What’s wrong with this list?
- Paleontological Society
- Parapsychological Association
- Pattern Recognition Society
- Phi Beta Kappa Society
- Phi Sigma Biological Sciences Honor Society
- Phycological Society of America
Seems at first glance like a list of scientific professional organizations, or at least the subset of such a list beginning with the letter “P.” And indeed it is — it’s an excerpt from the list of Affiliates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
But take a look at that second entry — the Parapsychological Association? Is that what it sounds like? Indeed it is — “the international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of ‘psi’’ (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition (“parapsychology”).”
The only problem is, parapsychology is not science. It’s pseudoscience. From a completely blank-slate perspective, one can certainly pose scientific questions about whether the human mind can tell the future or read minds or move objects around without touching them. The thing is, we know the answer: no. The possibilities have been investigated and found wanting; more straightforwardly, they would violate the known laws of physics. Alchemy was science once, but it’s not any more. Not all hypotheses are equally worthy of our respect and attention; sometimes we learn that a particular idea doesn’t work, and move on with our lives.
So what in the world is the Parapsychological Association doing as part of the AAAS? Benefiting from the implication of respectability, is the obvious answer. Note that “Affiliate of the AAAS” is displayed prominently on the PA homepage — an endorsement that, say, the Paleontological Society or the Phycological Society of America (not misspelled, I swear) didn’t deem worth of such prominent display.
Apparently the PA was founded by J.B. Rhine in 1957, and became affiliated with the AAAS in 1969 thanks to the advocacy of then-AAAS-president Margaret Mead. In 1979 John Wheeler campaigned to have it kicked out, but his effort failed.
The AAAS is a useful organization, and it’s a shame to see them associate their good name with pseudoscience. Their annual meeting begins to day in Boston, and it’s always a fun event, a great way to catch up with some of the major themes in all areas of science. None of those themes should involve reading people’s thoughts or bending spoons with one’s mind. I hope the AAAS can gently extract itself from this relationship.
Damn, I step out of the fray to get dinner and miss all the snark.
Hag said:
Crap. Put my end blockquote in the wrong place. Here it is formatted correctly.
Hag said:
Yeah, I’m usually the first person to point out confirmation bias. But remembering a dream is not an everyday occurrence for me. Finding the dream interesting enough to relate it to another party is far far less common. Then having that person respond with, “Holy Shit, I had the same dream last night” certainly qualifies as confirmation, but I bring myself to write that off as simply bias, especially when I’m talking about a recent dream where I’m in high school marching band trying unsuccessfully to play the oboe (my sister’s high school instrument) the very same night my sister had a dream of trying unsuccessfully to play the french horn (my high school instrument) in marching band.
I know an anecdote on a freaking blog comment page is not going to convince anyone, especially not here, I’m just trying to explain why “we know all the physical forces that could explain ESP, and nothing we know of is capable of doing it” isn’t a good enough argument for people like me, with personal experiences to the contrary, to dismiss what we’ve seen. And I for one hope that legitimate scientists have the opportunity to continue to look into the possibility, without being subject to ridicule.
I know there have been some well executed studies providing evidence against ESP, but I seem to recall a study on remote viewers that left open the possibility of something legitimately weird going on in certain cases? That ring a bell to anyone else? Maybe I, ah, dreamed it.
Zach writes:
I think this calls for our own equivalent to Godwin’s Law: When someone in the comments on a science blog compares a commenter to Kent Hovind, the real discussion is effectively over.
Brian Mingus wrote:
No, but have you seen the size of the detectors that are too small to detect gravitational waves? And you hope to do it with your brain? And processes that emit gravitational waves are ridiculously violent. Are you going to do that with your brain too?
Here is what we know:
1. Gravity has been detected. Like, every day!
2. Gravity is too weak to account for psychic phenomena.
3. Any unknown force with range greater than a millimeter would have to be much weaker than gravity to have escaped detection.
You do the math.
Venus is a bright, shiny thing. Why would it be any less useful as a love life enhancement tool than any other similarly pretty object?*
*Aside from the fact that it is currently only visible at 6 in the morning.
Sean,
Concerning: “Any unknown force with range greater than a millimeter would have to be much weaker than gravity to have escaped detection.”
How do we go about detecting an ‘unknown’ force?
I apologize for my ignorance, but there is a caricature in my head of a scientist waving around a measuring instrument set to “Detect Unknown Forces”
My last post might make me out to be a supporter of such woo as ESP etc. So I felt the need to write this:
One can find a convincing argument against Psychokinesis with an information theoretic flavour:
Say one wants to move a rock around with her mind and there are ways to ‘transmit’ such a want. How does a simple thing like a rock ‘decode’ such a command?
In fact, how does one transmit such a want in the first place?
When a person wants to pick up a pen, she just picks up the pen. The process is not like: A wants to pick up a pen followed by A thinks her hand into picking up the pen. This is an unfortunate consequence of having a dualist worldview.
We initiate a co-ordinated firing of motor neurons that results in a co-ordinated constriction of muscle cells, which we call ‘picking up a pen’.
Lastly, we do read other people’s mind and can even control them with ours. Its by using this deeply interesting thing called ‘Language’. Its unfortunate that Parapsychologists take it for granted and don’t find it worth their while.
As a younger child in a large and combative family, I found that people think by focusing. Often on the same things, thus leading to conflict. So it has been my default mechanism to unfocus. What I’ve found over the years is that other organisms perceptive area of concentration can be visually detected. There are a range of ways this manifests, from ripples in the space around them, to those spots that weave across your vision, like light reflecting off a lens. One of the most dependable times for this to be apparent is driving, because the people coming toward you are externally focused, especially on you, since your vehicle is a potential threat. So it is the opposite of walking along a sidewalk, where people naturally avoid concentrating on others space. Since it has become such a habit for me, I try not to read others and tune it out, but this tends to make me more sensitive to it, so I resort to mirroring effects and reflect others back at them. I’m putting this out there, because I don’t have a professional scientific rep to preserve. I ride horses for a living and it’s a job requirement for me to get inside other animals heads. I don’t bend spoons and I don’t teleport.
Why are other dimensions, alternate universes and branes qualitively different from spirit worlds, given consciousness inhabits these few dimensions, why not any others?
John, peripheral vision is actually more sensitive to light than direct vision. But if you really believe you can sense stuff, why not devise a suitable, as objective as possible experiment and check out your success rate?
Parapsychology?! The intended field is based on the notion that mind is a form of “substance” in the world which can be studied. Fair enough, at least at first. Yet science has indicated that such things are at best problematic. In biology there persisted an idea of an “elan vitale,” or a life force which made living things fundamentally distinct from inanimate objects. We know quite a lot about biology today, genetic codes, polypeptide function of kinases, phosphatases, transferases, and the grand scheme of evolution which binds together living species in an interrelated web. In spite of this science has found no elan vitale.
The vital force (elan vitale) and some related concepts are based on Aristotle’s scheme that distinct categories of objects hold their properties by an aether-like substance that was a metaphysical substance which conferred ontological properties to a physical body. Alchemy was based on idea of this sort. Different substances were thought to change their properties by how they contained this “aether,” called phlogiston. Lavoissier falsified this idea. The vital force in biology is a similar concept, a bio-phlogiston of sorts, which while it has not been exactly falsified it has been reduced to irrelevance.
We then get to this property called consciousness. We really know very little about this. We can only so far identify certain brain states as measured by PET and other methods in association with a subject’s reported inner experiences. There is a fair amount of data which indicates that physiological processes can be associated with mental states, but as yet the connection between how this “generates” the inner conscious state is unknown. The idea of mind as some substance or entity which inhabits a physical body, such as Descarte’s mind-body dualism, can be argued against pretty easily. While not falsified, it is ineffective. There was last decade a spate of interest in an idea of quantum consciousness, but this has fallen into irrelevance. Large scale quantum entanglements, particularly with states in a warm body with lots of thermal decoherence, are not likely to exist.
So mind as a substance which is exists in the world but is somehow independent of properties of physical bodies is not a scientifically credible idea. Parapsychology has as one of its main conjectures the idea that mind operates on the physical world, and can do so directly. This is whether it be Descarte’s dualism idea of a mind that functions on the body internally, or as an entity which can operate outside the body. Uri Geller made a bit of a spurious career on the idea he can move objects and bend spoons by pure thought or will. Yet so far none of these claims has passed the criterion set down by James Randi as credible.
Thus parapsychology is at best an idea of a science. All the putative science has is a set of loose and inexactly stated conjectures and no observational or experimental body of data. As such parapsychology can not be regarded as a scientific subject. Maybe in the future data might come to support its basic tenents, yet from a Bayesian perspective this appears to involve “unkown unknowns,” to use a Rumfeldism, where no Bayesian prior exists. Parapsychology as its stands exists as little more than one of many puerile notions upheld in popular society.
Lawrence B. Crowell
One can also approach this topic from the other end, i.e. assume that there does exist parapsychological phenomena and yet the laws of physics as observed in experiments are not violated (except possibly when doing parapsychology experiments). Then try to think of a universe in which this could be possible.
One possibility would be if our universe is implemented as computer simulation in another universe. We live in that other universe and access the simulation via virtual reality. Then, we would observe the laws of physics of the simulated universe, but we could still violate them ourselves.
Folks, no one is saying that the Psychies shouldn’t have their own society. But Sean is correct to point out that it has no place in the AAAS.
I’d be willing to entertain for the sake of argument that they might have some solid results that are worth studying, maybe, someday. But the fact remains that as of now, they haven’t come up with anything, ever.
If you include psi as a science, by what right would you exclude creationism? Or Vedic Quantum Mechanics?
There is no spoon.
The idea we exist in a computer simulation seems to have a measure of popularity these days. With Newton the universe was a clock, and today it is a computer. I am a bit of a partisan of the idea that quantum gravity is fundamentally about error correction gauged algebraic codes which perserve Q-bits, so there is a computer-like aspect to the universe I think.
I have this definition of three types of God. The first is a metaphysical God, which is a sort of metaphysical “mind force” which confers a reality on to existence. John Wheeler questioned what it was that made the “equations fly,” and this God is what does that. The second type of God is the Deist God which set things up and then let the clockwork run. This is the God of Newton, thought Newton would himself deny this, but it is the clockwork universe God. The third form is the MUG-God (MUG = Multi-User Game), who has set the universe up as His own little game. We are the little characters or self-actualized avatars in this simulation, or in a digital version of what the late 70’s post-punk existentially angstish band “Joy Division” called “God’s Colony.” If we were to pick people’s brains we would probably find that the MUG-God is most popularly believed. The fundamentalist notion of God with a 6-day creation and the whole Biblical literalist hook-line-sinker is a MUG-God. Curiously this notion has crept into some cosmology speculation as well.
We might then in part think of science as a form of Turing test, where here we are doing a sort of virtual reality Turing test analogous to an AI T-test. If we were to find that there are violations in the game, or where the physical rules we observe don’t apply in certain circumstances we might then conclude that the universe has failed the Turing test. If mind is found to circumvent physics, say in the way to players on “Second Life” might communicate by a channel outside the simulation, then we would be confronted by evidence of a most disturbing nature.
The idea of a computer basis for the universe is something I find interesting. There is a thread on this blog on this idea, but it appears to have died before I was aware of it. Yet with quantum information and quantum cosmology the “game” is a bit different. What we call classical information occurs because conditional entropy for EPR pairs is made inaccessible. This might occur for EPR pairs sent through a very noisy channel, such as a black hole. Yet this “computer” is self-emergent, computes itself and is not something that is “designed” from the outside. The MUG-God running a computer simulation is a cosmological version of the Intelligent Design thesis, which is not a theory but a statement on the falsifiability of biological evolution. A statement on the falsification of a theory can’t itself be a theory. Fortunately the irreducible complexity and ID concept has failed to be observed and it has so far been rejected as a scientific theory. The computer simulation as an algorithm established or designed from the outside is something which might stand as a falsification statement of a quantum cosmology which has quantum gravity bits in a self-assembled or selected algorithm. So we keep doing a “Turing test” on reality to determine if reality is somehow a virtually designed process, always trying to falsify our theories, which is what we call science.
Lawrence B. Crowell
1. Matt “in a field that has always been underfunded and mocked”
Underfunded? I would argue that parapsychology has been over-funded when one looks at the resources put into it vs. the reliable, replicable results obtained. In the 1970s, James S. McDonnell (of McDonnell-Douglas) gave enough money $$$ to Washington University in St. Louis to convince them to start up a department of parapsychology. The eventual result was Project Alpha, in which two young men made fools of the department’s researchers. Those clowns deserved to be mocked. There is a whole lot in the field of parapsychology that is mock-worthy. And there is, to this day, not a single reliable, replicable result from the entire field.
andy.s wrote:
Creationism doesn’t even make an attempt at falsification or lab study. How bout that for a pretty reasonable criterion?
Sean, Zach, Hag, you all are most likely right, that these para-shrinks are wasting their time testing for something that has never been found, and can’t be theoretically accommodated. But damn, they’re doing it in the framework of science, hoping against hope for the one result that could turn our understanding of life completely on its head. Juvenile? Maybe. But it’s also beautifully fucking human, and it earns my admiration, not my scorn. I’m glad these people are out there. Looking for something crazy, even futilely, even when doomed to utter failure before you’re out of the starting gate – that’s not the same thing as claiming to have found something crazy, against all evidence to the contrary.
Clearly, as already demonstrated, I have a bit of the crackpot in me. But damn, I love me a doomed enterprise. Failure is probably my favorite part of the great human enterprise (of course I have less romantic feelings about personal failure). But is there a more sympathetic character in all of mythology than Sisyphus?
We haven’t exactly explained consciousness either, or even a clear description of it. Does that mean it really doesn’t exist? Too woo woo?
Explained No. detected? Yes. (although if you wanted a serious discussion about it, you’d have to define your terms first, and then things would get very messy.) Parapsychology has not even demonstrated, in a reliable and replicable way, that its subject of study exists.
J.B. Rhine offered, in his book Reach of the Mind to have any other researcher “replicate” his result of a particular experiment using the data Rhine had already collected. I submit this as an indicator of how seriously the field deserves to be taken.
Tell the CIA, tell the US Army. Both those organisations had Operational Remote Viewing Units for over 20 years.
Just because you don’t understand something, doen’t make it non-existent.
Sean said:
> The possibilities have been investigated and found wanting;
> more straightforwardly, they would violate the known laws of physics.
I am as much against pseudoscience as the next physicist, but I have to point out that the above statement is a prime example of the practice, based as it is on logical fallacies. The first line is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam (since some possibilities have not been proven true, all possibilities are therefore false). The second line is an example of a false dilemma (I do not know how to describe *some* purported parapsychological phenomena using the *known* laws of Physics; therefore *all* possible parapsychological phenomena violate the laws of Physics).
I think it is unfair to paint those who would investigate certain phenomena using the scientific method with the same brush as the admittedly plentiful cranks.
>Just because you don’t understand something, doen’t make it non-existent.
But it is STILL bad science to invest in something merely because it is possible.
Willingness to accept a non-standard idea if and when there is evidence is one thing, but it is NOT the same thing as encouraging every weird idea because it is *possible*. There is something called scientific judgement, and being scientific about USING it.
The question is not one of possibility, but of probability.
Absolutely anything is *possible*.
I meant:
“…and being scientific _is_ about using it.”
Hag,
It’s not a question of whether I can devise a test to convince myself, but that would prove it to others. Since what happens is often visual, it would require an extremely sensitive camera with a gas based lens. Nikon just isn’t there yet.
On the other hand, I think the logic of it is quite reasonable. We all inhabit these bubbles of awareness that are constantly bumping into one another and have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. I find the level of communication is like an iceburg. Much of it is under the surface and we subconsciously block out most of what our subconscious doesn’t want to consider.
As Lawrence points out, “So mind as a substance which is exists in the world but is somehow independent of properties of physical bodies is not a scientifically credible idea.” It seems that if consciousness manifests itself as a physical property, it would be an electric field of sorts and it would shape itself to ones general area of concentration, just as light passing through a magnifying glass is concentrated to a point. Such as a focused cone out in front, or more unfocused area of attention, or any variety of such interactions. An example was that several weeks ago, I was riding out on my motorcycle and sensed this blurring/cross hatching as I was approaching a blind turn. Since the road in the other direction, before the turn, was visible from the direction I was coming, I hadn’t seen a car, but just as I went around the turn, there was someone on a bicycle. These sort of occurances happen to me on a daily basis, with probably half the cars I’ll pass driving down the road, if they are not in lines of traffic, in which case they are likely just focused on the car in front of them. It’s not like I can read their minds as to what their stream of consciousness is thinking, it’s just as though we bump into each other in passing. It doesn’t usually occur in face to face conversation, because that requires me to already be focused on them and following the subtle mannerisms such situations dictate.
It has been this way for much of my life. I can recall walking out in a field and having these spots appear in my vision, as the herd of horses looked up at me. It’s not like it’s overwhelming, just an undertone that is very persistant.
Obviously it would be difficult to put this into the sort of airtight box to which science aspires, but reality doesn’t always do boxes.
Another problem with concentrating on any old spot that appears in your vision, is that they are visual clues to previous thoughts you were just having and if you try following them as they disappear, it gums up the whole thought/vision process and you have to refocus. Push the reset button, so to speak.
The issue comes down to standards. The other day I got slightly pilloried for writing on how a lattice gauge physics was similar to a Bloch waves in a lattice in solid state physics, but where the “phonons” were massive. I got some flak for talking about “massive phonons” in the context of condensed matter physics. Maybe I was a bit “loose” with things. I fell below someone’s standards, a solid stater in fact.
We might imagine that somebody around 1860 came up with this idea that particles of matter were waves. The person might cite the planes of constant action in Hamiltonian mechanics as real parts of a wave front. They might even work through some exhaustive stuff to try to show that physics was fundamentally wave mechanics. Today we know that fundamentally this is close to the mark, but by the standards of the mid-19th century this would have been a questionable hypothesis which had no experimental contact. It really could not have been easily accepted into physics.
Now is this similar to parapsychology today? Is parapsychology a science waiting to germinate? Maybe, but in the above somebody advancing this might have contacts with known physics of the day. The idea might be premature, indeed Poincare almost literally had QM in his hand, but it is not completely out of line. This might be where string theory exists today. Parapsychology in contrast has no contact with theory, and it lacks any confirmation experimentally. So parapsychology falls to a lower standard than some suggestion of a theory that is premature or just wrong.
Of course science has to be open to new ideas, but just so much. We had after all cold fusion, and before then there were ideas of N-rays, and UFOs got some play, and there was a goofy idea of polywater, and … . After sufficient review these were either falsified or found to not produce any data above the signal to noise ratio. Parapsychology had its heyday as a scientific possibility in the late 60 to early 70s, particularly after B. Josephson went chasing after it. But with time, now over 4 decades, and nothing to show the idea is scientifically moribund.
Lawrence B. Crowell