Discussion post I submitted for my Atlantic University TP6100 Course – January 29, 2020.
In order to provide my perspective on the issue of whether there is adequate evidence of psi, I’m going to discuss the last point provided for this week’s assignment: What do you think might need to happen for an experiment to be acceptable to main street scientists as good evidence of psi?
In short, there is absolutely nothing that psi researchers can do to persuade certain elements of the “main street” scientists, who I prefer to call “establishment scientists.” As our Mentor and I discussed on Sunday’s Zoom call, psi researchers for the most part since their inception have bent over backward to meet rigorous scientific standards that virtually no other scientific field is held to. Despite this, the establishment continues to be increasingly hostile and skeptical, and as a result, it’s becoming more and more difficult to fund “out-of-the-box” scientific research such as that which examines psi phenomena.
It’s important to understand how science went from a creative, independent challenge in the pursuit of the truth to “established science.” Back in the early 1960s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about what might happen to science if it got too cozy with the federal government. In his now-famous “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” given as a Farewell Address, he said:
In this [technological] revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity (1961).
Since Eisenhower’s dire warnings, the entire scientific research field, not just those involved in defense, is now structured as he warned. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, doles out an average of more than $32 billion a year medical research grants (https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget). This is replicated across the government to include energy grants from the Department of Energy (DOE), intelligence grants from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Administration (NSA), law enforcement research money from the U.S. Justice Department, and on and on.
So how does this impact psi grants? In short, anything out of the “mainstream” is severely underfunded. It may be because it threatens the symbiotic relationship between the government and major industries, such as the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the pharmaceutical industry. Many people don’t know that phrma underwrites much of the costs related to the FDA’s own research. No potential conflict here.
Also, instead of tinkers in the shop, obtaining research grants these days is big business and if there aren’t any commercial applications, national defensive implications, or it’s not fulfilling some major political agenda of the day, it doesn’t get funded. Psi research doesn’t really check any of these boxes except for national defense. Again, as we discussed on Sunday’s call, the CIA did run the Stargate project at the end of the Cold War, which was a government intelligence program to use remote viewing as a possible means of spying on the old USSR and others, but this was shut down in the 1990s.
If a lack of federal funding, along with the support of prestigious universities who ultimately dole out grants, isn’t a challenge enough for psi researchers, there is also the problem of the “skeptics.” As our Mentor noted on the Sunday call, these people aren’t scientists, they’re dogmatics pursuing a “religion,” although not in the traditional sense.
Richard Broughton uses a subhead, “The Rise of Fundamentalism,” to describe the Psi skeptic industry that’s emerged since the 1980s. As he notes, “Parapsychologists have nothing to fear from responsible criticism. Unfortunately, the past decade has seen the growth of a form of scientific fundamentalism that threatens to undermine the productive, if not always amicable, relationship parapsychology has had with its critics” (1991, p. 81).
And who are these fundamentalists? They are radical human secularists, whose “movement, characterized by its unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the existing scientific worldview and its vehement condemnation of any deviations from orthodoxy, can trace its origins back to a magazine called The Humanist, a philosophical journal is known primary of its attacks on religion,” Broughton adds (1991, p. 81). Talk about ironies. In their zeal to stamp out anything religious and non-material, they have formed a closed-minded cult that cannot accept the fact that humans may consist of more than biological matter, despite how much scientific and non-religious evidence now exists like psi research and quantum physics that points to the opposite.
In large part because of the increasingly hostile environment psi research faces, unfortunately, I do believe that this can lead them to rely too much on laboratory testing. Most people experience psi phenomena spontaneously, and the research reports we read about this week are probably undercounting psi phenomena due to stale laboratory settings. As Irwin & Watt note, “Perhaps, in rightly seeking greater methodological rigor, parapsychology have moved too far from the conditions under which PK [and I’d add ESP and other phenomena as well] would occur in real life” (2007, p. 102). In short, they’ve let their critics define them, which is understandable given the fact that psi researchers appear to be for the most part upstanding curious truth-seekers open to an honest dialogue while most of their critics are clearly not.
This assignment calls for a closer look at some of the issues regarding psi experiments, and I may have short shifted this as a result of my own zeal on the issue of how research is conducted in this country. After spending most of my political career fighting against forces who have used scientific research to push a political agenda (which in most cases should be labeled political science rather than empirical science), I understand what psi researchers face and it shouldn’t have to be this way for them. The types of experiments they conduct, the lengths they go to ensure there is no fraud, sensory leakage, their diligence in reporting all results whether good or bad, is impressive.
The good news is that while the established scientific community may be closed-minded when it comes to topics like psi phenomena, the American public is not. They are opening up more and more every day to the realities that we are more than just material beings, and that gifts like ESP and PK are hard evidence of a connection to a greater universe and to a greater purpose for their lives.
References
Broughton, R. (1991). Parapsychology: the controversial science. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
Budget (n.d.). Retrieved Jan. 29, 2019 from The National Institute of Health: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget
Eisenhower, D. (1961, January 17). Farewell Address. Retrieved from https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp
Irwin H. & Watt, C. (2007). An introduction to parapsychology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.