# data[].attributes.body
1. Learning more about James Randi's past as a stage magician and escape artist was very interesting. I had no idea just how popular of a performer he was at the time and how often people compared him to another skeptic/magician, Harry Houdini. It was also interesting to see just how much his knowledge of magic helped him so much as a skeptic.

2. James Randi was passionate about ensuring people know how to identify pseudoscience and we are surrounded by it on a daily basis. With this being said, knowing what I know now thanks to our research into Randi we have a better idea of what to do when we come in contact with a farfetched pseudoscience claim.

3. I found Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge to be the most interesting piece to research. It is fascinating to know how passionate Randi is about the paranormal, and how badly he wants to see it be proven true. The challenge stated that anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria would be awarded $1,000,000 from the James Randi Educational Foundation. Over a thousand people have applied, and every single one has failed.

4. What I will remember most from this research is to be wary of certain claims being made. James Randi wants people to be aware of just how dangerous pseudoscience can be, how to spot it, and avoid it. With this being said, now thanks to James Randi and this research I have a better understanding of these tell-tale signs.

5. I believe that the pseudoscience that is the most harmful would be faith healing. Faith healing is extremely dangerous for a number of reasons. For one, faith healers scam unsuspecting people who then waste their money on a treatment that will not work. Additionally, because said treatment won’t work, those with a serious illness seeking a remedy from faith healing are putting themselves in even more danger as they are neglecting proper treatment. When it comes to faith healing, people’s lives are at stake. The pseudoscience I think is the least harmful is astrology. Believing in astrology is not dangerous in any way and is actually a fun, light-hearted way to learn things about yourself, even if they may not be 100% accurate.

6. I think the most important things to take away from this course would be the pseudoscience red flags. Knowing and understanding the red flags will help you identify pseudoscience and know when to avoid it.

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This is a poster advertising one of Randis old magic shows. As mentioned before, James Randi used to be a magician and went by the stage name, The Amazing Randi.

Connection: In 1946, James Randi started his career as a stage magician and escapologist. Randi could perform countless tricks and was known for his elaborate escape acts similar to those of Harry Houdini, another skeptic previously discussed throughout this course. Randi went on to break records with his stunts and again, went on to use his vast knowledge of magic to disprove any irrational claims.

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This is the cover of a book written by James Randi called The Faith Healers. In it, Randi talks about what faith healing is and how it needs to be exposed as a hoax.

Connection: When James first became a scientific skeptic he was very passionate about exposing faith healing and he did just that. He went on to expose countless faith healers such as Peter Popoff who we talked about in this course. By showing the public what these people’s true intentions were and that they couldn’t actually offer them any real help, Randi was able to save alot of people. He was able to save them from wasting their money and potentially harming themselves further as they could be neglecting much needed treatment.

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This is a photo of Uri Geller, an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He performs illusions like spoon bending and mind reading to emulate psychokinesis and other supernatural powers.

Connection: In 1973, James Randi was invited on the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Carson where Uri Geller would be a special guest. Randi was asked to help “prevent any trickery” within Uri’s performances. He provided all props and didn’t let any stage crew near them until they were filming. Once they were live and Geller was to perform his psychokinetic spoon-bending, he couldn’t do it. Surprisingly, this didn’t affect his career gravely. He continued being a guest star on multiple talk shows and performed regularly for paying attendees.

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This is a website all about skepticism and the paranormal. It carries loads of information about what pseudoscience is, what science is, how to compare the two, and much more. Viewers can browse podcasts, articles, journals, and more just through this site.

Connection: James Randi is best known for being a skeptic. He didn’t take anything at face value, and sought to investigate any claim that aimed to prove the existence of paranormal or pseudoscience activity. His legacy and what he’s known for is strongly reflected on this website and offers similar knowledge to which he preached. He never wanted anyone to fall victim to false psychic claims, so he would definitely appreciate a site like this one aiming to educate the public on psuedoscience and its dangers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
e Skeptic delivers great articles, videos, podcasts, reviews, op-eds, event announcements, and more to your inbox.

eSkeptic for September 4, 2020

In SPAS-008, we asked: (1) To what extent are peoples' political orientation consistent with their political party affiliation? and (2) How does political orientation correspond to political attitudes? To investigate this, we assessed attitudes towards abortion, climate change, and immigration among 600 self-identified liberals, moderates, and conservatives. Check out our latest findings.

Read this eSkeptic

eSkeptic for September 1, 2020

Dr. Michael Shermer considers the pitfalls of projecting the consequences of the pandemic for our future (the availability heuristic, the negativity bias, the difficulties of superforecasting, and the contingent nature of history). PLUS: In Science Salon # 131, Michael Shermer speaks with Stuart Ritchie his book Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth.

Read this eSkeptic

eSkeptic for August 28, 2020

In SPAS-007, the researchers asked: "Do sources of information differ by political orientation?". PLUS, this weekend only, Skeptic magazine back issues (in print or digital formats) are on sale for only 99 cents each!

Read this eSkeptic

eSkeptic for August 25, 2020

In Science Salon # 130, Michael Shermer speaks with Debra Soh - a neuroscientist who specializes in gender, sex, and sexual orientation - about her new book: The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.

Read this eSkeptic

eSkeptic for August 21, 2020

In SPAS-006, the researchers asked: "Do people with different political orientations have different bases-evidence or emotion-for their political opinions?" PLUS: Harriet Hall, M.D. examines Electronic Screen Syndrome (ESS) and shares the science.

Read this eSkeptic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
e Skeptic delivers great articles, videos, podcasts, reviews, op-eds, event announcements, and more to your inbox. eSkeptic for September 4, 2020 In SPAS-008, we asked: (1) To what extent are peoples' political orientation consistent with their political party affiliation? and (2) How does political orientation correspond to political attitudes?

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This website hosts an article written by Jacob Jolij who writes about James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge and Deepak Chopra’s $1,000,000 offer to anyone able to present a falsifiable theory of consciousness.

Connection: Randi and Chopra both host “challenges” that are impossible to complete. In this article, Jolij expresses his frustrations about how both skeptics aim to award a prize for an unachievable success. He jokes that Randi made a “safe bet” offering $1,000,000 to any proven psychic, knowing that he will never ever have to award that prize. Regarding Chopra’s offer, he says that it is pointless to offer a prize to someone who could falsify consciousness when as a society and scientists, “we are nowhere near an empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) theory of consciousness.” Both challenges are pointless and neither offer anything new or revolutionary to their respective topics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Whoa! Deepak Chopra is offering 1 million dollars to anyone able to present a falsifiable theory of consciousness, in response to James Randi's $1 Million Dollar challenge to show paranormal (psi) effects exist! Of course, Twitter and Facebook are going bonkers over this. And I have been going a little bit bonkers over all the responses, to be frank. Just to blow off some steam, here are my thoughts on Chopra's challenge, and the responses to it.

First of all, many people responded to Chopra's call with sarcasm and cynicism, and made fun of Chopra's lack of understanding of science.

It struck me how many of these people lack any understanding of science themselves, but I guess that's Twitter for you. I'd like to say to these people who 'fucking love science': proclaiming yourself an atheist or tweeting 'WOO WOO' to @jref does not make you a scientist any more than making a coherent sentence with the words "quantum", "universal", and "spirit".

So, what's this all about? Years ago, James Randi, a professional stage magician, and renowned skeptic put out a 1 million dollar prize to any individual able to show true 'paranormal' ability. Anyone who would be able to read the future, do telekinesis, or make money as Ghostbuster, Randi would pay one million dollars. To date the prize remains unclaimed.

Deepak Chopra, on the other hand, is an Indian MD who writes books on consciousness and quantum mysticism using the Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, and apparently makes enough money to throw a million dollars at anyone coming up with a falsifiable theory of consciousness.

Neither of these challenges make sense.

Randi's challenge does not make sense because it operates on a straw man argument: it makes a caricature of psi and then shoots at it. No, there are no such things as seeing in the future, telekinesis, or mind reading. No matter how sad it makes me to admit this, Professor X and Jean Grey DO NOT EXIST (come on, you all at least fantasized about being able to read minds and get the remote and/or your beer and pizza without having to leave your couch!) Period. Does not work, cannot work - not according to the laws of physics, not according to present theories on psi. What might exist, though, are weak, anomalous effects that if they exist, may only be detected in high-powered studies involving a large number of subjects set up in a very specific manner, that need to be pre-registered, and replicated, and replicated again before we can even start drawing conclusions about the existence of psi. So, no individual will ever be able to show paranormal ability, and thus claim the Randi prize. Safe bet, Mr. Randi.

Chopra's challenge makes no sense because it is horribly ill-defined. Coming up with a falsifiable scientific theory of consciousness is not possible without properly defining 'falsifiable' and 'consciousness'. What Chopra means to say is he will give a million dollars to anyone who can come up with a falsifiable materialist theory of conscious experience, that is, a theory of the subject of consciousness - the experience itself; not (necessarily) its contents. And that is an impossible challenge, because it is a contradiction in terms. You cannot come up with a falsifiable materialist theory of consciousness, and claim the Chopra prize. Safe bet, Mr. Chopra.

But how does mind relate to matter, then? Why can't we have a falsifiable theory of consciousness?

I am not going to repeat Introduction to Philosophy of Mind here, but roughly we have four classes of mind/matter-theories:

1. Only matters exists, mind is an illusion

2. Mind exists, independent of matter

3. Mind is dependent on matter (or vice versa)

4. Only mind exists, matter is an illusion

Now, let's be good scientists, and shoot at these propositions to falsify them, shall we? Classes 1 and 2 are fairly easy to shoot at, so I'll use proper bullets Classes 3 and 4 are somewhat more challenging, though.

Let's start with 1, which you may call orthodox materialism. It's easy to debunk (with one caveat, though).

Cogito ergo sum. I have conscious experiences. Even if these experiences (including the feeling of being the subject of conscious expriences) are illusions, I am still experiencing these illusions. Therefore consciousness exists - even if all other apparent conscious beings in the universe would be philosophical zombies (that is, beings that act rational, but lack conscious experience).

If consciousness exists, there is 'mind'. This rules out orthodox materialist monism (the notion that there is only matter, and that mind is an illusion).

Caveat: I can only falsify this for myself, because I cannot with certainty claim anyone else has conscious experiences. Vice versa, you cannot verify my conscious experiences, so you should not believe my claim, but base your evaluation on your own conscious experience (or lack thereof).

Number 2 is good old Cartesian substance dualism. Let's shoot!

In order to move a body, the mind needs a way to operate it

Operating a body requires brain cells to fire

In order to make a brain cell fire, energy is required - the mind needs to add energy to the brain in order to make this work

Physics (ie our understanding of matter) does not allow the creation of energy within a closed system. How can mind get energy into the brain?

The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics will not save you here, Church of the Quantum Spirit. Quantum mechanics describes physical reality at the finest grained level, and contrary to classical mechanics, which is deterministic in nature, quantum mechanics is probabilistic. In other words: the x(t) = v*t gives the position of a moving object at time (t) with absolute certainty; the Schroedinger equation (or better, a transformation thereof) only gives the probability that a particle will be at a given position at a given time. A typical 'quantum woo'-argument is that the probabilistic nature of QM potentially allows for a mechanism via which mind can influence matter. However, QM is probabilistic - the outcome of a quantum measurement is inherently unpredictable. That may sound very convenient if you want to believe in free will, but in fact it is a terrible property for a cognitive system, or social beings like us. Our entire social network, and our own mental sanity flourish by the mere fact that we are (in general) quite predictable in our actions and thoughts. Let's please not introduce fundamental randomness in there, I'd say...

Classes three and four are more difficult to shoot down. Since WordPress does not allow me to use mortar grenade points, but only bullet points I'll switch back to full text.

Number 3 is the class of what I call 'weak monism'. We accept mind and matter exist. However, the one substance is dependent on the other (or: one substance can be reduced to the other). This is the category in which we will find main stream theories of consciousness. Weak monist theories come in two flavours. Materialist (or physicalist) theories propose that mind is the result of physical processes, and can be described as such. The Orthodox Skeptics are adherents of these theories, as are most main stream scientists. Idealist theories state that mind is supreme, and that matter is created by the mind. Chopra's Church of the Quantum Spirit is of this denomination.

Weak monism, though, suffers from the dreaded Hard Problem. How does a change in one substance result in changes in the other? This goes for both materialism and idealism. Materialists need to explain how a change in matter (brain cells) translates into consciousness, and why some physical processes (action potentials) result in consciousness in some circumstances, whereas the same physical process do not in other circumstances. However, also if you're from the Church of the Quantum Spirit, you have a hard problem. If matter is a result of mind, how come not all mental activity results in changes in matter?

According to many materialists, including Dan Dennett, the Hard Problem is not really a problem at all. Consciousness simply is the sum of all brain activity, period. In slightly more subtle wording: consciousness is believed to be an emergent phenomenon, resulting from the complexity of the neural networks of our brain. This is called supervenience - reality can be described at different levels, and higher levels of description (consciousness, mind) are dependent on features of lower levels of description (brain, neurons). Or, as Kalat has put it in Biological Psychology for generations of psychology students: you can look at the Mona Lisa as a painting of La Giaconda, and talk about in the sense of her mysterious smile, or you can give a detailed descripton of the canvas and pigments used. Same thing, different levels of description. Similarly, mind is the same thing as brain activity, but simply described in different terms. Obviously, we can easily swap around the words 'mind' and 'matter' to fix the Hard Problem for idealism.

Now, I hate to bring this news to the Orthodox Skeptics, but this is Woo in its purest form. You cannot call any theory that only says 'if you make something complex enough it becomes conscious' a serious theory! How complex does a system have to be in order to become conscious? At what level of description does consciousness emerge? Does the physical system need to be a brain, or would any physical system do? In other words - calling consciousness an emergent property of brain activity and leave it at that is hardly any more scientific than declaring universal quantum love and spirit (or insert your favourite Deepak Chopra quantumism here).

There are several problems with the emergence/supervenience theories of consciousness, but I personally think John Searle brought up the best argument against supervenience theories. Let me paraphrase it in terms of the Chinese Room thought experiment: in this thought experiment, we lock up a man who only speaks English in a room. Via a slot in the door he is given sheets of paper with Chinese characters. Using a manual in the room, he is able to look up an appropriate response in English. He writes the reply on another sheet of paper, which he returns via the slot. From the outside, it looks like the man knows Chinese! In reality, of course, he does not. Searle used this to argue that true artificial intelligence does not exist - for example, if you are training a system to respond to a user in natural language, what you're doing is giving an artificial system a manual. The system does not understand language in the sense we understand language.

The Chinese Room can also serve as a thought experiment on consciousness. Take a system (a body), and pop a computational unit in there that can map inputs to outputs it (let's call this magic device a 'brain'). The brain or parts of it are not conscious in any sense - they simply map inputs to outputs. However, looking at the system, operating in the world, it is conscious, or at least, bears all signs of it. This is pretty much in the line of Alva Noë's ideas of how consciousness depends on embodiment.

In his book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking", Dan Dennett defuses Searle's argument by stating that the thought experiment is flawed. It does not matter if the 'guy inside' understands Chinese or not - the system (that is, the room) does. Digging deeper for 'understanding' or 'consciousness' makes no sense. There is no 'Hard Problem' - conscious experience is just what a system is doing at a particular level of description.

Now, I would like to very explicitly state here that Dan Dennett is probably one of the greatest minds alive, and I am nowhere in his league. I am a great fan of his work, and I feel that it should be compulsory reading for any undergraduate in psychology. However, I think he is wrong here. The reason for that? He plays a trick on us in defusing the Chinese Room.

The trick is this: he smuggles in an external observer. The Chinese Room understands Chinese only if observed by and interacting with an external observer. The 'understanding' of Chinese by the room only exists in the mind of the observer! Otherwise, the actions of the Chinese Room are meaningless. Likewise, the brain-in-a-body-operating-in-the-world is only conscious if observed in an appropriate context. Following Searle, I do find this problematic. Consciousness is a first-person perspective. I know I am conscious, because I am both subject and object of my experiences. Who or what is then describing the activity of my brain-body in such a way it enables my first person consciousness? It cannot be me because I am the result of this observation, and unless we allow paradoxical cause-effect relations (which I doubt any materialist would be very keen of), we are left with a very urgent question: in whose mind do I exist?

In sum, I see pretty big problems with materialist theories of consciousness. However, converting to idealism does not solve the problem. As argued earlier, idealism also suffers from the Hard Problem, and the above analysis applies as well. The Hard Problem is deviously difficult to defuse if you accept that mind and matter exist .

One possible solution is to give consciousness a 'fundamental' status. Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like the universal forces. Hameroff and Penrose's Orch OR model rests on this assumption, but also Giulio Tononi's highly fashionable and critically acclaimed IIT 3.0 model of consciousness puts as its 'zeroth' postulate ' consciousness exists'. In a recent online article, Christof Koch even explicitly explored panpsychism (the idea that everything is conscious) as a solution to the mind-body problem. However, this does not explain why consciousness exists. And given that physicists are not satisfied with merely stating that 'gravity exists', we as psychologists should not be satisfied with stating that 'consciousness exists'.

Anyway, in a rather large nutshell, this is why the Chopra Challenge makes no sense. Apart from the fact it is poorly defined, we are nowhere near an empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) theory of consciousness. All we're doing now and have been doing since the era of brain scanning is looking for neural correlates of consciousness, which is a very useful enterprise because it provides boundary conditions for consciousness, but we have not been cracking on the Hard Problem at all. The Hard Problem is probably fundamentally unsolvable within a weak monist framework. In itself this does not prove Chopra right, of course.

On a separate note: what would advance our understanding is a potential falsification of the idea that mind can be reduced to matter. This is actually the reason I started doing psi research, apart from my lifelong wish of being a Ghostbuster when I finally grow up. If we can convincingly demonstrate that certain aspects of mental functioning cannot be reduced to physical processes, we would have a strong case to either revise our physical models, or falsify materialism. Given the potentially huge impact of psi research, and the fact that the present corpus of data does not allow for clear falsification of psi, I think it is a very worthwhile area of research. But that's my 2c.

Oh, we have one class of theories left, don't we? Absolute idealism or monist idealism states that only mind exists, and that matter is an illusion. Well, to quote Sherlock Holmes, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Woo woo...

PS regarding my last point, I can recommend reading Schroedinger's "What is Life?" It is a short book, which you can read in a couple of hours, but will stay with you for a lifetime. Yes, I know I stole that quote from the reviews of the book, but it's very true.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why no one will win the Randi or Chopra Challenges

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Whoa! Deepak Chopra is offering 1 million dollars to anyone able to present a falsifiable theory of consciousness, in response to James Randi's $1 Million Dollar challenge to show paranormal (psi) effects exist! Of course, Twitter and Facebook are going bonkers over this.

# data[].attributes.headline
Post #1: James Randi - By Madison Akkerman & Isabelle Mitchell

# data[].attributes.subject
Post #1: James Randi - By Madison Akkerman & Isabelle Mitchell

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This video by The Good Stuff on Youtube lets viewers in on a conversation with James Randi about supernatural powers and why it is his mission to debunk them. He discusses Uri Geller and his spoon-bending career along with psychics, faith healers, and appeal to authority. We learn about why people believe these pseudoscience charades, and what that harm is in doing so.

Connection: This video relates to many reasons for belief that we’ve learned about in this course. Perception & Observation is a prominent reason for belief that occurs in this video. When talking about Uri Geller the spoon bender, Randi describes that people accept Geller’s telekenis powers because they have not thought critically about what they are seeing. When people see Geller bend a spoon after he claims he has supernatural powers, they simply believe him because he is showing them that he can do what he says he can. Without critically thinking about the legistics or logic behind these tricks, people believe because they want to believe.

# data[].attributes.body
Description: In the following video, James Randi demonstrates psychic surgery as he has seen performed in the Philippines. By using sleight of hand they can make it seem as though they are doing a bare-handed operation where they penetrate the skin and remove anything that may be harming you.

Connection: In this video, James Randi shows us just how dangerous believing in pseudoscience claims can be. There are people who may opt to seek these psychic surgery treatments as opposed to legitimate medical advice. This can become concerning, especially in situations where someone’s life is at stake. Additionally these “psychics” performing these treatments are scamming innocent people by making them think they’ve helped them when in reality they have done nothing at all. As Randi continues to disprove pseudoscience claims, people are able to become more aware and realize when they are falling victim to it themselves.

# data[].attributes.body
Description: Before James Randi decided he wanted to make it his goal to disprove pseudoscience claims, he was actually a magician. In the following video we see James performing a card trick.

Connection: Some may find it odd that a man who once did magic for a living went on to fight countless pseudoscience claims but he was only using his knowledge to his advantage. Having a background in magic, he was able to use this to help him figure out how certain claims were being falsified, such as the bending of the spoon trick performed by Uri Geller. Randi was easily able to prove that Geller was not using his mind to bend the spoon because he knew similar tricks as from his previous career. James Randi went on to become a world-renowned scientific skeptic and his legacy lives on today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
James Randi: Performing a Magic Trick | Big Think

# data[].attributes.body
Description: This article by The New York Times describes various accounts of James Randi debunking psychics and other people who claim to have supernatural powers. He would invite them to showcase their powers in a controlled environment where he could measure their validity, and if someone could show evidence of supernatural powers or paranormal activity, Randi would award them $1,000,000.

Connection:

Fei Wang is one of the "performers" the article mentions. Wang was a 32-year old who claimed he could transmit a “mysterious force” from his hand that could be felt by others as pressure, heat, or an unexplainable force. James Randi invited him to the Million Dollar Challenge where if Wang could prove his powers by 8 of 9 guests being able to feel his force through a curtain, he would be proven honest and awared $1,000,000. He was unable to do so, thus proven to be a fraud.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
James Randi in front of a painting done by his partner, the artist José Alvarez. Credit... Jeff Minton for The New York Times

"A cinch," Randi replied.

Ajay Appaden was 25 and had come from the Indian city Cochin. He was attending the conference for the second year with the help of a travel grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which was established with donations from the Internet pioneer Rick Adams and Johnny Carson. In addition to offering grants, JREF holds the $1 million in bonds that back the challenge, and pays Randi's annual $200,000 salary.

Video

Back

transcript

The Disillusionist

In this excerpt from the forthcoming documentary film "An Honest Liar," James Randi explains how Harry Houdini inspired him to also become a famed magician and escape artist.

No script.

In this excerpt from the forthcoming documentary film "An Honest Liar," James Randi explains how Harry Houdini inspired him to also become a famed magician and escape artist.

Raised as a Catholic, Appaden told me that he discovered Randi in 2010, when he watched the magician in an online TED talk discussing homeopathy. At the time Appaden was a student at a Christian college, struggling with his faith; two years later, during Randi's first visit to India, he took a 13-hour bus ride across the country to see Randi in person. "It literally changed my life," he told me, and explained that he now hopes to help teach skepticism in Indian schools.

The magician looked small and frail, lost in the folds of his striped dress shirt, leaning on his cane, but he mugged gamely for every acolyte. For many of his most zealous followers, the opportunity to meet Randi at TAM may be as close as they will ever come to a religious experience. "It's an obligation, it's a very heavy obligation," he said. "I can't stand one person being turned away and not being given the same attention that others have been given."

A few days before the conference, I visited Randi at his home, in Plantation, Fla. The modest octagonal house was almost hidden from the street by a lush garden of finger palms, elephant ears and paperbark trees. As we sat upstairs, surrounded by some 4,000 books - arranged alphabetically by subject, from alchemy, astrology, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle to tarot, U.F.O.s and witchcraft - he said that he disliked being called a debunker. He prefers to describe himself as a scientific investigator. He elaborated: "Because if I were to start out saying, 'This is not true, and I'm going to prove it's not true,' that means I've made up my mind in advance. So every project that comes to my attention, I say, 'I just don't know what I'm going to find out.' That may end up - and usually it does end up - as a complete debunking. But I don't set out to debunk it."

Born Randall James Zwinge in 1928, Randi began performing as a teenager in the 1940s, touring with a carnival and working table to table in the nightclubs of his native Toronto. Billed as The Great Randall: Telepath, he had a mind-reading act, and also specialized in telling the future. In 1949 he made local headlines for a trick in which he appeared to predict the outcome of the World Series a week before it happened, writing the result down, sealing it an envelope and giving it to a lawyer who opened and read it to the press after the series concluded. But no matter how many times he assured his audiences that such stunts were a result of subterfuge and legerdemain, he found there were always believers. They came up to him in the street and asked him for stock tips; when he insisted that he was just a magician, they nodded - but winked and whispered that they knew he was truly psychic. Once he understood the power he had over his audience, and how easily he could exploit their belief in the supernatural to make money, it frightened him: "To have deceived people like that . . . that's a terrible feeling," he said.

He turned instead to escapology - as The Amazing Randi: The Man No Jail Can Hold - and feats of endurance. He broke a record for his 55-minute stint encased in ice, and bested the time his hero Houdini had spent trapped in a coffin on the bottom of the swimming pool at the Hotel Shelton in Manhattan. But Randi never forgot the believers, and how susceptible they were to exploitation by those who lacked his scruples. And so, as his reputation as a magician grew, he also began to campaign against spiritualists and psychics. In 1964, as a guest on a radio talk show, he offered $1,000 of his own money in a challenge to anyone who could show scientific evidence of supernatural powers. Soon afterward, he began broadcasting his own national radio show dedicated to discussion of the paranormal. He bought a small house in Rumson, N.J., and installed a sign outside that announced randi - charlatan. He lived there alone, with a pair of talking birds and a kinkajou named Sam. Although Randi had known he was gay since he was a teenager, he kept that to himself. "I had to conceal it, you know," he told me. "They wouldn't have had a known homosexual working in the radio station. This was a day when you had to keep it completely hidden."

During the late '60s and early '70s, popular interest in the paranormal grew: There was a fascination with extrasensory perception and the Bermuda Triangle and best sellers like "Chariots of the Gods," which claimed Earth's ancient civilizations were visited by aliens. There were mystics, mind-readers and psychic surgeons, who were said to be able to extract tumors from their patients using only their bare hands - and without leaving a mark. Randi continued on his crusade. Few of his fellow illusionists were interested in exposing the way that conjuring tricks were used to dupe gullible audiences into believing in psychic abilities. "Everybody else just kind of rolled their eyes," Penn Jillette, a good friend of Randi's, told me. "'Why is Randi spending all this time doing this? We all know there is no ESP. It's just stupid people believe it, and that's fine.' "

In 1989, Randi and Geller were booked to appear together on a TV special, "Exploring Psychic Powers, Live!" According to Randi, before the broadcast, Geller pulled him into his dressing room and offered to end the feud. "There's no way that we are going to make peace until you level with your audiences," Randi replied. "Until you say that you are a magician like the rest of us, and that you don't have supernatural powers." Geller refused. (Geller says he does not recall the incident.) Soon after, Geller brought the first of several libel actions against Csicop and Randi - who, among other things, had characterized him as a sociopath and suggested his psychic feats had been learned from the backs of cereal boxes. Geller's suits in the United States were eventually dismissed. But the legal costs of fighting the cases were overwhelming, and Randi went through almost all of a MacArthur Foundation grant of $272,000 awarded to him in 1986 for his paranormal investigations. Finally, the struggle with Geller even cost Randi his place in Csicop; when Paul Kurtz told him it had become too expensive to keep going after such a litigious target, and demanded he stop discussing Geller in public, Randi resigned in fury.

Geller, who now lives in a large house beside the Thames River in England, says he long ago put the feud with Randi behind him. He claims to have used his show-business career as a cover for paranormal work on behalf of Mossad and the C.I.A., but he no longer calls himself a psychic. "I changed my title to 'mystifier,' " he told me. "And I love it - because it means nothing." But Randi's contempt for him still burns brightly. "He knows he is deceiving these people - individuals, in most cases - and he doesn't care what damage he does to them," Randi said. "They depend on the paranormal after they have met Geller, and you cannot talk them out of it. And that has crippled them for life."

Early one morning last summer, on a visit to Randi's house in Florida, I drew up outside a few minutes later than we had agreed. Randi, wearing a canary yellow sweatshirt, was waiting at the front door, holding his watch in his hand. "You're late!" he barked, and it was hard to tell if he was joking. We sat down in the living room to talk, and Randi spent half an hour laboriously adjusting his watch, winding the hands to display the correct date. "I am a little bit obsessed with having the right time," he said. "I've always been very, very, big on knowing what time it is. That's one of my connections with reality."

Randi has never smoked, taken narcotics or got drunk. "Because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers," he once said. "And I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That may mean giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I'm willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world."

That fixation on science and the rational life - and a corresponding desire to crusade for the truth - has a long history among magicians. John Nevil Maskelyne, who founded a dynasty of English conjurers in 1855 and became a prolific inventor, began his career by exposing fraudulent spiritualists and reproducing their tricks. Houdini turned to debunking mediums in his middle age as his career as an escapologist went into decline. He offered his own $10,000 reward to any spiritualist who could perform a "miracle" he could not duplicate himself. Martin Gardner, whose book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" is a founding text of modern skepticism, was also fascinated by magic, and became well known for his books explaining how many conjuring and mind-reading tricks rely upon strict laws of probability and number theory. Penn and Teller have since followed Randi down the path of conjurers who have become debunkers.

Randi now sees himself, like Einstein and Richard Dawkins, in the tradition of scientific skeptics. "Science gives you a standard to work against," he said. "Science, after all, is simply a logical, rational and careful examination of the facts that nature presents to us."

Although many modern skeptics continue to hold religious beliefs, and see no contradiction in embracing critical thinking and faith in God, Randi is not one of them. "I have always been an atheist," he told me. "I think that religion is a very damaging philosophy - because it's such a retreat from reality."

When I asked him why he believed other people needed religion, Randi was at his most caustic.

"They need it because they're weak," he said. "And they fall for authority. They choose to believe it because it's easy."

In the 1980s, Randi turned his talent for deception to debunking the supernatural. He set out to expose New Age channelers, mediums who - on shows and in profitable public appearances - purported to be possessed by ancient spirits. One, JZ Knight, a former cable TV saleswoman, claimed to be the terrestrial mouthpiece of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis who could predict the future.

To show how credulous audiences could be in the face of such claims, in 1987 Randi collaborated with the Australian version of "60 Minutes." He invented Carlos, a 2,000-year-old entity who, his publicity material stated, had last appeared in the body of a 12-year-old boy in Venezuela in 1900 but had now returned to manifest himself through a young American artist named José Alvarez. He prepared to take Alvarez on a tour of Australia.

Alvarez, at the time a 25-year-old student at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, was in fact Randi's boyfriend, and also his assistant. They met the year before in a Fort Lauderdale public library, where Alvarez was seeking visual references for a ceramics project. Randi, who had only recently relocated to Florida from New Jersey, struck up a conversation with him. They talked all afternoon and moved in together soon afterward.

Randi coached Alvarez carefully for his role as Carlos, rehearsing him through mock news conferences and TV appearances. He taught him how to squeeze a Ping-Pong ball in his armpit so that his pulse would appear to slow as he became "possessed" - "an old, old thing from Boy Scout camps," Randi told me. Before the trip, Randi sent out press kits to Australian TV networks and newspapers, filled with reports charting the apparently sensational - but fictional - progress of Carlos across the United States.

Soon after they arrived in February 1988, Alvarez was booked on many of the country's leading TV shows. Through an earpiece, Randi fed him answers to interview questions and the lines of doomsday prophecies. The climax of his tour was an appearance at the Sydney Opera House, after which the audience was invited to place orders for crystal artifacts, including the Tears of Carlos, priced at $500 each, and an Atlantis Crystal, offered at $14,000. Each proved popular - though Randi's team never accepted any money for them.

When the hoax was revealed a few days later on "60 Minutes," the Australian media was enraged at having been taken in; Randi countered that none of the journalists had bothered with even the most elementary fact-checking measures.

Afterward, Randi and Alvarez returned to Florida together, and Alvarez's reputation as an artist blossomed. For the next 14 years, he toured the Carlos persona around the world as part of a performance piece, appearing onstage in Padua, Italy, and sitting for photographs on the Great Wall of China re-enacting the hoax. In 2002, the work Alvarez created from the Carlos episode was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Meanwhile, the establishment of the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996 allowed Randi to continue his own pursuits with the foundation's headquarters, a Spanish-style stucco building in Fort Lauderdale, as his base of operations. He created the Million Dollar Challenge and regularly wrote bulletins for the foundation's website, where the message boards formed an online hub for skeptics worldwide. In recent years, he began making regular podcasts, and he also created his own YouTube channel to discuss everything from Nostradamus to cold fusion. In 2007, during his TED talk taking aim at quackery and fraud, Randi delighted his audience by gobbling an entire bottle of 32 Calms homeopathic sleeping tablets - which Randi speculated was certainly a fatal dose.

Disappointed by what he saw as the media's indifference to the Million Dollar Challenge, that same year Randi revised the rules and announced a plan to take the challenge to high-profile psychics, including Sylvia Browne, John Edward and - once again - Uri Geller. None of them agreed to participate. He had more success in 2008, when he invited James McCormick, a British businessman, to take the challenge. McCormick had built equipment that could supposedly detect explosives from afar, which Randi recognized was simply a telescoping antenna swiveling on a plastic handle - a dowsing rod. Randi publicly offered the million-dollar prize to McCormick if he could prove that the device worked as claimed. McCormick, who was selling his product to security forces in the Middle East, never responded. But the British Police began an investigation, and last year McCormick was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison, having sold at least $38 million worth of his miraculous device to the Iraqi government.

Recently, age and illness have begun to slow Randi down. In 2009, following chemotherapy for intestinal cancer, he presented the opening address at TAM from a wheelchair. Earlier this year, JREF's Fort Lauderdale building was sold, and its reference library and collection of memorabilia were boxed up and relocated to Randi's home. When I visited, many of the cartons remained unpacked; the portrait of Isaac Asimov that once hung above the fireplace in the JREF library was propped against a wall.

Randi was all but marooned in the house - he was forbidden to drive while he awaited cataract surgery - and Alvarez had been forced to surrender his driver's license, after a series of events that began on Sept. 8, 2011. That morning there was a knock on the front door. When Randi opened it, a pair of federal agents stood before him. They asked to speak to Alvarez. Outside, Randi could see two unmarked S.U.V.s blocking the driveway and at least half a dozen agents surrounding the perimeter of the property. When Alvarez came downstairs from his room, the agents explained there was a problem. They wanted to talk to him about passport fraud. They cuffed him and took him out to the car. Randi was left alone in the house, holding business cards from State Department agents, who, Randi said, gave him instructions to wait 24 hours before calling them.

The agents took Alvarez directly to Broward County Jail, where he was photographed, issued a gray uniform and registered as FNU LNU: "first name unknown, last name unknown." In an interview room at the jail, he told an agent everything: He had fled homophobic persecution in Venezuela and had come to the U.S. on a two-year student visa. He met Randi and knew he wanted to stay with him. But when his visa expired, there was no way to renew it. He said he was given the name and Social Security number of José Alvarez by a friend in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub, and used it to apply for a passport in 1987. Alvarez told the agent he was deeply sorry for the trouble he had caused the real Alvarez - who he believed was dead but turned out to be a teacher's aide living in the Bronx. FNU LNU said his real name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.

Charged with making a false statement in the application and use of a passport and aggravated identity theft, Peña faced a $250,000 fine, a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and deportation to Venezuela. After six weeks in jail, he was released on a $500,000 bond, and he subsequently agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of passport fraud. At a sentencing hearing in May 2012, the judge considered letters of support from Randi and Peña's friends from the world of art, science and entertainment, including Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette, as well as from members of charities to which Peña had given his time and work. The judge considered Peña's long relationship with Randi, and Randi's failing health. He gave him a lenient sentence: time served, six months' house arrest and 150 hours' community service.

But Peña still had to contend with the immigration authorities. After the sentencing hearing, he had been home for five days when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at the door. "Say goodbye," they told him. Peña assured Randi he would be back that afternoon. He was taken to the Krome detention center in Miami, and remained there while his lawyer tried to find a way of keeping him in the United States. After two months of incarceration, Peña was finally released from Krome on the evening of Aug. 2, 2012, to find that Randi had spent half the day waiting outside the front gate for him. The couple were married in a ceremony in Washington the following summer.

Today, Peña remains on probation and no longer holds any identity documents except a Venezuelan passport with his birth name. United States immigration authorities have agreed not to deport him for now, but he has no formal immigration status in the United States: were he to leave the country, he would be unable to return. Since his arrest, Peña has not entirely shrugged off his former persona. He signs his paintings with the name he has exhibited under for 20 years - but now followed by his true initials, D.O.P.A.

Sometimes when Randi forgets himself, he still refers to his partner as José. Yet exactly how much Randi - the master of deception and misdirection - knew about his partner's duplicity, and how complicit he may have been in it, is unclear. When Randi first met him in the Fort Lauderdale public library, it seems certain that Peña would have introduced himself by his real name: A profile of Randi published in The Toronto Star the following year describes the magician's young assistant, named David Peña, struggling through La Guardia Airport with Randi's luggage. When they traveled to Australia together for the "60 Minutes" stunt, Randi may have been masterminding a deception one level deeper than he ever acknowledged: Deyvi, pretending to be José, masquerading as Carlos, the 2,000-year-old spirit from Caracas. What followed might be the longest-running hoax of The Amazing Randi's career.

When I asked Randi how much he knew about Peña's true identity before the federal agents came to his door, he demurred, citing legal concerns. "This is something I don't think I'd like to get into detailed discussion about," Randi said. "Simply because it could prejudice our status in some way."

When he was still a young man appearing in Toronto nightclubs and pretending to predict the future, Randall Zwinge created what he hoped would be his greatest trick. Each night before he went to bed, he wrote the date on the back of a business card along with the words "I, Randall Zwinge, will die today." Then he signed it and placed it in his wallet. That way, if he were knocked down in the street or killed by a freak accident, whoever went through his effects would discover the most shocking prophecy he ever made. Zwinge kept at it for years. Each night, he tore up one card and wrote out a new one for the next day. But nothing fatal befell him; in the end, having wasted hundreds of business cards, he gave up in frustration. "I never got lucky," he told me.

Since then, Randi has had several brushes with death. But nothing has shaken his steadfast rationalism: neither the heart attack he suffered in 2006, nor the cancer that followed. Nor, for that matter, did a conversation he had with Martin Gardner a few years before Gardner's death in 2010, when his friend confessed to having chosen to believe in the possibility of an afterlife. "That really surprised me, because he was the rationalist supreme," Randi recalled. "He said: 'I don't have any evidence for it, you have all the arguments on your side. But it brings me comfort.' "

Randi told me that he now feels mild trepidation each time he goes to sleep at night, and pleasant surprise that he wakes up in the morning. But he insists he does not need the sort of reassurance that Gardner sought in his own last days. "I wouldn't have any comfort from it - because I wouldn't believe in it," he said. "Oh, no, I have no fear of my demise whatsoever. I really feel that sincerely."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"A cinch," Randi replied. Ajay Appaden was 25 and had come from the Indian city Cochin. He was attending the conference for the second year with the help of a travel grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which was established with donations from the Internet pioneer Rick Adams and Johnny Carson.