Paranormalia

Guests on Paranormalia

Since I seem to be on a sort of extended semi-hiatus I thought it would be a good idea to get other people to provide some comment from time to time. First up is Matthew Colborn, a freelance writer and artist with an MSc. in cognitive science and a doctorate in mainstream experimental psychology.

Although not blind to the problems of experimental parapsychology, Matthew thinks that there is more than enough positive evidence to justify serious research, especially given the lack of a convincing theory of consciousness.

Matthew posts below on Richard Wiseman's latest research.

Skeptics: more media savvy?

by Matthew Colborn

Richard Wiseman is at it again. He's just done a remote viewing study on Twitter with 7000 participants that, suprise surprise, has got negative results (New Scientist, 13 June 2009, p. 23).

Some thoughts:

1. Why is it that skeptics in the UK at least seem to have a far higher profile in the pop science literature than academic parapsychologists? Most controversies on psi in magazines like the New Scientist are fielded by Wiseman, French, etc., who seem a lot more media savvy than, say, the Northampton people.

2. I've come to see these sort of experiments as disconformatory propaganda e.g. high profile 'skeptics' claiming that they've looked into ESP and found nothing. Historically, mass-testing has proved a poor way of eliciting psi, but a negative result this way is a very effective way of persuading fellow scientists that there's nothing in parapsychology.

3. Ok, I'll be blunt; I think that academic parapsychology is absolutely lousy at self-promotion, especially when compared to those in the skeptical camp, who are far more articulate and media friendly. I suspect that Nancy Zigrone was right when she said that parapsychologists have let the skeptics set the agenda too much. The price is that parapsychologists tend to remain always on the offensive.

Secondly, academic parapsychologists seem a very timid bunch, who would rather hide and preserve reputations than stick their necks out and advocate their research. This also allows skeptics to gain the upper hand.

Another consequence for short-term timidity is a longer term closing of departments and the sidelining from serious academic discussion.

4. I'll be even blunter. I think that parapsychologists are losing the fight to be a visible and viable part of the academic research programme. This is despite the fact that there are probably more academic parapsychologists scattered through the UK that there have ever been. The spokespeople, however, remain far too apologetic and silent during critical moments, such as during the closing of the Edinburgh labs, or after the recent Perrott-Warwick day, where, once more, the skeptics dominated and set the agenda.

And it's not that the New Scientist necessarily censors 'pro' pieces; on the same pages (pp. 22--3), there's a piece by a chiropractor defending the profession against Singh's allegations.It's that professional proponents often lack the skeptics' initiative as far as the mass media is concerned. (This is ignoring the amateurs on shows like 'Haunted homes, 'etc., who often portray parapsychologyin a poor light, anyway.)

We all know who speaks for skepticism; they lose no opportunity for publicity and voice. But who, precisely, is speaking up for academic parapsychology?

The Geller Spanner

A subject of discussion over the years has been the idea of the Permanent Paranormal Object, something that would be impossible to create by normal means. One idea is a pair of interlinking rings, each seamless and made of different materials, like two different types of timber. As far as I know, there is nothing like this in existence. Even if there was, I'm not convinced it would be anything more than an object of curiosity - and the usual endless controversy, like the Turin Shroud and the Kluski wax hands.

But Guy Lyon Playfair has come up with a contender, the spanner that Uri Geller allegedly bent during a visit to a British Grand Prix event at Silverstone in 1998. Guy mentioned this in the comments thread on my Geller post recently, and his article on the subject has now appeared in this month's Fortean Times. 

The story is as follows. Geller had been invited to the pit by his Brazilian friend the Tyrrell driver Ricardo Rosset, and did his metal bending stuff in front of a group of mechanics. According to a report in the 29 July 1998 issue of The Autocar, Geller 'smoothed his fingers along an 18mm combination Snap-On spanner and it bent as thought it was made of spaghetti'. The mechanics tried to bend it by force, but could not even make an impression; then they put it in a vice and whacked it with a hammer, but could not bend it the way Geller had.

Writing this up for his book Mindforce (1999) Guy phoned Rosset in Sao Paulo for his version. Having bent a few spoons, Rosset said, one of the mechanics handed him a spanner and asked him to bend that as well. 'There were about 10 of us watching, and it took a while. He held it by one end and rubbed it in the middle, then he took his other hand away and it just bent - upwards". It apparently took about ten minutes, much longer than usual with spoons.

An appeal by Autosport brought another eye-witness account. A member of the Tyrrell team wrote in to say that he had been standing about one metre away from Uri when he bent the spanner, which had come straight from one of the mechanics' cabinets, and Uri had no way of having touched or even seen the spanner before he made it 'droop' over to one side. This is slightly at variance with the claim by Geller and Rosset that it bent upwards (Guy says that's how it is with everything he has personally seen Geller bend), but there is no suggestion in any of these accounts that he used any kind of normal force.

After Guy mentioned this incident in my previous post, a sceptic argued that Geller could have brought along his own pre-bent spanner and then planted it ... 'not exactly a major feat for an experienced conjuror.' Well, in order to fake this, Geller would have had to know the exact type and make of the spanner that would be handed to him. He would also have been able to bend it by normal means, and this is where it gets interesting.

The spanner is a pretty heavy duty bit of gear, as one would expect, this being Formula 1. It's made of chrome vanadium steel, which is exceptionally tough and resistant to wear and fatigue. One way to bend chrome vanadium is it to heat it to around 800 centigrade, at which point the surface would oxidise and the chrome would turn black - which the Tyrrell spanner has not. The other way is force. But how much? Guy has the original and having got hold of a similar spanner (the Tyrrell one is no longer available) went to a university mechanical engineering department to get them both tested. A Vickers hardness test established that the Tyrrell spanner was 12% harder than this one. Applying force to Guy's - unbent - spanner via a strain gauge required half a ton of pressure to bend it to a similar extent, rather more than the world weight-lifting record.  So to pre-bend a spanner which he planned later to switch, Geller would also have required serious machinery.

Guy suggests this might qualify at least as a Temporary Paranormal Object, until someone manages to bend a similar spanner under the same conditions as those of the Geller incident. I'm not sure about this, as long as the object can be duplicated by a machine, which I don't think has been ruled out. But the amount of research and effort involved, at the very least, complicates the obvious normal explanation, that Geller simply switched spanners, and that the audience didn't notice. It's not just the spoons but effects on this level which make some thinking people take Geller seriously; another is the frequently reported phenomenon of the cutlery continuing to bend in people's pockets or back home on their sideboards.  If James Randi or some other debunking magician could actually duplicate this sort of thing then I'd think again.

Patricia Putt - Score for Sceptics

What to make of the comprehensive failure of Patricia Putt in psychic testing recently?

I hadn't heard of Putt before, but she is apparently well established as a professional psychic, aka Ankhara. She has had media exposure, turns up at hauntings, exorcises, and does readings for £25 a go. She decided to go in for Randi's million-dollar challenge, and Richard Wiseman and Chris French were deputed to carry out the preliminary tests.

The experiment involved ten young women in turns sitting in front of her for a reading. They were all white, same gender and age-group to keep any identifying characteristics to a minimum, uniformly dressed in gowns, features concealed by wrap-around dark glasses and ski-masks, and facing away from her. There was no verbal interaction; Putt wrote her thoughts down. The ten transcripts were then handed to the subjects who each attempted to identify the reading that applied to her. Not a single one did so correctly.

This is a pretty comprehensive failure. One can make various excuses: the test doesn't prove that Putt isn't psychic (she might just have been having a bad day, and it doesn't prove that nobody is psychic. But although both these are logically true, it doesn't look good.

You can also argue that people who go for readings aren't heavily disguised, as the subjects were here, so Putt wasn't working in the conditions she was used to. But this is exactly what tests like this aim to do, to prevent any opening for cold reading. And, just as important, Putt was quite happy to go ahead on that basis. According to French, she felt that she had been treated fairly, and it was only afterwards, having scored zero, and having thought about it a bit, that she identified that as the problem.

It interests me that although this comes under the heading of Randi's million dollar challenge, it wasn't actually Randi who carried out this preliminary test, but French and Wiseman, who unlike him take a moderate approach to debunking parapsychology, and can't really be accused of setting Putt up for a fail. Curiously - and correct me if I'm wrong - there are rather few well-documented cases of psychics actually failing the challenge - we're just told that they are all kooks who never got past the preliminaries. The only other one I can think of was also quite recent, the case of Derek Ogilvie, whose failure in tests by both French and Randi was pretty total. But if it's so easy to demonstrate that psychism is a mirage, one wonders why, in the many years the challenge has been going, there aren't many more cases like Putt and Ogilvie.

One possibility is that psychics are too canny to let themselves be tested in highly unnatural circumstances, ie giving readings to people facing in the opposite direction and swaddled up like mummies. But apparently some of them, like Putt and Ogilvie, are naïve. They have boundless confidence in their own abilities and willingly walk into what others might see as a trap, agreeing to work in circumstances that they have never tried before.

Randi's million dollar challenge has always been vulnerable to the argument that there isn't any proper testing going on at all - it's just an opportunistic debunking ploy. But when people like Wiseman and French start to carry out very public and  transparent testing like this, it can start to be taken seriously by people who might otherwise have given psychics the benefit of the doubt. It's difficult to think of anything more helpful for the sceptics' cause, and it's interesting that this should only happen when the challenge itself is about to be withdrawn. 

Apart from the matter of influencing public perceptions, I'm interested in the science here. I take psychism to be real not on the basis of single tests like this, but on the accumulated data of psychical research. So I'm wondering why Putt failed. Some possibilities: she's not psychic at all, but just thinks she is; she is psychic, but needs to have a normal interaction with her sitters; as Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail suggests, the sitters might be sceptics who deliberately chose the wrong reading (unlikely, as Greg acknowledges, but potentially an experimental flaw); or that somehow French and Wiseman inhibited psi from manifesting - the experimenter effect.

If any of these, or a combination of them, is correct, it's worth following up. I'm thinking of the famous remote viewing experiments in which Marilyn Schlitz got significant results while Wiseman, using exactly the same setup and subjects, did not.  So let's get Putt back and have her work in the same circumstances with sceptics and parapsychologists, and compare the results. Or get them working with mediums of the first rank, like Colin Fry, for instance, or John Edward, who worked under controlled conditions in Gary Schwartz's first experiments, with sitters concealed behind a curtain and not speaking.

I suppose the conclusion is that we can't rule out psi unless we at least give it a chance to appear. Once we've seen it in action, we can fiddle with the parameters and see what's required to make it appear or disappear. Then we can argue about it. One-off tests aren't a way of establishing anything conclusively.

Could this sort of co-operation ever occur? I think both French and Wiseman might be up for it, if there was the organisation and the funds. But that's a big 'if'. I can't see it happening unless someone has the incentive to make it happen, and there's not much of that around at the moment. 

Uri Geller

Had a rather unexpected encounter with Uri Geller last week. He wants me to work on a writing project - nothing to do with the paranormal, but it should be interesting. He has an apartment in central London near the river, with a spectacular view across the city, although I don't think he spends much time there.  He was what I expected - tall and wiry, pleasant, outgoing, enthusiastic, intense, mentally sitting on the edge of his chair, as I was physically sitting on the edge of mine (his sofa was not made for comfort). No question, the guy relates on another level to most people: we parted with a hug, which doesn't often happen to me on an initial business meeting (OK, it's never happened).

It got me thinking about what a phenomenon Geller is. By chance I had recently read Jonathan Margolis's excellent biog, so his career is fresh in my mind.  To me, Geller is the tip of a very large iceberg, but for most people he is Mr Paranormal, there isn't really anyone else like him. I see him as the modern equivalent of Daniel Home, someone who caught the public imagination in a way that other psychics and mediums didn't quite manage. Both Home and Geller were investigated scientifically, but not in much depth: there is the Crookes experiments in Home's case, the SRI experiments published in Nature in 1974 in Geller's. The rest is mostly anecdotal, and it's the usual mix of enthusiasm, astonishment, confusion and disdain.

My views about Geller's abilities are a lot less complicated than some other people's. I do remember long ago sweating a bit over the SRI experiments where he successfully identified some drawings from an isolation chamber, and wondering, apropos of a ludicrous New Scientist article, whether he really was receiving signals via a radio receiver implanted in a gold tooth, or how much he could possibly have seen through a small hole in the wall, which James Randi claims - I think from the hostile gossip of some insider - was 34 inches high, but which someone who actually visited subsequently found was at floor level, in which case it would only have been any use if he had been asked to divine the colour of the experimenters' socks. But over the years my conviction that psi is a genuine entity became so firm, and Geller's abilities are quite clearly in a different category to anyone else's, it seemed simply the most logical conclusion to suppose that he is psychic.

The problem for a lot of people is that psychism is not a category that they recognise, or can attach any real sense to. It's a non-explanation. I think that accounts for the rather confused, incoherent nature of a lot of what gets said about him, particularly by professional mentalists and magicians  who have seen him at work. There are quite a few such comments here, and to me they make fascinating reading.

This just happens to be first on the list:

"So I came to my very personal conclusion that Uri Geller has some percentage of "abilities" although I am still convinced that he is using 90% of the time tricks. I searched all the years for an explanation but found none. Well, if something can not be explained it doesn't mean that there is no explanation....Psi or not..

Hmmm. If Geller has special 'abilities' (ie, is psychic), why would he need to cheat most of the time? Is it because it's easier to see him as a cheat - and the psychic stuff is just a little detail we don't need to pay much attention to? This doesn't make sense to me.

Also where did this speaker search for the explanation? Other conjurors? What does he mean by an 'explanation'?  What would have convinced him?

For me, as I say, psychism is a meaningful entity. To say that Geller is psychic is to say that he is connecting with something that exists in the universe, in ways that all humans potentially can, but that only a vanishingly small number actually achieve, for whatever reason. But if someone doesn't recognise psychism as a meaningful category, the only explanation that counts is one that he can relate to - ie, conjuring tricks.

That would change if one day science could explain how psychism works, or more likely come up with some fantastically complex quantum equation that a small handful of physicists and mathematicians say works, and the rest of us just go along with. Then the problem will magically disappear - yeah, sure, Geller is psychic, so are lots of people, so what. 

Or this:

"My original observation was made in 1975, long before the true research by the magic community of Geller's supposed 'powers,' However, my opinion has changed greatly. I NOW DO NOT BELIEVE THAT WHAT I SAW MR. GELLER DO WAS PARANORMAL. I simply believe that it was a "superior performance of a magic trick"...one that now, after becoming enlightened on the subject matter, is explainable."

This is a very common phenomenon in psychical literature (I discussed it in my SPR talk last October on sceptics' psychology). You see a psychic do his or her stuff. You absolutely can't explain it. You are totally gobsmacked. Then after a period of time elapsed you're no longer gobsmacked - of course, it was just a trick. But you haven't received any extra information, so there's no real basis for the change of view. The passing of time has merely 'healed' the dissonance.

One of the things that emerged strongly from the Margolis book - and also from the many comments on Geller's website and elsewhere - is that the spoons continue to bend after he has touched them. He rubs it and it starts to bend. Fifteen minutes later, in someone else's pocket, on the backseat of the car, on the sideboard, it is still bending. There are also instances where the metal proved to be too hard to bend before Geller got his hands on it, and where it bent at a point where there was little leverage. There are many cases of keys bending, which is tough to do with just your hands.

The magicians I relate to are the ones who engage with this, and can comment on what they experienced in a nuanced way. Like this comment from Canadian mentalist Paul Alberstat:

"Many of the top Mentalists in the world have no idea how Uri Geller can make a compass needle move. Since he does so in his bathing suit and has been checked over by ultra sensitive equipment for metal or magnetic radiation, he obviously is NOT using a hidden magnet to move the compass needle. Since reliable sources (and knowledgeable magicians) have not only witnessed Geller make spoons bend but have witnessed them to continue moving long after Mr. Geller has left, I would challenge these so called protectors and magic geniuses to explain how he does it. If they reply, "I don't know for sure" then they have no right to say that he is a fake."

Yet sceptical conjurors like James Randi insist there is nothing here that they can't do. I'm assuming they are talking about distraction and substitution, but I'd be more convinced by this if there was any evidence that these simple procedures (simple, that is, for a pro) actually have the same effect. Does anyone have knowledge of a sceptical magician who claims convincingly to have duplicated Geller's 'tricks'? Let me know.

Several magicians are prepared to acknowledge what the unthinking sceptics can't, that Geller really is in a class of his own. For example, this from Marvin Berglas: 'Let's say if he is a magician, he has got to be one of the best, if not the best, in the world.'  James Randi never gets that kind of response. Why is that? If Randi and other sceptics could really duplicate what Geller does, instead of just claiming they can, then surely that would be the proof - the enthusiastic acclaim of their peers.

Finally, the ethical dimension:

"Magicians get angry at [Uri] Geller because he is, we believe, a magician who does not admit to being one. That anger might be better directed at the fact that Geller uses his magic to promote only himself, leaving those who believe in him, and our world, no better off (and perhaps a bit worse than that)."

Not sure about that. Yes, he's a world class self publicist, and he's always been open about wanting to be a great celebrity. But one senses that it's more than just self-aggrandizement, he really does want to use his gift in a positive way. Unless he makes up the messages that take up eight pages on his website he has brought inspiration to a fair number of people. One thing's for sure - the world's a more interesting place with Geller in it.

The Ghost in the Machine - More From 'Irreducible Mind'

I talked about Irreducible Mind here last year, but didn't completely finish reading it before I had to give it back to the library (well, it is 650 pages long). But the SPR have given it to me to review for their Journal, and I am now the proud owner of my very own copy. Yay.

As a result, I'm getting a better grip on the detail of its argument, that physicalist approaches to the mind-brain problem are seriously untenable. Or to put it another way, that it's time to give dualism another look. Those of us who follow psychical research take that for granted, but it's a lot to swallow for the academic psychologists who the book is aimed at. The fact is, mind-body dualism as a philosophical concept is deeply unfashionable; the term 'Cartesian dualism' - that the body is a sort of machine animated by the soul - is a cue for right-thinking scientists to cough and laugh up their sleeves. It's intellectually unrespectable. Not at all the thing. What lingers in the scientific mind is the verdict of the behaviourist Gilbert Ryle, that there is no ghost in the machine.

That was always a big problem for parapsychology. Psychical phenomena seem to demand a dualist approach to mind and brain, but there were no half-way convincing models that it could point to.  When I first got interested in it in the late 1980s the only source that I saw referenced was The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John Eccles, and I got the sense even then that their arguments weren't really seen as overwhelming. (Irreducible Mind spells this out: the phenomena they referred to don't rule out physicalist explanations and they were attacking cognitive approaches that were already obsolete - it didn't help that Eccles's support for dualism was transparently motivated by his Catholic beliefs.)

John Beloff, a philosopher and first holder of the chair at the Koestler Institute in Edinburgh argued for radical dualism - as opposed to the non-radical kind argued by John Searle, which sees consciousness as a distinct entity in its own right, but one still wholly dependent on brain processes -  but as far as I'm aware did not attempt to provide any kind of neurophysiological model.

Then in 1990 came the Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, who argued from a mathematician's point of view that the brain could not be the sole origin of mentation, at least as currently conceived by computational theories. Penrose pointed out that computers work by means of algorithms and there are lots of things in maths that can't be calculated that way - we can discover them, and know them to be true, but only by using some non-algorithmic methods of calculation. His idea was that the brain must interact with something external, probably through a process of quantum gravity.

This too was a bit abstract, but Penrose subsequently teamed up with the quantum physicist Stuart Hameroff, who suggested in Shadows of the Mind that the kind of quantum processes Penrose had in mind could be performed by the 'micro-tubules' in the brain cells (there's a good summary of their argument here).

But neither Eccles-Popper nor Penrose-Hameroff related - as far as I'm aware - to abnormal mental phenomena, like stigmata, the placebo effect or savant syndrome, still less to the data of parapsychology such as remote viewing, ganzfeld, apparitional hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, etc -  which are surely the overwhelming empirical reason for taking dualism seriously. In any case, a rival quantum theorist named Max Tegmark popped up and claimed that Hameroff's claim didn't stand up, and that quantum processes could therefore not be implication in consciousness, which made it redundant as far as current neuroscience is concerned.

Personally, I'd always felt drawn to the analogy suggested by Aldous Huxley in the Doors of Perception, echoing the philosophers C.D. Broad and Henri Bergson, of the brain as a 'reducing valve' that filters undifferentiated Consciousness - or Mind at Large, as he called it - and narrows our focus on the business of physical life.

Huxley's insight came from his mescaline trips, which opened up huge, beautiful and potentially terrifying new reality. Much of the mystical content of psychedelic experience overlaps heavily with Eastern mystical philosophy, which itself - according to frequent mention in the Hindu Vedas, the earliest extant religious texts - emerges from the ingestion of soma, apparently some kind of psychedelic plant or fungus.  Mystical experiences can be triggered by stress or the contemplation of great beauty (music, sunsets, nature, etc), while religious experience is sought through fasting, pain, drumming, dancing, etc). At the other end of the spectrum, of course, are the religious delusions of schizophrenics.

Since modern neuroscience is not much interested in any of this, I'm not sure if anyone has seriously tried to explain these images, ideas, hallucinations and visions in terms of the same kind of computational processes that are supposed to account for ordinary day-to-day mentation. I'd love to see someone at least try, but I'm not holding my breath.  A much neater and more logical explanation, surely - if we don't have secularist or philosophical objections - is to view abnormal and psychical mental phenomena as glimpses of something that the brain normally screens out, as its functioning is momentarily compromised. 

Back to Irreducible Mind. The book has several authors, but it seems to be principally Edward F Kelly who is driving the dualism argument forward (he calls it 'non-Cartesian Dualist Interactionist, to distinguish it from the rather crude dualism of Descartes).   Kelly picks up on terms and analogies used by William James, who used the term 'permissive', as illustrated by the trigger of a crossbow that has a releasing function, or 'transmission', as light being refracted through a prism or the air going through an organ pipe. He also refers to Frederic Myers, whose work and thought is the central focus of the whole book. Myers posited a sort of a psychological 'membrane' that controls the passage of psychological elements and processes between the supraliminal and subliminal regions of consciousness. He saw the boundaries as being fluid, or 'permeable', with a constant exchange of material between regions.

Having established that the transmission/filter theory has some kind of pedigree, Kelly shows how it could be made to work, and he too opts for a quantum approach. His preference is for the work of Henry Stapp, a quantum theorist who, he approvingly states, is conservative, orthodox and serious about establishing connections with mainline psychology and neuroscience; he has also tried to improve technically on other theories like those of Eccles and Hameroff. Stapp's big idea is based around the brain process of exocytosis, in which, (pay attention now),

neurotransmitter molecules are released into the synaptic cleft. The release is triggered by arrival of calcium ions at critical sites in the transmitter storage areas, the vesicles. But as these small ions pass through their membrane channels (diameter circa 1 nanometer) their positions becomes nearly fixed; hence, by Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, what happens next must be represented as a cloud of possible trajectories in the vicinity of the vesicle. This injection of a true quantum uncertainty - that is, an uncertainty involving more than incomplete knowledge of classically conceived details - goes on constantly at every one of the trillions of active synapses in the waking human brain, and this by itself is sufficient to establish that the brain is subject to quantum principles.  This necessary entry of quantum uncertainties is also consistent with the findings of dynamic system theorists, who emphasize that in the waking state the brain operates continually on the edge of instability, with small changes in input potentially leading to large changes in overall behaviour. (p. 612).

The usual objection to quantum processes occurring in the brain is that brain processes are far too slow, and that they operate at macro level of bundles of cells, and at body temperature. However Stapp rejects this complaint. He says his proposal is 'entirely consistent with the observed spatial and temporal scales of brain activity in relation to experience and behaviour', and since these are 'saturated with quantum effects' the burden of proof falls on those who deny, not those who affirm the relevance of quantum theory to brain science (Stapp's words, my italics).

Kelly goes on:

The net effect of these quantum-theoretic developments... is to bring consciousness back into both physical science and brain theory at the foundational level. As Stapp... remarks, his model "makes consciousness causally effective, yet it is compatible with all known laws of physics, including the law of conservation of energy." This totally deflates the main arguments... that have routinely been advanced against interactive dualism. Indeed, far from ruling out dualism, as alleged by Dennett and numerous others: "Contemporary physical theory allows, and in its orthodox von Neumann form entails, an interactive dualism."

This is fighting talk. Kelly concedes that a great deal remains to flesh the theory out in psychological and neuroscientific detail. He thinks that the kind of mental phenomena that Stapp uses, as was also the case with Eccles, can be explained in conventional physicalist terms, which rather weakens the model's appeal to psychologists and neuroscientists. But that changes completely once one takes the 'rogue' phenomena described in Irreducible Mind.

Yes indeed. It will be interesting to see how well this model stands up, and whether it fares any better than Penrose-Hameroff's with its microtubules. A lot of the problem with quantum theory is that it's so beyond most of us - and that includes mainstream psychologists - that we are all in the hands of the experts. And it only needs one or two experts in the field to come along and rubbish Stapp, and that's the end of it. The sceptics can simply say that it's been debunked.

What we're up against, not just neuroscience but science generally, is that dualism introduces the idea of some external stuff - mind, soul, whatever - which, we suppose, must have some physical substrate but which we cannot presently trace. It's a serious difficulty too for people who worry about 'mysterian' non-solutions, and can't rid themselves of the feeling that people who support them do so for purely religious reasons, or because they don't like reductionist science. 

But I do feel that this is a big advance in the right direction. Irreducible Mind really is packed with empirical data that enforces the consideration of a dualist model - although interestingly the focus is more on the abnormal rather than the flat-out paranormal - and crucially, it takes the reader right to the end of the process. If it can be shown how dualism as a process might work, that might make it a bit easier for some of the sceptically minded to accept the reality of psi phenomena.

Religion at Easter

Recently I've found myself thinking as much about religion as about psi. I'm aware that the two aren't necessarily related, and that some people take survival of consciousness seriously without believing in God. That said, the logic is that paranormal and religious experience are closely linked - most obviously in mystical and near-death experiences. And considering how much documented data there is about these and other such things it interests me that the spiritualism/New Age take on religion it informs is so little known or discussed.

I notice that especially now at Easter, a time there's so much religious commentary about. These days, post Dawkins, a lot of it comes from atheists.  First up is Roland White, who writes jokey columns in the Sunday Times. Cornered by his daughter with the God question he panicked - as a disbeliever, what on earth was he to say? His problem, he explained, is that nobody could ever give him a convincing argument for the existence of God?

The best we're usually offered is that there is some powerful force that guides us, a force beyond human comprehension. We cannot discover it, we must simply have faith. Add the words "the truth is out there" and you have the theology of The X Files. I'm sorry to say this at Easter, but the older I get, the more I think Richard Dawkins might be on to something. How depressing is that?

White cited a recent discussion between the Archbishop of Canterbury and John Humphrys, the acerbic broadcaster who it seems lost the last vestige of religious belief after the mass murders of children in the Russian town of Beslan. The archbishop, trying to win him back, argued as follows:  'God is the agency that's at work in everything and has set up the world in such a way that not only is evil possible, but moments are also possible where something breaks through of healing, or miracle. Where and when it breaks through might be guided by the power of prayer.' White comments: 'I don't think it persuaded Humphrys, and it certainly didn't convince me.'

White was quite funny about Vincent Nichols, the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, who last week accused the football authorities of showing disdain for Christians by holding Premier League matches on Easter Sunday. Why should the Godless hordes sit around twiddling their thumbs during a religious festival that means nothing to them? Would it be OK if they kicked a ball around in the park with sweaters for goalposts? What about a slightly more formal amateur level match?  A fourth division event? How far up the footballing hierarchy before the archbishop detects disdain?

This is light, knockabout stuff. But the shadow of Richard Dawkins looms large. Over to the Guardian, where Madeleine Bunting discerns a growing distaste among thinking folk for 'the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume'.

Just this week, [author] AN Wilson announces in a thoughtful cover article for the New Statesman that he has apostated, abandoning his fellow atheists. Or take another example: in the Third Way, a Christian magazine, the poet Andrew Motion reflects wistfully, "I don't believe in God - though I wish I did, and I can't stop thinking about it so who knows what might happen one day?" Wilson and Motion talk of uncertainty, doubt and faith in terms that are probably far more familiar to the vast majority of the British - many of whom still describe themselves as believing in God, whatever they mean by that - than the certitudes used by Dawkins. New Atheism may come to be regarded as winning a battle but losing the war.

Bunting speaks of atheists' 'egotism and arrogance'. She sees the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith, and sharing 'the inner glow of complete certainty'. She cites the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, who argues that it's a mistake to see religion as a matter of belief in a set of propositions, when it's more about doing, acting with compassion.

She also approves of the philosopher and writer Alain de Botton, who calls himself an atheist but runs a quasi-religion School of Life, complete with Sunday sermons and 'pilgrimages' to fill the widespread longing for wisdom and insight. "Even if you're an atheist, there are a huge number of insights in religion," he says. "We're in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

That brought a come-back, also in the Guardian, from non-believing philosopher Julian Baggini, who pointed out that atheists are increasingly seen as shrill, bishop-bashing fanatics who are tone deaf to the spiritual. There's no point them complaining about this caricature, he added; if they publish books with titles like The God Delusion and God is Not Great then obviously they are going to be seen as anti-religious zealots.

Baggini's main point is that this extremism leaves the field free for people like Bunting who insist that religion is not to be taken literally, and that its creeds are not factual descriptions of the real world. This gets him going:

The idea that it is a modern distortion to think of religious beliefs as being factually true is manifest nonsense. If people thought their tenets of faith were metaphors, why did they torture or kill people who disagreed with them. Did doctrinal differences about Christ's divinity have no role in Rome's split from the Orthodox church? If literal truth is not what matters, why is it so hard to find a practising Muslim who's prepared to say that the Angle Gabriel didn't really dictate the Qur'an to the prophet?

(If it had come a few days earlier, the news that Mel Gibson and his wife are splitting up would have reminded the atheists of a perfect example of this kind of mind-boggling literalism. Gibson, a sort of ultra-traditionalist Catholic as I recall, was reported as saying that while he would make eternal salvation, his wife would not because she was a Protestant,  even though he considered her to be 'saintly' and it was rather unfair.)

Like many atheists, Baggini seems chiefly offended by the traditionalist extremists, but also derides the 'fluffy brigade', with their 'doctrine-lite' faith, whose idea of religion corresponds not to the reality, as expressed by traditionalist zealots, but to what they would like it to be. He doesn't care if people want to retain a sense of being religious, he says, as long as what they believe stands up to intellectual scrutiny.

As I say, in all this babble of voices there's very almost no reference to a body of research which in many ways offers new insights and possibilities, and offers tentative answers to the questions that stymie so many people.  Atheists always say: where's the evidence? There is no evidence. Go away.  Well, for me there is evidence: the fact that humans have psychic and religious experiences. Atheists of course are sceptics and think this experience is based on fraud, misperception, hallucination and wishful thinking. But most of them know little or nothing about it, and are just following the intellectual consensus, fed in the media by folk like Randi, Wiseman and Blackmore.

Some people can filter it out, but the fact is, these experiences and perceptions of many different kinds - apparitions and poltergeists, automatic writing, ouija board and other mediumistic communication, ESP, out-of-body and near-death experiences, and children's memories of past lives, and others - in their various ways all provide a detailed, multi-faceted picture of survival of death. Moreover, an abundance of channelled communications provide a very detailed picture of what kind of experiences may await us in the post-mortem state. The very least one can say is that humans are in some way subjecting themselves to an extraordinarily detailed and convincing illusion that they are psychic and immortal beings. If the power of the illusion isn't generally recognised, that's surely because there's a sort of taboo on taking psychical research seriously, so relatively few people know about it.

The point is, none of this would have to be proven beyond doubt - and of course it isn't - to be a part of the debate. Take the Beslan children that so upset Humphrys, the implausibly cruel God argument. The abundant indications that some children, in some circumstances, have memories of having lived before, offers some support - and some people would say, quite powerful support - of the Hindu and Buddhist claim that humans live more than once, and quite possibly many many times, a claim backed up by channelled communications and also in the data about the visions brought on by LSD and other hallucinogens. This offers a quite different idea of religion, of the world as essentially a kind of classroom, a learning experience, in which cruelty and suffering are a means, among many,  by which we mature into fully spiritual beings. Of course, this raises other objections, like why should that be necessary, and might be seen as equally repugnant as a capricious God. But it's much more logical, and it's backed by evidence - of a kind. 

Nor is it just about psychism and the paranormal. I've just been having another go at Irreducible Mind, and I'm astonished by the wealth of examples in it - relatively few of them from psychical research - that imply that the conventional view of consciousness, as a product solely of brain processes, is untenable and that the brain is much better conceived in terms of a device that transmits or filters some external factor. That factor doesn't have to be a soul, as traditionally conceived, but it seriously weakens one of the pillars of atheism, that the mind dies with the brain.

So there's plenty of food for thought here, and it would take the debate to a different level. Where I sort of sympathise with Baggini is his puzzlement as to what the basis of the 'fluffy doctrine-lite' religion actually consists of. What do people like Bunting actually believe? Is it a sort of tailored down version of Christianity, a nice friendly religion based on compassion and tolerance and quietly ignoring all the difficult and implausible bits. In that case how do they justify it? Where does it come from? Also, why don't they come out and condemn the excesses, cruelties and stupidities of the traditionalist zealots, instead of implying that that's not important or that it's a misrepresentation of religion by atheists?

Actually, I think Bunting is tapping into a kind of sympathetic agnosticism which I guess probably is pretty widespread in Britain and Europe and other parts of the developed world (I don't know about the US, which seems to be a somewhat different case). I've noticed - Bel Mooney's book Devout Sceptics based on a radio series, is a good example - that when famous folk are asked for their religious views they fiddle about on the margins of belief, rather like Andrew Motion, sometimes wanting to believe, but not really finding the justification for it.

I might well feel like this too if I hadn't happened to be curious about near-death experiences and the like, and spent some time getting to grips with it. I'm absolutely with the atheists on this one: there's no point in believing something without evidence. It's academic now, but I doubt whether the mere feeling that 'there is some powerful force that guides us, a force beyond human comprehension' would ever have made me religious, even vaguely and fluffily. I just wish I could collar all these people and say, stop wasting your time on anxious, puzzled speculation, and get reading. Then we can start to have a real conversation.

Skeptics Welcome

More sound and fury after my last post titled Passion for Fairness - ironic, as it turns out, as it reignited a previous tetchy exchange between regular visitors and skeptic Keith Augustine on the topic of near-death experiences, which he critiqued a few years back (NDEs in the Press, December 15, 2008).   Keith complained about bad behaviour, while his critics said he wasn't answering their points and that his arguments were generally preposterous.

I noted Michael Prescott saying on a previous thread here that he had given up arguing with skeptics, because it was pointless, and didn't change anything, or words to that effect. As someone whose been at this game quite a bit longer than me, I respect his viewpoint. I may feel the same way in time. But right now I have a different idea. I don't expect to change skeptics' minds any more than a Labour politician mouthing off in parliament seriously expects to change the minds of opposition MPs - it's voters he wants to influence.  Likewise, I think that listening to an informed debate by people at polar opposites helps other people make up their own minds.

For that reason, I'm really comfortable with skeptics showing up and exchanging views. I mention that, because Keith said at one point he had

the mistaken impression that this blog would be a civil environment for multiple points of view, in which constructive dialogue between skeptics and believers might be possible, given the "About Paranormalia" statement acknowledging that "the issues are hard to penetrate." Actions speak louder than words, however ... if skeptics are not welcome here--hinted at in Robert McLuhan's comment that "each side has its own forums, where likeminded individuals meet and discuss"--then the About Paranormalia statement should be changed to reflect that.

To clarify - that statement I made in the previous post about forums existing for likeminded individuals is factually accurate - that is what associations, societies and blogs mostly are for - but isn't meant to imply that Paranormalia is hostile to other points of view or to people who make those statements. The fact that we can have these discussions at all - and at considerable length - is surely testament to that.  My point was that these forums aren't obliged to go to the other extreme and give equal time and status to their critics in the interest of balance. 

Keith also complained about flaming, and wondered why I didn't moderate the comments. I'd only do that if the blog got a lot of junk messages, which mercifully hasn't been the case so far. I've only had to stop one comment - the guy has since moved on - which is pretty good. I'm not keen on the idea of chairing  discussions, even if I had the time for it (other regulars have stepped in with calming comments from time to time - for which, many thanks).

It's in the nature of things that these arguments get seriously heated. I take the view that if you have the guts to take the argument to the opposition, then you deserve credit for that, but by the same token, you shouldn't be surprised or upset if your opponents get frustrated, or the comments you get are hard to take.

Michael Prescott gave an admirably succinct appraisal of Keith's views on NDEs some years ago, and it pretty much expresses what I'd say, so I won't go into that here. I don't agree with most of what Keith thinks, and I'd suggest he greatly exaggerates the reliability of sources like Susan Blackmore on the topic of paranormal perception during NDEs, for instance.  But the point is, there are many, many people who are disposed to believe his arguments and will take them seriously, if they think they're the ones that are most convincing.  It's up to us, if we can, to change that perception. If we can't do this to the satisfaction of an uncommitted bystander, so much the worse for us.

The fact that Keith Augustine shows up to debate at least gives us an opportunity (and the serious stretches involved in his arguments - such as NDErs getting their OBE perceptions by normal means, inadequate anaesthetics, etc -  should make it all the easier). We complain about the angry snarky types who think people like us don't deserve to live, so it's good to find a skeptic who is prepared to discuss his ideas with us.  We're not going to agree with him, but does it really matter if we can't get him to agree with us? What matters is that we have clarified the points of disagreement, and in such a way that it's us, not him, that other readers agree with.

 

Passion for Fairness

One of the most trying things about growing up during the Cold War was the sense that we had to live and act by different standards to our enemies. Totalitarian regimes could beat up their critics, or let them rot in jail after putting them through a mockery of legal justice. But democrats were bound to be true to their principles. Free speech required that they give a platform for communists to preach their overthrow, just as today Islamic terror supporters get to live on benefits given them by the British state while shouting against everything Britain stands for.

This problem crops up sometimes in our dealings with skeptics. I remember when Nicholas Humphrey's Soul Searching came out, being shocked that something so vacuous and mindlessly disparaging could even get into print - surely a low point in the sceptical canon. I was even more dismayed to read a review in the SPR Journal by John Beloff, who thought we might be a bit miffed that the Perror-Warrick award, which is supposed to go to fund genuine parapsychological research, instead went to finance a book designed, as he says, 'to ridicule the field', but nevertheless advised us to 'swallow our resentment'.

Our Society has always prided itself on being open to every shade of opinion and Nicholas Humphrey knows how to write. He is erudite without being ponderous and witty without being frivolous. A belief that dare not expose itself to such urbane scepticism must be frail indeed.

Beloff had been making sterling attempts to reach out to skeptics, for instance trying to draw their attention to the Feilding report on Eusapia Palladino. 'What is your explanation,' he kept asking them.  I remember admiring him for it, while at the same time recognising the futility. They just seemed a bit embarrassed, and didn't really want to reciprocate. But with this review I thought he'd gone way too far. 

Today the SPR's Paranormal Review arrived, and it includes quite a long review by Matt Colborn on the SPR study day last October, when I joined Guy Playfair and Rupert Sheldrake in a discussion of skepticism. Guy gave a run down on the history, focusing in particular on CSICOP. Rupert talked about his own experience of getting stuffed by skeptics, and I talked about skeptic psychology. That seemed to me a reasonable topic: believers are routinely criticised for the way they think, but skeptics betray biases of their own.

Matt gave a detailed and pretty fair description of the talks, but he seemed to be bothered about the lack of balance. He was 'perturbed' to see that there would be three talks by anti-skeptics, and a single skeptic, Professor Chris French, would merely be invited to comment. He had 'feelings of unease', he wasn't sure it was 'constructive', he thought it was important to have a 'level playing field'.  He accepted that skeptics shout down the opposition, but 'two wrongs don't make a right'. He was puzzled that someone should have complained about French being given the last word.

I remain troubled by any tendency to want to silence the opposition, simply because this is undemocratic. And if parapsychologists demand a level playing field, then they should do everything they can to maintain it.

Well, up to a point, Matt. I agree completely that we should engage with skeptics where we can, as I've tried to do here, occasionally with some success. We even had that James Randi drop by a while ago. But each side has its own forums, where likeminded individuals meet and discuss. There's no rule that says they have to invite people who think their ideas stink. Since it was an SPR event, the bulk of the audience was always going to be SPR members, and they wouldn't necessarily have paid to hear people trashing their beliefs. 

As I recall, there was some discussion about whether or not to invite Chris French - it wasn't automatic. If he hadn't come there'd have been no balance at all. As it happens, I was very much in favour, for precisely that reason. But it never occurred to me that we should have gone the whole way, inviting an equal number of skeptics, and giving them equal time to make their own presentations. If we had done, none of us would have been able to give the kind of detailed, thoughtful presentations we did. It would not have been about information and insights from people who know their subject. Not at all, it would have been an intellectual fist fight. We would have been up there about defending our positions against critical attack, which is what we have to do all the time.

By all means let's run that event that sometime. It would be interesting, and we might establish some common ground. But there's a time and place for it. We don't owe our critics anything, and we don't have to go out of our way to let them join our discussions. 

Recession Blues

Things are getting a bit spooky. As a freelancer I normally get an average of 15-20 work-related emails a day. Three days into this week, and I've had none at all. Not a single one. Zilch.

No phone calls either, except for one with no one on the other end of the line. Perhaps it was my Mum calling from the Beyond. Just for encouragement.

An ideal time for blogging, you'd think. But it doesn't seem to work like that. It's an odd phenomenon which I've often noticed. The less I have to do, the less I get done.

I'm not completely unemployed, fortunately. But two days a week ain't enough. People ask if I'm available for commissions, as if nothing had changed - and then I never hear from them again. As I say - spooky.