[ExI] a book review by Ben Goertzel

[Damien Broderick]

[I know it's frightfully self-serving, but I'm so delighted by Dr. 
Goertzel's Amazon.com response to my book OUTSIDE THE GATES OF 
SCIENCE that I'm sharing it around here, with Ben's permission...]
======================================

***** A Brilliant, Groundbreaking Overview of Scientific Psi 
Research, January 26, 2008
By Benjamin Goertzel (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews


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 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 nauseam 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.