Paranormalia

Atheists and Neuroscience

A member of a Facebook forum pointed out this extended essay by Adam Lee, an atheist, and asked whether anyone had a response. I've been thinking about these things of late, so I thought I'd have a shot.

Lee takes aim at the idea of the soul, arguing that recent discoveries in neuroscience make it untenable. Growing evidence of the way the brain functions, as revealed by brain scans, demonstrates how closely it is implicated in the production of identity, personality and behaviour, he point out. He gives an overview of which bits of the brain do what. And where in all of this is the soul, he wants to know. 'Which brain lobe does it inhabit? Where is it hiding in this tangle of neurons and synapses?'

Lee explains:

As a practical matter, it should be easy to judge between dualism and materialism, because unlike most religious doctrines, the notion of the soul is an idea that would seem to have testable consequences. Specifically, if the human mind is the product of a "ghost in the machine" and not the result of electrochemical interactions among neurons, then the mind should not be dependent on the configuration of the brain that houses it. In short, there should be aspects of the mind that owe nothing to the physical functioning of the brain.

So where is the soul hiding? Area after area of the brain has yielded up its secrets to the probing of neuroscience, and not a trace of it has been found. The more our knowledge advances, the less reason we have to suppose that it exists, and the less sustainable the dualist position becomes. All the evidence we currently possess suggests that there is nothing inside our skulls that does not obey the ordinary laws of physics.

To add substance to this Lee goes on to describe in some detail the effects of different types of brain injuries. For instance there are patients with memory disorders who cannot remember, or cannot make new memories. He asks: 'According to dualist beliefs, what has happened to these people? Where are their souls?'

Furthermore, with their memory shot, they no longer have the option of converting to Christianity. Any proselytizer who tries to convert them has, at most, a few minutes, before they forget everything he's said. 'Will God condemn them for this? Assuming these people were not religious, are they now doomed to Hell because their souls are trapped in an endless loop of brain chemistry?'

This is before we consider more exotic cases of the type described by Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio, such as alien hand syndrome (where a hand seems to develop a mind of its own, viz. Dr Strangelove); paralysis and denial (the patient believes he can move his paralysed arm, and resists all arguments to the contrary); Capgras' syndrome (the patient thinks a person she knows well is actually an imposter); and of course Phineas Gage, who survived but underwent a severe personality change after a steel rod passed through the front of his skull.

The article is quite long, but you get the idea. The essential point is that all this data poses an insuperable challenge for dualism and for the existence of an immortal soul. And the more of it that accumulates, the tougher the challenge gets.

It struck me straight away that Lee is attacking an idea of the soul that no serious person could believe: the Cartesian substance that sits inside our heads and somehow meshes with the machinery. To ask where the soul is hiding is quaintly naïve, as if the thing could potentially be tracked down and ferreted out of its burrow. It's hard to think that he's completely serious about it, and yet one worries that actually he is. This is exactly how the scientific-sceptical mind thinks. It's akin to the observation that cosmologists have combed through the entire universe and found no trace of God - as if he might be hiding in a gas cloud somewhere.

Another approach would be to identify what contemporary dualists actually do think and then tackle that. Most these days tend to hypothesise some kind of quantum interaction at a deep interior level of the brain, as did Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. One variation of this would be the filter theory first outlined (in different ways) by Frederic Myers and William James, and recently given a dusting off by Edward Kelly in Irreducible Mind.

Like many people, I first encountered this in Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, where the brain is seen as a 'reducing valve', shutting out the greater part of the reality out there - Mind at Large, as Huxley called it. Having had similar mescaline experiences to Huxley's I found it immediately appealing: it's when brain functions are compromised, as for instance after ingesting hallucinogens, that consciousness changes radically, giving a glimpse of the greater reality Out There, magnificent and terrifying. Agreed, this stands more as an initial metaphor than as a fully worked out theory. Kelly has made a good effort, fleshing it out with the ideas of quantum physicist Henry Stapp, but it's still a long way from being taken seriously by the consciousness studies community.

So the model would not be difficult to challenge, for instance on the grounds that warm wet brains are hostile environments for quantum interactions. But unless you can demonstrate that it's terminally incoherent, or provide evidence that in some way falsifies it, you can't maintain that neuroscience has disproved the concept of the soul.

Another feature that interests me is Lee's emphasis on the accumulation of contrary evidence. Each new experiment that demonstrates a link between a brain state and a mental state - and the literature is by now extremely rich - is another nail in the coffin of dualism.

But was this ever really necessary? It doesn't need brain scans to observe, for instance, that the personality becomes progressively degraded with the progress of senile dementia, and this has long been viewed as a problem for any claim of survival of consciousness after death. New items of evidence don't need to be piled one on top of each other, as Lee does here, in order to make the point: it surely has to be ceded at once. Nothing bypasses the brain. Identity, personality and behaviour are all absolutely implicated in what it does. If the brain is damaged, one or more of these will be compromised.

It does not follow, however, that physical brain functions are the ultimate source of these things. No matter how successfully we correlate brain states with mental states, that's all we have - increasingly detailed and suggestive correlations. To argue that a correlation demonstrates fundamental cause is absolutely unwarranted. We remain free to hypothesise, say, the existence of the soul as an information field that exists in an unseen dimension, and which expresses itself through the brain and nervous system through some kind of quantum interaction.

If the brain is the medium by which this information field is expressed in the physical world, then, in the event of injury, one would expect its expression to fail in striking and various ways. Furthermore, if this field continues to exist after the death of the body we could hypothesise that it finds another way to express itself, in some other form, in some other dimension. In which case the individual is restored to health - as indeed is frequently described by spirit communicators through mediums, as their experience.

All this may seem to the sceptic to be speculative and unwarranted. But something of the sort is required to account for the observed facts of psi. A brain that can express telepathic intuitions, presentiment, precognitive dreams, and suchlike is not to be conceived in purely mechanical, physicalist terms.

So we end up some distance from where Lee set out. The real target is not the Cartesian concept of the soul, which hardly anyone takes seriously, but those phenomena that would require some alternative, more viable dualist framework to make sense of. That would have been the basis of a quite different argument, of the kind that Richard Wiseman et al produce, questioning psi's existence.

To be clear, I believe that the evidence from neuroscience, of the kind that is currently being produced, cannot be an argument against survival of consciousness after death. Still, I guess that it will continue to be a powerful element in atheists' thinking. They seem mesmerised by it, to the extent of letting themselves be seduced by an illusion.

The Politics of Psi

Halfway through writing Randi's Prize I started to feel a nagging sense that many of the people I hoped to reach weren't really open to persuasion. The brilliance or otherwise of my arguments wouldn't make much difference; they would be acclaimed by people who already on some level accepted them, and denounced by those who never could.

The fact is, surely, that when it comes to our personal worldview, studies and experiments play a secondary role. We accept findings that best fit our preferred narrative, and reject those that don't. Mostly, I think, we gravitate towards writers who reinforce what we already intuitively feel to be true. Paranormalia readers aren't likely to frequent JREF or Pharyngula, which they probably find alien and uncomfortable, and vice versa.

So these days I'm thinking less about psi evidence itself and more about the social and psychological context. As a psi-advocate, I believe I know why my group believes what it does: we're convinced by the evidence, which happens to validate our ideals. But what about sceptics? Why is it so extremely important to them that psychic claims be shown to be false? Why does it irritate them so much, and why do they go to such extraordinary lengths to explain it away? (I'm thinking of the tenacity of people like Gerald Woerlee, for instance.)

This would seem to be a question for psychologists in their quest to identify the drivers of human thought and behaviour. Our brains stopped evolving when we were still hunter-gathering, they say, and aren't terribly well equipped to deal with the challenges of modern living. Among other things, that's why some of us tend to go on believing in fantasies like gods and ghosts and life after death.

Interestingly, sceptical thinkers implicitly exclude themselves from this tendency towards irrationality, at least in this context. They don't have hallucinations, so it doesn't apply to them. But having close-up experience of the way they argue, it seems to me that it very much does; they are as profoundly affected by emotive thinking as any of us, and with the added complication that their complacency blinds them to the fact.

Two books I've been reading recently seem relevant to the psi controversy, at least indirectly, driving home the emotive basis of so much human behaviour. One is Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious At Our Peril, by Margaret Heffernan, a British writer and businesswoman. The other is a widely-covered new book by American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Wilful Blindness describes how people manage to close their eyes to obvious wrongs, often out of solidarity with the group they belong to. That results in catastrophes that could easily have been avoided. Doctors close ranks in support of a paediatric surgeon accused of incompetence, with the result that dozens of babies die who might otherwise have been saved. An oil company orders severe cost-cutting at a distant refinery, which local employees obediently carry through, all the while knowing that it is compromising safety: the resulting explosion kills 15 people. Citizens of a small town fiercely resist emerging health concerns about a local asbestos mine, to protect jobs, even while all around them their friends and family members are dropping like flies.

In big corporate scandals like Enron, plenty of people in positions of authority knew that its success was built on a giant scam, but looked the other way. When it's a choice between exposing wrongdoing or showing loyalty to peers and superiors, the latter usually wins. That's why whistleblowers are so rare, and why they have to struggle so hard to be heard.

The sheer number of Heffernan's stories builds a deeply depressing picture of the limits of human thinking. Especially when one realises how much of the present economic troubles are due to the wilful blindness shown by bankers, regulators and politicians who for years fell into a kind of moral slumber. Yesterday I read a news item about the Bernie Madoff scandal, that what seemed to hit the world like a bolt from the blue was really no such thing. Most of Wall Street suspected he was fraudulent - as indeed it should have, considering his abnormally high returns to investors and his refusal to tell anyone how he managed it - but no one publicly said or did anything about it. Earlier I might have been shocked, but now I understand this is absolutely normal.

This is relevant if we agree that science itself is subject to the negative effects of groupishness. Even some scientists themselves are at pains to deny the idealised picture that the public has of science, as a process of disinterested truth-seeking that is absolutely rational, fair and objective. On the contrary, they say, it's a hugely emotive business driven by cliques and factions who identify with pet theories and beat up their opponents (intellectually if not actually). They close ranks to freeze out intruders like parapsychologists, who are not loyal to the central tenets of materialism.

Unsurprisingly, there are persistent reports from scientists and medical professionals sympathetic to psi-research that some of their colleagues privately agree with them, but publicly wouldn't dream of exposing themselves to ridicule by speaking out. It's quite literally more than their job's worth. For most, the group-think is the truth, and what they personally think doesn't come into it.

I've often felt, grappling with sceptics' arguments, that they literally can't see why paranormalists argue as they do. They are literally blind to the paranormal element, so they can't see what the fuss is about - they think people are just making it up.

Heffernan references a 2005 experiment in which subjects were placed in an fMFRI brain scanner, shown some objects, and asked to decide which of them were similar to others. In one version they made the decision on their own, and in another decided only after knowing what their fellow participants had decided. The subjects tended to be swayed by the group, which was expected; the purpose was to determine which area of their brain was active as they made the decision. Activity in the prefrontal cortex would indicate that it was a conscious choice ('I'm going to follow the others on this one'.) But in fact, there was no activity there. Instead the activity was centred in the occipital and perietal regions of the brain, suggesting that conformity was an act of perception.

This is a shocking finding. Social influence had altered what the volunteer actually saw.

Jonathan Haidt too is sceptical about the primacy of reason, arguing that its role in human judgements has been vastly exaggerated. He follows David Hume in believing that intuition, not reason, is what drives people in their decision-making (interestingly, given Hume's status as the patron saint of sceptics, who glorify the primacy of reason). His image is of the rider (reason) perched on top of the elephant (intuition), and trying, for the most part ineffectually, to guide it.

Haidt is a moral psychologist who has studied the basis of leftwing and rightwing political thinking. No space, alas, to go into detail of his wonderful book. (It's a bit complicated, and confusingly structured, but if you stick with it all makes sense in the end.) He's a liberal, but found himself becoming critical of the relatively shallow basis of liberal or progressive morality compared with conservatives, and coming to appreciate the true value of conservative morality (of the Burkean rather than the Tea Party kind). The liberal emphasis on fairness and equality, he thinks, can have negative effects if it tries to override the moral foundations that conservatives are big on, such as respect for authority, loyalty and sanctity.

That sounds like common sense, but this is the most detailed and nuanced explanation of human morality that I've found coming from a scientist, and a lot more satisfying than the rather crude speculations of evolutionary psychologists.

Haidt's thinking about politics chimes with my own about psi. What one believes - and how one responds to claims and evidence - has a lot to do with one's genetic predisposition, and how that predisposition is shaped by life experience into a worldview.

I don't know what the equivalent foundations would be of advocacy and scepticism. As a moderate leftie myself, I've been tempted in the past to think of scepticism as a rightwing thing. It's perhaps partly because I associate the crude and noisy intolerance of people like Martin Gardner and James Randi with the blow-hard, Rush Limbaugh-Fox News tendency in American politics; also the way the Right espouses extreme climate scepticism, arguably another form of denial. In general, there seems to be something inherently reactionary in the deference to established scientific authority and tradition, and the knee-jerk rejection of radical new thinking. At its worst, the rhetoric looks like an angry white (mainly) male defence of the establishment against dippy idealistic liberal New Agers.

OK, this is far too simplistic and I wouldn't seriously argue it. Psi-sceptics just as easily fit the secular liberal model, and progressives can be every bit as snarky as their opponents.

But what interests me about Haidt's analysis is that it provides a in-depth view of both sides' motivations, particularly that of the group he has always opposed. I think we should be doing something similar. If sceptics take what seem to us to be extraordinary, egregious and indefensible positions to defend themselves from the implications, of, for instance, veridical out-of-body perception in the near-death experience, it's worth exploring why. Is it personal fear, or does it threaten an idea of the world that they value and want to defend?

Off the top of my head, I can think of all sorts of things that bother them. The corruption of personal privacy implied by telepathy; the threat to the integrity and authority of science; the invitation to witchcraft implied by psychokinesis; the notion of a supernatural interference in human affairs; the terror of living on after death (and having nothing to do) and so on. These are things which may not bother psi-advocates, or even appear on our radar. But quite possibly they are legitimate worries. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, what kind of world this would be if science did an about-face, and endorsed the reality of psi. Is it something we're ready for?

All questions for another post, and things I'll be exploring in my next book.

Something from Nothing

Physicist Lawrence Krauss has attracted a lot of attention with his claim that the universe could have sprung into existence from nothing. His lecture for AAI (Atheist Alliance International), introduced by Richard Dawkins, has been viewed 1.3 million times on YouTube. Now he has published a short book, again with an afterword by Dawkins.

Krauss argues that a quantum relativistic field is inherently unstable, and exactly the kind of thing that would bring forth a universe. That seems intuitively likely to me, although I obviously can't comment on the scientific arguments, which take up 95% of the text.

It's the other 5% which interests me. Krauss's goal is atheistic: he explicitly aims to knock away the First Cause argument, which he takes to be a pillar of religious faith. If the universe can be shown to have created itself from nothing, then there is no need for a creator god.

Actually the idea isn't new - another physicist and sceptic, Victor Stenger, has been banging this drum for a while. But Krauss's ability to get people's attention is exciting the atheist warriors, who seem to think he has really cracked it. 'Knockout blow', says Richard Dawkins. 'As it turns out, everything has a lot to do with nothing - and nothing to do with God (Sam Harris). 'The triumph of physics over metaphysics, reason and enquiry over obfuscation and myth, made plain for all to see' (A.C. Grayling).

Dawkins adds in his afterword:

The last remaining trump card of the theologian, why is there something rather than nothing, shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If On the Origin of Species was biologists' deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe from Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says, and what it says is devastating.

A lot of people have pointed out the flaw in the argument, however. The 'nothing' that Krauss talks about is, in both theological and philosophical terms, already 'something'. A 'nothing' that has properties, and can be described as being unstable - and indeed, the kind of thing that is highly likely to produce 'something' - is very far from being 'nothing'. On the contrary, it is a very definite 'something'.

So the book has generated a lot of heat, of the usual impassioned kind. Even some generally sceptical scientists like Jerry Coyne have problems with it. The charge is led by David Albert, a philosophy professor with a Ph.D in physics, in a quite hostile review in the New York Times.

Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states - no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems - are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn't this or that particular arrangement of the fields - what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don't is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don't.

Krauss seems to anticipate this come-back, sort of. He deals with it in the book in rather grudging asides. The question 'why is there something rather than nothing' is 'intellectually bankrupt', mere semantics, he claims. It's no more significant than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue. It used to be the domain of theologians and philosophers, but they've had their day, and now it's the turn of scientists, who are vastly better equipped to deal with it.

As a last resort, he concedes, the problem might justify a 'deistic' view of nature (of the kind that was briefly adopted by some thinkers in the eighteenth century). That's OK, just so long as we understand that this 'deity' is very far from the gods of the world's great religions, and isn't remotely interested in our doings. He concludes:

Either way, what's useful is not pondering this question, but rather participating in the exciting voyage of discovery that may reveal how the universe in which we live evolved and is evolving...That is why we have science.

It strikes me that this inability of scientists to accept the idea of 'nothing' - in its fullest sense, is closely analogous to the problems sceptics have with psi. It's a conceptual dead-end, a barrier that they can't get past. If they yield to it, it would represent the final triumph of mystery and uncertainty over the capacity of the human mind, harnessed to scientific thinking, to conquer all mystery. And this mystery must be vanquished, because it is exploited by wicked supernaturalists, to fuddle people's minds and cause evil.

I can understand why they should want to use this 'something from nothing' formula as atheistic propaganda - as part of their campaign to rid the world of the virus of religion. But I'd like to think that, in their heart of hearts, they know that there's a question here that science is not remotely capable of answering. What really worries me is that they don't, and that they actually believe this idea. In that case, there's no common ground on which to base a dialogue: we're in different conceptual worlds.

For me, Krauss's argument only goes to confirm Stephen Jay Gould's famous definition of science and religion as 'non-overlapping magisteria'. It's partly what Gould was talking about, and what atheists like Harris, who considers Gould's position 'doomed', seem unable to understand. For all of scientists' contempt for philosophers, casually expressed by Krauss throughout his book, they can't address this. Yes, biologists like Dawkins can explain why flowers are of different colours: it's to attract the right sort of pollinators, as insects and birds have different optical spectrums. But that sort of question is embedded firmly within the logic chain of material cause and effect. A state of 'nothing' that the human mind can conceive of, by contrast, is not - it's utterly beyond the mind's capability to deal with.

I may not be typical in this regard, but the First Cause problem has lurked obscurely in the background of my consciousness for as long as I can remember. It's an ever-present question. I accept that it can't be resolved in this world, with this mind, but I also struggle to understand how it could ever be resolved - in any future state. That frustrates me, so I'm never completely at peace about it.

I suppose one way to deal with it is to argue that the question doesn't exist, it's just a property of human consciousness to think in this way, an effect of the way the brain has evolved. But if we start down that road, then surely we degrade all human thinking, including the science that reveals to us the workings of the universe, in all its marvellous complexity. It's all so much meaningless fluff.

Or else we can believe that a state of mystical enlightenment may provide the answer, in a flash of intuitive insight, perhaps showing that the question in some way is false. That's something that's always intrigued me. But then the reasoning mind barges in, insisting that this would just be some comforting illusion, nothing to do with reality.

It's hard to escape the feeling that we're like fish in a tank, coming to an ever more detailed understanding of our environment, but still lacking the slightest clue what lies beyond it.

Chris Carter's Science and Psychic Phenomena

I've been having another look at Chris Carter's excellent book Parapsychology and the Skeptics, which I reviewed here. It's out in a new edition with the title Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics. It looks good (although the original was good too).

In a new postscript, Carter says he came to write the book after stumbling across a website devoted to debunking the belief in an afterlife.

Having read several serious books on the subject, I was shocked by the crudity of the author's arguments and by his utter ignorance of the vast amount of research that has been done on the topic over the past 12 years. I sent him an e-mail message, trying to get him to reconsider his dogmatic position, and, to my surprise, he responded with counterarguments. For the next few weeks, we engaged in a debate via e-mail, and I learned much about the so-called "skeptical" mind-set. I realized that it was based upon a certain set of metaphysical assumptions that were not treated as assumptions but as incontrovertible facts; and that it was also based upon an ignorance of certain facts that cast strong doubts on the validity of those assumptions.

I also realized that nothing I could possibly say would ever change his "skeptical" opinion. He had made up his mind, and that was that.

When I first read Carter's book I was impressed with the detail and clarity he brings to the descriptions of ganzfeld and other controversies. This time I've been paying more attention to his treatment of the philosophical challenge raised by psi, which is just as important. It's silly for sceptics to say there's no evidence for psychic functioning, but fair enough that they should have misgivings about how it fits in with established science.

A classic way to deal with the problem is to state that for psi to be true, science would have to be completely turned on its head, or "unravel all the way back to Galileo". I like this idea, like knitting coming undone (I think it comes from Steven Weinberg, or maybe James Alcock.) But intuitively I always thought it was crock. Psi has nothing to say about Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics, optics, chemical interactions, etc. It seems instead to have implications for the underlying basis of all matter, the realm of quantum mechanics, which at present is very imperfectly understood.

The Copenhagen interpretation, which seems to be the most commonly accepted, is that the act of measurement causes the collapse of the wave function into individual particles. The result depends on the observation; it is not a property of the electron itself. But in this interaction, if I understand it correctly, a mechanical device will do the trick just the same as a human observer. This never made any sense to me; it looks like an evasion, of the kind that physicists, not being philosophers, would easily content themselves with.

Carter focuses instead on mathematician John Von Neumann's idea that it's consciousness itself that collapses quantum possibilities into facts. This interpretation is a strictly minority view among physicists (although it was promoted by Eugene Wigner and others). How could consciousness, a product of matter, exert a causal influence on matter?

But it's remarkable, as Carter quotes physicist Nick Herbert saying, that the claim should come 'not from an otherworldly mystic in private meditation but from one of the world's most practical mathematicians deducing the logical consequences of a highly successful and purely materialistic model of the world - the theoretical basis for the billion-dollar computer industry'.

Carter goes on to describe a time-displaced PK experiment by physicist Helmut Schmidt, in which signals from a binary random event generator were recorded simultaneously on two cassette tapes, without anyone listening to them. One tape was given to a subject to listen to, with instructions to produce more 0s or 1s (usually in the form of clicks on the left or right of stereo headphones). When the results were analysed the influence of PK was observed. However the results also matched the other tape, which had been untouched.

One interpretation is that PK reached back in time to when the random events were originally generated. But a more interesting possibility, consistent with the Von Neumann interpretation, and put forward by Schmidt and his co-experimenters, is that events are not physically real until there has been an observation.

From this viewpoint, the PK effort would not have to reach into the past because nature had not yet decided on the outcome before the PK subject, the first observer, saw the result. Then, the PK effort should no longer succeed if we have some other observer look at the pre-recorded data previous to the PK subject's attempt. [An] experiment to study this situation ... has, indeed, reported a blocking of the PK effect by a previous observation.

The Von Neumann theory inevitably tends to invite quasi-theological speculation. What happened before there were conscious observers? If consciousness was needed to create humans - as conscious observers - then God or supernatural beings enter the equation. Carter quotes quantum theorist Euan Squires:

It is remarkable that such ideas should arise from a study of the behavior of the most elementary of systems. That such systems point to a world beyond themselves is a fact that will be loved by all who believe that there are truths of which we know little, that there are mysteries seen only by mystics, and that there are phenomena inexplicable within our normal view of what is possible. There is no harm in this - physics indeed points to the unknown. The emphasis, however, must be on the unknown, on the mystery, on the truths dimly glimpsed, on things inexpressible except in the language of poetry, or religion, or metaphor.

Sceptics could legitimately look for faults in experiments like Schmidt's to save themselves the bother of thinking about any of this. They can also complain - as they do - that quantum mechanics has been misappropriated and misunderstood by the spirituality community. But they would not convince me that there is not a mystery here, or that physicists are the people who really understand what's going on.

Baggini's Heathenism

In Randi's Prize I held a brief imaginary dialogue with Julian Baggini, a philosopher who writes for the Guardian. I picked Baggini because he'd made some remarks about mediums, but also because he sounded like the sort of atheist that a person with religious interests could have a conversation with. That impression has been confirmed by the thoughtful articles about religious belief that he has been writing on the Guardian's Comment-is-Free site recently - not least by the infuriated responses of hardline atheists.

Today in the print version Baggini publishes a manifesto, a list of 12 points that distinguishes what a 'heathen' believes. I like the term 'heathen', but use it in a jokey sense, along with 'infidel'. Baggini has a serious use for it: he thinks it helps distinguish moderate atheism from the highly-charged version espoused by 'bishop-bashers' like Dawkins and Hitchens. It shows that 'we do not think too highly or ourselves', unlike terms such as 'rationalist' and 'bright' - which imply (I guess he would agree) that people who think differently are irrational and stupid.

So what's in the manifesto? Baggini starts with beliefs. Like all atheists, heathens are naturalists, who have no reason to believe there is anything like heavens, spirit worlds and deities. They arrive at this conclusion because their first commitment is to the truth,

a commitment to see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have. That is where our primary commitment lies, and we are prepared to accept the possibility that we are wrong about some of the specific beliefs that has led us to.

However heathens are emphatically not followers of scientism. For them, science is not the last word on everything. They can even be made to feel uncomfortable by the way it undermines certain beliefs about free will and rationality. They also recognise that human beings are very imperfect users of reason, easily led astray by biases, distortions and prejudices.

Reason itself always leaves us short of certain knowledge, requiring us to rely on our judgements in order to come a conclusion.

That isn't to say that heathens aren't confident that they're right, they just prefer to be discreet about their certainty. They'll concede that religion may help people to be happier and healthier, if the evidence is there, although it wouldn't make them give up their convictions. They are secularists, but don't demand that religion be banished from society or public life.

Some heathens can even be a tiny bit religious themselves:

A small minority of religions reject the real existence of supernatural entities and divinely authored texts, accept that science trumps dogma, and see the essential core of religion in its values and practices. These are entirely compatible with the heathen position.

In fact religion is often the heathen's friend:

We believe in not being tone-deaf to religion and to understand it in the most charitable way possible. So we support religions when they work to promote values we share, including those of social justice and compassion. We are respectful and sympathetic to the religious when they arrive at their different conclusions on the basis of the same commitment to sincere, rational, undogmatic inquiry as us, without in any way denying that we believe them to be false and misguided.

On the other hand that's balanced by an 'equally honest' commitment to be critical of religion when necessary, especially when it 'promotes prejudice, division or discrimination, suppresses truth or stands in the way of medical or social progress.'

There were some approving comments, although it seems a lot of atheists are attached to their dogmatic warrior status, and would hate to lose it. The idea of giving ground to religions is intolerable to them (eg 'I like Atheist, it's loud, proud and to the point. Heathen sounds like I'm a pussy.') But Baggini predicts that many people of faith will agree with much of what he says, and I think he's right. He's to be commended for making the effort to build bridges and deflate the rhetoric.

Obviously, though, I disagree that scientific naturalism is the inevitable outcome of a 'commitment to the truth'.

Elsewhere, as I mentioned in Randi's Prize, Baggini argues that belief in life after death can only be based on faith, since the evidence and good reasons required for a rational argument that it exists are lacking. True, mediums sometimes make correct statements, but then there are bound to be occasional uncanny coincidences and lucky guesses. If there were genuine communication between the living and the dead, there would surely be many more accurate and otherwise inexplicable communications. The fact that they are so rare suggests they are genuine, but frauds, guesses and coincidences.

I went on to point out that Baggini could not reasonably talk this way if he knew anything about psychic research.

Just now I'm going through the investigative material on Leonora Piper, and it's an extraordinary read. Much of it consists of notes taken of sittings, where one can see the back-and-forth between sitter and Piper, in the form of a distinct trance personality. A sitter will typically hear his or her extended family described in detail, with exact names, ages, characteristics, interests, living or dead and so on, without any feedback or anything that gives the slightest support for the cold reading hypothesis. The communications were not only accurate and inexplicable, they were very far from being rare. On the contrary, this material is voluminous and no serious challenge has ever been mounted against it: such efforts as there have been are trivial. Even well-informed sceptics agreed that telepathy was the minimum needed to explain it.

Those of us who know about this, and about many other similar investigations of other individuals, think of it as evidence. In my case, the findings of psychic research help inform my spiritualistic worldview. That worldview may be in conflict with Baggini's naturalism, yet it's surely consistent with the commitment, as he describes it, to 'see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have'.

I'd add that it doesn't appear especially truthful or rational to insist that all mediums rely on pre-gathered information or cold-reading, when there are instances - and Piper is far from being the only one - that powerfully refute that.

Baggini's excuse is ignorance. As I said in my book, I guess he doesn't know that psychic research even exists. It's not on his radar; the people he mixes with, the institutions he frequents will know nothing about it either. It's part of the naturalist creed - and in this respect a creed is exactly what it is - that all such notions have been swept away by modern science.

If, on the other hand, he knows all about Piper but has a reasoned counter-argument, then I would be interested to hear it. I suspect it would be based largely on the fact of no one having won James Randi's million dollars, the possibility of cold-reading, the gullibility of investigators - all those general nostrums that sceptics typically offer, and that reveal minds that have not yet got to grips with the problem.

I think this evocation of the primacy of reason is made with the sceptic's natural complacency. A true commitment to truth and reason could eventually lead a thinker to interesting places - and expose him to deeply awkward conclusions.

James Randi's Personal Troubles

I don't pay much attention to James Randi, despite what one might think (having written a book with his name in the title). His views are predictable and outdated, and other public sceptics are generally more interesting - Hyman, Wiseman, Shermer even.

But there's no question that he's a cultural phenomenon. In his advancing age he's morphed from entertainer and intellectual street fighter into Grand Old Man. To the young especially, he's a sage, an object of hero worship, munching his homeopathy pills and dispensing wisdom with that avuncular twinkle. I monitored Twitter traffic about him a while back and was struck by the enormous number of 'James Randi is awesome' tweets (a lot of them in Spanish, for some reason). They significantly outnumbered the 'Randi is a pompous twit' type, although there were quite a few of those as well.

It seems that Randi's brand of 'rationality' appeals to young people who are searching for a firm foundation of belief, and are attracted by his simple, confrontational worldview. They gravitate to him as a source of truth. When he remarks in public performances that 'There's a difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out', it gets retweeted a zillion times, as if it was an original quote.

To those of us who understand the smoke and mirrors in what he does, it's frustrating. So it's not surprising that we look for flaws in his personality. There was a lot of schadenfreudig comment ten years ago when some salacious tapes surfaced of him apparently propositioning young boys. According to Randi himself he was taking part in a police sting, and the tapes were taken out of context, which seems to be generally accepted.

Then two years ago he finally outed himself as gay. Typically, he treated this as another opportunity to bash the opposition. If the likes of John Edward and Sylvia Browne had psychically divined that their arch-enemy was a closet gay, he argued, they would long ago have taken the opportunity to embarrass him in public. (Or as TV mentalist Derren Brown delicately put it, if psychics claim to know where bodies are buried they must surely know where Randi 'buries his salami'.) But this never happened, so hey - more proof that 'psychics' aren't psychic.

A more serious scandal has been getting attention of late. Randi's live-in lover is a gentleman by the name of Jose Luis Alvarez, a highly-regarded artist. It's emerged that Alvarez's identity is actually owned by a New Yorker, from whom he stole name and social security number after arriving from Venezuela some 28 years ago. As a victim of identity fraud the real Alvarez has been having the devil's own time getting official documents and credit, and when he applied for a passport the truth finally came out. 'Alvarez' pleaded guilty in a court appearance last week. He's thought unlikely to be jailed, but risks being deported.

This is all highly reprehensible, of course. But I'm not convinced that it's a good stick to beat Randi with. One supposes, naturally, that he was perfectly aware that his life partner was living under a stolen identity (not knowing about it would surely be more damaging to his reputation than to have covered it up). However it's being suggested that the scandal is a headache for the sceptic community, since it presents clear evidence of their hero's hypocrisy.

Steve Volk, for one, criticises the way sceptics either ignore the wrongdoing altogether, or else jump to his defence.

The identity Randi puts forward for public consumption is truth seeker. His professional role, at least on the surface, is to unmask hoaxers and charlatans-not live with them, or abet them.

Indeed. But should we expect anything else? We think of the psi controversy in terms of science, as a struggle to arrive at the objective truth. But it's also shaped by the same things - temperament, background, influences - that determine our political inclinations. When sceptics attack psychics, they're campaigning for the kind of world they think this ought to be, the reality that they can accept (and of course they think the same about psi-advocates). We take it for granted that politicians will get caught out in personal wrongdoing from time to time. They deserve to be embarrassed about it, but it doesn't necessarily have any wider implications for their arguments.

It seems clear that sceptics feel unsettled by their hero's travails. Should they be blamed for rallying to his defence? One would hardly expect them to renounce him. The best of us will stand by friends and family members who have done wrong.

So although Volk is clearly right, somehow I find it hard to get worked up by any of this. Being preoccupied with making the intellectual case for psi, I'm deeply aware of just how successful the whole concept of the Million Dollar Challenge has been. My priority is to come up with better arguments and get people's attention. This personal scandal is not going to make any of Randi's many supporters think again. Far from it: if Alvarez is deported, the outpouring of sympathy for a lonely old man will be at least as great as any damage to his reputation - a sign of natural human frailty.

In the end it's our intellectual strength that will make the case, not our opponents' personal weaknesses.

Plans for the Million Dollar Challenge?

I've been listening to a conversation between organisers of James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge. They were discussing a test of psychics that they organised for ABC's Primetime Nightline show last summer. It was quite revealing.

The test was set up by the stage magician Banacheck, DJ Grothe (president of the James Randi Educational Foundation), and Jamy Ian Swiss, also a magician and one of JREF'S resident experts on psychics. The clip can't be viewed outside the US, so I can't comment on how it went. But I was struck by the comments of Grothe and Swiss afterwards.

They categorise psychics in three ways. First there are the celebrities, led by the 'Unholy Trinity' of John Edward, James van Praagh and Sylvia Browne. Such people do great harm and make big bucks scamming ordinary people, they complain. They're desperate for scientific endorsement - if they get one they'll never stop talking about it - yet at the same time they're 'desperately afraid' to submit themselves to proper scientific testing. That's why none of them ever pitches for the million dollars.

Then there are the 'store-front' psychics, who offer quick readings off the street for a token fee, then try to bilk their customers with expensive cures for invented ills. The JREF folks were dismayed to learn that Nightline was targeting these people as potential participants, as of course none would submit to testing - and none did.

However they got a number of takers from their third category. These are psychics in the spirituality and New Age community, some of whom accidentally found out about the show and were keen to take part. Swiss calls them 'shut-eyes', by which he means people who actually believe that their psychic powers are real.

Grothe was fascinated by this. The idea of a faker who doesn't realise he/she is faking seemed to be a new idea for him. The psychics he met in the studio were all warm, sincere and kind-hearted, he commented with surprise. It's true, there really are such people, Swiss explained; they just don't realise that what they do is illusory.

Swiss went on to comment that sceptics are far too quick to assume they know what is going on in other people's minds. I'd say that hardly states the case. If they weren't so stuck in their ideological bubble these guys would know that psychic vision isn't just a game played by con artists - it's a mental process that people experience - more often than one would think. Just now I'm reading a book by a doctor who suddenly began having accurate psychic intuitions about real-life situations, followed it up, and is now also a practising amateur medium (a fascinating story for another post). You can't associate with psychics and mediums for long without understanding this. It doesn't have to be taken at face value, but that's where genuine investigation starts, by getting up close.

Grothe and Swiss also talked about the Challenge itself. This time, instead of designing a bespoke test, JREF came up with an off-the-shelf version they could apply more or less to any psychic, whether palm or tarot reader, psychometrist, mediums, or even astrologer. This was the way they'd like to go in future, Swiss said. It would mean the challenge would be more accessible, and they could take it out to the psychic community. 'No preliminaries, a one-shot test, and if you pass we'll give you a million bucks.'

As things stand, the Challenge is not a scientific test, as Swiss himself explicitly said. If someone ever won, he pointed out, it wouldn't mean that person was psychic, it would just mean he/she won on that day. It would be a fluke. (Surely this makes a nonsense of the taunt that psychics, by refusing the Challenge, show how scared they are of scientific testing.)

But there seems to be a certain impulse for change at JREF. When the Challenge was saved, having earlier been slated for retirement by Randi, I recall talk of it being made more transparent and accessible. This is odd, in a way. One of its strengths as a propaganda device has been that it's so opaque. We're invited to take the Great Man's word for it that no one has passed the preliminaries. With rare exceptions that's all there is.

It also succeeds by being so extremely hostile to the idea of what it aims to test. That ensures that no one who is at all gifted will participate, reduces the likelihood that anyone will win, and reinforces expectations of what it will find. As a method of investigation it's a non-starter.

So why tinker with it? It works perfectly well by just sitting there like a big roadblock. Scientists and sceptics love it, as it saves them having to leave their comfort zone.

But if younger, more dynamic people come along, and start doing things with the Challenge, pushing out the boundaries, what then? What might it become? As far as I'm aware there have only been three televised tests, but perhaps we could start seeing more of those. Suppose more psychics and mediums are encouraged to take part. In theory that might raise the chances of someone winning the cash, in which case the Challenge would become the victim of its organisers' overconfidence.

What interests me more is the possibility that, along the way, some of them might start to get a more educated view of psychics, and perhaps even feel that there's something here worth checking out, instead of mindlessly debunking.

I could be wrong, but I thought I glimpsed in this conversation some faint stirrings of seriousness. It would be going too far to call it scientific curiosity, but it might be the precursor to it.

Hitch in Heaven?

Christopher Hitchens's death has led to a predictable eruption of religious hostilities. For some Christian fundamentalists it's along the lines of 'that nasty atheist will have got a terrible shock'. For his part sceptic PZ Myers 'takes joy in discomfiting the godly'.

'We find our hope and joy in our lives, right now...not in an imaginary world, sight unseen, that we only get to enter after we're dead and unable to come back and tell everyone that the priests lied to us.'

It's hard not to wonder what a deeply committed atheist might feel on finding himself conscious after his death. Initial confusion and puzzlement, certainly, but gloating over a miscreant getting his come-uppance is surely misplaced.

Hitchens was praised for holding fast to his beliefs, even under the pressure of illness. I'd have expected no less. Even so, according to a BBC report he told an interviewer that if it turned out he'd been wrong he would be surprised, but that was OK, because he liked surprises. That sounds characteristic. I don't think he would feel any guilt. Like Bertrand Russell, he would say there hadn't been enough evidence. During life, the curiosity upon which he set such store just didn't stretch to psychic phenomena.

But perhaps all this is beside the point. I agree with the Huffpost's religious editor, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, who thinks Hitchens' thoughts about his own death, and death in general, deserve respect.

His fierce atheism was determined to yank our thoughts away from any future place and time after we die, back to the world that is present to us in this very moment. Take, for example, this arresting passage from The Portable Atheist:

'Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.'

This emphasis on the present may feel incomplete to some. But concentrating on what we know -- our own experiences, senses and rational mind -- does not, in fact create a void; rather, it fills these precious moments that we have on earth with intensity, urgency and inherent meaning. An atheist perspective on the afterlife eliminates the option of patient endurance in hopes of rewards in the sweet by and by; rather, it insists that any hopes and desires must be realized in this life, or not at all.

A powerful disbelief in afterlife might be seen as an affirmation the value of life - one of humanism's more attractive qualities. If we're sure this is the only one we have, we should live it to the full, and not go 'gentle into that good night'.

But could the opposite be true? Does a belief in afterlife actually weaken one's commitment to life. Do we value it less if we look forward to the kind of existence described for instance by near-death experiencers?

It's possible. I sometimes wonder if Frederic Myers, who died relatively young at 58, might have lived longer if he had fought against his last illness. He looked forward to the next life so much he seemed happy enough to let go of this one. But then Myers was powerfully immersed in the idea of survival of consciousness. He was deeply romantic. He believed he was in communication with the married woman he had fallen in love with, and who taken her life in tragic circumstances, and that she was waiting for him. He couldn't wait to move on.

So perhaps his case is exceptional. One certainly can't generalise, and say that religious people don't value life. What one thinks about that surely depends as much on temperament and circumstances as metaphysical beliefs.

Hitchens had a good life, doing what he loved, surrounded by friends, and well cared for at the end. Someone in his position doesn't need to find consolation in the idea of an afterlife. But concepts of 'loving life' and 'living it the full' are not so much of an option for peasant farmers struggling with floods and famine, wage slaves in dystopian urban hells, African child soldiers, the homeless and the chronically long-term sick. The slaves labouring in American plantations found solace in the Christian message of a better future life, and could they be blamed for that?

Sceptic Balloons (by Phil Brisk)

[Thanks to Phil Brisk for this therapeutic technique to help cope with sceptics.]

I've been thinking lately about storylines - or 'narratives', if you prefer a posher word - and how they shape our understanding of the world.

For example, take just two of the storylines that emerged recently in attempts to shape opinion on the UK's public sector pensions strike.

There's the narrative of the Daily Mail, presenting that action as an insult to hard-working private sector workers who can only gaze with envy at the privileges enjoyed by molly-coddled public sector staff. Then there's the contrasting version of the same events wheeled out by the other side - a version that portrays the strikers as brave champions of the right of all citizens to a well-funded, secure retirement.

These are only two examples, but they illustrate how narratives work. They take real life and package it in a particular way. They simplify, stripping out nuance and complexity. They boil things down to just a few key ideas - the ideas the inventor of the narrative wants us to focus on.

When you stop and consider, it's not hard to see why storylines are so seductive. After all, who's got time to do their own independent thinking and research these days? Much easier to grab a quick, convenient narrative - a pre-processed, off-the-shelf version of reality whisked up by somebody else. By a politician, say, or an ad man, or a tabloid editor - or any one of a thousand others with an axe to grind and position to push.

Of course, there's only one problem. Narratives aren't reality. As I said, they're only someone's selective and simplified version of it. The narrative might seem to be anchored in fact. But that connection will almost certainly only be a loose one. And storylines, in my experience, are a bit like balloons. The moment they get a bit of wind behind them, they want to take flight. They want to slip their anchors and soar. That's fine when you're talking about balloons. But with narratives, it's different. If you're not careful the narrative soon floats free, with no one to notice it no longer has any kind of connection with fact.

What's this got to do with the concerns of Paranormalia? Actually, quite a lot. Because the closer I study the work of the self-appointed "de-bunkers" of psychic phenomena - James Randi, Chris French, Susan Blackmore, et al - the less I see these people as sober scrutinisers of hard evidence and the more I see them as sellers of balloons. The balloons they're selling are all versions of the narrative of scientific materialism - a highly selective, oversimplified version of the world that, increasingly, is losing connection with the available facts.

In my imagination, that's not a scientist's clipboard I see in their hands, it's a big red balloon. Personally, I find this image rather useful. It encourages me to smile when I think of them, rather than snarl. And that's good. Because, as Robert reminded us in his recent post on Chopra and Dawkins, "spirituality in action" has got to mean remaining non-snarly and kind-hearted in response to the dogmatic scientific materialists - no matter how provocative they may sometimes be.

Here's a case in point. Last night I was listening to something quite irritating by Susan Blackmore - a rather muddled attempt to pour cold water on the fascinating and well-attested phenomenon of NDEs. For a moment I wanted to hit her. Then I closed my eyes ... and just pictured her holding her big balloon. (It was a lovely yellow and pink one, if you must know.) Then, I just wanted to give her a hug.

It's a visualising technique that works for me. Maybe it will work for you.

Sheldrake and Dawkins

I talked recently about Deepak Chopra describing how he was 'ambushed' by Richard Dawkins for his 2007 Enemies of Reason films on Channel 4. The film makers hadn't told him it was Dawkins he was going to be talking to.

Another putative 'enemy of reason' was Rupert Sheldrake, who in his new book describes a similar encounter. He talked about it at the time, and Greg Taylor published it here. But it's so extraordinary it's worth repeating.

Sheldrake was emailed by a Channel 4 researcher to say that Dawkins wanted to talk to him to discuss his research on unexplained abilities of people and animals for a new TV series. Sheldrake wasn't keen, because he knew it would be one-sided. Not so, said the researcher - they were now much more open minded: 'We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry.'

So Sheldrake agreed. Dawkins duly turned up with a film crew and the exchange started. Dawkins said they probably agreed about many things, but it worried him that Sheldrake was prepared to believe almost anything. Sheldrake replied that it worried him that Dawkins was so dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science.

One all. Dawkins then said he would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn't any evidence for it. He complained that if it really occurred it would turn the laws of physics upside down, and added , 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.' Sheldrake pointed out that most people have experienced telepathy, and suggested that the claim that they are deluded about their own experience is itself extraordinary. Where was the extraordinary evidence for that?' Dawkins took it for granted that people want to believe in 'the paranormal' because of wishful thinking.

They agreed that controlled experiments were necessary and Sheldrake started to talk about the work he had been doing on telephone telepathy. The previous week he had sent Dawkins some of his published papers.

I suggested that we actually discuss the evidence. He looked uneasy and said, 'I don't want to discuss evidence.' 'Why not?' I asked. He replied, 'There isn't time. It's too complicated. And that's not what this programme is about.' The camera stopped.

Sheldrake pointed out that he had made it clear that he wasn't interested in taking part in another low-grade debunking exercise. 'It's not a low-grade debunking exercise; it's a high-grade debunking exercise,' said Dawkins. The director asked to see the emails Sheldrake had been sent. He read them 'with obvious dismay' saying that the assurances Sheldrake had been given were wrong. So they packed up and left.

Sheldrake says

in no other field of scientific endeavour to otherwise intelligent people feel free to make public claims based on prejudice and ignorance. Yet in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason. They abuse the authority of science and bring rationalism into disrepute.

I suppose a certain amount of subterfuge is needed if you want to get your opponents to open up to you on camera. Although as I recall from the film, his various 'enemies' - Christian evangelists, alternative healers, etc - seemed only too happy to talk to him, perhaps not knowing who he was, and caring less. But he surely can't have imagined that Sheldrake would passively submit.

I often find myself defending Dawkins, as an original thinker and fine writer. I rather dislike the caricature of him as a zealot. But God, does he ask for it. This sort of behaviour is so childish and grubby. Sheldrake is a trained biologist pursuing evidence-based science and it's hard to forgive Dawkins for treating a fellow scientist with such disrespect.