Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective

Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective

David Ray Griffin

ABSTRACT: The main reasons for the marginality of parapsychology are its challenge to the modern worldview and its association with the occult. These are two sides of the same coin, because the modern worldview, with its mechanistic doctrine of nature and its sensationist doctrine of perception, was adopted in large part to rule out influence at a distance, especially to and from minds, which should be regarded as essential to the definition of psi relations. Parapsychology, which studies ostensible psi relations, is inevitably, therefore, a potentially revolutionary science. It need not pose an ultra-revolutionary threat, however, because it need not affirm true precognition; and the modern principles it challenges can still be regarded as expressing important, if limited, truths.

Philosophers of parapsychology should not concede that the modern worldview works quite well for everything except psi. It cannot handle various “hard-core commonsense notions,” which we all presuppose in practice, such as freedom, efficient causation, a real world, time, and the reality of values.

The bulk of the essay explicates the postmodern philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which affirms panexperientialism, the priority of nonsensory perception, and influence at a distance. The same revisions of the modern worldview to account for the hard-core commonsense notions turn out also to allow for the various types of psi.

Whitehead and Psi: Dreams, Process Theory and Nonsensual Perception

Richard Wilkerson

AI = Adventure of Ideas
MT = Modes of Thought
PR = Process and Reality
PRr = Process and Reality, revised edition
SMW = Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead [1861–1947], said very little about dreams and telepathy. He did belong to a society at Cambridge which kept votes on the topics of discussion, and according to his main biographer, Victor Lowe, Whitehead always voted yes on questions of psi phenomenon being possible. But no record from these meetings reveals any developed opinions. Still, his process theory, which attempts to encompasses science and non-science, provides a theoretical basis for nonsensual perception and action at a distance, which may be seen as the core elements of all psi phenomenon.

The primary core of prehension, is exactly this, the nonsensory reception and transmission of influence. As mentioned before, an occasion receives at beginning of its formation the whole of the past, and adds to this whole past selections from the realm of pure possibilities. "From Whitehead's point of view," states David Ray Griffin, "the only thing extraordinary about extrasensory perception…is that the information in question has risen to consciousness." [Griffin 1989, p.29] Process philosophy, at its core, is all about nonsensory perception. However, the datum from a prehension in London finding its way to consciousness in a mind in New York City will require some explaining. In theory, there is no barrier to this occurring.

The first item to note is that the nonsensory perception of actual occasions means that causality is retained, but separated from both the rule that the events must be contiguous and that causality implies full determination. There can be causal influence at a distance, and that influence needn't be fully determined as each occasion has a chance to alter its own course. Thanks to quantum physics, this is now not as much a stretch of the imagination as it once was. [Pleasants, 2003].

Given this paradigm, we are getting psi information all the time in the background of our perceptual flow. In fact, given this paradigm, we are getting more psi information than any other kind of information, as we are immediately prehending the past of all other occasions in any extensive continuum we might share with them.

Mentioned this elsewhere but this combination of Whitehead's ideas with Sri Aurobindo by Eric Weiss seems like a great metaphysics or, failing that, a great Psi-friendly Creation Myth:

The Involution 

Materialists see one material world, governed by immutable mathematical laws, and have a hard time accounting for the emergence of individual consciousness out of that. Ascetics see one immaterial world of Consciousness, and have a hard time accounting for the emergence of individual consciousness out of that. And yet individuated consciousness is always the starting point for our philosophical thought. To generate a theory which denies the reality of individual consciousness is to become engaged in a performative contradiction. What Sri Aurobindo tries to demonstrate with his doctrine of Supermind and the Involution is that there is a continuum of differentiation, with the absolute complex unity of the One on one end, and the myriads of separate, absolutely minimal consciousnesses of quantum events on the other.

Every Mind will be strictly finite – which means that it will be strictly limited within whatever spacetime that it inhabits. At this point in the Involution, Sachchidananda has manifested out of itself a creative advance of finite drops of experience. Here Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysics issues in a world which begins to seem, phenomenologically, like the world that William James and Alfred North Whitehead’s are describing. This is a point at which the two systems link up beautifully. Sri Aurobindo provides an analysis of the God and of the basic ontological ground out of which God arises that seems, to me, to be more coherent that Whitehead’s, and Whitehead provides an analysis of finite actual occasions and their interactions which is much more adequate to understanding the results of modern science and to articulating the nature of the subtle worlds which come into being in the course of the Involution. The Mental level, from this point of view, is a world of high grade actual occasions – occasions like those that make up our wakeful moments of experience – interacting directly with each other without the intermediation of emotional and physical bodies.

We can imagine the operation of self-absorption as the putting in place of a one-way mirror between Sachchidananda and the Individuals through which He/She/It is expressing His/Her/Itself. Sachchidananda, through Supermind, never loses its own Transcendent and Universal Knowledge and Bliss, but the Individuals at play in the cosmos put behind themselves even their own choice to self-limit, and so they come to take their finitude as an absolute, given truth. This is how Ignorance enters into the cosmic play.

Embodiment – An Explanatory Framework for the Exploration of Reincarnation and Personality Survival 

Eric Weiss

The overall objective of this series of conferences is that of investigating the possibility that an embodied personality can survive the death of its physical body. There seem to be two distinct, but interrelated, ways in which such survival may take place.

• First, it may be possible for a personality, with its memories, emotional texture, and characteristic patterns of thought to continue its existence somewhere and somehow after the physical body dies. In this essay, I will refer to this possibility as “personality survival.”
  
• Second, it may be possible for a newly embodied personality to establish physical, emotional and mental ties with a previously deceased personality in such a way that we come to consider the new personality to be a “reincarnation” of the old one.
  

The work of accomplishing the objective of these conferences falls into two parts.

• First, has been necessary to accumulate a body of evidence which establishes the existence of personality survival and of reincarnation, and which outlines the range of phenomena by which these realities are made manifest.
  
• Second, it is necessary to establish a framework of explanation within which the relevant phenomena can be discussed and further investigated. This explanatory framework must:
  • Elucidate the particular phenomena under investigation
    
  • Show clearly some coherent relationship between these phenomena and those phenomena which are investigated by mainstream science.
    

In this essay, I take it for granted that the evidence for both kinds of survival has already been established, and that the range of phenomena which need to be explicated has been, for the time being, laid out. On the basis of that evidence, I will attempt to outline a useful explanatory framework which can order this data, and can suggest directions for future research.