[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

If you begin to suspect - with evidence - that a great deal of good parapsychological evidence has been distorted, that is a valid reason to at least doubt the orthodox position - not least, because if parapsychology experiments could be debunked by fair methods, critics would do it that way.

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Clearly given any of these dog experiments, you have to establish what the dog does when it is waiting. If this were one isolated video, or if the dog always did something different when it was waiting, your criticism would have great force, as it is, it doesn't.

It's the only video that Alex has shown and is presumably the "best". He was pretty vague about how reproducible it is. Is is important to establish a criterion for judging the success of a trial and stick to it. It is fair enough to do some exploratory work first to try to work out what the signal is but at that point you've identified the signal by looking at what the dog is doing at the appropriate time and there will be by necessity be a correlation.

Unlike you, I don't think Alex wants to obtain a false result by not tightening the controls. However, as he has pointed out, as in any experiment, you have to tighten the controls in an intelligent way so as not to simply eliminate the signal real or false.

I don't think that Alex is doing this intentionally. I do think he is begging the question by assuming that the alleged psychic effect is influenced by the presence or absence of humans.

As I keep pointing out to you, whatever the mechanism may be, there is a real effect here - large numbers of dog and cat owners have observed this, sometimes fortuitously in way that are very hard to explain in conventional ways. I think that is why we approach these results in such different ways - you really assume they are some sort of fluke - I am pretty sure there is something real (and interesting) to explain.

A real effect does not mean that there is a paranormal explanation. It is an error to assume that the explanation must be "morphic resonance" or "telepathy". There are many possible natural explanations. The lack of interest in natural explanations on the part of "psi" proponents is very revealling.

The hypothesis that humans inadvertently give the dog clues about when the owner is coming home can be tested. You could look at the dog's performance with and without humans present. Alex doesn't like this idea, so you could do trials where the humans knows when the owner is coming home and when they don't. Does the dog perform better when the human knows when the owner is coming home? If so then this supports the theory that the humans are providing clues and you've discovered something interesting. If not then you can rule this explanation out. Either way you've learnt something.