Chapter Four

When I was six or seven, I was still a devout Catholic, and I believed in the power of prayer. At a class bowling party, when my turn came I silently said a Hail Mary, hoping the mother of God would help me throw strikes. She didn’t come through. Nor did Jesus, to whom I appealed in a snowball fight with older boys, keep me from being smacked in the face so hard by an iceball that I started bawling.

These disappointments contributed to my loss of faith, but I continued paranormal experiments in a secular vein well into my teens. I passed the time in dull school assemblies by telepathically commanding classmates in front of me to scratch their ears. Never worked. I could have been commanding them not to scratch.

I had better luck when I was 17 and carried out a card-reading experiment with Chris, a friend who had read a book by parapsychologist J.B. Rhine. Chris used the five cards that Rhine employed in experiments demonstrating extrasensory perception, or ESP. Each displayed a different symbol. Square, circle, cross, five-pointed star, three wavy lines.

I stared at the cards and Chris tried to guess them. After he guessed the first nine cards correctly, I started giggling, and Chris did too. Then he couldn’t guess correctly any more. Or so I remember. We were probably smoking weed. I called Chris while working on this chapter, and he said his memory of the incident was similar, although he couldn’t recall exactly how many cards he guessed correctly.

Another anomalous experience: In the mid-1980s I was sipping mint juleps in the living room of an old farmhouse in Maine with two women, India, the house’s owner, and her roommate Suzie, whom I married several years later. There was a strange noise, and we stopped talking to listen. It sounded like a woman crying upstairs. India and Suzie said it was a ghost, whom they had heard before. That incident and the card-reading episode remain inexplicable to me.

After I became a professional science journalist, my interest in the paranormal, or psi, faded as I delved into more scientifically acceptable mysteries. I decided that ghosts, telepathy and telekinesis are woo. My skepticism is not strictly rational—that is, based entirely on objective, empirical analysis. Like, say, sexual faithfulness, skepticism has become a fundamental part of my identity, personal and professional. A choice.

I’m proud of my skepticism, but a little ambivalent, too, because it is based in part on cowardice (again, like sexual faithfulness). I fear if I become too open-minded toward the paranormal, I might harm my image as a science writer, such as it is, and my self-image. I might forget who I really am. But in part because of my modest anomalous experiences, I’ve never achieved 100-percent certainty that the paranormal does not exist.

When I was writing a book on mysticism in 2000, the topic of psi kept popping up, and I dealt with it by devoting a chapter to British psychologist Sue Blackmore. Blackmore, after a spectacular, drug-induced out-of-body experience in college, believed in and tried to find evidence for astral projection and other manifestations of psi. But after many years she concluded that most of the evidence stemmed from confirmation bias or fraud. I liked and trusted Blackmore, so I believed her. I also wanted to believe her.

In 2004 physicist Freeman Dyson, who possesses one of the truly great minds I have encountered, proposed in The New York Review of Books that “paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science.” Scientists have had a hard time producing empirical proof of psi, he conjectured, because it tends to occur under conditions of “strong emotion and stress,” which are “inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures.”

Dyson even offered an explanation for what Rhine called the “decline effect,” the tendency of subjects to show less telepathy over time. “In a typical card-guessing experiment,” Dyson wrote, “the participants may begin the session in a high state of excitement and record a few high scores, but as the hours pass, and boredom replaces excitement, the scores decline.”

In 2007 I ran into Dyson at a scientific conference in Europe, and he affirmed his belief in psi. We happened to have this exchange while sitting at a table with seven or eight scientists. Soon, everyone started swapping stories about paranormal experiences. Surprised, I asked who, at the table, thought paranormal effects might be real. All, as I recall, raised their hands. None, other than Dyson and Wolf Singer, a German neuroscientist, had publicly revealed their open-mindedness. They worried that disclosure might harm their careers.

My skepticism wobbled again in 2014 when I met Rupert Sheldrake at a conference in England. Sheldrake, who earned a Ph.D. in biology at Cambridge, is a leading parapsychologist, renowned, or notorious, for claiming that humans, dogs and other animals have extrasensory perception. Sheldrake and I hit it off. He was smart, knowledgeable, funny, passionate about his research without being fanatical. He told me that scientists constantly confess, privately, that they keep their belief in the paranormal secret for fear of damaging their reputations. These are some of the reasons why I have devoted a chapter to the strange, tragic case of Stuart Kauffman.

* * * * *

Kauffman, who was born in 1939, has had multiple professional identities. He studied philosophy at Oxford, switched to medicine and earned an M.D., left medicine to do genetic research, earned several patents, became a biotechnology entrepreneur and even a business consultant. He is best known as a theoretical biologist, who claims that conventional materialist science cannot account for life and consciousness. He is one of the most intrepid mind-body theorists I know.

In early encounters, Kauffman aroused mixed feelings in me. I first talked to him over the phone in 1991 for an article on the origin of life. Kauffman had attracted attention for proposing that life emerged from a generic process called auto-catalysis, in which simple chemical compounds combine to form more complex structures capable of replication, mutation, evolution. I quoted Kauffman saying of his theory, “I’m sure I’m right,” a statement for which he apparently took some heat.

I interviewed him face to face three years later at the Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems, then one of the hippest places, intellectually, on the planet. People at the small but high-powered think tank were at the forefront of a field called complexity. They were creating a new science that could explain hideously complex things better than conventional reductionist methods. Armed with powerful new computers and mathematics, they were seeking general principles underpinning cells, immune systems, brains, nations, global economies…

Ugh. Even now, after all these years, when I describe the field of complexity, I feel like I’m writing an advertorial, the kind of crap that publishers put on book jackets, or that academic departments paste on their websites to impress students, parents and funders. I feel like I’m tapping the part of my brain dedicated not to genuine expression but to bullshit.

At any rate, Kauffman was a star of the Santa Fe Institute, along with Nobel-winning physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Phil Anderson. Kauffman was a theoretician