AI is Not Conscious

Skeptic Richard Dawkins has been in the news lately for asserting that AI chatbots are conscious, based on his own experiences interacting with Anthropic's Claude AI. That there's any question about this issue at all shows that the people making those assertions have no idea how chatbots work. This is not limited to Dawkins, who is a biologist with no background in computer science. Many people have developed the delusion that their chatbot is like a real person, to the point that "AI psychosis" is not considered a real thing.

Chatbots have been fooling humans since ELIZA, one of the earliest attempts to create a functional chatbot in the 1960's. ELIZA was designed to mimic Rogerian psychotherapy, a form of therapy that mostly involves listening to patients and rephrasing what they say back to them. So, for example, a person would type "I feel like my mother does not respect me" and Eliza would respond with "Why do you think your mother does not respect you?" The algorithm is hardcoded and incredibly simple, but at the same time some users found it convincing.

People sometimes bring up the Turing Test as a test for machine consciousness, which is wrong. Turing's idea was just that if a computer can fool enough people into thinking it's human, it might as well be interacted with as such. The test is all about behavior and says nothing about consciousness or the subjective interior "life" of such a program. It should be clear that we cannot conclude that a machine is conscious based solely on the gullibility of the users who interact with it, and that was never Turing's intention.

There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.”

When he asked Claudia whether it experienced a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”.

By the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly renowned for arguing with steely scepticism that God is not real, was “left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human”. “These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism,” he said.

Dawkins isn’t the first, but might be the most eminent person yet, to be seduced into believing an AI is somehow alive. Sceptics rushed to pick apart the 85-year-old’s conclusions, drawn from experiments with Anthropic’s Claude AI models and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and published on the UnHerd website.

As a professional software developer, let me see if I can explain AI in a way that makes a little more sense than the complex discourses on the mathematics of machine learning that get thrown around by tech companies.

Debunking Patterson-Gimlin

A new documentary by Marq Evans looking into the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film has finally uncovered real evidence that the film was faked. For years, researchers have speculated that the film was probably a hoax just based on probability. The argument goes something like this: if Bigfoot is a real animal running around in the California woods, somebody would have eventually gotten some footage better than Patterson-Gimlin, but no one ever has.

Now that's not exactly evidence, but it speaks more to a clever fake than a random wilderness encounter. Gimlin was interviewed years ago and confirmed that Patterson had basically led him to the site and told him to start filming as soon as they saw the creature, so it could have been set up without his knowledge. He added that for years he had been convinced the creature was real, but admitted in his old age that he was no longer entirely sure.

Bigfoot believers point out that the Patterson-Gimlin stands up to close analysis. You can magnify it and see what look like muscles moving under the skin. The proportions are all wrong for a human in a suit, with the ratio of arm length to height falling between that of the largest humans and apes. Special effects experts reviewed it when it first came out and concluded that it would have been incredibly expensive to fake if not impossible. The stabilized version of it that was created with digital technology still looks amazing and totally believable.

In the early 2000's a Discovery Channel program tried to make their own fake Bigfoot film using the current special effects of the time. It looked terrible. The Bigfoot was too skinny and the arms were too short. Even though the fur and so forth was well done, the final version still looked way faker than the Patterson-Gimlin. They had found a big person to put in the suit, but clearly said person was not big enough. The shorter arms also fell firmly into guy-in-a-gorilla-suit territory. Believers seized on the failure of this recreation as evidence that the original film was real.

Assessing James Randi

James Randi, founder of the capital-S Skeptic movement, passed away this last week at the age of 92. Over the years I have posted various articles about the Skeptics, and while I consider they methods useful for debunking fraudulent "celebrity psychics," I also think that the movement - and especially Randi himself - took an unnecessarily adversarial position with respect to actual scientific research of the paranormal.

I have been asked on a couple of occasions about this, and why I had a problem with his attitude. I do try to test my magical techniques in as scientific a manner as I can and don't have a problem with the findings of mainstream science. But skepticism - real skepticism, not the movement variety - should be based on an honest consideration of the evidence. Randi's approach never seemed honest to me, especially his constant accusation of fraud when presented with evidence he found hard to dismiss out of hand.

On the occasion of Randi's death, I considered writing up a piece expressing my assessment of the man, his legacy, and my issues with his approach to the paranormal. But before I could do that, I came across this article from Boing Boing which expresses my thoughts at least as well as I would have. It even includes some material of which I was previously unaware.

Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Toronto in 1928, Randi became a celebrated stage magician and escape artist who appeared in prestigious venues and on television shows, including Happy Days. His stage aesthetics and devices were often brilliant and original. Randi toured with rock icon Alice Cooper in 1973, designing a mock beheading-by-guillotine for the proto-metal star. When claiming the garland of skepticism in the early 1970s, the MacArthur-winning Randi announced his intention of exposing phony faith healers and grifter psychics.

Today, many people know Randi from the award-winning 2014 documentary An Honest Liar. But the laudatory and engaging profile tells its story in a fashion that skeptics traditionally decry: including only the magician's successful exposes (some of which were more questionable than the film allows) and obfuscating his darker and more lasting impact: making it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media. Indeed, Randi ultimately cheapened an important debate over how or whether extra-physical mentality can be studied under scientifically rigorous conditions and evaluated by serious people.

In a typical example, The New York Times ran a 2015 piece about a wave of fraudulent and flawed psychology studies; its lead paragraph cited a precognition study by Cornell University psychologist Daryl J. Bem — without justifying why it was grouped with polluted research or even further referencing Bem's study in the article. (I wrote to the Times to object. The paper has used several of my letters and op-eds, often on controversial subjects — this time, crickets.)

The Bem study is interesting for two reasons. First, while critics have argued that Bem's "presentiment" findings must be the result of experimental error, they can never pinpoint what the problem with the methodology might be. To be fair, that doesn't mean there's couldn't be a problem with the methodology, only that it hasn't been identified. The second reason it's interesting is that a very similar methodology was used in studies constantly pointed to by researchers opposed to the idea of "free will."

Uri Geller Versus Brexit

The spoons are gonna roll, people! That's the prediction of fully-debunked-but-still-claiming-psychic powers stage magician Uri Geller, whose original claim to fame was his purported ability to bend spoons with his mind. The trick isn't actually all that hard, which led to a high-profile debunking by none other than arch-skeptic James Randi himself. Geller is now threatening to use his (debunked) psychic powers to stop Brexit by means of telepathy, which he's totally going to do if the prime minister won't play ball. Theresa May, fear his spoony wrath!

In an open letter to the prime minister, the Israeli-British TV personality said he felt “psychically and very strongly” that most Britons were anti-Brexit and promised to stop the process telepathically. He wrote: “I feel psychically and very strongly that most British people do not want Brexit. I love you very much but I will not allow you to lead Britain into Brexit. As much as I admire you, I will stop you telepathically from doing this – and believe me I am capable of executing it. Before I take this drastic course of action, I appeal to you to stop the process immediately while you still have a chance.”

Geller, who is currently in Israel, used to live in Sonning, which lies in May’s Maidenhead constituency. In his letter, he said he had known the prime minister for 21 years and that she had visited his home. He added: “Three years before you became prime minister, I predicted your victory when I showed you Winston Churchill’s spoon on my Cadillac, which I asked you to touch.” He also claimed he is using the power of his mind to ensure that “Jeremy Corbyn never gets the keys to Number 10 Downing Street”. “I will ensure that they bend out of all proportion to ensure that he never takes up residence there,” he wrote.

To be fair, Randi is known to play as fast and loose with his debunking efforts as a lot of phony psychics do with their powers. So it's not entirely beyond the bounds of probability that Geller might have some psychic abilities, even if the spoon-bending thing is a stage magic trick. He's calling out what he's going to do ahead of time, so we can watch and see. If Brexit goes through and/or Jeremy Corbin becomes Prime Minister, those are just more failures to add to the list. On the other hand it's possible that he could succeed, so like a good scientist I will wait and see.

Note that I barely follow British politics and have no idea what's going to eventually happen. But Geller sticking his spoon into the mix is just plain hysterical.

Salem Encephalitis?

BBC has an interesting article up today discussing the possibility that an autoimmune illness, anti-NMDAR encephalitis, may have been responsible for some of the symptoms of "witchcraft" that fueled the Salem Witch Trials. Since the 1970's, the hypothesis that the witch craze in Salem might have been fueled by ergot poisoning - which can cause vivid hallucinations - has been reported in a number of places. However, as the article points out, no other symptoms of ergot poisoning were reported during the Salem trials.

Capital-S Skeptics like to run to their favorite explanation for the symptoms seen in Salem, "mass hysteria." As I've mentioned here before, this is basically the Skeptic version of "paranormal powers." We don't understand how it works, we can't predict situations in which it will happen, and we don't understand what triggers it. When a Skeptic describes something as "mass hysteria" he or she really means "I can't explain any of it, but what I do know is that anybody who calls it paranormal is deluded." In fact, whatever this phenomenon is, it is rare enough that it might as well be considered paranormal just like psychic abilities.

While I do understand that the witch trials and other events like them have a psychological component, I also know that they usually start with something, not nothing, and that something is usually inexplicable. That's why the ergotism hypothesis seems so appealing. It's fairly obvious that religious fundamentalists like the Puritans would interpret hallucinations as some sort of spiritual force, and interpret them as evil if they were threatening and scary - as hallucinations out of the blue often are.

But with no other symptoms consistent with ergotism the contention remains weak. That's why, according to an article published in the Journal of Neurology by Michael Zandi and Johnny Tam from University College in London, anti-NMDAR encephalitis could be a better candidate, especially in the case of the two cousins who started the whole thing up.

Here’s the story of a typical patient. She initially develops a flu-like illness. Within weeks, she becomes obsessed by god or the devil, consumed by paranoia and racked with insomnia. Now, she repeats the same words, then is struck mute. Next: seizures, writhing and contorted limbs, odd repetitive movements of the mouth and tongue. Her pulse races or slows, her blood pressure rises and falls. She sweats, drools, grunts and grimaces. She becomes catatonic and then comatose.

"Extreme Witchcraft?"

A number of news outlets are reporting on claims by Kimberly Thompson, a former drummer for singer Beyonce Knowles, has accused her former employer of tormenting her with "extreme witchcraft." According to this article from the British tabloid Metro, Thompson made these claims while trying to file a restraining order against the singer. The judge threw out her request, because, quite frankly, her charges are utterly bizarre.

Kimberly was part of Beyonce’s all-girl backing band but has claimed that her breaking point came a year ago when two psychics told her that Beyonce had cast a spell on Kimberley’s kitten, who had been regularly attacking her. ‘I was getting abused. Every time I came home from work to rest, I was just being abused to the point where I’m still healing from a scratch on my rib cage. It drew blood, it was awful. It was so manic and gnarly that I ended up calling two psychics. I got the word from the first psychic and I didn’t want to believe it,’ she told DailyMailTV.

‘So I called later to get a confirmation to make sure, because I didn’t want to believe. They were like the cat has a spell on it. I said what about [Beyoncé] and they were like yes, [Beyoncé] put a spell on the cat and you need to get rid of it right away, otherwise you’ll be in really, really, huge trouble.’ She also claimed that Beyoncé used witchcraft that allowed her to be ‘manipulated sexually’, alleging that the Formation star did this by ‘jumping into other bodies’ to watch her be intimate with partners.

If Thompson hasn't figured it out yet, she's still being abused by these two psychics. When you call up a fake psychic and tell them you're having trouble with a pet, the first thing out of their mouths is almost always "the pet is cursed." Then you say something like "I'm having problems with person x in my professional life. Could they have done it?" and the fake psychic always answers "yes." Then you call up another fake psychic and say "I was told person x cast a spell on my cat. Is that true?" Fake psychic #2 will also always answer "yes" unless they have some other angle. This is super basic cold-reading stuff. I could whip up a version of the old Eliza program on my computer that could do it at least as well.

A "Conjuring Arts" Chair

A university in Canada is looking to fill a new "conjuring arts" chair. I was excited for two reasons when I came across the story. First, for just a minute, I thought that the article was talking about Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. I attended Saint Olaf College just across town from Carleton, and I have to say, it really is about time that Carleton College assembled an Aleister Crowley collection even half as good as Saint Olaf's - which, unlike Carleton, is ironically a Christian (ELCA Lutheran) college. Second, before I read it I thought that the university might be trying to a curriculum in Western Esotericism, like only a handful of schools around the world have done. But I was disappointed on both counts. Carleton University is in Canada, and it sounds like "conjuring arts" in this context has nothing to do with, well, actual conjuring.

So what approach will the new chair take? “The conjuring arts” is not a term used by experts in the field, and the job’s terms of reference are somewhat vague. The president of Carleton, Alastair Summerlee, who has a great wizard name and actually looks extremely wizard-like, told CTV News that the scope of the job is “incredibly broad.” He says that the university is open to candidates from a variety of backgrounds, and would, in addition, like to find someone who will “use magic as entrée into the world of perception and deception.” This would include studying the techniques of persuasion used in politics and the media. So you might finally be able to get credit for your essay comparing every Trump administration official to a Harry Potter villain. But also, as Professor Magliocco points out, it could help us understand “how large groups of people come to believe things that are impossible and even dangerous.” She says this is of real value in an era when fake news is rampant and when thoughts and prayers are offered as the solution to school shootings.

The chair is named after Allan Slaight, one of Canada’s richest people, whose family foundation put up $2 million for it. (Carleton matched that sum from its own budget.) Before he sold out over a decade ago, Slaight was the owner of a broadcasting empire that included dozens of radio stations, a couple of television stations, and, at one point, the Toronto Raptors. Slaight spent several years when he was young touring the prairies as a performing magician, and he has remained obsessed with stage magic. He has edited and published two massive books on legendary Canadian magician Stewart James, which one reviewer has described as “the biggest books in the history of magic literature.” If academic opinion is divided over the new chair, the practicing magicians VICE spoke to were, perhaps not surprisingly, all enthusiastic — although one of them admitted he initially thought the Slaight family had donated an actual magic chair, which would have, let’s face it, been even cooler.

Not "Mass Hysteria"

Well, that was quick. Just as I predicted, researchers examining the Cuban "sonic weapon" brain injuries have concluded that what is going on is absolutely not a case of mass psychogenic illness, or if you will, "mass hysteria." To be clear, there's no evidence that any sonic weapon was employed to cause these injuries, but it is also clear that they have some sort of physical cause. That should have been obvious from the start, but skeptics just love to muddy the waters by insisting that anything they don't understand is "psychological."

While the exact cause of these concussion-like symptoms remains unknown, these individuals appeared to have sustained injury to "widespread brain networks without an associated history of blunt head trauma," report clinicians from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair in Philadelphia, which was selected to coordinate evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation of affected patients.

Importantly, note Randel L. Swanson II, DO, PhD, and colleagues, there is no evidence that the symptoms reported by US embassy personnel in Cuba can be attributed to mass psychogenic illness, as some skeptics have suggested. Mass psychogenic illness typically involves uniform symptoms that are of short duration and are often benign in nature, with no consistent physical exam findings. This is completely opposite of what is seen in the Cuba cohort, they note. Although not systematically excluded, viruses or chemical exposures are unlikely, they say.

"While there are many open questions that remain, we are collectively convinced that these individuals, as a group, sustained a neurological injury. So, the constellation of signs and symptoms and their response to rehabilitation mirrors what we see in patients with mild traumatic brain injury, both in the civilian population and in our military population," Swanson said in a JAMA podcast.

As a point, there are equally misguided folks in the magical community who do the same thing. There's no clear consensus on the nature of spirits, for example, so some practitioners dismiss them as "psychological projections." But my point is that what's going on with both spirits and the Cuba case is that we just don't know for sure. If you automatically dismiss everything you don't understand as "psychological," you are going to make a lot of mistakes evaluating any paranormal phenomenon - or even unusual ones.

Mass Hysteria is Paranormal

"Mass hysteria" is the skeptic's go-to explanation for anything they don't understand. According to its proponents, mass hysteria arises unexpectedly, is poorly understood, and is a relatively rare phenomenon. It is supposedly "mental" or "psychological," and yet it can apparently produce significant physical changes within the human body. In short, it is pretty much the same thing as "mind over matter" or "faith healing" in reverse - as generally speaking, it tends to cause illness rather than cure it.

The cause of mass hysteria is said to be "the mind," but to be clear, the same exact thing can be said about psychic phenomena. So I contend that mass hysteria is essentially a paranormal explanation. It's just a paranormal explanation that skeptics happen to like. Slate has an article up today arguing that the alleged "sonic attacks" that affected U.S. embassy workers in Cuba back in 2016 were the result of this phenomena. But I think the author of it has failed to consider all of the ramifications of his conclusion.

A few weeks after the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, several people working for the U.S. Embassy in Cuba fell mysteriously ill. Some lost their hearing. Some had headaches and a pain in one ear. Others reported feeling dizzy or nauseous, having trouble focusing, or feeling fatigued. Later, some would have a hard time concentrating, remembering things, sleeping, and even walking. These symptoms were “medically confirmed,” as the State Department’s medical director Charles Rosenfarb put it, and brain scans were said to show abnormalities in the victims’ white matter, which transfers information between brain regions. The illnesses were believed by the government to be “health attacks,” carried out by a foreign power, though as Todd Brown, assistant director at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “investigative attempts and expert analysis failed to identify the cause or perpetrator.”

Nonetheless, investigators concluded the illnesses, which ultimately affected 24 people, were likely the result of a “sonic device.” This conclusion seems to be primarily due to the fact that some diplomats reported hearing a high-pitched noise in their homes and hotel rooms. Despite a lack evidence for such a weapon, or any known way it could affect white matter, the sonic weapon theory proved irresistible for both media outlets and for Cuba hawks like Sens. Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, both of whom immediately transformed the sonic weapon into a handy political weapon. In the months following the “attacks,” new diplomats arriving in the country were warned of this sonic danger. Embassy employees were played a recording of what was thought to be the sound so they knew what to listen for. Soon, people at the Canadian Embassy in Cuba began reporting symptoms similar to what the Americans had experienced, as did a few tourists there. A husband and wife at the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan became ill as well. Whatever it was, it seemed to be spreading.

Pentagon Confirms UFOs Exist

To be clear, in my mind there was never much doubt. I refer you to Robert Anton Wilson, who once commented that of course he believe in unidentified flying objects, because he encountered unidentified non-flying objects all the time just going about his day. So I'm not necessarily saying that I believe that alien spaceships are visiting Earth, but rather that weird stuff that defies identification happens and that some of those phenomena happen to be flying ones. At any rate, last week the Pentagon confirmed that it has been funding the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program - that is, a military program that hunts for and tries to identify UFOs. It was previously thought that the government shut down that line of investigation when it ended Project Blue Book in 1970.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth. Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.” Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

I also am unconvinced that space aliens are currently visiting Earth. But I will say that this shoots a hole in the capital-S skeptics who basically assume that anybody who reports a UFO sighting is just lying, and that nothing is really out there. Something is clearly happening, and even though I think most of what people are seeing are experimental flying vehicles of one sort or another, to my way of thinking this is how we should be investigating paranormal events. Instead of wasting a bunch of time trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that paranormal events sometimes happen, we should go ahead and investigate apparently paranormal observations to see what is going on, whether they turn out to be paranormal or not.

A Skeptic Reviews America's Psychic Experiments

New Republic has a review up today of a new book on psychic experiments conducted by the United States Government, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U. S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by Annie Jacobsen. I'm including the Amazon link because if you take a look at the critical reviews, there are several that point out inconsistencies and omissions in the narrative that sound legitimate. The reviewer, on the other hand, appears to be a smug capital-S Skeptic who seems to generally like the book itself, but spends most of his time going on about what a waste of time all these programs were because, of course, psychic abilities don't exist.

This experiment is only one of the strange stories—many of them recently declassified—in Annie Jacobsen’s Phenomena: The Secret History of the U. S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. As with her previous books on Area 51, Operation Paperclip (the secret project to bring Nazi rocket scientists to the U.S. after the war), and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technology for the Defense Department), this one begins with the fallout of World War II and the extreme measures the military-industrial complex took to unlock and weaponize psychic abilities in the early days of the Cold War. Spanning over 50 years, Jacobsen’s tale takes us from the immediate postwar years to the CIA’s experiments in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Defense Department, she tells us, began its own experiments in the 1980s and ‘90s, before their final incarnation, Project Stargate, was finally decommissioned in 1995.

Later in the article, which I'm not going to quote, the reviewer tries to debunk remote viewing by citing a single failed experiment. However, if you dig into the Stargate material, there were also plenty of successful experiments that produced some reliable intelligence. I am not convinced everyone can be trained to do remote viewing effectively, but I think anybody talented enough to do practical magick should be able to develop a reasonable level of skill at it. One of the problems with trying to deploy these abilities on a large scale is identifying talented people in the first place who are worth the investment of time and money.

Although Jacobsen’s book demonstrates an alarming pattern of government activity, the phenomena themselves are what makes her book so fascinating, and often troubling. “My intention … for this book,” she writes, “was not to prove or disprove anyone or any concept, but to report objectively on the government’s long-standing interest in ESP and PK phenomena.” That being said, she cuts these charlatans a great deal of slack while subtly undermining their critics, creating a reading experience that’s alternately frustrating and exhausting. And while she couldn’t have predicted this before finishing the book, Phenomena arrives at the beginning of a presidency that is thriving on conspiracy, distortion of fact, the discrediting of reliable sources, and outright paranoia. With the President of the United States quoting the National Enquirer as a legitimate news source, we’re in desperate need of a thorough account of the overlap between the government and the occult—but given our current climate, such a book also requires greater moral clarity.

I guess "moral clarity" to this reviewer means that the book should make it clear that the James Randi, capital-S Skeptic position is obviously correct and that any believer in psychic or paranormal phenomena is hopelessly deluded. Obviously, I don't subscribe to that viewpoint. Personally, I like that the author of the book took a more neutral position, because arguing over the existence of psychic powers can consume a great deal of energy and is ultimately boring. People experience them. Of course they exist in that sense. So what we should be trying to figure out is what's going on, not "whether it's real." As a point, the Skeptic favorite "mass hysteria" is precisely as poorly understood as "psychic ability," and is really no more credible as I see it.

"Demonic Possession" Strikes Peruvian School

This last week up to eighty children were affected by an outbreak of "demonic possession" at a Peruvian school. The children suffered from seizures, exhibited bizarre behavior, and reported visions of a "man in black" who was trying to kill them. In addition to the possession explanation, the outbreak has been blamed on spirits haunting the school and the favorite non-explanation of skeptics, "mass hysteria."

Elsa de Pizango, a concerned mother whose daughter has experienced some of the symptoms, said: 'She fainted in school. They didn't say anything at the hospital. She just fainted. She keeps on spitting froth from her mouth.'

Describing her experience, a pupil not named in local media, said: 'It's disturbing for me to think about it. It's as if someone kept on chasing me from behind.

'It was a tall man all dressed in black and with a big beard and it felt like he was trying to strangle me.

'My friends say I was screaming desperately, but I don't remember much.'

Another schoolgirl said she had trouble breathing and was desperately holding her neck as if someone was strangling her. According to her friends, she kept screaming: 'Take it out.'

Another anonymous girl, aged 13, told local media: 'Several children from different classrooms fainted at the same time. I got nauseous and started vomiting. I heard voices. A man in black chased me and wanted to touch me.'

Franklin Steiner, a parapsychologist who investigates paranormal and psychic phenomena - said: 'It is known that years ago there were many victims of terrorism here. When this school was built, some say bones and dead bodies were found.'

Locals believe this is a case of demonic interference, saying some children must have played games that invoke demons such as using a Ouija board.

Now as I've said before, "mass hysteria" is a bullshit explanation. It's what skeptics rely on when they can't easily explain away something that seems paranormal, and there are no experiments whatsoever that demonstrate how it works. There's actually more scientific evidence for psychic powers and ghosts, because there's no scientific evidence for "mass hysteria" or any model that explains how it's supposed to work.

Revival of the Old Magick Doesn't Worry Me

Seven years ago, skeptic Phil Plait wrote an article for Discover magazine essentially arguing that paranormal investigation television programs would lead to angry mobs burning people alive. It's a ridiculous argument that has no grounding in reality, and I called it out as such back then in my response.

Capital-S Skeptics do this weird sort of splitting in their thought processes. They tend to assume that if you can do anything at all paranormal, it should follow that you can do anything they can possibly imagine by the same means. So the fact that you can't, say, levitate a building proves that you could never have possibly had a flash of psychic insight.

Plait's argument was built on the same fallacy. His idea seemed to be that if people had even one thought that he considered irrational, that was the exact same thing as said people being hopelessly insane. By this logic, anyone who likes Ghost Hunters wouldn't think twice about murdering the person standing next to them the moment they start feeling vaguely uncomfortable, because after all said person might be hexing them.

And just as a point, over the last seven years the popularity of paranormal investigation shows has exploded. They're everywhere - and still no witch-burnings!

So back in April, my fellow grimoire author Aaron Leitch posted an article on the Llewellyn magick blog stating his "worries" about the "revival of the old magick." I agree with Leitch's main point that it's great to live in the United States rather than parts of, say, Africa or India or Papau New Guinea where the fear of magick is widespread, and have been stating so for many years on this blog.

However, I disagree with the implied assertion that somehow, the "revival of the old magick" has any real chance of turning modern-day America into the sort of place where angry mobs routinely go around murdering practitioners. That's just silly. It's not as silly as Plait's "paranormal investigation shows will make us start burning people at the stake" argument, but it is essentially a contention of the same sort.

I try to make the point, over and over again, that anyone who doesn't understand statistics doesn't understand magick. I would go so far as to say such people don't understand life, period. The bottom line that statistically speaking, there are hardly any magical practitioners here in the United States. Even if our numbers doubled or tripled or quadrupled, we would remain little more than a drop in the bucket.

Skeptics Versus Skepticism

I've pointed out a number of times that there's a big difference between being a capital-S Skeptic and being skeptical. Skepticism is what I try to exhibit here on Augoeides, evaluating paranormal claims on the basis of the evidence. I've put up a number of articles along those lines, such as pointing out that the Loch Ness Monster is probably a fish (though sturgeon versus catfish is still a topic for debate) or evaluating ghost photography for signs of possible normal explanations.

Back in the 1930's, Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University conducted a whole series of experiments designed to test telepathy in human subjects. His work is where we get things like the Zener cards that appeared in movies such as Ghostbusters. Eventually one of the biggest problems with Rhine's protocols was discovered - if you have two people sitting across from each other at a table, with one looking at a card and the other trying to guess it, it is possible for the "receiver" to see the symbol on the card reflected in the eyes of the "sender."

Rhine's research was attacked by the scientific establishment of his day, but I find it rather telling that it wasn't the scientists attacking Rhine who worked out the eye-reflection explanation. That was done by other parapsychologists evaluating and trying to replicate Rhine's work. I remember how bizarre it was reading the critiques of Rhine back in college and seeing that no alternative explanations were proposed for his results at all. Rather, the critiques noted that Rhine had provided enough evidence to demonstrate virtually any other phenomenon, but they simply disliked the concept of psi and that was that.

Reading some of that material is what formed my current opinions of Skeptics and skepticism. A truly skeptical scientist would have looked over Rhine's work carefully for possible normal explanations, and might have even hit on the eye-reflection problem. That they did not showed me that they weren't really looking at the evidence. Many modern Skeptics do that as well. In the face of seemingly paranormal results, they quickly put forth explanations like "fraud," or if that's not possible or reasonable, "mass hysteria," which is an explanation that's about as well-understood as psi phenomena.

That background is one of the reasons I was so impressed with this article by Skeptic Michael Shermer that was published over a year ago, in which he discusses an apparently anomalous experience that he encountered and which he was unable to explain. To those of you not familiar with the Skeptic establishment, it probably seemed like no big deal. But to see one of them publicly admit there are weird things out there that current science can't completely explain was pretty much unprecedented at the time.

Lying About Enochian

I recently came across this article on one of the Facebook Enochian discussion groups, and found it to basically be the biggest bunch of nonsense I've read about Enochian magick in quite some time. While it's true that some of the claims in the article could be simple ignorance, some of it is so blatant that I think it does rise to the level of "lying." A simple Internet search, which the author apparently did not bother to do, would have dispelled much of it.

A warning: this turned out a lot longer than I originally intended, because there's a whole lot of crap to get through. But at the risk of venturing into TL;DR territory, let's start at the beginning.

Angels? Demons? There's no such thing as either! Welcome to the 21st Century. That doesn't stop a lot of people from trying to contact angels though.

So, no surprise, the author is a complete skeptic who doesn't believe in summoning spirits of whatever sort. I disagree, of course, but it is true that if you don't think there's any such thing as angels or demons there's not much point in studying or practicing Enochian magick.

JOHN DEE (1527-1608) invented Enochian "Magick" and tried unsuccessfully to get the spirits to bring him money.

This is the first bit of the bullshit I alluded to in my introduction. It is technically true - Dee did try on a couple of occasions to obtain money and find buried treasure. But it was a tiny percentage of the work that he did, and not his primary focus. For most of his life, Dee received a salary from Elizabeth's court and was not impoverished. His main interest in contacting angels was to gain an understanding of the nature of the spiritual universe, which is quite clear from his diaries.

Dee told Princess Elizabeth she would someday become the Queen, which was a prediction that was certainly possible, considering she was royalty, even though she was an unwilling guest of the Tower of London at the time. It’s unknown how many other nobles he might have also told a similar prediction about gaining the throne, figuring one of them would pay off.

Again, this story is accurate up to a point, but the snark at the end has no basis whatsoever in fact. Sure "nobody knows." But so what? The comment is a meaningless jab without any basis in fact one way or the other. "Nobody knows" whether Dee sacrificed live kittens to ancient Canaanite gods - but is such a thing even remotely likely?

Sturgeon or Catfish?

A while back I posted a series of articles suggesting that the Loch Ness Monster might be a sturgeon. We pretty much know at this point that it has to be a fish, as any air-breathing mammal or reptile would be surfacing often. Likewise, the fact that a sonar scan of the loch revealed no large creatures means that the only way it could have evaded detection is to have sat on the bottom of the lake or on a ledge. A diver in the 1970's reported seeing something that looked like "an enormous frog," which I contended could have been a sturgeon seen from the front.

While all of that adds up, sturgeons are not known to inhabit the loch. However, as it turns out there's another species of fish that grows quite large, hides on lake bottoms, and could easily look like a giant frog seen from the front. That fish is the Wels Catfish. The picture above shows one of the largest ever caught, measuring 8 feet 8 inches and weighing in at 280 pounds. And we also know that Wels Catfish can be found in the loch, because they were introduced as sport fish during the Victorian era.

Steve Feltham, who has searched for a solution to the Loch Ness mystery for almost 25 years, recently commented that he believes a Wels Catfish is probably the leading explanation at this time. Some newspapers reported this as an admission that he was giving up the hunt, but Feltham fired back that this was not the case and he intends to keep investigating.

Last week, the Times newspaper reported that Steve Feltham, who gave up his job, house and girlfriend 24 years ago to look for the creature full-time, had abandoned his long quest, causing ripples among monster-lovers across the world.

But Feltham says he has no intention of quitting his hunt for the prehistoric beast, which legend has it lurks beneath the deep, dark waters of the lake in northern Scotland, although his current best guess is that "Nessie" is just a large catfish.

"It's still a massive world-class mystery," Feltham, who lives in a van on the shores of the loch, told Reuters. "It's been a life-long passion for me and I'm dedicated to being here and being fully involved in this whole hunt. I couldn't be more content doing anything else."

Feltham said he suspected Nessie was most likely to be a large Wels catfish, a native European fish that can grow up to 13 ft (4 meters) long. Victorians introduced the fish to the loch near Inverness to provide sport. "At the moment, a Wels catfish ticks more of the boxes than any of the other contenders for the explanation," he said.

Lymphatic Vessels Link Brain and Body

Back when I was in college around 1990 one of the hot areas of interdisciplinary study was psychoneuroimmunology, a field built around the experimental observation that cognitive states could affect the function of the immune system. Researchers hoped that such a connection could provide an explanation for the placebo effect, the effectiveness of alternative healing modalities such as acupuncture, and impaired immune system function in depressed patients. It was also thought that it might be relevant as an explanation for the "relaxation response" provoked by meditation, which appears to have anti-inflammatory properties.

The base hypothesis was a logical one, but the mechanism behind it proved incredibly stubborn. Especially in the case of the placebo effect, it's not that anyone doubts something real is going on. It has to be controlled for in every medical drug trial, even though it's poorly understood. Also, last year researchers studying acupuncture may have discovered a chemical pathway involving interleukin-10, an anti-inflammatory compound produced by the immune system, that seems to be activated by acupuncture treatment.

In my article, I offered up the hypothesis that this interleukin-10 pathway could work in conjunction with the lymphatic system to produce the results reported for acupuncture treatment. A chart of the acupuncture meridians follows the lymphatic system fairly precisely, and a needle pentrating a lymphatic vessel will promote an immune response. So the needle would promote the production of interleukin-10 at the point of contact, and the lymphatic system would move the substance some distance from it. This is a straightforward chemical model that involves no mysterious energies, while at the same time explaining the effectiveness of exercises such as Qigong sets that promote the movement of lymphatic fluid.

Neuroscientists have now identified that the network of lymphatic vessels connected with the brain is more extensive than previously thought, which not only supports some of my contentions about acupuncture but which may also finally provide the mechanism that psychoneuroimmunologists have been seeking for nearly thirty years. It could explain the placabo effect and many other findings that relate subjective state of mind to immune system function. The newly discovered vessels are shown in green in the image on the right.

Debunking Charlie

So a couple days ago I posted an article on the "Charlie Challenge," a method for allegedly summoning a spirit using two pencils that went viral. In my article, I noted that if it worked, it might be usable as system for spirit communication that did not involve the ideomotor response, which is what makes pendulums and planchettes seem to move on their own. Last night I did some experiments with the two-pencil method, and concluded that it doesn't work. At least, not in the way that I posited.

First off, I determined that the pencil generally won't spin in response to vibrations in the room. That was one of my initial thoughts about how and why the pencil might be moving. One of the videos, for example, shows a couple of kids sitting in a kitchen bouncing a basketball on the floor. But when I set the pencils up on my desk I found that I was able to hit the surface quite hard without making the pencil on top spin at all. The best I could do was a slight wobble without sliding the desk.

My next thought was to apply Qigong methods and see if I could make the pencils spin that way. I previously have had some success with an Egeley Wheel along those lines, which was designed based on the observation that Qigong masters seem to be able to affect the rotation of leaves suspended in water. I should note here that this isn't necessarily a supernatural effect, as Chinese researchers have measured infrasonic waves being emitted from the hands of Qigong practitioners. But like my vibration tests this was a bust as well, with no noticeable effect.

I finally happened upon what I believe to be the mechanism. Moving air at just the right angle will make the pencil spin dramatically. It's not obvious, though. If the angle is off you can blow as hard as you want and it won't move. Likewise, if the angle is right even a slight breeze will work, whereas if it's wrong even a strong breeze won't do anything. Air movement is obviously going to be a factor outdoors, but forced-air furnaces also produce moving air. In a home with such a system, if the pencils are placed in the right spot they will move when the fan comes on.

Otherwise, breathing at the right angle will do the trick as well. I can imagine a bunch of teenagers calling out to "Charlie" and scrutinizing the pencils closely. As soon as somebody gets excited enough to start breathing hard, sure enough, the pencil on top will spin. I will add, though, that as with a breeze the angle seems to be very important. Just blowing on the pencil doesn't do it unless your breath hits it just right. Furthermore, the angle at which it needs to strike is not what you would expect, and at that angle it can work from further away than you would normally think.

The difference between how you would expect moving air to effect the pencil and how it really takes place probably explains the "supernatural" appearance of the method. The teenagers involved in this likely don't necessarily notice that they're breathing hard, and don't realize it when their breath hits the proper angle. So what this implies is that method probably won't work as a system for spirit communication - which is too bad, but at the same time I imagine that if it was usable some magician would have talked about it before now.

The apparent nature of this practice does highlight one of my problems with capital-S skeptics. Whenever they are confronted with something that looks paranormal, their first response is to accuse whoever is reporting it of lying or perpetrating an outright fraud. But, in fact, most experiences that people identify as paranormal are normal experiences that they misinterpret for various reasons. It's easy to dismiss accounts outright, but much more revealing to investigate them in a sincere manner.

I may still see about trying the pencil method in a formal ritual, but given the shifts I see on my EMF meter when spirits show up, my suspicion is that they won't be able to generate enough physical energy to produce noticeable movement. That's still just a working hypothesis, though, and if my tests turn out differently I'll be sure to keep you all posted.

Sheldrake Versus Shermer

Here is a fascination set of dialogues that will be going on over the next three months. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, author of the morphic resonance hypothesis, will be debating skeptic Michael Shermer on the nature of science. Ever since the controversy over a TED talk given by Sheldrake questioning some of the assumptions of modern science, this has been a topic ripe for debate. And Shermer is a good choice as well; unlike a lot of people in the Skeptic community, he has shown himself to be relatively fair-minded in evaluating evidence of paranormal phenomena.

MAY 2015: Materialism in Science

Sheldrake: Science needs to free itself from materialist dogma; indeed, science misunderstands nature by being wedded to purely materialist explanations.

Shermer: Science, properly conceived, is a materialistic enterprise; for science to look beyond materialist explanations is to betray science and engage in superstition.

Believe it or not, I actually side with Shermer on this one, though probably not in the way that he intends. I am not a believer in the supernatural, but rather in the paranormal. The distinction is an important one, and not merely an attempt to dodge the issue by means of semantics. Supernatural means above or outside the natural universe, while paranormal means beyond the realm of everyday experience.

According to the ontological model I follow, the natural universe is defined as the summation of all that exists, including phenomena such as consciousness which are not necessarily amenable to straightforward measurement. I classify the two primary components of all phenomena as matter/energy and information, which maps nicely to both the Platonic and Aristolean philosophical models.

These two schools share the notion that the primary components of existence may be classified as matter and form, with form corresponding to the modern concept of information. Plato proposed that form preceded matter, while Aristotle proposed that matter preceded form. The two schools can be reconciled by proposing that matter/energy and information are locked into a reciprocal relationship with each other, such that either may organically precede depending upon the circumstances.

So what this means is that Sheldrakes morphic field model is essentially based on similarities between information structures rather than conventional physical forces, but as information is part of the physical universe I still classify it as "material."

Weird Things Happen to Skeptics, Too

Michael Shermer is well-known skeptic who has written extensively on debunking all manner of alleged paranormal phenomena, from bigfoot to UFO's to psychic abilities. But as he explains in this article from Scientific American, he recently witnessed an event that appeared to be of paranormal origin - or at least something he could not explain away.

The event in question happened on the day of Shermer's wedding, this last June. Growing up in Germany, his wife Jennifer had been close to her grandfather but he passed away when she was sixteen. One of the items of his still in her possession was an old transistor radio that did not seem to work, despite Shermer's best efforts to repair it. He finally gave up and put the radio away in a desk drawer.

Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”

Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music. Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.