Psi effect: The Teton Mountain Stomp! Stamp! has not worked, I guess ...

A friend writes to remind me of some old papers regarding the psi effect - entanglement of mental states which results in action at a distance.

Materialist atheists have gone to considerable trouble to stamp out the very idea because their doctrine requires them to hold that the mind is an illusion. This 1987 paper is interesting too:

"With a scoring rate of 52.4% hits, the result is statistically significant with odds against chance of 10 million to one."

The main thing to see is that materialist atheists can't accept it because it is fatal to their system, not because it is fatal to science or nature or anything else.

Mario Beauregard and I made the point in The Spiritual Brain that psi is pretty well established as a persistent, low level effect. It doesn't justify TV psychics' ratings, of course, but - like blackbody radiation - it is there and is not going away.

Explaining it away is a waste of time. Explaining it accurately might lead to new insights.

See also: Neuroscience and physicalism: A key letter

(Note: Teton Mountain Stomp! Stamp? A folk dance. You can guess what it is like.)