Blog Post 1

 Clairvoyance: Lorraine Warren

    While reading Lecture 2: The Jersey Devil, a topic that was briefly touched on caught my attention: clairvoyance. According to the Oxford Dictionary, clairvoyance is the supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact. In this lesson a specific clairvoyant was brought up, and if you're familiar with The Conjuring movie series, then you've most certainly heard of Lorraine Warren. Throughout the series of movies, Lorraine and her husband Ed travel around the world in pursuit of demons, witches, and ghosts who haunt the living. They're best known for the containment of the cursed Annabelle Doll, which resides in their personal museum of horrors. Lorraine is able to look into the past and see into the future of others with her clairvoyant abilities. She's helped with exorcisms, possessions, and banishing demons. But due to her clairvoyant abilities, she's hyper aware of her surroundings. It's almost as if her "6th sense" is both a blessing and a burden.

    In the lecture slides, I find it interesting that it gets mentioned that Lorraine was in contact with the cryptid(an animal that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist) known as "Big Foot".  Lorraine had claimed to have telepathically been in contact with a creature she believed to have been Big Foot. The creature had apparently sent her mental pictures as a way of communicating and Warren had described this creature as "intelligent". Now when others with clairvoyant abilities have been questioned about Big Foot's elusiveness, they suggest that the creature probably possesses a power of invisibility. The clairvoyant ability is already considered a "hallucination" under psychiatric standards, and there's very much a lack of belief from the scientific community regarding this ability. So with the little faith already instilled in people with clairvoyant abilities, the answer being "invisibility" isn't entirely convincing.  According to Susan Blackmore, in "Blackmore's 1st Law", people's,"desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist". As much as entertaining the idea of Big Foot's existence as well as clairvoyant ability would be interesting, its existence just isn't plausible. The claims of seeing into the future and telepathically being able to communicate just can't be proved, there's no evidence that can be collected to prove or disprove this. The only evidence that can possibly be collected is the testimonials from these clairvoyant people, which is a tell-tale sign of pseudoscience. And as stated in our lectures, pseudoscience relies on fast thinking and heuristics. Once again using Big Foot as an example, simply suggesting that the creature is invisible isn't a well thought out answer. It's an answer given with little to no thought or reflection, and doesn't help support the idea of Big Foot or clairvoyance. It's gives no reassurance, presents no facts, and does nothing to help support the claim.