[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

On the whole, science has not progressed by moderate changes to existing laws - at least not in physics, and at the level of formalism. That may not necessarily be the way the next time, but it is suggestive.

You're right. For the most part it has advanced by small changes to existing laws -- e.g., modifying the gas laws to take into account the different number of degrees of freedom of movement for diatomic gases.

There have certainly been exceptions. SR was a moderate tweak to existing theory (though conceptually a big change, formally it is just a matter of distinguishing some concepts that were not previously distinguished and throwing in some gammas and the like to adjust the existing equations). GR however, though basically a small extension to SR resulted in some large changes to gravitational theory. QM, is, of course a radical change to the existing formalism. But that is quite rare. Most changes are small -- I think this will take more. The conceptual changes will be huge -- are huge even without a theoretical understanding -- but we may be able to get there without rewriting most of physics.

I think characterising explanations as 'extraphysical' may be missing the point. As I have debated with Paul, accepted physical theories have not all been about explanations, to some extent they have been about formalising non-explanations! Newton's law of gravity gave a formula for the force between two bodies due to gravity, but by saying that this force was mediated by a field, it essentially gave no explanation for the force at all. Likewise, QM declares that the outcome of an experiment involving small numbers of particles will typically be unpredictable.

I think I made the same point a bit before you, using the distinction between a descriptive theory and an explanatory one. Paul was claiming that science is allowed to reject evidence for a phenomenon until there is an explanation for the phenomenon. This clearly has nothing much to do with the way that science has always been conducted.

I guess I envisage a new theory of Ψ/consciousness in which certain aspects of the supposed predictability of the behaviour of physical matter would be transferred to conscious entities. This would be a theory, as you say, where consciousness has a special place in the structure of the universe. Paul objects that such a theory would provide no explanation of consciousness, but that need not necessarily be totally true. Electromagnetism does not explain the existence of charge, but it does formalise that way that it behaves. An explicit theory of consciousness might look rather similar.

That is certainly a possibility, and if one starts with a belief that consciousness has a fundamental causative role then you might give it a high likelihood. But even so, its just speculation. I don't think that it has been established that our sense of free will comes from an irreducible causative agent called "consciousness". So I'm looking elsewhere -- but I wouldn't say that I am by any means certain that with some more evidence I might change my mind (so to speak).

I suspect that any explanation of Ψ by a small modification of existing laws could only take into account a small subset of Ψ phenomena as they seem to manifest themselves. Such a theory would inevitably have to fall back on the usual skeptical arguments - fraud, self delusion, statistical fluke, etc. to discard those phenomena that it could not explain.

Well, lets get our terms straight. NDEs and other OBEs, even if in some sense real and paranormal are not psi, though when they are veridical they include psi phenomena. I do believe that a moderate (not small) change in existing theories may well be enough to explain or at least describe psi. From that standpoint, once we have some idea of whether or not psi is sufficient to explain the veridical aspect in those very rare cases where it has been established, or whether it implies a range of phenomena that encompasses NDEs, homing instinct, self sacrifice of weak herd members, memory, love, creativity or any of the many other phenomena that have been proposed over the years to be explained by psi.

Keep in mind that the number of NDE cases that are not fully explained conventionally are quite small, and those that are not plausibly explainable by psi (not "superpsi", which is a term coined to dismiss the possibility) is even smaller. I am not saying that those cases are not an indication of something beyond the physical (that is a Skeptics game, not a scientists), but I am saying that errors, misunderstandings, etc. do occur so that the very few cases in hand provide only weak evidence for it.