ESP: Will Evidence Survive Posturing?

Benedict Carey reports,

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

- "Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage", New York Times (January 5, 2011)

We hear, of course, the familiar "craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is ..."

ESP may be the victim of a sort of materialism in science that has long since functioned more as a stopper on science than a filter. Briefly, there have been many honest studies that confirm the existence of some sort of entanglement, as Mario Beauregard and I discuss in some detail in The Spiritual Brain.

ESP is a psi phenomenon, the apparent ability of some humans and perhaps animals, to consistently score above chance in controlled studies of mental influences on events. It is seen in such phenomena as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, and is a low-level effect, to be sure, but efforts to disconfirm it have failed.

It isn't popular.

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.

—Artificial intelligence pioneer A. M. Turing, quoted in A. M. Turing, excerpt from “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950), reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett, Mind’s I, p. 66.

And it seems nothing much has changed since Turing's (1912-1954) day.

Carey mentions an argument against study of the psi effect which was once offered against Newton's laws of gravity: No mechanism is proposed. That's not a very good argument when there is persistent evidence for a small effect. We still don't have a definitive mechanism for gravity, but Newton's laws proved outstandingly useful in subsequent decades and were accepted on that basis, mechanism or no.

Lets hope that study wins out over furore and posturing.

See also: Psi effect: The Teton Mountain Stomp! Stamp! has not worked, I guess ... and Neuroscience and Physicalism: A Key Letter

Psychic phenomena: Persistent paradox

Here is an interesting old paper by Robert G. Jahn, in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Vol. 70, No. 2, February 1982), "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Persepective." Abstract:

Abstract-Although a variety of so-called psychic phenomena have attracted man's attention throughout recorded history, organized scholarly effort to comprehend such effects is just one century old, and systematic academic research roughly half that age. Over recent years, a sizeable spectrum of evidence has been brought forth from reputable laboratories in several disciplines to suggest that at times human consciousness can acquire information inaccessible by any known physical mechanism(ESP), and can influence the behavior of physical systems or processes(PK), but even the most rigorous and sophisticated of these studies display a characteristic dilemma: The experimental results are rarely replicable in the strict scientific sense, but the anomalous yields are well beyond chance expectations and a number of common features thread through the broad range of reported effects. Various attempts at theoretical modeling have so far shown little functional value in explicating experimental results, but have served to stimulate fundamental re-examination of the role of consciousness in the determination of physical reality. Further careful study of this formidable field seems justified, but only within the context of very well conceived and technically impeccable experiments of large data-base capability, with disciplined attention to the pertinent aesthetic factors and with more constructive involvement of the critical community.

Mario Beauregard and I talk a bit about this in The Spiritual Brain.

The basic problem is that there are two confounding factors in the study of psychic phenomena. One is Madam Rosa the Psychic, who allegedly uses occult powers - for a fee - to help a lonely woman find a tall, dark, and handsome man. The good thing about Madam Rosa is that she doesn't even pretend that what she is doing is science, which clears at least some rubbish out of the public's way.

Then there are the materialist atheists, who need to discredit any psychic effects because their theories require the mind to be an illusion with no power to cause anything to happen.

In principle, an atheist could accept psychic effects. Not believing in God is not at all the same thing as not believing in the existence or causal power of the human mind. But a materialist atheist can't accept such a solution. So he will forever be finding some reason to discredit any findings regarding psychic effects. Even one such finding would be fatal to his case.

The ongoing problem isn't with finding a critical community, but with finding one that can offer constructive criticism as opposed to simple denunciation.

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.)