My comment was in response to your statement:

"Some excellent scientists have already devoted much time and effort to trying to prove psi exists with little to show for it."

Actually, nearly every scientist that has devoted "much time" to psi research has had positive results. Skeptics generally don't do tests, apart from Wiseman (who is guilty in many cases of very selective reporting, if you take time to read his papers, and in the case of Jaytee actually had positive results), and Blackmore (who you quoted, though she herself agrees with Berger that no conclusions should be made from her experiments).

The highest ranking experiments would probably be the Ganzfeld, which have been replicated over a long period of time. Apart from that, others of interest are the presentiment experiments of Dean Radin (replicated by Dick Bierman), Sheldrake's "sense of staring" (which I'm pretty sure have at least one replication), remote viewing (pronounced positive by Jessica Utts, and skeptic Ray Hyman - though Hyman covered his tracks with an extremely basic caveat), and the work of the PEAR labs.

Unfortunately the obvious explanation in that case was Oscar was sleeping on their faces,

I'd be very interested to know what are considered the most convincing results pointing to the existence of psi. Anybody?

Further research than Blackmore's article would turn up some surprising findings. Rick Berger examined Blackmore's claims, finding "the claim of 'ten years of psi research' actually represents a series of hastily constructed, executed, and reported studies that were primarily conducted during a 2-year period." Further, seven of her twenty-one published experiments produced statistically significant results for psi - however, Blackmore filtered her results and explained positive results as being 'flawed', and negative results as being from sound experiments. Berger doesn't claim this as evidence for psi though, commenting...

"Blackmore's claims that her database shows no evidence for psi are unfounded, because the vast majority of her studies were carelessly designed, executed, and reported, and in Blackmore's own assessment, individually flawed. As such, no conclusions should be drawn from this database."

Here is quote from her:

"The way I really think is more like this "I am a scientist. I think the way to the truth is by investigation. I suspect that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and life after death do not exist because I have been looking in vain for them for 25 years. I have been wrong lots of times before and am not afraid of it"."

In particular, a skeptic could test if anyone could predict when Pam had started to return home from the dog’s pattern of waiting-by-the porch at a better than chance level. If a few randomly chosen students say) couldn’t do so, he’d have proved the claim of Wiseman that the dog exhibited no pattern of behavior that predicted Pam’s return. OTOH, if his testees were all very successful, as I expect, he’d have falsified Wiseman’s claim. (Testees should be offered a reward for successful prediction, and should be randomly chosen, to eliminate “ringers.”)

It would be time well spent to help determine if psi is real. And it would be a little spare change out of a scoftic’s pockets.

Wiseman attempted to debunk a claim that was made on a TV show, not the claim in the entirety of Sheldrake's earlier and more thorough work, which hadn’t been published at that point. One of the announcers had apparently claimed or implied that Jaytee almost infallibly signaled Pam's return by going to the porch, and this is what gave Wiseman his target to debunk. He didn't debunk the entire pattern of Jaytee’s behavior, although when speaking to audiences of skeptics and to the press he and his co-authors claimed that he had done so. (“We tried the best we could to capture this ability and we didn’t find any evidence to support it” (Smith); “When we put it to the test, what’s going on is normal not paranormal” (Wiseman).)

Jaytee's psychic behavior was indicated by her staying on the porch more than 2/3 of the time during the period Pam was returning home, as opposed to less than 10% of the time prior to the start of Pam's return. This is explained in a post on the Skeptico site by davidsmith73, here: http://forum.mind-energy.net/skeptiko-podcast/24-can-dogs-know-podcast.html#post1571

Here are some selected sentences from it: "Wiseman et al are posing a different hypothesis to Sheldrake. They are saying that any telepathic ability of Jaytee should necessarily be reflected in the first trip [of two minute's length] to the porch. ... We have no reason to think that normal psychological processes should not operate in parallel with psi ... [as a part of which ] Jaytee always goes to the porch [briefly]…."

The problem is, as Dr G says, that you can't prove something doesn't exist - you can only prove it does exist.

In this experiment proving the dog is psychic comes down to making a judgement about which of the dog's behaviours should be considered evidence that it is psychic.

This is why two people can look at the same evidence - as it appears they have done here - and come to radically different conclusions. So, M. C., the fact that Wiseman and Sheldrake agree their data corresponds doesn't necessarily mean only one of them is right about the interpretation.

The same thing happens in lots of psychology experiments. People do the same experiment and get different results then argue vehemently for their own interpretation. Then they set up their own experiments to prove their own point of view is correct.

Ultimately the view that usually wins is the one that has the most evidence to back it up. Or at least that's the way it works in theory.

The only way for this question about this dog to be resolved is to do more experiments on the dog. This time everyone should agree on the criteria for psychic phenomena beforehand.

Then, if there's one psychic dog, there are probably more - so lets do the same experiment on other dogs.

The reason this won't happen is that the majority of people, including me, would consider this process of experimentation a gigantic waste of time.

But that's just my personal view.

http://www.sheldrake.org/controversies/wiseman.html

Here's Sheldrake's commentary on Wiseman.

This is the sort of thing that makes me throw up my hands about skeptic/credent debates. Someone here is full of bullshit, and if I knew who it was I would dismiss them from all future consideration - but I don't know who it is.