Paranormalia

Some Precognitive Dreams

Thanks to Lawrence Brennan for this post about some recent precognitive dreams.

I am not psychic. I take that word to imply believing oneself to have a controllable or even vaguely useful power of some kind. However I've experienced enough odd things to be convinced that psi is real. Recently precognitive dreams (PDs) have been to the fore. I can't add much to the sum of knowledge on the subject, but can maybe make a few useful observations.

In my case, at least, the idea that PDs are movie-style visions of exactly what is going to happen is completely untrue. Likewise the idea that they are warnings of disaster is a popular fantasy. They are, by and large, completely trivial. I can't of course assume that the limits of my experiences are a rule that must apply to everyone else. But my suspicion is that the headline grabbing cases of foreseeing assassinations are distinguishable from the trivia only by virtue of their box office value...and no divine forewarning is intended.

In a 2011 Guardian article Richard Wiseman relies heavily on the idea of a Law of Large Numbers to explain away seeming PDs . . . putting a "once-in-a-lifetime" coincidence in the context of millions of dreams. This would only be a persuasive argument if they were remotely as rare as he imagines.

I found my dreams were precognitive, sometimes, when I started recording them into a bedside dictaphone, whenever I stirred in the night. Listening back to my sleepy mutterings after a day or two, some of the dreams I was reporting matched incidents which had subsequently occurred. This happened too often to dismiss.

On one recording I described a low flying aerial view of a city which I decided was Berlin, as the attention was drawn to a specific point below, which my dream self identified as the spot where Hitler was born. I would have no conscious memory of this dream if it were not on the recording. Four or five nights later a new TV documentary about Hitler is broadcast and begins with low flying aerial footage of an Austrian town, seeming to hone in on a particular building, as the narrator points out this was where Hitler was born. You can imagine how startled I was.

Last Monday night, 6 May: I dreamt of the Queen at a Commonwealth gathering and the (genuine) plot of a movie in which a missing girl had been abducted and kept alive below ground.

In the morning I noted down the dreams, then checked the news. Stories included Amanda Berry, the kidnapped woman who escaped from her captor's basement and the Queen to miss the Commonwealth Conference for the first time.

You'll see that my report of both dreams appear to be direct hits. And I consider them so. But it's worth pointing out that your agreement - if I have it - was partly won by my summarising the tale and referring only to the matching imagery itself. If I included more detail of the dream - it was the Queen at a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony . . . not a dream about her not attending a heads of government meeting; and in the other dream I carefully chose to say "kept alive under ground" instead of "buried alive" to draw out the comparisons with Amanda Berry - then you might be drawn to the differences and denounce my observation of a link as tenuous. This in fact is what Wiseman does in his article. And this fallacy strikes me as important to correct.

It is the imagery in the dream, not its plot, which appears precognitive. Though one might use the Law of Large Numbers here to acknowledge that, by chance alone, sometimes for some people the sleeping brain's dream factory must re-assemble the images that go into it in very close to the "correct" order.

This point was evidenced on Thursday night, 9th May. I thought my recording attempts were a complete washout, as the second I tried recalling each dream it vanished. So the first 3 or 4 recordings consisted of no more than random images, without the accompanying plot details.

Exact transcript of the first recording, 2-3am, Friday morning:

There was . . . oh god I can't remember it's so . . . I'm going to say some words to try and remind myself . . . Linda Bellingham . . . cameras . . . Ian? Not 'that' Ian . . . I'll get back to you in a second . . . no hold on . . . mmm . . . will get back to you in a minute.

Lunchtime 12.30pm, I switch on the television show Loose Women (for the first time in 3 weeks):

Today's guests are Linda Bellingham and Ian Kelsey.

Deprived of its actual plot, the dream - whatever it was, for I've no idea - appears undeniably precognitive.

In Wiseman's article he composes a hypothetical dream sequence (about a fictional rock star in a car crash) and suggests there is something silly in connecting it to certain equally hypothetical "real" events, given the numerous differences between them. This is a convincing sounding yet irrational argument. He is - in the proper sense of the phrase - begging the question. That is, his conclusion - that dreaming the future is not possible - can only be reached by starting with the premise that perceiving the future is not possible!

How so?

Well consider if you had a dream in which Peter O'Toole turned up as your window cleaner. Afterwards you scratch your head as to why on earth it should be him of all people. Then you recall that in the day preceding the dream you'd caught a glimpse of Lawrence of Arabia while flicking between television channels. Aha! But following Wiseman's logic your "explanation" would be tenuous and faintly laughable because, after all, O'Toole did not play your window cleaner in Lawrence of Arabia! Such an argument for a 'no connection', where one is so self-evident, would doubtless be considered bizarre.

But if it is, it must also be bizarre to make this "tenuous connection" argument if O'Toole were seen not before the dream, but rather on the day after, perhaps being interviewed on a magazine programme which also later features an item on streak free window cleaning. You can only reasonably treat the logic of the "tenuous connection" argument applying in one case but not the other as rational if you start from the point of view that of course one cannot ever perceive the future!

Record your dreams. You'll be surprised how often one can.

Dean Radin's Psi Research List

I'm very glad to see this list of psi research articles compiled by parapsychologist Dean Radin. The articles are all downloadable, and cover a range of topics - exactly what's needed.

By way of introduction Radin says:

In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast.

So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these papers were published after the year 2000. Most report experimental studies or meta-analyses of classes of experiments. I will continue to add to this page and flesh it out, including links to recent or to especially useful ebooks. This page may eventually become annotated, then multithreaded and hyperlinked, and then morph into a Wiki.

I hope to go through the full list in the months to come, and will recommend it to visitors. In the meantime, I have commented on one of the papers in a separate post, below.

How To Make Psi Disappear

Dean Radin's new list of psi articles includes one which he referenced on his blog some time ago, and which I mentioned here quite recently. It's one of those richly comical moments that bubble up in sceptic discourse from time to time, so I thought I'd add a bit more detail.

The paper was published in The Humanistic Psychologist in 2005, by psychologists Edward A. Delgado-Romero and George S. Howard. Their general drift is that experimental findings in psychology are much less reliable than is realised, due to little acknowledged factors such as the file drawer problem. Here they propose to investigate the case of parapsychology. They take as their starting point the Wiseman-Milton meta-analysis, which concludes that the accumulated results of methodologically sound ganzfeld experiments is non-significant. To confirm this then carry out their own experiments, but worryingly, after doing eight studies they have an overall hit-rate of 32%. Not only does this match the positive meta-analyses, when added to the Wiseman-Milton study it brings it, as they say, 'precariously close to demonstrating humans do have psychic powers', a conclusion which they admit makes them feel 'very uncomfortable'.

What to do? A thought strikes them.

In the ganzfeld procedure, participants are run in pairs. According to psychic theory, if one member of the pair is psychic (P) but the other is not (n) there will be no transmission of information. Only PP pairs can successfully send and receive messages. What exactly does this imply?

It implies, they believe, that the statistical approach in the ganzfeld methodology is fatally flawed. If the research literature is recalculated to accord with this idea, the significance in the database practically vanishes. To confirm their hunch, they do one last study, pairing up people whose psi-hitting in their previous studies indicates that they have psychic powers. As they suspect the result is now not significant.

These are enormously disappointing data for individuals who believe humans possess psychic powers- especially because the sample had undergone a selection procedure to increase the percentage of Ps in the sample. Due to this last data set, we do not believe that humans possess telepathic powers.

That said, they admit to remaining 'perplexed' by the 32% figure obtained in an enormous number of other psi studies. Perhaps, they suggest, it's

comparable to Meehl's (1978) "crud factor," which suggests that everything is correlated with everything else to a small degree. Meehl cited this as evidence that a null hypothesis is never literally true. Or, perhaps it simply reflects our enduring preference for significant results over studies that obtain nonsignificant findings.

I'm used to critics tearing published psi experiments to ribbons, with caustic remarks about potential security flaws, alleged failure to randomise properly, and so on. But when disbelieving psychologists do their own experiments they sometimes seem to lose touch with reality altogether. They wander onto a field about which they know almost nothing, and casually reorganise matters to suit themselves, without the slightest reference to anybody or anything.

Until now I'd never heard of anything called 'psychic theory', or the notion that transmission of information depends on both receiver and sender being psychic. The authors give no reference for it; it seems to have just popped into their heads. No serious parapsychologist, as far as I'm aware, talks about people having 'psychic powers'. The prevailing paradigm is that it's a property of consciousness, a form of knowing that is potentially available to anyone, but which in practice is favoured by certain conditions and characteristics. And no parapsychologist would dare declare, on the basis of a single study, that the existence of psi has been proved, so it seems reckless, to say the least, for critics to declare, on the basis of a single study, that it does not exist - never mind crowing about how devastating this must be to its advocates.

The problems are discussed by Radin in a tart rejoinder to the journal. If the authors had done some homework, he suggests, they would have realised that there is no file drawer problem in parapsychology, for the simple reason that it's such a small discipline that pretty much every extant study can be tracked down. Intriguingly, while discussing the Wiseman-Milton study the psychologists point out in a footnote that its sampling method represents a serious departure from the norm. If this is corrected, they concede, it greatly increases the effect size. Yet, as Radin says, although they profess to be puzzled by this, it doesn't stop them using the study as an authority. (An analysis based on a 'theory of crud' is hardly persuasive, Radin adds.)

I wondered how a paper so deficient in an understanding of established parapsychological principles could ever have made it in to print. My guess is that it's a symptom of the way that parapsychology is marginalised, and the views of its experts distrusted. Since from a certain point of view telepathy is a fiction, there must be something wrong with the way parapsychologists do their experiments. So it's something that anyone can have a go at, even complete beginners. The worst that could happen is that they get positive results, but then they can use the opportunity to figure out the mistake, and in so doing make a real contribution to science. In their own minds, they're at no more of a disadvantage than the veterans who have been doing it for forty years.

But perhaps that's just my attempt to make sense of something that is actually incoherent. The feeling I'm left with is of otherwise intelligent people having temporarily gone mad. It's the Enchanted Boundary phenomenon described by Walter Prince: confronted by something that seems to imply a complete breakdown of logic, they engage in wild mental contortions that they hope will restore order. It's not science so much as the effect on the academic mind of cognitive dissonance - a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, and it's good to see it sometimes illustrated so graphically.

Things Children Say

A reader sent me a link to a Reddit thread which I hadn't seen before, about the odd stuff that very young children sometimes come out with. I thought I'd pull out some of the more interesting ones.

There are actually two threads, this recent one, and another from a year ago. Each paragraph is a separate story. I won't add any comments - sometimes it's good just to listen.

When my little sister was younger she used to walk around the house with a picture frame with a picture of my great grandpa in her hands crying and saying "I miss you Harvey." Harvey had died before even I was born. Other than this common occurrence my mom told me that she would constantly say things that my great grandma Lucy would say.

While changing my daughter in front of the open closet door. She kept looking around me and laughing. I asked her what was so funny. She said, "the man." To which I replied, "what man?" She then pointed at the closet and said, "the man with the snake neck." I turn around and nothing was there. I'm afraid to look into the history of my house to see if anyone hung themselves in the closet. At least she wasn't scared.

Why are you crying? "Bad man." What bad man? "There." Points behind me at a dark corner of the room. Lamp on bookshelf next to said darkened corner falls off as soon as I turn to look. She slept in our bed that night.

Getting my two and a half year old daughter out of the bath one night, my wife and I were briefing her on how important it was she kept her privates clean. She casually replied "Oh, nobody 'scroofs' me there. They tried one night. They kicked the door in and tried but I fought back. I died and now I'm here." She said this like it was nothing.

My 3 year old nephew was at my cottage. He's asked me numerous times about the "girl over there" while pointing at one of the back bedrooms. The place is small, and there is definitely nobody there so I just dismiss it as a really active imagination (he has lots of imaginary friends) . . . Then some friends are visiting and they have a daughter around the same age. She has never met my nephew. Twice in the one day she asked about the "pretty girl" while pointing at the exact same room. Definitely caught me out and I didn't know what to think . . . Then at Christmas my family was over at my place and my nephew points at a picture of my wife and asks if she is coming to visit us here or does she just stay at the cottage. My wife died ten years ago. Personally I don't really believe in paranormal stuff so it's probably just my logical brain putting together a bunch of kids ramblings but it definitely got my attention.

When I was about 4, I would remember talking to "Mr.Peterson" whenever I was at my grandmothers house. He looked like a hobo from the great depression and had a guitar and sang me old timey blues, he told me that he died when he fell of a train he was riding whist drunk on moonshine. I stopped seeing him when I was about 6. Anyway, 6 months ago I found my dads old acoustic guitar and started playing, and my little cousin told me "Mr.Peterson is proud of you!" And left.

When my daughter was around 4 or 5, we lived in a house that had been converted into three separate apartments. We lived in the basement portion. Because of the way they converted the house there was a small recessed area under one of the stairways that formed a small closet/storage space in her room. One night while she was getting ready for bed I overheard her talking to someone in her room. I poked my head in and asked if she was calling for me. Her words - "No. I was talking to the little boy who lives in my closet... He's dead."

A good friend of mine and her husband bought what is considered an 'old' house around here. (Western Canada...not many houses over 100 years old). They were renovating the basement one day while I was visiting. I was down there alone with their son, who was barely 2 at the time, and could not yet speak in full sentences. He took my hand and led me over to a brick chimney-like thing thing, with a rusty metal door on it. He looked up and said 'That's where the dead babies go.' . . . I was horrified. Firstly, because, like I said, the kid could barely talk, let alone say something like that. I doubt he even knew what 'dead' meant. I'm positive that no one would have told him that, and there were no older kids around that would have said that as a joke. Still creeps me out to this day.

My wife was getting my 2yr old son up one morning. He was standing in his bed/crib. As she said good morning and walked over to him he picked up her shirt a little and crooked his head to the side. She asked him what he was doing and he said, "looking for my baby sister in your tummy." She laughed it off as a weird kid imagination thing. We found out later that at the time she was 2 weeks pregnant and it was, in fact, a girl. We are due in September. We had never really had the talk about where babies come from nor did we talk about having another child at all around him. So spooky.

When my little sister first started talking she used to say some really disturbing things. She used to tell us about how her old family would put things inside of her and would make her cry but her Daddy eventually burned her so much that she was able to find us, her new family. She spoke about things like that from the ages of almost two to four, she was much too young to have ever been exposed to any content where children, or anyone else could be sodomized, so my family has always thought she held memories of a prior life.

Between the ages of two and six my son would tell me the same story of how he picked me to be his mother. He said something about being with a man in a suit and picking a mother that would help him accomplish his souls mission (I'm atheist, so we didn't discuss spirituality at that point, nor was he raised in any sort of religious environment). The way he described it was that it was similar to grocery shopping, that he was in a bright room with people who were lined up like dolls, and that he picked me. The man in the suit asked him if he was sure, he replied that he was, and then he was born . . . My son also had an early fascination with WWII era planes. He could identify them, their parts, what region they were used in and the like. I still have no idea where he got that information. I'm a science gal, his dad is a math guy . . . We have always called him "Grandpa" because of his peaceful and gingerly demeanor. This kid seriously has an old soul.

My nephew when he first began really talking in sentences told my sister and her husband that he was "so happy he picked them". And then went on to say that before he was a baby he was in a bright room and saw lots of people and he "picked his Mom because she had a nice face".

When I was young, like maybe two years old, my grandma was in the hospital, dying of cancer. Obviously i had no idea what was going on, but apparently one day when my mother and aunt were watching me, I suddenly looked at them and said "Only one Grandma." . . . They kept trying to convince me otherwise, that no, I had two grandmas, but I kept repeating that line over and over . . . Then the phone rang. It was my uncle calling to tell my mother that my grandma had passed a few minutes ago . . .

My brother had a similar experience as a child. We had gone to visit my grandparents earlier in the day and everything was fine. When it was time to go to bed my brother, he was about 5 at the time, started crying and saying he wanted to "talk to Papa because he's sick". My mom and dad kept assuring him that he was fine as we were just over there earlier in the day. My brother wouldn't stop screaming so my mom called my grandparents. My grandma was awake and said my grandpa was asleep but she decided to take the phone into his room so he could talk to my grandpa. When she went in to the room my grandpa was unresponsive and had just had a heart attack. Fortunately for him my psycho brother knew somehow and he was able to survive. That was 23 years ago and my grandpa just passed 2 years ago . . .

My mum's dad died 10 years before I was born. I was about 6 or 7 when my parents divorced. The day before my mum told me they were divorcing apparently I was at the kitchen table drawing or something while my mum cooked tea. She says I stopped instantly and looked toward the front door as if I'd heard it open. I stared for a long time, then giggled, turned toward my mum and said "Grand-dad says don't worry, everything will be okay and he won't let anything bad happen." I then began humming and went back to my drawing. My mum says it's the single creepiest thing that's ever happened to her, and I have no memory of it happening.

According to my mom when I was younger I would tell her about how I had died in a fire a long time ago. I don't remeber that but one of my biggest fears is my house burning down or Just being around open fire scares me.

While changing my daughter in front of the open closet door. She kept looking around me and laughing. I asked her what was so funny. She said, "the man." To which I replied, "what man?" She then pointed at the closet and said, "the man with the snake neck." I turn around and nothing was there. I'm afraid to look into the history of my house to see if anyone hung themselves in the closet. At least she wasn't scared.

When my sister was little (like three or four), she explained about how she used to be black until the soldiers came to raid her village and how she died when they shot her family and set fire to the hut . . . I'm still not sure if she somehow encountered the concept of Africa on the radio, or what. And she doesn't remember it anymore.

The most detailed one I ever heard was actually delivered second-hand through my friend's mother. Apparently beginning around the time my friend could form sentences until he was little more than 2, he would go on and on about how he was a Native American named Conchon and that after his wife and son got sick and died, he moved to a mountain to live by himself with his horse. He died of a broken neck when he fell into a ravine.

As someone who frequently gave details of a past life, I can confirm I have absolutely no recollection of the life I supposedly lived before this one, but I do remember one time when I was about five giving a detailed story of being a viking executing someone. I used to always give very detailed stories of when I 'was a viking on the ship' and they always went together. I said that I was part of the same family and what not. Later found out that my family actually was vikings hundreds of years ago, and the names I gave were real people. Again, I have absolutely no memories of the viking days, just the one time I told the story.

I had one of those when I was young, we were walking along and there was a plane flying over head and I pointed at it and said "I can't wait to get a new one" my dad was obviously kind of confused and asked what happened to my old one and I said "it crashed so I came here", also strange side note, I have a line of birthmarks on my left shoulder that perfectly follow the curve of my shoulder and I have frequent dreams about being attack by a shark, what happens is I am floating in the water with a lot of fire everywhere and a shark grabs me by my left shoulder and drags me down. (See here for a picture of the birthmark.)

My mother told me this story once that a woman she worked with told her, about how her son used to speak French in his sleep, even though he couldn't speak French while awake. It turned out he had been having a series of dreams where he was a French fur trader in colonial era America (or pre-colonial?).

According to my father, when I was a toddler I had a nightmare and woke up screaming, and told him about how I was stuck in a burning building with a bunch of people jumping out windows. Keep in mind, we lived in an incredibly rural town in Portugal at the time and had no television or internet, so there was no way the concept or image of a burning highrise could have gotten into my head. My father thought it was weird, and wondered if that could have been how I died in a past life or something.

Savant Syndrome and Psi

There's been quite a bit of interest in the nine-year-old girl Nandana, who is said to have a telepathic connection with her mother. The child is severely autistic, but the mother started to notice that she seemed to know exactly what she was going to be given to eat, or the details of a trip the family was about to make, before being told about them.

In a test, a poem was given to the mother to read to herself and Nandana was then able to type it in a laptop without any prompt. She also identified a six digit number, a nine-digit number, and simple words and phrases. It's said she didn't look at her mother while typing. However I didn't see any measures being taken to control for cueing by either of the parents, so the testing probably won't carry much weight.

Even so, the affair has aroused the usual sort of anxieties among sceptics, who to reassure themselves want the parents apply for James Randi's million dollars. The couple seem to be sensible, so I'm sure they won't. The idea of them co-operating with Randi's people only - inevitably - to be told that their daughter failed, then finding themselves being denounced across the Internet as heartless publicity-seekers, is upsetting to even think about. Events like this remind us that this is psi's natural habitat, in the home, in relationships and domestic situations, and often where there is some stress or maladjustment, which doesn't therefore lend itself very well to verification.

In a sane world we should be able to treat these things as part of life, without accusations of fraud or the exploitation of children. Which, oddly enough, is exactly what we do with Savant Syndrome, to which Nandana's ability clearly belongs, even though in many respects that's as challenging to science as psi itself.

Khaleej Times, in which the feature article about Nandana first appeared, later interviewed Darold Treffert , an expert in Savant Syndrome. Treffert was consulted in the making of the film Rain Man, which he credits with doing more than anything to educate the public about the phenomenon. He thinks that around 10% of autistic children exhibit savant abilities, usually in one of five categories (in order of frequency): calendar calculating (such as naming which of the next thirty years February 9 will fall on a Friday); music, art, mathematics and mechanical/spatial abilities (such as model making and assembling complex machinery). By contrast, reports of ESP are rare: in one sample of 561 savant children, it was reported by the parents of just four.

We marvel at savants, and yet we don't on the whole question their abilities. Obviously they can demonstrate their skills easily enough, but it's not the whole story. We accept it readily because it reinforces what we already think about brain/mind, that it has almost limitless powers. Savant Syndrome is just part of the much larger mystery that neuroscience has started to unravel.

To me that seems a bit complacent. Treffert cites severely cognitively disabled youngsters who know every detail of city transport systems, can assemble jigsaw puzzles without any picture to guide them, and recite Gibbon's Decline and Fall forwards and backwards. There's one who played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concert No 1 having heard it only once, and another whose understanding of numbers enables him to fiddle at casinos: police raids on his house and bank account have seized $700,000, but prosecutions fail because the courts recognise he is severely mentally retarded and doesn't understand that what he has done is wrong. All this makes Nandana's ability to identify simple phrases in her mum's mind look almost pedestrian.

It's easy to think of savant abilities as something that some autistic children are gifted with, as if to recompense them for the inconvenience of being severely retarded. The bits of their brain that deal with the day-to-day stuff are seriously defective, but that somehow frees up other bits, the source of creative genius and memory, which in other people lie dormant. But there are reasons to doubt this. In his recent book Islands of Genius Treffert gives examples of perfectly normal people who acquired savant abilities as a result of a brain injury or disease.

A 54 year old construction worker recovers from a stroke and, having previously shown not the slightest interest in such things, becomes an accomplished poet, artist and sculptor.

Twelve elderly persons with dementia demonstrate an ability for art and music, sometimes prodigiously so, as the disease progresses. No such talent was observed before they became ill.

A 54-year old surgeon recovers from being struck by lightning. He becomes obsessively interested in classical music, in particular with a tune that keeps repeating in his head. He eventually transcribes it as a sonata and becomes a professional musician, while retaining his surgical skills.

A 40-year old motivational speaker recovers from a major concussion to discover that he can play guitar and piano. He now makes his living as a composer of movie sound-tracks.

The literature of the near-death experience contains similar examples, such as Tom Sawyer, the young blue-collar worker who after recovering from a road accident became obsessively interested in quantum mechanics.

This is all quite provocative. The unchallenged materialist assumption has been that savantism will one day be accommodated by physicalist theory, such as the computational and modular 'bottom-up' processes popular with AI and Darwinist proponents. It will be revealed as some kind of malfunction of the mechanisms that underlie normal memory, motor skills, emotions and everything else. I doubt that. My reading is far from comprehensive, but I'm not aware of any serious attempt to include this kind of phenomena in such models, and it's hard to see how that could be done.

This phenomenon of 'acquired' savantism forces us to think about the matter in a different way. We can't just attribute it to autism, that highly mysterious entity which we may assume has some curious property all of its own. This is about the effects of damage to brain tissue, pure and simple. It's as if I was to take a hammer to my six-year-old laptop, and instead of instantly expiring it suddenly blossomed into the latest supercomputer performing a thousand times faster.

The overwhelming implication in this surely is to reinforce the filter or valve theory of consciousness, that the function of the brain is to focus attention in this reality, and when that function is compromised, another reality breaks through. It's the same effect that may be had by ingesting hallucinogens, by fasting, mediation and various religious practices, and of course the near-death experience. As Edward Kelly writes in Irreducible Mind:

What psychedelics have in common with all other means of producing mystical states may consist not in the engagement of any highly specific final common neurophysiological pathways, mechanisms, or modules, but rather in some sort of more global disruption or "loosening" of the normal mind-brain connection, which in turn enables fuller expression of an objectively real transpersonal component of human personality.

Treffert himself is especially intrigued by the 'acquired' version of savant skills, and speculates that such abilities may be available to all of us, if we could only learn how to tap them. I'm not convinced about that. It's one thing for a poet or musician or artist to feel occasionally that they are in touch with some greater reality, but it might diminish the act of creation if they felt all the time that they were just taking dictation.

But Treffert is spot on when he says:

No model of brain function, including memory, will be complete until it can fully incorporate and explain this jarring contradiction of extraordinary ability and sometimes permeating disability in the same person. Until we can fully explain the savant, we cannot fully explain ourselves.

Science as Propaganda

In the comments to a recent post a sceptic tried, in the usual way, to convince us to abandon our delusions. He cited various references, including a fMRI study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2008, which claims to have demonstrated that psi does not exist.

Again, as is often the case, the study says more about the urgent disbelief of debunking psychologists than it says about psi. It's shortcomings were widely noted at the time, but since sceptics take it so completely at face value I thought I'd give it another look.

The experiment was carried out by Samuel Moulton, a Harvard psychology graduate, and his mentor Stephen Kosslyn, who is well-regarded for his brain studies on mental imagery and visual perception. The authors consider that the evidence for psi so far is highly dubious. Anecdotal experiences can be attributed to cognitive illusions, while the outcome of ESP experiments is ambiguous. By contrast, they think that brain scanning technology is sufficiently reliable to settle the matter. If psi exists then, ergo, it ought to show up in fMRI scans.

Accordingly they recruited 19 bonded pairs of people - twins, couples, friends - which they whittled down to 16, one acting as sender and the other placed in the scanner as receiver. The receiver was shown two pictures, one being 'sent' by the sender and the other a control, and asked to guess which by pressing a button. The results came out at 50%, as expected if chance alone was operating, nor did anything unusual show up on the scans.

They conclude:

Analyses of group data revealed no evidence whatsoever of psi. Psi and non-psi stimuli evoked widespread but indistinguishable neuronal responses . . . The results support the null hypothesis that psi does not exist.

The study shows an impressive attention to detail, and in its technical aspects looks extremely solid, eg:

Functional series were analyzed using FMRIB's Improved Linear Model (FILM; Woolrich, Ripley, Brady, & Smith, 2001), which removes nonparametrically estimated temporal autocorrelation in each voxel's time series before applying the general linear model (GLM). For each series we modeled neural responses to the psi stimulus, non-psi stimulus, and feedback stimulus, as well as their temporal derivatives by convolving the basic waveforms (based on onset time and duration) of these variables with a double-gamma canonical hemodynamic response function (Glover, 1999). The same temporal filtering that was applied to the data was also applied to the model. For every functional volume, the following linear contrasts were employed to create statistical parametric maps (SPMs): non-psi > psi, and psi > non-psi.

So these guys know their stuff. Or do they?

Moulton and Kosslyn talk as if they're pioneering a new method which will settle the psi controversy once and for all. But they make no mention at all of any of the successful previous psi research using scanners, which even by this time was quite significant. Critics gave them such a hard time about this, they eventually went to Dean Radin to ask him what they'd missed (see a description here) - something they might have usefully done at the outset.

Then there's their method of producing ESP, which I did not at all recognise. If it wasn't tried and tested, it's not surprising that it was unsuccessful here. The more so, considering that the receiver is in a noisy machine and being asked to perform tasks in quick succession - hardly conducive to the relaxed state of semi-disassociation that is known to be ideal for generating psi.

And interestingly, despite their insistence that their methodology beats 'behavioural' research, it still centred on a cognitive process, of conscious knowing. At least one of the earlier fMRI studies bypassed this by looking to see if a light flash stimulus on the sender provoked the same response in the receiver's brain as in the sender's - it did.

In the earlier studies, moreover, efforts had been made to find participants that really could have produced psi. These authors knew enough to understand that bonded pairs are more likely to produce psi interactions than those that are not. But they seemed to think that alone would guarantee it. Earlier successful fMRI experiments selected people who had demonstrated psi abilities, for instance having worked as healers or taken part in a successful previous study.

There are other possible explanations for the negative results. Perhaps the ESP activity was there, but masked by the activity relating to visual perception. Or the signal might have simply been too weak to pick out from the noise. It's not clear why the experimenters were impressed by the absence of activity in the brain relating to psi if there was no psi in the first place - unless they saw the sender's intention as a material entity that was bound to register visibly among the receiver's neurons.

What really catches the eye is that one of the receivers actually did show potential evidence of psi - in the form of a relative absence of brain activity that correlated positively with the psi stimulus. The authors concede this would count as a positive result, but devote the best part of two pages trying to explain it away as an 'uninteresting artefact'. Having discussed and rejected two hypotheses, they eventually decide that the anomaly reflects the participant's 'idiosyncratic reactions to perceptual, conceptual, or affective differences between the psi and non-psi stimuli'.

Their reasoning is highly technical and difficult to appraise. But it begs a number of questions. If a single positive result can be neutralised in this way, could not similar arguments be applied in the event that other participants showed positive effects? Is there any guarantee that any of the three people whose data was rejected did not also show positive results? And what is the point of looking for evidence in the first place if it can be so easily dismissed? Surely this weakens the authors' insistence on the power of fMRI scanning to settle matters once and for all.

This is one of the more curious features of debunking studies. The sceptics embark on a process in the expectation of getting null results, are embarrassed to get positive results after all, but save the day with post hoc reasoning such as, 'yes but it wouldn't have happened if we'd done the randomisation differently'. (Radin references a wonderful study published in the The Humanistic Psychologist in 2006 by two psychologists, who carried out eight ganzfeld experiments and were shocked to get the usual 32% significance rate. To deal with this they redesigned the experiment to their own specification, and got a null result, which they then used to explain away all the rest.)

Someone who is not an out-and-out sceptic might spot the authors' hostility towards the idea of psi and wonder what effect this might have on their reasoning. To those of us who know about psi research, it stands out a mile. Their preamble makes it abundantly clear. They go to the trouble of quoting in full a rather good example of a crisis ESP episode - a woman waking one night experiencing powerful symptoms of choking and blood falling down her head, and learning two days later that her son was shot in the head at this time - but wave such testimony away on the grounds that it's probably all caused by confirmation bias, clustering illusions, etc. Even if ESP was proved, they say, it would just be an unexplained anomaly. They admit that claiming a single null result to be proof of non-existence is problematic, but consider that their results are so clear-cut it's fair to make an exception.

As an exploratory experiment it has value, and arguably forms an interesting addition to the parapsychological database. But their ambition is manifestly not to add to the database but to discredit it, backed by the big guns of contemporary neuroscience. The real story here is one of individuals setting out to rid themselves of their uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Hence the triumphant press release that one can guess generated headlines around the world: 'ESP does not exist, Harvard scientists prove.'

The result is a curious illusion - an apparently careful, well-designed and thoroughly scientific study which is in fact only superficially so, and whose real effect is to reinforce materialist prejudices. Science as propaganda, one might say.

A Crowdfunding Appeal

Crowdfunding is a big deal these days, to judge from the number of start-ups using it to fund innovative new devices. It seems to work and I've been wondering if and when psi research would start using it.

Now someone has. The Windbridge Institute is appealing for help to fund an investigation of the healing effects on the bereaved of readings by mediums.

Director Julie Beischel comments:

For those of you who have already experienced the healing effects of a mediumship reading, putting effort into studying this may seem like a waste of time. I assure you that it is not. In our culture, science serves as an authority and only by using the tools of science can we truly affect change and potentially make this a treatment option available to everyone suffering from a loss.

Any scientific research on mediums is worth doing, so I hope this bears fruit. Michael Prescott has published Julie's email in full, and you can sign up here.

Ray Kurzweil's "How To Create a Mind"

I'm a bit of a fan of Ray Kurzweil, and had been planning to get his new book How to Create a Mind. I've since discovered a full synopsis on a website, which saves me some time and money. (For non-fiction authors the existence of such a site should be a worry - but that's another story.)

Kurzweil is that interesting type of thinker who drives scientific materialism to seemingly absurd limits. His idea is that having completely understood how humans are put together we can remake ourselves and overcome the imperfections that biological evolution saddled us with.

Kurzweil's transhumanist thinking sound kooky, even to many of his peers. But he's a credible figure, having made major contributions to artificial intelligence, notably in the field of voice recognition. I think Kurzweil's vision of the technological singularity, that machines will outstrip human intelligence by mid-century, is rather cool. I completely disbelieve it, for what I consider are sound empirical as well as practical reasons, so I'm not threatened by it, or feel the need to heckle (he gets plenty of flak as it is from other AI thinkers like Daniel Dennett). But I love it that science can let the imagination rip - it would be dull if we weren't allowed to dream.

I was curious to know, though, how does one create a mind? It's about understanding how it works. Kurzweil follows the well-trodden computational route, where lots of lower-level processes based on responses to the environment combine to produce higher level abstract thinking. He identifies the basic process as that of pattern recognition and thinks the underlying architecture is relatively simple, the kind of thing that could be readily replicated by a sufficiently powerful computer - by 2029, at the present exponential rate of progress.

He concedes that a supercomputer like IBM's Watson, currently the most advanced of its kind, could not yet pass the Turing Test, fooling a human interlocutor into thinking it is human. But that's only because it was not designed to engage in conversation but to succeed at specific tasks, like winning at chess and Jeopardy. The most advanced AI machines are already using these same principles and processes. Indeed, AI was using them even before it was discovered that the human neocortex is doing the same thing, and now the traffic has been reversed, with neuroscience feedings its discoveries back to AI.

Where reasoning is concerned, Kurzweil sees quality as an outcome of quantity. Nature endowed us with a mere 300 million pattern processors, but once we start making synthetic brains why not give them a billion, or even a trillion? This, he claims, will not only increase the kind of intelligence we already see in humans, but also generate higher orders of abstract thought and complexity. The synthetic brains could have an in-built critical thinking module that stops them holding a bunch of inconsistent ideas, as humans do. While humans are limited by evolution in terms of what we can achieve, these super intelligent, super rational machines could pursue goals like curing disease and alleviating poverty with a realistic prospect of success.

Meanwhile humans can beef up their own brainpower by adding new modules as brain implants. Lest we worry this would change our identity, Kurzweil thinks that identity is an effect of our entire system, and would not be compromised by changing individual parts.

The next step in the journey will be to spread this new intelligence throughout the universe.

If we can transcend the speed of light - admittedly a big if - for example, by using wormholes through space (which are consistent with our current understanding of physics), it could be achieved within a few centuries. Otherwise, it will take much longer. In either scenario, waking up the universe, and then intelligently deciding its fate by infusing it with our human intelligence in its non-biological form, is our destiny.

OK, then!

The book has stirred the pot, and it's interesting to see what sceptical perspectives have emerged. One is to point out just how incredibly distant we really are from the goal that Kurzweil thinks is just around the corner. Take the humble earthworm, C. elegans. Where the brain has 100 billion neurons connected by 100 trillion synapses, the worm has only 302 neurons connected by roughly 5,000-7,000 synapses, and a lot is known about it. Scientists can tie its reflexes and behaviours to individual neural pathways or brain circuits. But . . .

Can we use this to model or predict the actions of the worm? No. We're not even close. In fact, it takes a computer with a billion transistors to make a weak, incorrect guess at what a worm with 302 brain cells will do.

If we can't simulate 302 neurons and 5,000 synapses, how can we hope to conquer 100,000,000,000 and 100,000,000,000,000? Let's not even get started on the 100,000,000,000,000,000 electrical signals per second that form the traffic on that neural road network.

Then again, are mental phenomena really the outcome of mere pattern recognition processes? Colin McGinn, a long-time critic of mainstream thinking about mind, points out that this is in fact a very partial view of what the brain does. There's no perceptual recognition going on at all in thinking about an absent object - 'for instance in thinking about London when I am in Miami, or in dreaming, or in remembering that I have to feed the cat'. Kurzweil talks as if everything in the mind involved perception. But there are also other mental phenomena, such as

emotion, imagination, reasoning, willing, intending, calculating, silently talking to oneself, feeling pain and pleasure, itches, and moods - the full panoply of the mind. In what useful sense do all these count as "pattern recognition"? Certainly they are nothing like the perceptual cases on which Kurzweil focuses. He makes no attempt to explain how these very various mental phenomena fit his supposedly general theory of mind - and they clearly do not. So he has not shown us how to "create a mind," or come anywhere near to doing so.

McGinn also makes the point - widely noted by other critics of dominant trends in neuroscience such as Raymond Tallis - that these sorts of accounts are saturated in anthropomorphic language. Kurzweil's pattern-recognisers 'receive and send messages', they 'manipulate information'. Listening to this, it's easy to forget these are lumps of tissue: in fact they have no awareness of doing any such thing. A retort is that such representational talk is merely intended to be metaphorical. But that's not altogether true. Its effect is to create in the reader's mind a sense of a coherent process, a masking pseudo-explanation that leaves the fundamental mystery entirely untouched.

Kurzweil does include a chapter on such key matters as free will and identity, which he concedes his model can't really explain. Like many people he asserts that they somehow 'emerge' from lower level activity, just as conscious awareness does. This is problematic enough, but there's also an absence - as far as I can tell, having only read a synopsis - of any serious consideration of emotional or moral intelligence. It's not widely observed that the cleverest people are also the most emotionally mature - that is to say the wisest, the best at cooperating with groups, and most fully committed to finding the most widely acceptable outcome to any given social or political problem.

In principle I suppose one could program the machines with some utilitarian-type algorithm. However to design such a thing, humans would first have to agree on an ideal, which would be like competing groups getting together to write a national constitution - always an extremely fraught process. Kurzweil seems to think such matters can safely be left to the machines themselves, since they will be vastly more intelligent than us. This implies that there exists out there some single outcome that is so obviously rational they can all agree on it. But that is emphatically not the human experience, and what happens if the machines too start to compete with each other? This is the stuff of Hollywood dystopian nightmares, a world given over to indestructible beings with unimaginable strength and inhuman cunning.

One might say it's pure fantasy, not least because no machine could ever pass the Turing Test, as long as that test includes a demonstration of ESP - as Turing himself intended. It is course argued that ESP doesn't exist and that Turing naively let himself be seduced into accepting spurious claims. Or that even if ESP does exist, it plays such a marginal role that by meeting all the other requirements a computer could achieve human status. But if we take ESP to be a property of minds, then clearly minds are something more than the effect of brain processes.

It follows, therefore, that if some Frankenstein character were to try to use How to Create a Mind as a manual, he wouldn't get very far. Without understanding the true basis of mind we will only ever be able to mimic it. But that's not necessarily the end of the story.

Science can't create minds from dead matter, but perhaps it can create the conditions for minds spontaneously to come into being. This would mean taking seriously the idea of panpsychism, that consciousness is inherent in matter, and will emerge in systems of sufficient complexity. In this way, something of Kurzweil's vision could come about by quite different means. Or imagine that these thinking robots he anticipates, although not properly human, are sufficiently sophisticated that they can be possessed by the dead as a means to revisit the world in mechanical bodies.

That's why I like this transhumanism stuff. We don't have to take it literally, but it can take us to some interesting places.

More on Wikimandering

Thanks to everyone who contributed comments on my post about Wikipedia. The case histories were especially interesting. Rather than add my own I thought I'd make a new post, by way of general reflection.

One line of thought - probably the dominant one - is that keeping the articles clean is too much of a struggle, given how determined is the sceptic opposition. Wikipedia is a lost cause; it will always reflect critical mainstream thinking. But that doesn't matter because there are plenty of other sources where interested people can go to find out about psi-research.

Another view - less popular, apparently, but persuasively argued - is that we should get stuck in and do something about it:

Wikipedia appeals to the entire cross section of humanity, from the elite to the Great Unwashed. The elites are going to believe what their fellow elites tell them to believe, but the average curious schoolkid may initially take what they see in a Wiki article at face value, and move on.

Getting a full picture of any paranormal related topic takes a heluva lot of digging. Pseudo-sceptics can be intimidating and convincing. Maybe I'm being pollyanna-ish here, but a civil, concerted campaign to counter-balance sceptic attempts at repressing the open discussion of spirituality is the right thing to do.

I have to say, this is my way of thinking too. I disagree with the expressions of disdain about Wikipedia - I think it's an extraordinary resource. And yes, I do use it all the time, mostly to get an instant take on people and situations in world affairs, stuff that would be impossible to get quickly from anywhere else. Of course I double check when required, but in the ten years or so that I've been using it I can't ever recall coming unstuck - which in my line of work could easily happen. And I'm always astonished by the effort and commitment that contributors put into it - and hugely grateful for it.

If that's my experience as a professional person, then I guess it will be others' as well. Its not an accident that Wikipedia comes up near the top of searches - it's because so many people find it useful. So I'm not convinced that someone who decides to consult Wikipedia on a psi-related topic - on a whim, perhaps, or having come across some article or controversy in a newspaper - will recognise the sceptical barracking for what it is. On the contrary, it will shape their view. And this is surely something we can't be indifferent about.

It's true there are a lot of other good sources (and thanks to the commenter who kindly included this blog). But I don't agree that such people will easily find their way there, or that they would necessarily make any sense of what they found. That's why something like Wikipedia is needed - for beginners as opposed to intermediate level and advanced.

If I'm right about this, there are two options (actually I'm sure there are more, but this is something to be going on with).

One is to take the battle to the sceptics on their own terms. It's not as though their pages are immune to hostile tweaking. It won't be pretty, and we'd have to accept that we will never actually win, but we could get enough of a leverage at least to improve the quality of the psi pages for the benefit of newcomers.

Another option might be to create an independent portal with entry-level, Wikipedia-type articles on psi topics. I've long thought that something like this would be a good idea. It would essentially duplicate the material that already exists, and perhaps expand it, but without the heckling. Critical opinions and studies should be referenced, of course, and ideally the full range of sceptic alternatives should be represented - just as they are in any decent parapsychological paper. But sceptics would not be able to interfere without actually hacking into the site.

Whether to do one or the other - or both, or neither - touches on a much larger issue, whether we want to be in the business of advocacy. My impression is, there's less appetite for that on our side than there is among our opponents. For sceptics, influencing opinion is what it's all about. Wikimandering is just the sort of thing that their organisations are there to do. It's a fundamentalist thing: evangelising comes naturally to them.

We're more about generating ideas, studies and experiments than in 'spreading the word'. We're receptive to people who come to us, but we don't go looking for people to convert, minds to change. We don't have an equivalent of CSICOP/CSI. And looking around, I can't see any research organisation wanting to get behind an initiative like this. But like the reader whose comment I quoted, I'm starting to think it's the right thing to do. If we don't stand up for what we believe in, then why would anyone else believe it?

To the commenter who kindly offered her services as an editor, but asked if this was all just talk, I'd answer - thanks, that's appreciated; and, quite possibly but not necessarily. A lot depends on whether there's someone out there who is able and willing to undertake this sort of project. I don't have the skills myself. It needs to be a very particular sort of person - someone who thoroughly understands websites and Wikipedia, who is determined and patient, can manage a team of editors, and in is it for the long haul. All as a labour of love. It certainly shouldn't be undertaken lightly, or it could do more harm than good. So let's not rush into anything.

But I can contribute, and act as a communications hub in the first instance. So as far as getting the ball rolling goes, if anyone wants to get in touch to kick around ideas, then please do.

Guerrilla Skeptics

I use Wikipedia a lot in my journalism work, and I must say I've always found it an excellent resource. I know it has to be treated with caution, but in practice I assume it will be more accurate than not. So mostly I take it on trust.

Recently I've been poking around on the site to see how psi topics are presented. My impression is that a novice would come away with a pretty jaundiced view. It's obvious that sceptics are busily re-editing articles in their favour, and a reader has kindly sent me a link that shows how they do this. It's a project called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, run by Susan Gerbic, who recruits sceptics to give pages a makeover, both those that publicise their own side (ie debunkers, key sceptic figures, etc) and also the opposition's (celebrity psychics, paranormal claimants, etc).

This is a specialised activity and Gerbic's blog gives tips and techniques. Recently she's gone global, getting sceptics to edit foreign language pages. It's all about creating perceptions - or I suppose they would say 'correcting'. The use of the word 'guerrilla' underlines its essentially hostile nature, but of course in their view the battle against superstition is just that, a battle. So they'll use whatever weapons come to hand.

And Wikipedia presents a rather large opportunity. It's easy to deflate a positive perception and replace it with a negative one. We encounter it all the time in sceptic discourse. The use of a 'however' qualifier at the end of a paragraph is often all it takes: 'Believers say they have uncovered X effect, however more careful researchers . . .' Look at this paragraph on remote viewing from the entry for 'Parapsychology':

Several hundred such trials have been conducted by investigators over the past 25 years, including those by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) and by scientists at SRI International and Science Applications International Corporation.[59][60] Many of these were under contract by the U.S. government as part of the espionage program Stargate Project, which terminated in 1995 having failed, in the government's eyes, to document any practical intelligence value.[61] PEAR closed its doors at the end of February 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn, said of it that, "For 28 years, we've done what we wanted to do, and there's no reason to stay and generate more of the same data."[62] However, physicist Robert L. Park said of PEAR, "It's been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton".[62]

This is cleverly done. One can see how an essentially neutral description might have been mucked about with by suitable insertions, particularly the rhetorical declaration at the end.

Always the aim is to round off any claim with a counter-claim. So in the section in 'Parapsychology' on random number generators a claim about meta-analyses consistently showing a statistically significant effect is followed by this:

The most recent meta-analysis on psychokinesis was published in Psychological Bulletin, along with several critical commentaries.[63][64] It analyzed the results of 380 studies; the authors reported an overall positive effect size that was statistically significant but very small relative to the sample size and could be explained by publication bias.

In other words, where the original claim was a general comment about many studies, this is a detailed comment about a single study. But precisely because it is detailed, it gives the impression of being more authoritative.

An awful lot of the sceptic material is just hostile opinion and rhetoric- as Park's comment above. In at least some cases this should be challenged.

In a review of parapsychological reports Ray Hyman wrote "randomization is often inadequate, multiple statistical testing without adjustment for significance levels is prevalent, possibilities for sensory leakage are not uniformly prevented, errors in use of statistical tests are much too common, and documentation is typically inadequate".[92]

Yes, Ray Hyman did write that in his review, but that's the only uncontested statement here. Citing a reference does not magically convert his hostile opinions into facts. Trouble is, this will not be at all clear to the casual reader.

Or this:

According to the skeptic Robert Todd Carroll research in parapsychology has been characterized by "deception, fraud, and incompetence in setting up properly controlled experiments and evaluating statistical data."[91]

In what world could someone like Todd Carroll, a compiler of spectacularly biased and poorly informed encyclopedia entries, be considered a serious authority? If this sort of thing is allowed on Wikipedia then what's to stop me inserting remarks like, 'According to psi-advocate Robert McLuhan, this type of critical commentary is tendentious tosh by people who haven't a clue what they're talking about."

We can't really complain about hostile editing, as long it stays within the Wikipedia guidelines for editors, which Gerbic seems committed to doing. As she sees it, it's all about insisting on backing up claims with evidence, which is what sceptics are all about. In fact I've even seen it suggested that Wikipedia is by nature a sceptical endeavour, since it depends on evidence. Some seem to have taken heart when its founder Jimmy Wales came out against homeopathy, a subject that infuriates them more than almost anything else.

I'm not sure how worked up I can get about Wikipedia's view of homeopathy or about celebrity psychics, who can look after themselves. Still, it's a pity that this key source for learning and education is so compromised as far as serious parapsychology is concerned. There is of course plenty of information about parapsychology, but little that isn't gummed up with sceptic disdain. Even aside from that, it looks rather flat and lame. What's to stop editors giving quotes from credible people - scientists, psi-researchers, experients who are well-known in other fields - that give their own enthusiastic responses? Why are the dullards, ignoramuses and professional nay-sayers getting such a free run?

We need to make it clear that our evidence counts as evidence. At the very least, if sceptics insert a long section at the end of an entry that promotes their views exclusively, under the heading of 'Criticism' or some such, then it seems to me to be perfectly legitimate to add a following section headed 'Responses to criticism', in which the key points would be rebutted, at leisure and without constant heckling.

I did briefly consider making contributions of my own, but where does one start? This is clearly a job for a specialist. We need our own Gerbic to help create a co-ordinated effort. For all I know, some-such project is being planned, in which case I look forward to hearing about it, and good luck!

The danger of course is getting into a tiresome tit-for-tat, with teams of rival guerrillas coming out at night and trashing the opposition's most recent efforts. In that case the victor would be whoever runs out of steam first. Actually I don't think it need come to that, and Wikipedia surely has ways of dealing with it. We don't need the last word; all we need to do is to put the carping in perspective, and ideally encourage readers to check out the subject for themselves in other sources, where they aren't going to be distracted by noisy sceptics.