The central subject of this book is the problem of relations between the inherently private, subjective, “first-person” world of human mental life and the publicly observable, objective, “third-person” world of physiological events and processes in the body and brain.
Scientific psychology has been struggling to reconcile these most-basic dimensions of its subject matter ever since it emerged from philosophy near the end of the 19th century. Both were fully present in William James’s monumental Principles of Psychology (1890b), the earliest English-language survey of the new academic discipline that is still widely cited today. James explicitly acknowledged the normally intimate association between the mental and the physical, and he systematically and sympathetically rehearsed what little was then known or surmised about the brain. Unlike many of his scientific contemporaries, however, James resisted premature and facile attempts at neural reductionism. When he recognized limitations on the physiological side, he was content to record his psychological observations and await further progress in neurophysiology. The bulk of the Principles therefore consists of masterful expositions, relying heavily on sophisticated observation of his own inner workings, of central properties of mental life such as attention, imagination, the stream of consciousness, volition, and—at the heart of everything—the self (Leary, 1990).
James’s person-centered and synoptic approach was soon largely abandoned, however, in favor of a much narrower conception of scientific psychology. Deeply rooted in earlier 19th-century thought, this approach advocated deliberate emulation of the presuppositions and methods—and thus, it was hoped, the stunning success—of the “hard” sciences, especially physics. James was barely in his grave when J. B. Watson (1913) published the founding manifesto of radical behaviorism, the logical culmination of this tradition. Psychology was no longer to be the science of mental life, as James had defined it. Rather it was to be the science of behavior, “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science” (p. 158). It should “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like” (p. 166). Its task was instead to identify lawful relationships between stimuli and responses: “In a system of psychology completely worked out, given the response the stimuli can be predicted; given the stimuli the response can be predicted” (p. 167).
Watson’s doctrine quickly took hold, and for the next half-century mainstream American psychology deliberately avoided contact with issues of the sort most important to James. It largely abandoned the first-person perspective of the investigator trying to understand things from within, and adopted almost exclusively that of an external observer whose task it is to predict and control the behavior of a material object, an opaque “black box,” the experiential interior of which psychological science can and should ignore. Indeed, the success of physical science could be viewed as resulting in part precisely from its having in a similar way stripped from its subject matter all traces of purpose and teleology. In hopes of carrying through Watson’s program of discovering units and laws in terms of which all behavior might ultimately be explained, most psychologists thus turned to narrowly behaviorist experimental studies—sometimes of humans but more commonly of simpler organisms, and typically in artificially simplified environments.
The inward dimension of psychology did not altogether disappear, however. The old introspectionist schools lingered on for a while, and introspection continued to play a significant role in areas such as psychophys-ics and the mainly European movements known as Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. During the same years in which behaviorism was seizing control of the American scientific mainstream, people such as Janet, Freud, Jung, and their followers were elaborating the various schools of depth psychology or “dynamic psychiatry” (Ellenberger, 1970). Even in the darkest days of the early behaviorist period—the rabid and monolithic “Age of Theory” (Koch & Leary, 1985)—major figures such as Morton Prince, Henry Murray, Gordon Allport, and Gardner Murphy steadfastly defended the complexities of human mind and personality against simplistic reductionist onslaughts. More recently, schools of “humanistic” and “transpersonal” psychology have also emerged which openly aspire to bring the deeper parts of human personality back within the framework of scientific psychology. It cannot be denied, however, that for most of psychology’s first century these dissident movements have had to wage an uphill battle at or sometimes beyond the margins of the discipline.
The ascendancy of the behaviorist juggernaut thus essentially fragmented the traditional subject-matter of scientific psychology as envisioned by pioneers such as James, and left the fragments in the care of distinct, poorly integrated, and sometimes even mutually antagonistic professional sub-specialties. That the deep divisions it created remain with us even today is conspicuously exemplified by the 1989 schism within the American Psychological Association, which reaffirmed a fundamental split between the experimental and clinical dimensions of the field. These divisions represent, we contend, something much deeper than the ordinary process of specialization within an otherwise unified scientific discipline. Rather, they reflect the continuing failure of scientific psychology to come fully to grips with the inescapably dual nature of its subject matter—in short, with the mind-brain problem that lies at the heart of our discipline.
This has begun to change, however, in part because of the maturation of mainstream psychology itself. The 20th-century co-evolution of mainstream psychology with developments in allied fields such as neuroscience and philosophy of mind began with progressive refinement, but ultimately rejection, of its original behaviorist formulations, which fell by the wayside as their defects and limitations were progressively identified and articulated. Starting in the 1950s, however, a more sophisticated form of behaviorism arose, uniting the philosophical doctrine of functionalism with the logical theory of Turing machines and the applications technology provided by the digital computer. As described in more detail in the following chapter, this “Computational Theory of the Mind” (CTM) liberated cognitive science from the most oppressive strictures of radical behaviorism and has dominated the mainstream ever since. It also is currently driving what appears to many observers and participants to be an ever-deepening and unquestionably successful marriage between psychology and neuroscience.
Any contemporary discussion of mind-brain issues must certainly take into account the enormous advances made during the past century in our understanding of the brain. New manifestations of mind appear everywhere to be closely associated with modifications of structure or process in brains. In evolution, for example, we see an overall correlation across animal species between behavioral complexity and the level of organization of the nervous system. The rapid post-natal mental development of the human infant likewise is associated with massive structural and functional changes in its maturing brain. And as human adults we are all familiar with numerous facts—the normal daily fluctuations of consciousness and the effects of mild cerebral trauma induced by alcohol and other psychoactive substances, fatigue, thumps on the head, and so on—that also reflect in a general way this dependence of mind upon brain. But what about the details?
In recent decades brain researchers have begun “opening up the black box,” deploying a formidable array of increasingly sophisticated clinical, pharmacological, biochemical, genetic, neurosurgical, electrophysiological, and behavioral methodologies in efforts to understand what brains can do and how they do it. The last 20 years in particular have witnessed the emergence of an entire family of new “functional neuroimaging” techniques such as high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and positron emission tomography (PET), which allow researchers to observe with ever-increasing temporal and spatial precision subtle physiological processes taking place in the interior of intact and functioning human brains.
These techniques have yielded a torrent of new information about the brain. Scientists and philosophers confronting the mind-body problem even as recently as a century ago knew only in a relatively global and undifferentiated fashion that the brain is the organ of mind. Today we know a great deal more, although our knowledge undoubtedly remains in many respects extremely primitive relative to the brain’s unimaginable complexity. We know a lot about the structure and operation of neurons and even lower-level constituents. We also know a lot about the structural organization of the brain, its wiring diagram, and thanks mainly to the new imaging technologies we have begun to learn a fair amount about its functional organization, the manner in which complex patterns of neural activity are mobilized and coordinated across spatially separated regions of the brain in conjunction with ongoing experience and behavior.
The empirical connection between mind and brain seems to most observers to be growing ever tighter and more detailed as our scientific understanding of the brain advances. In light of the successes already in hand, it may not seem unreasonable to assume as a working hypothesis that this process can continue indefinitely without encountering any insuperable obstacles, and that properties of minds will ultimately be fully explained by those of brains. For most contemporary scientists, however, this useful working hypothesis has become something more like an established fact, or even an unquestionable axiom. At the concluding ceremonies of the 1990s “Decade of the Brain,” for example, Antonio Damasio (1999) encapsulated the prevailing view:
In an effort that continues to gain momentum, virtually all the functions studied in traditional psychology—perception, learning and memory, language, emotion, decision-making, creativity—are being understood in terms of their brain underpinnings. The mysteries behind many of these functions are being solved, one by one, and it is now apparent that even consciousness, the towering problem in the field, is likely to be elucidated before too long.1
That an enormous amount of methodological and substantive progress has been made by scientific psychology in its first century can hardly be denied, and I do not mean to deny it. But what sort of root conception of human mind and personality has so far emerged from all this effort? There are many rapidly shifting cross-currents and variations of detail amid the welter of current views, but to the extent that any provisional consensus has been achieved by contemporary mainstream scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists in particular, it is decidedly hostile to traditional and com-monsense notions and runs instead along roughly the following lines: We human beings are nothing but extremely complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is in principle causally explainable from the bottom up in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics—ultimately, that is, in terms of local contact interactions among bits of matter moving in strict accordance with mechanical laws under the influence of fields of force.2 Some of what we know, and the substrate of our general capacities to learn additional things, are built-in genetically as complex resultants of biological evolution. Everything else comes to us directly or indirectly by way of our sensory systems, through energetic exchanges with the environment of types already largely understood. Mind and consciousness are entirely generated by—or perhaps in some mysterious way identical with—neurophysiological events and processes in the brain. Mental causation, volition, and the “self” do not really exist; they are mere illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And of course because one’s mind and personality are entirely products of the bodily machinery, they will necessarily be extinguished, totally and finally, by the demise and dissolution of that body.
Views of this sort unquestionably hold sway over the vast majority of contemporary scientists, and by now they have also percolated widely through the public at large.3 They appear to be supported by mountains of evidence. But are they correct?
The authors of this book are united in the conviction that they are not correct—that in fundamental respects they are at best incomplete, and at certain critical points demonstrably false, empirically. These are strong statements, but our book will systematically elaborate and defend them. Our doubts regarding current psychological orthodoxy, I hasten to add, are at least in part shared by others. There seems to be a growing unease in many quarters, a sense that the narrowly physicalist contemporary approach to the analysis of mind has deflected psychology as a whole from what should be its most central concerns, and furthermore that mainstream computationalist/physicalist theories themselves are encountering fundamental limitations and have nearly exhausted their explanatory resources. The recent resurgence of scientific and philosophic interest in consciousness and altered states of consciousness, and in the deep problems which these topics inherently involve, is just one prominent symptom, among many others, of these trends.
Even former leaders of the “cognitive revolution” such as Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, George Miller, and Ulric Neisser have publicly voiced disappointment in its results. Chomsky in particular has railed repeatedly and at length against premature and misguided attempts to “reduce” the mind to currently understood neurophysiology. Chomsky (1993), for example, pointed out that empirical regularities known to 19th-century chemistry could not be explained by the physics of the day, but did not simply disappear on that account; rather, physics eventually had to expand in order to accommodate the facts of chemistry. Similarly, he argued, we should not settle for specious “reduction” of an inadequate psychology to present-day neurophysiology, but should instead seek “unification” of an independently justified level of psychological description and theory with an adequately complete and clear conception of the relevant physical properties of the body and brain—but only if and when we get such a conception. For in Chomsky’s view, shared by many modern physicists, advances in physics from Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation to 20th-century developments in quantum mechanics and relativity theory have undermined the classical and commonsense conceptions of matter to such an extent that reducibility of mind to matter is anything but straightforward, and hardly a foregone conclusion.
Several contemporary state-of-the-art surveys in psychology—for example, Koch and Leary (1985), Solso (1997), and Solso and Massaro (1995)—provide considerable further evidence of dissatisfaction with the theoretical state of things in psychology and of a widely felt need to regain the breadth of vision of its founders, such as William James. Solso and Massaro (1995) remark in their summing-up that “central to the science of the mind in the twenty-first century will be the question of how the mind is related to the body” (p. 306) and that “the self remains a riddle” (p. 311). David Leary’s (1990) essay on the evolution of James’s thinking about the self begins by documenting the remarkable degree to which the Principles had already anticipated most of the substance of subsequent psychological investigations of the self. He then goes on, however, to emphasize that later developments in James’s own thought—developments completely unknown to the vast majority of contemporary psychologists—contain the seeds of an enlarged and deepened conception of the self that can potentially secure its location where James himself firmly believed it belongs, at the very center of an empirically adequate scientific psychology. From still another direction, Henri Ellenberger (1970) ends his landmark work on the discovery of the unconscious with a plea for reunification of the experimental and clinical wings of psychology: “We might then hope to reach a higher synthesis and devise a conceptual framework that would do justice to the rigorous demands of experimental psychology and to the psychic realities experienced by the explorers of the unconscious” (p. 897).
As will become apparent, our book wholeheartedly endorses this historically conscious, ecumenical, and reintegrative spirit. Before proceeding with its very unusual substance, however, we must set forth certain methodological principles that have guided us throughout, and that we strongly encourage our readers to adopt as well.
First and perhaps foremost is an attitude of humility in relation to the present state of scientific knowledge. Although we humans indisputably have learned a great deal through systematic application of our scientific methods, and are learning more at an accelerating rate, we undoubtedly still have a long way to go. There is surely a great deal about the physical world in general, let alone brains, minds, and consciousness, that we do not yet understand. Furthermore, our intimate familiarity with the basic facts of mental life—including, for example, our ability to direct our thoughts to states of affairs in the external world, and indeed the fundamental fact of consciousness itself—should not be confused with understanding, or blind us to the deeply puzzling and mysterious character of these phenomena. The self-assurance, even arrogance, of much contemporary writing on these subjects seems to us wholly unjustified and inappropriate. From this point of view many old scientific books and papers that purport to explain features of mental life in terms of hypothetical brain processes make fascinating reading, because of the many ultra-confident pronouncements they contain which in hindsight we know to be false. Future readers of many present-day books and papers about brain, mind, and consciousness, we believe, are likely to experience similar reactions.
Second, we emphasize that science consists at bottom of certain attitudes and procedures, rather than any fixed set of beliefs. The most basic attitude is that facts have primacy over theories and that beliefs should therefore always remain modifiable in response to new empirical data. In the forceful words of Francis Bacon (1620/1960), from the beginning of the scientific era: “The world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding… but the understanding to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world as it is in fact” (p. 276).
Although all scientists presumably endorse this idea in principle, there are complications and subtleties in practice, because “facts” and theories are strongly interdependent. As remarked long ago by philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1905), “for the facts to be ‘discovered’ there is needed the eye to see them” (p. 60). Many of the issues discussed in this book revolve around well-documented empirical phenomena—facts, we will insist—that have been systematically ignored or rejected by mainstream scientists who find them too discordant with prevailing views to take seriously.
This is a tricky and delicate business, however; for when current scientific opinion hardens into dogma it becomes scientism, which is essentially a type of fundamentalism, a secular theology, and no longer science. As William James (1896) remarked, “science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect” (p. 6).4 Although this may seem uncontroversial, even trite, it is easily and often forgotten. The history of science is therefore replete with the sad spectacle of scientists—sometimes even very prominent scientists talking about their own scientific specialties—issuing what later prove to be profoundly erroneous judgments. For example, Badash (1972) studied the last third of the 19th century, when a “malaise of completeness” pervaded the physical sciences. James Clerk Maxwell commented in 1871 that “the opinion seems to have got abroad, that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals” (p. 50). In 1894 his American counterpart A. A. Michelson declared that “it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice” (p. 52). But the next year brought the discovery of X-rays, and within the decade radioactivity, the electron, quantum theory, and relativity would shake the foundations of physical knowledge. Misjudgments of this magnitude—and many further examples could easily be adduced—should certainly give pause to anyone tempted to presume that today’s science defines the limits of the possible.
Although facts have primacy, not all facts are of equal importance. The ones that should count the most, relative to a given problem, are obviously those that can contribute most to its solution. A useful principle that provides orientation and helps guide the search for such facts was stated as follows by Wind (1967): “It seems to be a lesson of history that the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but the exceptional cannot be understood as an amplification of the commonplace” (p. 238). This lesson has not penetrated contemporary cognitive science, which deals almost exclusively with the commonplace and yet presumes—extrapolating vastly beyond what in reality are very limited successes—that we are progressing inexorably toward a comprehensive understanding of mind and brain based on classical physicalist principles. This serene confidence seems to us unwarranted. It is now evident, for example, that chess-playing computer programs represent progress toward real intelligence in roughly the same sense that climbing a tree represents progress toward the moon. This book will apply Wind’s principle by focusing upon a variety of psychological phenomena that any adequate theory of mind and consciousness will have to accommodate, but that we believe cannot be satisfactorily accommodated within the current explanatory framework of cognitive science. This in turn will motivate an effort to identify an expanded framework capable of overcoming these limitations.
Our own empiricism is thus thorough-going and radical, in the sense that we are willing to look at all relevant facts and not just those that seem compatible, actually or potentially, with current mainstream theory. Indeed, if anything it is precisely those observations that seem to conflict with current theory that should command the most urgent attention. As James (1909/1986) put it: “When was not the science of the future stirred to its conquering activities by the rebellious little exceptions to the science of the present?” (p. 375). Or again (James, 1890–1896/1910):
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to…. Any one will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when the science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules, (pp. 299–300)
The contribution of anomalies such as radioactivity and the photoelectric effect to the rise of quantum theory amply confirms the wisdom of this remark.
To qualify for this navigational role, of course, the relevant facts should also be suitably well-attested, and this caveat provides considerable scope for exercise of personal judgment. Science must always seek an appropriate balance between liberalism and conservatism in the admission of new observations, and it tends naturally and appropriately toward conservatism, amplified in proportion to the depth to which the new observations appear to conflict with expectations based on current understanding. Contrary to the popular mythology of science, however, such judgments often fall short of its professed ideals of dispassionate and open-minded evaluation of evidence.
Real science is saturated, like all other human endeavors, with human failings. It is often portrayed, and likes to portray itself, as reliably marshaling the intellectual virtues of reason and objectivity against retreating forces of religion, authority, and superstition—Galileo’s treatment at the hands of the Catholic Church providing a hackneyed example. But especially in more recent times, opposition to new scientific ideas comes principally from other scientists, and often on less than satisfactory grounds (B. Barber, 1961; Kuhn, 1962). Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood and discoveries by Lister, Semmelweiss, and Pasteur related to the germ theory of disease and the importance of sterilization in hospital environments were at first bitterly resisted by their medical colleagues. Lord Kelvin strongly resisted Maxwell’s formulation of the laws of electromagnetism, and he never gave up his belief that atoms are indivisible (B. Barber, 1961). Scalp-level recording of brainstem evoked potentials is now used routinely to verify the integrity of sensory pathways in neonates and major-surgery patients, but its developer Don Jewett has described vividly the difficulties he experienced early on in funding and publishing this work, which conflicted with what his reviewers thought they knew about the behavior of electrical potentials in biological tissue. Wegener’s geophysical theory of plate tectonics was similarly ridiculed for decades before being empirically confirmed. Many other examples of this sort could easily be cited. Pioneer of quantum mechanics Max Planck (1950) was perhaps only slightly exaggerating when he said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” (pp. 33–34).
This issue of scientific resistance has proved especially troublesome for one particular family of observations among the many kinds we draw upon in developing the central argument of this book—namely, observations adduced in the course of over a century of effort by workers in “psychical research” and its somewhat desiccated modern descendant, “parapsychology.” My co-authors and I wish therefore to state immediately and unequivocally our own attitude toward this still-controversial subject. The irrational incredulity that remains characteristic of mainstream scientific opinion in this area seems to us a remarkable anomaly that will provide abundant and challenging grist for the mills of future historians and sociologists of science. Sufficient high-quality evidence has long since been available, we believe, to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt the existence of the basic “paranormal” phenomena, at least for those willing to study that evidence with an open mind.5
Our Appendix contains an annotated bibliography providing useful points of entry into this large and complex literature. I hasten to add that this literature is uneven and imperfect, like any other scientific literature, and that our endorsement does not extend to all parts of it equally. What we do insist upon, however, is that this scientific literature is something entirely different from what one routinely encounters in checkout lines at the supermarket or in the flood of sensationalized drivel invading our TV and movie screens. The public credulity that enables this industry to thrive is deplorable, and we ourselves deplore it, but this has no bearing on the underlying scientific issue as to whether psi phenomena really exist as facts of nature.
It seems to us axiomatic that no intellectually responsible person, and especially no responsible scientist, should feel entitled to render opinions on this subject without first taking the time and trouble to study the relevant literature. This axiom is regularly violated, however, and in this connection we wish to comment briefly but more generally on the behavior of outside critics of this field, without being drawn into a discussion that could very easily become a book in itself.
The fundamental issue was incisively framed by American philosopher C. J. Ducasse (1969) as follows:
Although the evidence offered by addicts of the marvelous for the reality of the phenomena they accept must be critically examined, it is equally necessary on the other side to scrutinize just as closely and critically the skeptics’ allegations of fraud, or of malobservation, or of misinterpretation of what was observed, or of hypnotically induced hallucinations. For there is likely to be just as much wishful thinking, prejudice, emotion, snap judgment, naivete, and intellectual dishonesty on the side of orthodoxy, of skepticism, and of conservatism, as on the side of hunger for and belief in the marvelous. The emotional motivation for irresponsible disbelief is, in fact, probably even stronger—especially in scientifically educated persons, whose pride of knowledge is at stake—than is in other persons the motivation for irresponsible belief. In these matters, nothing is so rare as genuine objectivity and impartiality of judgment—judgment determined neither by the will to believe nor the will to disbelieve, but only by the will to get at the truth irrespective of whether it turns out to be comfortably familiar or uncomfortably novel, consoling or distressing, orthodox, or unorthodox, (p. 35)
In our informed and considered opinion, the critiques of psychical research that have so far been offered by outside observers mainly demonstrate the validity of Ducasse’s concerns, and routinely though not invariably fail to meet normal standards of scholarly practice. These tendencies were already fully apparent to William James, who took psychical research far more seriously than most present-day psychologists realize (James, 1986; G. Murphy & Ballou, 1960; E. Taylor, 1996), and they have scarcely abated in the subsequent century. We will not dwell on these controversies here, but have included in the Appendix some pointers to recent literature that illustrates their strange character.
We do, however, want to highlight here one particular critical strategy that has been very commonly and inappropriately employed. Most critics implicitly—and some, like Hansel (1966, p. 19), explicitly—take the view that psi phenomena are somehow known a priori to be impossible. In that case one is free to invent any scenario, no matter how far-fetched, to explain away ostensible evidence of psi. Because there are no perfect laboratory experiments—nor, for that matter, perfect “spontaneous” cases involving psi experiences occurring outside of a laboratory—any positive result whatever can be discredited in this way, and thus any potential accumulation of evidence aborted.6 The extent to which many critics have been willing to pursue this strategy reveals the depth of their emotional commitment to current scientific orthodoxy, and is to us nothing short of amazing. Contrast this with the attitude expressed by James (1920): “I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are impossible” (p. 248). Can there be any doubt which is the scientifically more responsible attitude?
One further point needs to be drawn out in this connection. Many critics also seem to presume that words like “paranormal” or “supernormal” are synonymous with “supernatural.” That is not the case, however. Psi phenomena (and certain other unusual phenomena that we will discuss in this book) are in our view inconsistent only with the current materialistic synthesis, summarized by Broad (1962) in the form of widely accepted “basic limiting principles.” They do not obviously or necessarily conflict with more fundamental laws of nature, and indeed to claim such a conflict is to presume that we already know all the relevant laws, which hardly seems likely. The authors of this book emphatically do not believe in “miracles,” conceived as breaches of natural law. Our attitude is that these seemingly anomalous phenomena occur not in contradiction to nature itself, but only in contradiction to what is presently known to us of nature. The phenomena we catalog here are important precisely because they challenge so strongly the current scientific consensus; in accordance with Wind’s principle, they not only invite but should command the attention of anyone seriously interested in the mind.
Finally, we also wish to make clear immediately that in our view “empirical” research includes but is by no means limited to experimental research. Laboratory research using random samples of subjects, control groups, and statistical modes of data analysis can be wonderfully useful, but obsession with this as the only valid means of acquiring new knowledge readily degenerates into “methodolatry” (Bakan, 1967), the methodological face of scientism. Laboratory experimentation certainly does not exhaust the means of obtaining valid and important information. Detailed case studies of special individuals, such as persons displaying rare cognitive skills or having unusual neurological deficits, have often provided unique insights and indisputably can play a valuable role in the evolution of scientific understanding. Pertinent modern examples here are the investigations by Luria (1968) and Sacks (1987) of persons displaying prodigious abilities of memory and calculation. Conversely, the experimental literature itself is replete with examples of supposedly “rigorous” laboratory studies which were in fact performed under conditions that guaranteed their failure from the outset. A good example here is provided by the many superficial studies of “meditation” carried out by unsympathetic investigators, using as their subjects random samples of undergraduates having little if any experience or interest in meditation (M. Murphy & Donovan, 1997; M. A. West, 1987; see also our Chapter 8).
With these methodological principles in mind, we turn now to the substance of our book. In our opinion, the most systematic, comprehensive, and determined empirical assault on the mind-body problem ever carried out in the suggested spirit, during the entire long history of psychology, is summarized in F. W. H. Myers’s (1903) undeservedly neglected two-volume work Human Personality (henceforth, HP). Myers’s friend and colleague William James (1901) declared that “through him for the first time, psychologists are in possession of their full material, and mental phenomena are set down in an adequate inventory” (p. 16). Gardner Murphy (1954) praised “the heroic accumulation of data and amazing integration which the work represents” (p. iv). Ellenberger (1970) described Myers as “one of the great systematizers of the notion of the unconscious mind” (p. 314) and his book as “an unparalleled collection of source material on the topics of somnambulism, hypnosis, hysteria, dual personality, and parapsychological phenomena,… contain[ing] a complete theory of the unconscious mind, with its regressive, creative, and mythopoetic functions” (p. 788). James and various other writers have suggested that to the extent Myers’s views are upheld by subsequent research he could rank with Charles Darwin in terms of the character, scope, and originality of his contributions. Myers also powerfully influenced many leading thinkers of the day, including both William James and Pierre Janet, but like James and Janet themselves he was soon pushed aside by the virulent behaviorism nascent at that period. However, just as James and Janet have undergone a major renaissance in recent years, as their central concerns and ideas have begun to reanimate the psychological mainstream, we believe that Myers’s work deserves both wider recognition and careful re-examination for the light it can shed on the current situation in psychology.
The balance of our book attempts to further these aims. Chapters 1 and 2 provide essential background. We begin by reviewing modern developments in cognitive science, calling into question the ability of physicalist/ computationalist models of the mind in any of their current forms to deal adequately with the most basic, central, and pervasive phenomena of mind and consciousness. We also identify a variety of specific empirical phenomena, and a variety of critical aspects of human mental life, that appear to resist or defy understanding in terms of the currently prevailing physicalist conceptual framework. The central objective of this exercise is to reduce whatever confidence in that framework readers may initially have, and thus to provide justification for revisiting the broader and deeper framework elaborated over a century ago by Myers, James, and their colleagues.
The following chapter summarizes the contributions of F. W. H. Myers to empirical investigation of the mind-body relation. It begins with a brief summary of the relevant 19th-century intellectual background that suggests why Myers and his type of synoptic approach were ultimately ignored by the nascent materialist psychology. After outlining the purposes and principles in which Myers’s work was rooted, the chapter goes on to describe Myers’s theoretical model of human personality and consciousness, a model that is the most fully worked out example (so far) of “filter” or “transmission” theories of mind (James, 1898/1900; Schiller, 1891/1894), according to which mind is not generated by the brain but instead focused, limited, and constrained by it. The chapter also includes a description of the methodological principles and empirical phenomena which Myers considered essential for a fully comprehensive and adequate science of psychology.7
The next six chapters constitute the empirical heart of the book. We focus in detail on selected large classes of psychological phenomena, several of which were investigated in considerable depth by Myers himself, that appear especially challenging to contemporary mainstream views and capable of yielding new insight into the nature of the mind-brain connection. We do not attempt to review these topics exhaustively, but discuss them selectively in relation to their bearing on this central issue. In so doing, we also begin to assess the degree to which Myers’s views have been sustained and confirmed, or must be modified or discarded, in light of subsequent work. Following Myers’s own practice, we attempt to lead readers by degrees and without obvious discontinuity from phenomena which, though challenging, are well established and seem at least potentially compatible with current orthodoxy, to phenomena which in our view are just as well or nearly as well established, but clearly cannot be accommodated or understood without radical revision of our most fundamental theoretical ideas. The principal topics we discuss include extreme forms of psychophysiological influence, empirical and conceptual difficulties with current “trace” theories of memory, psychological automatisms and secondary streams of consciousness, the family of “near-death” and “out-of-body” experiences and related phenomena, genius-level creativity, and the world-wide psychological phenomenon of “mystical” experience.
In the final chapter we attempt to re-assess Myers’s theory of human personality and to draw out additional implications of this book for future psychological theory and research. We underscore that Myers and James made the most comprehensive effort to date to analyze the mind-body relation empirically, and we urge scientific psychology to return to its great central problems with a comparably synoptic empirical approach, but supported now by the tremendous methodological and technical advances achieved in the intervening century. We further argue that Myers’s theoretical scheme and the empirical phenomena he deployed to support it have held up remarkably well, and at many points have been substantially reinforced by subsequent research. Remaining difficulties and weaknesses, however, are also pointed out, together with critical opportunities and problems for further investigation. Finally, we attempt to show how the theoretical framework elaborated by Myers and James, although certainly incomplete and imperfect, can be reconciled with leading-edge contemporary physics and neuroscience, and prefigures an enlarged scientific psychology that can potentially overcome the historical fragmentation sketched above.
1. This quotation and others in this book that do not list a page number were taken from sources published on the internet without specific pagination.
2. Newton’s law of universal gravitation, insofar as it implies instantaneous action at a distance, appears to conflict with this characterization of physical causation, and indeed this feature greatly troubled Newton himself. The idea that matter could influence other matter without mutual contact was to him “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it” (Newton, 1687/1964, p. 634). Newton himself presumed that this difficulty could eventually be removed—as indeed it was, more than two centuries later, with the appearance of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
3. Just as this introduction was being drafted, a lengthy cover story on “mind/ body medicine” appeared in the September 27, 2004, edition of Newsweek. This article exemplifies throughout the attitudes I have just described, and it culminates in a full-page editorial by psychologist Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works (1997), decrying what he terms “the disconnect between our common sense and our best science.” Pinker further advises Newsweek’s massive readership that contrary to their everyday beliefs “modern neuroscience has shown that there is no user [of the brain]. ‘The soul’ is, in fact, the information-processing activity of the brain. New imaging techniques have tied every thought and emotion to neural activity.” These statements grossly exaggerate what neuroscience has actually accomplished, as this book will demonstrate.
4. The degradation feared by James is exemplified by media figure Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, in an opinion piece appearing in Scientific American (June, 2002). There Shermer not only overtly embraces scientism, apparently unaware of the generally derogatory connotations of this term, but goes on to characterize leading contemporary scientists in quasi-religious terms: “This being the Age of Science, it is scientism’s shamans who command our veneration.”
5. The popular terms for the main classes of relevant phenomena are “extrasensory perception” (ESP) and “mind-over-matter” or “psychokinesis” (PK). ESP is sometimes broken into subtypes such as “telepathy” (direct or unmediated awareness of the mental state or activity of another person), “clairvoyance” (of distant events or objects), and “precognition/retrocognition” (of future/past events). It is widely recognized by researchers, however, that these familiar terms are unduly theory-laden and may not correspond to real differences in underlying process. Many researchers therefore prefer the more neutral terminology introduced by Thouless and Wiesner (1947)—”psi” for paranormal phenomena in general, occasionally subdivided into “psi gamma” for the input side and “psi kappa” for the output side.
6. Statistically knowledgeable readers will recognize that critics of this type are acting in effect like Bayesians who have assigned a prior probability of zero to the existence of psi phenomena (see also Radin, 2006).
7. This chapter provides a useful introduction to Myers, but it is no substitute for the real thing. With the hard cover version of Irreducible Mind, we included a CD containing the entire text of Human Personality in Microsoft Reader ebook format, as well as its most significant contemporary reviews and translations of all foreign text. This digital version and the reader are freely available at the Esalen website (http://www.esalenctr.org/display/hp_ctr.cfm) or through the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu).