Paranormalia

Psi Rage

Interesting post by Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail about comments by PZ Myers, a biologist and fabulously prolific blogger (four to five posts a day, and allegedly with a university teaching job - how does he do it?). Myers was taking a pop at Rupert Sheldrake, clearly the kind of person who would pull all his levers. 'The man is nuts ... His 'experiments' are exercises in gullibility, anecdote, and sloppy statistics ...embarrassingly gullible nonsense ... grossly in error in the way he pursues science... " Etcetera and so on.

Greg got Sheldrake's response to this, which as one would expect from a researcher of his long experience was dignified, resigned and a bit puzzled. He wondered whether it was worth engaging with people who aren't interested in the facts and are just venting their rage. Both pointed out that Myers had not read any of the research, so his opinion couldn't be worth much. But of course he expresses himself in such a combative and authoritative way, he serves to reinforce prejudice and dogmas. 

I've sometimes been tempted to say that sceptics are calming down a bit, but that's clearly not right. It might apply to critics like Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman, who understand some aspects of the subject quite well and can talk about it without becoming apoplectic. But the rest don't seem to have moved on much from the Gardner-Randi template: a rabble of sarky-sneery gremlins.

Yet I sometimes think we need to take a more detached view of this sort of thing. It's a natural response to what is perceived as awesome and dangerous - if only a human tendency to believe in such things as telepathy, and not the thing itself - and which makes a person feel utterly impotent. Hence the rage.  But it's like a toddler having a tantrum - one just has to be firm and patient, and wait for it to blow over. It's something we need to understand and address, more than get upset about. Sceptics like Myers are angry and opinionated, and of course their tirades attract readers. But they are not stupid, and they can't be immune to reason. A few hours with some appropriate reading materials might help a person to see that this isn't about silly people 'swallowing crazy stuff', or mere Fortean anecdotes.

Is it naïve to think that sceptics can change? Perhaps, but at least we could try to find out. People who pride themselves on their reason can't go on indefinitely refusing to engage with the research - we have to find ways of confronting them with it. To be sure, the die-hards will still prefer to pick apart the weakest experiments as a justification for rejecting it. But my guess is that a lot of people who currently side with the sneerers will have their curiosity roused, and will start to take a more nuanced view.

So one could at least suggest they have a look at the literature. Damien Broderick's excellent Outside the Gates of Science might be a good place to start. Another could be Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing, which I'm reading just now and plan to discuss shortly. This is the story of a sceptic who was forced to change her own view by a powerful anomalous experience, and then gradually discovered that other people with whom she was in daily contact - colleagues, patients and friends - were having exactly the same kinds of experiences, but seldom discussed them for fear of ridicule. 

I'm due to talk at an SPR seminar in the autumn on the subject of sceptics and scepticism, and hopefully Sheldrake will be contributing as well. Doubtless Myers's outburst is one of the things we will be chewing over. My own idea is to focus on the psychological foundation of knee-jerk scepticism - a large and complex subject, as I'm starting to discover, and one I doubt I can do justice to. I'll also push my view that parapsychology needs to be taking more account of it, drawing attention not just to the anomalies themselves, but also to the very natural difficulties that humans have in processing this information. There's a lot of work to be done here.

Humbug

James Randi has been talking about doing a show for Channel 4. Not sure when it is planned for, or indeed if anything has been decided yet, but I hope it goes ahead. As far as I know he hasn't been on TV in the UK for some time. There was a series of programmes he did for Granada back in 1991 and an appearance on the Discovery Channel's Ultimate Psychic Challenge five years ago, both of which stirred up a lot of interest. Randi will be 80 in August, so I guess this will be a last chance for the British audiences to see the great man in action. 

Since the million-dollar challenge is due to be withdrawn in a couple of years it might also be an opportunity for brave or foolhardy souls to go for a last minute victory. At the time the challenge was only $10,000 dollars, which would not have broken the bank, but this time there will be more at stake.

The Granada show pre-dated my interest in parapsychology and I didn't see it. But it was interesting to hear him reminisce about it in a podcast interview recently. Randi couldn't remember much, but he recalled doing better than an astrologer at predicting the stock market, basing decisions on some random method like chucking darts at a board. He was temporarily stumped by the success of a map-dowser in locating an object, until a stage-hand told him afterwards that a model giving away the location had been on prominent display in the hall outside the studio. 

Randi gently aired a gripe: the programme makers had 'unwisely' ignored his advice to get an audience of uncommitted individuals, and instead filled it with believers. As a result they were all sitting there willing him to fail. I can see that would have been tough for a performer. But he added there had been some neutral people on the show, and he felt on the whole he had got his message across. It wasn't confrontational, he stressed, he really just wanted to discuss the issues. This rather startled me, especially when he went on to insist that he was not a debunker. Honestly, he said, his attitude is always 'I don't know, we'll investigate it.' He didn't completely believe in the Tooth Fairy, and Santa was way off the scale, but hey, in principle he is willing to be proved wrong about other stuff.

As if !  I think some people really are taken in by this affable old geezer act. So modest, so open minded! (Funny how he manages to work the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus into just about everything.) It's pure humbuggery, utterly at odds with the mad invective in many of his books and on his website. On my way to the podcast I'd involuntarily refreshed my memory about his views on Stargate: 'what's known in woo-woo circles as "remote viewing programme" ... by the early 1990s, investigations showed divisiveness within the group, poor performance, and few accurate results', etc. In my own mind Randi occupies a rather pivotal position, a key figure whose views influence high profile scientists like Richard Dawkins, and who as a result needs to be taken seriously. It's a shock to be reminded what a crude propagandist he is, and how extraordinary it is that such a man can be treated as an expert on a such a profoundly important topic. It's most comedy knock-about stuff, but reeks of the kind of ignorance and prejudice which in other circumstances would speak for itself.

So bring him on! A new UK TV show would be a wonderful opportunity to debate some of the issues. Alas, I have little confidence in the ability of TV folk in this respect. It's worth having a look at the late Monty Keen's spirited attack on the 2003 Discovery Channel programme in which Randi took part (and which I also missed). Keen lays into the producers for their reliance on gimmicks, their bias - for instance editing out the most impressive mediumistic evidence - and for allowing little time to critics like himself to make the case for the genuineness of some psychic phenomena, or to point out the problems with Randi's challenge. He also reveals that The Amazing One's attempt at cold reading was so futile that the embarrassed floor manager had to stop it, under the pretence of a 'technical fault'.

It's not often that someone stands up to Randi so convincingly. Interestingly, Keen seems to have got under his skin: he posted some 7000 words of angry rebuttal, assuring his readers that Keen would not escape from censure for his 'unfair and virulent' assault. I've noticed this rather curious characteristic before in militant sceptics, that they are very free with their own criticisms - which are often uninformed, uninsightful, and couched in derisive terms - yet deeply hurt to find themselves coming under counter-attack. It's as though they think their own point of view is so unanswerable it's not open to serious debate.

Yet I'm keen to see the old fraud take to the public hustings one last time. Whatever one thinks about him, it's courageous to keep doing what he does at his age, and with his recent history of ill-health. Considering which, I have to say, I'm not altogether convinced this programme is actually going to happen. But if it does it's bound to stir up some real and productive debate, if not in the show itself, then hopefully in the reaction to it.

The Illusionists

Thanks to Greg at The Daily Grail for drawing attention to Richard Wiseman's article on magicians and the paranormal, which I'd missed.  Some magicians - Randi, Penn and Teller, Paul Daniels, etc - are so obnoxiously loud about their disbelief in psychic phenomena, it creates the impression that they all think the same way. Not so, according to Wiseman, himself a former professional magician, who polled professional and semi-professional conjurors around the world. A quarter of his sample of more than 400, he says, believe in the reality of telepathy, precognition or psychokinesis

In fact there have been, and continue to be, conjurors who have experienced psychical incidents they can't explain, and are quite happy to go on record about it. The famous nineteenth-century French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin was famously gobsmacked by the psychic Alexis Didier - a fact that Harry Houdini apparently didn't know when he named himself after him, and he was disgusted when he later found out. There's also a rather little known fact about JN Maskelyne, the Randi of the nineteenth century séance era as he is portrayed in debunking books. The sceptics describe, as historical fact, that the phenomenon of table-turning was explained away by the scientist Michael Faraday, although it plainly wasn't, as even a glance at the documented reports would confirm. Another fact, but one I think you will never learn from the sceptics' books, is that Maskelyne himself tried it out, got a result, and publicly avowed it to be a genuine psychic phenomenon, and not at all accounted for by Faraday's suggested mechanism.

Wiseman himself draws attention to the fact that magicians earn their bread by making things disappear. His point is simply that they will be far less likely to believe paranormal claims, because they understand how tricks can be done. Of course, but what's less well understood is that one of the things they make disappear is any evidence of paranormal phenomena. That's the illusion they create.  It's comical to see scientists like Richard Dawkins elevating practitioners like Randi to the status of experts, when all they are doing is selectively reviewing data to make their audience think what it suits them to believe - a classic case of distraction and misdirection.

The literature is simply stuffed with examples of this process in action - sceptics lapping up pretty much anything these self-appointed experts feed them, without any real attempt at critical thinking, all the while imagining that they are being heroically clever. It's an absolute mirror image of the 'devious charlatan duping gullible believer' scenario.

It's true of almost any episode that conjuror-sceptics have been involved in, but one that comes instantly to mind is Randi's debunking article of the Columbus, Ohio poltergeist, the case of Tina Resch. When this started getting international publicity Randi was asked to check it out by Paul Kurtz who had just founded the CSICOP. He hastened to the scene, only to find that the family would not let him in. No matter - he got some negative gossip from jaded reporters, who hadn't managed to see the spook in action, and cobbled together a debunking article. This is printed in Kendrick Frazier's anthology Science Confronts the Paranormal, and is one of very few sources that sceptics cite. The piece centres on a forensic dissection of a news photograph supposedly showing the spook in action. What sceptics don't really understand it that that's pretty much all it does - Randi didn't see anything at first hand, or interview anyone who had. Yet they typically consider his article utterly damning, not just of this case but of the whole category.

Wiseman has none of Randi's aggressiveness thankfully, but he's not above this sort of misdirection himself. He used to be involved with the Society for Psychical Research, and years ago sparked a furious controversy about the Italian séance medium Eusapia Palladino. His argument, laid out in the SPR journal with a good deal of brio, was that the report of the SPR's Naples investigation in 1908 - as complete an endorsement of séance phenomena as can be imagined - was actually riddled with holes. He proposed that Palladino had an accomplice, probably her husband, who had previously contrived to create a movable panel in the wall, through which he clambered at an opportune moment, and then managed to create much of the 'phenomena' behind a curtain. Wiseman's point is that the report does not provide the explicit detail to rule this out. You'd have to know a bit about the circumstances to grasp how utterly implausible this is - it would not have worked for five minutes. But if you don't, it's easy to be taken in by Wiseman's assurance and self-belief.

Actually I don't think there's any real harm done in this particular case - the claims regarding Palladino are hardly affected. On the other hand Wiseman's intervention in the case of Rupert Sheldrake's psychic dog Jaytee is surely as dubious a piece of chicanery as anything that Randi has carried out. On the basis of four rather poorly thought-out experiments he claimed to have debunked media claims that the dog always knows exactly when its owner is coming home. This wasn't hard to do, but he failed to acknowledge that Sheldrake himself had never claimed this, and was instead pointing to a suggestive statistical correlation established in 117 experiments (they showed the dog spending only an average of 4% of the time waiting by the window during the main period of his owner's absence and 78% while she was returning). Close scrutiny, if sceptics were capable of such a thing, would show that Wiseman has utterly misrepresented this episode - but of course they are happy to take his word for it. (See Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics for a summary).

A few days ago I questioned Susan Blackmore's slightly contradictory attitudes, and in the same way, I'm not always sure where Wiseman really stands. He's a charming fellow, and not obviously fired by hostility to the paranormal - he once told me he finds it good fun, and course he's done quite well out of it. Unlike Randi he is capable of nuanced thinking, and seems impressed by some of the ganzfeld work for instance.

Nor is there really any point in complaining about what sceptics do. They are addressing their audience and meeting its expectations.  As stage magicians always say, some people really like being deceived. It's up to those of who us who think that this is more than just a game to expose the tricks for what they really are.

That Mad Feeling

Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics came in the post today, and I'm looking forward to reading it. I'll review it in a while, but today I just want to mention something that struck me while I was dipping into Rupert Sheldrake's introduction. It's that extraordinary episode that occurred eighteen months ago, when Sheldrake and others were invited to present papers at a science festival and were furiously denounced in the press by leading scientists like Peter Atkins, who said there was no reason to suppose telepathy was anything more than a "charlatan's fantasy".

It's the sheer heat of sceptics' responses that gets my attention. I've often wondered about it, and just recently I got a sense of why people react so fiercely to what they can't explain. It was while spending Easter with my father, now pushing 92. While I was there my sister called, asking me to look for a business letter that she had left there on her last visit. I put off looking for it as long as possible, and then took the plunge.

The problem is, my Dad doesn't do filing. Never has. Thirty or so piles of paper are distributed around the house, on the kitchen and dining room tables, around his armchair in the living room, in his bedroom, on the table in the hall, on chairs, on the floor, behind desks... So if you want to find a piece of paper all you know is: it's in one of those piles.

The first pile I tried contained, more or less in this order, two recent bank statements, a letter concerning a hospital appointment next month, a speech given by Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s, a very old bar of Swiss chocolate, a restaurant menu, an invitation to a wedding in 1973, a letter warning that the car insurance is about to expire, a Christmas card from people who died ten years ago, two sheets of blank paper, junk mail for kitchens, a clipping from a 1960s fashion magazine, a maintenance manual for an old food processor, and last month's phone bill.

Note the distribution of recent and possibly relevant material - bank statements, bills, hospital appointments, etc - evenly spread through the detritus of the past. Even more fascinating: every single pile of paper is exactly similar. There is the same anarchic spread of current business mail with personal correspondence, clippings, photos, etc. If you want to gather all the phone bills or bank statements together - as we sometimes do - you will have to hunt through all the piles to collect them.

Now, you may say, that happens with elderly people - get over it. But it's not that at all. Not only is Dad quite normal in every other respect, he is mobile, mentally sharp, and has an active social life. It's not because he's lazy or forgetful, he likes it this way. My sister and I once spent an afternoon filing the statements and bills, and on our next visit he had turned everything back to the way it was before.   

Of course it's my problem, not his. But it really is a struggle. It provokes me - there's something creatively mad about it. When I was searching for this letter I found myself simultaneously clutching my head and groaning. I'm sure a psychologist could come up with some neat explanation of why he does it, but I'm not convinced it would really satisfy me.

That night I lay awake anxiously trying to fathom it, and completely failing.  Then I recalled Kant's odd image of one man milking a billy goat and the other holding a sieve underneath to catch the milk - it comes in the Critique of Pure Reason to illustrate the idea of complete nonsense.

I also remembered where I first came across it, mentioned in With the Eyes of the Mind, a book about out-of-body experiences by two psychiatrists, Gabbard and Twemlow. It's their response to reports of accident victims and hospital patients having consciousness of events around their bodies when by every normal indicator they are unconscious. Up until this point the authors had done a competent job of researching the OBE, but this aspect of it completely stumped them. They then struggled rather inefectually to explain it away, for instance by accusing hospital doctors of being bamboozled by deviant patients or of doctoring their own data.

I realised then that I entered that strange state of mind that militant sceptics occupy when they contemplate paranormal claims. They are reacting to something which is impossible, inexplicable, and makes no sense. It really is a deeply uncomfortable feeling. So when they reject ESP or out-of-body awareness it's not just an ideological act, a commitment to scientific orthodoxy, but a cry of anguish. Of course I know this perfectly well on an intellectual level, but it was salutory to be reminded of just what it feels like.

That Glass Screen

Earlier this week (What's Weird, March 3), I wrote about the extraordinary anomaly - as it seems to me - of living in a world where indications of psychism as a feature of consciousness are abundant, yet utterly invisible to a large section of society. As I said, it's like a parallel universe where I'm separated from other people, many of whom I value and respect as friends or as writers and thinkers, by a conceptual glass screen.

This is something that has preoccupied me a good deal over the past few years. Those of us who are literate in parapsychological matters, who are familiar with the work and thought of people like William James, Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, JB Rhine, Ian Stevenson and many many others, can find it hard to understand why our peers - friends, family, co-workers - often don't see our interest in the same way. The evidence that these researchers gathered, the analyses they made and the conclusions that they arrived at seem to us to be deserving, if not of actual acceptance then at least of consideration. But this body of work is not only largely unknown in intellectual circles, it's something many people don't even want to hear about. More than once I have been gently harangued by well-meaning friends who upbraid me for even showing an interest in it, as if I was somehow letting myself down.

I've recently been reading a book by Julian Baggini, a British philosopher who writes about his subject in accessible books and articles. This 2004 volume is titled What's It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. In chapter 3 (of 11) he disposes of life after death in just over four pages. He points out that consciousness appears to be dependent on the brain and that the idea of living on after death is difficult to make sense of, important arguments both. So far so reasonable. But he also says:

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. The only evidence we have for life after death is the testimony of those who claim to have seen or communicated with the dead. This would certainly not stand up in a court of law and nor should it stand up in the court of reason. It is true, though not surprising, that a small number of these claims are hard to falsify. Among the many thousands of alleged communications with the other world there are bound to be a small number of uncanny coincidences and lucky guesses. However, if there were genuine communication between the living and the dead we would expect a great many more accurate and otherwise inexplicable communications. The fact that they are so rare suggests they are not genuine, but frauds, guesses, and coincidences.

Baggini is no foaming God-basher: au contraire, he's eminently reasonable and wears his atheism lightly.  I think - and I'm just guessing - that he talks like this here because it's the conventional wisdom in secular circles. He has no personal background of psychic experiences, his university philosophy department would almost by definition have been wholly secular, and he has never come across anything that would give him pause. In other words he's just very poorly informed. He has a vague idea about mediums, but gives no hint that he knows about the work with Piper and Leonard or the cross correspondences, let alone the vast data relating to crisis apparitions, near-death experiences and children's memories of a previous life, to name only a few of the 'reasons required for a rational argument'. If he wants to insist that these things are not sufficient reason for believing in post-mortem survival, then fine, he can apply his philosophical bag of tricks, as others have done. But an analysis this superficial will not do it.

There's a lot going on here, but I'd just like to mention the two things that are uppermost in my mind. One is that Baggini and many people like him, who might conceivably modify their views if they had an opportunity, have very little access to the data. True, they might find books by Braude, Ducasse, Broad, Almeder and others in the philosophy library, but they would still want to check the primary sources, and these are harder to get hold of. With the Internet that's starting to change, and hopefully more people will start to see what the evidence really consists of, if ways can be found to point them in the right direction.

At the same time, I think that for many people this is not really about the evidence, it's about what they feel comfortable with. This is stating the obvious, of course, but it's something we tend to forget when we upbraid sceptics for their complacency and intellectual cowardice, as we often do. The rest of Baggini's book offers a thoughtful series of ideas and arguments about how humans can find the meaning of life themselves, without having it thrust on them. For some people there is moral value in ignoring parapsychology, and it's something we should take into account when we try to draw their attention to it.

Bad Psychics

As I mentioned on Monday (The Wasteland, Feb 25) I'm embarking on a tour of websites on paranormal topics, and recording my thoughts from time to time. First up is Bad Psychics, which has been going since 2003 and is run by Jon Donnis from Birmingham. The site's original aim was to debunk Derek Acorah's Living TV show Most Haunted.  Since then Donnis says he has been on a 'moral crusade, to stop the vulnerable being taken advantage of by people using known mentalist techniques.'

I gather that for Donnis there are no good psychics. However he did a course in mediumship - coming top, he says, despite an absolute lack of psychic abilities - and now thinks they aren't all deliberately faking. Some of his interviewees are similarly nuanced.  Mentalist Derren Brown for instance is dubious about mediums, but insists he's not into mindless debunking or dissing other people's spiritual beliefs.

I've hardly scratched the surface of the material on the site. But there's a lot of it, and it's quite informative, if mainly about the negative gossip and 'exposures' floating around. What impressed me is the engagement of people who really know their stuff. This came out when Donnis had a go at the direct voice medium Leslie Flint  (1911-94). He posted an audio clip supposedly of the deceased Ghandi, which he sensibly compared to a recording of the real Ghandi, finding that they don't sound at all alike. As it happens I had reservations about that too: when I listened to a bunch of Flint recordings, supposedly of different people, the voices sounded identical. It doesn't inspire confidence.

But the post got a lot of comment from people who take mediums seriously, and who were more articulate and better informed than their host. They pointed out the background and the test conditions regarding Flint made fraud quite unlikely. Donnis wasn't convinced but didn't have much else left to offer, and got more and more frustrated:

The differences in our arguments is that you believe without ever seeing any true evidence, ie: you believe purely from faith, where as i do not believe becuse there is no actual evidence to suggest he was real... Now which out of those two is the logical intelligent stance, and which is the blind faith stance based on ignorance'

At one point he chucked into the pot an "exposure" of Gary Schwartz, the University of Arizona psychology professor whose apparently successful experiments with John Edward and other mediums got a lot of media coverage. As became clear later in the thread this had been cobbled together from some selective quotes coming from disgruntled associates, and says more about sceptics' tactics than about Schwartz.

Some of Donnis's other views, given in an interview:

Paranormal investigation is purely a social activity these days, mainly for housewives and Pagans... I just think it is so easy to prove the claims of psychics, yet they always fail when you remove the chance to cheat ... I dont need experiences to think about the possibility of life after death. In fact this athiest prays to god every night that he is wrong about the afterlife, because the last thing I want is to die and thats it.
I want to believe more than anything else, the problem is that I need a bit more proof than a medium talking about those legal papers in an old biscuit tin to convince me...

This site's bound to appeal to people who know that mediums are evil, and could well convert casual visitors into militant sceptics. It's quite well presented, it hammers home the message about cold reading and other tricks, and it has plenty of gossip about exposes, cheating and so on. But if the Flint thread is typical, anyone prepared to dig a bit deeper will be exposed to different views, and also to links and references to the real research. That's got to be a good thing.

The Paranormal Online

Just caught up with the latest edition of The Skeptic, where regular columnist Steve Donnelly announces his departure. Looking back, he asks, has anything changed for the better over the two decades since the magazine was founded? 

Not really, he thinks: the sceptical movement in the UK seems to be 'unusually apathetic', especially compared to the US and Australia.  Perhaps this means Brits aren't as irrational as folk in other countries? Possibly, but it can't be the whole story, when one considers the creeping progress of creationism in the UK.

What has certainly changed in recent years, Donnelly goes on, is the emergence of the Internet as a virtually infinite source of low-grade information.  This is leading to all sorts of problems: these days students are handing in coursework based on Wikepedia, hardly the most reliable source, as the articles can be modified by anyone without any editorial control. But it also promotes paranormal belief, as anyone with a leaning towards this has access to a huge range of information to work with, sometimes extremely well presented, making the sceptics' job vastly more difficult.

Even a fence-sitter on matters such as UFOs, "free-energy" devices or angelic visitations is likely to be overwhelmed by the amount of (non-sceptical) information available via a simple internet search. It would not surprise me to learn that the level of paranormal belief in our society had significantly increased over the last decade or so - although I have not seen any research that confirms this.

Donnelly's solution? He doesn't really have one, except to keep up the good fight, make sure that sceptic magazines keep going and ensure that sceptical sources of information are prevalent on the web. But he does tentatively suggest that computer-savvy sceptics might develop a search engine that filters out the nonsense and provides only rational, scientific information on any topic.

Hmm, interesting. I wonder how it would work? I suppose it depends on how you define 'rational and scientific'. If you typed in ESP, for instance, would you just get a bunch of articles authored by Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman, or would the search engine also return pages by experimenters like Rupert Sheldrake and Charles Honorton?  On 'poltergeists' would you just get James Randi and Joe Nickell, or would you also get Gauld and Cornell, William Roll, Scott Rogo, etc, etc? The point is, a lot of people would argue that the parapsychologists are at least as rational and scientific on paranormal matters as the debunkers. In that case the machine would have to be programmed to behave, not just rationally, but like a sceptic.

But Donnelly has a good point about the effects of the Internet. I don't necessarily agree with him that it is making much difference to paranormal belief: the media has always done that - books, TV, magazines and popular papers - and as for being 'well-presented', a lot of the websites on UFOs, angels and the like, are so hard to read and navigate, they are impossible to derive any kind of information from, useful or otherwise.

Where I think the Internet will have a real and lasting impact is by making accessible the academic sources of psychic research. Sites like Survivalafterdeath.org and the Society for Psychical Research are a gateway to the primary sources upon which the case for psychism rests, and of which many people, believers and sceptics alike, are still pretty ignorant. Writers and researchers should find it far easier to lay their hands on important books and papers, and one would think this should improve the quality of the debate. If, for example, the documented investigations of mediums like Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard were easily accessible, instead of being sequestered in obscure specialist libraries, it would be harder for sceptics to insist that fraud is the sole explanation of what mediums do.

Yes, that might promote paranormal belief, in Donnelly's terms. But I wouldn't look at it that way. The point of the material becoming available is not to create converts but to promote a debate about human existence, taking into account the entirety of our experience, not the carefully filtered version that sceptics labour to create.

Paranormal Hearing

Michael Fremer is an audio buff, who appreciates the difference a good pair of speaker cables can make to one's listening pleasure. He recently locked horns with James Randi when he tried to enter for the Amazing One's prize.

What, you cry, is paranormal about audio cables? Nothing at all, obviously, but Randi was so incensed by a positive review of a 12-foot set of Pear Anjou speaker cables (price $7200) that he was moved to add "hearing cable differences" to his million dollar challenge. Fremer took him up on it, being sure he could hear cable differences under blind conditions. It went downhill from there. Randi published Fremer's picture on his website and claimed that he had said he could make vinyl records better by demagnetizing them.   "Of course I wrote no such thing," Fremer comments, "but as I came to learn, the Amazing Randi twists better than Chubby Checker." You and many others, Michael.

Fremer contacted Pear and asked them if he could borrow a set of their cables for the challenge. He then carried on a lively correspondence with Randi, who among other things told him he was delusional. At this point Pear backed out, having presumably discovered who Randi was and what they were getting into.  Fremer writes:

The next morning, Randi's website headlined Pear's pullout, and he disgustedly announced to his acolytes that he'd known that the "blowhard" Fremer would never take the challenge, that the matter was closed, and that it was time to move on to the next challenger. Talk about sleight of hand. Randi had used Pear's pullout as a cover for his own. Judging by the vitriolic follow-ups posted by his cultists, he'd gotten away with blaming both Pear and me.

Fremer concedes that he should have dropped the matter, but he was angered by all the name calling on Randi's site, and the way the story of his "cop-out" was spreading across the Internet. So he spent a while longer trying to engage with Randi and his acolytes, and just getting his nose rubbed in more dirt. Eventually his wife told him it was turning him into a grouch and he should quit.

A lot of people take Randi's prize very seriously, including big name scientists like Richard Dawkins. They see the fact that no one has ever won the challenge, or even passed the preliminaries, as a sign that paranormal phenomena are imaginary. But you can see from this sort of thing that you wouldn't just have to be psychic - or in this case, have abnormally good hearing - to win the prize: you'd have to have Randi's street-fighting skills, along with a tough skin and amazing persistence, to even get the point of being tested.  No wonder no one has even got close.

Counterknowledge

Food for thought in Damian Thompson's Counterknowledge, a polemic against 'conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history'. It's shocking to be reminded that a majority in many Muslim countries think the US government carried out the September 11 attacks, and also, incredibly, more than a third of adult Americans. But that's just one example of many: satanic abuse, Intelligent Design, AIDS and Holocaust denial, it's all here. Thompson pours scorn on pseudo-history  based on bogus scholarship, such as the bestseller that insists Chinese circumnavigated the globe well before the Europeans (eagerly taken up by China's leaders, unsurprisingly). He has harsh words too for alternative medicine and the way bogus experts get rich from their untested claims.

I like the book, which is well-argued, passionate and surely right in its central premise. Many people seem not to care very much whether or not there is good evidence, or any evidence, for their beliefs about what goes on in the world. The boundaries of truth and falsity are blurring: knowledge is increasingly not just what science and scholarship say are true, and for which can be demonstrated to accord with the facts, but anything that sounds interesting or plausible or fits with people's agendas, and for which the supporting evidence is scarce, weak or simply made up. Especially if shedloads of money can be made out of it.   

There are weaknesses in Thompson's position. Some reviewers seem to think not all his targets are merited and I suspect would probably not dismiss all alternative treatments so quickly. Others point out that its egregious for a Christian  - as well as being a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph he is editor of The Catholic Herald - to attack beliefs for which there is no evidence. To get round this Thompson suggests that religion and the supernatural do not come under the heading of counterknowledge, because its claims are not about the material world and cannot be tested empirically. But of course the sceptics to whom this book otherwise appeals don't accept that for a minute.

My own feeling while reading Counterknowledge was one of discomfort, not just at the bleak picture of irrationality that he uncovers, but at my own position.  For of course those of us who take seriously the claims of parapsychology are firmly in the firing line. In fact Thompson did not get onto this at all, apart from the obligatory inclusion of ESP and near-death experiences in a list that also includes 9/11 theories, Creationism, Holocaust denial, crank physics, UFOs, astrology, and so on. But for sceptics who are cheering him on, these things are all of a piece. For them, apparently, someone who 'believes in near-death experiences' is not being any more rational than someone who thinks that the Holocaust never happened, or that the CIA murdered thousands of American citizens in order to unleash a war on Islam.

It's slightly odd to see a non-fundamentalist Christian dismissing near-death experiences so glibly, considering how dramatically they suggest the reality of survival of death. It struck me that this is how many religious people deal with the science-religion divide, by creating a firm barrier between the two: according to Thompson, religion does not provide anything that is empirically testable. But the observations of parapsychologists and psychic researchers suggest quite the contrary, that humans are subject to all kinds of religious and psychic experiences, many of which can be tested and analysed.

We know, for example - and Thompson ought to know - that near-death experiences are not something one believes, stupidly, irrationally and uncritically, they are a category of experience, a fact of nature, fully documented by hospital doctors, psychologists and other researchers, a fit subject for scientific study. And if you accept, as I do, that they cannot, on strictly logical grounds, be casually dismissed as aberrations caused by drugs or oxygen deprivation, then they become a legitimate part of the debate about our world and our place in it.

The challenge for academic parapsychologists is this: to find some way of extracting the phenomena they examine from the fluff and nonsense which sceptics, and they themselves, as the rational thinking people they are, quite rightly deride. The day needs to come when critics cannot unthinkingly include near-death experiences and ESP in lists that also include the Loch Ness Monster and the Easter Bunny. That would mean getting them to accept that even if the evidence is not automatically coercive, there is enough of it to demand serious consideration. It's an enormous problem, and one that I'm sure I'll keep coming back to.

Fear and Loathing in Academia

The postman comes bearing gifts, actually Stephen Braude's latest book, The Gold Leaf Lady, which I could not resist peeking into when I should have been working. Braude is professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and one of that tiny band of academics who 'gets' the paranormal and is brave enough to talk about it. He has a particular interest in psychokinesis and has written about séance mediums such as Eusapia Palladino. His last book Immortal Remains was a very bracing workout on the subject of survival phenomena - he thinks parapsychologists are not rigorous enough in their interpretations, although he concludes in favour of survival by a narrow margin.

This book is a look at some paranormal cases that he has personally researched, and I'll mention some of them in later posts. What strikes me straight away - since he talks about it in the preface - is his frustration at the way his university colleagues denigrate his interest. One knows in a general way that sceptics are hostile to claims of the paranormal, and one sees the rudeness with which people like James Randi and David Marks behave towards scientists and intellectuals who take an interest in it. So it's not surprising that someone at the receiving end of this sort of thing should want to get it off his chest. But it's still depressing to hear what goes on in academia spelled out in such graphic detail.

Braude says that in the 30 years since he declared his interest he has been 'marginalised'. He naively thought that other philosophers would be open-minded about his interest in parapsychology. But they behaved with 'surprising rigidity and cowardice', refusing to engage seriously with it and pretending to know the material much better than they actually did. He describes in detail a televised debate in which he was browbeaten by a fellow philosopher, who kept repeating stock objections, refused to listen to Braude's arguments, and showed he had not read any of the primary sources.

Braude also reveals that plenty of people within the academic community are sympathetic to parapsychological phenomena, but dare not be open about it. That also applies to mental health professionals, a community he came into contact with after writing on multiple personality. Many started confiding in him about apparent psychic episodes involving their patients, but insisted that he not talk about it, not because of patient confidentiality - no names were mentioned in any case - but because they feared being ridiculed and ostracised by their colleagues. Similarly, Braude says that many of the students who turn up to his course on philosophy and parapsychology complain of being threatened with reprisals by their psychology teachers.

It sounds overstated, but anyone with a good knowledge of parapsychology will recognise it only too well. As an observer I can get a sense of it through what I read. But for someone like Braude to live his professional life on the wrong side of a taboo must be a strange experience.