Not long ago, the publisher of the new book Debating Psychic Experience kindly sent me a review copy. I found the book very interesting, but also so densely packed with arguments and counter-arguments that a brief review would not do it justice. For that reason, in this post I'm largely focusing on just one portion of the book: a lively and sometimes acrimonious exchange of views between Ray Hyman and Chris Carter. Even though I've narrowed the scope of this review, I still can't cover all the points made by each of these writers. What follows are only some of the highlights.
First, an overview. Debating Psychic Experience, published in 2010, is is a serious give-and-take between skeptics and parapsychologists (or those sympathetic to parapsychology) aimed at an academic audience. It is edited by Stanley Krippner and Harris L. Friedman. The contributors are Dean Radin, James E. Alcock, Ray Hyman, Christopher C. French, Michael Shermer, Chris Carter, Richard S. Wiseman, Stephan A. Schwartz, Damien Broderick, and Elizabeth Loftus.
Ray Hyman contributed two essays to the book. The second one, titled "What's Wrong with Materialism?", is his rebuttal of Chris Carter's earlier chapter "Persistent Denial: A Century of Denying the Evidence" -- surely a title calculated to raise the hackles of any committed skeptic!
Hyman's hackles are clearly up. He writes,
Unfortunately, I have to conclude that Carter's chapter comes close to consisting of an ad hominem attack against critics of parapsychology. His emphasis is on the alleged worldview that compels the critics to go to any lengths -- including deliberate suppression of data. Indeed, there are, and there have been, vocal skeptics who have behaved in ways that might justify some of Carter's concerns. On the other hand it is a logical fallacy to dismiss a person's criticisms on the basis of their alleged motivations and mindsets. Worse, attributing motivations and worldviews to critics on the basis of flimsy gossip makes for misleading and irrelevant arguments.
He goes on to characterize Carter's essay as a "diatribe," and makes it clear that he feels personally maligned by it.
Here I think Hyman, in his prickly defensiveness, simply misreads the entire thrust of Carter's argument. Carter is not saying that the skeptics of psi are wrong because they are materialists. He is saying that skeptics of psi are wrong because they have not come to grips with the evidence. Having made this point, he goes on (as a related, but separate, issue) to ponder the question of why intelligent, knowledgeable people would be resistant to the evidence. His hypothesis is that they find the evidence upsetting because it threatens their deeply held beliefs, which can be labeled "materialism."
And indeed, the publicly stated attitudes of some prominent skeptics, notably those associated with CSI (fomerly CSICOP), seem to substantiate this reading of the facts. CSI has been explicit in saying that any widespread acceptance of psi by the scientific community would undermine the foundations of science and threaten civilization with a descent into a new dark ages. In any case, Carter is not launching a crude ad hominem attack, as Hyman believes; he is merely trying to understand the motivations of people whose continuing obstinacy in regard to a growing body of evidence is, as Yul Brynner would say, "a puzzlement."
Hyman also seems to misinterpret what Carter means by materialism. It is clear from the context that Carter is referring to the Newtonian worldview of a clockwork universe. It is this paradigm that, he says, has been exploded by developments in quantum physics and other fields. He is certainly correct; the Newtonian clockwork universe is passé. Yet, in objecting to the idea of psi, some critics often tacitly assume that the Newtonian world-picture remains intact. When they say that psi is impossible in terms of the laws of physics, they must mean Newtonian physics; they cannot mean quantum physics, since, as Carter points out, prominent quantum physicists have endorsed the possibility or even the reality of psi.
When Hyman argues for methodological naturalism (a term he does not use, but which is clearly meant), he is on reasonably firm ground; but when he conflates methodological naturalism with Newtonian physics, he has overreached. The two are by no means identical. Methodological naturalism is entirely consistent with quantum physics, the most thoroughly tested and empirically validated theory in the history of science. And when Hyman suggests that the only alternative to materialism is some "brand of supernaturalism," he is again overreaching; it is possible to reject Newtonianism without embracing the supernatural. Psi need not be supernatural, and few contemporary parapsychologists would say that it is. Psi is not consistent with Newtonian physics, but it may well be consistent with quantum physics; or to put it another way, psi may not be consistent with materialism, narrowly defined, but it may be consistent with naturalism, broadly defined.
In general, Hyman seems to adopt the weakest and most uncharitable reading of Carter's positions, possibly so he can mount a straw-man argument in response, or possibly because he simply cannot read criticism of his own position in a fair-minded way. Indeed, what struck me the most about Hyman's response to Carter's essay was how personally he took Carter's remarks. Even if he did feel personally slighted, it might have been a better debating strategy to conceal this reaction, which only makes him look petty and vain.
Perhaps the major point of contention between the two involves Hyman's work for a government committee that produced an official statement -- the National Research Council Report -- essentially denying any and all evidence for psi. The chairman of the committee, John Swets, told the press, "Perhaps our strongest conclusions are in the area of parapsychology. The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of one hundred thirty years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena." Hyman chaired the subcommittee on parapsychology, and selected James Alcock to provide a second opinion. Both Hyman and Alcock were members of CSICOP at the time and were known for their criticisms of parapsychology. Incidentally, Alcock contributed two skeptical essays to Debating Psychic Experience, one of which is rather tellingly titled "Attributions about Impossible Things."
With both Hyman and Alcock apparently convinced in advance that psi phenomena are "impossible things," the conclusion of the report was inevitable. Carter, in presenting the whole thing as little better than a put-up job, relies heavily on US Army Colonel John Alexander, who investigated many of these subjects himself as part of his military duties. In 1989 Alexander wrote:
... the only person assigned to the committee who had had any previous familiarity with the parapsychological research literature was Ray Hyman -- who was known from the outset to have his mind already made up.... Thus, I questioned from the beginning the issues of "bias" and "objectivity" as they related to the committee's constitution. For it seems clear that [Dr. George] Lawrence, and then Hyman and James Alcock ... proceeded on an intentional path to discredit the work in parapsychology.... Throughout the parapsychology section of the EHP Report, the committee referred only to those published articles that supported its position and ignored material that did not.
Clearly stung by Carter's attack on the committee's work, Hyman mounts a lengthy defense. He decries Carter's version of events as an "urban legend" and insists that the committee behaved responsibly. Some of his points are well taken, but on the whole Hyman makes too many questionable assertions to be really persuasive. For instance, he claims he selected Alcock simply because Alcock was well-versed in the subject matter, and for no ulterior motive. But clearly this is disingenuous; there were other people equally well-versed in these controversies who could have brought a more neutral or disinterested perspective to the investigation than Alcock, who has been vociferously and intransigently hostile to psi research for decades. Hyman obviously chose Alcock, at least in part, because he knew that Alcock would agree with his own preconceived conclusions.
Hyman also says he allowed parapsychologists to review his and Alcock's findings. This, he implies, ought to clear him of any charge of bias. But letting parapsychologists comment on the report after it was already finalized amounts to very little. As far as I know, no parapsychologists' comments were included in the official report. The only dissenting view that ever saw daylight belonged to Robert Rosenthal -- a psychologist, not a parapsychologist, who found himself impressed with the psi data. Carter observes that committee chairman John Swets actually took the extraordinary step of attempting to suppress Rosenthal's contribution to the report. Despite going into tedious detail on other aspects of the committee's work, Hyman does not even comment on this point.
The exchange about the NRC Report dominates the debate between Carter and Hyman, but there are other issues, as well. In particular, Hyman has many criticisms of the ganzfeld and autoganzfeld experiments, which are generally viewed as the strongest laboratory evidence for psi. He claims that the "autoganzfeld experiments failed to replicate the original ganzfeld data base. In the original data base the average effect size was derived from studies that all used static targets. The autoganzfeld experiments used both static and dynamic (action video clips) targets. Only the dynamic targets produced a significant effect. The results on the static targets were consistent with chance and differed significantly from the results on the static targets in the original data base."
Carter responds that this version of events is nearly the opposite of the truth. He writes,
The original ganzfeld experiments used quasi-dynamic targets (ViewMaster "slide" reels) in addition to completely static targets. Studies using the ViewMaster reels produced significantly higher hit rates than did studies using single-image targets (50% versus 34%). Meta-analysis of the original data led to the prediction that dynamic targets would show greater results than static targets. This prediction was in fact strongly corroborated.
In other words, the fact that psi was shown to be more effective in perceiving dynamic targets had been predicted on the basis of the original studies, and the prediction was vindicated by the subsequent, more stringent studies.
Hyman goes on to complain that some experimenters were not able to replicate the ganzfeld results. On page 159 Carter includes a table listing all autoganzfeld experiments conducted from 1991 to 2003. The initial autoganzfeld experiments were carried out at Princeton; later experiments took place in North Carolina, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Sweden -- in short, at laboratory facilities around the world. These subsequent trials produced reasonably consistent hit rates, with outlying results of 27% (close to chance) in one study and 47% in another (involving artistically gifted subjects), but with the remaining six results clustered around 34%. In other words, the Princeton autoganzfeld results were not a fluke; they were repeatedly duplicated by independent researchers at other labs.
Perhaps showing a touch of desperation, Hyman further argues that there has been a "decline effect" in the autoganzfeld studies. This often-repeated claim has been exploded as a canard so many times, it's amazing to see it still appear in print. The only "decline" that occurred was in new exploratory studies that tested different, previously unanalyzed aspects of psi. For instance, there was an attempt to test for auditory psi by seeing if subjects could psychically perceive musical passages; results were no better than chance. This is entirely different from testing for psychic perception of visual images, and conflating the two sets of data only serves to confuse the issue.
Carter concludes bluntly, "It seems clear that Hyman and the other counteradvocates have lost the ganzfeld debate."
Naturally I approach this subject with a strong bias in favor of psi -- a bias that I like to think is supported by my extensive reading on the subject. From my (hardly neutral) perspective, Carter comes across as serious, knowledgeable, and persuasive, while Hyman comes across as thin-skinned, overly emotional, and less than reliable in his presentation of the facts. Will the average reader come away with this impression? I'm not sure. Though the book is intended to be a balanced presentation of both sides of the issue, the skeptics dominate in terms of page count. I count ten essays critical of parapsychology versus five essays sympathetic to parapsychology (with three more-or-less neutral essays contributed by Damien Broderick and the editors).
Some of the skeptics do a pretty good job of concealing what I believe to be their agenda. Richard Wiseman, in his essay "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose," claims that the preceding "collection of essays makes me very concerned." Shedding crocodile tears, he declares he is worried "because after over one hundred years of parapsychological research there exists no real consensus on the most fundamental question facing the field -- does psi exist? Worse still, time is running out... Indeed, I believe that if parapsychology continues on its current trajectory, university-based psi research has only another few years to run." Those who are familiar with Wiseman's history of questionable conduct and dubious assertions will take his claims with more than a pinch of salt, but the uninformed reader just may be taken in.
Meanwhile, some of the pro-psi arguments are problematic in their own right. In his essay "The Antique Roadshow," Stephan A. Schwartz, who has done yeoman's work in applying psi to archaeology, tries to discredit the critics of psi by comparing them to other "denier" movements, namely creationism and "climate change deniers." As something of a climate change denier myself, I'm not overly impressed with this approach. It seems to me that the highly pejorative term "denier" ought to be reserved for people who are denying facts that are almost universally uncontroversial among educated people, such as the Holocaust or the moon landings. Applying this term to anthropogenic global warming or to parapsychology strikes me as premature and unfair. (As far as creationism is concerned, I have no sympathy for young-earth creationism, but I do think there may be merit to the arguments of Intelligent Design theorists like William Dembski, who apply information theory to evolution. Psi itself may possibly play a role in evolution.)
Although I wish the pro-parapsychology side had been given equal space with the skeptics, I still found Debating Psychic Experience to be a worthwhile , illuminating -- and often surprisingly entertaining -- read. Perhaps the best thing about the book is that it is clearly aimed at an academic audience, incidentally giving the lie to Wiseman's lament that university-based parapsychology is on the verge of extinction. While the book could have been bolder, I applaud the effort to bring a serious debate about psi into the classroom. I hope it finds the intelligent and open-minded audience it deserves.
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