A pretty good blog post I read recently about this very issue by Jacob Jolij, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Groningen:
https://thewinnower.com/papers/is-psi-truly-impossible
Does psi violate physics?
Well, as it seems, not necessarily. There are interpretations of physics that do allow for psi-like effects to occur. However, these interpretations are not your main-stream ones, and do take some background in physics to fully comprehend.
(source: "Is psi truly impossible?" by Jacob Jolij, published in "The Winnower")
I thought it was a defining feature of psi phenomena that they seem to be impossible in some fundamental sense.
For example, in Daryl Bem's Feeling the Future paper, he purports to show that people can predict the immediate future. There is nothing impossible or remarkable about that- usually. But in his experiments he took care to create circumstances under which it should be impossible and that was the whole point of the paper and what made the effect a psi effect.
Are you asking about the precautions that Bem took? I'm not sure I understand what you are asking.Why should precognition be impossible?
A pretty good blog post I read recently about this very issue by Jacob Jolij, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Groningen:
https://thewinnower.com/papers/is-psi-truly-impossible
Thanks - it looks as though there are a number of interesting posts about psi in that blog:
http://www.jolij.com/?cat=3
In fairness, the Randi challenge claimants (and psychics generally) are not presenting themselves as having weak, anomalous effects. They can only test what's in front of them.
Do psi phenomena violate any of the known laws of physics?
Here is an example: if one views our consciousness as purely epiphenomenal from material interactions, then this means consciousness is a local phenomenon in spacetime. With this view, the ability to communicate across any distance through telepathy would seem to violate Special Relativity. It would also be very difficult to explain how that information could be communicated anyway, since a local mind would need some sort of signal to transmit the information. I would argue that panpsychism runs into the same problem.
I am surprised that there has been so little response to this question.
Does quantum entanglement violate special relativity?
I am too. I suspect that most skeptics dismiss parapsychology because they believe that psi phenomena necessarily violate the known laws of physics