Psychic Powers - Criticism and Controversy

Criticism and Controversy

Parapsychological theories are currently viewed as pseudoscientific by the scientific community as they are incompatible with well established laws of science. The social psychologist James Alcock in his book Parapsychology: Science or Magic? (1981) wrote "parapsychology is indistinguishable from pseudo-science and its ideas are essentially those of magic." The philosopher Raimo Tuomela summarized why much of parapsychology is considered a pseudoscience in his essay "Science, Protoscience, and Pseudoscience".

• Parapsychology relies on an ill-defined ontology and typically shuns exact thinking.
• The hypotheses and theories of parapsychology have not been proven and are in bad shape.
• Extremely little progress has taken place in parapsychology on the whole and parapsychology conflicts with established science.
• Parapsychology has poor research problems, being concerned with establishing the existence of its subject matter and having practically no theories to create proper research problems.
• While in parts of parapsychology there are attempts to use the methods of science there are also unscientific areas; and in any case parapsychological research can at best qualify as prescientific because of its poor theoretical foundations.
• Parapsychology is a largely isolated research area.

John Beloff in his book Parapsychology: A Concise History (1997) has written that in the Western world parapsychology has been "driven by desire to confound materialism or reductionism" and that there has only been a minority of parapsychologists who have advocated physical theories for psi. No accepted theory of parapsychology currently exists, and many competing and often conflicting models have been advocated by different parapsychologists in an attempt to explain reported paranormal phenomena. Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the paranormal (2003) wrote:

Many theories have been proposed by parapsychologists to explain how psi takes place. To skeptics, such theory building seems premature, as the phenomena to be explained by the theories have yet to be demonstrated convincingly.

According to a report in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1997 no credible theory of psi has yet been presented. Koneru Ramakrishna Rao, a past President of the Parapsychological Association, has written that the lack of any agreed-upon theory of parapsychology is one reason for the general skepticism of the scientific community regarding the existence of paranormal phenomena. Skeptics such as Antony Flew have cited the lack of such a theory as their reason for rejecting parapsychology.

On the subject of psychokinesis the physicist Sean M. Carroll has written that both human brains and the spoons they try to bend are made, like all matter, of quarks and leptons; everything else they do is emergent properties of the behaviour of quarks and leptons. And the quarks and leptons interact through the four forces: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational. Thus either it's one of the four known forces or it's a new force, and any new force with range over 1 millimetre must be at most a billionth the strength of gravity or it will have been captured in experiments already done. This leaves no physical force that could possibly account for psychokinesis. The physicist John Taylor in a series of experiments was concerned to establish whether there is an electromagnetic basis for psi phenomena such as psychokinesis but his experiments were negative and after failing to find it, wrote there could not be any other explanation in physics. Paul Kurtz in his book A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology (1985) wrote that precognition and psychokinesis contradict the laws of physics.

In their publications many parapsychologists have written psychokinesis and all other psi phenomena is totally non-physical in basis, this is in opposition to physics as any action of a totally nonphysical force on matter would entail the violation of physical laws, such as the conservation of energy. In response Joseph Rhine wrote that psi is beyond spacetime. The first president of the Parapsychological Association R. A. McConnell wrote "psi phenomena are "non-physical" and thus show the existence of a non-physical realm in which the existence of a "God" becomes a possibility." The parapsychologist Charles Tart has written that psi is non-physical in basis and does not operate to known physical laws.

According to the skeptic Robert Todd Carroll research in parapsychology has been characterized by "deception, fraud, and incompetence in setting up properly controlled experiments and evaluating statistical data." In a review of parapsychological reports Ray Hyman wrote "randomization is often inadequate, multiple statistical testing without adjustment for significance levels is prevalent, possibilities for sensory leakage are not uniformly prevented, errors in use of statistical tests are much too common, and documentation is typically inadequate".

In an experiment using neuroimaging to resolve the psi debate (Moulton and Kosslyn, 2008) wrote:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in an effort to document the existence of psi. If psi exists, it occurs in the brain, and hence, assessing the brain directly should be more sensitive than using indirect behavioral methods (as have been used previously). To increase sensitivity, this experiment was designed to produce positive results if telepathy, clairvoyance (i.e., direct sensing of remote events), or precognition (i.e., knowing future events) exist. Moreover, the study included biologically or emotionally related participants (e.g., twins) and emotional stimuli in an effort to maximize experimental conditions that are purportedly conducive to psi. In spite of these characteristics of the study, psi stimuli and non-psi stimuli evoked indistinguishable neuronal responses-although differences in stimulus arousal values of the same stimuli had the expected effects on patterns of brain activation. These findings are the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena.

Some researchers have become skeptical of parapsychology such as Susan Blackmore and John Taylor after years of study and no progress in proving the existence of psi by the scientific method.