Hodgson's choice

I ended up reading the Philpott book about Dean Bridgman Conner right away. (A link to the complete text is found in the comments thread of the last post.) It's a good, quick read and sheds valuable light on Mrs. Piper's mediumship. Philpott establishes convincingly that Piper's spirit controls produced a raft of false information about the supposedly kidnapped Conner, who actually had died of typhoid fever just as the authorities originally reported.

At the same time Piper also provided accurate and detailed information about Conner's itinerary prior to his death, the part of the hospital in which he died, and the view from a certain specific vantage point in Mexico. All of this, however, could have been obtained telepathically from the sitters, with the possible exception of the hospital room in which the young man died (a fact not necessarily known to anyone present at the seances). Philpott concludes that in this case, Piper's mediumship can be explained in terms of "mind reading," rather than spirit communication.

Overall, he makes a strong case and deserves credit for his indefatigable investigation, which consumed five months, and for his judicious approach to a controversial subject. Perhaps most important, he challenges the standard view of Piper's chief investigator, Richard Hodgson, as a cool, capable, objective researcher. Philpott sees him, at least in this instance, as decidedly emotional, obsessed with using the Conner case to prove spiritism to the world, and so personally committed to Piper's mediumship that he would explain away or simply refuse to face any facts that called the spiritist hypothesis into question.

Unfortunately, I suspect there's a lot of truth in this. Hodgson does seem to have become caught up in the excitement of "the new revelation" (in Arthur Conan Doyle's phrase) at the expense of his detachment and scientific rigor.

I do have a quarrel with one of Philpott's claims, though. He says that Hodgson was convinced that a successful resolution of the Conner case would prove spiritism to doubters once and for all. Possibly he did believe this; but I'm not convinced. Surely someone as well versed in the super-psi argument as Hodgson must have been - or as any member of the SPR had to be - would have realized that even the dramatic rescue of young Conner from his supposed Mexican captors would still be compatible with super-psi. After all, proponents of super-psi would simply argue that Mrs. Piper had used her wide-ranging telepathy to read Conner's mind while he was in captivity, or had used clairvoyance to spy on him in his prison cell. The Conner case could no more have disproved super-psi than any other case, since super-psi, by its nature, is not disprovable.

Maybe Hodgson was too excited by grandiose fantasies of worldwide acclaim to perceive this rather simple point; but I think it is more likely that Philpott (who shows little grasp of the super-psi argument) is misinterpreting Hodgson's position here.

Philpott's more important point is much harder to dispose of. To what extent was Piper's vaunted mediumship based on reading the minds of her sitters? It may well be true that telepathy played a larger role in the proceedings than Piper's most vigorous champions (then and since) would allow.

Still, there are arguments against mind reading as an all-inclusive explanation. One that occurs to me offhand involves Piper's spirit control "George Pellew," who successfully identified thirty out of thirty-one friends and relatives known to the living Pellew. Yes, Piper could have read the minds of those thirty and determined their connection with Pellew. But the thirty-first case is more problematic. That particular sitter had been a child when the living Pellew last saw her; since then, she had grown up. Accordingly the Pellew control did not recognize her until he was prompted. But if Piper could read the sitter's mind, why wouldn't "Pellew" have recognized her immediately?

I suppose we could speculate that Piper's subconscious was so crafty, it deliberately avoiding recognizing the sitter in order to undermine the telepathy argument. But this seems like an overly elaborate charade, even for a subconscious that is going to great lengths to fool the conscious mind.

Other examples are possible, of course. Perhaps the best that can be said is that Piper's mediumship was a mixture of telepathy and spirit communication, as may in fact be true of all mediums.

And it would be well to keep in mind that Richard Hodgson may not always have been the supremely competent and clinically impersonal investigator he is so often made out to be. In aligning his reputation and his life's work so decisively with Mrs. Piper, he in effect made the choice to become her apostle, rather than her inquisitor. That choice is understandable - but it may have been wrong.

 

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Comments

[Juan]

I agree with you, but given the difficulty in determining if the mediums are in contact with spirits of deceased or using only psi capacity, current psychic researchers maybe would have to put more emphasis on the OBEs, NDEs and apparitions of living and deaceased. What do you think?

[FDRLincoln]

One of the things that bothers me about the super-psi proponents: they act as if saying "it is just telepathy, not spirits" eliminates the survival hypothesis.

But think about that. Even if it is "just" telepathy, this still proves that human minds communicate with each other through non-physical, non-material means, that our minds are connected somehow in ways that the materialist viewpoint does not allow. Our minds are more than just brain.

Telepathy does not prove survival, but it fits into a survivalist hypothesis better than it fits into a purely materialist one.

[no one]

I read it too, last night. Philpott does manage to effectively toss a wet blanket over Hodgson and Piper.

As Alan Gauld (In the article you linked to in the previous post) points out, at some level it's necessarily ALL psi - whether the information comes from sitters or the disincarnate (or both).

So Phillpott's point becomes a bit diluted.

Unless we accept as an implication the black/white, on/off position that there is no post mortem survival of anything, ever, and that "mind" is a phenomenon distinct to an individual brain; a position that seems incorrect given that at least super-psi has pretty much been proven to exist.

I think we need a new paradigm. It would be based on One Mind, indestructible, with many expressions in many different bandwidths; expressions that can be retained indefinitely to greater or lesser extents, within bandwidths, depending on currently unknown variables.

[no one]

However, NDEs seem to be a fly in the One Mind ointment. NDErs report maintaining individuality during the experience. Yes, they feel a connection to The One, but they they are still, somehow, distinctly themselves. Additionally, they meet distinct individuals that had once been physically incarnate who have also, somehow, maintained some kind of individuality.

This does not mean that there isn't One Mind at some level. It does, however, imply that there is not an instant personality obliterating merging with it absent the "pipe" physical body. And, if individuality is maintained without the pipe of the physical body, then, logically, a medium could contact a distinct deceased individual (e.g. good old Uncle George).

[Philemon]

Having just read Joe Fisher's Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts over the past few days, I think we need to include the ever-present possibility that intentional lying and fabrication is occurring with these spirits - thus explaining to some degree the incorrect information being received.

[Matt Rouge]

Great post!

[David Schaffer]

I'm not sure if this was submitted after I signed in, so it could be a double-post:

Julie Beischel did an double-blinded experiment with some of her research mediums who also do psychic readings. She presented her results at the SSE meeting this summer. The mediums report a completely different phenomenology when doing one sort of reading or the other. To them, psi feels more cold and "factive", whereas the mediumship readings feel more warm and personal, as you might expect. I forget the setup, but Julie's study tests whether this difference in phenomenology is reliable in determining whether the reading they did was for someone who was dead or alive. Apparently, it was reliable, which she took to confirm that the two forms of anomalous information retrieval are different, and to disconfirm the superpsi hypothesis.

[Warren]

>> Joe Fisher's Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts

Fascinating, thought-provoking, and very disturbing book.... especially in light of Fisher's later apparent suicide.

[steve em]

the super psi hypothesis is fairly well demolished by the birthmarks in children who remember past lives. BY what mechanism would superpsi produce birthmarks that directly correspond to the decedents death?

[Bruce Siegel]

"However, NDEs seem to be a fly in the One Mind ointment. NDErs report maintaining individuality during the experience. Yes, they feel a connection to The One, but they they are still, somehow, distinctly themselves."

no one, maybe we can think of it this way. You know how when sunlight travels through a prism, the individual colors of the spectrum separate so we can see them?

So clear light is like the One Mind, and the colors of the spectrum represent individuality. Even when they're apparently merged and lost forever, the individual colors are always there, hidden within the clear light.

It takes a physical prism (a body) to manifest an individual within a physical realm, but that doesn't mean the individuals (colors) aren't still in existence, even when the body (prism) is gone.

And it takes ALL the colors (individuals) to make the perfect, clear, light (One Mind or God).

This is similar to Michael's analogy of air traveling through pipes to create individual souls, and then back out again to join up as the One Mind.

[Juan]

the super psi hypothesis is fairly well demolished by the birthmarks in children who remember past lives. BY what mechanism would superpsi produce birthmarks that directly correspond to the decedents death?

I reject the super psi hypothesis because once we accept paranormal data in survivalist context, it is unlikely that some entity is imitating all survivalists cases so that cases really are not survivalists.

However, it is conceivable how the super psi hypothesis could explain birthmarks of children who seem to remember past lives. Imagine that a pregnant woman unconsciously tuned for some reason a recently deceased individual, so that the mother transfers the memories of the deceased to their baby, but the mother shows psychokinesis on the body of the baby for originate birthmarks that match wounds deceased individual's death.

So we would have an imitation of a case of reincarnation without reincarnation. It is obvious that the only thing that proves is that it is logically possible to imagine cases that mimic reincarnation without being reincarnation, but there is no evidence of this happening.

[Bruce Siegel]

Even though I meant it is a metaphor, my spectrum analogy is supported, in a sense, by the fact that the being of light (the One Mind?) is usually reported as a white or clear light, and individual souls are described as various hues (I'm thinking of what Michael Newton's informants say).

[Art]

"I was unique yet I was the tiniest part of the whole." - excerpt from Mark Horton's NDE,
http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/markh.html

I have read this same sentiment in a number of NDE descriptions. You know how we seem to experience separation in this life over and over again? I believe that in heaven we will experience oneness and connectedness in the same way. The physics of this side seems to generally be separation and the physics of the other side will be oneness and connectedness.

Excerpt from RoseMarie's NDE:
"I was going backwards from what I perceived to be a place of division. ... [snip]... I was going backward as if I was going away from that place of separation."

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/rosemarie_w_nde.htm