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May 25, 2013, 7:40am

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don salmon
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The Richard Wiseman Challenge
« Thread Started on Apr 5, 2012, 3:02pm »

The Richard Wiseman Challenge

In another forum post, “A Context for Trimming Ken Wilber’s Evolutionary View With Ockham’s Razor”, I quoted Richard Wiseman saying that the data for psi is as good as the evidence in any other area of science. That means that Wiseman – a psychologist who has conducted research in parapsychology and is widely known as rather passionately anti-psi – believes that in terms of statistics and methodology, parapsychologists have presented evidence for telepathy, remote viewing, precognition and psychokinesis that is as strong as the evidence for gravity, evolution, and the relationship of mind and brain. He of course goes on to say this is not good enough; since psi is so “extraordinary” according to Wiseman, we should not accept this evidence. Rather we need evidence **stronger** than that in any other area of science.

I’ve included some critiques of Wiseman in the “Context” post that I think respond quite well to his notion that psi is extraordinary. But for what I am calling “The Richard Wiseman Challenge”, I’d like to offer this:

Let’s bracket the “extraordinary” claim, and take Wiseman at his word. What if the 125+ years of parapsychology evidence is doing just what Wiseman says it is doing – it is valid evidence that anomalous cognition (psi) actually takes place. Instead of assuming this is extraordinary, perhaps it can be explained within the predominant physicalist/materialist paradigm – or maybe not. Let’s not assume anything for the moment. Just ask ourselves – if Wiseman thinks the evidence is that good, let’s go with it and see where it leads. Let’s be completely “empirical” – don’t assume anything because of prior beliefs – just follow the evidence.

And I’d like to add one more part to the RW Challenge, as long as we’re being strictly empirical. Almost all philosophers of science that I’ve been able to find agree that, technically, it is impossible to prove the existence of wholly mind-independent or consciousness-independent matter. Despite that, of course, they still accept it. But again, let’s leave aside theories and assumptions, and stick with purely empirical data. If we do that, we can follow Sri Krishna Prem when he says:

It should be clear from introspective meditation that all forms are sustained in consciousness, and that, apart from consciousness, we know nothing and can know nothing of forms... No one knows them, no one can ever know them; to believe in their existence is a pure… act of faith… It should not be supposed that by the forms are meant sensations, camera pictures of reality located somewhere in the brain. The brain itself (as an 'object') is one of the constructs of which mention has just been made. The usefulness of such constructs in certain realms of thought and study is not at all denied, but they are irrelevant here. The primary bedrock of experience is not sensations in the eye, ear, or brain, but visual and other forms in space. All the rest is inference and construction.

As Sri Krishna Prem says, such constructs are useful, and perhaps the physicalists are correct when they say such purely physical forms or objects exist, entirely apart from consciousness. But as most philosophers of science (often reluctantly) agree, there is no way we could ever provide proof of their existence (as soon as they do, they become objects of consciousness; try it; try to think about anything, and abstract all qualities as well as all human concepts and imagine that that “thing” might be apart from all consciousness – human or non-human – whatsoever).

So with that introduction, here’s the challenge:

Starting with what we know directly, by direct experience, that is – a world of forms known by means of the “space of awareness” or consciousness, and taking into account Wiseman’s statement about the strength of evidence for telepathy, remote viewing, psychokinesis and precognition, how might our understanding of physics, evolutionary biology and neuroscience change if we take these things into account?

Just to prepare you, I want to say just a few things about what the “Richard Wiseman Challenge” (RWC) is not – it is not an invitation to debate the facts. Wiseman may be wrong, but this is not my concern for now. You might say that the whole RWC is kind of a trick or at least a glib attempt to bypass the whole psi argument/debate, just to enjoy thinking differently about things for a bit.

Second, if you’re interested, I’d like to invite you to spend a few weeks – preferably, a few months – looking at things from this point of view, without debating the premise. Again, both premises may be entirely wrong – Wiseman may be completely wrong in his analysis of psi data, and Sri Krishna Prem and the philosophers I’ve alluded to may be utterly naïve in their assumptions about the impossibility of verifying the existence of mind-independent matter. I’m simply suggesting, let’s try something different because the old arguments – which often end up in a stalemate between physicalists and alleged ‘dualists” (physicalists, especially the Buddhist pragmatists, are now calling the non-dualists “closet dualists”) - don't seem to be working.

Let’s just look at the empirical evidence – it’s there for psi, according to Wiseman, and as far as I understand Sri Krishna Prem, he has at least a reasonable case – one worth spending a few weeks or months on – that we might look again at our direct experience and see that the assumption of wholly consciousness or awareness-independent matter is just that, an assumption, and not only an unprovable one, but one that just may be unnecessary for the conduct of natural or social science (astrophysicist Piet Hut, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, has made an interesting case that, although he doesn’t believe in mind-independent matter, it was a necessary belief for the first 4 centuries of physics; I don’t understand why that is the case, but I’m glad to see he no longer believes it’s necessary).

Finally, I’d like to say that the challenge does not mean – as one or two have taken it to mean, assuming that psi is everywhere, easily accessible, happening all the time, and affecting us in huge obvious ways. For example, Gerry Worlee, fierce NDE skeptic, answered the challenge by saying if psi was true, we’d have to close casinos, the stock market, and similar ventures, and nobody could lie, there would be no crime, we’d solve the energy problem with psychokinesis, etc etc. I hope it’s obvious that Wiseman is not saying that psi is huge and all-pervading. All he’s saying is that the current evidence – with extremely small effect sizes – is as good as that in any other area of science. So the challenge asks us to think: what does it mean in the current state of world affairs, that in some way we can barely comprehend, there are some kind of psi effects that show up in minimal ways in our laboratories, and perhaps greater psi effects in “real life”, but ones that as yet cannot be measured in conventional “double blind, controlled” studies.

And if you take offense at Wiseman’s analysis of the data of the parapsychologists, and find Sri Krishna Prem’s proposition to be nonsense, fine! Don’t’ take the challenge:>))) Meanwhile, if you are interested, I’d be very interested in hearing from you.

Ultimately, I think the implications of the challenge will be something along these lines: If it’s not possible to contest Wiseman’s analysis of psi data or Sri Krishna Prem’s observations about forms existing utterly independent of consciousness, then does this help us get any closer to solving what I understand to be the great mysteries of modern science that appear as yet to be completely unresolvable by means of our present physicalist/materialist theories;

1. The problem of qualia. Most philosophers agree that materialism cannot account for sensory qualities (I would add, moral, esthetic and other qualities, but this would be too controversial, so we’ll leave it at sensory qualities). To make this even simpler, most neuroscientists say that as yet, we are unable to explain how our assumed “vibrations” of light that stimulate the visual apparatus and various pathways in the brain become the experienced visual images – qualia – that make up so much of our experience.

2. How the material universe arose from nothing (even Krauss, I think, who says that there never was “nothing”, ultimately has the same problem – how can there be something at all in an utterly mindless, pointless, unintelligent dead universe.

3. How did the so –called ‘laws’ (or habits) of nature arise, and how do they persist (if you don’t think this is a mystery, see Steven Weinberg’s comments, quoted in my “Shaving Science With Ockham’s Razor” over at www.integralworld.net; click on “News” and search for my name)

4. How did life emerge from dead matter?

5. How did sentience and/or consciousness emerge from “dead” matter? I don’t see how panpsychism or "panexperientialism" answers this (and I like Christian deQuincy's writing very much) though perhaps you might help me. I agree with psychologist Bill Adams who refers to “emergence” as a “weasel” that emergence theorists use that explains nothing. But perhaps you can show me how “emergence” explains the thing it’s trying to explain: emergence.

I don’t mean to be coy here – I don’t think materialism or physicalism will ever explain any f this, and I think it utterly fails with #1 – no quail, no universe. I’m not sure why anyone wants to hold on to a theory that dissolves the only universe we can ever know or experience. But then, a professor at a college I attended, William Roll, thinks that parapsychology can be explained quite well within a physicalist paradigm. So if you’re a committed panpsychist or physicalist, you don’t need to bend yourself into all kinds of strange, yogic-pretzel like shapes in order to deal with Wiseman’s analysis of psi data. Maybe he’s right, maybe the psi data is good and it’s really pointing to real world, actual, telepathy – so what? Let’s try to come up with a physicalist explanation for it; one that accounts for the psi data and that answers the 5 questions above. Maybe we’ll come up with a whole different approach to physics, evolution and neuroscience in the course of thinking a bit differently about things.

Anybody?

Anybody?

(with apologies to Ferris Bueller)