Jump to the english article here.
J. Konstapel Leiden, July 27, 2026
The Construction and Deconstruction of a Category
Jump To The English tramslation here
Waarom we het paranormale niet moeten verklaren, maar de grenzen die we zelf hebben getrokken moeten onderzoeken
Heb je je wel eens afgevraagd waarom we sommige dingen ‘paranormaal’ noemen? Waarom zijn helderziendheid, telepathie of bijna-doodervaringen ineens ‘bovennatuurlijk’, terwijl we andere mysterieuze verschijnselen gewoon als ‘natuur’ accepteren?
Eer bestaat niet zoiets als een aparte categorie ‘paranormale verschijnselen’.
Wat wij zo noemen, zijn gewoon verschijnselen die niet passen binnen onze vooronderstellingen over hoe de wereld zou moeten werken.
De onzichtbare aannames
Denk eens na: als jij iets ziet bewegen zonder dat er iemand bij is, vraag je meteen: “Welke kracht heeft dat gedaan?” of “Wie heeft dat veroorzaakt?” Dit lijkt logisch, maar ik laat zien dat deze vragen al een heleboel aannames bevatten:
- De natuur is passief – wij gaan er automatisch vanuit dat materie ‘gedaan wordt’ in plaats van dat het zelf iets doet.
- Elke gebeurtenis heeft een uitvoerder – onze taal dwingt ons om een onderwerp te verzinnen, ook als die er niet is.
- Afzonderlijke dingen hebben een signaal nodig om contact te maken – we denken dat alles een boodschapper nodig heeft.
Deze aannames zijn zo diep ingesleten dat we ze niet eens meer als aannames zien. Ze zijn voor ons ‘gewoon hoe de wereld werkt’.
Het echte probleem
Het probleem is niet dat paranormale verschijnselen zo moeilijk te verklaren zijn. Het probleem is dat ze niet eens als verschijnsel worden toegelaten. Een gebeurtenis zoals het Pauli-effect – waarbij apparatuur stukging in de buurt van natuurkundige Wolfgang Pauli – wordt niet serieus onderzocht. Het wordt een grap, een anekdote. Waarom? Omdat het niet past in ons wereldbeeld.
In deze blog hzet ik in de pdf 58 van zulke onzichtbare aannames op een rij.
Denk aan:
- “Wat niet herhaald kan worden, is niet gebeurd” (terwijl de meeste geschiedenis uit eenmalige gebeurtenissen bestaat)
- “Alleen gewoon wakker bewustzijn telt als een wetende toestand” (dromen en trance worden uitgesloten)
- “De mens eindigt bij zijn huid” (hiermee wordt actie op afstand per definitie onmogelijk)
Wat als we die aannames loslaten?
Als we deze aannames niet langer als vanzelfsprekend beschouwen, verandert er iets fundamenteels. De categorie ‘paranormaal’ valt weg. Wat overblijft zijn menselijke vermogens – sommigen hebben ze meer dan anderen, net zoals de een beter is in wiskunde en de ander in muziek.
In traditionele culturen was er geen aparte categorie voor ‘paranormaal’. Mensen met bijzondere gaven kregen gewoon een rol: genezer, ziener, iemand die gestuurd wordt voor bijzondere taken. Het was een beroep, geen bovennatuurlijk fenomeen.
Een nieuwe wetenschap
Konstapel pleit voor een wetenschap die niet langer meet hoe ver mensen afwijken van een norm, maar die onderzoekt wat mensen daadwerkelijk kunnen doen. Niet: “Is dit paranormaal?”, maar: “Wat is dit voor vermogen en hoe werkt het?”
Zijn conclusie is verfrissend: het paranormale is niet iets dat we moeten verklaren. Het is een spiegel die ons laat zien wat wij normaal vinden. En wat wij normaal vinden, is vooral wat past bij onze eigen vooroordelen over de wereld.
De grens tussen normaal en paranormaal zit niet in de wereld, maar in ons. Als we dat eenmaal zien, kunnen we eindelijk serieus kijken naar wat mensen werkelijk kunnen.
Abstract
This essay advances a radical thesis: the category of “the paranormal” does not name a class of phenomena requiring special explanation, but rather marks the boundary of a particular set of metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological commitments. The paranormal is not what resists explanation; it is what resists admission as the kind of thing that gets explained. Through a systematic inventory of fifty-eight undeclared commitments—spanning assumptions about the world, description, language, mathematics, the human investigator, and the human subject—this work demonstrates how the category was manufactured, when and by whom it was installed, and why it has persisted for two millennia. The central claim is that changing the commitments dissolves the category not by explaining its contents, but by eliminating the boundary that produced the exclusion. The essay then outlines what a science without this line would look like: one that takes as its subject the range of what human beings are actually able to do, rather than the distance of each from a norm.
Keywords: paranormal, philosophy of science, epistemology, anthropology of knowledge, history of ideas, synchronicity, consciousness studies
Table of Contents
- The Thesis: Against the Category
- The Grammar of the Standard Question
- The Inventory: Manufacturing the Excluded
- The Dependency Structure: What Holds the Edifice Together
- The Route: How the Line Was Drawn
- The Persistence: Why the Commitments Endure
- The Case Study: The Pauli Effect as Diagnostic
- The Other Side: Practices Before Assumptions
- Physics at the Boundary: What It Can and Cannot Do
- The State of the Evidence: A Reframe
- Toward a Science Without the Line
- The Horizon: Non-Embodied Agency and the Vacuum
- Conclusion: The Work Ahead
1. The Thesis: Against the Category
The central claim of this essay is deceptively simple: there is no class of phenomena requiring a special account. What we call “the paranormal” is not a natural kind, a set of events sharing some underlying essence that demands unique explanatory resources. It is, instead, the name we give to what falls outside a particular configuration of commitments—about reality, about knowledge, about language, and about the human. The boundary is not in the world; it is in the inventory of assumptions we bring to the world. Change those assumptions, and the category does not get explained. It ceases to exist, because the line was never anywhere but in the commitments themselves.
This reframing inverts the standard approach. Typically, the question is posed as: What is the paranormal, and how can it be explained? This already concedes the category. It assumes there is a coherent set of phenomena that resist conventional explanation and thus require some special framework—whether that be new physics, new metaphysics, or simply the suspension of disbelief. But this way of posing the question presumes that the phenomena in question form a natural class, united by their resistance to existing explanatory schemes. The thesis here is that they do not. They are united only by their exclusion from a particular way of carving up the world—a way defined by a specific, historically contingent set of commitments.
The implications are profound. If the category is an artefact of our commitments, then the project of “explaining the paranormal” is fundamentally misguided. It is like trying to explain what it means for something to be “beyond the pale” without noticing that the pale itself is a socially constructed boundary. The correct project is not to explain the contents of the category, but to dissolve the category by examining the boundary that created it. This is not a call for scepticism about the phenomena often labelled paranormal. It is, rather, a call for a different kind of attention: attention to the commitments that make certain phenomena appear paranormal in the first place.
To say that the paranormal is normal, then, is not to claim that all the phenomena typically placed in that category are real, or common, or unproblematic. It is to claim that the category itself is a construct, and that the phenomena it contains are only “paranormal” relative to a specific and historically situated set of assumptions. Remove those assumptions, and the phenomena are simply part of what human beings do—neither more nor less mysterious than any other human capacity.
2. The Grammar of the Standard Question
Ask what the paranormal is, and the answer arrives in a fixed grammatical shape: someone did something to something at a distance. What force crossed the gap? What signal was transmitted? Where did the energy come from? This is not an empirical description of the phenomena in question. It is a grammatical frame that predetermines the shape of any possible answer.
Three undeclared commitments produce this frame, and they are so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking that they often go unnoticed:
2.1 The Passivity of Nature
The first commitment is that nature undergoes rather than acts. Matter is passive, moved by external laws rather than acting from its own impulse. This is a theological inheritance, one in which the acting was reserved for a divine realm, and it outlived the theology that birthed it. In this view, the world is a stage upon which forces act, but it does not itself initiate action. The consequence is that any apparent action at a distance—any phenomenon in which one thing seems to influence another without a mediating mechanism—must involve some hidden force, some unseen agent. The grammar demands a doer, even if the doer is invisible.
This commitment is not merely philosophical; it is baked into the very language we use to describe the natural world. We speak of “forces” acting on objects, of “laws” governing their motion, of “causes” producing effects. The vocabulary itself presupposes a world in which agency is external to the things that are moved. When we ask, “What force acted on the object?” we are already assuming that the object itself did not act, but was acted upon.
2.2 The Ubiquity of the Subject
The second commitment is that every event has a subject performing it. This is not just a metaphysical claim; it is a grammatical one. Indo-European languages, in particular, require a subject for every predicate. The rain it rains; the wind it blows. Nietzsche identified this mechanism with characteristic clarity: “the doer is a fiction added to the deed.” Korzybski later built an entire discipline—General Semantics—around the observation that we systematically confuse the map with the territory, the description with the thing described, and the doer with the doing.
This grammatical requirement has profound consequences. It means that every process we describe is delivered with an agent attached, even when no such agent is empirically present. The result is that we are constantly on the lookout for the “doer” behind every deed. When we encounter a phenomenon that seems to lack a doer—psychokinesis, say, or synchronicity—we are left with a grammatical gap, a sentence that cannot be completed. The discomfort this produces is not empirical; it is syntactic. And because the grammar demands a subject, we are impelled to invent one, even if it must be a placeholder like “the universe” or “quantum vacuum fluctuations.”
2.3 The Necessity of the Signal
The third commitment is that separate things require a signal to make contact. This is the default assumption of every model of communication since Shannon: information is transmitted from a sender to a receiver via some medium. The consequence is that any apparent interaction between separated systems must involve a carrier—a wave, a particle, a field. If no such carrier can be identified, the phenomenon is deemed impossible or, at best, inexplicable.
This assumption is so deeply embedded in our thinking that it is often taken as a definition of what it means for two things to interact. But it is not the only possible model. One can imagine a world in which things are connected in ways that do not require signals—through resonance, through entanglement, through some form of non-local correlation. The Shannon model is a powerful tool for understanding certain kinds of communication, but it is not a metaphysical necessity. Yet it has been elevated to the status of a default, such that any phenomenon that does not fit its frame is dismissed as impossible.
2.4 The Stalemate and Its Grammar
Together, these three commitments fix the answer before the investigation begins. If matter is passive, something must act on it. If every event has a doer, the doer must be found. If contact requires a signal, a carrier must be identified. The only admissible answer, under these constraints, is a new force, a new signal, a new doer. But if no such force, signal, or doer can be found, the file is closed. The phenomenon is deemed impossible.
This stalemate is often taken to be empirical. It is, in fact, grammatical. The commitments do the work of ruling out certain phenomena a priori, before any evidence is considered. And this is why lifting physical prohibitions—on over-unity devices, superluminal signalling, retrocausation, or consciousness without a brain—can succeed on its own terms and yet produce nothing. Lifting a prohibition yields a permission, not a capacity. The question of what a human being is actually able to do is untouched by any of it, because the commitments doing the real work lie further back than physics. They are embedded in the very grammar of our descriptions.
The consequence is a category error. We treat the paranormal as a set of phenomena that resist explanation, when in fact it is a set of phenomena that resist admission as phenomena at all. They are not inexplicable; they are unclassifiable under the current set of commitments. And the solution is not to find better explanations, but to examine the commitments that make the classification impossible.
3. The Inventory: Manufacturing the Excluded
The undeclared commitments that produce the category of the paranormal can be systematically catalogued. The inventory presented here contains fifty-eight such commitments, arranged in five chapters:
- About the World: Assumptions concerning the nature of reality, causality, and the structure of the physical universe.
- About Describing: Assumptions concerning the methods and limits of description, measurement, and representation.
- About Language and Mathematics: Assumptions concerning the relationship between symbols and what they symbolise, and the role of formal systems in understanding.
- About the Human as Investigator: Assumptions concerning the position, capacities, and limits of the knowing subject.
- About the Human as Subject: Assumptions concerning the nature, boundaries, and proper state of the human being.
Three criteria governed inclusion in the inventory:
- The commitment must not be marked as an assumption by those who hold it. It must be treated as obvious, as a background condition rather than a contestable claim.
- Some serious figure must have refused it. The commitment must have been explicitly rejected by a thinker of standing, demonstrating that it is not universally accepted.
- It must do work. Some other commitment on the list must rest upon it, such that removing it would destabilise the structure.
3.1 The World: The Stage and Its Laws
- 18. The observer is removed. The description is held to survive the deletion of the one describing. This enters European culture as a narrative device: in fiction from roughly 1450 to 1700, the story acquires a watcher who sees everything and influences nothing. Objectivity first appears as a place: the court, the theatre, the laboratory.
- 19. Measurement is made neutral. The act of measurement is assumed to have no effect on what is measured, or that any effect can be corrected for.
- 22. What cannot be isolated cannot be studied. Rules out phenomena that are essentially relational or contextual.
- 23. What cannot be repeated did not happen. Popper’s dictum rules out most of history, biography, and singular personal experiences.
3.2 Describing: Methods and Their Limits
- 26. Third-person description is made more reliable than first-person report. Watson’s 1913 behaviourist manifesto institutionalised this view.
- 34. The investigator is placed outside what is investigated. The Cartesian ideal of the detached observer.
- 35. Perception imposes no limits that belong in the theory. The body is treated as an instrument to be corrected or bypassed.
3.3 Language and Mathematics
- 20. Mathematics is the language of nature rather than the describer. The Pythagorean commitment.
- 42. Number is the measure of a person. The foundation of psychometrics.
3.4 The Human as Investigator
- 36. Imagination is reclassified from a faculty of knowledge into a source of error. Leibniz’s division of scholarship excluded imagination.
- 37. The outside world is the proper object of study; the inside world is not. Reversal of the older settlement.
- 38. Knowledge is storable outside the person without loss. Plato’s objection to writing was overridden.
3.5 The Human as Subject
- 48. Human nature is defective and requires correction. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.
- 50. Only ordinary waking consciousness counts as a knowing state. Aristotle denied standing to dreams; the Enlightenment generalised this.
- 49. Knowledge reaches the person from outside. Contrasts with traditions where knowledge comes through practice.
- 51. Capacity is given by nature, not acquired by practice. Renders training invisible.
- 52. The human ends at his skin. Rules out action at a distance by definition.
- 53. Contact between humans requires a signal. The Shannon model applied to human relations.
- 55. There is a correct human; difference is defect. Quetelet’s statistical norm made prescriptive by Galton.
- 56. Consciousness stops when the brain stops. Functions as a premise, not just a finding.
- 57. The human does not act; something acts through him. Agency is always located elsewhere.
3.6 The Manufacturing Process
These commitments form a manufacturing process for the category of the paranormal. Each step removes a possible way of understanding or engaging with the world. The paranormal is not what is left over after the natural has been explained; it is what is excluded by the very definition of the natural.
4. The Dependency Structure: What Holds the Edifice Together
The fifty-eight commitments form a directed structure, a web of dependencies. Following these to their ends reveals five terminal assumptions:
- The human is measured against a standard lying outside him.
- Every event has a subject performing it.
- A thing remains identical with itself through time.
- Nature undergoes rather than acts.
- What a human being is has been laid down elsewhere.
Thirty-two of the fifty-eight commitments reach the external measure by some path. The most load-bearing commitment is not physical but anthropological: the Pythagorean conversion of number into the being of things, and into the measure of a person.
The chapters divide historically: the world and description chapters are early modern (1600-1700), installed by method. The human as subject chapter is pre-Greek and Greek, installed by doctrine. The recent layer inherits its terminal commitments from the ancient one.
Refusals were treated differently: in description, all objections were published and argued. In the human as subject, seven of seventeen were condemned, burned, or preserved only as errors. Protagoras, Pelagius, Bruno—these refusals were processed, not answered.
5. The Route: How the Line Was Drawn
Ordered by route, the assumptions form a genealogy. The physical route: modern humans in East Africa 200,000 years ago; coastal corridor to Australia by 50,000 years ago. Along it travelled concepts: communication with animals, knowledge in altered states, healing in those states. These recur independently at points along the corridor.
The earliest stretch contains no assumptions—only practices. The assumption as a form appears where a practice acquires a custodian and is converted into a teaching (Mesopotamian and Egyptian temple priesthoods). Greece receives the material already converted; Aristotle prunes it into a system. By the time it reaches European physics, it is an interpretation of an interpretation of a practice.
The chain pulses: the Florentine reopening of 1462 (Ficino’s translation of the Hermetic corpus) put the interior back at the centre for a century and a half. What followed was a harder closure: imagination as delusion, memory arts abandoned, Leibniz outmanoeuvred by Newton.
The heaviest impositions arrive immediately after a reopening. This pattern explains why this subject has the history it does.
6. The Persistence: Why the Commitments Endure
Schank’s theory of dynamic memory explains persistence: understanding runs on scripts—standing expectations applied without deliberation, revised only when they break. A script that keeps predicting correctly is never inspected. Expectation failure is the whole mechanism of learning.
Two cases of persistence:
- No failure has occurred (the assumption was never run in a situation that could break it).
- The failure occurred and the re-indexing was prevented (the anomaly was registered, but the structure was defended).
The two chapters divide as the theory predicts: world assumptions survive because no failure occurred; human assumptions survive because failures were not allowed to re-index.
The practical criterion: if the assumptions are invisible while they hold, they can only be found where an expectation broke and nothing was re-indexed. The history of a field is best read as its record of blocked re-indexings, kept in disciplinary obituaries rather than textbooks.
7. The Case Study: The Pauli Effect as Diagnostic
Wolfgang Pauli was accompanied by the failure of apparatus in his vicinity—the Pauli effect, a joke among physicists. The best-documented instance: at the founding of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich on 24 April 1948, a Chinese vase fell without external cause. Pauli was occupied with the dispute between Kepler and Robert Fludd (Robertus de Fluctibus, “Robert of the flowing waters”).
The case requires no mechanism—it requires an account of its classification. Every assumption needed for its conversion into a joke is on the list:
- Happened once: 23 disposes of it.
- Involves inner state: 26 and 37 remove that from consideration.
- Suggests contact without signal: 53 makes it unintelligible.
- Suggests state reaching past body: 52 forbids it.
- No doer to name: 28 and 57 leave the sentence unfinishable.
The event did not fail to be explained. It failed to be admitted as the kind of thing that gets explained. The machinery of that failure is fully documented.
8. The Other Side: Practices Before Assumptions
If the category is an artefact, the interesting question is what was there before the exclusion. The answer: practices, and people who had them.
8.1 Trance Healing (Katz’s Kalahari Kung)
An acquired discipline, trained over years, with recognised state, effects, and practitioners. Not a belief system but a craft—something people do, learn, get better at.
8.2 Roles for Differently Distributed Talents
In societies without the inventory, unusual talents acquire roles: healer, diviner, the one sent for. What is now called paranormal was an occupation. It is our arrangement that has no slot for it.
8.3 Amplification
Practices intensify the state—rhythm, exertion, deprivation, plant material, sustained attention. Practitioners report perceiving what others do not. Assumptions 50, 49, 51 make this unreportable.
8.4 The Art of Memory (Yates)
The interior as constructed and navigable space, practised for two millennia, abandoned within a century. A human capacity simply dropped—not refuted, not disproved, forgotten.
8.5 The Body as Instrument (Dambricourt Malassé)
Cranial base flexion as internal developmental programme. Meaning as acoustic resonance rather than arbitrary sign. The motor is internal—Rosen’s claim in another register: a system can be its own agent.
8.6 Methodological Principle
A thinker counts if he has met the phenomenon himself. Pauli counts; a commentator who works Jung and Pauli out in quantum language without experience does not. This is assumption 26 refused where it matters.
9. Physics at the Boundary: What It Can and Cannot Do
Two moves dissolve much of the first four chapters:
- Rosen’s closure to efficient causation removes the external agent, and with it passive nature, the demand for a first term, simulability as understanding.
- Readmitting the observer’s situation removes observer-free accounts, neutral measurement, absolute space, universal uniformity.
Neither reaches the fifth chapter. Correcting physics yields a permission, not a capacity. The two lists are not one list of different lengths: the first was inferred; the second was inherited.
9.1 Three Physical Frameworks
- Fractal Context Dynamics: Effective laws as state functions of the local vacuum. “The laws forbid it” stops being a complete sentence.
- Quaternion Vacuum Model: Removes the privilege of the scalar. What falls out of the notation falls out of the science (assumption 20 in operation).
- Harmonic-Coherence Work: Coupling by proportion rather than magnitude. Formal shape of what “meaningful” might mean.
9.2 The Four Roots of Synchronicity
- Unus mundus: Refusal to treat inner and outer as two substances.
- Logos with Eros: Readmission of the body as instrument of knowledge (refusal of 36, 43, 44).
- Oscillation: The mechanism.
- Magma: Local, temporary order without global determinism (refusal of 9).
None of this produces a capacity. It removes reasons why a capacity was ruled out.
10. The State of the Evidence: A Reframe
The evidential question changes: not Does the paranormal exist? (which grants the category) but What happened to the evidence for ordinary human capacities once the assumptions were in place?
Two things happened:
- Where the assumption was never stressed, no evidence was gathered (bodies measured one at a time; non-waking states excluded; capacity treated as innate).
- Where evidence was gathered, re-indexing was blocked (anomaly registered, commitment defended; finding reclassified as error, finder as unqualified, domain as not a domain).
10.1 The Record of Blocked Re-Indexings
- PEAR Programme: Large datasets, small effects. Multi-lab replication did not reproduce; PEAR published that result.
- RNG Meta-Analysis: Small significant effect with strong publication bias, judged the likelier explanation.
- Bem’s Precognition: Failed registered replication; did more for the replication crisis than for precognition.
- Cardiac-Arrest Studies: Handful of veridical accounts under extraordinarily hard designs. Terminal lucidity documented without mechanism.
This is a thin and contested record. The thesis does not need it to be otherwise. A category can be shown to be an artefact whether or not the excluded things turn out to be there.
10.2 The Structural Argument
Radin et al. argue that the influence-per-bit assumption is untenable; magnitude tracks context, stake, meaning rather than number of binary events. This is the one place where the empirical literature and §9’s coupling-by-proportion make contact. It is an argument about which model is fitted, not whether the numbers are large enough.
11. Toward a Science Without the Line
11.1 A Science That Values the Human As He Is
Two assumptions do most of the damage in the fifth chapter:
- 48: Human nature is defective and requires correction (Augustine’s fault; Pelagius condemned for arguing capacity was intact).
- 55: There is a correct human; difference is defect (Quetelet’s average man; Galton’s prescriptive norm; Canguilhem’s refusal).
Drop those two, and what remains is not a lowered standard but a different object of study. Pico’s human has no fixed nature or place and makes himself what he chooses. Spinoza: “Nobody has yet determined what a body can do.” A science taking that as a research question would look nothing like ours. Its subject would be the range of what humans turn out to be able to do, not the distance from a mean.
11.2 The Vacuum as Common Ground
If the vacuum is not a background but is the physics—if it encompasses everything—then a human is not a thing in the vacuum but an expression of it. Matter as frozen topology + context principle = study of human and vacuum are one subject at two scales.
The practical consequence: if the human is an expression of the vacuum, the organs by which he registers it are not restricted to the five senses. Practitioners are using something. Assumptions 35 and 36 ensure the question of what they are using was never asked. It is a good question, empirical, and nothing but the inventory stands in front of it.
11.3 The Right Level, and Why Finding It Is the Art
In a fractal ontology, there is no privileged level. Effective laws are scale-dependent; every winding is built of windings. At what level does this operate? has no default answer.
The art is finding the level at which a given person, difficulty, or organisation actually sits, and helping it balance there. Alexander’s first property of living structure: levels of scale. A configuration is alive when its levels are in proportion, dead when one has swallowed the others. This is the same judgement a coach makes about a person, a strategist about a company. It is one question asked in three places because the structure is fractal.
Balance is not a moral recommendation but a structural condition: a system is in balance when the level at which it is run is the level at which it lives. Most difficulty is a level mismatch.
12. The Horizon: Non-Embodied Agency and the Vacuum
If consciousness is not bounded by the organism (Bateson’s unit of mind; Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind; Gibson’s perceiving animal inseparable from what it perceives), then the question of what else might be organised in the vacuum is open.
Assumptions 52 and 56 closed it by definition. Neither was a finding. They were commitments, and commitments can be revised.
The old vocabularies for non-embodied agency (angels, demons, spirits, archetypes) are extensive and not produced by fools. The inventory shows why they were closed—not that they were wrong. Whether anything corresponds to them is unknown. That it is unknown rather than excluded is the whole of what this essay establishes.
This is a large hypothesis, offered as a direction of work. It will be found, if at all, where an expectation broke and nothing was re-indexed.
13. Conclusion: The Work Ahead
The inventory is unfinished and meant to be. Fifty-eight is not complete; anyone can find fifty-nine. The dependency matrix was built by hand; every edge is a reading. The five terminal assumptions are consequences of those edges. The argument should be conducted on the edges.
One tension in physics: two candidates for recursion between winding levels—the Bronze Mean sequence (1, 1, 4, 13, 43, 142) and highly composite numbers (12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 120, 360). Possible resolution: two axes, not two candidates.
The method: run frames into one another; treat every point of non-fit as a place to look, not a mistake to correct. A commitment that is working is transparent; it shows up when an expectation built on it breaks.
Whatever is worth doing next belongs at the other end of the chain from physics: where the practices are, and where nobody had yet written anything down.
The paranormal is normal. This is not a claim about the reality of phenomena but about the category—the line that separates. That line is not in the world but in us. To dissolve the category is to open a space for a new science, one that takes as its subject the full range of what human beings are actually able to do.
The work ahead is to build that science. The first step is to see the line for what it is: not a boundary in the world, but a boundary in us.
Annotated References
I. The Unnecessary Agent: Rethinking Causality and Agency
Rosen, R. (1991). Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life. Columbia University Press.
- Establishes: The Newtonian paradigm as a special case mistaken for the general one; closure to efficient causation removes the external mover Aristotle built into physics. Demonstrates that anticipatory systems cannot be described by present state alone.
- Level: Foundational for systems theory and biology.
- Contestation: Demanding and technical; challenges reductionist biology but slow to enter mainstream.
- Relevance: Most consequential single reference for the inventory; provides framework for removing external agents from biological/cognitive explanations.
Nietzsche, F. (1887). Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality), First Essay §13.
- Establishes: “The doer is a fiction added to the deed.” Concise demolition of grammatical subject as metaphysical entity.
- Level: Philosophical and linguistic.
- Contestation: Widely accepted in post-structuralist thought; resisted in analytic philosophy.
- Relevance: Identifies grammatical mechanism for systematic attribution of agency.
Korzybski, A. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Institute of General Semantics.
- Establishes: Non-identity principle (map is not territory) and indexing discipline. Written as training manual, read as epistemology.
- Level: Epistemological and pedagogical.
- Contestation: Criticised for overemphasis on language; Korzybski’s rejection of Aristotle leads to unexamined Pythagoreanism.
- Relevance: Provides tools for recognising how language structures perception, including agency attribution.
Whitehead, A. N. (1933). Adventures of Ideas. Cambridge University Press.
- Establishes: Law as imposed vs. immanent; critiques reification of abstractions as concrete things.
- Level: Metaphysical and historical.
- Contestation: Process philosophy remains minority in analytic metaphysics.
- Relevance: Clarifies error in treating efficient causation as only form of causation.
Spinoza, B. (1677). Ethica (Ethics), Part III, Proposition 2, Scholium.
- Establishes: “Nobody has yet determined what a body can do.” Radical claim about untapped potential of bodies.
- Level: Metaphysical and ethical.
- Contestation: Spinoza’s parallelism and determinism contentious, but this claim never adequately addressed.
- Relevance: Epigraph for §11’s programme; suggests limits of human capacity are to be discovered, not given.
Pico della Mirandola, G. (1486). Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man).
- Establishes: Clearest pre-modern denial that human nature is fixed: no predetermined place, no fixed form, responsibility for both.
- Level: Philosophical and theological.
- Contestation: Pico’s humanism radical for its time; remains challenging to essentialist views.
- Relevance: Historical counterpoint to Augustinian views of human defectiveness (assumption 48).
II. How Commitments Are Installed and Why They Survive
Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People. Cambridge University Press.
- Establishes: Expectation failure as learning mechanism; re-indexing as memory’s response to broken scripts. Source of §6’s account of why unfailed scripts are invisible.
- Level: Cognitive science and AI.
- Contestation: Script theory criticised for rigidity, but core insight about expectation failure remains influential.
- Relevance: Explains why commitments persist as unexamined scripts.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press.
- Establishes: Chronotope essays: detached observer dated to adventure novel (1450-1700); sealed private interior to biographical novel (post-1700).
- Level: Literary theory and philosophy of language.
- Contestation: Historical claims occasionally contested; insights into narrative structure widely accepted.
- Relevance: Most useful single source for narrative mechanism installing objectivity as cultural norm.
Bachelard, G. (1938). La formation de l’esprit scientifique (The Formation of the Scientific Mind). Vrin.
- Establishes: Epistemological obstacle: what blocks science is not ignorance but existing knowledge.
- Level: Philosophy of science.
- Contestation: Historical epistemology not as widely adopted in Anglophone philosophy as Kuhn or Popper.
- Relevance: Anticipates scripts and expectation failure by 30 years; explains how existing knowledge blocks new understanding.
Collingwood, R. G. (1940). An Essay on Metaphysics. Clarendon Press.
- Establishes: Metaphysics as historical study of absolute presuppositions a period does not question. Almost exactly the inventory’s project, stated in advance.
- Level: Metaphysical and historical.
- Contestation: Collingwood’s idealism out of fashion, but method remains prescient.
- Relevance: Provides historical methodology for identifying undeclared commitments.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
- Establishes: Paradigms structure perception; anomalies accumulate without absorption until crisis produces revolution.
- Level: Philosophy of science.
- Contestation: Paradigm theory widely debated; core insight about anomalies’ role remains influential.
- Relevance: Blocked re-indexing at discipline scale; anomaly registered but not absorbed.
Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson.
- Establishes: “Non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science.” Source of assumption 23.
- Level: Philosophy of science.
- Contestation: Falsificationism widely criticised; methodological commitments remain influential.
- Relevance: Mechanism guaranteeing thin evidence for context-dependent phenomena.
III. The Route and the Practices: Before the Assumptions
Erlandson, J. M., et al. (2007). “The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas.” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 2(2), 161-174.
- Establishes: Coastal migration corridor from southern Africa around Pacific rim—the physical route for people and concepts.
- Level: Archaeological and anthropological.
- Contestation: Timing and route debated; broad outline widely accepted.
- Relevance: Physical context for spread of practices later becoming raw material for assumptions.
Katz, R. (1982). Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung. Harvard University Press.
- Establishes: Trance healing described operationally: acquired discipline, trained over years, with recognised states, effects, practitioners.
- Level: Ethnographic and anthropological.
- Contestation: Some interpretations debated; operational description widely accepted.
- Relevance: Clearest look at practice layer preceding assumption layer; primary source for §8’s trance healing account.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton University Press.
- Establishes: Comparative synthesis of soul-journey and trance-healing across Siberia, Central Asia, Americas. Documents recurrence across cultures with no recent contact.
- Level: Comparative religion and anthropology.
- Contestation: Universal core claim contested; documented recurrence not.
- Relevance: Supports claim that certain practices are widespread and ancient, predating excluding assumptions.
Yates, F. A. (1966). The Art of Memory. Routledge.
- Establishes: Interior as constructed and navigable space, practised for two millennia, abandoned within a century.
- Level: Historical and intellectual.
- Contestation: Historical claims occasionally debated; broad outline accepted.
- Relevance: Strongest case that a human capacity can simply be dropped—not refuted, not disproved, but forgotten.
Yates, F. A. (1964). Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Routledge.
- Establishes: Florentine reopening of 1462 (Ficino’s Hermetic corpus translation); Bruno’s fusion of memory arts with Hermeticism; subsequent closure.
- Level: Intellectual history.
- Contestation: Interpretation of Bruno occasionally challenged; historical outline widely accepted.
- Relevance: Primary source for §5’s pulse of closure and reopening.
James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Longmans, Green.
- Establishes: “Normal waking consciousness is one type only, and other forms lie parted from it by the filmiest of screens.”
- Level: Psychological and philosophical.
- Contestation: Pluralism widely accepted in principle; rarely acted upon in practice.
- Relevance: Most quoted and least acted-upon statement; direct refusal of assumption 50.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler.
- Establishes: Unit of mind not bounded by skin. Entry point to extended/enacted cognition; opens possibility of non-embodied agency.
- Level: Anthropological, psychological, systems-theoretical.
- Contestation: Holism occasionally criticised for vagueness; core insights remain influential.
- Relevance: Theoretical foundation for §12’s non-embodied agency hypothesis.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception). Gallimard.
- Establishes: Perception as only access there is; intercorporeality as denial that contact requires a signal.
- Level: Philosophical and phenomenological.
- Contestation: Phenomenology not universally accepted; remains powerful alternative to representationalism.
- Relevance: Directly refuses assumption 53 by showing perception is non-signal-based contact.
Canguilhem, G. (1966). Le normal et le pathologique (The Normal and the Pathological). PUF.
- Establishes: Norm as construction, not discovery. Health/disease, normal/pathological are value-laden, not objective.
- Level: Philosophical and historical.
- Contestation: Constructivism occasionally resisted; critique of norm remains influential.
- Relevance: Standing refusal of assumption 55; load-bearing for §11’s programme.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934/1978). Thought and Language / Mind in Society.
- Establishes: Development through mediated activity; capacity as acquired through practice, not given by nature.
- Level: Developmental psychology.
- Contestation: Sociocultural theory widely accepted; implications not always appreciated.
- Relevance: Counter-tradition to assumption 51; explains why trained performance is invisible to the inventory.
IV. Physics: Context-Dependent Laws and Alternative Ontologies
Sakharov, A. D. (1967). “Vacuum quantum fluctuations in curved space and the theory of gravitation.” Doklady 177, 70-71.
- Establishes: Gravitation as elasticity of the vacuum. First respectable statement that a constant might be output of vacuum processes.
- Level: Theoretical physics.
- Contestation: Induced gravity not mainstream; idea of emergent constants gaining traction.
- Relevance: Supports context principle (effective laws as state functions of local vacuum).
Volovik, G. E. (2003). The Universe in a Helium Droplet. Oxford University Press.
- Establishes: Lorentz invariance, particles, effective metrics emerging in low-energy limit of quantum liquid (superfluid helium-3).
- Level: Condensed matter physics and cosmology.
- Contestation: Analogy between helium-3 and universe not universally accepted; emergence of effective laws well-established.
- Relevance: Strongest precedent for context-dependent laws; shows effective metrics/constants can emerge.
Jacobson, T. (1995). “Thermodynamics of spacetime: the Einstein equation of state.” Physical Review Letters 75, 1260-1263.
- Establishes: Einstein equations derived from δQ = T dS on local horizons. Mainstream and much-cited.
- Level: Theoretical physics (spacetime thermodynamics).
- Contestation: Interpretation as thermodynamic debated; derivation widely accepted.
- Relevance: Route by which emergence account (context principle) adopted in mainstream physics.
Heaviside, O. (1893). Electromagnetic Theory, Vol. I. London.
- Establishes: Maxwell’s quaternion formulation compressed into four vector equations. Explains why quaternions rejected (scalar potential discarded as “unphysical”).
- Level: Historical and theoretical physics.
- Contestation: Vector formulation now standard; loss of scalar potential occasionally regretted.
- Relevance: Standing refutation of assumption 20; shows representation decisions shape physics.
Williamson, J. G., & van der Mark, M. B. (1997). “Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?” Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie 22(2), 133-160.
- Establishes: Electron as self-confined photon with toroidal topology. Non-mainstream but carefully argued.
- Level: Theoretical physics (speculative).
- Contestation: Toroidal electron model not widely accepted; concrete realisation of “matter as frozen topology.”
- Relevance: Supports Rosen’s relational biology; models particles as stable network configurations.
van der Mark, M. B. (2015). “On the nature of ‘stuff’ and the hierarchy of forces.” Proc. SPIE 9570.
- Establishes: Energy-balance argument: internal kinetic energy fraction rising from 10^-14 (Earth-Sun) to ≈0.37 (proton), implying granularity must terminate.
- Level: Theoretical physics (heterodox).
- Contestation: Critique of quarks controversial; continuity conclusion quantitative, not rhetorical.
- Relevance: Supports fractal ontology with bottom level; granularity must terminate.
Kuramoto, Y. (1975). “Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators.” In Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Physics. Springer.
- Establishes: Canonical model of phase-locking; origin of critical-coupling threshold.
- Level: Nonlinear dynamics.
- Contestation: Widely accepted.
- Relevance: Mathematical foundation for coupling-by-proportion (harmonic coherence).
Arnold, V. I. (1983). Geometrical Methods in the Theory of Ordinary Differential Equations. Springer.
- Establishes: Arnold tongues; locking-region width scales inversely with denominator of frequency ratio in lowest terms.
- Level: Mathematical (dynamical systems).
- Contestation: Entirely standard.
- Relevance: Fact on which coupling-by-proportion depends; relations hold across differently sized systems.
Berengut, J. C., et al. (2013). “Limits on the dependence of the fine-structure constant on gravitational potential from white-dwarf spectra.” Physical Review Letters 111, 010801.
- Establishes: Current observational bounds on fine-structure constant variation in white dwarfs.
- Level: Astrophysics and fundamental physics.
- Contestation: Null result widely accepted; methodology debated.
- Relevance: Experimental arena for testing context principle; next improvement could decide prediction.
Alexander, C. (2002-2005). The Nature of Order, Books 1-4. Center for Environmental Structure.
- Establishes: Fifteen properties of wholeness, with levels of scale first; mirror-of-the-self test showing harmony judgements stable across persons.
- Level: Architectural theory and philosophy of design.
- Contestation: Theory of living structure controversial in architecture; empirical claims testable.
- Relevance: Intersubjective stability makes observer-anchored criterion non-arbitrary; empirical anchor for §11’s level/balance account.
V. The Empirical Record: What Counts as Evidence?
Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (1987). Margins of Reality: Exploring the Frontiers of Physics and Consciousness. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Establishes: PEAR programme’s account: very large datasets, very small effects in mind-machine interaction.
- Level: Experimental parapsychology.
- Contestation: Effects small and controversial; methodology criticised.
- Relevance: Shows anomalies can be systematically studied, even if results not widely accepted.
Jahn, R., Mischo, J., Vaitl, D., et al. (2000). “Mind/machine interaction consortium: PortREG replication experiments.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 14(4), 499-555.
- Establishes: Multi-laboratory replication attempt; did not reproduce original effect.
- Level: Experimental parapsychology.
- Contestation: Failure to replicate cited as evidence against original claims.
- Relevance: PEAR’s own principals published the failure; example of honest reporting.
Bösch, H., Steinkamp, F., & Boller, E. (2006). “Examining psychokinesis.” Psychological Bulletin 132(4), 497-523.
- Establishes: Most thorough meta-analysis of RNGs: small significant effect with strong publication bias, judged likelier explanation.
- Level: Meta-analysis (psychology).
- Contestation: Widely cited by sceptics as evidence against psychokinesis.
- Relevance: Principal evidence against parapsychology claims; belongs in honest list.
Radin, D., Nelson, R., Dobyns, Y., & Houtkooper, J. (2006). “Assessing the evidence for mind-matter interaction effects.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 20(3), 361-374.
- Establishes: Bayesian reanalysis of PEAR data; influence-per-bit assumption untenable; magnitude tracks context, stake, meaning.
- Level: Meta-analysis and methodological critique.
- Contestation: Bayesian approach and effect size interpretation debated.
- Relevance: Only structural argument in parapsychology literature; makes contact with §9’s coupling-by-proportion.
Bem, D. J. (2011). “Feeling the future.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100(3), 407-425.
- Establishes: Experimental evidence for precognition.
- Level: Experimental psychology.
- Contestation: Widely criticised for methodological flaws; results not reliably replicated.
- Relevance: Cited with replication failure; did more for replication crisis than for precognition.
Ritchie, S. J., Wiseman, R., & French, C. C. (2012). “Failing the future.” PLoS ONE 7(3), e33423.
- Establishes: Failure to replicate Bem’s precognition results.
- Level: Experimental psychology.
- Contestation: Replication attempts widely accepted as methodologically sound.
- Relevance: Shows importance of replication in evaluating anomalous claims.
Parnia, S., et al. (2014). “AWARE—AWAREness during REsuscitation.” Resuscitation 85(12), 1799-1805.
- Establishes: Prospective study of awareness during cardiac arrest; establishes incidence of NDEs but not veridicality.
- Level: Clinical medicine and neuroscience.
- Contestation: Methodology and interpretation debated; results taken seriously.
- Relevance: Honest about limits; establishes NDEs occur but does not prove objective reality.
van Lommel, P., et al. (2001). “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest.” The Lancet 358, 2039-2045.
- Establishes: Prospective study of NDEs in cardiac arrest survivors; reports veridical elements in some cases.
- Level: Clinical medicine.
- Contestation: Interpretation controversial; data widely accepted.
- Relevance: Establishes NDE phenomenon; veridical elements remain unexplained.
Nahm, M., Greyson, B., Kelly, E. W., & Haraldsson, E. (2012). “Terminal lucidity: A review and a case collection.” Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 55(1), 138-142.
- Establishes: Documented case series of terminal lucidity without mechanism.
- Level: Medical case review.
- Contestation: Phenomenon not disputed; lack of mechanism makes it controversial.
- Relevance: Instance of §6 pattern: registered, named, not re-indexed; anomaly acknowledged but not explained.
VI. Synchronicity and the Pauli Case: The Boundary in Action
Jung, C. G. (1952). “Synchronicity as an Acausal Connecting Principle.” In Jung & Pauli, Naturerklärung und Psyche (The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche). Rascher.
- Establishes: Original formulation of synchronicity. Two of three terms are negation (acausal) and undefined predicate (connecting principle), why concept never did formal work.
- Level: Psychological and philosophical.
- Contestation: Synchronicity widely criticised for vagueness, lack of empirical support; later extension to “acausal orderedness” admission of limitations.
- Relevance: Origin of synchronicity concept; shows difficulty of formalising non-causal connections.
Pauli, W. (1955). “The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler.” In Jung & Pauli, Naturerklärung und Psyche.
- Establishes: Pauli’s essay on Kepler and Robert Fludd (Robertus de Fluctibus). Half the evidence in §7 is content of Pauli’s preoccupation.
- Level: Historical and psychological.
- Contestation: Pauli’s interpretation of Kepler debated; historical material accepted.
- Relevance: Context for Pauli effect incident; shows Pauli’s engagement with non-rational thought.
Meier, C. A. (ed.) (2001). Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-1958. Princeton University Press.
- Establishes: Primary correspondence between Pauli and Jung; best source for how they reasoned together.
- Level: Intellectual history.
- Contestation: Letters widely accepted as authentic; interpretation debated.
- Relevance: Depth and seriousness of Pauli-Jung collaboration; counters dismissal as mere speculation.
von Franz, M.-L. (1974). Number and Time: Reflections Leading Toward a Unification of Psychology and Physics. Northwestern University Press.
- Establishes: Jung’s assignment to von Franz; concludes number is archetype common to psyche and matter.
- Level: Psychological and philosophical.
- Contestation: Interpretation of number as archetype controversial, even among Jungians.
- Relevance: Pythagorean move in modern guise; bridge between inner and outer built from external measure (assumption 42).
Enz, C. P. (2002). No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli. Oxford University Press.
- Establishes: Standard biography by former assistant; soberest source on Pauli effect and colleagues’ treatment of it.
- Level: Scientific biography.
- Contestation: Account widely accepted; interpretation of Pauli effect debated.
- Relevance: Documents phenomenon and professional response; shows even great scientists complicit in exclusion.
Gieser, S. (2005). The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics. Wolfgang Pauli’s Dialogue with C.G. Jung. Springer.
- Establishes: Most thorough scholarly treatment of Pauli-Jung collaboration; historically careful, not committed to metaphysics.
- Level: Intellectual history.
- Contestation: Historical work widely accepted; interpretation balanced.
- Relevance: Best source for understanding Pauli-Jung dialogue without later myth-making distortions.
Roth, R. (2011-). Return of the World Soul. Pari Publishing.
- Establishes: Source of 1948 Pauli effect reading used in §7, developed from von Franz’s material. Interpretive and committed to particular metaphysical view.
- Level: Interpretive and speculative.
- Contestation: Interpretation not widely accepted in mainstream scholarship.
- Relevance: Cited for reconstruction of Pauli effect incident, not as independent evidence.
Afterword: To the Reader
This essay is an invitation—not to believe in the paranormal, but to examine the normal. The category of the paranormal is a mirror. It reflects back to us the commitments we have made, the boundaries we have drawn, the exclusions we have enacted. To dissolve the category is not to embrace its contents uncritically. It is to see ourselves more clearly.
The work ahead is not to prove that the paranormal is real. It is to ask: What have we made normal? And what have we excluded in the process? The answers will not come from the laboratory alone. They will come from history, anthropology, philosophy, from the study of the practices the inventory has obscured. They will come, above all, from the willingness to look at the anomalies—not as curiosities, but as diagnostics.
The paranormal is normal. The question is whether we are ready to see it.
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