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Ex-Stargate Head Ed May Unyielding Re Materialism, Slams Dean Radin |341|
by Alex Tsakiris | Feb 28 | Consciousness Science, Near-Death Experience, Parapsychology
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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: And [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…
————————————
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 materialist, 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, well 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 program and say, “Of course it worked.” We even had presidents saying, “Oh yeah, it was unbelievable what they found. They found this missing plane,” all these stories came out that made it clear to anyone who was paying attention that, yes, something real was happening.
Now, all this is a lead up to how this show came to be, because the other day I was watching this excellent video from a very excellent parapsychologist, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, who you might recall was on this show a long time ago, probably need to have him back, need to make a note of that, but anyway, on his new revamped version of Thinking Aloud, he had today’s guest, Dr. Ed May and I was rather stunned to find that, here is a guy who is a PhD physicist, ran the Stargate Program for 10 years, is absolutely certain from all his scientific training that this is something that really occurred, that is, psychic spying was real, really happened, they sat in this room and they saw stuff that was going on on the other side of the world. He’s saying, operationally, we know it happened, experimentally, we know it happened. It happened, get over it, but at the same time, what he’s saying is that, “You know what, I’m still a physicalist, I’m still a materialist, I’m still holding to the idea that it’s all in the brain; mind=brain. So, of course, that piqued my interest and I reached out to Ed and was able to get him to agree to come on the show.
Now, it turned out to be quite a contentious interview at times. Ed’s got a lot of strong opinions, he’s not afraid to express them and I, as you know, am generally not someone to back down from asking questions… and I know that sometimes pisses people off.
Now, Ed says a bunch of stuff in this interview that, in the final analysis I think is a little bit out there, but we can discuss that later and pull that apart in the forum, but there’s one thing that he said that I really did want to follow up on directly, and that was his comment about Dean Radin, because I’ve always found Dean Radin to be absolutely one of the smartest guys in the room, when it comes to parapsychology; and certainly a topnotch, careful researcher. So when Ed did his little shtick on Dean Radin’s recent double-slit experiment, I really knew I wanted to follow up with that. I was able to have a little email correspondence with Dean and I will update you on what I discovered at the end of this show.
by Alex Tsakiris | Feb 28 | Consciousness Science, Near-Death Experience, Parapsychology
Share
Tweet
SHARES0
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: And [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…
————————————
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 materialist, 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, well 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 program and say, “Of course it worked.” We even had presidents saying, “Oh yeah, it was unbelievable what they found. They found this missing plane,” all these stories came out that made it clear to anyone who was paying attention that, yes, something real was happening.
Now, all this is a lead up to how this show came to be, because the other day I was watching this excellent video from a very excellent parapsychologist, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, who you might recall was on this show a long time ago, probably need to have him back, need to make a note of that, but anyway, on his new revamped version of Thinking Aloud, he had today’s guest, Dr. Ed May and I was rather stunned to find that, here is a guy who is a PhD physicist, ran the Stargate Program for 10 years, is absolutely certain from all his scientific training that this is something that really occurred, that is, psychic spying was real, really happened, they sat in this room and they saw stuff that was going on on the other side of the world. He’s saying, operationally, we know it happened, experimentally, we know it happened. It happened, get over it, but at the same time, what he’s saying is that, “You know what, I’m still a physicalist, I’m still a materialist, I’m still holding to the idea that it’s all in the brain; mind=brain. So, of course, that piqued my interest and I reached out to Ed and was able to get him to agree to come on the show.
Now, it turned out to be quite a contentious interview at times. Ed’s got a lot of strong opinions, he’s not afraid to express them and I, as you know, am generally not someone to back down from asking questions… and I know that sometimes pisses people off.
Now, Ed says a bunch of stuff in this interview that, in the final analysis I think is a little bit out there, but we can discuss that later and pull that apart in the forum, but there’s one thing that he said that I really did want to follow up on directly, and that was his comment about Dean Radin, because I’ve always found Dean Radin to be absolutely one of the smartest guys in the room, when it comes to parapsychology; and certainly a topnotch, careful researcher. So when Ed did his little shtick on Dean Radin’s recent double-slit experiment, I really knew I wanted to follow up with that. I was able to have a little email correspondence with Dean and I will update you on what I discovered at the end of this show.