magic is a great analogy for what for how we process the world generally so we
have this infinite data source coming at us there's an infinite number of things
that we could think about that we essentially make up a story about what
we're seeing we edit and delete we form a narrative we mistake that narrative
for the truth the way you watch a magic trick of any sort and edit your
experience to form a story that brings you a point to a point of going my god
that's impossible is what we do every day in real life and we have to because
it's our only way of navigating forward but it's important to remember sometimes
that it is just a story that there's a lot of stuff going on that we're not
aware of and of course a magician doing a trick is exploiting exactly that
process the fact that we are master editors so what I am I am encouraging a
form of a form of skepticism but I do think that the the broad easy skepticism
of the magician or the atheist you know I'm an atheist but I think that both of
those camps have it too easy so there are things I think they're important
skeptically and then there's also important checks on the very nature of
skepticism so I think the the important in Pacific in the world of sort of you
know people making claims grand claims which is what I you know as a somebody
rooted in magic come across a lot the important point that that goes back to
Hume which is that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence so if
somebody is making a grand claim a supernatural claim for example it's
going to be up to them to come up with equally strong and impressive and grand
evidence for that thing it's as opposed to it's up to the other person say you
to disprove it which is often what they say you know well you can't you can't
dis you can't disprove it if I say I've got a green mouse living in my house and
I expect you to believe that it's not your job to prove that I don't have a
green mouse by looking in every corner of my house because you could always
miss the mouse is to me to show you it if I'm going to
show you a photograph of it there's got to be a proper picture and not a
doctored picture and so on so what you have a lot of is evidence that isn't
real evidence so for example you know a psychic medium using say her very
demonstration of doing it that's proof of psychic psychic mediumship
well that's no more valid than if a magician saw as a woman in half and says
what his proof that I'm doing it look I'm soaring her in half well that's not
proof proof would be okay well do it with my sword
do it with my box do it with my woman as opposed to your assistant and do it
under some kind of control conditions and then maybe then maybe you'll believe
it you know that you create conditions that everyone you know agrees on and
then you are and then it becomes evidence so I think that that just in
terms of understanding not getting too caught up in other people's stories and
other people's narratives and and and and falling for them is that reserve of
skepticism is important and when it's when it's your job to disprove and when
it and when it isn't that's important particularly a world full of charlatans
and people trying to get us to believe what they want but it's very difficult
because it's very hard to know what information source is to trust and
that's just that's part of the world we live in now and it's it's dizzying and
depressing knowing we're knowing where where you can where you can't start but
at least you can do your best you can try and work or authentically by
spotting your own biases and understanding as much as you can the
biases of others where I think
skepticism in its broad modern popular sense I've just you know don't believe
in God don't believe in this don't believe in that well I think it has its
limits and I speak very much as a skeptic myself and and as an atheist as
I said where it is important to realize the the edges of its of its usefulness
is where those things that may not be objectively true but can be
psychologically true in inverted commas in other words psychologically resonant
to you know the path of living and what we what we take in in life and what's
what's important and what's helpful so that's what you
don't want to throw out you don't wanna throw out that maybe with the with the
bathwater so in religion for example those things that are easily knocked
down if you're a if you're an atheist they're easy to kind of make fun of and
disprove those things are also they're kind of often our straw men to knock
down but they can often be pointers back to something that is psychologically
useful there's signifiers of something if you
take what happens with religion is that you have a a something that happens an
experience of transcendence or a kind of a thing that happened historically
nothing magical or supernatural but just for people at that time a connection to
a sense of the transcendent whatever that was a message or something and then
as that moves out of living memory to recreate it a bunch of practices and
dogmas and things are formed to try and recreate that feeling and that becomes
now a thing of belief rather than a sort of knowledge that it was at the time and
then to sustain and protect that belief an institution is sort of created and
developed and becomes politicized and powerful and monetize and all of those
things and then it moves into a world where we are nowadays where things have
to be sort of then proved with evidence so it starts to try and come up with
evidential arguments that somehow never quite really sort of work so you do end
up with a thing that's easier to knock down but that can miss the fact that
there's something at the heart of it which maybe is useful maybe those
narratives around religion are useful to us psychologically maybe they have an
archetypal or a mythological use that it would be ashamed to dismiss because we
feel the absence of those things it's the very fact we turn to psychics and
fortune tellers and become terrified and lonely around death those things happen
because we've lost touch with some of those myths and some of those more
resonant narratives so I I am I think being a little skeptical about
skepticism itself and the easy narratives that it forms is also I think
very useful