Michael Prescott's Blog

Je suis PK?

There's a new Twitter trend: uploading videos of people trying to "summon a demon." 

The players place one pencil crosswise atop another pencil. After reciting the formula "Charlie, Charlie, are you here?" they wait to see if the top pencil will move.

In some videos, it clearly does move. Could it be blown by someone's breath or moved by a hidden wire? That's certainly possible. But the reactions of the participants (who start screaming and sometimes run away) seem genuine enough. Maybe they're just good actors. Maybe not. 

Since I already think there's good evidence for macro PK, I wouldn't be too surprised to see an example of it spreading via social media. 

In a way, it's the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century's table-tipping craze. In both cases, ascribing the phenomenon to supernatural forces, rather than to PK, could be psychologically useful as a defense mechanism. ("Fear of psi" may inhibit the phenomena, as discussed by Stephen E. Braude in this essay.) 

The fact that most of the "Charlie" players are teens may also be relevant. Teenagers seem more likely to display PK talents. Most poltergeist cases, which arguably are manifestations of PK, center on troubled adolescents. 

Unfortunately, since the Charlie phenomena appear to depend on spontaneity, they may be impossible to study scientifically. Setting up an experiment in a lab would probably make the procedure too formal and create the tension of high expectations. A lighthearted attitude — not taking the whole thing too seriously — may well be crucial to success. This was true of table-tipping also; it had to be approached as a parlor game, with the players singing songs and making light conversation. Again, this is probably a defense mechanism to deal with fear of psi. 

Encore?

It's often argued that, in any scientific inquiry, the true test involves replication. When it comes to testing the validity of a particular medium, we're sometimes told that if the first sitting goes especially well, we need to schedule a second or even third sitting in order to confirm our initial experience.

Something about this has never set quite right with me, and it's not a policy that I've followed myself. For instance, I had a very successful sitting (over the phone) with the medium Georgia O'Connor a few years ago, but I've never scheduled a follow-up. Lately I asked myself why.

There are a number of possible explanations. First, there's what the parapsychologist Charles Tart has called "fear of psi." There may be a deep-seated aversion to paranormal phenomena that affects even those of us who are inclined to believe in such things.

Second, there's an interesting point noted by Michael Crichton in his memoir Travels, in which he recounts his experience at a spoon-bending party. He found that he was able to bend the metal with no apparent effort, as were many people around him. But he also found that after a while he lost interest in the phenomenon. Spoon bending was boring! Logically this seems to make little sense, since the ability to manipulate solid objects by means of mental power ought to be the least boring thing in the world. So perhaps it's another aspect of fear of psi – a defense mechanism to protect us from delving too deeply into these things.

Or perhaps it really is boring, once you know you can do it. It's well known that card guessing experiments often show a decline in results over time, presumably because either the test subject or the experimenter (or both) gets bored and loses focus. Having played around with some online card guessing experiments now and then, I can say that I get bored with the game after no more than twenty minutes, even if I happen to have scored fairly well.

Another possible factor is confirmation bias. If we've had a particularly successful session with a medium, we may be reluctant to press our luck with a second session. We may prefer to hang on to the first session as something close to "proof" of life after death, while worrying (perhaps subconsciously) that a second session would undermine our confidence if it goes wrong.

Fear of psi, the possibly concomitant feeling of boredom with psi, and confirmation bias may be real enough, but they are probably not legitimate reasons to avoid a return trip to a medium. But I think there are other reasons that are more  forgivable.

For one thing, a sitting with the medium – unlike, say, an experiment in chemistry – depends heavily on the emotional state of the sitter. There is reason to believe that a sitter with a sincere, earnest desire for an emotional connection will achieve better results. If we return for a second session, having already obtained the emotional connection we needed the first time, we may be driven by a less worthy motive – maybe the ego-based need to prove something to ourselves or to others. It's possible that this motive is not conducive to the best communication. 

There's also a question of the communicator's motivation – that is, assuming that there really is a communicator involved. If the deceased has said everything he needed to say the first time, he may not come through again. Or, having done all he could in the first session, he may feel that further communication is pointless inasmuch as the sitter will always revert to skepticism. In addition, it seems that many communicators remain in contact with the earth plane only for a limited time before moving on to higher planes where communication becomes more difficult.

Then there's the medium herself. She is not a machine, and as with anyone relying on intuitive abilities, she is going to have her ups and downs, her good days and bad days. The precise conditions necessary for good communication are unknown and may involve such variables as the medium's mood, health, and alertness, and perhaps even outside factors like the weather. It's as unreasonable to expect a dazzling performance at every sitting as to expect a home run every time a good hitter is at bat. Even the best hitters manage a home run only a minority of the time. That doesn't mean they can't do it; it just means that hitting a home run is a complex intuitive skill that is not fully under the player's conscious control.

Finally, we might consider whether replication really is the gold standard in science. The emphasis on replication derives largely from the physical sciences, like physics and chemistry, where the same experiment can be performed over and over again, consistently yielding the same results. 

But there are other sciences that don't depend so much on replication. Field anthropology comes to mind. In many cases, the observations recorded by a particular field anthropologist are not seconded by other observers. Occasionally a set of observations will be challenged, as was the case with Margaret Mead's reports of life in Samoa, but mostly the observers are trusted as being reliable.  

Parapsychology probably has more in common with anthropology than it does with physics or chemistry; like anthropologists, parapsychologists study people, sometimes in their home environment. A parapsychologist investigating a poltergeist outbreak in someone's house is more like a field anthropologist observing an unfamiliar social situation than like a chemist mixing chemicals in a beaker.

None of this is to say that repeated visits to a particular medium can be of no value. A lot depends on the reliability of the medium herself. Charles Drayton Thomas did excellent work over a period of decades with the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, and Richard Hodgson is equally well-known for his long work with Leonora Piper. But Leonard and Piper were two of the most powerful full-trance mediums ever studied, and full-trance mediumship in general probably yields more consistent results than the light-trance mediumship generally practiced today.

Moreover, even Leonard and Piper were not always on target; both had significant failures and both produced a lot of "bosh," to use William James's term. (Michael Tymn's biography Resurrecting Leonora Piper does a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff, focusing on Piper's most impressive hits, many of which were truly spectacular.) It should be pointed out that a great deal of patience was needed to carry out these time-consuming investigations; Hodgson devoted all his time to the studies – something that's not an option for most of us in our own inquiries.

Speaking personally, I don't feel a strong need to talk to Georgia O'Connor again, at least right now. I don't think my motivation would be right, and I don't see that I could gain much from the experience. Maybe I would get a little additional evidence to support the genuineness of mediumship, or maybe the session would be a bust, but in either case the original session, which I recorded and studied in detail, still happened and can't be explained away.

And if we expect to achieve absolute proof, we're probably asking the impossible. There seems to be an element of ambiguity and doubt built into this whole subject – what George Hanson dubbed "the trickster." If our everyday reality is, as Roger Ebert said in his final days, "an elaborate hoax," then we probably are not meant to see through it in any final way. The man behind the curtain must remain hidden; the show must go on.

True or false

One of the standard arguments to come up whenever there's an evidence-based discussion of life after death is the so-called transmission theory, first proposed by William James, which views the brain as a receiver of the "signal" of consciousness (not an actual electromagnetic signal — it's a metaphor). The transmission theory stands in opposition to the production theory, which holds that the brain produces consciousness. 

The essential point underlying the transmission theory is that correlation is not causation - that the admittedly obvious correlation between brain states and mental states does not establish that the brain causes the mind to come into being. The usual modern analogy is of a television set; damage to its components will compromise the picture and sound in predictable ways, but this does not mean that the TV actually produces the content it displays. The content actually originates as a signal, and the signal will continue uninterrupted and unimpaired even if the set is turned off or destroyed. 

William James

Though objections to the transmission theory today are usually dressed up in the latest findings of neuroscience, there's really nothing new here. Even in James's day (and long before) it was well understood that brain damage or the ingestion of alcohol or certain drugs could alter mental states. No one disputes this; the question is whether the changes to the brain affect the brain's ability to produce consciousness or affect the brain's ability to receive and decode the signal of consciousness, which comes from an outside source. 

Another common Skeptical objection is that the transmission theory is unfalsifiable — i.e., that it cannot be disproven even in principle, rendering it untestable and unscientific. Let's take a closer look at this argument. 

First, it should be pointed out that neither the transmission theory nor the production theory really deserves the name of "theory." Both ideas are thumbnail sketches, vague starting points for a possible theory that has yet to be developed. Though there has been some effort to explain the mechanism of transmission in terms of quantum tunneling and microtubules, the work is still in a preliminary phase and is very controversial. Meanwhile, no one on the production side of the debate has ventured to solve the "hard problem" of neuroscience - how electrochemical activities in the brain become qualia and self-awareness. 

Though I'll continue to use the term "theory" for convenience, it might be more accurate to describe both production and transmission as hypotheses — or even as suggestions, notions, or speculations. 

But what about unfalsifiability? Is it true that the transmission theory is inherently impossible to disprove? 

Probably, yes. No matter how many correlations are found between brain and mind, the transmission theory can always insist that the mind's true source lies elsewhere. Even if the source is never found, advocates of transmission can maintain that it's out there ... somewhere. And even if artificial intelligence someday replicates human intelligence, it will be possible to argue that AI is only a simulation lacking true self-awareness — a masterful imitation but not the real thing. 

So if transmission is unfalsifiable, where does that leave us? Well, it means we need to take a hard look at production. Is that theory falsifiable in principle?

Answer: yes. It could be falsified by any convincing evidence that consciousness can operate when the brain is shut down or permanently defunct. After all, if consciousness persists when the brain is flatlining or dead, then it cannot depend on the brain's activity for its existence (even if it does require the brain to mediate its interaction with the physical world). 

Now, I would argue that there already is convincing evidence on exactly this point. The best documented cases of NDEs, mediumship, and spontaneous reincarnation memories (among other things) strongly suggest — and arguably prove — that consciousness does, in fact, continue even when the brain is temporarily or permanently offline. 

In other words, it can be argued that while transmission is indeed unfalsifiable, production has already been falsified. Production cannot cover all the data — it cannot explain, and is not consistent with, the parapsychological evidence — and therefore it must be wrong. 

This, in itself, does not prove that the transmission theory is correct. Perhaps there is some third alternative. Perhaps any form of dualism is wrong, and consciousness is all there is. Who can say?

But while we can't say definitively that transmission is true, we can — if we accept the evidence from parapsychology — say definitively that production is false. To overturn that conclusion, Skeptics would have to show that all the empirical evidence indicative of postmortem survival can be explained by deception, delusion, mistaken observation, faulty memory, and so forth. I wish them luck!