Chapter 13 - What Would Change My Mind

There is a question that separates genuine scientific inquiry from motivated reasoning more reliably than almost any other, and it is disarmingly simple to ask, though most people asked it in the heat of a real argument struggle to answer honestly: what specific evidence would change your mind? If you cannot answer that question - if no conceivable observation would move you off your current position - you are not holding a scientific belief, however much evidence-sounding language you might dress it in. This chapter asks that question from both directions on morphic resonance, seriously and specifically, and introduces you properly to the two critics whose sustained, technically substantive engagement with Sheldrake's work has done the most to sharpen the actual empirical stakes over the past three decades: Richard Wiseman, whom we already met investigating the staring-detection literature, and the psychologist and former stage magician Susan Blackmore.

Susan Blackmore's Journey

Susan Blackmore's intellectual biography is one of the more genuinely instructive case studies available of a researcher's views evolving in direct, documented response to her own accumulated experimental evidence - a field where public reversals of this kind are rare enough to deserve real attention when they occur.

She did not start as a skeptic. As an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1970s, Blackmore had a vivid, spontaneous out-of-body experience - hours long, by her own later account, complete with a sense of floating above her body and traveling along telepathic "cords" of energy to visit friends elsewhere in the city - an experience so persuasive that it redirected the entire shape of her career. She went on to a PhD specifically investigating psychic phenomena, hoping, in her own words, to find and document robust evidence for exactly the kind of paranormal ability her own experience had convinced her must be real. This is worth sitting with: the researcher who would become one of parapsychology's most cited skeptics began as a believer with the most personally compelling evidence a person can have - her own vivid, unforgettable experience - and set out specifically to vindicate it scientifically.

What followed was roughly a decade of increasingly careful, increasingly well-controlled experimental work - testing claims of telepathy, precognition, and related phenomena, tightening her methodology year over year as she became more sophisticated about the specific confounds (sensory leakage, statistical artifacts, subtle experimenter cuing) that had plagued earlier, less careful studies in the field, including some of her own. Study after study came back null. Not ambiguous - null. In her own later account of the period, collected in her memoir In Search of the Light, she describes the accumulating disappointment directly: each time she tightened the protocol to close off one more possible mundane explanation, the effect she had gone looking for shrank a little further, until there was nothing left to explain. She did not walk away from the question. She walked toward the conclusion her own data kept handing her, publicly reversed her position, and became one of the most well-known skeptical voices in the study of anomalous experience - while insisting, and I think she's right to insist, that this was not intellectual surrender but the honest terminus of following her own accumulating null results where they led.

Blackmore has specifically engaged with Sheldrake's staring-detection research, running her own replication attempts in the 1990s and reporting results at chance levels. She has been candid, in her subsequent writing, about the methodological lesson she believes her long research career in this area taught her: early enthusiasm and insufficiently rigorous controls can produce a string of apparently promising results that evaporate almost entirely once methodology is tightened to modern standards - double-blinding, pre-registration, removing any possibility of the "psi-conducive experimenter" objection by fully automating trial delivery. This pattern, modest and exciting early results under looser controls followed by null results under tighter ones, recurs so consistently across the parapsychology literature broadly, not just Sheldrake's specific work, that it constitutes, in her assessment, a meaningful methodological red flag in its own right - worth taking seriously as data about the field's overall evidential trustworthiness rather than dismissing as mere coincidence.

Blackmore's trajectory deserves to be told without editorializing it into either a triumphant "skeptic converts, case closed" narrative or a dismissive "she just gave up too easily" counter-narrative; both framings do a disservice to what's actually valuable here: a rare, well-documented example of a serious researcher's confidence tracking her own accumulating evidence over time, in exactly the way we'd want a scientist's confidence to behave, regardless of which direction it happened to move in her particular case. The generalizable lesson is methodological, not personal: tightening controls in this specific research area has, across multiple independent researchers' careers, tended to shrink reported effect sizes, and that pattern itself is meaningful evidence, of the kind a proper Bayesian framework would weigh against the hypothesis.

Wiseman's Standing Challenge

Richard Wiseman, whom we already know through his adversarial collaboration with Marilyn Schlitz, has articulated his position on morphic resonance and related claims with unusual explicitness, in a way that actually satisfies the "what would change your mind" test better than most skeptics manage. Wiseman's consistent public position is not that psi phenomena or morphic resonance are logically impossible, nor that no evidence could ever be sufficient - a position that would itself fail the falsifiability standard we discussed in Chapter 6, applied now to the skeptical side rather than the believing one. His position, rather, is that the specific evidence produced to date has, in every case he has personally investigated closely, either failed to replicate under his own tightened protocols or has revealed identifiable methodological weaknesses sufficient to explain the reported effect without requiring any exotic mechanism - and that he would be persuaded by a sufficiently large, sufficiently well-controlled, pre-registered, adversarially-collaborative study (designed jointly with proponents, exactly as his staring-detection collaboration with Schlitz was designed) that produced a robust, replicated positive effect surviving his own best attempts at finding a mundane explanation.

This is worth taking seriously as a genuinely falsifiable skeptical position, in exactly the sense this book has demanded of the pro-resonance claims themselves: Wiseman has, in effect, specified in advance the conditions under which he would update his view, which is precisely the discipline that makes a position scientific rather than dogmatic, in either direction. It's also worth noting, in fairness to Sheldrake, that he has repeatedly expressed frustration that skeptics who set this kind of bar rarely follow through with the well-funded, large-scale, jointly-designed studies that would actually meet it - a legitimate complaint about the general under-resourcing of adversarial collaboration in this space, and one that, again, points toward the kind of well-funded, technologically sophisticated, jointly pre-registered research program that Part IV of this book will argue is now more achievable than at any previous point in the hypothesis's history.

What Would Change Sheldrake's Mind?

Turning the question around: has Sheldrake himself specified conditions under which he would abandon or substantially revise morphic resonance? This is worth examining carefully, because the answer reveals both a genuine strength and a genuine weakness in how the hypothesis has been maintained over four decades.

On the strength side: Sheldrake has, at various points, specified concrete predictions that a sufficiently large, well-controlled null result would count against - the geographically isolated learning experiments, the crystal formation protocol, and various proposed refinements of the staring-detection paradigm - several of which include explicit statistical power calculations and pre-specified significance thresholds. This is genuine, falsifiable content, and it's worth crediting Sheldrake with having gone further than many proponents of unconventional hypotheses in actually specifying it.

On the weakness side, and I want to be direct about this because it is a fair and important criticism: Sheldrake has, at various points across his public writing and interviews spanning four decades, responded to specific null or unfavorable results (including some of Wiseman's own replication failures) with explanations - a psi-inhibitory effect from a skeptical experimenter, insufficient similarity between the specific task tested and the broader category of morphic units it was meant to represent, subtle protocol differences from his own preferred version of the experiment - that, while not necessarily false, are also not independently checkable, and were not, in most cases, specified as legitimate escape hatches before the unfavorable result was obtained. This is exactly the pattern Lakatos warned about in Chapter 6: a research programme that responds to anomalies with new testable predictions is progressing; one that responds with unfalsifiable ad hoc patches is degenerating. Sheldrake's four-decade track record shows real examples of both patterns, and a fair-minded assessment has to hold both in view simultaneously rather than picking whichever supports a predetermined conclusion.

A Symmetrical Standard

I want to press hard, in this chapter specifically, on a point of intellectual symmetry that I think gets lost in most popular treatments of this debate, which tend to hold Sheldrake to a demanding falsifiability standard while implicitly exempting his critics from an equivalent one. It is just as intellectually important to ask what would change a committed skeptic's mind as it is to ask what would change a believer's, and a truly rigorous skeptic should be able to specify, as Wiseman has attempted to, the exact evidentiary bar that would move them - rather than simply treating every positive result as automatically explicable by some combination of chance, bias, and methodological flaw, regardless of how well-controlled the specific study turns out to be. A skeptical position that is constitutionally incapable of being moved by any conceivable evidence is exactly as unscientific, in the technical Popperian sense, as a believing position that absorbs every null result with an ad hoc patch. I don't think most serious critics of morphic resonance actually hold this constitutionally unmovable position - Wiseman and Blackmore, to their credit, do not - but I think it's worth naming as a failure mode to watch for in yourself, whichever direction your own priors currently lean, because it's a far more common failure mode in online and popular discourse about this topic than either side's most careful published critics actually exhibit.

A Concrete, Symmetrical Bar

Let me try to state, as precisely as I can, what I think a genuinely decisive experiment - one that a well-calibrated skeptic and a well-calibrated proponent should both agree, in advance, would meaningfully move their confidence - would need to include, synthesizing the methodological lessons of this entire Part.

It would need a pre-registered protocol, publicly time-stamped before data collection begins, specifying the exact hypothesis, sample size (calculated via a formal power analysis, ensuring the study is large enough to detect the claimed effect size if real, and to be a genuinely informative null if the effect is absent), and statistical analysis plan, with no researcher degrees of freedom left open for after-the-fact adjustment. It would need to be designed adversarially and collaboratively, with both proponents and skeptics agreeing on the protocol before any data is collected, exactly following the Wiseman-Schlitz model, specifically to prevent either side from later attributing an unfavorable result to the other side's alleged bad-faith execution. It would need full automation of any component susceptible to unconscious experimenter cuing, removing the live human experimenter from the loop wherever technologically possible. It would need geographically and, ideally, genetically or materially isolated populations (rats, crystals, or human subjects with no plausible conventional channel of information transfer between the groups being compared) sufficient to rule out ordinary cultural or physical transmission as an alternative explanation. And it would need to be pre-committed to publication regardless of outcome, ideally through a registered-report format (in which a journal commits to publishing the study based on its methodology, evaluated before the results are known, specifically to eliminate publication bias at the source) - a format that has become increasingly available across psychology and related fields in exactly the post-replication-crisis reforms discussed in Chapter 12.

To my knowledge, no single study meeting all of these criteria simultaneously has yet been conducted on any core morphic resonance claim. That is not a criticism unique to this field - very few studies in any field meet every one of these criteria simultaneously, and doing so is expensive, logistically demanding, and institutionally difficult to fund, especially for a topic carrying the reputational risk we discussed in Chapter 4. But it is precisely the gap that Part IV of this book will argue modern computational tools, sensor networks, and large-scale collaborative research infrastructure can, for the first time, make genuinely closeable - not as a certainty, but as a live, fundable, technically achievable possibility in a way it simply was not in 1981, or even in the early 2000s when most of the Wiseman-Sheldrake exchanges took place.

Looking Forward

We close Part II here, with the evidentiary ledger open rather than closed: a real, historically interesting, but confound-laden body of animal learning data; a small, statistically significant, but experimenter-dependent effect in human perceptual studies; a genuinely puzzling but not conclusively non-mundane pattern in industrial crystallography; a real and still partially open theoretical gap in developmental biology's account of biological form; and, threading through all of it, the general statistical pathologies - publication bias, researcher degrees of freedom, small sample sizes - that make any single result in this space harder to interpret than its face-value p-value would suggest.

Part III now turns from evidence to theory. If morphic resonance is even provisionally true, what would it actually require of physics, of information theory, of our understanding of mind and matter? We begin, in Chapter 14, by returning to the genetic and epigenetic alternative explanations for biological form in far greater technical depth than Chapter 11 allowed, asking specifically what the newer science of epigenetics - largely developed after Sheldrake's original 1981 formulation - has and hasn't done to fill the explanatory gap that originally motivated his hypothesis.