Why mediums have so much trouble with names

I don't know but I suspect that materialisations, whether from the spirit world or spontaneously by some form of PK are probably impossible to explain by accepted laws of physics. Therefore, by extension, both Super-Psi and spiritual phenomena seem more likely to be indicators of something beyond the physical and, therefore, not the get-out-of-jail card the physicalists are grasping for.

If they are prepared to extend the so-called natural into the realms of the supernatural and accept that Psi effects are real according to this expanded definition of reality, then they seem to me to be taking that step over to our side of the fence - or merely demolishing the fence. Isn't that what we have all been arguing all along - that there is a continuum.

I think that may be a bit of a circular argument (I think you agree). It’s akin to calling any phenomenon one can’t explain as fraud as far as I can see.

I don't know but I suspect that materialisations, whether from the spirit world or spontaneously by some form of PK are probably impossible to explain by accepted laws of physics. Therefore, by extension, both Super-Psi and spiritual phenomena seem more likely to be indicators of something beyond the physical and, therefore, not the get-out-of-jail card the physicalists are grasping for.

If they are prepared to extend the so-called natural into the realms of the supernatural and accept that Psi effects are real according to this expanded definition of reality, then they seem to me to be taking that step over to our side of the fence - or merely demolishing the fence. Isn't that what we have all been arguing all along - that there is a continuum.

Well Braude is a neutral-monist as he says there's just one kind of stuff that has both mental and physical aspects.

Braude does think Survival wins out over Superpsi, he just gives a LOT of credit to Superpsi that most would not. AFAIK he never mentions Replacement Reincarnation, where IMO if any one case is true that's pretty much a "home run" for Survival.

Well Braude is a neutral-monist as he says there's just one kind of stuff that has both mental and physical aspects.

Braude does think Survival wins out over Superpsi, he just gives a LOT of credit to Superpsi that most would not. AFAIK he never mentions Replacement Reincarnation, where IMO if any one case is true that's pretty much a "home run" for Survival.

I can respect that though. Stongmanning the other position. Even if you think survival is more convincing give EVERYTHING to the other side. You wouldn't normally be able to find a survivalist willing to do that.

I can respect that though. Stongmanning the other position. Even if you think survival is more convincing give EVERYTHING to the other side. You wouldn't normally be able to find a survivalist willing to do that.

Except Super-Psi allows for "Magic Wand Psi" and "Hidden Personalities and/or Subconscious Intentional Planning".

Basically we have within us god-like power but it can almost never be accessed consciously. Additionally its primary observable manifestation is making us *think* there are such things as an afterlife and reincarnation.

But if this is the case then Super-Psi also has to be squeezed into a Natural Selection account, as well as the issue that sub-personalities at times seem to behave like spirits that can even be exorcised.

I am not wholly unsympathetic to the idea of Super-Psi in certain cases like Joe Fischer's supposedly Hungry Ghosts - assuming anything paranormal happened there - or certain mediumship examples. But trying to figure out the Super-Psi explanation for the best mediumship cases, Replacement Reincarnation, and the best Peak in Darien cases just feels like trying to force a square peg through a round hole.

Except Super-Psi allows for "Magic Wand Psi" and "Hidden Personalities and/or Subconscious Intentional Planning".

Basically we have within us god-like power but it can almost never be accessed consciously. Additionally its primary observable manifestation is making us *think* there are such things as an afterlife and reincarnation.

But if this is the case then Super-Psi also has to be squeezed into a Natural Selection account, as well as the issue that sub-personalities at times seem to behave like spirits that can even be exorcised.

I am not wholly unsympathetic to the idea of Super-Psi in certain cases like Joe Fischer's supposedly Hungry Ghosts - assuming anything paranormal happened there - or certain mediumship examples. But trying to figure out the Super-Psi explanation for the best mediumship cases, Replacement Reincarnation, and the best Peak in Darien cases just feels like trying to force a square peg through a round hole.

And what about the best veridical NDEs?

And what about the best veridical NDEs?

Wouldn't a Super-Psi advocate say those are clairvoyance?

I was thinking of cases where Super-Psi has to increase knowledge of figures completely unknown to the NDEr (Peak in Darien) or mystically heal a body and then replace it with a new identity (Replacement Reincarnation).

For mediumship I was thinking less knowledge delivered and more the kind of multiple acting personas that would need to be done.

This problem seems to be very common with mediumistic communications with the deceased. An example from the work of one of the most famous and most investigated mediums, Leonora Piper:




This account is very much in line with the following hypothesis: The reading, writing and understanding of words, especially names, must be a neural process, the function of certain brain structures. Naturally they no longer support the spirit or soul after it has left the body. Accordingly, when out of the body in other spiritual realms, the spirit would have great difficulty in naming names. This is because absent the neural brain structures the consciousness or awareness or idea of the identity of a unique person can no longer automatically be associated with the sound of the persons name and the shapes and identifications of the letters making up the name.

The spirit would be aware of and identify another spirit through direct psychic perception, telepathy or other paranormal modalities - sense their essence so to speak, and have no need for names.

This example was apparently an account by a discarnate person of his initial experience of being greeted after his physical death, communicated through Leonora Piper. Piper was still mostly in body and had fully functioning linguistic neural processing, but the being she was receiving the communication from did not, causing the name difficulty. 

This simple hypothesis would seem to explain one of the more puzzling characteristics of the communications coming through psychic mediums - their often great difficulty in getting names correctly.

The occurrence of very numerous cases of this problem in mediumistic communications with the dead would seem to be strong evidence of the truth of the hypothesis - they fit it to a T. The hypothesis presumes the survival of some aspects of the former human personality, in order for the communication to occur. By extension perhaps the confirmation of the prediction of this hypothesis could be considered yet another piece of evidence for survival.

This would also appear to be another fairly strong piece of evidence against "super-psi" as an explanation for mediumistic communications with the deceased. Why would the subconscious mind of a medium choose to fake a phenomenon that would be later explained as an expected artifact of the nature of the physical brain, spirits, and the psychic communication chain?

I don't think it has anything to do with "neuronal process". To say the feeling of familiarity - appearance, mannerisms, etc - is not a neuronal process but that articulating a name is... doesn't make any sense to me.

My guess is that it has to do with something deeper about the metaphysical structure of reality and the relationship between freedom, power, and identification.

In spiritual and magical traditions, to name a spirit is to have control over it. I think this needs to be cogitated on long and hard.

There's a fundamental relationship between identification and control. Identification is the building block of structure which limits freedom within the structure. Ambiguity of identity creates space for freedom. It could be that in the "more free" realms ambiguity of identity allows this type of freedom.

To name a spirit is to bring it down into a structure in which its free will is more limited.

Another thing to consider... in my view, an individual life is like one iteration of a simulation and the Soul is like the AI agent which is being trained by the life. What is learned in life modifies parameters within the "soul" that help it more efficiently achieve goals. In such a case, an individual identity is just a temporary thing which is irrelevant after the lessons learned are integrated into the soul's structure.

There is some brain research that evidently goes some way toward confirming the hypothesis that psychic mediums' difficulty with communicating names and spellings may be related to they and their communicators being partially or entirely out of body:

In split-brain patients the corpus callosum connecting the left and right hemispheres has been completely severed in an attempt to treat intractable epilepsy. Research on such split-brain patients has shown that despite having had the two hemispheres totally separated by the operation, the unity of subjective abstract consciousness and thought including knowledge and understanding of concepts is not affected. For example, the knowledge and understanding that the symbol shaped like the letter "p" is a consonant. A general abstract principle. Apparently our understanding of what a consonant (or vowel) is, is not connected to a part of the brain. It’s an immaterial power.

At the same time, the simple perception and recognition that this shape is the letter "p" was indeed prevented in the callosumotomy patients. Perception was split.

This research seems to relate to the problem mediums tend to have of usually not being able to come up with names and correct spelling. The experiments indicate that while consciousness resides in the brain (the dualist interpretation seems implied), perception is at least greatly facilitated by neural structures in the brain, where this level of mind is intricately intertwined with these neural structures, while abstract thought is independent of the brain.

This would correlate with and apparently explain the observed mediumistic difficulties with names and spelling, since while the psychic medium is in altered consciousness he/she's consciousness has at least partially separated from the physical brain (again the dualist interpretation), and no longer has the perceptual capacities of the brain. Which capacities presumably have to be re-learned from the experience of a detached consciousness.

This last inference would seem to correlate with the observations of some of the early investigators of the communications of powerful mediums like Leonora Piper, that initially the communicators tended to have great difficulty in communication (especially names and spelling), that considerably improved as time elapsed since their physical death. 

A summary description of these experiments, from https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/how-the-s...-the-mind/ :

"...(This research) was done by Justine Sergent (1950–1994), a neuroscientist working at McGill University in Canada.

She took patients who had had split brain surgery and she would show either consonants or vowels in their visual fields. She would flash a k or an a — or a p or an i — in their visual fields. And she would ask them to push a button when they saw a vowel or a consonant.

So a patient would be sitting there and she’d be flashing consonants and vowels in different visual fields. She would ask them: When you see a vowel anywhere, left or right, push a button. So she’d do it a thousand times. (01:06:28)

She understood that, in people who had had a corpus callosotomy [severing the two halves of the brain], the right visual field was connected to the right arm and the left visual field was connected to the left arm … but there was no connection between the two hemispheres (halves) that control opposite sides of the body.

So a person pushing a button with the right hand had to be pushing the button — at least from a material standpoint –- based on what the left hemisphere had seen. That is what was in the right visual field. The right hand had no way of knowing what was in the left visual field because it was a disconnected hemisphere.

She found that, if she asked them, “Whenever you see a vowel anywhere, in either hemisphere, push this button with your right hand,” the right hand would push the button. Whether the vowel was seen by the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere. Even though the hemispheres were not capable of material connection with one another. (01:07:13)

So, she said, somehow the right hand (controlling hemisphere) knew what it was not connected to materially. If the vowel was put in the left visual field, the right hand (controlling hemisphere) had no way, metaphorically, to see it. But it still knew it. That happened with the other hand too. The left hand could respond to stimuli in the right visual field, even though there was no material connection that would allow information to get to the left hand from the right visual field."

(Other corroborating researchers observed),

"Across a wide variety of tasks, split-brain patients with a complete and radiologically confirmed transection of the corpus callosum showed full awareness of presence, and well above chance-level recognition of location, orientation and identity of stimuli throughout the entire visual field, irrespective of response type (left hand, right hand, or verbally).”

“Both the patients and the people nearest to them claim that consciousness is still unified in the patient. Moreover, their everyday behavior confirms this."

In split-brain patients the corpus callosum connecting the left and right hemispheres has been completely severed in an attempt to treat intractable epilepsy. Research on such split-brain patients has shown that despite having had the two hemispheres totally separated by the operation, the unity of subjective abstract consciousness and thought including knowledge and understanding of concepts is not affected. For example, the knowledge and understanding that the symbol shaped like the letter "p" is a consonant. A general abstract principle. Apparently our understanding of what a consonant (or vowel) is, is not connected to a part of the brain. It’s an immaterial power.

At the same time, the simple perception and recognition that this shape is the letter "p" was indeed prevented in the callosumotomy patients. Perception was split.

Interesting stuff...It's worthwhile to note how questionable the "split brain means split consciousness" conclusions were.

Really shows how fundamentalist atheism/physicalism can corrupt the sciences. I've actually mentioned a related issue before, how materialist philosophers (really evangelicals of their atheist-physicalist faith) corrupt science.