Super-Psi & some notes from Braude's Immortal Remains

The strongest argument against all of these non-survival explanations for apparitions of the dead—including the super-psi hypothesis—is the existence of apparitions where the person doing the appearing retained a first-person memory of doing so.

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.”

Ian Stevenson investigated a case in which a Burmese woman, Daw Kyin Htein, experienced an apparition of a family friend a few months after his death in a plane crash. The apparition happened one night as she was returning from a trip to the outhouse. When she saw her deceased friend, she invited him to reincarnate into her family. Then she went to sleep and had a dream of him as well, one in which his mother and sister (both still living) asked him to go with them but he declined. The mother of the deceased also apparently had a dream—it’s not clear if it was on the same night—in which her son said he was going to live with U Ba Hein, Daw Kyin Htein’s husband.

Soon after this, Daw Kyin Htein conceived a son, Maung Yin Maung, who had memories of being her deceased friend. Furthermore, at the age of 12, he reported to Stevenson that he remembered being near Daw Kyin Htein’s home after his death. He saw someone he thought was her coming out of an outhouse. He remembered “showing himself” to this person as an apparition, and he remembered her inviting him to become her child. He also remembered communicating with his former personality’s mother and sister. They asked him to be reborn with them, but he said he was going to be reborn into Daw Kyin Htein’s family instead.

-- Rawlette, Sharon. Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness

We had touched on intermission memories, but I don't think we zeroed-in on the cases where a child recalls not only their past life but appearing either as an apparition or in a dream to the living and having this confirmed.

I do think that technically the Super-Psi advocate could claim the past-life memories are psychically implanted, the apparition is made out of ectoplasm manifested via PK, and then a false memory of being the apparition is implanted into the child's mind.

And of course all this planning is supposedly done through the subconscious, which can perform these kind of X-men like (if not godlike) abilities unavailable to the conscious mind...but I think with every other criticism in this thread about the Super Psi Hypothesis this seems quite implausible, especially considering the evolutionary explanation* would stretch plausibility in itself.

*I'm referring to the argument made in prior posts that if Super Psi is true - and thus there is no afterlife - the default explanation is that somehow Psi arises via evolution but is not available to prevent death. [Instead it] can only fool us into thinking there's an afterlife. Chris Carter is the first person I recall to make this criticism of Super Psi though I wouldn't be surprised to find someone making the same argument earlier.

Couple more interesting points from Rawlette's book:

The deceased will sometimes correct a false belief held by the sitter. In a case reported by Gary Schwartz, medium Laurie Campbell correctly spelled the name of a relative of the sitter, but the sitter thought it was an error until he looked into it.

So here if the medium was using telepathy one would expect them to use the same erroneous spelling that the sitter expected.

This has some parallels with the discussion on the conversations with the dead Maroczy.

Another case she mentions is drawn from The debatable land between this world and the next,by Robert Dale Owen.

A woman - whom he refers to as Miss V - stays the night in her aunt's house, specifically in a particular room with a reputation for being haunted. Miss V, having locked the door for the night, is approached by an apparition that tries to talk to her, but the ghost vanishes quickly without being able to articulate anything.

Miss V later ends up at a seance where a "Sarah Clarke" comes through telling Miss V that she used to be the aunt's housekeeper and was wracked with guilt over stealing a few items over the years including a silver sugar bowl.

Miss V later confirms with her aunt that the housekeeper was named Sarah Clarke, and that a sugar bowl had gone missing. However the aunt considers the matter more than past, and says of course Sarah is forgiven.

From then on the apparition never appeared to anyone again.

Now, accepting this case as we have for all others in this thread, it is difficult to see how Super Psi makes the apparition appear [for] some time and then ends it just when the forgiveness for theft is vocalized. One could spin a story about such a chain of coincidences, or deny the case altogether, but if the facts are as stated it would seem Super Psi takes yet another hit.

Mediums report experiencing regular communication from the deceased and this phenomenon has been a normal and useful aspect across cultures all over the world since antiquity. Modern mediumship research has included accuracy testing of the information reported by mediums under blinded laboratory conditions with statistically significant results. It has been posited that mediums are using clairvoyance, precognition, or telepathy with the living to acquire accurate information about the deceased.

A recent study examined mediums’ experiences during mediumship readings for the deceased and during psychic readings for/about the living. Participant responses from 113 self-identified mediums and 14 Windbridge Certified Research Mediums were quantitatively analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software and qualitatively analyzed using a content analysis methodology. Statistically significant differences were seen for LIWC categories including social and perceptual processes and insight. Qualitative content analysis found that mediumistic experiences include a triangulation of the communication and that psychic experiences include the information flowing from various sources including from the deceased. Further analysis demonstrated that the level of development of the self-identified mediums was significantly less than that of the Windbridge mediums (z=4.931, p&alt;0.01) and indicates that blocking unwanted communication from the deceased is a learned skill. Together, these findings strongly call into question the continued use of terminology separating mediums’ experiences into categories that do and do not involve communication with the deceased. Going forward, it will be necessary for language to reflect empirical data and the experiences of modern mediums rather than philosophical conjecture.

Bio: Julie Beischel, PhD, has been performing empirical research with mediums full-time for 15 years. She has examined the accuracy and specificity of the information mediums report; their psychology, physiology, and phenomenology; and the potential social applications of mediumship readings. She received her doctorate in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. She is currently Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center, an Arizona non-profit corporation dedicated to alleviating suffering by performing rigorous scientific research and creating free educational materials on the topics of dying, death, and what comes next. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and academic anthology chapters as well as the books Among Mediums, Meaningful Messages, From the Mouths of Mediums, and Investigating Mediums.

"Living agent psi is dead" - I agree. This has also been called "super psi" and has been a means for overcautious parapsychologists to avoid the obvious conclusion from the mediumistic communications that these communications are actually from the dead. These parapsychologists have wanted to come up with some sort of or any interpretation of the data that doesn't involve communications from the dead, evidently in order to stay as close to a materialistic position as possible.

Super psi just doesn't work to explain the data, and has the problem that it makes it necessary to assume that the psychic powers of the living can be much more powerful than have ever been demonstrated.

and has the problem that it makes it necessary to assume that the psychic powers of the living can be much more powerful than have ever been demonstrated.

I would agree with everything [else] you said at first glance, but I'm not sure about this one. I do think there have been cases that do seem to involve living persons having strong Psi abilities.

However, from what I recall there are some grey areas in those cases potentially involving OOBEs or even spirits (the latter noted in Beischel's talk). They also seem to suggest the idea from Sheldrake that the true soul is field-like in it extension, with the soul then containing the body.

I would agree with everything [else] you said at first glance, but I'm not sure about this one. I do think there have been cases that do seem to involve living persons having strong Psi abilities.

However, from what I recall there are some grey areas in those cases potentially involving OOBEs or even spirits (the latter noted in Beischel's talk). They also seem to suggest the idea from Sheldrake that the true soul is field-like in it extension, with the soul then containing the body.

I didn't mention the other very serious flaws in the concept of super psi or living agent psi. I think another flaw is the implausability of LAP explaining verified mediumistic communications, where the medium reports definitely sensing a deceased personality, and the sitter is sure he/she is communicating with the deceased personality due to the many unique personality characterisics of the deceased that come through in the communications. It seems extremely unlikely that even powerful psi could acheive such perfect acting on the part of a medium, especially with the medium strongly feeling that he/she is communicating with an actual discarnate.
 
The kicker is that it seems extremely implausible that the medium would or even could somehow subconsciously trick his/her self. Why do that?

Related to the above there is an even more serious flaw in LAP - the seeming near impossibility of LAP explaining the existence of a boatload of verified NDE and reincarnation cases. The problem for LAP here is that these people go through and recount extremely vivid experiences, not information. The notion of super psi was mainly concocted to explain away in some fashion just the information that comes through during mediumistic communications.

How could LAP possibly get inside a person's psyche and consciousness so as to actually create different experiences?
 
In reincarnation cases the experiencers remember being another previous person along with giving some veridical information. The information could be possibly ascribed to LAP. But here also in addition to the case of verified NDEs it is very hard to imagine how LAP could actually get inside a person's psyche and consciousness so as to create past life memories. There are even some cases of unlearned language ability emerging from the memories. 

It seems very unlikely that LAP could be true but only for one little corner of paranormal experiences - the information that comes through in verified cases. 

And LAP would have to have almost unlimited godlike powers for it to explain the above issues with NDEs and reincarnation memories. These powers seem to be far beyond anything that has ever been demonstrated.

I didn't mention the other very serious flaws in the concept of super psi or living agent psi. I think another flaw is the implausability of LAP explaining verified mediumistic communications, where the medium reports definitely sensing a deceased personality, and the sitter is sure he/she is communicating with the deceased personality due to the many unique personality characterisics of the deceased that come through in the communications. It seems extremely unlikely that even powerful psi could acheive such perfect acting on the part of a medium, especially with the medium strongly feeling that he/she is communicating with an actual discarnate.
 
The kicker is that it seems extremely implausible that the medium would or even could somehow subconsciously trick his/her self. Why do that?

Related to the above there is an even more serious flaw in LAP - the seeming near impossibility of LAP explaining the existence of a boatload of verified NDE and reincarnation cases. The problem for LAP here is that these people go through and recount extremely vivid experiences, not information. The notion of super psi was mainly concocted to explain away in some fashion just the information that comes through during mediumistic communications.

How could LAP possibly get inside a person's psyche and consciousness so as to actually create different experiences?
 
In reincarnation cases the experiencers remember being another previous person along with giving some veridical information. The information could be possibly ascribed to LAP. But here also in addition to the case of verified NDEs it is very hard to imagine how LAP could actually get inside a person's psyche and consciousness so as to create past life memories. There are even some cases of unlearned language ability emerging from the memories. 

It seems very unlikely that LAP could be true but only for one little corner of paranormal experiences - the information that comes through in verified cases. 

And LAP would have to have almost unlimited godlike powers for it to explain the above issues with NDEs and reincarnation memories. These powers seem to be far beyond anything that has ever been demonstrated.

I would say the biggest issue for LAP is that, as Beischel points out, mediums who will do other psychic work note that they sometimes get *that* information from the deceased.

This really throws a wrench into LAP because now we don't know if the best psychic cases of the living are assisted by the dead or not. The only thing LAP can do to salvage itself is to take the report of a psychic that no dead person assisted them at face value....yet as you point out this then puts, at best, LAP on equal footing to Survival in terms of accepting first-person witnessing.

A few people - including me heh - have mentioned this before, that a "Super Spirit" Hypothesis is just as valid as a Super Psi one. But Beischel has given us some great data to support the idea at least *some* Psi is due to assistance from the dead, though IMO it doesn't have to be a deceased person aiding in Psi function. It could be due to some elemental spirits, angels, etc.

I feel the logical scientific position is to reject Super-psi on the grounds of Occam's razor. I know we have been over this territory several times before.

I would say that if psi exists (in a weak, strong, or super-strong form), that means that the human mind can achieve all sorts of effects regardless of the laws of physics, and given this, there is no powerful reason to reject the idea of life after death.

Without Occam's Razor, no science is possible.

David

I feel the logical scientific position is to reject Super-psi on the grounds of Occam's razor. I know we have been over this territory several times before.

I would say that if psi exists (in a weak, strong, or super-strong form), that means that the human mind can achieve all sorts of effects regardless of the laws of physics, and given this, there is no powerful reason to reject the idea of life after death.

Without Occam's Razor, no science is possible.

David

I agree, except that I think as I have pointed out that there are also other reasons to reject LAP. The major one I think is that a major problem for LAP is that NDErs and experiencers of reincarnation memories go through and recount having extremely vivid experiences, not information. Another way of stating the problem is that LAP can only explain (and was invented to explain) the information that comes through during such experiences (and also with mediumistic communications), not experiences.

How could LAP possibly get inside a person's psyche and consciousness so as to actually create different experiences, not just to supply information or data?

Finally, and also as I have pointed out, LAP would have to have almost unlimited godlike powers for it to explain the above issues with NDEs and reincarnation memories. These powers seem to be far beyond anything that has ever been demonstrated.

I agree, except that I think as I have pointed out that there are also other reasons to reject LAP. The major one I think is that a major problem for LAP is that NDErs and experiencers of reincarnation memories go through and recount having extremely vivid experiences, not information. Another way of stating the problem is that LAP can only explain (and was invented to explain) the information that comes through during such experiences (and also with mediumistic communications), not experiences.

How could LAP possibly get inside a person's psyche and consciousness so as to actually create different experiences, not just to supply information or data?

Finally, and also as I have pointed out, LAP would have to have almost unlimited godlike powers for it to explain the above issues with NDEs and reincarnation memories. These powers seem to be far beyond anything that has ever been demonstrated.

I suppose that my feeling is that scientists who ignore Occam's Razor should simply be called out for breaking the rules of science!

David