Sarah Thomason (LH) posted at Facebook about the article of hers that has been reprinted most often, “one of my little papers on linguistic pseudoscience, not one of my more serious/substantial publications”:
The article is Past Tongues Remembered?, published in the Skeptical Inquirer decades ago. It’s about claims that, under hypnosis, people can be age-regressed to earlier lives and speak the languages they spoke in those earlier lives. This paper has been reprinted four times, three of them in other countries (India, Canada, Germany) and two of them in translation (French and German). Nothing else I’ve written has been reprinted more than once.
I’ve added the link, which will take you to the article (open access); here’s the start:
Suppose you want to convince people that you’ve discovered a
genuine case of reincarnation. If you can prove that your subject can
speak the language of an earlier incarnation, that would obviously be
strong evidence in favor of the reincarnation claim—provided, of course, that
the language is not the subject’s present native language and that you can
also show that the subject has had no chance to learn the “past life’s” language
in his or her current lifetime. The reasoning would go like this: Speaking a
language is a skill that requires extensive long-term exposure to the language.
If a person has that skill, but lacks such exposure in his/her current lifetime,
then the skill must have been acquired paranormally—for instance, in a
previous lifetime whose memory lingers on.There are several published case studies in which reincarnation (or the
related phenomenon of temporary possession of a subject by another per-
sonality) is proposed as the source of a subject’s ability to speak a foreign
language. The most impressive of these case studies are in two books written
by Ian Stevenson (1974; 1984), who is Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the
University of Virginia Medical School. Stevenson has studied two native
English-speaking subjects who, under hypnosis, manifest foreign personalities
and seem to speak—very haltingly—foreign languages, specifically Swedish
and German, respectively. To establish his subjects’ linguistic competence in
these languages, Stevenson arranged sessions in which native speakers of
Swedish and German interviewed the subjects, questioning them about their
past lives; in the second case, Stevenson himself participated in the interviews,
since he knows some German
She demolishes the claims in satisfying fashion; in one sense, it’s hardly worth the trouble — to a rational mind the whole idea is silly, and someone who believes it is not going to be convinced anyway — but it’s still an enjoyable read.
By what reasoning do you conclude the whole idea is silly?
The only surprising thing about this is that a professor of psychiatry should be so completely ignorant of even the basics of linguistics. But even that suprise is probably misplaced.
William Samarin on glossolalia is worth reading, BTW. (Referenced in the article.) A proper linguist (I have his grammars of Gbeya and Sango) he was raised as a Molokan, so he knew what he was talking about. Some of his stuff is online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Samarin
By what reasoning do you conclude the whole idea is silly?
By the same reasoning I conclude the ideas of ghosts, telekinesis, and alien visitation are silly — the only “evidence” for them is hoked-up nonsense that wouldn’t fool anyone but a true believer.
This is not about evidence, but effectiveness.
Alien visitation is an adult version of playing doctor. It’s much more expensive to set up, but there have been cases over the years where I would have gladly donned an E.T. mask if I thought it might further my purposes.
Public protestations against certain activities never fazed me. In a more discreet ambiance, many doors opened at a knock.
I think that some of these “rectal exploratory visitations” may have actually happened – except that no aliens were involved.
To believe in reincarnation, you presumably already have to believe that some kind of very comprehensive amnesia takes place between one life and the next. It would seem rather inconsistent to expect knowledge of a previous language to survive that. Thinking back to Plato, you might expect the erased knowledge to somehow prime acquisition, so that a person who had been German in a past life might learn German more easily than one who wasn’t. But of course a person who thinks he was German in a past life and finds a German class already has a strong inner motivation to learn it which should put him ahead of the game anyway.
(German is a bad example anyway, for a 20th c. American, or indeed any English speaker; Kusaal, now, that would make for a stronger argument.)
By the same reasoning I conclude the ideas of ghosts, telekinesis, and alien visitation are silly
To believe in reincarnation, you presumably already have to believe that some kind of very comprehensive amnesia takes place between one life and the next.
For me the matter is even simpler. I dismiss the very idea of reincarnation, because it’s founded on the idea of incarnation which* I reject as ultimately incoherent.
* Benign non-restrictive which with no preceding comma. A comma would weaken the force of the comma before because – and grammar is not (pace Pullum, on which/that) hostage to punctuation. Such a comma would also introduce a slight ambiguity.
@DE: from the Wipe article on Samarin you linked:
#
Samarin was also the author of the first textbook on field research in linguistics, and the first to use the term “field linguistics” (Samarin 1967).
#
Athough of course I know from nothing, I vaguely remember reading that other people have been credited with “first to use the term” in the 1920-40s – or at least “first to take field research seriously” as an enhancement to poring over manuscripts in a philological armchair.
Yeah. Seems a hostage to fortune to say things like that.
He evidently was a very capable field linguist himself, which seems to me to be quite enough to be going on with.
Incidentally, according to his grammar, in 1962 practically everyone in the CAR could speak Sango as a L2 except for “very old women in remote areas”; yet another illustration that Zamenhof had the wrong idea about language and conflict.
Evidently very old women in remote areas are the only real hope for humanity.
[Sango undoubtedly is a creole, BTW, contrary to the implication of WP’s “the history of the Sango language, which he claimed involved pidginization.” (Maybe the issue has got politicised somewhere along the line.) It also has lexical tone, with three tones: suck it up, John McWhorter!]
Evidently very old women in remote areas are the only real hope for humanity.
Our newest predicament with an old man at the Free World’s throbbing centre lends that idea some credibility – to say nothing of coherence (a genuine concern, thereabout).
Evidently very old women in remote areas are the only real hope for humanity.
Anyone who survives the Flood of Information, not just those in remote areas without internet access, is a hope for humanity. The Ark of Unknowing is the only safe bark. (“Somewhere, a bark docked”)
Seemwhere in the dustance a god embarqued. (We have much to learn, we eulexics.)
Kusaal, now, that would make for a stronger argument
I was clearly Kusaasi in a previous life …
It’s sometimes said that people from the cultures thereabouts “believe in reincarnation”, but I think this is something between a simple error of fact and a category mistake. A lot of people have the win “spiritual individuality” of an ancestor as their own sigir “spiritual guardian” but that is hardly the same thing. And although win probably comes closest to our “soul” in terms of how people conceptualise the makeup of a human being, it really is by no means the same thing. (It’s not totally bizarre that the Bible translators hijacked the word to mean “pagan god.” You can at least see how it happened.) I think there are related cultures that hold that you can actually have the win of an ancestor as your own, but it’s still not the same concept as what Westerners mean by “reincarnation”, even then.
Similarly, Theravadin Buddhists don’t, properly speaking, believe in reincarnation: the concept is empty, because there is no “soul” to reincarnate. They believe in the transmission of moral cause and effect across lives, which is not the same thing. (Their stock analogy is lighting one candle from another.)
Alien abduction is a modern version of demonic possession—framed in science fiction, rather than fantasy, language, because science and technology are the kinds of wonders that are is natural and respected in our modern culture.
I have heard it claimed, rather uncharitably, that the incidence of garden-variety (no abduction angle) UFO sightings has declined rather than increased with the fairly recent ubiquity of cell-phones-with-cameras that would have made it easier to document such sightings than was the case in earlier times when the average person who might stumble into such a situation quite understandably did not have a camera on their person at all times. Is there good data out there on how the rate of abduction reports has varied over time and what the trendline in the last decade or two has been like?
While Brett’s analogy may be correct as to abduction-specific scenarios, one might note with a more positive valence that others have seen anthropological parallels between a) more positive sounding UFO-encounter narratives; and b) narratives of simple-but-pious peasant children etc. encountering the Bl. Virgin Mary.
The BVM is known for her vimana.
https://www.historicmysteries.com/unexplained-mysteries/vimana/22091/
The only surprising thing about this is that a professor of psychiatry should be so completely ignorant of even the basics of linguistics. But even that suprise is probably misplaced.
Very definitely misplaced, I’m afraid.
The age of polymaths has passed; my own researches in playing-card history (my hobby) have taught me that there is apparently no limit to the potential deficiency of specialists’ knowledge in all fields other than the one in which they specialize. For example, in an otherwise excellent essay by a clearly quite capable art historian (in a collection accessible here: https://books.google.com/books?id=9mscDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false ), we find on p. 71 the statement “Unfortunately we see only the backs of the cards [in the painting]”. This refers to the painting shown as Fig. 4 on p. 69, in which a woman holds three cards in her hand. The designs of two of them are partially visible, and the designs are obviously different. Therefore, the only way those could be the backs of the cards is if they were from different decks, which seems very unlikely … and it would surely not have been difficult to do even a tiny bit of research into traditional Italian playing cards, which would have revealed that such cards always feature suits of Coins and Cups, as are visible on the cards in this painting.
Alas, this is not an isolated example.
From the wonderful world of
[AI Overview: Learn more
Ian Stevenson (1918-2007) was a University of Virginia psychiatry professor and researcher who was known for his work on reincarnation:
Research : Stevenson was fascinated by unusual experiences and conducted research into reincarnation, apparitions, and near-death experiences. He traveled the world for decades, recording over 2,500 cases of children who claimed to remember past lives. He believed that reincarnation, along with heredity and environment, could explain a range of personality traits.
Publications: Stevenson wrote many books on reincarnation, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966), Cases of the Reincarnation Type (1975-1983), and Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997).
Division of Perceptual Studies: Stevenson founded the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1967. DOPS investigates the paranormal.
Support: Chester Carlson, the inventor of the xerox machine, funded Stevenson’s research and accompanied him on a field trip. When Carlson died in 1968, he left a million dollars in his will to support Stevenson’s work. ]
I note that (per WikiP) : Supporters of his work include … a psychiatrist and colleague at the University of Virginia who now heads the division Stevenson founded….
— This morning the view of PKD’s Black Iron Prison is clearer than ever.
In further news, cf perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_T._Pepper
The only surprising thing about this is that a professor of psychiatry should be so completely ignorant of even the basics of linguistics. But even that suprise is probably misplaced.
Imagine a burst aorta, emergency surgery, a ~39 cm incision. Things were closed up with lots of metal staples. They were grey, so that ruled out stainless steel. The patient, a humanities major, suspected a titanium alloy.
Visiting the life saving surgeon about a month after the event, the patient expressed gratitude to the brilliant doctor. He also asked her, out of curiosity, whether the metal staples, now removed, were non-ferrous, and if so, what metal or alloy was used. She not only had no idea, she showed no interest in the topic.
When I told my family physician about this, he muttered something about “par for the course… all they care about is cutting…no intellectual curiosity.”. I remain grateful for the surgery, and surprised by the lack of interest in the tools of the trade. Titanium-nickel alloy.
John Mack was head of the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School* when he concluded that the people he was studying who claimed to have been visited or abducted by aliens really had been. He was not a stupid person and, if not an actual polymath, at least passed as one (winning a Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Lawrence of Arabia).
* The field of psychiatry, at least in America, does not ever seem to have found a balance between different treatment modalities. My grandfather was a psychiatrist, and when he entered the profession in the 1940s, it was standard for him and other medical doctors to do a lot of talk therapy and relatively little prescribing of medication. However, this changed over time, in part due to the vast expansion in the array of psychiatric medications available; it made sense to be slower to put a patient on a drug when the only drugs available were things like haldol. Nowadays, psychiatric practice is very heavily focused on pharmaceutical treatments, with patients expected to have a separate provider for therapy. One upshot of this is that psychiatrists like Mack may not remember that much of what they were supposed to learn about practical psychology.
I’ve certainly known surgeons who would bang on at length about the composition of their favourite staples, sutures or whatever.
Orthopaedic surgeons are especially prone to this.
Skin sutures/staples are probably not a good test case. Not only are they temporary, but by that stage of the procedure the surgeon has probably got bored after all the excitement of preventing actual death.
My experience of surgeons is that they are probably less prone to intellectual incuriosity than most of those who work in intensive jobs that will eat your whole life if you let them.
(I am in no way biased in this assessment …)
the surgeon has probably got bored after all the excitement of preventing actual death.
I imagine boredom would set in even when death was not prevented – were it not for grief-stricken relatives demanding explanations. Then the surgeon has to keep on his/her toes to prevent actual lawsuits.
There are indeed various exciting aspects to the job.
If you see a crocodile, don’t forget to scream!!!
I take it you aren’t allergic to nickel…!
I take it you aren’t allergic to nickel…!
Either that or I have been reincarnated as ________.
Taking DE’s comment to heart—no vascular puns intended—I recall many of my undergrad classmates. They were pre-meds majoring in history or comparative literature or Romance languages. Those I stay in contact with are now retired from practicing various fields of medicine, and they continue to show strong interests in many non-medical topics. Could my family doctor’s comment about lack of intellectual curiosity among surgeons reflect a generational shift? Is it American only?
Tunnel vision is, of course, common in many areas. While working on an MBA I was dismayed to find that the great majority of students could talk about business, sports, and… Well, not much else seemed to grab their attention. I sought refuge among the Latin American contingent, a nice collection of polymaths.
It seems like there are a wide number of what might be loosely called “paranormal” or “outside-current-consensus-thought” phenomena that could equally plausibly account for e.g. Swedish fluency on the part of someone whose biography revealed no exposure to Swedish speakers or motive/opportunity to have studied Swedish. How could you assess whether reincarnation-of-someone-who-spoke-Swedish-in-a-prior-life is a more or less likely causal explanation for the evidence than, e.g. demonic-possession-by-a-Swedish-speaking-demon?
I used to work for one of the pioneers of Emergency Medicine in the UK, back in the days when A and E (what Americans call ER) had only recently separated itself definitively from the trauma-management side of orthopaedics (I’m that old.) It was still very much a surgical specialty.
He had a longstanding interest in mediaeval law, somewhat handicapped by not being able to read Latin. (He used to get me to translate documents for him.)
I also remember (and revere) him for being one of the best people I have ever met at defusing complaints by meeting the complainants personally (a highly valuable skill in A and E, where you will get formal complaints made against you and you eventually will get sued.)
demonic-possession-by-a-Swedish-speaking-demon
Impossible. All Scandinavian demons speak Danish.
Thomason’s paper actually does discuss the alternative-supernatural-explanations thing a bit: hence the reference to Samarin (although what he discusses is glossolalia, not xenolalia.)
Looking at some of the other links of the WP article for Stevenson, it rather seems that he had a shaky grasp of scientific method in general, rather than just linguistics. I think he practiced the subtype of psychiatry where this is not a show-stopper; less common these days.
How could you assess whether reincarnation-of-someone-who-spoke-Swedish-in-a-prior-life is a more or less likely causal explanation for the evidence than, e.g. demonic-possession-by-a-Swedish-speaking-demon?
If you’re speaking Swedish from a prior life it would be somewhat-to-very archaic and likely an archaic dialect at that. Anyone speaking modern Swedish for no plausible reason must be demonically possessed .
vascular puns
In the same vein, somaware a goddess embarked. Truly, vimana better at सच्च things.
Alien abduction is a modern version of demonic possession
the aliens versions of the anti-societal-cabal intellectual myth (to jam 280 pages of norman cohn into 5 words) that is the main euro-colonial locus for demon possession narratives is fascinating in the variety of ways it can connect to other elements of far right ideology, from icke’s Reptilians to some of the “root-race” theory variations to regular old black-helicopter militia stuff.
For those who enjoy this stuff in small doses, the Internet Archive has a scan of Ancient Egypt Speaks, one of the more remarkable such artifacts, with generous use of a Middle Egyptian font. (Here is a contemporary — I am pretty sure satirical — review by Christopher Sykes.)
Or IAPSOP, which has scanned millions of pages of Spiritualist periodicals.
This brings up a fond recollection of Masters of Atlantis; Portis came up here recently.
Well, of course vimana gets penultimate stress because it’s really vimāna (विमान) – with pleasant etymology and connexions.
On an unrelated matter, I have not seen robust, well-considered, or useful distinctions between synergistic and the less common synergetic. I have a plan to use synergistic, along with the general, to mean “manifesting synergy” (compare categorical, historic) and synergetic to mean “having to do with synergy” (compare categorial, historical). Do I have Hattic approval for this venture?
Recently I was discussing, with the chief technical lead of a group of critical applications, some code locations that were programmed in unnecessarily complicated ways and thus were hard to understand. I ventured to remark that I couldn’t imagine why someone would write such code.
His answer:
Q: Warum leckt sich die Katze am Hintern?
A: Weil sie das kann!
Transposed into the human realm – it’s natural for a show-off to show off.
synergistic and the less common synergetic
Do you have room for synergic in your scheme?
The German word for what a male peacock does with its tail is radschlagen. I just discovered the English expression for that: train rattling. Males often spread their tails, but they rattle them only in the presence of females.
Why does a programmer rattle his train ? Because he can. Hens are not required.
Thanks MMcM. Why not? But I can’t readily think of a shade of differentiated meaning for it.
Ancient Egypt Speaks
That reminds me of the famous case of Umm Seti, who reportedly took a slightly more realistic attitude towards her language skills:
Reincarnation with minor impairments. It’s only natural that skills become weaker when not exercised for thousands of years.
It’s conceivable that she is a reincarnation of a slightly earlier imposter or crazy lady like herself.
Q: Warum leckt sich die Katze am Hintern?
A: Weil sie das kann!
Familiar to me as “Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can.”
The German version has no potentially harmful imputation of biological gender.
forgotten how
But E. A. Wallis Budge taught her (again, if you like) and she was a fast learner and a good draughtsperson.
Hulme had the practical idea of using Lady Nona to clear up some ambiguities of Ancient Egyptian phonology.
What would really confuse the issue would be if an actual competent scholar of Egyptian became convinced that they were a reincarnated Ancient Egyptian.
One of the ways of recognising that visual symptoms are unlikely to be due to a straightforward physical lesion is that they may be inconsistent with known anatomical facts about how vision actually works (some of which are quite counter-intuitive.)
I pointed out once to a highly expert neurophthalmologist that if he ever evinced so-called “functional” visual symptoms we would be in serious diagnostic trouble.
Interesting, DE. Compare classic ways to distinguish cases of “hysterical” paralysis (or numbness, etc.) from “genuine” neurally rooted cases that fit with the dermatomes. To say nothing of Anton[‘s] syndrome, and anosognosias that are not quite so dramatic. (And to say even less of blindsight.)
I think reincarnation possible.
Admittedly, not wishing to argue it.
not wishing to argue it
You can always change your mind in a later reincarnation.
One point that people sometimes miss is that even if past memories are veridical, they’re not necessarily one’s own past memories, whatever that exactly would mean in the first place.
As for me, I’d be inclined to dismiss the whole notion if I hadn’t read Don’t You Remember? by my eminently truthful friend Ms. George Ella Lyon.
Good example, Stu, why not wanting to argue here.
(You later change too?)
I simply wished to register.
I have occasionally toyed with the notion that we might all take turns with incarnating as everyone (I see no reason to limit the reincarnation idea to being sequential in time. Why should it be?) So whatever you do to someone, it will eventually be yourself on the receiving end, again.
A drawback is that I can’t see this idea appealing to billionnaires. Have to come up with some other funding stream.
That might take care of the fact that the world population is growing.
@dm
It should appeal to you on grounds of parsimony, only one soul is required. Although perhaps you prefer an alternate hypothesis requiring zero souls.
I had in mind a sort of sequential queuing system, but yes, that’s actually quite possible given these parameters: just one soul would suffice. And entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, after all.
I hadn’t envisaged any transference of memory or karma. (The classic Buddhist setup is a zero-soul system, but with transmission of karma. Quite neat, really.) More a kind of supernatural Rawlsism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
With a judicious dab of Galen-Strawson-style panpsychism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen_Strawson
we could then have a stab at unifying ethics and quantum physics. Now that might appeal to some billionnaire tech bro. I mean, it’s quite plausible compared with some of the stuff they actually believe in. (We’re not talking sophisticated thinkers here.)
Gotta consider that funding stream.
Got it!
If tech bro achieves his objective of eternal life with all fleshly pleasures immediately available, that gives the One Soul an unlimited amount of Good Times beside which its sojourn in billions of downtrodden peasants is insignificant in the long term. Totally self-absorbed egotism is the highest possible virtue. This is even better than Effective Altruism!
I think that’s my retirement taken care of …
[The above posts under my name are copyright to David Ernst Stavro Eddyshaw, 2024. All rights reserved with extreme prejudice.]
@DE:
i regret to inform you that you may have rediscovered the tsadik-prinzip interpretation of the lurianic doctrine of the shattering of the vessels / gathering of the shards, in which a recombinant-soul-shards model of reincarnation plays a significant role in the process of reassembling the unitary divine essence (tikkun), through the mediation of a virtuosic spiritual intermediary. i hope you have your red wrist-thread handy; if the TESCREAL cell within the Kabbalah Centre finds you have stumbled onto the truth without their assistance, the consequences could be dire! or, worse, you could fall into the hands of the tunnel-digging faction of ChaBaD!
(my apologies to charles stross, and especially to Fabian Everyman MP – iä! iä! cthulhu fhtagn!)
This “DE” whom you address is a mere front for Our true identity. We do not fear this Kabbalah Centre of which you speak, and Our bunker has a reinforced concrete tunnelling-resistant floor.
(Fabian is a good sort when you get to know him. We wish he’d stick up for himself a bit sometimes, though, instead of just meekly going along with everything We tell him to do.)
I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?
@ rozele,
our research group here at Miskatonic is working to use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(proof_assistant)
to calculate the graph cohomology of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefirot
bwa ha ha haa…
one-electron universe
I arrived at a similar idea to explain the apparent lockstep behavior of “entangled” particles far apart. They’re merely the fingertips of a single hand with its fingers inserted slightly into spacetime.
I got the idea from a horror movie made around 1970, in which someone going down a corridor sees the outlines of hands (trying to grab the someone) pressing inwards against the walls, as if these were made of rubber. Rosemary’s Baby ?
Could also be that all particles of the same kind are the visible infinitely-many teats of one infinite sow otherwise invisible in the darkness of the void.
Makes sense.
The initial versions of the language, later known as Lean 1 and 2, were experimental and contained features such as support for homotopy type theory – based foundations that were later dropped.
I dropped the HOTT book only yesterday and nearly broke a toe.
So according to Mr Strawson, it’s not just a metaphor when a physicist says that an electron is experiencing acceleration due to an electrical field/the Lorentz force?
Presumably.
Panpsychism is apparently not regarded as so far-out among philosophers as one might naively have supposed, perhaps because it seems to coexist quite happily with a far-from-mystical general outlook.
Russell (surely no mystic) had a not completely dissimilar view:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#RussMoni
(Naturally, rather than all this Westernising talk about “mind” and “consciousness”, I would prefer to recast this myself in terms of the much more coherent Kusaasi concept of win. I can see no fundamental difficulty with the idea that an electron might have a win, though I don’t recall the matter coming up much in conversation.)
@Jerry Friedman: That “only one electron” thing doesn’t really work.
@rozele: Sabbatai Tzvi sonetimed evoked imagery of the kellipot (husks?) imprisoning the nitzotzos (sparks of holiness) as eldritch abominations. Then he joined them.