What is ESP?
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| | ESP stands for Extra Sensory Perception. It refers to the abilties that some people possess that cannot be explained in terms of the known five senses.
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| | There has been extensive research into ESP, in such areas as telepathy (reading another's mind), psychokinesis (affecting matter at a distance) and remote viewing (visualising distant scenes beyond eyesight).
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| | Because ESP is essentially inexplicable with our current human understanding, and because of the destabilising effect an acceptance of ESP would have, it is mostly bypassed by Science.
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| | The Scientific community has a generally sceptical view of ESP. This view has forced ESP research to become some of the most rigorously controlled research of all. But as substantive results are still produced, so the bar is moved higher by the sceptics.
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| | This article tries to illustrate that sceptics cannot enforce absolutely rigorous conditions to any experiment, including mainstream scientific experiments. So there comes a time when the results of ESP experiments should be accepted. Focus should then be on the use of this research as a platform for trying to understand how ESP works.
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Because we are human
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| | Essentially, if research is carried out by humans, there is always scope for corruption, or inaccuracies, in scientific experiments, regardless of type.
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| | Research by machines is likely to be more reliable, but not in an absolute sense, in part because the machines are in turn built and controlled by humans.
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| | I'll illustrate typical shortcomings by example.
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| | It has been recorded that Houdini, the great escapologist, shared a secret code with his partner, known only to each other. Shortly after his death, a medium acting for his widow was able to pass on the code from the deceased Houdini, his widow verifying the authenticity of the code.
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| | Sceptics will say that there may have been some underhand activity by the medium. The medium might perhaps have hyptonised the widow into revealing the code.
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| | If you wanted to prepare an experiment that avoided any such corruption, then the secret code would have to be verifiable only after the medium had performed his deed. But where could the code be stored in such a fashion with a guarantee of no human involvement? Storage in a secure vault would be reliant on the integrity of the guards. And so on.
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| | Only humans can arrange for the protection of the code, but no human can be treated as absolutely beyond suspician.
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Quantum equivalence?
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| | It occurs to me that the validity of the experiment collapses when a human is involved - much as the speed of an elementary particle can never be known when its position is measured. The absolute validity of the medium collapses when measurement is attempted.
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| | This is a tenuous link, and maybe is not meaningful. But the involvement of humans in experiments does remove absolute certainty about the validity of the results.
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