Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science

Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science * JULE EISENBUD, M.D. I Parapsychology deals with correspondences between events. These correspondences are occult in the sense that whatever is responsible for them is, in line with a standard dictionary definition of the term occult, “not immediately known; perceivable only by investigation.” Up to recently it was customary to designate such correspondences as telepathic, clairvoyant, precognitive, psychokinetic, or by roughly equivalent terms. In the past few years, however, the term “psi” has come into increasingly widespread use in relation to the class of occult correspondences formerly encompassed by such terms as those given above. Most investigators have come to feel that there are no compelling grounds for making any assumption other than that behind the various phenomenological forms and manifestations in the realm of occult correspondences there is one underlying pro- cess. This fundamental what-is-it, which they presume to be the common noumenon behind the phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, etc., they agree to call psi. It is felt that the term psi succeeds in eliminating some of the possibly misleading implications with which the older terms were burdened. In designations like ‘‘a psi event,’ “a psi relationship,” “psi phenomena,” it is supposed to be understood that psi refers to nothing more than the still unknown means or process by which a given event, relationship, or phenomenon is brought about. It is often more or less automatically assumed, however, that this means or process is an actual something-or-other which in principle can be Positively identified (that is, not solely by exclusion) and differen- tiated from a set of non-psi processes. The term psi, in other words, is not limited to the designation merely of a class of events which Tends itself to differentiation solely on certain phenomenological grounds from other classes of events; it is frequently used to refer to a quite special and even, as far as all the natural forces and pro- ‘esses now known to science go, uniquely operating principle which ‘is postulated to be the particular thing-in-itself that, working from below, as it were, is inherently responsible for the fact that this class Of events can be more or less sharply differentiated from other classes ‘of events. f / _ 1A condensation and abridgement of a paper presented at the First Inter- tional Conference of Parapsychological Studies, University of Utrecht, _ Holland, July 30 — August 5, 1953.

4 Journal of the American S ociety for Psychical Research Despite the lack of clarity surrounding the concept of psi and the looseness with which the term is often used, in the minds of some parapsychologists it has come to be looked upon as a force of some kind — a “spiritual force,” a “psychic force,” a force vaguely asso- ciated with thought — at all events, a “non-material force” inso- far as it is generally held to be “independent of time and space.” Somehow, the notion of a psi force has taken deep root, and it is this “force” that, in one form or another, is held to provide the causal connection between the events that make up those correspondences that would otherwise be completely inexplicable. (One need not cite the parapsychological literature at length to show that this is a wide- spread notion about “psi,” whether or not explicitly stated as such.) It would be highly desirable to be able to arrive at a more precise conception of what we mean by “psi.” Although we do not know what inertia is, or momentum, or electronic charge, we nevertheless have a high degree of clarity about what we mean to signify when we use these terms. The meaning of terms like these, and of many others of similar stock, is derived directly or indirectly from a group of con- gruent pointer readings which vary consistently in relation to each other under circumstances which we are able to describe with great exactness. From this we are able to infer the highly consistent — in fact predictable — quantitative variation of that which we agree to call inertia (or momentum or charge) under varying conditions that we are able to define and specify in terms of other pointer read- ings with a high degree of precision. The underlying principle, the “thing-in-itself” behind the dynamical concept, we have no way of getting at; but so long as we have a consistent means of mathe- matically relating events in a given domain, we are content to speak of a “force.” The notion of force has no other meaning. It is a metaphysical skin drawn over a skeletonized set of mathematically stateable relationships. It is the absence of relationships of this kind, however, that characterizes the correspondences dealt with by parapsychology. It is this lack — and mostly this lack, moreover — which seems to set these correspondences apart from most other correspondences known to science. If not for this lack, perhaps, there would be nothing that would be considered occult, nothing “paranormal” about any of the phenomena we now classify under psi. What measurements we do make have to do with chance (telling us merely that we have corre- spondences on our hands, nothing about what is responsible for them) and latterly with personality characteristics. But neither of these classes of measurement is of the type of those tightly interlocking pointer readings which provide us with the most familiar basis on which we conventionally define in a positive way a so-called causal ‘ = Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 5 connection between events.? As a matter of fact, all we have accord- ing to this way of structuring events are what might be termed causal disconnections. These disconnections in our process map of science — our simple inability to account for any of our observed correspondences by means of “force” assumptions that are in any way explanatorily continuous with those used to link other corre- spondences known to science — are all that the term “psi” can legiti- mately be construed to refer to. : Perhaps the gap that confronts us represents nothing more than some inadequacy in the grammar of the language with which we _ describe nature, a developmental anomaly resulting in a baffling lack of congruence between our descriptions of various aspects of _ the whole, or at least what we have always been tempted to assume to be, despite our clear difficulties in picturing it as such, a well hung-together and smoothly running whole. But however this be we cannot make a disconnection into that type of connection we call a “force” by simply giving it a name and imputing to it a negative qualification — something that tells us how “it” does not act — like “psychic,” “spiritual,” or “non-material.” Such terms still fail to state anything more than that we are confronted by a contentless hole (descriptionwise) in our process map of nature, an abrupt and disconcerting chasm separating our techniques of de- “scribing certain correspondences from our techniques of describing other correspondences. Have we then nothing more in “psi” than a new name for some- thing essentially indistinguishable from the demons of old, which too were “force” assumptions invented to fill gaps in the presumed causal fabric of things but which lacked the positive identifying credentials which alone are capable of being harnessed for the work of scientific inquiry? Is “psi” nothing more than a modern-dress latecomer to the demonological hierarchy? _ 2The closest we have come in appearance to such measu ‘ € rements are th tis Crawford. (Experiments in Psychical Science, New York, Titi, ] ; The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, Dutton, 1921). A funda- mental methodological difficulty in this work, however, is that the measure- reported by Crawford were not confirmed by a sufficient number of pendent investigators to minimize, if not to obviate, the possibility that Rereeers was simply producing data to order. Crawford was an engineer thought entirely in terms of mechanical “forces,” beams, cantilevers, and the like. It is entirely conceivable that the medium, who after all was demon- bly capable of a wide range of physical manifestations, was unconsciously ing as an accomplice “before the fact” by acquiescently dishing up data ‘hoe that Crawford, an engineer, would find most comprehensible and _ This methodological difficulty is inherent in all our i i i ions of psi. Once events of the psi class are ened: 4 ei ane "at to redefine the basic concept of measurement as it applies in all

6 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research II Before attempting to deal with this question, let us first look at types of disconnections met elsewhere in our process map of nature. As it happens, such breaks in our map are not rare, and we do not have to look far to find other areas of experience where we have never really succeeded in getting behind a description of events in terms of correspondences that remain — for all our efforts to ac- count for them coming into existence as correspondences — occult. These correspondences do often enough group themselves into certain regularities and can to this extent be described with more or less satisfying consistency; but they nonetheless remain correspondences of unknown origin, correspondences with, so to speak, no visible or, so far as our conventional means of structuring experience go, invisible means of support. The most familiar example, and the one ostensibly in closest con- nection with our present problem, is the broad group of psycho- physical correspondences that has always been a central preoccupa- tion of philosophy under the heading of “the relation of mind to matter.” The disconnection here has been dealt with mainly in two ways: One, the postulation of a connecting “force” principle which has been given various names (the soul, for example) and which is essentially demonological; two, the attempt to restate the problem in such a way that what appears to be a duality can be reduced to unity. The latter method of attempting a resolution of the issue might be quite satisfactory if the “body-mind” problem existed alone, isolated from the other data and problems of science. But it does not; in fact the more data we gather from other fields, the more this problem, in one form or another, intrudes into everything. Of this, more later. Another area (or possibly the same projected onto different coordinates) in which we are confronted by a major theoretical disconnection is that of the relation to each other and to the whole of all the events in nature to which the theory of probability is applied. There are currently several differing approaches to prob- ability theory, but the objective of each is to arrive at statements which describe the ways in which events which are axiomatically held to be genetically independent fall out in relation to each other, Herein lies the paradox. One starts with events that are assumed to occur completely independently of each other and ends up with events that, insofar as they fall out in the aggregate in over-all con- formity to definite patterns of expectation, seem to show a mutual dependency of some sort that has developed en route, a lawfulness that has crept into the situation somewhere between the initial state- Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 7 ment of the rules of the game and the final scoring of results. At any rate, while it may be possible to describe with the consistency demanded by logic what takes place when a hundred or a thousand events, each independent of every other at the start, somehow whip themselves into a regimented outcome, it is not possible to say how this comes about. For all our devices of logic, there remains a descriptionless gap between one toss of a coin and any other (to take the most familiar case). No less enigmatic than the theory of probability upon which it rests are those aspects of quantum theory which provide descrip- tions of events on the microphysical plane. Exactly the same diffi- culty is encountered here since our only method of describing what occurs in this realm is to utilize the language of the mathematics of probability. Just how it happens that ruggedly individualistic waves or particles, each conceived of as a law unto itself, somewhere along the line decide to waive their potentially anarchical individual rights and prerogatives and swing good-naturedly and with remarkable esprit de corps “into accordance with” the laws of probability, thus transforming themselves into highly respectable and well-ordered macrophysical events — this we cannot account for. We are left again with nothing more than simple, unexplainable correspondences between events that cannot be related except in terms of probabilistic correspondences which themselves have in some inexplicable fashion “jes growed,” like Topsy. We have the spectacle of one disreputable character vouching for another. The one other major segment of nature where we have had to put up with a kind of disconnection which has never been success- fully resolved is that in which the law of gravitation is held to apply. Here we have a set of correspondences capable of mathe- matical definition but with no assumptions as to the causal or dynamical connections involved. “Force” turns out to be an unneces- sary concept in the geometry of mass and field, just as it is in the theory of probability, and the technique of description used out- flanks the “action-at-a-distance” difficulty by ignoring it. Il We see thus that, as far as our means of describing what goes on in “causal” terms go, the gaps between our correspondences in the thought-action sphere, between any two events in a probability series, between two definable states of an electron, and between any two bodies in a gravitational system, are just as wide, just as empty of the “stuff of causality” and, in this sense, just as occult, as any two events that go to make up a correspondence of the psi class.

8 Journal of the American S ociety for Psychical Research The question now arises: Do we have any particular justification for treating events of the psi class in isolation from the events which make up the occult correspondences in other spheres, and in postu- lating a special principle applicable primarily to these “psi” corre- spondences and without reference to the disconnections encountered in our descriptions of other segments of nature? This question can of course also be posed the other way around ; but let us simply recognize the fact that nobody but parasychol- ogists would ask it this way, since the data of parapsychology have no official standing in science. Before going further, however, let us take a preliminary look around to see what other people are doing about their disconnections. The first thing we notice is that in regard to what assumptions it might be convenient to make about this or that disconnection, no uniform convention has been agreed upon by scientists of diverse fields or even by scientists working in the same field. The positions adopted in regard to the treatment of disconnections seem to be a matter of individual preference, and the three main categories into which these positions can be divided appear to be correlated along vocational lines in as little degree as political attitudes. One convention which has been in high favor among quantum physicists, relativity physicists, and biologists is to treat the problem as one without immediate relevance to the tasks in hand. For work- ing purposes, anything on the order of a “causal” bridge over the disconnections met with is considered to be an unnecessary assump- tion. In each area the technique of description is held to be adequate to the events dealt with to the extent of providing the necessary framework for the continuance of scientific operations. So long as the structural formulae for relating observed events to each other and for the prediction of as yet unobserved events seem to work, nothing further is demanded. The question of whether or not to impute a causal character to whatever reality may exist beyond the observable data themselves is held to be not a scientific question but a metaphysical one; and the fact that scientists nevertheless spend their time endlessly debating this question is held to be not germane to what they are supposed to be doing as scientists. A somewhat different position, which spread rapidly from the quantum physicists to scientists in all areas after Heisenberg enun- ciated in 1927 his famous indeterminacy principle, is to deny not only the operational necessity of the causality principle but the very existence of any such principle in nature itself. To the in- determinists, what has looked like causality is at best an illusion, a statistical artefact. There is no nature, no reality, say they, apart Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 9 from what we observe; and since we can observe only by means of metrical devices and techniques of description which embody funda- mental discontinuities in the mathematical sense and disconnections in the dynamical sense, the grounds for belief in a causal “beyond” in which any such nonsense as “ultimate” process in nature may be imagined to take place simply disappear. The only way we can define nature is in acausal terms; and that, they state with perhaps the maximum degree of certainty they can muster, is that! An inability to accept either of these first two positions has led a growing number of scientists to a third view which, as it turns out, is simply a revival, with very few modifications, of one of the most ancient and widespread attitudes toward the problem of causality in the history of mankind. But first as to the grounds on which the first two positions are sometimes found wanting. That there can be a sharp distinction between science and meta- physics is disputed. Science, it is claimed, cannot even begin to formulate physical theories — or theories dealing with any type of event, for that matter — without making the most sweeping meta- physical assumptions and without taking into account unobservables and unmeasurables of all kinds. What is more, the distinction be- tween what is observable and what must be assumed is becoming so increasingly blurred that to imagine that we are in a position clearly to say what are “necessary” working assumptions and what are not is a hazardous presumption. There are more fundamental grounds, however, on which the utter abandonment of something like causality, whether as a working principle or as an ontological one, is unacceptable to many. Such a theoretical position, it may be pointed out, involves a peculiar contradiction in the entire structure of science and scientific method. These have but one consistently tenable objective, an objective to which all part-operations are necessarily subordinate: The con- struction of hypotheses which replace chance with definable non- chance factors in the description of the universe. The establishment and the carrying out of this program on a level of conscious aware- ness is the feature which distinguishes scientific activity from all other activities of man. To have all our operations, however, cul- minate in an hypothesis which accords chance a fundamental and sovereign role in all events is just as absurd (for science) as to set up a government at whose apex sits a supreme court which decides every issue in jurisprudence on the assumption that all government is false and by right does not exist. It may be claimed, moreover, that what the acausalists and indeterminists actually do is accept ‘government de facto while denying it de jure, which puts them in a

10 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research iti he woman who, when sition hardly less anomalous than that of t aes why she didn’t finally marry the man who was the father of her ten growing children, replied, “He just doesn't appeal to me. w when men of science begin looking for a causal principle Be quite put their fingers on, which they can't define in via of an unambiguous set of symbolic relationships, they not is a quently end up with the idea of God, or at least some transcen enta principle which amounts to the same thing. This is, of sari exactly what every major metaphysician from Aristotle throug! Whitehead has held to be the inevitable logical consequence of the global approach in which things and events are considered all to- gether. While today a high degree of sophistication seems to be required before this idea takes hold, this was not always the case. The men of science of Newton’s era took it for granted that nature had a Supreme Author, and that their efforts were of course merely attempts to piece together His Work. The mystery and awe they felt were not the blank confusion of today, since there was no mystery in principle: No disconnections existed in the Mind of God. At any rate, this is a third way of attempting to deal with the problem, an increasingly popular way among men In the top ranks of science and mathematics who are becoming less and less diffident in expressing their conclusions. The disconnections are recognized, held to be a legitimate concern, and dealt with by imputing all occult causal bridges — both in their logical and dynamical aspects — to a Divine Principle or the Mind of God (in the metaphysical sense). These people may agree that the God concept may be as unnecessary for the adequate performance of the daily nine-to-five tasks of the scientific investigator as is the concept of the workings of a huge corporate structure to the petty bookkeeper in one of the branch offices at the periphery of the system. On the other hand they find it difficult to account for the peripheral transactions except in terms of the existence of the parent corporation. IV There are then these three major positions on the problem of disconnections taken by scientists today. And since there is no unt- formity in the treatment of this problem, it should, needless to say, be permissible in all fairness for parapsychologists to adopt any one of the three positions, which we might characterize as the “No need to worry about it,” the “There is nothing to worry about,” and the “Let George do it” positions. The matter could conceivably rest this way indefinitely were it not for the fact that even the small measure of tolerance shown among Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 11 scientists by the adherents of one doctrine toward the heresies of the other groups does not extend toward the parapsychologists when the latter attempt to adopt one of these positions in relation to their own problem. It is just as feasible, for instance, to adopt the first position — that for working purposes one can do without metaphysical luxuries — in the case of correspondences of the psi class as it is in the case of the occult correspondences in the other areas cited. Up to this point, in fact, this has been effectually the state of affairs. It has been possible (1) to classify data, (2) to devise experiments, and (3) to make a promising beginning toward the integration of psi data with the major hypotheses of currently acceptable psycho- logical theory — all solely in terms of correspondences of unknown origin established according to the conventional rules for the making of correspondences. The hypothesis of a psi “force,” as the form in which the assumption of causality is put, is virtually impertinent to the actual tasks of investigators in these areas; and the question of a causal bridge over the disconnection has had, whether or not acknowledged as such, the essential status of a metaphysical issue. But the license to ignore what they consider to be metaphysical questions which many statisticians, physicists, and biologists allow themselves they do not grant to the parapsychologists. Physicists may state: “Our only way out seems to be to take for granted the fact that space has the physical property of transmitting electro- magnetic waves, and not to bother too much about the meaning of this statement”(3) ; but they are not at all willing to say to the para- psychologists, “You just go ahead and make what order you can of the events you feel justified in arranging as correspondences, and don’t worry too much about how it is possible for these correspon- dences to occur at all.” Scientists in divers fields can and do shrug off their unexplainables in this way, but the no whit more “miracu- lous” data of the parapsychologists are considered by them to be outside the province of science precisely because they are unexplain- able in terms of conventional causal assumptions. It would appear that among scientists the absence of sauce for the goose is one thing while the absence of sauce for the gander is quite another. It is also possible — or at least permissible on comparative grounds — to espouse a more thoroughgoing doctrine of acausality in relation to events of the psi class. In this case too, the adoption of such a credo, or rather non-credo, would make little difference as far as the present program of classification and research in parapsychology goes. It is plain that if we are so disposed as to be able to conceive of what is termed the fundamentally statistical

12 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research character of events, then psi data, like physical data, need uote further to justify them than the probability determinations “4 now have and in terms of which they are in fact construed as signi cant data. Here again, however, it has become plain that the ras “4 scientists close into a solid wall of opposition to any su : aa of view. An attempt on the part of parapsychologists , ae squarely and exclusively on their statistical determinations (it 4 no difference in such a case whether an outright doctrine o' ase . ity is explicitly asserted or not) seems to call forth a pl ae possibility which stems plainly from the implicit “3 uu “A statistics are not enough in the absence of a justifying causal concept. This, as is well known, has led to a type of attack on the yi mental and statistical procedures employed which has not n similarly the case in an effort to batter down the ae eS > this sense equally “impossible” data of the physicists. Even the a9 determined anti-determinists seem to resist the logical ae fe) their doctrine (or dogma) to the data of Psi, which is as absurd as one atheist claiming that his atheism is a higher atheism, eee worthy of faith and belief, than the insubstantial and positively ungrounded atheism of his neighbor. istorically the most popular tradition in parapsychology, from i in wher it was all yeti research, is that which corresponds to the third, or “let George do it” tradition. George has been vari- ously conceived of and has had different noms d action under one or another spiritistic hypothesis, has even achieved the status of Deity, and has now become quasi-mechanized under the alias of “psi”; but George is still the same old George for all that or creation, a moving principle, a “force” with plenty of raison d étre and yet with no more positively identifiable existence than the illustrious Putois of Anatole France’s allegorical extravaganza of that name. Putois, whom nobody had ever seen, became endowed with a reality in the minds of the simple villagers who created him as indubitable as that of their own selves, simply because he came to be the perfect and natural explanation of a whole series of other- wise inexplicable events, such as the pregnancy of one of the town’s most unassailable virgins. The fact that there was not a shred of first-rate evidence that any one had ever seen Putois, talked to him, heard him, felt him, smelled him, or received a bona fide kick in the seat by him, did not render him any the less credible as the actual agency of a great many otherwise disconnected happenings. It is questionable whether there is much of a difference between psi, conceived of not solely as a category of phenomenological classi- Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 13 fication, but as some sort of dynamical “force,” and the transcendent principle which metaphysicians and latter-day scientists identify generically as God. Perhaps the main point of distinction is the former’s provincial character, like one of the old tribal gods who later ceded to Jahveh. Psi does things only for the parapsychologist, while the God of the metaphysician has a blanket commitment to do things for all logicians and natural scientists, to fill up all blanks, gaps, holes, discontinuities, and disconnections wherever they may be. In any case, it is precisely the unlimited flexibility of such a concept that has bothered the practical scientist who likes to be weighing and measuring and who prefers a specifiable datum in hand (even if the datum be his own hand) to a deity in the bush (even a burning bush). And it is highly doubtful, furthermore, whether the very scientist who today falls back upon the God con- cept when he comes to the end of his technical and theoretical tether would grant the same sanctuary to the equally desperate parasychol- ogist. At all events, it appears that all of science is in the same boat as far as its fundamental assumptions about the interconnections between events go, with parapsychology neither more nor less adrift than other disciplines. Most of these deal with correspondences between events which cannot be accounted for except in statistical terms; but the theory of probability behind this system of account- ing turns out to be based upon a set of correspondences no less obscure than those they are used to “explain.” It is like finding that all the alleged gold in Fort Knox is nothing but paper money after all, and that all our transactions have been carried out without real collateral. Vv Several scientific authors have recently suggested compromise solutions to the problem of the disconnections within their special fields of investigation but have failed to recognize that the problem they are dealing with cannot be given a narrowly limited treatment. Schroedinger and Lillie, speaking for biophysics and biology respec- tively (14, 10), have tended to make an implicit distinction between living and non-living systems, and have given the impression that the central problem, as they see it, is simply that of accounting for the directive factor which opposes and alters, as it were, the general laws of probability in the special instance of life. That the problem, however, is exactly the same in non-living systems, where even what we call randomicity stands in need of some sort of explanation, has been brought out by Margenau in his inquiry into what makes quantum-mechanical systems work (12).

14 Journal of the American S ociety for Psychical Research The one who most clearly saw that it made no difference whether we were dealing with living or non-living systems, with anti-chance or chance, and who tried to formulate the problem squarely in terms of probability theory itself, was the philosopher-mathematician Karl Marbe (11). This author saw in the paradox of the fact that prob- ability had laws at all and that it worked, what many metaphysicians had already grasped in terms of ontological and cosmological necessity _ that nothing in the universe would work, neither atoms nor animals nor astral systems, in the absence of what amounts to a communicating dependency of each event upon every other event and upon the whole, a state of affairs that more or less implies (if we are to avoid unconditional surrender to the “Mind of God” hypo- thesis) cognitive, reactive and “volitional” aspects of every element in nature, whether as single atoms or as complex polyatomic systems, living or non-living. In his exhaustive study of “what makes prob- ability run,” Marbe was led to deny the statistical independence of successive trials in a coin-toss series and came to the same conclusion in regard to every other type of statistical series: i.e., that in a sense nature does have a memory (at least he suspected that the answer to the riddle lay somewhere in the psychological sphere, just where he could not finally say). Had Marbe given some thought to the implications of the psychical research of his day, he might have come somewhat closer to unravelling the puzzle which he saw so clearly. VI As far as I know, the first major attempt to view the data of psi in connection with the data of both physics and psychology was that of the physicist Jordan (8). Drawing a parallel between the data of these disciplines on an epistemological basis, Jordan attempts to resolve all contradictions between the three sets of data in terms of Bohr’s principle of complementarity and the concept of the uncon- scious, as described by Freud in connection with the phenomenon of repression and as extended by Jung into the idea of the collective unconscious. Jordan sees no causal connection between these sets of data but holds one to be complementary to another in the sense that what is actually done by the observer in the act of measurement determines and at the same time limits the type of datum that results. He extends the psychological concept of repression to the notion that one set of data “represses” another. In terms of the logical relations involved, he feels, this can be asserted just as validly in respect to the position and velocity of the electron as it can in relation to the two phases of a dual personality, only one of which is objectifiably in evidence at a given time. He feels that in some way “the Uncon- Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 15 scious” is the missing link. At any rate, paranormal phenomena he holds to occur in the “collective unconscious,” which stands in complementary relation to the “collective conscious” space in which physical phenomena (e.g., those linked by radiations of one sort or another) take place. Although what happens in these two “spaces” may be said to be in complementary relationship, there is no causal relationship between the two. This, states Jordan, follows from the fact that physics can assert with complete certainty that there are no undiscovered radiations which can now or ever be brought forth to explain what happens in the parapsychical realm. A theory somewhat similar to that of Jordan has recently been brought out by Jung (9). This author too points out that the conven- tional notion of causality is inapplicable to psi phenomena insofar as these are independent of space, time, and energy transfer. He proposes as a hypothetical “explanation factor” in the case of psi phenomena a kind of relationship which he terms synchronicity. Synchronicity may be said to obtain where events are linked together in a meaningful but in nowise causal manner, the meaningfulness of a relationship being defined in terms of archetypal ideas existing in the collective unconscious. In other words, archetypal ideas, spring- ing from the collective unconscious, manifest themselves as psi occurrences. Jung too falls back on what amounts to a principle of complementarity in holding the two types of order in the universe — the familiar causal order and the order of events linked by syn- chronicity — to be mutually irreducible. _Both Jordan and Jung do indeed succeed in showing that the disconnections in data of the psi class are in principle no less embar- rassing in the total picture of science than the disconnections in any other class of data; but at the end they leave us with a jigsaw puzzle which somehow fails to fit together. Jordan stresses the epistemo- logical limitations which make it impossible to assert that para- psychical phenomena cannot take place, and Jung merely postulates a new principle, a sort of paracausality, by way of justifying the existence of these phenomena. But at this point both leave the world in pieces, divided into the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s, and with little concern over the fact that a big problem remains so long as Caesar and God are left still not com- municating with each other but either “repressing” one another or working side by side, amicably enough and on the whole not getting in each other’s way, but in the last analysis quite independently. : The problem, however, is not simply that of staking out the rela- tive domains of differing types of correspondences in a universe big enough and variegated enough to include them all, but of accounting

16 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research for the fact that there exist correspondences to be accounted for in the first place. This now brings us back to the question posed earlier : Are we justified in treating all the occult correspondences with which we have to deal, including those we designate as of the psi class, in isolation from one another ? Vil It appears that this question can be argued from many points of view. In many quarters, moreover, it is conceded to be unlikely that a “solution” of the problem of the whole will eventuate solely from the methods of science. Many feel that there will always be some- thing left over, something which cannot be assimilated or even accounted for by any system, however self-consistent in itself, which is forced to abstract for the sake of logical comprehension that which is, if it is anything at all, ineffable, unnameable, and perhaps even unthinkable in the ordinary sense. This is the difficult-to-express insight which the great mystic philosophies have all tried to convey. What we might strive to achieve, however, is at least a degree of consistency in our ordering of experience that does more than simply admit correspondences of the psi class into a crazy quilt structure on the assumption that one more unassimilable patch isn’t going to make much difference. It may be possible to show that it does make a difference, and that the difference is in the direction of an increased ability to describe and order experience as at least a fictional continuum. To my mind a proposition which has been asserted so often that it has almost become the watchword of parapsychology — that “paranormal phenomena will not fit into a niche in the exist- ing scheme of science” (Tyrrell) — does not possess the validity that appears to many so self-evident. It can be argued, on the contrary, that paranormal phenomena do fit into such a niche, that the niche in fact calls for something like paranormal phenomena to fill it. For the following argument, a few ground rules must be laid down and clarified for at least minimal working purposes. Actually these are all highly controversial and admit of almost endless debate, but for our purposes let us try provisionally to accept them as axiomatic. All we ever do in science is arrange and order sets of correspon- dences in ways that result in the maximum of meaning to us. We establish the rules for the making of correspondences, and we are the ultimate arbiters of meaning. We have worked out certain techniques (for both these aspects of our behavior) which have at least the capacity for facilitating maximum agreement among our- selves on the question of what the rules are to be and what we mean Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 17 by “meaning.” In this wise we have arrived at working fictions which we term lawfulness, chance, causality, force, and other abstractions. When we make (or, as we customarily term it, “observe”’) a correspondence, we are utterly without means for ordering it in relation to other correspondences we have made except in terms of still other correspondences we have made. This system of kiting correspondences is all we have, and is as close as we ever get to the bottom of notions like “force” and “causality,” and to explaining what takes place in a solar system, a mechanical system, a kidney, or a group of people acting in a specifiable way. In none of these areas can we do better than “explain” (i.e., order into what we consider to be a meaningful arrangement) one set of correspondences in terms of another. One set constitutes, so to speak, the warp of our fabric, another the woof. The warp and the woof hold each other in place, order each other, as it were, but do not constitute, except in the sense of the patterned arrangement that results, a continuum. In logic we can make any number of ordered arrangements which satisfy in this way our criteria of meaning. In pragmatic science we are to a great extent limited by a set of firmly established correspondence- making habits which are altered only slowly in the development of new habits. Now events which we have come to designate as of the psi class constitute a set of correspondences which we have so far had little success in meaningfully ordering in terms of those correspondences which we abstract into the familiar notions of space and time. Asa matter of fact we have much greater success in establishing corre- spondences of the psi class if we abandon completely any attempt to relate events according to time and space measurements. We can make an analogy here to the superfluity of spatial measurements in many other correspondence systems — for instance that of prob- ability itself. When we adhere to our program of abandoning completely any reference to spatial and temporal coordinates (i.e., correspondences ) and view certain events against a backdrop of a system of corre- spondences developing from the attempt to order the data of human behavior according to the correspondences that result when we relate the self-observed behavior of the individual to his non-self-observed behavior (i.e., according to the so-called psychodynamic principles based on the concept of “unconscious mental functioning”) we find a very rich field for the making and ordering of correspondences which, according to our rules, we may reasonably presume and

18 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research designate to be of the psi class.3 This system of making correspond- ences appears provisionally to justify the following inferences, according to the published work of several psychoanalytic investi- gators (1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 13, 15) and the still largely unpublished studies of my own: (1) a large and variegated (i.e., in respect to phenomen- ology and conditions of appearance) segment of events can now be brought into the class of psi correspondences which otherwise would pass unremarked and unconnected ; (2) a much larger than heretofore believed probable segment of the general population (in fact, by not unreasonable presumption, the entire population) lends itself to a certain ordering of behavior in terms of psi correspondences; (3) a reasonable model for the interaction of the members of psycho- logically defined groups can be constructed along the lines of psi correspondences to supplement but also to integrate descriptively with models of so-called “interpersonal relationships” developed along the lines of other systems of correspondences. Vill What can be construed from the study of psi correspondences made from the psychoanalytic observation of small groups of in- dividuals is that people appear to be in effective, albeit “unconscious,” communication through other than so-called normal means and in ways in which they mutually influence each other’s behavior (thoughts, feelings, actions). This is not continuously observable in the case of any individual or group, and thus we cannot strictly determine from our data whether this “psi-conditioning” of be- havior (for lack of a better term) occurs only under certain con- ditions or can be observed only under still but poorly defined con- ditions in the observer as well as the observed. Suffice it to say, however, that many of our data show this type of psi-conditioning of behavior under conditions so similar to what appears to obtain in the most prosaic and humdrum circumstances of life — so far from what are usually considered catastrophic or stressful circum- stances — as to invite more than the suspicion that this sort of sub- liminal determination of behavior may indeed be a general feature of all interpersonal relationships. For reasons which are gradually becoming clear, this presumed state of affairs has to be denied by 3 Here, however, is precisely where some parapsychologists seem to balk. Despite a good deal of abstract talk about the need to apply the psi hypothesis along broad lines, the moment this is attempted in this or that concrete instance in an effort to achieve a meaningful ordering of otherwise incomprehensible human behavior, an outraged cry arises as if the psi hypothesis were being rudely wrenched from its secure moorings in a glass case and being made off with. People who insist on their money earning interest should not complain that they cannot also have it as gold in their stockings. Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 19 what we conventionally regard as the conscious part of the self. This part of us has to adhere to the fiction that we are perforce con- strained through natural limitations to live for the most part cut off from, and unreactive to, what goes on about us in a chance-ridden universe, and that the avenues of determination for our behavior at any given moment constitute at best a comparatively thin network in the vast oceans of freedom around us. This view of things is given great support by our seemingly fresh and “unpremeditated” reactions to events which break upon our awareness in the so-called normal manner, and our seeming inability to avert “unforeseen” dangers or to achieve professed goals successfully and without mis- adventure. But psychoanalytic studies of psi-conditioned behavior tend to show that these are often “cover reactions” at least partly designed to support the fiction adopted by the conscious part of the self. This fiction, at any rate, is easily enough rationalized, as only rarely do psi correspondences which require no particular psycho- analytic decoding come spontaneously to light, and when these do, as every parapsychologist knows, everything in the conscious ego (so to speak) of civilized society seems to conspire to discredit their authenticity, their significance and their power seriously to affect the prevailing belief in the essential separateness of individuals. Some light on the origin and nature of this resistance can be shed by psychoanalytic and anthropological studies on an aspect of psi that appears to be decidedly unwelcome even to the parapsychologist — namely, its active and destructive potential. One must remind oneself of course that such a schema as has been suggested here of the kind of patternization that can be achieved in interpersonal relationships by means of a psi-correspondence assumption is ideal — ideal in the sense that one cannot actually pick out at random a segment of historical reality and plot it out completely, and with no lacunae left to account for, in these terms. But this is true in one degree or another of any assumption we might entertain and apply. What is perhaps of more relevance at the moment is this: If we do make the generalized assumption that the human macrocosm can be descriptively ordered along these lines, and if we stop worrying for the moment about what the psi correspondence “really” is or Tepresents, is this in any way helpful to us in ordering other seg- ments of experience? True we have, one way considered, a basic disconnection on our hands. Can we, however, manage to make do with something on the order of this one basic disconnection in other areas of our scientific picture map, or need we continue to have Many disconnections, with disconnections between these disconnec- tions? Can we in some way turn several into one?

20 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research IX These questions can at present be only tentatively explored, and any suggestions that can be made are perhaps far yet from the stage where they can be rigorously formulated for decisive testing. But since we are at the moment primarily interested in a general descriptive framework in terms of which we might be able to order the data of several areas of scientific correspondence-making with greater consistency than obtains at present, we might do worse than attempt to apply toward this end a provisional model developed from the study of psi-conditioned human interrelationships. For this, several provisional assumptions would seem to be required, of which the two major ones appear to be as follows: (1) It is possible to order any given set of meaningful correspondences in terms which satisfy certain criteria for meaning in the ordering of any subset, and vice versa. Here we shall have to pass over the difficulties in- volved in the definition of sets, subsets, criteria for meaning, etc. We shall simply take it that all our present scientific data can be ordered as a set of correspondences, and that the data we divide into physical, biological, parapsychological, etc., can be ordered as homologous subsets. (2) The correspondence we now designate as that of the psi class can be taken as the prototype of every corre- spondence we are able to and in fact do make in science. If now we take as a model of all event systems (i.e., all corre- spondence systems) that segment of the macrocosm which includes the observer and correspondence-maker himself, we are able to dis- cern some method in the madness of the elements of any set. What we are attempting by taking the model of psi-conditioned human interrelationships as a model for all relationships which can be statistically defined is to introduce the notion of a dynamical system geared not to the categorically indeterminate vagaries but to the intercommunication-based responses and “strivings” of the individual element in such relationships. We can, in short, arrive at a means of describing the ways in which the laws of probability are carried out. This is a crucial advance. We are perhaps as far from understand- ing the ultimate necessity of these laws as we are from comprehend- ing the “whys” behind seemingly universal constants like e, i and i, but we at least glimpse a mechanism whereby these laws, which we must accept simply as givens, are maintained. With the assumption of psi-intercommunication between individuals, this is in principle no more incomprehensible than is any directed activity in a freely intracommunicating group. The essential trick behind the “miracle” of probability has been exposed. In embodying the behavior of the Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 21 individual as well as of the group in one system of description, furthermore, we are able to bridge the gap between statistical regular- ity and individual variation. There is another aspect to this about which we might say a word. When we follow out the implications of the model of how events come to happen that we have derived from our psychological study of psi-correspondences in humans, we are more or less forced, I be- lieve, to a picture of things essentially similar to that which has been poetically expressed in the great mystic philosophies, those of Lao- Tse, Meister Eckhart, and others. In these systems the growth of a seed, the mind of man and the light from our most distant star are, if I might so put it, reciprocally influential, mutually determina- tive. This way of expressing things suffers, of course, from our almost ineradicable proneness to view things from the outside, which Lao-Tse and others caution us against when they tell us we must strive to nullify the gap between the “I” and the “not I” in any attempt to “know” what is what. When, however, we stick to the method of description in which we use the correspondence of the psi class in the manner suggested, we can break down to a great extent the distinction between the “I” and the “not I” at the same time as we are forced step by step to connect in one system the doings of the electron, the strivings of man, and the motions of the stars. An anthropocentric bias in our conception of the psi correspondence sooner or later becomes untenable except in terms of ourselves as the map makers. x We have tried to minimize the number of separately conceived disconnections with which science has to deal. We as parapsychol- ogists term the disconnection we deal with the correspondence of the psi class. Physicists and biologists no doubt would prefer to call it something else. But whatever it is called, it performs the same service descriptively in linking events which can be ordered meaning- fully but not in terms of those congruent pointer readings to which we give the shorthand designation of “force.” We have tried to out- line a system whereby it might be possible to take care of several unknowns with one basic postulate, much as the Federal Reserve Banking system has been able enormously to expand the monetary credit structure with a single mobile cash reserve. If there be some who prefer to believe that the kiting of correspondences that we do in these maneuvers corresponds to something “inside” or “outside” that may be called causality, I can not personally foresee in this any undesirable consequences. At least such a belief might constitute a “cause,” so to speak, serving to unite various factions in an other-

22 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research wise loosely knit household, like a decrepit old family servant who no longer gets the stairs swept but whose welfare nevertheless con- stitutes the one effectual point of liaison between the otherwise mutually disinterested members of the younger generation. One way or the other, however, it no longer appears strictly necessary to divide the universe into two mutually irreducible principles, causality and chance, or causality and synchronicity.* These apparent opposites can be satisfactorily brought together and reduced into mutually meaningful terms by the consistent use of our correspondence-making system. In regard to the question of, “Is there or is there not a power behind the throne,” it may indeed be that with so much concrete “causality” in absentia, we are led inevitably to a metaphysical God concept. But such a concept need not be a static one, however much of a hard, unfilterable residue may be yet left over after all its trans- formations. The fact is that the metaphysical God of Whitehead is not quite the same as that of Aristotle: One might say that he has shrunk somewhat (although very little, to tell the truth) in mystery as he has gained in cleverness, much as a magician who has bit by bit revealed his secret methods of legerdemain. In a sense he remains the master magician whether he leads you to believe in the immanent entelechy of his strange automatons or tells you finally that he does it all by cybernetics. But even if one felt one had to rest upon the principle of an ultimate Godhead, it should be possible to do more than proclaim its utter unfathomability and unknowableness. Perhaps the Godhead can be seen and known by means of certain tricks and devices, technical and operational mirrors, if you will, in many modalities now still unperceived or uncomprehended. By progressive devacuumization and definition, by substitution of sharp lineament and positive specification for hazy aura, we can perhaps trade ultimate for penultimate mystery, approach more closely to The Asymptotic Essence. In such an approach, which we might make somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, the psi correspondence would appear at the moment to give us our maximum leverage. 4It seems to me that in any case Jung’s distinction between causality and synchronicity is not very helpful. What is generally referred to as causality has fundamentally all the earmarks of what Jung terms synchronicity in that it is found to “consist of,” so to speak, nothing but a certain type of meaningful- ness; and what Jung terms “synchronistic” occurrences have as much right to be considered “causally” connected, insofar as we can succeed in ordering them at all, as any other events. Whether or not they have a connection “in them- selves” may be beyond our power to ascertain; but so long as we are able to connect them in ways which we regard as lawful, we have a right to view them, if we so please, as “causally determined.” We can do no more in the case of the heavenly bodies.

Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 23 XI Before concluding, I would like to say something about those psi correspondences to which the term “precognition” has generally been applied. Most parapsychologists have tended to regard the data of these correspondences as requiring radical alterations in our con- structs of time and causality. It is almost axiomatically assumed that on the face of things a complete revolution in our ways of ordering events in relation to these parameters will be required before a satis- factory framework for “precognitive” phenomena will ever be found. However, parapsychologists have failed fully to explore the logical implications of all the psi data they have, and have given short shrift to hypotheses advanced by investigators who have tried to do so. The most consistent hypothesis of this sort was put forth by Tanagras (16, 17), who attempted to account for all chronologically extraordinary psi correspondences (a term which I prefer to “precog- nitive phenomena”) on the basis of the more readily accepted psi “pro- cesses” such as telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis in conjunc- tion with hypotheses involving telepathic influence and control. Malevolent wishes on an unconscious level, corresponding to hexing and the “evil eye” on a conscious one, he believed to play a hidden but none the less greatly determinative role in the affairs of man- kind. Tanagras’ point in essence was that in the case of all psi correspondences which appear to be “precognitive,” the future is not foreseen but created, brought about by means of the agencies he described. I do not believe that Tanagras’ theory, or any other theory that rests exclusively on such simple and ready-to-hand notions as this author invokes, can account successfully for all types of psi corre- spondences which appear to be chronologically extraordinary, partic- ularly long term correspondences such as those which some of Nostradamus’ predictions might conceivably be classified as. How- ever, I do believe that Tanagras’ basic hypotheses are in the right direction, and that those of the parapsychologists who feel obliged to postulate novel, hidden “dimensions” (or what not) in regard to time are completely indefensible from every point of view. The 5 There is enough ground in the studies and commentaries on Nostradamus to date to warrant a much more searching historical and linguistic investiga- tion of his quatrains than has been done. To write these off as unsuitable_for further research is an unjustifiable presumption. 6 Some of these postulates have been presented in terms which look mathe- matical, but C. T. K. Chari has shown in a recent study (Time as Minkowski’s Fourth Dimension: Indian Astrological Magazine, Annual Number, 1952) that there is not a shred of evidence anywhere in mathematics to support the Notion that any sense they seem to make in this form is anything but illusory.

24 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research necessary assumptions (assumptions about “mind,” if we may so put it, rather than about “time”) that would be required to correct Tanagras’ theory and to bring it into concordance with our data are not only logically conceivable but even positively justifiable in terms of science’s present stockpile of correspondences, including those of the psi class.’ On the other hand, the radical assumptions about time which have been suggested to account for “precognitive” phenomena are irreconcilable on all fronts with all other correspondences known to science. On analysis these assumptions turn out to be magic wands which the looseness of our language permits us to wave about in all seriousness and solemnity. One of the more significant consequences of bringing the psycho- analytic set of correspondences to bear upon the problem of chrono- logically extraordinary psi correspondences (“precognition”) has been that a number of pieces of a complex puzzle have one by one begun to fall into place, revealing something of the depth and the interrelationships of the all-but-unconquerable resistances to psi which tend to narrow and distort the perspectives not only of science in general but also of the parapsychologists themselves. The working out of this puzzle has in many respects been like the unfolding of a mystery novel, with the resolution of one apparent paradox after another once the long hidden clue has been brought to light (5). The clue in this case seems to be related to one of the most important consequences of the origin somewhere in the dim past of the primor- dial family institution, with its much prolonged period of maternal dependency, namely, the development on man’s part of more and more ineradicable guilt over his destructive tendencies and his con- sequent need to project further and further from himself both the responsibility for his deeply repressed aggressions and the awareness of his active role in the events that he comes to conceive of as occurring “outside” of and apart from himself. This can be related on the one hand to the peculiarly obscure “now you see it, now you don’t” phenomenology of psi and, on the other, to man’s ostensible need to project the entire notion of causality step by step from within outward, beginning with the primitive conception of mana, progressing through magic and witchcraft to parallel developments 7 It will be necessary, however, for many parapsychologists first to untether themselves from the completely unwarranted assumption, implicit in much of the current literature, that our best source of information upon which to base inferences regarding the possible range and scope of psi is the laboratory. As a case in point we might cite the scandalously rigid attitudes toward PK which seem to prevail. One might gather that the reporting of observations on the behavior of dice constituted science, while the reporting of observations on the behavior of people — by such disingenuous dabblers as Crookes, Lodge Barrett and others — constitute merely unreliable contributions to folklore. , E Psi and the Problem of the Disconnections in Science 25 in science and religion, and culminating in our day in an epistemologi- cal device for getting rid of the basic concept altogether.® I believe that the time may soon be ripe for a counter-revolution in which both the data of psi correspondences and the data of psychoanalysis, particularly those relating to man’s hidden aggres- sions, his defenses against them and the techniques with which he attempts to minimize and deny them, will be brought into a frame- work for the ordering of experience much more unified and much more self-consistent than now obtains. The problem of the discon- nections in science will not then disappear, but it will have a decidedly new look about it. 8See in this connection, Kelsen, Hans: Society and Nature, University of Chicago Press, 1943. This author has been able to arrive through anthropo- logical and historical research at a thesis which checks precisely with the inferences to be drawn from a psychoanalytic approach to the problem of the disconnections in science (which can be said to include the problem of chrono- logically extraordinary psi correspondences). This thesis is that the conven- tional concept of causality had its origin in primitive fears of retribution for wrong done. Kelsen is able to show, among other things, that the original words for guilt and cause were identical in both the early Indian languages and in Greek, whence they were taken over into juristic forms and later into the writings of the early Greek scientist philosophers. 901 Sherman Street Denver 3 Colorado REFERENCES 1. Devereux, George, Editor, Psychoanalysis and the Occult. (An Anthology.) International Universities Press, Inc., New York, 1953. Ehrenwald, Jan, New Dimensions of Deep Analysis, Grune and Stratton, New York, 1955. Einstein, Albert and Infeld, Leopold, The Evolution of Physics, Simon and Schuster, New: York, 1938. Eisenbud, Jule, “Behavioral Correspondences to Normally Unpredictable Future Events,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, 1954, pp. 205-233, 355-389. , “The Problem of Chronologically Extraordinary Correspondences” (Privately circulated). , “The Use of the Psi Hypothesis in Psychoanalysis,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. XXXVI, Part 6, 1955. . “The Use of the Telepathy Hypothesis in Psychotherapy.” In: Specialized Techniques in Psychotherapy, Eds., Bychowski, Gustav and Despert, Louise, Basic Books, New York, 1952. 8. Jordan, Pascual, Verdringung und Komplementaritat, Strom-Verlag, Ham- burg-Bergedorf, 1947. 9. Jung, C. G. and Pauli, W., Naturerklarung und Psyche, Rascher Verlag, 1952. 10. Lillie, R. S., General Biology and Philosophy of Organism, University of Chicago Press, 1945. » 2 SN uw

26 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 11. Marbe, Karl, Die Gleichférmigkeit in der Welt, Beck, Munich, 1916. 12. Margenau, Henry, “Physical Versus Historical Reality,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. XIX, 1952, pp. 193-213. 13. Meerloo, J. A. M., “Telepathy as a Form of Archaic Communication,” Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, 1949, pp. 691-704. 14. Schroedinger, Erwin, What is Life? The Macmillan Co., New York, 1945. 15. Servadio, Emilio, “Le Conditionnement Transférentiel et Contre-transfér- entiel des Evénements ‘Psi’ au cours de 1!’Analyse.” Acta Psychother., Psychosom., et Orthopaed., Supp. Vol. 3. 1955. pp. 656-661. 16. Tanagras, A., Le Destin et la Chance, Société des Recherches Psychiques Hellénique (undated). , “The Theory of Psychobolie,” Journal A.S.P.R., Vol., XLIII, 1949, pp. 151-154. i aly