Leading Objectivist Advocates Extra Sensory Perception?

Michael Shapiro was quoted from his report on this year's Objectivist Center Summer Seminar in Schenectady, New York: "Duncan Scott interviewed Nathaniel Branden, who admitted some belief in ESP and the supernatural, much to the raised-eyebrow dismay of the audience." This caused quite a stir here at SOLO and elsewhere, and while subsequent accounts have softened Shapiro's characterization of Branden a bit, we are nonetheless left with the distinct impression that Branden sees nothing in the Objectivist philosophy to rule out the existence of forms or modes of awareness that science has not yet explained.

However, this is really old news, since a leading proponent of Objectivism wrote in 1970:

"Animals, infants and small children are exceedingly sensitive to emotional vibrations: it is their chief means of cognition. A small child senses whether an adult's emotions are genuine, and grasps instantly the vibrations of hypocrisy."

On the inductive premise that sensory awareness operates by means of some sense organ on some form of patterned energy, one wonders how "emotional vibrations" are transmitted and received. As such, it is truly unfortunate that the originator of these words is no longer around to explain her assertions, since Ayn Rand, author of "The Comprachicos," died in 1982.

One also wonders, if "emotional vibrations" are an authentic, observable means of extra-sensory awareness, why Branden is being so vehemently ridiculed and condemned for his interest in such matters. And if they are not, why Rand is not also being ridiculed and condemned by those currently thrashing Branden."

-- Roger Bissell

Post 1

Friday, July 29, 2005 - 12:03pm

Roger,

I think this is probably metaphor, but if Rand did mean that there were literally emotional vibrations she would be subject to the same criticism.

Jim

Post 2

Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - 1:27pm

There was a discussion on the Branden Yahoo forum a while back relative to this. Someone had a research item talking about finding a component in the brain that I guess you could call an "empathy" component.

Post 3

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 12:27pm

Roger�s quote from �The Comprachicos� is really fascinating. It would be an interesting experiment for someone to ask about �emotional vibrations� at a Peikoff lecture, without citing the source. I suspect they would get savaged for suggesting some mystical, undefined means of cognition. The questioner would be reminded that there is no such thing as "intuition." The response would sidestep the fact that, because we do not understand such phenomena, we cannot ignore evidence that it exists. The speaker would then add the critical point, intended to assure that there be no follow-up and to discourage anyone from asking such questions in the future:

�If you could ask such a question, you obviously need to work harder on living in full mental focus.�

Perhaps ARI's newest true believer, Diana Hsieh, might want to give this a try.

Post 4

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 5:02pm

Roger,

You write, "One also wonders, if "emotional vibrations" are an authentic, observable means of extra-sensory awareness, why Branden is being so vehemently ridiculed and condemned for his interest in such matters. And if they are not, why Rand is not also being ridiculed and condemned by those currently thrashing Branden."

Rand wrote the passage you cite in 1970; Branden spoke in 2005. That's 35 years later. During those 35 years, one supposed "mental vibration" phenomenon after another has been conclusively disconfirmed by experimental evidence. What was a plausible conjecture 35 years ago has become, with evidence from 35 years of observation and experiment, a plain falsehood if spoken today. Rand's mind was open to plausible conjectures and to picturesque figures of speech; Nathaniel Branden's mind is closed to 35 years of painstakingly won evidence.

Post 5

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 7:38pm

When I saw the title to this thread I figured it was N. Branden. This seemed to mesh w/ some of his hippie-dippie kind of California statements made in years past, e.g. about hypnotism, and in his strange distinction between "reason" and "the reasonable" in one of his taped lectures.

I cannot say I am too surprised anyway. As I have noted, the Objectivist notion of downward causation is similarly spooky. Likewise, the Objectivist notion that there can be many "kinds" of entitities meshes with the open-ended view of what types of things are possible. Here I mean in particular the view I have heard some express about why intellectual property (another spooky concept) is possible: "after all," so the argument goes, "there are 'many types' of things, 'ontologically speaking'. If you 'create' a 'thing', such as a canoe from a tree trunk, you own it. Likewise, a 'poem' is a type of 'thing,' so if you 'create' it then you are the owner. What could be more natural than that the 'creator' of a 'thing' is its 'owner'?"

The problem with such reasoning is it simply allows any concept we have for things to be turned into an actual thing that may be owned, where ownership is always enforced in the the real, physical world; which means that if you proliferate the types of entities that "exist" by fancy "ontological" reasnoning, you necessarily take away property rights in real things. For example: if the socialist state that most Objectivists seem to support arbitrarily decrees that A "owns" a certain "method for adjusting a carburator" then what this means is that A is now a part-owner, with B, of B's car. Because B cannot now fine-tune his carburetor in his own driveway using a given seqeunce of steps, without A's permission. Intellectual property is socialistic since it amounts to a wealth transfer from owners to non-owners.

But my point is that a similar thing happens anytime you undly stress the importance of "different" "ontological" "types" of "thing". ESP, hypnosis, IP--it's all a bit spooky and unscientific and non-rational, IMHO.

Post 6

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 7:45pm

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 12:12pm

Dennis,

Full mental focus, eh? :) Is that how it would go? I hope not...

I think my senses would, at that point, give me full evidence that someone was being just a teeny bit evasive.

There is a difference between focus and awareness. The first one is limited, and can give you a headache.

Post 8

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 8:21pm

First of all, contrary to some reports recent and older, Branden has not advocated extra-sensory perception. He simply expresses intrigue about awarenesses that people have (or say they have), which have not yet been explained by science. He refers to it as "anomalous perception," or "anomalous cognition."

Secondly, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an apologist for Branden's position about this issue. I merely tried to point in my SOLO post to a double standard at work in this area. (My training as a crypto-feminist has prepared me well for taking on such crusades. :-) No official Objectivists (that I am aware of) have to date bothered to offer a correction or clarification of Rand's "emotional vibrations" notion, nor her howlingly false claim in ITOE that infants are not capable of perception.

Since "Comprachicos" and ITOE are prominent parts of Rand's philosophy -- IN PRINT, and not just offered in extemporaneous comments -- it would behoove her followers to take this matter a little more seriously, and a little less defensively.

It may interest SOLOists to know that I sponsored an email discussion list in 1997 called "Problems in Philosophy," and there was some amount of time given to this notion of "anomalous perception." Various Objectivists and other interested parties took part, including Tibor Machan, Dean Brooks, Chris Sciabarra, Bob Campbell, Irfan Khwaja, and myself. This interchance between Branden and myself should dispel any belief that I am toadying for Branden about this issue:

NB: "My observation is, first, that there is a good deal of scientific experiment of a very high quality that supports the reality of what is now called anomolous perception."

REB: "My own observation is that there is a great deal of flim-flammery connected with claims of ESP and NSP and anomolous perception. There is a great deal of room for not only the most obvious problem, fraud on the part of the experimenter, but also deception by one or more of the experimental subjects (the recent debunking of Margaret Mead's research 'findings' that Polynesians live in a crime-less, non-violent, Eden-like society comes to mind as a paralll example from the social sciences; she had been egregiously and deliberately misled by the natives). Wasn't there a magician named 'the Amazing Randi' who debunked a lot of this stuff a few years back? Also, I think a guy named Hansel wrote a book called ESP: A CRITICAL EVALUATION. I would be ~very~ interested to read a reputable account of the very high quality scientific experimentation that Nathaniel refers to.

NB: "Possibly anomoulous perception can be accounted for, at some level, by what we call 'physical' reality, but not by the recognized sensory modalities. But before one can speculate about this, one needs to educate oneself?? concerning what kinds of things anomolous perception experiments claim to have demonstrated.?? Because this material is so controversial, the scientific standards are very high, much higher than are offered for more 'respectable' experiments."

REB: "As I said above, I would like some references to such research. I am aware of some of the kinds of things that are ~claimed~, however, just not how they are ~substantiated~."

NB: "As to my own personal claims, aside from any research I have seen, is that I have personally witnessed demonstrations of anomolous perception I am unable to account for by conventional explanations, and have seen these demonstrations repeated over and over again, and have participated in them myself and been stupified by what I found myself able to do and quite at a loss to explain it.?? When I was offering my 3 day Intensives, I had the? whole room participating in some simple experiments I devised and many members peformed in mind-boggling ways, in the presence, usually, of over a hundred students.

REB: "A 'conventional explanation' that comes to mind (i.e., to my irrepressibly skeptical mind :-) is ~collusion~ among two or more 'students.' While the vast majority of people at the Intensives were undoubtedly well-meaning folks, I can't help but wonder if several of them didn't cook up a scheme to pull the wool over Nathaniel's (and everyone else's) eyes. Since I'm not a magician and I don't know the details of how the experiments were carried out, I can't be more specific as to ~how~ this might have been done. But it does not strain credulity to imagine that 'certain people' would have liked to find a way(s) to embarrass or discredit (even destroy) Nathaniel, and seized upon the fact that he was well-known for his arch-opposition to mysticism for an avenue of attack. As I said, this is my own skeptic fantasy, and whether or not it has a basis in fact, it is to Nathaniel's credit that he reacted to the seeming anomolies with an open-minded, empirical attitude, as below:"

NB: "When asked what I think it all means, here is my representative answer:? 'Surprise, surprise, looks like there are things I don't know yet know about all the ways it is possible to access information in the universe.' I have never claimed more than that, although I had heard the most absurd rumors about what I am presumed to believe."

The rumors still ricochet around the Objectivist movement nearly 10 years later. And the long knives still circle for the kill...

Roger Bissell

Post 9

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 9:09pm

Roger,

My summary of your post would run as follows:

Nathaniel Branden either does not understand that an existent's identity consists of the measurements of its attributes, or he does not understand the concept of measurement. Therefore he does not understand how information, and the transfer of information, are measured. For this reason, Nathaniel Branden

1. Sets an unreasonably low threshold for what he considers to be "evidence" for "anomalous transfer of information" and

2. Sets an impossibly high threshold for evidence that no such "anomalous transfer of information" exists.

For those of us who do understand that identity consists of measurements, and that knowledge is identification, the fact that there has never been a single non-zero measurement of the amount of information actually transferred in "anomalous transfer of information" situations, even after decades of persistent attempts by thousands of scientists who know how to measure such a transfer if it existed, the evidence is clear:

"Anomalous transfer of information" has no measurable attributes and no measurements.

"Anomalous transfer of information" has no identity.

"Anomalous transfer of information" does not exist.

Post 10

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 10:32pm

For one thing, before going any further with this, let us cut the package dealing here - there are several distinct so-called fields involved under this 'esp' labeling [or whatever one wishes to call it]. For another, one or two of those 'unmeasured' fields can be explained not thru any violation of physical causes but thru a heightened awareness, subconsciously, of utilizing the senses we have, much as animals not with conceptual capacity have displayed. After all, we are overlays in the evolving of our being, with essentially the same possibilities - stretched across to perhaps the other side of the norm scale - as these our 'distant cousins'. Coupling that with the rare cases of so-called 'crossed wires' within the brain, and much of these seemingly impounderables could conceivably see the light of day. Of course, such notions as telekinesis, pregconition and such are quackery, as indeed those have a defilement of physics - but the ability of some to be able to assess another being with little more than concerted looking, for example, that could be manageable. But to label it all under an umbrella of charlatonism - is irresponsible.

Post 11

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 8:57am

I have been accused by an anonymous wack-job on another list of failing to consider that Nathaniel Branden may have been lying in 1997 when he told a list I moderated of eyebrow-raising occurrences on his Intensives. I should supposedly have known, because of "all the available evidence on his character," that Branden is "extremely dishonest" and "enjoys deceiving people."

Whatever I do or don't know now, the fact is that my exchange with Branden took place in 1997. At that time, I had ~no~ evidence that Branden enjoyed deceiving people, nor any evidence of his present-day "extreme dishonesty." Also, recall the fact that the exchange was between me ~and Branden~. For me to have accused him of lying about events during his Intensives would have been not only extremely rude, but also unwarranted by any information I had at that time. So much for claims that I am "defending" Branden's "assault on rational epistemology" because I do not accuse him outright of lying.

In addition to his sharing details from his Intensives, Branden did indeed provide some of us (in 1997) with copies of a journal article purporting to provide evidence and analysis in support of anomalous cognition. The article in question was "AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC FUNCTIONING" by Professor Jessica Utts, Division of Statistics, University of California, Davis, posted on the internet at <http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html>. The same set of experiments is also addressed by Jim Schnabel in his book REMOTE VIEWERS: THE SECRET HISTORY OF AMERICA'S PSYCHIC SPIES. One of my Objectivist friends opined at the time that the material was worth taking into consideration, but I personally was not able to get a clear enough grasp of it to form an evaluation. I'd be interested in seeing a careful Objectivist dissection of Utts' claims.

As for claims that Rand was being metaphorical or using colorful language when she used the phrase "emotional vibrations," I just have this to say. After decades of being beaten about the head by Objectivists with how precise and literal Rand is when she is writing non-fiction, it is refreshing to find some Objectivists actually comfortable with the idea that she did not always mean precisely what she said. But isn't it likely that Rand apparently did ~not~ intend "emotional vibrations" as a metaphor, since she didn't put it in quotes or otherwise signal that it was just a figure of speech? She was always quite careful about such things, wasn't she? The defenders of her non-fiction writing style can't have it both ways. I don't think my questions are unreasonable, considering that Rand used the term in a carefully written and edited piece, as against Branden's extemporaneous comments in a live interview.

There is a sense of proportion to these things, and it is all out of balance in those who let partisan and personal hatred govern their evaluations of the opinions of others. Woe be unto those who challenge their eviscerative jihads.

REB

Post 12

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 11:47am

Roger,

You are right that nothing in this matter demonstrates deliberate deception, whether on the part of Nathaniel Branden or the "parapsychologists." However, the Utts 1995-1996 reports are part of a repeating cycle of events - a cycle that cannot be accounted for except by application of objective epistemology. The cycle goes like this:

1. A "parapsychologist," usually a mathematical or physical scientist who is not familiar with the mechanisms of stage "magic" or of the relevant "normal" experimental psychology (or either) finds (in the case of Utts 1995-1996, by applying the then-new methodology of statistical meta-analysis) results that apparently cannot be explained by normal means.

2. The procedures and data are examined by one or more "skeptics," who find a way to account for the same results with specific "normal" causal mechanisms. These "normal" causes must be controlled for, before the "evidence" can be reasonably interpreted in favor of "alternative" causes.

3. The experiments are repeated with controls for the "normal" causes, and the "evidence" for "alternative" causes vanishes. In most cases the latter experiments are never published. All one can see from the "parapsychology" side is the subsequent silence. In the case of "results" originally reported by Utts 1995-1996, we have silence since 1999.

Then the cycle is repeated in a new context.

The cycle has been repeated enough times, that to be taken in by it at this late date can only be accounted for by failure to adhere to objective epistemology.

Post 13

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 6:05pm

Adam, thank you for your lucid analysis of the Utts paper and its aftermath. The scientific method will out, as they say.

I have never believed for a moment that what Branden related about his Intensives could have really happened without there being some fraudulent process involved. C. E. M. Hansel and Paul Churchland have both written compellingly about this.

I simply took Branden at his word that he was honestly reporting what he observed, and that things were happening that he did not understand, and which he thought could be replicated and studied and identified scientifically. I personally thought that if he looked carefully enough into the matter, he would either detect the fraud involved, or he would see that his careful attention caused the happenings to stop happening. This is invariably the pattern in claims of ESP, anomalous cognition, etc., and I have no reason to believe it would have been any different for an investigation into the happenings in Branden's Intensives. His apparent failure to follow up on the matter, along the lines of your analysis, certainly puts his recent remarks at TOC in a bad light. At best, he is far too gullible and careless about the matter.

Best to all,
REB
(Edited by Roger Bissell on 8/07, 6:06pm)

Post 14

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 8:35pm

Roger,

I'm having some trouble evaluating this quotation from Nathaniel Branden because I don't know what kinds of experiments he was getting people to participate in, or what the mind-boggling performance consisted of:

When I was offering my 3 day Intensives, I had the whole room participating in some simple experiments I devised and many members performed in mind-boggling ways, in the presence, usually, of over a hundred students.

Did he give you examples?

Robert Campbell

Post 15

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 8:41pm

I took Branden Intensives and was a therapy client of his just prior to same. I have had a few strange things happen in my life including something that happened in therapy I cannot explain except as incredible coincidence. However, I never thought of a replicable process.

Nathaniel Branden simply does not have a scientific bent and is more gullible than anything else when it comes to these things. No big deal.

--Brant

(Edited by Brant Gaede on 8/08, 2:46pm)

Post 16

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 9:32pm

Thanks for this discussion, Adam, Roger, Robert, et al.

Like most starry-eyed newcomers, I made sure to attend all of Branden's events at last year's TOC conference. The details of his encounters with Rand were interesting (the first time around), but his "differences" with Objectivism came across as imprecise and ill though-out. Ditto for this "anomolous perception" stuff. I didn't bother with his interviews at TOC this year. (I definitely do need to catch up on his writings on psychology.)

Given the beliefs of some other California coast-dwellers, though, I'd say Nathaniel has aged quite gracefully, haha!

(Edited by Andrew Bissell on 8/07, 9:33pm)

Post 17

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 10:18pm

Robert Campbell asked:

I'm having some trouble evaluating this quotation from Nathaniel Branden because I don't know what kinds of experiments he was getting people to participate in, or what the mind-boggling performance consisted of:
When I was offering my 3 day Intensives, I had the whole room participating in some simple experiments I devised and many members performed in mind-boggling ways, in the presence, usually, of over a hundred students.
Did he give you examples?

Robert, perhaps you don't recall our Problems in Philosophy online discussion group in 1997. I related how my wife and I had lunch with Nathaniel Branden in the early 1990s, not long after sending him a copy of my mind-body essay from Reason Papers #1, and he launched into a discussion of anomalies of consciousness. One example: Branden had conducted sensitivity exercises in which one person would internally focus on some experience, and the other person just by touching them would be able to verballize all kinds of things about the other person that they couldn't possibly have known. Another: in answer to the idea I voiced that our consciousness needs a functional brain, Branden claimed that there are people with a miniscule film of cerebral cells--as opposed to the normal thickness of such--and that they are out on the streets looking for all the world like normal people.

The very first post of our discussion group was from a friend, Barry Rosenthal, whom I will quote at some length, since he had a similar experience with Branden. Rosenthal wrote: "I recall a discussion we had about your lunch with Nathaniel Branden in which he claimed that by touching another person, the toucher could learn all kinds of things about the touchee that the touchee was not conscious of, such as repressed memories. Here, the toucher had no previous knowledge of any of the things learned. I thought the toucher was making inferences based upon the felt physical signals from the other's body, such as the muscular rigidity often associated with emotional repression. According to you [Roger], however, that was not how Branden presented it. He said that the information conveyed did not go through the sense of touch, but was nonetheless transmitted during the touching and *only* during the touching (if I recall correctly). IOW, this was some sort of perception that was outside of what we understand to be the 5 senses (i.e., ESP). Well, my friend, I should have listened to you. Branden told a similar story at the IOS conference to Ken Livingston and I, and this one didn't involve touching at all. He talked about two people, who I will call John and Howard, who previously did not know each other (a word of warning: I am going by my sieve-like memory; feel free to confirm this with Livingston). John is instructed to clear his mind and simply stare at Howard for a few minutes. Suddenly, John sees a vision of a very youthful Howard falling out of a tree. It turns out, according to Branden, that Howard in fact fell out of a tree in the exact same way that John had visualized. This 'anamolous perception' was the first information John had about the fall. As Branden was telling this story, I kept muttering to myself, "Gee thanks! You've just given me a heapin' helpin' of crow to eat!" :~) Branden insisted that this kind of thing has actually happened in his practice. He added that he did not regard this event or any other like it as being supernatural in any way. But then he asked a very interesting question: What part or parts of Objectivist metaphysics and epistemology would have to be revised in order to accomodate these anamolous perceptions? I must confess that I've been unable to come up with an answer. Neither have other O'ists to whom Branden has posed this question. The reason he raised this issue is that he sees an inappropriate tendency of O'ists to be married to materialism in metaphysics and epistemology. In the former branch, he says there is a tendency to regard *all* existents as material, [and in the latter branch, he says there is a tendency to regard the five senses as the only perceptual means of awareness]."

I hope these examples suffice to illustrate what Branden was talking about.

Best regards,
Roger Bissell

Post 18

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 10:26pm

Also, Robert, on July 22, 1997, you posted to Problems in Philosophy these comments on Branden and anomalous perception:

"I think we need to differentiate the sources of knowledge Nathaniel has been talking about from the sorts of claims that James Randi and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal typically go after.

"I was a participant in a workshop where Nathaniel asked various of us to pair up with strangers and, after holding their hands wordlessly for a fairly short time, tell them what came to our minds about them. I ended up with a woman in her 60s and my hit rate wasn't on the uncanny level exemplified in some of these stories, but it wasn't too bad, either. I knew more about her than I would have thought I did--and I took that to be the point of the demonstration. One of the themes in the workshop was that we often have a much better idea of what to expect from lovers or romantic partners than we consciously think we do.

"This kind of thing is 'anomalous' only in the strict sense that we don't have good explanations for it (and, in everyday life, we usually assume that we can't really do it). It does not pose the kind of problems in principle that something like clairvoyance does. My guess would be that a lot of it is not perception in the strict sense; I wonder how well even those who showed remarkable levels of insight into the strangers they were partnered with would do if they were paired up with people from the highlands of New Guinea--or, for that matter, people from the highlands of Rabun County, Georgia (a place less than 30 miles from Clemson that is primarily inhabited by 'hillbillies'). In other words, I wonder whether it does not depend in part on common culture.

"Still, the Gibsonians remind us that we directly perceive action-relevant properties of many things in our environment: that rock 'affords' sitting, that faucet 'affords' twisting, that door handle drives us nuts because we can't see what sort of handling it affords, and so on. Some Gibsonians, like the late Ed Reed, have suggested that we perceive 'social affordances' as well as physical ones, but not much work has been done on this issue.

"What James Randi does is expose people who make professional claims to the possession of paranormal powers, when in fact they are just doing conjuring (which is what Randi does for a living, too; he just doesn't claim he is doing anything else). One of the endemic problems in this area is that you are either expected to believe that all claims about the 'paranormal' are bunk--or you are expected to believe every one of them that comes down the pike. Well, I think there was something to Nathaniel's demonstrations--and I am convinced that old spoon-bender Uri Geller was a fraud. There is no doubt that deception and flim-flammery are quite common in these areas, and you have to be prepared to catch them. The existence of fraud is not a mere possibility--it well attested historically. But the fact that various claims are fraudulent doesn't rule out the possibility that others are genuine.

"To get a better handle on our ability to perceive what other people are like, what is in their pasts, what kind of pets they have, etc. etc. on the basis of a brief encounter, one of the things that is necessary is to understand how often and under what circumstances we are wrong in our judgments. A demonstration of pretty incredible hit rates is insufficient; we have to know what the false-alarm rate is like. (The presence of some false alarms does not make this sort of knowledge worthless; knowing about the false alarms just helps us keep the right perspective on it.)

"There is this outfit that keeps sending me literature urging me to subscribe to their (expensive) newsletters and reports so I, too, can profit from the coming apocalypse. They boast of their inside information and correct predictions on a wide array of subjects, from the stock market crash of Fall 1987 to the fall of the Soviet Union, etc. OK, let's assume they really did make all of these predictions, which have now turned out to be correct. How about the predictions they made that turned out to be incorrect? How many of these were there? How important were they? They aren't telling me about those (and I am quite comfortable assuming that there were some). I do note that the authors of these flyers have been predicting a massive worldwide depression, with epochal credit contraction and monetary deflation, for at least 6 years. And 6 years ago they talked as though it was going to hit in a year or so!"

I think these old comments of yours give some helpful perspective on the matter, Robert.

Best regards,
Roger Bissell

Post 19

Sunday, August 7, 2005 - 10:38pm