Skeptics might be jumping to conclusions

[Angrboda]

I would love to be able to provide a fair and unbiased assessment of the evidence for psi and decide whether it exists or not. But this is simply impossible. Many people have tried and failed. In some of the best debates in parapsychology the proponents and critics have ended up simply agreeing to differ (e.g., Hyman and Honorton 1986; Hyman 1995; Utts 1995) or failing to reach any agreement (Milton and Wiseman 1999). The only truly scientific position seems to be to remain on the fence, and yet to do so makes progress difficult, if not impossible.

For this reason, if for no other, you have to jump to one side or other of the fence — and preferably be prepared to jump back again if future evidence proves you wrong. I have jumped onto the side of concluding that psi does not exist. My reasons derive from nearly thirty years of working in, and observing, the field of parapsychology (Blackmore 1996). During that time various experimental paradigms have been claimed as providing a repeatable demonstration of psi and several have been shown to be false. For example, in the 1950s the London University mathematician Samuel Soal claimed convincing evidence of telepathy with his special subject Basil Shackleton, with odds estimated at 1035 against the effect being due to chance (Soal and Bateman 1954). These results convinced a whole generation of researchers and it took more than thirty years to show that Soal had, in fact, cheated (Markwick 1978). Promising animal precognition experiments were blighted by the discovery of fraud (Rhine 1974) and the early remote viewing experiments were found to be susceptible to subtle cues which could have produced the positive results (Marks and Kammann 1980). As Hyman (1995, 349) puts it, “Historically, each new paradigm in parapsychology has appeared to its designers and contemporary critics as relatively flawless. Only subsequently did previously unrecognized drawbacks come to light.”

What Can the Paranormal Teach Us About Consciousness?