That Glass Screen

Earlier this week (What's Weird, March 3), I wrote about the extraordinary anomaly - as it seems to me - of living in a world where indications of psychism as a feature of consciousness are abundant, yet utterly invisible to a large section of society. As I said, it's like a parallel universe where I'm separated from other people, many of whom I value and respect as friends or as writers and thinkers, by a conceptual glass screen.

This is something that has preoccupied me a good deal over the past few years. Those of us who are literate in parapsychological matters, who are familiar with the work and thought of people like William James, Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, JB Rhine, Ian Stevenson and many many others, can find it hard to understand why our peers - friends, family, co-workers - often don't see our interest in the same way. The evidence that these researchers gathered, the analyses they made and the conclusions that they arrived at seem to us to be deserving, if not of actual acceptance then at least of consideration. But this body of work is not only largely unknown in intellectual circles, it's something many people don't even want to hear about. More than once I have been gently harangued by well-meaning friends who upbraid me for even showing an interest in it, as if I was somehow letting myself down.

I've recently been reading a book by Julian Baggini, a British philosopher who writes about his subject in accessible books and articles. This 2004 volume is titled What's It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. In chapter 3 (of 11) he disposes of life after death in just over four pages. He points out that consciousness appears to be dependent on the brain and that the idea of living on after death is difficult to make sense of, important arguments both. So far so reasonable. But he also says:

Belief in life after death can only be based on faith, since the evidence and good reasons required for a rational argument that it exists are lacking. The only evidence we have for life after death is the testimony of those who claim to have seen or communicated with the dead. This would certainly not stand up in a court of law and nor should it stand up in the court of reason. It is true, though not surprising, that a small number of these claims are hard to falsify. Among the many thousands of alleged communications with the other world there are bound to be a small number of uncanny coincidences and lucky guesses. However, if there were genuine communication between the living and the dead we would expect a great many more accurate and otherwise inexplicable communications. The fact that they are so rare suggests they are not genuine, but frauds, guesses, and coincidences.

Baggini is no foaming God-basher: au contraire, he's eminently reasonable and wears his atheism lightly.  I think - and I'm just guessing - that he talks like this here because it's the conventional wisdom in secular circles. He has no personal background of psychic experiences, his university philosophy department would almost by definition have been wholly secular, and he has never come across anything that would give him pause. In other words he's just very poorly informed. He has a vague idea about mediums, but gives no hint that he knows about the work with Piper and Leonard or the cross correspondences, let alone the vast data relating to crisis apparitions, near-death experiences and children's memories of a previous life, to name only a few of the 'reasons required for a rational argument'. If he wants to insist that these things are not sufficient reason for believing in post-mortem survival, then fine, he can apply his philosophical bag of tricks, as others have done. But an analysis this superficial will not do it.

There's a lot going on here, but I'd just like to mention the two things that are uppermost in my mind. One is that Baggini and many people like him, who might conceivably modify their views if they had an opportunity, have very little access to the data. True, they might find books by Braude, Ducasse, Broad, Almeder and others in the philosophy library, but they would still want to check the primary sources, and these are harder to get hold of. With the Internet that's starting to change, and hopefully more people will start to see what the evidence really consists of, if ways can be found to point them in the right direction.

At the same time, I think that for many people this is not really about the evidence, it's about what they feel comfortable with. This is stating the obvious, of course, but it's something we tend to forget when we upbraid sceptics for their complacency and intellectual cowardice, as we often do. The rest of Baggini's book offers a thoughtful series of ideas and arguments about how humans can find the meaning of life themselves, without having it thrust on them. For some people there is moral value in ignoring parapsychology, and it's something we should take into account when we try to draw their attention to it.

Comments

[Dean P.]

I agree that for some people PSI, or even worse, any possibility of life after death is inconvenient at best and extremely threatening at worst. But, how many people really enjoy the idea that the brain is a piece of meat entirely responsible for one's experience? Some, I'm sure, but I'm also guessing the vast minority. And yet it is this view that is pervasive in academia. There is a definite chill about what one can and cannot and should not talk about. I'm a grad student who accepts that it is highly likely that PSI exists, but I would never talk about this topic with my professors or even fellow students because the issue has become highly 'political.'

As Rupert Sheldrake notes, it is absolutely amazing that we can talk in academia about infinite universes with not a shred of evidence and that this can pass as perfectly normal rational thinking; yet, any mention of PSI is dismissed out of hand.

If some people are against PSI or possibility of survival on philosophical or moral grounds - that's fine. But they should not attempt to stifle all of the debate out of hand because it is dishonest and I would say unethical. Science is supposed to be free of bias. We all know that cannot be. But surely we can do better than this. A good example of this is the field of evolution, where the random mutation mechanism currently cannot be challenged, even though it is a load of garbage that should not be taken seriously by anyone even slightly familiar with the topic. Yet, papers keep getting published with same assumptions and conclusions year in and year out. We've replaced one fairytale (creationism) with another (neo-darwinism). We should not just accept this.

[Mark]

So right after talking about the afterlife, you segway into saying, "Baggini is no foaming God-basher." Who's to say that you can't be a "God-basher" and still believe in the possibility of an afterlife. The last sentence I just wrote probably describes this guy pretty well:

http://members.tripod.com/~blackdragon_1998/atheismafterlife.html

I also am an atheist myself, but I am at least willing to say that it is definitely possible that some sort of consciousness survives the grave. It may be true that most people who believe in an afterlife also believe in a god of some sort, and that most people who do not believe in an afterlife also do not believe in any god, but the two are not necessarily linked. I think it is important to take care to separate the question of the existence of a god and the question of the existence of an afterlife.

[Eva]

But I think this is not really surprising considering this is how many people also live their lives in areas that are not concerned with psi. People newly in love often totally fail to notice/ acknowledge obvious flaws in the object of their affections, flaws that are often obvious to all those around who are more objective. People believe what they want to believe, that their problems are the fault of some other group of people or that the winning lotto tickets will surely be the next one or that screaming one more time in their kid's face will somehow do any good or whatever. Seems like it's natural (or common?) for people to screen all incoming stimuli so that it matches previously decided upon world views. This is a problem I think in all aspects of life, not just the paranormal and I also think it has a lot to do with when emotions are involved.

In the case of the paranormal, I think the emotion for many is fear of something that by its very nature sounds (is) powerful, all pervading, and could change every aspect of human existance. If you think about it, it's no surprise something so profound would bring up psychological shields in most people. To accept the ramifications of psi is to accept that almost everything they have ever assumed is wrong, that their lives are almost entirely different from what they had thusfar expected, that privacy is an illusion, etc etc. Scary stuff!

[John]

Eva, what you've said strongly echoes what I've recently said on another website about arguments. I argued that debates rarely hinge on solid facts, but rather, emotions.

[Mark]

I agree that it's not surprising at all, and I pretty much agree with everything else you said, Eva. I also agree with you, John. I have a lot of positions that seem contradictory until you examine them closely, so I'm bothered by this problem a lot.

[jack]

Off topic
Does anyone know what has happened to:
SurvivalAfterDeath.org
It has not been updated since July.
There is a tremendous amount of information on that site and somehow we should make sure it does not disappear.
sorry for being off topic.

[John]

Jack: The owners said somewhere they didn't have time for weekly updates. It'll still be around, but they just don't have time for constant updates.

[Kevin]

Robert: excellent posting. I've found your blog via Michael Prescott's, and I hope to contribute something worth reading.

Regarding Mr. Baggini's pronouncements, his belong to an intellectual sub-grouping I call "Fossilized Thought". His unexamined assumptions are both unfortunate and unsupportable. You are right to point out that such people, especially those who inhabit academia, are ignorant (often willfully) of the experimental evidence supporting psi-related phenomena. Even tenured professors are made to fear the wrathful disdain of their peers. The Materialistic Reductionism championed by Scientism creates an atmosphere of repression as great as any produced by the religions (mostly Christianity) which Scientific Enlightenment opposed. I would recommend Mr. Baggini begin furthering his education by reading "Irreducible Mind". Between the text and the bibliography, he will have plenty to occupy his thoughts, but he will need to beware if he dares to make revisionist statements showing the inadequacy of reductionism and empiricism in attempting to unveil the secrets of consciousness. The Priests of Scientism will tolerate NO heresies. To further augment his reading, I'd offer Jenny Wade's "Change of Mind" and Chris Carter's "Parapsychology and the Skeptics". Admittedly, I have had the advantage of personal experiences in some of these areas (precognitive dreams, death apparitions, ghosts/poltergeists), and so sought for answers and information AFTER encountering the seemingly incredible, but I would think that honest intellection could help bring Mr. Baggini and his ilk and least partially closer to the non-materialist reality. If not, then the old truth still holds: "science advances one funeral at a time". Not to wish a dirt-nap finale on anyone, may I suggest something about "old dogs and new tricks"?

[Robert McLuhan]

Kevin, thanks, good points, worth another post!

Mark, ditto about atheism not precluding belief in afterlife. Rather surprised by this guy's assertion that surveys show only one in five atheists/agnostics say there is no afterlife (perhaps he means the other way round) but it's clearly an important group.

[Mark]

Robert, I don't believe the assertion about only one in five atheists not believing in an afterlife, either. I would like to know where he got his numbers from. I'm certainly not going to vouch for the factual content in that essay, but I do still think that it effectively makes the point that it is at least reasonably possibly to be an atheist and believe in an afterlife.