proposing physics as a surrogate spook."
　　　　  Michael Scriven, Ph.D., a philosopher of science who can recall with
　　　　  relish the occasion when, barely more than a graduate schoolboy
　　　　  himself, he argued with Einstein over "whether time could be closed
　　　　  as well as space," finds such dismissals a little glib. "I'm a
　　　　  little irked," he says in his crisp Down Under accent, "about
　　　　  mainstream scientists' knee-jerk reactions to strangeness, as if
　　　　  kangaroos can't be real because they've never seen one themselves.
　　　　  It's pathetic to hear Nobel Prize winners acting like children
　　　　  seeing a ghost at night."
　　　　  Scriven, who has been around the scientific block (he worked for the
　　　　  NIH in the forties and in the fifties served on the board of the
　　　　  Journal of Mental and Nervous Diseases), is a member of a loosely
　　　　  affiliated group of thinkers who are trying to come up with less
　　　　  reductionist solutions to the conundrums of consciousness. He refers
　　　　  to himself as the "Guardian at the Logical Gates" for the group
　　　　  (dubbed the Causality Project and sponsored by the same Fetzer
　　　　  Foundation that funded the Moyers series.)
　　　　  "But it's also wrong to say," he hastens to add, "that just because
　　　　  there's something parapsychological out there, everything we know
　　　　  must crumble. The basis of science is so well founded, so built up
　　　　  layer upon layer, that this stuff is no more than a little crack at
　　　　  the edges of some very old, very solid monuments."
　　　　  Others think, however, that the cracks could widen into a serious
　　　　  structural flaw. Consider Spiegel's Stanford study, where women with
　　　　  advanced breast disease who attended a psychological support group
　　　　  lived twice as long as those who didn't attend. Suppose an
　　　　  anticancer drug were undergoing trials, and the experimental group,
　　　　  unbeknownst to the experiments, contained a disproportionate number
　　　　  of patients who were also in group therapy. Longer survival rates
　　　　  might not have to do entirely with the efficacy of the
　　　　  pharmaceutical, but with the patients' state of mind. Thus, even
　　　　  carefully designed experiments could be hopelessly, invisibly
　　　　  skewed.
　　　　  This would be what Larry Dossey calls a "local" effect of
　　　　  consciousness, the stuff of PNI: a person's attitudes, emotions, and
　　　　  thoughts can have effects on their bodies. But Dossey and the Panel
　　　　  on Mind/Body Interventions go yet further, pointing to evidence
　　　　  suggestive of "non-local" effects: that the body may be "influenced