Thank you all for your kind answers.

First I try to answer Mike:

> My difficulty with placing spontaneous
> psi events above experiments is that
> they are often not documented soon
> or well enough.

Yes, often but not always. I guess you know the Rosenheim and Miami
poltergeists? There were research teams present when the cases were still
active: policemen, engineers, physicists and psi researchers. And the Scole
Report? Excellent psi researchers present during tens of seances. And also
some experimenting was done. The results were convincing in my opinion.

What about the interesting article in your link?

www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/pdf/15.1_beichler.pdf

It is a good historical review of parapsychology with the eyes of a
physicist, but there were some astonishing ideas in it:

"(…) as political events and new scientific realities once again altered the
criteria for deciding which phenomena were valid for scientific
investigation and which were not."

In my opinion absolutely anything can be investigated scientifically. It is
only a question of method.

"These changes provide an opening for paraphysics to develop independent of
any questions regarding the validity of the paranormal."

Well, validation of parapsychology is not needed? He thinks that physics
will unavoidably find psi without any prior observations. Weird.

"Since the 1980s, it has become acceptable to talk about developing a
‘theory of everything’ or TOE. By its very nature, a true TOE must either
explain psi or demonstrate the physical impossibility of psi."

What a super-optimism! In my opinion it is still best to do psi research in
the meantime in waiting for that TOE. History has shown that knowing more
means only capability to make more questions and enlarge the surface against
the unknown. ‘The end of science’ is impossible.

> For me, I was once a very gullible proponent
> of a specific religion. When I developed critical
> thinking skills, I quit, becoming an ardent, but
> honest, skeptic. The debunker's dishonesty drove
> me to where I've been for a number of years,
> only choosing to give any time or attention
> to that which has been carefully constructed
> and peer reviewed or at least well-documented
> with other documented claims revealing
> similar experiences.


An interesting personal history. I have had rather similar experiences, but
the distress of changing fundamental opinions has perhaps been less, but not
nonexistent. Very good learning to objectivity! I have discussed much with
the Finnish skeptics on their own forum. If you click the link

http://keskustelu.skepsis.fi/html/haku.asp

and write ‘kiviniemi’ in the window ‘Kirjoittaja:’ so my messages will
emerge in pages of 100. You can recognize many familiar names in spite of
the language. Be patient, it will take time.

And to Art:

> I am not sure that increasing interest in
> process-oriented research necessarily
> represents a move away from gathering
> evidence for psi.

I agree, but it has happened so in the real life. I cannot forgive
parapsychologists for their ignoring the ‘mini-Gellers’. I know what I say
because I have experimented with them in 1974.

> While I agree that spontaneous cases
> must be the touchstones upon which
> all psi theories must be based, I am not
> frankly sure that we can get much further
> with them, let alone provide evidence
> that will significantly strengthen the 'psi
> hypothesis'.

I disagree with the last sentences. The spontaneous cases often yield
physical evidence that can be much stronger than mere information received
by psi. For example, the Charles Crussard team produced extremely strong
evidence for psi in their research of metallurgical specimens. But it is in
French language and requires knowledge in metallurgy, that happens to be my
professional field.

> For decades SPR developed collections of
> spontaneous case reports, collecting by and
> analyzed according to very specific guidelines
> that they developed. Despite many technological
> breakthroughs, the problems of verifying
> spontaneous cases are no less daunting than
> they ever were. Spontaneous cases lack
> control of variables, and the details needed
> for replicability; furthermore, we have learned
> since the days of SPR just how potentially
> unreliable witness testimony is, yet we have
> not made many developments insofar as
> being able to 'prove' whether a particular piece
> of witness testimony can be taken as entirely
> reliable, though there are ways of better filtering
> out the more obvious cases of unreliable
> testimony (which is something, at least).


You are partly right but only partly. Who reads those SPR reports any more?
Extremely few. Who publishes new well recorded and verified reports any
more? Very few again. And replicability is good when it is understood that
there are huge amounts of spontaneous cases and they can be treated
statistically. I have done field work very much and have noticed that people
seldom have experience in it and they seldom understand the important
possibilities.

In physical cases the research has been really simple and clumsy. There are
innumerable possibilities to verify the authenticity of cases. Ask the
magicians! John Hasted always weighed his metal specimens with a precision
weighing machine before experimenting, but after all he lost very much
information in many ways. You can use scratching, sooting, spreading talcum
powder and using the finest measuring and recording instruments in still
active cases. Where can you read such reports? There is published nearly
nothing but experimenting with sporadic and infinitesimal effect sizes. You
can never know beforehand whether psi emerges or does not emerge in single
experiments.

> Furthermore, without being able to measure correlates
> of psi properly, spontaneous cases grant little or no
> insight into the underlying mechanisms involved.
> We can study a billion spontaneous cases, but what
> good does it do if we can never use that information
> to explain the 'hows' and 'whys' of the experience.
> It would be akin to psychology having never
> proceeded beyond the days of early observational
> psychoanalysis.


I strongly disagree. Spontaneous cases give best insights into the
underlying mechanisms, and that is because of their great variability and
functioning in everyday reality, that can be tough indeed. In experimental
work it is impossible to foresee and test all possibilities that can be
found out because of the spontaneous cases, and there are only limited
possibilities to control the circumstances.

Well, I am not an enemy of experimental and process oriented work, on the
contrary. It gives scientific rigor to parapsychology and convinces best
scientists about reality of psi. But it is not interesting for the general
public, and parapsychology needs more publicity.

> It seems silly for Parapsychologists to encourage
> trying to get at the truth by going around the
> truth, instead of by striking for the heart; and
> suggestions by researchers like Kennedy, or
> Lucadou & Zahradnik, that psi is innately and
> unavoidably elusive and uncontrollable do not
> seem helpful, rather they sound like cries of
> surrender.

Unfortunately the "shyness" of psi is a reality and it would be unwise not
to accept that. There are many examples that have confirmed the phenomenon,
and even I have observed it many times. But to understand that is not to
surrender before the fact. It is only a nice clue that there is some kind of
intellect behind and it is not a question of natural phenomena like weather
or earthquakes.

To Maryse:

In my opinion the transcommunication work is not parapsychology, in the
sense it is most often done nowadays. It is often impossible to verify the
information that is given by the spiritual actors and even the origin of the
actors is unverifiable. Parapsychology is a science and limited only to
verifiable things. But certainly it is also possible to study
transcommunication scientifically if there emerges verifiable information.

- Olavi