Michael Prescott's Blog

Hot stuff

As someone who is skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, I'm enjoying the news lately.

In case you haven't heard, a huge batch of private email correspondence among prominent pro-AGW scientists has been leaked to the Internet, and the contents of said correspondence do not put the scientists in the most favorable light. The emails seem to suggest that these powerhouses of global warming research were actively conspiring to conceal data, mislead the public, and shut down all criticism.

Leaking the emails would ordinarily be illegal, but given the public policy implications of AGW claims, this case may fall under the category of whistleblowing. In any event, the information is out there now, and it's not going away.

A few links of possible interest:

A cautious overview.

A philosophical perspective.

An amusing rundown of media reactions.

Some choice excerpts.

The blog post that broke the story.

A gargantuan comments thread that developed as the story began to unfold.

My favorite (sarcastic) comment from that thread:

Wait a minute! These e-mails and documents can’t be genuine. None of our models predicted that this information would be released.

Incidentally, I don't dispute that there has been a small rise in planetary temperatures since the nineteenth century, and that human action has played some role in it (not necessarily a major role). My skepticism is directed at notoriously unreliable computer models that pretend to predict the future, alarmist claims (such as Susan Blackmore's) of global apocalypse, dubious schemes like carbon credit swaps, and assertions that recent increases in temperatures are historically unprecedented.

There's been a lot of heat about global warming. Maybe it's time for cooler heads to prevail.

Book review and excerpt: Guided By Spirit

Lately I've been reading a very interesting book, Guided By Spirit: A Journey into the Mind of the Medium, which was self-published by two authors: Charles F. Emmons, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Gettysburg College, and his wife Penelope Emmons, a psychotherapist with a master's degree in social work who also works as a medium and has had a variety of paranormal experiences.

What's fascinating about the book is the way it intertwines the dual perspectives of its authors. Charles Emmons takes a somewhat more analytical approach, often viewing mediumship as a social phenomenon with important psychological benefits, while his wife has a more overtly "spiritual" perspective. I'm oversimplifying a great deal, since Charles Emmons clearly has an excellent grasp of the spiritual issues involved, and Penelope Emmons keenly appreciates the social and scientific aspects. But each author offers his or her own particular emphasis. The two approaches complement each other very nicely and show that there need not be any irreconcilable differences between a properly "scientific" study of this subject and a more personal experience of it.

Both authors are well-educated, sophisticated, and highly intelligent, and strike me as impeccably honest and straightforward.

Although I enjoyed both perspectives, I identified somewhat more with the viewpoint of Charles Emmons, who came at mediumship, at least initially, as something of an outsider. Later, to deepen his understanding of the phenomenon, he took classes in mediumship and did some informal demonstrations in which he scored his share of "hits" as well as "misses." He also investigated mediumship in Hong Kong, where it is a thriving part of the culture, and wrote a book about it called Chinese Ghosts and ESP: A Study of Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences, which sounds very worthwhile in its own right.

Near the end of Guided By Spirit, the two authors sum up their particular viewpoints. I found Charles Emmons's summary especially congenial to my own way of thinking, so I am reproducing a large part of it below.

The chapter is titled "Charlie's View."

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Let me begin by saying that I find some "truth" or usefulness in all of these perspectives: social/behavioral scientific, debunking, parapsychological, and spiritual. I do not think that this represents a "relativization of knowledge," in which anything can be true if you believe in it. I just mean that taken literally each perspective offers interesting possible explanations, some of which may be valid at certain times.

Taken at a deeper level, each of these perspectives tends to become a dogmatic, competitive belief system conducive neither to science nor spirituality. Practitioners of them tend to lose sight of the alleged purposes of systems: to explain reality and to enrich our lives. Every organized belief system is really a social construct created in part to serve the political ends of the group, or at least of the elite members of the group.

What I would like to do is to extract some wisdom from each perspective (giving it a sympathetic reading), and leave the competitive interests and dogmatic structures behind. This (ideally) approaches a multifaceted or pluralistic (and not merely relativized) approach.

I feel good about having played the role of practitioner in each of these systems, so that I can use each without being overly committed to any. The one I have least experience with is debunking, because I cannot accept the narrow view of debunking and its attempt to demolish "ignorance" rather than to engage in open-ended inquiry. If members of CSICOP should hasten to claim that I have an incorrect view of their purpose, which is actually to be skeptical, providing a counterbalance to uncritical belief, then I would happily concur that I have been a "skeptic" in this sense too. And in fact some pieces in Skeptical Inquirer and by members of CSICOP published elsewhere have been fair. Susan Blackmore is my favorite example of such fairness.

I anticipate that some of my colleagues in sociology and anthropology will say that I have taken participant observation too far and have "gone native" by actually learning to do a spirit mediumship. I was supposed to study spirit mediums, not become one. This is a valid criticism that must be considered, but I see what I have done as "participatory science," becoming involved fully in the phenomenon itself, which has made it more understandable to me on a personal level. Of course this becomes more controversial when the phenomenon is considered deviant or dubious by the scientific community.

I say that I have become fully involved, but actually I have not become a registered medium or done mediumship for personal financial gain. I have joined a Spiritualist Church and done "student" mediumship.

Having said all of that, let me now reflect on each of these perspectives and share what I think about spirit mediumship as a phenomenon.

First, there cannot be much doubt about spirit mediumship having social and psychological functions.... Traditional Chinese ancestor worship culture requires mediums to facilitate the communication between ancestors and descendents who are supposed to help each other. Going deeper, ancestor worship has held together large kinship groups who worship common ancestors going back several generations....

As for psychological functions (and dysfunctions), mediumship certainly has a psychological base in terms of altered states of consciousness (which I have also experienced myself), even for mediums today who tend to go into only a light trance. There is no strong general correlation between mediumship and mental illness, although this has been an issue in the literature. Some mediums quite apparently have multiple personality or experience other dissociative states. I think that labeling all of these as pathological is problematic and prematurely judgmental....

I think that scientists who see the connection between brain patterns and anomalous experience as an obvious reputation of the "reality" of the paranormal, and the psychospiritual folks who are upset with this research are both mistaken.

Just because such experiences have a brain component doesn't mean that they don't have "evidential" (containing evidence of paranormal knowledge or experience) aspects as well. If people do have a spiritual or surviving-consciousness component, they also need a physical component in order to experience life on the physical plane and to make connections between the two. Although it seems plausible to claim that a spirit medium, for example, is merely dissociating when he/she experiences a spirit message, it could also be that the brain needs to disconnect from normal patterns in order to get the information more clearly....

Now I am ready for my most difficult task: finding useful elements in the debunking perspective to help understand spirit mediumship. I recall when I was doing my book on UFO researchers how some of them pointed out that UFO debunkers were good for keeping serious ufologists on their toes. Even if some debunkers often were scornful and disrespectful of UFO experiencer claims and often refused to look at the evidence, there were also times when some of them came up with good alternative theories for sightings, such as radar malfunctioning an earthquake lights. Most UFO researchers recognize that the bulk of UFO reports in fact can be "explained away" through mundane explanations. Therefore their own scientific skepticism about any particular report actually coincides with the perspective assumed by debunkers.

Moving to the issue of spirit mediumship, the same sort of overlap exists between debunkers and parapsychologists and even spirit mediums. As pointed out earlier in this book, many of the mediums we interviewed, and even many of the famous mediums in history have had considerable skepticism even about their own personal work. Although many late nineteenth-century Spiritualists became impatient with the scientists who studied mediumship, they did share a desire to root out and expose fraudulent mediums.

CSICOP proclaims the worthy objective of promoting scientific literacy and reducing gullibility in the general population. When it comes to mediumship, this would involve pointing out various tricks used by fraudulent mediums. Even mediums who are not intentionally fraudulent can engage in guesswork through observing body language at other cues....

Now I must show some distance from this perspective. First, it is difficult to judge that believing in the reading is a bad thing, even if it is not really from "spirit". Going to a spirit medium or psychic may be very therapeutic....

Next, I think it is very difficult to pass judgment on particular mediums. Partly this is because it is so difficult to establish a probability frame for scoring a medium's accuracy. Even when a medium is rather general, she or he may be very good at identifying the person's personal issues and do a good service....

One thing that I definitely oppose is the unscrupulous gouging of clients. There are stories of mediums or psychics who tell people that they will remove a curse for a $3,000 fee (although I do not have any first-hand evidence of this). There are also a very few mediums to charge very high fees; but this would be a problem if we were talking about doctors or attorneys as well.

At any rate, debunkers help sound a note of caution for those who are ready to believe in anything allegedly miraculous. In my experience I do not think that many of the people who frequent Lily Dale or who attend the Spiritualist churches I have observed are seriously absent of judgment. They are not participating in some cult that is taking away all their worldly goods. Good mediums also remind people that they have free will and should use their common sense.

Moving to parapsychology, which shares a scientific skepticism with the debunkers, especially when it comes to mediumship as noted above, I think that it requires a great deal of reading to sort out the evidence on mediumship. From reading the sources referred to above and many more, I think that the evidence for mediumship is very supportive of a core of truly remarkable phenomenon that cannot be dismissed.

It was often the case that famous mediums mixed legitimate phenomena with cheating (perhaps unconsciously). These tended to be prematurely dismissed by some even though there was good evidence for the nonhoaxed portion. Also, complex cases like that of the Fox Sisters, who at one point admitted cheating but then recanted, should not be dealt with stereotypically and simplistically as they often are popular publications or debunking literature.

From the beginning I realized that this study could not hope to set the validity issues in mediumship straight when a century and a half of research had failed to do so. No one should accept the last two paragraphs above without doing some research. It is not a very efficient way to do things, but in a field that has not been legitimated by mainstream science, one almost has to do one's own study to decide the issue for oneself. I believe that I have done enough research of my own to appreciate the fact that some phenomena in mediumship are genuine (which is not to say that I can explain it). This is apart from my own experiences as a medium. What I'm referring to here is my study of mediums that was part of a larger study Chinese Ghosts and ESP. It was clear to me that some sessions were so accurate that they were markedly beyond what could be reasonably attributed to chance.

What parapsychology contributes is a relatively open-minded exploration of the truth claims of spirit mediumship, something that social scientists and debunkers do not do (if they are performing their expected roles)....

Last I need to comment on a spiritual perspective on spirit mediumship. In part this is where my own "participatory science" belongs, insofar as my attempted to do mediumship represents a direct experience of an allegedly spiritual phenomenon.

Most of my experience is not directly a test of whether spirit mediumship is really a communication with the spirit world. Most of it is learning to understand the role of spirit medium, how one becomes recruited and socialized to it, and how one performs it and feels about it. Previously in this book we have discussed all of that, including the persistent problem of doing something intuitive in a rational culture.

In a larger sense I feel the mediumship in this society is just one piece of a larger spiritual attempt to find meaning in an increasingly meaningless, technologically dominated mass society....

However, I do not want to just get lost in a spiritual subculture to feel good about my place in modern society and to be at peace with my dead relatives. I also have a curiosity addiction fed by the scientific side of me, which is continually laughing at the "spiritual" side of me. On the other hand, my skeptical side is also fair enough to consider the subject of evidence provided through my own experience. The price my spiritual side pays for this tolerance is that it needs to come up with some pretty good evidence to my skeptical side that I'm not just being deluded by wishful thinking....

The parapsychologist in me is very sure that I have received intuitive messages that are correct way beyond any reasonable chance expectations. This satisfies the skeptical side of me, to a point. However, I cannot prove that there isn't some explanation other than spiritual communication. It could be super-ESP, or the one mind, or whenever.

My spiritual side is convinced (sort of) that I really am communicating with my parents and other people, and that my mother is my spirit guide when I do mediumship. How do I know? I just know. But that's not good enough for my skeptical side. I really don't know of a critical experiment that could settle the matter. Right now I'm content to go on marveling at seeking, and acting as if it's true. I think I've already discovered more than I ever expected to.

But there's more. From my observations I think that spirit mediumship is a great mystery, of which we know only a little. I find it both amusing and annoying when people think they have it all figured out. "It's nonsense." "It's real, but you have to do it this way." From interviewing many mediums and from doing it myself, I think that it happens in a great many ways, not just one way. And of course lots of people try to do it without very good results....

In my own mediumship I have learned to be less analytical (difficult for a college professor) and to bring things forth with less editing. I have learned to set a good intention and to worry about it less. I continue to marvel when I get things right, more right than would seem possible by chance. Any more than that I shall probably have to tell you after I die.

[pp. 285-291]

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If you want to read more, you can find Guided By Spirit previewed in Google Books, or you can order it from Amazon.com and other online retailers.

The gift of doubt

Some years ago, security consultant Gavin De Becker wrote a worthwhile book called The Gift of Fear, which argues that fear, while ordinarily seen as a negative emotion, can actually serve a very positive and useful purpose in keeping us safe.

Maybe it's time for a book called The Gift of Doubt.

Most of us who are interested in the subject of life after death probably think it would be great to have no doubt -- to be utterly convinced of the reality of the afterlife once and for all. No more questions, no more searching, no more annoying equivocations, no more listening to that irritating skeptical voice in our heads -- just the sweet relief of certainty! We may find it frustrating that the evidence, while much stronger than most people realize, is nevertheless not quite conclusive. We may envy those who have achieved a state of total, unquestioning certitude.

But perhaps we shouldn't. There may be real advantages to maintaining some degree of doubt. We can see these advantages more clearly by looking at people who have lost all doubt, and how they have fared.

Many near-death experiencers report that they have lost all fear of death and are completely convinced that a beautiful afterlife awaits them. This might sound like a desirable frame of mind. But follow-up studies tracking these people (notably those conducted by P.M.H. Atwater) have found that many of them encounter a great deal of difficulty in readjusting to their normal, everyday lives following their NDE. They complain of feeling alienated from other people, of longing for the glorious afterlife environment and feeling dissatisfied with the comparatively mundane world around them, of feeling unfocused, of having difficulty committing to the priorities of their regular life. They may report extreme emotional sensitivity to relatively trivial stresses. Their relationships may suffer; their marriages may fail. On the plus side, they typically report significant spiritual growth. Whatever has happened to them clearly has had both positive and negative consequences.

Not infrequently, people who have had transcendent mystical experiences -- glimpses of what Richard Bucke called "cosmic consciousness" -- face increased difficulty in dealing with the workaday world. It's not a coincidence that many such people have retreated to a life of solitude and contemplation, finding the hurly-burly of everyday life too difficult to handle. Those who do remain out and about in the busy world may find themselves struggling heroically to balance their preternatural insights with their ordinary responsibilities.

Is it possible that some degree of doubt about the ultimate nature of life and death is psychologically healthy? That this kind of doubt is actually necessary to maintain a balanced state of being? Perhaps so. People who have become unhesitatingly convinced of the afterlife through their own personal exploration of the subject sometimes seem to gradually lose their critical acumen and eventually fall victim to obvious hoaxes and scams. The clearest example may be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose total commitment to the reality of life after death seems to have led him to accept some very dubious -- and in some cases definitively disproven -- claims, such as the purported materialization abilities of the Davenport Brothers and, most notoriously, the "Cottingley fairies" case.

An even more troubling development is the fanaticism that can accompany the absence of all doubt. The 9-11 hijackers apparently were motivated, at least in part, by the belief that they would be instantly transported to Paradise; the members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who committed mass suicide, were convinced they would be reborn aboard an alien spacecraft. In these cases and many others like them, some element of doubt might have prevented people from taking rash and tragic actions.

If doubt is, in fact, a useful component of our psychological makeup, perhaps it's not surprising that absolutely conclusive evidence for life after death remains, for most of us, somewhat elusive. The world may be set up in such a way that we get just enough evidence to dispel some doubt but not enough to dispel all doubt. If unquestionable scientific proof of life after death were ever announced -- something so conclusive that no one could dispute it -- the consequences for humanity might be pretty scary. An element of doubt may help keep most of us grounded; removal of all doubt could have unexpected and unwanted side effects.

So perhaps we should make friends with our doubt. Instead of treating the condition of doubt as a problem that needs to be solved, we might be better off seeing it as a necessary component of good psychological health. We might even be grateful to the universe for making it possible for most of us to maintain some degree of doubt.

In wishing for the resolution of all doubt, we may be wishing for something that's actually unhealthy. Like the child who longs to play with his daddy's gun, we may be better off not getting what we think we want. And the universe, like a wise parent, sees to it that most of us don't.

Bird droppings

Today I happened to look at an essay about medium John Edward that I posted on my Web site back in 2003. I found it interesting on two levels. First, I seem to have been a lot snarkier back then! Second, I was much less convinced of the reality of mediumship than I am now.

The other thing I noticed was that in '03 it was still necessary to explain what a "blog site" is.

The reason I reread this old essay was that I remembered a particularly weak skeptical argument used to debunk one of Edward's more impressive televised "hits." The argument was made in an article called "Birds of a Feather" that appeared on the Web site SkepticReport in 2002.

Here is the relevant part of the transcript, as reproduced by SkepticReport:

John: Why is Niagara Falls significant?

Lady 1: We was just there.

John: You were just at Niagara Falls, ok.

Lady 1: Me and my daughter.

John: Did you find a feather there?

Lady 1: Yes, and my daughter…

John: Did you tell your daughter that was from daddy?

Lady 1: Yes.

John: Ok, this is a validation that he was there for you, ok? ‘Cause he’s showing me the feather. Lucky for you that’s my mother’s symbol when she communicates with me. I find feathers. So it was a very easy symbol for me to get. But I need to validate for you that is was definitely, definitely him there for her.

Lady 1: Thank you.

So Edward told the woman that he was getting "Niagara Falls," and in fact the woman had just been there. He then asked if she had found a feather there, and the woman said yes. He then asked if she'd told her daughter that the feather was "from daddy" (deceased). The woman confirmed this, too.

Sounds pretty good to me. But SkepticReport will have none of it. Here is their explanation:

But what of the feather? Isn’t that a fantastic piece of evidence?

Not really. According to the 35th Annual Niagara Falls Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, December 29th, 2001, a total of 101 species of birds were found, and a total of 49,744 birds in Niagara Falls, NY.

There are also quite a few photos on the web from Niagara Falls with birds in them:

[Links to bird photos are given.]

Tons of birds on these ones.

I think we can safely say that it would not be uncommon to find a feather at Niagara Falls.

OK, then: What about Niagara Falls itself?

What does John Edward actually say about Niagara Falls? “Did you tell your daughter that the feather she found at Niagara Falls was from her Daddy?”

No. Previously in the reading, we have learned that Catherine has lost her husband. First, John Edward asks: “Why is Niagara Falls significant?” He doesn’t say anything about the nature of the significance. He asks Catherine!

From there, she tells John Edward that she was there with her daughter. Since birds are commonplace there, it would be likely if the daughter found a feather – it is fun for kids to find feathers.

Immediately after, Catherine – tearfully – begins to tell John Edward that “her daughter” – and then John Edward breaks in and asks about the father.

It takes three steps, and after each, John Edward asks a crucial question. It doesn’t take a genius to see what is happening here.

According to this argument, Edward's references to a) Niagara Falls, b) finding a feather there, and c) the mom telling the daughter that the feather was a gift from her departed father were all lucky guesses or obvious logical inferences. Money quote: "Since birds are commonplace there, it would be likely if the daughter found a feather – it is fun for kids to find feathers."

Now, really. I mean, come on. (Hey, I just found some of my missing snark.)

I have no doubt that there are many birds at Niagara Falls, and it was hardly necessary for SkepticReport to cite bird counts and bird photos to establish this uncontroversial point. (I'd guess that these citations were added to make the article look more "scientific.")

As a matter of fact, there are lots of birds everywhere, except maybe Death Valley. I've lived in several different parts of the country, in widely differing climate zones, and have never found any shortage of birds, even in urban areas.

Even so, I have rarely noticed any feathers on the ground, and to the best of my recollection I have never seen a kid pick up a feather. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's not the sort of thing you see every day. ("Hey, look, there's another kid picking up a feather. Third time today.")

Moreover, I have never heard anyone tell a child that a feather was a gift from a deceased parent, or anything of the kind. Actually, I don't think I've ever heard been part of a conversation about picking up bird feathers in any context.

The whole "explanation" is an obvious example of rationalizing after the fact. If Edward had said that the woman's husband was run over by a dump truck in Newark, maybe SkepticReport would cite statistics and photos proving that there are many dump trucks in Newark. When you think of Newark, aren't dump trucks the first thing that come to mind? And since people sometimes get run over by dump trucks, it was easy for Edward to guess that the husband had died this way. Why, when you think about it, it's just common sense!

SkepticReport also points out a minor and debatable discrepancy between the show's transcript and the way it's written up in Edward's book Crossing Over.  Here's how part of the exchange is described in the book:

“Did you find a feather there?” I asked her.

“Yes, and…” Catherine was crying.

“Did your tell your daughter that was from Daddy?”

“Yes.” She buried her face in her hands.

SkepticReport makes much of the fact that Catherine's words "Yes, and my daughter ..." were shortened to "Yes, and ..." in the book. Is this significant?

I don't think so. First, I saw a rerun of this episode of Crossing Over after reading the SkepticReport article, so I was paying close attention. If my memory is correct, there was crosstalk at this point, and Edward, talking very fast as usual, actually said, "Did you tell your daughter ..." at the very same moment when Catherine was saying, "... and my daughter." In other words, he was not reacting to her statement, but talking over it and partly drowning it out.

Second, and more important, the mere fact that Catherine said "and my daughter" would not lead most people to infer that Catherine told her daughter that the feather "was from Daddy." There are countless ways the statement "and my daughter" could have concluded. 

It's probably silly to spend this much time on a trivial and foolish debunking exercise from seven years ago. The SkepticReport article, however, does illustrate an important point: No matter what kind of hits are obtained, no matter how specific they are or how unlikely or how meaningful to the sitter, they can still be rationalized away by a determined doubter.

Two-fer

Two items of possible interest.

Recently I had a telephone reading with medium Georgia O'Connor. This was only the third time I've sat with a medium. While I prefer to keep the details private, I found the reading strongly evidential and emotionally meaningful. I personally feel much more convinced of life after death than I did before. Some of the material that came through was not only accurate and specific, but seemed so eerily on-target that I found myself thinking, "I can't believe she's actually telling me this." I don't think any amount of advance research could explain the results, and "lucky guesses" - while impossible to rule out - seem like an inadequate explanation also.

Of course, I can't guarantee what other people's results might be. For those who may be interested, Georgia O'Connor's Web site is here.

Michael Tymn's blog is one of the few paranormal blogs I read regularly. Currently he's doing a fascinating series on materialization mediumship. Never having witnessed these phenomena first-hand, and knowing there has been much fraud in this area (not to mention some very fake-looking photos, like this one), I remain somewhat skeptical. But the eyewitness reports cited by Michael are certainly impressive; if I'd seen what they saw, I would be a believer too!

Michael's series of posts begins here.

Out of this world

How common are out-of-body experiences? Are there other experiences we don't normally think of as OBEs that nevertheless might fit into the same general category?

What got me thinking along these lines was the book Abduction by John Mack, the controversial study of people who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials. Right off the bat, I should say that I'm no expert on this subject; in fact, I know very little about it. So far I haven't even read all of Mack's book, just the opening and closing sections.

I should also say that I'm not convinced that Dr. Mack, though he was undoubtedly well-meaning, was entirely able to separate his duties as a psychological therapist from his duties as a scientist. As George Hansen notes in an article on a famous, but badly flawed, abduction case:

The outside critic who is not directly involved in such activities almost never recognizes how difficult it is to serve as both a therapist and as a scientist. Those persons trying to help abductees emotionally need to provide warmth, acceptance, and trust. The scientist, however, needs to be critically open minded and somewhat detached and analytical. The two functions are not altogether compatible.

Even so, as Hansen notes in the same article, it seems apparent that there is something to many of these claims, even if they are not necessarily evidence of contact between human beings and space-traveling ETs. But if they are not events of this kind, then what are they?

What I found interesting, and rather unexpected, about Mack's book was how closely the so-called "abduction experiences" resemble OBEs, at least in many important respects. Mack's patients reported that their experiences often began with a humming or buzzing sensation; they then found themselves floating out of bed and through the house while perceiving strange new sources of light around them. If they tried to rouse the person sleeping in bed with them, they would find the person unresponsive. Often they would float through a solid wall in order to get outside. Frequently they reported heightened senses, the feeling that the experience was more real than ordinary reality. When they encountered the so-called aliens, they perceived some of them as luminous beings, creatures of light. Their communication with these "aliens" was telepathic. In some cases they reported becoming aware of a lifelong relationship with an alien who had served the kind of role ordinarily assigned, in a more overtly spiritual context, to a "spirit guide." Moreover, some of these "abductees" remembered seeing flashes of past lives during their experience, while others felt they were being given a glimpse of omniscient knowledge. Some of them reported seeing Earth from space, or having visions of impending global catastrophe, usually of an ecological kind.

All of this strongly reminds me of a mixture of astral projection and an intense mystical experience -- the sort of events reported by Sylvan Muldoon, Robert Monroe, and other accomplished OBErs. To me, the "abduction experience" does not sound like a physical event at all. It sounds as if the person's astral body left the physical body, moved around on the physical plane for a while, and then (maybe) entered what Monroe calls Locale II -- essentially a realm of alternate universes or parallel realities. Perhaps it was in Locale II that the experiencers entered "spaceships," were subjected to invasive surgery, learned about human-alien hybrid breeding experiments, and encountered reptilian creatures and small gray aliens with bulbous heads. It all sounds pretty crazy, but if Monroe's reports are accurate, some of the stuff going on in Locale II is a lot stranger than that.

Or perhaps it would be more reasonable to assume that some of the more exotic details of the experience were the product of misinterpretation or fantasy. Throughout history there have been stories of people who were abducted and carried away to a secret realm of fairies, sprites, pixies, elves, leprechauns, etc, where they were subjected to various indignities before their release or escape. Could these stories have their origin in OBEs in which the experiencer encountered another plane of reality, which he was able to interpret only in terms of folklore familiar to him? Extraterrestrials and spaceships, after all, are part of our modern folklore, just as forest nymphs and flying chariots were part of the folklore of an earlier age. It is interesting to note that so many of these folkloric figures are small, even miniature, and that the most commonly reported "aliens" today are the "grays," which are said to be small in stature.

I admit that other elements of the "abduction experience" are less suggestive of OBEs. Mack's patients sometimes claimed that there was physical evidence of their experience, such as bits of metal inserted under the skin, or strange lesions or nodes on their bodies, or marks on the ground indicating where the UFO landed. And there have been reports of so-called "abductees" going missing during the time when their experience was taking place, and of UFO sightings that were reported around the same time by people who were not "abducted."

Trouble is, I don't know how reliable such reports are. Many of them seem to depend on the investigative work of Budd Hopkins. George Hansen, in collaboration with Joseph Stefula and Richard Butler, has written an entertaining account of an "abduction" that Hopkins looked into; it's the same article I quoted earlier. To put it mildly, the account does not show Hopkins in a favorable light, and I urge all interested readers to take a look at it. The three authors raise serious questions about Hopkins' investigative skills and even his basic contact with reality. (The fact that Mack relied pretty heavily on Hopkins as an authority is another reason to approach Abduction with caution.)

So how good is the physical evidence for abductions? In the Hansen article we are told that well-known NDE researcher Kenneth Ring and his colleague Christopher Rosing carried out a study of "abduction experiences" from the standpoint that something non-objective (in terms of ordinary physical reality) was going on. The article drew an angry response from history professor David Jacobs, an associate of Budd Hopkins. "Jacobs was bitterly critical of Ring and Rosing, saying that they ignored 'cases of witnesses seeing others being abducted while not being abducted themselves.' Surprisingly, Jacobs gave no citations for any of these cases. Hansen wrote to Jacobs requesting such citations but received no reply." Jacobs' apparent inability to substantiate his claims does little to encourage confidence in the "objective" nature of these events.

Indeed, while accepting that "abduction" is typically a genuine subjective experience and not a hoax, Hansen et al conclude:

Because the argument for the "objective reality of UFO abductions" relies heavily on [Budd] Hopkins’ work, our findings call into question this entire theoretical perspective.

In other words, the experience is subjectively real and worth investigating, but there may not be much, if any, reliable evidence to support its objective reality.

If for the moment we discount the purported physical evidence, what we are left with seems to be very much consistent with OBEs. Remember that the "abductees" often said their experience began with a humming or buzzing sensation. Many people have reported that an OBE begins just this way.

Quite a few "abductees" reported a strange glowing light that suffused their environment from the moment they started floating through the air. This reminds me of a case I once read about, though unfortunately I've forgotten the details and cannot cite the source. In this case, a person felt strongly that he was experiencing an OBE; he moved about his house at night and clearly perceived the objects around him, making particular note of the fact that some of them were illuminated by moonlight. However, upon waking, he discovered that there was no moon. Accordingly, he chalked up the whole thing to a vivid dream.

Maybe it was. But if there are sources of illumination apparent to us in an OBE that are not normally apparent in our waking state, then possibly what the person perceived as moonlight was actually some other form of luminescence.

Indeed, many people who have enjoyed intense mystical experiences say they suddenly perceived the world as bathed in a strange new light. And of course people who report near-death experiences frequently talk about a bright light. So perhaps it would not be unusual, during an OBE, to perceive some light that isn't there in any ordinary sense. The "abductee" accounts might shed some light, so to speak, on this aspect of the OBE phenomenon.

Obviously, the "abductee" reports of floating through the air and passing through solid walls are strongly reminiscent of OBEs. Even the fruitless attempts of "abductees" to rouse sleeping persons in their beds have some parallels in OBEs and NDEs. A report of an NDE published in 1917 contains a description of the frustrated NDEr trying to communicate with her sleeping fiancé. Robert Monroe also reported unsuccessful efforts to make people aware of his presence while he was out of body.

Heightened perception and telepathic communication, two other features of "abductee" accounts, are also frequently reported by OBErs and NDErs. Contact with a "being of light" is, of course, a very common feature of NDEs, as is the sense of a deep personal connection with the "being" in question. Scattered memories of previous lifetimes and/or a sense of being immersed in total knowledge of the universe are also reported by some NDErs; a sense or glimpse of all-encompassing knowledge is also frequently reported by people who have undergone transcendent mystical experiences or achieved "unity consciousness." Occasionally NDErs will report seeing Earth from space (see Carl Jung's NDE), and not infrequently they will remember apocalyptic visions (see Damian Brinkley's NDE).

In some cases, two or more individuals claimed to be "abducted" together. Could these be cases of shared OBEs? Robert Monroe would teach his students to meet up while out of the body and then compare notes upon their return; if his research is to be trusted, shared OBEs are not only possible, but rather easy to arrange.

The bottom line is that the OBE phenomenon may be considerably more complex and multifaceted than we might assume at first glance. It may take in not only "ordinary" OBEs, but "alien abductions," as well, and perhaps even the curiously persistent legends of "little folk" of various kinds who have a penchant for carrying off unwary mortals.

Who knows? As I said at the outset, I know very little about "alien abduction" and am certainly not qualified to speak authoritatively on the subject. All I can do is toss out a few speculative ideas. But I doubt that the many similarities between "abduction experiences" and out-of-body experiences are entirely coincidental.

Under the table

I came across an interesting factoid in Wikipedia's entry on 19th-century medium Daniel Dunglas Home.

The article first mentions Sir William Crookes's experiments with Home, one of which involved placing an accordion in a wire cage under a dining table. A narrow opening at the top of the cage allowed Home to insert one hand and grasp one end of the instrument. It would be impossible to actually play the accordion in this fashion. Nevertheless, in the course of the experiment, the accordion did play two songs and other scattered notes.

Wikipedia says:

It was reported by sitters and Crookes [that] Home's accordion played only two pieces, Home Sweet Home and The Last Rose of Summer. Both contain only one-octave. Home played his accordion with only one hand beneath a table. James Randi stated that Home was caught cheating on a few occasions, but the episodes were never made public, and that the accordion Home is supposed to have played was a one-octave mouth organ that Home concealed under his large moustache. Randi writes that one-octave mouth organs were found in Home's belongings after his death. According to Randi 'around 1960' William Lindsay Gresham told Randi he had seen these mouth organs in the Home collection at the Society for Psychical Research. Eric Dingwall who catalogued Home's collection on its arrival at the SPR does not record the presence of the mouth organs. It is unlikely Dingwall would have missed these or did not make them public.

The reference to Eric Dingwall, who was well-known as a scrupulous and conscientious researcher with a decidedly skeptical bent, cites Peter Lamont's 2005 book The First Psychic: The Extraordinary Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard. I haven't read this book and cannot vouch for the accuracy of the citation. If true, it obviously nullifies the hearsay evidence upon which Randi relies.

The summary of Randi's theory is accurate. It comes from his book An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, which is now online. The relevant page is here. Randi writes:

[Home] actually was discovered cheating several times, though these events were not made public.

One of the features of his act was the playing of an accordion which was locked in a cage located beneath the table at which he sat. An "accordion," in that day, was not what is usually pictured today; it was a concertina, a rather small bellows affair with a simple keyboard at one end. When Home produced music, it was said to be very thin and faint, in character with its purportedly etherial [sic] origins. But another possible origin is to be considered. Since a number of tiny one-octave mouth organs were found among Home's belongings when he died, and he wore a very full "soup-strainer" style mustache, it might be suspected that he was able to play the music by means of such an instrument hidden in his mouth. That suspicion is further supported by the observation that the only two identifiable songs reported to be played at a Home séance were, "The Last Rose of Summer" and "Home, Sweet Home," the latter just possibly a pun on the part of the spirits or of the medium himself. Both tunes are limited to a range of nine notes, and both can be played on the small one-octave mouth organs.

The eminent British scientist Sir William Crookes declared Home to be genuine in 1871, but his own accounts show how careless his investigation was. He was also an intimate friend of Home.

In passing, I note that Randi makes no attempt to substantiate his claim that Home was repeatedly caught cheating. If these "events were not made public," how does Randi know about them? I would assume this is just another instance of Randi making things up out of thin air. (A couple of other examples are found here and here.)

Randi also says nothing to back up his assertion that Crookes' "own accounts show how careless his investigation was." In fact, while Crookes can be criticized for his handling of some later, very different experiments involving materialization medium Florence Cook, his tests involving Home seem to have been carried out with meticulous care and were reported in extensive detail at that time.

In any event, I find Randi's theory of the case preposterous on several counts. Let's take a closer look at it.

Essentially Randi is arguing that Home concealed a mouth organ (generally known as a harmonica in the U.S.) under his bushy mustache. In order for such a scheme to work, at least three conditions would have to be met.

1. The room would have to be very dark, since even the bushiest mustache couldn't conceal a harmonica, no matter how small, if the light were good.

2. The experimenters would have to be seated far away from Home, because if they were close, they could easily determine that the music was coming from the vicinity of Home's mouth, and not from under the table.

3. The accordion would have to be unobserved, since close observation would reveal that the instrument wasn't actually playing.

In fact, none of these conditions were met, as anyone who looks at Crookes' report can easily ascertain. The complete report, along with supplemental material, is on the Web and takes only a few minutes to read. (PDF format here, starting on page 5.)

1. Was the room dark? According to Crookes, "The meetings took place in the evening in a large room lighted by gas." In describing Home's appearance during the experiment, he writes, "His other hand was on the table, visible to all, and his feet were under the feet of those next to him." In a follow-up report concerning other tests conducted in the same room, Crookes writes, "There was always ample light in the room where the experiments were conducted (my own dining room) to see all that took place."

2. Was no one seated near Home? Crookes: "Mr Home sat in a low easy chair at the side of the table. In front of him under the table was the aforesaid cage, one of his legs being on each side of it. I sat close to him on his left, and another observer sat close to him on his right, the rest of the party being seated at convenient distances round the table. For the greater part of the evening, particularly when anything of importance was proceeding, the observers on each side of Mr. Home kept their feet respectively on his feet, so as to be able to detect his slightest movement."

There were five observers in all. The other four were "an eminent physicist, high in the ranks of the Royal Society (Sir William Huggins, F.R.S.), a well-known Serjeant-at-Law (Serjeant Cox), my brother, and my chemical assistant." All five men were closely watching Home.

3. Was the accordion unobserved? Quite the opposite. Crookes:

Very soon the accordion was seen by those on each side to be waving about in a somewhat curious manner; then sounds came from it, and finally several notes were played in succession. Whilst this was going on, my assistant went under the table and reported that the accordion was expanding and contracting; at the same time, it was seen that the hand of Mr. Home by which it was held was quite still, his other hand resting on the table.

Presently the accordion was seen by those on either side of Mr. Home to move about, oscillating and going round and round the cage, and playing at the same time. Dr. Huggins now looked under the table, and said that Mr. Home’s hand appeared quite still whilst the accordion was moving about emitting distinct sounds....

The accordion was now again taken without any visible touch from Mr. Home’s hand, which he removed from it entirely and placed upon the table, where it was taken by the person next to him, and seen, as now were both his hands, by all present. I and two of the others present saw the accordion distinctly floating about inside the cage with no visible support. This was repeated a second time after a short interval.

Clearly, Randi's hypothesis has no merit. It is contradicted by Crookes' report in every detail. That report, by the way, was seconded in print by both Huggins and Cox.

Huggins: "Your proof appears to me to contain a correct statement of what took place in my presence at your house.... The experiments appear to me to show the importance of further investigation, but I wish it to be understood that I express no opinion as to the cause of the phenomena which took place."

Cox: "Having been present, for the purpose of scrutiny, at the trial of the experiments reported in this paper, I readily bear my testimony to the perfect accuracy of your description of them, and to the care and caution with which the various crucial tests were applied."

Moreover, from photo portraits of Home, it doesn't appear that his mustache was, in fact, particularly bushy, nor does it seem to have covered his mouth, so it probably couldn't have concealed a harmonica anyway. (See photos here, here, and here.)

Randi's "encyclopedia" entry on Home, then, is a mishmash of hearsay ("tiny one-octave mouth organs were found among Home's belongings"), innuendo (Home "actually was discovered cheating several times, though these events were not made public"), questionable claims ("he wore a very full 'soup-strainer' style mustache"), and intentional omissions (the room was well lit, observers were seated directly next to Home on both sides, observers saw the accordion "expanding and contracting" and "moving about emitting distinct sounds", and even "floating" when Home's hand was not in contact with it).

Incidentally, Randi does not tell his readers that Crookes carried out a total of 28 sittings with Home over a period of approximately two years, and that Crookes personally regarded the accordion experiments as much less conclusive than other, more carefully designed tests (also reported in the PDF document previously mentioned). Since Randi cannot possibly be unaware of these facts, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he withheld the information from his readers in order to make the case for Home look as weak as possible, just as he withheld so much relevant information about the accordion tests themselves.

No doubt he was betting that the great majority of his readers would never look at the original reports and would simply take his word for it. And about that, he is probably right.

Zulu time

Vitor, in comments, asked me to transcribe Lyall Watson's account of a Philippine case that Watson personally witnessed.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

The case is presented on pages 152 -160 of Watson's 1987 book Beyond Supernature, under the heading of "Possession." Here it is:

----　

Long before either Spanish or American colonisation, the islands of the [Philippine] archipelago were a patchwork of well over a hundred distinct linguistic, cultural and racial groups -- many of which still survive.

Cagayan Valley in north-eastern Luzon is home to one such community -- an Igorot or mountain people who are marked by Christianity and post-war developments, but nevertheless leave all the most important decisions of their lives to solemn rituals that involve animal sacrifice and lead to consultation with the spirits. Communion is accomplished by aniteras or female shamans who are now rare, but carry on like gently beating hearts in dying tribal life. It was to meet one such woman that I made the long journey from Bayombong up into the forests of the Cordillera. I spent several bewitching weeks living in the old lady's compound, watching the daily work of weaving and basket making, taking part in the evening rituals of healing and spirit worship. It was an altogether magical time, but one I remember best for my involvement in what I can only think of as a kind of exorcism.

A child was brought to the aniteras suffering from a complaint like none I have ever seen. He was said to be ten years old, and from the right side he looked about that age; but from the left, he had the appearance of an aged and diseased dwarf. From the front, you could see a line running down the centre of his body ...

[T]he effect was truly horrible. The hair on the right side of his head was dark and glossy, while that on the left was dank and lifeless. One eye was clear and bright, the other squint and rheumy. Half his teeth were widely spaced and drawn out into fangs by the retreat of bloody gums, and the skin on that side of his face and down his left arm was covered in running sores. He walked slowly and with obvious pain, hunched with every other step over a left leg shortened several inches by a clawed foot. And when he spoke, which he did rarely, it was out of the twisted left side of his mouth in a snarl and in a language which nobody there understood. Nobody except me. I was astounded to hear, in amongst the deep-throated growl, a few phrases in clear and ringing Zulu -- the one African language that I was able to speak when I was his age. The words were odd ones and inappropriate to that situation, but they left me feeling very vulnerable, as though I had just had my pocket picked.

The aniteras decided that the child was possessed by busao, an evil spirit -- which, in the circumstances, seemed like the only reasonable diagnosis. And for three days she worked her wiles on the child, plying him with herbal potions, saturating him with ceremony and invocation. All to no avail. On the fourth night, however, she was otherwise occupied and the boy/dwarf was sitting on the ground next to a fire encircled by a group of elders, frightening me from time to time with occasional obscene twitches. The people and I were talking in reluctant Tagalog, which is no more their language than it is mine, just passing the time. Nobody was concentrating on the figure at the fire, he was not subject of conversation and he was looking away from me into the flames. Then slowly, one by one, our cases focused on him, the talk stopped, the air became almost heavy with condensed attention; and suddenly, as if by prearrangement, the old lady was there with us, standing tall on the edge of the circle. She hurled something into the fire, which flared up in a green blaze and she shouted very loud, very angry, a long quick string of words hurled directly at the afflicted boy.

There was a moment of silence, complete silence, then a terrible scream as the child threw himself down on the ground and began to thrash around violently. Again she shouted, and once more he screamed -- a searing combination of pain and anger. It was a duel in sound, a pitched battle that raged and grew into a frenzy, and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun as the child hurled himself face down to the earth and lay still with one arm and shoulder in the glowing coals. For a long, awful moment nobody moved, and then the old woman stepped forward, gently lifted the body up and carried it away to her hut. And it was as though she took with it a great weight from our shoulders -- a burden that we were not conscious of carrying, but that had been with us ever since the weird child had arrived.

The next morning, the boy was up early with the rest of the women, helping carry water. He looked straight at me for the first time and his eyes, both eyes, were clear. By that evening he was talking normally, in his own tongue, and walking with only the suggestion of a limp. And by the end of the week, his skin and teeth and hair, his whole appearance, were those of any other healthy, unmarked, active and attractive Filipino child.

I make no apologies for telling this story in such detail and without corroboration. I am not offering it in evidence, but as a starting point for a line of argument. Three things about it are of interest to me. The first is the laterality of the affliction -- which, however it was caused, suggests at least a biological vector, involving just half of the brain. The second is the nature of the cure -- which was both rapid and dramatic, suggesting the sort of catharsis that has mental rather than physical origins. And the third is the use of an unfamiliar language -- in the presence of perhaps the only person out of fifty million in the Philippines who could have understood.

I am not claiming that the child was possessed. I discovered later that his problems had begun three years before when his mother was run over by a truck -- killed and hideously disfigured as he was walking down the road with her -- holding her right hand. There are, however, strong resemblances between this incident and several other accounts in the literature of what has been identified as demonic possession -- most notably the case of fourteen-year-old Karen Kingston, who was cured of a similar affliction in North Carolina in 1974 by a group including three clergymen, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a general practitioner.

[He cites the 1977 book The Devil and Karen Kingston, by Robert Pelton, and describes the exorcism, which cured the girl of major psychiatric problems. Then he continues:]

But to me the crucial aspect of both cases, is that events were clearly culturally determined. They followed the scenario appropriate to the circumstances, drawing on beliefs and expectations relevant to those involved. The cures remain mysterious, amenable one day perhaps to the liberal tenets of the fledgling science of psychosomatic medicine, but the process was essentially traditional and social. Which is why I believe it succeeded. I suggest that the clergyman who acted as Karen's exorcist, also played the devil's role -- just as I somehow contributed a few words of Zulu to the Philippine performance. Neither of us was conscious of doing so, but I am convinced that at some saman level [sama is Watson's term for the interconnectedness of minds] we were involved. We added social weight to an individual dilemma and helped move it to communal resolution....

Let me return, however, for the next step in the argument, to those Zulu phrases. Parapsychology has a name for the ability to use a language of which a person has no ordinary knowledge. It is called xenoglossy or "foreign tongue" and comes in two forms. "Recitative" xenoglossy is the utterance of fragments of a strange language, as one might parrot Latin phrases without having any idea of their syntax for actual meaning. And [there is] "responsive" xenoglossy, which is something far more intelligent, involving an ability to converse in the unknown language....

The Filipino child was not speaking Zulu, he was practicing recitative xenoglossy. There are many similar examples in the literature on spiritism -- of mediums reciting the Lord's prayer in Greek or throwing in the odd word that turns out on later analysis to be Egyptian or even Hawaiian. Some of these borrowings can be traced to a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia or "hidden memory", in which we dredge up information from unconscious areas without being aware of doing so...

[But] I cannot imagine any set of circumstances which could have brought a ten-year-old boy in the Cagayan Valley into contact with Zulu at any stage of his life. Nor am I disposed to assume that he was possessed by the discarnate spirit of a Zulu witch doctor. It seems altogether more reasonable to assume that somehow, the mechanism is still far from clear, he was able to recite phrases that were familiar to me, borrowing them from my mind...

-----

Watson goes on to give examples of "the sudden acquisition of linguistic, musical and artistic skills" by apparently paranormal means, such as the well-known case of Sharada, reported by Ian Stevenson (and described here by Scott Rogo), and the case of Rosemary Brown, who wrote classical music compositions by apparently channeling deceased composers. His overall point is that "the actual limits of the senses... can be surprisingly elastic."

Personally, I have no particular problem with the idea that the Igorot boy (and probably Karen Kingston, too) was actually possessed -- not necessarily by a "demon," but perhaps by a low-level, earthbound spirit. Indeed, the possessing entity in the Kingston case reportedly gave its name as "Williams," which sounds decidedly human. I also find it likely that a possessing entity could possess the kind of freewheeling ESP that could indeed grab random thoughts from the minds of bystanders, including snatches of Zulu.

In any event, the Philippine case is not particularly strong as a case of xenoglossy, since only a few random words were spoken, and it is possible that Watson simply misheard some scattered gibberish. What is strong about the Philippine case, if we are willing to take Watson's word for what happened, is the remarkable effectiveness of the shaman's cure, which healed the boy both mentally and physically almost overnight.

As Watson himself notes, there is no corroboration of his story and therefore, strictly speaking, it cannot be counted as evidence. But I find him to be an intelligent, sensitive, and honest observer, so I'm prepared to take him at his word.

Nature and supernature

A while ago I picked up a copy of Lyall Watson's 1987 book Beyond Supernature: A New Natural History of the Supernatural. It sat on my shelf for a long time before I got around to it. Now I'm finding it fascinating.

Watson, who died in 2008, has been described as  "a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and author." He combined his interest in exotic cultures and native traditions with an open-minded, hands-on approach to investigating the paranormal. His book is a serious overview of parapsychology, enlivened by accounts of his personal encounters with anomalous events, including a destructive poltergeist in Indonesia.

He took the view that while laboratory research is all well and good, it may be too sterile to capture the more exciting incidences of psi that occur spontaneously in everyday life. Card-guessing games and their equivalents generate little emotional response, yet intense emotions often go hand in hand with the most dramatic psi manifestations (crisis apparitions, for instance). Indeed, many indigenous cultures practice frenetic rituals precisely to bring about a state of emotional excitement more conducive to psi. Meanwhile, Westerners who study the subject in the anodyne, antiseptic confines of a laboratory wonder why their results are not more "robust."

Though unconvinced of life after death (he attributed poltergeist activity to unconscious psychokinesis), Watson was personally persuaded of the reality of many psi phenomena, having witnessed a large number of them.

In the concluding chapter he sums up his point of view with the casual eloquence that made his earlier book Supernature a major bestseller:

-----

Something strange is going on.

We live in a world whose realities are defined by science, which tells us how things work. And yet there are some things which don't seem to work that way at all. Our science tells us that these things are impossible and don't exist, yet they stubbornly refuse to go away. There are relatively few of them and they are often elusive and hard to control, but they are there for anyone to see. They exist. And by their very existence, no matter how tenuous this might be, they present a problem.

Some students of the unusual feel that the fact of this existence turns science on its head. Some scientists seem to agree. They find the whole possibility so alarming that, rather than have science submit to such indignity, they choose to turn themselves upside down instead. The gesture is heroic, but the posture is ridiculous.

Consider just one example. A dowser, who claims to be able to find underground water and buried minerals with the aid of a pendulum, is tested in Wales. He walks across a valley floor and hammers in a line of stakes to show where he believes a stream to be, giving an estimate of its depth and flow. He is being filmed by a television team for a programme on the paranormal. The interviewer objects that such claims are hard to check and asks for a diagnosis that can be verified. The dowser holds his pendulum over the man to assess his state of health and makes the surprising claim that the interviewer seems to be healthy enough, except for a piece of metal in his thigh. Everyone is very impressed. The diagnosis is unusual, but it just happens to be true. The interviewer once had an operation that required the reinforcement of his femur with a metal brace. It's not something that he talks about, and the scientist assessing this demonstration concedes that it would have been difficult for the dowser to have discovered the fact about the embedded metal beforehand, without having a very efficient spy network. He notes that there was no defect in the interviewer's limb movement caused by the metal insertion.

So what happens? Is there a serious discussion about the possibility of dowsing having any scientific validity? Does he begin to wonder about organic metal-detection? No. Faced with the paradox, this distinguished physicist stands on his head. "I regard this," he says, "as a coincidence." And closes the subject.

It is, of course, a scientist's duty to consider all the angles. Given the extraordinary nature of the dowser's claim, he has every right -- as long as all other things are equal -- to favour explanations consonant with the orthodox scientific view of how things work. All things, however, are not equal here. Coincidence remains one possible explanation of what happened, but its probability is very low. And there is a point where "normal" explanations become more implausible and more far-fetched than a frank acceptance of the facts.

The fact is that unusual things do sometimes happen. I have seen them happening often enough now to be certain of that. And, as a scientist myself, I admit that they present us with a problem. But it is not insoluble and it does not require any desperate mental gymnastics. I see it, in truth, as more of a paradox than a problem. An apparent contradiction produced by poor definition rather than faulty procedure.

Science decides what is possible by reference to its definition of reality. Anything which fits the definition is acceptable. Anything which doesn't fit is impossible and must be rejected. And the problem is that the facts of dowsing or poltergeist phenomena stand in direct contradiction to the current definition. So the issue is reduced to a choice between rival facts. The normal versus the paranormal. And, of course, the normal wins -- even if it does have to stand on its head to do so.

Such contortions ought to make us suspicious of the premises that made them necessary. There has to be a flaw somewhere in the argument. And there is. What is being ignored is the point that our definition of reality is a theory, not fact. We don't know exactly how things work. All we have is a reasonably good hypothesis. And it never was a matter of choosing between rival sets of facts. The debate concerns a set of discordant facts and their relationship to a theory of how things happen. All that is at stake is the validity of a working hypothesis. And all that is necessary to reconcile the new facts with the old theory, is an admission that the theory might be incomplete. There is no need for anyone to stand on their heads. There is no assault on the laws of nature or the principles of science, and no need for protectors of the faith or charges of heresy.

What we need is a slightly broader definition of reality. One which includes the possibility of certain things happening when humans are involved. A definition that is not so exclusive; one less inclined to dismiss certain things as impossible, and better able to deal with what actually happens in terms of probability rather than outright and unreasonable denial.

I don't have such a definition to offer. I think it is probably still too soon to frame one that will work. What we need are more facts on which to base our discussion. And that is what I have been trying to provide. [Beyond Supernature, pp. 264-266]

The limits of objectivity

While I was out for a walk today, something occurred to me that is pretty obvious, yet I hadn't thought of it quite this way before -- namely, that there can never be any objective answer to the question, "What is life?"

By "What is life?", I don't mean the strictly biological question of what physical processes are necessary to maintain the existence of an organism. Instead, I mean: "What is the nature, meaning, purpose, or significance of my life, or of the lives of others?"

Life, in this sense, is a set of subjective experiences. Everything we perceive, remember, or imagine is subjective -- a thought, image, sensation, etc. in our field of consciousness. This is not to say that there is no objective component to our experiences. There may well be. But we cannot access this objective component directly. What we know directly is only our personal experience, which is necessarily subjective.

Nor are we entitled to assume that the objective component, if any, is identical to our subjective experience of it. We simply don't know. A case can be made that our method of experiencing reality has developed in such a way as to simplify the world, and that our perceptions may no more resemble the underlying structure of reality than the icons on a computer desktop resemble the underlying applications they represent. This argument has been developed in some detail by Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive sciences at UCI, in his paper "The Interface Theory of Perception" (PDF).

In any event, all that we directly know consists of our subjective experience.

Now, suppose someone were to ask whether the formula "E equals mc squared" tastes sweet or sour. The obvious answer is that it has no taste, because mathematical formulas do not belong to the category of things we can taste. The question is a category error.

Well, subjective experiences are not part of the category of things that are objective. Therefore, if life is a set of subjective experiences, then looking for an objective answer to the question "What is life?" is also a category error. Or so it seems to me.

Objective methods of proof are possible only in regard to things that can be measured objectively. For practical purposes, we generally agree on what those things are. We can agree that there are objectively ten laboratory rats in a cage because we all agree on the existence of laboratory rats and the reliability of our sense perceptions. In fact, we are actually agreeing only that we all perceive ten rats, but as a practical matter, we assume that our perceptions accord with some underlying reality. To this extent objectivity is possible.

But when it comes to purely subjective experiences, how can there be any objective validation or proof? Without such validation, these experiences are doomed to be considered scientifically unproven, and some people will reject them for this reason. But in this case, "scientifically unproven" merely means that the particular method of science is not applicable to these experiences. There is no ground for saying that the experiences are unreal or unimportant just because they do not happen to fit the particular methodology that science employs.

Imagine if science were to "prove" that there is no such thing as love -- that love is purely a chemical reaction with no moral or spiritual significance. Would anyone be tempted to give up on love, to divorce his spouse or abandon his children, to deny his own subjective experience of love, merely because some presumed authority had ruled against it? But of course science could not "prove" such a proposition in the first place. The most it could prove is that there is some chemical state that is correlated with the subjective experience of love. Science as such cannot go beyond that point. Some individual scientist might presume to do so, but then he would not be speaking for "science" as such. He would be expounding his own private philosophy.

When I came back from my walk, I looked up an essay by William James called "Is Life Worth Living?", which can be read in full here. I had a vague recollection that there was something in this essay relevant to the subject at hand.

What follows is the final section of the essay, considerably compressed, and with a couple of the longer paragraphs broken up for easier reading. (It is worth reading the whole thing at the link provided.)

======

Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science opposes to our act.

There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the idol. Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.' It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues, -- that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head....

[But science is still in its infancy, and therefore] our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain, -- that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any practical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever.

Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no need.

And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing.

And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? ... Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind....

It is a fact of human nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal, -- this bare assurance is to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane.... 

Probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living, if we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf....

[James analogizes the life of a domestic animal, who cannot conceive of the larger sphere of human relations around him, to the life of a human being, who cannot fathom the possible larger sphere of divine activity around him.]  In the dog's life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.

But "may be! may be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?" Well, I reply, the 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss.

In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, -- both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act....

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? ....

Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments -- the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith -- sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal....

Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there."