Research Program / Claims / esp-1

Extrasensory perception is not an unnatural, mysterious, or supernatural phenomenon, but a natural expression of the human personality's greater reality and broader awareness than previously assumed.

超感官知觉并非不自然、神秘或超自然的现象，而是人类人格具有比过去所假设的更伟大的实在性与更广大的觉知的自然表现。

Concept esp · Domain Extended Perception and Consciousness Transduction · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status contested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
  • esp-power §15
Adjudicating experiment
Test its empirical core: recruit approximately 2,000 participants across 5–10 laboratories, with each participant completing four trials of a four-alternative forced-choice task involving an isolated target. Targets are automatically randomized; participants, experimenters interacting with participants, and scorers are all unaware of the correct answers. Exclude acoustic, optical, network, and feedback leakage. Pre-register the primary hit rate, the minimum meaningful effect, and stopping rules, and conduct hierarchical analyses at the participant and laboratory levels; duration: 18–24 months. Replicated positive findings could support anomalous information acquisition but could not adjudicate the claim of the personality's “greater reality.”
Suggested paper title
A Pre-registered Multicenter Test of Target Identification Under Sensory Isolation
What it would overturn
If rigorously replicated, the findings would revise the empirical assumption that humans cannot acquire information about random external targets when sensory input, prior knowledge, and inference are excluded.
Candidate labs / funders
Chris A. Roe，英国北安普顿大学：[研究主页](https://pure.northampton.ac.uk/en/persons/chris-roe/); Caroline Watt，爱丁堡大学 Koestler Parapsychology Unit：[研究单位](https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/); Bial Foundation，心理生理学与超心理学资助机构：[资助范围](https://beyondthebrain.bialfoundation.com/en-GB/grants)
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Low specificity; “natural” and “broader awareness” specify neither effect size, applicable populations, nor failure conditions, and do not distinguish this claim from general hypotheses of anomalous cognition.
Note
Searches current through 2026-09-06; the contested label for this item applies only to the empirical core of ESP, while the ontological interpretation remains untested. Throughout the text, untested means that no direct test was found in this search; it does not guarantee that no one worldwide has studied the issue. All sample sizes are planning estimates and must be determined through power simulations. The who field indicates only similarity in research direction.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim esp-1, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/esp-1