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EXCERPTS

Need for a new scientific paradigm

Psi phenomena have been part of human life throughout recorded history and, no doubt, prehistory too. They have often been accepted as part of the normal, orthodox picture of the world. Over the past three centuries, however, a new orthodoxy has arisen - in the form of scientific practice and scientific doctrines - which systematically excludes psi phenomena from any serious consideration.

To a large degree, this exclusion can be traced to science's roots being firmly embedded in materialism. From that perspective, psi phenomena are impossible, and so science sees no point in investigating them; conversely, anyone who does investigate them is presumed to be an incompetent scientist. In this vicious circle, anyone who genuinely wants to investigate psi phenomena - if for no other reason than that they are reported to be part of the world we inhabit - will find effective deterrents in the tremendous peer pressure and risk of damage to her reputation and career prospects.

One of the ways in which this impasse can be broken is to go back to the origins of the scientific world-view in the seventeenth century, and see that there is another route that can be taken, which leads to a world-view radically opposed to materialism. It is a world-view that nevertheless does not in any way devalue or discredit the validity that existing scientific knowledge has within its own domain, the realm of physical things.

George Berkeley was an innovative philosopher living at the time when the scientific ball was first set rolling. He had the perspicacity to see that the direction it was taking would lead away from all things spiritual. But he also had the vision and intelligence to formulate an alternative philosophy, one rich enough to encompass both science's growing understanding of the physical realm, and the humanly important realm of spirit.

To a large degree, our experience of the realm of the spirit is just the everyday engagement with the mental world - colours, sounds, and other sensory imagery, on the one hand, and the exercise of the will on the other hand. This quotidian engagement with the mental is camouflaged by its close association with the course of events in the physical world: for instance, when we see a colour externally, there are physical rays of light that match our conscious experience of the colour. There is, however, one form in which the realm of spirit obtrudes into human life: in what are called 'psi' phenomena: telepathy, telecognition, telekinesis, and retrokinesis. They have no known counterpart in the physical world, so they constitute raw phenomena of the spirit.

In this book, I shall aim first to present a short account of Berkeley's metaphysics, and to relate it to much more ancient philosophies, such as the Hindu Vedanta; second, to describe the range and characteristics of psi phenomena, referring in particular to recent scientific research by the relatively few people who have been actively working in this field; and finally to develop some speculations on how Berkeley can help us to make sense of those phenomena. I shall also consider how this theory may help us to understand some of the more esoteric phenomena such as ufos.

I shall not be presenting large compilations of laboratory data, or anecdotes, of alleged psi phenomena in order to try to persuade you that they are real. My business here is not to argue the case for the existence of the phenomena. That is done very well by those who are actively involved in parapsychological research, such as Dean Radin in his excellent book, "The Conscious Universe"; and by journalists, such as Jim Schnabel and John Keel, who have carried out first-hand investigations of people who have experienced the paranormal; and by scientists such as Jacques Vallee who have studied the weirder forms of the paranormal. Here, my starting point is the assumption that the investigators have done their job well, and that their reports can be trusted. My aim is then to consider this question: if these phenomena are real, how can they be explained? What model of the universe do we need to have for us to be able to make sense of psi phenomena?

Obviously, this approach is open to the criticism that some of the reported phenomena may not really exist, that maybe the investigators were blinded by their own beliefs and accidentally, or otherwise, mis-reported the data. Well, that is a risk that one inevitably has to take. It is a sterile exercise to limit ourselves to just accumulating data: we need to understand it. I do not imagine that the theoretical approach that I propose in this book is the final answer. But we have to start somewhere, and Berkeley's metaphysics seem to me to be a good starting point.

There is, moreover, a reciprocal relationship between theory and experimentation. Theories, if they have any value, predict properties of the phenomena. Those predictions suggest further experiments or observations that should be made, which in turn yield new data that confirm the theory, or entail revisions to it, or completely destroy the theory. Thus theorising is not something that we do after all the data are in: it complements the acquisition and cataloguing of data.

Berkeley versus Eastern philosophies

Berkeley's philosophy is often thought to be similar, in some ways, to the metaphysical systems found in Eastern traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. There is some truth in this, but there are also differences. Interestingly, the largest differences have to do with the methods of philosophical inquiry, and the motivation. It is as if both Eastern and Western mystical philosophers have obtained the same insight into the nature of the world, but they seek to express that insight in terms of different concepts, they present different arguments to defend their vision, and also they see different reasons for pursuing the truth and different ethical implications of it. In some respects, the early Berkeleian philosophy (which is clearly stated in the "Principles" and the "Dialogues") does not penetrate as deeply as some Eastern doctrines, such as those of the Advaitan (non-dualistic) school of Vedanta. Nevertheless, the philosophy that Berkeley intimated in his later life (in "Siris", published thirty-four years after the "Principles") does approach a genuinely mystical absolute idealism that draws close to that of the Vedanta. Berkeley seems never to have had the opportunity to study the Hindu texts, but traced this deeper ontology to the Neo-Platonists. The Neo-Platonists formed a dominant intellectual school from the third to the thirteenth centuries CE, and resurfaced in various guises in later centuries. Nevertheless, Peter Kingsley has shown that they transmitted a much earlier tradition, which was attributed to Pythagoras and may well have had its ancient origins in common with the Hindus. Certainly, Berkeley seemed to be aware of these beliefs' having ancient roots, as he wrote in "Siris" concerning Plato's works:

... which seem to contain not only the most valuable learning of Athens and Greece, but also a treasure of the most remote traditions and early science of the East. (Siris, 338)

Traditions, anecdotes, and data

The literature on what we are calling 'psi phenomena' is vast. There are thousands of traditions of both practice and theory, and innumerable practitioners and theoreticians. there is an ocean of published and unpublished anecdotes that report what appear to be psi phenomena. Finally, there are the data produced by scientific experiments and the systematic compilation and investigation of spontaneous reports; and there are the speculations proposed to account for them. How are we to find our way around this jungle of information? The answer, I believe, is quite simple: the scientific method is the only road to the truth.

There are a lot people who believe that psi phenomena are real but can somehow elude scientific investigation. Or, they talk of 'scientific reality' as being only a small subset of the much grander total reality. Or, they talk of psi phenomena as being 'real for' some people but not for others. Or, they identify science with quantitative studies, and insist that psi phenomena are not measurable. Or, they identify psi phenomena with non-conceptual spiritual 'truths', which are beyond the reach of the black-and-white analyses of science. And so on.

All of this is wrong. Mainly, it is wrong because people are misled by the reification of science (and, indeed, of logic). If one construes 'scientific truth' as labelling a particular variety of truth, then one might naively suppose that there are other varieties of truth, which can be found out by other means: thus one might seek a 'spiritual truth', or a 'holistic truth', or a 'truth for' this person and a 'truth for' that person (so that I have 'my truth' and you have 'your truth'). That, however, is a basic misconception. The concept of reality does not admit of varieties. It is built into the defining conditions of the concept of reality that there is only one reality. Likewise for the concept of truth. In this sense, phrases such as 'scientific reality' are misleading misnomers, whose only genuine significance is to emphasise the scientific method as a method for getting at reality.

A fundamental premise that I shall adopt, and which I hold to be self-evident and in no need for further discussion, is that there is only one reality. Psi phenomena may or not be a part of that reality. The only way to obtain a high degree of confidence about the existence, and characteristics, of psi phenomena, is to investigate them scientifically.

Some phenomena are very hard to investigate scientifically, because they are rare and unpredictable, or the conditions under which they occur are hard to control. For example, it is hard to study spontaneous incidents of telepathy precisely because they do not happen every day and we have no idea when they will occur. And it is hard to study psi phenomena that depend on human emotions and intentionality because the intervention of the investigative process itself may disrupt the conditions required for the phenomenon to take place. As J.B.Rhine found, if you put psychics in a laboratory and get them to guess zenner cards all day, the psychics become bored and you substantially degrade the psychic ability.

The inference from this is not that we must give up the scientific method, but that we should employ ingenuity and imagination to get as close to the ideal of the scientific method as possible, and recognise clearly and explicitly the limitations that the shortfall places on the confidence of any conclusions we may reach.

As we all know, some things are so obvious that the rigorous application of the scientific method would be otiose. For instance, I know perfectly well that flicking the light switch in my study will turn the light on or off: it works with such a high reliability that I can see that a scientific study of my light switch would unavoidably yield the conclusion that it works. As far as I am aware, however, very few - if any - psi phenomena exhibit that degree of reliability. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically.

So, what is the scientific method anyway? I often wish, in this sort of discussion, that we could avoid using terms such as 'science' and 'scientific method' altogether. Instead of contrasting a 'scientific investigation' with a 'non-scientific investigation' (which makes it sound as if there is more than one way of investigating a phenomenon), I would prefer to contrast an 'investigation' with 'a pretence of investigation'. Of course, if you just pretend to investigate psi phenomena, if you play-act, then you will obtain only pretended results.

We must make a distinction between the scientific method, as a fundamental mode of approaching the world, and the current theories and paradigms that make up current scientific knowledge. Theories and paradigms come and go; they evolve and change in response to new facts. Some of the paradigms that the scientific community now embraces will have to be expanded or replaced by new ones to accommodate psi phenomena. This will inevitably engender a lot of resistance, as indeed it is doing already, even though we do not yet have new paradigms to put in their place. Throughout all these changes, however, the basic tenets of the scientific philosophy will be unchanged. No matter what new theories are developed to understand psi, we will still formulate theoretical models, generate testable and falsifiable hypotheses, carry out experiments, rationally assess the results, probably using existing statistical and mathematical methods, and base our beliefs about the nature of the world exclusively on those results as opposed to anybody's preferred opinions. None of that is going to change. A science of psi is still a science.

© Peter B. Lloyd, 1999. Last modified 28th February 2000.

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