PSI: What It Is and How It Works. A Central Model for Parapsychology - Book Review

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Dec, 2002 by Fiona Steinkamp

PSI: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS. A CENTRAL MODEL FOR PARAPSYCHOLOGY by Keith Chandler. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 2001. Pp. xii 407. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-595-20089-3.

Given the clearly immodest tide of the book and the writing of PSI as if it were an acronym, it was with some trepidation that I set out to review this offering from Keith Chandler. My fears were partly allayed and partly confirmed. Fortunately, psi appeared in lowercase throughout, although the presentation of the volume was marred by the preponderance of typos. The tone was, at times, too arrogant for my liking, although softened by qualifying remarks at others. Readers of the book may have to prepare themselves mentally to bracket off these mild irritations.

The first chapter is introductory. It illustrates well not only the views that Chandler is going to suppose throughout his book but also some of the more problematic aspects of the volume. For instance, on page 2 Chandler writes that there is an "overwhelming amount of hard evidence for the existence of some kinds of psi phenomena." I find this claim rather lacking in caution. If the hard evidence for psi were overwhelming, parapsychology would not be the poorly funded science it is. It is clear that, for whatever reason, many people do not find the evidence for psi overwhelming. True, on page 22 Chandler acknowledges the lack of unanimity about the proof of psi, but because this qualification appears only 20 pages later, it is sometimes difficult to remember that Chandler does soften his claims.

Chandler also distinguishes between spontaneous and laboratory psi in chapter 1. He claims that spontaneous psi is characterised by strong personal involvement, high emotional levels, and unrepeatability, whereas laboratory psi involves minimal emotion, occurs in relaxed settings, and with the participant in a positive mental state. Although these characterisations could be hody debated, the distinction is an interesting one and is used throughout the hook. Chandler assumes Mental Realism, which he has expounded in his book The Mind Paradigm (Chandler, 2000), as the philosophical underpinning for his model of psi. He summarises the main tenets of Mental Realism in chapter 2.

Mental Realism is the view that the energy of the universe is the psychic energy of Cosmic Mind (CM). The physical world isjusta manifestation of CM's thought processes. Chandler identifies CM with the zero-point field, but he does not discuss the likenesses and differences to help the reader understand this identification, unless CM really is its exact equivalent. In Mental Realism, the phenomenal and the physical world are both simply projections of CM, and CM's progression of thought is seen through evolution. Consequently, there is no such thing as human free will; free will belongs to CM. I have a number of reservations about Mental Realism, some of which I will mention in passing in this review. However, I will not focus on this model, given that the book provides only a summary of it and the model is not the main topic of this volume.

In PSI: What It Is and How It Works, Chandler treats each psi modality separately, because he does not want to assume that each modality operates on the same principles. Thus chapters 3-5 discuss telepathy, chapters 6-8 handle precognition, chapter 9 debates clairvoyance, and chapter 10 discusses psychokinesis (PK).

Chapter 3 provides the basis on which Chandler will attempt to explain various types of telepathy. He argues that both telepathy and memory are extrasensory insofar as neither "occur[s] through ordinary channels of sensation" (using the 1914 Webster definition of telepathy), and he maintains that memory is a form of communication; we ask ourselves questions of our memory to gain a response. The response comes from our own cognitive structure, which is that aspect of the cognitive field to which we have, metaphorically speaking, the key. Telepathy, he claims, is similar, only we ask questions to the area or aspect of the cognitive field to which we normally do not have the key but with which we happen to resonate. He labels this the offer-response model. The recipient offers a question and the agent responds. As Chandler notes in chapter 5, it reverses the traditional understanding of the sender-receiver relationship. In chapter 9 he even goes so far as to say that psi has the same modus operandi as memory (p . 271).

The model is not without its problems. First, it is not clear that either memory or telepathy is as voluntary as the model suggests. Many memories come unbidden; likewise many people complain that they do not want the information that they claim to have telepathically obtained. Thus it is dubious whether the receiver always "offers" a question to the cognitive field. Second, I am not convinced that memory is extrasensory in the parapsychological sense (if this is Chandler's claim). The use of Webster's 1914 definition of telepathy is a rhetorical device to make the connection between telepathy and memory seem convincing, whereas the 1914 definition of telepathy is not one that would meet today's more rigorous classifications. Third, the relationship between the offer-response model and CM is obscure. If there is no human free will, the questions (or "offers") must come from CM and not from the individual. However, for the offers to be comprehensible as genuine offers, it seems that some free will must ultima tely devolve to the individual. If, however, the individuals' offers are ultimately offers from CM, then why does CM arrange itself so that there are different cognitive carriers rather than it instantaneously knowing all its thoughts? Chandler accepts in chapter 2 that once Mental Realism is accepted, psi becomes problematic insofar as it occurs in space and time. I am not sure that he truly answers this problematic. He may have just answered one question (how can there be purely mental phenomena in a physical world?) with another (how can there be obstructions in a purely mental world?). One is left wondering whether there are any advantages to Mental Realism. It is possible, however, that some of these questions are answered in The Mind Paradigm.