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The Truth Is Out There
Posted on Wednesday, January 09, 2008 (CST) by Thoth
 The pivotal moment of Stephen E. Braude's academic career happened when he was in graduate school, on a dull afternoon in Northampton, Mass., in 1969. Or, at least, what follows is what he says happened. Readers — skeptics and believers both — will have to make up their own minds.
Braude and two friends had seen the only movie in town and were looking for something to do. His friends suggested going to Braude's house and playing a game called "table up." In other words, they wanted to perform a séance.
They sat at a folding table, with their fingers lightly touching the tabletop, silently urging it to levitate. Suddenly it shuddered and rose several inches off the ground, then came back down. Then it rose a second time. And again and again. Braude and his friends worked out a code with the table, and it answered questions and spelled out names.
Braude says
he had not given much thought to the paranormal before that afternoon,
but the experience shook him to his core, he says, sitting in an easy
chair in his immaculate home in suburban Baltimore. He insists there
was no way his friends could have manipulated the table, adding, "I
should tell you, we were not stoned."
Today Braude, 62, is one of
the few mainstream academics applying his intellectual training to
questions that many would regard at best as impossible to answer, and
at worst absolutely ridiculous: Do psychic phenomena exist? Are mediums
and ghosts real? Can people move objects with their minds or predict
the future? A professor of philosophy at the University of
Maryland-Baltimore County, Braude is a past president of the
Parapsychological Association, an organization that gathers academics
and others interested in phenomena like ESP and psychokinesis, and he
has published a series of books with well-known academic presses on
such topics.
His latest, The Gold Leaf
Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (University of Chicago
Press), is sort of a summing up of his career, filled with stories of
people who claimed to have otherworldly abilities. The writing is so
fluid that the book at times seems made for a screen adaptation. (In
fact, Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, contributes a blurb to the
back of the book. Braude advised Carter on a screenplay he is writing.)
But Braude also includes some dense philosophical arguments —
especially in a chapter about synchronicity, in which he ponders
whether humans can orchestrate unlikely coincidences through
psychokinesis, the ability to move or influence objects with the mind.
"He is setting the standard
for how an analytic philosopher who takes this stuff seriously should
proceed," says Raymond Martin, chairman of the philosophy department at
Union College, in New York, who formerly worked at the University of
Maryland at College Park and met Braude then. "He's very thorough in
informing himself about what has been shown empirically, and he is
cautious. He is usually skeptical in the end, but he is not dismissive."
Martin thinks philosophers
are often too quick to dismiss anything that smacks of exotic phenomena
because they want to protect the integrity of the discipline. "A lot of
people just don't want this stuff on the table, because they regard it
as an embarrassment to philosophy," he says. "Steve does take it
seriously, and he has paid a price."
Greg Ealick took several of
Braude's classes 20 years ago when he was an undergraduate at UMBC, and
he is now Braude's colleague as an adjunct instructor in the philosophy
department there. He says the philosophical aspects of Braude's work
are "first-rate," although he's not convinced of the science of
researching paranormal phenomena.
Braude's explorations could
be seen as thought experiments, he says. Common in philosophy, such
experiments pose odd scenarios to test arguments. A particularly
well-known one asks: What if your brain were pulled out of your skull,
put into a vat, and hooked up to a computer that could keep it alive
and simulate external stimuli? Would you know that you were no longer
inside your body? Therefore, can you know anything about the external
world? "A lot of first-rate philosophy of mind comes from wildly
speculative thought experiments," Ealick says. "I don't think that
Steve's are really any wilder than the rest."
After his experience with
the table in Northampton, Braude says, he put the event out of his mind
for almost a decade. He got a job at the University of Maryland in
1971, and he went about publishing articles on the philosophy of time
and the philosophy of language for the next seven years, until he got
tenure.
Then he came out, so to
speak. He knew that philosophers, like William James and later H.H.
Price, had studied paranormal phenomena such as spiritualism and life
after death. He thought he could demonstrate to colleagues that such
phenomena were still worth studying. "To show you how naïve I was, I
actually thought that they would be pleased to discover that they were
wrong, so long as that brought them closer to discovering the truth."
Instead, many shunned him.
"It clarified for me a lot
about the scholarly community generally, something that has been
confirmed over and over and over," he says. "It's not the haven of
intellectual freedom that it is often cracked up to be."
Some of that jaded
perspective comes through in The Gold Leaf Lady, which Braude describes
as his "kiss-and-tell book" about his paranormal research. He trashes
plenty of people in the book, including supposed psychics and their
handlers who appear to be frauds. But he saves his sharpest barbs for
prominent skeptics, like Paul Kurtz, a professor emeritus of philosophy
at the State University of New York at Buffalo and founder of the
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and James Randi, a magician better
known as the Amazing Randi. Randi is described as a "publicity hound"
who "weaseled out" of a challenge to explain phenomena produced by Ted
Serios, who some believe could make odd and spooky images appear on
Polaroid film. Kurtz is described as "disreputable" and sloppy. The
skeptics, Braude says, pick out the weakest cases and demolish them,
then use those spectacular debunkings to persuade the public that all
exotic claims are bosh.
Braude believes that most
people who dismiss the possibility of paranormal phenomena simply have
not considered "the best cases" in parapsychology — cases like that of
D.D. Home, which Braude summarizes in The Gold Leaf Lady. Home, a
medium who lived in the mid-1800s, allegedly performed several
fantastic phenomena under strict observation. He once held an accordion
by one hand inside an electrified cage, and the instrument played all
by itself — or so several observers documented.
Another "best case,"
according to Mr. Braude, is the real-life gold-leaf lady of the book's
title. She is an allegedly illiterate Florida woman named Katie who
goes into trances and writes in French, has predicted events for police
detectives with stunning accuracy (like the time she predicted that
bales of marijuana would wash up on a particular beach on a particular
day, and they did), and occasionally finds flakes of paper-thin brass
growing on her body. Braude believes that he saw a piece of brass
appear spontaneously on her face during an interview. (He has kept some
samples of the brass leaf in Ziploc bags.)
But other chapters of The
Gold Leaf Lady describe the difficulties of putting strict controls on
tests of "psi" abilities (like psychokinesis or ESP) and the
inconclusive results that follow. Braude tells the story of Dennis, a
fellow who showed potential in psychokinesis and was in many ways an
ideal test subject. He was easy to work with, and he had no problem
stripping and changing into inspected garments in front of a camera (a
standard test procedure to make sure a subject isn't hiding any trick
devices). But each time Dennis traveled from California, he traveled on
a red-eye flight and arrived tired and flustered, like an athlete who
hadn't rested before a big game. That, Braude believes, may explain in
part why Dennis could not do much during the controlled tests.
Or it could have been the
disdain a colleague showed for Dennis, which may have undermined his
confidence before the tests. While observers want to apply strict
controls, they don't want to squelch phenomena by applying pressure or
making test subjects feel badgered. "That would be like saying, Let me
see an erection," Braude says.
Or it could have been a
"source of psi" problem — that is, the unconscious, latent psi
abilities of the testers could have interrupted the movement of the
objects.
(Sadly, Dennis could not
continue his tests under better conditions. After he traveled back to
California the second time, he was bitten by an opossum and died of a
heart infection.)
Even to consider the
question of psychic ability, never mind going through the trouble of
testing people like Dennis, takes a leap in faith that psychic ability
actually exists — a leap that many people aren't willing to make.
And some people at UMBC
seem to not want to be associated with his research, or even talk about
it. Senior members of Braude's own department either did not reply or
did not want to comment about his work when contacted by The Chronicle.
In 2002 Braude gave a
lecture to the physics department, where he says he was shouted down by
other professors. Lynn Sparling, an associate professor of physics at
the university, doesn't remember the substance of the talk, but she
remembers her impression of Braude. "I came away feeling that this guy
was kind of an embarrassment to the university," she says. "I just
thought he was a total goofball. I couldn't believe some of the things
that I was hearing."
"If you're going to talk
about that stuff, you really need to know what the physical laws are,"
she says. "If something is defying gravity, you have to have a reason
for defying a law that has been proven over and over and over again."
In an e-mail message,
Braude responds that so little is understood about psychokinesis (if
indeed psychokinesis is real) that a levitating table does not
necessarily defy laws of physics. And, he says, we don't necessarily
have to understand and explain a phenomenon to know that it is real.
"This matter could only be a problem for those who naïvely believe that
physics must have an explanation for everything that happens," he says.
Larry Wilt, library
director at UMBC, who has a doctorate in philosophy, has read much of
Braude's work and admires its philosophical rigor. "My sense is that he
is well respected by people on campus who have read his work," he says.
"Those who haven't read it will dismiss it out of hand."
Braude will retire within a
few years, and he's not sure to what extent he will continue to study
the paranormal after he leaves the university. He is a pianist trained
in classical music and jazz — a beautiful grand piano sits in his
living room — and he plans to devote lots of time to playing and
performing with groups.
He is also a stereoscopic
photographer, with a collection of antique equipment, some inherited
from his grandfather. His photos of landscapes pop to life in three
dimensions when placed in a viewer. His portraits of people are so
lifelike they are eerie — human beings locked in time, almost like wax
figures.
But there may also be new
horizons for him in parapsychology. Djurdjina Ruk, his wife of five
years, studies astrology. Once a professor of psychology at the
University of Novi Sad, in the former Yugoslavia, she supported herself
during the recent civil war by providing astrological predictions for
European and Chinese soccer teams and for the Serbian mafia. She wanted
for nothing and was even offered a Ferrari by the mob while the country
around her imploded, as Braude details in the last chapter of The Gold
Leaf Lady.
Braude says that during
their time together she has been uncannily accurate, determining, for
example, the time of the birth of one of Braude's friends down to the
minute. The couple plan their trips and vacations around her
astrological charts. They also gamble based on her predictions; their
winnings during the 2005 football season paid for a summer vacation.
He's still not sure what to
make of it. He once regarded astrology with the sort of disdain that
others bring to his work, but now he thinks he should have an open
mind. One thing is certain: He doesn't care what other people think.
"I stopped worrying about trying to convince other people," he says. "I'm in this to try to figure out things for myself."
Copyright: The Chronicle
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Re: The Truth Is Out There
by zoarian on Wednesday, January 09, 2008 (CST)
(User Info | Send a Message) http://fairiejewelry.com | | My experience has been that overly educated people are the most shut down when it comes to the metapyhsical(and to what the govt is really up to); they already know everything because they have a pieice of paper and have been completely brainwashed by the system. I guy that goes into the akashic records told me that it takes 5 lifetimes to purge a Ph.D. from someones psyche, i beleive it. |
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