Though I was unimpressed with the recent Final Destination 2, it did get me thinking about the premise of the films, which is interesting and had potential. The plots are about people who managed to avoid death because psychic powers foretold their doom. Thinking they discern a pattern in the deaths around them, the survivors use their predictive powers to try and stay alive. This is all the more difficult, of course, because they are not being stalked by Jason Voorhees, the Predator, or other typical baddie but Death itself.
Perhaps the one redeeming quality of Final Destination 2 is how it realistically shows the machinations of the superstitious mind, and just how illogical most “psychic predictions” really are. The Final Destination movies provide an interesting platform to discuss the idea of predicting the future and psychic powers.
At one point in Final Destination 2, the psychic girl suggests all the survivors keep in touch by cell phone, and if she has a vision she will call the others and let them know what she predicted. For example, she says, if she sees a subway, that would tell everyone to go to a high-rise building—where a subway could never be. But of course in the fuzzy world of ambiguous predictions, that wouldn’t work at all because someone in a high rise could be watching a TV program about subways. Or be a subway conductor. Or eating a Subway sandwich.
This is how real-life “psychics” try and make their incorrect predictions fit the facts, by stretching logic and plausibility. Thus when a psychic “predicts” that a missing person’s body will be found “near water” (as they often do), it’s a pretty sure guess. “Near water” could be interpreted as in or near a lake, river, ditch, water pipe, below a water tower, etc.
Sometimes, however, this is wrong. This technique backfired on self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne when she told Fox News Channel’s Paula Zahn that missing Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy’s body was near “some trees down in a marshy area.” Browne may need to buy some Windex for her crystal ball: The remains were found across a steep incline in a heavily wooded area—perhaps near “some trees” but clearly not “in a marshy area,” since a marsh located on an incline is geographically impossible. At least Browne isn’t alone in her faulty psychic powers: None of the other thousands of tips from psychics led police to her body either. If psychics have the powers they claim, why are such vague, useless predictions the best they can do?
If you have any weird feelings, Final Destination 2’s psychic says, or experience any strange or “ironic” moments (such as seeing a truck with “drink responsibly” written on it steered by a drinking driver), that is a “sign” that Death is coming. They interpret ambiguous everyday situations and patterns (such as shadows and stains on carpets) and read meaning into them.
The human mind is amazingly good at imagining connections between unrelated phenomena; there is even a formal logical fallacy describing this: post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of it”). The idea is that just because one event follows another doesn’t mean the first caused the second. This sort of flawed reasoning occurs in everyday life, for example when a person thinks of a friend who he or she hasn’t spoken to in years, and that person suddenly calls. To the superstitious mind, it may seem like a “special connection,” psychic power, or the hand of Fate instead of a simple coincidence.
Or take an example from the first Final Destination: Many people have a fear of flying. According to a Harris Poll of 1,015 adults surveyed between July 15 and 20, 1999, about half of Americans have a fear of flying (14% very afraid, 35% very to somewhat afraid). While those most afraid won’t fly at all, with well over a hundred passengers on the average domestic flight, it is almost certain that many of those passengers will be nervous. They may search the wings for signs of trouble, listen to the engine roar for odd sounds, or imagine the plane crashing and killing all aboard. For the person who is afraid, these thoughts and feelings are very real.
I suspect we can all recall times when, at least for a few seconds, we thought for sure we were going to die. Yet we all made it through despite the genuine (if momentary) conviction of our impending doom. The intuition was wrong, the feelings a false alarm. This is exactly why “gut feelings” and intuition about such things are not good guides and cannot be trusted. Yet many New Age, self-help, and feminist books place a very high value on trusting intuition.
After airline crashes, stories often emerge of last-minute twists of fate that saved passengers from an early death. A traffic delay, a flat tire, or simply misplaced tickets that made a person miss a doomed plane are cited as examples of divine intervention, or Fate deciding that it’s not yet that person’s time to go (though, of course, God, Fate, or whoever is being thanked had no problem with killing the hundreds of other people who took the flight).
A news story last year showed the flip-side of the story. On July 2, 2002, a Russian plane collided with a DHL cargo plane over Germany. Fifty-two children and nineteen adults were killed; the children were headed to Spain for a beach vacation, and were chosen for academic excellence at their school in Russia. In this case, the twist of fate did not save the children but killed them. Their tour guide had mistakenly directed their tour bus to the wrong airport, causing them to miss their flight. The busy tourist season caused a delay, and the children were re-booked on a special chartered flight out of Moscow two days later. That flight crashed and killed them all, while their original flight landed safely. Death’s design or simply bad luck?
The Final Destination movies sort of gloss over the paradox inherent in precognition: The future would be changed by knowledge of the future. For example, foreknowledge of an accident —a car crash, for example— would move any responsible person to prevent the tragedy, thus making the precognition inaccurate. So which is it? If the future is changed, then the prediction wasn’t accurate, was it?
Accurate psychic predictions also have serious implications for individual liberty, responsibility, and free will. If psychics can see the future, that means that our future is predetermined. I suspect that many people who believe in precognition don’t realize that if they are right, they have answered one of the fundamental questions in philosophy, that of free will versus determinism. Most people would prefer to believe that they control their own actions and make their own decisions in life; but anyone’s ability to know the future proves them wrong. Our society presumes that people have free will and assigns individual responsibility to each person accordingly. But there can be no responsibility in a world in which we are all essentially actors going through pre-scripted roles. If you believe that it is possible to have accurate knowledge of the future, logically you should believe that you have no control over (or choice in) your life. It’s that simple.
Perhaps if psychic predictive powers were proven real, criminals would be able to avoid penalties for their crimes. After all, society shouldn’t punish people for crimes they had no choice but to commit. If Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Osama bin Laden were simply following their predetermined paths, surely they are not to blame for the vicious roles given them.
Some fortunetellers try to get around the free will problem by claiming that their powers show only a possible future, that individual free will does exist and can alter the future. But besides being illogical, what good is that? Presumably the whole point in tapping into a higher power is to avoid the uncertainty that muddles predictions in our world. One doesn’t need to consult a psychic or astrologer to come up with a limp “possible” future of what might happen; anyone can do that. Most people want to know what will happen.
If psychics were real, their predictions should be the most accurate type of prediction. We’d know at the beginning of the year what day the World Trade Center would be bombed and when George Harrison would die. We’d know what happened to Chandra Levy and the missing, pregnant Laci Peterson. All we’d have to do would be to check the events off a list as they occur. And unlike predictions based upon “normal” criteria (such as predicting the number of disease cases by extrapolating current ones, or using past performance of a stock fund), information gleaned from supernatural powers would presumably be much more accurate. Uncertainty in prediction is usually the result of human error or inability to predict unforeseen circumstances. By removing human limitations from the method of prediction and placing it in the hands of a supernatural force or entity, psychic information should be uncannily accurate.
Psychics should have near-universal agreement in predictions. Instead of pockets of occasional, correct predictions, we’d get hundreds of psychics saying the same thing, coming to each prediction independently. Granted, a person might consult three different doctors with the same malady and get slightly different diagnoses, but they would be pretty similar: one won’t claim the problem is a broken leg, for example, while another insists it’s dandruff.
Perhaps the claim might be that there are different forces at work, and not all psychics can “tap into” powers of equal quality or strength. But to claim that, well, some “higher powers” are better than others just begs the question. Either a prediction comes true or it doesn’t, and if two different psychics are consulting two different “powers,” and only one gets it right, doesn’t that call the entire idea into question? If these paranormal powers are so fallible, why use them at all? We can get bad advice right here on Earth, and it’s usually free.
It’s a good thing that psychics and the Final Destination films are fiction; the truth would be too scary to contemplate.
© Benjamin Radford
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