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not the given set of information it’s yielded to date. That store of information will change, and if history is any guide, it will continue to change dramatically—in ways we haven’t even dreamt of. Look at the way science has dealt with quantum mechanics. By now, most people are familiar with the basic weirdness of the quantum universe, where particles regularly perform impossible feats: appearing in two places at once; communicating information across distances; blinking out of existence in one spot and reappearing suddenly in another.
    Those strange subatomic operations underpin our every day reality, mainstream physicists long maintained, but do not manifest themselves up here at the macro-scale. In fact, in the realm of the paranormal, skeptics have long laughed at the way believers resort to quantum explanations for everything from the afterlife to consciousness and telepathy: Quantum phenomena are so small and require such cold and stable environments, they chortled, that they could never persist long enough to be of any real importance in the operations of warm, wet biological systems. But just in the past five years biologists have been discovering possible interactions between the micro- and macro-scales—interactions thought impossible till we found them. I discuss a few of these in chapter 3, but I am arguing that, given this state of affairs, we should be alert for and wary of dogmatism of any kind—be it religious or scientific. And I am further arguing that, before the evidence is in, many of us presuppose the answer that will best fit our worldviews—and soothe our overheated amygdalas.
    What this means, in practice, is that professional skeptics deny any thought that validation for mysticism might arise from the quantum realm, while many modern believers go on seeing the quantum as the heavenly land we’ll journey to when we die. I’d like to see these two sides in the debate start collaborating—or at least start taking each other seriously, and occasionally, there are signs such a thing might be possible. I’m a fan of the skeptic Brian Dunning, an atheist without an attitude, who runs a podcast on critical thinking called Skeptoid , which I highly recommend. And I’m perhaps even a bigger fan of the semi-retired entrepreneur Alex Tsakiris, who runs a podcast called Skeptiko . Tsakiris doggedly attempts to bring proponents of the paranormal and skeptics together for productive conversations—and sometimes he even succeeds. The brightest spot on the horizon, however, might be David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and author who has become the de facto leader of a new way of looking at the world, dubbed possibilianism . The creed of the possibilian is, I think, best summed up by Eagleman himself in an interview with the New York Times: “Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position—one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.”
    In most respects, I applaud Eagleman. We live in a world of false certainties, a world in which a fundamentalist minister like Pat Robertson claims to know God, and Richard Dawkins claims with near-equal certainty and no less passion that no such God exists. The media, of which I am a member, foments this kind of debate all the time, in which only two polarized views are presented. We suffer through this in political coverage, too, listening to the most strident Republicans and Democrats and no one with an alternative point of view. And I think, as