I had an old VHS cassette as a kid that had some monks balancing on swords and spears and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Some of that definetely looked mind over matter.
I've seen those as well, but I think it can be explained via mundane means.
I know there's some Robert Anton Wilson fans around, thought this quote was interesting:
Those who reject even telepathy have reached the point where they are impugning either the honesty or the sanity of several thousand scientific researchers on all major continents over a period of decades. Such expedient ways of disposing of data are shared only by the most ardent anti-Evolutionists among the Fundamentalist sects.
—R.A. Wilson, Cosmic TriggerBut then RAW was known for his fondness of parapsychology. More interesting to me is this section of Turing's
COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE:
(9) The Argument from Extrasensory Perception
I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.
It'd be interesting to see what evidence was so convincing. Was it genuine? Was it merely parlor tricks that fooled unwary scientists?
I prefer to be agnostic about such things, because it seems unfair to appeal to the authority of scientists only when they say things in line with our modern conception of reality. For example, how many of us can really refute the arguments of the Intelligent Designer without recourse to shaming tactics of the "Only stupid people believe in that!" variety? That kind of tactic, IMO, may be pragmatic but ultimately is beneath my sense of intellectual integrity.
Far better, IMO, to point out that even if ID were true it would not mean Yaweh was real, or any deity was responsible. The Nobel winning physicist Josephson has a theory that involves Wheeler's idea that the observer in QM has an effect on determining reality, and that this produces physical laws as well as natural selection. (See
here +
here.)
In the case of ESP, I prefer to just wait and see if anyone can find a smoking gun for this sort of thing.