The best argument for parapsychology

From WikiSynergy

Some people —such as those who set up the Parapsychological Association website— seem to think that laboratory evidence is the best reason to believe in psi. But a layman can read the works of Dean Radin and others, telling all about the meta-analyses of the many studies. Then the layman can read the criticisms of those studies by authors such as Ray Hyman (who also express their disgust with pseudoskepticism). If one keeps on searching, one will eventually hear the nasty little secret that even some who call themselves parapsychologists (or transpersonal psychologists) don't believe the studies are proof of psychic phenomena. Some of them don't even believe in the paranormal.

Scientists who really study the laboratory evidence for psi usually believe that it is irrefutable. Maybe it is. But looking at the debate from a layman's perspective, it seems that even if you spent years becoming fluent in statistics and the other methodologies used in parapsychology, you still might end up not believing psi exists, or at least that the question is so complicated that a firm conviction is difficult.

So maybe we should just be agnostic about the paranormal. There's no shame in saying we don't know, if we really can't know. But there's a problem with this stance: lab evidence for psi is the worst evidence you can get. There are lots of other accounts of psi which are much better and much more evidential. There are people who bent spoons, had near-death experiences, went out of body and saw something which turned out to be real, had precognitive dreams, experienced psychic healing... the list goes on.^[1]

There is no doubt that a lot of these things are fraud. There is no doubt that many of them are self-delusion. So let's put those aside. Let's also put aside all the experiences and phenomena which might reasonably be due to fraud or self-delusion. Then let's put aside many of those where the likelihood of self-delusion or fraud is so small that we feel embarrassed -as reasonable beings- to disregard them. We are still left with a core of experiences of which we can say: either the person actually experienced that, or they are lying. And there are a lot of liars.

There are two major points to consider relative to parapsychology today. The first is that the laboratory experiments are merely attempts to confirm phenomena observed in the field. The second is a personal judgment: do you think all those people out there are liars? Remember that they aren't just liars for a day, but for life. Our judgment of parapsychology must hinge on our judgment of psychology.

But we should not pretend that the lab results are really terribly important. They are only an attempt to confirm and isolate the other evidence.

A spoon bent by Dr. Dean Radin- unless he is lying.

[edit] References

1. ↑ It is incorrect to say that anecdotal evidence is worthless in science, it merely needs to be handled carefully.