Metaphysical powers – woo-woo or fact? Lent 2024, Day four

"A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force" – Newton's First Law of Motion (1687). Now, that mug on your table – try moving it without exerting any force upon it. Just by thought alone. You can't do it? Neither can I. If we could, that would literally be magic, i.e. physical effect without physical force. 

But metaphysical force? Altering physical outcomes in the material world with the mind? With consciousness. Foreseeing the future and forestalling future calamities. Healing without drugs or surgery. Environmental effects – summoning rainfall by chanting, for example. Sounds like a bunch of baloney. Especially when some pseudoscientific claptrap is attached to it.

And yet, since the development of quantum physics, Newtonian laws no longer hold true at the sub-atomic scale. 

If the half-life of the isotope Radium-228 is five years and nine months, it's only a probability – not a certainty – that over this time, half of the atoms in a lump of that stuff will have decayed into Actinium-228. Exactly how much, physicists can't say, but 50% is most probable over those five years and nine months. Observe a single atom of that isotope, and that decay could happen within the next second, or it could happen in ten years' time.

Einstein bridled at the notion that the process of nuclear decay could be random. "God does not play dice," he said, being uncomfortable with the probabilistic nature of subatomic physics, preferring Newtonian determinism.

Yet this very uncertainty has become the launch-pad, the theoretical underpinning for modern parapsychology. If photons can be both particles and waves until a conscious observer observes them, thus collapsing the wave function, then can the conscious observer also alter quantum outcomes? Now this starts to be interesting. If so – and this is a huge leap into the unknown – can we measure the effect of mind on matter?

Experiments into the paranormal – psi phenomena – are cheap to conduct, but mainstream science won't go there, mostly for fear of scorn. But some studies do end up with results that are 'above chance'. Yes, the debunkers will debunk, casting aspersions of the methodology and motives of the experimenters. A cold bucket of ridicule will do the trick whenever falsification of results can't be proven. But over time, a consistent picture is emerging – of a consistent, though very weak, effect that is visibly above chance.

Imagine tossing a coin 100 times, and willing the outcome to be heads, and the outcome is that 51 times it indeed comes out heads, just as you'd willed it, and 49 are tails, defying your will. Does that tell you anything? Probably not. However, if you get a thousand people to conduct those 100 coin-tosses, always willing heads, and in the overwhelming majority of the thousand runs of 100 tosses, you get 51 (or more) heads – then this becomes statistically significant. That's the proposition made by Prof Etzel Cardeña in his peer-reviewed meta-analytic study of psychic abilities, The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. published in 2018 by American Psychologist, a mainstream publication.

The difference, in the eyes of science, is that whilst the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 was underpinned by calculations positing its existence, no one has the slightest idea how these psi phenomena work. 

When the CIA's Project Stargate considered an analysis of no-shows on passenger flights that crashed, the airlines refused to participate, citing customer privacy and commercial secrecy as their excuse. Anecdotally, it seems that there has been a small but consistent increase in people who didn't board a fatal flight because of a premonition, or just fate.

Two long-term researchers into parapsychology, Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin, have persisted over the decades trying to prove the reality of psi phenomena despite being labelled 'pseudoscientists' by some of their colleagues. [Incidentally, it's worth reading these men's Wikipedia entries – not only the actual pages, but also the View history tab which shows the persistence with which sceptics/debunkers patrol Wikipedia to ensure scientific orthodoxy prevails.]

Modern science knows it hasn't got all the answers. A hundred years ago, physicists were far more certain than they are today. More and more avenues of enquiry result in dead ends (string theory) or demand philosophical rather than scientific explanation (fine-tuning).

I'm not stating that Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin are right, but my intuition is that they are not wrong. There's far more to their claims than the debunkers can debunk; I feel that this is very much the right avenue for science to explore.

But with a caveat – what if psi doesn't want to be discovered? What if it doesn't feel that the time is right for these metaphysical powers to be gifted to the human population yet?

Lent 2023: Day four
The nature of reality, Pt III

Lent 2022: Day four
The Ego: what is it good for?

Lent 2021: Day four
Would the Universe exist without God"

Lent 2020: Day four
Conscious Life after Death