Dr. Ed May ran the U.S. Stargate psychic spying program for 10 years, but as a materialist, rejects psychic woo.

photo by: Skeptiko

On this episode of Skeptiko…

Alex Tsakiris:  [Dr. Dean Radin] was the first guy to say, “…let’s see if a meditator can affect that photon beam within a double-slit experiment,” and again, an astounding result. I mean, statistically an overwhelming result showing that, yes, human consciousness collapses the wave function.

Dr. Ed May: Dean Radin’s a good friend of mine, he is simply one of the most creative people we have in our field, but I’m sad to report, his idea of consciousness and wave functions are just demonstrably inconsistent with 80 years’ worth of experiment and theory, it’s just simply not the case.

(later)

Alex Tsakiris: …but take the near-death experience science, I mean, there it’s kind of game over, because now we have the brain out of the equation, the brain doesn’t…

Dr. Ed May: No, no, no, no, no, no, no absolutely not. I’ve just been engaged in a huge debate over this issue of near-death experiences, arguing with my colleagues that that is hard evidence for survival of bodily death. First off, there’s nobody that has had a near-death experience, who’s in fact dead. It’s a different category…

Alex Tsakiris: Not true… not true, if we were going to answer that question…

Dr. Ed May: I’ve read the literature in detail, just finished reading a book about it by one of the biggest proponents sir… 

Alex Tsakiris: Nope… nope…  

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Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Of course, as you know, I always say the same thing at the beginning, I say controversial science, but primarily what this show has dealt with is consciousness science and this battle of the idea of whether consciousness, your minute by minute experience, is more than just your brain, and of course that’s important, because if it is, and it is — because we’ve shown it over and over again — but if it is, then it more or less overturns science in some pretty important ways.

Now, for a long time it was always assumed that psi effects; ESP, telepathy precognition, that kind of stuff, that if that was proven true, then the materialists, the mind=brain folks, would have to admit they’re wrong, because the assumption being made — and I always point to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who was famous back in the day when the atheists were kind of running the world and saying “consciousness is an illusion” and along with that was this idea that “consciousness can do no work,” consciousness being this non-physical thing that’s going on up there that can’t really “do” anything, that can’t really impact our physical world. So if psi was shown to be happening it was assumed that it would be game over, the non-physical affecting the physical, we can no longer rely on this scientific materialism.  This is why there was this tremendous pushback on psi. For example, the James Randi folks and all the very materialistic people would just rail against parapsychology and all the psi stuff as hard as they could. And of course this led to them making up a bunch of crap that we’ve gone over again and again and again on this show. Their debunking of psi was really a shame.

Now, in that long list of things that got the strong pushback from the “skeptics,” was remote viewing. So, if you go back 20 years ago skeptics were saying, “Oh, that never really happened… it never really worked.” Then you had a bunch of people come out of the Stargate progra...