Layers of skepticism

[David Bailey]

As I see it, the 'conventional' sceptical agenda operates at a whole series of levels - each of which compounds a distortion of the facts.

1) Scientists contemplating research in PSI must think very carefully if they wish to jeopardize their entire career. Several sceptical speakers on these podcasts have suggested that people would flock to research a genuine PSI effect - who are they kidding?

2) Many conventional experiments could easily be modified to investigate PSI effects, but are not. For example, if you had a grant from a medical charity to study brain scans of people subjected to particular stimuli, would you risk recording before the stimuli was presented? If you did, and exposed evidence for presentiment, you lab would instantly be mired in controversy, and possibly lose its grant.

3) Proponents of a purely materialistic explanation try to present their ideas as common sense, yet they ultimately involve equating consciousness with the operation of a (biochemical) machine. How do you make a machine conscious - nobody knows! How would you test a claim that some machine were conscious - nobody knows. In effect some scientists deny the existence of consciousness - yet they continue to rely on their own copy to write their next paper or book! If at least the sceptics would acknowledge that there are deep puzzles in this area whichever side you take, I would feel happier. Promoting the idea that they are simply proposing a 'common sense' approach just seems dishonest to me.

4) Some sceptics seem to resort to blatant dishonesty to make their case. Brian Josephson (Nobel Prize for physics) catalogs some of these on his website. For example:

Scientists use Media for Propaganda

see also

Dialogues and Controversies - Controversies - Index

5) When a PSI-related paper is prepared for publication, peer reviewers use the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" doctrine to apply a level of 'rigour' that would eliminate almost all conventional scientific papers. For example, how many conventional scientific papers are reviewed on the basis that the researcher is potentially fraudulent - even though a bad apple turns up sometimes. This level of rigour obviously stifles a lot of research by making it more expensive and time consuming to conduct.

6) Some chemicals, when ingested, seem to reveal other realities. Needless to say, these are mostly illegal. A few researchers are permitted to do work in this area, but could any of them risk mentioning PSI in their proposals or papers?

7) Scientists do not, on the whole, possess the tough skins of politicians. However if they stray even slightly into the consciousness debate, they are subjected to incredible personal abuse. For example, try looking up some of the things that have been said about the theoretical physicist Roger Penrose after he wrote "The Emporer's new mind", and "Shadows of the Mind". These books never even mention PSI, but suggest that consciousness is not well explained as an "emergent phenomenon" and requires some new physics.

I would argue that taken together, all the above factors multiply together to create a grossly distorted view of the world.

David