Geoff Arnold's Blog

Well, it’s not a real “FAQ” – but perhaps it would make sense to create a page which links some of the more egregious questions to the blog postings which best demolish them. Here are two examples.
First Phil (the Bad Astronomer) addresses the old canard “Is science faith-based?”

Science is not based on faith. Science is based on evidence. We have evidence it works, vast amounts of it, billions of individual pieces that fit together into a tapestry of reality. That is the critical difference. Faith, as it is interpreted by most religions, is not evidence-based, and is generally held tightly even despite evidence against it.

And then Sean nails telekinesis, and the rest of parapsychology, in a piece called “Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory”. This is long, but well worth your time. He considers claims about spoon-bending, and points out:

* Spoons are made of ordinary matter.
This sounds uncontroversial, but is worth explaining. Spoons are made of atoms, and we know what atoms are made of — electrons bound by photons to an atomic nucleus, which in turn consists of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of quarks held together by gluons. Five species of particles total: up and down quarks, gluons, photons, electrons. That’s it.
There is no room for extra kinds of mysterious particles clinging, aura-like, to the matter in a spoon. That’s because we know how particles behave. If there were some other kind of particle in the spoon, it would have to interact with the ordinary matter we know is there…

Of course what applies to spoons also applies to brains. Sean’s arguments against spoon-bending also work against telepathy:

It’s a little bit less cut and dried, because in the case of telepathy the influence is supposedly traveling between two human brains, rather than between a brain and a spoon. The argument is exactly the same, but there are those who like to pretend that we don’t understand how the laws of physics work inside a human brain. It’s certainly true that there is much we don’t know about thought and consciousness and neuroscience, but the fact remains that we understand the laws of physics in the brain regime perfectly well. To believe otherwise, you would have to imagine that individual electrons obey different laws of physics because they are located in a human brain, rather than in a block of granite.

(My emphasis.)
Indeed. And yet supposedly eminent scientists and philosophers like Roger Penrose argue for some mysterious form of “quantum mind”. It seems as if some people just need a certain amount of mystery in their lives, and for them subatomic physics provides a satisfactory alternative to supernatural forces. In spite of this:

The philosopher David Chalmers half-jokingly claims that the motivation for Quantum Mind theories is: “a Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.”

I think it’s more to do with conservation of mystery than minimization; when one kind of mystery looks like evaporating try to exploit another, unrelated mystery.