This is an interview with Robert McLuhan, journalist, blogger and author of the book Randi's Prize. I thank Robert for kindly accepting this interview. Enjoy.1-Robert, tells us something about your background.
My first proper job was working as a foreign correspondent in Spain and Portugal, mainly for the Guardian newspaper. I then did a ten-year stint in the music business, running a recording studio and dance music label. For the last ten years or so I’ve been writing again, mainly for news and business magazines, while pursuing my interest in parapsychology.
2-In the United Kingdom, the current materialistic version of secularism seems to be very widespread and influential among citizens there (at least more than in other countries) and books promoting atheism and materialism (like Dawkins' The God Delusion or Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before the Breakfast) have been in general sympathetically received by the public and the media. As a journalist and a citizen of England, which is your impression about this sociological phenomenon and why is UK more prone to it than other countries?
Thanks for raising this – it’s something I have been thinking a lot about. There’s a paradox here. Lots of people who I meet are actually quite open to the idea of psychic phenomena, and will readily tell me their experiences. Yet opinion-makers in the serious media – the “commentariat” as it’s sometimes called – will hardly ever mention it. Some journalists, particularly the younger ones, are very snooty and dismissive, and are probably genuinely sceptical. I think it’s possible that many others won’t touch it for fear of what other people might think.
There has been a lot of discussion of religion in recent years, in a political and social context. But it’s always in terms of traditional religion (mainly Christianity and Islam) versus atheism. There’s a lot of complaint about Dawkins-type reductionism. But where you’d often expect the debate to turn to spirituality, and the way this is reinforced by widespread psychic and mystical experience, there’s silence.
An example. A writer called Bel Mooney did a radio series a few years back, talking to agnostics in the media – famous writers, artists, etc - about their views about religion, belief, spirituality and so on. She subsequently wrote some of them up in a book, and it struck me that not a single one of them mentioned the near-death experience, even though they must have been aware of it as a widely-reported phenomenon, and also it was directly central to the subject under discussion. Why?
So far my book Randi’s Prize has been read mainly by people who share its assumptions. That’s fine, but my main aim has been to try to engage people with my sort of background, British writers and intellectuals, and get them to look at psychic reports, not as an outdated superstition but as an aspect of consciousness and of human experience. I think a public conversation about this is long overdue.
It’s hard, though I do sense it might be possible. It just needs one or two brave souls out there to pick it up and say, yes, there is something interesting here, something that merits a closer look. Let’s not be squeamish about it.
3-How did you get interested in parapsychology and the afterlife research?
Near where I once worked was a New Age/occult bookshop, where I used to browse in spare moments. It’s not what I would have chosen, but it was the only one within walking distance. I read about all kinds of crazy things – materialising mediums, spirit possession, etc - and it struck me that people seemed to be describing actual experience. They didn’t seem to be making it up. That surprised me because at the same time I was reading a lot of science books, which I also really enjoyed. On some level I’d always assumed that science tolerates ideas like telepathy and so on, and kept an open mind. But I realised nothing could be further from the truth. Science absolutely forbids such things, insists they can’t and don’t happen. So I was mightily puzzled.
Then my business went bust and my days were suddenly free. So I decided to spend a bit of time checking it all out. I spent the best part of three years in libraries and putting together the first draft of Randi’s Prize.
4-Have you had any personal, first hand encounter with some phenomenon suggestive of psi and the afterlife?
Nothing that compares with what other people have reported. But I did have a couple of encounters with fortune tellers, who seemed to know exactly what was going on in my life at the time, and in a way that is hardly explained by “cold-reading”. The first, when I was about 22, had to do with my love life. Someone just came up to me in the street and started haranguing me about it. This was in a small village in a foreign country, so there was no way she could have known about the details. The other was in a fun-fair, a classic gypsy fortune-teller. I had big problems at the time with my business, and was going through rather stressful litigation. She rattled this all off as if she knew about it, but of course she couldn’t possibly.
I’d vaguely supposed that these things could be explained in terms of ‘cold-reading’, and when I started reading about psychic research found that this is indeed what sceptics argue. But however hard I tried I couldn’t make that fit in either of these cases. For one thing, I was completely mute. Didn’t say a word. So there was no verbal feedback to work with. Of course they could have picked up quite a lot from my age, appearance and gender. But the information was quite detailed – in both cases it was a particular individual, and my relationship with that person, which was causing me problems – and in both cases they identified and described this individual with stunning accuracy. Also it just came pouring out – there wasn’t any of the hesitancy and mental effort that you see going on when, for instance, Derren Brown demonstrates cold reading.
I wouldn’t say that these experiences were why I got interested – it was more of a general philosophical thing. But they gave me something personal to work with when I was trying to make a judgement about the sceptics’ arguments.
5-Which is the best scientific evidence for the existence of psi phenomena?
I suppose that depends how one qualifies “scientific”. Is it just psi-research in controlled conditions? Or could it also include field research of spontaneous phenomena like poltergeists, ghosts and apparitions. We might consider some of the NDE research to be “scientific”, but considering the nature of the phenomenon sceptics might disagree. The same with children’s memories of a past life.
If one makes a narrow definition, then I suppose we would be looking at the best evidence from the ganzfeld and remote viewing experiments. But I don’t think a mere statistical anomaly would carry much weight without the very considerable amount of evidence from other fields.
Personally I find the investigations of poltergeists and mediums to be quite persuasive, for instance William Roll’s investigation of the Miami poltergeist, and the Sorbonne and Feilding reports on Eusapia Palladino. There are other investigations of mediums that one might mention, for instance Rudi Schneider, who in two separate studies was shown to be able to deflect an infra-red beam in conditions where fraud could not apply. I discussed this recently on my blog. The papers on Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard also impacted my thinking. Pim van Lommel’s study of NDEs has been quite influential, as has also Ian Stevenson’s voluminous studies of past life memories.
Sceptics quite often say they would be convinced if there was one, just one unambiguous piece of scientific evidence. Actually I think that people, sceptics included, become convinced when they personally experience something they can’t explain away. But that’s not about science – it’s not going to carry conviction with anyone else. That’s the nature of this subject.
For me it’s not about a handful of convincing experiments, it’s about making a judgement on the entirety of the research. Is this a real phenomenon, or ultimately can it be explained away? That’s why I focused on the sceptics’ arguments so closely in Randi’s Prize. For me the alternative “explanations” don’t explain it.
6-Which is the best scientific evidence for the existence of an afterlife?
Again, I have slight problems with the word “scientific” in this context. It’s not something you can prove in a laboratory. But certainly the investigations of Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard had an impact on my thinking in this regard, and there’s a lot of data that one can extract from other areas of investigation – apparitions, poltergeists, past life memories, NDEs and past life memories – which would be used to build the argument. It’s not that there are a few particular things that clinch it. It’s making a judgement about the source of all these different kinds of experience. If it’s not what it seems (evidence of survival of consciousness, that is), then what is it really? How are we going to explain it?
7-Is there good evidence for the existence of reincarnation?
I think the work by Stevenson and other researchers on memories of a past life in very young children has revealed a genuine phenomenon. I can’t see any easy way to explain it away. If one reads the detail of these episodes the quite fine detail of the past lives that these children often remember – the friends the personality had, the preoccupations, possessions, living environment, often in quite a lot of detail – and which is found to correspond to actual lives of recently deceased individuals, it just seems beyond anything that can be explained away in terms of fraud or misunderstandings, or by faulting the investigators’ methods and biases.
One of the biggest arguments against the research has been its preponderance in cultures that believe in reincarnation. But there is evidence of it also in places where it isn’t believed, such as Europe and America. The difference is that the previous personality can’t often be traced, as happens more frequently in Asia. But if individual consciousness survives death, one could speculate that human culture survives also – in fact it would be surprising if it didn’t. In that case, one could further speculate that it influences the way in which individuals are reborn into this world, and the speed of the process. A quick rebirth might be natural for an Asian person who has always believed in the process than it would be for a Westerner for whom the idea is alien and probably repugnant. That would explain why Western past lives can’t be traced.
The problem with this sort of speculation is that it appears to defy Occam’s razor, multiplying entities without need. I just think that if survival of consciousness is true, then we have to start thinking in terms of these sorts of possibilities. It’s a fascinating area.
8-Do you think the evidence for psi phenomena and the afterlife conflicts with contemporary science, specially neuroscience and evolutionary biology?
That’s something else I’ve been thinking about. I remember the physicist Steven Weinberg in a television interview years ago complaining rather petulantly that if telepathy is true, then “science will unravel all the way back to Galileo”. This rather grand statement is a bit of a cliché now. Not being a scientist I felt at the time obliged to take it at face value. But I’ve become rather sceptical about it. Psi phenomena indicate the potential involvement of consciousness in material processes, which is certainly a huge challenge. But even it was proved, it surely wouldn’t invalidate existing understanding of physical laws.
But as you say, neuroscience and evolutionary biology face the biggest challenge from psi phenomena. If minds are interconnected at a distance then where does that leave Dennett and Dawkins?
9-Do you think that quantum mechanics is relavant for parapsychology and the afterlife studies?
Not really my area, I’m afraid. But Chris Carter has written interestingly about this. If the brain is merely mediating mind (eg William James’s “transmission” hypothesis) then one is bound to imagine that quantum processes are involved. But quite how is obviously problematic.
10-Do you think the evidence for psi and the afterlife provides some kind of evidence for the existence of God (widely conceived as an spiritual intelligent creator of the universe)?
I’m aware that some psi proponents are also atheists. But this doesn’t seem terribly coherent to me. I take an either-or view on this. If psi phenomena are imaginary – explicable in the sceptics’ terms, that is – then the brain is the mind and there’s no God. If it’s real, I see no reason to go on resisting the claim of a divine reality described by the great mystics of East and West. But I realize that other people will disagree.
And that’s good. I talked about this a bit at the end of Randi’s Prize. It means that we can debate the existence of psychic phenomena without having necessarily to include divinity in the equation. If sceptics understand this, then hopefully some of them at least will feel less squeamish about accepting the genuineness of psi.
11-Even though not directly related with parapsychology and the afterlife, have you studied the evidence from ufology? Do you think is there any good evidence for the presence of extraterrestial intelligence on Earth and, more precisely, for the extraterrestial origin of some UFOs?
I did look into this, but quite a while ago. I was interested in the overlap between alien intelligences and spiritual entities, as described by Kenneth Ring, for instance. But it’s not something I’ve really followed through.
I was very interested in the findings of Rick Strassman, a doctor who carried out investigations into the halluinogen DMT. This produces quite short, intense trips, a bit like acid but it’s all over quite quickly. He commented on how often subjects reported having been contact with alien visitors, similar to those described in alien abduction scenarios. It has always made more sense to me to think of aliens in a multi-dimensional context, rather than as inhabitants of our own physical cosmos. I suspect the human imagination provides the actual forms.
12-Regarding alternative medicine, do you think the scientific evidence for the efficacy of praying, healing at distance and homeopathy is a good one?
I’m aware that there is some evidence, but I haven’t reached a judgement about how good it is. Homeopathy is a big puzzle, and I admit to being somewhat seduced by the placebo idea. Again, I do think we will find the human imagination to be implicated in things that some people take to be objective. What I mean is, we may be creating genuine effects and clothing them in imaginary forms. But this is just my speculation.
13-You're the author of an excellent book entitled "Randi's Prize". What did motive you to write this book?
Thanks for the compliment. When I set out, I had in mind a study that would make sense of the arguments, a sort of guide through the marshes of psychic research. It took me much longer than I expected, and there was a lot of rewriting to boil it down. In fact there are some quite obvious omissions – some significant laboratory research that I would have liked to dwell on a bit more, also the phenomenon of precognitive dreams, which sceptical psychologist Richard Wiseman discussed in his book Paranormality, and which two British newspapers ran an extract on recently. But I sort of feel I got there in the end. It’s the book that would have answered a lot of my questions, had it been around when I first got interested.
As I mentioned, though, I also have another objective, which is to try to draw the attention of thinking people to psychic research and its implications. I think it’s a pity if they fall in too easily with the glib and dismissive pseudo-explanations of debunking sceptics, which, as I say, seems to be the case with the serious media in Britain. I have to admit, getting serious people, agnostics, to think about ghosts and mediums is an uphill struggle. But worth trying, I think!
14-In your opinion, what influence has Randi's challenge had in the world of psi/afterlife research?
Good question. It’s certainly had a major influence in sceptic thinking, perhaps not so much conceptually, but in hardening attitudes. It’s the perfect comeback for a sceptic. If you say you’re psychic, why haven’t you won Randi’s prize?
My impression is that professional sceptics generally have been successful since the 1980s in discouraging serious interest in the field, which may have a lot to do with its apparently rather weakened state.
I know some would disagree with that characterisation of psi research. In Britain there are said to be quite a number of university psychology departments where it is active. But with notable exceptions such as Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin the discipline seems to suffer from a lack of confidence compared to earlier periods.
15-In your book, you suggest that the convinced skeptic seems to be simply unable to see and hence understand the problems posed by evidence for psi and the afterlife. What causes this skeptical inability to see what other people can see and understand easily?
I’ve no idea what causes it. Why are some people religious and others atheists? Or Republicans or Democrats. I think temperament comes into it a lot. Of course, sceptics say exactly the same thing about us in reverse: we see something that isn’t there. They tend to think they are unbiased and neutral, but of course they are as subjective as the rest of us.
Psychology is a huge element in our attitudes to the idea of the paranormal. That’s why I’m a bit ambivalent about your earlier question: what constitutes good scientific evidence. The evidence will only be as good as you want it to be.
16-As Chris Carter and others have demostrated, as a rule, convinced skeptics are secular humanists, metaphysical naturalists and militant atheists. Do you think these ideological and philosophical beliefs provide the proper mindset and conceptual framework to enable an objective and fair examination of the best evidence for psi and the afterlife?
If you put it like that, then obviously no! But again, one can also reverse it. Sceptics argue that people with religious leanings (or superstitious longings, as they sometimes put it) can’t be objective either.
If there is an answer to this, and that’s something I’ve only just started to explore, it’s to recognise the potential biases on each side and focus hard on the research findings. Perhaps that way we can discover each other’s weaknesses and find common ground. That seems to me to be a better way forward than putting on armour and going out to fight on an ideological battlefield.
17-Some people argue that being a vocal skeptic is easy and very profitable. First, the skeptic rarely if ever need to do any serious empirical research, he needs simply debunk other people's empirical researches. Secondly, with little effort, the professional skeptic appears on TV, on radio, can give paid conferences in Universities about many topics and in addition he is sympathetically received and supported by the scientific and academic community. Do you think the desire for getting personal prestige and money, with relatively little effort, play some role in organized skepticism and the motivation to be a professional "skeptic"?
Undoubtedly it does. I don’t necessarily think sceptics have it easier than psi-researchers or psychics, though. It depends on the individual. Rupert Sheldrake gets quite a lot of respectful attention. If Richard Wiseman does too it’s because he’s a brilliant operator. He knows how to engage people’s attention and put his views forward.
At the end of the day it’s the quality of our arguments that counts, and our ability to make our point heard. We shouldn’t complain that the opposition has an unfair advantage!
18-In addition to your book, what books would you like to recommend about psi, afterlife and related topics?
Chris Carter’s books are good, and the volume of essays Debating Psychic Experience, in which he has a couple of essays, is an excellent update. I’d particularly recommend the Kellys’ Irreducible Mind, which provides a powerful case for a dualist view of mind and brain, not just from psi evidence. The books by Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin are essential reading, obviously. There’s a lot of good stuff out there.
19-Would you like to add something else to end the interview?
Thanks for the opportunity to muse in public! You had some interesting questions. I write about these things on my blog Paranormalia, and am always glad when readers leave comments or get in touch.
My first proper job was working as a foreign correspondent in Spain and Portugal, mainly for the Guardian newspaper. I then did a ten-year stint in the music business, running a recording studio and dance music label. For the last ten years or so I’ve been writing again, mainly for news and business magazines, while pursuing my interest in parapsychology.
2-In the United Kingdom, the current materialistic version of secularism seems to be very widespread and influential among citizens there (at least more than in other countries) and books promoting atheism and materialism (like Dawkins' The God Delusion or Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before the Breakfast) have been in general sympathetically received by the public and the media. As a journalist and a citizen of England, which is your impression about this sociological phenomenon and why is UK more prone to it than other countries?
Thanks for raising this – it’s something I have been thinking a lot about. There’s a paradox here. Lots of people who I meet are actually quite open to the idea of psychic phenomena, and will readily tell me their experiences. Yet opinion-makers in the serious media – the “commentariat” as it’s sometimes called – will hardly ever mention it. Some journalists, particularly the younger ones, are very snooty and dismissive, and are probably genuinely sceptical. I think it’s possible that many others won’t touch it for fear of what other people might think.
There has been a lot of discussion of religion in recent years, in a political and social context. But it’s always in terms of traditional religion (mainly Christianity and Islam) versus atheism. There’s a lot of complaint about Dawkins-type reductionism. But where you’d often expect the debate to turn to spirituality, and the way this is reinforced by widespread psychic and mystical experience, there’s silence.
An example. A writer called Bel Mooney did a radio series a few years back, talking to agnostics in the media – famous writers, artists, etc - about their views about religion, belief, spirituality and so on. She subsequently wrote some of them up in a book, and it struck me that not a single one of them mentioned the near-death experience, even though they must have been aware of it as a widely-reported phenomenon, and also it was directly central to the subject under discussion. Why?
So far my book Randi’s Prize has been read mainly by people who share its assumptions. That’s fine, but my main aim has been to try to engage people with my sort of background, British writers and intellectuals, and get them to look at psychic reports, not as an outdated superstition but as an aspect of consciousness and of human experience. I think a public conversation about this is long overdue.
It’s hard, though I do sense it might be possible. It just needs one or two brave souls out there to pick it up and say, yes, there is something interesting here, something that merits a closer look. Let’s not be squeamish about it.
3-How did you get interested in parapsychology and the afterlife research?
Near where I once worked was a New Age/occult bookshop, where I used to browse in spare moments. It’s not what I would have chosen, but it was the only one within walking distance. I read about all kinds of crazy things – materialising mediums, spirit possession, etc - and it struck me that people seemed to be describing actual experience. They didn’t seem to be making it up. That surprised me because at the same time I was reading a lot of science books, which I also really enjoyed. On some level I’d always assumed that science tolerates ideas like telepathy and so on, and kept an open mind. But I realised nothing could be further from the truth. Science absolutely forbids such things, insists they can’t and don’t happen. So I was mightily puzzled.
Then my business went bust and my days were suddenly free. So I decided to spend a bit of time checking it all out. I spent the best part of three years in libraries and putting together the first draft of Randi’s Prize.
4-Have you had any personal, first hand encounter with some phenomenon suggestive of psi and the afterlife?
Nothing that compares with what other people have reported. But I did have a couple of encounters with fortune tellers, who seemed to know exactly what was going on in my life at the time, and in a way that is hardly explained by “cold-reading”. The first, when I was about 22, had to do with my love life. Someone just came up to me in the street and started haranguing me about it. This was in a small village in a foreign country, so there was no way she could have known about the details. The other was in a fun-fair, a classic gypsy fortune-teller. I had big problems at the time with my business, and was going through rather stressful litigation. She rattled this all off as if she knew about it, but of course she couldn’t possibly.
I’d vaguely supposed that these things could be explained in terms of ‘cold-reading’, and when I started reading about psychic research found that this is indeed what sceptics argue. But however hard I tried I couldn’t make that fit in either of these cases. For one thing, I was completely mute. Didn’t say a word. So there was no verbal feedback to work with. Of course they could have picked up quite a lot from my age, appearance and gender. But the information was quite detailed – in both cases it was a particular individual, and my relationship with that person, which was causing me problems – and in both cases they identified and described this individual with stunning accuracy. Also it just came pouring out – there wasn’t any of the hesitancy and mental effort that you see going on when, for instance, Derren Brown demonstrates cold reading.
I wouldn’t say that these experiences were why I got interested – it was more of a general philosophical thing. But they gave me something personal to work with when I was trying to make a judgement about the sceptics’ arguments.
5-Which is the best scientific evidence for the existence of psi phenomena?
I suppose that depends how one qualifies “scientific”. Is it just psi-research in controlled conditions? Or could it also include field research of spontaneous phenomena like poltergeists, ghosts and apparitions. We might consider some of the NDE research to be “scientific”, but considering the nature of the phenomenon sceptics might disagree. The same with children’s memories of a past life.
If one makes a narrow definition, then I suppose we would be looking at the best evidence from the ganzfeld and remote viewing experiments. But I don’t think a mere statistical anomaly would carry much weight without the very considerable amount of evidence from other fields.
Personally I find the investigations of poltergeists and mediums to be quite persuasive, for instance William Roll’s investigation of the Miami poltergeist, and the Sorbonne and Feilding reports on Eusapia Palladino. There are other investigations of mediums that one might mention, for instance Rudi Schneider, who in two separate studies was shown to be able to deflect an infra-red beam in conditions where fraud could not apply. I discussed this recently on my blog. The papers on Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard also impacted my thinking. Pim van Lommel’s study of NDEs has been quite influential, as has also Ian Stevenson’s voluminous studies of past life memories.
Sceptics quite often say they would be convinced if there was one, just one unambiguous piece of scientific evidence. Actually I think that people, sceptics included, become convinced when they personally experience something they can’t explain away. But that’s not about science – it’s not going to carry conviction with anyone else. That’s the nature of this subject.
For me it’s not about a handful of convincing experiments, it’s about making a judgement on the entirety of the research. Is this a real phenomenon, or ultimately can it be explained away? That’s why I focused on the sceptics’ arguments so closely in Randi’s Prize. For me the alternative “explanations” don’t explain it.
6-Which is the best scientific evidence for the existence of an afterlife?
Again, I have slight problems with the word “scientific” in this context. It’s not something you can prove in a laboratory. But certainly the investigations of Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard had an impact on my thinking in this regard, and there’s a lot of data that one can extract from other areas of investigation – apparitions, poltergeists, past life memories, NDEs and past life memories – which would be used to build the argument. It’s not that there are a few particular things that clinch it. It’s making a judgement about the source of all these different kinds of experience. If it’s not what it seems (evidence of survival of consciousness, that is), then what is it really? How are we going to explain it?
7-Is there good evidence for the existence of reincarnation?
I think the work by Stevenson and other researchers on memories of a past life in very young children has revealed a genuine phenomenon. I can’t see any easy way to explain it away. If one reads the detail of these episodes the quite fine detail of the past lives that these children often remember – the friends the personality had, the preoccupations, possessions, living environment, often in quite a lot of detail – and which is found to correspond to actual lives of recently deceased individuals, it just seems beyond anything that can be explained away in terms of fraud or misunderstandings, or by faulting the investigators’ methods and biases.
One of the biggest arguments against the research has been its preponderance in cultures that believe in reincarnation. But there is evidence of it also in places where it isn’t believed, such as Europe and America. The difference is that the previous personality can’t often be traced, as happens more frequently in Asia. But if individual consciousness survives death, one could speculate that human culture survives also – in fact it would be surprising if it didn’t. In that case, one could further speculate that it influences the way in which individuals are reborn into this world, and the speed of the process. A quick rebirth might be natural for an Asian person who has always believed in the process than it would be for a Westerner for whom the idea is alien and probably repugnant. That would explain why Western past lives can’t be traced.
The problem with this sort of speculation is that it appears to defy Occam’s razor, multiplying entities without need. I just think that if survival of consciousness is true, then we have to start thinking in terms of these sorts of possibilities. It’s a fascinating area.
8-Do you think the evidence for psi phenomena and the afterlife conflicts with contemporary science, specially neuroscience and evolutionary biology?
That’s something else I’ve been thinking about. I remember the physicist Steven Weinberg in a television interview years ago complaining rather petulantly that if telepathy is true, then “science will unravel all the way back to Galileo”. This rather grand statement is a bit of a cliché now. Not being a scientist I felt at the time obliged to take it at face value. But I’ve become rather sceptical about it. Psi phenomena indicate the potential involvement of consciousness in material processes, which is certainly a huge challenge. But even it was proved, it surely wouldn’t invalidate existing understanding of physical laws.
But as you say, neuroscience and evolutionary biology face the biggest challenge from psi phenomena. If minds are interconnected at a distance then where does that leave Dennett and Dawkins?
9-Do you think that quantum mechanics is relavant for parapsychology and the afterlife studies?
Not really my area, I’m afraid. But Chris Carter has written interestingly about this. If the brain is merely mediating mind (eg William James’s “transmission” hypothesis) then one is bound to imagine that quantum processes are involved. But quite how is obviously problematic.
10-Do you think the evidence for psi and the afterlife provides some kind of evidence for the existence of God (widely conceived as an spiritual intelligent creator of the universe)?
I’m aware that some psi proponents are also atheists. But this doesn’t seem terribly coherent to me. I take an either-or view on this. If psi phenomena are imaginary – explicable in the sceptics’ terms, that is – then the brain is the mind and there’s no God. If it’s real, I see no reason to go on resisting the claim of a divine reality described by the great mystics of East and West. But I realize that other people will disagree.
And that’s good. I talked about this a bit at the end of Randi’s Prize. It means that we can debate the existence of psychic phenomena without having necessarily to include divinity in the equation. If sceptics understand this, then hopefully some of them at least will feel less squeamish about accepting the genuineness of psi.
11-Even though not directly related with parapsychology and the afterlife, have you studied the evidence from ufology? Do you think is there any good evidence for the presence of extraterrestial intelligence on Earth and, more precisely, for the extraterrestial origin of some UFOs?
I did look into this, but quite a while ago. I was interested in the overlap between alien intelligences and spiritual entities, as described by Kenneth Ring, for instance. But it’s not something I’ve really followed through.
I was very interested in the findings of Rick Strassman, a doctor who carried out investigations into the halluinogen DMT. This produces quite short, intense trips, a bit like acid but it’s all over quite quickly. He commented on how often subjects reported having been contact with alien visitors, similar to those described in alien abduction scenarios. It has always made more sense to me to think of aliens in a multi-dimensional context, rather than as inhabitants of our own physical cosmos. I suspect the human imagination provides the actual forms.
12-Regarding alternative medicine, do you think the scientific evidence for the efficacy of praying, healing at distance and homeopathy is a good one?
I’m aware that there is some evidence, but I haven’t reached a judgement about how good it is. Homeopathy is a big puzzle, and I admit to being somewhat seduced by the placebo idea. Again, I do think we will find the human imagination to be implicated in things that some people take to be objective. What I mean is, we may be creating genuine effects and clothing them in imaginary forms. But this is just my speculation.
13-You're the author of an excellent book entitled "Randi's Prize". What did motive you to write this book?
Thanks for the compliment. When I set out, I had in mind a study that would make sense of the arguments, a sort of guide through the marshes of psychic research. It took me much longer than I expected, and there was a lot of rewriting to boil it down. In fact there are some quite obvious omissions – some significant laboratory research that I would have liked to dwell on a bit more, also the phenomenon of precognitive dreams, which sceptical psychologist Richard Wiseman discussed in his book Paranormality, and which two British newspapers ran an extract on recently. But I sort of feel I got there in the end. It’s the book that would have answered a lot of my questions, had it been around when I first got interested.
As I mentioned, though, I also have another objective, which is to try to draw the attention of thinking people to psychic research and its implications. I think it’s a pity if they fall in too easily with the glib and dismissive pseudo-explanations of debunking sceptics, which, as I say, seems to be the case with the serious media in Britain. I have to admit, getting serious people, agnostics, to think about ghosts and mediums is an uphill struggle. But worth trying, I think!
14-In your opinion, what influence has Randi's challenge had in the world of psi/afterlife research?
Good question. It’s certainly had a major influence in sceptic thinking, perhaps not so much conceptually, but in hardening attitudes. It’s the perfect comeback for a sceptic. If you say you’re psychic, why haven’t you won Randi’s prize?
My impression is that professional sceptics generally have been successful since the 1980s in discouraging serious interest in the field, which may have a lot to do with its apparently rather weakened state.
I know some would disagree with that characterisation of psi research. In Britain there are said to be quite a number of university psychology departments where it is active. But with notable exceptions such as Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin the discipline seems to suffer from a lack of confidence compared to earlier periods.
15-In your book, you suggest that the convinced skeptic seems to be simply unable to see and hence understand the problems posed by evidence for psi and the afterlife. What causes this skeptical inability to see what other people can see and understand easily?
I’ve no idea what causes it. Why are some people religious and others atheists? Or Republicans or Democrats. I think temperament comes into it a lot. Of course, sceptics say exactly the same thing about us in reverse: we see something that isn’t there. They tend to think they are unbiased and neutral, but of course they are as subjective as the rest of us.
Psychology is a huge element in our attitudes to the idea of the paranormal. That’s why I’m a bit ambivalent about your earlier question: what constitutes good scientific evidence. The evidence will only be as good as you want it to be.
16-As Chris Carter and others have demostrated, as a rule, convinced skeptics are secular humanists, metaphysical naturalists and militant atheists. Do you think these ideological and philosophical beliefs provide the proper mindset and conceptual framework to enable an objective and fair examination of the best evidence for psi and the afterlife?
If you put it like that, then obviously no! But again, one can also reverse it. Sceptics argue that people with religious leanings (or superstitious longings, as they sometimes put it) can’t be objective either.
If there is an answer to this, and that’s something I’ve only just started to explore, it’s to recognise the potential biases on each side and focus hard on the research findings. Perhaps that way we can discover each other’s weaknesses and find common ground. That seems to me to be a better way forward than putting on armour and going out to fight on an ideological battlefield.
17-Some people argue that being a vocal skeptic is easy and very profitable. First, the skeptic rarely if ever need to do any serious empirical research, he needs simply debunk other people's empirical researches. Secondly, with little effort, the professional skeptic appears on TV, on radio, can give paid conferences in Universities about many topics and in addition he is sympathetically received and supported by the scientific and academic community. Do you think the desire for getting personal prestige and money, with relatively little effort, play some role in organized skepticism and the motivation to be a professional "skeptic"?
Undoubtedly it does. I don’t necessarily think sceptics have it easier than psi-researchers or psychics, though. It depends on the individual. Rupert Sheldrake gets quite a lot of respectful attention. If Richard Wiseman does too it’s because he’s a brilliant operator. He knows how to engage people’s attention and put his views forward.
At the end of the day it’s the quality of our arguments that counts, and our ability to make our point heard. We shouldn’t complain that the opposition has an unfair advantage!
18-In addition to your book, what books would you like to recommend about psi, afterlife and related topics?
Chris Carter’s books are good, and the volume of essays Debating Psychic Experience, in which he has a couple of essays, is an excellent update. I’d particularly recommend the Kellys’ Irreducible Mind, which provides a powerful case for a dualist view of mind and brain, not just from psi evidence. The books by Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin are essential reading, obviously. There’s a lot of good stuff out there.
19-Would you like to add something else to end the interview?
Thanks for the opportunity to muse in public! You had some interesting questions. I write about these things on my blog Paranormalia, and am always glad when readers leave comments or get in touch.
Links of interest:
-Robert's website.
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