On Personal Integrity

I've been thinking more about Gary Mannion, and folk like him. A notion that is widepread in new age and magical thinking is that we are all following "paths"1; that we are given a set of experiences or a lesson to learn and sent on our way, and it is our duty to construct a worldview based on those experiences, to take onboard whatever purpose our three score and ten is supposed to teach us. This idea, in part, stems from certain notions - that reality is subjective, and that all viewpoints are equally valid. So lets deal with those two first.

Reality is not subjective. Our perception of reality, it could be argued, is subjective, but evidence abounds for reality's refusal to be bound by our perception - from the guy who walks into (and not through) a patio door he perceives to be open to clinical trials that overturn perceptions about blood-letting, or even our understanding of the way that diseases are carried. Perceptions of reality can indeed be subjective; I doubt there's a child alive who hasn't at some point toyed with the notion that what one person perceives as the color red is not the same thing that someone else perceives as red. But this is just a difference in perception; we have no innate control over the way we perceive the world. Many illusions still have the power to fool us even when we know we are being fooled, such as the so-called Thatcher Effect. When we perceive, we create in a fantastically sophisticated and complex way a mental model of the universe as we perceive it. But it's important to understand that this model is created by information flowing from the universe as it really exists, through our senses, before being thrown up in a necessarily corrupted and incomplete fashion in the theater of our mind. At no point does the information flow from the model to the universe. We cannot vividly imagine an apple, say, and have that apple genuinely appear before us. Even if we see that apple, we know it isn't there the moment we pick it up and offer it to somebody else.

New age readers at this stage may be reaching for their copies of The Secret. I refer you, also, to the previous Beacon post on cosmic ordering. Even if the universe did bend to our will in this way, it would take the form of external communication; the universe bends to our will to no greater extent that K-Mart bends to our shopping list.

If we take this on board, then it knocks a hole in the second idea; that all viewpoints are equally valid. Again, they are not. This might hold water in more illusory fields, such as English literature or art criticism, but only because we are faced with notions of constructing meaning from oblique sources, and variant readings of texts do not effect what was intended by the author. And even here, it is clear that some readings are more worthy than others.

To take something realworld, that is more on-topic, look at evolution vs. creationism2. Here we have a theory that is based on empirical evidence that presents a coherent picture of the origin of the species; it describes the world. It has found itself in conflict with creationism, which cannot even be described as a theory inasmuch as it is not based on evidence but on a kind of black hole of reasoning. It is difficult to explain the complexities of life on earth, therefore we kick the question to a place that we cannot go, handing creation to an entity that is all-powerful and sits outside of such logical constraints as those posed by the question "what created the creator". At best, these two ideas are poles apart; one is scientific, in that it is based on evidence and on a progression of ideas, the other is not scientific. Creationism comes nowhere near balancing the scales, and yet there are those who insist "in the interests of balance" that it be taught alongside evolution in the science classroom. That would be akin to teaching flat earth theory in geography, or holocaust denial in history. These ideas are lacking in validity.

So where does that leave us. It leaves us with the uncomfortable truth that whatever ideas we have in our head, some of them will have validity and some of them won't. The idea of personal integrity being about honouring the ideas we have seems to be flawed. It's not personal integrity but ideological integrity, which is a different kettle of fish. In essence, by blindly honouring our ideas in the face of contradictory evidence is the opposite of personal integrity; we dishonour ourselves by not testing our beliefs strongly enough.

But this is a normal human trait. That model of the universe we have is based to a fair degree on "heuristics", on logical shortcuts that aren't 100% accurate but make it possible for us to function more efficiently in the world. To cite an oft-used example, we do not feel the need to test the sidewalk before we walk on it each time. Heuristics tells us that the sidewalk is solid, and that it will take our weight. Heuristics tells us that its state has not changed since we last walked on it, and that it does not differ in any meaningful way from any other sidewalk we have encountered. So it's great for the sidewalk, but not so helpful when dealing with the ineffable. It's not even so great when dealing with medicine. I take such and such a pill; my headache clears. There's a corelation there that we are quick to interpret as cause, but it aint necessrily so, and is not something that can be determined by carrying on taking the pills; stopping taking the pills; or switching pills. The same goes for faith healing and lucky briefs.

I was fortunate enough to go along to a demonstration of mediumship recently. The medium did not fair very well, perhaps as a result of not being in front of an audience that was invested in receiving messages from beyond the grave. I suspect the majority of the people attending were there to see the medium rather than hear from Nanny Johnson. I've seen cold reading before, and felt that that was all that was taking place. I've posted before on my belief that it is perfectly possible for people to learn to cold read without knowing that that is the method they are using. When developing one's ability in this field, one is presented with hits and misses, but the process itself remains mysterious. We receive waves of information; images, words, voices, and over time develop the ability to discern in that noise the particular pieces of information that are more likely to hit home with someone in the audience.

Following the demonstration was a Q&A. Someone raised a question that wasn't really answered fully. How does the medium know when he is receiving information from the other side; how does he tell the difference between that and plain guesswork. I suspect that he can't, because he has shifted his perception of what guesswork is. He has defined it as spirit communication, presented it as such, and surrounded himself with people who are invested in that reality. Like Garry, it will become increasingly rare that he encounters data that challenges his view of what he does. Because of the environment that he has built around himself, he will become increasingly convinced that the patio door is open; will reach such a level of certainty that he never feels the need to prove this perception by attempting to step out into the garden.

There is a skeptic mantra which is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I feel the real definition of personal integrity is to realise that the claims you are making are extraordinary, and to go in search of extraordinary proof. Test your abilities, and test them properly. Test your tests. Not only do you owe it to the people you present your skills to, but you owe it to yourself.

1It's important to note, here, how passive the notion of "life paths" is in the first place. We do not blaze our own trail, we follow some predetermined route to which we are either oblivious or meekly a slave to. To think of our lives as paths we are forced to follow renounces a fair amount of personal responsibility.

2At the risk of boring people, creationism seeks to describe the origin of life, evolution seeks to explain biodiversity, so these ideas are not necessarily incompatible outside of Genesis.

Giving Up The Ghosts

Readers of this blog will not find it at all surprising that I don't envy Scientologists, be they public or staff. Between damaging practices such as auditing (which can lead to psychotic breaks) or the purification rundown (which involves dangerously high vitamin doses), practices such as disconnection, the harrassing marketing strategies, and the subtle threats and pressures that come about from the existence of case study files and the RPF, their lives can very easily stray from the "good roads, fair weather" front they are supposed to maintain. But that's not what this post is about. It's about something much much closer to home.

I recently had something of an awakening. It's not usual for me to post about myself, but in this instance, it's appropriate, and I hope you'll see why. I was raised in a spiritualist environment. This "raising" was by no means a harsh, controlling regime. It really just amounted to an active belief that the dead are with us still; trips to a church that followed fairly mainstream Christian dogma, but also involved a spot of platform mediumship at the end. My most vivid memory of this mediumship was of a woman who burst into tears on being told by a medium of the bizarre image of a "rhubarb sandwich". Even then I was aware of the ridiculousness of a medium asking a crowded room if anyone knew of a person in spirit called John. Here I had tangible evidence that mediumship was real - a stranger calling out an obscure snack that was such a potent image that it brought tears to the person for whom the message was received. This became something of a touchstone for me through my adult years; without having much in the way of encounters with the Spritualist church, whenever I caught myself doubting the existence of the afterlife, I would think to myself "ah, but what about the rhubarb sandwich", and my belief would remain intact.

Spiritualism, you see, prides itself on being evidence-based. Where other Christian faiths will talk about Heaven and immortality, Spiritualism serves it up at the end along with sweet tea and biscuits. What a draw!

A few years ago, however, I took up another childhood interest for a second time, that of conjury. As a result I read Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer. This charted the development of stage illusions, the eponymous effect being Houdini's vanish of an elephant on the stage of the Hippodrome. Wanting to learn more about Houdini I read a biography and learnt about the work he did to expose fraudulent mediums. I, with my spiritualist head on, thought this was no bad thing. I knew there was a difference between reproducing the appearance of a séance and disproving that genuine séances existed, but much of Houdini's exposure involved specific mediums who were, for one reason or another, clearly fakes. Perhaps it was the submergeance in biography and history, but I began to view the Spiritualist movement from a chronological perspective. I had revelled in the antics of the golden age mediums; those that could produce ectoplasmic entities and other more physical phenomena. This seemed a world away from the necromantic messaging service I had witnessed. But the trouble was, once a method of reproducing such effects was presented to the world, by Houdini or Robinson or whoever, although the mediums who practiced such arts objected, those particular phenomena died out. Rather than devising ever-more thorough tests that did away with fraudulent methods, the spirit activity was withdrawn.

And how did the Spiritualist movement get started in the first place? It emerged from the following of three girls, the Fox Sisters, who began to experience ghostly encounters in their Hydesville home. These encounters seemed to follow the girls around, and soon they were giving audiences with people determined to have answers, seemingly, from beyond the grave. From the Fox girls we get the rapping codes so popular with entertainment programs such as Most Haunted. In fact Most Haunted seems to present an interesting return to the older methods of fraudulent mediumship, with its focus on channelled voices, and its love affair with ideomotor driven phenomena such as table tipping and talking boards.

The trouble is that in 1888 Margaret Fox admitted that their mediumship was bogus. Reasons have been put forward for this; that she was impoverished by this point and had been offered a large sum of money to make a false confession. Such conspiratorial imaginings run riot to this day, with the notable disparity that whistleblowers always come from those practicing allegedly paranormal abilities, and never from conspirators debunking such powers. Spiritualism to me became a movement that was founded on a lie, was furthered by more lies, and as faiths went didn't have much in the way of a unique selling point as a result. Nevertheless I was still left with the miracle of the rhubarb sandwich to cling to in hope.

If this were a movie, we'd now be in a montage, where I would be flicking through books, looking at evocative woodcuts and doing my best "smell the fart" acting, before addressing a close personal friend with my discoveries; ferven whispering in medium close up. That is not how it happened at all. It was a slow and steady transformation in my thinking, and not a straight line. It was more like mulling over a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece, and then suddenly realising that it had already been solved.

Platform mediumship is something like a comedy circuit. You get bookings from a number of churches up and down the country, but with the added benefit that congregations remain fairly stable. But your source of work isn't just at the platform. You also have private clients. You'll get many of these private clients directly from members of the congregation that you address, from people who either received messages, or were impressed by the messages others received (and felt a bit left out). So what happens is the touring medium will be in a position where she receives private clients who she performs one-to-one sessions with, and consciously or unconsciously cold reads them. When she does platform mediumship, she will (out of courtesy) let her private clients know when she has a demonstration in their area. The platform medium is playing to a congregation some of whom are her private clients...

Which means the rhubarb sandwich is a lie. It was too long ago for me to confirm it in this instance, sadly, but mediums know what buttons to push to get certain responses from people. They cold read the crowd, but should they need a "convincer", something that confounds our understanding of how cold reading works, will come out with a "bolt from the blue" piece of information that not only couldn't have been guessed at, but gets a strong emotional response from the person that understands what it means. That information comes from previous knowledge gleaned, sometimes quite openly, from private sittings.

There is also, I suspect, still in existence the "blue book" - a system of mutual assistance where clients details are shared amongst mediums. With the advent of social networking sites, too, the amount of information that can be gleaned from someone's Facebook or MySpace page far outweighs what can be read from them on that first or second sitting.

So bye bye, rhubarb sandwich. Bye bye evidence of an afterlife. I still hope it exists, but I relinquish anything approaching certainty that it does. This has been (and I'm tempted to say "literally") soul destroying. I've gone from being an immortal being to someone that has, at best an outside chance of a life everlasting, and that's not an easy thing for me to deal with. Tears have been shed; sleep has been lost. But I'm getting through all that. Along with the anxiety is an odd sense of freedom. I think of life as a search for some kind of deeper truth about the universe we live in, and I've now dispensed with some blind alleys; I've finished checking the attic. That can only be a good thing. Ironically, I feel more open minded now than I did before. If that sounds odd, I can understand. I want to believe; I want to know, but the evidence for the belief and knowledge I once had is lacking. My newfound openness is in the assessment of the evidence. An open mind, but open eyes too.

Dispensing with the afterlife does new and interesting things to your perspective, I have found. It makes life a thing to be more greatly valued. Picture, if you will, someone who is suffering from a brain tumour. It's inoperable, and the only hope he has is chemotherapy. But chemotherapy is no picnic, so does he go ahead with it, or does he let the tumour take him? Whatever your take on this question is, it seems clear that the belief in an afterlife has a huge effect on that person's decision, and in what way. I often find myself wondering if suicide is considered such a terrible act by some religions simply as a preventative, something to counter this effect belief in an afterlife can have.

But I digress. I in no way consider myself the victim of a cult, but I do find myself in a "floating" state. Along with notions of necromancy, I bought into various ideas about subjective reality and magical thinking. I'll sometimes catch myself, in a run of bad luck, wondering if some outside force or agency is at work. What's worse is, these thoughts feel safe and familiar; they feel like the embrace of an old friend. I recognise them as sirens.

To make things more awkward, my mother and my sister both work in the psychic industry, to a lesser or greater degree. They are firm in their beliefs, which makes some conversations and encounters very difficult, and my most morally sound path difficult to identify. People can believe what they like, but when those beliefs tip over into practices that are harmful, that needs to be addressed.

So here I am, with little in the way of pointed indoctrination and control, struggling with my exit from a fairly simple and straightforward belief system. It's not an easy thing to do; it's genuinely transformational, has taken courage, has caused me pain. But it's nothing compared to what a someone in a cult is up against when they start mulling over their own jigsaw puzzle. They are often in an environment where the doubt itself, let alone the discussion of it, is utterly taboo. This is not a place where they can test their faith and have it grow stronger. I have awkward conversations with my family, but on leaving a cult, people will find they may have no conversation at all with the family and friends that remain behind. I'm not saying members of cults should stay where they are; leaving a cult is a way of embracing your own quest for truth, knowledge and wisdom. If I didn't think it was worth all the pain and heartache and regret in the world, then I'd be back chasing delusions at church in an instant. What I am saying is that critics need to keep in mind that it isn't an easy sacrifice. There are no ruby slippers.

There's a parrallel here, in a way, with drug addiction. Realising you have a problem is the "big step" but it's not the only step. Critics need to realise that barking out ridiculous bits of scripture, logical fallacies and factual inaccuracies may, on occasion, plant doubt in people's minds, but it's not the whole journey. A great deal of sensitivity and support and space (from the cult and the criticism alike) is also required.

Making Asses

I do not personally believe that people claiming the ability to channel the dead have a genuine ability. I hope that some do. I would find comfort in proof of an after life. However, belief in such an ability is not, in my view, the most valuable and practical starting point. I view my scepticism not as an abject refusal to accept the existence of such ability – more that I have a high level of required proof.
I do not believe that all of those who claim such abilities are wilfully fraudulent. I believe that most are mistaken. I’m not talking here about the grandstanding psychics calling out to an audience of several thousand for a “Jonathan” who might be in this world or might have passed over; or who invite existing customers to their stage shows before picking them out and making them cry with knowledge already garnered. I want instead to discuss the jobbing mediums, the day-to-day, unassuming folk who may offer up their services gratis, or for some token payment, to friends or family or parishioners. These people in the main, I believe, are employing skills they themselves are not aware of but are nevertheless grounded in a real world model.
I spoke in a previous post about the possibility of someone cheating a personality test by answering on behalf of an imagined character. This is not a particularly difficult skill – we humans are a complex bunch, and so learning to interact with other humans ostensibly relies on conjuring up these humans in our mind, of attempting to model their behaviours mentally in order to establish boundaries of acceptable behaviour, or the best way to communicate with them, and so on. This sounds a little sinister but it is not; imagine, for instance, that you have heard a joke that you liked, and wish to share it with friends. Without even thinking too hard about it, you will probably be able to gauge which of your friends would appreciate the joke, and which would find it unfunny or even offensive (if it’s that kind of joke). By making these judgements you are recreating in your head the people in question. This is not a perfect process, of course, and some people will be much better at it than others, but it is an every-day skill that we use all the time without thinking about it.
Now consider this. You are a spiritualist. You believe in life after death. You believe it is possible for the dead to commune with the living. You have experienced people who claim to be able to do this, and have seen evidence which, to you, validates the process. You are interested in learning how to channel the dead. The key to learning how to channel the dead is to practice. And perhaps in your initial attempts, with friends and confidants, lead to quite poor responses. You are trying to garner meaningful messages from figures that appear to you in your mind’s eye and relate them to your sitter. Bearing in mind that you already are sold up to the notion that the figures are out there, and so validation of their existence is not paramount, how does this process begin? By relating information that comes “out of the blue” that seems to be attached to the figure or the sitter. And from within the belief system it remains good when you get a hit, and bad when you get a miss, but when you get a miss, it does not invalidate your belief, merely suggests that you have not yet become adept in the skill you are practicing. So you continue to practice. Occasionally you will get what appear to be astounding hits. At other times you will get miss after miss after miss. Perhaps you will couch such misses more carefully as you develop. You will still be alive to the possibility that it was just a miss, but you will see no reason to dismiss the possibility that the miss is only a miss because the sitter hasn’t made sense of it yet, or its significance may lie in the future. The point is, nothing you encounter will necessarily be enough to negate the validity of your core beliefs. You will see every hit and miss within your existing framework. Also, you will start getting better at it.
And here I finally reach my point, which is that the skills involved in cold-reading, based as it is on a real-world model (or known-world model, if you prefer something less loaded) are subtle ones. Cold-readers themselves are quite aware that it is not enough to read a book on the skill and suddenly be capable of doing it; without practice you will get nowhere, even through the hilarious “and/but” technique, perhaps the simplest form of cold reading ever devised, based as it is on using “and” to follow on from a hit with added detail, and “but” to follow on from a miss with a modified message. I don’t doubt for a second that our student psychic is more than capable of taking on cold-reading skills sub-consciously, and from within their own belief system.
An example of this would be the notion that if you can garner the rough age of the sitter and the gender (and neither ought to cause too many difficulties) then you can isolate with a fair amount of conviction a “question” that has been bothering them for some time. It is no stretch of the imagination for a medium to “feel” that this question is at the forefront of the person’s mind without necessarily understanding that they are just making a judgement based on sex and age.
I believe it is even possible for the very loose descriptions of visiting spirits that pass for hits amongst mediums to be arrived at by similar means. I once saw a psychic artist who I suspect was fraudulent in that she seemed, while the opening address of the church was in progress, to be sketching out variations of people sitting in the audience. The technique seemed simple enough – take an old man in the audience, and draw them as if they were a young girl. Switch the age and the sex and you can, with a certain degree of certainty, be able to come up with something with a passing resemblance to a dead relative. I believe that mental images of people can be arrived at again unconsciously by interpreting the sitter. An exercise for the reader might be to imagine what a friend’s father might have been like and see how far you get. Our putative medium would be in a position whereby they are imagining this fallen forebear but putting the source of that imagination down to the spirit world. This is not too outlandish a skill because, as already stated, our minds are quite used to generating models of real people; we’re doing it all the time.
An interesting analogy here is with the writer who talks of creating characters who, once formed, behave as they will; the author claims to have little or no power over them, and writing for these characters becomes something more akin to dictation.
The overarching point here is that we have a situation where a phenomenon has become attached to a belief system by way of an assumed mechanism. An individual can be trained to understand that if he presses a button, then a packet of food will drop down a chute, but without any full investigation he cannot ascertain what pressing a button has to do with food. It could be that some automated machine that is routinely supplied with food by an outside agency is at work. It could be that the button is monitored by a person who physically drops the food down the chute. It could be that pressing the button appeases a God who creates the food and drops it down the chute. The person is capable of interpreting his action and reward in any way that his belief system will allow, with the added kicker that every time the button is pressed and the food is delivered the belief system seems in some way validated, even though it serves no logical form of validation whatsoever.
To make matters worse for our thought experiment subject, the button may even be immaterial. If the subject only presses the button when he is hungry, then the food moving down the chute could be triggered not by the button at all, but by the hunger itself, or even an understanding by the creator of the experiment in the cycles of digestion the subject experiences. Yet in the mind of the subject it is the pressing of the button that causes the food to emerge.
And we can go a step further. If we place our subject in a room where there is a button and a chute, and at random send packets of food down the chute, if he is playing with the button he will in all likelihood associate the pressing of the button with the delivery of the food. He will assume, though, that he needs to press the button in a certain way in order to get the food, and will then try and fathom out that necessary method.
It is vital, therefore, that we learn to recognise and challenge our own belief systems, especially when dealing with causal relationships that we have long accepted. This takes us, kinda sorta, back to our well-meaning but mistaken cold reader. They need to isolate the phenomenon, look at its origins (either within them personally or from a historical perspective (see future posts on the history of spiritualism)), and seek out a mechanism that goes above and beyond the belief system. If the belief system itself is longstanding, then it is prudent also to look at the roots of the belief system itself. A fruitful example of this would be astrology, where in order to understand the supposed mechanism (even before we look at efficacy) we need to discover how the understanding came about, and refuse to accept at first glance any provision of a mechanism from outside current understanding, even once we have exhausted that current understanding. Even if we accept that the position of planets can have a subtle influence over our behaviour and life experiences, and this is simply not proven to begin with, how is it that we came to have such knowledge thousands of years ago – who did the research and how was the research carried out.
Assumed mechanisms and assumed correlations are not exclusive to the world of strange beliefs. It occurs in the button-down world of science too, although with an all important difference. In science, for instance, one might observe that chewing on the bark of a willow tree can alleviate headaches; one might go on to isolate what it is in the willow tree bark that alleviates headaches, possibly even synthesising it in a laboratory, but without necessary inquiry, the scientist can only guess at the mechanisms involved that link the bark derivative to the experience of pain. Where science wins over on this front, however, is that it is determined to establish the mechanism through evidence-based inquiry, and to give some CAM practitioners credit they too are determined to establish the mechanisms (although sometimes before they have established efficacy!).
Strange belief systems tend away from such inquiry. They assume a mechanism without such need for proof, and often end up defending this invented mechanism (attractive meme that it is) in the face of evidence to the contrary. This defence can even take the form of an attack on the notions of experimental proof in the first place. They will suggest that the mechanism shies away from laboratory conditions, for example, that something in the controlled environment dissipates whatever effect exists in the world at large. The belief becomes a full-stop, and no wider understanding can emerge.
What saddens me about this is that for many people who believe they have strange abilities, the abilities actually become secondary to the belief, and the belief gets in the way of any reasonable assessment of the ability. Take, for example, a recent Randi test on an individual who claimed that she could guess the sex of dead diary-keepers without even seeing the diaries themselves, merely the boxes containing them. Had this ability been framed without the mechanism she provided, then the ability she claimed to possess would have seemed, although still peculiar, much more amenable than her belief that she could determine the sex because the spirits of the dead gave her the information. It was doubtful that she had such an ability, but the fact that the ability was packaged up with the existence of an afterlife and the reality of necromancy, then had she somehow pulled off the feat, her belief system would have served as an obstacle to any inquiry as to how such an ability actually worked. What is more, the mechanism, rightly or wrongly (and I think wrongly) sometimes serves to inform the establishment of statistical significance.
To guess the sex of dead diary-keepers one would expect roughly a 50/50 split across a large number of attempts through chance alone, and the number of hits more (or in a perversion of probability less) to suggest something more than chance is at work is relatively low, but when the subject claims to be in communion with the dead diary-keepers themselves, one would expect a much higher hit rate. As the axiom has it “extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proofs”. But we have moved away from the ability and into the belief system that supports the ability – the claim itself hasn’t changed, and so the required level of proof ought not to have changed either.
This is an almost flippant example – sexing diary-keepers in the unlikely event of being unable to examine the diaries themselves is a fairly useless ability, about as useless as rendering cutlery inoperable. However, when one enters the realms of the miracle cure, the stakes become much higher. There is a reasonable amount of testimonial evidence concerning situations where someone is diagnosed with an illness, then prays, or wears a particular piece of jewellery, or visits a particular hallowed spot, only to find the illness miraculously cured. This is the belief system’s full-stop at its most wicked, because it could be that there is a physiological reason for the cure (though I suspect misdiagnosis figures highly in most genuine cases), it could be that useful information could come from such miracles. If there is, we will never know, because in the closed mind of the cured believer it was not physiological deliverance but Something Else and so such inquiry is pointless, unnecessary and possibly even churlish, and bugger the rest of us.