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The Carrington Event and massive solar storms: just how screwed are we?

Mark Duwe

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10th January 2011

The Carrington Event and massive solar storms: just how screwed are we?

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

The Sun is our constant companion; it supplies heat and light to us and keeps our small blue-green world from freezing. However, as serene as the Sun seems on a lazy summer’s day, a close look at its surface tells a very different story.

The surface of the Sun is a roiling, turbulent, ever-changing environment. Pockets of superheated gas larger than the Earth rise to the surface and sink again within a matter of hours. The colossal magnetic field of the Sun can even physically lift some of the superheated gas right off the surface, wrap it into coils and fling it off into space at hundreds, if not thousands of miles per hour. If this ejecta is flung at the Earth, things down here on the surface can get very interesting indeed. Space weather is now a full time area of study for astronomers – trying to predict when the next major solar flare will happen and what we could possibly do to mitigate its effects.

New Scientist magazine ran an article entitled Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe in their 21 March 2009 issue. It was full of dire predictions of death, disaster and the collapse of society if such an event were to occur today. But how true is this scenario? For example, if the next solar cycle, due to reach maximum in 2012, were to produce such a space storm, what would happen to our everyday lives?

A truly massive solar event would swamp out radio emissions, as the Sun increased its output of radio frequencies, followed shortly by satellites’ circuitry shorting out due to induced current because of the increase in electromagnetic radiation. The Earth’s magnetic field would warp, bend and reconfigure, causing showers of highly energetic particles to rain down into the upper atmosphere, and causing brilliant aurorae that could be seen as far south as the tropics. Induced currents along high-voltage power lines would flood transformer stations, causing the breakers and transformers to melt, creating blackouts across entire cities. Any humans in space would, if inadequately shielded, be exposed to radiation that could kill them very quickly.

Following on from this, if we couldn’t get the grid back online, there would be no power, no heating; without the ability to pump gas, water or petrol, essential services would vanish within a couple of days, hospitals would run dry of essential medicines and starvation and disease would ramp up, as food and medical supplies couldn’t be transported.

Sounds like a pretty doomsday scenario, and it is something that we should be concerned about; after all, the Sun is well known as a troublemaker. In both 1972 and 1989, telecommunications, electricity grids and other services were severely disrupted. Should we really be worried?

The worst solar storm on record, now known as the Carrington Event after the man who witnessed it, was an unprecedented eruption from the surface of the Sun. It happened without warning and it was only because Richard Carrington was studying the Sun that morning that we even knew what was to unfold was caused by the Sun. On the morning of 1st September, 1859, Carrington was observing the Sun. He was an amateur astronomer, widely regarded as one of the finest solar astronomers alive. Using the projection method of viewing the Sun, he was tracing the outlines of sunspots; in particular, a large group near the equator of the Sun. As he was doing so, he saw a brilliant white flash of light, quickly followed by another bright flash that lingered for almost five minutes.

Within 24 hours, the Earth was subjected to a geomagnetic storm the likes of which haven’t been seen since. Skies all over Earth erupted in auroras that were seen as far south as the equator. Such solar outbursts normally take between 3 to 4 days to reach Earth; this one managed the 93-million-mile journey in less than 24 hours. Even more worrying, telegraph systems worldwide went berserk. Electrical discharges sparked along the wires and caused fires. In some cases, the telegraph wires melted from the increased current.

In the 150 years since the Carrington Event, there has been nothing even close to it. It’s now possible to look back in time by examining arctic ice as energetic particles leave a nitrate record in arctic ice cores. The Carrington Event was the biggest event in 500 years and nearly twice as big as the next largest. Are we in danger? Potentially. The current solar cycle appears to be fairly quiet compared with the past few cycles, so the Sun may be entering a ‘quiet phase’. Ice cores show these events seem to have a half-millennium cycle, so we could be safe for another 350 years, but it’s always wise to be prepared.

Act Without Hope: charitable giving, effective altruism, and the life you can save

Julian Baggini

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10th January 2011

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Act Without Hope: charitable giving, effective altruism, and the life you can save

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

I recently read moral philosopher Peter Singer’s latest polemic, The Life You Can Save. I say polemic, because it is not a dry piece of theory, but a carefully calculated attempt to get people to give more of their wealth away to help ease global poverty and disease.

It certainly succeeds in making you feel guilty. Yet there are those who would say that western guilt about poverty in the developing world is one of its most futile manifestations. What’s more, they have a compelling case for why we should stop feeling it. As Immanuel Kant argued, ought implies can: you are only obliged to do things which you can actually do. You may well be obliged to look after your own children, for example, but you’re not obliged to find a cure for cancer by Monday.

Armed with this rock-solid moral maxim, the argument then runs that there is nothing we ought to do to help the developing world, because there is nothing we can do. Indeed, well-intentioned help more often than not ends up causing more harm than good.

For example, the Commission for Global Road Safety last year reported that roads built with international aid were causing unnecessary deaths, particularly among children, because they are not being made safe enough. The saying that the road to hell needs to be paved with more than good intentions has never been more apt.

As private citizens we have even more reason to feel sceptical about whether our giving can actually make a difference anyway. Our hard-earned donations are tiny compared to the amounts doled out in government aid. What’s more, we know the root causes have more to do with international trade laws, war, and governance in developing countries than they do western generosity. Add to that the law of unintended consequences, by which the gift of a road ends up killing people and you’d be forgiven for dropping the moral debt we feel we owe.

The arguments against guilt stack up and there is plenty of truth in all of them. However, they do not let us off the moral hook for the simple reason that the case that we have a duty of assistance is just too strong, whether or not we are responsible for the suffering we seek to alleviate.

Moral philosophers have used a number of analogies to pinpoint the source of this duty. Onora O’Neill asked us to imagine a lifeboat which had room and supplies for drowning people, yet refused to change course even a little bit to pick them up. We would rightly deplore the people in charge of the boat. But by the same logic, we should be prepared to make a relatively small effort to save our fellow human beings, even if we did not cause them to be in the desperate plight they are.

Most of us recognise that there is something obscene about enjoying the incredible wealth and prosperity we do while others die for lack of a few pence per week. The moral imperative to do something about it is so strong that it is no wonder we seek to forget about it, or try to deny it. That’s where the idea that we do need to help because we are not responsible and cannot change anything comes in. It’s the ultimate get out of jail free card for the tortured western conscience.

But our duty is not so easily removed. Our moral obligation to help is not predicated on us having caused the problems we seek to solve, merely on the fact that we have find ourselves with so much while others have so little. It’s not good saying you shouldn’t have pulled a drowning child from a pond because you didn’t push her in: when the stakes are so high, the mere fact that you can save her at so little cost means that you must.

Nor is the fact that much aid doesn’t work an excuse not to give any. If it could be shown that aid causes more harm than good in the long run, then we should stop giving straight away. But that is far too pessimistic a diagnosis.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who was very politically committed, said something very important about social action. He said we should act without hope. What he meant was that we should not seek to build a better future on the basis of over-optimistic illusions about the inevitability of our success. That’s exactly how we should approach aid. It is good that we no longer naively believe that popping a cheque in the post will make everything better. That does not mean we shouldn’t send the cheque, it just means we should realise that achieving lasting change requires more than we alone can do. Scepticism about aid is therefore entirely justified; using it as a reason to withhold it is not.

Technophobia: Facebook and computers cause cancer; typewriters apparently don’t

Mark Williams

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9th January 2011

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Technophobia: Facebook and computers cause cancer; typewriters apparently don’t

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

The media has historically (and misguidedly) blamed many societal ills on technology. Television has reportedly been blamed for over-stimulating children before bedtime (BBC News, 2000). Computer games, the internet and television were criticised for, in part, making children become more selfish (BBC News Online: Education, 2001). Regular television, video or DVD consumption is supposedly closely associated with attentional problems, aggressive behaviour and poor cognitive development (Telegraph, 2007), and, strikingly, social networking website Facebook could apparently elevate the risk of cancer (Daily Mail, 2009).

It seems ironic that the BBC, as the UK’s largest and internationally recognised broadcaster, happily report the association of such widespread and adverse effects with television, but American news channel CNN are willing to take these correlations one step further.

The network recently published reports of research from a University of Southern California study suggesting that “Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering” because “the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s moral compass”.

The delicious irony of this arises from the fact that CNN publishes updates regularly through 44 Twitter accounts and recently engaged ‘actor’ Ashton Kutcher in a race to be the first with one million ‘followers’. Interestingly, the account belonging to one of the CNN news anchors has been hacked (alongside those of Barack Obama and Britney Spears) obviously demonstrating that social networking tools not only numb morality but are also very attractive to ‘criminal types’.

Clearly the reports hold little significance for news channels or at least insufficient weight to prompt a change in practice, rightly so perhaps, but the notion of being influenced by information outside of conscious awareness is not new.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union uniquely interpreted a quote from market researcher James Vicary (of ‘eat popcorn, drink Coke’ fame) to suggest that subversive subliminal suggestion was employed to boost ailing sales of alcohol. This was considered, of course, to be completely immoral.

Similarly, reports from 1951-53 demanded from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, show tests, now dubbed ‘mind control’ experiments, were conducted with two 19-year-old female volunteers and demonstrated hypnosis could be induced by telephone, writing or speech, and used to make the volunteers perform acts of which they later possessed no memory.

The problem comes when trying to establish which of these reports are actually based on robust and reliable evidence. Vicary was the mastermind of the aforementioned subliminal suggestion study in which cinema visitors were allegedly exposed to slides displaying the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” for 1/3000 of a second. He reported that popcorn sales increased by an average of 57.5% while Coca-Cola sales increased by 18.1%, figures which are evidently statistically significant.

Replications of the study, however, provided data which were non-significant and upon later questioning, Vicary admitted his own results had been forged. It’s disappointing that one of the most publicly recognised scientific studies of subliminal perception is actually a hoax, but I suspect its notoriety developed as the commercial potential for subliminal advertising gained support.

While stories of ‘Facebook causes cancer’ or ‘Twitter undermines moral development’ may capture the technological and social networking zeitgeist, there does seem to be a chasm between common sense and science. The mere concept that Facebook can cause cancer while MySpace or Google do not is clearly ludicrous.

In the same way that resistance developed for subliminal messages and advertising due to a prevailing sense of fear and manipulation, so sensational stories like these capture the interest of an internet-savvy generation, while preying on the uncertainty and ignorance of those less experienced with computers. There remains little excuse, however, for ignorance of common sense.

Free Will? The role of remorse and rehabilitation within the justice system

Michael Heap

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8th January 2011

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Free Will? The role of remorse and rehabilitation within the justice system

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

At the time of writing this piece there is a discussion about ‘free will’ taking place on ASKE’s email forum. This has been stimulated by an article Sue Blackmore wrote for the Guardian (March 2rd, 2009) headed, “Let’s drop the charade: It’s right we come to terms with the fact that free will, just like the sense of a higher power, is an illusion”.

In particular, Dr Blackmore is interested in the implications of abandoning the idea of free will for how we treat criminals:

“We can do it communally by realising that our legal system can punish wrongdoers not because they could have done otherwise and freely chose to be bad, but because some punishments are effective…

Instead of asking how much punishment someone deserves, we should ask what actions we can take to make this person behave better in the future, and others not follow this bad example.”

Actually, what Dr Blackmore appears to be advocating does happen in our criminal justice system. There is however something that should not be overlooked. Those who work in our courts, our prisons, the probation service, and (like me) our forensic mental health services, should remember that they serve the community (and the latter pay them to do so). Since we are a democracy, they should be mindful of the wishes, values, and expectations of the majority about how offenders are to be dealt with.

It is not a healthy situation when the activities of our criminal justice system and the philosophy behind them become too detached from what the public expects. For an example, witness the outrage when the perpetrator of a heinous crime appears to be given only a modest sentence.

I made this point last year when I was speaking at a meeting of professional colleagues that was devoted to the topic of ‘remorse’. The title of the meeting was “Is remorse necessary?” If you put that question to professionals who work with offenders, most of them will probably interpret it from the standpoint of “necessary to reduce risk of reoffending”. “Lack of remorse” is listed as a risk factor in instruments that attempt to assess a person’s likelihood of committing a violent crime in the future, but it is only one of many factors and of itself is probably only a weak predictor of violent recidivism.

But if free will is an illusion anyway, and if our behaviour is determined without it, what is the point of feeling remorse, guilt, self-recrimination, shame and so on when we cause needless suffering in others? Is it an unnecessary by-product of the way we are brought up?

In fact my main point at the meeting was that remorse is a desirable end in itself; something, if possible, to encourage any offender to experience for no other reason than it is a good thing that he or she does. This is what the public demand; it is offensive to most people when it is reported that a murderer or rapist, for example, “showed no sign of remorse” during his trial and sentencing.

People may argue that a certain individual cannot help being violent because “it is in his genes” or because of his chaotic upbringing or some malfunctioning of his frontal lobes and so on. In my own experience, now and again a prisoner or detained patient will appear to disclaim responsibility for some awful crime by saying that he was mentally ill at the time and didn’t know what he was doing, or that he was intoxicated by alcohol or drugs. We may tolerate some or all of this, and yet do we not feel gratified when such individuals still profess to feel remorse for their actions? It is certainly usual practice to try and do what we can to bring the person to this state of mind. And I suspect that being found out and punished by the community does assist this process.

Some people, whom we describe as ‘psychopathic’, appear incapable of feeling remorse. They have a weak conscience or, in Freudian terminology, superego. And neither they nor we are any the better for it. They include some very violent individuals but also non-offenders who are untrustworthy, self-centered, inconsiderate, irresponsible and so on. Like everyone else they believe they have free will but they are not particularly remorseful, despite our best efforts.

Remorse does appear to be necessary. Maybe the anticipation of remorse prior to a misdemeanour or the experience of remorse afterwards serves as punishment to deter antisocial behaviour and is thus valuable for the social group.

As for ‘free will’, it may be an illusion but it is a very useful one. Indeed, we might make a deal of trouble for ourselves if we stop believing in it. But do we have any choice as to whether we do or don’t?

When The Skeptic came of age: a 2011 reflection on the first 21 years of the magazine

Wendy M. Grossman

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7th January 2011

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When The Skeptic came of age: a 2011 reflection on the first 21 years of the magazine

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

In May 1987, the Irish press was filled with stories about the weeping statue in a north Dublin suburban home. A web site documenting the story now says there were others in Cork and the south of Dublin around the same time (Catholic Tradition, n.d.). In fact, the site comments, the 1980s generally were a good time for weeping Rosa Mystica statues, which were found not only in Ireland but in Belgium, Sri Lanka, the US, and Italy.

I was living in Dublin at the time, and The Skeptic was a few months old. The stories seemed dramatic and mysterious. Weeping statues!

By then, even though it was only a few months old, The Skeptic had some readers, who had begun sending in newspaper clippings. (This may seem quaint to younger readers, but at the time the Web hadn’t been invented yet, few outside universities had email, and I wasn’t one of them.) One of these was a snipped letter to The Daily Telegraph written by someone in the plaster trade. He explained the phenomenon thus: the plaster that statues are made of retains some water, and so plaster statues are sealed with a plastic coating. If you poke holes in the coating, water will ooze out. If you poke those holes at the eyes, the statue will seem to weep.

I loved this for many reasons. For one thing, it seemed to me to prove that The Skeptic was worth doing to try to help make sure stuff like this didn’t get lost. For another, the explanation had the same elements that appealed to me so much about the decades’ worth of murder mysteries I’d read: an apparently impossible situation and a plausible and natural explanation. For a third, you could test this explanation’s validity for yourself by buying a few cheap plaster statues and poking holes in them and seeing what happened.

That last point is the key element of what good sceptics do, or should do. Contrary to what most people, particularly in the UK, seem to think, scepticism isn’t about saying no to everything all the time. Instead, it means enquiry. What is the evidence for a particular claim? How can it be tested?

If it can’t be tested – if, in other words, the claim is what philosopher of science Karl Popper called an “unfalsifiable hypothesis” – there’s nothing for a sceptic to do, really. You are free to believe that a small, invisible, unmeasurable pink cloud occupies a permanent spot in the sky like a geostationary satellite and directs all human affairs, and if you do sceptics are unlikely to try to interfere because we’re talking about a matter of faith, for which there are no tests. But if you start claiming that the pink cloud is coming down to earth at night and making crop circles, that is a physical effect that can be examined, and a hypothesis can be formed about the cause and then tested.

A brief history

However, that doesn’t tell you anything about how The Skeptic was founded, except that I am the kind of person who is excited by unexpected, natural explanations. That personality trait made me receptive when Mark Plummer, then the executive director of the US-based Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, said to me, “Do you think you could start a newsletter over there?” This was in late 1986. I was living in Dublin, where I knew hardly anyone, and I had been reading CSICOP’s own publication, Skeptical Inquirer, for more than five years after running across first a live lecture/demonstration by magician and debunker James Randi and then a copy of Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, by Martin Gardner. On a visit back to my former US home town, Ithaca, NY, I persuaded a friend to drive up to Buffalo to visit CSICOP. Once there, I asked Mark: “Is there anything I can do?” This was his answer.

Starting a newsletter didn’t really seem like much, but you never knew. And sometimes things work in non-obvious ways. If you ask people now, 22 years later, what The Skeptic has changed you won’t necessarily get an encouraging response. I paused while writing this to ask Guardian journalist and author Simon Hoggart what difference he thought The Skeptic had made. “Not much”, he said, or something like it. After all: the alternative ‘medicine’ market is booming in defiance of any scientific research; books, magazines, and TV shows promoting paranormal claims continue to proliferate; and the average person you meet at a party still always knows their star sign. On the other hand: there seem to be a lot more sceptics – and a lot more visible sceptics – all over the landscape, and when you’re a founder, that seems like a result.

One step at a time

In 1986, I remember practically throwing things at the television when, in a daytime discussion of spiritualism the only opposition to the medium’s claims was a Church of England minister who said that any spirit contacted by such a means was evil. Why wasn’t there a sceptic to question whether there were any spirits to begin with?

That doesn’t happen now (and not just because I don’t watch daytime television). Within a couple of years of The Skeptic’s founding, you wouldn’t see a TV show promoting paranormal claims without a sceptical viewpoint. That is, of course, still not an entirely satisfying state of affairs, because so often what happens is that you’re simply the token sceptic and the show is really about paranormal claimants and the wonders they perform. Sceptics who can be proactive and set the agenda are few and far between; a few years later along came Richard Wiseman, who is doing just that.

It feels, anyway, as though there’s a lot more scepticism and sceptics around in 2009 than there were in 1987. How much of a role The Skeptic has played in that can be debated by others. What has definitely become noticeable since 1987 is that that there are fashions in belief as there are in everything else. Certainly there are perennials that just don’t die – astrology being the most obvious case. UFOs continue to baffle sky-watchers, and today’s ‘alternative’ medicine is a panoply of remedies that have been around for 150 years and up. Ghosts, numerology, dowsing, graphology, all still with us. Still others – physical spirit manifestations, spirit photography – die off because technology has overtaken them. But others are just short-lived fads. Who now talks about biorhythms or crop circles, both much in the public consciousness in The Skeptic’s early years?

Crop circles had the rare distinction of being a native phenomenon. No one suggested a pink cloud was causing them, but there were some other theories that seemed just as unlikely: currents in the earth’s magnetic field (Colin Andrews), UFOs, whirlwinds (Terence Meaden). Watching the evolution of these theories as new phenomena made them even more unlikely was instructive. Terence Meaden, for example, had to adapt his whirlwind idea after crop circle formations were discovered in about 1990 that featured rectangular elements; the whirlwinds, he said, were intelligent plasma vortices. It was a fine example of a phenomenon that was to become rather familiar: the theory that is stretched mercilessly by adherents unable to accept that new developments had invalidated it.

Many, if not most, of the new and trendy beliefs in the UK over the past 21 years came from elsewhere, usually the US, although see also the influence of Feng Shui from the East.

Fads and fallacies

I will say that British sceptics often seem to me to overestimate the common sense of the British public as compared to the gullibility of Americans. In the early 1990s, for example, I was told categorically that British folks would never believe in alien abductions, then an emerging belief in the US. “We’re too sensible,” I was told. But five years later you were seeing abductees talk about their terrifying experiences on daytime talk shows here, which was to be followed, a few years later, by believers in angels.

Similarly, about four years ago when I tried to write a piece about the growth of creationism in the UK, the received wisdom held that creationism would never gain ground here – British people understood more about science, and anyway, evangelical Christianity didn’t have much of a hold. Cut to February 2009 and the headline on page 15 of the Daily Telegraph reads: “Half of UK population ‘believe in creationism’.”

But creationism is a perfect example of what a very small number of passionate sceptics can achieve. One of the reasons so many people thought that Britain was somehow insulated from creationism was that the subject made some noise in the late 1980s and then seemed to die off. What they didn’t know was that it didn’t die by itself; instead, the disappearance of creationism from the national consciousness was the result of a thought-out, diligent, and persistent attack on those promoting it by Michael Howgate, who founded a little (two-member) organisation he called APE: the Association for the Protection of Evolution. Howgate made a point of going along to creationist meetings and doing his best to ask awkward questions, point out errors of fact, correct quotations taken out of context, and embarrass the speakers until they stopped holding public meetings.

A sense of community

These days, the Internet has made it easy for like-minded people to find each other, but for much of The Skeptic’s lifetime so far it took a printed publication. Scepticism is a hard sell, to both supporters and outsiders. In the UK, people seem to see the word as negative and closed-minded instead of open-minded and enquiring. Sceptics are generally used to feeling – and being – isolated. And much of scepticism is not media-friendly: there is no story in saying that astrology is just a 2,000-year-old first attempt at understanding astronomy, or that the apparent success rate of ‘alternative’ therapies is generally due to a poor understanding of the principle that ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’.

In 1996, Wayne Spencer and Tony Youens got together and put a notice in The Skeptic looking for like-minded people to start a membership organisation. Their group, the Association for Skeptical Enquiry (ASKE), was founded in 1997, and represents Britain as a member of the European Council of Skeptical Organisations (ECSO). Similarly, Skeptics in the Pub was founded in my living room while stuffing magazines into envelopes one day in 1999, when Scott Campbell, new in London from Australia, said, “I was thinking of starting a pub meet.” My sole contribution was to say, “Sounds great. Go for it.” Skeptics in the Pub is now ten years old, attracts standing-room-only crowds every month, and is being copied in Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and, most recently, Liverpool.

The thing I am actually proudest of in fact is not my own contribution in starting The Skeptic. What I am proud of is that it has attracted so many persistent supporters who have worked far harder to keep it alive and make it prosper than I ever did myself: Chris French and his Goldsmiths students; Hilary Evans, who has contributed both illustrations from the Mary Evans Picture Library and his own writing for so many years; cartoonists Donald Rooum and Ted Pearce; Toby Howard and Steve Donnelly, who edited the magazine for eight years and did the brutally hard work of growing the subscriber base; Peter O’Hara, my partner in getting the magazine out when it was photocopied and posted by hand; Michael Hutchinson; and the many, many contributors of articles and other features to the magazine who are too numerous to list. It is not a great thing to start a newsletter, but it is a great thing 20 years later to see it still alive and not dependent on its founder for its survival. That is really the key, because for something to have real, longterm impact it must be a community effort.

As it turns out, like many phenomena, weeping statues can have more than one explanation – and more than one manifestation. Since then (and before) there have been many stories about statues weeping blood and oil, and, conversely, drinking milk. Soak a sponge in scented or coloured oil or water and stuff it in the empty head cavity of a plaster statue and poke a pair of those ever-useful holes, and the statue will weep oil or ‘blood’. A number of sceptics have by now built even cleverer models, because, really, what good is it being a sceptic in 2009 if you can’t improve on a medieval miracle?

James Randi in 2011, on mortality, Project Alpha, Peter Popoff and so much more…

Chris French

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5th January 2011

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James Randi in 2011, on mortality, Project Alpha, Peter Popoff and so much more…

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

Talking with James Randi about his life is like being drawn into some sort of fantasy world. There was deceit, betrayal, magic, death-defying stunts, medical miracles, and a legendary prize of one million dollars just waiting to be claimed. At almost 80 years of age when I interviewed him, Randi exuded enough vibrancy and passionate inquisitiveness to fill a room and then some.

A natural sceptic and explorer of the world from a young age, Randi schooled himself in the public libraries and museums of Toronto, Canada, and started teaching himself magic tricks after an accident left him in a cast and immobile as a child. I sat down to talk with Randi about some of his experiences that we wanted to know more about.

CF: Just to start with the entertainment side of what you’ve done over your conjuring career, you’ve done some amazing things: you’ve been on stage with Alice Cooper as an executioner; you’ve done an escape act from a straitjacket suspended upside down over Niagara Falls. Could you single out just a couple of highlights, from that side of your life?

JR: Well, I had twenty-two jailbreaks. All legal, all legal! I hadn’t done anything nefarious. Well, I’d done some nefarious things but they didn’t come to the attention of the authorities! Yes, I did twenty-two jailbreaks all over the world.

The one that I didn’t carry off was the one that I really regretted. I managed to get the information about the brig on the Isle de France when I crossed the ocean on that vessel. And I was all prepared the next time I was on the Isle de France to surprise the folks there by doing an escape from the brig, the prison that is, the on-board prison. I was all prepared for it, I knew how to operate the locks but, you see, they wouldn’t know that I had prepared myself for this. That’s the way we escape artists are. And it went to the bottom of the ocean and I’m sure the brig is still intact someplace down there. And I have a key made from impressions that will never be used. What a pity. But, twenty-two jailbreaks, that’s a bit of an accomplishment I think.

CF: That is quite an achievement! There are a lot of people around who say they are sceptics but for them it’s not a kind of life-long passion in the way it is for you and the way it is for some other people. What is it about those kind of sceptics that make them different from others?

JR: I think that they’ve perhaps taken on an ethical responsibility as I have, you see. As a magician I have expertise in two different fields: how people are deceived and how they deceive themselves. And the second one is the one that is more important to me. I saw people being swindled by charlatans out there pretending to be psychics by doing everything from bending spoons to reading sealed messages in envelopes and telling fortunes and predicting the future and they were using exactly the same gimmicks that we conjurors were using.

I infinitely prefer the term conjuror over magician because a conjuror is a person who approximates the effect of a magician, so I think that’s technically more correct. I was offended by that and I thought that it would be well if at a certain point in my career, though I did it all the way through my life up until this point, that I would retire from the magic profession as a performer and dedicate myself entirely to explaining to people how these things can be avoided, how they can be solved, and not to teach them magic tricks, but just tell them, “Think about what I’m saying, perhaps you have been deceived”.

CF: Will you tell us something about Project Alpha?

JR: Briefly. I can’t be brief but I’ll try! Project Alpha arose because some years ago I received a letter from a young fella who essentially said that “if you ever have the opportunity to infiltrate a parapsychological lab with someone who knows how to do magic tricks in order to tell, to inform, and demonstrate for the scientists that they can be deceived by simple magic tricks, I’m your man!”

I looked at this letter and I didn’t know where to file it. So it went into my filing cabinet as Alpha and I just called it Project Alpha and put it in a folder. Not less than ten days from that, a second letter arrived from a different part of the country, from another young gentleman who said that he would volunteer to do the same sort of thing. Now he didn’t know about the first one, and I thought “ooh, second piece of paper in the Project Alpha file”.

And not long after that I saw an article in the paper saying that Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, had been given a half million-dollar grant to study children who could bend spoons with their minds! What they actually should have said was that the intent of the study was to establish life after death because James S. McDonnell of the McDonnell aircraft corporation, a very wealthy individual, was in his nineties at that time and he gave them the half million dollars to determine whether there was an afterlife. Apparently he didn’t want to go unless there was one! And the researchers convinced him that studying spoon-bending children – how they convinced him of this I really don’t know but they convinced this august gentleman – would be a good way to do it and therefore they established this laboratory.

I simply wrote to the lab and I said in so many words who I was and such, I was not that well known at the time, of course. And I said that I would offer my services free to them in return only for expenses, to act as an adviser in case people approach them who could use techniques, trick techniques, to deceive them.

I received a letter back which was very long, and it boiled down to “We’re very smart and we don’t need your help because we’re scientists and you aren’t. Thank you, yours truly”. They put their noses up in the air and turned me down because they didn’t need the help of a mere magician. I remember that John Taylor in this country once referred to me as a ‘mere magician’ at the Royal Academy and in my response I said “John, you referred to me as a ‘mere magician’. ‘Magician’ yes, ‘mere’ never!”

CF: At the end of the day then with Project Alpha, your team went in and were just using simple magic tricks?

JR: Well, let me tell you under what provisions, however. I said to the two kids we must agree in advance on two things – I will not help you develop your techniques. You’re both amateur magicians, you’re on your own. I want to be able to show that amateur magicians not instructed will be able to fool the scientists. And I said, second, we will never allow them to publish a scientific paper. If you get any word of this coming up you must notify me immediately and we must inform them that they have been deceived. And the third, well, there was a third one. If you are ever asked “Was that a trick?” you say immediately “Yes it was, this is how it was done and we were sent here by James Randi”.

None of those things happened: they went into the lab and they did their thing. I should say first though that they called me after each encounter in the lab. Now over a three and a half year period they were called in on holiday periods and such. Never accepted a cent of remuneration, only expenses. And they would call me and tell me on the telephone what they had done, under what circumstances, and I would make note of that.

Now I would not give them advice. “Carry on” was all the advice I would give them. But I would then sit down and write a letter to Professor Phillips and Mark Sheaffer, his associate assistant there, and I would tell him “If you’re ever confronted by people who do the following…” and describe exactly what had just happened, though in different language, “… this is what you should do”.

Well, Phillips, on their next visit to the lab, would present them with this letter with great amusement and he’d say, “Look what this guy has written me, can you imagine?” and they stood there waiting for him to say “Was that a trick?” and he wouldn’t ask it! And I suggested in every letter “Why don’t you ask the subjects?” – I wasn’t supposed to know that he even had subjects, you see – “Why don’t you ask the subjects whether or not this is the method they use?” And he wouldn’t do it, because there is a reluctance with these people to know the truth.

They’re very happy to have the phenomenon. They can see a Nobel Prize, I’m sure, on the horizon someplace, it’s glowing like a satellite rising in the distance. That doesn’t materialise, so far it hasn’t materialised, but we might hope!

So that was Project Alpha. It eventually happened that they called me and they said yes, they’re ready to publish at the Parapsychological Association conference and I had been invited to that too to speak, limited to ten minutes because I was a mere mortal, I was not a PhD and I couldn’t speak beyond that, but I certainly did attend.

Now the way we revealed it to Phillips – I knew that if I were to call or write to Phillips, say this is the case, he would probably refuse to accept it because he would suspect a trick of some kind. So, as we do with audiences, you let the audience find out the facts for themselves then they’re convinced of it.

Now we may give them the wrong facts, you see: “This is an empty cardboard box” for example, is not the way you approach it. Instead you toss it on the stage and let it skip across the stage behaving like an empty cardboard box. They make the assumption that it is empty and they make that assumption on their own and they’re convinced of it, not if you tell them it’s an empty cardboard box. Now it may or may not be empty, that’s not the important point, but I wanted this fellow to discover for himself, then he would believe it.

So Marcello Truzzi at that time, now deceased, was a sociologist – that’s a very soft science as you probably suspect, and he had a hard time getting published over the years that he functioned as a sociologist – but he was a fence-sitter on this whole matter. He didn’t know whether to believe in it or not. I knew that in his heart he didn’t believe in it because he knew magic very well, he came from a family with a tradition of doing magic and being magicians, so he knew that it was trickery and self-deception but he would always vacillate.

He never quite made up his mind on it and so I wanted Marcello to find out because I knew he was a gossip. Oh, he couldn’t hold onto any information no matter how much you admonished him, he would gossip. And so we allowed it, we had our means, which we won’t get into, of letting him find out that I knew the Alpha boys. That is, I didn’t want him to know that we were cooperating together, but that I knew the Alpha boys was sufficient for him and he did alert Phillips immediately and Phillips changed the paper.

Now I have both versions of the paper: as he was going to present it and as it was eventually presented. And what he did was he put modifiers all the way through it: ‘ostensibly’ and ‘apparently’ and ‘perhaps’ were put in.

The Parapsychological Association had been very pleased with the initial paper but they were not at all happy with this one with all the provisional terms in it and he said nonetheless that’s the way he wanted it presented. So he saved himself and we saved him from having admitted definitive statements and that’s the way Alpha went down.

It was a feature article in Time magazine and it was featured on the USA Today show, a very prominent news show over there. And we had a big press conference sponsored, I believe, by Time magazine at which all the media showed up in great numbers and we revealed to them that this had happened. And Phillips and Schaeffer made a joint statement following saying, “Well now we’ve seen all the ‘evidence’” – and they put that in quotation marks – “that’s been presented but we know that basically the kids did have psychic power because we observed it”.

They couldn’t quite get off the hook, you see, they were getting the barb out but they insisted on still hanging on the hook. I don’t know what happened to Phillips after that. I knew that he went off to China to investigate the children that I subsequently investigated, the so-called ‘indigo children’ over there. And they were revealed, very easily, doing tricks, for a naïve parapsychologist over there named Ding, but I don’t know what happened to him otherwise. Mark Schaeffer, I never tracked what happened to him.

But, you see, that’s the kind of thing that happens to academics when they commit themselves to a thing like this. Though I saved them in the long run from issuing this, they can always say, “Oh no, we never said it scientifically, officially“. That’s okay, I let them off the hook that way then, if they want to get off the hook.

CF: Just going back slightly, I remember when Uri Geller first appeared on the scene. I was in the sixth form at school at the time and I was totally convinced, I thought he was the real deal. And one of the things about that was that I just so much wanted him to be for real.

JR: That’s the point.

CF: And in some ways sceptics have this image problem that they’re seen as being kind of negative and the people who are going want to spoil all these things that everybody wants to believe in. You’ve been faced with that for decades. What do you do to try and make scepticism come across as the positive thing that we both know it to be?

JR: Well, as I’ve said frequently in my talks, there are two means by which people are deceived: they’re either self-deceived or they’re deceived by an external agency. I used to say “They want it to be true”, I now say “They need it to be true”. In many cases they do. Grieving people, for example, they want to believe in life after death, they need desperately to have proof of that and they will accept anything that is told to them if it’s posited in that direction, and they will reject anything that is against it.

I was in New York city with a television crew filming a faith healer and one woman there was asked to stand up out of a wheelchair and the audience went wild and she walked up and down the aisle and came back, tears coming down her face, and she didn’t need the wheelchair any longer! Well, we grabbed her aside because we knew that she didn’t come in a wheelchair. She had asked to sit in the wheelchair so she could be brought up to the front for healing, you see. And this is a popular gimmick with the evangelical healers, of course.

And we asked her, we said, “But don’t you think that was rather deceptive?” And she smiled and she said, “Well, yes, but I still believe, I still believe” and she smiled and she gave us the thumbs up and walked off. That’s the kind of thinking that goes on; people need this to be true.

CF: Would you tell me about your investigation of Peter Popoff in the mid-1980s?

JR: Peter Popoff, there’s a name to conjure with, to say the least! Yes, Peter Popoff, we went to investigate him; Steve Shaw, one of the Alpha kids was with us at the time. That was in, I believe, in San Francisco if I remember correctly. Vast auditorium, monstrous auditorium, and the place was just jammed to the roof and there were people waiting outside in the street.

These people make money, you know, and they attract a lot of attention. Popoff was marching up and down and screeching in his inimitable fashion and striking people on the forehead and whatnot, and I would be recognised of course, so I stayed well backstage and I sent Steve Shaw out there and he walked around with a microphone; it wasn’t connected but he walked around with a microphone and appeared to be interviewing these people and getting close to Popoff and at a certain point he came rushing backstage and he said “Popoff’s wearing a hearing aid!”

Now this is the kind of hearing aid that’s right in your ear, in the ear canal and it’s not fed with wires, no wires, it’s fed by an induction coil around the neck, so you see no connecting wires at all. It has its own little battery in it and a receiver at the belt and, as we said afterwards, it seemed incredible that Peter Popoff who ‘heals the deaf’ requires a hearing aid.

So we knew what our approach would be from then on. I asked a gentleman, Alec Jason, a friend of mine – a private investigator and electronics expert as well – I asked him to attend the second night of the Popoff crusade at the same auditorium. This went on for 4 or 5 days at this auditorium. So he went in there and his technique was to festoon himself with identification cards and when the guards saw him coming they just went “Go, go, go, go” because they didn’t want to read all of these cards that he had his face on!

As a private investigator he had access to that sort of thing and he had a tool bag with him and electrical tools and voltmeters and various other things like this and he had a Walkman. Now that Walkman was not a Walkman! He was actually receiving radio images from around the place. And he went earlier, well before the Popoff programme started, and he recorded all of the frequencies that were used. Now, the cash registering system, the intercoms of all kinds in the building and such, use different frequencies. He recorded each and every one of those frequencies. And then when the Popoff thing started, he simply went down the list of frequencies and found one frequency that had not been used until Popoff got there, and on the basis of picking up this spurious frequency, he tuned in on it, recorded it and of course it was Popoff’s wife. “Hello Petey, this is your wife speaking, can you hear me? If you can’t, you’re in big trouble! The first woman is the…” – yes, I’ll use the expression – “ … the big ***** ****** in the back”.

CF: That’s awful!

JR: This is the disrespect these people have for their victims from whom they were taking money. “And you keep your hands off those tits Peter, I’m watching you.” We’ve got that on tape, believe it or not. This is the disrespect that Mrs. Popoff and Peter Popoff had for these people.

And a gentleman with testicular cancer the size of a melon, a huge tumour that he had, and the women in the control room with Popoff broadcasting were laughing hysterically: “Look at those balls, wow, that’s a record”. This is a man dying of testicular cancer in front of them, they’re taking his money and his emotional security and such and they’re laughing at him.

That’s the kind of people these are, I’m sorry to be so frank with you but this is what we have and this is the reason that I have to be offended by these people and to fight them tooth and nail.

CF: That’s very disturbing, actually. That really is awful, but possibly even more disturbing than that is the fact that Popoff is now there raking the cash in again.

JR: He made last year, the actual book-keeping records show, he made 10 million dollars more than in the year that he was exposed. So people don’t learn, they will not listen, they don’t get the message at all.

CF: I guess that raises the big question, can sceptics achieve any kind of lasting victories in these kinds of areas?

JR: Well, Chris, I’m encouraged, yes, I think we can. I’m encouraged by the fact that, oh, two to four times a week, by postal mail or e-mail or fax or any of various means, I get a communication which usually starts out “Mr. Randi, at one time I was very much opposed to you and I thought you were a dreadful man but then I looked into it…” and it goes on from there. And it may also start out as something like: “ Thank you for having made a substantial change in my life, I now have a different attitude”. And many of those will have phrases in later on, “Mind you, I’m not convinced on your stance on such-and-such”.

All I want, my goal with this whole campaign, is just to get people thinking, have them ask questions, have them think about what I have told them. Don’t just believe me, any more than you believe these other people who make these claims: I’m making a claim too, it may or may not be true. Investigate it. Think about it. Think about it sensibly and rationally and think about it long and make a decision based on that, that’s all I ask.

And people do. We’ve got a raft of letters like that from, usually, young people which pleases me no end. That’s where you have to get them, of course. And go to authorities too. We say, “Think for yourself”. Yes, of course, think for yourself but think and go to authority on this thing. And the kind of authority may not be the local psychologist down the street because I’ve known all kinds of scientists, as we know of course, who have believed in this sort of thing, because they simply can’t believe they’re wrong and they’re out of their expertise. And a psychologist is not going to know conjuring techniques necessarily; it’s a matter of expertise.

CF: Well you’re doing a great job so I’ll say thank you, thank you from all of us! You set up the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996, so tell us about the aims, tell us about the achievements, and give us the latest news.

JR: Well, after retiring from the escape business, I did get a bit tired of struggling out of jails and straitjackets and whatnot, so at the age of sixty I essentially retired from active performing in that field. I had been investigating these things all along, since I was a teenager. I decided that I would go one hundred per cent in that direction and dedicate myself to this.

I was fortunate in that a gentleman contacted me by e-mail and I had a bit of, well, it wasn’t called a blog in those days, but I had a bit of presence on the internet and he offered to fund me and said, “I have a lot of money, I think I should give some of it to you to further your ends”.

I insisted on meeting him in person first because I didn’t want to have somebody who was sort of half on my side and half not and I didn’t want to offend any of his personal convictions. I met with the gentleman and we were very very compatible and he said that he would send me a small advance on this in order that I could look around for a headquarters. A cheque for a hundred thousand doll… a hundred thousand dollars arrived – I have a hard time saying it! – arrived in the mail and I looked at it somewhat sceptically I must admit!

So I took it over to the bank. The bank says “Looks good”. Put it in, few days later it went through. Hallelujah!

So we found ourselves a headquarters and the rest of the money arrived shortly after that. Now that’s not the million dollars – that was a separate gift from him. But he financed us to buy the building that we now occupy outright so we own it and we became a 501C3 which in the United States is essentially a charity, a not-for-profit organisation.

Now we can sell things and we can make a profit on the sales and on our activities, on our conferences and such but that profit doesn’t go to share-holders or any such thing. I am paid a salary by the foundation and my income by and large goes directly into the foundation. Anything that I earn as an activity of the foundation goes directly into it. It’s a good arrangement, it does very well.

We have our headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and we have a rather large library there. Two thousand, two hundred and eighty something books at the moment, most of them, what is the category? “Bullshit”, that’s most of them, but my books are of a contrary nature.

When I die, as will happen – I’m not ready yet, not ready, not yet, not yet. Got work to do, bills, taxes the whole thing – I often picture, with great relish, oh eight or ten years after my demise, some kid will be in the library looking around and he’ll come up to Flim Flam!, what’s all that about, and open it up. Hallelujah! And may just decide to sit down and read it and it may change his or her view of the world.

CF: Now that we’re talking about mortality, you underwent coronary artery bypass surgery in 2006 and we’re very pleased that you made such a good recovery, but while that ordeal was taking place, was there even a part of you that actually was tempted by religious ideas about an afterlife and so on? Do you think you went through that any differently than you would have done, would it have been easier for you if you’d been religious?

JR: I had no problem at all. No problem whatsoever. I allowed Daniel Dennett to speak for me. He’s a great philosopher and good friend of mine. He looks very much like me: we’re both remarkably good looking fellas, except that he is inordinately tall. Of course everybody is inordinately tall compared to me and so I ask them to sit when I speak to them!

Dan Dennett issued a little essay from the hospital, from his hospital bed. He typed it out on his computer and put it out on the internet and it’s an absolute classic. I published it on my website, as a matter of fact and it’s called ‘Thank Goodness’. He got tired of people coming into the hospital, now, he had very serious surgery, and they put in a Dacron artery or something. They used to use Dacron to make sports coats when I was a kid now they use it to make arteries apparently, what a change of function!

But, when he was recovering in the hospital he had people coming in and saying “Oh, thank God, you’re doing this, that and the other”, and he wrote this little essay, he said “No, never mind ‘thank god’ but I’ll accept thank goodness. Thank the goodness of the anaesthesiologist. Thank the goodness of the nurses who empty my bedpan. Thank the goodness of the intern who sweeps the floor regularly so that I don’t have to breathe too much dust. Thank the designers and makers of Dacron.”

All of these things, he said, “Yes, thank their goodness but don’t thank a mythical being.” And, essentially that’s a contraction of it, rather severely, but that’s the way I feel, yes.

I was so grateful. I was, you know, in a semi-stupor all the way through with tubes down my throat and whatnot. But they would take the morphine drip off occasionally and they would question me, you know, “How do you feel on this?” and “Would you like this and that, the other thing?”, and most of my answers were “Aaargh aaaaaaarrgh aaaargh” or something to that effect.

I am absolutely astonished by the efficiency of medical science. Now, think what they did: they immersed my body in ice, they broke open my chest, removed my heart, took veins out of my leg, redundant veins. Not exactly a good example of intelligent design, I would say, because the heart has no redundant parts in it, my cardiac surgeon tells me. And they replaced certain parts and they put it back and they sewed it up again and there it goes.

Damn, that’s okay. Now that is not a miracle but it’s as close to a miracle as you’re gonna get. It’s better than bending damn spoons, I’ll tell you that. And it has some function. And so I’m very very grateful to medical science and the progress it’s made. It’s not perfect and I’m tired of these people saying, “Oh, science doesn’t know everything”, but science admits that it doesn’t know everything. That’s why it exists and goes on. It doesn’t suddenly say, “Well now we know everything so we’ll just close the text books”. No, it’s an ongoing search; science doesn’t know everything and knows that it doesn’t know everything. But science is pretty damn good and we would, the lot of us, would not be here – this person speaks from experience – if it had not been for science.

CF: Well, all I can say is, here’s to the next eighty years. Thank you.

JR: Thank you Chris and thank you ladies and germs!

Acknowledgements: Sincere thanks to Mark Williams for recording this interview and to Simon Taylor for transcribing it.

From the archive: Can Science Accommodate Psychic Experience?

Jon Wainwright

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4th January 2011

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From the archive: Can Science Accommodate Psychic Experience?

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.

As someone who has only recently had their sceptical consciousness raised, I have the impression that this is an unusual question for anyone to ask, let alone a physicist. So, it was fascinating to hear Professor Bernard Carr talk on this subject in March 2009 at Goldsmiths, University of London, as one part of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit’s Invited Speaker Series. I cannot do justice in this article to either the scope of the lecture or the illustrations that accompanied it, but I do want to draw out one or two salient issues for discussion.

Bernard began by acknowledging something that I think we would all agree with: psi is a genuine experience that many people report. He admitted that his long-standing interest in psychic phenomena had not always sat comfortably alongside his day job as a professional physicist specializing in cosmology. For some of his colleagues, even a glance in the direction of psi is intellectual adultery, no matter how rigorous and sceptical the approach. While physicists by and large have steered clear of psi, psychology departments have found it much easier to accommodate psi within respectable research programmes. Whatever the ultimate explanation, there are real people with real – if not necessarily true – beliefs to study.

Like most scientists, Bernard rejected any kind of supernatural explanation: if psychic phenomena are real we should assume they obey natural laws, and since the study of natural phenomena is the undisputed domain of science, psi must therefore be amenable to scientific investigation. (However, I agree with Victor Stenger, 2003, in thinking that the naturalism of science is methodological and not necessarily ontological – even if there are supernatural ‘forces’ out there, our methods should be able to detect their effects on the natural world.)

Having answered his original question in the affirmative, Bernard then seemed to take a step back, by asking: Can science deal with mental experience? If science can deal with psi, surely it can deal with the more mundane category of mental experience? Jumping ahead to the more speculative conclusion of the talk, he asked another challenging question: Is psi an experiential glimpse of the holistic fabric of reality?

Are Psychic Phenomena Real?

First things first: We know that we make errors in perceiving the world around us. Is that a tiger in the grass? A type I error is seeing a tiger that is not there, a false positive. We waste some energy running away from a non-existent threat and need a bigger lunch. A type II error is not seeing a tiger that is there, a false negative. We are lunch. The cognitive mechanism at work here is the hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD), which “scans the environment for intentional agents and their activity” (Barrett, 2007, pp. 67–68). The evolutionary strategy is simple: better safe than sorry. And in the modern world, where threats to survival from intentional agents have been reduced to almost zero for many people, we’re still lumbered with our error-prone HADDs (What’s that spooky creak? Someone’s there!).

The anthropologist Pascal Boyer and the psychologist Justin Barrett explore the fascinating possibility that our HADDs are involved in the construction of religious concepts (Boyer, 2001). Could they also be involved in the construction of paranormal concepts? While we’re good at detecting traces of agency in our lives, we’re also generally good at discarding false positives. Once we’ve run away from the tiger that wasn’t there, we forget about it. Non-existence is usually, cognitively, not very interesting. Only when such over-detection is maintained and becomes a stable trait over time can this lead to the formation of supernatural concepts, which in turn generate their own complex inferences (Boyer, 2001).

If we can make errors in perceiving the world around us, why shouldn’t we make errors in perceiving the world within us? Is this a different kind of world, made of different stuff, obeying different laws? There is a scurrilous kind of philosophical scepticism which denies that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality outside ourselves, that we should instead be true to our own natures (Frankfurt, 2005, pp. 64–67). Cogito ergo sum is a famous confusion, suggesting “that thinking, and awareness of thinking, are the real substrates of being” (Damasio, p. 248).

Being certain of one’s own mind and sceptical of the minds of others is a tricky cul-de-sac for some to reverse out of, it seems, even after Darwin. “We have no direct, conclusive evidence to support the belief that people are intentional agents with minds. Minds cannot be directly observed. We have no empirical evidence for their existence” (Barrett, 2007, p. 69). While Descartes may be excused his lack of evolutionary perspective, it seems incredible that in the same article in which he writes so well about HADDs, Barrett cites Alvin Plantinga in support of this sceptical position.

A more balanced approach is to admit that, just as we can be mistaken about the world out there, so too do we have imperfect self-knowledge and underprivileged access to ourselves. We are far from perfect conscious introspectors. No wonder we are tempted, as Daniel Dennett suggests, to “exploit the cognitive vacuum, the gaps in our self-knowledge, by filling it with a rather magical and mysterious entity, the unmoved mover, the active self” (Dennett, 1984, p. 79).

Returning to the question – are psychic phenomena real? – let’s cut to the chase. When we see a woman sawn in half, we marvel at the trick, even though we have no idea how it’s done. Having paid to see a magic show, we’re unlikely to conclude that psychic powers were involved. In a different context, however, a naturalistic explanation might not be so readily available.

Still, while I don’t believe psi is real, like many of us drawn to this magazine’s brand of scepticism, I’m interested in belief formation, and how throughout history various characters have gone around claiming to be able to access a higher power, often gaining power and status as a result of being able to convince other people of their abilities.

The Varieties of Human Experience

One of the themes of Bernard’s lecture was that parapsychology was more interested in experiment than experience, that there is a general discomfort with spirituality and mysticism, and that we should focus more on experience. He displayed a graph of ‘Rare versus Profound’ experiences (see Figure 1) and toward the lower left of the graph, in the armpit of the axes, lurked gut feelings, just below telepathy and ‘distant healing’, while soaring in the clear blue sky of the upper right floated mystical union.

Plot of frequency against profundity of mental experiences. Graph courtesy of Dean Radin, Institute of Noetic Sciences. On the X axis impact from mundane to profound. On the Y axis frequency from common to rare. Plotted within the graph experiences such as religious epiphany (quite rare and quite profound) and deja vu (quite common and quite mundane).

While rarity of report is probably a variable most observers can agree on, more difficult to determine is the profundity of an experience. This will inevitably involve a value judgment, and may even be flatly contradicted by other individuals. For example, would a Christian agree to have their experience of the healing power of Jesus placed slightly lower on the grid than a Bodhisattva’s experience of enlightenment, or vice versa? There is a subjective dimension to our experience of profundity.

In making the distinction between experiment and experience Bernard pointed up the contrast between third- and first-person reporting. Third-person is the realm of no-nonsense science, while first-person would seem to be beyond measurement (forget about those fancy new fMRI machines) – but obviously not always beyond description. Bernard went back to the graph of first-person experiences and characterized the ‘lower’ experiences (those rooted in our bodies, e.g., gut instincts) as capable of transforming the individual only, while the ‘higher’ experiences (those involving the spirit, however this emerges) as capable of transforming the world.

An interesting aspect of this characterization of purely first-person experiences is to what extent it is open to third-person scrutiny. Because of what happened to him and what he achieved, Gandhi tends to be believed when he claims profound contact with a higher reality: he got involved with a political movement that affected the destiny of a whole subcontinent. If someone claims a gut instinct lay behind some decision, we tend to believe them, and we don’t request objective evidence for their experience. Gut instincts are also key to falling in love – and while your best friends might not agree you’ve fallen for the right person, they will take your self-report at face value. In our personal lives, such ‘low’ instincts – butterflies in the stomach and a rapidly beating heart – can have profound repercussions.

Now take the case of David Shayler, who announced that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ at Glastonbury Town Hall (Wilson, 2008). Even the most credulous person in Britain might furrow their brow at this announcement and for a fraction of a second become an absolute sceptic. David Shayler would have to change the world in a pretty amazing way for us to even begin to believe that he was self-reporting accurately a real state of the universe and not just a really, really anomalous mental state.

Intuitive Dualism

To illustrate his point that parapsychology is the bridge between matter and mind, Bernard showed a slide of Monet’s Bridge at Giverny, the one with lots of lilies and the sort of garden we’d all love to spend a lazy summer afternoon in. Bernard could have chosen the Iron Bridge in our own lovely county of Shropshire, but I fear that the weight of that massy structure would have broken the back of his metaphor. While we are all “natural-born dualists” (Bloom, 2004, p. xiii), I believe dualism to be false.

Gilbert Ryle was right to expose the “official doctrine” that “every human being is both a body and a mind”, and right to ridicule the “dogma of the Ghost in the Machine” (Ryle, 1949, pp. 13, 17). It is a category mistake to suppose that matter and mind are the same kinds of entities between which a bridge, however metaphorical, can be built. Bernard did not address this question, and this is where his metaphor began to wobble like the original Millennium Bridge.

Intellectual Trickle Down

What to make of Bernard’s suggestion that the bridge has something to do with higher dimensions? This was a novel idea to me, but such talk can pop up in unexpected places. In his recent excellent book on the Dover trial to keep intelligent design out of the science class, Matthew Chapman included part of an interview with a local called Scott Mehring, who had this to say: “Now if you believe in physics, you got the eleventh dimension… and inside the eleventh dimension they say there’s an infinite number of universes. So my take on that is that if you die on this earth, we just hop over to the eleventh dimension… So that means the bible could be right with everlasting life after we die” (Chapman, 2007, p. 252).

The intellectual trickle down effect at work! And who, precisely, are “they”? Legitimate scientists like Bernard Carr, whose ideas get reported and simplified and passed on down the food chain till they’re recycled in the most surprising ways. People attracted to quantum woo of the Deepak kind are unlikely ever to have solved Schrödinger’s equation, and even erudite philosophers can come over all confused by the simple metaphor of the ‘selfish gene’. Here we have serious ideas being wrenched from their original, and probably highly mathematical, context and plunked into the brains of middle-aged men in Pennsylvania. What kind of psychological anomalies is that going to provoke? The kind on peacock-strutting display in a Pennsylvania courtroom.

As Chapman puts it, here was the whole ID debate in its most naked form: an auto repairman – a biblical literalist without a shred of knowledge – deciding which books the kids should learn from, helped along by a woman who had no curiosity about anything and would happily lie in court to promote her religion (Chapman, 2007, p. 236).

At the other end of the intellectual spectrum, at least in terms of qualifications, was Steve Fuller, drafted in at the last minute for the defence and now, in Professor John Worrall’s phrase, “wanted for crimes against truth and rationality”. (This is how Worrall began a recent talk at the Conway Hall in London: a photograph of a smiling Steve Fuller with this as a caption.)

Pushing the boundaries of science is not what comes to mind when contemplating the inanities of the ID crowd, but, according to Fuller, that’s what was at the intellectual heart of the case. Patrick Gillen, lead attorney for the defence, in his summing up claimed that ID was a new scientific theory that Fuller “believes may well open a fascinating prospect to a new scientific paradigm.” Indeed, Fuller argued that ID was science, that it was not religious, and that it was as testable a theory as evolution. All it required was a scientific revolution, because at the moment there was a ‘dominant paradigm’ which stood in its way. ‘Paradigm’ may once have been triple-A scientific jargon but its status is now more subprime (even its best-known advocate Thomas Kuhn had his doubts). Is this crying in the wilderness for a new paradigm the secular version of turning to god to explain the gaps in our knowledge?

Polyfilla Paradigms?

So I was intrigued to hear Bernard Carr say that “there are gaps in our current paradigms”, not just gaps in our knowledge. Is this a kind of supercharged agnosticism? Or are paradigms overrated, more rhetorical devices than serious research tools? While polyfilla gods are in constant retreat before advancing knowledge, the Newtonian paradigm is still immensely useful in the snooker hall and when flying to the moon.

The study of consciousness is another fertile area for those with a taste for mystery – there are plenty of gaps in our understanding, but also that special additional peculiarity that while thinking about the problem, you’re actually in the middle of it. It’s not remote like the Cambrian explosion but by definition (so long as you’re not asleep on the job) real and present.

As an unashamed monist and a reductionist, and insofar as I understand the issues from my amateur perspective, I’ve tended to side with optimists like Daniel Dennett in rejecting the argument that consciousness is a special case, an exception to the reductionism that has been so successful elsewhere in the sciences. The optimists believe that the mysterians have sold reductionism short. So what to make of someone like Jonathan Miller (whose scientific and atheist credentials are impeccable), who describes himself as an agnostic materialist and recently dismissed naive reductionism as involving a fundamental category error? For him, consciousness is not like any of the problems that neuroscience is proving successful at investigating, and, during a lecture at the Royal Institution, he rather mischievously characterized the Churchlands as naive West Coast reductionists (Miller, 2009).

Plus Ultra

Whoever is right, and whatever new paradigms lie in store, one paradigm that isn’t going to change anytime soon is that scientific progress rests upon the observation of uniformity in the course of events and the application of past experience to new circumstances. According to William Clifford (1999, p. 7), this is the aim of scientific thought: to gain “information transcending our experience”.

There is a strong temptation, however, even among some scientists, to go along with Stephen Jay Gould’s separation of science and religion into ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, each competent within its own field of expertise. There isn’t space here to explore this issue, but Bernard Carr alluded to a similar idea by quoting Price (1955): “We inhabit two worlds simultaneously, the world of common experience governed by physical laws and another space quite as real which obeys other laws… continuous dream life goes on throughout our waking hours and occasionally we may catch a glimpse of it.”

Such fanciful talk reminds me of an example Clifford (1999, p. 5) used as a warning about what counts as legitimate inference: “Now suppose that the night before coming down to Brighton you had dreamed of a railway accident… the result of which was that your head was unfortunately cut off, so that you had to put it in your hat-box and take it back home to be mended. There are, I fear, many persons even at this day, who would tell you that after such a dream it was unwise to travel by railway to Brighton. This is a proposal that you should take experience gained while you were asleep… and apply it to guide you when you are awake… in your dealings with a real railway. And yet this proposal is not dictated by scientific thought.”

Clifford was writing in the 1870s, but many people would still hesitate at London Victoria after having such a dream.

Can Science Deal with Mental Experience?

Heterophenomenologically speaking, yes. (On a good day and with a fair wind, I can even pronounce this word.) What Dennett is proposing is that we neither challenge nor accept as entirely true the assertions of subjects, but rather maintain “a constructive and sympathetic neutrality, in the hopes of compiling a definitive description of the world according to the subjects” (Dennett, 1991, p. 83).

Just as I’m sceptical of the dreamer who doesn’t want to take a train, I’m not convinced that religious visionaries have, even temporarily, a special ability to discern aspects of reality that ordinary experience can’t disclose. Some think that religious people are generally pretty trustworthy, but as the Dover trial judge (a Republican Bush appointee) pointed out in his summary, as well as wasting time and resources, those Christians who had brought the case had lied for God (Chapman, 2007). One of the witnesses for the defence self-reported feeling under great pressure during a meeting. On listening to the tape the judge said, “You didn’t look like you were very pressured to me. Is there something in that tape that suggests to you that you were feeling pressured at the time?” The Christian replied: “I can’t help how it looks… I’m telling you I felt pressured at the time.” (Chapman, 2007, p. 221).

The World As Other Than It Is

Can science accommodate psychic experience? Can science explain the mind? The original question has broadened and become rather more personal. We’re used to a little privacy inside our skulls. Even those pioneering male Victorian scientists who delighted in lifting the skirts of nature might have baulked at having their own breeches pulled down. Dennett (2003) reports that scientists, from the outside, using their third-person methods can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of. So, we may not even be experts on ourselves. Perhaps that will be a good thing: humanity’s never been short on hubris.

Finally, let’s not forget that other bridge, between the world as it is and the world as other than it is, between the real world and the world of the imagination. The normal human mind is an engine of the imagination as well as an information processing machine. We’re always transcending humdrum reality, weaving our own holistic fabric by picking up a Harry Potter book, going to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or just wondering what to have for tea. Perhaps psi is yet another imaginative exercise with which to engage the mind, simply one more view from the bridge?

References

Barrett, J. L. (2007). Is the spell really broken? Bio-psychological explanations of religion and theistic belief. Theology and Science, 5, 57–72.
Bloom, P. (2004). Descartes’ baby: How child development explains what makes us human. London: William Heinemann.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors. London: William Heinnemann.
Chapman, M. (2007). 40 days and 40 nights: Darwin, intelligent design, God, OxyContin and other oddities on trial in Pennsylvania. New York: HarperCollins.
Clifford, W. K. (1999). The ethics of belief and other essays. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Damasio, A. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Vintage.
Dennett, D. C. (1984). Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. London: Penguin.
Fearn, N. (2005). The latest answers to the oldest questions: A philosophical adventure with the world’s greatest thinkers. New York: Grove Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On bullshit. Princeton University Press.
Kitcher, P. (2007). Living with Darwin: Evolution, design, and the future of faith. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, J. (2009). Art and the brain: The evolving story. Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 17 March. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. (Reprinted 2000). London: Penguin Books.
Stenger, V. (2003). Has science found God? The latest results in the search for purpose in the universe. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Stenger, V. (2007). God? The failed hypothesis: How science shows that God does not exist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Wilson, R. (2008). Don’t get fooled again: the sceptic’s guide to life. London: Icon Books.

From the archives: There isn’t one single purpose for a university, or for education

Julian Baggini

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2nd January 2011

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From the archives: There isn’t one single purpose for a university, or for education

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 21, Issue 1, from 2011.

It is an uncontroversial truth that sex is for procreation. But it is to slip from the obvious to the preposterous to claim that sex is therefore only for procreation.

A similar slip, however, is made by many who set out to answer the question of what universities are for. The question has become more pressing since rapid expansion of higher education has drawn many more people into it, and not everyone can see the benefits this has to the students or society. But there is no single answer, so anyone who attempts to give one is making a big mistake.

The novelist Ben Okri, for example, has written about the need for universities to “teach the art of self-discovery”, lamenting the fact that students “leave universities with skills for the workplace but no knowledge of how to live, or what living is for.” But someone going to university to study food science is not looking for self-discovery, at least not in the lecture theatre or laboratory. Self-discovery is but one desideratum of a university education, and not one that applies equally to all courses.

The question of what universities are for is thus like the question of what a Swiss army knife is for. The knife can be used for many things, cutting being one of the more important and cracking nuts one of the more peripheral. Similarly, universities are for many things, some of which are more important than others without negating the legitimacy of those other uses altogether.

One role universities have is enabling social mobility. As a 2001 Institute for Employment Studies survey concluded:

The main motivating factor, which encourages potential students from lower social class backgrounds to enter HE, is a belief that a higher qualification will bring improved job and career prospects, and also improved earnings and job security.

Universities also play a role in financial advancement. One Mori survey showed that 87% of students believe the money they are spending is a good investment for their future.

Talk of social advancement and improved financial prospects as a purpose for higher education strikes many as irredeemably philistine. But it does not follow from the fact that these are some of the things universities are for that we should therefore make the fulfilment of these functions the universities’ primary goal. At the very least they are like the corkscrew and toothpick on a Swiss army knife: they may not be the tool’s primary functions, but seeing as they are often put to good use, why would anyone want to remove them?

Matters become more contentious when it comes to the main blades. The problem here is that people are too quick to assume that the functions they themselves use most, or would like to use most, are the ones which really do define what universities are primarily for.

For instance, the only real justification for what many of those working in the humanities do must involve the lofty ideas of learning for learning’s sake, with perhaps a nod to the value of a broad, humanistic education in producing well-rounded citizens. Hence they are hostile to any suggestion that universities serve utilitarian functions and are apt to champion the value of pure enquiry.

This general line of argument has been defended by Gordon Graham in What Are Universities For? He argued that universities are essential to maintaining the intellectual vibrancy of our culture and should not serve mere instrumental functions for economic benefit.

But Graham is a philosopher. Were he to stroll across the University of Aberdeen to the medical school at Foresterhill, he might discover that the rationale for study there involves precisely the kind of talk of skills and utility which is anathema to humanities scholars. These faculties are there to produce medics and researchers. Their role is not primarily to push back the boundaries of knowledge for its own sake but to save lives and improve health.

If universities have a range of different functions, you might wonder why they should be combined in the one institution. Why have one multi-purpose tool rather than a variety of more specialised ones?

The short answer is that the functions cannot and should not be so neatly separated. Consider the case of philosophy. Most of the time, the value of philosophy is simply that it helps us to tackle philosophical problems, and since these problems arise inevitably from the human desire to understand the world, it is part of our ongoing quest for greater understanding.

But from time to time we discover that other needs arise and philosophy is in a position to help meet them. Computer scientists start to work on artificial intelligence and philosophers contribute to their understanding of what intelligence is and the ethical implications of AI. Cognitive scientists increase our understanding of how the human mind works, but the problem of consciousness has a philosophical as well as neurological dimension. Biologists work with human DNA and embryos, and bioethicists are required to help clear the moral ground. Educationalists realise that children need help to develop their critical thinking skills, so philosophers and psychologists are enlisted to help meet that need.

All of this is made much easier by the fact that philosophers, educationalists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists and biologists are part of the same institution: the university. And this is no happy accident. It reflects a deeper philosophical truth: that all human knowledge is interconnected.

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A brief history

One step at a time

Fads and fallacies

A sense of community

Are Psychic Phenomena Real?

The Varieties of Human Experience

Intuitive Dualism

Intellectual Trickle Down

Polyfilla Paradigms?

Plus Ultra

Can Science Deal with Mental Experience?

The World As Other Than It Is

References

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