Response to Chris

Dear Chris,

I agree. It is important to remain skeptical of “odd” claims, until all the evidence has been thoroughly investigated. That is why I have been thoroughly investigating exactly this for the last year. Now, to be fair, it was hard to do a completely thorough job on anything while working on a thesis in an unrelated area. And, it’s especially hard to be thorough in a single year in an area that has a deep literature – which, believe it or not, parapsychology does.

If I thought it was a lot of dead-ends, I would have given up on this a long time ago. However, the sources I have been going through so far are very convincing. And, if I had to hedge my bets today I would say: I DO believe the claims that “psi” has been shown in the lab. That is, through careful experimentation scientists have demonstrated effects that cannot be explained by classical Newtonian models of time and space (e.g. telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, etc.).

Trust me, I plan to keep reading through the literature and watching this field very closely.

On the topic of keeping an open-mind versus skepticism I would like to say this:

Skepticism should come with an awareness. First, an awareness of what skepticism should mean. Skepticism should mean that certain scientific theories have gained considerable force, and any claims that seem to violate these theories need EXTRA explaining. Given that, however, it is also important to realize that science does not progress linearly, and occasional a “paradigm shift” is observed, when old ideas / theories are completely abandoned for ones that make more sense.

So, all skeptics should be grounded with the awareness that their understanding of the physics and metaphysics of the world may (in time) turn out to be completely inaccurate.

That is, skepticism should allow rigorous investigation of “odd” claims, not the steadfast, blind adhering to old belief systems in the face of new evidence. If scientists only ever consider or pay attention to data that “makes sense”, then we run the risk of never being able to explain all the other weird things that happen in the universe.

As my good friend Darren would say: “Be careful what you believe, because it’s true!”

I would say, don’t delude yourself into thinking for understand the universe, because then you begin to close your mind to the real truths.