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- A Skeptical Examination of Psychic Phenomena
A Skeptical Examination of Psychic Phenomena
- By Gene Doucette
- Published 07/14/2008
- The Paranormal
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Rating:
Gene Doucette
Gene is the author of Beating Up Daddy, and The Other Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody. He is also a screenwriter, a playwright, a novelist, and a blogger.
View all articles by Gene Doucette
Now, we don’t need anything close to 100% accuracy to have had a
successful experiment. Generally, anything above 30% is very
significant statistically (given sufficient trials,) with 25% the
baseline for chance. If we do find statistically significant results,
are we ready to publish a paper? (The parapsychologists in the room are
not allowed to answer.) The answer is no, because we haven’t finished
eliminating the other possibilities.
For example, is our randomizer really random? In one experiment of this kind the random number generator automatically did not choose the same number twice. This increases the baseline for chance from 25% to 33% and suddenly 30% is just about right.
Is there any way for subject A to signal subject B other than by psychic means? If they’re in the same building, subject A could stomp on the floor and theoretically give the number to subject B rather easily.
Did we do enough trials? Thirty percent is not at all significant if we only did 100 trials. And the reverse of this is, how many times did we do this experiment? If we set the bar at 2,000 tries, and then did it fifty times on fifty different occasions, we may very well end up with a single test that shows statistically significant results. But the forty-nine times we ended up with chance results may have had something to do with it; eventually we were going to get lucky. We might even get something statistically BELOW chance, which we could report as “psi missing.” (I’m not making this up.) We could publish a paper announcing on two trials we had statistically significant results above chance on one trial, and statistically significant misses below chance on another. Parapsychologists will toast us. We just have to bury the data on the other 48 trials.
Finally, if we pass all the other questions, we still have to answer what might seem obvious: what did we actually test for? Was it ESP, with subject B reading the mind of subject A? Or did subject A send the information to subject B? It could have been precognition; subject B could have been looking into the future at a printout of the results from subject A’s computer. It could even have been PK; subject B might have influenced the randomizer in the computer to get it to come up with specific numbers. This sort of confusion is what makes Pratt’s defense of Soal perfectly reasonable to other parapsychologists.
There IS a much simpler test of psi, or more specifically, PK. Take a sewing needle and put it between two magnets in such a way that is rests upright on its tip. Put the entire thing in an enclosed glass container. Sit the subject at the other end of the room and tell him to try and get the needle to spin.
It’s simple, it’s direct, and it would be very difficult to do without psychic powers, which is probably why no parapsychologist has tried it, even though it was suggested years ago.
But none of this actually gets to the root of what’s wrong with parapsychology and psi because, experimental problems notwithstanding, there is a huge gap where there should be theoretical psi research.
Before psi is going to be accepted by the scientific community at large (and by skeptics like me) someone is going to have to come up with a positive theory. By this I mean what’s missing is a theoretical explanation for how psi COULD exist. This is psi’s achilles’ heel, and it’s ultimately why I don’t believe in it.
The problem is, psi experiments are all essentially designed to prove psi by process of elimination. This is, at its core, an argument from ignorance. Take the needle experiment again. If someone sits at the other end of that room and manages to make the needle spin, well, we’ve eliminated every physical possibility from our list of explanations, so would we be right to conclude that it MUST be psychic power at work? Not necessarily, no.
Just because we can’t think
of another explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It may very well
be that our subject psychically willed the needle to spin, but it is no
less likely that a mouse hiding under his chair psychically willed it
to spin, nor is it any less likely that some other unknown phenomenon
is at work causing the needle to spin. There is no logical distinction
between one unknown phenomenon and another, and because we don’t have a
positive theory that makes definite, testable predictions, we cannot
conclude with any degree of certainty whatsoever that psi was involved.
There are many reasons to doubt that any practical theory of psi will be forthcoming, because just about every attempt to do so will violate at least one well-established law or prove to be a biological impossibility. Take the issues of instantaneous communication and remote viewing. If a psychic can instantly communicate with someone else, or “see” something that is a great distance away, by exactly what mechanism is this instant information being received? The psychic can’t just “know” it without it being communicated to him and so, if real communication is taking place, there HAS to be a delay between the sending and the receiving. But despite the fact that nothing can travel faster than light, remote viewers claim they can go to other planets immediately, and even to other galaxies that are many light years away. The lack of a time gap creates a huge credibility gap.
You might say-- as many proponents of psi do-- that an undiscovered aspect of physics is the answer to this question. Consider what you’re doing when you argue this point. You’re invoking an undiscovered phenomenon to explain another undiscovered phenomenon. You’ve now gone from science to fantasy, perhaps without even realizing it.
One field of legitimate science that has recently been co-opted to serve psi proponents is quantum mechanics. In quantum theory, there is something equivalent to instantaneous information transfer, best illustrated by the EPR paradox. The problem is, applying anything in quantum mechanics to the macroscopic universe is a mistake. This is like saying that because an ant can survive a fall from a tabletop, you can live through a fall off of the Empire State building. We do not use quantum mechanics-- which is largely a non-observational series of mathematical constructs already-- to make predictions about the world on our scale. It’s not designed to do so.
So why don’t I believe in psi? There’s no working model to explain how it CAN work. There’s no experimental proof that it works, or even exists, and every experiment conducted on it to this point has been proven to be either severely flawed or possessed of results that have much more prosaic explanations.
Most people I know who profess belief in psi utilize a much simpler argument. “There MUST be something there” they argue. Occasionally anecdotal evidence is provided, evidence that in my eyes is either non-spectacular or simply a matter of coincidence. Or luck, even. Cases of “I was just thinking of so-and-so and then he called” which are much more readily ascribed to remembering hits and forgetting misses abound. I don’t begrudge anyone’s belief, even those of the parapsychologists. (I do, however, wish more of them were as honest as John Taylor, who eventually disavowed his own research when he realized he was fooling himself.) What I find surprising is that in the first part of the twenty-first century, my opinion that psi does not exist puts me in a significant minority.
Which is why, when the question “why don’t you believe in psi” is posed, I usually answer with a question of my own: “why do you?”
Why does anybody?
For example, is our randomizer really random? In one experiment of this kind the random number generator automatically did not choose the same number twice. This increases the baseline for chance from 25% to 33% and suddenly 30% is just about right.
Is there any way for subject A to signal subject B other than by psychic means? If they’re in the same building, subject A could stomp on the floor and theoretically give the number to subject B rather easily.
Did we do enough trials? Thirty percent is not at all significant if we only did 100 trials. And the reverse of this is, how many times did we do this experiment? If we set the bar at 2,000 tries, and then did it fifty times on fifty different occasions, we may very well end up with a single test that shows statistically significant results. But the forty-nine times we ended up with chance results may have had something to do with it; eventually we were going to get lucky. We might even get something statistically BELOW chance, which we could report as “psi missing.” (I’m not making this up.) We could publish a paper announcing on two trials we had statistically significant results above chance on one trial, and statistically significant misses below chance on another. Parapsychologists will toast us. We just have to bury the data on the other 48 trials.
Finally, if we pass all the other questions, we still have to answer what might seem obvious: what did we actually test for? Was it ESP, with subject B reading the mind of subject A? Or did subject A send the information to subject B? It could have been precognition; subject B could have been looking into the future at a printout of the results from subject A’s computer. It could even have been PK; subject B might have influenced the randomizer in the computer to get it to come up with specific numbers. This sort of confusion is what makes Pratt’s defense of Soal perfectly reasonable to other parapsychologists.
There IS a much simpler test of psi, or more specifically, PK. Take a sewing needle and put it between two magnets in such a way that is rests upright on its tip. Put the entire thing in an enclosed glass container. Sit the subject at the other end of the room and tell him to try and get the needle to spin.
It’s simple, it’s direct, and it would be very difficult to do without psychic powers, which is probably why no parapsychologist has tried it, even though it was suggested years ago.
But none of this actually gets to the root of what’s wrong with parapsychology and psi because, experimental problems notwithstanding, there is a huge gap where there should be theoretical psi research.
Before psi is going to be accepted by the scientific community at large (and by skeptics like me) someone is going to have to come up with a positive theory. By this I mean what’s missing is a theoretical explanation for how psi COULD exist. This is psi’s achilles’ heel, and it’s ultimately why I don’t believe in it.
The problem is, psi experiments are all essentially designed to prove psi by process of elimination. This is, at its core, an argument from ignorance. Take the needle experiment again. If someone sits at the other end of that room and manages to make the needle spin, well, we’ve eliminated every physical possibility from our list of explanations, so would we be right to conclude that it MUST be psychic power at work? Not necessarily, no.
There are many reasons to doubt that any practical theory of psi will be forthcoming, because just about every attempt to do so will violate at least one well-established law or prove to be a biological impossibility. Take the issues of instantaneous communication and remote viewing. If a psychic can instantly communicate with someone else, or “see” something that is a great distance away, by exactly what mechanism is this instant information being received? The psychic can’t just “know” it without it being communicated to him and so, if real communication is taking place, there HAS to be a delay between the sending and the receiving. But despite the fact that nothing can travel faster than light, remote viewers claim they can go to other planets immediately, and even to other galaxies that are many light years away. The lack of a time gap creates a huge credibility gap.
You might say-- as many proponents of psi do-- that an undiscovered aspect of physics is the answer to this question. Consider what you’re doing when you argue this point. You’re invoking an undiscovered phenomenon to explain another undiscovered phenomenon. You’ve now gone from science to fantasy, perhaps without even realizing it.
One field of legitimate science that has recently been co-opted to serve psi proponents is quantum mechanics. In quantum theory, there is something equivalent to instantaneous information transfer, best illustrated by the EPR paradox. The problem is, applying anything in quantum mechanics to the macroscopic universe is a mistake. This is like saying that because an ant can survive a fall from a tabletop, you can live through a fall off of the Empire State building. We do not use quantum mechanics-- which is largely a non-observational series of mathematical constructs already-- to make predictions about the world on our scale. It’s not designed to do so.
So why don’t I believe in psi? There’s no working model to explain how it CAN work. There’s no experimental proof that it works, or even exists, and every experiment conducted on it to this point has been proven to be either severely flawed or possessed of results that have much more prosaic explanations.
Most people I know who profess belief in psi utilize a much simpler argument. “There MUST be something there” they argue. Occasionally anecdotal evidence is provided, evidence that in my eyes is either non-spectacular or simply a matter of coincidence. Or luck, even. Cases of “I was just thinking of so-and-so and then he called” which are much more readily ascribed to remembering hits and forgetting misses abound. I don’t begrudge anyone’s belief, even those of the parapsychologists. (I do, however, wish more of them were as honest as John Taylor, who eventually disavowed his own research when he realized he was fooling himself.) What I find surprising is that in the first part of the twenty-first century, my opinion that psi does not exist puts me in a significant minority.
Which is why, when the question “why don’t you believe in psi” is posed, I usually answer with a question of my own: “why do you?”
Why does anybody?
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Comments
Comment #1 (Posted by Joseph Mitzen)
Rating:
Great article, with two quibbles.
1)"You might say-- as many proponents of psi do-- that an undiscovered aspect of physics is the answer to this question. Consider what you’re doing when you argue this point. You’re invoking an undiscovered phenomenon to explain another undiscovered phenomenon. You’ve now gone from science to fantasy, perhaps without even realizing it."
It seems you could lay this charge at the feet of modern science much more strongly, with "dark matter", "dark energy" and a host of other unobserved entities constructed to prop up the big bang theory/inflationary universe whenever observational data differs with its predictions. For that matter, many of the scientific errors you cite have appeared at one time or another in mainstream scientific research.
2) I disagree with the need for a theory before believing in something. There won't be sufficient fundamental research into any phenomenon until observational evidence establishes its existence. Also, many discoveries have been made use of before theory appeared, and there are phenomena today we don't have adequate explanations for but that doesn't stop acknowledgement of its existence or use in engineering.
Comment #2 (Posted by Gene)
Rating:
Joseph--
Thanks for writing. If you take another look at the examples you cite you will find, first, that they are logical consequences of established theory, and second, that-- Dark energy and dark matter-- that can be tested for. That they have not yet been discovered means they are not proven, but the theoretical existence of them stems, again, from a positive theory. Science is self-correcting: if a proof cannot be found, these ideas will eventually be abandoned as a wrong turn.
In point #2 you said something very interesting. You are correct, you do not need a theory before believing in something. You can believe in anything you want. But "belief"is not a scientific concept. The article addresses attempts to prove a belief without success.
Comment #3 (Posted by mike3)
Rating:
You say that a theory is needed beforehand, but how can a theory be set up before on even knows this thing "exists", that is, to have a "theory of psi", you need some hard data beforehand to study, which means you need experiments. Without any experiments and any data, any "theory of psi" that you could test for would be total, 100% guesswork, and useless. So what do you do?
I also noticed this:
"We do not use quantum mechanics-- which is largely a non-observational series of mathematical constructs already-- to make predictions about the world on our scale. It’s not designed to do so."
This is not quite correct. Quantum mechanics *can* make predictions about the world on "our" scale. *And* they work. *But*, here's the kicker -- all the "spooky" stuff pretty much disappears and you're left with something that is pretty much good old classical Newtonian mechanics. (I.e. the predictions do not deviate significantly from classical physics.) The only reason one does not *use* QM for *that* purpose is because it is too complicated -- classical physics is much simpler and the errors introduced are negligible.
Comment #4 (Posted by addy )
Rating:
i think that this was a great article but people are misunderstanding psychics because hey are capable of many things, and they have practiced and are now pros. they are capable of getting and doing what many others are not capable of doing. certain people have these amazing powers, and if people keep pushing that away, then this world will come to an end, and this america may come crashing down in a big bloddy mess. i just have one more thing to say, listen to what psychics themselves have to say, because most of the psychic phenomena happens as personal experiences, stuff that happens when no one is around. and actually kids are the main pat of this phenomena because kids minds can be molded, and are open, and fresh, thy can see beyond that all the skeptical, critical noobs dont seem to believe them just because they are children. well i think thats really stupid, because if they cant see whats really going on, if they cant ee that the spiritual world can come to reality, then all those scientists out there have there head in the clouds.