SIO149: Is ESP Real? No, Really... It Might Be...

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 149, I'm your host Thomas Smith, and thank you so much for listening, I've got a really interesting episode today, something I really never thought I would be talking about, or I guess hearing about in this way, which is, and I'll put it very click-baity, is ESP real, or is any sort of psychic phenomenon real, and contrary to what the normal thing with those questions is, The headline asks the question, then the article just says, nah, turns out there may be there as of right now, there is a peer reviewed scientific article published in a major journal with statistically significant results.

0:01:16 Thomas: I'm putting that as. Directly and parsimoniously as I can, without trying to bias anything one way or the other, and And I've got a really cool team here to talk us through it, and I will just go right over to it because we do some introductions when they are on, so let's cut on over to find out more about this really bizarre and kind of surprising and mind-blowing thing.

0:01:48 Thomas: And I'm joined by Aaron and Jesse, well shoot, what are we gonna say for your last name? I know, Aaron, you go by something, and Jesse, I don't know why you go by, so what are we doing here? Tell me.

0:02:00 Jesse: I go by Rabinowitz, I don't know what that boy does, woo, damn, first

0:02:01 Thomas: All right.

0:02:03 Aaron: Can Aaron and Jesse Rabinowitz and make it a big reveal, I suppose,

0:02:08 Thomas: Aaron and Jesse Rabinowitz, I'm so glad you're here. We've got a very interesting paper and interesting fallout to talk about. I know everybody is familiar with Aaron from the hit podcast, Philosophers in Space, as well as ETV and other work, but also, Jesse, you're new to the show. First time, right? All right, guys. No, we're not in space right now, that's the other one there.

0:02:28 Jesse: Time in space, yeah, oh, first-time on serious inquiries

0:02:34 Thomas: We Go, yeah. Yeah. This one is, takes place on earth, but It's at uh Cape Canaveral, so that's, yeah.

0:02:34 Jesse: Only, yes, well, I dunno, I'm fairly

0:02:41 Thomas: So Uh, could you give us a little background for listeners who aren't familiar with you? Wow.

0:02:37 Aaron: He's

0:02:41 Jesse: Out in space but okay, sure, I am a clinical psychologist in Richmond, Virginia, I have been in practice since 1985, I I'm a generalist. See adults for psychotherapy. I do have a specialization in mindfulness approaches, but I am a generalists really when it comes to the work I do. How's that?

0:03:06 Thomas: That's Great, it sounds like I, I should probably talk to you about a bunch of my personal problems after this, but we'll, we'll save that for For After

0:03:12 Jesse: All right. Lay it on me when you're ready. It's what I do

0:03:13 Thomas: Yeah. So Yeah.

0:03:17 Aaron: Has been doing it as long as I have been alive, apparently, same.

0:03:19 Thomas: Yeah, me Too, wow.

0:03:20 Jesse: That's right.

0:03:21 Thomas: Uh, Jesse brings some expertise to the table, and Aaron brings memes and other, what else do philosophers do?

0:03:29 Aaron: Here as my father's skeptic translator, I'm Gonna be Uh, Stepping in to make sure that he doesn't utterly ruin our credibility with the skeptical community by talking too much about um things like uh non-dualist uh mental experiences, for example, it's

0:03:31 Thomas: So

0:03:46 Jesse: There you go. Get in between me and the skeptics. That's perfectly fine by me.

0:03:50 Aaron: Been going so well for me for the past couple of days, I

0:03:52 Jesse: Jeez Louise.

0:03:53 Thomas: Banter aside, when Aaron, you just shot me a message, I don't know, last week sometime and just said like, dude, ESP is real. The kind of thing that, yeah, like the kind of thing that I think like, okay, you know, you clicked on some sort of porn fishing, you now like email or something, but no, it sounds as though there's a paper that seems to be, it seems as though it's fairly convincing in certain respects, so I can't wait to get into it. Also, it seams as though skeptics who possibly have a guide to certain universes aren't convinced, but we'll get into that later. Why don't, Jesse, why don't you introduce the paper and get into It?

0:04:04 Aaron: Believe I said ESP might be real.

0:04:36 Jesse: Sure. So I am a skeptic when it comes to what they call in the paper psi phenomenon, PSI phenomenon, which is short for parapsychological phenomenon. But I have an interest in consciousness and where consciousness is located and what consciousness does. So when I saw this paper come up, I found it very interesting. Again, because I'm largely, you know, have been a materialist and a skeptic when it comes to consciousness. So this paper just showed up in the American Psychologist, which is the main journals sent to all psychologists who belong to APA. It's a peer-reviewed journal that generally has large summary articles and meta-analyses that cover, you know, large regions of the field. So it is peer- reviewed, I

0:05:28 Thomas: So question, this journal wouldn't have published something something like the penis hoax kind of thing. Probably.

0:05:33 Jesse: Hope that it wouldn't. I mean, you can always slip a penis this hoax by everybody.

0:05:35 Thomas: Yeah. We're play. Yeah, we are not dealing with pay-for-play kind of, you know, online. The real deal.

0:05:42 Jesse: No, no, no. American Psychologist is, you know, pretty straight up journal. And so there is, it's worth trusting that it's at least gone through a pretty solid peer review process. And given the subject matter, I'm guessing that the peer review process, you probably was rigorous because this subject matter brings, as Aaron and I I discovered the past couple of days talking about it online with people, it brings a lot of critique.

0:06:12 Jesse: But I found it interesting, impressive, and thoughtful. So I passed it on to Aaron, and he passed it onto you.

0:06:11 Thomas: Yeah and there we are.

0:06:21 Jesse: So here we go. The name of the article is The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena, a Review. It's by a guy named Edsel Kardinia, who's at Lund University, which is in Sweden. And I'm just going to give you a little bit from the abstract because parapsychology is not my thing. And so the terms don't roll off my tongue. So I'm just going kind of lay out a little bit from the abstract. The article presents a comprehensive integration of current experimental evidence and theories about so-called parapsycological or psi phenomena. And so basically what he does is he covers decades and decades and decades of parapsychological experimental research, as well as meta-analyses that have come up over time within the field.

0:07:11 Jesse: Meta-analysis being analyses that cluster together a whole bunch of studies, and there are metrics for how to combine these differing studies and come out with of the data and whether the data supports psi phenomena or not. Follow so far? Okay. So the kinds of phenomena we're talking about are that used to be called extrasensory perception. They now call it anomalous cognitions. So the ability of a sender to think about a particular item and have a receiver somewhere else localized in space, somewhere else, mental content that seems similar enough to what's being sent. There are some studies that are reviewed that have to do with what they call, oh a bunch of reverse-y stuff, like can somebody come up with information that hasn't even occurred yet in time, and then occurs, say, random number generation or something like that, that comes up later, and is there a correlation?

0:07:33 Thomas: Sure.

0:08:25 Jesse: There's also, uh, some studies on what used to be called, uh, telekinesis. Uh, can a sender affect a random number generator at greater than chance? Uh, something like that. So the author goes through, you know, a bunch of these studies and, uh, goes through his own meta-analysis and, and basically, the conclusion is that the evidence for PSI is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines, although there's no consensual understanding of them. And then he makes recommendations for further progress in the field. He talks a bit at the beginning of the article about how there are physicists within the quantum mechanics area who have been talking about the universe as possessing consciousness and as consciousness potentially being able to travel across space and time, whereas we normally think of consciousness as located within our heads, within our skulls, and bounded by such.

0:09:34 Jesse: So he talks, you know, yeah, Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Definitely. Some of the physicists that he talks about have been quoted by Deepak Chopra. I know he's a favorite demon for the skeptics. I don't know what to say about that, except that, you know, he's quoting, I assume, some reputable physicists. What little reading I have done since I read this article indicates that there is controversy within the field of physics about the notion of consciousness being universe-wide, and he goes through as well the controversies in psychology over the decades about this research, including a fair amount of history that indicates that because the PSI studies were so attacked for possible bias, that at a certain point they began to lead the way in terms of creating research protocols that would address those bias issues and make the studies a bit more airtight,

0:09:34 Thomas: This is getting really Deepak-y, really Deepaki.

0:10:35 Jesse: And also that made the study protocols more replicable across different laboratories. So standardized protocols, kinds of ways of reducing experimenter bias, reducing subject bias, and so on. So it's pretty comprehensive. When I read the article, I was impressed by the amount of data he amassed. I am not a research psychologist, nor am I a research psychologist in the area of parapsych, so I cannot speak to his meta-analysis and how valid it is. If anything, I'm simply taking my cues off the fact that the peer reviewers at American Psychologists saw fit to publish this, which is some sort of a vote of of confirmation that, yeah, he seems to be following reasonable procedures.

0:11:22 Jesse: It seems to be a reasonable literature review and meta-analysis. And so it's worth putting it out there to the general psychology population. Yeah. So that in summary is kind of what's in the article.

0:11:34 Thomas: I guess one question I have, this is a meta-analysis, and I, you know, I understand, understand at least on the surface what that means, but doesn't that essentially mean that it's just a bunch of other experiments that have already been done and he's kind of, you uh, putting them together, uh, collating them into one thing, and and how can we know that those experiments were reliable, or does the paper go into that? Right.

0:11:56 Jesse: Right. Yeah. He goes through a whole bunch of stuff about the critics of these papers and their criticisms, and he talks about how he dropped these papers or those papers because of the criticisms. He tried to balance his meta-analysis by dropping stuff that looks suspect, by including stuff that didn't look suspect, and by finagling with numbers in order to give the most accurate presentation of the overall data. And he's pretty thorough in terms terms of the little bit of background reading that I did on Psy research, he hits a lot of the major critiques of it in his article, from what I can see.

0:12:39 Aaron: Yeah, I agree. Just to list off a few more of the ones that have come up in discussions that I think he addressed more than people were willing to admit, he talks about p-hacking, which is a way of trying to get statistically significant results from something that is not statistically significant, um, and he talks abut, um, main, one of the main concerns with meta analysis is the idea that the survey is only showing studies that got published, and that there might be a bunch of studies that didn't get published that end up in drawers, and that if those were included in the study, that would sort of undermine the study. But what he shows, is through the math, that, like, in some of these cases, the, the, oh, that's a hard one, the statistical significance is such that you would need something like 400 unreported studies in order to take away that statistical significance. So in a sense, he's making a an attempt to show that we can relatively well believe that there are not all of these studies sitting hidden in drawers somewhere that are preventing a proper analysis. I

0:12:54 Thomas: Well, Do you want to give an example of what some of of these results would be like? What I don't know, one of the studies, or what, what they tested? You mentioned random number generators and stuff, but can we, can we get some numbers? How, how accurate were people at predicting whatever the thing they're trying to ESP predict? Was

0:14:00 Aaron: Think we should focus in on the Ganzfeld stuff, if that's okay, Jess, um,

0:14:06 Jesse: Okay. Do you want me to do that or you want to go with it?

0:14:08 Aaron: You Go For it, if you want, you're

0:14:10 Jesse: So let me just give you a little rundown. Ganzfeld is a German term. It means whole field, G-A-N-S-A field, whole field. In Psy research, it refers to a procedure in which participants sit in a comfortable chair and listen to physical relaxation instructions and exposure to white or pink noise, acetate ovals covering their eyes in order to produce the effect of shapeless redness. The participant's task is to become aware of an unknown image or clip chosen randomly, which might be shown simultaneously in a distant computer with nobody watching it, with somebody watching it, or chosen after the participant makes a selection.

The Psi-Gansfield technique is based on the noise reduction theory. The noise reduction therapy is a theory that says that if there are these psi phenomena, they normally aren't experienced by people because they are drowned out by the noise of our normal cognition. And so what they do in the Ganzfeld studies is they try to put the person into a kind of a meditative state where you could say their default mode network, which is a term for our normal everyday chatter mind, where that settles down, theoretically, would make them more susceptible to picking up the signals of of these rather subtle psi phenomena.

0:14:50 Thomas: Wow.

0:15:31 Aaron: Got one for you here, um, This This was the point at which, you know, like my father sent me this paper. And because I am a skeptic, I was like, yeah, sure, OK, let's have a look at the actual paper. And then I started reading it, and I got to the quantum mechanics part, like many skeptics. And I said, oh, I've seen this before, this is all there is to this, this is not a good sign, and I'm going to have to break it to my father. But then I got the Ganzfeld stuff, which I hadn't, which I wasn't super familiar with. And specifically this line, Williams reported that Ganzfeld participants guessed around 31% of the time the correct target out of four choices presented in random order, when mean chance expected would be 25%. So what you get out of that is that there is a low amount of impact, right?

0:15:33 Jesse: Okay, good.

0:16:21 Aaron: So you're going from 25% only to 31%. That's a fairly small number. But when you look at it across these studies, it appears to be a statistically significant difference, which I think is worth looking at. It doesn't convince me immediately that this theory or these experiments prove that ESP is real, but I think those numbers are worth looking It's worth finding out why a bunch of these studies have been done for decades, and when they have been controlled in the ways that Jess was describing, they have consistently found statistically significant results.

0:16:58 Jesse: Yeah, that's a pretty good summary of it. I would have to really dig through in order to give you more detailed numbers. And again, it's not my field, either parasite or research meta analysis. But overall, at the beginning of his discussion, he says this overview of meta analysis of various different research protocols supports the psi hypothesis. The analyses satisfy the local and global criteria specified by a critic of psi who demanded replicability, consistency of effects, and cumulativeness. The meta-analyses conducted on studies using different protocols by different researchers provide cumulative vertical and horizontal support of PSI. Right.

0:16:58 Thomas: Yeah,

0:17:43 Aaron: And, you know, as a skeptic, when I read through the paper, I hadn't read about Ganzfeld much before, so I googled it and started doing some more research. And I was really saddened that, like, it gave me a big sad, that our community didn't do that before looking at this paper, that it feels like there is some really interesting, legitimate scientific work going into these kind of studies. And yet we treat this work as no different than than Venkman down in the basement trying to hit on girls by pretending to say they're psychic. You have this misconception, I think, I have, I personally will say I had this misconception going into reading this paper, that the Psy community is a bunch of people arguing towards a conclusion, when in reality, they appear to have been at the cutting edge of replicability and avoiding the replication crisis that psychology has faced.

0:18:39 Aaron: And that, while they have not, you know, while in the reality I don't believe that a lot of these things work out the way they say they do, uh, what I do find interesting is that when they have done the work that uh skeptics wanted them to do, they produced interesting results, and I think if we're being consistent as skeptics, we have a responsibility to look at those results and not just dismiss the paper because it mentions quantum physics in ways that we don't like.

0:19:06 Thomas: I'm a little, uh, I guess taken aback. I don't know how, I'm not sure what the proper way to react would be. I, obviously, it seems as though my instinct, and I imagine your instinct would be, there's got to be some mistake here, but what are we to do when it's published in a major journal, like one of the major journals about this, and it's been peer-reviewed, and there seems to be statistically significant results? I'm not quite sure what to say, to be honest.

0:19:27 Aaron: Yeah.

0:19:36 Jesse: Yeah. And in the back and forth we've had online about this with folks, one of the points that I've made is the article just came out. We don't yet have responses coming from the field other than the obvious, the peer reviewers, but we don't jet have the responses from the field. And I think it's worth us waiting and seeing what happens when those come out. But it has crossed a number of hurdles to get to this point and be published in this way. And so, you know, I think it deserves not just skepticism, but an open mind about the data they seem to indicate. I also, I'd like to talk a little bit about the whole business of materialism and consciousness here, if I could, because I think it bears on some of the pushback on this stuff that we've been experiencing in our discussions online. So if that's okay, I I'd like to talk about that for a minute.

0:20:35 Thomas: What do you think, Aaron? Aaron, should we jump onto that?

0:20:37 Aaron: I think we should let him do whatever he wants. He's the expert here.

0:20:40 Jesse: Look, I think a lot of the pushback on this comes from the fact that our conventional wisdom comes out of materialist science, Materialist science say that consciousness exists in the skull. It is a function of brain function. And there's no possible way that that consciousness could travel outside the skull, but here's the thing. Materialist science, neuroscience, has told us precious little about what consciousness even is. Materialist Science tells us a lot about how neurons work, about how neurotransmitters work, about structure and function, but we have yet to see anything from Materialist science about consciousness itself, the nature of it, where it exists, what it is.

0:20:40 Thomas: But

0:21:31 Jesse: And so it's a bit premature for us to be able to make conventional wisdom statements that say this is impossible because we know consciousness exists in the brain, the brain alone, and can't cross any other barrier. That's really an assumption, but it's not a truth. It's not something that we've seen verified by science, because science as yet is unable to observe a thought, an image in the mind. Materialist science is based on the ability of multiple observers to observe the same phenomena and replicate and observe the sam phenomena replicated across different locations and laboratories.

0:22:18 Jesse: The problem is consciousness so far has only been observed within the private space of each person. And as such, materialist empirical science has nothing to say about that.

0:22:30 Thomas: Well, I don't know about nothing to say, but it does sound like a hard problem. But I have a One thing I want want to say is I want to first agree with, in my opinion anyway, agree with what you're saying, that I don't think materialist science in this way could ever rule out the fact that consciousness could somehow reach out of our own skulls. But I also think in my experience, every time I hear hear scientists talk about this, they tend to frame it in terms of, well, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that consciousness could be anything other than, you know, what's going on in our brains. You know, it doesn't, it seems, and it seems like an absurdly, to a lay person, it seems like an absurd thing to even have to qualify in that way.

0:22:37 Aaron: They

0:22:35 Jesse: It

0:23:22 Thomas: But I think they do go out of their way to say that often. And also, when it comes to materialism, materialism it's not as though materialists reject like I don't know quantum entanglement or something right so it's Not Like It's Not like Materialism

0:23:36 Aaron: Just Don't like when you tie It to consciousness

0:23:37 Thomas: Well yeah I guess that that's true maybe but it's NOT as though Materialism would is some sort of religion that couldn't be modified by some scientific explanation of what's going on yeah

0:23:51 Jesse: True. We take for granted that there are invisible visible forces like gravity. Those are of course inferred by data. We don't see gravity. We can't measure it like consciousness. We infer that consciousness is a function of brains and neurons and we do experiments where we show how stimulation of different parts of the brain or impairment or damage to different parts of the brain seems to correlate with changes in consciousness, but correlation is not causation.

0:24:30 Jesse: Still don't Know where consciousness lives and because materialism says that everything is reduced to pieces, to materia, we have yet to see how materia and the the subjective experience of consciousness, how on earth they meet or interact. That's the hard problem of consciousness. If you begin with materialism as your basic worldview, the hard problem of righteousness is staring you straight in the face.

0:24:29 Thomas: Right right right Right.

0:25:00 Jesse: Some of the pushback we're getting is because materialism is considered to be the true worldview. And yet, as you point out, there are some things from quantum mechanics that look really funky when it comes to classic materialism, and there are things within consciousness that seem to defy materialism and materialist science. All I'm saying is, when I read this study, because I'm interested in consciousness, because I work with people and their consciousness, and because I am engaged in trying to understand what consciousness is and how it operates, this study caught my attention because it does seem to provide empirical support for the idea that consciousness is not bounded necessarily within our skulls, within our neurons.

0:25:49 Thomas: Well, that's a whole lot to say about six percent above chance. Can we talk about I mean, I'm not a statistician, but yeah, but like how how much can we infer from 31 percent versus 25 percent? I know I know it's a meta study. So it's if that's is it enough data to where that seems pretty ironclad. But what do you think?

0:25:56 Aaron: Yeah, Do you Want me to step in As skeptic translator here As skeptic translator, I will say I'm very, you know, I'm sympathetic to what you are saying, Thomas. And while I love my father, I am skeptical Of panpsychism and this idea that consciousness expands universally throughout the universe, even though there are hard problems of consciousness in various forms that arise when you deny that kind of theory. Theory, what I do believe is that this, uh, is that there is a logic trap sort of going on here that I've seen sort of come up in a couple of these arguments, where it feels like, uh, the psychologist is forced into either presenting some sort of account of the mechanism for this process that is satisfactory to the materialists, or not. And if they don't provide that, then they are dismissed as not having provided a sufficient theory for accounting for their data. But if they do provide that as this paper does in attempting to talk about quantum mechanics, they are derided as stepping outside of their lane and trying to talk about theories that they don't understand. So, yeah,

0:26:21 Jesse: Yeah,

0:27:19 Thomas: Hmm. I think that's a great Point, because if you know, one thing I to relate it back to, not that I have any sort of specialty, but the the the science I tend to consume in a in a more more of a fanboy type way is more like physics and stuff. And in physics lectures, they'll say stuff like, "We were hoping that, we're kind of hoping we wouldn't find the Higgs boson when we fired up the Hadron Collider. And we're hoping we'd find something that would just totally go against what our theory was." And that's exactly the opposite of what you're describing here. There was an enthusiasm for, "Maybe we'll find some results, results that will just totally change every theoretical framework we have," you know, and that wasn't, the answer there wasn't, "Well, if we did," then we would just reject it unless you had a theoretical framework ready to go already. But what you're describing here sounds like people are kind of treating that this way.

0:28:17 Aaron: I mean, it just, it feels like these weird catch-22s that, like, honestly, I think it feels, like arguing from the conclusion to a problem, you know, which is to say there is some data here and there is not a very clear mechanism. And the paper makes this explicit. They say, you know we don't have a perfect account of Or even an ideal account of the mechanism. But here is one potential alternative analysis of various materialistic theories that suggest that this could be incorporated into that theory. And I'm very sympathetic to this idea that these could be, in some form, some kind of thing that is going on that fits within the natural world.

0:29:05 Aaron: I don't think that any of this is unnatural. I think it's insane to think that what's going on here is extra natural in some kind of way. I just think that, right, exactly, in the very Humean kind of a way.

0:29:12 Thomas: Well, I don't even know how something could be, right? Like if if you're getting an experimental result, what's that?

0:29:18 Aaron: In the very David Hume kind of away of anything that fits within natural experience is natural. And as my father, I think, is correctly pointing out, the difficulty with naive materialism is that it has a lot of trouble accounting for some experienced phenomenon. Phenomenon.

0:29:36 Thomas: Well, when you call it naive materialism, I guess I agree with you.

0:29:39 Aaron: I know I'm loading that loading the deck here.

0:29:41 Thomas: Yeah. What are you, the Donald Trump of debating philosophy here? Oh, naive materialism. Crooked materialism over here. No. So I want to just highlight that point again, because I think that's really well said. And it does sound like at Catch-22, which is, I don't think that anyone in a vacuum, like if we're just talking about science in general, and and if I asked a skeptic, you know, like, what if someone found a, you know, something that they're able to replicate, a result they're able to duplicate, other people are able to verify, and it goes against some theory that we hold. I mean, what would you think would be the answer? Would it be, you know, well, don't publish that because obviously it's fake. It's like, no, that's not how science works. That should be the definition of progress is you find experimental results. And if they go against our theory, we don't pretend the results don't exist.

0:29:46 Aaron: Crooked materialism.

0:30:35 Thomas: We adjust our theory. And it's not as though we require them to have a theory ready made once they find these results. So I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, where the paper tries to provide some possible mechanism, but it doesn't even seem as though that's a necessity for this paper to do it. It almost seems like that's stepping outside of its specialty to even try to do it.

0:30:58 Jesse: The paper offers up at the beginning both quotes from quantum mechanics physicists about the possibility of intelligence or consciousness being a fundamental property of the universe. It goes through some psychological theories as well that could be at work here, but mostly the paper is there to say, look, we've done this meta-analysis, and as far as we can tell, there's something going on here that flies in the face of what we think about in terms of materialism and consciousness.

0:30:59 Aaron: Yeah,

0:31:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:31 Jesse: And it does its job in that way,

0:31:32 Aaron: And I, and It does a very good job, I think, of pointing out this weird Catch-22 problem where it's like, uh, it says in the, you know, one point, um, because psi phenomenon or something assumed a priori to violate physical principles, which is a nice way of saying you all have a lot lot of bias against what we're talking about here, uh, three common objections will be discussed, namely that they violate the laws of nature, if accepted they would invalidate scientific achievement, and there are no theories to account for them.

And I, you know, like, part of me is like, I wish they had left out the quantum physics stuff just because it would have taken that away from the skeptics as something to harp on and force them to talk about the data. But I'm I'm also sympathetic that, like, let's be honest, the history of psychology is a demand for psychologists to reduce their analysis down to other fields, fields that they are not experts in. And when I read more about the Ganzfeld study, it's it's a history of moving posts, moving goalposts. You know, like first they were like, parapsychology has to provide replicability.

And they're like, OK, we've accomplished that to some extent with the Gandsfold study. What do you think about this replicabilty? And they said, oh, well, your methods aren't precise enough. So they refined their methods. And then they said, oh, well, you don't have a theory for how this is working. So we're not going to look at this until you have a theory. So it's like, what do you do?

0:32:09 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, so I'm trying to think, maybe we could transition a little bit to the to the reaction you've seen and to some of the analysis you've seen in the skeptical community, but I'm just trying to, for myself, as trying to be a good skeptic, you know, and scientifically minded person, I guess, in the back of my mind I might, I might think like, okay, well, probably something could end up being wrong here. You know, like it could be some study was, uh, something was wrong and enough with it to throw off the results. I don't know. Or maybe we'll get some explanation that this wasn't peer reviewed properly or something. I don't know. But until then, the data I have right now is that this has been published in a major peer reviewed journal.

0:33:47 Thomas: And I, you know, I have a certain amount of trust in that system them in peer review. And so I can't just reject it out of hand because I don't like it. You know, like I don't know. So as just a lay person skeptic, I guess the only thing I could do is say, well, I'm kind of, I don't know what the word is. I'm definitely skeptical of this, but let's study it more. You now, what do you think the answer and the reaction and what we should you do going forward is.

0:34:01 Aaron: Let me add one thing in here. Like with the Ganzfeld study especially. And that's what I'm particularly interested in. Like they talk about Reiki and stuff. But they say that the results are not nearly as reliable. They say that the Ganzfeld is really the sort of the flagship of these kinds of studies.

0:34:33 Aaron: Let me take out the quantum mechanics and put in a more psychologically focused account of what's going on here. So the Ganzfeld studies appear to show that when you cancel out a bunch of the information that is being processed by the brain, it seems to generate other information. In the form of hallucinations. That is unquestionably true. The hallucinations are quite real. So is, sense deprivation, Tanker?

0:35:03 Thomas: So it's like when you go in a, you know, what do you call it? A sensory deprivation tank. And

0:35:09 Aaron: Yeah, it's altered states all the way there. When you are in that sensory deprivation state, you hallucinate. And the question then becomes, what is the cause of those hallucinations? Is it 100% your own mind making stuff up? Or Or is it some mix of that and awareness of external factors? And the data seems to suggest that there is some awareness of external factors going into it, despite really rigorous controls on what is going into your sensory analysis. So we don't need the quantum mechanics, right? Drop the quantum techniques and just say, look, we don' understand sensation very well. And if we limit sensation very heavily, it appears that the the mind corrects by generating experiences that sometimes correlate with external realities that it is not easily explicably aware of.

0:35:09 Thomas: Yeah, that seems right.

0:35:10 Jesse: Much. Yeah.

0:36:05 Aaron: I think that's very interesting. And I don't think that that upends all of science or anything like that. I mean, I think it's quite plausible that psychology involves awareness of stimulus that we aren't consciously aware of, and when you deprive us of the easily available stimulus, that less available stuff comes to the surface.

0:36:24 Thomas: Well, I don't know that that seems like you're just trying to blur the lines of what you know. If you if you went into it and tried to come up with a theoretical framework of how this is working, I think ultimately you would have to upend some science to do so, don't you think?

0:36:41 Aaron: Mean, I think a little bit, but like what I'm saying is you don't have to dive into quantum mechanics to talk about how our understanding of perceptual consciousness is incredibly infantile.

0:36:51 Thomas: Right. Yeah. You Yeah, know, do you want to talk about how, I guess, the skeptics guide folks address this, and what you thought about that, because it seems, I don't know, it seems a little weird to me, but

0:36:55 Aaron: Mean, I understand where they're coming from, and I don't want to stir too much shit to get fans, but like, when I listen to it, it it felt it felt it feels very dismissive, and like, I spent the past weekend being really sympathetic to religious people and anyone who puts up with skeptics who act this level of dismissiveness towards whatever it is that they have experienced and believed in. I am not religious, I am NOT pro psychic abilities or anything of that sort, short, but I can tell you what my experience was. As a skeptic reading this, it was exactly what I described. My father sent it to me, I was skeptical. I read the first part, I was still skeptical. I read the data, I was more interested. SGU only did the, you know, patented make fun of quantum mechanics and call it a day kind of skeptical response. They didn't

0:37:11 Thomas: They're being total armatures. No, I'm just kidding. I

0:38:01 Aaron: Spend any time on the Ganzfeld, which I, I think, is by far the most interesting part of the paper and something that would be really useful for skeptics to understand if they wanted to be sophisticated in their account of what is good and bad about parapsychology. And I just, to me, the skeptical response should be either, I've looked into this a bunch, I'm not totally convinced, but this is interesting data and I'd like to see more, or I haven't looked into THIS a bunch because I don't really believe that this stuff is real. And And I'm willing to hold out until experts tell me one way or the other. And therefore, I'm not going to be, you kind of snide about this study.

0:38:41 Thomas: Think I'll opt for that that second one. I like that option. I'm going to do that.

0:38:42 Aaron: It. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a good option. Like, I thinkskeptics have lost the part of, when I think of, like, sexist empiricists, the great skeptics who would say, in situations like this where you have insufficient evidence, suspend judgment. That's okay. Okay, it's okay to say, I don't know if this is real or not. There's interesting data on both sides, but I'm willing to suspend a need to make a claim one way or another until I get more information.

0:39:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:13 Thomas: But just to go back to a question that I don't think exactly got answered. I mean, how significant is this 6% difference over chance? I mean is that, how significantly is that? How should I feel about that? I feel like, you know, you flip a coin, you're not going to get exactly 50% heads and tails, but is it just, go ahead.

0:39:24 Aaron: And there's

0:39:28 Jesse: I don't know how to assess that number because it's not my area. Research statistics is not my area. But report consistent, statistically significant results should get our attention. Now, what the effect sizes mean that are reported, and he reports the scads of effect sizes and how, how they relate to the different study designs, I'm not in any position to assess that. But I'm also not arrogant enough to dismiss it until other experts vet the data. That's what science is supposed to be. So just because we are skeptical about fake psychics and mediums and seances, and have every reason to be, doesn't mean that you take an article from a peer-reviewed journal and dismiss it out of hand as if this is yet another stage magician. I think that that's not really being skeptical and not really having the proper humility about waiting for the data.

0:39:43 Thomas: Right.

0:40:32 Thomas: Interesting.

0:40:34 Aaron: Some really fascinating, confounding factors when I looked at this data, when I read more about the Gansville study. So for example, in this question about like, Like, how do we feel about this 31%? One interesting thing is that when studies deliberately pick certain participants, they get higher results. And that reasonably, I think, should throw up some skeptical red flags, right? How are they picking those participants? Are they doing it in a way that primes them for certain something or other? But from what I can tell, what their argument is, and I think it's an interesting argument, is that certain individuals who are more empathic and more sort of attuned to certain factors produce more reproducible results. And I think that we, you know, we can look at that and say, is this something that varies a little bit depending on the individual who is studied? And if so,

0:40:55 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, fast

0:41:34 Aaron: Do we get consistently higher results from, as ridiculous as it is to say, psi-psi-sensitive individuals? Okay, it went all philosophers in space on us.

0:41:43 Thomas: Forward to the part where a new generation of mutants is rising.

0:41:50 Aaron: There, it's good, I'm proud of you. But like, I understand why we would be, we would be scared about that fact, but I also think it's a, a valuable point about the nature of consciousness. So they've also found that

0:42:02 Thomas: Well, to play Depak's advocate here, I mean, it doesn't... I see what you're saying. If we assumed for the sake of argument that this was a real phenomenon, it wouldn't be unscientific or unreasonable to expect that some people would be better at it than others, right? Right.

0:42:04 Aaron: Absolutely.

0:42:22 Jesse: That some people might be better receivers of the information. If, for example, the theory is that there is consciousness spread out through the universe and that our brains are kind of radios that tune into certain frequencies, it is reasonable to think that some people have more sensitive receivers. Yeah,

0:42:22 Aaron: And

0:42:25 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:42:43 Aaron: There's also some interesting data that as they have developed this method, they have moved from single images to dynamic, what they call dynamic targets, which means videos of things, and they've moved towards emotionally impactful videos. And what they've found is that as you are looking at dynamic, more impactful stimulus, you get more results, which again would be plausible. And here's an evolutionary psych account, right? If you're talking about human beings who are trying to be sensitive to other members of their community, and this is what they say in the paper, if there was any percent chance that you would be more aware of something that was going on with other members of your community, especially hugely important traumatic or significant emotional events, that that would carry on in the, you know, adaptive advantage kind of view of reproduction.

0:43:20 Thomas: Hmm.

0:43:42 Thomas: Yeah, man, I guess that makes sense. I would say, wow, I don't know where we where we are and what more we need to discuss. But I would Say that I'm still opting for that second option you outlined. I think that I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, a month from now, there's like a correction issued or like a something something went wrong. But, you You know, until then, I can't really, you know, if something is peer-reviewed science and it's statistically significant and it is replicated, I cannot really just dismiss it out of hand. So, I do not know. I guess I will just sit here and wait. Is there anything else we should do? What do you guys think?

0:43:48 Aaron: Well, a lot of people compared it to the study recently that falsely showed that something had violated the speed of light. And I think that's a really valuable comparison for skeptics, because when that happened, people weren't like, oh, skept, you know, physics has jumped the shark or something like that. They were like, oh, well, that's, you know, violently contradicts a lot of things we believe. Let's look at that study very, very carefully and let's find out what's going on. And what they ended up finding out was that like one of the machines was off on its calibration, which is a valuable thing to find out. And I think that skeptics should do the same thing here, that like move past the quantum mechanics section. I know it's frustrating. I do a lot of woo stuff. I see a lot of quantum woo, but like I was willing to look at the metadata analysis separate from that. I think that, you know, we have an obligation to do that.

0:45:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:16 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. What do YOU think, Jesse? Closing thoughts?

0:45:19 Jesse: No, I'm thoroughly in agreement. You know, when I passed the article on to Aaron, I didn't think that we were going to throw it up online and then have to argue about it for days. Because the truth is, this is not something that I'm in a position to debate. I found the article interesting because the data looked fairly solid and it had gone through the peer review process. And I thought, wow, this is very, very interesting. And it does throw into question some of our assumptions, our materialist assumptions about consciousness, which I'm perfectly ready to entertain as long as there's data. Because again, as I say, materialist science has not done a good job of telling us what consciousness is and where it is. So I was perfectly open to it, and I remain perfectly open to whatever comes out. I searched the web before our broadcast today to see if there were responses yet online about the article.

0:45:32 Aaron: You don't know me very well.

0:46:22 Jesse: I have not found any, but I'm happy to pass them along as I find them to you, Thomas, and you can throw them up online and Aaron can throw dem up on the various pages.

0:46:28 Thomas: Yeah. I think that is important. I think, I think that that's a good point. That's what we will do. We will keep an eye on it, because if, if it is one of those things where up, one of the machines was, was that someone had put a playing card under one of machines, is a little off-kilter. If it's something like that, then, you know, we'll come back and happily report that our materialism is for now intact. But until then, I don't really know what we can do. So thanks, guys, for the breakdown and for explaining it in a way that a non-scientist can understand. And wow, I mean, it could be nothing, but it could Be kind of groundbreaking. It's interesting. It's exciting.

0:46:45 Jesse: Right. Yep. Yep.

0:47:12 Jesse: Well, thanks for entertaining it.

0:47:14 Aaron: Yeah. And I'm not, I want to say I'm not any more believing about, you know, street side psychics than I was before reading this paper. But I do think any reasonable skeptic should be Googling G-A-N-Z-F-E-L-D and like reading reading about the history of this, it's fascinating. It's really interesting stuff. And I'm sad that more people haven't talked about that part of it rather than doing the by the numbers quantum mechanics woo stuff.

0:47:22 Thomas: Right. Yeah. All

0:47:43 Jesse: Right. But, you know, I would also suggest that the quantum mechanics stuff be looked at because he does quote a number of what seem to be eminent, notable physicists who talk about levels of mind in the universe from particle to cosmic levels, that a continuous model of sentience is more parsimonious than one proposing that mentality just emerges from matter at some level of complexity. And he's quoting what I assume are heavy hitters. Now, again, I'm not able to assess their opinions about it. But this stuff is out there. And it's not just coming from psychics. And it's not just coming from psychologists.

0:48:28 Aaron: Let me add one more thing, right? Which was a reoccurring theme within these conversations that we had, which was, you know, quantum mechanics doesn't work that way, even though we don't know how quantum mechanics works. And that's what I found really frustrating amongst skeptics. They were like, they quoted Feynman to me as saying anyone who claims that they know quantum mechanics works doesn't know what they're talking about, or like how it works doesn't know what they're talking about. And like, if that's true, you should be a lot more skeptical about anyone who says, and this is definitely how it doesn't work.

0:49:01 Aaron: I'm not a quantum physicist, but I'm a philosopher and I know a logical incoherence when I see one.

0:49:07 Thomas: Absolutely. Well thank you guys for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Aaron, of course, philosophers in space embrace the void. Uh, Jesse, how many podcasts you got going? You got started any yet or all

0:49:18 Jesse: I got No podcast. Going, but now and again I might show up on one or another, like I did tonight, I'm always Happy To shoot My mouth off in public.

0:49:24 Thomas: Right. Well, we,

0:49:27 Aaron: He's going to be on ETV again real soon talking about non-dualism to screw with the stem lords.

0:49:28 Thomas: I love it. And, uh, until next time, uh Jesse hang online for an extensive, uh therapy session. Thanks

0:49:37 Jesse: Alright. Thomas, I Want you to relax and just say Whatever comes to mind.

0:49:47 Aaron: Great.

0:49:45 Thomas: Guys so much for coming on. I really do appreciate it.

0:49:50 Jesse: Thank you, Thomas.

0:50:15 Thomas: Wow, weird stuff, huh? I, uh, I don't know what to say. I think, I think... I think we said it all, actually, as of right now. As of the current information we have, and I'm curious for the response on this. If you are somebody who is literally an expert in this field, or maybe you're an expert statistical analysis, or if you have any... opinions on this, please let me know, I definitely don't want to be missing anything, but I'm, you know, curious about this, it's really interesting, put it to you this way, I mean, if I had to make a bet right now, I would bet vast sums of money that this is nonsense. I think that's, it is going to take a lot to make me start thinking that there is a way to detect other people's thoughts in some way.

But, you know, I cannot argue with the fact that this is published in a major journal in past peer review and is statistically significant. So what I think is, I guess we just, what we should do is not judge it, as we kind of said in the recording, but I've been processing this as I always do. It feels like we should not reject it out of hand, but just we should study this more.

0:51:24 Thomas: It could be a really cool thing. I mean, how awesome would it be if scientifically we were able to establish that this could exist. And if you study it more and it turns out, oh, nope, can't replicate this as much as we thought, even though, I mean, it's kind of been replicated. But anyway, can't replicate this or we disproven it or we've shown how we got this result and it's not what you think. That would be great, too. I would love to know either way.

That should be how science works. So I don't know. I find this very interesting, but I'm curious on your take on that as well. Well, but I, again, my strong intuition is that there's something, something, some mistake has been made somewhere. And, uh, but you know what I, you know, it is what it is.

All right, well, just like last month, I keep forgetting with this one show a week schedule that the end of the month comes at very awkward times, so the end of the month is next Tuesday, and I want to, as I said, do my voicemail episode at the end month, so I've decided what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do an extra episode,

0:52:22 Thomas: But not just for bonus people, I'm doing an extra extra episode, which will be the voicemail episode. And I think I'll put it out on the main feed so everybody can enjoy it. And so that means you've got a couple days here before I record that. I got to get it in by the end of July. But get your voicemails, especially if you want to talk about this. I'd be curious for your reactions. But hop on that voicemail line. The number is in the show notes. And leave some voicemails and we'll do our monthly thing. I think it's a really cool thing. And it's my favorite show to do every month. So that's what I'm going to do. And everybody is going to be getting a bonus episode. So thank you so much for listening and supporting as usual supporters do make the show happen. And you can go to seriouspod.com/support or patreon.com/seriouspod either way and support the show, make it happen. Thank you so Much for listening and I'll see you very soon.