The Value Of A Human Psi Hypothesis

Since I appealed to human paranormal activity as the best explanation of UFOs in my last post, in the process of commenting on Lue Elizondo's recent book, I thought I'd reiterate and expand upon an important point in that context. One of the values of a human psi hypothesis is that it includes both living and deceased humans. That can be thought of in contrast to what people often refer to as a living agent psi hypothesis, one that involves the paranormal activity of living humans. I believe in postmortem survival, because of the evidence for Christianity and for other reasons. So, I don't limit human activity to this life. One of the things that follows from including deceased humans in a paranormal explanation is that it allows for more advanced forms of paranormal activity while retaining the human element. A deceased human may have developed his paranormal abilities with the passing of time (which can span a lengthy period in the context of the afterlife), some of the actual or potential contexts of the afterlife can provide humans with knowledge or motives they wouldn't have in this life, etc. It's important that we keep in mind that a human psi hypothesis doesn't have to limit itself to living humans. That's one of the strengths of the hypothesis.

And that's one of the underestimated problems with appeals to the demonic hypothesis. The inclusion of deceased humans narrows the gap between humans and demons.

As I've explained before, I don't hold that the demonic hypothesis should never be appealed to, that demons are no longer active in the world, or anything like that. Given factors like how active demons were in the world during the Biblical era and what the Bible anticipates about life after the Biblical era, it's to be expected that there will be ongoing demonic activity and generally a lot of it. And as a general principle, I'd expect demons to be more advanced than deceased humans in some ways, which gives the demonic hypothesis some advantages.

But the hypothesis isn't as advantageous as Christians often suggest, and it shouldn't be appealed to nearly as often as Christians appeal to it. We frequently have no way, under our current state of knowledge, of discerning that the involvement of one type of entity is more likely than the involvement of another. Sometimes agnosticism is appropriate. And even when there's reason to prefer one explanation over another, such as human psi over demonic activity or vice versa, we often have to hold that conclusion with a loose grip. The evidential advantage of one hypothesis over another often doesn't consist of much.

When I say that something like UFOs seems to be best explained by human psi, I'm not necessarily claiming to have some high degree of confidence about it. And, in fact, I don't have high confidence in my conclusion in that context. UFO research is at an early stage, and it's a large and very complicated field. But I see some reason for preferring the human psi hypothesis at this point.

For those who are interested in reading more about why I prefer that hypothesis, I've addressed it in other posts, like here and here. For why I view the afterlife as I do, including why I think humans sometimes continue to interact with life on earth after they die, see here.