Hard SF : Psychic Powers & Fringe Theories : Introduction
I might be more tolerant of psychic powers in "science fiction" if it weren't so common. There are exceptions to every rule - so allowing a particular unscientific element into science fiction once in a while isn't that unreasonable. And if someone wants to establish a literary genre with its own section in the library and book store of "psychic fiction", that's OK with me. (Actually, I'd prefer it in a separate section.) As long as there's enough hard science fiction for me to read, I won't care if "psychic fiction" has 10 times as many books.
Unfortunately, I find an alarming fraction of SF has what is presented as or amounts to psychic powers. In some cases this is not explicitly called psychic. For instance, a species with a "group mind" (implicitly telepathy), one species "contacting" or "controlling" the minds of another (more or less telepathy between species), body-less minds and so on.
Many times it's explicitly called telepathy or mind-reading; telekinesis; mind-controlled invisibility; mind-controlled teleportation; precognition; a "sixth sense" to find water, people or whatever; etc.
There are strange cases of people whose minds can "read" or "control" computers. (Even if one thinks humans evolved so one human mind could interact with another human mind, that would hardly make them able to interact with electronic hardware.) And so on.
Newton's laws were replaced by Einstein's. Quantum physics has advanced over Einstein's objections. String / membrane theory may supersede quantum theory. Maybe one day scientific evidence will support the existence of psychic powers, but probably not.
Keep in mind I mean psychic powers as they are generally portrayed in fiction and those claiming such powers in the real world. There is nothing in science that prohibits "telepathy", if by that you mean a species that has evolved a body organ that acts as a radio transceiver. But that is not what the word is generally used to mean. And if there was such "telepathy" scientists would have no trouble detecting the radio waves.
Generally, the portrayal is of something less material. Often there isn't an explicit reference to the supernatural, but that is implicit. Just as when a fantasy book's wizard performs a magic spell to make a tree grow overnight, nothing is explicitly said about a deity or the wizard's soul or the tree being aided by demons, angels, ghosts or the like. But if we think about it, we know the magical spell does not act according to the laws of nature. We are not told what supernatural entities play a role, but the supernatural is involved.
Similarly, when a character in a "science fiction" book reads a mind, sees the future or uses telekinesis, no supernatural entities are mentioned. Occasionally, we may be told that brains have electrical activity and the character is able to "harness" this energy to move objects with his mind. (Needless to say, you would need an electro-magnet with much more electrical energy than the brain has in order to move large objects.) But more often, there is not even this flimsy attempt at a physical explanation. It is left vague in a magical kind of way.
Whether or not a book is vague or gives a precise (but nonsense) explanation, we lack evidence for psychic powers today. People could in the future be bioengineered or surgically augmented to have a "psychic power". However, this would be like the earlier example of a body organ that acts as a radio transceiver. Doctors might provide a physiological communications system that some people call "telepathy". But that is not "psychic" in the normal sense of the word.
The realm of science is the material world. If scientists can add something to a person, it is a material something. It is outside the scope of science to determine whether there is a supernatural realm.
There is one thing we can say about the supernatural and "psychic powers". None of the major religions claims that their most religious people by virtue of their closeness to the supernatural have psychic powers such as telepathy, telekinesis and precognition. They may believe in divine miracles, but not in psychic powers by the saintly. As a result, it would seem that a belief in the psychic leads us to reject most of the world's beliefs in the supernatural. If there is evidence of the supernatural in the form of psychic powers, why has this evidence not led to more belief in the psychic and belief systems [religions] that include it? For the time being, both scientists and major religions agree practical psychic powers don't exist.
*
A few years ago a family member was watching "Unsolved Mysteries" or some such TV show with a segment on Big Foot. The program wanted to seem unbiased and scientific. So in addition to the hearsay claims they presented, they told about a man who was placing instruments to detect and record activity in the forest. However, the show never said anything about results from this man's tests.
We could draw various conclusions from this. It might be that of all the people who have talked about evidence of Big Foot for decades, only this one man had ever had enough scientific inclination to try to use a scientific approach. Or we could conclude that others had tried to establish scientific evidence, but nobody had ever succeeded and the program chose not say past experiments had found no evidence. We might assume the reason why no results were mentioned is because the man set up his test just as the show was being put together (an unlikely coincidence) AND the producers had not considered it worth waiting to see if any evidence developed. Or it could be the testing equipment had been out in the forest for a while at the time the program was completed, and no evidence had been detected.
The thing we can be sure of is there is no real significance to someone planning an experiment to find evidence for a "fringe" theory. What could be significant are the results of such an experiment.
This is the kind of indifference to / misunderstanding of / circumvention of science one often encounters in discussion of "fringe" theories. Other articles in this section will discuss particular "powers" and claims further.
*
Readers interested in investigations of such claims from an evidence-oriented approach may want to read Skeptical Inquirer magazine.