JREF Million Dollar Challenge

I do not know all of the details about how the prize evolved and how people tried and failed. All I know is that it has been generally understood amongst people I respect that the prize was simply a mechanism to debunk these phenomena.

My wife and I were once asked to be on some kind of Penn & Teller television program about the paranormal, but we refused. They are well-known debunkers and even though the publicity might have helped the Association we refused. The probability we would be bushwacked was too high.

We also participated in a pilot for a TV program that was supposed to be a fair pros and cons look at the paranormal. The pro actor was fair, the debunker actor was Boston Rob and only had disruption in mind. We recorded phenomena but it was drowned out by jokes. That was the last time we attempted to work with television.

One of the best, certainly the most public physical mediums was betrayed by a so-called parapsychologist when he agreed to be studied. He produced phenomena but virtually all of the subsequent reports are about how he may have tried a trick years earlier and outside of the protocol. Other parapsychologists gave the supposed researcher an award. That and other mistreatment of practitioners is the reason we now recommend practitioners do not work with parapsychologists. Open Letter to Paranormalists: Limits of science, trust and responsibility

I am barred for life from editing the Rupert Sheldrake Wikipedia article because I tried to balance the article a little. The reason was that I was promoting pseudoscience. Paranormal and fringe are officially pseudoscience on Wikipedia and that was done by a hoard of Randi Debunkers. (I know that is a general statement, but if you read the Wikipedia Arbitration archive, I think you will see why I say that.

The idea that you would bundle God, people who think they talk to God and serious practitioners in the same pile is reason itself for serious practitioners to stay away from the Randi circus. 

Finally, it is irritating that some of you think we are idiots, yet smart enough to be tricksters.

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Finally, it is irritating that some of you think we are idiots, yet smart enough to be tricksters.

Great post, Tom. Succinctly summarised much of what is wrong with the world of publicised scepticism.

By the way, I agree with you about the way "parapsychology" has been co-opted by sceptics. You describe them as Trojan Horses in your open letter and you are correct. A couple of examples from the UK are Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt, both of whom call themselves parapsychologists, both of whom are prominent professional sceptics and debunkers. They have taken the grant funding at Edinburgh University - originally intended to fund true psi research - and used it to promote themselves and their debunking activities. They are nothing more than unprincipled charlatans.

I do not know all of the details about how the prize evolved and how people tried and failed. All I know is that it has been generally understood amongst people I respect that the prize was simply a mechanism to debunk these phenomena.

Yes, that should be how it is understood.

I think the interest in these challenges comes about because it is frustrating when people make claims that their abilities are remarkable and obvious, yet are unable or unwilling to demonstrate that this is the case under conditions which don't leave open the possibility that someone is fooled (themselves or others). The conditions under which people can be fooled shouldn't also be the only conditions under which psi appears.

Parapsychologists have focussed on teasing out tiny anomalies, but I'm not sure that a connection can be made between their effects, which would be invisible to the naked eye, and the claims made by experiencers which are obvious to the naked eye. As Mediochre pointed out earlier, why are we looking at whether a computer can be coaxed to produce an extra bit every once in a while when poltergeists are throwing lamps across the room?

Linda

To me it's kinda like calling yourself a martial artists after your first 3 lessons. Personally I only think you're a martial artist after getting your black belt. Likewise I think the standards for thinking of yourself as a psychic or telekinetic should be equally as high, like if you can move around 20kg objects in all 3 dimensions at will, then yeah, you're a telekinetic, anything less than that, or less reliable than that, no. Keep training and come back later. That's why I, for example, am not bothering submitting any of my stuff as evidence yet. It's nowhere near a respectable level and I know it.

It's the same with me. While I've got some statistically significant results on the tests, until it's reliable and demonstrably useful it's not convincing enough to show.

If more people took these things more seriously and eradicated all traces of spirituality, philosophy, religion and any other form of the same emotionally childish garbage from the process and just focused on getting results we might actually have high level demonstrations of telekinesis and psychic abilities already. I do think that's coming, but much slower than it otherwise could've.

How do you think we get the results? I'm unsure of this because ISTM, going by my very limited experience, that psi has something to do with transcending the ego. That spirituality - meaning reaching a non-egoic consciousness, however that's understood - is necessary for psychic ability (nonlocal awareness and action). My understanding so far is that it's the reaching of a consciousness higher than personal, egoic consciousness that causes psychic ability. Psi, being nonlocal, comes from a nonlocal mind. It can't be gained by wanting it in order to show off.

This is what distinguishes it from childish magical thinking. A child believes their own will can cause things to levitate. But real psychic ability is I believe different because it comes from the transcending of the individual.

But the good news is I've noticed a growing trend towards that mentality with more and more people of various ages starting to do their own training from a far more results based and scientific mindset. It's slow but I do think it will yield results in time. I think people are getting tired of the cosmic parent bullshit finally, I mean statistically speaking individualism and atheism is going up in many countries and both religion and spiritualism are going down.

I support science and results, rather than blind faith, but I think there's a baby and bathwater issue. If psi comes about in people because of their ability to go beyond their ordinary self and their ordinary stream of thoughts, then it's not part of atheism and individualism. Certainly on the tests, for example, whenever I've tried to guess or force the right answer I miss it. It's only by relaxing and listening with empathy towards the different answers that sometimes the answer comes. While there are certainly bad things about religions - if they encourage people to let go of the self to some degree then I'd think they're more conducive to developing psi than an individualist belief system.

It's the same with me. While I've got some statistically significant results on the tests, until it's reliable and demonstrably useful it's not convincing enough to show.


How do you think we get the results? I'm unsure of this because ISTM, going by my very limited experience, that psi has something to do with transcending the ego. That spirituality - meaning reaching a non-egoic consciousness, however that's understood - is necessary for psychic ability (nonlocal awareness and action). My understanding so far is that it's the reaching of a consciousness higher than personal, egoic consciousness that causes psychic ability. Psi, being nonlocal, comes from a nonlocal mind. It can't be gained by wanting it in order to show off.

This is what distinguishes it from childish magical thinking. A child believes their own will can cause things to levitate. But real psychic ability is I believe different because it comes from the transcending of the individual.


I support science and results, rather than blind faith, but I think there's a baby and bathwater issue. If psi comes about in people because of their ability to go beyond their ordinary self and their ordinary stream of thoughts, then it's not part of atheism and individualism. Certainly on the tests, for example, whenever I've tried to guess or force the right answer I miss it. It's only by relaxing and listening with empathy towards the different answers that sometimes the answer comes. While there are certainly bad things about religions - if they encourage people to let go of the self to some degree then I'd think they're more conducive to developing psi than an individualist belief system.

I replied to you in a new thread beause otherwise this would drag this one way off topic:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-p...techniques

All good comments. Maybe this will help.

I apologize for referring to my own writing but I have taken some time to try to address issues like this with a diagram that needs explanation. Take a look at the Perception essay, especially the section on First Sight Theory. I have found that the corollaries of First Sight Theory provide a ruleset of sorts for the operation of the Perceptual Loop in the Attention Complex. (All my terms)

According to First Sight Theory, all of us sense information in the Psi Field. We also psychokinetically impress psi information into the field. If mind is separate from body, and brain is a transceiver, it seems reasonable to model the sensory signals from our body as psi signals. Movement commands to our body would be psi signals as well.

If this is true, ability to consciously demonstrate psychic ability probably follows the natural distribution so that most of us are not so effective, a few are very effective and a few outliers are like Mikael Jordens of the psi world.

With that in mind, the rest of the story seems to be a combination of two other factors. One is how we manage our mental processes. The switching corollary 10 provides one hint. The Bidirectionality Corollary 8 talks about turning toward or away from experience. The Personalness Corollary 1 is concerned with whether we care about the subject of incoming signals. Corollaries 11, 12 and 13 talk about psi functioning. (Please note that the essay contains paraphrases in many parts of the explanation.)

The other factor is our ability to manage our intention and our worldview. 

The model is based on the corollaries and other concepts related to how we think and what I know about paranormal phenomena. There are a few takeaways that seem to apply to this conversation.

Note in the Attention Complex of the Functional Areas of Perception and Expression Diagram that Worldview acts as a database which is queried by the Perceptual Loop. The ruleset for the loop is mostly First Sight Theory. The explanation is long, but the implications are that what we become consciously aware of is determined by that loop based on Worldview. If we believe in scientism, we will likely not become aware of many instances of paranormal phenomena. We will also likely not be able to express more than the normal intention in our naturally occurring psi output.



The reason I talk so much about the Mindful Way in my writing is that the more we are able to manage our perception, the more lucid will be our ability to sense past the limitations of our attention complex. The more nonsense in our worldview, the less effective we will be in managing our psi expression or perception.

With this in mind, consider the Lucidity and Hyperlucidity sections in the How We Think Essay. We become consciously aware of what is presented to us from the Attention Complex as perception. The first implication is that the degree to which a mental medium is lucid determines the likelihood of a correct message. We very easily fool ourselves. We also color the message, or even what we see around us, based on expectations formed from what we have been taught.

On the subject of measurement, I have just a little south of a masters degree in math because of my engineering education. Statistics probably do not have a place in the study of things paranormal. While I understand the need to seem scientific, FLS is right in that there is a disparity between the human experience and the lab results.

I have sat with physical mediums who can produce amazing phenomena of lights, sounds, objects and levitation. Most had taken many years of development and a lot of native ability to attain that level. With my wife, Lisa, and another couple, I have unsuccessfully tried for many years to produce even a small amount of such phenomena. Others have sat for a short time and reported good results. That bell curve again.

My point is that such phenomena can be produced but one is not going to recruit a few college kids to study the effects. The same can be said for EVP. It is necessary for the scientist to go to the competent practitioners. The problem is that they are mostly not competent scientists and the way this recent batch treat practitioner makes it pretty hard for them to find research subjects.

The measure we use for EVP can be described as "decisive determinism." That is, wither the example is demonstrably present using a witness panel or it is not. Anything less should be set aside. In statistical analysis, the relatively rare Class A EVP example is considered an outlier and discarded.