Psience Quest

(2023-06-03, 03:23 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]The final chapter of Shusan's The Next World discuss[es] what kind of afterlife we might expect given the varied Survival evidence. Will cover that in my next post.

Shushan notes that the book has gone through Survival evidence specifically to determine what the afterlife might be like. And in this vein we see that sometimes claims of what lies beyond align with our ideals - peace, unity of humanity, possibly some path to improvement & virture - but other times is culturally bound even to the point of disappointment and doubt. The latter referring to supposed spirits of slaves happy to be slaves or lower classes continuing to be in their "proper place".

There are also the varied gods and other spirit entities that are drawn from cultural expectation. This does not always seem to be the case, as sometimes NDEs seem to influence cultural shifts and there are cross-cultural elements in NDEs. However one cannot deny that a good deal of afterlife claims seem to be drawn from people's own cultural expectations.

Shushan suggests two possibilities -

1. The afterlife, at least in its early stages, conforms to certain expectations to ease the passage from this life to the next. This can include allowing the dead to create certain aspects of reality.

2. There is only one afterlife but it is clothed in imagery that suggests there are differences.

Neither of these seems too comforting, and one can't help but feel there is something forced about this to deal with what could be considered contradictory elements. However if something like Idealism is true one might expect there to be these pocket realities wherein certain afterlives correspond to the beliefs and desires of varied persons.

Thankfully we do have a set of cross-cultural elements that strengthens the idea that what lies beyond is an actual place ->

Quote:In summary, just as we dream in symbols – giving form and apparent “reality” to fears, desires, worries, hopes, and other abstract concepts without conscious intent or deliberation – it is conceivable that we manifest our afterlife experiences in the same way. NDEs are apparently universal on contextual, thematic, and interpretative levels. They also share highly specific cross-cultural similarities on the symbolic and narrative levels. The most common features can therefore give us some idea of what the afterlife experience could be like, including OBE, darkness, light, heightened awareness and emotions, meeting spirits of the dead, personal evaluation, and so on – all given specific form by our individual and cultural particularities. Such features also regularly occur in the mediumistic and PLR accounts, though the reports of intermission states in spontaneous reincarnation memories appear to be more closely aligned with NDEs and without such extensive elaboration and idiosyncrasies.

Shushan, Gregory . The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife (pp. 252-253). White Crow Productions Ltd. Kindle Edition.

As an additional point of interest, Shushan notes the idea the early stage of the next life shows certain expected imagery is itself expected in certain religious texts ->

Quote:The Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead, c. eighth century CE) describes how souls undergo an expected set of intermediate postmortem experiences, though their character is determined by cultural and individual expectation. These involve leaving the body, an encounter with a bright light, having a “karmic body” formed by one’s “own past and deeds,” encounters with good and evil entities (including beings of light), darkness, fear, judgment, and punishment followed by rebirth. Afterlife images are mind-dependent manifestations of personal hopes, fears, desires and so on (Evans-Wentz 1927: 94; Hick 1976: 414, 400-3).

There are also parallels in the Vedas, which describe the heavenly realm (Svargaloka) as “a projection of the mind” and an intermediate state to be transcended by achieving moksha, or liberation (Panikkar 1977: 633)...Upanishads. Indeed, the Upanishads characterize dreaming and lucid dreaming as analogous to the afterlife state, with the atman described as “that person who, as one sleeps, roams about in dreams.” The afterlife world of the fathers, Pitaraloka, is also analogous to the dream-state...

The Lacandon Maya believe in an illusory afterlife which tests the readiness of the deceased to transcend it (Bierhorst 2002: 155), reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhism...

For myself while I accept Survival I have to admit I feel it remains a mystery of what that Survival might be like. Nor am I convinced we all go to the same places. It does seem that there may be some peace, for a time though.

So that concludes the book. Sadly I don't know if it really moved the scales between Super Psi and Survival that much, though I do think the NDE cross cultural commonalities - especially from some of the earliest civilizations - is worth looking deeper into.

There's a corner of Survival evidence we haven't really touched on, which are Death Coincidences - stuff like stopped clocks in multiple locations at the time of someone's death. These are arguably easy to claim as examples of Psi but I think they are worth examining because of the time at which they occur and at least some would involve demonstrations of PK. So will do that in the next post...

(2023-06-11, 03:52 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]There's a corner of Survival evidence we haven't really touched on, which are Death Coincidences - stuff like stopped clocks in multiple locations at the time of someone's death. These are arguably easy to claim as examples of Psi but I think they are worth examining because of the time at which they occur and at least some would involve demonstrations of PK. So will do that in the next post...

Fenwick's paper Dying: a spiritual experience as shown by NDEs & Deathbed Visions mentions Death Coincidence though it's more focused on Deathbed Visions - which we've covered a bit - than some of the more just odd coincidences and synchronicities that seem to occur at someone's passing.

Fenwick also co-authored a chapter with Franklin Santana Santos in Exploring Frontiers in the Mind-Brain Relationship , the chapter title being Death, End of Life Experiences, and Their Theoretical and Clinical Implications for the Mind–Brain Relationship. Here he gets more into Death Coincidences that don't directly involve visions.

Will draw from both, and then add some other stuff.

From the paper ->

Quote:...further group of reported phenomena are deathbed coincidences. These are coincidences, reported usually by family or friends of the person who is dying, in which they say that the dying person has visited them at the
hour of death. Many relatives are reluctant to describe these phenomena, but nevertheless they are frequently reported.

Carers also occasionally report other phenomena just prior to death. They sometimes describe a radiant white light, which envelops the dying person and may spread through the room and involve the carers as well. The quality of the light is described as surrounding those who experience it with love.

And though we've covered Deathbed Visions here is a bit on that:

Quote:Very few scientific studies have been done to classify the phenomenon of deathbed visions. The largest survey was carried out by Osis and Haraldsson (1997) over 20 years ago. In a cross cultural survey they reported that over 70% of death bed visions were ‘take away.’ In a Western culture dead parents or relatives are most commonly seen; strangers are occasionally seen and children may report seeing living friends. People who have a strong religious faith may see religious figures, and in Eastern cultures the take-away figure is often a ‘Yamdoot’, the messenger of the God of death.

Usually the dying person’s response to the vision is one of interest or joy, the figures are welcome and the person is usually ready to leave with them. More rarely the response may be one of fear or a refusal to go.

It is interesting children see living friends which of course will raise doubts. However one might ask are these figures then taking the form of whoever might be comforting, rather than being deceased themselves? Or is the love the living have for the dying child allowing a part of themselves to be present? There are also the religious figures seen. However on that note I've read a lot of children see wingless angels against the cultural expectation of winged ones in art.

Of course the strongest cases, as covered previously, are when someone has a deathbed vision of someone who they don't know has already died or experiences terminal lucidity.

Tying into this are the simpler death premonitions when someone just knows they are going to die, and what might be considered precognition cases where one has a vision that someone living is dead but said person dies soon after the vision takes place.

Can possibly revisit this but want to stay focused on the Death Coincidences, which Fenwick and Santos get more into in the book chapter. Among the first is clocks stopping ->

Quote:1. ‘The TV screen went totally blank, the sound went totally and then a nurse came rushing
into the room and asked why we had pressed the alarm. At that very moment my father, 58,
took his last breath. Nobody had rung the alarm, yet it was ringing in the nurse’s offi ce and
nobody can explain why the television started malfunctioning. A short while after my
father’s passing the TV returned to normal. I later spoke to the nurse about the alarm going
off and she said it happened all the time at the point of somebody passing.’ I am neither a
believer or non-believer in an afterlife, but this has certainly opened my eyes to something
out there that nobody can understand.

2. My father died at 3.15 a.m. At about 8.30 a.m. I went to see my Uncle Archie, who’d
been close to dad, rather than ‘phone him, to tell him about losing dad and bring him back
to the house if he wished. As Uncle Archie opened the door it was clear he was distressed
and as I began to tell him of dad’s passing away he interrupted me and said he already
knew…he said no one had telephoned him but told me to look at the clock on the mantlepiece
– it was stopped at 3.15, as was indeed his own wristwatch, his bedside clock and all
other clocks in the house. There was even an LED display, I think on a radio, flashing 3.15.
I was completely taken aback, but Archie seemed comfortable with the phenomena and was
just concerned at losing someone close.’

3. On the morning of my mother’s death, I wound her clock, of which she was very fond,
and put it to the right time before going to work. While at work a nurse phoned to tell me
that my mother had died at ten minutes to eleven that morning. She had not been expected
to die that day, and I was very upset that I had not been with her. I drove straight home and
the first thing I saw on entering the house was that the clock had stopped at ten minutes to
eleven exactly. Twenty-one years later it is still going strong on my mantelpiece.

Strictly on the localized stopping of clocks Fenwick suggests the materialist possibility that maybe some kind of localized field in the skull is released out at the time of death, but that this phenomena should be far more common and measurable if that were the case.

In the Uncle Archie case (#2) you have two rather separate locations.

Other types of cases include:

Quote:If the receiver was awake, the experience usually consisted of inexplicable and overwhelming emotion on which the person felt compelled to act. Sometimes a nonspecific feeling was felt. If the coincidence occurred when the receiver was asleep, the phenomena were more complex and the experience tended to be more narrative and specific. A vision of the dying person might be seen or their voice heard. A third received a warning that the sender was dying or had died, and almost half that the sender had come to say farewell and reassure them that they would be alright.

Quote:Light seen surrounding or emanating from the body was reported by a third of the carers in the English sample, although half of the Dutch carers reported this. The light was sometimes described as a transformation of the person and at other times, small globules of light originating from the person would circulate around the room.

Cases vary from a few mere odd sparks to light leaving the person to a moment where the deceased and the loved one beside them seem to be temporarily displaced into a place consisting of light alone.

Quote:Dad passed away in the early 1980’s. At the moment of his last breath, I was at his side, holding his hand. I believe my eyes were closed. At this point I can only say that everything disappeared and was replaced by a bright white consuming light. Within this was total peace. No pain, no thought, no time. It could have lasted seconds or minutes. I have no awareness of its duration.

Quote:…Gayle came in to tell us Annick had died and we sat around the bed quietly …what I saw then was totally unexpected. Above Annick’s body the air was moving – rather like a heat haze you see on the road but swirling slowly around.

As he died something which is very hard to describe because it was so unexpected and because I had seen nothing like it left up through his body and out of his head. It resembled distinct delicate waves/lines of smoke (smoke is not the right word but I have not got a comparison) and then disappeared. I was the only one to see it. It left me with such a sense of peace and comfort. I don’t think that we were particularly close as my sister and I had
been sent off to boarding school at an early age. I do not believe in God. But as to an afterlife I now really do not know what to think.

None of the coincidences has the strength of other types of Survival evidence, and all of it [is] arguably easy to fit under Super Psi.

However it does seem odd that all that is managed are these "lesser" events when Super Psi apparently can paint birthmarks on a fetus and fill its head with memories from a previous life. OTOH you could say if Survival were true why are these events so varied.

I feel with Survival, however, you can at least posit something like a place in reality where varied events happen, a place that intersects with the living world where limitations might alter whether one person sees an apparition rise from the deceased's body and vanish in loving light whereas another person just gets heat haze.

For Super Psi everything that happens has to occur without having too much reference to any kind of space where the different psychic powers interfere with each other, because the more one explains this in terms of spatial metaphors and analogies the more it seems exactly line the kind of location Survival would take place in. [Consider the "Ocean of Information" Colin Wilson thought of as enabling Super Psi, though eventually he changed to the side of Survival.]

This question of "imperfections" in the data [where the evidence is below the claims Super Psi usually makes] is actually more interesting than I'd previously considered though, and I think revisiting certain types of cases like mediumship can yield some results. For example next post I will talk about the "Chess Match with the dead Grandmaster" where I posit the actual chess skills are arguably of lesser importance than the conversations around the game...

(2023-06-15, 08:14 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]This question of "imperfections" in the data [where the evidence is below the claims Super Psi usually makes] is actually more interesting than I'd previously considered though, and I think revisiting certain types of cases like mediumship can yield some results. For example next post I will talk about the "Chess Match with the dead Grandmaster" where I posit the actual chess skills are arguably of lesser importance than the conversations around the game...

So the case can be found here.

Maroczy comes through a medium, plays chess in game stretching across years, and makes a lot of factual statements. It's very impressive, and a lot of people think that a medium cannot just pick up skills in such a way as to emulate the style of a grandmaster using telepathy.

I agree with all this, though what I think is most interesting is the lack of knowledge:

Quote:Asked if the name ‘Romi’ meant anything to him, Maroczy replied:

Quote:I am sorry to say that I never knew a chess-player named Romi. But I think you are wrong with the name. I had a friend in my youth, who defeated me when I was young, but he was called Romih—with an ‘h’ at the end. I then never again saw the friend whom I so admired. In 1930 at the tournament of San Remo—who is also present? My old friend Romih coming from Italy also participated in that tournament. And so it came about that I played against him one of the most thrilling matches I ever played. I suspect that you were thinking about the same person but gave the name incorrectly. 

Research showed that the name was indeed sometimes spelled with an ‘h’ at the end, Romih, as it had been spelled in the tournament record. Delving deeper, Eisenbeiss learned that Romih was of Slav origin and emigrated to Italy in 1918; in the years following the tournament he dropped the ‘h’ because it was unfamiliar to Italians.

And:

Quote:Another striking verification came about when Maroczy, asked a question to which he didn’t know the answer, provided information in an unrelated topic which proved to be more evidential.  He was asked ‘Who was the Austrian founder of the Vera Menchik club?’ Vera Menchik was the first-ever female world chess champion, holding the championship from 1927 until her death in a bombing in 1944. The ‘Vera Menchik’ club was an informal collection of men whom she defeated, and the ‘Austrian founder’ was the first member and president, having lost to Menchik in 1929. The question was posed by a Swiss chess magazine in 1988 as a reader quiz.

In answer, Maroczy confessed he could not remember and speculated that it could be one of three men, one of whom (Dr Albert Becker) was correct, but whom he incorrectly dismissed.  When the correct answer was published, Maroczy described another incident that happened at the same 1929 tournament, in Karlsbad, Germany. The world champion, Jose Raoul Capablanca of Havana, had taken up a Russian mistress who accompanied him at the tournament.  Unexpectedly, his Cuban wife showed up, and the moment Capablanca saw her, Maroczy wrote, ‘his face turned white and then red.  I was there.’13 Discomfited, the champion blundered disastrously in his next move, leading to a loss to an inferior opponent. Maroczy’s account was found to match that of an author who claimed he might be the only one who knew the reason for Capablanca’s surprising error; the only discrepancy was the colour of the mistress’s hair. The story could be found in no other source.

Even more interesting is a lot of people in the room and beyond did know the correct answer at the time, as noted in Chris Carter's Bigelow essay:

Quote:He still does not name Becker as the founder of the club, as might be expected under the Super-ESP hypothesis; once the solution was published it should be possible for the medium to access the information, either clairvoyantly, or telepathically from the minds of the magazine’s readers. But instead of correcting his wrong answer Maroczy quite unprompted comes up with a different story which evidently demanded his attention much more than the ‘silly joke’.

Another imperfection:

Quote:The 1924 New York Tournament

A similar incident occurred when Maroczy was discussing a tournament in which he performed badly (by his standards). He discusses a “thrilling game” which he (correctly) says ended in a draw, but does not reveal his final ranking, admitting “it is true for me that I am not able to remember everything, most of all whenever winning
eluded me.”

Research revealed that Maroczy finished sixth in the tournament.

Carter references some commentary:

Quote:Eisenbeiss and Hassler concluded:

Quote:Because Maroczy claimed to know Romih from his youth, it is logical that he
would have known the original spelling of Romih’s name and would not have
replaced it with the later Italianization. For the Super-ESP Hypothesis to work, the
controlling mind, on perceiving varying references to Romih or Romi, would have
to be able to grasp the correct one from Maroczy’s perspective, decide to address
the situation, formulate a response to the conflict and dramatize it in the context
of a teasing dialogue with Eisenbeiss/Rollans about their ignorance of the correct
spelling.

Quote:Eisenbeis and Hassler concluded:

Quote:In our example Maroczy’s rationale for forgetting the name of a man whom he
would have considered to be merely indulging a pointless joke but then relating
an unprompted story about a woman whose beauty had impressed him is
plausible, whereas for Rollans the medium it is difficult to understand [if using
Super-ESP] why he should be unable to retrieve the name requested, given his
ability to convey detailed precise information on other occasions, even less why
he should digress to an umprompted narrative thread.

Quote:If Rollans were trying to engineer a story with verifiable facts as evidence of
survival, he could have inserted Maroczy’s final ranking, a checkable fact. Clearly,
elsewhere the Maroczy transcripts contain innumerable such verifiable facts. …
we know Maroczy to have been very ambitious and it is thus entirely in character
that he would omit reporting failures or mediocre tournament rankings. Yet for
Rollans, whose main objective was to provide convincing evidence to support the
survival hypothesis, it would make no sense to censor information concerning
Maroczy’s failures.

I think these kind of instances where, against the background of Maroczy's skill and play style + a lot of verified facts, there are imperfections in knowledge that could easily have been filled in by ESP are of great interest.

Another "imperfection", from Nahm's Bigelow Essay:

Quote:CORT involving unrelated families are particularly frequent in Sri Lanka. But although the
subjects of these cases provide just as much information about their past lives as children in
many other countries, they rarely mention personal names. Consequently, an unusually high
proportion of 76% of Sri Lankan CORT remained unsolved in Stevenson’s files.[72] I have
already mentioned that unsolved cases pose a problem for the motivated physicalist model, but
the extraordinary share of unsolved cases in Sri Lanka flatly contradicts what must be expected. It
isn’t reasonable to assume that all these people launched complex hoaxes but omitted, of all
things, the most relevant details. But this curious lack of providing names matches the survival
model: At least when Stevenson conducted his investigations, people in Sri Lanka avoided using
personal names as much as possible for traditional reasons.

I'm not 100% sure Stevenson is correct about that, at least not exactly. But I do think this is another instance where the failure [of a certain limited kind] actually hurts Super Psi explanations.

A quick detour back to drop in cases:

See this thread for more details but the Emil Jensen case [if assumed to be genuine] is an example of a very good case of someone speaking through a medium:

Quote:To sum up, matching the original records of the sittings with archival information confirmed both the entity’s claimed identity, and the events it described. The entity was not related to or known to the sitters; it spoke in a language not spoken by the medium; in modern times, a record has been found that such a person did exist; that person died some years before the sittings with Indridason in the 1900s; and the then contemporary events also took place. Haraldsson titled his report: “A perfect case?” (Haraldsson, 2011). So what do we do with a sophisticated, coherent physical manifestation of a classic ‘drop-in’ communicator, familiar from mental mediumship?

 -Zofia Weaver