What is the importance of Parapsychology in the Study of Consciousness?
It is through our consciousness that we can come to understand anything, but only recently has consciousness itself become a subject for scientific study. Psychologists have returned to an earlier interest in consciousness after decades of avoiding it as a subject. They have developed new tools that make meaningful study more possible, and recent developments in theoretical physics have been interpreted by some as indicating that consciousness plays an important role in the very constitution of reality. Medicine has new and powerful means of influencing the quality of consciousness, as in the case of anti-depressant and other psycho-active drugs. This raises an urgent question about the importance of consciousness: Is it important in its own right, or is just a film on top of physical processes that should be manipulated as we see fit? Another fundamental question about consciousness has to do with what might be called its “existential status” — that is, in what sense does consciousne
