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A GenePoool.com Essay
PSI
If you're not familiar with the term, that's okay. You've come across it under different headings, probably, be they ESP, remote viewing, or psychokinesis (PK). They are "psychic powers" or, psi. There's a fair degree of likelihood you also believe in at least one of the above phenomena on some level. That's understandable.
I can't disprove that human beings possess psychic powers, and really, nobody else can either. On a fundamental level of basic logic, this would fall under the category of proving a negative, and that can't be done. So I'll leave you to your own opinions on the matter. But I will tell you why I don't think there is such a thing as psi. That's what I'm here for, after all.
In the last fifty-odd years the not-altogether respected field of parapsychology has blossomed thanks to the groundbreaking work of many scientists who began with "I believe in psi" and ended with "and I'm going to prove it's real." Because that's the way things work in the sciences. Before researching practical applications and what-have-you, it's a good idea to know you're researching a genuine phenomenon.
And, you would think, in the last fifty-odd years, parapsychology had at least been able to confirm that psi exists.
So have they?
The answer to that question depends on who you ask. But before you ask a parapsychologist, maybe you should know what the rules are. They have their own rules when it comes to examining their results. So I give you the rules, as summarized by James Randi:
"1: No real psychic can produce phenomena upon command or on a regular basis. Thus the performer who can consistently turn out effects that defy explanation by ordinary means is considered a fraud, and the one who 'hits and misses' or who has periods of impotency is judged to be the real goods.
"2: Cheating is a compulsion of the psychic, something that he feels he must do given the opportunity. But he is forgiven for this, since he can't resist the feeling.
"3: Unless the detractor is able to explain away ALL the phenomena exhibited by the psychic as done by ordinary means, he has failed to prove his case. Similarly, those who have been exposed as cheats or who have confessed are still assumed to have a margin of real powers that they have been unable to organize effectively.
"4: Psychics cannot be expected to produce results when persons of negative attitude are present, nor when controlled so as to inhibit their sense of trusting and being trusted."
Lest you think that nobody who wishes to consider themselves practitioners of the scientific method could seriously employ such fallacious logic when in the discourse of science, I give you another quote. When one of the most famous of the parapsychologists, S. G. Soal, was discovered to have cheated by deliberately fudging data on a psi test, here is what investigator J. G. Pratt had to say:
"[Soal may] have used precognition when inserting digits into the columns of numbers he was copying down, unconsciously choosing numbers that would score hits on the call the subject would make later."
If you think this logical, perhaps you have a great future ahead of you in the field of parapsychology.
Consider the practical advantages these rules serve. If the person you're testing is caught cheating, well, that's okay, because he wasn't cheating the times he wasn't caught. How do you know? You didn't catch him. If another laboratory attempts to perform the necessary replication of your experiments but come up with non-confirming results, that's okay too, because skepticism automatically nullifies psychic powers.
Or say someone who has no stake your experiments comes in and observes your trials. Say that person notices there's a way for your subject to cheat (i.e., get the answers or create the results through non-psychic means) and suggests a way to eliminate cheating as a possibility. You're feeling gregarious, so you adopt the proposals. Suddenly, the remarkable results you'd been getting disappear. Do you then conclude, as a reasonable scientist, that the subject had been cheating all along? Of course not. Obviously, the new controls make the subject nervous, which creates a situation in which psi cannot function. So you loosen the controls again. Perhaps you even defend this decision by espousing the honorable nature of your laboratory psychic.
If you look closely at the rules, you'll find there is a way to explain away every single negative result every single parapsychologist has managed to come across. In fact, by these rules, I'M psychic, and so are you. And so is my dog.
The annals of parapsychology are littered with one poorly controlled experiment after another. They range from minor statistical errors to outright fraud, and sometimes veer into unadulterated comedy. Take for example Professor John Taylor, who claimed he had tested a dozen children who could bend spoons with their minds. It turned out the only time any of them could do it was when NOBODY ELSE WAS IN THE ROOM. Rather than suggest the possibility that the children were simply bending the spoons by pressing them up against a table, something called the "shyness effect" was invoked. (It is, by the way, deceptively easy to bend a spoon, but I'll save details on this for a later column on Uri Geller, who deserves one all his own.)
This is not to say all parapsychologists are de facto poor scientists, or even poor practitioners of laboratory science. Many of them come from respectable positions in respectable fields, such as physics. (For some reason, a lot of parapsychologists are also physicists.) And many of them design perfectly valid experiments that would work perfectly well provided they were testing animals or inanimate objects. What they consistently fail to take into account is the possibility that their human subject is versed in sleight of hand.
The only practical difference between a conjuror and a psychic is that the conjuror will tell you it's only a trick. But when facing the argument that their prized psychic might be no more than a good conjuror, the typical response of the parapsychologist is "I'm a scientist; I can't be fooled by a magic trick." This is, naturally, patently ridiculous.
Given the choice between performing a magic act in front of a roomful of scientists or a crowd of children, a magician will opt for the scientists every time. Why? A magic performance hinges on the magician's ability to confound the assumptions of an adult. The conjuror will know that a certain form of redirection will work on an adult of sound mind, but he cannot be certain that the redirection will succeed in the case of a child, because children don't always think logically or follow the same visual cues. In other words, generally speaking, the higher the intelligence of the audience, the more likely the trick will work. Scientists are exactly the sort of people sleight of hand will fool, every time.
There are other ways a seemingly good experiment can go wrong, even with the most reasoned of investigators. Sometimes it has nothing to do with a cheating subject or an error-ridden test.
Let's construct a generic example of a psi experiment. In one room we put a computer that chooses the numbers 1-4 at random, and test subject A. Subject A's job is to send the information psychically to subject B. Subject B is in a separate room, and their job it is to receive the "sent" number and record it on a second computer. The two computers record the choices, and the results are subsequently compared.
Now, we don't need anything close to 100% accuracy to have had a successful experiment. Generally, anything above 30% is very significant statistically (given sufficient trials,) with 25% the baseline for chance. If we do find statistically significant results, are we ready to publish a paper? (The parapsychologists in the room are not allowed to answer.) The answer is no, because we haven't finished eliminating the other possibilities.
For example, is our randomizer really random? In one experiment of this kind the random number generator automatically did not choose the same number twice. This increases the baseline for chance from 25% to 33% and suddenly 30% is just about right.
Is there any way for subject A to signal subject B other than by psychic means? If they're in the same building, subject A could stomp on the floor and theoretically give the number to subject B rather easily.
Did we do enough trials? Thirty percent is not at all significant if we only did 100 trials. And the reverse of this is, how many times did we do this experiment? If we set the bar at 2,000 tries, and then did it fifty times on fifty different occasions, we may very well end up with a single test that shows statistically significant results. But the forty-nine times we ended up with chance results may have had something to do with it; eventually we were going to get lucky. We might even get something statistically BELOW chance, which we could report as "psi missing." (I'm not making this up.) We could publish a paper announcing on two trials we had statistically significant results above chance on one trial, and statistically significant misses below chance on another. Parapsychologists will toast us. We just have to bury the data on the other 48 trials.
Finally, if we pass all the other questions, we still have to answer what might seem obvious: what did we actually test for? Was it ESP, with subject B reading the mind of subject A? Or did subject A send the information to subject B? It could have been precognition; subject B could have been looking into the future at a printout of the results from subject A's computer. It could even have been PK; subject B might have influenced the randomizer in the computer to get it to come up with specific numbers. This sort of confusion is what makes Pratt's defense of Soal perfectly reasonable to other parapsychologists.
There IS a much simpler test of psi, or more specifically, PK. Take a sewing needle and put it between two magnets in such a way that is rests upright on its tip. Put the entire thing in an enclosed glass container. Sit the subject at the other end of the room and tell him to try and get the needle to spin.
It's simple, it's direct, and it would be very difficult to do without psychic powers, which is probably why no parapsychologist has tried it, even though it was suggested years ago.
But none of this actually gets to the root of what's wrong with parapsychology and psi because, experimental problems notwithstanding, there is a huge gap where there should be theoretical psi research.
Before psi is going to be accepted by the scientific community at large (and by skeptics like me) someone is going to have to come up with a positive theory. By this I mean what's missing is a theoretical explanation for how psi COULD exist. This is psi's achilles' heel, and it's ultimately why I don't believe in it.
The problem is, psi experiments are all essentially designed to prove psi by process of elimination. This is, at its core, an argument from ignorance. Take the needle experiment again. If someone sits at the other end of that room and manages to make the needle spin, well, we've eliminated every physical possibility from our list of explanations, so would we be right to conclude that it MUST be psychic power at work? Not necessarily, no. Just because we can't think of another explanation doesn't mean there isn't one. It may very well be that our subject psychically willed the needle to spin, but it is no less likely that a mouse hiding under his chair psychically willed it to spin, nor is it any less likely that some other unknown phenomenon is at work causing the needle to spin. There is no logical distinction between one unknown phenomenon and another, and because we don't have a positive theory that makes definite, testable predictions, we cannot conclude with any degree of certainty whatsoever that psi was involved.
There are many reasons to doubt that any practical theory of psi will be forthcoming, because just about every attempt to do so will violate at least one well-established law or prove to be a biological impossibility. Take the issues of instantaneous communication and remote viewing. If a psychic can instantly communicate with someone else, or "see" something that is a great distance away, by exactly what mechanism is this instant information being received? The psychic can't just "know" it without it being communicated to him and so, if real communication is taking place, there HAS to be a delay between the sending and the receiving. But despite the fact that nothing can travel faster than light, remote viewers claim they can go to other planets immediately, and even to other galaxies that are many light years away. The lack of a time gap creates a huge credibility gap.
You might say-- as many proponents of psi do-- that an undiscovered aspect of physics is the answer to this question. Consider what you're doing when you argue this point. You're invoking an undiscovered phenomenon to explain another undiscovered phenomenon. You've now gone from science to fantasy, perhaps without even realizing it.
One field of legitimate science that has recently been co-opted to serve psi proponents is quantum mechanics. In quantum theory, there is something equivalent to instantaneous information transfer, best illustrated by the EPR paradox. (I've no intention of explaining the paradox here, although I could; it will just take too long.) The problem is, applying anything in quantum mechanics to the macroscopic universe is a mistake. This is like saying that because an ant can survive a fall from a tabletop, you can live through a fall off of the Empire State building. We do not use quantum mechanics-- which is largely a non-observational series of mathematical constructs already-- to make predictions about the world on our scale. It's not designed to do so.
So why don't I believe in psi? There's no working model to explain how it CAN work. There's no experimental proof that it works, or even exists, and every experiment conducted on it to this point has been proven to be either severely flawed or possessed of results that have much more prosaic explanations.
Most people I know who profess belief in psi utilize a much simpler argument. "There MUST be something there" they argue. Occasionally anecdotal evidence is provided, evidence that in my eyes is either non-spectacular or simply a matter of coincidence. Or luck, even. Cases of "I was just thinking of so-and-so and then he called" which are much more readily ascribed to remembering hits and forgetting misses abound. I don't begrudge anyone's belief, even those of the parapsychologists. (I do, however, wish more of them were as honest as John Taylor, who eventually disavowed his own research when he realized he was fooling himself.) What I find surprising is that in the last part of the twentieth century, my opinion that psi does not exist puts me in a significant minority.
Which is why, when the question "why don't you believe in psi" is posed, I usually answer with a question of my own: "why do you?"
Why does anybody?
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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