Alex,
I liked this podcast, and I was pleased that you dropped the flippant approach, but kept your own monologues - that I think are very relevant - after all, you have by now spent a lot of time studying the reasoning processes of researchers and skeptics in this area.
I thought that was an excellent interview with someone who clearly had a deep understanding of animal behaviour, even though he was not (as far as I could tell) working on 'paranormal' phenomena as such.
Your point about animal emotion being an almost inevitable consequence of evolution was right on the mark. It always used to frustrate me (nothing explicitly to do with the paranormal) that researchers would argue that Occam's razor meant that it was best to assume that only humans (and maybe the great apes) had consciousness. I remember some researchers actually used the 'definition' of consciousness as 'self awareness' to justify the claim that only those few animals that could recognise themselves in a mirror were conscious!
I do hope you continue to pop in the odd podcast like that - it helps to keep this place alive!
I am curious - how easy is it to find dogs that show potential Ψ-ability - I got the feeling from odd remarks of yours that maybe that was proving difficult.
David  |