📚 Finished reading Proof of Spiritual Phenomena by Mona Sobhani.
This book details neuroscientist Mona Sobhani’s journey from uber-sceptical scientific mega-materialist rationalist through to seemingly an all-out spiritual seeker and believer in all sorts of things that fall under the umbrella of “unexplained phenomena”.
She’s not always super-definitive as to what level of belief she has in which phenomena, but the evidence presented suggests it’d include at least:
- fortune-telling
- psychics
- mediums
- remote viewing
- past life regression
The book is an engrossing mix of her anecdotal journey, conversations with various scientists and other thinkers related to these topics, as well as, my favourite bit, a presentation of the evidence - including that of a scientific nature - that has persuaded her of her new worldview.
As she says, one book, no matter how comprehensive, is unlikely to change the mind of someone who has little history in believing in such matters - or, as she discusses later - perhaps is in some way, very likely unconsciously, invested in not believing in such things. Her request to us is to take a look at all the evidence she presents together and see if those of us who are not naturally inclined believe in some of these phenomena might change our minds a little.
She is of course indisputably right that a lot of people claim to have had currently inexplicable experiences - oftentimes experiences that resemble other people’s experience reports. And belief in these phenomena is certainly not a rare thing - far from it. She shares Pew Research stats about the American public, whereby in 2009 almost a quarter apparently believed in reincarnation, 95% in a God or a higher power, 46% in supernatural beings. 75% claimed to have at least 1 “paranormal” belief.
It’s also uncontroversially true that our brains are not neutral observers. They’re laden with well-known biases at this point, some of which are discussed in the book. I have often taken these biases to potentially, if anything, provide more conventional explanations for some of the phenomena she discusses, but she sees it differently. I didn’t quite follow how that section supports her thesis, other than perhaps to have us - quite rightly - question ourselves, question why we think what we think.
Another episode of her using fascinating scientific studies in favour of her argument, contrary to my intuition that if anything they undermine it, comes from her background in neuroscience. She details how it’s been shown that you can induce spiritual-seeming states in people through wholly physical means.
Categories of this include:
- Brain lesion studies that look at how people react when parts of their brains are damaged.
- Neurostimulation studies - what happens when electric or magnetic signals are applied to the brain.
- Meditation - and its neural correlates.
- Psychedelic usage.
All these phenomena can result in spiritual-style effects such as feeling connected to the transcendent, out of body experiences, seeing God, feeling a sense of unity, changes in consciousness and more.
But whilst she sees why this might lead people to assume consciousness and paranormal seeming experiences are manufactured quite conventionally by our brain (although we still didn’t solve the hard problem of consciousness of course), her take is that this is more like correlation.
Just because your brain is evidently involved in consciousness doesn’t mean that it creates it - any more than the fact that the TV show stops when you break your TV means that it was the original source of whatever you were watching. She believes that the existence of, for example, savants, shows the limitations of thinking otherwise. Perhaps consciousness doesn’t come from the brain; but rather the brain is the thing through which is is expressed.
She makes two big claims about formal science.
Firstly that it’s incorrect to think that science has disproven the existence of the various “spiritual phenomena”, or even the weaker form of the argument; that it has simply not proven that it exists.
Secondly, that we in any case over-focus on capital S science - especially the standard way that science is practiced within modern “Western” society today - as being the best or only way of knowing. Instead she portrays it as an insufficient approach to worldview building that should be used only as part of a cross-disciplinary fashion, illuminating only part of the picture. Again, I can accept this point, even if recent developments over the other side of the Atlantic don’t make me think that science and rationality are being over-focused on by a certain type currently in power. That said, her book came out prior to Trump v2.
Back on the first point, she notes that the point of science is not to be sceptical of everything, but rather to be open to striving for the best explanation of a phenomenon.
There are inexplicable things in the Universe. A bad scientist throws out or ignores an anomalous data point, but a good scientist asks why.
Some of the most interesting material to me was her summary review of several published studies regarding various facets of the world of “psi”. This include papers on both:
- anomalous cognition - clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, that kind of thing.
- anomalous perturbation - claims that focused human attention and intention can influence the physical environment, so things like energy healing would fall under this, as well as the ability to influence random number generators, etc.
I was particularly enchanted by some of the Implicit Anomalous Cognition protocols. These are methods set up to look like a standard psych study test but behind the scenes some component that includes an assumption made by mainstream scientific materialism - “time flows in one direction” for example - is reversed. Think here of people whose responses to a prompt are influenced by that prompt; even when their action occurs before the prompt existed.
At first sight I can’t help but think, umm, given related-but-far-more-accepted-fields such as psychology have tremendous scientific study reliability problems, isn’t it more likely that these papers involve some (possibly inadvertent) questionable research practice (QRP), weird statistical aberration misinterpretations or similar? But, she would likely say, that’s my background and/or societal pressure provoking that response in me. It’s not like I’ve personally checked all the psi studies. So if I want to claim I believe in the scientific method then I have to be consistent in that even when the results it produces are “weird”. She does cite sources to be fair, so it’s on me to follow them up and see what’s going on. Daryl Bem is the author of some of those that sounded most interesting to me.
She does go through the details of some QRPs - file draw problem, arbitrary significance tests, replication crisis et al. Taking what she says at face value, she reports that the effect sizes and statistical significance levels of these psi studies is apparently at least equivalent to many well-accepted psychological phenomena.
One criticism I might have though is that the way she writes it you could come away thinking there’s never been a paper that didn’t find some sort of evidence of psi phenomena - even a small one. This could of course be the case - I don’t know the field - but I sincerely doubt there’s almost any even totally mundane and accepted psychological phenomena that every single study ever performed validates - at least not one in a field we’re confident is not subject to extensive QRPs. It feels too good to be true. But, to be fair, she does raise the point that if even one of them reliably shows some of the effects purported then that implies the mainstream model of the world is incorrect.
At the same time, she claims that it’s difficult to do much research in this field. There’s a lack of funding for parapsychology research, as well as the risk of being attacked one way or another by disbelievers. People from the world of science can seemingly be as contemptuous to people from the world of spirituality as much as the opposite can also be true.
Nonetheless, she reports that these phenomena have been examined by scientists for centuries and replicate well. I am vaguely away of the work by the US Army and the CIA in the past on subjects like remote viewing - The Men Who Stare At Goats et al - which comes up briefly.
Her overall point is that:
There is substantial evidence for the reality of psi that cannot be discounted by the common criticisms of faulty study design, selective reporting, or fraud.
I am entirely on her side in thinking it fair enough to ask why certain extraordinary stories, such as Jesus being resurrected, accepted by a vast amount of people but others, such as reincarnation, are questioned.
And what does it truly mean that “I believe in science”? These days very few of us can possibly confirm for ourselves, well, very much of anything.
…although we revere science so much in our modern-day society, sometimes it just comes down to whether you trust and believe in someone or something, because evidence is not always available for you to analyze yourself.
At the end of the day, our belief is belief She worries that we often accept what society tells us - saying “there’s no evidence for that” without first checking whether actually there is some.
She goes on to note that some of the assumptions of conventional scientific materialism include:
- Realism: that there is an external reality with physical properties that exist independently of observations.
- Locality: that objects are totally separate from each other.
- Causality: that time moves forward, the past affects the future.
Her claim here is that a perfectly accepted field unrelated to “spiritual phenomena” - quantum physics - brings these assumptions into question. And if you can show that our assumptions of how the universe works are wrong in even one case, well, at the very least, we need to update our models.
She moves also into disciplines outside of the the formal scientific, with the belief that scientific materialism actually starts off as philosophically dubious on the basis that it’s not possible for us to experience reality outside consciousness.
Few people think that we perceive reality as it is. Our brain is not a camera. It’s likely we evolved in many ways to perceive things in ways that suit us in terms of evolution.
…a tree may actually be a collection of vibrating atoms, but it appears as one solid object to humans because it is evolutionarily beneficial to human survival to perceive the tree in this way,
After all, the modern Western worldview may be dominant where I live at the point in time I live in - but it’s only existed for a tiny fraction of human existence. Before the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, it was more religion that claims to supply an understanding of the world and provided meaning to life. The loss of that over time might have come at a great cost according to the author, who worries that an increased prevalence of mental health problems may be a result of this new view of the world
There are certainly various schools of thought that imbue more things than just humans and our close animal relatives with consciousness.
- Idealism states that consciousnesses is the only thing that exists, so must be fundamental.
- Dualism suggests that consciousness and physical reality are separate and distinct, but both are fundamental.
- Panpsychism suggests that every physical particle has phenomenal experience, so consciousness is fundamental.
Her claim is that the idea of consciousness being the fundamental building block of the Universe is a better fit to the data that modern physics, including quantum field theory, is producing than the materialism assumption of matter is.
As she says, one book is unlikely to be enough to shift your world view . I’m also not so sure I buy the whole biographical “I was the world’s biggest sceptic” claim entirely, whilst having no reason to doubt that her views have shifted over time. But it is written in a way that appeals to the point that in recent years I’ve never been able to get over fully no matter how many people in my life that I love and respect are inclined to think in less mainstream ways or even have had some of these experiences: if this stuff is real why can’t we prove it scientifically?
She says, well, I’m wrong - we can and have proven it scientifically. Me saying the science doesn’t exist when it does or saying it’s all nonsense when I didn’t check it doesn’t make it so. So if nothing else, this has got me interested enough to check some of the references.
And who knows, perhaps I will find something that entirely rends asunder my current strong tendency towards the mainstream-lamestream scientific worldview. Whilst it doesn’t feel that way, maybe I, like the author in her previous life, only like conventional science because it makes me feel smart. I mean, not much these days does.
On the other hand perhaps I’ll read the cited papers and think, hmm, OK, I’ve never seen such an unreplicated statistical hot mess, it’s nothing but self-evident fakery. But if I don’t read them, I’ll never know.
Somewhat contradictorily, given her claims of how well-proven psi phenomena have been by science, she also provided possibly the first potential answer for “why can’t you do an experiment to show it then?” that I haven’t found entirely hand-wavy and inconsistent.
It comes down to the assumptions that the scientific method is somewhat predicated on: we can be independent and objective observers, at least in theory if not in practice. But if everything is consciousness, if our minds can interact with matter as some psi advocates claim, then is this necessarily true? Strong vibes - and indeed explicit mention - of some interpretations of the famous double-slit experiment are to be found here.
I’m not sure that it provides a fully convincing explanation, unless we live in a kind of trickster universe, overseen by Descarte’s Evil Demon - something to be fair which might explain recent world events better than most other attempts but which of course has the handy property of being able to explain everything you could ever imagine in an unfalsifiable way - but it’s certainly a point that my mind will enjoy chewing on over time.
After all, as she quotes William James as saying:
First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
