The dead continue to exist: Sommer excerpt #13

Historian Andreas Sommer concludes his review of the evidence for conscious life after physical death: After Part 1 cleared the path for an ideally unbiased recognition of a serious research tradition which most educated people are unaware of, it seems there are only two interpretations of the empirical evidence discussed in Part 2: We can either assume some kind of cosmic conspiracy by a Neoplatonic ‘world-soul’ or Absolute Mind bent on perpetually tricking us, or adopt the more natural and simpler view that the dead continue to exist, and sometimes – under conditions whose exploration will need to be part of continuing research – are able to manifest, either sporadically as suggested by the best cases of apparitions and mediumship, or through rebirth into a new life.

Note that I do not claim personal survival is scientifically proven. However, unlike our alternative hypothesis, the idea of survival can be put to work for the purpose of developing new avenues of research, whose results may eventually engender techniques or devices which might allow us to communicate with the ‘other’ side in much the same reliable and robust ways we communicate with the living today. But for that to happen, not only will we need to actively work to remove the immense social stigma associated with this kind of research, but also raise a question which is practically never raised by survival researchers: Who is our audience?

This question brings us back to the concrete context of F. C. S. Schiller’s sarcastic comment on fundraising for survival research vs. medical care for leprous cats at the beginning of this essay. Schiller’s article was in fact part of an appeal to fellow academics to help him tackle questions that had never been addressed in a systematic manner: Is it true, as it has been asserted by advocates and opponents of survival, that the question was felt by most humans to be of fundamental importance? And was there really a universal preference for survival – or a ‘will to believe’ in it, which, it has often been argued, inevitably contaminated any supporting evidence? Schiller – you probably guessed it already – was a member of the SPR. And like his friend William James, he was on the fence regarding survival but still a vocal advocate of impartial survival research.

To obtain an informed picture of actual attitudes to survival in the educated public, Schiller designed a questionnaire which was sent to around 10,000 participants. The project was quite different from more recent sociological surveys, which have assessed the prevalence of belief in life after death. Among the key questions was if survival was desirable in the first place, while others tried to tease out how common not just a ‘will to believe’ in it was, but also a ‘will to disbelieve’. Most crucially for survival researchers, Schiller wanted to find out how common the ‘will to know’ was. After all, the question whether or not there is an audience for the findings of empirical studies regardless of results, was and is now vital for the future of research funding.

The results of Schiller’s questionnaire study predicted a rather bleak future for survival researchers: Not only was there a high ambivalence in attitudes regarding the desirability of survival. Most significantly for investigators, the results suggested a striking lack of interest by most respondents to have their beliefs or disbeliefs informed by solid evidence. The results were met with silence then, and there has never been a discussion of their implications in the dwindling community of survival researchers up to the present day.

I think this silence spoke, and continues to speak, volumes. The practical point I’m trying to make is this: To the majority of educated Westerners, what I may think is evidence for survival ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ can never be as straightforwardly persuasive as, say, evidence for the discovery of a new butterfly species. The question of survival goes straight to the essence of what we believe, hope, and fear we are. I doubt that anything resembling mathematical proof for survival is possible, but as long as the problem of the ‘personal equation’ is simply ignored, such proof would fall on deaf ears just the same way as the already existing volumes of published empirical evidence has. After all, as Schiller observed, if there is resistance you can’t make someone even add 2+2.

Biases either way do exist and must be dealt with in a systematic way, before there can be any tangible progress. Rather than exclusively focusing on empirical research, I therefore think that public education concerning the nature and history of both conventional and unorthodox science will be just as important as the actual empirical 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.

Embodied minds: Sommer excerpt #12

Exotic and strange as distinctions of parapsychological capacities of embodied minds from the agency of discarnate spirits may appear to most moderns, they are hardly new. Such ideas were in fact at the heart of mainstream Renaissance natural philosophy and related Neoplatonic currents, which centred around notions of a ‘world soul’, in which individual minds were thought to be embedded and intrinsically interconnected with the material world on a basic ontological level. This was also the cosmology of early modern science icons including Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Francis Bacon. In 1605, for example, Bacon noted that parapsychological cognitions needed to be distinguished according to the ‘input source’: In his discussion of psychic phenomena occurring near death and in altered states, from which we briefly quoted in Part 1, for example, Bacon divided ‘natural divination’ (divinatio naturalis) into ‘primitive’ divination – parapsychological capacities of the embodied mind – and divination by ‘influxion’ – veridical input from disembodied spirits.206

Far from being refuted during the supposedly linear growth of scientific knowledge, it would again be fair to say that such holistic cosmologies were squarely written out of history by figures like Huxley and du Bois-Reymond, along with striking continuities of associated ‘paranormal’ beliefs held by members of intellectual elites. Notions of a ‘world soul’ would be preserved in major philosophical systems of German idealism, a worldview which grounded much of late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century science. These idealist frameworks were notably formulated by F. W. J. Schelling, J. G. Fichte and later G. W. F. Hegel – all of whom were convinced of the reality of ‘paranormal’ phenomena, especially those reported to occur in mesmerist trance and other altered states.

For example, Hegel’s leading philosophical antagonist was Arthur Schopenhauer, who still agreed with Hegel that “He who nowadays doubts the facts of animal magnetism and its clairvoyance is not to be called incredulous, but ignorant”. Schopenhauer also studied reports of spirit apparitions, which, however, he did not interpret as evidence for personal survival, but as indications of dramatized expressions of an impersonal and unconscious ‘world will’. Similar notions were at the roots of the famous Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann, who adopted Schopenhauer’s comparisons of biological instinct with clairvoyance, and who was a major German critic of spiritualism.

Gustav T. Fetchner

One scientifically eminent contemporary of Hartmann who also subscribed to the notion of a ‘world soul’ was the aforementioned Gustav T. Fechner, whose works would increasingly come to inspire William James’s philosophy. And it is hardly an accident that James’s fellow psychical researcher Frederic Myers was a trained classicist. In fact, Myers’s coinage of ‘telepathy’ in 1882 – as well as his invention of the word ‘subliminal’ – was more than informed by his studies of ancient Greek mystical to Renaissance natural philosophical and German idealist traditions. While Skeptics typically portray Myers as a haplessly naïve and uncritical spiritualist, his early work in fact seemed to directly undermine the idea of spirit agency, which provoked rather fierce attacks by actual spiritualists.

Rather than through isolated investigations of anomalies directly suggestive of survival only – verifications of ‘spirit identity’ in mediumship and apparitions – Myers tried to strengthen the scientific case for survival by constructing a model of the self, in which undisputed psychological and properly parapsychological phenomena did not face each other as irreconcilable, but were continuous. For the case of mediumship, for example, Myers argued that properly scientific research in this area

will not be difficult only, but impossible, – it will lead to mere confusion and bewilderment – if it be undertaken without adequate preliminary conception of what our own personalities, our own intelligences, are in reality and can actually do. The most ardent Spiritist should welcome a searching inquiry into the potential faculties of spirits still in the flesh. Until we know more of these, those other phenomena to which he appeals must remain unintelligible because isolated, and are likely to be obstinately disbelieved because they are impossible to understand.

This quote is from Myers’s review of James’s Principle of Psychology, where we find a general conception of mediumship which James himself had adopted from Myers. Somewhat oversimplified, this methodological maxim roughly goes like this:

Even veridical cases of mediumship should initially be approached as non- pathological instances of multiple personality. A medium is simply someone with a disposition to go into a self-induced trance, during which expectations by a sitter wishing to communicate with a deceased loved one are unconsciously acted out. Rather than actually ‘channelling’ the spirit in question, the entranced medium, uninhibited by the habitual control of self-consciousness, constructs a ‘split personality’, persuasively camouflaging as the expected ‘spirit’ by accessing a cosmic mental nexus, in which the minds of all beings (living and dead) are constantly connected below the threshold of everyday conscious awareness.

A similar approach was applied in the SPR’s aforementioned early studies of veridical ‘hallucinations’, which Myers conceptualized as exceptional, dramatized telepathic eruptions of subliminal mental interconnectedness into conscious experience. One of the spiritualists who had absolutely no use of all this new talk about subliminal minds and divisions of the self was the ‘other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace. But instead of attacking his fellow countryman Myers, he singled out Carl du Prel, a German author who proposed similar ideas. Never mind that du Prel – the most prominent German- language theorist of the unconscious mind before Freud, who once called du Prel “that brilliant mystic” – was a devout spiritualist himself, as he reminded Wallace in his reply.

At a time when the medical and psychological mainstream still regarded hallucinations and trance states as clear signs of mental degeneration, Myers and colleagues at the English SPR, William James in the US, and du Prel in Germany belonged to the most vocal figures who disputed such blanket diagnoses. Their insistence on more discerning diagnostics would in fact place them firmly against the grain of medical orthodoxy even before they discussed properly parapsychological phenomena. Regarding divisions of the self, for example, du Prel argued that rudimentary forms of non-pathological multiplicity already occurred in ordinary dreams:

If in dream I sit at an examination, and do not find the answer to the question put by the teacher, which then my next neighbor, to my great vexation, excellently gives, this very clear example shows the psychological possibility of the identity of the Subject with the contemporaneous difference of persons.

Approaching spiritualism using such minimalist conceptions which were continuous with ordinary psychological knowledge, Myers and James initially viewed trance mediumship as a more pronounced instance of such dramatized dream monologues. For example, on the height of her career Mrs. Piper occasionally gave up to three communications simultaneously, each hand writing a message from a different ‘spirit’, while a third would coherently address another sitter in the room.  Spiritualists viewed such dramatic instances as self-evident spirit communication even when messages were not veridical. However, Gurney, James and various psychologists were able to demonstrate similar multiple automatic action in hypnotized subjects, while experiments in telepathy between the living through automatic writing likewise suggested striking parallels without the need to invoke spirits.

And it is in this context that early Piper investigators came to believe that her first prominent ‘spirit control’, a personality calling himself ‘Phinuit’, was not a spirit, but a fragment of Piper’s own mind: Not only did ‘Phinuit’ fail to produce evidence supporting his claim that he was the spirit of a certain French doctor. While he did often provide highly specific veridical information about ‘spirits’ other than himself, Phinuit and other trance personalities would also often make absurd statements reminiscent of confused ramblings of a sleepwalker. One example is the often-cited claim by the ‘spirit’ of Sir Walter Scott that there were monkeys in the sun, a statement the reasonably well- educated medium would not have made in the waking state. On another occasion, the entranced Mrs. Piper grabbed the arm of the chair she sat in, correctly identifying it as belonging to a deceased aunt of Lodge’s, but stating it was part of a church organ.

Another strong indication that Phinuit was indeed a partition of Mrs. Piper’s own mind was the fact that he would sometimes shamelessly ‘fish’ for information, trying to tease out responses from sitters which might help to improve his performance. These and other instances – for example, Phinuit sometimes making up ludicrous excuses for giving blatantly false information – only reinforced the impression that the entranced Mrs. Piper, through the vehicle of ‘Phinuit’, was unconsciously responding to investigators’ expectations like a hypnotic subject, compelled to satisfy sitters by furnishing them with ‘information’ no matter how. Principal Piper investigators frequently discussed these and many other signs as fundamental hurdles for the spirit hypothesis. At the same time, they still struggled to make sense of the wealth of impressive veridical information provided by Phinuit and other supposed ‘split personalities’ of Mrs. Piper, which they preliminarily pigeonholed as ‘telepathy from the living’.

One of several early examples which appeared to far outstrip such an interpretation, however, was reported by Oliver Lodge. When he hosted Mrs. Piper during the first series of experiments in England, a personality claiming to be the son of Mr. Rich, head of the Liverpool post office, was purported to communicate. The only other sitter present was a friend of Lodge’s, whom he had introduced to Piper using a pseudonym, but who was still addressed by his actual name. Moreover, while Lodge and his friend faintly knew Mr. Rich, neither were aware that his son had died. The communicator then urged Lodge and his friend to pass on a message to Mr. Rich, expressing worry over his wellbeing and claiming among other things that he had recently suffered from dizziness and saw himself forced to retire.

Lodge decided to bite the bullet and convey the message to Mr. Rich as requested, who confirmed these and other details. Moreover, Rich said that he took the loss particularly badly because of an estrangement with his son shortly before his unexpected death a few months before the sitting. Considering how he should explain Piper’s veridical impersonation of his dead son to Mr. Rich in terms of telepathy from the living, Lodge wrote:

the only thought-transference explanation I can reasonably offer him is that it was the activity of his own mind, operating on the sensitive brain of the medium, of whose existence he knew absolutely nothing, and contriving to send a delusive message to itself!

This is by no means one of the most striking cases, and there are countless others, reported and analyzed in often painstaking detail, in studies of many other mediums. Moreover, the case of Mr. Rich already gives us an idea of the intimacy of many communications. In fact, a frequent complaint by James in his writings and private letters to friends was that sitters frequently did not consent to a publication of some of the most striking veridical material because it was too private and personal.

A much more complicated case of mediumship strongly suggestive of survival were the so-called ‘cross-correspondences’, beginning in 1906. On the face of it, this appeared like a concerted long-term effort from the ‘other side’ by deceased SPR personnel – including Gurney, Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Hodgson – to prove their continued existence through mediums distributed across three continents. These included Rosalie Thompson, ‘Mrs. Forbes’ (the wife of Judge Raikes), Mrs ‘Willett’ (Mrs Winifred Coombe-Tennant), and Margaret Verrall and her daughter Helen in Britain; Mrs. Piper in the US; and ‘Mrs. Holland’ (Rudyard Kipling’s sister Alice Fleming) in India. Prompted by the supposed spirits of Myers and colleagues, each medium conveyed pieces of a literary jigsaw puzzle, whose individual parts were meaningless in themselves, but assumed significance when assembled according to directives of ‘Myers’ and fellow spirits.

An often-cited critique of the cross-correspondences has interpreted them as a result of chance-coincidence. However, the author only used a small fraction of these literary fragments, while ignoring said ‘directives’ by ‘Myers’ and other supposed spirits, which in themselves contained many rather specific, veridical aspects. The most recent and comprehensive account and painstaking analysis of published and previously unpublished primary sources has clearly shown that chance coincidence is a rather inadequate explanation for the bulk of the messages: “Whatever the source”, Trevor Hamilton has argued, “the scripts were not passive inert structures that did not answer back”. ‘Myers’ and other communicators regularly gave explicit instructions in which order to assemble the pieces of the puzzle, gave hints of interpretations, and provided an overall strong impression of a conscious, deliberate direction and monitoring of the process from the outside.

William James and other critical mediumship researchers increasingly acknowledged that telepathy and clairvoyance of the living seemed insufficient as an explanation of subtle aspects of the ‘trance drama’, which were often lost in the printed records. Even the most seasoned and cautious sitters would often admit to be impressed not only by veridical bits of information specifically matching a certain deceased individual, but especially the way in which it was conveyed – vividly displaying a deceased person’s unique mannerisms, tone of voice, characteristic humor, and so on.

In his final comprehensive study of Piper’s mediumship, James once again admitted to struggle with what he called the “rubbish of trance-talk”, which we briefly addressed above. At the same time, he strongly doubted that a medium’s subconscious ‘will to personate’ plus telepathy was a sufficient explanation. If telepathy from the living was all there was, James argued, it should “play an entirely passive role – that is, the telepathic data would be fished out by the personating will, not forced upon it by desires to communicate, acting externally to itself”.

Some of the strongest impressions of such an external ‘push’ often only emerge from a close study of certain details in the original records. Boston psychiatrist Walter F. Prince, an authority in the study of multiple personality disorder, provided a vivid example of the apparent discrepancy between a medium’s ‘will to personate’ and a supposed spirit’s ‘will to communicate’ in an account of his investigations of Mrs. Chenoweth. There, a ‘spirit’ claiming to be Prince’s deceased mother tried to identify herself by mentioning an event in Prince’s childhood, a visit to a neighbor who owned a young calf (colloquially a ‘bossy’) which young Prince had been fond of. Here’s an excerpt from the stenographic records of communications from Prince’s supposed mother:

“We went to a neighbor’s to see a pet Bunny” – pause – “pet Bunny BB Bunny” – pause – “No, it was a pet Bunny BB Bunny B” – long pause – (medium moans) “Milk – a small cow Bossy”.

Prince, who stated there was no plausible way for the medium to be aware of the event from his childhood through conventional means, comments:

Who can doubt that someone or something intended “Bossy” [...] from the first? Else why did the communicator stop at Bunny every time and begin again, express dissatisfaction, pause as though pondering what was the matter or how to remedy it, experience emotion which extorted moans from the medium, and finally say ‘small cow’ as though to avoid the word beginning with B? If two minds were engaged in the process, the second receiving from the first, we can see how this second, call it [...] the medium’s subconscious, would, when the ‘pet B-‘ was reached, conceive the picture of a rabbit and cling to the preference for some time despite the efforts of the first mind to dislodge it.

In short: The stammers in the communication suggest signs of a struggle by the spirit of Prince’s mother to enforce her own memory against the medium’s immediate association with the letter B.

By far the strongest evidence for personal survival along these lines available by 1939 has been provided by German philosopher Emil Mattiesen. Discussing findings of English, American, French, Italian and German psychical research throughout his three volumes of fine-grained analysis of such important formal aspects of mediumistic impersonations, as well as apparitions, Mattiesen identified what he called a “center of activity”, arguing that

a complete theory has to explain not only where the expressed knowledge comes from, but also determine the origin of the drive that weaves both into a lively personation, which as such bowls over the sitter as persuasive.

Similar views were also expressed by perhaps the last scientifically eminent figure to sit with Mrs. Piper, American psychologist Gardner Murphy. Following an intense study of the literature on mediumship, Murphy likewise concluded that it was “the autonomy, the purposiveness, the cogency, above all the individuality, of the source of the messages, that cannot be by-passed”.

Finally, another class of mediumistic case reports also more than suggests a ‘push’ from the ‘other side’ instead of a ‘pull’ from the living: well-documented cases in which a ‘spirit’ who was completely unknown not just to the medium, but to all sitters, initiates communications. While Lodge and his friend in the Rich case cited above, for example, were aware of the existence (though not of the death) of Rich’s son, cases of so-called ‘drop-in communicators’ are defined by the perfect strangeness of a ‘spirit’, whose deceased biographical counterpart is eventually identified only through its own veridical statements. Here, motivations to produce impersonations are typically difficult to ascribe to the medium or any of the sitters, but more plausibly to a deceased man or woman whose communications seem driven by their own motivations.

There are close equivalents of ‘drop-in’ cases in studies of apparitions, some of which seem even more suggestive of spirit agency than so-called ‘Peak-in-Darien’ cases, where a person thought to be alive appears, and is later found to have died before the ‘hallucination’ occurred. The most striking and recent counterpart of ‘drop-ins’, however, is to be found in certain cases of the reincarnation type. Here are some of the most impressive and well-documented features:

·  Reported past-life memories by young children are narrated repeatedly and with strong emphasis;

·  Specific names of persons, places, etc. are given, which eventually lead to the discovery of the child’s supposed previous personality (PP);

·  Social standing and profession of the PP is acted out in play;

·  Claimed memories engender family conflicts, due to ambiguity of family

membership;

·  Sexual precocity and gender dysphoria in cases where the PP belonged to the opposite biological sex;

·  Display of unlearned skills not plausibly acquired in the present life, including basic foreign language skills, procedures associated with a profession, etc.;

·  Unusual behavior and idiosyncratic traits corresponding to the PP, including phobias, aversions, obsessions, and penchants;

·  Alcohol and drug addictions that were manifest in the PP;

·  Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which do not seem to match any events in the child’s current life, but to specific circumstances in the remembered PP’s life, often their mode of death; and not least:

·  Birthmarks, differing in etiological features such as size, shape and colour from conventional birthmarks, and other bodily abnormalities, including severe deformations. Often resembling actual scars and lesions, they significantly correspond to wounds involved in the death of the PP as shown by autopsy reports and other evidence.

Puzzling psychological and behavioral reincarnation evidence, especially children’s substance addictions seemingly out of nowhere, and phobias and full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms corresponding with remembered causes of death, is occasionally discussed even in conventional medical and psychology journals. Together with the physical evidence – specific lesions which mirror typically fatal wounds of a PP – they strongly point to the carrying-over of affects and other compulsive elements of personality from one life to the next. And while cases of birthmarks and lesions may appear especially odd and inexplicable, even they seem continuous with phenomena of conventional biomedicine: Shortly after World War 2, for example, the Lancet reported the case of a traumatized army officer, on whose body marks or imprints would spontaneously appear, resembling ropes with which he had been tied up during war. Other cases reported since then have involved similar spontaneous reappearances during psychotherapy of signs of physical abuse.

 

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.

Reincarnation evidence: Sommer excerpt #11

Ian Stevenson

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Ian Stevenson did not just replicate findings from classical areas of survival research. In the early 1960s, he single-handedly created a new branch of investigations into survival, which can be considered complementary to classical research on mediumship and apparitions: the evaluation of claimed memories of previous lives by young children. As put by Stevenson, if the strongest mediumship and apparition cases suggested that someone who had died was still alive, some cases of the reincarnation type suggested that someone who is now alive had previously died.

In the early days of the SPR, ideas of reincarnation were strongly associated with the ‘Indian Theosophy’ of H. P. Blavatsky, one of several psychics debunked by Richard Hodgson. However, although early psychical researchers like James and Myers did not investigate claimed reincarnation memories, they were certainly open to the notion. In fact, years before James came rather close to accepting the ‘spirit hypothesis’ as an interpretation of the strongest mediumship cases, he wrote that to him empirical evidence for reincarnation would make the most convincing case for personal survival.

In 1960, Stevenson was the first scientist to write about rigorously investigated empirical indications of reincarnation, and eight years later he published his first collection of 20 investigated cases. Most though by no means all of Stevenson’s investigations took place in India and other countries and regions where belief in reincarnation is widespread and cases not as difficult to come by as in the West. Today, however, there are thousands of cases on record internationally. And while modern Skeptics dismiss this material along with other findings of psychical research, one of the most widely read endorsements of Stevenson’s research in 1995 came from a rather unlikely figure: co-founder of modern Skepticism Carl Sagan, who wrote in his classic The Demon-Haunted World that Stevenson’s cases of the reincarnation type (CORT) deserved “serious study”.

By the time of Sagan’s reference, Stevenson was no longer the only scientist to investigate CORT by applying rigorous methods and the highest standards of documentation. Principal investigators who independently replicated his findings were the aforementioned Erlendur Haraldsson, Indian psychologist Satwant Pasricha, Canadian anthropologist Antonia Mills, German-born psychologist Jürgen Keil at the University of Tasmania, and the current director of DOPS at the University of Virginia, psychiatrist Jim Tucker, whose own research has strongly focused on American cases. 

 

A strong case might look like this: A child, usually aged between 2 and 5, alarms their parents by claiming to be someone else, stating the name of their ‘previous self’. To the parents’ added horror, the child also demands to be reunited with their spouse, children, and ‘real’ parents, whose names are also given. Despite threats and beatings by the parents, the child continues to insist. Apart from giving names and other details, the child also exhibits unusual and specific behaviors, which strikingly correspondent with idiosyncrasies of personality in an actual individual, who is eventually located in a different city or village, and who had in fact died a few years before the child was born. Perhaps most incredibly, in addition to specific memories, the child also displays birthmarks, lesions or deformations, which strikingly correspond to fatal wounds in the ‘previous self’ (as corroborated by autopsy reports), who had died in an accident, or by murder or suicide.

Stevenson and most other principal investigators never claimed that the mass of this astounding empirical material provided conclusive proof of reincarnation. One seasoned CORT researcher, Jürgen Keil, even explicitly argued against the reincarnation hypothesis, but his alternative still had to resort to squarely parapsychological explanations involving ‘psi’ (extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis) from the living. You remember a similar theme in my brief account of Piper’s mediumship, whose principal investigators discussed whether her trance phenomena should be explained by spirit agency or unconscious telepathic information acquisition from the minds of living persons. And it is in a discussion of these ideas where I believe we can find evidence that more than just tips the scale towards personal 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.

Mediumship evidence: Sommer excerpt #10

James made this argument in a skirmish with a contemporary Skeptic, fellow psychologist James McKeen Cattell, concerning tests of veridical statements made by a supposed spirit medium. The medium in question was Leonora Piper, who was discovered by James in 1885, and who became the most thoroughly investigated medium of all time. An ordinary Boston housewife, Piper seems to have started her career somewhat reluctantly, when she spontaneously fell into a trance. Moreover, unlike most other mediums, she never actually claimed to channel spirits, and although the SPR arranged generous compensation for her services as a test medium, it seems the wish to have her states explained by competent researchers also motivated her consent to be scrutinized for almost three decades.

James’s allusion to Mrs. Piper as his ‘white crow’ to express his belief in her psychic abilities is relatively well known. More obscure is an earlier reference in the Principles of Psychology, where James gave a brief account of experiences with her and stated that “a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology”. However, James’s discovery of Piper by no means marked the first time he investigated a medium. And like his colleagues at the English SPR, James was not exactly squeamish when it came to making sure he wasn’t fooled.

To test if Piper feigned her trance state, for example, James pricked her arm, tongue and lips with a pin in his early experiments, but reported that he found them to be “absolutely anesthetic”. Richard Hodgson, who became Piper’s principal investigator after leaving England for Boston in 1887, also put Piper’s trance to the test on several occasions, by holding a bottle of ammonia under her nose, putting a spoonful of salt in her mouth, severely pinching her, and holding a lit match to her forearm. When physicist Oliver Lodge hosted Mrs. Piper during the first series of experiments in England in late 1889, he pushed a needle into her hand, which, according to Lodge, elicited “not the slightest flinching”.

Like his colleagues in England, Hodgson in Boston strictly flew his supervision of Piper experiments under the radar of the press, and only selected test sitters who were strangers to her and her family. As an additional safeguard, for several weeks the Piper family was shadowed by detectives, who failed to discover indications that Piper or members of her household may be part of a network of fraudulent mediums supplying each other with information about sitters. Similar precautions were taken when Piper visited England for experiments arranged by the SPR in Liverpool, London and Cambridge. Piper’s host in Liverpool, Oliver Lodge, for example, used the occasion to employ new servants unaware of his unorthodox research interests; upon Piper’s arrival he searched her luggage; he locked rooms and hid photographs and documents a trickster would search for information presented in fake seances; he read nearly all her letters; and like Hodgson and other investigators, he introduced all sitters anonymously.

Lodge was the first investigator to express in 1890 his suspicion that some of Piper’s trance phenomena suggested the intervention by certain departed individuals. And when in 1898 Richard Hodgson announced the verdict of his 11 years of research with Mrs. Piper, it came quite as a shock to those who knew him as a zealous debunker of psychic frauds: At least one of Piper’s trance personalities, Hodgson declared, had indeed furnished undisputable evidence for its identity with a deceased person, an acquaintance of Hodgson’s named George Pellew.

Hodgson’s conviction was not shared by everybody in the SPR, although all key researchers agreed that Piper’s often strikingly specific veridical performances were not explicable by chance coincidence let alone fraud. Many continued to stick to what Hodgson had regarded a more parsimonious interpretation himself before accepting the ‘spirit hypothesis’: Piper’s mediumship was a case of a benign multiple personality, telepathically mining the minds of the living to construct persuasive impersonations of the dead. Odd as this view may sound, we shall unpack it below and see why it needs to be considered as a possible counter-explanation for survival.

Skeptics will of course tell you the Piper case collapsed shortly after William James’s death in 1910, when psychologist Amy Tanner published a book detailing her and G. Stanley Hall’s really scientific experiments with the medium, which showed that absolutely nothing paranormal was going on. But as an historian with no discernible sympathies for psychical research put it: “Hall and Tanner proved little with their tests except that they could do physical damage to Mrs. Piper”. This refers to procedures they performed on Piper, which – unlike the also rather invasive tests of Piper’s trance by James, Hodgson and Lodge two decades earlier – seemed to have little purpose other than to cause Piper discomfort, and left her with badly blistered lips and a scar. Based on just six sittings, Hall and Tanner’s main finding, touted as their own discovery, was hardly original: Mrs. Piper, they concluded, was a case of multiple personality.

Piper continued to sit for tests despite her widely publicized ‘exposure’ by Hall and Tanner. But around the time of James’s death in 1910, she would be just one of several mediums investigated by the SPR, who together became involved in the famous ‘cross-correspondences’, which we will briefly look at in the next section.

Meanwhile, James Hyslop, professor of logic at Columbia University and a former pupil of Hall’s, had re-founded the American SPR in 1907. One of Piper’s American main investigators, Hyslop was the author of the most extensive Piper report, and one of a growing number of investigators who shared Hodgson’s conviction that Piper occasionally channelled spirits of the dead. Hyslop discovered several promising new mediums in the US, and continued to publish extremely detailed reports of his experiments with ‘Mrs. Smead’ (pseudonym for Mrs. Willis M. Cleveland), ‘Mr. Chenoweth’ (pseudonym for Minnie Soule) and others until his death in 1920.

In England, the medium most thoroughly tested by the SPR after Mrs. Piper was Gladys Osborn Leonard. Among Mrs. Leonard’s specialties was the production of highly specific veridical information in so-called ‘proxy-sittings’: There, sitters who hadn’t known the deceased person supposedly channelled by a medium attended séances on behalf of others who had. Proxy sittings sought to rule out ‘cold readings’ – fraudulent mediums’ use of subtle unconscious clues given by sitters to construct a convincing but fake spirit impersonation –, but also an immediate telepathic ‘contamination’ of trance statements by sitters in the know.

Hyslop’s mediums and Mrs. Leonard were by no means the last to provide an overall striking mass of evidence in the twentieth century. Initial tests of a young medium named Eileen Garrett in the 1930s provided further interesting results. Like Mrs. Piper before her, Garrett was unconvinced of the ‘spirit hypothesis’, and after she became wealthy through marriage, from 1951 she would actively sponsor research of phenomena suggestive of survival by founding the still existing Parapsychology Foundation in New York.

Later, it was again psychiatrist Ian Stevenson who continued to publish methodologically rigorous research on mediumship suggestive of survival, often in collaboration with the Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson. And while experiments with mediums are still occasionally published in mainstream scientific journals today, to me it seems that few are of the same quality as these earlier studies by the SPR, William James, Hyslop, Haraldsson and Stevenson.

 

 

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.

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.