Skeptiko
This podcast is a leading source for intelligent, hard-nosed skeptic vs. believer debate on science and spirituality. Each episode features lively discussion with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics.
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January 31st, 2012 Alex
UFO researcher sees evidence of telepathy in the accounts of UFO witnesses.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Stanton Friedman, author of Science Was Wrong. During the interview Friedman discusses the implications of his research for human consciousness:
Alex Tsakiris: I want to talk about extended consciousness in terms of the research you’ve done because there’s this whole controversy within the field that wants to push everything into the psycho-social explanation. But at the same time we do have to acknowledge, as you did in your work with the famous abduction case of Betty and Barney Hill that we do have reports of telepathy, mind control, psychokinesis, and all the rest. I’m wondering what that evidence tells us about ourselves and our human capabilities that extend beyond what we normally think of as our conscious experience.
Stanton Friedman: Well, it’s a very important point because I’m convinced that any advanced civilization will know about telepathy and mind control and communication at a distance. It really came home to me when I was standing at the exact location where Barney Hill was standing when the saucer was over their car and he’s looking through binoculars at the crew on board.
For no good reason, they jumped back in the car, very frightened, and they get off the main road, Route 3, and they go onto a secondary road. Then they go onto a dirt road –which Barney would never have done. And he winds up alongside the only place in the area where you could land a, let’s say 80-foot in diameter, flying saucer. It was a sandy area, there were trees all over the place, but this area was big enough to get a saucer like the one they described down. It was clear proof to me that these guys were directing his actions.
It seems to me eminently clear that these guys have capabilities—as the only simple term I know—to do things that we don’t look upon as being respectable. Such as mind-reading, mind control, and getting people to forget.
Stanton Friedman’s Website
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Alex Tsakiris: Today’s guest was a nuclear physicist before becoming one of the best known and most well informed UFO researchers. I’m talking about Stanton Friedman and Stan, it’s a great pleasure and an honor to welcome you here today on Skeptiko.
Stanton Friedman: I appreciate that. I always like doing it. I grew up with radio. I’m one of the old guys, you know. Put the pictures in my head instead of on a tube. Read the rest of this entry »
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January 17th, 2012 Alex
Author and scientist sees pattern of decreased brain activity during peak experiences.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, author of Meaning in Absurdity. During the interview Kastrup discusses his beliefs about human consciousness:
Alex Tsakiris: You make some interesting connections between the “fainting game”, erotic asphyxiation and some new research with psychedelic mushrooms. You suggest that when we really look at what’s going on in the brain we actually see a dampening down of brain areas – the opposite of what we would expect. So what are the implications of this in terms of this idea of filtering of consciousness?
Bernardo Kastrup: The current paradigm says that conscious experience is an epiphenomenon, a by-product, of brain activity. So you should always be able to find a tight correlation between conscious states as reported by the subject and measurable brain states as measured, for instance, with an FMRI scanner. Usually this correlation is there, but there are instances, like this study you mentioned, where this correlation is not there in a very spectacular and repeatable way. What it suggests is that we have to find another model of reality, if you will, to accommodate this. A model that accommodates both the fact that normally, ordinarily, conscious experience is modulated by brain states, but also sometimes there is a lack of correlation in a spectacular way.
Alex Tsakiris: So these anomalies you’re talking about, for example, with psilocybin and reduced brain functioning, or brain injuries that lead to increased consciousness, these have to be explained. We can’t just sweep them off the table and say, “well, materialism seems to work pretty well in the general sense,” right?
Bernardo Kastrup: These anomalies are major anomalies. They are gigantic anomalies. The only way we can get away with them and still honestly believe in the materialistic paradigm as many of us do is because that paradigm embodies an approach of looking upon the world that is a third-person perspective. In other words, it’s not through personal experience but through reports and measurements.
Metaphysical Speculations Website
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Alex Tsakiris: Today’s guest is an author, blogger, an entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in computer engineering and all-around fascinating guy, Bernardo Kastrup. Welcome to Skeptiko.
Bernardo Kastrup: Thanks, Alex. It’s a pleasure to be here. Read the rest of this entry »
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January 3rd, 2012 Alex
Psychotherapist and Medium claims communication with spirits reveals no reincarnation.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with August Goforth, author of The Risen. During the interview Goforth discusses his beliefs about reincarnation:
Alex Tsakiris: You said that through your communication with on the other side that reincarnation isn’t a core part of the overall spiritual plan. Could you be wrong?
August Goforth: I have a huge library of books written by mediums and spiritualists that go back almost a couple hundred years. I noticed not a single one mentioned reincarnation.
Alex Tsakiris: I’ve spoken to plenty of mediums and many of them have talked matter-of-factly about reincarnation as being a reality. And I’m a little bit familiar with some of the medium literature out there, and I think the idea of reincarnation comes up quite a bit.
August Goforth: It does now. It’s only been maybe in the past 10 years. I would also suggest that it’s a function of the ego-mind that invents these ideas about reincarnation because of its fear of losing its own consciousness. I may have these dreams or these feelings about an experience of being someone from the 14th Century and I get names and I get all kinds of facts and dates and rather than separating myself from it, there’s something about me–the ego-mind will do this, it will grab onto it and sort of put it on like a costume and say, “Okay, this is me. I’m having a past-life experience.”
Me not realizing consciously that I just experienced someone else’s life and they told me about their life in a dream or an astral experience. When I woke up, somehow it became very blurred and I had this desire because I don’t want to die, I want to live on, that if I can convince myself that I had these past lives that gives me a sense of continuity. It gives me a sense of feeling alive and grounded. I feel more expanded.
Alex Tsakiris: For reincarnation the best scientific work—and I’m sure you’re familiar with it—is the work of Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia and now Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia has followed up on this work. They have thousands at this point of cases of well-documented reincarnation accounts. It’s quite a body of research; it’s very impressive to anyone who looks at it. So I can listen to what you’re saying and I can be open to hearing it, but how do we resolve that? How do we resolve that when it brushes against what I think is some good, down-to-earth science that I can really lay my hands on?
August Goforth: I don’t know. These are just suggestions of how I’m interpreting what information has come to me as best as I can. My bias, if any, is that I’m not interested myself in reincarnation and God – no – I don’t want to come back to this place. But there are people who do or have a belief. It’s a core belief in some way or it’s necessary. But it seems more and more to me that everyone’s experience, whatever it is, is ultimately their own final test of what’s true for them.
The Risen Website
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Alex Tsakiris: What Skeptiko is about is really three things. First, it’s about understanding the overwhelming scientific evidence that consciousness survives death. So if you just, from a science standpoint, if you look medically people die. They are brought back to life. And they have these incredible encounters with what happened when they had no brain, which means they were dead.
August Goforth: About the survival of consciousness, yeah.
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November 1st, 2011 Alex
How reliable is the reporting of science journalists who are also part of the “Skeptical community”?
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a review of his work investigating psychic detectives:
Alex Tsakiris: A couple of years ago, I did a fairly lengthy investigation of psychic detective case with Ben Radford. It’s taken two years, but next week I’m going to have a chance to do an interview with Ben Radford again, and hopefully close the loop on some of that work that we did.
Background on this case:
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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 episode we’re going to look at a topic that I haven’t touched on in quite some time, and that is psychic detective work. The idea, of course, of psychics and law enforcement working together to solve crimes. In particular, we’re going to focus on how that work is reported in the media.
Hey, by the way, what do you think of the title of this episode? The title again is “Science Journalist Ben Radford Believes Psychic Detective.” Let me tell you how I put that together. See, I took the first part, which is true—Ben Radford is a science journalist, so I took that, Ben Radford, science journalist. And then I took the part that I wished was true, “Believes Psychic Detective,” and I added that onto the end and I got a good title. A title that I wanted.
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October 25th, 2011 Alex
Lucid dreaming expert Robert Waggoner explains how to become aware of our dreams while we’re dreaming, and how paranormal dreams can lead to a journey of self-discovery.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with author, and lucid dream expert, Robert Waggoner. During the interview Waggoner explains how paranormal dreams can reveal future events:
Andrew Paquette: Can you give an example of something like that where you’ve been in a dream and you’ve asked for some kind of future information, you’ve been given it, and later on in a waking state you were able to verify this?
Robert Waggoner: Sure. One time a good friend of mine asked me if I’d ever sought out the lottery numbers while lucid dreaming. That had never occurred to me and I asked him if he had. He said, “Oh yeah,” and he told me what happened. He said he became consciously aware and that he asked for the numbers of the MegaLotto or whatever it was called in his state, to appear when he opened up something. So he opened up a book or something, and he saw six sets of two numbers.
And during the lucid dream he was really excited and he started to memorize them as quickly as he could. So there’s the first number, 26 and the next number is 3 and the next number is 17. And it goes on and on. He said he was really working hard to memorize the set of six two-digit numbers.
When he woke up from the lucid dream he immediately reached for his dream journal and began writing them down as quickly as possible. He says he got the first three exactly right but from then on his memory failed him. He just couldn’t recall the exact order. So a week later when the MegaLotto happened, he said he got the first three exactly right but then the other ones, the order had been goofed up. He’d transposed the numbers as anyone might.
Robert Waggoner’s Website
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Andrew Paquette: Tonight we welcome Robert Waggoner, author of the book, Lucid Dreaming and a frequent speaker on the subject of lucid dreams. Welcome to the Skeptiko program, Mr. Waggoner.
Robert Waggoner: Thanks, Andrew; I’m happy to be here.
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August 30th, 2011 Alex
Jim Harold explains why mainstream media outlets stick to conventional “giggle factor” reports of the paranormal.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with author, and host of the Paranormal Podcast, Jim Harold. During the interview Harold explains how the mainstream media reports on the paranormal:
Alex Tsakiris: You’re covering an area that has a great deal of interest to the general public, but one that still doesn’t get a lot of serious mainstream media coverage. Are you surprised more media outlets haven’t jumped into it just for the numbers?
Jim Harold: I wish I knew the answer to that because that’s my problem with the mainstream media when it comes to something like the paranormal. I can’t tell you why it is. I don’t know that it’s a conspiracy. Maybe it is that people who are in the mainstream media understand this area has a “giggle factor.” They’re almost afraid to treat it seriously because they’ve been trained otherwise.
And I think in some cases it may not be a conspiracy. They just think — this is the way we cover the paranormal. We laugh at it; we giggle at it; we play The X-Files music; we put it as the kicker to end the broadcast and we’re done. So I think it’s more of a convention than anything else.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m not going to jump too quickly on the conspiracy idea, but I do think we have to go there a little bit. We have to go back and ask — who created the template in the first place?
Jim Harold: True.
Jim Harold’s Website
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Jim Harold to Skeptiko. As host of the super-successful “The Paranormal Podcast” show, Jim covers all manner of paranormal topics including ghosts, hauntings, UFOs, parapsychology, and many others that we will get into today.
Jim, I’m a long-time fan of your show and I want to welcome you to Skeptiko.
Jim Harold: Well thank you, Alex. That’s very gracious of you to ask me to be on the program and I’m honored.
Alex Tsakiris: You know, you do have a great show, a unique show. I thought we could start just by telling folks who maybe don’t know about it a little bit about The Paranormal Podcast, some of the history to it. What I’m particularly interested in is your overall perspective on covering the paranormal, if you have any thoughts on that.
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April 19th, 2011 alex
Biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake expresses dismay at latest claims made by Skeptic Richard Wiseman in his recent book, Paranormality.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. A distinguished biologist, Dr. Sheldrake is the author of several books including, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. During the interview Mr. Tsakiris and Dr. Sheldrake discuss the latest claims of Skeptic Richard Wiseman:
Alex Tsakiris: When someone hears you say Richard Wiseman’s portrayal of your research is deceptive, well, it sounds so horrible. But in this case, the deception is so obvious, the misinformation so outrageous, that it’s hard to understand how he assumed he could get away with it. But then again, of course he’s going to get away with it. He’s gotten away with it for years.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, it’s outrageous. Wiseman’s research on psychic pets was entirely parasitic on my research. He portrays himself as this kind of heroic debunking figure who goes in and exposes people who fool themselves about their dogs and so forth. But, in fact, his own tests show an even bigger effect than I’d observed. Incredibly, he then appeared on TV and made press releases, wrote a scientific paper in a scientific journal, claiming to have refuted the effect we both demonstrated. It is completely outrageous, but as you say, he’s got away with it before. He’s been exposed before, but that seems completely irrelevant to him.
Alex Tsakiris: What is going on here? What do you think is really behind this? Because it’s easy to spin out of control with conspiracies and all sorts of strange ideas. What’s your best guess, having been in this for as long as you have?
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Personally, I think it’s just what Wiseman said it is. I think it’s a tendency for people to see what they want to believe, to believe what they want to believe, to only notice evidence that fits their dogmatic point of view or their belief system. He himself is a perfect example of that. He accuses people who are interested in psychic phenomena and do research in an open-minded way of being fooled or of self-deception, but in fact this is the kind of thinking he’s engaged in. Basically, Wiseman is a dogmatic materialist. People who are materialists aren’t people who don’t believe anything; they’re people who have a really strong belief that the mind is nothing but the brain, that the free will doesn’t really exist and we are just robots. He tries to prove that in this book. I think it’s as simple as that. He’s dogmatically committed to that point of view. He firmly believes it. Therefore, the evidence must be flawed. People must be either deceiving themselves or deceiving others. So I think we have to see that we’re dealing here with a fundamentalist belief system of people who pretend to be scientific but are not.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s website
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Today we welcome back to Skeptiko biologist and author, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Now, many of you know that Dr. Sheldrake has been nice enough to join me on Skeptiko several times in the past. He’s a real hero of mine-not just for his innovative and imaginative ideas and research, but for his clear, straightforward manner of talking about controversial science and those who oppose it. So I’m really delighted, Rupert, that you’ve joined me on Skeptiko today.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, it’s a pleasure to be back.
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April 12th, 2011 alex
Human consciousness researcher Dr. Stuart Hameroff describes how discoveries are revealing more brain complexity than artificial intelligence (AI) experts suspected.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Stuart Hameroff. Dr. Hameroff is Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies. During the interview Mr. Tsakiris and Dr. Hameroff discuss whether DMT-based psychedelic experiences provide evidence that our consciousness exists outside of the brain:
Alex Tsakiris: Your understanding of the quantum mechanics of the neuron really stirs up a lot of angst among the AI singularity crowd. Tell us a little bit about that controversy.
Dr. Stuart Hameroff: To look at our brain as 100 billion simple switches — to look at a neuron as a switch or gate — it’s an insult to neurons. It’s just not that simple. If you study biology you realize this. But a lot of biologists get bogged down with the details and lose the big picture. They see the information processing in the cell as a minestrone soup of chemicals when they’re ignoring the solid state system in the microtubules.
The bit with the AI and the singularity, there’s actually a couple of points of friction here. As I said, I spent 20 years studying microtubule information processing. The AI approach would be, roughly speaking, that a neuron fires or it doesn’t. It’s roughly comparable to a bit, 1 or 0. It’s more complicated than that but roughly speaking. I was saying no, each neuron has roughly 10-8 tubulins switching at roughly 10-7 per second, getting 10-15 operations per second per neuron. If you multiply that by the number of neurons you get 10 to the 26th operations per second per brain. AI is looking at neurons firing or not firing, 1,000 per second, 1,000 synapses. Something like the 10 to the 15th operations per second per brain… and that’s without even bringing in the quantum business. So that alone was pushing the goalpost way, way downstream into the future.
Dr. Stuart Hameroff’s website
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Today we welcome Dr. Stuart Hameroff to Skeptiko. Dr. Hameroff is Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies.
Dr. Hameroff, thank you so much for joining me today on Skeptiko.
Dr. Stuart Hameroff: You’re welcome, Alex. It’s nice to be here. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 5th, 2011 alex
Pulitzer Prize winning author Deborah Blum discusses the challenges of science reporting and the paranormal taboo.
Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk welcomes Deborah Blum author of, Ghost Hunters – William James and the Hunt for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. During the interview Ms. Blum discusses her approach to covering the paranormal:
Steve Volk: This is one of the hardest things. Who do we believe? Who do we trust? I want to see somehow people in the middle pick this stuff up and look at it, but that’s a very, very rare occurrence.
Deborah Blum: I agree. Like I said, I’m a mainstream science journalist and daughter of a chemist. But what was fascinating to me when I started working on Ghost Hunters is that I’d go and give talks at different universities. I mean literally, I was at the University of Florida and they said, ‘Oh, let us tell you about our haunted laboratory.’ Or I was at a meeting with a bunch of animal researchers and I was sitting next to a very respected scientist from Stanford who immediately started telling me about the telepathic experiences she’d had with a friend of hers who is a scientist at Southwestern University. I thought to myself, ‘This whole world exists that really those of us in the skeptic/science community never see because people just don’t tell you about it.
Steve Volks’s website
Fringe-ology Trailer
Deborah Blum – Ghost Hunters
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Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On this episode, as you just heard, there’s a new voice behind the interview so before we get started I thought we’d take a minute and introduce that voice, that being the voice of journalist and author, Steve Volk, who’s joining me right now.
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September 14th, 2010 alex
Interview with author Ophelia Benson explores how a scientific understanding of life after death might impact an atheistic worldview.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for and interview with the author of, “Does God Hate Woman?”, and “Why Truth Matters”, Ophelia Benson. During the interview Ms. Benson expresses her admiration for being an atheist to the very end, “…Christopher Hitchens, as we all know, is admirably insisting that he’s not going to change his opinions about the nature of the world and about whether or not there’s a God just because he’s mortally ill. And if there are any rumors that he’s done a deathbed conversion, he wants it to be on the record right now that that’s not what he considers the real Christopher Hitchens.”
When pressed as to whether one could decide to not have a deathbed conversation prior to having such a conversion Ms Benson replied, “I know, it’s sort of tricky in a way, but on the other hand, I kind of think we all do have a right to do that. If you’ve been a lifelong atheist and are continuing to be an atheist, I think you have a right to say, ‘Well, okay, if at the last minute I mumble something, I want to go on the record right now saying I repudiate that in advance.’ It’s ours, so I think we get to do that.”
Ms. Benson also discusses how advances in near death experience science and other research that suggesting a continuation of consciousness might impact the “new atheist” worldview.
Check out Ophelia Benson’s Website: Butterflies and Wheels
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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 an interview with Ophelia Benson, author, Atheist, and editor of the very popular and very well done Butterflies and Wheels website.
Now, this interview didn’t really go the way that I planned, but when I was editing it I realized that maybe it really made the point I was trying to make after all, and that’s just to demonstrate how this new science of consciousness that we’ve been exploring so much on this show in terms of near-death experience, medium communication, and psi phenomena, how that new science is making its way into the marketplace of ideas. So how a public intellectual like Ophelia Benson is processing this. And in that respect I think the interview is quite revealing. So listen in to my interview with Ophelia Benson:
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