Celia Green is, as you say, a parapsychologist; “Advice to Clever Children” is, among other things, advocacy for belief in ESP and telekinesis and such things; it seems curious that the only indication in this post of that aspect of her thought is four letters “para” towards the end of the first sentence.
This is a post about Green’s psychological and philosophical reflections. A book in which only one chapter (chapter 17) out of 39 introduces paranormal topics, and only in order to talk about the psychology of attempting the impossible, hardly constitutes advocacy for belief in psychic powers, and it would be positively misleading to describe it as you have done.
Paranormal topics are found in (at least—I haven’t checked through the whole thing) the Introduction and chapters 16, 17, 20, 23. I agree that they are not central to the book. (Though, in view of the “Invitation to Young People”, I’d say that the book is about paranormal phenomena in roughly the same way as Eliezer’s “Sequences” are about AI.) None the less, Green’s serious belief in ESP and telekinesis (and, more specifically, in her own ability to perform those psychic feats) seems to me to be useful information about the nature of her thinking.
(It’s by no means the only thing in the book that strikes me as a very bad sign. Others include her apparent obsession with her own cleverness and the lack of support she received from others; her statement—she seems to be proud of it! -- that her philosophical views have remained unaltered since the age of 13; repeated gratuitous digs at “socialism”; and more.)
I do think chapter 17 is the only one in which psychic powers feature directly as a topic of discussion, and then only to illustrate her psychological technique for attempting impossible things, which boils down to reminding yourself that you don’t know them to be impossible because you don’t really know anything. I see there are similar incidental remarks elsewhere in the book too, but it’s all pretty tangential to the main subject, the “two kinds of psychology”.
Actually, her career as a parapsychology researcher is about as slim as Eliezer’s career as an A.I. programmer. She produced one serious book of “advocacy”, The Decline and Fall of Science, and mostly what it advocates is that her research organization ought to be supported in a broad program of psychophysical investigations, which would also encompass phenomena such as lucid dreams and other hallucinatory experiences, and the potential for physiological self-control arising from altered psychological states. The objective is to learn more about reality, not to shore up a particular belief system. But her group has never managed to establish a lab.
Celia Green is, as you say, a parapsychologist; “Advice to Clever Children” is, among other things, advocacy for belief in ESP and telekinesis and such things; it seems curious that the only indication in this post of that aspect of her thought is four letters “para” towards the end of the first sentence.
This is a post about Green’s psychological and philosophical reflections. A book in which only one chapter (chapter 17) out of 39 introduces paranormal topics, and only in order to talk about the psychology of attempting the impossible, hardly constitutes advocacy for belief in psychic powers, and it would be positively misleading to describe it as you have done.
Paranormal topics are found in (at least—I haven’t checked through the whole thing) the Introduction and chapters 16, 17, 20, 23. I agree that they are not central to the book. (Though, in view of the “Invitation to Young People”, I’d say that the book is about paranormal phenomena in roughly the same way as Eliezer’s “Sequences” are about AI.) None the less, Green’s serious belief in ESP and telekinesis (and, more specifically, in her own ability to perform those psychic feats) seems to me to be useful information about the nature of her thinking.
(It’s by no means the only thing in the book that strikes me as a very bad sign. Others include her apparent obsession with her own cleverness and the lack of support she received from others; her statement—she seems to be proud of it! -- that her philosophical views have remained unaltered since the age of 13; repeated gratuitous digs at “socialism”; and more.)
I do think chapter 17 is the only one in which psychic powers feature directly as a topic of discussion, and then only to illustrate her psychological technique for attempting impossible things, which boils down to reminding yourself that you don’t know them to be impossible because you don’t really know anything. I see there are similar incidental remarks elsewhere in the book too, but it’s all pretty tangential to the main subject, the “two kinds of psychology”.
Actually, her career as a parapsychology researcher is about as slim as Eliezer’s career as an A.I. programmer. She produced one serious book of “advocacy”, The Decline and Fall of Science, and mostly what it advocates is that her research organization ought to be supported in a broad program of psychophysical investigations, which would also encompass phenomena such as lucid dreams and other hallucinatory experiences, and the potential for physiological self-control arising from altered psychological states. The objective is to learn more about reality, not to shore up a particular belief system. But her group has never managed to establish a lab.
Did she advocate lucid dreams before LaBerge published? If so, that’d be a point in her favor.
She was the pioneer. She published about it in 1968.