Most honest, informed sceptics these days accept that there is an effect.
In the face of the overallbody of evidence, it would be irrational, illogical and against occam to suggest each and every last peice of scientific evidence is a result of either self delusion, cheating or collusion of some sort. In fact it is extraordinary unlikely that that should account for every psi effect on record.
The liklihood is that the effect exists and current scientific thinking does not yet understand the mechanism of action.
People who study the phenomena agree that the effect shall be known as the 'Psi Effect'. You have to accept and remember that no known method of action has been found to account for the Ganzfeld. And if you are to assume that each and every last known recorded purported 'effect' is responsible to either delusion, fraud or error, in light of so many undeunked accounts, that is an extraordinary claim in itself, and as such requires extraordinary evidence.
The fact is, the method of action has not been identified, yet it fits so close to both common human experience and now the QM theories of non-local behaviour, that it is more likely that the effect is indeed non-local and therefore worthy of increased research and funding.
Here's the first part of the compilation of resources. Please feel free to add to it so we can begin the new forum with a good firm grounding.
"[...]When 10 new studies published after the Milton Wiseman cut off date are added to their database, the overall ganzfeld effect again becomes significant, but the mean effect size is still smaller than those from the original studies. Ratings of all 40 studies by 3 independent raters reveal that the effect size achieved by a replication is significantly correlated with the degree to which it adhered to the standard ganzfeld protocol. Standard replications yield significant effect sizes comparable with those obtained in the past. " Bem, D.J, Palmer, J. and Broughton, R.S. (2001). Updating the Ganzfeld database: a victim of its own success? Journal of Parapsychology, 65, 207-218
The above was also covered in
Science News:
"Since the metanalysis was completed, nine more ganzfeld studies have been published. Milton acknowledges that the psi effect would be statistically significant if the analysis were updated to include these studies." -
http://www.sciencenews.org
Bem's response to Hyman - http://comp9.psych.cornell.edu/dbem...e_to_hyman.html
"The Ganzfeld experiments at Edinburgh are getting highly
significant results. They appear to be well designed and
if they are carried out as stated, then the results are
very unlikely to be due to chance and therefore may be
evidence of ESP. " - Dr S Blackmore (member of CSICOP)
Bem, D. J. and Honorton, C. (1994). Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer, Psychological Bulletin, 115, 4-18. Here's the article online: psi in the ganzfeld.
http://www.psych.cornell.edu/dbem/does_psi_exist.html
Child, I. L. (1985). Psychology and anomalous observations: The question of ESP in dreams. American Psychologist, 40, 1219-1230.
Jahn, R. G. and Dunne, B. J. (1986). On the quantum mechanics of consciousness, with application to anomalous phenomena. Foundations of Physics, 16, 721-772.
Jahn, R. G. (1982). The persistent paradox of psychic phenomena: An engineering perspective. Proceedings of the IEEE, 70, 136-170.
Radin, D. I. (1989). Searching for "signatures" in anomalous human-machine interaction research: A neural network approach. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 3, 185-200.
Radin, D. I. & Nelson, R. D. (1989). Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems. Foundations of Physics, 19, 1499-1514.
Radin, D. I. (1994). On complexity and pragmatism. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 8 (4), 523-534.
Rao, K. R. & Palmer, J. (1987). The anomaly called psi: Recent research and criticism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 539-551.
Utts, J. (1991). Replication and meta-analysis in parapsychology. Statistical Science, 6, 363-378.
Jessica Utts' Report on Remote Viewing for the US government, critic Ray Hyman's Response to Utts' Report, and her Response to Hyman's Response.
http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/users/utts/response.html
).