Science is a method, not a position

The end. . .

2007-09-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

For now anyway. When I started AMNAP, there were relatively few places online where psi phenomena and other evidence against a reductionistic, materialistic model were discussed and debated in a serious and rigorous manner. That's all changed now. I feel the baton has been passed and it's time for me to focus on other things, like my family, my photography, and less time online.

Thank you for your readership, and for some great discussions and comments. I'm sure I will see many of you occasionally from time to time on various fora and other blogs. Just a lot less frequently. Life is calling. . .

Real epistemology

2007-09-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

This letter from Stuart Resnick to Ray Kurzweil does a nice job summarizing my view of true epistemology. Stuart is referencing Buddhist philosophy, but I think the points he makes apply to any conceptual approach to consciousness. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Buddhism uses the word "consciousness" as follows. If a factory makes animal crackers out of dough, you could say that "dough" is a name for the substance common to all the animal crackers, regardless of their differing names and forms. In the same sense, Buddhism uses "consciousness" as the name for the substance of all things without exception. Though this definition may seem somewhat different from the one you use, it's still adhering to the understanding that "consciousness" is a synonym for "what you're experiencing right now."

According to the view of "consciousness" assumed in your debate with Searle, you could doubt that it's a property of a chair. But you'd hardly doubt that a chair appears IN consciousness. And in fact, anything you could possibly perceive, experience, or imagine appears in consciousness. For instance, if you can "imagine" something, it's (by definition, by both definitions) in consciousness. You could speculate, "A long time ago, a universe existed in which consciousness had not yet arisen." That speculation itself would be one more thing appearing in consciousness.

So far I am pretty much in full agreement.

To say "consciousness is the ultimate substance" is a way of expressing this conclusion that all things appear in consciousness. It follows that "consciousness" has meaning only as a name for this substance. That is: since nothing could be outside of consciousness, there's no meaning to the idea of "having" or "not having" consciousness. So the Buddhist view is: the very idea that there are things that "have consciousness" (i.e. "sentient beings") is along the lines of a dream, a delusion, or mere jugglery conjured up by some magician.

I would not go as far as Resnick that the idea of things "having consciousness" is necessarily a dream or delusion. However he is certainly correct that we cannot ever hope to know of a world of unconscious materiality. Everything we do, see, or think about is known only insofar as it is registered by consciousness. And this is the foundation of epistemology, which materialists so very often lose sight of.

The relevance to this blog is to notice that the ultimate composition of the only world we can know, is subjective. Objective reality is just another subjectively experienced set of concepts and models for predicting the (subjectively experienced) results of investigations. It may be "true" or not, but its epistemological foundation is exactly the same as belief in Zeus, crystal healing, geocentrism or telepathy. In all cases we are talking about beliefs and models, experienced subjectively. This even goes for beliefs like Dennett's and the Churchlands, who are convinced that subjective experience is not real, and attempt to flog this porridge among their materialist fellow-travellers.

More from the "rationalists". . .

2007-09-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

The favorite blog of the "rationalists" these days has to be Overcoming Bias.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the most prolific bloggers there. A man unwilling to consider the possibility of parapsychology experiments being valid unless they pass a repeatibility test that no experimental psychology protocol (or clinical medical protocol) has ever acheived: a 95% successful replication rate across many different research centers. Now let's read him pontificate about human longevity:

I think it's pretty absurd for any of us to pretend to maturity when all of us are less than a thousand years old, making us infants by the standards of future civilization.

That ranks right up there with his comment on how terrible and immoral it is not to freeze the heads of everyone after they die, presumably so that the nanotech replicators can copy our neural synapses and download them into computer simulations. Eliezer also believes that his non-profit organization will succeed in bringing about the Singularity by developing the world's first artificial intelligence.

Yes, folks, this is "rationalism" for you. . . Meanwhile, Eliezer and his fellow travellers have absolutely no interest in reading about real research suggesting that the mind is something other than just brain processes.

AMNAP Hiatus. . .

2007-09-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

AMNAP is going on hiatus for a while. We will see you all sooner or later. . .

Reductionism in biology

2007-09-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

It is a matter of great faith among many science bloggers and fellow travellers that reductionism has made great strides in explaining many of the mysteries of life in terms of physical causation. While they admit that reductionism has, thus far, failed to explain consciousness, memory, and perception, they maintain that the reductionist program has essentially solved the mysteries in biology. Sadly, this is yet another example where an assumption of knowledge impedes actual knowledge.

Yes, we do know about DNA, transcribed to RNA, which codes for the sequence of amino acids in proteins. What we do not know about biology, however, vastly exceeds what is actually known. While there is a great faith among reductionists that biology can all be explained in terms of contact mechanics, molecular machines and chemistry, the actual explanations are sadly lacking in just about every case. For example, we do not know:

Why do proteins fold so quickly into a characteristic shape when there are millions of thermodynamically equivalent conformations that a protein could take?

What controls the unfolding of complexity in development in each case for millions of different species?

How exactly do acquired characteristics like knee callouses in camels, migration patterns in birds, and predator fear behaviors (which are learned) turn into "hard-coded" behaviors based solely on genes that exactly duplicate the learned / acquired characteristics?

How do organisms based on blind/dumb contact mechanics "regulate" during development to overcome problems?

How do organisms heal (which amounts to many of the same processes as development, only in response to particular injuries)?

How does a single-celled organism like paramecium display complex behavior, including learning?

How do organisms perceive, which ones are conscious, and how do they learn?

And on and on. . .

It is obvious at this point that boasts like Eliezer's claiming that biology has been explained reductionistically are almost entirely empty.

Readers who have grown tired of the endless promises of reductionism coupled with an apparent inability on the part of their adherents to notice the lacunae of materialist theories would do well to read Rupert Sheldrake's book on field phenomena in biology, which points towards a very different understanding of morphogenesis, regulation, healing and behavior.

Unsolved problems in Neuroscience

2007-09-02T18:26:00.001-07:00

I thought readers of this blog would find this Wikipedia entry of great interest. Reductionistic materialists assume that science has already proven that mind = brain, and that anyone who disagrees with that assessment is simply uninformed, a religious zealot, or deluded. But perhaps that is just a case of an assumption of knowledge providing an obstacle to understanding? This list of the unsolved problems in neuroscience (most of which have been investigated, over and over again, for the past hundred years!) shows just what materialists have not even begun to explain about mind and consciousness.

Here is the Wikipedia article, in full:

Some of the yet unsolved problems of neuroscience include:

Self awareness: What is the neuronal basis of subjective experience, wakefulness, alertness, arousal and attention? What is its function?

Perception: How does the brain transfer sensory information into coherent, private percepts? What are the rules by which perception is organized? What are the features/objects that constitute our perceptual experience of internal and external events? How are the senses integrated? Is face perception special (e.g. innate)? What is the relationship between subjective experience and the physical world?

Learning and Memory: Where do our memories get stored and how are they retrieved again? How can learning be improved? What is the difference between explicit and implicit memories? How plastic is the mature brain?

Development: How and why did the brain evolve (the way it did)? What are the molecular determinants of individual brain development?

Sleep: Why do we dream? What are the underlying brain mechanisms? What is its relation to anesthesia?

Cognition and Decisions: How and where does the brain evaluate reward value and effort (cost) to modulate behavior? How does previous experience alter perception and behavior? What are the genetic and environmental contributions to brain function?

Language: How is it implemented neurally? What is the basis of semantic meaning?

Diseases: What are the neural bases (causes) of mental diseases like psychotic disorders (e.g. mania, schizophrenia), Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease or addiction? Is it possible to recover loss of sensory or motor function?

Materialists assume that each and every one of these unanswered questions will be resolved through reductionist explanations, in terms of neurons and neural firing patterns. However, the lack of progress on many of these items should bring that unstinting faith into some question. . .

Interesting stuff. . .

2007-08-31T13:33:00.001-07:00

Eteponge has a promising new blog with a fascinating overview of the accuracy of psychic detection. An area I have not personally done much investigation into, but worthy of study.

A perfect example. . .

2007-08-31T13:25:00.001-07:00

This article is an absolutely perfect example of my thesis.

Atrociously awful, biased materialist propaganda masquerading as "science writing".

H/T TDG.

The primacy of observation over theory

2007-08-31T08:59:00.000-07:00

If I had to summarize what AMNAP is about, it is that observations are more important than theories. The great failing of all dogmatisms, is that they develop theories about the nature of the world, what is possible, and what is not, and then filter through the facts in order to fit them to whatever theory is currently popular.

Stephen Braude writes quite eloquently about that here:

As far as parapsychology is concerned, some would say, “I can’t accept that a table levitated (or that someone received information directly from a remote location, or influenced a random number generator by thought alone). It simply makes no sense (or is overwhelmingly improbable) in terms of our scientific knowledge. . .

Besides (and even more to the point), it’s completely obvious that we can know that something is the case without knowing why it’s the case. . .

Many critics, then, seem to have it backwards. Theoretical speculation requires, from the beginning, careful and systematic observation. Without the initial accumulation and systematization of observed facts, scientists won’t even begin to know what they’re theorizing about. Moreover, as the history of science demonstrates, we often think we know how to explain observed facts until better explanations come along. So obviously, our currently preferred explanations never provided much (if anything) in the way of additional assurance that the phenomena were real. On the contrary, no matter what science eventually takes the phenomena to be, their reality was our starting point, the source of our puzzlement and our urge to find an explanation.

Off Topic. . .

2007-08-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

One of the things I enjoy doing is landscape photography. I've put up a "real" website for the photography, if you are interested in that sort of thing. . .

Greatest obstacle. . .

2007-08-25T17:10:00.000-07:00

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin

Pathologies in investigating borderlands phenomena

2007-08-25T11:40:00.001-07:00

Michael Prescott has just written a masterful essay on the pathologies that some "investigators" display when examining phenomena on the borderlands of what is known. . .

Go read it.

Avoiding Messiness

2007-08-25T07:00:00.001-07:00

According to M. Szlazak on the Skeptiko Forum, clinicians are now running away from meta-analyses in favor of single large-scale experiments to test and make a "final resolution" on questions of clinical effectiveness. He cites this paper and this open letter in support of his position.

Frankly, this does not surprise me at all. After all, the desire to have a simple worldview with black and white answers to every question is very tempting for human beings. And when different researchers conduct the same kinds of experiment, they often get contradictory results, or wildly different effect sizes, eg:

So it is not at all surprising that many people, especially a self-selected group of people who tend towards systematizing and simplifying reality, want to use methods that avoid raising difficult questions.

If the psi hypothesis is true, then the beliefs of experimenters can have a strong result on the results of their experiments, even when the experiments are conducted double-blind, most particularly when the overall experiment is statistical in nature and the experimental subjects are extremely complex and non-deterministic. Medical clinical trials certainly fall into this realm. Given the demonstrated reality that the beliefs of experimenters do effect the results of their experiments, it is certainly possible that psi correlations might help account for this (as opposed to experimenter fraud, biased errors, biased conclusions, etc. which materialists believe account for funding effects on experimental outcome).

Given the inevitable messiness of real science and the often varying results of experimental trials, it should be expected that some people want to avoid all those questions being raised by setting "rules" for science along the lines of what Topher Cooper suggested, tongue in cheek:

1) Don't reach a conclusion.
2) Completely ignore the data and just go with your faith.
3) Kill anyone who ever looks like they might ever do a second test of any hypothesis of interest.

But, of course, a committment to truth and reality demands that we face all of the facts, not just those that confirm our world-view. So long live multiple independent labs and experimenters. Long live meta-analysis!

Materialism as Meme

2007-08-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

As I've discussed before, many people assume that materialism is essentially the same thing as a scientific world view. In fact, materialism is only one possible belief system about the world, and one that definitely struggles with certain findings and observations. Like other conceptual memes, materialism continuously seeks to propagate itself at the expense of competing mental frameworks. In reality, much of what purports to be "science reporting" is instead just "materialism meme reporting". Here's a great example of such (H/T TDG):

New virtual-reality experiments show the brain can be tricked into believing it's outside the body, lending credence to the strange claims of some patients and shedding light on how the brain might generate its "self-image."

Notice two things. The first is that these experiments are supposed to be about tricking "the brain". The clear implication is that "the brain" and "the person" are identical and interchangable concepts. This is practically de rigueur for science reporting and is considered much more scientific than talking about people or selves (presumably in imitation of the Churchlands). The second is that this experiment somehow explains the "strange claims of some patients" that they believe they are "outside the body". That is an obvious reference to out-of-body experiences associated with the Near-Death Experience. Clearly the "science writer" is assuming the materialist metaphysics here without the least bit of question.

The point of this kind of science article is not really to discover the truth about near-death experiences, but rather to attack other interpretations of the NDE and to proselytize the materialistic one. It doesn't really matter to materialists that this research actually does not address the most important fact about near-death experiences -- that they often result in veridical perception. The point is not to actually address that kind of evidence, but instead to come up with some kind of nice-sounding way explain away the NDE while completely ignoring those aspects of the NDE that contradict materialism, to defend the materialism meme from alternative concepts, allow materialists to feel smarter and better-informed than those 'superstitious and backwards' people who think that the NDE has a non-materialist explanation, and in effect to "twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones".

Next time you read an popular media article about any kind of psychology or consciousness research, look for the key words indicating an unquestioning assumption of materialism and mind = brain. You are almost certain to find it.

Marcel Cairo and Alex Tsakiris team up again. . .

2007-08-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

Definitely worth tuning in to, and calling in to the show. This time Alex is interviewing Marcel. Call in with your tough questions!

Tuesday August 28, 4PM PDT / 7PM EDT.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the show will not be aired live because of scheduling conflicts. So you can't call in. Darn! However you can certainly email Marcel or Alex with your questions this weekend before they record the show.

Great interview with Deborah Blum

2007-08-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Daily Grail has an extremely informative interview with Ghost Hunters author and Pulitzer prize-winning author Deborah Blum. Here are a few extracts:

TDG: . . .I'm interested to know why you concentrated on the 'William James era' of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Were you lead into the topic accidentally when originally researching James, or is there something about this period of psychical research which made it stand out to you as a writer?

DB: First by accident, then by plan. I was researching the history of psychology for an earlier book (on the science of affection) and I stumbled across some references to William James losing his mind and getting caught up in spiritualism. Other psychologists were just furious with him, angry enough, that I began to wonder why.

As it turned out, they were angry because he was such a leader in the field, they were afraid he would lead the field astray. And was what led me to concentrate on the Victorian period. Because it turned out to be the one time when some of the best scientists in the world - James, Charles Richet and John Strutt (both Nobel Prize winners), Oliver Lodge, a pioneer in wireless communication - were willing to risk their careers to explore supernatural science.

They were so smart, such good researchers, I wanted to know what they found. . .

DB: Here's the blessing and curse of mainstream science. It's the most powerful investigative tool ever invented. It has succeeded by following a very strict set of rules for "proof" of a phenomenon. That phenomenon, for instance, must be predictable, testable, replicable, confirmable. An example of this is the freezing temperature of water (phase change from liquid to solid at 32 degrees fahrenheit.) I can predict this and I (and you and the entire population of the world) can repeat and confirm it ad infinitum.

So far, paranormal phenomena don't follow those rules. They're not predictable in any consistent sense, and rarely perfectly replicable. So - and this William James complained about bitterly - mainstream science has responded by declaring them nonsense and the scientists who pursue them as pseudo-scientists. The problem with that is that our scientific rules may prevent us from trying new approaches, considering alternative ways to measure reality - in other words, box us into a very limited world.

Bottom line, science plays it safe and ruthlessly defends its limits. Totally human and - here's the scandalous part - punishes those who try to make the universe a little more open. . .

TDG: A number of those 'skeptical' reviews of Ghost Hunters have suggested that your 'balanced position' shows that you did not read up on the techniques of fraudulent mediumship, and hence your account was overly credulous (James Randi himself made this point in his newsletter). Can you clarify as to whether you researched things like cold reading, and the other methods used by conjurors and charlatans?

DB: Yes, I knew I was going to get that reaction and, candidly, I thought I could live with it. I'm an obsessive over-researcher so I looked at cold readings, muscle readings, the wonderful fraudulent devices used by mediums, the works. But what made the story interesting, worthwhile, wasn't the fraud. Do we need another book debunking dead mediums?

The whole point of my book - the one I knew would get me in trouble with the Randis of the world - was that possibility exists, that some things remain genuinely fascinatingly explicable, and that there are still questions that deserve to be answered in the realms of the supernatural. Even if we only learn that "supernatural" is the wrong word, that the real answer is that we simply haven't found the limits of the natural world yet.
. . .

TDG: To finish, the tough question - but you can keep your answer extremely short, no need for an explanation. In light of your experience in writing Ghost Hunters, if you (personally) had to answer the question with only a yes or a no: is there something beyond death?

DB: I don't know. But I will tell you that before I researched the book, my answer would have been No. So I'm glad I took the time and trouble - it's made the world a more interesting place for me. . .

This interview is very much worth reading in full.

Irrational beliefs

2007-08-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

Religion is a popular target for self-identified "rationalists". This essay by George Mason economist Bryan Caplan attacks religious beliefs as being arrived at through particularly irrational processes. But I think we will find that Caplan's criteria are equally applicable to the non-religious belief of reductionistic materialism and the non-existence of psi phenomena. Let's take a look at the first part of his essay:

To tell people that their non-religious beliefs are just a religion is an insult. Why is it an insult? There isn't any nice way to answer, so I'll be blunt. It is an insult because the way that people form religious beliefs is so intellectually irresponsible that their conclusions are almost guaranteed to be false. People:

· accept their religious beliefs with little or no evidence

· accept religious beliefs that are contrary to the evidence

· accept religious beliefs without studying competing views

· are certain about religious beliefs that are dubious at best, and

· accept their religious beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling, but because they are emotionally comforting.

Forming non-religious beliefs in a religious way is irrational because forming any beliefs in a religious way is irrational.

Now let's examine these criticisms in detail and see if they apply to reductionistic materialism and the denial of psi phenomena:

1) Do most reductionistic materialists "accept their . . . beliefs with little or no evidence" or "accept . . . beliefs that are contrary to the evidence"? I think that is the case. Reductionist materialists who deny psi phenomena are real discard a large body of research pointing towards a non-material aspect of mind and consciousness. They also ignore a vast body of anecdotal evidence to this effect, often extremely well corroborated.

2) Do most reductionistic materialists "accept . . . beliefs without studying competing views"? I think the answer to that could easily be "yes". There are certainly exceptions, like Andrew Endersby, but even the designated skeptics in debates about psi are often poorly read on the research they are attacking. I see no evidence that the run-of-the-mill reductionistic materialist has read books like Entangled Minds, Best Evidence or Irreducible Mind, nor that they have read the studies from researchers like Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, Ian Stevenson and the like.

3) Are reductionistic materialists "certain about . . .beliefs that are dubious at best"? I think so. I've discussed many topics with reductionistic materialists on a number of blogs and fora. These kinds of statements are typical: "ghosts are nonsense", "of course mind is reducible to brain states", "death is the end, extinction, annihilation". Very well documented psi phenomena suggests that at least some doubt is warranted about these positions, but instead many materialists express absolute certitude in their uninformed position.

4) Do reductionistic materialists "accept their . . . beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling, but because they are emotionally comforting"? For this question we have to look beyond the surface of the question. Certainly there are discomforting aspects to materialism, such as the nihilism that many of its adherents seem to feel is the ultimate truth of reality. However, looking through a sociological lens, a straightforward answer appears. Materialism provides the opportunity to distance oneself from the beliefs of the masses of "deluded" people and join the club of the wise, intelligent, culturally powerful and unquestioned leaders of academia. So from that perspective it is clear that materialism is quite a comfortable position indeed. I think B. Alan Wallace stated it quite nicely in his Skeptiko interview:

So this is what bothers me about many of the so-called skeptics. What they're doing is defending the status quo, which doesn't take a whole lot of guts, frankly. The status quo, where so much money, power and status is, of materialism. And so no skepticism is required there at all, and so standing up in front with a whole team of scientists behind one all agreeing on the same metaphysical worldview, and then saying "we're skeptics", they're about as skeptical as Pat Robertson or Billy Graham. . .

In short, I think I have demonstrated that the criticisms that Caplan made against religious beliefs apply quite nicely to the unquestioned metaphysical materialism which holds sway in academia. However denunciations of religion are very popular within that circle, while questioning materialism is practically never done. And that's really too bad. . .

Materialism as a reaction to religion

2007-08-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

Much of what is labelled as "science" or "scientific" today is actually simply materialism. In many minds materialism and science are believed to be the same thing, but of course they are not. Materialism is a philosophical belief system that all of reality can be reduced to the physically measurable while science is a methodology for unearthing correlations and relationships between observables. My own definition of the "spirit of science" is that it is to systematically place observations above beliefs, while materialists attempt to make all observations fit onto the procrustean bed of their pre-existing beliefs, discarding those facts which refuse to be cut down to size.

One of the most relevant and historically obvious observations about materialism (and have no doubt, materialism is the unofficial doctrine of most official institutions of science) is that its prevalence today owes a great deal to the historical relationship of conflict between scientists and the religious institution of the Catholic church at the dawn of the Enlightenment. It is not difficult to see that today, the identity of a great many of the most influential materialists is caught up in a conflict with religion and religious beliefs.

This blog barely discusses religion, but if you read prominent and high-traffic science blogs written by materialists, religion is very often front and center on the agenda. On the one hand, you have blogs like GNXP, where Razib continually pokes and prods at religious beliefs as an odd curiosity of the human mind (although of course never subjecting his own materialism to the same kind of analysis). But even more common (and much more popular according to site traffic) is a "demonology" approach to religion, as displayed by P.Z. Myers antipathic Pharyngula blog (by far the highest traffic blog for Seed's scienceblogs). This is also the kind of analysis of religion we see in books like Sam Harris' The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, and Stengers's God: the failed hypothesis. Religious belief as a toxic mental delusion and pathology.

This same kind of combatative attitude is very easily seen in many articles on science written in mainstream publications. For example, there is an incessant parade of articles meant to bash religious beliefs like the soul, free will and God.

All of this attention on religion by materialists serves a very obvious purpose of maintaining group identity by praising the in-group beliefs (these things don't exist, only atoms in motion and the void) and poking fun at the out-group beliefs (religion). After all, materialists already disbelieve in these things, so why the constant harping on them? It is a way to construct a sociological identity of the praiseworthy against the intellectually condemned. A very clear and obvious reaction to religious beliefs.

Here is an invitation from AMNAP to all the religion-obsessed. Move on. Get over it. Start constructing your beliefs based on the observations, instead of constantly reacting to mythologies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. . .

Volume 1, Issue 1 of Antimatters published

2007-08-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Ulrich Mohrhoff and his collaborators for publishing the first issue of AntiMatters.

This journal looks to be of significant interest to readers of AMNAP. . .

New Skeptiko forum

2007-08-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

Jacob of mind-energy.net has created an official forum for the Skeptiko podcast. He also has other forums for discussion of psi-related topics.

Thanks Jacob for providing this service!

UPDATE: Jacob brought to my attention that the second link was incorrect. Fixed now.

"As skeptical as Pat Robertson or Billy Graham". . .

2007-08-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed listening to this Skeptiko podcast with B. Alan Wallace. Here's a brief quotation from Alan (emphasis added by me):

The author of "The Discovers" wrote: "The greatest impediment in the whole history of science to progress is not ignorance, but the illusions of knowledge". Thinking that we know something that we've actually assumed. Susan Blackmore's words there, I think in many respects. . . have expressed illusions of knowledge rather than actual knowledge. . . In this regard her statements are enormous impediments to knowledge rather than knowledge. She said we must start with what we know of reality, and then she goes on to this whole sequence of things she says we know [but don't]. . .

What do we know about what happens to consciousness at death?. . . Do we have any means of measuring the presence of consciousness? The answer is no. . . Is there any scientific definition . . .of consciousness? The answer is no. We don't know whether insect-eating plants are conscious. We don't know whether coral are conscious. What are the causes of consciousness? We don't know. . . This is a massive amount of ignorance. . . If we take that as a starting point. . . how on earth with confidence can we say we know anything about what happens to consciousness at death with all that ignorance? And so to start off and say any spiritual practice has to take place in terms of what we know, very good. But why don't we be a bit skeptical about what people think they know as opposed to what has actually been demonstrated in a rigorous scientific fashion? So this is what bothers me about many of the so-called skeptics. What they're doing is defending the status quo, which doesn't take a whole lot of guts, frankly. The status quo, where so much money, power and status is, of materialism. And so no skepticism is required there at all, and so standing up in front with a whole team of scientists behind one all agreeing on the same metaphysical worldview, and then saying "we're skeptics", they're about as skeptical as Pat Robertson or Billy Graham. . . I just don't see much difference in the skepticism of a religious fundamentalist and the skepticism of a hard-core committed scientific materialist. . .

Coal-colored glasses?

2007-08-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

Watch Michael Prescott go to town on a positional skeptic's review of Blum's seminal Ghost Hunters.

Remote Viewing study

2007-08-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

This remote viewing study was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration 14.1. Here is the abstract:

Abstract—Remote viewing (RV) is a perceptual ability whereby individuals are able to describe and experience objects, pictures, and locations that are blocked from ordinary perception, either by distance, shielding, or time. RV is usually carried out as a team effort, consisting of a viewer who is attempting to describe a target, and an interviewer who assists the viewer in exacting images and sensations from his of her subconscious process. We report a RV experiment carried out at a conference in Arco, Northern Italy, with a class of 24 participants, many of whom were healers and “energy workers.” Based on previous work of the authors, great attention was given to creating a feeling of community and coherence of intention within the group during the threeday class. In the fourth of the five sessions of the class, a formal, RV experiment was conducted with class members working in pairs, wherein each person served alternately as viewer and interviewer. Viewers were asked to describe a picture of an outdoor scene, encased in an opaque, sealed envelope, which they would be shown immediately after the session. The interviewer then was directed to take the viewer’s sketches and written impressions to the front of the room and rank order the material (from 1 to 4) against the four possible pictures from a preset target package. In this blind-ranking protocol, 6 first-place matches would be expected by chance from the 24 viewers. Instead, 14 first-place matches were achieved. The binomial probability of this outcome is 5 ´ 10- 4, with an effect size Z/(N)1/2= 0.64

Below are photographs of two of the remote viewing session drawings that were blindly matched with the correct target, and the target and decoy photos.

Parapsychology dispute

2007-08-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

Looks like two of George Hansen's initial blog posts amount to swipes at Dean Radin's statistical credibility.

Disputes in academia are nothing new, but thanks to the internet, and the fact that both Radin and Hansen are bloggers, this one has the potential to be a lot more public than many previous dust-ups in parapsychology. . .

UPDATE: Radin has addressed Hansen's critique here. H/T Book Surgeon, in the comments. . .

O/T Rant about obnoxious website behavior. . .

2007-08-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

If you are distributing prerecorded audio content online for people to listen to, you need to distribute MP3 files. End of story. Not any of the myriads of protected formats like Real, various flash-based players, etc.

When I want to listen to internet content, I want to download it and listen to it later, usually while driving home from the office. And many people like to listen to audio programs on their iPods or other MP3 players. The protected / streaming formats do not allow this.

I consider seeing a site with audio content where MP3 files are not provided as evidence that that site is completely clueless about how people wish to use the internet. For a media organization like Wisconsin Public Radio to offend in this manner is simply beyond acceptable.

Get with the program, folks!

A real treat. . .

2007-08-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow (Tuesday August 7th), Marcel Cairo has a real treat for us: parapsychology researcher and author of The Trickster and the Paranormal, George Hansen.

Hansen's book is a must-read for those interested in psi phenomena and why they inhabit the murky and ill-defined edges of our knowledge and institutions. Don't miss it.

As always, this show will begin at 4:00 PM PDT, 7:00 PM EDT.

UPDATE: The show is now scheduled for tomorrow, August 7th.

Remote Viewing

2007-08-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Remote Viewing is a psi technique where some people claim to be able to perceive aspects or features of some location through some kind of non-physical perceptual process. Of currently living Remote Viewers, Joe McMoneagle is probably the most famous.

In 1994 the ABC news show "Put to the Test" created an informal test for McMoneagle.

Skeptoicriticized McMoneagle's interpretations of the scene, but I found their critisms rather strained. McMoneagle's drawing was of a river with straight sides, and a bridge, which were obvious matches for the target site and not the other three sites. A few of their criticisms were very misleading. . .

She's looking up at it. This would apply best to the treehouse, the waterslide, or the Water Wall. There was really nothing to look up at at the dock.

Did the skeptoid commentor actually watch the entire video? First of all, McMoneagle said "There's something tall at the target. She keeps looking up at it". The video footage clearly shows her repeatedly looking up at the bridge, which looks to be over 100 feet tall. For the skeptoid commentor to make this misleading comment is ridiculous. Of course, he is correct that the other sites also have something tall at the target site, and if they were chosen it is likely that the individual at the target site would have looked up at them as well.

She's standing on an incline. She was not standing on an incline, and there were no apparent inclines at any of the four locations.

McMoneagle never said this. He said "the actual target itself is more on an incline". And the bridge, the most prominent visual feature of the target site and target photo, is certainly on an incline up from ground level to high above the river, curving back down to an incline on the opposite bank.

There's a river or something riverlike nearby, with manmade improvements. Houston is a famous river town, so this was a pretty good bet. It applies equally well to the waterslide and to the dock.

I saw no evidence in the photographs or video footage that the other two sites fit nearly as well with this description. Perhaps they were near a river, but the target photo and video footage from ABC made it clear that the important aspects of the other potential targets was something completely different. Certainly the dock is the best possible fit for the illustrations and commentary McMoneagle provided during the program.

I argue that the target person could have been at any one of the four locations, and Joe's psychic predictions would have seemed equally impressive. Joe made numerous sketches, but the only two that they showed were a sketch of a squiggly river (the river at the dock is between straight cement seawalls) and a vague triangular shape, which they interpreted as similar to a crane on a barge when seen from a certain angle.

The river McMoneagle drew was clearly squiggly in the distance, but the part in the foreground was drawn with completely straight banks, which fit the manmade straight lines of the dock area perfectly.

In addition, ABC news showed many more than two sketches. Again I find myself questioning whether Skeptoid bothered to watch the entire video carefully?

An interesting video, certainly not a scientific test, and not proof of anything, but I found it intriguing and entertaining.

I'll address a more formal study of remote viewing soon here on AMNAP.

UPDATE: Brian in the comments questions whether the woman was looking up or not.

Based on these stills from the video, I would say it appears to me that she was looking "up" at the bridge, which is very large and a hundred feet or more high. Now if Joe had suggested that she was looking "straight up" that would be obviously inaccurate.

Interesting test of mediumship. . .

2007-08-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Tymn writes about the "Newspaper Tests". . .

H/T Michael Prescott, who also writes about the same tests. . .

What's wrong with AI (AMNAP 1.0 Repost)

2007-07-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

Skeptic magazine has a meticulously-footnoted article that evicerates the dubious claims of AI:

On March 24, 2005, an announcement was made in newspapers across the country, from the New York Times1 to the San Francisco Chronicle,2 that a company3 had been founded to apply neuroscience research to achieve human-level artificial intelligence. The reason the press release was so widely picked up is that the man behind it was Jeff Hawkins, the brilliant inventor of the PalmPilot, an invention that made him both wealthy and respected.4

You’d think from the news reports that the idea of approaching the pursuit of artificial human-level intelligence by modeling the brain was a novel one. Actually, a Web search for “computational neuroscience” finds over a hundred thousand webpages and several major research centers.5 At least two journals are devoted to the subject.6 Over 6,000 papers are available online. Amazon lists more than 50 books about it. A Web search for “human brain project” finds more than eighteen thousand matches.7 Many researchers think of modeling the human brain or creating a “virtual” brain a feasible project, even if a “grand challenge.”8 In other words, the idea isn’t a new one. . .

The fact is, we have no unifying theory of neuroscience. We don’t know what to build, much less how to build it.12 As one observer put it, neuroscience appears to be making “antiprogress” — the more information we acquire, the less we seem to know.13 . . .

A Brief History of A.I.
Duplicating or mimicking human-level intelligence is an old notion — perhaps as old as humanity itself. In the 19th century, as Charles Babbage conceived of ways to mechanize calculation, people started thinking it was possible — or arguing that it wasn’t. Toward the middle of the 20th century, as mathematical geniuses Claude Shannon,17 Norbert Wiener,18 John von Neumann,19 Alan Turing, and others laid the foundations of the theory of computing, the necessary tool seemed available.

In 1955, a research project on artificial intelligence was proposed; a conference the following summer is considered the official inauguration of the field. The proposal20 is fascinating for its assertions, assumptions, hubris, and naÃ¯vetÃ©, all of which have characterized the field of A.I. ever since. The authors proposed that ten people could make significant progress in the field in two months. That ten-person, two-month project is still going strong — 50 years later. And it’s involved the efforts of more like tens of thousands of people. . .

According to the roboticists and their fans, Moore’s Law will come to the rescue. The implication is that we have the programs and the data all ready to go, and all that’s holding us back is a lack of computing power. After all, as soon as computers got powerful enough, they were able to beat the world’s best human chess player, weren’t they? (Well, no — a great deal of additional programming and chess knowledge was also needed.)

Sad to say, even if we had unlimited computer power and storage, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. The programs aren’t ready to go, because there aren’t any programs. . .

With admirable can-do spirit, technological optimism, and a belief in inevitability, psychologists, philosophers, programmers, and engineers are sure they shall succeed, just as people dreamed that heavier-than-air flight would one day be achieved.88 But 50 years after the Wright brothers succeeded with their proof-of-concept flight in 1903, aircraft had been used decisively in two world wars; the helicopter had been invented; several commercial airlines were routinely flying passengers all over the world; the jet airplane had been invented; and the speed of sound had been broken.

After more than 50 years of pursuing human- level artificial intelligence, we have nothing but promises and failures. The quest has become a degenerating research program89 (or actually, an ever-increasing number of competing ones), pursuing an ever-increasing number of irrelevant activities as the original goal recedes ever further into the future — like the mirage it is.

Autobiography of Rupert Sheldrake (AMNAP 1.0 Repost)

2007-07-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

Rupert Sheldrake has posted a concise autobiography on his website. Here are some short extracts:

I was born and brought up in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. My family were devout Methodists. I went to an Anglican boarding school. I was for a while torn between these two very different traditions - one Protestant and the other Anglo-Catholic with incense and all the trappings of Catholicism.

But the thing that really preoccupied me was my interest in living things. From a very early age I was interested in plants and animals. My father was an amateur naturalist and microscopist and he encouraged this interest. My mother put up with it. I kept lots of animals at home and she said, as mothers always say, "It's all very well, but who's going to feed them?" And of course, in the end, she usually did.

I knew from quite an early age that I wanted to do biology, and I specialized in science at school. Then I went to Cambridge where I studied biology and biochemistry. However, as I proceeded in my studies, a great gulf opened between my original inspiration, namely an interest in life, actual living organisms and the kind of biology I was taught: orthodox, mechanistic biology which essentially denies the life of organisms but instead treats them as machines. I had to learn that you can't respond emotionally to animals and plants. You can't connect with them in any way except by detached objective reason. There seemed to be very little connection between the direct experience of animals and plants and the way I was learning about them, manipulating them, dissecting them into smaller and smaller bits, getting down to the molecular level and seeing them as evolving by blind chance and blind forces of natural selection.

I could learn this stuff; in fact, I was quite good at it. But the gulf grew bigger and bigger. When I was at Cambridge in the Biochemistry Department, I saw a wall chart showing the different chemical reactions in the body. Someone had written in big letters across the top of it KNOW THYSELF. This brought home to me a huge chasm between these enzymatic reactions and my own experience. The first thing we did in the Biochemistry Department was to kill the organisms we were studying and then grind them up to extract the DNA, the enzymes, and so on.

I felt more and more that there was something wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. No one else seemed to think there was anything wrong.Then a friend who was studying literature lent me a book on German philosophy containing an essay on the writings of Goethe, the poet and botanist. I discovered that Goethe at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century had had a vision of a different kind of science, a holistic science that integrated direct experience and understanding. It didn't involve breaking everything down into pieces and denying the evidence of one's senses.

This filled me with great excitement, the idea that there could be a different kind of natural science. So invigorated was I by this prospect that I decided I wanted to study the history of science and philosophy to see why science had got to where it was. I was fortunate to get a fellowship at Harvard where I spent a year studying philosophy and history. Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had recently come out and it had a big influence on me, gave me a new perspective. It made me realize that the mechanistic theory of life was what Kuhn called a paradigm, a collectively held model of reality, a belief system. He showed that periods of revolutionary change involved the replacement of old scientificparadigms by new ones. If science had changed radically in the past, then perhaps it could change again in the future. I was very excited by that. . .

I was beginning to explore the holistic tradition in biology, which is a minority tradition, but it's always been there. I began to formulate the idea of morphic resonance, the basis of memory in nature, the main thing I've been working on since. The idea came to me in a moment of insight and was extremely exciting. It interested some of my colleagues at Clare College - philosophers, linguists, and classicists were quite open-minded. But the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species didn't go down too well with my colleagues in the science labs. Not that they were aggressively hostile; they just made fun of it. Whenever I said something like, "I've just got to go and make a telephone call," they said, "Ha, ha, why bother? Do it by morphic resonance!" . . .

Someone else discusses the sociology of science

2007-07-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

Alternative medical researcher and author Dr. Larry Dossey has written an interesting essay about the sociology of science and why the public's image of science has been deteriorating over the past several decades. Here are a few extracts:

Some observers believe that CSICOP and other debunking organizations are a major cause of the science blues because, in their attempt to save science, they are creating a public backlash. Consider, for example, that more than half of the adult population in the United States has had psychic experiences and believes in the reality of these phenomena. As Hansen states: "Those who have had [these] experiences but encounter the debunking attitudes of apparent 'scientific authorities' are likely to conclude that science is a dogma and inapplicable to important aspects of their lives." Parapsychology researcher Jacques Vallee goes further. He suggests that debunkers "are among the primary contributors to the rejection of science by the public.". . .

Over the past 2 decades we've seen many CAM [complementary and alternative medicine] therapies condemned as implausible--acupuncture, exercise, nutritional supplementation, meditation, biofeedback, and others--only to win eventual endorsement and acceptance within conventional medicine. No wonder the public is leery when experts say a particular CAM therapy can't work because it's implausible.

Experts who are hung up on the plausibility of CAM therapies ought to get out more. They might actually try biofeedback, acupuncture, or yoga--not because personal experience constitutes irrefutable proof, but because personal experience shapes our worldview, our concept of what is possible and plausible.

A ruckus over plausibility took place in England between famous scientists over a century ago. The dispute involved telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, which suggest that consciousness can operate remotely. Nobelist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), the discoverer of thallium, favored the investigation of these phenomena even though they could not be explained. He contrasted his approach with that of fellow physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867), famous for his work in electricity and magnetism, who bitterly opposed them. Crookes stated:

Faraday says, "Before we proceed to consider any question involving physical principles, we should set out with clear ideas of the naturally possible and impossible." But this appears like reasoning in a circle: we are to investigate nothing till we know it to be possible, whilst we cannot say what is impossible, outside pure mathematics, till we know everything. In the present case I prefer to enter upon the enquiry with no preconceived notions whatever as to what can or cannot be.

We should be cautious in rejecting events as implausible, because subsequent developments may reveal that our notion of plausibility reflected little more than our own ignorance. For example, when Newton advanced the notion of universal gravity in the 17th century, his colleagues condemned his ideas as implausible and a sellout to mysticism. Most scientists today probably believe they would not have been as hidebound as Newton's doubting colleagues, but in 1995 "an editorial in the journal Nature questioned whether Newton would have been able to publish his theory today, given its self-evident preposterousness .... "

hat tip to commentor "anonymous" on Michael Prescott's blog. . .

Fascinating

2007-07-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

This fascinating documentary video presents information that suggests reincarnation, but the ending is a twist.

This coincides with my own take on phenomena suggestive of reincarnation -- that the memories and information transfer (and sometimes birthmarks, etc.) are real, but do not necessarily indicate that a particular person has died and is then reborn again.

Go watch it and come up with your own explanation. . .

H/T Daily Grail

Debating psi phenomena. . .

2007-07-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

For those who doubt that psi phenomena are real:

There are some of you who have read many parapsychology papers, popular books on the subject like Entangled Minds, Best Evidence and the like, and academic tomes such as Irreducible Mind, as well as anti-psi material. To you, I tip my hat. You have exposed yourself to some of the best evidence for psi phenomena and against it, and so your opinion is informed by the relevant facts. You bring value to the discussion.

But for the far larger community of psi deniers who have not read the literature of evidence for psi, and get all your information from the Shermers and Randis of the world, I have a simple message: you are uninformed. You are unaware of the enormous amount of evidence that these phenomena do occur and cannot be explained through "conventional" reductive materialist theories. You are taking an essentially faith-based position regarding the non-existence of psi phenomena. And I will no longer engage in any extended, time-consuming debates with you, until you familiarize yourself with the relevant literature. Because, frankly, your opinion on psi is worth very little, since you are judging it without possession of the relevant facts.

Feel free to convert yourself to the first kind of critic, which only requires some study on your part, although I cannot promise that you won't end up changing your mind. . .

Reminder. . .

2007-07-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

Marcel Cairo has a show on his Afterlife FM program coming up today that looks interesting titled: Science, Spirituality and Spinoza's God.

Sounds like a great topic.

As always, the show starts at 4:00 PM Eastern, 7:00 Pacific.

The guest today is blogger Brian Hines, who has often had interesting things to say on his blog. Call in and talk to Brian and Marcel on this interesting subject. . .

Who will watch the watchers?

2007-07-17T05:57:00.001-07:00

Michael Prescott is writing a continuing series of blog posts investigating the quality of a CSICOP "debunking" of one particular near-death experience with veridical perception. Here are parts one, two, three, four and five. Here's a small taste of this excellent series to whet your appetite before you go read them on Michael's blog (background: Clark reported the NDE, while Ebbern and Mulligan are the Skeptical Inquirer researchers):

So we have a clear discrepancy between Clark's account of the shoe and that of the two student investigators. It seems to me that there are two ways of resolving this discrepancy:

1. Clark's account is simply wrong, either because of dishonesty or because she has unwittingly embellished the story over the years. Or ...

2. Ebbern and Mulligan did not put the shoe in exactly the same place where Clark says she found it 17 years earlier.

The authors obviously want us to accept the first option and do not even mention the second one. Yet the second possibility cannot be ruled out. If we skip ahead just a bit in the Skeptical Inquirer article, we find the authors observing in a different context, "As far as we were able to ascertain, Clark never photographed the shoe on the ledge." They also take pains to report that "Clark has not produced notes or recordings from her interviews with Maria."

Now, if Clark did not take any photographs of the shoe in situ, nor did she make any contemporaneous notes or records, then how did the students know where to place the shoe? The article tells us that they put it on the ledge "at the place Clark described." The article does not say that Clark accompanied the students and pointed specifically to where the shoe should be placed. It appears that the students were relying on Clark's verbal description alone.

It should be obvious that the visibility of the shoe, either from the ground or from a window, would vary tremendously depending on exactly where and how it was placed. For instance, if it was right up alongside the wall of the building, perhaps it would not be visible from the ground. Or if it was some distance away from the window, perhaps the telltale details would not be seen even when pressing one's face to the glass.

One detail the authors offer inadvertently lends credence to the thesis that they put their shoe in a more visible position than the original. When they returned to the hospital "one week after placing the shoe on the ledge, the shoe had been removed, proving that it was also discernible to someone not specifically looking for it."

No doubt it was. But if the original shoe, back in 1977, was equally visible, then why wasn't it removed from the ledge before Kimberly Clark hunted it down? If people could see the shoe from both outside and inside the hospital, and it was easily retrievable, then what was it still doing there when Maria had her NDE?

The bottom line is that we have no reason to assume that the student researchers put the shoe in exactly the same place where it was found 17 years earlier. Without photographic records or detailed notes, and without Kimberly Clark's direct participation in the recreation, they could rely only on guesswork. And yet on the basis of their guesswork, they were willing to call into question Clark's recollection of the entire event. . .

How could Clark so thoroughly fail to interrogate Maria or to accurately recollect one of the most dramatic events of her life? The authors suggest an answer. "Kimberly Clark is not a trained investigator," they say.

This, of course, raises the question of whether the researchers in this case, Ebbern and Mulligan, were trained investigators at the time when they took their trip to Seattle. Here is what we are told about the pair at the end of the article:

Hayden Ebbern is an undergraduate in the Department of Psychology and Sean Mulligan is a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

Ebbern was an undergraduate?

Are we supposed to believe that an undergraduate -- a college student who has not even earned his degree -- is a "trained investigator"? Are his powers of observation, analysis, and memory automatically assumed to be better than those of an experienced social worker at a major hospital?

At least Mulligan was a graduate student at the time, but does a grad student in the biology department have the skills necessary to evaluate the testimony of witnesses or determine their allegedly hidden motives? Are biology departments teaching interrogation techniques nowadays?

I would suggest that if a parapsychologist sent two students with comparable qualifications to investigate a controversial case, he would be roundly criticized -- especially if the students began casting aspersions on the honesty, intelligence, training, and motives of the people they were sent to interview. . .

Besides allegedly taking too long to report the case, Clark was found to have a "cavalier attitude." How so?

When Ebbern and Mulligan asked Clark about the current whereabouts of the shoe, Clark replied that she probably had it around somewhere, maybe in her garage, but that it would be too much trouble to look for it. The cavalier attitude toward the most important artifact in the field of near-death studies struck us as odd.

Two responses are possible. First, I'm not aware of any near-death researchers who regard the shoe itself as an especially important "artifact." It is, after all, just a beat-up old shoe. What's important is the story associated with it, not the shoe itself. Second, and more important, there may be another explanation for Kimberly Clark's lack of cooperation with Ebbern and Mulligan. I submit that it is at least possible that Clark, upon meeting the intrepid pair of student investigators, sized them up as militant skeptics, strongly biased against any nonmaterialist interpretation of NDEs, researching a CSICOP hit piece. She may also have noticed that the researchers were contemptuous of her friends in her NDE support group, and were more than willing to cast aspersions on her own memory, intellectual capabilities, honesty, and motives. Under the circumstances, she may not have felt particularly interested in presenting the shoe to Ebbern and Mulligan so they could snicker at it.

The authors finish up by allowing that "perhaps" Clark "now honestly misremembers" the details of the case -- the alternative, of course, being that she dishonestly misremembers or misrepresents the details.

The motivation to defend cherished or self-serving beliefs makes it easy for unintentional embellishments to creep into key accounts as they are retold. In our discussions with her, Clark exhibited obvious emotional commitment to the spiritual interpretation of Maria's story. She has become a minor celebrity because of her involvement with it and is writing yet another, potentially profitable, book on the subject."

Unpacking this passage is almost too easy. I'll leave it to you to count all the ways that the authors cast aspersions on Clark's psychology and motives. Naturally, no skeptic could ever be motivated to "defend cherished or self-serving beliefs," or to have an "emotional commitment" to a point of view, and and no skeptic has ever become "a minor celebrity" or written a "potentially profitable" book. By the way, aren't all books potentially profitable? This is like saying that someone just bought a "potentially salable house." Why would they phrase it like that? What are they trying to imply? Gosh, I wish I knew.

The authors take a moment to disparage Clark's NDE support group, which, they claim, "bills itself as devoted to scientific research into NDEs." If so, it's a pretty unusual support group, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that the group did characterize itself this way. So what, exactly? Even if the members of the group are rank amateurs, they are hardly typical of the leading researchers in the field of near-death studies -- accomplished professionals like Michael Sabom, Melvin Morse, Peter Fenwick, Bruce Greyson, and Pim Van Lommel, who have published their research in peer-reviewed journals. (Skeptical Inquirer, incidentally, is not peer-reviewed.) In any event, Ebbern and Mulligan reportedly

were struck by the revival-meeting atmosphere. The participants exhibited a conspicuous lack of scientific knowledge and low levels of critical thinking skills. They seemed quite unaware of how to mount a proper investigation of such incidents. The appeal throughout was strictly to faith. The few mildly critical questions the visitors raised were decidedly unwelcome.

So a group of people who have experienced NDEs are met by two researchers -- one, a grad student, the other, an undergrad -- who are openly skeptical of the most meaningful, life-changing event of their lives, and the NDErs made the students feel "unwelcome." How welcome do you think Kimberly Clark would feel at a CSICOP meeting?

Perhaps it is cynical of me, but I can't help thinking that Ebbern and Mulligan would regard any gathering of spiritual seekers as having a "revival-meeting atmosphere." (From what I've read of CSICOP events, the description might be better suited for the get-togethers sponsored by that organization.) . . .

The authors conclude their essay in an effusion of self-congratulation:

We have shown several factual discrepancies [have they? or did they put the shoe in the wrong place?] and plausible ways [plausible? really?] that Maria's supposedly unobtainable knowledge could have been obtained by quite ordinary means. In delving into this incident, we were first disappointed [sure they were], then amused, that such a weak case should have achieved the importance it has been accorded....

Now go read the entire series of posts from Michael. They are not to be missed. . .

Why the public distrusts science. . .

2007-07-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

One of the recurrent and very questions that skeptics, rationalists, and materialists ask themselves is why the general public does not share their faith in reductionistic materialism. Invariably the answer is given: we are impartial examiners of the evidence, which all points to the truth of our metaphysical reductionistic materialism, while the general public is deluded by their erroneous natural psychological tendencies, . This article by Paul Bloom is extraordinarily typical of the genre. Here is one particularly egregious outtake:

But evolution is not the only domain in which people reject science: Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical interventions, the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences, the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies, and the legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination. . .

In fact it is Paul Bloom who rejects science in this case, not the public. To Bloom, science is equated with the belief system of reductionist materialism. In reality, science is the method of observing reality, creating models to describe reality, and testing the models by experiments and further observations that can either support or weigh against those models. For people like Bloom to dismiss phenomena with massive collaborated observational and / or experimental support like crisis apparitions (ghosts) and telepathy is utterly unscientific, dogmatic, and in reality no different from the methodology of the fundamentalist religionists he decries who reject evidence for common descent and an ancient earth and universe.

The biggest reason that the public distrusts science is that scientists distrust science. They prefer to maintain a belief system in reductionistic materialism instead of admitting any observations which do not fit. For example, Michael Prescott quotes the following accurate observations from Michael Sabom's Recollections of Death during a surgical NDE:

When I left that room [prior to surgery], I was totally unconscious and don't have any awareness whatsoever as I was transported from there down to where they do the operation until all of a sudden the room is lit up, not as bright as I thought it ought to be. . . .I recall consciously... seeing two doctors stitch me up after the operation; Dr. C., I think it was because the hands were so large, injecting a syringe of something into my heart on two occasions, one on one side and another on the other side of the heart; the apparatus that they used to keep the ribs apart to make the aperture; . . . And the fact that my head was covered and the rest of my body was draped with more than one sheet, separate sheets laid in layers. I knew it was my body. I always imagined that the lights would be brighter, but it didn't seem that bright. More like banks of fluorescent lights rather than a big high-powered beam... I was amazed that I had thought there would be blood all over the place, but there really wasn't that much blood. Not what I expected it to be... A lot of it was draped. I couldn't see my head too much but I could see from about my nipples down better.... [Sewing him up] they took some stitches inside me first before they did the outside. And then it was just like they sew you up. The shorter doctor started down here and worked this way. The other doctor could have started in the middle and worked up. They had a lot of trouble right here, but the rest of it was pretty fast... And the heart doesn't look like I thought it did. It's big. And this is after the doctor had taken little pieces of it off. It's not shaped like I thought it would be. My heart was shaped something like the continent of Africa, with it being larger up here and tapered down. Bean-shaped is another way you could describe it. Maybe mine is odd shaped... [The surface was] pinkish and yellow. I thought the yellow part was fat tissue or something. Yucky, kind of. One general area to the right or left was darker than the rest instead of all being the same color... I could draw you a picture of the saw they used and the thing they used to separate the ribs with. It was always there and I can remember the details of that probably better than the other things. It was draped all around, but you could see the metal part of it. I think all they used that for was to keep it constantly open. They had instruments hanging around it that obscured it and they undid the clamps sometimes and stuck in sponges stuck on the clamps and there were hands so I couldn't see it constantly because it was obscured sometimes... It seems Dr. C. did most everything from my left side. He cut pieces of my heart off. He raised it and twisted it this way and that way and took quite a bit of time examining it and looking at different things ... That thing they held my chest open with, that's real good steel with no rust, I mean, no discoloration. Real good, hard, shiny metal... [Stopping his heart] I sensed they did it with the needle when they injected something into my heart. That's scary when you see that thing go right into your heart...

What is the response of the "scientific" priesthood to such events? Typically, they simply ignore all such stories. When they are addressed, stories are invented which fit the assumptions of reductionist materialism, but ignore the details of these cases. Only a very few actually address the details of these cases and attempt to create materialist explanations that actually fit the facts (although fail to escape Ockham's razor in my book. . .)

In pointed contrast, writers like Paul Bloom get a huge amount of attention for simply patting his fellow materialists on the back for their clearheadedness and rationality, and in contrast denigrating the biases and ignorance of the general public who disagree with Bloom and the NAS.

Is it any surprise that the general public distrusts what scientists say about psi phenomena, life after death, meaning and purpose in cosmic and biological evolution, and the like?

A curmudgeonly critic of academia. . .

2007-07-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

We disagree about some of Mencius Moldbug's metaphysics, but think his barbed observations of academia are mostly on target:

There is definitely no point in saving any particular department which claims to be "science," any university which pleads that it's "private," any "newspaper" or "public school," etc. The entire system of official "education" has to be completely wiped. . .

It's not clear to me that Digg, Wikipedia, arxiv.org, and other modern systems which solve, or at least purport to solve, the critical problem of separating content from nonsense, are quite ready for their new roles. But perhaps we'll be surprised. Certainly, industry will not suffer from the impact of a large population of extremely intelligent and potentially productive individuals, who until now have been devoting their nervous systems to what might as well be Neoplatonist astrology. As for "science," most of the advances in Western scientific history, contrary to popular belief, occurred when scientists were not servants of the State. . .

The problem with CS - and I suspect in other sciences, such as physics, although I am certainly not qualified to fire so much as a BB gun in the great Woit-Motl war - is that science today is, contrary to popular belief, a business.

And it is a very special kind of business. In this business, there is exactly one customer, and his name is Uncle Sam. And there are no companies in this business - apart from your "mafia," you're on your own. You can get students to do your programming, true, but you have to do your own research and, more importantly, your own sales.

Selling to Uncle Sam is a fascinating problem. Uncle Sam wants his serfs to know that their tax dollars are being spent on top-notch research which will make America #1. If the dollars are being spent in the constituency of a Congressman with the right seniority, this is even better. Otherwise, Uncle Sam does not give a tinker's damn what he funds, as long as the result does not actually make him look like an idiot. Fortunately, Sen. Proxmire has departed this earth and all of your big-league journalists are pro-science pretty much the way Pat Robertson is pro-God, not to mention that if they have a BA in anything besides basketweaving it's a surprise, so Uncle Sam is unlikely to see any trouble from this front.

In any event, Mencius has some very interesting things to say about how government funding of projects actually works.

Hubris part II (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-07-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, I linked to an article in the Guardian showing amazing recovery for some PVS (persistent vegetative state) patients given a particular kind of sleeping pill.

Here is additional evidence from another article in the Guardian that at least some PVS patients are not hopeless vegetables but instead awake and aware of their environment:

A 23-year-old woman who has been in a vegetative state since suffering devastating brain damage in a traffic accident has stunned doctors by performing mental tasks for them. Brain scans revealed that the woman, who has shown no outward signs of awareness since the accident in July last year, could understand people talking to her and was able to imagine playing tennis or walking around her home when asked to by doctors.
The discovery has astounded neuroscientists who believe it could have dramatic implications for life and death decisions over other patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Last year, an intense legal battle over the life of Terri Schiavo, a woman diagnosed as PVS, was brought to an end when US courts upheld the decision to remove her feeding tube in March. She died 13 days later in a Florida care home.

Neuroscientists at the Medical Research Council's cognition and brain sciences unit at Cambridge and the University of Liege in Belgium used a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect signs of awareness in the woman, the first time scientists have been able to do so in a PVS patient. The technique is now likely to become a standard way of determining how conscious vegetative patients are.

"This is extremely important. It's the difference between life and death. From cases in the UK and the US, we know that end-of-life decisions are of course extremely important and this will definitely change the way we deal with these patients. When you have signs of consciousness, you cannot decide to stop hydration and nutrition," said Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege and co-author of the study which appears in the journal Science today.

Researchers led by Adrian Owen at Cambridge University began tests on the woman five months after her accident. Although she had emerged from a coma, she was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, in which patients enter a cycle of sleeping and waking and even open their eyes, but are completely unresponsive.

Scientists ascertained that the woman could understand speech by playing a variety of sentences. Using the fMRI scanner, which takes snapshots of brain activity every second or two, they spotted different parts of her brain lighting up depending on which sentence she heard.

Previous attempts to spot signs of awareness in PVS patients have been inconclusive because brains can respond to some actions automatically. The uncertainty forced the scientists to come up with a test that would show categorically whether the patient was conscious or not.

Dr Owen said: "We said to her, when you hear the word 'tennis', we want you to imagine being on the centre court of Wimbledon playing a big rally and every time the ball comes to you, you struggle to get it back. Then, we had a second scenario in which we wanted her to imagine going from room to room in her home."

The two scenarios were chosen to trigger activity in different parts of her brain so they would be picked up by the scanner. While thinking about tennis, the scientists hoped to see a part of the brain called the premotor cortex, which governs limb movement, flicker into life. If she thought about walking around her flat, they expected to see a brain region called the parahippocampal gyrus, which handles mental maps of places, light up.

During the scans, the scientists said the words "tennis", "home" or "rest" every 30 seconds and looked for changes in her brain activity. Remarkably, after each word, her brain lit up as expected, suggesting she was responding to the instructions. Further tests showed her brain activity was indistinguishable from that of healthy volunteers doing the same task.

Scientists now have to discover how common it is for others in a vegetative state to be similarly aware of their surroundings. The woman in the study has since been able to follow her own reflection in a mirror, leaving open the possibility the brain scans may simply have picked up very early signs of her recovery.

Hubris (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-07-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

I'm sure we all remember the spectacle last year of Terri Schaivo's last days. Court decisions came down, then were appealed appealed to higher courts. In the end, Schaivo - who we were told emphatically was "already gone" years ago - was pulled off her feeding tube and dehydrated to death and was laid to rest.

Practically the entire "scientific" medical community assured all of us that Schaivo's condition was permanent, that the real Terri Schaivo was hopelessly gone. But what if the medical consensus was based on a flawed understanding of how human consciousness works? What if our memories and personalities are not really "stored" in our brains after all, but simply accessed through them. In that case recovery from extremely severe brain damage seems much more reasonable.

This week, the Guardian published a fascinating article about a new treatment for "hopeless" PVS cases that is bringing many of them back to life:

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these 'strange and wonderful' rebirths.

For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it's as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. "No," George smiles, and his family burst into tears.

It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated - and bewildered - GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.

Across three continents, brain-damaged patients are reporting remarkable improvements after taking a pill that should make them fall asleep but that, instead, appears to be waking up cells in their brains that were thought to have been dead. In the next two months, trials on patients are expected to begin in South Africa aimed at finding out exactly what is going on inside their heads. Because, at the moment, the results are baffling doctors.

The remarkable story of this pill and its active ingredient, zolpidem, begins in 1994 when Louis Viljoen, a sporty 24-year-old switchboard operator, was hit by a truck while riding his bike in Springs, a small town 30 minutes' drive east of Johannesburg. He suffered severe brain injuries that left him in a deep coma. He was treated in various hospitals before being settled in the Ikaya Tinivorster rehabilitation centre nearby. Doctors expected him to die and told his mother, Sienie Engelbrecht, that he would never regain consciousness. "His eyes were open but there was nothing there," says Sienie, a sales rep. "I visited him every day for five years and we would speak to him but there was no recognition, no communication, nothing."

The hospital ward sister, Lucy Hughes, was periodically concerned that involuntary spasms in Louis's left arm, that resulted in him tearing at his mattress, might be a sign that deep inside he might be uncomfortable. In 1999, five years after Louis's accident, she suggested to Sienie that the family's GP, Dr Wally Nel, be asked to prescribe a sedative. Nel prescribed Stilnox, the brand name in South Africa for zolpidem. "I crushed it up and gave it to him in a bottle with a soft drink," Sienie recalls. "He couldn't swallow properly then, but I helped him and sat at his bedside. After about 25 minutes, I heard him making a sound like 'mmm'. He hadn't made a sound for five years.

"Then he turned his head in my direction. I said, 'Louis, can you hear me?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Say hello, Louis', and he said, 'Hello, mummy.' I couldn't believe it. I just cried and cried."

Hughes was called over and other staff members gathered in disbelief. "Sienie told me he was talking and I said he couldn't be - it wasn't possible," she recalls. "Then I heard him. His mother was speechless and so were we. It was a very emotional moment."

Louis has now been given Stilnox every day for seven years. Although the effects of the drug are supposed to wear off after about two and a quarter hours, and zolpidem's power as a sedative means it cannot simply be taken every time a patient slips out of consciousness, his improvement continues as if long-dormant pathways in his brain are coming back to life.

How to maintain the hegemony of a reductionistic viewpoint. . . (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-07-14T05:23:00.001-07:00

Just offer misleading criticism of dissenting scientists, then refuse them the opportunity to respond:

i) Dr Sheldrake said the programme's treatment of his decision to remove trials when N'kisi did not respond, was flawed for two reasons:

a) The programme did not understand that the decision not to include these trials was in line with established practice in mainstream research with animals, young children and autistic people. Dr Sheldrake explained that analysis is performed in this way, to take into consideration the subject's limited attention span and inability to know that they are being tested.

b) Notwithstanding the first reason, Dr Sheldrake said the programme completely ignored a key finding of one of the paper's reviewers. This reviewer, included at the end of the paper, directly questioned and tested the effect that the removal of non-response trials had had on the results. The reviewer found that if the non-response trials were included, the results "differed only trivially". Therefore it was false for the programme to imply that by omitting these trials the results would have altered.

Dr Sheldrake said the programme implied that by removing the trials, where rarely used words were used, from the analysis of test results he increased the probability that N'kisi would appear telepathic.

However, Dr Sheldrake said that, as his paper had explained, by removing such trials the opposite occurred: the removal of such trials "made the result slightly less significant, rather than more". Dr Sheldrake said the programme failed to explain that regardless of which methods of analysis were used, the experiment's results remained significantly above the level of chance.

ii) Dr Sheldrake maintained that the test conducted by programme makers was flawed, therefore making a comparison between the two tests unscientific. However notwithstanding such flaws, Dr Sheldrake said that the programme's attempts to apply his methods of analysis were misleading for the following reasons:

a) Dr Sheldrake's conclusions were not based on 'percentage hit rates', as used by programme makers. Rather the conclusions were based on standard kinds of statistical probability analysis including randomised permutation analysis.

b) The programme implied that N'kisi's success in telepathy tests was a result of data manipulation rather than due to any genuine ability of N'kisi. The programme made it appear to viewers that Dr Sheldrake had omitted or massaged data to get the desired result, regardless of what the facts indicated. Dr Sheldrake said his results were analysed in several alternative ways and the significance of the results were not dependent of the type of analysis used.

. . .

Dr Sheldrake complained that the programme makers gave assurances that his work would be presented fairly and without bias, which they did not fulfil. Ofcom noted that both broadcaster and complainant offered correspondence which confirmed that such an assurance had been given by programme makers to Dr Sheldrake.

. . .

Dr Sheldrake complained that the programme did not offer him or any other qualified scientist an opportunity to respond to Mr Youen's claims, which resulted in unfairness. As previously noted, if a programme alleges wrongdoing or incompetence or makes other significant allegations, those concerned should normally be given an appropriate and timely opportunity to respond. Accordingly, Ofcom first considered whether the programme made any such allegations. In this respect, Ofcom concluded that the programme's critique of Dr Sheldrake's work was capable of adversely affecting the regard in which Dr Sheldrake's work was held which in turn drew into question Dr Sheldrake's professional credentials. As such, Ofcom considered that in order for the programme not to be unfair to Dr Sheldrake, programme makers should have given Dr Sheldrake an opportunity to respond to the criticisms contained in the programme concerning the conduct of his experiment and his interpretation of that experiment. Ofcom noted that though Dr Sheldrake had been asked to make a contribution to the programme on a number of occasions, at no time was he asked to comment on the specific criticisms of his research which were to be included in the programme. This failure to give Dr Sheldrake an opportunity to respond to what would amount to a damaging critique of his research resulted in unfairness to Dr Sheldrake. Ofcom has upheld this part of the complaint.

What is the brain for (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-07-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

Reductionistic materialism tells us the brain is an information processing device, where memories are stored, experiences occur, where decisions are made. That our brain is us, and the destruction of the brain is the end of an individual's existence.

We've already seen a lot of evidence that this might be incorrect.

If we let go of the assumption that all of the properties of consciousness and mind are explained by brain constituents, structure, and behavior, if we allow the possibility for a non-corporeal component to awareness and qualia and memory and mind, then what might the brain be for?

The brain and nervous system could be an interface for mind to manifest itself within matter, and to interface with sense perceptions. If this is the correct interpretation, what would we expect to see?

One of the arguments for no free will is that the physical universe is causally closed. That is, all of the behaviors of atoms, molecules, cells, organs and organisms are already specified through the equations of physics.

In the early twentieth century, we learned that at the smallest scale, the universe is indeterminate. Reductionists typically claim that it doesn't matter, that while quantum effects may be indeterminate at the smallest scale, they wash out at the level of molecules, cells and organisms. Chaos theory casts considerable doubt on this claim, ie: the butterfly effect. They also usually say that quantum indeterminacy is essentially random, not meaningful. But what if this is wrong? What if consciousness itself can influence the collapse of the quantum waveform, in a desired direction. This would provide the mechanism for consciousness to act within the world.

Neural firing is indeterminate. That is, the behavior of any given neuron and its firing is probabalistic. In other words, sometimes a neuron will fire under stimulus, and other times not. This is almost certainly because neural firing is mediated by the behavior of ions within the synaptic gap, and the behavior of those ions is subject to quantum fluctuations. Because the firing of a single neuron can be amplified through thousands or millions of other neurons throughout large areas of the the brain, and trigger motor neurons, this gives the possibility for individual quantum events to determine gross motor behaviors (shall I give the possible example of neurons controlling muscles in fingers typing a blog entry?). To a large degree, the brain can be seen as a device for magnifying the effects of quantum indeterminancy to the macro-scale, and if those quantum fluctuations are somehow influenced by consciousness, they can use them to drive behavior.

Certainly there is evidence that consciousness can influence quantum systems (ie: RNG PK). Is this how the mind drives the brain and body?

Mind and Brain (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-07-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

One of the assumptions of most people with a "scientific" worldview is that human consciousness is entirely a function of the brain. One reason for this is the well-known finding of neuroscience, that damage to the brain often affects the functioning of the mind. For example, damage to or destruction of the hippocampus through stroke or brain injury will lead to memory impairment of varying degrees. Probing different parts of the brain with electrical currents can lead to reliving memories or experiencing emotions. And a loss of blood flow to the brain leads to immediate unconsciousness.

However these phenomena can be interpreted in multiple ways. The standard reductionist viewpoint of the brain could be termed the "ipod model". That is, the hardware, software and content are all encoded and packaged into a stand-alone device. The obvious alternative to this is the "radio" model. A radio looks very much like a tape player or an ipod. Removing components from the radio may prevent it from playing certain bands (AM or FM), lock the tuning onto a particular station, or create distortion in the music. However the music itself is external to the device, and destroying the radio does not destroy the music.

Which of these two models is correct? Is mind / awareness / memory solely a product of the brain, or does the brain "tune into" and affect the mind in some fashion? There are a number of relevant points of fact that shed some light on this question.

The first pertinant factor is the current state of understanding of the mind from the findings of neuroscience. Have the mysteries been solved? Despite the absolute certainty of reductionists that the mind is fully explainable in terms of neural properties, the most prominent questions today are the same questions we had fifty years ago. Certainly, neuroscientists have faith that most or all of these questions will be answered soon with materialist explanations, but this is more a matter of faith in their assumptions than anything else.

Despite many decades of investigation, the sacrifice of thousands of laboratory animals and the efforts of the best minds in neuroscience, memory traces have never been located in the brain. In exasperation, some have posited a "holographic" or distributed storage of memories throughout most or all of the cortex, while others embraced a non-material aspect to the mind and memories.

Brain functions are highly plastic, after a stroke, some patients are able to recover from massive loss of abilities through remapping areas of the brain to take on new functions. What, exactly, is organizing this recovery?

Some people have demonstrated a high degree of functioning despite the lack of most or nearly all of their brain tissue.

Psi experiments provide substantial evidence that mind phenomena extend beyond an individual brain in space-time.

Near-death experiences with veridical perception have been reported when the brain is completely shut down.

Genuine mediums have brought back information from the deceased, even under tightly-controlled experimental conditions that preclude ordinary explanations.

All of these factors give support to the "radio" model of the brain and consciousness versus the "ipod" model.

Great post. . .

2007-07-11T13:48:00.000-07:00

Michael Prescott hits the nail on the head, yet again:

Remember those halcyon days of the O.J. Simpson trial, when instead of worrying about the next terrorist attack, we all crowded around our television sets to hear the latest testimony about the double murder in Brentwood? There was, as innumerable commentators pointed out, a "mountain of evidence" against O.J. Simpson -- yet his legal defense team, styled the "dream team," managed to create at least the illusion of reasonable doubt and obtain an acquittal. How'd they do it?

They did it by taking each piece of evidence individually and casting doubt on it. The doubt in question was often based on nothing but far-fetched speculation, and much of the speculation was contradictory. For instance, bloodstains on Simpson's driveway were said to have been planted by the police, while other blood samples found at the crime scene were said to have been contaminated. In other words, we were asked to believe that in some cases the blood was unquestionably Simpson's but it got there through sleight of hand on the part of some corrupt detective, while in other cases the blood wasn't Simpson's at all but somehow matched his DNA because of an unspecified error in chemical analysis.

As for eyewitness testimony, it was debunked by casting doubt on the competence, credibility, or honesty of every single witness from the hapless Kato Kaelin to the limo driver to the neighbor who found Simpson's vehicle awkwardly slant-parked outside the Rockingham Estate. In order to believe Simpson's innocence, you pretty much had to believe that every other person involved in the case was corrupt or hopelessly prejudiced or impossibly stupid or desperately seeking the media limelight. Police detectives who had handled hundreds of cases without incident were presented as bumbling nincompoops who were simultaneously criminal masterminds bent on framing Simpson for some nefarious reason that was never quite explained. All the evidence was either planted or faked on the one hand, or hopelessly mishandled and misinterpreted on the other. It worked. But you don't have to go back to the 1990s to see this strategy in effect. Because as you might have guessed by now, this is very much the same strategy that is used by many diehard skeptics. . .

Faced with a "mountain of evidence" that is in some respects even more intimidating than the evidence in the Simpson case, the skeptics have chosen the same counterattack. They simply dismiss all of it, claiming that there is no evidence of all, not a single bit, and they back up this sweeping assertion by casting doubt on any and every individual item of evidence. . .

It turns out that just as O.J. Simpson was the only honest man in the courtroom, so the skeptic is the only perceptive person on the face of the earth.

It doesn't much matter if the skeptic can't support most of these speculations, or even if the speculations contradict each other, as they did in the Simpson case. All that matters is that a penumbra of doubt has been cast over the evidence. The testimony has been called into question. The data have been challenged. And most people, lacking the time or the interest or, in some cases, the ability to look into the matter for themselves, will conclude that the doubt is justified. They may not side wholeheartedly with the skeptics in denying all paranormal phenomena, but they will grant that they just don't know and probably nobody knows -- which is really all the skeptics need to accomplish. . .

Now go read the whole post. . .

In the hot seat. . .

2007-07-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

I will be appearing tomorrow (Tuesday July 10) on Marcel Cairo's internet radio show AfterlifeFM at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PM PDT. You can listen live and call in too. . .

UPDATE

Thank you very much Marcel for the opportunity to appear on your show. You are a very generous host, free iPhone or not. ;-)

You can download the show from Marcel's archives here.

Burying Ockham

2007-07-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

This article shows quite clearly how far from the wisdom of Sir William of Ockham modern cosmology, and biology, have strayed:

Recent developments in cosmology radically change the conception of the universe as well as the very notions of "probable" and "possible". The model of eternal inflation implies that all macroscopic histories permitted by laws of physics are repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite multiverse. In contrast to the traditional cosmological models of a single, finite universe, this worldview provides for the origin of an infinite number of complex systems by chance, even as the probability of complexity emerging in any given region of the multiverse is extremely low. This change in perspective has profound implications for the history of any phenomenon, and life on earth cannot be an exception.

Ah, yes. We are now in a position where googleplexes, or even an infinity, of completely unobservable, untestable universes are used to explain (away) anything that looks purposeful or friendly towards the development of life about the properties and regularities of our universe. But any mention of the possibility of psi phenomena being real means instant relegation to crackpot status. Such are the sociological taboos of science.

Blogs that make me think. . .

2007-07-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

After Jack Pickard meme-tagged AMNAP as a blog that makes him think, I immediately came up with a list of my own. However, a busy life has been intervening, and it has taken me a couple of weeks write up my own list here. It was tough narrowing things down to five, and indeed I cheated a bit as you will notice. Please don't feel any obligation to continue the meme, but I thought it was worth noting five blogs that make me think. . .

Here they are, in no particular order:

Camera Obscura by Billie -- This gifted artist writes about and photographs the subtle currents and nuances of her life with a deep groundedness and soulfulness that I marvel at and strive to notice within my own life.

Michael Prescott's blog -- Michael writes much more eloquently, and in far greater length, about many of the topics that appear here on AMNAP, as well as other things that interest him and his many readers and commenters.

The Daily Grail -- Not exactly a blog, but there are always new and amazing things on the daily link / story updates. There's also stuff there that exceeds even my rather extensive boggle threshold. TDG has also been very generous with links to AMNAP, and I expect many of you reading this originally found your way here via TDG.

Marginal Revolution -- Tyler Cowen is a polymath, and the breadth of his interests always surprises me. Alex Tabarrok argues the case for liberty most persuasively. MR is NOT really an economics blog, although a few economics posts do manage to find their way there from time to time. . .

Fifth place is a tie, and neither are actually blogs either. But I always listen to the Skeptiko podcasts with its list of impressive psi researchers, skeptics, and spiritual philosophers, and Marcel Cairo's new Afterlife FM internet radio show and podcast is off to a great start with some very knowledgable and articulate guests. Marcel has been gracious enough to invite me to his show next Tuesday, July 10th.

Thanks again Jack for listing AMNAP as a "blog that makes you think".

Interesting show ahead. . .

2007-07-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Marcel Cairo is hosting the very knowledgable Public Parapsychology blogger Annalisa Ventola today on his Afterlife FM show.

Don't miss it!

The show starts at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PDT.

Looks like an interesting book. . .

2007-07-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

Guy Playfair has written what looks to be a fascinating new look at evidence suggesting reincarnation occurs in some cases. . .

I'm sure one of the usual subjects will be the first to read and review it. ;-)

H/T Annalisa @ Public Parapsychology

This looks good. . .

2007-06-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Edward and Emily Williams Kelly, two of the authors of Irreducible Mind on Skeptiko. . .

Gotta go listen to it now. . .

Prospective study of Near-Death Experiences

2007-06-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

This prospective study of NDEs published in Lancet has been out for a while, but if you haven't read it before you should definitely take a look.

The design of the study, which set it apart from previous NDE studies which were based on surveys, is that it consisted in conducting interviews of all patients treated for cardiac arrect at a series of European hospitals. Each of those patients who survived was asked a series of questions about possible NDE occurring during their heart attack. Afterwards, both NDE and non-NDE patients were followed up at two year and eight year intervals with additional questions about fear of death, the importance of spirituality, and a number of other topics.

The first interesting note is a report of a veridical NDE that occurred during the study:

“During a night shift an ambulance brings in a 44- year-old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He had been found about an hour before in a meadow by passers-by. After admission, he receives artificial respiration without intubation, while heart massage and defibrillation are also applied. When we want to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the ‘crash car’. Meanwhile, we continue extensive CPR. After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. I distribute his medication. The moment he sees me he says: ‘Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are’. I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: ‘Yes, you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that car, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.’ I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself.

The other fascinating finding of the study was a large difference in the beliefs and additudes of NDE experiencers vs. non-experiencers after their heart attacks:

people who had NDE had a significant increase in belief in an afterlife and decrease in fear of death compared with people who had not had this experience. . .Most patients who did not have NDE did not believe in a life after death at 2-year or 8-year follow-up (table 5). People with NDE had a much more complex coping process: they had become more emotionally vulnerable and empathic, and often there was evidence of increased intuitive feelings. Most of this group did not show any fear of death and strongly believed in an afterlife.

More dubious phenomena. . .

2007-06-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

As someone who likes to take pictures, I've always cringed at the credulity of some people regarding "orbs" which appear in photographs, which supposedly are images of ghosts, extraterrestrial visitors, angels or the like. Shadowseekers has a nice writeup:

As you look from group to group and encounter orb photo after orb photo, you will encounter a variety of theories and defenses for the "evidence" many groups so ardently defend. Some will claim that no dust or dirt was present when they photographed a particular orb. The truth is, the only dust free environment known to man exists in outer space, and a simple breath is capable of stirring up dirt and debris in the air. Some groups will claim that an orb is a spirit because it looks different form one that they admit is dust. In fact, dust particles look vastly different from snow particles, which look different from rain particles, which look different from dirt molecules. Thus, you can have several orbs in a photo, each looking quite different from the other, yet none being anything paranormal in nature. The color of particles in the air can be altered by atmospheric conditions and moisture, thus helping to explain the varying colors of orbs. Many investigators will claim that because the orb was capture in a reportedly haunted location, it must be evidence of a ghost. By that logic, a picture taken of a man in the same location would mean that the man was also a ghost.

H/T Daily Grail

Michael Prescott investigates some dubious mediumship

2007-06-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

Michael Prescott has written an informative series of posts on some questionable mediumship here, here and here.

He will also be appearing to discuss this topic on Marcel Cairo's Afterlife FM internet radio show next Tuesday at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PDT. Marcel is a mental medium, who himself believes that most or all physical mediums are frauds.

Michael is one of the the world's foremost amateur experts on the history of the scientific investigation of mediumship, the evidential cases, and the many frauds. It should be an entertaining and interesting show.

Good point, Dean

2007-06-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

This is an extract from a follow-up comment by Dean Radin on his blog:

. . . He's just echoing what is accepted as common knowledge by many scientists. Science is a social enterprise, and as such one cannot drift too far from the accepted norm and also maintain one's credibility (to say nothing of one's job!). So rather than trying to learn everything yourself, it's easier to simply adopt mainstream prejudices, because they won't get you into trouble by repeating them.

His original post is well worth reading too.

Speaking of Alex Tsakiris. . .

2007-06-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the latest Skeptiko podcast with Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Shapiro and Alex discussed the relationship between science and religion, and both of them felt strongly that religion needs to take into account the results of scientific research. Best quote from Shapiro:

If science can disprove some aspect of Judaism, then to hold on to it makes me, I guess, a loyal Jew, but a stupid human being… If my religion says that the world is flat, and I can show a photograph that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world is round, but as a faithful person I’m going to hold onto the flatness of things, then yeah, I’m a faithful idiot.

Shapiro is interested in nondual spirituality, which is also an interest of mine.

Medium Marcel Cairo hosts Alex Tsakiris

2007-06-13T13:53:00.001-07:00

Medium Marcel Cairo, who AMNAP has enjoyed working with, is hosting a new internet radio show: Afterlife FM.

His first guest will also be well-known to AMNAP readers -- Alex Tsakiris of the Skeptiko podcast.

This show is airing Thursday June 14th at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PDT. Sounds like a fascinating initial episode!

Reminder: This show is TOMORROW.

Controversy between Dean Radin and Andrew Endersby

2007-06-12T14:46:00.001-07:00

Andrew Endersby has been commenting about Dean Radin's meta-analyses for some time on this blog and elsewhere as well, and I have remarked that I would like Radin to respond.

Endersby's position is that Radin's meta-analyses are not done properly, that he does not provide inclusion criteria, and that he has left out relevant studies.

I felt that Endersby's points needed to be addressed by Radin, and asked him to do so in an email.

Radin did not wish to be drawn into a debate on this topic, but made the following points in his emails to me, which I will paraphrase.

1) Endersby's ganzfeld meta-analysis also shows staggering odds against the null hypothesis, so Radin doesn't understand the large controversy Endersby is stirring up over Radin's ganzfeld meta-analyses.

2) Radin has conducted two formal psi meta-analyses, published in the literature, and in those papers the inclusion criteria were formally outlined. Those meta-analyses covered PK experiments using dice, and PK experiments using RNG.

3) Radin's meta-analysis of the ganzfeld and his other meta-analyses (besided the two mentioned above) relied on earlier meta-analyses published in the literature, updated with data from more recent studies. They were not full, formal meta-analyses. So studies left out of earlier meta-analyses by other authors are also left out of Radin's meta-analysis updates.

4) Radin mentioned that he invited Endersby to submit his paper to a peer reviewed journal, and that if and when it gets published, he will consider the controversy important and relevant and respond. Until that happens, Radin doesn't believe that Endersby's critique rises to the level of a genuine controversy, and lacking such a controversy, Radin feels it would not be the best use of his time to respond formally.

I want to thank Dean Radin for his responses to my emails, and Andrew Endersby for bringing our attention to some important missing studies in the Radin and previous Ganzfeld meta-analyses. Andrew has also occasionally pointed out problems in my own research for AMNAP, and I appreciate his attention to detail and his penchant for rolling up his sleeves and doing his own investigations.

Testing nonlocal observation as a source of intuitive knowledge

2007-06-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

Dean Radin just posted the abstract for this forthcoming study to his blog.

This study explored the hypothesis that in some cases intuitive knowledge arises from perceptions that are not mediated through the ordinary senses. The possibility of detecting such “nonlocal observation” was investigated in a pilot test based on the effects of observation on a quantum system.

Participants were asked to imagine that they could intuitively perceive a low intensity laser beam in a distant Michelson interferometer. If such observation were possible, it would theoretically perturb the photons’ quantum wave-functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer. The optical apparatus was located inside a light-tight, double steel-walled shielded chamber. Participants sat quietly outside the chamber with eyes closed. The light patterns were recorded by a cooled CCD camera once per second, and average illumination levels of these images were compared in counterbalanced “mental blocking” vs. non-blocking conditions. Interference would produce a lower overall level of illumination, which was predicted to occur during the blocking condition.

Based on a series of planned experimental sessions, the outcome was in accordance with the prediction (z = -2.82, p = 0.002). This result was primarily due to nine sessions involving experienced meditators (combined z = -4.28, p = 9.4 × 10-6); the other nine sessions with non- meditators were not significant (combined z = 0.29, p = 0.61). The same experimental protocol run immediately after 15 of these test sessions, but with no one present, revealed no hardware or protocol artifacts that might have accounted for these results (combined control z = 1.50, p = 0.93). Conventional explanations for these results were considered and judged to be implausible. This pilot study suggests the presence of a nonlocal perturbation effect which is consistent with traditional concepts of intuition as a direct means of gaining knowledge about the world, and with the predicted effects of observation on a quantum system.

"Skepticism" and (dis)confirmation bias

2007-06-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite studies shows the insidious way that confirmation bias distorts thinking and causes people to slant all facts towards their preferred theory and away from opposing points of view.

This blog post from The Calladus Blog is an example of how "positional" skeptics tend to approach any new information that might challenge their worldview. I found a particularly large number of errors and irrelevancies in this post, and thought it would be useful to analyze them here. So I will be excerpting from the "Nutty Professor" post and providing commentary on what I found problematic at each point.

The Nutty Professor: Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and Telephone Telephony

We are off to an inauspicious start with the namecalling ad-hominem right out the gate. . .

"However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages."

Notice that Dr. Sheldrake didn't address the problem of a too small sample size for his experiment, and instead immediately widened the experiment to include different tests. This is not a sign of good science!

Woah, there, pardner!

Just because the "yahoo news" article made a claim of "too small sample size" doesn't make it true. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Sheldrake was studying. If Sheldrake was seeking to demonstrate that everyone has telephone telepathy, then indeed this sample size is much too small. In addition, Sheldrake did not select a random sample of a population -- he actively sought out individuals who felt that they frequently experienced telephone telepathy. Furthermore, Sheldrake only took the most successful participants from the first phase of the experiments for the more detailed and rigorous videotape trials. He was seeking out a very specific population of people with the best possibility of showing strong effects for telephone telepathy -- the exact opposite of What Mark of the Calladus blog is suggesting by complaining about sample size. Sheldrake's sample size was (deliberately) small, and that is not a problem, as long as his effect size and number of trials is sufficiently large, as they certainly are in Sheldrake' experiment.

This isn't the first time Dr. Sheldrake has been accused of making unwarranted claims based on improper methodology. CSICOP took Dr. Sheldrake to task and debunked his Psychic Staring Effect experiment - where he claimed to show that people could tell, better than random chance, when someone was staring at them.

The link Mark provides offers a normal "explanation" for Dr. Sheldrake's results. However Dr. Sheldrake's rebuttal is also found linked to the "debunking" article:

Colwell et al.'s second experiment was designed to test their pattern-detection hypothesis by using "structureless" random sequences. Sure enough, this time there was no significant overall positive score, although in two of the three sessions there was a highly significant excess of correct guesses in the looking trials.
At first sight, the overall non-significant result seems to confirm their hypothesis. But Marks and Colwell (2000) omitted to mention the crucial fact that in Experiment Two there was a different starer, David Sladen. Can we take it for granted that changing the starer made no difference?

Such experimenter effects are not symmetrical. The detection of Schlitz's stares by the participants under conditions that excluded sensory cues implies the existence of an unexplained sensitivity to stares. By contrast, the failure to detect Wiseman's stares implies only that Wiseman was an ineffective starer. Perhaps his negative expectations consciously or unconsciously influenced the way he looked at the subjects.

In Colwell et al.'s Experiment Two, the starer, Sladen, as one of the proponents of the pattern-detection hypothesis, was presumably expecting a nonsignificant result. His negative expectations could well have influenced the way in which he stared at the participants. It would be interesting to know if Sadi Schršder, the graduate student who acted as starer in Experiment One, was more open to the possibility that people really can detect when they are being stared at.

Other Relevant Experiments

Marks and Colwell claimed that their pattern-detection hypothesis invalidated the positive results of staring experiments carried out by myself and others. If these experiments had involved pseudo-random sequences and feedback, as required by their hypothesis, their criticism might have been relevant. But this is not how the tests were done, as they would have seen for themselves if they had read my published papers on the subject.

First, in more than 5,000 of my own trials, the randomization was indeed "structureless," and was carried out by each starer before each trial by tossing a coin (Sheldrake 1999, Tables 1 and 2). The same was true of more than 3,000 trials in German and American schools (Sheldrake 1998). Thus the highly significant positive results in these experiments cannot be "an artifact of pseudo randomization."

Second, when I developed the counterbalanced sequences that Marks and Colwell describe as pseudo-random, I changed the experimental design so that feedback was no longer given to the subjects. Since the pattern-detection hypothesis depends on feedback, it cannot account for the fact that in more than 10,000 trials without feedback there were still highly significant positive results (Sheldrake 1999, Tables 3 and 4).

Conclusions

In spite of their prior assumption that an ability to detect unseen staring must be illusory, both Baker (2000) and Colwell et al. (2000) in their first experiments obtained unexpected positive results consistent with such an ability. They attempted to dismiss these findings with question-begging arguments. In their second experiments, which gave the non-significant results they expected, an investigator with negative expectations acted as the starer. This arrangement provided favorable conditions for experimenter effects, already known to occur in staring experiments (Wiseman and Schlitz 1997). Both Baker and Marks and Colwell also failed to mention a large body of published data that went against their conclusions. In short, their claims were misleading and ill-informed.

To summarize: Sheldrake takes the SI "debunking" and completely shreds it with a devastating recitation of the facts. The hypothesis outlined in the debunking article is completely at variance with the actual data and experimental findings, which Baker and Colwell would have noted if they had carefully read Sheldrake's research before attacking it. I suppose that is the difference between a "debunking", and a scientific investigation. The latter is an attempt to discover the truth, and the former is simply an attempt to win an argument with no particular regard for reality.

In another paper Sheldrake mentions offering to analyze Marks and Colwell's own data in detail and see if it matches their hypothesis of pseudorandom pattern recognition. Not unexpectedly, Marks and Colwell fail to take him up on that offer.

Dr. Sheldrake also wrote a book called, "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals" (Amazon link) In this book he attempts to show that dogs can somehow psychically 'tell' when their owners are coming home. The methodology described by Dr. Sheldrake shows that he didn't even attempt to create a 'double blind' experiment, where neither owners, dogs, nor observers knew when the owner was coming home. Instead he allowed the owners of these dogs to record the observations of their pets. He again used a very small sample size.

Again, Mark displays a lack of understanding of this kind of research and the relevant statistics. Small sample size is a canard here. His is also completely wrong about the experimental design, which involved both "observational" and double-blind and randomized components. The researcher who analyzed the videotape data was blind to the experimental conditions, as was everyone in the house (including the dog). Either Mark hasn't read the studies he is criticizing here, a cardinal sin in science, or he read them sloppily and is misinformed.

Instead of publishing to peer-reviewed media, Dr. Sheldrake writes popular books and makes claims and announcements pitched to the media.

Like many other scientists, Dr. Sheldrake does write popular books in addition to his admirable record of peer reviewed publication credits, including multiple articles in Nature, Planta, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I'm sure that Mark is not intending to imply that Francis Crick, Stephen Hawking and John Wheeler are bogus scientists, because of their popular science works, or that Nature, Planta and JCS are bogus journals, right?

His results are based on a small sample size, which is at the very limit of detection of effects.

Again, the relevant statistic here is the number of trials, not "sample size". In the videotaped experiments, there were of 271 trials, and were 122 (45%) correct guesses (p = 10-12). This is astronomically far from being "at the very limit of detection of effects"!

He bases some of his conclusions on anecdotal evidence (for example, allowing a dog's owner to record their observations.)

Any scientist uses anecdotal evidence as a starting point for designing experiments. Sheldrake's experiments absolutely do not rely on "allowing a dog's owner to record their observations", but rather use videotapes, evaluated blindly by a third party, to determine the measured data.

He claims that Quantum Theory can explain psychic phenomena, which is a proposed new law of nature since Quantum Theory describes the subatomic, not macroscopic, universe.

Now Mark is confused. The quantum nature of matter is responsible for many of the properties of the macroscopic world, such as the very most basic fact that atoms take up space. You cannot wall off quantum mechanics and say that it is completely irrelevant to macroscopic reality!

He works in some isolation, well outside the mainstream science community.

Sheldrake works with many other researchers, including avowed "skeptics", and has been published in a large variety of journals as I described above.

What I find most interesting about Dr. Sheldrake's supposed skepticism is his refusal to cooperate with noted skeptic James Randi in Randi's Million Dollar Challenge.

Randi is a showman, not a serious researcher. And he has already established a track-record of distortions trending to outright lies with regards to Rupert Sheldrake's research:

The January 2000 issue of Dog World magazine included an article on a possible sixth sense in dogs, which discussed some of my research. In this article Randi was quoted as saying that in relation to canine ESP, "We at the JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation] have tested these claims. They fail." No details were given of these tests.

I emailed James Randi to ask for details of this JREF research. He did not reply. He ignored a second request for information too.

I then asked members of the JREF Scientific Advisory Board to help me find out more about this claim. They did indeed help by advising Randi to reply. In an email sent on Februaury 6, 2000 he told me that the tests he referred to were not done at the JREF, but took place "years ago" and were "informal". They involved two dogs belonging to a friend of his that he observed over a two-week period. All records had been lost. He wrote: "I overstated my case for doubting the reality of dog ESP based on the small amount of data I obtained. It was rash and improper of me to do so."

Randi also claimed to have debunked one of my experiments with the dog Jaytee, a part of which was shown on television. Jaytee went to the window to wait for his owner when she set off to come home, but did not do so before she set off. In Dog World, Randi stated: "Viewing the entire tape, we see that the dog responded to every car that drove by, and to every person who walked by." This is simply not true, and Randi now admits that he has never seen the tape.

And Sheldrake is not the first psi researcher who has uncovered a pattern of untruths from James Randi.

Given Randi's history of distortions and lies, why would any serious psi researcher want to work with him on any experiments?

Psychic Pets - request for information

2007-06-01T17:43:00.000-07:00

From OpenSourceScience.net:

Researchers at OpenSourceScience.net have issued an open call for dogs that know when their owners are coming home.

Many dog owners claim their pets anticipate their arrival by going to wait at a door, window, or driveway. Some claim their dogs do this even when they arrive home unexpectedly, or at odd hours. While some researchers, including Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist, and former Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University have investigated this phenomena, many scientists remain unconvinced that it really occurs. Now, a new website located at www.opensourcescience.net is tackling the question through the collaborative efforts of researchers and skeptics.

The researchers are encouraging dog owners who have noticed this behavior in their dogs to take part in the experiments. The original researchers, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman, both support this collaborative re-examination of the experiments, and have called it "the best way forward."

OpenSourceScience is the first scientifically oriented website to bring the power of open source methods to the skeptical examination of controversial areas of science such as telepathy, psi, parapsychology, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and after-life encounters.

Contact OpenSourceScience

The Harp

2007-06-01T16:40:00.000-07:00

From Extraordinary Knowing:

The harp that came back. . .

In December of 1991, my daughter's harp was stolen; we got it back. But it came back in a way that irrevocably changed my familiar world of science and rational thinking. It changed the way I go about living in that world. It changed the way I perceive that world and try to make sense out of it. . .

My eleven year old daughter, who'd fallen in love with the harp at age six, had begun performing. She wasn't playing a classic pedal harp but a smaller, extremely valuable instrument built and carved by a master harp maker. After a Christmas concert, her harp was stolen from the theater where she was playing. For two months we went through every conceivable channel trying to locate it: the police, instrument dealers across the country, the American Harp Society newsletters -- even a CBS TV news story. Nothing worked.

Finally, a wise and devoted friend told me: "If you really want that harp back, you should be willing to try anything. Try calling a dowser." The only thing I knew about dowsers was that they were that strange breed who locate underground water with forked sticks. But according to my friend, the "really good" dowsers can locate not just water but lost objects as well.

Finding lost objects with forked sticks? Well, nothing was happening on the police front, and my daughter, spoiled by several years of playing an extraordinary instrument, had found the series of commercial harps we'd rented simply unplayable. So, half-embarrassed but desperate, I decided to take my friend's dare. I asked her if she could locate a really good dowser -- the best, I said. She promptly called the American Society of Dowsers and came back with the phone number of the society's current president: Harold McCoy, in Fayetteville Arkansas.

I called him that day. Harold picked up the phone -- friendly, cheerful, heavy Arkansas accent. I told him I'd heard he could dowse for lost objects and that I'd had a valuable harp stolen in Oakland, California. Could he help locate it?

"Give me a second," he said. "I'll tell you if it's still in Oakland." He paused then: "Well it's still there. Send me a street map of Oakland and I'll locate the harp for you." Skeptical -- but what, after all, did I have to lose? -- I promptly overnighted him a map. Two days later he called back. "Well, I got that harp located," he said. "It's the second house on the right on D__ street, just off L__ avenue."

I'd never heard of either street. But I did like the sound of the man's voice -- whoever he was. And I don't like backing down on a dare. Why not drive to the house he'd identified? At least I'd get the address. I looked on an Oakland map and found the neighborhood. It was miles from anywhere I'd ever been. I got in my car, drove into Oakland, located the house, wrote down the number, called the police, and told them I'd gotten a tip that the harp might be at that house. Not good enough for a search warrant, they said. They were going to close the case -- there was no way this unique, portable and highly marketable item hadn't already been sold; it was gone forever.

But I found I couldn't quite let it go. Was it the dare? Was it my admiration for the friend who'd instigated the whole thing? Was it my devastated daughter? Or was it just that I had genuinely liked the sound of that voice on the other end of the line?

I decided to post flyers in a two-block area around the house, offering a reward for the harp's return. It was a crazy idea, but why not? I put up flyers in those two blocks, and only those two blocks. I was embarrassed enough about what I was doing to tell just a couple of close friends about it.

Three days later, my phone rang. A man's voice told me he'd seen a flyer outside his house describing a stolen harp. He said it was exactly the harp his next-door neighbor had recently obtained and showed him. He wouldn't give me his name or number, but offered to get the harp returned to me. And two weeks later, after a series of circuitous telephone calls, he told me to meet a teenage boy at 10:00 PM, in the rear parking lot of an all-night Safeway. He looked at me and said, "The harp?" I nodded. Within minutes, the harp was in the back of my station wagon and I drove off.

Twenty-five minutes later, as I turned into my driveway, I had the thought, This changes everything.

Transplanted personalities. . .

2007-05-31T20:50:00.000-07:00

Some fascinating anecdotes about personalities being transplanted along with donor organs. This is obviously compatible with field theories of memory like Sheldrake's morphic resonance and incompatible with reductionistic neuralism. . .

H/T Ulrich Mohrhoff

David Chalmers and John Horgan discuss consciousness

2007-05-31T20:31:00.000-07:00

If you haven't yet, go watch this fascinating video of Chalmers and Horgan discussing the nature of consciousness.

Why do so many people resist science?

2007-05-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

This self-congratulatory essay has been gathering a lot of commentary around the blogosphere. Basically authors Bloom and Weisberg are posing the question (and quite a pose it is) 'why are so many non-scientists so deluded about reality? (of course we scientists have it in the bag)'

From that fundamental misunderstanding of science as a position, not a method, Bloom and Weisberg go on to enumerate their prejudices:

Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical interventions, the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences, the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies, and the legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination.

Bloom and Weisberg sneer at these beliefs as "unscientific". But of course what is unscientific is to make a dogmatic judgement for or against the reality of a phenomenon without evidence. Actually, most of their "roll of anti-scientific errors" are in fact supported by scientific research and anecdotal evidence of the highest quality. These two authors seem to feel that all belief systems should be discounted, except their own, which cannot be questioned or examined scientifically because it is a priori true.

The question must be asked, why do people like Bloom and Weisberg resist the scientific inquiry of their materialistic belief system?

Fashionable stupidity

2007-05-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. - Carl Gustav Jung

2007-05-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness. - Jerry Fodor

H/T: Ulrich Mohrhoff

Great interview with Deborah Blum

2007-05-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

Michael Tymn begins his interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum by recounting a brief history of the history of psychic research:

A century ago, roughly between 1885 and 1925, some distinguished scholars and scientists conducted some very thorough investigations of mediums. Their objective was to determine if spirits were really communicating through the mediums and, concomitantly, whether consciousness survives bodily death. Almost without exception, they came to the same conclusion: that spirit communication was real and that consciousness does survive physical death. The few exceptions accepted that certain mediums were not charlatans; they simply didn't know what to make of it and sat on the fence to protect themselves from ridicule by their closed-minded colleagues, who felt it was beneath their dignity to consider such foolishness.

When I see modern scholars and scientists aping those “closed-minded colleagues” of yesteryear and their ancient ancestors, I've got to believe that evolution has come full circle. Either that, or there are checks and balances in the evolutionary plan to make sure that we don't progress too rapidly. A recent example of what I am talking about is a comment in TIME Magazine by Steven Pinker, a Harvard University psychologists, that “attempts to contact the souls of the dead” by scientists of a century ago “turned up only cheap magic tricks.”

Having thoroughly studied the research done by those psychical researchers of a century ago, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could make such a statement, unless he or she hasn't really dug into the material and is simply suffering from the aping syndrome, the tendency to want to look bright and not foolish by smirking, scoffing, and sneering at things that are beyond the grasp of current science.

After introducing us to Blum's area of research, Tymn goes on to ask some good questions which Blum adroitly answers. Here's the first:

Tymn: What prompted you to write the book?

Blum: Curiosity. I had been researching the early history of psychology for another book and I kept finding references to William James losing his mind, going astray into the world of the weird. And I thought, ‘Well, that's strange because I thought James was considered an intellectual statesman.' So I got a book that Gardner Murphy had put together called ‘William James and Psychical Research.' And as soon as I read it, I saw the possibilities. First, James was far more adventurous and less stuffy than I'd always thought. His personality and that of his correspondents - Fred Myers, Edmund Gurney, Oliver Lodge - just shone in their writing. Second, I found myself agreeing with James perspective on the attitude of science toward psychical studies. More than 100 years ago, he wrote: ‘The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pink one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius and degrades the scientific body to the status of a cult.' And that is as true today as it was then. And finally, I realized that there were some wonderful inexplicable supernatural events, uncovered by this group that I wanted to recreate. One of them, I use as the opening of my book - it's called ‘The Woman on the Bridge'.

Now go read Tymn's interview, and check out the rest of his blog while you are at it!

(HT: Michael Prescott)

Suppression of ideas. . .

2007-05-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, it has no place in the endeavour of science. - Carl Sagan

A cult?

2007-05-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pink one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius and degrades the scientific body to the status of a cult. - William James

When half a brain is better than a whole. . .

2007-05-28T16:23:00.000-07:00

A fascinating article showing how the brain is able to heal and reroute functionality, even when half of it is removed. Here are a few excerpts:

The operation known as hemispherectomy—where half the brain is removed—sounds too radical to ever consider, much less perform. In the last century, however, surgeons have performed it hundreds of times for disorders uncontrollable in any other way. Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.

The first known hemispherectomy was performed on a dog in 1888 by German physiologist Friedrich Goltz. In humans, neurosurgeon Walter Dandy pioneered the operation at Johns Hopkins University in 1923 on a brain tumor patient. (That man lived for more than three years before ultimately succumbing to cancer.). . .

Nowadays, the surgery is performed on patients who suffer dozens of seizures every day that resist all medication, and which are due to conditions that mostly afflict one hemisphere. "These disorders are often progressive and damage the rest of the brain if not treated," University of California, Los Angeles, neurosurgeon Gary Mathern says. Freeman concurs: "Hemispherectomy is something that one only does when the alternatives are worse."

Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly, memory and personality develop normally. A recent study found that 86 percent of the 111 children who underwent hemispherectomy at Hopkins between 1975 and 2001 are either seizure-free or have nondisabling seizures that do not require medication. The patients who still suffer seizures usually have congenital defects or developmental abnormalities, where brain damage is often not confined to just one hemisphere, Freeman explains.

Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically once their seizures stopped. "One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his state, and others are in college doing very nicely," Freeman says.

Of course, the operation has its downside: "You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision on that side is lost," Freeman says.

Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. If the left side of the brain is taken out, "most people have problems with their speech, but it used to be thought that if you took that side out after age two, you'd never talk again, and we've proven that untrue," Freeman says. "The younger a person is when they undergo hemispherectomy, the less disability you have in talking. Where on the right side of the brain speech is transferred to and what it displaces is something nobody has really worked out."

Don't set an impossible bar. . .

2007-05-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

Here is the second minor quibble with Alex I mentioned in my last post.

Stephen Novella stated the following:

In the end we have the same goals, design research that is carried out in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you believe, that the results will be valid despite the belief of the researcher...

Alex cheered this comment multiple times in the podcast. However I am not sure how realistic this is. Even clinical research trials in medicine show strong lab and experimenter effects, and standard psychology experiments do as well. I don't see how anyone can expect and hope that parapsychology experiments will ever be conducted without experimenter effects, since no other human subject science is able to do so. Sheep / goat performance differences for experimenters are the rule in parapsychology as in other fields of human-subject experimental science. Additionally, if the psi hypothesis is correct, then psi influence can work both for believers and disbelievers in psi phenomena to reveal or obscure psi effects.

This does not mean that every experiment by a sheep will demonstrate results, nor that every experiment by a goat will point at the null hypothesis. But there is a definite tendency for this in psi research, as well as clinical trials, standard psychology experiments, animal experiments, and other experiments with probabalistic results.

I'd also suggest additionally that if one's goal is primarily to "prove" psi or spiritual reality and "defeat" materialism once and for all one might well find oneself walking down the path tread by Susan Blackmore and Louie Savva, and ending up in the same place as they did. Because that kind of motivation does not seem to be correlated with fostering psi phenomena.

Science is a method, not a white coat. . .

2007-05-22T20:43:00.000-07:00

I was listening to Alex Tsakiris today and uncharacteristically found myself disagreeing a bit with him. He was talking to Stephen Novella and kept saying to Stephen "You're a scientist" and "I'm not a scientist" and "I'm just a layman".

The problem with that is that science is a verb, not a noun. A method, not a position. So anyone can be practicing science, or failing to practice science, at any particular time. A white coat and the honorific "doctor" in front of our name and many years spent in a medieval-style apprenticeship resulting in a fancy certificate doesn't mean that we are approaching a phenomenon scientifically, and lacking those qualifications doesn't mean we are failing to use the scientific method.

Indeed it seems clear to me that often those educated in science and paid to do it approach the topic of psi phenomena in the least scientific way imaginable. Confirmation bias is ubiquitous, and all of us are susceptible to it. Never forget that!

I have another small quibble with Alex's comments today and I will post on it soon. . .

More Richard Conn Henry

2007-05-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

Richard Conn Henry has another delightfully irreverent essay on the implications of Quantum Mechanics, this time commenting on a recent experiment testing "realism" interpretations of QM:

Alain Aspect is the physicist who performed the key experiment that established that if you want a real universe, it must be non-local (Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”). Aspect comments on new work by his successor in conducting such experiments, Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues, who have now performed an experiment that suggests that “giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.”
Be clear what is going on here. Quantum mechanics itself is not crying out for such experiments! Quantum mechanics is doing just fine, thank you, having performed flawlessly since inception. No, it is people whose cherished philosophical beliefs are being threatened that cry out for such experiments, exactly as Einstein used to do, and with exactly the same hope (we think in vain): that quantum mechanics can be refined to the point where it requires (or at least allows) belief in the independent reality of the natural world it describes.

Quantum mechanics makes no mention of reality (Figure 1). Indeed, quantum mechanics proclaims, “We have no need of that hypothesis.” Now we are beginning to see that quantum mechanics might actually exclude any possibility of mind-independent reality and already does exclude any reality that resembles our usual concept of such (Aspect: “it implies renouncing the kind of realism I would have liked”). Non-local causality is a concept that had never played any role in physics, other than in rejection (“action-at-a-distance”), until Aspect showed in 1981 that the alternative would be the abandonment of the cherished belief in mind-independent reality; suddenly, spooky-action-at-a-distance became the lesser of two evils, in the minds of the materialists.

Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.

Hat tip: Alex.

An optical delusion of consciousness. . .

2007-05-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. - Albert Einstein

Real science (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

Read Michael Prescott explain to "scientists" and "journalists" how to do their own job.

Dubious claim (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

Michael Prescott covers the self-destruction of a dubious claim. . .

Psi in the real world (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

While skeptics debate whether "science" proves that psi phenomena cannot possibly exist, intriguing evidence keeps showing up out in the real world. .

A fascinating project (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

This man is reproducing some of the enormous stone-block construction of the ancient world using only muscle power and simple handmade machines. Quite remarkable!

Deja Vu (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

I originally planned to title this post, Bad Science part two. Because this is yet another example of how the sociological mainstream of science investigates a phenomenon presupposing the parameters of the debate in advance, and ignoring any evidence that its presuppositions might be mistaken.

Deja vu is a very common, yet extraordinarily odd subjective phenomenon which many or most people have experienced at least once in their life. Here is a brief description from Wikipedia:

The term deja vu describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. . . The experience of deja vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of "eerieness," "strangeness," or "weirdness." The "previous" experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience "genuinely happened" in the past.

After reading about or experiencing deja vu, one comes to the obvious question: is this just a misguided feeling of familiarity, or is the feeling due to an actual repetition of something the experiencer is remembering from a previous dream or other altered state of consciousness? A few minutes research on the internet turned out the following stories that bear on this question:

1. for example, a few years ago i was in a building that had posters taped to the walls. i was walking and talking with my friend, but i was distracted by one of the posters as we walked by it. i stopped, walked back to the poster, and said, "that poster is going to fall." my friend and i stood there for a few seconds, then the poster fell.

2. Alright, when I was about 14 and only friends with which is my girlfriend now I had a dream of being on a train. So I was sitting on this train I was sitting next to someone I don't remember the face but I remember the hair color and holding my hand, and two people infront of us(we were sitting at the very last seat against the wall), young couple. Across from me was an African American woman with spiked curly hair and glasses and a tan sort of suit, she was sitting next to a nerdy looking cacausian male who had a newspaper, behind them was a man, looking like a musician with his bike tucked away behind him, he had a beard and glasses. Also behind the couple infront of myself there was a guy built like a wrestler in a very nice suit and seemed very professional.

Well when I had went to Washington D.C in August I had went on a train, this was with my girlfriend. We chose a seat at the very end at the wall, my girlfriend holding my hand with the same dirty blonde hair color in my dream, but now the people infront of me I recognized, this was her sister and her boyfriend and they looked exactly like they did in my dream years ago, I looked across and there was the African American lady, the nerdy guy and the musician and the wrestler built looking guy.

3. I often find myself in these awkward situations, seeing dreams play out. Over the years, I can even see the situations coming. The other day, I was in my office planning to work late. All of a sudden someone comes into my office, then another. The dream begins playing back. I sat there like I was watching a movie, even interacted with the cast. I was freaked and didn't work late that night. Which also bothers me. I often wonder how my decisions during these moments affect the outcome.
I've been searching for anybody that understands this stuff. I consider myself an educated person, well studied and well read. This stuff literally freaks me out. If I ever told my friends, family, or co-workers, I just don't know. I have mentions stuff like this in general conversation, just to test the waters.
Somebody say something.

4. I had a conversation yesterday with Hendrik and Elise about those times when you experience something you're sure you've dreamed about in the past. She had a dream scene that she saw, months later, in a movie. I had a mundane dream sequence of driving in a car with Cristian and two other people I didn't know in a U-shaped parking lot; months later, when it happened, I almost had to pull over.

5. I have been experiencing deja vu for almost my entire life, but today I had the most vivid of all: I was watching a TV show, one that I have never seen or heard of before, and then the feeling started, I saw that before and I actualy recited three lines before they were spoken on the show. Unfortunatley now I cant remember much. My question is if deja vu is caused by some temporary mulfunction of the brain, how could I have known the future ?

And here are two incidents I relayed previously on AMNAP:

In 1990 I was sitting with some friends in the Rathskeller, a favorite nachos-and-toppings hangout next to the NCSU campus where I was enrolled. Suddenly I had a strong feeling of deja-vu and I recognized the couple sitting at the next table over. Because the experience was stronger than previous deja-vu experiences I wondered if it would be possible for me to actually predict what was going to happen. I realized that I could "remember" what was going to transpire. I said to myself "that woman is about to say: " and came up with a 12-15 word sentence that I remembered her saying. About 5 seconds later, she turned and uttered exactly the sentence I "remembered".

In 1991 in another cafe, Elmo's Diner in a nearby town, I had exactly the same experience. Again, I "remembered" what a woman sitting at a nearby table was about to say to the man sitting with her. Again, she said it, word for word, about 5 seconds after I recalled the words I "remembered" her saying. In neither of these cases did I know the woman or her companion.

Now let's look at the so-called "scientific" explanation of the phenomenon from the same Wikipedia article:

In recent years, deja vu has been subjected to serious psychological and neurophysiological research. The most likely candidate for explanation, according to scientists in these fields, is that deja vu is not an act of "precognition" or "prophecy" but is actually an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is "being recalled" which is false. This is substantiated to an extent by the fact that in most cases the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong, but any circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where and how the earlier experience occurred) are quite uncertain. Likewise, as time passes, subjects can exhibit a strong recollection of having the "unsettling" experience of deja vu itself, but little to no recollection of the specifics of the event(s) or circumstances they were "remembering" when they had the deja vu experience, and in particular, this may result from an overlap between the neurological systems responsible for short-term memory (events which are perceived as being in the present) and those responsible for long-term memory (events which are perceived as being in the past).

Notice the "scientific" explanation assumes that deja vu couldn't possibly be what it seems to be, living through a previously remembered precognitive experience. Notice how it conveniently ignores evidence from incidents which indicate that the precognitive explanation is the correct one.

Mainstream science has an extraordinarily poor understanding of subjective experiences. Perhaps that is because it refuses to question its foundational assumptions that consciousness is fully explainable through chemical and physical properties of brain tissues, that precognition is impossible in principle, and that anyone who has an experience to the contrary is deluded or mentally unbalanced.<

Lewontin lets the cat escape. . . (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

Here is an extremely interesting citation of Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin:

We take the side of science despite the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, despite its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises, despite the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories because we have a prior commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

Uncovering Fraud (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with psi research is sifting out the chaff. It's no secret that many people make fraudulent claims of extraordinary abilities, whether for personal profit or to garner attention.

Dr. Gary Schwartz is best known for his VERITAS program - revolutionary investigations of the abilities of mediums to obtain anomalous information - perportedly through communication with deceased individuals (AMNAP will be discussing this research in the near future). But his Human Energy Systems laboratory at the University of Arizona also conducts research into a wide range of other unusual phenomena and controversial claims. Dr. Schwartz has made it very clear that if any of his investigations uncovers evidence of fraud or trickery, he will expose it. In this case that is exactly what happened:

Abstract: The purported ability of a seventeen-year-old female, investigated for seven years in China, to perceive information without using visual and kinesthetic cues, was studied. In one experiment, five letters from A to Z and five numbers from 0 to 100 were randomly selected by computer, written on small sheets of paper and individually folded and placed in a sealed envelope. The folded stimuli were removed one by one and placed into a cloth bag that was opaque to light; the bag was tied below the participant's right elbow. The participant was accurate for all ten trials. In a second experiment, three video cameras carefully monitored the participant's hand movements; in addition, both ends of the folded papers were sealed with clear tape. Careful analysis of the clear tape and the videotapes revealed evidence of practiced deception. Data were also collected from a 25-year-old graduate student and a 7-year-old child not employing a cloth bag. Their data suggest that deception is not necessarily involved in all cases of purported anomalous perception.

Scientific proof of psi phenomena (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

The phrase "Scientific Proof" is a high standard to acheive. In science, a phenomena is considered proven if it has met the standard of multiple independent replications, as determined through meta-analysis of all the data available. And certain experiments demonstrating psi phenomena have easily met that standard of proof.

The first question to answer is "what is the meaning of replication". A simple naive belief in replication is that it refers to a phenomenon which can be demonstrated at the 95% confidence level in every single experiment.

Unfortunately, in science involving huge numbers of uncontrollable variables such as human beings, this sort of replication almost never happens. Instead, replication is a statistical phenomenon.

In order to illustrate this phenomenon, Dean Radin selects the example of studies on aspirin as a preventative for second heart attacks in his seminal book on the meta-analysis of psi, The Conscious Universe. Today, everyone knows that aspirin is an effective preventative treatment for heart attacks. Why is this an accepted scientific fact? Because a large meta-analysis of multiple studies comparing aspirin to placebo showed an overall significant effect far beyond the chance expectation. See Radin's figure 4.2 below. Note that the vertical line with horizontal endpoints in these charts shows the 95% confidence interval with the actual measurement value in the center.

Notice that only 5 of the 25 individual studies actually returned statistically significant results on their own. If we relied on statistical significance of individual studies, we would say "aspirin's effects on heart disease can't be replicated" because of all these individual "failed studies". In fact, 3 of the 25 studies showed a (non-significant) negative effect from aspirin versus placebo! That is why we need to use a meta-analysis of studies from multiple independent researchers. The combined meta-analysis clearly shows us that aspirin has a statistically significant effect in preventing heart attacks. Aspirin therapy has gone up against the most rigorous examination possible and come out with the scientific seal of approval.

So what happens when we examine the evidence for psi phenomena? Certain categories of psi experiments have been extensively conducted at independent institutions by seperate research teams. These psi phenomena have all been subject to meta-analysis by Dean Radin and other independent meta-analysists, including skeptics such as Ray Hyman. And the effects are astronomically significant. For certain types of experiment such as the Ganzfeld and auto-ganzfeld, the time, effort and expense means that most of the data which could have been collected has been included in these meta-analyses, so no possible "file drawer" effects can even exist.

Below I have reproduced Radin's charts for meta-analysis of dream telepathy experiments, the 1985 Ganzfeld meta-analysis by Hyman and Honorton, an updated Ganzfeld meta-analysis, high-security ESP card tests, RNG PK experiments and dice-rolling PK experiments. Although all of these meta-analyses include data from trials showing non-significant effects, the overall meta-analysis is clear. These phenomena all show enormous, often astronomical deviations from the null hypothesis.

So the answer is clear. Certain psi phenomena have gone up against the most rigorous examination possible and come out with the scientific seal of approval. So why do so many scientists and "rationalists" think that psi is "nonsense", "without a shred of real evidence"? I'm afraid that is more of a sociological question than a scientific one.

Open-source science

2007-05-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Alex Tsakiris of the Skeptiko podcast and Annalisa Ventola of the Public Parapsychology blog have just publically launched a project that I believe has an enormous potential to change the way science is done.

Go check it out.

AMNAP wishes this endeavour the best of success!

Prescott on quantum mechanics. . .

2007-05-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

Michael Prescott has written a great post on quantum mechanics. Go read it. . .

Wonderful quote. . .

2007-05-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

I am skeptical of people who believe they know what is possible and what is not. This belief leads to dogmatism, and to the dismissal of ideas and evidence that do not fit in. Genuine skepticism involves an attitude of open-minded enquiry into what we do not understand, and this is the approach I try to follow. -- Rupert Sheldrake

The White Crow

2007-05-09T20:02:00.000-07:00

This post is another response to another discusson on Overcoming Bias.

Robin Hanson is addressing disagreements in the context of the cold fusion controversy.

How can they each reconcile their own view with the fact that smart expert people are on the other side?

The positions of accepting and denying a phenomenon are not symmetric. This was pointed out by William James with his "White Crow" analogy. You only need one white crow to disprove the rule that all crows are black.

In a similar way, a large number of failed cold fusion replications are irrelevant if we can find a single experiment that provides irrefutable data. Of course there is no such thing as a single irrefutable experiment, but in the case of LENR / cold fusion there are a whole host of good experiments demonstrating some kind of anomalous effect.

The principle problem is that people, even very smart and motivated professional scientists, are very much driven by their theories on how the world must be. In fact, professional scientists are probably much more theory-driven than the average person, and therefore more inclined to confirmation bias.

We see a good example of this in Eliezer's remark in his afterlife post that cryonics, actuarial escape velocity, and nanotechnology roads to immortality were preferable to a hypothesized afterlife, because they "put far less of a strain on the Standard Model".

The truth-seeking approach is to consider the full spectrum of available evidence to determine the correctness of our models, instead of using our models to determine what evidence is correct. It is the only way to avoid dogmatism and discover what is real.

Reply to an OB post

2007-05-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

My comment is too long for Overcoming Bias, so I am posting it here instead. The subject is apropos for this blog. You can read Eliezer's post for more context.

Eliezer: Any one of those Third Alternatives stretches credulity less than a soul - that is (a) an imperishable dualistic stuff floating alongside the brain which (b) malfunctions exactly as the brain is neurologically damaged and yet (c) survives the brain's entire death.

If I yank capacitors from my radio, randomly reconnect wires or otherwise damage the device, I might find the sound becoming distorted, the station changing, or the entire radio becoming silent. That does not mean, of course, that the music is somehow stored inside the radio.

I am not sure that the religious concept of "soul" brings anything of value to the discussion. A better concept is "survival of consciousness". And dualism is not required, neutral monism or idealism will do just fine. Given the failure of neuroscience and computational theories of mind to supply any decent explanation for subjectivity as well as the vast amount of evidence, including many scientific studies showing a non-material aspect to consciousness, I think avoiding a premature raising of the "mission accomplished" banner for reductionism would be wise.

Unless someone has investigated this topic thoroughly, reading the best material from each side, they are quite simply "excuse[ing] a fixed previous belief from criticism". Since I know the good folk at OB would prefer to avoid that at all costs, here's some homework. Start with Chapter 3. I think by the time you finish that chapter, your faith in reductionism will be sorely challenged. Neurobiologist David Presti of UC Berkeley had this to say about Irreducible Mind:

This is an extraordinary book. Despite the awesome achievements of 20th-century neuroscience in increasing our knowledge about the workings of the human brain, little progress has been made in the scientific understanding of mental phenomena. This book infuses new hope into the issue of scientific approaches to the study of these phenomena. In the arena of neuroscience of mind, it is the most exciting reading to have crossed my path in years.

"Protecting" Science

2007-05-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

Frank Tipler has written an intriguing paper questioning whether the current peer-review system is stifling science. Here are some pertinent extracts:

If one reads memoirs or biographies of physicists who made their great breakthroughs after, say, 1950, one is struck by how often one reads that “the referees rejected for publication the paper that later won me the Nobel Prize.” One example is Rosalyn Yalow, who described how her Nobel-prize-winning paper was received by the journals. “In 1955 we submitted the paper to Science.... The paper was held there for eight months before it was reviewed. It was finally rejected. We submitted it to the Journal of Clinical Investigations, which also rejected it.” (Quoted from The Joys of Research, edited by Walter Shropshire, p. 109). Another example is Günter Blobel, who in a news conference given just after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, said that the main problem one encounters in one’s research is “when your grants and papers are rejected because some stupid reviewer rejected them for dogmatic adherence to old ideas.” According to the New York Times (October 12, 1999, p. A29), these comments “drew thunderous applause from the hundreds of sympathetic colleagues and younger scientists in the auditorium.”

In an article for Twentieth Century Physics, a book commissioned by the American Physical Society (the professional organization for U.S. physicists) to describe the great achievements of 20th century physics, the inventor of chaos theory, Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, described the reception that his revolutionary papers on chaos theory received: Both papers were rejected, the first after a half-year delay. By then, in 1977, over a thousand copies of the first preprint had been shipped. This has been my full experience. Papers on established subjects are immediately accepted. Every novel paper of mine, without exception, has been rejected by the refereeing process. The reader can easily gather that I regard this entire process as a false guardian and wastefully dishonest. (Volume III, p. 1850). Earlier in the same volume on 20th century physics, in a history of the development of optical physics, the invention of the laser by Theodore Maiman was described. The result was so important that it was announced in the New York Times on July 7, 1960. But the leading American physics journal, Physical Review Letters, rejected Maiman’s paper on how to make a laser (p. 1426).

Scientific eminence is no protection from a peer review system gone wild. John Bardeen, the only man to ever have won two Nobel Prizes in physics, had difficulty publishing a theory in low-temperature solid state physics (the area of one of his Prizes) that went against the established view. But rank hath its privileges. Bardeen appealed to his friend David Lazarus, who was editor in chief for the American Physical Society. Lazarus investigated and found that “the referee was totally out of line. I couldn’t believe it. John really did have a hard time with [his] last few papers and it was not his fault at all. They were important papers, they did get published, but they gave him a harder time than he should have had.” (True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, p. 300). Stephen W. Hawking is the world’s most famous physicist. According to his first wife Jane (Music to Move the Stars: A Life with Stephen Hawking, p. 239), when Hawking submitted to Nature what is generally regarded as his most important paper, the paper on black hole evaporation, the paper was initially rejected. I have heard from colleagues who must remain nameless that when Hawking submitted to Physical Review what I personally regard as his most important paper, his paper showing that a most fundamental law of physics called “unitarity” would be violated in black hole evaporation, it, too, was initially rejected. (The word on the street is that the initial referee was the Institute for Advanced Study physicist Freeman Dyson.) Today it is known that the Hawaiian Islands were formed sequentially as the Pacific plate moved over a hot spot deep inside the Earth. The theory was first developed in the paper by an eminent Princeton geophysicist, Tuzo Wilson: “I … sent [my paper] to the Journal of Geophysical Research. They turned it down…. They said my paper had no mathematics in it, no new data, and that it didn’t agree with the current views. Therefore, it must be no good. . .

Philip Anderson, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics opines that “in the early part of the postwar [post-WWII] period [a scientist’s] career was science-driven, motivated mostly by absorption with the great enterprise of discovery, and by genuine curiosity as to how nature operates. By the last decade of the century far too many, especially of the young people, were seeing science as a competitive interpersonal game, in which the winner was not the one who was objectively right as [to] the nature of scientific reality, but the one who was successful at getting grants, publishing in Physical Review Letters, and being noticed in the news pages of Nature, Science, or Physics Today. . .

But the interesting question is, what caused the “excessive specialization and careerist sociology” that is making it very difficult for new ideas to be published in peer review journals? There are several possibilities. One is a consequence of Anderson’s observation that, paradoxically, more scientists can mean a slower rate of scientific advance. The number of physicists, for example, has increased by a factor of a thousand since the year 1900, when ten percent of all physicists in the world either won the Nobel Prize or were nominated for it. If you submitted a paper to a refereed journal in 1900, you would have a far greater chance of having a referee who was a Nobel Prize winner (or at least a nominee) than now. In fact, a simple calculation shows that one would have to submit three papers on the average to have an even chance that at least one of your papers would be “peer” reviewed by a Nobel Prize winner.

Today, to have an even chance of having a Nobelist for a referee, you would have to submit several hundred papers. Thus Albert Einstein had his revolutionary 1905 papers truly peer reviewed: Max Planck and Wilhelm Wien were both later to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Today, Einstein’s papers would be sent to some total nonentity at Podunk U, who, being completely incapable of understanding important new ideas, would reject the papers for publication. “Peer” review is very unlikely to be peer review for the Einsteins of the world. We have a scientific social system in which intellectual pygmies are standing in judgment of giants. . .

Great new blog to read

2007-05-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

In addition to his fascinating website, Ulrich Mohrhoff also writes a blog called koantum matters that I have been enjoying immensely. Mohrhoff covers a wide variety of topics, such as observations in other branches of science, essays about his own work in quantum mechanics, and more personal and philosophical matters.

Here's part of a recent post about John Horgan's book I liked:

On p. 261 of The End of Science, John Horgan describes a mystical episode that he considers “the most important experience of my life” (p. 281):

“Years ago, before I became a science writer, I had what I suppose could be called a mystical experience. A psychiatrist would probably call it a psychotic episode. Whatever. For what it’s worth, here is what happened. Objectively, I was lying spread-eagled on a suburban lawn, insensible to my surroundings. Subjectively, I was hurtling through a dazzling, dark limbo toward what I was sure was the ultimate secret of life. Wave after wave of acute astonishment at the miraculousness of existence washed over me. At the same time, I was gripped by an overwhelming solipsism. I became convinced — or rather, I knew — that I was the only conscious being in the universe. There was no future, no past, no present other than what I imagined them to be. I was filled, initially, with a sense of limitless joy and power. Then, abruptly, I became convinced that if I abandoned myself further to this ecstasy, it might consume me. If I alone existed, who could bring me back from oblivion? Who could save me? With this realization my bliss turned into horror; I fled the same revelation I had so eagerly sought. I felt myself falling through a great darkness, and as I fell I dissolved into what seemed to be an infinity of selves.”

This was written a decade ago, but it’s such a fine demonstration of the little self’s fear of the big Self — the self of all selves — that it merits comment. For once John is lifted out of the confines of his little self, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge (which we all share), merges with the conscious substance that constitutes and contains the world, with the ecstasy that creates the world by expressing itself… and shrinks back in horror. Oh ye faint of heart! What need is there to bring you back to your little self, to save it? You missed your chance! You think the big Self can’t do much better everything you did, and much more? You fell back into the habitual darkness of your little self — you hadn’t realized before how dark it was — but still you noticed, at least in reverse, that we all — this infinity of selves — are fragments of the big Self.

Now go add koantum matters to your bookmarks!

Quantum Mechanics, actually explained

2007-05-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

I've read over most of Ulrich Mohrhoff's website over the past few days, and pored through his papers on quantum mechanics.

For the first time, I think I am actually beginning to understand *why* quantum mechanics is the way it is. Not in great depth or detail, because this is not my domain of expertise. However, enough so that it actually makes sense why the quantum world appears the way it does, and something about its relationship with the more ordinary world we experience as human beings.

I outlined this understanding in a comment on Michael Prescott's blog (who is also on a QM tear the last couple weeks). Here is what I wrote there about what I believe Mohrhoff is pointing out:

What [the Pondicherry interpretation of quantum mechanics] is saying, essentially, is that the quantum universe represents the "edge" of the classical world. Quantum behavior is necessary to create the apparent [material] world of separate particles and evolution through time that we live in out the actual inherent oneness and wholeness of Reality.

It is not that the quantum rules are bizarre. It's that in order to create a classic[al] world out of what is essentially an undivided whole, you need the quantum world in order to do it.

The quantum world is the boundary condition where ultimate Oneness manifests itself as the apparent many, the divided, the dualistic. It is an instrument for the creation of our apparent world of space and time. The purpose of the quantum world is to create the structure needed in order to manifest the ordinary material world of space and time and the possibility of evolution.

I think Mohrhoff is absolutely dead-right about this. A true vision of genius, IMO.

Ulrich, you're very welcome to comment here, especially if you see something off-base with my personal understanding of the PIQM. A confusing topic, but one I feel is very important and relevant to scientific approaches that go beyond reductionistic materialism.

New online journal - request for contributions

2007-05-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ulrich Mohrhoff, author of the Pondicherry interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, is launching a new online journal called AntiMatters.

Ulrich is inviting contributions for the inaugural issue of AntiMatters. Here is an excerpt from the journal's statement of focus and scope:

Focus and Scope
Materialism, in one form or another, is still widely accepted as the overarching framework for discussing issues not only in science but also in the humanities. AntiMatters is dedicated to illuminating these issues from nonmaterialistic perspectives.

Materialism is by nature pluralistic. It assigns ultimate reality to a multitude (particles, spacetime points, monads, actual occasions, bits, q-bits, etc.). It models reality "from the bottom up." Its principal explanatory concepts are composition and interaction, to which modern field theories have added the concept of instantiation (usually of physical properties by spacetime points).

AntiMatters encourages the exploration of ontologies that are essentially monistic, not because they aim to reduce reality to a single category such as matter or mind, but because they assign ultimate reality to an entity or principle that is intrinsically one. Such ontologies model reality "from the top down," using novel explanatory concepts such as differentiation, manifestation, emanation, or emergence (and probably others that no one has though of yet).

AntiMatters is for those who are uncomfortable with (or unconvinced of) materialism, or who favor a non-materialistic world view. Such persons are oftentimes unaware of how much of what is claimed to have been scientifically established is actually spurious. For their benefit, the Journal aims to critically examine the alleged scientific evidence for materialism. While authors are expected to respect and take account of all relevant empirical data, they should bear in mind that empirical data are inevitably theory-laden and paradigm-dependent, and that theories and paradigms, being to a considerable extent social constructions, are relative.

Science operates within an interpretative framework that formulates questions and interprets answers. This framework is itself not testable. AntiMatters wants to serve as a platform for the comparative study of alternative interpretative frameworks. The Journal emphasizes the following criteria for the evaluation of such frameworks:

(i) Consistency with all empirical data, not only the quantifiable ones but also those obtained through phenomenological methods, altered states of consciousness, and mystical or spiritual experience.

(ii) An appropriate ontological status for what we value most, such as happiness, self-fulfillment, excellence — the Platonic trinity of beauty, good, and truth.

The Journal wants to set high intellectual standards, without sacrificing substance. Style is important, but more so is content. Positive thinking is as essential as clarity of exposition. Deconstruction for its own sake qualifies as little as religious dogma.

It is not the (primary) aim of AntiMatters to "convert" die-hard materialists. Instead, the Journal offers non-materialists the opportunity of a stimulating exchange of views. It will invite comments on articles that are accepted for publication and encourage comments on published articles. Authors will of course be allowed to respond to comments.

Discussions of "anomalies", which are neglected or ignored by mainstream science, also fall within the scope of the Journal.

Looks like a very worthy project. We wish Ulrich a great deal of success with this new project and invite readers of AMNAP to consider contributing material.

Changing fundamental constants? (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

It looks like the eternal, unchanging universal fundamental constants of physics may not be quite so unchanging after all. Wim Ubachs and Elmar Reinhold have collected evidence that suggests that mu, a constant determining the scale of the strong nuclear force, has varied over cosmic history:

Measured today, the ratio indicates that a proton weighs (just roughly speaking here) 1836.15267261 times more than an electron.

The study team compared the value of mu measured today to the value measured in the light from a pair of quasars, thought to be super-massive black holes sucking in huge amounts of gas and star dust. The quasars' light was measured by study team members at a European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile. Since the quasars are about 12 billion light years away, it has taken 12 billion years for their light to reach Earth, making them indicators of conditions when the universe was only about 1.7 billion years old.

By combining today's mu measurement with the mu measurement from the chemical spectrum of light from the quasars, the European team suggests that mu has dropped by 0.002% over the last 12 billion years.

Rupert Sheldrake's theory of formative causation through morphic resonance suggests that "natural laws" evolve over time, and Dr. Sheldrake has predicted that the so-called universal constants are probably variable, in contrast with most scientific models which have postulated eternal, unchanging natural laws.

More AMNAP 1.0 articles coming. . .

2007-05-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

I found some more articles from the previous version of this blog at Archive.org. So I will be reposting additional material here.

Who's there?

2007-05-01T18:16:00.000-07:00

How many of you have had the experience of thinking of someone you know and suddenly having them call you out of the blue?

Those conventional explanation is that this is simple coincidence, and that you never remember all the times when you think about somebody and they don't call.

Rupert Sheldrake wanted to test this scientifically and see if there was evidence that people could determine the identity of an unknown caller at better than chance rates. He advertised in various newspapers looking for people who felt that they knew who was calling them before they picked up the phone.

After a series of preliminary trials, Sheldrake picked the most successful participants for a more rigorous set of trials under videotaped supervision. Here is the abstract of his paper:

The authors tested whether participants (N = 4) could tell who was calling before answering the telephone. In each trial, participants had 4 potential callers, one of whom was selected at random by the experimenter. Participants were filmed on time-coded videotape throughout the experimental period. When the telephone began ringing, the participants said to the camera whom they thought the caller was and, in many cases, also how confident they felt in their guesses. The callers were usually several miles away, and in some cases thousands of miles away. By guessing at random, there was a 25% chance of success. In a total of 271 trials, there were 122 (45%) correct guesses (p = 10-12). The 95% confidence limits of this success rate were from 39% to 51%. In most trials, some of the callers were familiar to the participants and others were unfamiliar. With familiar callers there was a success rate of 61% (n = 100; p = 10-13). With unfamiliar callers the success rate of 20% was not significantly different from chance. When they said they were confident about their guesses, participants were indeed more successful than when they were not confident.

Sheldrake has also studied the same phenomena in conjunction with emails. The results here also are astronomically significant, with a large effect size.

And Lobach and Bierman successfully replicated the telephone telepathy study, although their effect size and statistical significance is much less than Sheldrake's. This might be because Sheldrake advertised in large-circulation newspapers for people who felt they often experienced telephone telepathy, while Lobach and Bierman merely circulated an emailed request for volunteers among people they knew, likely reaching far fewer potential subjects with lesser abilities.

Six PK experiments

2007-05-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

Dean Radin wrote a research paper published in 1983 summarizing six PK experiments he conducted.

Here is his summary:

In summary, of six experiments testing a mental influence on machine-generated random events, four showed some evidence of PK. Two one-subject experiments showed significant psi-hitting when the subject was both relaxed and confident; a third one-subject experiment showed significant psi-missing when the subject was relaxed but not confident; a fourth experiment with ten unselected subjects showed marginal psi-hitting in an unfavorable environment; and the remaining two experiments were nonsignificant; one in an unfavorable environment, the other when the subject was doubtful of the outcome. All control studies were nonsignificant.

Note that the highly significant studies showed odds against chance of less than 1/100 and 1/2000, respectively.

New podcast and a great article about fundamentalist materialism

2007-05-01T02:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't listened to the latest Skeptiko interview with Neal Grossman yet, but I did notice that Alex linked to a remarkably worthy article by Grossman over at the IONS website.

Here are a few cogent paragraphs:

When researchers ask the question, "How can the near-death experience be explained?" they tend to make the usual assumption that an acceptable explanation will be in terms of concepts—biological, neurological, psychological—with which they are already familiar. The near-death experience (NDE) would then be explained, for example, if it could be shown what brain state, which drugs, or what beliefs on the part of the experiencer correlate with the NDE. Those who have concluded that the NDE cannot be explained mean that it cannot be, or has not yet been, correlated with any physical or psychological condition of the experiencer.
I wish to suggest that this approach to explaining the NDE is fundamentally misguided. To my knowledge, no one who has had an NDE feels any need for an explanation in the reductionist sense that researchers are seeking. For the experiencer, the NDE does not need to be explained because it is exactly what it purports to be, which is, at a minimum, the direct experience of consciousness—or minds, or selves, or personal identity—existing independently of the physical body. It is only with respect to our deeply entrenched materialist paradigm that the NDE needs to be explained, or more accurately, explained away. . .

Perhaps the "smoking gun" case is the one described by Michael Sabom in his book Light and Death. In this case, the patient had her NDE while her body temperature was lowered to 60 degrees, and all the blood was drained from her body. "Her electroencephalogram was silent, her brain-stem response was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain." A brain in this state cannot create any kind of experience. Yet the patient reported a profound NDE. Those materialists who believe that consciousness is secreted by the brain, or that the brain is necessary for conscious experience to exist, cannot possibly explain, in their own terms, cases such as this. An impartial observer would have to conclude that not all experience is produced by the brain, and that therefore the falsity of materialism has been empirically demonstrated. Thus, what needs to be explained is the abysmal failure of the academic establishment to examine this evidence and to embrace the conclusion: Materialism is false, and consciousness can and does exist independently of the body. . .

Our collective irrationality with respect to the wealth of evidence against materialism manifests in two ways: (i) by ignoring the evidence, and (ii) by insisting on overly stringent standards of evidence, that, if adopted, would render any empirical science impossible.

One of my earliest encounters with this kind of academic irrationality occurred more than twenty years ago. I was devouring everything on the near-death experience I could get my hands on, and eager to share what I was discovering with colleagues. It was unbelievable to me how dismissive they were of the evidence. "Drug-induced hallucinations," "last gasp of a dying brain," and "people see what they want to see" were some of the more commonly used phrases. One conversation in particular caused me to see more clearly the fundamental irrationality of academics with respect to evidence against materialism. I asked, "What about people who accurately report the details of their operation?"

"Oh," came the reply, "they probably just subconsciously heard the conversation in the operating room, and their brain subconsciously transposed the audio information into a visual format."

"Well," I responded, "what about cases where people report veridical perception of events remote from their body?"

"Oh, that's just a coincidence or a lucky guess."

Exasperated, I asked, "What will it take, short of having a near-death experience yourself, to convince you that it's real?"

Very nonchalantly, without batting an eye, the response was "Even if I were to have a near-death experience myself, I would conclude that I was hallucinating, rather than believe that my mind can exist independently of my brain." He went on to add that dualism (the philosophical thesis that asserts mind and matter are independent substances, neither of which can be reduced to the other) is a false theory, and that there cannot be evidence for something that's false.

This was a momentous experience for me, because here was an educated, intelligent man telling me that he will not give up materialism, no matter what. Even the evidence of his own experience would not cause him to give up materialism. I realized two things in that moment. First, this experience cured me of any impulse to argue these things with recalcitrant colleagues; it is pointless to argue with someone who tells me that his mind is already made up, and nothing I can say will change it. Second, this experience taught me that it is important to distinguish between (a) materialism as an empirical hypothesis about the nature of the world, which is amenable to evidence one way or the other (this is the hallmark of a scientific hypothesis—that evidence is relevant for its truth or falsity) and (b) materialism as an ideology, or paradigm, about how things "must" be, which is impervious to evidence (this is the hallmark of an unscientific hypothesis—that evidence is not relevant for its truth).

My colleague believed in materialism not as a scientific hypothesis that, qua scientific hypothesis, might be false, but rather as dogma and ideology that "must" be true, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. For him, materialism is the fundamental paradigm in terms of which everything else is explained, but which is not itself open to doubt. I shall coin the term "fundamaterialist" to refer to those who believe that materialism is a necessary truth, not amenable to empirical evidence. I call it fundamaterialism to make explicit comparison with fundamentalism in religion. Fundamentalism connotes an attitude of certainty towards one's core belief. Just as the fundamentalist Christian is absolutely certain that the world was created in the manner described by The Bible (fossil evidence notwithstanding), so also the fundamaterialist is absolutely certain that there exists nothing that is not made up of matter or physical energy (NDE and other evidence notwithstanding). In fact, and this is the crucial point, their respective beliefs have nothing to do with evidence. As my fundamaterialist colleague put it, "There can't be evidence for something that's false."

With respect to (a), materialism held as an empirical hypothesis about the world, the evidence against it is overwhelming. With respect to (b), materialism held as an ideology, evidence against it is logically impossible. A complicating factor is that the fundamaterialist typically holds the metabelief that his belief in materialism is not ideological, but empirical. That is, he misclassifies himself under (a), while his behavior clearly falls under (b). The debunker and skeptic believe they are being "scientific" in ignoring and rejecting the evidence against materialism. But when asked what kind of evidence it would take to convince them that materialism is empirically false, they are, like my colleague, usually at a loss for what to say. If they're not familiar with the data, they'll come up with a criterion of evidence that in fact has already been met. When it is pointed out that there exist many well-documented cases that satisfy the proposed criterion, they will simply make the criterion more stringent, and at some point they cross the line between the reasonable demand for scientific evidence and the unreasonable (and unscientific) demand for logical proof. . .

Skeptic demonstrates psi (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

2007-05-01T01:31:00.000-07:00

In 1995, Rupert Sheldrake began an investigation of a dog named JayTee and his apparent ability to know when his owner, Pamela Smart, was on the way home. Dr. Sheldrake became aware of JayTee when Smart answered an advertisement in the paper looking for dogs who seemed to know when their owner was returning home.

Dr. Sheldrake began to observe JayTee and it quickly became apparent that JayTee was, indeed, going to the window and apparently waiting for her whenever Smart was on her way home. And this behavior occurred despite changes in her return time and using a variety of different modes of transportation. So Sheldrake designed a videotape experiment to provide objective evidence of JayTee's unusual ability, and conducted a large number of trials with Pam and Jaytee.

Sheldrake invited Dr. Richard Wiseman to perform his own videotaped trials with Jaytee. Wiseman conducted four trials total and then proclaimed loudly to the media that JayTee had no special abilities.

However, Sheldrake obtained the videotape data and found that Wiseman's data matched his own experimental data very closely.

It appears that Dr. Wiseman is still claiming JayTee showed no special abilities and "failed the test" despite the fact that his own data matches Sheldrake's. Certainly most of the "skeptic" websites seem to loudly proclaim how Wiseman "disproved" Sheldrake's research with JayTee.

I'm including data published in Sheldrake's account of the controversy with Wiseman below so you can judge for yourself.

The first graph shows Sheldrake's data from 30 videotaped trials. The second shows data from Wiseman's 3 trials taken at the same location. The bottom graph shows control data from 10 trials when Smart arrived home much later than the recorded data or did not return that evening. Note that the last point in all trials shows the first 10 minutes of Smart's return journey which always lasted at least 13 minutes, so no data from Pam's actual arrival in the vicinity.

UPDATE: Richard Wiseman admitted in his recent Skeptiko interview, that his data does correspond with Sheldrake's. Wiseman should be congratulated for his honesty about this.

Triple-blind mediumship experiment published

2007-05-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Gary Schwartz and Julie Beischel of the University of Arizona recently published a very well designed study of the ability of mediums to provide anomalous information about deceased people. Here is the abstract:

Context: Investigating the information reported by mediums is ultimately important in determining the relationship between brain and consciousness in addition to being of deep concern to the public.

Objective: This triple-blind study was designed to examine the anomalous reception of information about deceased individuals by research mediums under experimental conditions that eliminate conventional explanations.

Participants: Eight University of Arizona students served as sitters: four had experienced the death of a parent; four, a peer. Eight mediums who had previously demonstrated an ability to report accurate information in a laboratory setting performed the readings.

Methodology: To optimize potential identifiable differences between readings, each deceased parent was paired with a same gender deceased peer. Sitters were not present at the readings; an experimenter blind to information about the sitters and deceased served as a proxy sitter. The mediums, blind to the sitters’ and deceased’s identities, each read two absent sitters and their paired deceased; each pair of sitters was read by two mediums. Each blinded sitter then scored a pair of itemized transcripts (one was the reading intended for him/her; the other, the paired control reading) and chose the reading more applicable to him/her.

Results: The findings included significantly higher ratings for intended versus control readings (p = 0.007, effect size = 0.5) and significant reading-choice results (p = 0.01).

Conclusions: The results suggest that certain mediums can anomalously receive accurate information about deceased individuals. The study design effectively eliminates conventional mechanisms as well as telepathy as explanations for the information reception, but the results cannot distinguish among alternative paranormal hypotheses, such as survival of consciousness (the continued existence, separate from the body, of an individual’s consciousness or personality after physical death) and super-psi (or super-ESP; retrieval of information via a psychic channel or quantum field).

Interview with a quantum physicist. . .

2007-04-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

Here is a fascinating interview where a parapsychologist interviews a quantum physicist. Here are a few excerpts:

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, as a parapsychologist I find it fascinating that of the various academic disciplines that are interested in psychic phenomena, there seems to be the most interest from quantum physicists such as yourself.I wonder if we can begin the program tonight by having you explain to our viewers just what is quantum physics, and why would you find the phenomenon of consciousness to be so interesting?

HERBERT: Well, quantum physics started out in the twenties to explain the interaction of light with atoms. It focused on that, but now it's extended to explain the interaction of anything with anything. It's basically the physicists' theory of the world these days, and it's been very successful. So there are two reasons, I think,why quantum physics and consciousness have some connection. One is that quantum theory, as most people know by now, is very strange. It has very weird properties. . .

MISHLOVE: Subatomic particles. Typically we hear that this sort of stuff [knocking on furniture] is no longer solid; it's mostly a vacuum in quantum physics.

HERBERT: Not only is it not solid, is it mostly empty space, but it's also probabilities -- just fuzzy, not even totally real.

MISHLOVE: In other words, particles aren't even particles anymore.

HERBERT: Particles aren't even particles anymore. That's one of the connections with consciousness -- that the solidity of matter is dissolving away in light of these theories, and becoming more and more like the fuzziness that's inside our heads.

MISHLOVE: And that's the basic, most fundamental theory in all of physics.

HERBERT: Yes, that's the basis of everything that we do in physics anyway, in quantum physics.

MISHLOVE: And physics is in fact the basic science of all the sciences. So the most fundamental theory of all of science is that the basis of reality is fuzzy.

HERBERT: Is fuzzy, is crumbling, and it is ambiguous -- that's a word I like to use. Somehow there's a basic ambiguity at the center of the world -- the center of the inanimate world, the unconscious world. . .

MISHLOVE: A term that I keep hearing is quantum interconnectedness, and the notion that separability doesn't exist -- that somehow all is one, the way the mystics used to say it.

HERBERT: Yes. There is a peculiar feature in quantum theory called quantum interconnectedness, and it was discovered right when quantum theory was discovered. It was found that in the quantum description of two objects, when two objects briefly interact and then you pull them apart, in the description at least they never come apart; there's a kind of stickiness that connects them together, so they're bound together forever in the theory. They never separate, even though they're not interacting anymore. It was thought that this was just a theoretical artifact; it was nothing that existed in the real world. Physicists noted it, said this is very strange, and then they promptly forgot about it for about fifty years. But recently, due to something called Bell's theorem, new interest has been rekindled in this interconnectedness. Bell's theorem proves that this connection is not a theoretical artifact, but actually exists in the real world.

MISHLOVE: I should mention for the benefit of our viewers, Nick, that you are probably one of the world's foremost authorities on Bell's theorem; that's what you specialized in. Bell's theorem seems like the crack in the cosmic egg, in a way; it's the one part of quantum physics that's almost turned everything upside down.

HERBERT: One of my claims to fame is that I have produced the shortest proof of Bell's theorem in existence. It's about three lines.

MISHLOVE: Now, Bell's theorem, as I understand it, goes back even prior to Bell -- to Einstein, and Einstein's disagreement with quantum physics, back in the early days. He made his classic statement, "God doesn't play dice with the universe," at a time when Einstein himself felt he disagreed with quantum physics, as I understand it. He felt that if quantum physics were true, it would have these horrendous implications which it now turns out are true.

HERBERT: Yes, Einstein was never comfortable with quantum theory, and he basically had three gripes with it. The one gripe was that quantum theory is a probabilistic theory. It just describes things like the world is essentially random and governed only by general laws that give the odds for things to happen, but within these odds anything can happen -- that God plays dice. Einstein didn't like that, but he could have lived with that. The second aspect that Einstein didn't like was the thinglessness, this fuzzy ambiguity -- that the world isn't made of things, it's not made of objects. It was put by Paul Davies -- the notion that somehow big things are made of little things. Quantum theory doesn't describe the world that way. Big things aren't made of little things; they're made of entities whose attributes aren't there when you don't look, but become there when you do look. Now, that sounds very, very strange.

MISHLOVE: Like an illusion.

HERBERT: Like an illusion, yes.

MISHLOVE: Or the Hindu concept of Maya, something like that.

HERBERT: That's right. The world exists when we don't look at it in some strange state that is indescribable. Then when we look at it, it becomes absolutely ordinary, as though someone were trying to pull something over our eyes -- the world is an illusion. Einstein didn't like that. He felt that the big things were made of little things, as the classical physicists thought.

MISHLOVE: The Newtonian view of billiard-ball-like particles -- that if you could only understand the momentum and position of each one, you could predict everything in the universe.

HERBERT: Everything in the universe, yes, a comfortable sort of view.

MISHLOVE: You mentioned three things that Einstein objected to; then there must be one more.

HERBERT: Well, the third thing is this interconnectedness. Einstein said the world cannot be like this, because this interconnectedness goes faster than light. With this quantum interconnectedness, two objects could come together, meet, and then each go into the universe, and they would still be connected. Instantaneously one would know what the fate of the other one was. Einstein said, now that can never be; that's like voodoo -- in fact, he used the word -- it's like telepathy, he said; he said it's spooky, it's ghostlike. Almost his last words in his biography were, "On this I absolutely stand firm. The world is not like this." He died in '55, and ten years later Bell showed that the world must be like this. It's kind of ironic. Bell himself said, "My theorem answers some of Einstein's questions in a way that Einstein would have liked the least."

MISHLOVE: And Einstein created a very strange picture of the universe as it is, almost time travel, in his theory of relativity.

HERBERT: Yes, but even Einstein's mind wouldn't go this far, to accept these instant connections, which now we believe really must exist in the universe.

MISHLOVE: The notion of instant connections almost implies that space itself is an illusion.

HERBERT: Yes, that distance is an illusion.

MISHLOVE: That distance is an illusion -- that you and I and our viewers and the chair are all somehow intimately connected with the most distant part of the galaxy.

HERBERT: Yes, that we're all in one place, that there aren't any places.

MISHLOVE: And the notion the mystics sometimes say, that you and I, we're not really separate individuals, but at a deeper level we're like fingers; we're all connected. Or we're like islands connected. There's that sense of connectedness as well. . .

MISHLOVE: Well, you mentioned earlier that you believe quantum physics is at the basis of consciousness. I wonder if you would come back to that point and elaborate on it.

HERBERT: Yes. Right now there are two main approaches to consciousness, I believe. They are studying the brain, looking at how the brain does it -- the one machine in the world that we know is conscious for sure -- and then trying to simulate cognitive things on computers. I think this is where the smart money is placed these days. I think these are a good place to do research.

MISHLOVE: Trying to simulate brain functioning on the computer.

HERBERT: On computers, and looking at brains. And I think we learn a lot about brains and computers there, but not very much about consciousness.

Fraud-proof experimental design demonstrates PK effect. . .

2007-04-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

The entire paper is available from this site.

Here is the abstract:

The author summarizes five experiments in which he studied the psychokinetic (PK) effect (the mental influence on the outcome of chance processes) under tight supervision by independent observers. Through the use of prerecorded random events as targets, the observers could evaluate the results independently, without having to trust the reliability of the author or his equipment. The total of these five studies, which represent all the work done under external supervision, produced an effect deviating by 3.67 standard deviations from chance expectancy. The odds against such an outcome are about 8,000 to 1. Thus, the results support the extstence of a PK effect on prerecorded random events, in agreement with previous experiments. The observed PK effect is inconsistent with current quantum theory. It shows that the theory is not correct when applied to systems that include human subjects. Furthermore, the existence of a weak mental effect on the outcome of chance events cautions the physicist to be careful in the interpretation of results that are based on relatively few chance events.

This is very impressive. Schmidt designed a protocol which allowed outside observers, including a skeptic of the phenomenon, an essential role in demonstrating the PK effect.

Great discussion thread over at Dean Radin's blog

2007-04-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

Dean wrote a post about books on psi phenomena, however the comments have veered into an extended discussion of variously meta-analyses of Ganzfeld studies.

We had a good debate on this topic on the old AMNAP with Andrew Endersby and some other folks, and I hope the participants in that discussion will go to Dean's blog and weigh in. . .