Politics of the "soul": Sommer excerpt #4

And here we need to stress one absolutely crucial dimension of our story, which both Skeptics and historians of parapsychology have almost consistently ignored: the rather explosive significance of the ‘soul’ as a political object, and heated debates over its nature which more than just shaped the very curricula of modern sciences.

Most fundamentally and consistently, this played into the rather justified concern over the unholy alliance of altar and throne. A central argument by both religious and areligious critics of Catholicism not just since the Reformation was that the Church, supported by monarchs and aristocrats appointed by the Pope, consciously exploited human fears of hell for the purpose of maintaining absolute power. Such fears, it has been alleged throughout the centuries, were kept alive by stories of demonic possession, poltergeist infestations and ghostly visions of souls of the damned, and the assurance that relief could only come from Catholic priests performing exorcisms and reading masses.

And here we begin to understand the prominent place of attacks on ‘paranormal’ belief in Hobbes’s aforementioned political treatise Leviathan, first published in 1651. A much more prominent move to deny the existence of spiritual beings apart from God, as in the examples of Hobbes, Newton (who, however, still believed in angels) and Priestley, was to deny not the existence of spirits, but merely the possibility of their manifestation in the physical world. This view was consistent with mainstream Protestantism and (officially) held by major Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke, Leibniz, and to some degree, Kant. Also in the eighteenth century, it was properly atheistic materialists predominantly in France, including Diderot and La Mettrie, who fought alongside Deists like Voltaire to wage a war on any form of ‘paranormal’ belief, with the declared political goal to end talk of souls, hell, and devils once and for all.

It was these fierce debates over souls, prophecies, visions and ‘magic’ which also lay at the root of wars of religion, riots and bloody revolts, such as Cromwell’s overthrow of the monarchy in England before the restoration of the throne (and foundation of the Royal Society) in 1660, and the French Revolution in the 1780s and 90s in particular. Unsurprisingly, these never-ending religio-political upheavals were prominent topics in the correspondence and often at least alluded to in published writings of virtually every Enlightenment intellectual. And as Charcot’s appropriation of hypnosis for overtly secularizing purposes during renewed anti-Catholic revolts in Third Republic France indicates, this ‘Enlightenment crusade’ (to use Roy Porter’s term) continued until far into the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Perhaps the most relevant cultural transformation following similar events, however, occurred in Germany – a major cradle of modern experimental university sciences.

When debates over materialism divided German scientific and medical communities after a group of political radical physiologists declared that “Thoughts stand in about the same relationship to the brain as bile to the liver and urine to the kidneys”, these self-styled ‘scientific materialists’ were attacked not just by religious scientists. Among their most vocal critics in Germany were the famous physicist Herman Helmholtz and his friend, the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond. These men, who would become two of the most influential scientists and science popularizers internationally, were themselves deeply anti-clerical. And their critiques of the ‘scientific materialists’ notwithstanding, they certainly also contributed to modern notions of materialism being the default worldview of science.

Ernst Brücke

Throughout their long careers, both men worked relentlessly to implant a methodological reductionism in the fledgling life-sciences in Germany and beyond. This had been their professed goal since their student days, when they formed a circle of friends including other now famous physiologists, Ernst Brücke (Sigmund Freud’s teacher) and Carl Ludwig. Together, as put by du Bois-Reymond in a letter in 1842, these young men “conspired to assert the truth that there are no forces at work in the organism other than the common physical-chemical ones”.

Again, it would be writing history backwards if we simply assumed that this ‘truth’ was already scientifically established in 1842 (the beginning, by the way, of one of several political German revolutions against the Church). In fact, it’s not particularly controversial to state that the jury is still out even from the perspective of today’s mainstream biophysics. On the contrary, the reference to “common physical-chemical” forces already implies that ‘animal magnetism’ and related notions of a vitalistic ‘life force’ were to be categorically excluded from the men’s empiricism, which they indeed dismissed without any investigation whatsoever. Interestingly, this was demonstrably not the case in British elite physics, where such concepts – along with parapsychological phenomena, which Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond also categorically rejected – continued to be seriously considered at least until the early 1900s.

Still, and contra the ‘scientific materialists’, Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond absolutely refused to claim that science had solved the mystery of the relationship of mind and brain. Instead, and despite their own life-long anti-Catholic political commitments, they actively popularized a programmatic agnosticism: Science, they argued, never has and never will be able to say anything definite about the ultimate nature of the mind. This agnosticism was famously expressed in one of the most influential mottos of German science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which would also stake the permitted limits of scientific enquiry for decades to come: du Bois-Reymond’s verdict ignoramus et ignorabimus (Latin for “we do not know, and we will not know”).

Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond were friends with prominent scientists in Britain including Thomas H. Huxley and the physicist John Tyndall, who pursued the same secularizing goals as their German allies: to transform the sciences from an activity of leisurely, wealthy gentlemen to stable, paid professions protected from theological influence and censorship. We already noted Huxley’s critique of Hume, and his dislike of the new word ‘scientist’. As for neologisms, Huxley himself was the inventor of an important modern word which I just used: agnosticism. Huxley had originally coined the term in 1869, not so much to profess ignorance regarding the nature of mind-brain relationships, but of the existence of God. And unlike his German friends, Huxley famously did argue for the complete dependence of the mind on the brain.

Still, as philosophers are well aware, mind-brain epiphenomenalism is not the same as ontological materialism: Assuming matter, including the brain, turns out to be completely reducible to a mental substance or process, it does not necessarily follow that our individual minds persist after the brain dies. Despite his epiphenomenalism, Huxley was therefore still a vocal critic of ontological materialism, and while Huxley and Tyndall have often been called ‘materialists’, they both in fact subscribed to metaphysical positions much more closely akin to ‘pantheism’ – the belief in nature’s all-pervadedness by an impersonal divine spirit or force.

But as far as spiritualism and paranormal phenomena were concerned, Huxley, Tyndall and other members of the growing network of popularizers of ‘scientific naturalism’ were just as programmatically hostile as their German allies Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond. To illustrate this, let’s briefly return to Huxley’s critique of Hume’s assertion that even well-substantiated reports of ‘paranormal’ phenomena should be dismissed because the claimed effects would constitute transgressions of natural law (which, as you may have noted, closely resembles Faraday’s later claim concerning the impossibility of levitating tables). In reply, Huxley wrote:

If a piece of lead were to remain suspended of itself, in the air, the occurrence would be a “miracle”, in the sense of a wonderful event, indeed; but no one trained in the methods of science would imagine that any law of nature was really violated thereby. He would simply set to work to investigate the conditions under which so highly unexpected an occurrence took place; and thereby enlarge his experience and modify his, hitherto, unduly narrow conception of the laws of nature.

In practice, however, things looked a little different. When Huxley’s friend Alfred Russel Wallace invited him in 1869 to join a committee for the scientific investigation of reported marvels of spiritualism, which quite frequently involved levitating objects, Huxley replied: “Supposing the phenomena to be genuine – they do not interest me”. Still, both Huxley and Tyndall did occasionally attend seances. But as the unveiled sarcasm especially in Huxley’s private correspondence, and the bitingly polemical tone of both men’s ‘reports’ (published in popular papers) indicates, they did so with the evident goal to debunk rather than seriously investigate mediums.

Besides the ‘other Darwin’, A. R. Wallace, additional eminent scientific friends of Tyndall and Huxley came out in favor of the reality of spiritualist phenomena. The most prominent among those apart from Wallace was William Crookes, the discoverer of the element thallium and a pioneer in the study of radioactivity. Another eminent British parapsychological investigator was a former assistant and co-worker of Tyndall’s, physicist William Barrett. After failed attempts to mobilize scientific interest in parapsychological investigations through lectures to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and elsewhere, in 1882 Barrett became one of the founders of the aforementioned Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

When he was appointed president of the SPR in 1904, Barrett mentioned in his presidential address a meeting with Hermann Helmholtz during a visit in Britain in the late 1800s. When the conversation turned to the topic of telepathy, Barrett claimed, Helmholtz told him that neither “the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses”, would make him “believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation”, as this was “clearly impossible”.

We should be weary to accept Barrett’s verbatim quote from a decades-old conversation as a historical document. But his characterization of Helmholtz as an influential critic of the paranormal who was absolutely uninterested in empirical evidence is certainly consistent not just with Helmholtz’s goal to liberate science from theological tyranny through the professionalization and polarization of ‘naturalistic’ science, but expressed in statements Helmholtz made first-hand, for example in his correspondence with du Bois-Reymond. It’s also no coincidence that Helmholtz was one of the main proponents of a physical law which is still cited by Skeptics as a supposed knock-down proof of the physical impossibility of any paranormal phenomenon: the principle of the conversation of energy. Helmholtz himself explicitly stated that his formulation of the law – which was immediately translated into English by Tyndall – had been motivated by his intent to demonstrate the implausibility of the concept of the sou and vitalist notions of a life-force.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.

Miracles denied and ignored: Sommer excerpt #3

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: So where did all this ‘atheism’ and opposition to belief in paranormal phenomena come from, which troubled Boyle and several fellow men of science so much? The consensus of professional historians of science today is once again completely at odds with popular standard narratives here. In Boyle’s day, the Enlightenment default derision of all things ‘paranormal’, which also increasingly came to characterize religious texts, was first popularized not by men of science, but by Protestant divines and anti-clerical though not strictly atheistic ‘free-thinkers’, who typically gathered not in scientific societies but at court and in fashionable coffee-houses.

Moreover, free-thinkers in England were often followers of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who – unlike Newton – made no secret of his mortalist theology. This – as well as the fact that he was a vocal philosophical critic of conventional scientific experimentalism – was enough to make Hobbes a persona non grata in the Royal Society. Here it’s important to point out that allegations of ‘atheism’ were hurled freely at anyone with unorthodox theological convictions, and it can be doubted if Hobbes really denied the existence of God. It was Hobbes’s expressed Christian materialism, which inevitably provoked accusations of ‘atheism’ by the intellectual and scientific mainstream of the time. But while Newton would in secret only reject belief in evil spirits (he was fine with angels), the Christian materialism of Hobbes was far more thoroughgoing. This is especially evident in the many attacks on belief in immaterial spirits and magic in Hobbes’s famous Leviathan. And as we will see in a moment, it is hardly accidental that the rejection of spirits and magic occurred so prominently in what is now considered a classical text in political philosophy.

The key lesson of all this is another insight fundamentally at odds with popular views: In striking contrast to modern ‘free-thinkers’ since the late nineteenth century, early Enlightenment scoffers at magic did not claim science as the ultimate cudgel in their war on belief in the occult. On the contrary, early modern English opponents of magic in fact often followed Hobbes in holding the collective scientific experimentalism of the Royal Society in contempt. To assume that the new science championed by Boyle and colleagues – and here I mean perfectly conventional experimental sciences, including chemistry and physics – instantly gained prestige would again mean to write history backwards. In fact, those who began to laugh magic and spirits out of intellectual discourse also often mocked the new scientific experimentalism of the Royal Society as a trivial, eccentric fad, unworthy of men of culture and common sense.

Whereas science historian Michael Hunter, the leading expert on Boyle and the Royal Society, has reconstructed in painstaking detail the actual means by which the ‘empirical occult’ was suppressed in Enlightenment Britain, other historians have presented similar findings for countries including France, Germany and Italy. The professional consensus regarding the role of science for the supposed ‘disenchantment’ of the world throughout the Enlightenment was nicely captured in a seminal study of the marginalization of the anomalous by the former director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a colleague at Harvard, who observed:

it was neither rationality nor science nor even secularization that buried the wondrous for European elites. Enlightenment savants did not embark on anything like a thorough program to test empirically the strange facts collected so assiduously by their seventeenth-century predecessors or to offer natural explanations for them [...] Leading Enlightenment intellectuals did not so much debunk marvels as ignore them [...] On metaphysical, aesthetic, and political grounds, they excluded wonders from the realm of the possible, the seemly, and the safe.

Emanuel Swedenborg    

The case of the most famous spirit-seer of the Enlightenment, Emanuel Swedenborg, offers a good illustration of rejections of the occult on such non-scientific grounds. Swedenborg’s greatest critic in Germany was philosopher Immanuel Kant, a devout believer in the immortality of the soul. On the one hand, Kant was certainly impressed by reports from reputable witnesses who claimed that Swedenborg – who, incidentally, was a leading man of Scandinavian science and a Fellow of the Royal Society – had demonstrated clairvoyance and the ability to communicate with the dead. But this didn’t keep him from ridiculing Swedenborg by comparing spirit visions with brain flatulence, before declaring him mad. Apparently the only major representative of Enlightenment science to openly criticize Swedenborg was the great English chemist, Joseph Priestley. But despite Priestley’s eminence as a natural philosopher, his ‘critique’ was no more scientific than Kant’s. Unlike Kant, Priestley was completely uninterested in testimony for Swedenborg’s supposed extra-sensory and mediumistic capacities, and he declared spirit visions null and void for explicitly theological reasons: Priestley, who was a lay preacher as much as man of science, was yet another devout Christian mortalist who used the Bible rather than science to ‘prove’ that immaterial souls and spirits did not exist.

Skeptics will of course object and say there were at least two instances in which the ‘paranormal’ was successfully refuted during the Enlightenment by perfectly rational means. One of the standard texts in the arsenal of modern Skeptics, after all, is the essay “Of Miracles” by Scottish philosopher and critic of religion, David Hume. In a nutshell, Hume argued that specific reports of ‘miracles’ can and always should be dismissed in favor of ‘natural’ general explanations, such as fraud, errors of perception, love of wonder, and of course religious dogmatism as the prime motivating force behind pitfalls of human testimony regarding the ‘miraculous’. Perhaps most crucially, Hume argued that the better-substantiated reports of ‘miracles’ (he mentioned levitations and dead men coming back to life as examples) were so rare and exceptional that the alleged effects would constitute violations of natural law, and therefore should be rejected along with purely anecdotal claims.

Interestingly, Hume’s arguments were practically ignored by contemporary fellow anti-occultism crusaders, and his essay only began achieving some popularity about a century after his death, when it was cited in battles against spiritualism and other large- scale occult movements. What’s more, it would be wrong to assume it was only spiritualists or religious types who fundamentally disagreed with Hume. ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas H. Huxley, for example, certainly shared Hume’s antipathies with orthodox Christianity and heretical occult beliefs and dismissed contemporary evidence for paranormal phenomena (some of which, as we shall see, was published by scientific friends of his). Still, as we shall see below, Huxley especially rejected Hume’s interpretation of hypothetical levitations as self-evident violations of natural law, and part 2 of this essay will address other problems with Hume’s arguments.

For now, let’s say the examples of Bacon’s explicitly theological prohibition of ‘survival research’, and Boyle’s fears of devils preventing him to follow a strictly experimental route to a spirit world, more than indicate that Hume’s claim that reports of ‘paranormal’ phenomena have only been motivated by religious beliefs is questionable at best. But he probably knew this fairly well himself. For example, as an instance of seemingly well-attested ‘miracles’ reported to occur in the present, Hume referred to marvels associated with a group called the ‘French prophets’. These were followers of a widely revered heretical priest, at whose tomb in Paris a broad range of paranormal phenomena were observed – marvellous cures, clairvoyance, automatic writing and speaking, spirit visions, and so on. When physicians began documenting the efficacy of healings supposedly worked by the ‘prophets’, this was a serious problem not just for devout anti-clerics, but also for the Church: The prophets were members of a religious sect, so the Church could impossibly embrace them as legitimate Christian miracles, and therefore officially declared them false. British historian of Enlightenment science and medicine, Roy Porter, spelled out the dilemma:

if for reasons of its own, the Catholic Church saw fit to discredit ‘miracles’ which happened in the here-and-now, on its own doorstep and before people’s very eyes, how could any other ‘miracle’ in the Christian canon be sustained?

Porter also reminds us that the Church’s contradictory stance on ‘miracles’ was water on the mills of French atheist-materialist critics of the ‘paranormal’ like Denis Diderot, and anti-clerical Deists (who believed in God but rejected miracles) like the great Voltaire. And as we shall see, the debate over the French prophets is just one of countless examples where the ‘empirical occult’ was declared a mortal enemy by two powerful and mutually opposed camps: orthodox religion on the one end, and anti- clerical thinkers on the other.

Still, as Hume’s familiarity with the case already suggests, news of the French prophets spread across the channel, and soon enough they garnered a following in England and Scotland. Isaac Newton considered these reports with interest, and one of his closest and most promising students, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, even became their leading spokesman in England. Hardly surprisingly, de Duillier’s public support of these brazen heretics quickly resulted in the ruin of his scientific career and social standing, after his support of the prophets led to legal persecution and had him end up on the pillory.

Apart from Hume’s essay on miracles, another episode routinely cited by Skeptics as a victory of Enlightenment science over the ‘paranormal’ was the famous refutation of mesmerism or ‘animal magnetism’ by a French Royal Commission, which included the pioneer of electricity, Benjamin Franklin, and the eminent chemist Antoine Lavoisier. The commission’s goal was to test claims by the physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who professed to have discovered an all-pervading physical imponderable or vital fluid. Health and disease, Mesmer argued, were a matter of balance and distribution of this ‘animal magnetism’ in the human organism. A prominent technique employed by Mesmer and his pupils to restore such balance were magnetic ‘passes’ – up- and downward movements of the hands, usually a few inches away from the patient’s body, which were often reported to put patients in a state of trance and occasionally induced convulsions.

The Franklin commission set out to test these claims by conducting experiments on people who did not know whether they received actual or sham mesmeric treatment. In their report to the King, the commission did not doubt that patients did indeed occasionally get better. Crucial, however, was the finding that they not only responded to actual mesmeric interventions, but also when treatments were absent or only pretended. Instead of assuming the existence of a ‘magnetic fluid’ as claimed by Mesmer, any healing success was therefore explained in terms of effects of the ‘imagination’. Modern medics usually read ‘imagination’ as the equivalent of what has been called the ‘placebo effect’ since about the 1950s: genuine healing caused not by medicine, but by a patient’s beliefs and expectations.

Today, physicians typically decry Mesmer as a self-deluded charlatan, not least because of the popular image of mesmerism as a ‘paranormal’ belief system. But while it is true that many other practitioners of mesmerism certainly claimed the occurrence of properly parapsychological phenomena in the therapeutic setting – telepathy, clairvoyance, and not least spirit visions – Mesmer himself was actively hostile to all these things. As a child of the Enlightenment and its worship of cold reason, he also considered the induction of trance states and convulsions in mesmeric patients not as a welcome part of the treatment, but a rather regrettable side effect. And to be fair, even if we grant that the story of mesmerism can be reduced to a history of the placebo effect, it should be acknowledged that it often worked. Not to be outdone, mesmeric practice was also far less invasive and dangerous than treatments offered by contemporary mainstream medicine, which still prominently relied on blood-letting, purging, and other highly questionable blanket interventions. With a perspective on concrete historical contexts, it should also be acknowledged that Mesmer’s concepts were not actually that outlandish or even new, as they followed in the tradition of perfectly mainstream Renaissance natural philosophy.

Moreover, Mesmer himself became known as a ‘scientific’ opponent of supernaturalism, when he was appointed by the Bavarian government to debunked the German exorcist Johann Gassner in 1775. Mesmer did not doubt that Gassner’s exorcisms often worked. But in his view, the ailments in Gassner’s patients were not caused by evil spirits but organic imbalances, which the priest unwittingly restored through unconscious use of his unusually strong ‘magnetic’ powers. Mesmerism may be considered a ‘pseudoscience’ today by the medical mainstream, but Mesmer’s ‘explanation’ was still good enough for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences to appoint him a member in reward for his services in the battle against ‘superstition’, and it also informed Emperor Joseph II’s decision to prohibit exorcisms for the German empire.

We shall come back to squarely political motifs of Enlightenment crusades in a second. But there’s evidence that the downfall of Mesmer was also connected to a major course of worry of political elites in France, for the plain fact that mesmerist societies were often havens for revolutionaries working to upend the reign of the King.

There seems to be a widespread assumption today that the ‘scientific community’ instantly and overwhelmingly accepted the report of the Franklin commission as the ultimate verdict on the question of mesmerism. But as far as its practice by physicians is concerned, it certainly continued almost unabated, despite occasionally being prohibited by law. And this continuity included its ‘paranormal’ guises, which Mesmer himself had so thoroughly despised. Telepathic rapports between mesmerists and patients, and clairvoyant and spirit visions of entranced patients, continued to be anecdotally reported en masse not only by the scientific and medical laity all over continental Europe and, somewhat belated, in Britain and the United States, throughout the remainder of the eighteenth and the whole nineteenth century.

According to chronologists of modern ‘enlightened’ hypnotherapy, the irreversible death of mesmerism occurred at the hands not of the Franklin commission, but of Scottish physician James Braid in the early 1840s, when Braid experimentally demonstrated its medical powers lay not in a quasi-physical ‘animal magnetism’, but in the psychological principle of hypnotic suggestion. Like practitioners of mesmerism before him, Braid put his patients into a trance state, during which he claimed to painlessly extract teeth, cure paralysis, and restore sight and hearing. When Braid coined the term ‘hypnotism’, it was also important for him to stress that he never observed any paranormal phenomena in his medical practice. This was certainly wise to state, as one of his most vocal critics had accused him of being in league with the devil, which was in fact the topic of Braid’s very first publication concerning hypnosis. How far British science and medicine still was from embracing ‘scientific materialism’ is further illustrated by the fact that Braid himself was no materialist let alone an atheist – far from it: In 1852 he would sternly admonish a historian of magic for claiming there was no such thing as the devil and demons.

In the same year, Michael Faraday, perhaps the greatest British physicist of the nineteenth century, applied Braid’s psychological principles to explain ‘table-tilting’, a practice associated with spiritualism. Slight table movements, Faraday was able to show in a series of brilliant experiments, were not caused by ‘supernatural’ powers, but by unconscious muscular motions of the sitters. This episode in particular has been interpreted as yet another supposed victory of secular Skeptical science over paranormal superstitions. Never mind that Faraday, a devout member of a heretical Christian sect, revealed in a letter the squarely theological worries which had moved him to intervene: the new craze, Faraday suspected, was the work of “unclean spirits” let lose by Satan to delude man at the end of times, as predicted in the Bible.

Later, Faraday justified his conscious decision not to investigate widely reported phenomena which were inexplicable by unconscious muscular action – most notably levitating tables – by stating such reports were clearly ridiculous: levitations, Faraday proclaimed, were impossible because they obviously violated the law of the conservation of force. There is some irony in the fact that one of the most detailed and angry critiques of this argument by Faraday came from a man who was widely suspected to be an atheist, the London mathematician August De Morgan. Whatever his religious beliefs, De Morgan was no friend of dogmatism in any form, as he was one of the first major intellectuals to confess that he was fully convinced of the reality of certain phenomena of spiritualism, while doubting they were caused by disembodied spirits.

When Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace formulated modern evolutionary theory, Faraday’s refusal to comment on this game-changing event was probably also owing to his biblical commitments. Darwin’s own antipathies to spiritualism and the occult are well known and have been taken to represent the attitude to these things by the Victorian ‘scientific community’. But Darwin’s ally Wallace of all people became an enthusiastic convert to spiritualist faith, and he would later even argue that spirits were actively involved in the process of human evolution. It’s not far-fetched to assume it was because of Wallace’s highly unorthodox views, and his rather fervent proselytizing for spiritualism, that we associate only Darwin’s name with modern evolutionary theory today. And as we shall see in Part 2 of this essay, unfortunately Wallace was not always critical in his investigations, and we shouldn’t simply adopt his belief in survival on the grounds of his eminence as a biological scientist.

Wallace wrote that his first encounters with the paranormal took place during mesmeric experiments he conducted as a young man, which convinced him of the reality of clairvoyance. This was in the decade of Braid’s inauguration of medical hypnotism, which, however, British scientific and medical communities at large either completely ignored, ridiculed, or lumped in with mesmerism and spiritualism, Faraday and a few others being notable exceptions. It was only in the 1870s that hypnotism began to gain momentum not so much as a medical treatment, but as an experimental tool for the exploration of the human mind. This time, however, the man whose name became prominently associated with hypnotism was not a devout Christian like Braid, but a fierce atheist: the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot in Paris.

Charcot consciously blended public spectacle and medical demonstration in his legendary hypnotic performances at the Salpêtrière, a hospital which predominantly housed mentally ill female patients. Using hysterical girls and women as little more than dummies to demonstrate the stupendous powers of the hypnotist over the weak and sick mind, Charcot induced and released trance states, catalepsies, and seizures in his patients at will. Particular stress was laid by Charcot and his peers on the ease with which states resembling demonic possession and mystical ecstasy could be induced. This hammered home Charcot’s principal message: The whole history of religious experience was to be reduced to hysteria and mental disease .

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.

Science and parapsychology: Sommer excerpt #2

Andreas Sommer writes: One of the first histories of parapsychological research I read was by John Beloff, a widely respected British psychologist and advocate of impartial research on the paranormal. Beloff was also instrumental in establishing the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh, following a bequest by author and social critic Arthur Koestler. I highly recommend Beloff’s sketch of the little-known history of parapsychology at universities other than Edinburgh throughout the twentieth century, which he wrote from the well-informed perspective of an insider.

But I doubt Beloff did his efforts of bringing parapsychology into the scientific mainstream any favors when he set the stage with a reference to the Scientific Revolution beginning in the sixteenth century. It was then, he wrote, that modern standard notions of “a sharp distinction between normal and paranormal, between science and pseudoscience, reality and magic” began to crystalize, and it was in the “aftermath of this revolution” that these supposedly fixed boundaries have “ever since divided parapsychology from conventional science”.

To be fair to Beloff, he did draw on writings by professional historians of science. However, most of his sources were already outdated by several decades at the time he wrote his book. Other works not considered, such as a now classical eight-volume survey by science historian Lynn Thorndike, had already documented the significance of the ‘occult’ in the early history of experimental science by the late 1950s.  Since about the 1970s, other mainstream historical works increasingly showed that supposedly fixed boundaries between science and the ‘paranormal’ simply did not exist during the Scientific Revolution. On the contrary, it is now common knowledge that practically all figureheads of the Scientific Revolution held rather strong occult beliefs. Isaac Newton’s alchemy is probably well known today – though not nearly as widely as his studies of apocalyptic prophecies. And next time you meet an astronomer, observe his reaction when you mention that Galileo, Kepler, and in fact all early heliocentrists, were practicing astrologers who didn’t just cast horoscopes for money, but because they seriously believed astrology worked.

The reason why I’m pointing this out is obviously not to imply that we all should believe in astrology because Kepler and Galileo did. It’s simply to illustrate the fact that once certain ingrained cultural myths are being questioned, public opinion can be as impervious to mainstream historical and sociological evidence as it is to heterodox but well-supported empirical findings. And here again it is no accident that modern historical standard narratives, which inform public opinion as well as the self-image of scientists as part of their very training, have relied upon popular myths rather than academic research.

The bible of modern popular science is probably Carl Sagan’s best-selling The Demon-Haunted World, first published in 1995. Sagan, an astronomer on a mission to improve public scientific literacy and critical thinking, was also a co-founder of the modern Skeptics movement. His works are not history books, but he occasionally invoked great scientific names of the past to get his core message across: Scientists are the incarnation of heroic anti-dogmatism and love of truth, and if there was an essential characteristic of science, it was the systematic elimination of personal biases and wishful thinking. From its early beginnings, science was thus defined by a single and universal method, which boiled down to a set of personal virtues vouching for the self-correcting nature of science.

As an illustration, Sagan paraphrased statements to this effect by Francis Bacon, a key figure of the Scientific Revolution in England, who has been called the very ‘father’ of modern science. In 1604, for example, Bacon cautioned that the “root of superstition” lay in the widespread mental habit of men who “observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other”. Sagan called this principle “observational selection”, but psychologists might say that Bacon gave a description of confirmation bias – roughly, the natural but unfortunate tendency of our minds to inflate the significance of perceptions if they confirm our beliefs. And while Sagan admitted that scientists have sometimes sinned against the ‘scientific method’ by being dogmatic and unethical, the take-home message of his writings was that such instances were only insignificant exceptions to the rule: The organizing principle of science has always been, still is, and will ever be, nothing but reason and devotion to truth.

We will see in a moment why his references to Bacon, which served the purpose of making Bacon appear like a modern ‘naturalistic’ scientist, may qualify as unintended evidence for Sagan’s own confirmation bias. In fact, other passages in Bacon’s writings, which clearly out him as a believer in things most scientists would dismiss as ‘superstition’, are pretty hard to miss. And as far as the ‘scientific method’ is concerned, Sagan also failed to address works by professional historians and historically informed philosophers of science who systematically studied the very practice of science, and in result dropped the term ‘the scientific method’ as an accurate description of what science separated from other fields of knowledge.

In 1974, Science journal in fact published an article with the peculiar title “Should the history of science be rated X?”, which seriously entertained the question if the growing consensus in the community of professional historians of science should be censored. After all, the upshot of this work, which the article stated could no longer be doubted, was that the popular image of the scientist did not stand up to scrutiny. History of science scholarship had thoroughly undermined the “professional ideal and public image of scientists as rational, open-minded investigators, proceeding methodically, grounded incontrovertibly in the outcome of controlled experiments, and seeking objectively for the truth, let the chips fall where they may”. The author, a physicist and historian, justified his implicit suggestion to censor the findings of colleagues in the mainstream history of science for pedagogic reasons, arguing that young scientists needed a moral compass and heroes to look up to – even if the heroism of these figures was largely mythical. As candidates for censorship, he further briefly mentioned historical studies revealing occult beliefs in icons of the Scientific Revolution, which, however, he downplayed as supposedly inconclusive.

But the concrete historical evidence for the occult underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution was already too strong to be dismissed, with the paranormal beliefs of Francis Bacon being a point in question. Bacon in fact suggested a wide range of squarely ‘parapsychological’ experiments, to test the effects of ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’ – contemporary terms for modern concepts including ‘telepathy’ and ‘psychokinesis’. In a statement particularly interesting for survival researchers, Bacon was further open to the belief that

the mind, when it is withdrawn and collected into itself [...] hath some extent and latitude of prenotion, which therefore appeareth most in sleep, in extasies, and near death, and more rarely in waking apprehensions; and is induced and furthered by those abstinences and observances which make the mind most to consist in itself.

Bacon here refers to prophetic glimpses into the future, reported to occur during what we may call ‘altered states of consciousness’ – sleep, trance or ecstasy, meditation, and the process of dying. Elsewhere, Bacon admitted that questions about the nature of the ‘soul’ – including its survival after death – had previously not been investigated in a systematic manner. Possible solutions, Bacon observed, “have been not more laboriously inquired than variously reported; so as the travel therein taken, seemeth to have been rather in a maze than in a way”.

However, instead of conducting such experiments, let alone suggesting concrete areas of research especially concerning survival, Bacon nipped such scientific aspirations firmly in the bud:

But although I am of opinion, that this knowledge may be more really and soundly inquired even in nature than it hath been; yet I hold, that in the end it must be bounded by religion, or else it will be subject to deceit and delusion [...] the true knowledge of the nature and state of the soul, must come by the same inspiration that gave the substance.

In other words: Bacon here explicitly disavows ‘survival research’ – not for scientific, but for squarely theological reasons. In the spirit of his time, he demanded that knowledge about the hereafter must come not by natural but by properly supernatural means: by divine inspiration.

Bacon has been widely portrayed as the first thinker to systematically propose a modern scientific approach to nature, one supposedly unrestricted by religious dogma.

Yet, especially in regard to the question of empirical research concerning survival, we see that this is simply false. Here it’s also important to note that Bacon’s daytime job was not ‘man of science’, but Lord Chancellor and Solicitor General of England. And in his role of a high-ranking politician, Bacon again expressed his religious worries over magic – by formulating bills for the prosecution of witchcraft such as these:

Where a man conjures, or invocates wicked spirits, it is felony.
Where a man doth use or practise any manner of witchcraft, whereby any person shall be killed, wasted, or lamed in his body, it is felony.

Perhaps you are puzzled by Bacon’s prohibition to invocate wicked spirits only. But far from encouraging intercourse with good or divine spirits, early modern intellectuals considered any attempt to contact the spirit world with profound concerns. To be sure, in Bacon’s day you would have been in serious trouble if you denied the existence of immaterial souls. But that may have been nothing compared to the problems you’d gotten yourself into by telling someone you were trying to converse with them. Bacon and fellow intellectuals still subscribed to biblical authority, and scriptural prohibitions of contacting spirits – the story of the witch of Endor in the Old Testament and warnings of evil spirits camouflaging as angels in the New Testament being important examples – still determined the way mainstream scholars like Bacon thought about these things.

Hence, Bacon’s contemporary, the famous Cambridge mathematician John Dee, had every reason not to publicize his ostensible communications with angels, which he claimed to have received through crystal-gazing. When Oxford scholar Méric Casaubon published the records after Dee’s death, he in fact presented them as a case study in illicit magic or necromancy. Issuing a stern warning in the preface, Casaubon asserted that Dee’s accounts of spirits were authentic but “A Work of Darknesse”.

We will see that fears of devils and other theological concerns would often continue to motivate intellectual opposition to the study of ‘occult’ phenomena until at least the nineteenth century. In fact, it would be a grave mistake to assume that attacks on all things smacking of magic by certain prominent modern scientists were necessarily driven by sympathies with ‘scientific materialism’, let alone atheism.

And here it’s worth remembering that the very word ‘scientist’ was only coined in the 1830s, about two decades after Bacon’s death. (Before then, men of science were called ‘natural philosophers’). Many eminent scientific figures – such as physicist Michael Faraday and Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas H. Huxley – rather disliked the term and refused to call themselves so. And while we are accustomed to assume that modern experimental science has always been the domain of universities, by the time of the coinage of ‘scientist’ there were almost no university laboratories for experimental sciences like physics anywhere in the world.

In fact, modern scientific experimentalism as a collective and transparent endeavor – with findings published in professional periodicals for anyone to scrutinize – emerged as an expression of protest against the perceived dogmatism and stagnation of knowledge in the early modern universities. Pathbreaking in this respect was the establishment of private associations like the Royal Society in England in 1660, which was co-founded by a ‘father’ of modern chemistry and physics, Robert Boyle. There was probably no other natural philosopher at the time who did more to put Francis Bacon’s visions for an experimental approach to nature into common intellectual practice than Boyle, a wealthy man with important political connections. And Boyle and the early Royal Society once again show the extent to which the close entanglements between early modern science and the ‘paranormal’ were virtually written out of history.

Like Newton, Boyle was an avid practitioner of alchemy, but in contrast to Newton, he was also a strong advocate of what we now may call psychical research. For example, he supported investigations by other Fellows of the Royal Society – most notably Joseph Glanvill and Henry More – of reported apparitions, poltergeist disturbances, spirit possession and hexing. Boyle also wrote the preface to the English translation of the ‘Devil of Mascon’, a French report about a poltergeist case which had thoroughly impressed him. Not least, Boyle himself investigated the faith healer Valentine Greatrakes and initiated field research on clairvoyance or Second Sight in the Scottish Highlands. And while modern science popularizers in the ‘Skeptical’ tradition of Sagan typically cast the figure of the stereotypical scientist as a timeless debunker of ‘paranormal’ phenomena, the case of Boyle and others shows the opposite at a crucial moment in the history of modern science: Boyle and colleagues at the Royal Society tried not to debunk, but to establish the reality of the ‘paranormal’.

Here we must of course stress that Boyle and colleagues promoted these investigations explicitly as a weapon against ‘atheism’, and that their parapsychological research never became official part of Royal Society business. In fact, some Fellows like Robert Hooke, the astronomer and pioneer of modern microscopy, vocally opposed it. But neither should the Christian apologetic agenda of Boyle and fellow parapsychological researchers in the Royal Society make us assume that early modern skepticism regarding occult phenomena was informed or motivated by science, let alone that atheism or materialism were even remotely popular positions within early modern scientific communities. And if you look for dispassionate methodological dissections of these investigations by critics like Hooke, you will find nothing of the sort. Hooke’s ‘critiques’ were essentially polemical and sarcastic, and therefore hardly more ‘scientific’ than Isaac Newton’s later reported howl of despair over those taking news of a contemporary poltergeist outbreak seriously: “Oh! yee fools ... will you never have any witt, know yee not that all such things are meer cheats and impostures? Fy, fy!”.34

Newton’s own rather strong occult beliefs and practices – the study of alchemy and biblical prophecies – are well known today, and in the case of Hooke it’s also important to note that his skepticism regarding the ‘paranormal’ was rather selective as well. While he rejected the heretical investigations of Boyle and other Fellows offhand, Hooke was still a believer in ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’ – capacities of embodied minds to act and perceive at a distance. In his ‘Lectures of Light’, for example, Hooke provided a mechanical account of such parapsychological effects.

In the case of Newton’s skepticism regarding poltergeist phenomena, it would be fair to say that he simply had no theological use for reported manifestations of supposedly evil spirits. Newton’s theology belonged to a tradition called ‘mortalism’ – a term for then heretical Christian conceptions of the mind as being essentially dependent on the body. But far from maintaining sympathies for atheism, mortalists like Newton held that the only legitimate notion of immortality was the bodily resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day. According to mortalist theologies in their strict form, mind and body were inseparable and indeed perished together at death, only to be recreated for eternal bliss or damnation in a physical hell or heaven by a supernatural act of God. Newton kept his strong but heretical mortalist faith a secret to avoid trouble, but again, we shouldn’t simply assume his religion was informed by the state of science at the time.

In Boyle’s day and indeed throughout the next two centuries to come, it was still primarily fundamental religious and associated political convictions and worries, which discouraged and practically outlawed parapsychological research perhaps more than anything else. Religion is almost certainly also the reason why Boyle and colleagues never held seances or tried other properly experimental approaches to the spirit world. In fact, for a while Boyle seriously considered taking up John Dee’s technique of crystal-gazing to communicate with spirits, but in the end his scientific curiosity was outweighed by demonological scruples.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?' A winning essay in the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies contest. The paper with notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.

Confronting the obstacles: Sommer excerpt #1

Historian of science Andreas Sommer responds to the question posed in 2021 by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?”

Summary: This essay makes the case for survival in two parts. Part 1, which draws on my work in the academic history of science, intends to clear the path for an unbiased appreciation of the empirical evidence discussed in Part 2, as well as for other essays in this contest which I presume will confront the empirical data head-on: It identifies and eliminates common obstacles in the way of recognizing the very existence of a serious survival research tradition, which began in the late 1800s and continues in the present time. In line with the consensus of perfectly mainstream history of science, I will show that the marginalization of survival research had practically nothing to do with the growth of scientific knowledge. I reconstruct striking continuities of serious scientific interest in survival from the Scientific Revolution to the present time, beginning with founders of modern science like Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle in England. I then discuss later eminent scientific figures interested in survival research, including William James, the ‘father’ of American psychology. Closely working with psychical researchers in England, James in fact conducted ground-breaking empirical investigations of spirit apparitions and mediumship, and formulated important methodological maxims of survival research.

The empirical Part 2 begins by discussing evidence from conventional biomedical sciences showing that, contrary to popular assumptions, survival-related subjective experiences – of encounters with the departed, end-of-life and near-death experiences (NDEs) – are widespread and can have strong therapeutic effects. I will then look at recent developments in neuroscience, which increasingly show that traditional ‘production’ models of mind-brain connections, which predict that consciousness is annihilated at death, are inadequate to account for recognized psychophysical anomalies such as ‘terminal lucidity’ and paradox findings of neuroimaging studies during induced mystical and NDE-type experiences. I will then discuss evidence showing that not all experiences suggestive of survival are subjective, by drawing on rigorously investigated cases of mediumship and children claiming memories of past lives. Finally, I will argue that the only rational alternatives to the assumption of personal survival are not fraud or chance coincidence, but squarely parapsychological explanations. I will conclude by arguing that there is strong evidence for personal motivation in certain categories of mediumship, which, together with certain features of well-documented cases of the reincarnation type, more than just tip the scale towards survival.

PART 1: IDENTIFYING AND REMOVING THE OBSTACLES

120 years ago, the only substantial scientific body dedicated to questions touching upon the subject at the time was the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England. Founded in 1882 by eminent Victorian intellectuals, the SPR’s mission was to investigate various contested phenomena associated with spiritualism and other controversial beliefs and practices, “in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated”. Members of the SPR included the leading scientists of the day, such as physics Nobel Laureates J. J. Thomson (the discoverer of the electron), and later Marie Curie. Serving as a the SPR’s president in the years 1894 to 1895 was the great Harvard psychologist and philosopher, William James, who was also a co-founder of the smaller (and initially rather passive) American SPR in 1884. Certain influential accounts have portrayed the SPR as little more than a club of self-deluded spiritualists. But as we will see shortly, SPR membership often did not even indicate interest in the question of survival in the first place.

Fast forward to the present day: The SPR still exists, and although it continues to publish research on the ‘paranormal’ in its peer-reviewed Journal and Proceedings, it is now a mere shadow of its glorious Victorian self. Today, still not all of the research published by the SPR is concerned with survival, and the society is still lacking means to train let alone employ investigators. In the USA, on the other hand, there exists a research unit, which – housed by one of the country’s most prestigious medical schools – has specialised in survival research for over half a century. Founded in 1967 at the University of Virginia by the Canadian psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) is a team of psychiatrists, neuroscientists and psychologists, who investigate a wide range of reported phenomena suggestive of survival – e.g., near-death experiences, apparitions, spirit mediumship, terminal lucidity, and children’s memories of previous lives. Applying open-minded yet critical and rigorous methodological approaches, members of DOPS have produced an astounding wealth of sophisticated research, much of which has been published in scientific and medical mainstream journals.

As I will argue in Part 2 of this essay, anybody who has carefully studied this and the vast psychical research literature produced since the 1880s (and the critical responses to it) should agree it can no longer be doubted the data suggests that something strange is going on. Obviously, the ‘paranormal’ has always attracted dubious characters, and it would be ludicrous to deny that bias, wishful thinking, fraud and errors of human perception are problems which serious researchers constantly have to grapple with. But good science should and can separate the wheat from the chaff. And as I’ll try to indicate later, a perspective which integrates these data with more conventional scientific and medical knowledge can demonstrate that they point to a coherent picture of mind-body interaction that far outstrips mainstream reductionist accounts. In short, we are dealing with pretty revolutionary stuff, clearly demonstrating that the still prevailing worldview of nineteenth century physics is in urgent need of a facelift, to put it mildly.

But ask a random scientist if he or she has ever heard of DOPS or the SPR, let alone studied any of the psychical research data published over the past 150 years. Chances are that your question will either be met with a shrug or a reference to Wikipedia entries debunking all these studies as obvious pseudoscience. In fact, sociological evidence suggests that the average scientist rarely studies original, peer- reviewed research publications on ‘paranormal’ phenomena. Like the opinions of most non-scientists, judgements by members of the ‘scientific community’ on these controversial topics seem overwhelmingly informed by secondary, popular portrayals of this research.

Accounts informing public and mainstream scientific opinion are often produced or inspired by professional ‘Skeptics’, who usually make no secret of their outright hostility to the ‘paranormal’ in all its guises. The reason I write ‘Skeptics’ in American spelling and with a capital S is to specifically refer to self-appointed gatekeepers of scientific orthodoxy, who are typically associated with the ‘Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’ (CSI, formerly CSICOP) in the US. Well organized internationally in associations for the supposed promotion of ‘science’ and ‘reason’, these self-styled experts on ‘pseudoscience’ actively maintain and cultivate links to journalists, but have often no scientific or relevant academic training. To publicly bolster their supposedly scientific mission, Skeptics organizations have recruited celebrity scientists and science popularizers as ‘Fellows’ – astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, Harvard psychologists Steven Pinker, and the ‘Science Guy’, engineer Bill Nye, are just some of the most prominent names in the US. And while Skeptics portray their widely publicized debunking exercises as ‘investigations’ and ‘inquiry’, their targets have documented grave misrepresentations of the targeted research, along with other serious acts of intellectual dishonesty.  

Sociologists of science studying marginalized disciplines have independently confirmed these serious accusations: Regardless of the quality of scientific methods employed by unorthodox scientists, professional Skeptics have misrepresented even rigorous research as dangerous quackery, as soon as it produces findings suggesting the existence of ‘paranormal’ phenomena. Skeptical activists and their followers typically don’t err on the side of responsible caution, but are out to eradicate belief in the ‘paranormal’ whatever it takes – consciously destroying reputations and careers of serious, qualified scientists in due course.  In the face of well-documented instances of unethical conduct, scholars who studied the strategies by which ‘Skeptics’ and their supporters powerfully shape public opinion for decades have expressed concern. Sociologists of science Harry Collins and Robert Evans, for example, felt it was their duty to speak up and say:

this is wrong – it is a dereliction of scientific duty. After all, among other things, scientists are there to help us know whether there are paranormal effects [...], but their input should be based on their best scientific efforts; ex-cathedra statements, or dirty tricks, are of no special value, nor should scientists pass their responsibility to outside groups.  

Neither the general public nor scientists normally read sociological studies, any more than psychical research periodicals. It’s therefore pretty uncontroversial to say that your average scientist is usually unaware of the actually relevant research on the ‘paranormal’ – and the not exactly scientific ways by which the supposed consensus of the ‘scientific community’ regarding the non-existence of ‘psychic’ phenomena has been formed. This has certainly been my personal experience as well, in countless discussions I had with scientist friends and acquaintances over the last decades.

Most instructive in this regard were almost daily encounters with elite academics from a wide range of scientific backgrounds during my three years as a Research Fellow at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. The Fellowship was awarded in recognition of my doctoral studies, which reconstructed the simultaneous emergence of experimental psychology and psychical research in nineteenth century Europe and US.  Being a Fellow at a typical Oxbridge college is a little like being part of a monastery, as you live on college grounds and take your meals with other Fellows. Modeled on the MIT in the US, Churchill is one of the youngest and most secular Cambridge colleges, and its research and teaching staff are predominantly natural and applied scientists. Overwhelmingly, when I told scientists – including Fellows from other Oxbridge colleges and visitors from universities abroad – about my historical research, I had the impression of a general open-mindedness regarding my historical work.

Usually, however, there was considerable surprise when I mentioned that serious research on psychic phenomena was still going on. But as far as I can tell, even the few whose interest appeared sufficiently strong to request some of this literature never actually read it.

I was particularly stumped by several Fellows who told me in private of their own strange experiences. For example, one stressed he didn’t believe in spirits or any other ‘paranormal nonsense’. But then he shared what he said was the most striking experience of his life: he claimed that he knew his son had just died, at the very moment he had in fact perished in a car accident in London. Another senior scientist at Cambridge claimed that his wife saw apparitions of the dead on a regular basis. But even in these and other instances, there was not the slightest interest to study the literature, let alone to conduct research first-hand – or at least help bring critical but open-minded scientific attention to such experiences into the academic mainstream.

Another group of academic experts whose very job it is to help us separate the wheat from the chaff are professional philosophers of science, notably those trying to work out formal criteria distinguishing legitimate science from pseudo-science. But this literature hardly inspires confidence either. Seven years ago, I guest-edited a special section in a leading journal for the history and philosophy of science, with articles by fellow scholars working on psychical research in the history of science. In my introduction, I surveyed the professional literature and found that philosophers quite often literally didn’t know what they were writing about when it came to psychical research: primary sources such as original studies published by trained scientists in peer- reviewed organs were bypassed, and instead there was an unquestioning reliance on highly problematic secondary accounts popularized by media-savvy Skeptical activists and their supporters.

To illustrate ambiguous attitudes by philosophers of science to the topic, I also quoted from a private letter by Karl Popper, one of the most prominent philosophers of science of all time. Turns out that Popper himself was convinced of the existence of ‘paranormal’ phenomena, but absolutely rejected the idea of studying them scientifically – without bothering to offer a rational explanation why.

Knowing my audience, I deliberately didn’t make any claims about the reality of psychic phenomena in my review, but simply focused on the philosophical reception of parapsychological research. Still, when I submitted the proofs for print, I felt a little nervous and started bracing myself for the expected onslaught.

But what happened? Practically nothing. No barrage of emails hurling abuse, no constructive critiques, no expressions of agreement.

It seems, then, that you can’t just throw the data at scientists and other professional thinkers, expecting them to engage with this controversial material the way they engage with their own, conventional research specialities. Of course, serious research requires time and funding. So the situation may change if we could provide scientists with real career opportunities and some projection from the machinations of Skeptical activists and their journalistic supporters.

And I’m convinced that outright hostility to this research is not nearly as widespread as indifference. Not much has changed in this regard since 1869, when William James began complaining about responses by most of his fellow scientists to the reported marvels of spiritualism: James (who never came to fully believe in personal survival and was critical of the excesses of spiritualist beliefs) found that it was almost impossible to move scientists to actually investigate these empirical indications for survival.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.