Book Report: Science and the Supernatural by John Taylor (c)1980

Science and the Supernatural by John Taylor (c)1980

Background Information: John G. Taylor was a Distinguished Professor of theoretical physics and artificial intelligence. He was very involved in the development of neural networks and wrote a number of books on various subject including physics, mind sciences and finance. more about him can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-013-9226-z

 In 1980, John Taylor was an angry man. Being a solid, well respected scientist, he risked his reputation by applying himself to researching a variety of exotic psychic phenomena with the best of intentions, and it didn't work out very well. 

Among the phenomena he discusses and examined are remote viewing, telepathy (including dream telepathy), dowsing, precognition, psychokinesis. He discusses previous research done by J.B. Rhine, Victor Vasiliev and others. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to prove the existence of anything and came away clearly angry and disillusioned. Worse still, some of the most promising evidence turned out to be what he terms Fraud and Mischief. Some was deliberate fraud and trickery done by prominent "psychics" in order to build their reputation, or malicious mischief. Some was unconsciously done by people with the best intentions who were unaware of what they were doing. Some was mere coincidence misread as proof.
He entered with an extremely open mind, but left disappointed and with no conclusive data at all.

For what it's worth, I have some issues with his scientific methodology, and perhaps you'll agree, or disagree. From the top, he theorizes that of all the possible energies involved in psychic phenomena, it must be either caused by a transmission of X-rays, Black Body Radiation, Radio Waves or Electromagnetic Energy. He settled on the last one as the likely force involved, and right there he's set up a kind of a criteria bias. For all his experimentation, he failed to find any sign of it. Secondly, when he calculated results of his experiments, and the data he examined, he counted only positive and negative results. There were inevitably a lot of inconclusive results which he also considered as negative results, creating an almost impossible threshold where only absolute positives count, in a field where ambiguous results predominate. The book Parapsychology Today explores the difficulties and subtleties of interpreting data from psychic research in a way that takes into consideration all the vagaries more completely. 

The book is an interesting read, and even if it offers no final proofs, science is always fun. The author documents all the stories and sources very well, and some are thought provoking, even if they couldn't be proven. One interesting bit of trivia is that, at the time of writing, there was a Central Premonitions Registry, which was in operation from 1968 to about 2008, designed to collect data about premonitions from the public at large, and the author made use of their data.