THE GOLD-LEAF LADY AND OTHER PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

If the SMN had medals to give out we would have to give one to Stephen Braude. In a number of books, over a number of years, he has risked his reputation as a philosopher to face a situation of which the Network is so acutely conscious: there are, to express that situation clearly, many reasons to believe that the scientific-materialist paradigm is not the whole story; there are also many reasons to be cautious about what we can reasonably supplement it with to make the picture a little more whole. Braude refuses to countenance any sort of nonsense, but he also refuses to protect himself by the Ostrich Strategy. Thus in Immortal Remains of 2003 he looked steadily and coolly at the evidence for Life after Death and, because he doesn't dismiss it a priori (or by some concealed version of a priori) found that on balance some of us seem to survive our deaths and remain for some time as conscious beings. If one were to read Braude as a perfectly neutral observer (impossible of course, but the thought-experiment is worth making) one would be pretty much forced to agree that the Survivalist conclusion of Immortal Remains followed well enough from the evidence and the arguments he advanced. He has done the same thing with psychic events in general (The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science, 1997; ESP and Psychokinesis, 2002) and now he returns to the field to give an account not so much of a number of psi experiments and investigations, though The Gold-Leaf Lady does contain such things, as of the reactions of a thinking person to the whole business of parapsychology. Braude will not be put off by fear. If that word seems exaggerated I should warn the faint-hearted that this book includes several depressing narratives of how poorly Braude has sometimes been treated by colleagues, skeptics, debunkers and, worst of all, psi enthusiasts over the years. The only heartening thing about these stories is that they leave one thinking that he must be on the side of sense and reason because he has managed to get himself hated by both sides. The gold-leaf lady herself inexplicably produces 'Dutch gold', a species of bronze, on her skin at unpredictable intervals. Braude has had the 'gold' analysed and it proves to be consistently. The lady, Jackie, submits cheerfully to controls and tests and searches. She seems to be the real deal and there is no reason other than prejudice to think otherwise, so Braude, himself the real deal in psi investigation, takes her seriously. The important point, the crucial one, the point so easy to dismiss in later years and in another place where she is not present and doing her stuff, is that Jackie does do something paranormal. The metal forms, visibly and palpably, for no normal reason. I stress this because I feel that we really must, at this time of day, get beyond the question of whether apparently paranormal phenomena occur. They do. Many of us have seen or experienced them. Braude is as good a witness as we need and any normally rational person would believe his account; we might prefer it not to be without current scientific explanation but that is not a sufficient reason for not believing that what he says happened happened. Why or how it happened is another matter. Braude, however, refers to 'the lofty – but I believe completely unrealistic – goal of carrying out a conclusive demonstration of PK' (his italics.) Perhaps then psi phenomena cannot come into the mainstream and into scientific acceptance, much as the SMN or the SPR or any of the other open-minded bodies would like them to. They cannot because PK and psi sometimes work, but they don't work like normality. This is the impression that this book leaves one with above all. Psi 'stars' perform erratically. They are susceptible hostile influences (on a psi or on a psychological level), they tend to do things in reduced light, they get things wrong, they cannot repeat their tricks in front of certain audiences, they may be 'doing psi' at a time and in a place where others, including the investigators, are unconsciously 'doing psi' themselves in a way which negates what the psi the star is doing. So Braude tells us mostly depressing stories of getting research grants and private funding and setting up experiments with a few American psi 'stars'. Some results are achieved, usually of a minor kind; much bad blood is generated; media attention is hostile, thin, badly-set-up so that those liable to take a psi claim seriously look like fools on television. Bad faith, bad arguments and tricks are deployed, psi stars are let down, lied to, asked to do some new impossible thing (instead of just the impossible thing that they usually do), some of them are simply fraudulent. Challengers from the sceptical camp such as James Randi claim that they can replicate the psi-tricks of the better non-fraudulent subjects and put money on their claims, but then slide away when challenged to perform. The whole business is a sorry mess. In spite of which Braude will claim no easy way forward. Indeed 'If psi exists, then by its very nature it could evade all conventional experimental controls' (his italics). And at the end of it the cynics are as cynical as ever they were and the investigators are bruised. Braude has a tough hide and a tough mind and he isn't put off. But then he is a philosopher in every sense of the term. Utterly unabashed he ends his book with two chapters that should be compulsory reading for all of us interested in psi research; one asks us not to believe in something that many of us find easy to believe in; the other asks us to think of taking seriously, at least for a moment, something most of us don't believe in at all. The first of these is synchronicity. Braude takes us through the arguments from Jung onwards and subjects them to logical analysis focusing in particular on the modern (dare I say 'poststructuralist?) style of thinking that challenges the notion of essential categories. Since there are no real 'events' in nature or in the abstract, no given sections of reality that we have to accept as having been cut out for us in advance of language and culture, there are no units available for us to use in an ontologically-unchallengeable comparison of one thing with another. Thus there could never be a non-subjective synchronicity. So here is the man who 'believes in' the gold-leaf lady and who believes in Daniel Dunglass Hume's levitations and, indeed, in some species of Life after Death, resisting the apparently much softer and easier-to-swallow idea of some heartening pattern of synchronicities cropping up at crucial points in our lives. But he's right. And we needed a good modern philosopher to show us the reality here. So no synchronicity. But the final chapter is about, wait for it, astrology. Now Braude, like most of us, is disinclined to buy the idea that star-positions at the time of our birth determine whether we will do well on the Stock Exchange next week. But he is an SMN hero, and he keeps his head. And when he marries a Serbian lady who has survived a war and made money out of astrological predictions from some pretty hard-nosed people (Yugoslavian mafiosi, Chinese football managers) he won't just repeat the mantra of the (wrong sort of) sceptic: 'It can't work because I know that it can't work.' Instead he investigates. And behold and lo, he makes money at Las Vegas with his wife's help, he watches her accurately predict the minute details of football games, he makes a journey by car leaving at the time she says and, for the first time in thirty years of doing the same journey, he avoids the usually inevitable heavy traffic. What does this astrological stuff amount to then? Well, not, of course, to proof of anything. But equally not, of course, evidence of nothing. Braude says he will go on looking at the impossible things his wife does; he observes that he may not be omniscient and until he is he is going to keep looking. Let us, he says, be 'tentative and humble.' This book is not a reassuring list of psi-hits and successes; but nor does it only concern psi-failures and belief-wars. It simply demonstrates the best possible approach to these matters which do, after all, seem very strongly at least to exist. Braude, unquestionably, quietly, is the man for us.