Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal

Rating:
Summary: Not Getting to Grips With Our Fears and Unwillingness
Review: For anyone that might be interested in buying and try to read this book it is important to know the following:

This book is a collection of articles, scholarly articles, from the Journal of Consciousness Studies, a special issue of the year 2003. The 15 authors (including the 3 editors) wrote these articles specifically for this issue, and the idea of the editors were to have both sides present as fully and as clearly as possible their views. The "both sides" are: Psi researchers (that is, parapsychology researchers), and researchers skeptics about Psi phenomena (that is, Psi research critics). Some of the articles may be a little difficult for the lay reader (like myself) to fully understand.

I have bought this book because I wanted an update on the current status of the Psi research, as well as an update on the major criticism towards it. I myself have a skeptical site (in portuguese, Brazil) where I perform a deep scientific critical analysis of my own "faith", that is, spiritualism, mediumnistic abilities, and the like. I am a biologist with interests in mind-brain studies, physics, species evolution theories, artificial inteligence, and phylosophy of science (among other related interests). Parapsychology actually came as a "by-product" of my critical interest in life-after-life studies. For almost twenty years I had not paid much heed to parapsychology, precisely because it is mainly concerned with extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. I do not think (and I have never thought) that proving that ESP-PK exists can give any support to life-after-life hypotheses. To me, the current status of the scientific hipothesis of life-after-life is extremely weak (even though not negligible). On the other hand, I have come to know, during the last two years, that the current status of paranormal research (ESP-PK) is unimaginably strong.

This came to me as an enormous surprise, as the "interest" of mainstream science for parapsychology research (and "respect" too...) seems to be close to zero.

I have read many scientific Psi research papers (Dean Radin, Jessica Utts, Dick Bierman, Daryl Bem, Richard Shoup, etc), and I have also carefully analyzed the criticism of top skeptics like Susan Blackmore, Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Victor Stenger, Michael Shermer (and also of lesser skeptics like Robert Todd Carroll, Paul Edwards, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - I left out James Randi for want of a clear classification...). I don't mean to say that Psi exists. But "avowed skepticism", the way it has been practiced during the last twenty years or so, is clearly Bunk (to use the very same expression that Richard Dawkins used in his 1998 article What's Wrong with the Paranormal?: "The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans, and some of them have grown rich and fat by taking us for a ride." - Incidentally, this uncivilized utterance came right after Dean Radin's wonderful, even though not flawless, parapsychology book: The Conscious Universe - 1997).

Again, in this book, history repeats itself. I have found the skeptics' criticism in Psi Wars very weak (the articles by James Alcock, Stanley Jeffers, and Brugger & Taylor), even though respectful, respectable, and very much worth reading.

At this point I must ask: What the hell is happening in this World of ours? I mean, I don't really care if Psi exists or not. If it does exist, I find it something very exciting, a true scientific revolution. But if it does not, I am not going to cry or even be just a little bit sad because of that (By the way, the very opposite happens with the life-after-life hypothesis. If it is false, I am surely going to feel very depressed: a true existential breakdown...). But how can the mainstream scientific community, universities, and governments (especially the very very rich US government) not support and fund research on this issue given the extremely sophisticated corroborative level of the current Psi research?

The answer to me seems to be that we are not dealing with a scientific issue here. We are dealing with religous-like feelings, and also social-cultural-anthropological dispositions and unwillingness. In that, I must say that I am a little bit disappointed with Psi researchers. They are usually very bad at marketing strategies and at psychological-political strategies. They (and all of us too) do not understand why Psi research is being neglected. Therefore, it seems unlinkely that they can effectively alter this scenario. In a way, Adrian Parker Psi Wars article ("We Ask, Does Psi Exist? But Is This the Right Question and Do We Really Want an Answer Anyway?") deals with it. But even he does not seem to fully understand what is going on (and, again, all of us too).

Meanwhile, we are missing out on two priceless opportunies, which lie surely within our grasp: First, we could settle once and for all if Psi exists or not; and if the answer turns out to be "No", we could fight much more effectively the excesses of the so called "irrational beliefs". Second and foremost, if Psi exists, we could learn to control it and amplify its effect size, and by doing so harness a power that might bring enormous benefits for mankind (Sounds preposterous? But that is precisely what happened with electricity and antibiotics). Either way we would gain.

Adrian Parker kind of foresees that Psi research will be soon cast out of consciousness studies, in a repetition of what has happened many times before. I suspect that too. Until we can better understand why we hold this most strange blend of fear and apathy for Psi research, there may be not much hope that we will gain from it what we deserve: understanding and existential fulfillment.

Julio Siqueira - Biologist and editor of the site Criticando Kardec

Rating:
Summary: Confronts the evidence and asks the hard questions
Review: It's difficult to write a book on this scientifically controversial subject that doesn't either dismiss the putative phenomena out of hand, or cross the line into stretching credibility. How can a book maintain a scientific tone while discussing things that so widely assumed to be incompatible with a scientific worldview, things like reading people's thoughts without using our five senses, or affecting physical matter with "mind power?"

There have been a small handful of treatments that have come close, such Ray Hyman's "The Elusive Quarry" on the mostly skeptical side, and Broughton's "Parapsychology: The Controversial Science" on the slightly less skeptical side.

When we pick up a book on science and the paranormal, the first thing we generally want to know is whether the author is arguing for the reality of anomalies or against them. When it comes to a true scientific controversy, many of the best treatments are neccessarily the ones where you don't quite know which side is being argued because the facts are being presented as far as practical for you to evaluate. That's a difficult posture to take in a book on scientific anomalies because the term itself is somewhat of an oxymoron to many people.

If it is an anomaly, how can it be scientific? Isn't science supposed to be about things we can measure and "prove?" Parapsychology relentlessly tests our attitude and philosophy toward how science works by presenting us with what are potentially very significant anomalies to the way we understand nature.

"Psi Wars" is a particularly good treatment of the general topic of the paranomal and its investigation by science. It begins by showing clearly why putative psi phenomena are so threatening to our understanding, by virtue of their sheer bizarreness. It then reviews the evidence for certain phenomena, such as telepathy, and shows it to be, (as parapsychologists have long contended, often against ridicule and accusations), remarkably strong.

A unique aspect of this book is that while reviewing the strength of the evidence for psi phenomena is an unusually balanced way, it also presents well-reasoned articles explaining why skepticism is still the most useful approach for scientists to take toward certain kinds of anomalies. Standard statistical methods can show intrinsic weaknesses when used to analyze highly unusual results. Scientific protocols have some unavoidable difficulties dealing with results that are so unreliably replicated in a laboratory.

This book stands out as an excellent case study of methdological issues of particularly difficult scientific investigations and a good way to examine tricky issues of philosophy of science. Could it be that the phenomena are real and our understanding of nature has some disturbing holes in it, or could it be that our methods of understanding nature have limits yet to be fully recognized?

Psi Wars stands out for me as an unusually serious and responsible treatment of anomalous science in a field all to easy to dismiss or pass off as a joke.

Rating:
Summary: Confronts the evidence and asks the hard questions
Review: It's difficult to write a book on this scientifically controversial subject that doesn't either dismiss the putative phenomena out of hand, or cross the line into stretching credibility. How can a book maintain a scientific tone while discussing things that so widely assumed to be incompatible with a scientific worldview, things like reading people's thoughts without using our five senses, or affecting physical matter with "mind power?"

There have been a small handful of treatments that have come close, such Ray Hyman's "The Elusive Quarry" on the mostly skeptical side, and Broughton's "Parapsychology: The Controversial Science" on the slightly less skeptical side.

When we pick up a book on science and the paranormal, the first thing we generally want to know is whether the author is arguing for the reality of anomalies or against them. When it comes to a true scientific controversy, many of the best treatments are neccessarily the ones where you don't quite know which side is being argued because the facts are being presented as far as practical for you to evaluate. That's a difficult posture to take in a book on scientific anomalies because the term itself is somewhat of an oxymoron to many people.

If it is an anomaly, how can it be scientific? Isn't science supposed to be about things we can measure and "prove?" Parapsychology relentlessly tests our attitude and philosophy toward how science works by presenting us with what are potentially very significant anomalies to the way we understand nature.

"Psi Wars" is a particularly good treatment of the general topic of the paranomal and its investigation by science. It begins by showing clearly why putative psi phenomena are so threatening to our understanding, by virtue of their sheer bizarreness. It then reviews the evidence for certain phenomena, such as telepathy, and shows it to be, (as parapsychologists have long contended, often against ridicule and accusations), remarkably strong.

A unique aspect of this book is that while reviewing the strength of the evidence for psi phenomena is an unusually balanced way, it also presents well-reasoned articles explaining why skepticism is still the most useful approach for scientists to take toward certain kinds of anomalies. Standard statistical methods can show intrinsic weaknesses when used to analyze highly unusual results. Scientific protocols have some unavoidable difficulties dealing with results that are so unreliably replicated in a laboratory.

This book stands out as an excellent case study of methdological issues of particularly difficult scientific investigations and a good way to examine tricky issues of philosophy of science. Could it be that the phenomena are real and our understanding of nature has some disturbing holes in it, or could it be that our methods of understanding nature have limits yet to be fully recognized?

Psi Wars stands out for me as an unusually serious and responsible treatment of anomalous science in a field all to easy to dismiss or pass off as a joke.