The paper starts out by complaining at length that the American Psychologist (the flagship publication of the American Psychological Association) last year published a paper summarizing the evidence for psi effects such as ESP (extrasensory perception). The paper (entitled "The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review") concluded the following:
"The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines, although there is no consensual understanding of them."
Reber and Alcock state that this paper "bothered us on several levels." We can understand why that would be true. Both Reber and Alcock have spent decades crusading against the overwhelming empirical evidence establishing psi phenomena such as extrasensory perception. We can understand why they would be deeply irritated that this very solid scientific evidence is getting a little bit of the mainstream recognition that it richly deserves.
Hard to judge fairly when you're this "bothered"
The authors then start off their attempt to discredit such evidence by stating, "It is not a matter of reviewing the existing database, scratching at the marginal and highly suspect findings of meta-analyses for something that passes the '< .05' cutoff point." This statement clearly attempts to suggest that the evidence for phenomena such as extrasensory perception is only statistically marginal evidence that just barely passes the level of statistical significance. Such an insinuation is extremely misleading. The laboratory evidence for psi is overwhelming, vastly greater than merely a marginal result. You can see extremely dramatic examples here, here, here and here. For example, in the Riess remote test of ESP, a subject scored with 73% accuracy on guessing 1850 cards, in a test in which the expected chance result was only 20%.
We can excuse Reber and Alcock for being ignorant about such results, for they confess their refusal to examine the evidence on this topic. The authors state the following:
"We did not examine the data for psi, to the consternation of the parapsychologist who was one of the reviewers. Our reason was simple: the data are irrelevant."
I can only say that such a confession is completely consistent with the impression I got from reading Alcock's book entitled Belief. In reviewing that book, I noted that Alcock "seems to show only a slight knowledge of the evidence for beliefs and alleged paranormal phenomena he criticizes." But this is par for the course, since virtually no skeptics of the paranormal show any signs of having deeply studied the relevant literature. In this regard, they're like someone who doesn't know the difference between a fastball and a curve ball lecturing you on the impossibility of anyone ever hitting a home run.
There then follows the author's case attempting to argue that the effects so abundantly observed by parapsychologists in careful, controlled experiments cannot exist. The authors say, "We identified four fundamental principles of science that psi effects, were they true, would violate: causality, time’s arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law."
Let's look at their statements about each of these things.
Causality. After a paragraph that merely evokes the principle that things have causes, the authors write the following:
'Within the study of psi, there are no causal mechanisms, and none have been hypothesized. Worse, there is virtually no discussion over whether the claimed effects have singular or multiple causal mechanisms or why the purported findings lack coherency. If psychokinesis affects the roll of dice in a psi lab, why not at craps tables? If telepathy exists, why are our brains not constantly abuzz with the thoughts of those around us? To maintain that the future puts in appearances—but only in psychology labs at Lund or Cornell—is to strain credulity to the snapping point. There are no patterns here. As we noted in our paper, 'It is as if actors from a dozen different plays have appeared on the same stage in a discordant farrago.' ”
The first statement is completely false. Those who maintain that there is evidence for psi (things such as ESP) do not at all maintain that there are no causal mechanisms that might produce such a thing. A parapsychologist will typically maintain that we do not understand the causes of psi, but that is not equal to maintaining that there are no causes for it. It is also completely false to claim that "none have been hypothesized." Parapsychology literature contains many speculations about possible causes of psi effects. A simple hypothesis commonly made is that humans have a soul, and that psi effects are an aspect or capability of such a soul.
The questions asked are simply unanswered questions. It is not at all true that something violates causality if we don't understand how it works. For centuries, people observed earthquakes, without having any understanding of what caused them; and for centuries people observed plagues without having any understanding of the microbes that cause them. There was no valid causality argument against claiming that earthquakes or plagues existed prior to our understanding of them, and there is no valid causality argument in regard to psi phenomena such as ESP. Such phenomena do have a cause, but we don't understand their cause. It is very common in the history of science for things to be observed before we understand what caused them. As for the suggestion that parapsychologists claim that precognition only occurs in laboratories, it shows an ignorance of the literature, since there is much evidence suggesting precognition occurring outside of laboratories.
Time's Arrow. The authors state, "Within parapsychology time is turned upon itself, most glaringly in precognition." This argument is toothless, because it is completely inapplicable to ESP (extrasensory perception). ESP or telepathy does not involve any "knowing the future" effect. As for precognition, there is no clear case to be made that most results we have got suggesting precognition violate anything we know about the nature of time. We don't understand the exact nature of time, and a wide variety of different theories about it are advanced by theoretical physicists. The authors veer a little into a discussion of quantum mechanics. I may merely note that interpretations of quantum mechanics are rather "all over the map," so it is not at all clear that anything we know about quantum mechanics rules out experimental evidence for precognition. Clumsily, the authors quote physicist Richard Feynmann as saying, "It is safe to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." That quote argues against the claim they are trying to establish, that physics rules out precognition. The authors don't have any formal training in regard to the very deep, subtle and esoteric topics of quantum mechanics and the nature of time, so there's no reason why we should think their opinion on these topics has any weight.
Thermodynamics. The authors (who are not knowledgeable about thermodynamics) do not say anything in their paragraph about thermodynamics that argues the slightest bit against psi phenomena, precognition or extrasensory perception.
Inverse square law. The authors state, "In telepathy, the distance between the two linked persons is never reported to be a factor, a claim that violates the principle that signal strength falls off with the square of the distance traveled." This generalization is not correct. Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception among family members living nearby are actually far more common than reports of extrasensory perception between people living in different continents. So you do have a hint of a kind of an "inverse square" effect going on. Since we do not understand how telepathy works, there is no reason why it has to follow an inverse square law. The issue of "dropping off with distance" has received little attention by parapsychology researchers, so we don't have any clear verdict in the literature about whether ESP does or does not follow an inverse square law.
We also know of physical effects involving quantum entanglement that do not follow an inverse square law. The authors comment on this, but any attempt by them to assert any expertise on this very subtle and obscure matter is not credible. They are not physicists or mathematicians, and their opinion on quantum entanglement carries no weight.
Judging from their statements, the authors are apparently unaware that two of the four fundamental forces of nature do not follow an inverse square law. While gravitation and electromagnetism follow an inverse square law, neither the strong nuclear force nor the weak nuclear force follow an inverse square law, as is made clear on this expert answers page. Since there is no rule of physics that effects have to follow an inverse square law, it is fallacious to argue that psi effects such as ESP or mind-over-matter cannot exist because they do not follow an inverse square law.
Closing their argument, the authors state, "In short, parapsychology cannot be true unless the rest of science isn’t." That claim is false, and the authors have done nothing to establish it. They have not established that any single finding of science would be overturned if psi effects such as ESP exist. The authors then veer into some very weak reasoning:
"Moreover, if psi effects were real, they would have already fatally disrupted the rest of the body of science. If one’s wishes and hopes were having a psychokinetic impact on the world—including computers and lab equipment—scientists’ findings would be routinely biased by their hopes and beliefs. Results would differ from lab to lab whenever scientists had different aims."
The existence of psychokinesis (mind-over-matter) certainly does not imply that scientists would be unconsciously influencing the machines or subjects they are working on by subconsciously using psychokinesis. And it is actually largely true that the results of scientists are "routinely biased by their hopes and beliefs" and that results "differ from lab to lab whenever scientists had different aims," regardless of whether mind-over-matter does or does not exist. So as a reductio-ad-absurdum argument, this argument fails completely. A good reductio-ad-absurdum argument says, "X must be false because it implies Y, and Y must be false." In this case, the X does not imply the Y, and we know the Y is largely true. So we have a double failure of the attempted reductio-ad-absurdum argument.
I don't know which is more lame, the attempts of Reber and Alcock to assert generalizations about psi phenomena such as ESP after confessing "we did not examine the data for psi," or their attempts to lecture us on physics, quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement (extremely subtle and esoteric mathematical topics they have never formally studied, and have never written about at any real length). We can find in Brian Josephson an example of a physics Nobel-prize winner who believes in both the possibility and the likelihood of psi phenomena.
The authors have done nothing to substantiate the claims that psi phenomena are impossible. In particular, the authors have not presented the slightest reason for thinking that the best-established psi phenomenon (extrasensory perception or telepathy) is impossible. Their only comment relevant to ESP was their inaccurate suggestion that effects must follow an inverse-square law, a suggestion that is false because we know that two of the four fundamental forces of nature (the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force) do not follow such a law.
Postscript: See pages 593 to 643 of the .pdf file here for other writers' rebuttals of Reber and Alcock.
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