The Reality of Parapsychology, and Why Attempts to Deny it are not Science
I’ve already written a series of articles on the reality of ESP earlier this year. This included some personal experiences, a method for achieving results, the history of parapsychological research, ESP in animals, communication with plants, and more.
I now feel inspired to write a new series with fresh material, having read recently a Medium article by Jack Vance entitled ‘People Still Believe in Psychic Powers Despite the Evidence’. My immediate reaction to this was one of surprise — how could someone possibly say that in 2022? One glaringly obvious example that he is ignoring is the CIA’s successful remote-viewing programme known as Stargate, which was funded to the tune of 20 million dollars for more than 20 years. Would the American government fund something to that extent if there were not demonstrable positive results? Is he not aware of this?
There is much material about it in the public domain. One of the most successful viewers was Joe McMoneagle, who told his story in Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, two of the scientists involved, gave their account of the project in their book Mind-Reach. Other famous names are Pat Price and Ingo Swann. Here’s one relevant quote: “Pat Price was one of SRI’s (Stanford Research Institute’s) most successful viewers and with Ingo Swann propelled remote viewing headlong into the arms of the American military. Pat’s sessions were constantly accurate as the quote below shows: ‘He was extraordinarily accurate, unbelievably accurate’.— a former CIA official, on a series of remote viewings by Pat Price” ¹.
Other relevant books are Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: the Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, and David Morehouse’s Psychic Warrior. I’ve written about the project as part of the history of parapsychological research here.
I wondered why Jack Vance would want to deny all this. (He says that he is attracted to parapsychology and would like to believe in it, but various scientific books have persuaded him otherwise.) There was a strong clue at the end of the article, however, where it was stated that the article had previously been published at a website called atheistrev.com. Atheists have a strong tendency to deny parapsychology, despite the voluminous evidence, because it poses a significant challenge to their worldview. (Thus famous atheist Richard Dawkins is also a noted parapsychology denier.)
In what follows I shall define atheism as being equivalent to physicalism, the denial of anything transcendent or supernatural, not merely the denial of a theistic creator God, which I prefer to call non-theism.
Atheists believe something along the lines of the following. They will probably subscribe to:
- the Big Bang model, in which at the early stages of the universe there was nothing except the potential for matter to emerge
- organic life later emerging out of dead matter, even if it is hard to comprehend how this might have happened
- Darwinian evolution theory (now known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis), according to which life evolved as a consequence of natural selection operating on random genetic mutations
- the neuroscientific viewpoint that considers consciousness to be an epiphenomenon, an accidental (and unexplained) by-product, of the brain.
According to such a worldview, since consciousness is believed to be restricted to the brain, parapsychological phenomena appear ‘miraculous’ and therefore impossible. How could different brains (consciousnesses) communicate with each other? How could one individual consciousness free itself from the limitations of its associated brain and gain access to information not available to the five senses?
The acceptance or denial of parapsychology is therefore ultimately a spirituality versus atheism/physicalism issue. I suggest that this is why atheists can be so blind to its reality, why they choose to be blind to it.
Problems arise when someone with such a worldview conducts so-called ‘scientific’ investigations into parapsychology. If you believe on principle that parapsychology is impossible, how can you conduct any research objectively? You will be unwilling to accept any evidence, no matter how compelling it is.
One such figure is the late C. E. M. Hansel who some time ago wrote a book called ESP and Parapsychology, a Critical Re-Evaluation. In it he states: “It is wise to adopt initially the assumption that ESP is impossible… (This) is not unreasonable, since there is a great weight of knowledge supporting this point of view”. He says ‘knowledge’. I suggest that prejudice would be a more accurate term. (He has presumably been reading the same type of books as Jack Vance.) This leads him to state: “If the result could have arisen through a trick, the experiment must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is finally decided that such a trick was, in fact, used”. Thus, because he ‘knows’ that ESP is impossible, the simplest explanation is that any success reported must be due to fraud, even where none is detected. Let us note that he was saying this in all seriousness, despite the obvious absurdity.
He did not hesitate to apply this strategy. His descriptions of the Maimonides Medical Centre dream-telepathy experiments were “crafted in such a way as to lead unwitting readers to assume that fraud was a likely explanation, whereas in fact it was extremely unlikely given the controls employed by the researchers” ².
Even the equally sceptical Ray Hyman agreed, and criticized Hansel publicly. Now, if the methods of an extreme sceptic are criticised by someone from his own camp, then we can be sure that something seriously dodgy is going on. We can also wonder why he could not see this himself. But this is where a passionate faith that ESP does not exist can take you.
Here’s an interesting quote from the philosopher Albert North Whitehead: “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them” ³.
It would be hard to claim that Hansel’s assumptions were unconscious, since he states them so clearly. One wonders what was going through his mind, however, when he manipulated the experiments in order to arrive at the conclusion he desired. Did he consciously realise that he was doing this? If so, how could he believe or claim that his research was scientific?
In the context of the current discussion, if one believes, consciously or unconsciously, that ESP is impossible in principle, then one will inevitably be drawn to any ‘science’ which claims to disprove it. This seems to be true of Jack Vance, even though he is clearly aware of this possibility. He mentions confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, then preconceived notions: “we start with our beliefs and seek confirming evidence. Guarding against these tendencies is vital. At least, it is vital if we care about knowing what is true”. He doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that the skeptical scientists he so admires are guilty of this, and do not guard against these tendencies. It certainly seemed to apply to Charles Hansel.
Vance says that he “wanted to believe that some people might have psychic powers”, but that he “could not ignore the clear scientific consensus on the topic”. He says that he has read several books on this theme, and says that “the answer was the same in study after study from book after book. They found no evidence that claimed psychic powers were real. They found no evidence that anybody had psychic powers, whether they claimed them or not”.
One wonders which books he is referring to. He doesn’t mention any in the article (although there may be some in the links to the website). Are they possibly ones written by members of CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Claims of the Paranormal, now renamed as The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and its associated publishing house Prometheus Books? I wrote about them here, where I concluded: “By ‘scientific inquiry’ CSICOP does not actually mean an objective examination of the evidence, and a search for truth. They describe themselves as ‘a small scientific and educational organization advocating science and reason’. This seems to be something of a euphemism, however, for it might be more accurate to describe their attitude as ‘pathologically materialist’ ”.
Vance concludes that many people continue to believe in psychic powers despite the evidence. I would respond that people believe in psychic powers because they have experienced them. Once you have had a powerful experience of ESP, you are less likely to worry about what skeptical scientists have concluded in laboratories, what the alleged scientific ‘consensus’ is. His “early foray into science” might perhaps be more accurately called a foray into committed materialism/atheism, which I would also call pathological scepticism, having read some of the Prometheus books.
More to follow.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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Footnotes:
- pat price — remote viewer (remoteviewed.com)
- Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe, HarperOne, 1997, p247
- Science and the Modern World, Free Press, 1967
