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Lively debate between biologist Rupert Sheldrake and telepathy skeptic Richard Wiseman reveals wide rift between skeptics and psi proponents
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a spirited debate between biologist, author, and telepathy researcher, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and noted researcher of anomalous psychology, and parapsychology skeptic, Dr. Richard Wiseman. During the 90-minute episode Sheldrake and Wiseman discuss the scientific evidence for telepathy and other psi phenomena.
The debate covers a range of topics, but according to moderator Alex Tsakiris, the real friction began after the debate ended, “During the debate, Dr. Wiseman appeared eager to participate in collaborative research with parapsychologists. He went to great lengths explaining why skeptics and psi proponents should team-up on experiments of telepathy and other psi phenomena. But during an email exchange following the debate (published on the Skeptiko website), his stance took a radical change.”
According to Tsakiris, Wiseman stonewalled attempts to create a skeptics/proponents research forum, “I contacted three very prominent psi researchers and convinced them to take Wiseman up on his offer. They agree, but Wiseman would not. He made various demands aimed at agitating the other researchers, and even balked at a mere one-hour initial dialog. I was stunned, especially since I offered to fund the research.”
The discussion began with Professor Richard Wiseman offering a defense for scientific skepticism regarding psi phenomena, “In terms of my own research, some of it has looked at the notion that certain individuals possessing very strong psychic abilities, the mediums and the psychics and so on, and I’m very, very skeptical about that data. I don’t think it shows anything particularly remarkable in terms of psychic ability going on. And then I’ve done a small amount of work, although other people have done a lot more, into the notion that psi is a more subtle signal. There, I’m fairly skeptical about the literature. I certainly wouldn’t want to argue the case that psi definitely exists on the basis of that literature.”
But Sheldrake challenged the idea of relegating telepathy and other psi phenomena to the fringes of science, “I just want to go back a bit to what Richard called the Humian argument against miracles. Hume’s argument against miracles was that miracles are extremely rare and it’s more likely that people have been lying about them than that they actually happened. They so defy the common experience of humanity. Now, I think the argument is exactly reversed when it comes to phenomena like telepathy. They’re not extremely rare. Whether it’s 30 percent, 50 percent, 70 percent of the population who have had them, the details don’t matter. The point is these things are very common. Hume’s argument was that commonsense, the kind of common experience of the bulk of humanity, is what gives credence to something. So I think it’s completely inappropriate to apply an argument against miracles to phenomena which happen on an everyday basis to large numbers of people.”
Next, the discussion examined the institution of science itself. Wiseman was asked to defend his statement, “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that [psi] is proven. That begs the question do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal?”.
In defense of this, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” argument, Wiseman stated, “I think that parapsychologists by not far from 100 years of research have failed to come up with that level of evidence. It’s not to say they couldn’t in the future, but to me there just hasn’t been the level of progress that you would expect given the amount of work that’s been put in… that strength of evidence simply isn’t there.”
To which Sheldrake responded, “Again, I come back to the fact that what we’re dealing with here is an ideological issue. I mean, what Richard calls mainstream science and there’s a kind of materialistic faith that many scientists have, at least in public. Many of them in private have telepathic experiences and have quite different views.
Nevertheless, he’s right. There is a kind of materialistic ethos in science. I think that itself is something we need to question and look at because it leads to an extraordinary blindness. He said that if you said there’s a car outside, you wouldn’t need to look. If you said there’s a spaceship, you would, because that’s an incredible claim. So it’s okay for cosmologists to claim there are entire universes out there, a whole lot of universes, not just one, but trillions. No one bothers to look. The reason that gets past the filters is it doesn’t overturn a particular ideology. What’s at stake is not science itself but ideology.”
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Alex Tsakiris: We have a very special live dialogue today between Dr. Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at University of Herefordshire in the UK. In addition to his job there at the university, Dr. Wiseman, as many of you know, is also a parapsychology skeptic and an author of many popular books such as Quirkology, which explores the quirky way our mind works.
Skeptic’s Million Dollar Challenge To Be More Open and Transparent Says JREF President, D.J. Grothe
Join Skepitko host Alex Tsakiris for a 90-minute interview with journalist, skeptic, and president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, D.J. Grothe. During the interview Grothe discusses the science of skepticism, evidence for survival of consciousness, what constitutes “extraordinary proof”, and changes to the JREF Million Dollar Challenge.
“If some people conceive of the Million Dollar Challenge as the way science works, in other words, ‘to advance our scientific understanding in this field, be challenged for a million dollars’… well, science is not a cage match, despite the fact that you put some big personality scientists in a room and they fight, science doesn’t work that way.
The Million Dollar Challenge is done in the spirit of science. It’s done looking at the evidence, but it is a vehicle of a non-profit educational foundation to raise public consciousness and awareness about these important questions”, Grothe said.
Grothe also discussed ways to make the challenge of paranormal and supernatural claims more open and transparent, “I’m proud of the transparency so far and we want there to be even more transparency in the following ways. The claimants, when they apply, in short order - although I’m kind of letting the cat out of the bag - in the months ahead we want to have a running public display of all the claimants and the progress of their challenges and their applications.”
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by someone whose skills as a broadcaster, journalist, and activist I greatly admire. Formerly the host of Point of Inquiry, D.J. Grothe stood toe-to-toe with Nobel Prize winners, leading public intellectuals, and scores and scores of best-selling authors. He not only held his own, but he brought a depth and a command of the topics that was, well, was pretty darned impressive.
The most comprehensive research into near-death experience deals a kill shot to skeptics and aims to change how science views the afterlife.
Science has studied the near-death experience for more than 20 years. Most research has concluded NDEs are real and unexplainable, but scientists have been slow to accept consciousness beyond death. A new scientific study by Jeffrey Long, M. D. may change that. The research compiled in his new book, Evidence of the Afterlife, represents the largest, most comprehensive study of near-death experience and according to the study’s author is, “a real game-changer”.
Dr. Long explains, “we looked at nine lines of evidence that indicate the reality of near-death experiences and their consistent message of an afterlife. With each of these lines of evidence we carefully reviewed all prior scholarly research on the subject and made our contributions with our original research… from my point of view, the scientific term is compelling, but you can put it another way — the nine lines of evidence that I present is proof of the reality of near-death experiences.”
The conclusions of Dr. Long’s research are paradigm smashing for near-death experience skeptics who’ve argued that limited brain functioning may explain NDEs. “What near-death experiencers see correlates to their time of cardiac arrest and it is almost uniformly accurate in every detail. That pretty much refutes the possibility that these could be illusionary fragments, or unreal memories associated with hypoxia, chemicals, REM intrusion, anything that could cause brain dysfunction”, Dr. Long stated.
“I looked at over 280 near-death experiences that had out-of-body observations of Earthly ongoing events… If near-death experiences were just fragments of memory, unrealistic remembrances of a time approaching unconsciousness or returning from unconsciousness, there is no chance that the observations would have a high percent of completely accurate observations. They’d be dream-like or hallucinations. But 98% of them were entirely realistic… In fact, these observations of Earthly ongoing events often include observations of things that would be impossible for them to be aware of with any sensory function from their physical body. For example, they can see the tops of buildings. They can see far away. In my study over 60 of these near-death experiencers later went back and independently attempted to verify what they saw in the out-of-body state. Every single one of these over 60 near-death experiencers that reported checking or verifying their own observations found that they were absolutely correct in every detail.”, Dr. Long said.
While some near-death experience researchers have been reluctant to make the leap from NDEs to proof of the afterlife, Dr. Long is convinced by his research findings, “I’ve gone over every skeptic argument I can get my hands on. At the end of the day, I have no doubt in my mind near-death experience is for real. It’s a profound and reassuring message that we all have an afterlife. Every single one of us. And it’s wonderful. It is probably the greatest thrill of my life to be able to carry forward that important message to the world. I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t absolutely convinced that it’s correct.”
The conclusions of this research will be controversial, but Dr. Long stands ready to take on the critics, “I would be delighted to debate any near-death experience skeptic, any time, any place, on any media, as long as they’re scholarly, well informed, and as long as it can be a very high-level, intellectual debate.”
Jeffrey Long, M.D., is a physician practicing the specialty of radiation oncology (use of radiation to treat cancer) in Houma, Louisiana. Dr. Long has served on the Board of Directors of IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies), and is actively involved in NDE research. His book, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperCollins), was published in 2010.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on today’s show I have an interview with Dr. Jeff Long, author of, Evidence of the Afterlife. As you’ll hear, Dr. Long is probably one of the most qualified near-death experience researchers. He’s just compiled a huge body of that research into this book. This guy delivers the goods. I had a chance to interview him a few months ago for the documentary film that I’ve told some of you about that we’re putting together. He’s on top of his game. A medical doctor, well qualified in the field of medicine; also a very accomplished researcher.
Near-death experience skeptic, Dr. Kevin Nelson says the burden of proof is on experiencers to show their experiences are real.
We all dream, but do we know when we’re dreaming? Recent research from Dr. Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky suggests that near-death experience is akin to dreaming, and uses the same rapid eye movement mechanism associated with sleep. In a recent interview on Sketiko.com, Dr. Nelson defends this controversial research that contradicts the accounts of thousands of near-death experiencers:
Dr. Kevin Nelson: Then you ask how can we have experiences with a flat EEG? My question to you is, that’s an extraordinary claim. Where is the data that says the experience that they later remembered actually happened at the time the EEG was flat?
Alex Tsakiris: Penny Sartori’s research, where she went and interviewed people about their resuscitation process and found that people who have a near-death experience are much more accurate in reporting the specific events that go on during resuscitation, is pretty good, solid research that backs up what so many of the near-death experiencers say, which is that this was…
Dr. Kevin Nelson: Where’s the data?
Alex Tsakiris: Well, that’s data. I mean, if you ask people…
Dr. Kevin Nelson: No, what is her data?
Alex Tsakiris: Her data is that they’re statistically significantly more likely to recount the…
Dr. Kevin Nelson: No, that’s her conclusion. What’s her data?
Alex Tsakiris: Her data is the number of events in the resuscitation process that they’re able to recall. That’s the data.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko, I’m going to dig into the near-death experience research a little bit further. It’s just fascinating to me. Every time I turn over a new stone, it gets more and more interesting.
The stone I was looking to turn over today came about when I was Googling near-death experience research. What pops up over and over again in the most popular mainstream science kind of publications like CNN Health or CBS Science News, Time Magazine, these folks who just touch on this, what pops up over and over again is some research that was done a couple years ago by this guy at the University of Kentucky named Kevin Nelson. You’re going to hear from him today. The way CNN summed up his research is as follows:
“Nelson thinks that near-death experiences are a part of the dream mechanism and that the person having the experience is in a REM (rapid eye movement) state.”
Biologist, and noted telepathy researcher, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is developing an automated telephone telepathy system and is looking for qualified interns to help.
Despite the ever increasing pace of modern life many of us experience brief glimpses of a reality just beyond our grasp. One such example is the experience of hearing the phone ring and having an unexplainable sense of knowing who is calling. The phenomenon has been called telephone telepathy by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
Sheldrake, a former Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and current director of the Perrott-Warrick project, has developed a automated system for testing the telephone telepathy phenomenon in the U.K. “The experiments we’ve run in Britain have yielded impressive results, but the new telephone telepathy system we’re developing will allow us to take these tests to the next level and further investigate this interesting phenomenon throughout the U.S. and Canada.”
Sheldrake continued, “We’re in need of talented people with technical and project management experience who can assist in bringing this web-based system to completion. It’s a chance for someone to join a research project that has a chance to fundamentally change long held scientific beliefs about our connection to one and other… it’s very exciting.”
For information on the internship opportunities with Dr. Sheldrake’s telephone telepathy project please email intern@telepathyexperiment.com.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko I have another brief update for you.
If you recall, on the last episode of Skeptiko, we talked a little bit about the Global Consciousness Project and how we’ve gotten involved with that a little bit. One of the other projects that regular listeners will know that we’ve been involved with for a long time is some of the research of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Now as many of you know, Dr. Sheldrake is a long-time friend of the Skeptiko show and was actually one of our first guests on Skeptiko and has been on a couple times since.
Neurologist and University of Toledo Neuroscience Researcher, Dr. John Greenfield considers the EEG data from patients with near death experience (NDE).
For near death experience skeptics, medical evidence of a flat EEG during an out of body experience has always been a stumbling block. After all, a brain dead patient can’t hallucinate. But, does a flat EEG really mean no brain activity? NDE doubters have claimed activity deep inside the brain, beyond the reach of EEG instruments, must account for the complex “realer than real” experiences reported by those who briefly pass into the afterlife. Now, University of Toledo Neuroscience researcher, and EEG expert, Dr. John Greenfield explains why this claim doesn’t hold up.
“It’s very unlikely that a hypoperfused brain [someone with no blood flow to the brain], with no evidence of electrical activity could generate NDEs. Human studies as well as animal studies have typically shown very little brain perfusion [blood flow] or glucose utilization when the EEG is flat. There are deep brain areas involved in generating memories that might still operate at some very reduced level during cardiac arrest, but of course any subcortically generated activity can’t be brought to consciousness without at least one functioning cerebral hemisphere. So even if there were some way that NDEs were generated during the hypoxic state [while the brain is shut off from oxygen], you would not experience them until reperfusion [blood flow] allowed you to dream them or wake up and talk about them”, Greenfield stated.
NDE Researcher, Dr. Penny Sartori, examines memories of resuscitation by patients suffering cardiac arrest.
With near death experience cases making there way into the, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Psychiatry, and other major medical journals, NDE doubters have looked to the timing of patient memories as a way of explaining this unexplainable phenomena. If memories of out of body travel, and all embracing love occur after ones brush with death, NDEs may still fit within our medical science worldview.
The timing of NDE memories is the research question Dr. Penny Sartori sought to answer, “I worked in the intensive care unit and because of the nature of my job, of course, I’d come across a lot of death. And of course makes you wonder what happens when we die. For five years I gathered data, where I spoke to patients in the intensive care unit and particularly patients who’d had a cardiac arrest. When these patients revived, as soon as they were medically fit, I approached them and asked the simple question, ‘Did you have any memory of the time that you were unconscious?’”
“For the people who had a near-death experience and out of body experience [their recollection of resuscitation] was really quite accurate and I decided then to ask the control group, the people who’d had a cardiac arrest but had no recollection of anything at all. I asked them if they would reenact their resuscitation scenario and tell me what they thought that we had done to resuscitate them. And what I found is that many of the patients couldn’t even guess as to what we’d done. They had no idea at all. And then some of them did make guesses, but these were based on TV hospital dramas that they’d seen. I found that what they reported was widely inaccurate. So there was a stark contrast really in the very accurate out of body experiences reported and then the guesses that the control group had made.”, Dr. Sartori reported.
While research like this may never be enough to convince dogmatic skeptics, the medical evidence for near death experience continues to challenge us to reexamine our beliefs about what lies beyond death.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and I want to start by thanking those of you who’ve contacted me directly since the last episode of Skeptiko and have joined me on Facebook or joined me on Twitter. It’s been great to get to know you, to dialogue a little bit, and I hope we can keep that going.
Neuroscience Researcher and Laurentian University professor, Dr. Michael Persinger, demonstrates telepathy under laboratory conditions.
Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles. Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980’s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states.
Now, Persinger has discovered the same type of brain stimulation can create metal states conducive to human telepathy. “What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”
While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types. They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.”
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and before we get started with today’s interview, and a very fascinating interview it is with Dr. Michael Persinger, I’m going to take a minute and invite you to connect - connect with this show, Skeptiko, and with me personally.
Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. “I’d known about Rupert Sheldrake and I found him very interesting”, Phillips said.
Although skeptical of Sheldrake’s theories, Phillips focused on how Sheldrake was being judged, “I wanted to be impartial as to whether he was right or wrong and instead go on and look at whether he’d been treated fairly.”
What he discovered surprised him. Stevens found that despite an unblemished academic record and a research fellowship at the Royal Society, Sheldrake faced public scorn from colleagues for publishing his theory of morphic fields which suggests a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. “There was a review in the journal, Nature in which the editor, John Maddox said that the book, A New Science of Life, should be burned”, Stevens said. “You’d think that that sort of attitude towards what was just a theory would be out of date and would be seen as you know, unscientific. But in fact, it damaged Sheldrake’s career, not John Maddox’s career.”
But the biggest surprise came when Stevens looked at Sheldrake’s collaboration with skeptics like Dr. Richard Wiseman. According to Stevens Wiseman failed to follow normal procedures scientists use when collaborating and reporting their results.
“Wiseman actually did repeats of Sheldrake’s results. He never denied this, but he only admitted it, I think, ten years later. I mean, in normal experiments, if you repeat someone’s results, you say it. And there didn’t seem to be any reason for him not to say, ‘I’ve repeated his results. These experiments work. Sheldrake wasn’t wrong.’ And you know what? Sheldrake was a Research Fellow at the Royal Society. I would hope that when he has some experiments and tests things he’d get it right because he’s from one of the best institutions of science in Britain and in the world. So I really don’t know why Wiseman took so long just to say, ‘Yes, the patterns in Sheldrake’s works were repeated in my own.’”, said Stevens.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko we’re going to talk about science and skepticism. You know, a few months ago I received an e-mail from a gentleman in the UK who was completing his master’s dissertation on the philosophy of science. He had chosen Rupert Sheldrake as the person that he was going to profile as part of his dissertation. I had done a couple of interviews with Dr. Sheldrake, as well as delved into the research that he had done with skeptic Richard Wiseman, who’s a professor in the UK as well.
Join Host Alex Tsakiris for a discussion with remote viewer and former U.S. Army psychic spy, retired Major Paul H. Smith. The hour long interview explores the science of remote viewing portrayed in the film, The Men Who Stare at Goats and role Major Smith played in the StarGate project.
Major (Retired) Paul H. Smith served for seven years in the government’s remote viewing psychic espionage program at Ft. Meade, MD. He is one of only a handful of government personnel to be personally trained in remote viewing by Ingo Swann at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He has a MS from the Defense Intelligence College, and is currently completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Texas.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, remote viewer and retired psychic spy, Major Paul H. Smith.
“Ronson himself is on record that he only cared about the people, not about the phenomena, but that’s because as I think he said on your interview, that he didn’t actually believe in the phenomenon. And he said something about he hadn’t seen any evidence that convinced him, but I know I’m paraphrasing here. I’m not exactly sure how he said it, but he said that he hadn’t seen any evidence that convinced him. In fact, kind of just the opposite. Well the fact is, he never saw any of the evidence. He never looked into the evidence.
You know, he might have listened to some of the stories but he of course, is able to dismiss those because when we did tell him credible things - now he interviewed me at length at the Remote Viewing Conference and I tried to present some real bottom-line, fundamental — this is how it really was, these are the kind of things that we did - that kind of stuff. None of that shows up in the book. None of that shows up anywhere, which just to me, that’s irresponsible. “
Join Host Alex Tsakiris for a discussion with The Men Who Stare at Goats author, Jon Ronson. The 35-minute interview explores the science of remote viewing portrayed in the film, and whether skepticism is warranted.
Jon Ronson is a British journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. Ronson has a distinctive self-deprecating reporting style, which incorporates aspects of Gonzo journalism while skeptically exploring quirky characters.
Ronson’s third book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, has been turned into a major motion picture starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson.
“They stuck a bunch of soldiers in a room at Fort Meade in Maryland, including some who’ve gone on to become quite famous paranormal buffs like Ed Dames and Dermot Monocle and Ingo Swann and so on, and they kind of stuck them in a room and told them to be psychic. And some of them tried to be psychic for like 20 years and they do point to some remote viewing successes, but even if they did manage to harness psychic powers which you know, I suspect they probably didn’t, but even if they did, there was still nothing the military could do with it.”
Announcer: Stay with us for Skeptiko.
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode I have a very interesting interview with the author and really main character behind the movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson.
Of course, I was more interested in the science behind the movie and the skeptical spin on it. I mean, haven’t people like Hal Puthoff and Steven Schwartz established that remote viewing really works and that the military should be interested in it? So we had a chance to talk about that and a number of other of Jon’s projects. And stick around for the end of the interview and I’ll tell you about a little bit of the additional research I did and some of the follow-up e-mail exchange I had with Jon. Here’s my dialogue with Jon Ronson.
Update on the Skeptiko’s Summer Vacation and my non-interview with mentalist Mark Edward.
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Read it: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. I hadn’t really planned on doing this little update here, but I was visiting the Skeptiko Forum which I haven’t been visiting quite as often lately, and I read some posts that I just thought I really need to give some attention to and update folks on a couple of things.
First thing I guess I have to explain is why I haven’t been quite as active with Skeptiko over the summer and it’s certainly not been because I’ve lost interest, but a couple things are going on and very exciting things. First, there was just the issue of summer. Summer for folks like us who have four kids and two kids visiting from Latvia can be a little bit busy, and it was for us. I just didn’t have time to do a whole lot of Skeptiko stuff. Read the rest of this entry »
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer.
Dr. Phil Plait: My initial reaction to what you’re saying is strong disagreement with what you’re saying. First of all, science is not a single track. It’s not saying let’s look for a God gene to explain everything. There are psychologists, there are researchers who’ve gone out and researched this sort of thing. Why do people believe in some things?
There are people who study brain physiology, try to figure this kind of stuff out. If – there are reasons we speak. There are reasons we communicate. There are reasons our hands work the way they do. And it all ties into the function of the brain. And there are people who are in there looking at sort of the brain-mind connection.
Announcer: Stay with us for Skeptiko.
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode I have an interview – quite a long interview – with Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. Now in the course of this interview you’ll hear me several times talk about finding a skeptic to follow-up on the Global Consciousness Project and to kind of face off with the data and with me on that.
And I have followed up with Phil on that, but I’d also like to follow-up with you, the Skeptiko audience, find someone, if you’re skeptical, who you think can do a good job of debunking or just countering the claims of the Global Consciousness Project. We’d love to have them on. Read the rest of this entry »
Guest: R. Craig Hogan, author of Your Eternal Self claims studies unmistakably point to the finding that the mind is separate from the brain.
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Guest: Roger Nelson, formally of Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab, joins Alex Tsakiris to discuss how skeptics view the Global Consciousness Project. The episode includes email excerpts from Dr. Dean Radin.
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THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and this episode of Skeptiko is Part Two of my examination of the Global Consciousness Project.
You’ll recall on Part One we had an interview with skeptic Brian Dunning, host of Skeptoid, and we spent a good deal of the time talking about the Global Consciousness Project. It stirred up quite a debate between us about Brian’s skeptical analysis of that work.
So after that interview I really wanted to drill into this, because I really thought that Brian had just made some really obvious mistakes in his analysis. I e-mailed Dean Radin and he was nice enough to get back to me with this response. I want to read to you that e-mail. “I recently completed an interview with Brian Dunning of Skeptoid. We discussed the Global Consciousness Project and Brian’s criticisms. Even with my limited understanding of this research, it seems obvious he’s made some errors in his analysis. “Then I provided him a list of Brian’s criticisms of the Global Consciousness Project and I pulled that right off of the Skeptoid transcript from this episode. I didn’t edit anything into what Brian had to say there.
Here’s Dean’s response. “I’m copying this to Roger (Dr. Roger Nelson at Princeton and he introduces me by way of this e-mail). He’s the prime mover behind the Global Consciousness Project.” Then he goes on to say, “My quick responses, which Roger can amplify on, as could anyone if they bothered to study the Global Consciousness Project Web site,” and then he’s going to give those responses and I’m going to go into those in a minute. I have to say that I really dug into the Global Consciousness Project and he’s completely correct. Everything is right there, very, very concrete, spelled out quite succinctly.
Here are some of Dr. Radin’s specific responses to Brian Dunning’s criticism. The first criticism was that the Global Consciousness Project doesn’t define what event qualifies as significant. Dr. Radin actually sent me a paper that he wrote and published this on the Skeptiko site and you can find a link to it. He goes through in detail the criteria that they used. Again, as we talked about, some of the events that they pick are actually scheduled in advance, some of them are picked retrospectively. Even the ones that are picked retrospectively, they have a clearly defined way that they define what those events are.
Second criticism. They don’t define what type of effect in the data constitutes a result. Dr. Radin’s response is that the statistical outcomes are very precisely defined. You’ll hear more about that later but that’s exactly the case. They are completely, in very standard, well-understood terms, defined beforehand.
Going on to some of those other criticisms. “The analysis is not blinded in any way. When something happens they look at their data and then find patterns”, this is Brian Dunning’s criticism. Dr. Radin’s response, “All the data are freely available for anyone to blindly re-analyze.” Think about that for a minute. So the criticism is, hey, they don’t blind themselves to the analysis beforehand. His response is, the data’s there, ten years worth of data, go back and re-analyze it any way and show us where the problem is.
Dr. Radin goes on to say, “No skeptic has attempted to do this to my knowledge. In any case, several of us have independently re-analyzed certain events like 911 and we get the exact same result.”
Next. They don’t look for alternative causes in the data anomalies, sunspots, cell phones, etc. Dr. Radin’s response, “False. Much effort has gone into looking for alternative causes including solar and geophysical. Also, the random number generators are specifically designed to be impervious to mundane influences like electromagnetic signals and fields.”
Next criticism. They make claims of specific numbers for how they beat chance. Clearly it’s impossible to have meaningful metrics, given the lack of standards for scoring and choosing events. Dr. Radin’s response, “Not just false, stupid. Chance expectations are clearly defined in the actual data and actual results are significant, far beyond chance.” Again, he’s being very blunt there, but there’s really no way around it when you look at the data.
And then finally, they make no attempts to falsify their theory. This is really just a repeat of the point made earlier, and he points out that he’s already addressed that.
So with this in mind, I dug into the Global Consciousness Project Web site, read a lot, read their very excellent Frequently Asked Questions, and at that point I was really incensed. [Laughs] It was just another example to me of how skeptical analysis, critical thinking on their part, falls way, way short of their purported goals.
So, I was able to schedule an interview with Dr. Roger Nelson from Princeton University. We had a chance to talk more about the Global Consciousness Project and some of the criticism that it’s received and some of the ways that he’s dealt with that and really controlled for that inside of his experiment. Here’s that interview.
Alex Tsakiris: It kind of galls me that you have to even have to respond to some of this criticism. I think it’s inappropriate for you and folks like Dr. Radin to continuously have to engage these skeptics, yet they have a lot of sway, they get a lot of media attention. I really do feel like it’s beneath you, but I feel like it’s not beneath me.
Dr. Roger Nelson: [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: So, I’d like to get in there and say, hey, where’s the critical thinking that you always talk about?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Yeah, really. [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: Why aren’t you applying it to your own analysis?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Right. I totally agree with you and on the other hand, some of us, and maybe Dean and I are both pretty good examples, respond to intelligent and informed skeptics, but we tend - I’ll speak for myself - pretty much ignore the completely - I don’t know, where do they come from? People who imagine they know things, but absolutely know nothing about what’s being done, or what it might mean, or how statistics works. Or anything else that you have to know in order to understand this kind of work.
We’re right at the edge of what we know about and we understand. That means we have to be especially careful, otherwise we’d make mistakes that make it look like something’s there when there isn’t anything. So we’re very much educated by the quality skeptic people who pay attention and try to understand what’s happening and say, “Did you think of this?” That’s another kind of matter altogether. We’re hugely grateful to people like that who will take the time, learn what’s going on, and then if there are still questions, ask them.
Alex Tsakiris: I just have to interject because I’ve been at this little Skeptiko thing which just kind of started as my own project to kind of understand whether the skeptical side of the argument really did have any merit. I have to say over the last two years I’ve come more and more to the opinion that that open-minded skeptic that you’re talking about doesn’t really exist. I mean, maybe so. They are so few and far between.
The folks who are even put forth as being the most scholarly, the most academically well-credentialed, Richard Wiseman, Michael Shermer. These people are making huge, obvious, logical errors, and when you point them out, they just refuse to acknowledge it.
I look at the criticism that you’ve received from the Global Consciousness Project, and buried in there are some little tidbits of perhaps valid criticism, but they’re always wound up in this ball of nonsense and clearly inappropriate sideshow debates that it’s really hard for me. I don’t see it. I don’t see the honest skeptic who’s really saying, “Gee, let’s figure this out. Let’s sit down arm-in-arm and really figure out what’s going on here.” I don’t know. Do you really encounter those folks?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Well, you’re really quite right. In my experience, they’re rare. Yes, I have encountered a few, mostly years ago, but rather recently in a guy named Jeff Scargle who I think may be blocked from ever believing this is real. But at least what he does is look at the situation and say, “You’re using an exclusive XOR to remove bias from your data,” and he says, “That means you are removing any possibility of affecting your data.” He says, “You’re throwing out the baby with the bath water, ” and so forth in that vein.
The problem is that the data that we collect actually showed changes in spite of throwing out the baby with the bath water. So that means that his background of assumptions is wrong. But still, he’s asking a serious question which results in us stirring the pot a little deeper, trying to find out well, if his idea has merit at all, if he’s even half right, then maybe we are throwing half the baby out with the bath water. Let’s see what would happen if we try to understand how something could possibly get through the XOR.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s take that example, because I read Scargle’s paper and one thing that I pointed out to Brian Dunning, who I had this conversation with, who is a skeptic and publishes a very popular skeptical blog and podcast called Skeptoid. In part of the dialogue he had referenced Scargle’s paper so I went and looked at Scargle’s paper.
First thing, I need to kind of re-emphasize is that Scargle’s paper is published right alongside your paper and Radin’s paper in The Journal of Scientific Exploration. So sometimes when skeptics call out this paper as some kind of criticism, it seems to me like a pretty fair scientific debate. Everyone’s talking to each other, everyone’s publishing in the same journal, and everyone’s trying to figure out the truth.
Dr. Roger Nelson: Yes.
Alex Tsakiris: So that’s point Number One. Point Number Two, I read Scargle’s paper and I have to say personally, I think you’re being a little bit too generous.
Dr. Roger Nelson: [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: He seems to be nipping at your heels on some minor, minor stuff. The XOR stuff is really interesting, but the logic that he applies to why this is such a huge oversight is kind of strange, too. It’s this, oh, you guys claim that there’s this consciousness effect. Aren’t you eliminating it by XORing it out? The obvious argument to that is, well, what you just said. Perhaps some is being eliminated but still there is a lot there to look at. I don’t see that as a real substantive claim.
Taking that all aside, here’s what I’d like to ask. What’s been the follow-up to that? Has Scargle come back? Has he collaborated? Has he retracted any bit on his stance or his position, or has he just gone away?
Dr. Roger Nelson: He has not retracted anything. In fact, because I kind of present him as a reasonable skeptic, he gets interviewed because I tell people who are interviewing me from NBC or whatever, they will want to know who can they talk to who’s a reasonable skeptic. So I give them Scargle’s name. He appears in one interview saying after things have been explained, how it all works and so forth, he says, “Well, unusual things will happen in random data. And so if you look long enough, you’re going to find something unusual.”
So I get to respond to that in the interview saying, “All right, that’s true, but what we show in the data and the whole experiment is that the likelihood of this particular unusual thing happening is on the order of one in a million or some other large number.” So it becomes, I guess, your point is manifest in what he does in that. Now he’s not talking about XOR, he’s saying or implying at least, that we’re picking out the unusual bits and saying, “See? Here’s something unusual.” Which is, of course, not what we do.
Alex Tsakiris: Right. And there’s even less room for him to stand on that argument of data mining. I think that’s just an outrageous claim for a serious scientist to make. In particular, all he has to do is separate the A priority events, right? As you’ve pointed out, and I have to say, if someone really takes the time to read your Web site, there is a tremendous amount of data there and there’s also a very excellent Frequently Asked Questions section that I think addresses every claim that I’ve ever heard a skeptic make. Do you want to talk a little bit about prospective events versus retrospective events?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Right, we do, as you say, have a pretty well-defined, formal analytical series. That is, we have a kind of general hypothesis that is open enough so that we aren’t stuck asking, what did this hour look like, or what does this particular kind of event look like? In other words, it allows us the general hypothesis says, there will be structure in our data corresponding to great events in the world. You can add things like global, or you can say, importance to human, or whatever, but that’s the general notion.
Now, that’s so general that people complain, well, you don’t really have a hypothesis to test. So what we do, is instantiate that general hypothesis in very specific terms. Because of the generality we can make a test hypothesis that says, this four-hour period or this 24-hour period will show deviations from expectation because there is a particular event we’ve identified from maybe ahead of time or from news reports.
Then we can specify furthermore the statistical tests that will be used. Then we have a completely formal, rigorous test of a very specific hypothesis that’s a sub-class of the general hypothesis. We do that repeatedly. We’re doing what amounts to a replication experiment. One experiment after another, after another. We now have 280-some, approaching 300 formal, rigorous experiments, all of which are designed to test this general notion expressed in the overall hypothesis.
Alex Tsakiris: There’s a couple of points that I just want to pull out and kind of clarify, maybe in simpler terms. One thing, this whole idea of there lacking a theory, I think that’s just ridiculous. A couple of things I want to point out. One is, there is an established theory in physics, a fundamental theory that there shouldn’t be any structure to random data. So, if you’re doing nothing else other than testing the validity of that theory, that’s a pretty fundamental kind of physics thing to do.
Dr. Roger Nelson: Right. You’re right. There are a couple of implications or results that have nothing to do with this so-fearsome notion of global consciousness that a lot of people protest, that have to do really, as you say, with fundamental issues in physics. One could also stretch that to include statistics.
We’re looking at distributions of from true random number generators, that’s physical devices, not algorithms, which when we look at them just in a kind of background way without reference to anything in the world, then they are beautiful data. They are really good, quality, random number generators which produce data that are indistinguishable from what theory as you say predicts.
Unfortunately for that theory about random numbers, they’re not necessarily invulnerable to something happening in the world. What that something seems to be as a result of not just our global consciousness experiment, but lots of well-done, highly rigorous experiments in laboratories. The random process does not seem to be completely invulnerable to variations from the basic theory.
Alex Tsakiris: Great. Let’s touch on that for just a minute and delve in there. So the idea is, we have this piece of hardware. It’s an industrial-strength thing that we can hook up and it generates 200 zeroes or ones every second. You add those up and you should always get 100, and sometimes you don’t get 100. That’s the basic idea, right?
The other thing I want to really bring up, which is so interesting, is that it’s not like this research totally sprung out of the air. It’s built on some observations over time that we really can’t explain. That’s if you get a group of people together and they’re all meditating, sometimes they cause this same kind of fluctuation in the random generator that we’re looking at here.
The same with ritual prayer, and some other things. So there is some body of research that we’re building off of here. What you’ve tried to do then is expand that out and see what that looks like if we look at it from this global network of these 65 random number generators spread out across the world.
Dr. Roger Nelson: Oh yeah, that’s right. There’s actually a prior step. There’s laboratory research with just individuals typically, and sometimes get a couple of people working together, who are trying intentionally to change the way a random number generator behaves, and they succeed. It’s a tiny, tiny effect, but the experiments have been repeated so much that it’s now quite clear in statistical terms that there is some aberration or distortion of what the supposed output is of a random number generator because of human intention or consciousness.
In the experiments you mentioned with groups of people doing some kind of a ceremony or ritual or listening to a fabulous concert and all just pulled together into a unit. Those experiments, they don’t even have intention. But they do have a very special quality of mind, shared consciousness, where people forget about their individual stuff and become part of something that’s, I guess you would say, new. A group consciousness. I think that happens on the global scale sometimes.
When 911 happened, at first people said, “Oh my God, some poor fellow accidently drove his Cessna into the Trade Towers.” But within minutes, people knew that wasn’t so, and became utterly shocked, totally engaged and engrossed and probably almost millions and millions of people suddenly were no longer in the world they used to live in. They’re not in their individual space but in something that was connected by the events in New York and Washington that pulled vast proportions of humanity into a kind of unit.
On a day like that, we know that we can make a prediction that that engagement, that shared state of consciousness is something that may have the power or ability to change the behavior of random systems in a way that’s parallel to, even though it’s kind of on a bigger scale, by far, but it’s parallel to what happens when intention is applied in a laboratory or when a beautiful aria brings people to a standing ovation at an opera.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk for a minute about the 911 event as it manifests itself in the Global Consciousness Project. The article I received from Dean Radin said that the variation from the mean on 911 was greater than any day in 2001. Is that essentially what you found?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Yeah. There are different measures, but the standard measures we typically look at were distorted more than in any day up to that time since the project began in 1998. So it’s like several hundred days, not just a year. In fact, although we haven’t actually tested this in a thorough way, at least in terms of the scan of the formal experiments we’ve been looking at, 911 still stands out as the most powerful event in the history of the GCP.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, and what about the skeptical argument that you are just data mining that and that the window of time you’re moving back and forth to make it fit. Can you respond a little bit to how you can be sure that that day is really that significant statistically?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Okay, we start with a formal prediction which was from I think 10 or maybe 20 minutes before the first plane hit and continued for four hours after the first plane hit. That was the formal prediction made without knowing what the data actually held. That shows a significant departure from expectations in the measure that was specified formally. Okay, so that’s the starting point.
Some people complained, they were skeptics, one of the friendly skeptics James Spottiswoode says, “Well, that’s not big enough to represent such a fantastic day in the history of the world.” So who knows that? Anyway, that’s the formal prediction. Because it was a big event, we naturally feel it’s sensible to look at the data and find out what the data looked like.
So then we open up and look at the whole day instead of just the four hour period or four and one-half hours. Then that turns out to be striking in a number of ways. For example, the primary measure doesn’t just stop at the end of the four hour period. It goes on. In fact, it goes on being deviant for two full days, 50 hours, and then becomes normal again.
Then there’s another measure, a second kind of statistic that we calculate. That one shows a tremendous excess - it’s a variance measure. It shows a tremendous excess that begins actually something like four hours before the first plane hit. It continues to be unusually large for maybe six or seven hours and then - I can’t remember exactly how long - but anyway, after all the planes have hit, the buildings have collapsed, everything seems to have stopped in terms of an active terrorist situation, the measure then turns around and becomes very small for the next eight or ten hours.
So there’s a huge spike in the cumulative deviation that goes up for a long time and then it comes down for a long time in the middle of that day, 911. Then, of course, we look at more days. How about a week? How about a month? Then we ultimately ask the question that you’ve started with. How about the whole database? Is this spike of extraordinary departure from expectation, is that unique for 911? And it is, in fact, in the formal examination, which we can only do by doing it.
It turns out that it is an extraordinary day. I don’t think there’s anything at all unscientific about that exploration. It would be stupid not to look. But the formal test is set down before the data are analyzed and that becomes the contribution to the composite overall score that we say represents the test of the journal hypothesis, this replication experiment. In other words, these explorations moving the data around or whatever the skeptics are saying, those are to learn something. They’re not to prove something.
Alex Tsakiris: That’s a very, very good and thorough explanation. I just want to draw out one point because I think it’s particularly interesting and relevant to the discussion I was having with Mr. Dunning. That’s that 911 is a fantastically significant event that we all want to look at and we’re all interested in, as are other unexpected tragedies or natural events that might occur. Those are all in one kind of class in events.
As you point out on the Web site and in the published papers, there’s a whole other class of events that we will know beforehand are going to happen. The World Cup is scheduled every four years, every four years it’s going to happen. Same with the Olympic opening ceremony. Same with New Year’s Eve. So all these criticisms of data mining really have to fall away when we look at events that we can anticipate in advance and schedule the test for, right?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Exactly. I think on the order of half, it could be more or less, of the events that we have in the formal database of 285 or something, are this sort that we know ahead of time will happen. So the formal predictions are laid down well before the day and the data and they’re, I guess you might say, completely pure tests in terms of a prediction without foreknowledge. There’s no way anybody is going to change when New Year’s happens.
By the way, the data on the Web site are fully accessible. It’s completely free access to the data so any skeptic that wants to can pull down the data for all the New Year’s and do the composition across all the time zones and whatall and find his or her own results and match that up with ours. If he or she wants to look at their personal birthday, they’re welcome to do that. You want to look at what happens when 20 million or 15 million Indians all go to the Ganges and bathe during the Kumbh Mela, they can do that.
Alex Tsakiris: So not only are approximately half the events known in advance, but then from there on let’s just take it forward. Everything kind of runs itself. I mean, the statistics, the analytical tools are already in place. It’s not like you’re fiddling with those after the fact, so once an event is scheduled to happen, it just kind of runs, the analytics run, and the statistical measures kind of run. This argument that I’ve heard in the past that you’re not blinded and there’s somehow this ability to go back and not have metrics in place, everything’s in place, right?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Exactly. We don’t just turn on the switch when the day starts and let everything run. We have to identify the events that we’re going to look at and that’s done. There is a registry that has all the details. The exact second of the beginning of the event and the end of the event, and the particular analysis that will be applied. That registry of hypothesis statements or predictions, if you will, that’s available on the Web, too. So again, anybody who wants to can pull down the data and do his own analysis on the day or the three hour period or whatever it is that’s specified in one of our events.
Alex Tsakiris: It’s almost silly to have to go over this stuff repeatedly, because it’s all so spelled-out so darn clearly on the Web site. I have to say, even myself included, I wasn’t as familiar with the Global Consciousness Project other than just kind of passing news articles, and just the depth on the Web site is just amazing. You go and you get the answer and then you get it in another place and another place. They all kind off cross-reference.
So the last point that I guess I’d bring up on this thing is the whole idea of control, which is another issue you’ll hear brought up by skeptics. That there’s a lack of control and we’re not looking for alternative explanations for it. And of course, one of the great things about the network that you’ve built is you have so much data that controls really aren’t a problem. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you would see whether there’s EMI interference or whether it’s just a localized event, or all the normal kind of control objections that raised?
Dr. Roger Nelson: I guess the first and most important kind of thing to do is to set up control data that don’t have events. So basically we have a little over one percent of all of the data, all the seconds of time that have passed in 10 or 11 years are not in those events that we specify. So that’s a huge body that you can look at to find out if there’s anything odd or out of the ordinary for random data. The answer is that the data are random. They match the predictions of probability theory to a T.
Of course there is variance and so forth, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that you’d know you should expect if you understand empirical probability theory and binomial distributions and whatnot. So if we want to, we can do what’s called re-sampling, and we do this kind of thing. Some people think of it as simulation or as Monte Carlo or whatever. We take the prediction and say, let’s not use the data from the moment or the hour and a half, or seven hours that’s specified for this event, but instead from a week ago or a month ago or two years ago, okay?
Alex Tsakiris: See, if it works, it’s going to control.
Dr. Roger Nelson: That is, yeah, that is actually used as a formal. Re-sampling is one of the best ways of doing something like control, especially when you don’t know exactly what the data you’re dealing with are like. You can, in other words, take your experiment and just move it around in the whole database many, many times, and what you get is a distribution of the results that come from sampling the database that you have, okay?
Alex Tsakiris: Excellent. Excellent, that’s great, yeah.
Dr. Roger Nelson: Then you look to see what your real data, the actual hypothesis test looks like relative to that distribution. If what you expect or want to see is that your real test is not right in the middle of that distribution, but instead out in the tail. That’s what we find.
Alex Tsakiris: That’s terrific. It really has been an eye-opener for me to dig into this and I think it’s good to really engage the skeptical side of things, even if it doesn’t always…
Dr. Roger Nelson: Right. I really wish there were people like you were saying before, I mean, Jeff Scargle. We’ve had some that actually did calculations and helped and so forth, and there’s a guy named Mike Myer, and my friend and colleague Peter Bancel. Those guys are serious skeptics. What they did is dive right in. There are more. There’s a dozen or so people that actually are part of our group, in a way, who are skeptical at base and say, I can’t believe this unless I do the appropriate tests and so forth.
They work very hard, pull the data, process it through canonical, ordinary procedures and some very sophisticated ones, and they come up with an answer for their own skeptical questions. What they’ve typically found is that the data are real and there really is something different about the data during these events, which is a kind of confirmation of the general hypothesis that there will be structure in our nominally random data during those moments when very large numbers of people are engaged by events in the world.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so then what happens? I have to ask. This is kind of a larger question outside of the Global Consciousness Project. What happens when people really do encounter and interact with the data?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Well, yeah, Peter is maybe the best example. He’s been devoting half his life for the past six or eight years or something like that - I can’t remember exactly when he became interested - to more in-depth analysis of these data. His skepticism is still there, but he long since knows that the data are solid, that the procedures are correct, and so forth.
Now his energies are going into finding out things like, does distance matter? What is the basic quality of these outcome measures? He’s determined, for example, that what we’re really looking at is not some zap to individual, random number generators, but correlations among them which should not exist. They’re completely independent devices, they’re separated by thousands of miles in some cases, and so they shouldn’t be correlated but they are.
Just a little bit, and they are correlated just a little bit during these events. Not always. Not otherwise, but during these events they are, and so on. There’s second order measures, there’s been correlations among the measures. These are the kinds of deeper investigations that are necessary for an eventual understanding of how it works, what’s really happening.
Alex Tsakiris: Right. This is Peter who?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Bancel. He’s the co-author of some of the recent papers including one that was published last year in The Journal of Scientific Exploration, which people who are interested in these kinds of things, including the skeptics, should know about. They should read the JSE. The Journal of Scientific Exploration is published by the Society for Scientific Exploration. It’s a venue for papers and arguments and discussions like you said before. That’s where this three-part presentation about the GCP data, including Jeff Scargle’s skeptical paper, that’s where that discussion is published.
Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, we’ve had Peter Sturrock on the show.
Dr. Roger Nelson: Oh, yeah. He’s a wonderful man.
Alex Tsakiris: I think it was very, very enlightening and I just pull that out when anyone kind of scoffs at the JSE, which I think is a very, very great publication and very necessary in the overall scene. If we can’t support that kind of peer-review of stuff that doesn’t fit into scientific orthodoxy, where is it going to come from?
Dr. Roger Nelson: Really. The JSE, which is of course, published by the Society for Scientific Exploration, is an expensive proposition to run a serious journal for a small society. If any of your listeners want to be helpful in the matter of science at the edge, but good science at the edge, let them donate some money to SSE. [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: There you go. You hear it, everyone, let’s respond. What about Global Consciousness Project? What’s in the future for that? How can people participate and support the Global Consciousness Project?
Dr. Roger Nelson: I’ve just set up some forums and writing about one of those which has to do with participation. I have to say I’m not real good at giving people jobs, right? But I love it when people are self-starters and say, I’m interested in this. Can you give me access? I can do that. I can provide help for people who have a question they’re really interested in that relates to the GCP or the data or whatever, to go ahead and maybe even connect them with other people that are also interested.
If people look at the site and say, there is something that really needs to be done. I want to do it, I can help them go for it. My e-mail address is on the site. Let’s see, money? Yeah, we actually could do a lot more. There are only two or three of us that do a lot the work of analysis and so forth. If we had university positions and a bunch of graduate students we would have some really much more powerful array of analyses already in hand.
We know good questions that have not yet been answered and we’re working on them, but there are only 24 hours. If somebody wants to help, it requires skill and also a real interest. We’d be very much interested in that, or if somebody has vast resources and can donate money we can then hire research assistants to do things that need to be done and don’t get done when we’re all just volunteers. [Laughs] That’s a long answer to your question.
Alex Tsakiris: No, I think it was all well-said and appropriate stuff. Dr. Nelson, thanks again so much for joining us.
Dr. Roger Nelson: Thank you for an interesting conversation. I hope that it is helpful in giving some of your readers and listeners a bit more insight into the proponent side of this argument which always seems so hazy to me on the other side.
Alex Tsakiris: There’s only one side! [Laughs]
Dr. Roger Nelson: I know.
Alex Tsakiris: There’s only one side. If someone comes up with some really valid criticism, I’d love to hear it.
Dr. Roger Nelson: I would, too.
Alex Tsakiris: But it’s…yeah.
Dr. Roger Nelson: As I’ve said, and maybe I was too generous, but we really literally do appreciate having people look at it and say, I don’t understand this. And I don’t believe that, and why. They don’t want to believe it, that’s one matter, but if they have a reason why, we’d like to know about it.
Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Dr. Nelson for joining us today, and of course, thanks to Dean Radin for introducing me and for his e-mail exchange. Let me pick up the story from where it goes from here because it has an interesting, interesting conclusion. Very in line with what I’ve learned through my work on Skeptiko, and that is I decided that I was going to follow-up with Brian Dunning of Skeptoid and tell him what I had learned. So let me read for you the e-mail exchange I had with Brian following my interview with Dr. Roger Nelson.
“Hi, Brian, I’ve been following up on our dialogue, had an e-mail exchange with Dean Radin, and a pretty lengthy interview with Roger Nelson. Discussed all the points you raised, as well as Scargle’s paper. I know we’ve discussed whether point-by-point debating is worthwhile, but I really think we need to take another stab at this because your initial criticisms are off the mark, at least based on what I’ve learned.
Give a look at the comments below and let me know if we can re-visit this. As we discussed, this is as much about the process of skeptics via believer debate as it is about the details of the Global Consciousness Project. ” Then I listed for him the responses that Dean Radin and Roger Nelson had made to his points. I end the e-mail by saying, “I really hope you’ll join me for a brief interview so we can tackle these points. It would be nice to deliver some kind of resolution to the skeptic vs. believer debate.”
Here’s Brian’s response. “I’m not interested in discussing their research. That is for people in the field to discuss and they’re already doing that. My interest is helping laypeople to understand the difference between the claim that passes scrutiny and has become a part of mainstream science, and a claim that has not succeeded in convincing a significant number of researchers. I’m not going around trying to prove that there’s nothing to global consciousness. Those are two different points, only one of which is defensible, and that’s the only point I’m interested in making.” Not exactly sure what that last point means, but nonetheless.
Then here is my response. “Yeah, but isn’t that really what Skeptoid is all about? Help the layperson understand science? Well, you took your best shot at understanding the Global Consciousness Project. Remember, you told me you did quite a bit of research on it, and it looks like you really missed the mark. Again, that’s my take. So doesn’t this really get to the heart of how we scrutinize science? I can do the show without a follow-up interview, but I think it’d be a lot better if you come back on for a couple of minutes and at least give your take.”
Here’s Brian’s response. “Don’t take this the wrong way because I mean this respectfully. Here’s the problem with your show. Because I did an episode where I reported the criticisms that have been made on global consciousness, you would have global consciousness people come on your show and respond to those criticisms. Seems fair.
But it’s tabloid reporting, because you don’t present global consciousness in its proper context. It’s a fringe claim that is outside all of established science and has not convinced anyone of its validity. It’s not earned the right to be reported. Reporting it as science and presenting discussions on its claims as if it’s science is bad science journalism. I believe that participating in such a discussion is counterproductive to the mission of teaching people to think critically.”
This is the final response that I made. “Brian, this is quite a claim. I don’t think you can back this up. Keep in mind, you’re the one who suggested discussing global consciousness. Remember, I gave you a list of topics and you said you didn’t know much about them but you were fairly familiar with the Global Consciousness Project? I had never even read the Web site until the day before our interview.”
“So now you’re saying the science you dedicated a show to and then discussed with me at length no longer has ‘the right to be reported?’ Boy, I don’t think you want to leave things like that. It’s an indefensible position.” With that I closed and I haven’t heard anything more from Brian.
It’s going to be interesting to see what you Skeptiko listeners think about this. I’ve railed in the past about this position of skeptics feeling a need to defend scientific orthodoxy to be the gatekeepers for all that is “good science,” all that can be appropriately spoken about or discussed as science. I think that position is absolutely indefensible, especially on the part of Brian Dunning and Skeptoid. I just don’t know how he can really expect to defend that position.
That’s where we’re at. We’ll leave it up to you to decide. Let us hear from you. Visit our Web site. It’s www.skeptiko.com. Drop me an e-mail, visit our forums, get involved there. You’ll also find links to all our previous shows as well as some of the links that I mentioned pertaining to this topic.
That’s going to do it for today. Thanks for hanging in there for a two part episode. We have some very interesting shows coming up that I’ve already recorded and I’m just waiting to get out. Stay with us for all of that. Take care, and bye for now.
74. Dr. Dean Radin And Dr. Roger Nelson Respond to Global Consciousness Project Criticisms [48:24m]: Download
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