Veridical apparitions: Sommer excerpt #9

Probably the first modern American psychiatrist to call for a more discerning use of the term ‘hallucination’ on the basis of experiences discussed above was Ian Stevenson, chair of the department of psychiatry and founder of DOPS at the University of Virginia, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Stevenson cited clinical and sociological studies which suggested that ‘hallucinations’ of deceased loved ones are remarkably common in the general population, and that therefore not all ostensible spirit visions were pathological.

Stevenson’s article didn’t provoke any responses from fellow psychiatrists, probably because it offended modern ‘enlightened’ sensibilities by placing emphasis on empirical evidence suggesting that many of such ‘hallucinations’ were not just purely subjective. Apparitions of the dead, Stevenson argued, have been reported to be perceived by more than one credible witness at a time, and are often veridical (‘truth-telling’): They are reported not just by grieving persons who are obviously well aware of a loved one’s death, but there is a wealth of well-corroborated cases indicating that often clear and vivid visions of dead or dying relatives, partners and friends are also seen by people who did not know that the ‘hallucinated’ person had in fact just died or suffered an accident around the moment of the vision. Stevenson cited two cases of veridical apparitions he had investigated himself, as well as classical early works produced by leading members of the SPR, including Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick.

Edmund Gurney

In the light of the historical contexts sketched above, it’s probably unsurprising that the SPR’s first major field research on ‘hallucinations’ – spearhead by Gurney in England – was the first major effort by secular thinkers to actually test Enlightenment assumptions that apparitions were self-evident figments of diseased imaginations. After Gurney’s death in 1888, this work was replicated on behalf of the International Congress of Psychology, with William James being in charge of the American census portion.  Published in 1894 by the SPR, the results of the international census, which drew on responses from over 17,000 participants, essentially confirmed the findings of Gurney’s original study: not only were ‘hallucinations’ in the sane surprisingly common, but they also often included veridical elements.

Skeptical activists cited on Wikipedia as the supposed ‘experts’ on these things have consistently portrayed this SPR material, along with later research by Stevenson and others, as little more than anecdotal ghost stories collected by self-deluded spiritualists. In fact, one of the most influential historical standard texts of the Skeptical genre, a biography of Gurney by amateur historian Trevor Hall, argued that Gurney had killed himself, following devastating scientific critiques and the discover that he had been hoodwinked. Unfortunately, Hall’s account continues to inform even professional historical works, whose authors have been unaware of refutations of Hall’s story, showing in detail that it is based on severe omissions, misrepresentations and other tricks deployed by Hall to make the past fit the orthodoxy of the present.

One of several scholars taken in by Hall was philosopher of science Ian Hacking. Still, on the basis of primary sources which Hacking did study for himself, he acknowledged in an article on the history of statistical randomization that it was in the work of the early SPR where we find the first applications of probabilistic inference. Before advancing into a methodological standard in fields like psychology, biology and medicine, Hacking argued, randomized trials were pioneered by psychical researchers like Gurney and Charles Richet with the specific aim to rule out chance coincidence as a counter explanation for telepathy and veridical hallucinations. Despite his evident antipathies, Hacking therefore admitted that “Throughout these discussions the highest standards of positivist scientific methodology were observed”.

Early psychical researchers applied additional measures to systematically rule out confirmation bias and other issues in their field research on ‘veridical hallucinations’. For example, collectors of the SPR’s census questionnaires were instructed to hammer home to participants the importance of Yeses and Noes in response to the question of whether they had experienced ‘hallucinations’. Also, data coming from spiritualists and other known believers in the paranormal were marked for higher scrutiny. Cases were not simply published on the basis of trust, but personal cross-examinations of claimants and their witnesses were carried out to assess their credibility, and only reports deemed sufficiently strong were printed, together with documents corroborating the veracity of claimed experiences.

And while Skeptics typically like to claim that psychical researchers had not the slightest clue of the pitfalls of eyewitness testimony, by far the most sophisticated and systematic discussion of these problems available at the time is to be found not in a text of conventional psychology, but throughout the two bulky volumes of Gurney’s first case collection of ‘veridical hallucinations’.

Not to be outdone, one year after Gurney’s pilot study, the first experimental study investigating pitfalls of eyewitness testimony was not conducted by a professional psychologist, but by Richard Hodgson of the SPR. Collaborating with a conjuror who fraudulently produced direct ‘spirit writings’ in sealed slates and other physical phenomena of spiritualism, Hodgson tested the reliability of observations of such phenomena in (usually dimly lit) séance rooms. By comparing written statements by observers with the actual events, Hodgson was able to demonstrate expectations and prior beliefs had indeed produced rather grave distortions in their perception and memories of the witnessed ‘phenomena’.

It was this rigor and quality of methods employed by Gurney, Myers, the Sidgwicks, Hodgson and others in the SPR which prompted William James’s decision to actively collaborate with them for the remainder of his life. James also often publicly protested against polemical attacks and misrepresentations of the methods of psychical research by several ‘enlightened’ fellow psychologists in Germany and the US, who actively manufactured what James called the “newspaper and drawing-room myth”, according to which “soft-headedness and idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy” in the SPR, “and general wonder sickness its dynamic principle”.

For example, in a review of Gurney’s study of ‘veridical hallucinations’, James stated in Science journal that it displayed a combination of qualities “assuredly not found in every bit of so-called scientific research that is published in our day”. A decade later, he took it up a notch:

were I asked to point to a scientific journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I think I should have to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level of critical consciousness.

And a critical but fair study of this early material, which is now freely available in digital format, certainly confirms James’s impressions.

Unsurprisingly, however, such public endorsements by James as the leader of the American psychological profession would only make other psychologists ramp up their efforts to demarcate their fledgling discipline from politically dangerous associations with the ‘occult’ A comparatively harmless example of such ‘boundary-work was the appropriation of Hodgson’s study of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony by Joseph Jastrow, an ‘enlightened’ psychologist on a life-long mission to eradicate paranormal belief at all cost. Jastrow, America’s first major popularizer of psychology, cited Hodgson’s findings to imply they demonstrated the wholesale fallibility of testimony for all psychic phenomena.

Jastrow here pioneered a basic strategy adopted by Skeptics and their champions in academic psychology up to the present day: The application of insights from the psychology of error without limits on a general, abstract level to explain away any belief in the paranormal, as an excuse to bypass systematic engagement with the best concrete evidence and cases.

However, psychical researchers were not just the first to systematically formulate and experimentally demonstrate the fallibility of perception and memory. The primary sources also show they went out of their way to apply the lessons learnt from these insights to systematically eliminate or limit errors – to ensure, one could say, the sifted, published evidence would stand in a court of law. In the case of research on apparitions, for example, it’s simply not true that psychical researchers were typically satisfied with cases of ambiguous impressions reported to be perceived in low light, at long range, fleetingly, or by uncritical people in a state of expectation or similar conditions known to be associated with pathological and non-pathological hallucinations. On the contrary, the bulk of published cases has focused on perceptions of vivid apparitions over the course of several minutes at close range and in bright light, and under such conditions they have also been reported to be perceived collectively, i.e., by more than one credible witness.

Moreover, while Skeptics typically assume that memories of anomalous experiences are embellished over time to inflate their significance, those who have actually tested this assumption by re-interviewing recipients found that experiences are usually remembered consistently, over the course of up to 20 years.

This is of course not to claim that psychical researchers were infallible and never made mistakes. But anybody who begins their research by studying the primary sources with a critical but open mind, instead of simply relying on Skeptical secondary accounts, will agree that on average considerable pains have been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. A standard move by Skeptics to dismiss all this material off-hand is of course to echo David Hume and simply ‘explain’ it on a general level by fraud. But as William James observed, anybody who suggests fraud as a scientific hypothesis should remember that

in science as much as in common life an hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed; and a fraud which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply ‘fraud’ at large, fraud in abstracto, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of specific concrete facts.

In other words: unless a critic can provide specific evidence that concrete precautions taken by serious researchers against fraud have failed, general accusations of fraud are merely polemical and impede rather than advance actual scientific inquiry.

 

 

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.

Transcending embodied mind: Sommer excerpt #8

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: One of the major upshots of the secularization of modern sciences by professionalization since the 1800s is what historian of neuroscience Fernando Vidal has called ‘brainhood’ – the popular standard view of modern neuroscientists claiming that anything worthwhile saying about humanity can be said by studying the brain. According to this view – parodied by cartoonist Scott Adams with the image of the ‘moist robot’ – our minds and personalities cease to exist with the death of our bodies. As the aforementioned examples of Christian materialists Hobbes and Priestley, and the German ‘scientific materialists’ of the nineteenth century already suggested, the idea ‘mind equals brain’ has long predated modern neuroscience. And as a growing body of sophisticated studies in the history of neurosciences have shown (which, I hardly need to stress, are not usually read by scientists), the fledgling brain sciences of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would become major platforms for political battles driving the ‘soul’ out of scientific discourse. In practical terms, rather than constituting the undisputable result of modern brain sciences, ideas of ‘brainhood’ were on the contrary a significant motivating factor in their very formation. Unsurprisingly, any competing ideas, data and theories, which have always existed as well, fell to the wayside – again not so much for coercively scientific and empirical reasons, but on overtly political and ideological grounds.

One of the most striking psychophysical anomalies reported by physicians since antiquity but ignored by brain researchers from about the mid-nineteenth century until recent years, is called ‘terminal’ or ‘paradoxical lucidity’. These are well-documented cases of a sudden and often full restoration of personality in cognitively impaired, mentally ill or disabled patients, whose loss of cognitive functions has been assumed to be permanent, shortly before death. The anomaly lies in the fact that ‘terminal lucidity’ is reported to occur even in victims of severe neural decay or brain damage following accidents, hydrocephalus, meningitis, dementia, hemispherectomy, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, abscesses, tumors, and so on.

In a typical case, a patient who was in a prolonged state of profound dementia and confusion would spontaneously come to, recognize and communicate with their family and friends in a clear and coherent manner, and appear to be in a state of heightened mood and vitality – only to die within hours or days after the puzzling recovery. Cases of such anomalous recoveries just before death are now again reported in the biomedical mainstream literature and are acknowledged to pose serious difficulties for reductionistic understandings of brain-mind relationships.

As pointed out by authors like nineteenth-century philosopher Carl du Prel and the modern rediscoverer of ‘terminal lucidity’, biologist Michael Nahm, these cases occasionally are reported to come with other anomalies, e.g. patients having visions of deceased loved ones or displaying extra-sensory perception. But even without properly ‘paranormal’ features, cases of terminal lucidity belong to a growing class of anomalies which are threatening to explode practically all models reducing the mind to the brain. If our understanding of mind-brain relationships is at least basically accurate, ‘terminal lucidity’ simply should not occur.

2021 book cited for this paragraph

The same applies to classical NDEs occurring during states like cardiac arrests and deep general anesthesia – including cases in which patients have reported ‘veridical’ perceptions, i.e. often highly specific events taking place while they ‘flatlined’. Cases involving veridical components are occasionally published even in the medical mainstream literature, and in my view there are now too many well-corroborated veridical cases on record to be dismissed as anecdotes. But even if we categorically ignored veridical cases, NDEs often occur during states in which, according to recognized criteria of modern brain sciences, neocortical functions required for any form of coherent conscious experience are abolished

Since 2012, neuroscientists have struggled to make sense of neuroimaging studies which demonstrate another fundamental anomaly. We already noted well-established therapeutic effects of NDE-type mystical states produced by psychedelic drugs. Brain scans made during these experiences have shown that the intensity of these mystical experiences dramatically correlates with a deactivation of all neural regions held to be responsible for conscious experience. These findings have caused quite a stir in the neuroscientific community as they show the opposite of what should happen: conscious experience is normally associated with activation of the neural network in question. Almost a decade later, it seems there is still no conventional solution for this puzzle in sight.

Granted, discussions of these findings are ongoing, and they do not provide strong, direct evidence for personal survival by themselves. But apart from considerably weakening the evidence-base for all models with hold that consciousness inevitably dies with the brain, models which do account for these anomalies, and which also provide a conceptual framework allowing us to integrate these findings with more positive evidence for survival, have existed since the late 1800s.

So let’s turn to such more direct evidence, and begin with indications suggesting that at least some of the aforementioned ‘bereavement hallucinations’, deathbed visions, and encounters with the departed during NDEs are not hallucinations in the ordinary meaning of the word. 

 

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.

The medical mainstream: Sommer excerpt #7

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: You probably noted that I still haven’t made anything like a strong statement about the reality of parapsychological phenomena. But as it should be evident by now, one major obstacle for many people to even look at the evidence has long been removed by perfectly mainstream history of science and medicine scholarship: The standard belief that ‘scientific naturalism’ – the categorical exclusion of ‘paranormal’ explanations from science, and indeed academic discourse at large – is the inevitable, cumulative and irreversible result of impartial scientific research over the past centuries, is not supported by evidence. Quite on the contrary: perhaps shockingly, ‘naturalism’ turns out to be little more than a gentleman’s agreement, one that has been shaped by theological as much as by properly secular concerns.   

Our Judge might of course still object even before we get to the empirical evidence, and say: Fine, Skeptics and their orthodox religious forerunners shouldn’t have twisted historical facts to suit their ends. But their battle against paranormal beliefs is still praiseworthy and noble. After all, it’s undeniable that such beliefs have always disastrous consequences: Jihad suicide bombers commit unspeakable atrocities for rewards in the afterlife. In Africa and other parts of the world, people accused of witchcraft continue to be tortured and murdered. Even here in the West, people still sometimes die in the course of exorcisms. Then there’s the undeniable emotional and economic damage caused by charlatans making a profession out of preying on the bereaved and other vulnerable people.

Similar arguments were of course common throughout history. In fact, Wilhelm Wundt advanced such concerns in his 1879 attack on spiritualism, where he explicitly stated that evidence for paranormal phenomena simply didn’t matter. Wundt thought it would be irresponsible to admit them even if they were real: “The moral barbarism produced in its time by the belief in witchcraft”, Wundt wrote, “would have been precisely the same, if there had been real witches,” and he added: “We can therefore leave the question entirely alone, whether or not you have ground to believe in the spiritualistic phenomena”.

Nobody in their right mind will deny that uncritical belief in the paranormal has caused disasters and will continue to do so. In fact, my own journey into the strange world of survival research as a teenager back in Germany began with such a tragedy: My surrogate family fell apart as a result of my closest friend’s mother’s growing obsession with the Ouija board, leading to divorce and grief which continues up to the present day. For me, this was a painful experience, and it’s probably easy to image it would bias me against rather than in favor of belief in the paranormal. But I have also witnessed how friends and acquaintances became better people – kinder, more responsible, and more resilient to the hardships of life – after adopting certain paranormal or spiritual beliefs which I myself find rather odd and do not share. 

And here I have to confess I don’t quite buy it when Skeptical activists claim they are primarily motivated by feelings of social responsibility. After all, it would never occur to Skeptics associations to try and debunk nuclear physics because of Hiroshima and Chernobyl; or destroy the automobile industry because of hundreds of thousands of traffic accident fatalities; or attack mainstream medicine and pharmaceutical corporations because of tens of thousands of patients dying of medical misconduct and side-effects of drugs every year. What’s missing here is a basic appreciation of symmetry regarding evident functions of paranormal beliefs. And the need for symmetry as a basic methodological tool in the assessment of the empirical evidence should start becoming clear once we face certain drastic changes in recent mainstream medicine in approaches to survival-related experiences (as I have argued in a recent contribution to a volume published in the Oxford Cultural Psychiatry series).

For example, since the early 1970s there has been growing medical attention to so- called ‘hallucinations of widowhood’ or ‘bereavement hallucinations’, medical terms for encounters of the bereaved with deceased spouses and loved ones. These ‘hallucinations’ are now recognized to be remarkably widespread, with a conservative estimate of at least 40% of the bereaved experiencing them. They range from a vivid sense of presence to tactile, auditory and visual impressions, which can be indistinguishable from encounters with actual people. These ‘hallucinations’ are reported by persons with no other indications of mental illness, and they can be transitory but can occur over years. ‘Ghostly’ encounters experiences by the bereaved are not usually perceived as scary or disturbing, and physicians do not consider them pathological or even therapeutically undesirable. On the contrary: whatever their ultimate explanation, it is recognized that these ‘hallucinations’ often provide the bereaved with much-needed strength to carry on.

A related body of clinical data concerns so-called ‘end-of-life experiences’ including ‘deathbed visions’, i.e., comforting other-worldly visions reported by dying patients. The first mainstream psychiatrist to call systematic attention to often emotionally striking visions of dead relatives and friends by terminally ill patients was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer of the modern hospice movement. Like ‘hallucinations of widowhood’, these visions, which seem to differ markedly from drug- and dementia- induced hallucinations, are also reported to have overwhelmingly constructive effects, and are recognized to be of significant help for the dying and sometimes bystanders (including family and medical personnel) to come to terms with the fear of death.

Kübler-Ross was also one of the first psychiatrists to write about ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs), which have been reported by survivors of cardiac arrests and other close brushes with death. Certain NDE elements have become part of popular culture – impressions of leaving the body, passing through a barrier or tunnel, encounters with deceased relatives and friends, a light representing unconditional love, a sudden insight of the interconnectedness of all beings, and so on. The public discourse over NDEs is typically polarized by claims that scientists who study NDEs have either proven life after death or debunked them through ‘natural’ explanations. But once you get past the clickbait, it again turns out there exists a wealth of rigorous research published in biomedical mainstream journals which suggests something strange is going on indeed. Medical authors usually steer clear of discussions of paranormal effects often reported by NDE survivors, but yet again even the ‘naturalistic’ clinical consensus is that NDEs have often strikingly constructive after-effects and can even be transformative.

While no two NDEs are identical, they can often occasion lasting and significant personality changes. Regardless of survivors’ previous religious convictions or lack thereof, they usually ‘come back’ with the unshakable conviction that personal consciousness persists after bodily death. Other long-term effects of NDEs are striking increases in empathy, altruistic engagement and environmental responsibility, as well as significantly reduced consumerism and competitiveness. Considering that NDEs are overwhelmingly characterized as a state of bliss, perhaps the most counter-intuitive finding is that those having them are not prone to commit suicide. In fact, studies have suggested that suicide survivors reporting NDEs typically don’t repeat attempts to end their lives, and claim their NDEs as a reason to categorically rule out suicide in the future.

Interestingly, full-blown NDEs can occur in situations other than near death, such as in states of deep meditation. Practically each of its elements have also been described throughout history by people (including – you guessed it – modern scientists) reporting to be overcome by ‘mystical’ ecstasy and related states. The mainstream biomedical literature has also shown NDE-style experiences to occur in psychedelically induced mystical states, using substances such as psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’) and N, N- Dimethyltryptamine (DMT, naturally occurring in the ayahuasca plant). Clinical trials have demonstrated that these induced ‘other-worldly’ experiences often cause similar personality changes as NDEs, most notably a loss of fear of death, and a newfound courage to face the struggle of life. For these reasons, psychedelic therapies have become serious contenders in the treatment even of severe conditions, including alcohol- and drug-addictions, and treatment-resistant depressions and post-traumatic stress disorder.

There is great irony in the fact that experiences and states of mind which mainstream medics now induce for therapeutic purposes have been demonized and aggressively pathologized throughout the history of Western science and medicine. The fact that today’s medicine is far more discerning in its diagnoses of patients reporting ‘weird’ experiences, and has even begun to exploit apparently striking therapeutic benefits of certain mental states and experiences which were systematically suppressed throughout the last four centuries, might justify a rather delicate question: Can clinicians afford historical illiteracy?

After all, it seems the ‘naturalistic’ self-image of modern scientists and clinicians has been informed – or rather, fundamentally misinformed – by certain historical myths and evidence-free assumptions. Modern axiomatically ‘naturalistic’ sensibilities have had a considerable limiting impact not only on scientific and medical research, but also on clinical practice. And while it remains important to keep exaggerated and uncritical beliefs in the ‘paranormal’ in check to avoid tragedies, I think it is high time to finally look at the other side of the coin, and wonder how much concrete damage has been caused by centuries of stigmatization, mis-diagnoses and mis- or overmedication of people reporting ‘paranormal’ experiences.

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.

History of science and magic: Sommer excerpt #6

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach once famously suggested that the Christian dogma stating man was created in God’s image had to be inverted, as it was actually the other way around. There’s obviously much to be said for this argument. But as we have seen, it’s also in the nature of man to create eminent fellow mortals in his own image, through the magic of the historian’s pen.

This is most safely done when the revered person in question is dead and can’t object. That such transformations can occur even when the idol in question is still alive, I already suggested through the example of Gustav T. Fechner’s failed attempts to rectify false claims about his skepticism regarding parapsychological phenomena.

  Robert Boyle            

There are of course other cases, including that of Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society. When Boyle was still alive, someone circulated rumors asserting he had finally seen the errors of his ways and no longer believed in poltergeist phenomena. Like Fechner centuries after him, Boyle publicly set the record straight and emphasized his views had not changed, but without effect.

1848 saw the birth of modern spiritualism, but also the publication of  a new history of the Royal Society. Written by its secretary, it briefly addressed investigations of ‘things that go bump in the night’ by the Society’s founding members, but adjusted the historical record to recreate them in the image of nineteenth-century scientists:

It was a labor well worthy the men who met avowedly for the investigation and development of truth, to inquire into these superstitions, and patiently and dispassionately to prosecute such experiments as should tend to eradicate them. It would indeed be difficult to over-estimate the great benefit that accrued to society by their destruction, and a lasting debt of gratitude is due to the Royal Society, for having been so essential an instrument in dispelling such fatal errors.

As we have seen earlier, this is pretty much the exact opposite of what had actually happened: Boyle and other early members who did investigate the phenomena came out in favor of their reality, and the few outspoken critics within the Society empathically did not proceed “patiently and dispassionately”, but responded just like non-scientific outside critics: with little more than scoffs. Still, as Boyle scholar Michael Hunter observed, this falsification of basic historical facts survived into the next major history of the Royal Society published in 1944, and continued to inform the ‘naturalistic’ self-image of modern scientists.

The nineteenth century was the first time in history when scientists made efforts of becoming celebrities, a status which was often cultivated and exploited to influence public opinion. One such science celebrity in Germany was du Bois-Reymond, who also appropriated history for his own secularizing ends. In one of his legendary public lectures, he proclaimed, rather falsely:

In the place of miracle, natural science put law. Like fading from the light of dawn, spirits and ghosts faded away from her. She broke the reign of old sacred lie. She extinguished the witches’ and heretics’ burning stakes. She put the blade into the hand of historical criticism.

14 years later, du Bois-Reymond’s friend Huxley replaced his coinage ‘agnosticism’ with ‘scientific naturalism’ at the end of a historical reconstruction of the evolution of modern naturalistic thought. The first proponents of scientific naturalism, Huxley asserted, were not the materialists of the French Enlightenment, but the humanists of the Renaissance. But instead of singling out a Renaissance man of science for special praise, Huxley’s focus was on the great philologist and early biblical critic Erasmus.

Huxley’s selection made good sense in the context of his ‘naturalistic’ agenda, as he could hardly afford to admit the fact that practically every leading man of Renaissance science embraced beliefs in occult principles and phenomena, ranging from astrology to clairvoyance and what was now called telepathy. And as historians of early modern science accept today, it was these occult Renaissance philosophies which would inspire and shape the experimental philosophy of the man widely regarded as the very ‘father’ of modern science, Francis Bacon.

Naturally, evidence-free historical narratives would also underpin anti- parapsychology polemics by early university psychologists. In 1892, for example, Wilhelm Wundt launched an attack on the SPR in England, two German psychological societies emulating the SPR’s work, and French scientists (he explicitly targeted Richet and fellow psychologist Pierre Janet) who had published experimental evidence for telepathy. Recycling tropes from his public assault on spiritualism in 1879, Wundt claimed that telepathy would indicate the existence of a world in which natural law would be “turned on its head”, one which was separate from “the world of a Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, of a Leibniz and Kant”, and he concluded this ‘scientific’ critique by terming psychical research an endeavor he thought was “pathological through and through”.

The year of the coinage of the German term Parapsychologie (by philosopher- psychologist Max Dessoir) saw the attack on psychical research by another eminent experimental psychologist using history in his defense of ‘science’ and ‘reason’. Hugo Münsterberg, a pupil of Wundt’s, scolded psychical researchers for failing to realize that telepathy was quite obviously “impossible”, arguing that a serious consideration of telepathy would be just as anachronistic as a renewed scientific interest in alchemy.

After William James employed Münsterberg to run his laboratory of experimental psychology at Harvard from 1892, the German psychologist only ramped up his polemical crusade. Using tricks which might put the stereotypical fraudulent medium to shame, he would virtually sabotage James’s efforts to establish critical but open-minded psychical research as a branch of experimental psychology.

One of James’s and Münsterberg’s successors at Harvard was the psychologist and historian Edwin Boring. An opponent of continuing attempts to establish parapsychology at American universities, in 1950 Boring still briefly acknowledged Gurney’s and Myers’s work in his classic History of Experimental Psychology. But he situated psychical research “just at the periphery” of the discipline, and neglected to mention the fact that William James, whom Boring considered the ‘father’ of psychology, considered Gurney and Myers his closest scientific allies. 

Later, in a preface for a book by a debunker of experimental parapsychology, Boring selectively quoted James, with the purpose of portraying him as being at best agnostic regarding the existence of psychic phenomena: Insisting that it was “quite clear that interest in parapsychology has been maintained by faith. People want to believe in an occult something”, Boring praised “James’s own suspended judgement on psychic research”.

 

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.

 

 

 

Psychical research: Sommer excerpt #5

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Hermann Helmholtz was the teacher of several famous physicists including Heinrich Hertz and Max Planck, but he also trained the founder of experimental psychology – the science of the ‘soul’ (a literal English translation of psyche) – in Germany, Wilhelm Wundt. Some psychologists still debate the question whether the ‘father’ of their profession was Wundt in 1879, or William James at Harvard a few years earlier. More important for our purpose is a check of how the maximally opposed attitudes to the ‘paranormal’ by the founders of modern academic psychology have been portrayed in histories of the discipline.

Since histories of psychology are still often written not by trained historians, but by psychologists invested in promoting the ‘naturalistic’ public image of psychology, it may not be very surprising that Wundt’s rejection of the ‘empirical occult’ has been adopted without question. Occasionally, even professional historians have praised him as a hero of modern science vanquishing self-evident paranormal charlatanry. Reviews of the scholarship on William James, on the other hand, found that his life-long involvement in parapsychological research had either been downplayed or passed over by most scholars until about the late 1980s.

 

While James’s advocacy of psychical research will become evident enough during the remainder of this essay, it’s probably no overstatement to say that Wundt consciously cultivated a deep hatred of all things ‘occult’. In fact, Wundt had practically inaugurated the birth of his institute for experimental psychology in 1879 with a polemical attack in the same year on fellow Leipzig scientists who investigated the hotly debated American medium Henry Slade. Spearheaded by astrophysicist Karl F. Zöllner (a friend of William Crookes in England), these investigators included the man Wundt himself would later call “the founder of experimental psychology”, the widely revered physicist and philosopher Gustav T. Fechner.

Later, Wundt literally rewrote history when he portrayed Fechner as being overwhelmingly skeptical of paranormal phenomena, by selectively quoting from the dead man’s diary. The full diary would only be published in 2004, but relevant passages, which shone a rather different light on Fechner’s actual attitudes than Wundt’s selections, were printed in a German psychical research journal as early as 1888. In his tribute to his teacher, Wundt also briefly mentioned correspondence with Fechner in response to Wundt’s 1879 attack on spiritualism, but did not reveal its contents. Little wonder, as Fechner’s letters included a detailed critique of Wundt’s arguments and misrepresentations of the experiments. Wundt also swept Fechner’s attempts to publicly set the record straight under the carpet, concerning misrepresentations of parapsychological research in general and Fechner’s views in particular. These included a book by Fechner on these topics and his public protest to made-up skeptical statements attributed to him in an interview with the secretary of the Seybert Commission for the ‘investigation’ of spiritualism at the University of Pennsylvania. However, Fechner’s interventions had practically no effect and psychologists have essentially ignored these contexts up to the present day.

The cultural and political climate in which Fechner and colleagues had conducted their parapsychological investigations was of course still hardly conducive to a calm, dispassionate reception of their findings by fellow intellectuals. After all, with Wundt’s foundation of German experimental psychology, they took place toward the end of yet another political key event, which would only reinforce the ‘naturalistic’ foundations of modern university sciences during their infancy: The so-called Kulturkampf (‘war for culture’), waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church in Germany throughout the 1870s. The crisis reached a peak in 1876 in Marpingen, a small village in Baden, where three eight-year-old peasant girls claimed to see apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Soon, crowds of pilgrims began flocking to Marpingen, where the ‘Virgin’ began making dangerous political statements. Hardly surprisingly, the result was a brutal crackdown on the child visionaries and their followers by the police, and this and similar events only served to polarize debates about the supposed pathology of visions and other supposed revelations from the beyond, which were lumped in with spiritualism.

Declared opponents of spiritualism and its calm, dispassionate investigation also included a growing number of philosophical materialists, most notably the founders of Communism including Karl Marx – who, incidentally, explicitly refused to base their ‘dialectical materialism’ on science. One of Marx’s few scientific friends in England was the zoologist and self-appointed secular Great Inquisitor of the paranormal, Ray Lankester. A patron saint of the modern Skeptics movement, Lankester is often credited for having exposed the medium Henry Slade as an evident impostor before he was investigated by Zöllner and Fechner.

Let’s assume for the sake of brevity that Lankester really did catch Slade red- handed in the act of fraudulently producing ‘spirit writings’ as often claimed. What matters for our present purpose is not to obtain certainty whether Slade – a professional medium who charged hefty fees for his seances – was the real deal or nothing but a fraud (thankfully, we don’t have to rely on his case). What should be acknowledged is that Slade wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting a fair hearing, no matter the concrete evidence either way. In fact, when Lankester famously sued Slade for fraud in England, the court proceedings show that the rule of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ was not observed. For example, there were eminent intellectuals on the defense for Slade, and while Lankester certainly made a strong case, he did not prove fraud beyond reasonable doubt. Still, Slade didn’t just get a slap on the wrist, but was sentenced with the maximum penalty of three months prison with hard labor.

Henry Sidgwick        

Among Slade’s defenders were not just devout spiritualists like the biologist Alfred R. Wallace, but another major Victorian intellectual, Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick. A doubter of survival and the physical phenomena of spiritualism, Sidgwick was widely admired for his skepticism in the proper meaning of the word – doubt or suspended judgement informed by active and calm consideration of all sides of an argument. A tireless promoter of women’s rights, Sidgwick became a reformer of British secular education after resigning his Fellowship at Trinity College at Cambridge University in the late 1860s because of religious doubts. Fellows were required to pay only lip-service to Anglican dogmas including belief in the biblical miracles, but having lost his faith, Sidgwick felt it was his duty to resign from his highly prestigious and well- paid position. Impressed by his integrity, supporters at Trinity would eventually create a lectureship for Sidgwick, which came without any theological stipulations. Later, Sidgwick occasionally worked with Huxley and other agnostics to achieve the admission of students by universities regardless of their religious faith.

In 1882, Sidgwick became the first president of the SPR after its foundation by Tyndall’s former assistant, William Barrett. Early members included (apart from the already-mentioned) J. J. Thomson and another future physics Nobel laureates, Lord Rayleigh, as well as dozens of now less famous members of the Royal Society, and even one of Helmholtz’s famous students, Heinrich Hertz in Germany. However, the wider context spelled out below makes it easy to understand why Hertz would remain the only famous professional German scientist among the early members, and why, as Hertz had emphasized to his friend Oliver Lodge, he would categorically refuse to conduct parapsychological investigations himself.

Contrary to the often-claimed ‘disenchantment’ of the modern world, there has been a clear continuity of serious interest in the paranormal by British scientific elites wide into the twentieth century. And as I have tried to show, even though physicists like Crookes, Barrett and Lodge were among the most active investigators, the strongest and most conscious efforts by early SPR members to contribute to scientific knowledge was not in the realm of physics, but to the fledgling science of experimental psychology. Apart from Sidgwick and his wife, the mathematician Eleanor M. Sidgwick, by far the most industrious early workers in this regard were two close friends and former students of Sidgwick’s, Edmund Gurney and Frederic W. H. Myers.

A nephew of the man who coined the term ‘scientist’ (William Whewell), Myers is known for also having invented a famous word, which, however, most scientists today may utter in a tone of enlightened contempt at best: telepathy. Myers’s Wikipedia page shows perhaps a little too clearly that whatever is at stake for modern Skeptics, concern for historical evidence is not it. The entry is an almost exhaustive list of ‘scientific’ critiques and rumors spread about Myers, along with several false claims and misrepresentations of his work, all with the evident purpose of making him appear like a hapless victim of an obsessive ‘will to believe’. The entry also mentions but immediately downplays the fact that Myers’s theory of the ‘subliminal self’ (of which more in Part 2) influenced Théodore Flournoy, the founder of Swiss experimental psychology, and Wundt’s competitor in ongoing claims of having ‘fathered’ the psychology as whole, William James.

What’s missing, however, is the acknowledgement that Myers – along with the Sidgwicks and other SPR figures – practically represented British psychologists at the early International Congresses of Psychology, the main platform on which the methods of fledgling experimental psychology were negotiated, from its first session in 1889 until Myers’s death in 1901. And while it is true that several ‘enlightened’ psychologists either ignored or actively denounced Myers, both Gurney and Myers became James’s closest collaborators in experimental psychology. They corresponded frequently, James replicated some of their experiments in automatic writing and hypnosis, and cited these studies in his Principles of Psychology and other canonical texts. Not least, between 1889 and 1897, James would collaborate with Myers and the Sidgwicks on an international survey of ‘telepathic hallucinations’, which we will discuss with other evidence in Part 2.

And as far as such ‘enlightened’ critics of Myers and psychical research go, of the early university psychologists who aggressively battled his and James’s unorthodox science, not a single one was a materialist. On the contrary, major early university psychologists, such as Wundt in Germany and G. Stanley Hall in the US, routinely asserted that spiritualism and its open-minded investigation posed a fundamental threat to “true religion”.

 

But let me complicate things even further: While empirical approaches to occult phenomena prior to the nineteenth century have been rather consistently motivated by religious apologetics indeed, Victorian psychical research was by no means the exclusive domain of religious or even spiritual folk.

Myers’s and James’s principal collaborator in France, for example, was the future Nobel prize winner in physiology, Charles Richet. After inspiring Charcot’s interest in hypnosis, Richet would later be a major force behind the foundation of the International Congresses of Psychology. But far from being a spiritualist, Richet – the doyen of French psychical research from the 1870s to his death in 1935 – shared Charcot’s ‘medical materialism’. Although he held survival researchers like Myers and Oliver Lodge in high esteem and would somewhat soften his stance late in life, Richet was convinced that the mind would die together with the brain, and therefore rejected the survival hypothesis throughout his long career. It is true that Richet published volumes of empirical evidence for the occurrence of a wide range of paranormal phenomena, and he even claimed the coinage of ‘ectoplasm’ – the word for the weird substance out of which spirits are claimed to materialize in seances. But his work was explicitly atheoretical, and he considered the marvels of whose reality he convinced himself not as evidence for a spirit realm, but as fundamental scientific anomalies with unique potential to expand human understanding of the physical world.

The historical novelty of this strictly positivist approach, which investigated and accepted parapsychological phenomena as facts of nature but programmatically rejected spiritualist interpretations, can hardly be exaggerated. Especially in continental Europe, this non- and often anti-spiritualist approach was shared by other pioneering psychical researchers, and would characterize the work of practically all leading continental investigators in the twentieth century. These would also include Marie and Pierre Curie, who were rather uninterested in evidence for personal survival, but more than intrigued particularly by the physical phenomena produced by spiritualist mediums.

Einstein rejected off-hand spiritualist beliefs together with evidence for the physical marvels which interested J. J. Thomson, Lord Rayleigh and the Curies so much, but occasionally participated in tests of clairvoyance and telepathy. Though he usually avoided taking a stance in public, the archival evidence suggests that Einstein was more than just interested in certain psychic phenomena, and once he even wrote the preface to an experimental study of telepathy – in which he urged scientific psychologists in particular to pay open-minded attention to psychic phenomena.

Einstein never joined the SPR, but two of the most iconic modern psychologists – Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung – did. Jung’s parapsychological interests and convictions are well known, but despite his belief in psychic phenomena he did not adopt the ‘spirit hypothesis’. This was the subject of an article by Jung in the SPR Proceedings, which he concluded by stating “I am personally convinced of the reality of such facts, but I cannot accept them as evidence for the independent reality of spirits”.

 

Freud, who had studied hypnosis under Charcot, is known for his own promotion of ‘medical materialism’, and his epoch-making work was significantly motivated by a similar wish to reduce religion to pathology. Still, Freud would also become a believer in telepathy, which he almost certainly interpreted not as a spiritual phenomenon, but within the prevailing positivist and physicalist frameworks of continental European parapsychology. However, he was far more hesitant than Jung to put his convictions on public record. A letter by Freud to his disciple Ernest Jones, who was worried that Freud’s paranormal belief may jeopardize the ‘scientific’ image of psychoanalysis, speaks volumes:

 

When anyone adduces my fall into sin, just answer him calmly that conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and many other things, and that the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis.

 

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.

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.