Esalen photo
This is a funny shot of me and actor John Cleese, at a research seminar on survival of consciousness held at Esalen Institute a few years ago. John is as funny in person as in the movies.
Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven
Excerpt from a January 2008 item in the UK's The Daily Mail newspaper: In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected. Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow. She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established. "The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments." Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing. He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area ...
Comments
http://www.csicop.org/si/2008-04/hyman.html
Seems to me that he's engaged in some rhetorical tricks here, but I lack the background to challenge his assertions.
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-gorilla.html
You seem to meet a lot of interesting people in your work Dean.
As to the Skeptical Enquirer article you linked to book surgeon, it is amusing to see how much certain skeptics can twist the facts.
I remember when I read the AIR review, with the two reports by Utts and Hyman. When I read the Hyman report I was surprised. He actually used this argument to refute psi the anomalous cognition claims:
I cannot provide suitable candidates for what flaws, if any, might be present. Just the same, it is impossible in principle to say that any particular experiment or experimental series is completely free from possible flaws. An experimenter cannot control for every possibility--especially for potential flaws that have not yet been discovered.
To say that an experiment can never be free from flaws in principle, and use it as reason to discard an entire field of study is ridiculous.
Since then I have found time and time again that these academic skeptics that seem to have clever arguments on the surface, when you dig into their claims, there actually is nothing there. And sometimes they grossly twist the facts and boarder to the dishonest. There should be no room for such tactics in science.
"John Cleese Podcast #32: The Scientist at Work"
http://funkwarehouse.com/jcpods/john_cleese_podcast_32.mp4
Funny man :)
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=searching-for-god-in-the-brain
Interestingly, a commenter on the article mentioned something dear to our nonlocal hearts:
"A real religious experience is not induced but spontaneous, so how can you possibly record anything unless you happen to have someone have a religious experience while wired up to your equipment. Furthermore you need to distinguish between religious experience, which still includes a sense of ego self and true mystical experience, in which the sense of personal self is gone. Why not examine insightful perception instead, without the double blinds that block such perception and with relationship which is necessary for insightful perception. For instance a person is insightful of a distressing image about to be viewed on a pc screen in what are known as precognition experiments. This perception points to the mind being a non-physical reality. it would be very interesting and maybe even provide some infor that may help solve the quantum measurement problem in modern physics".
Drinks are on Dean, Tor buys the cookies and I'll reserve the pool tables.