First Sight

First Sight by James Carpenter, a practising psychologist, is one among many recent publications with a high standard of scholarship that seeks to rethink mainstream psychological understandings of mind, consciousness, etc. As Carpenter rightly notes, parapsychology is often framed as dealing with the abnormal, and parapsychologists are apt to argue that it is the anomalous events that are ignored or even denied by mainstream psychologists, but that they must somehow be worked into our understanding of the self, mind, etc. Carpenter, however, argues that a paranormal or para-psychological (psi) phenomenon is not always a rare or an atypical event (although he acknowledges them as well), but it can be traced out in everyday and normal cognitive functions of ordinary people.

Carpenter's "first sight" theory of psi is that we should also look for the paranormal in the normal as well as the extraordinary. There is an unconscious and unbounded origin to normal waking consciousness, one that can be studied and one that must be included if our picture of the human self is to be complete. He attempts to show us how psi is present within ordinary consciousness, and how this psi can help us better understand ordinary human decision making, creativity, cognition-formation, anxiety-management, memory, etc. He also applies his theory to some of the traditional paranormal "practices" such as remote viewing, and tries to make sense of paranormal events like pre-cognition using first sight.

The text is systematically organised, detailed in its exposition and sufficiently referenced, although I shall say more on that below. It has 26 Chapters with VI Sections. Sections I-III are mainly concerned with providing a general theory of mind, one that takes into consideration how conscious experience is formed by personal or individual processes of meaning-making, processes that are not reducible to physical mechanisms. Carpenter is aware that in saying this he has immediately put himself in opposition with the mainstream approach, but he does not directly engage in philosophical polemics or with polemicists from the mainstream. Section IV examines and attempts to countervail opposition psi, and Section V discuss some real-world applications of first sight.

Section VI, Chapter 22 provides a helpful overview of some recent work in parapsychology that supports his first sight theory. This chapter would have been the most interesting chapter to me, since it would directly root the more theoretical aspects of the book in contemporary research, but I felt the author could have put more time into detailing and critically evaluating the referenced studies. This highlights my major concern with the book: it is highly theoretical, but not composed in an argumentative or "defensive" style. Although learned and systematic, it does not read like a philosophical defense of a mental theory. It may, then, be more relevant to practising psychologists (which I am not) and the larger parapsychological community rather than those working in philosophy of mind (which I am).

Carpenter's central thesis – that the unconscious and typically considered paranormal aspects of human cognition – should be and can be studied to help us better understand our ordinary thoughts and experiences is both simple and complex, obvious and often ignored, and I think he is to be complimented for bringing it into further discussion with this book.