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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  This is a good point.
Many skeptics have already gone though the previous "best" evidence for psi and found serious problems. The previous "best" evidence for psi then fades into obscurity and another "best" evidence then arises.
Why can't psi proponents get together, agree on the best evidence for psi, and simply keep on working on it? |
I don't think that this holds water. As in all fields of science, the experiments become more sophisticated over time and more is learned. Occasionally there are false starts and mistakes are found, but generally there is progress. The existence of new and more sophisticated experiments in no way invalidates the older experiments.
Parapsychologists develop good solid experiments, that by the standards of science are firm solid proofs of something that we label "psi". The experiments are replicated, thoroughly and repeatedly. Skeptics come along and say "the rules of scientific evidence require that for parapsychology, unlike all other scientific fields, there needs to be a single overwhelming experiment that unambiguously proves psi without any conceivable possibility of an ad hoc alternative explanation." Of course, this is unreasonable and impossible (there has never been an individual experiment that cannot be explained away by ad hoc explanations). They then go on to choose a particular experiment and attempt to "debunk" it. Generally there criticisms are either nonsensical or easily refuted. It doesn't matter, because the Skeptics generally ignore any answer to criticisms.
The debate over the ganzfeld is unusual in the history of the debate with Skeptics in that there is some acknowledgment that science is about replication and the overall weight of the evidence. However, please note: Charles Honorton hoped that the auto-ganzfeld could be turned into a utility experiment that could be run and would reliably generate positive results. This property is certainly very useful, but is not a logical requirement for an experiment to be considered valid, and experiments in other fields are not particularly expected to behave this way. Unfortunately, he did not believe that he had reached that point when he lost funding and later died young.
Some people in the field hoped that the ganzfeld had, despite Honorton's belief to the contrary, had reached this stage of development -- or close to it. The criticisms of the ganzfeld amount to a demonstration that this was not the case.
The original series of ganzfeld experiments, including the auto-ganzfeld, and the many replications, still stand as strong, unrefuted evidence for psi. The meticulous quality of the experiment is rarely matched in other fields.
For that matter, there has never been a meaningful refutation of the original Rhine experiments and its many replications. Criticisms like that the subject may have spent hours standing on a chair in a heavily trafficked public hallway peering in a transom, that no one remembers existing, does not exist now and appears on no architectural records, and taking notes, somehow unobserved and unnoticed are hardly substantial (and in any case would apply to only the single experiment that the Skeptic chose to identify as "the" experiment required to be perfect).
I remember when the Aspect experiment came out in physics in the early 80s. I read the report and noticed how much it resembled a parapsychology experiment. However, it was pretty obvious that the report left out far to many details and would never have been accepted for publication in a parapsychology experiment. Even with the missing details supplied in the most positive manner, it would have been easily torn to pieces by Skeptics. Of course, there really were some "edge cases" that were not excluded by the experiment, and there were later experiments that covered these "holes" in the original experiment. Yet this is considered to be one of the most important experiments in QM in the latter half of the 20th century, establishing "incontrovertibly" that the universe works in a way that is incompatible with common-sense notions of realism and determinism (and, no, according to the dominant Copenhagen Interpretation, there is no theory to explain the results, and there is never likely to be one -- only a theory that describes them -- the experiment "disproves" conventional theories on the assumption that it excludes any influence that might explain the contrary results).
One can certainly find some more interesting experiments establishing the reality of psi, and lots of more sophisticated ones. But the early card experiments, as described and analyzed in "Extra-Sensory Perception after 60 years" (first published in 1940), with detailed listings and replies of all criticisms, still stands as strong evidence for psi, unrefuted in all this time.
05-05-2008, 10:51 PM
) , the 'gold standard' method of randomized, double blind trials in conventional medicine may turn out to be the 'tin standard' of the future 
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