper that “Psi is a controversial subject, and most academic psychologists do not believe that psi phenomena are likely to exist.” That is correct, and I am one of those psychologists. I do not believe any psi phenomena have ever been demonstrated scientifically, nor indeed that they exist at all. How do I explain then, scientific findings such as Bem’s (and there have been many such supposed demonstrations of psi phenomena over the years)? There are four obstacles to acceptance that any such scientific demonstration must overcome:

Methodology. . The experiment must be designed and conducted in such a way that the best, most reasonable conclusion is that psi phenomena have been demonstrated, rather than some other explanation, such as pure chance, lurking (uncontrolled) variables, equipment or procedural error, biased sampling, unintended clues being given to participants, inadequate experimental controls, or other kinds of unintended bias or error (deliberate fraud is not considered, as that is rare and easy to detect).

2. Statistical. The experimental data must be conceptualized, analyzed and reported in a simple, correct, and non-controversial way, so that the best, most reasonable conclusion is that psi phenomena have been demonstrated. Even if the experimental procedure was sound, the statistical handling of the data can introduce biases that lead to invalid conclusions, such as when the data are manipulated inappropriately (e.g., leaving out some data from the analysis), or conceptualized strangely (such as counting certain results in one way, other results in another), or analyzed with controversial or questionable statistical techniques, or interpreting the outcome in obscure or inappropriate ways.

3. Theoretical. The findings must be coherent with an existing body of scientific data, or if they are not, some revision in understanding of the existing data must be specified which accommodates the new, anomalous finding. There are two reasons for this requirement.

One is that according to the scientific method (a consensus model of scientific reasoning), the hypothesis that an experiment tests is drawn from the existing body of scientific data. A scientist does not just wake up one morning with a hypothesis that says, “I suspect that giraffes would float in water as well as raspberry marshmallows.” That is not how science is done. Instead, the scientist finds areas in the existing body of scientific knowledge where there are questions, errors, gaps, unexplained connections, or incomplete understanding. A hypothesis is then generated that could extend the existing knowledge or make it more understandable or more internally consistent.

The second reason for requiring that scientific findings must mesh with existing knowledge is that science is a cumulative exercise in knowledge production. Even if some arbitrary and idiosyncratic hypothesis were experimentally tested and confirmed, the result would be uninterpretable because it would not connect to existing knowledge, would not further general understanding, and would not even contradict what is already known. There would be no context for making sense of the experimental result, making it essentially meaningless, no matter what it purports to demonstrate.

Historically, strange things have sometimes been found in nature that could not be explained until much later, such as lightning or x-rays. But technically, those discoveries were anomalous observations, not scientific findings, until some explanation was hypothesized that could be tested under a scientific hypothesis.

4. Philosophical. A scientific finding that meets all of the foregoing requirements still must be interpreted in a scientific way. For example, a finding that concludes, “All human beings are therefore merely ideas in the mind of God,” cannot be accepted without a great deal of further explanation. The interpretation of the finding must conform to principles of scientific reasoning and evidence. This examples fails on both counts, because there is no scientific evidence of God, and to characterize humans as ideas rather than as biological objects is not consistent with scientific reasoning.

Alternatively, the interpretation of the finding can go too far in the other direction, being so scientifically overspecified that the result admits of no generalization, an error of “external validity.” An example would be an experiment that claims to study “violence in children” but defines violence as a high frequency of button presses on laboratory equipment. Since that does not describe what we normally understand as violent behavior, even if the study meets all other criteria, we are unable to say anything about the result beyond the specific experimental procedure.

Another common error is that an study defines its variables in terms of laboratory procedures, but interprets its results in different terms, an error of “internal validity.” In the example above, if college students were used as participants, it is not valid to conclude anything about violence in children.

Bem’s studies that purport to demonstrate psi phenomena fail to overcome any of the obstacles described, and therefore I remain unconvinced of the existence of so-called psi-phenomena.

To prove this definitively, I would have to study the experimental protocol, data, and statistics to make detailed criticisms, and that would require either that I have access to Bem’s laboratory notebooks, which is not going to happen, or I would have to repeat his experiments, step by step, in order to understand what he did and what kind of data he obtained. That is also not going to happen. So, like any other ordinary consumer of scientific information, I must base my acceptance of, or criticism of the experiments based only on the scant information provided. Here are some criticisms then, within that constraint.

Summary of Bem’s Experiment 1

1. Methodological factors. In Experiment 1, a featured experiment supposedly demonstrating precognition, participants had to guess which of several pictures would be randomly shown. I’ll start by summarizing the experimental procedure.

One hundred Cornell undergraduates were self-selected (volunteer) participants, half men, half women and were paid for their participation. They all knew it was an experiment in ESP.

A picture of starry skies was shown on the screen for three minutes, while new-age music played. Then that picture was replaced (and presumably the music terminated, although that is not stated), with two pictures of curtains, presumably side-by-side (although that is not stated). When a participant clicked on one of the pictures of a curtain, it was replaced with another picture, either a picture of a wall, or a picture of something other than a wall.

The content of the “other than a wall” pictures is not described, except to say that 12 of the 36 non-wall pictures showed humans (presumably – this is not specified) engaging in “sexually explicit acts” (not further described), while another 12 of the non-wall pictures were “negative” in emotionality (not further described), and the final 12 non-wall pictures were “neutral” (but not described).

All these pictures had previously been (although when, is not stated) rated by other people not in this experiment as being reliably “arousing” for males and females (although “arousability is not defined), or as being reliably “emotional.” There is no information about whether any arousing pictures were also emotional, and it is hard to imagine that they were not. There is no definition of what constituted a “neutral” photograph, and there is no description of the arousability or emotionality of the wall picture or of the curtain pictures.

Part way through the experiment, some or all (not specified) of the “arousing” pictures were replaced by more intense (not otherwise described) internet pornography pictures, which were not reported to be scientifically rated for arousability and emotionality, so in the end, the nature of these pictorial stimuli is essentially unknown. (We assume that among the 36 non-wall photographs, none of them was in fact, of a different sort of wall, although this is not actually stated.).

The non-wall pictures were selected at random from the group of 36, with randomness defined by a software algorithm. Whether the wall or non-wall picture was placed on the left or the right of the screen was also randomized by the computer.

Each participant’s task was to click on one of the two pictures of curtains to indicate which one they thought would be replaced by a non-wall photograph. They were told that some of the pictures were sexually explicit and allowed to quit the experiment if that was objectionable. No information is given on how many participants quit. After the participant’s choice was made, the curtain picture was replaced by another picture, either of a wall or a picture of non-wall content.

Errors of Internal Validity

That summarizes the experimental protocol. According to Bem, this methodology made “the procedure a test of detecting a future event, that is, a test of precognition” (p. 9). However, that is not how the results were recorded. You would think that the scientist would simply record whether or not the participant had correctly predicted which side of the screen the non-wall picture had appear on (since that was the instruction given to the participant, and that was the hypothesis to be tested). Instead some other, strange measure was recorded, namely, the number of correct predictions of which side of the screen the “erotic” (meaning sexually explicit) pictures occurred, even though that was not the hypothesis being tested. This odd recording of the results constitutes an error of internal validity.

The hypothesis that college students will be better at predicting the location of a sexually explicit picture is unconnected to the introductory literature review, which referred only to a previous body of findings that asked for straightforward predictions of visual content, with no special reference to sexually explicit material. This new (implicit) hypothesis is then, essentially like the “giraffe and marshmallow” hypothesis, arising “out of the blue” rather than being logically derived from existing knowledge. This is another methodological error. If there is, in fact, a previous body of knowledge about predicting the locations of sexually explicit photographs, then the error is one of scientific reporting, since the literature review was obviously grossly incomplete.

One other, rather minor error, is the experimenter’s referring to the participants’ prediction of the location of a non-wall photograph as a “response” to that photograph. But this is a semantic distortion, since the participant’s choice is made before the photograph is shown. Ordinary, common-sense language would call that choice a “prediction” not a “response.” For the experimenter to call it a “response,” presupposes the validity of his belief that the participants are seeing into the future, but until that is proven by the experimental results, it is scientifically inappropriate to use the language in a non-standard way without justification.

Statistical Errors
Next, Bem reports that participants correctly predicted the position of the sexually
pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% rate expected by chance, and in fact were correct 53.1% of the time. But this is an incorrect analysis. To be counted as correct, a prediction would have to correctly say on which side of the screen a non-wall photograph would appear (one chance out of two, or 50% chance rated) AND, if that guess were correct, they would also have to predict that it was a sexually explicit photograph (12 chances out of 36, or 33%) for an overall probability of 0.50 x 0.33 = 0.165, which means that one would expect a person to guess correctly fewer than 17 times out of a hundred.

Did that happen? No information is reported on how many times the participants DID actually predict the location of sexually explicit photographs. It was not 53.1%. That is the number you get when you ignore, or leave out of the calculation, all the wrong predictions of the non-wall photograph. But that is an illegitimate way to count the results, unless there is a very good reason, and none is given.

Still, can we at least say that the participants correctly predicted the location of ANY non-wall photograph better than chance (53.1% vs. 50%)? No we can’t, because that information is not reported either. Instead, what is reported, is that participants predicted the location of only the sexually explicit photographs at 53.1%. But that leaves out all the results for the non-sexual predictions, which is not a legitimate way to count the results. So in the end, the results that bear on the experiment’s stated hypothesis are not reported at all.

This kind of anomalous counting of the results constitutes a statistical error and makes the experimental findings uninterpretable.

The same kind of anomalous, illegitimate, and uninterpretable counting of results is given for non-sexually-explicit pictures, emotional pictures, and neutral pictures, and even for pictures that were “romantic but non-erotic pictures,” a category that was never defined in the description of the pictures (let alone in any experimental hypotheses).

The experiment also reports that there were no significant differences in response findings between males and females. That is a legitimate “control variable” to be reporting, although the experimental hypothesis being tested has nothing to do with gender. So that is not an error, as much as an irrelevance.

Then the experiment reports on a history of findings in other experiments that turns up a small correlation between the ability to predict the occurrence of visual materials at a rate greater than chance, and the participant’s score on an extraversion test, with extraverts supposedly being better at making such predictions over introverts. There are two problems with this so-called result.

One, is that it is based on a statistical technique called meta-analysis, in which the main findings of individual experiments are treated as if they were individual response data points observed in individual participants. While this statistical technique is now widely used in the medical literature, it is by no means without controversy when applied to psychological experiments, and I reject it as a valid statistical technique for psychology.

The main reason for my rejection is that the technique generally does not take into account the quality of the underlying experiments, or if it does, does so inadequately. For example, if some future meta-analysis includes this experiment, that will introduce significant undocumented error into the meta-analysis because this experiment does not actually report any valid results, despite its claim to the contrary.

The second problem with this so-called reported result between predictive success and personality is that it is irrelevant to any scientific hypothesis, implicit or explicit, that was supposed to be tested by this experiment.

Errors of Interpretation:
The experimental report goes on at great length to determine what “kind” of psi phenomenon had been demonstrated by the test results (which were never properly reported). Was it simple clairvoyance or was it a subtle form of psychokinesis? Or was it actually pure chance (admirably, the report does consider that possibility).

But a simpler explanation is hinted at by the experimental procedure itself. After the participant made his or her prediction of where the non-wall photograph would appear, the curtain picture chosen was replaced with either the wall, or a non-wall photograph. This essentially gave the participant feedback on the correctness or non-correctness of the prediction. But why was that necessary or desirable?

The experimenter knew immediately upon the participant’s click whether the prediction was correct or not. That could be scored right on the spot by the computer. Why was it important to give the participant “feedback?” The experimental hypothesis was about ability to see into the future, precognition. Why is feedback necessary to do that? Was the hypothesis really that ability to predict the future can be taught by a computer and learned with practice? There is no theoretical or practical reason to believe so, and the experimental report does not suggest it.

The only reason I can think of to give the participants feedback on the correctness of their predictions is so that they might be able to learn from their mistakes and improve their performance. That is a standard learning procedure going back over a hundred and fifty years in experimental psychology and thousands of years in human experience. The experiment thus introduced a spurious learning paradigm into a procedure that was supposed to test only ability to predict the future. That is a serious error of internal validity that renders the experiment uninterpretable (if it was not already).

What would the participants be learning, with this embedded learning procedure? I am unable to say without more detail about the experiment. Could they be learning (even if only implicitly) to detect a non-random pattern in the order of presentation of the materials? A non-random pattern could have emerged. Either the random number generator could have been imperfect (since there is, theoretically, no such thing as a perfect random number generator), or, within the pseudo-random sequence of events, an identifiable non-random pattern could have emerged, just as when one flips a fair coin “heads” 7 or 8 times in a row, just by chance. These things happen. It wouldn’t take much non-randomness to produce a mere 3% deviation from chance expectations.

Or, more likely in my opinion, the participants could have been learning something else, some other clue that was unintentionally left in the procedure by the experimenters. I cannot say what that might be. For example, it would be interesting to know if an experimenter was in the room while the participant performed. There is no reason why one should have been, but if one was, there are all kinds of opportunities for subtle, unintended clues (or “experimenter effects”) to be transmitted to the participants.

Bem reports that he re-ran the experiment but using randomized, simulated computer inputs for the “predictions,” with no human participants involved. Under those conditions, no psi effects were detected. I am not surprised, but that result furthers my skepticism about the human-based findings: that if there really were any legitimate ones (which I doubt), they were due entirely to unintended experimenter effects or performance biases.

The only way to satisfy my skepticism on this point would be to re-run the experiment, with humans, but omitting the spurious learning component from the procedure, and isolating the participant completely from any contact with the experimenter or any other participant. I would be extremely surprised if any so-called “psi effect” were reported under those conditions.

Theoretical and Philosophical Errors:
Aside from the methodological and statistical problems with this study, there are additional theoretical and philosophical problems. First, I must emphasize again that no psi phenomena were demonstrated by any of these experiments, as reported. But even if there were such a thing as psi phenomena, for example, ability to predict the future at a rate better than chance, what sense would it make?

There is no known mechanism, either biological, physical, or psychological, by which that would be possible. Human beings are simply not able to predict the future very well. Would that it were otherwise! Bem does some hand-waving around quantum indeterminacy and the earth’s magnetic field to suggest possible explanations of psi phenomena (if they existed), but that verbiage constitutes, most generously, only loose metaphor, nothing close to an explanation.

Could the explanation of psi effects, if there were any, just turn out to be something bizarre, something we have never thought of yet, not related to anything familiar, not like anything ever reported in the accepted scientific literature? Well, yes, that is possible in principle. I’m sure Socrates himself would not have been able to understand a butane lighter or a sheet of plastic food wrap, let alone some of our more complex technological marvels. So it is not a denial of the possibility of psi phenomena to assert that there is presently no conceivable explanation of them, as they have been described. But it is utterly idle to speculate on explanations until the phenomenon to be explained has been demonstrated, and I am not convinced it ever has been.

Conclusion:
In his forthcoming paper, Bem describes three additional experiments, similar to the first one, in some detail, and refers to five others, not fully described. However, as is always the case when I take the trouble to read such experimental reports, after analysis of the first one (an analysis that was by no means exhaustive), I simply have no energy to go on to the rest of them. The quality of the first one is so poor that there is little promise that the others will be much better. So I give up at this point and return to my default belief, that has not been challenged by Bem or anybody else, that no psi phenomenon has ever been scientifically demonstrated. Show me a proper demonstration and I’ll change my mind.

What is Introspection?

The fact that I can be aware of my own thoughts is preposterous. How is it possible? Is my cup aware that it is a cup? Is the coffee aware that it is hot and brown? Of course not.

Why should I be aware of what I am thinking? That is not reasonable. Nor could it have been predicted by any scientific observation. It is utterly perplexing.

There are many philosophical and quasi-scientific explanations of introspection. One is to deny that introspection is actually a fact. That eliminates a large anomaly from the purview of the scientific explanation of the world, but at the expense of self-contradiction. Introspection is required to understand what is being denied.

Another explanation is that one part of the brain becomes aware of another part of the brain, so really, introspection is just brain activity, completely physical. Beside the awkward fact that there is no scientific evidence for this hypothesis (nor could there be, since “awareness” is not a scientifically defined function of brains), this proposed solution does not answer the original question. I am a person, not a brain. It is I who have the introspective thoughts. If my brain also does a little introspecting on the side, so be it. Perhaps my liver introspects also. It wouldn’t matter to me.

What if we set aside self-contradictory and confused biological explanations of introspection, and consider only the mental experience? What is the experience of introspection?

We don’t introspect every minute of every day. On the contrary. Most of the time we are focused on the world, not on our own thoughts. But when we are focused on our own thoughts, what is going on? Who is focused on what? If I am the thoughts, who is looking at them? If I am the witness to the thoughts, who is in charge of the thoughts? I am pretty sure there is only one me.

This is one of the most profound mysteries confronting humanity.

Have You Ever Seen A Circle?

I was in the shower, looking down at the drain, and it appeared to be elliptical in shape even though I knew it was circular. So I moved my head directly over the drain to appreciate its true circular shape, but I couldn’t quite do it. For one thing, it was not possible to hold my head still enough that I could say for sure that I had seen a perfect circle. Secondly, there was a difference in point of view between each of my two eyes. Each eye saw the drain from a slightly different angle. Only one of them could be directly over the drain. Even repositioning my head with one eye closed, I couldn’t hold still, and anyway, I know that eyeballs always twitch about five times a second as a routine matter, so it was not going to be possible for me to truly apprehend the circular shape of the drain.

I realized that even the most sensitive scientific instrument, mounted exactly above the drain and kept absolutely still, could not measure circularity with zero error. There are probably instruments that can measure to 100 decimal points of accuracy, or better, but not an infinite number of decimal points of accuracy. Anyway, at some point, the measuring instrument would be so sensitive that no human being could calibrate it without error nor read its output without error. Besides, I doubt that the drain is genuinely circular in the first place. At some level of inspection, it surely would be “out of round”. So it became obvious that it was not possible, in principle, for me to ever apprehend the circular shape of my shower drain.

(Does this diagram show a circle tilted back, or an ellipse?
Joseph Brooks, socrates.berkeley.edu/ ~plab/earlygroup/shape.htm)

As the hot water began to turn cool, I concluded that there aren’t any true circular shapes in the world, and even if there were, as a practical matter, we wouldn’t be able to perceive them as such. Circularity could only be an abstraction; a generalization from many perceptual experiences of viewing approximately circular shapes, in comparison to other abstract shapes, such as ellipses. The mathematical formula for a circle is a further abstraction. In short, there are no circles, and nobody has ever seen a circle.
Except maybe Plato.

Plato appreciated the shower drain problem. He realized that objects of the mind, like the idea and image of a circle, are stable and perfect (and “eternal” he said). Objects of the world that we actually perceive are only approximations to the perfection of the objects of the mind, and on top of that, he knew that the body itself is forever changing, and inherently unreliable, so the appearances of things are always in flux.

By contrast, the perfect mental forms do not change. Plato called these the “essences” of things. The essence of something is what it truly is, its core nature, despite appearances. So my shower drain is truly circular in shape, despite appearances to the contrary.

But why assume something to which evidence speaks the contrary? The evidence is that the drain is not, in fact, circular. But Plato reasoned that if essences are perfect and eternal, and every object has an essence as its core, then every object must be perfect and eternal in its innermost nature. If our actual experience of the world contradicts that, well, so much the worse for experience. The experience is wrong.

But if experience is wrong, and always has been, how did Plato come to his theories about objects and their eternal essences? His whole life experience, like everyone else’s was erroneous. Plato’s answer is that he was just born with the knowledge of perfect essences, and so was everyone else. So there!

That’s a large pill to swallow. It is tantamount to the favorite argument of parents, “Because I said so!”

It is not necessary to assume that the perfect essence of an object resides in the object. Why can’t we say that essences reside in the mind, as inductive abstractions and deductive proofs? If that were allowed, then we would not be troubled by the fact that perception and measurement are inherently unreliable and that all objects are changeable. We could simply mentally accommodate for the error variance to infer the correct reality.

But Plato seemed blind to subjectivity, especially his own. Everything in his theory was “out there,” separate from the human mind, because he did not explicitly take the mind into consideration in his theory of reality. The best he could do was to say that the perfect and eternal essences lived in a special world, the spaceless and timeless World of Forms. The Forms were “out there” somewhere, although they would have to be in heaven to be in a spaceless and timeless domain.

So circles are in heaven. When you imagine you have seen a circle, you have actually glimpsed heaven. The same is true for a square, a triangle, or a dodecahedron.

In fact, we would have to say, keeping with Plato, that heaven is all you ever see. Everything has a shape, and a size, and so forth, because perceived things must have form. But when you apprehend and conceptualize a thing’s form, you are actually dealing with its Form, or essence, and Forms exist only in heaven. Therefore we have never, and cannot ever, perceive any part of the actual world, only the world of Forms.

(What shape is the rim of this cup?)

Plato’s is a profoundly antiscientific theory. Science is the observation and measurement of the actual world, not description of some theoretical heavenly world beyond space and time. So you would think scientists would be keen to avoid missteps leading to Platonist thinking. Yet they actually make the same mistake Plato made, assuming that everything is “out there,” nothing is “in here.”

In other words, scientists today are just as blind to their own subjectivity as Plato was to his. Scientific hyperobjectivity leads to the same reification errors that characterize Plato’s implausible theory of heavenly Forms.


Most scientists insist, for example, that patterns exist in nature that are not constructions of the human mind. I once pinned down a scientist who argued this way and asked him directly, “Do you really believe there is a face on the moon?” To my amazement, he answered yes. He said “If you set up an appropriate camera it will objectively record the pattern of a face on the moon without any human intervention.” (It did not occur to him that someone would have to look at the camera’s picture to prove the presence of a face).

Likewise, most scientists insist that there is objective “information” in the world and even “knowledge” independent of any knower. Many believe that numbers exist independently of the human mind, and so do space, time, energy, mass, and force. Theoretical physicists are convinced they are close to having a “theory of everything,” by which they mean everything in the objective world, which is the only world, in their thinking. Such hubris would be risible were it not pervasive.

Unfortunately, even the field of psychology, which supposedly specializes in the study of the human mind, has drunk the scientific Kool Aid. The American Psychological Association, and most of its members, insist that psychology is an objective science. Scientific psychologists have become blind to subjectivity, projecting and reifying their own minds onto the brain and the genome, the modern-day repositories of Platonic Forms.

What is the alternative? Abandonment of science and return to the prescientific darkness of ignorance and superstition? Hardly. All we need are a few tweaks to the philosophy of science to allow that subjectivity exists in the world as a natural fact and can be studied without shame.

Why There Are No Aliens

People are fascinated with the idea that there are aliens out there; intelligent beings like us, or maybe not like us. This theme has been a staple of television and movies for decades, and is an obsession of UFO buffs. Scientists started the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the hope of making contact with aliens. But there are no aliens.

How can I be so sure? With tens of billions of galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars, many of them like ours, statistics alone would argue for the nonzero probability of life elsewhere in the universe.

Ah, but I do not argue against the probability of extraterrestrial life. It would not surprise me too much if bacteria were found in some moist spot on Mars.

What’s impossible are intelligent aliens; beings that have thoughts, and technologies like radio and space travel and who could communicate with us. Why is that impossible? Because it is oxymoronic. It’s like trying to conceptualize a square circle or a flying pig. You can do it vaguely, in abstractions, as long as you don’t think it through too clearly. But if you give the idea a moment of serious thought, it becomes obvious that it is so muddled, we don’t know what we are talking about.

“Alien” means not like me; foreign in nature; from some other context. Yet we always assume our own context. That’s why E.T. (from the famous movie) looks so remarkably humanoid: one head, frontal eyes, mouth for speaking and eating (language too of course), two arms, two legs, one torso, ten fingers, bipedal locomotion, breathes air, functions in 1g of gravity, and on and on. Sure, he has some special powers and some special needs, but don’t we all. The differences are minor. How alien is E.T.? Not very. He is us.

The old TV show, Star Trek, had some imaginative aliens. My favorite was the Hortas. They were a silicon-based life form (as opposed to our carbon –based) and they looked approximately like a two-foot long gray egg with a fringe around the edge. The fringe presumably was for locomotion, as the Horta were ground dwellers. They looked like big rocks, but they were intelligent, as Spock proved by making a Vulcan mind link with one of them. That was a good representation of an alien that tried to cut through anthropocentric imagery. Nevertheless, the Horta still had thoughts and concerns very much human. It was concerned with territory, safety, family, nutrition and longevity. It didn’t look like us, but it was us.

Another good fictional alien was the race of Krell, the mysterious, extinct beings in the movie, Forbidden Planet, who left behind a gigantic underground computing complex. But surprise, they were not extinct as thought, and when they manifest, they appeared as wavering ghostly shapes of light, a sort of body. It turned out that the Krell were actually projections of the unconscious mind of man, the opposite of alien; extreme intimates of humanity. But their initial representation without a substantial body was innovative.

But why would a real alien have a psychology anything like ours? Would an alien distinguish subjectivity from objectivity, as we do? There’s no reason to think so. Would aliens think of the world as separate from themselves? Could they distinguish themselves as individuals in a group, or not? Maybe they would be absolute individuals. Is intelligence necessarily social? Would alien minds undergo years of socialization as ours do? Would they necessarily have language? Would they be mortal, and if so, would they conceptualize their mortality, and if so, would that mean anything important to them? Would they be susceptible to perceptual illusions (assuming they had perception)? Would they have emotions?

That list goes on endlessly. The fact is, we cannot conceive of a psychology that is very different from our own. We have no reason to expect that we could ever recognize aliens as intelligent beings since only egocentricism prompts us to suppose they would have a psychology like ours. Maybe they’re here now! Maybe the trees are them! That makes about as much sense as anything else.

A related problem is that we have no idea what “intelligence” is, not even in humans, let alone in aliens. We have vague ideas like “smart” versus “dim” people, but we really don’t know how to define that, even for ourselves. So looking for an alien intelligence is looking for something we cannot conceive.

In the movie, Contact, a message from aliens appeared on a computer screen in the pattern of a circle. The scientists looking at it appeared to be gazing into a large hand-mirror. As in fact they were.

The spacecraft Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972 by NASA. It left the solar system after its mission, to fly forever into deep space. The question arose, "What if someday, some intelligent extraterrestrial beings saw our spacecraft floating through deep space, and caught it. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a message for them." So it was decided that a small plaque would be mounted on the spacecraft with a message to the aliens. This is not a Hollywood movie. This actually happened.

What should we say on the plaque? And how? Do aliens know English? What if everyone speaks Spanish in interstellar space? The scientists got around that dilemma by using only pictures and symbols on the plaque. The nine planets of our solar system are shown lined up next to our sun as ten circles. The fourth one from the left (our circle) has an arrow coming off it that points to a little drawing of the spacecraft. Obviously, what we're trying to say here is that this spacecraft came from Earth, third planet from the Sun.

Is that obvious? Would it be obvious to an alien? This plaque is a monument to our ignorance and egocentricism. In what way does a circle represent a planet? Planets aren't circles. And in what way does a line of ten circles represent a solar system? Maybe the illustration means we really like to play billiards here on Earth. As for the arrow on one of the circles, what is an "arrow" anyway? A drawn arrow is a derivative of a hunting arrow, isn't it? Do we suppose that any aliens worth their salt would have used arrows at one time? For hunting space buffalo?

The line drawings of the naked man and woman are uninterpretable. They could be diagrams of electronic circuits. They could be coffee stains. How would an alien even know which side of the drawing was up? The incredible naiveté of the plaque designers seems to suggest that the aliens will look at the drawings and say, "Oh look. On Earth they're parting their hair on the left now."

Even if we allow that aliens might have some experience in common with us about solar systems and hydrogen atoms, it is a vast leap to assume they will also share our concepts of circles, arrows, binary arithmetic, time, distance, figure-ground relationships, spatial orientation, and two-dimensional line drawings. That plaque is just another hand mirror. We cannot conceive of an alien intelligence.

To summarize then. Why are there no intelligent extraterrestrial aliens? For the same reason there are no xlotopopples.