36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant, Groundbreaking Overview of Scientific Psi Research, January 26, 2008
This review is from: Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold (Paperback)
This is an exceptionally well-conceived, thoughtful and important book. It's one of those rare books that I would recommend to basically everyone I know -- if I were a rich man, I'd buy them a copy.
Let me explain why I'm so excited by Broderick's work. Having grown up on SF, and being a generally open-minded person but also a mathematician/scientist with a strong rationalist and empiricist bent , I've never quite known what to make of psi. (Following Broderick, I'm using "psi" as an umbrella term for ESP, precognition, psychokinesis, and the familiar array of suspects...). Broderick's book is the first I've read that rationally, scientifically, even-handedly and maturely, reviews what it makes sense to think about psi given the available evidence.
(A quick word on my science background: I have a math PhD and although my main research areas are AI and cognitive science, I've also spent a lot of time working on empirical biological science as a data analyst. I was a professor for a 8 years but have been doing research in the software industry for the last decade.)
My basic attitude on psi has always been curious but ambivalent. One way to summarize it would be via the following three points....
First: Psi is NOT wildly scientifically implausible after the fashion of, say, perpetual motion machines built out of wheels and pulleys and spinning chambers filled with ball bearings. Science, at this point, understands the world only very approximately, and there is plenty of room in our current understanding of the physical universe for psi. Quantum theory's notions of nonlocality and resonance are (as many have observed) conceptually somewhat harmonious with some aspects of psi, but that's not the main point. The main point is that science does not rule out psi, in the sense that it rules out various sorts of obvious crackpottery.
Second: Anecdotal evidence for psi is so strong and so prevalent that it's hard to ignore. Yes, people can lie, and they can also be very good at fooling themselves. But the number of serious, self-reflective intelligent people to report various sorts of psi experiences is not something that should be glibly ignored.
Third: There is by now a long history of empirical laboratory work on psi, with results that are complex, perplexing, but in many ways so strongly statistically significant as to indicate that SOMETHING important is almost surely going on in these psi experiments...
Broderick, also being an open-minded rationalist/empiricist, seems to have started out his investigation of psi, as reported in his book, with the same basic intuition as I've described in the above three points. And he covers all three of these points in the book, but the main service he provides is to very carefully address my third point above: the scientific evidence.
His discussion of possible physical mechanisms of psi is competent but not all that complete or imaginative; and he wisely shies away from an extensive treatment of anecdotal evidence (this stuff has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere). But his treatment of the scientific literature regarding psi is careful, masterful and compellingly presented. And this is no small achievement.
The scientific psi literature is large, complex, multifaceted and subtle -- and in spite of a lifelong peripheral fascination with psi, I have never taken the time to go through all that much of it myself. I'm too busy doing other sorts of scientific, mathematical and engineering work. Broderick has read the literature, sifted out the good from the bad, summarized the most important statistical and conceptual results, and presented his conclusions in ordinary English that anyone with a strong high school education should be able to understand.
His reviews of the work on remote viewing and precognition I found particularly fascinating, and convincing. It is hard to see how any fair-minded reader could come away from his treatments of these topics without at least a sharp pang of curiousity regarding what might actually be going on.
I put a few days effort into checking up his analyses by going back and reading some of the original papers he cited, and in every case I found his summaries completely accurate and impressively insightful.
What is my conclusion about psi after reading his book? Still not definitive -- and indeed, Broderick's own attitude as expressed in the book is not definitive.
I still can't feel absolutely certain whether psi is a real phenomenon; or whether, as an alternative explanation, the clearly statistically significant patterns observed across the body of psi experiments bespeak some deep oddities in the scientific method and the statistical paradigm that we don't currently understand.
But after reading his book, I am much more firmly convinced than before that psi phenomena are worthy of intensive, amply-funded scientific exploration. Psi should not be a fringe topic, it should be a core area of scientific investigation, up there with, say, unified physics, molecular biology, AI and so on and so forth.
Read the book for yourself, and if you're not hopelessly biased in your thinking, I suspect you'll come to a conclusion somewhat similar to mine.
As a bonus, as well as providing a profound intellectual and cultural service, the book is a lot of fun to read, due to Broderick's erudite literary writing style and ironic sense of humor.
My worry -- and I hope it doesn't eventuate -- is that the book is just too far ahead of its time. I wonder if the world is ready for a rational, scientific, even-handed treatment of psi phenomena.
Clearly, Broderick's book is too scientific and even-handed for die-hard psi believers; and too psi-friendly (although in a manner solidly based on the evidence) for the skeptical crowd. My hope is that it will find a market among those who are committed to really understanding the world, apart from the psychological pathologies of dogmatism or excessive skepticism. But, time will tell.
I note that Broderick has a history of being ahead of his time as a nonfiction writer. His 1997 book "The Spike" put forth basically the same ideas that Ray Kurzweil later promulgated in his 2005 book "The Singularity Is near." Kurzweil's book is a very good one, but so was Broderick's; yet Kurzweil's got copious media attention whereas Broderick's did not ... for multiple reasons, one of which, however, was simply timing. The world in 1997 wasn't ready to hear about the Singularity. The world in 2005 (or at least, a substantial part of it) was.
The question is: is the world in 2008 ready to absorb the complex, fascinating reality of psi research? If so, Broderick's book should strike a powerful chord. It certainly did for me.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Come out of the Cold, July 24, 2007
This review is from: Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold (Paperback)
Damien Broderick: Outside the Gates of Science
This is THE book for those seriously interested in the current status and future of the scientific study of what has variously been known as "psi", "parapsychology", "esp", "psychokinesis" etc. and more recently by the blander, more "neutral" terms "anomalous cognition (AC)" or "anomalous perturbation" (AP).
Broderick's basic proposition is that psi (to stick with the more familiar term) has as much or more experimental support as many other areas within the mainstream of science, and that phenomena of such challenging potential should be subjected to the full rigours of scientific examination, not relegated "outside the gates of science" because of past prejudices, poor theory, and association with shonky practices.
This is not, as Broderick points out, a textbook of psi. It is written by an author who has spent decades exploring the subject and getting to know the people and projects on the inside. Broderick takes a basically skeptical stance, but that of an intelligent and informed skeptic. His position is essentially a materialistic one, in the sense of dismissing simple-minded dualistic or "spiritual" views, but even these are presented fairly and the arguments against them clearly spelled out.
He passes lightly and quickly over the early history of the study of parapsychology (there are several good sources of this material), and spends a good part of the book in a detailed look at more recent and scientifically rigorous research, such as the "Star Gate" remote viewing program run by the CIA (if you think that that alone removes this research from contention, be prepared to be surprised or amazed!), the PEAR program carried out by Princeton University, May's Decision Augmentation Theory, and others.
If your acquaintance with the field is limited to popular works on "psychic powers" you might want to consider a crash course in the basics of scientific method and current research and thinking in neurophysiology, human genetics and physics (especially quantum theory) before embarking on this review. This is not an easy read, but written by a skilled writer who has done the hard work of coming to grips with what current science actually has to say about such topics as quantum entanglement, the role of consciousness in the collapse of the wave function, problems of backward causality, and other difficult to grasp topics, rather than taking the easy road of the handwavers and "quantobabblers" whose logic seems to be that "psi is mysterious; quantum mechanics is mysterious; therefore psi must be connected with quantum mechanics".
Broderick's style is what you would expect of one of today's best science fiction writers - erudite, captivating and witty (two chapter headings, for example- "the half-truths are out there" and "quantum leaps and pratfalls").
The most interesting part of the book, in my opinion, is the section on theories of psi. Broderick comprehensively and critically examines currently extant theories and finds most of them wanting. He is especially good in his critique of theories linking quantum phenomena and psi (REAL quantum phenomena, that is, not the "quantobabble" of some popularisers).
Broderick's conclusion? Basically, that psi has been repeatedly shown to exist under carefully controlled conditions, and the continual repetition of such studies to try to replicate this basic finding is pretty pointless. If psi exists, as seems virtually undeniable, it must serve an evolutionary function and can be properly ubderstood only within the framework of science and not as something spooky or supernatural. He echoes the words of Richard S. Broughton,: "If you want to know how it works, first find out what it's for." We need a comprehensive research program WITHIN the gates of science, driven by sound and rigorously tested theory, to increase our understanding of the nature of the beast, to develop methods of pinning down the phenomena and finding ways to amplify or make them more useful.
If you have a serious interest in understanding these strange phenomena, whether as a "believer" or a skeptic, this is one book you must read.
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