Utrecht II: Personal reflections Chris A. Roe

1. Utrecht II: Personal reflections Chris A. Roe

2. How have things changed? Shift away from dualistic orientation • Allows a rapprochement with establishment ‘science’ • Counters concerns over ‘deviance’, ‘mysticism’, ‘pseudoscience’ • Places psi effects in a context of recogniseable methods and procedures • Makes available to us terminology, constructs and models that may have some value in explaining observed patterns or suggesting hypotheses

3. BUT • There is a real danger of inheriting semantic confusions, or misappropriating respectable terminology (or stretching its application to distortion point) • ‘States’ of Consciousness • also applies to ASCs of ganzfeld stimulation and meditation • ‘Consciousness’ of RNG and healing studies • intuitive or lay understanding, but what properties in common with more technical usages (qualia, intentionality)? Need for conceptual clarity • ‘Entanglement’ of various phenomena • Explanatory power? • if a metaphor, what properties of the subatomic system are found in the human systems? • what defence against the claim of appropriating credibility?

4. What have we learned? • Convergence of evidence from separate lines of research, particularly with the adoption of new technology • Psi may largely be an unconscious process • Direct physiological measurements (DMILS, presentiment) • Behavioural indicators (time reversed effects) • Hidden psi tasks (PMIR) • global and field RNG effects, RSPK • Where psi is brought to awareness it is mediated by altered states • dream ESP, ganzfeld, meditation, hypnosis • But these features need to be understood as elements of interacting systems • The best predictors of spontaneous experience are personality and experiential variables that reflect an underlying factor pertaining to fluid access to nonconscious processes • the best predictor of lab ESP will be derived from these

5. Why might replication be so difficult? • We have expectations about replicability that are not being fulfilled • Dualists propose it to be a property of the phenomenon • Physicists look for a physical explanation • Skeptics (and some meta-analysts) interpret as reduction of error • Statisticians point to effect size and study power • But as a psychologist I would note • Psi is a product of complex (and interacting) open systems and we don’t design studies to suit • Experimenter effects • Psi phenomena do not occur in a semantic vacuum Perhaps the question should be: ‘why do we get so much more replication than we deserve?’

6. Our biggest challenge(s) • Ed’s paper raised some real concerns • Few replication attempts • Limited skills set within the field • “despite over 100 years of research…” • In my view these reflect two things • our overall numbers • fewer than 100 engaged full time in parapsychology • the kinds of funding we attract • few opportunities • competition encourages distinctiveness • small amounts encourage short termism • little scope for collaboration or coordination

7. What do we need to do? • Increase our numbers • Grow our graduate numbers • an alternative view of the talent filter • encourage inter-disciplinarity so as to develop skill sets the field needs • Recruit from related disciplines • make our study designs understandable and attractive to peers in outside fields • Better coordinate our empirical activity • More emphasis on inter-laboratory collaborations • More systematic intra-laboratory programmes of research • more meaningful time scales (5-10 years) But the current climate is more promising than before and we can meet these challenges and look forward to the future with some confidence

8. Thanks for your attention • Email address for correspondence: • Chris.Roe@Northampton.ac.uk