Myth of an Afterlife?

A couple of people have spoken to me about a review I wrote last year for the SPR Journal, on a book purporting to debunk afterlife claims. I thought I’d give it a more general airing.

The book is titled The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against Life After Death, and is a collection of essays aiming to demolish arguments for survival of consciousness after death. It’s edited by Michael Martin and Keith Augustine and published by Rowman and Littlefield, who also published Irreducible Mind (which in terms of heft and production values it rather resembles). It proclaims its departure from nearly all of the contemporary literature on an afterlife in taking the ‘eminently reasonable’ position that, in all probability, biological death permanently ends a person’s experiences. It argues that the questions that one should ask about an afterlife have been mainly dictated by those who believe in one, and encourages the consideration of other questions that have been overlooked but that are essential to ask.

The writers are mainly philosophers and psychologists, with some neuroscientists and others. Many are, or have been, involved in paranormal sceptic activities. The volume is jointly edited by Michael Martin, an atheist philosopher, and Keith Augustine, a philosopher and executive director of the sceptics website Infidels.org, which is dedicated to combating pseudoscience and paranormal belief on the Internet (and which one supposes is behind much of the aggressive editing of psi-related material on Wikipedia.)

The essays are grouped in four parts. The first, headed ‘empirical arguments for annihilation’, describes in detail the dependence of life and mental functions on a working brain and nervous system - the effects of strokes, accidents and dementia; brain scans that connect behavioural changes to lesions in specific areas, and so on – along with insights from evolutionary theory and the relationship between personality and genetics. Given the powerful scientific evidence - from cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, comparative psychology, behavioural genetics, evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, and neurophysiology - it seems obvious that minds cannot exist in the absence of a functioning brain, however much we might wish it.

The second section describes conceptual and empirical difficulties for the principal models of survival: interactionist substance dualism, an ‘astral’ body, and the Christian idea of bodily resurrection. Essays explore such topics as the metaphysical impossibility of survival or of nonphysical souls violating physical laws, and the implausibility of astral bodies and astral worlds, the latter by Susan Blackmore. The philosopher of mind Jaegwon Kim also makes an appearance, arguing for the incoherence of the dualist idea of an immaterial mind or soul interacting with a physical brain.

A short section of three essays focuses on concerns about the nature of afterlife. They expose logical absurdities such as the idea of God condemning a person to an afterlife in hell, and the incoherence of notions of heaven: How would a soul move from place to pace? How would it recognize other souls? What would disembodied souls do all day, since presumably there would be no need to sleep? A third essay addresses the intrinsic unfairness of karma, as a moral law that inflicts horrible punishments on individuals in the form of disease, disabilities and poverty for alleged previous wrongdoing they have no recollection of ever committing.

It’s not uncommon for atheist writers to tackle survival without at all referencing the evidence from psychical research (for instance, Mark Johnston’s Surviving Death (2010) and Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife (2013) ). The editors here are fully aware of the importance of such research for many people, and accordingly take pains to demolish it as thoroughly as possible. Essays in section four address alleged shortcomings in claims for ghosts and apparitions, out-of-body and near-death experiences, and reincarnation and mediumship research.

The book is impressively clear, thorough and detailed. It is also forcefully argued. The driving force is Keith Augustine, who set the cat among the pigeons some years ago with a series of arguments in support of near-death experiences being hallucinations, which are reprised here; he also provides two of the longest essays, an introduction and a chapter titled ‘The Dualist’s Dilemma: The High Cost of Reconciling Neuroscience with a Soul’ (co-written with Yonatan I. Fishman). These two pieces cover most of the main arguments, with the other contributions reinforcing it with sidelights and detailed explorations of individual facets.

As one would expect, this is a highly partisan construction, of the kind that a team of expensive lawyers would present in court to sway a jury. Any refuge or loophole used by survival proponents is ruthlessly sought out and exposed. Might one suppose that terminal lucidity – the phenomenon of elderly patients with advanced dementia being restored to a brief moment of coherence in the hours or minutes before death – reinforce a dualist view? Alas, says Augustine, the evidence is anecdotal; hardly any cases have been satisfactorily documented. In any case, we should not place too much trust in exceptional cases:

Proponents who appeal to uncharacteristic cases as evidence for the independence thesis … suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, latching on to any data potentially favorable to their own point of view, heedless of the fact that the exceptions prove the rule. And in focusing on the rare neurological outliers while disregarding the immense body of neuroscientific evidence unfavorable to their perspective, independence thesis proponents frequently overlook the comparatively poor quality of the data thought to support their point of view (p. 251).

Arguments that are often employed by survival proponents – perhaps somewhat casually – are forcefully confronted. Thus for instance, ‘correlation is not causation’ is countered by the observation that the effects of other organs – the kidney’s role in filtering toxins, for instance – is not disputed, and that it’s highly selective to apply different reasoning to the brain (p. 102). (Who now continues to resist the implications of the correlation between smoking and lung cancer?) To insist otherwise, is a ‘fallacy called moving the goalposts: an utterly unreasonable person pretends to be reasonable, if only more evidence, impossible to obtain, were available’ (p. 103).

Most readers here will find a major weakness in the book’s one-sided consideration of psychical research, as is usually the case with sceptic productions (although this will not be obvious to its natural audience). The arguments are as detailed and skilfully expounded as I have seen anywhere, but they stray little from the long-established script. Important caveats and objections regarding experiments and investigations– some new, others made originally made by psi researchers themselves – are mixed in with the familiar generalisations about cold reading, conjuring tricks, witness unreliability, and so on. Inevitably, studies that support the sceptic view – and that knowledgeable readers will recognise as laughably biased and misinformed - are said to have been carried out by ‘sophisticated’ researchers.

It also appears that, for all the focus on established science, the arguments here are not always less subjective than those they oppose. For instance, Augustine concedes that survivalists do not generally contest the neuroscientific evidence for mind-brain dependence: the problem is the way they interpret it (p. 4). But he nevertheless seems to believe that the great preponderance of evidence of correlation – which the book establishes by piling it up in quantity - obliges us to make the qualitative leap to accept causation.

Out of sheer intellectual honesty, a few brave souls within parapsychology have conceded the daunting challenge that this evidence poses for survival. But their only apparent recourse is to argue – quite implausibly – that the ambiguous parapsychological evidence for survival actually outweighs the virtually incontestable neuroscientific and other evidence for extinction (p. 5).

The claim of ambiguity surely cuts both ways. Even leaving aside evidence of psi, the source of consciousness in brain functions is never more than an appearance – however incontestable to some - and the considerable difficulties for physicalists of establishing how consciousness arises are hardly at all addressed. The writers have little to say about the problems raised by indications, thoroughly catalogued in Irreducible Mind, that mere suggestion can bring about appropriate, and highly complex, biological effects – sudden unexpected cures, stigmata, and the like – implying that, far from being an epiphenomenon, consciousness can exert direct effects on matter in ways utterly mysterious from a physicalist perspective. One imagines that such evidence would be treated on the same basis as paranormal claims (that it is weakly supported and probably spurious), but that can hardly be said about the placebo effect, which is not listed in the index.

Also, the book shows that tendency, marked with atheist and sceptic writers, to make unwarranted assumptions about what should be the case if such-and-such were true, and to hold that, since it is quite clearly not the case, it cannot therefore true. Sentences that begin, ‘One would expect that…’ should be treated with caution. We can accept, to take just one example, that viewed as a biological event, death should happen in a more-or-less uniform biological manner for every individual of the human species. But we cannot go on to infer that afterlife and rebirth must equally be uniform experiences, and that the manifold cultural variations in near-death and reincarnation reports therefore indicate that these are products of the imagination. If consciousness and memory survive the death of the body, one might at least acknowledge the possibility that communities continue to exist that are shaped by culture, and whose actions – for instance in the manner in which they are reborn, in terms of gender, the length of time following death, and so on – conform to the cultural norms that their members are accustomed to.

In this context there’s also a point to be made about differing temperaments. Much that is unflattering is said about those who believe in an afterlife: that they indulge in wishful thinking, that they’re swayed by religious faith in the teeth of the evidence, that they blithely overlook difficult scientific and metaphysical obstacles. But it hardly needs to be pointed out that sceptics have their own mental and emotional quirks: notably, the conservative tendency to seek security in what has been objectively established, and to be repelled by unappealing problems, mysteries and unresolved issues whose investigation, nevertheless, history tells us may lead eventually to new insights, and even to changed worldviews. It’s true that human testimony such as that provided by family members in rebirth cases can be infuriatingly complex and difficult to disentangle, but it doesn’t mean that conclusions cannot, or should not eventually be drawn from it that are potentially every bit as significant as those based on brains scans. And while questions about what survival could possibly mean boggle the literal mind, an imaginative exploration of these mysteries – such as many people follow by immersing themselves in psychical, religious and spirituality literature – can help to provide illumination.

That said, this is an important book, and can be read with profit by believers, if only to remind themselves how formidable the arguments against survival of consciousness can seem to be. It will reinforce the atheistic convictions of its natural audience, and will doubtless encourage young Americans, especially, to disregard the God-talk they hear spouted all around them. To be fair, for many people, it is far more reasonable to trust the conservative, well-established claims of brain science than the apparently uncertain – and often chaotic and incredible – testimony about anomalous experiences. One can only hope that at least some of those who are impressed by the book will have the curiosity to seek out the other side of the story.

THE MYTH OF AN AFTERLIFE: THE CASE AGAINST LIFE AFTER DEATH edited by Michael Martin and Keith Augustine. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, 2015. 675pp. £51.95. 978-0-8108-8677-3

References

Kelly, Edward F., et al. (2007). Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield).

Johnston, Mark (2010). Surviving Death. (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Scheffler, Samuel (2013) Death and the Afterlife. (New York: Oxford University Press).

Comments

[Julie Baxter]

"But it hardly needs to be pointed out that sceptics have their own mental and emotional quirks: notably, the conservative tendency to seek security in what has been objectively established, and to be repelled by unappealing problems, mysteries and unresolved issues whose investigation, nevertheless, history tells us may lead eventually to new insights, and even to changed worldviews."

But of course! The very thing that fundamentalists of all persuasions share is an inability to live with ambiguity. Fundamentalism is the creed of certainty. Everything must be nailed down and all the shapes placed neatly into the correct holes.

I really can't be bothered with all the arguments and counter-arguments anymore. Authors of books such as the above seek not to uncover truths (which, after all, are potentially dangerous to the nailed-down world view that keeps their hands from shaking) but, rather, they seek only to engage in endless verbal gymnastics in order to defend their stance. Engaging with such people is like trying to plait live eels in a bucket.

It all seems absurd and wholly nonsensical to me. I do suspect that life continues after death (or at least some form of consciousness remains). And I hold that there is sufficient evidence, both anecdotal and from scientific research, to make that a reasonable and rational perspective. But,on the other, hand I am not in any way disturbed to consider, seriously, the possibility that it might all prove to be some kind of anomaly.

It's an interesting subject when debated with intellectual honesty - without the need choose a side. Otherwise, it's an endless, tedious game of knights, knaves and normals.

[Steve Hume]

I couldn't have put it better myself, Julie. So I won't try.

[Julie Baxter]

Thank you, our Steve. :)

(Just don't get me going on the subject of Trump's supporters and apologists!) ;)

[Julie Baxter]

Ps. Those red links are nice and 'clicky', Robert, but they don't seem to lead anywhere. :/

[Robert McLuhan]

Mine seem to working OK, Julie. Anyone else having a link problem?

[Julie Baxter]

That's very spooky! Mine are working now too. But they definitely weren't the last time I tried them - and the time before that. Perhaps one of us is haunted?? 8}

[Robert McLuhan]

Not me :)

[Tony M]

If only your honesty in presenting the best thinking of the materialist viewpoint honestly and dispassionately. If only the other side did the same, the conversation could advance.

[Paul]

Interesting article Rob. I recall having a discussion with Keith Augustine some time ago and wasn't particularly impressed. He didn't seem to have read much of the research and didn't want to find anything we had read in common to discuss. Perhaps he was busy and I wasn't worth the effort.

Nevertheless, as Julie rightly mentioned, only someone who hasn't really looked at the research can dismiss it all. The body of research, as you know, is vast. That isn't the same of course as accepting survival as a fact, but what Keith is trying to do is to show it's a fact that there is no survival. It's pretty lame as far as I can see.

[Roy]

The skeptic of today should rather be known as a pseudo skeptic of yesterday because they are not skeptical of their own materialist belief system. Irreducible Mind was a grave attack on the materialist belief system, so the gatekeepers of materialism, the pseudo skeptics, got busy with this barnburner book to preserve their fantasy.

Of course, we're in an age when materialist belief system is going the way of the dodo. It has a big beak and heavy body and won't fly in the age of quantum and relativity. But pseudo skeptics love their materialism, so they will go to great lengths and apply unreasonable standards to their own and other's data. It has happened time and time again.

Yet, the evidence for psi and nde remain, and it's not going away. In fact, the evidence in their favor is increasingly clear as heart resuscitation techniques improve, and psi experiments become more repeatable. The day is coming when the pseudo skeptics will have to answer for their bogus misreadings.

[Alan]

"they are not skeptical of their own materialist belief system ... the gatekeepers of materialism, the pseudo skeptics, got busy with this barnburner book to preserve their fantasy."

I believe they *are* skeptical but some kind of response was necessary to books of the calibre of, say, Irreducible Mind. Been said before, present society is based on your mortgage, the daily grind, shopping, etc., not on the existence of spirits (though people encounter these too) and similar. Even though the former are just neuron firings in the brain! (for a materialist what else could they be?), though with practical consequences. The materialist is literally trapped in the brain and the world it presents.

Present science, I think, can be viewed as non-materialist via quantum ideas, so the whole base is undermined. Pure materialism seems sloppy thinking. On the one hand you're trapped in your neuron firings, on the other you're ignoring the basis of physics (and what could be beyond that in physics). I guess one can't run a practical education system if we go too deep.

[Lawrence B]

I can never quite bring myself to say I believe in life after death - certainly not that I have "faith" in it - but am more persuaded of it than not as a result of all that I read. But then again, as you pointed out in Randi's Prize, we tend to be convinced by the last book we read, and I have to recognise that like a committed sceptic my reading is entirely now confined to stuff which confirms and corroborates my established outlook on the subject. I read the material which confirms survival and am too dismissive of the "opposition" now to pay them much heed. Someone else's disbelief is none of my business.

But I have to pause and realise if I read the book reviewed here its arguments may convince me that all the stuff I've read before now was bunkum. Maybe we are just brain matter creating picture shows for itself before it finally shuts down.

And then I realise WHY I'm so willing to believe in apparitions and NDEs and after death communication and all the rest of it, despite lackof direct experience. It's because I KNOW, not suspect or believe or delude myself into thinking, but know in the every day sense that mind is not limited to the brain. I know this because the future turns up in my dreams with such petty regularity, and thoughts from the minds of friends almost as often, that the very premise of the materialist argument..that mind is brain, confined with its own walls, is to me personally and demonstrably untrue. I don't need to convince anyone else of it. I know it in the same way I know I have two hands and there's a sun in the sky. And accepting..knowing..that mind is not confined to the physical brain removes any reason to doubt the witness of those who encounter some other world. Because if mind and brain are not the same, then that the former may survive the death of the latter is no great leap at all. It doesn't mean that it does, but it does mean there is for me no logical impediment to accepting the testimony of the thousands who have seen ghosts, gone through a tunnel of light, heard the secret code from Aunt Ethel through a medium and all the rest. It could all turn out to be nonsense, but there is no reason to assume it is based on the materialist arguments of the book under review, because that - from my personal experience and perspective - is itself charmingly ignorant of "reality" as I experience it.

[Julie Baxter]

Alan writes: "I guess one can't run a practical education system if we go too deep."

Even so, it's a pretty lame excuse for conditioning students to pull the wool over their own eyes.

[Julie Baxter]

Lawrence B writes: "It could all turn out to be nonsense, but there is no reason to assume it is based on the materialist arguments of the book under review, because that - from my personal experience and perspective - is itself charmingly ignorant of "reality" as I experience it."

'Wilfully ignorant' might be nearer the mark.

[Lawrence B]

On the more philosophical/practical objections mentioned...how these non physical spirits make things happen, how they find each other, the physical space required of a "heaven" big enough to house them all...along with others not here mentioned...why do "ghosts" wear clothes, what sense organs are they seeing with when they have no eyes and so on...

Such questions strike me as showing a monumental lack of imagination.

Every night I - and you and everyone else - see without the use of eyes, hear without the use of ears, touch and interact without our limbs, and we inhabit physical spaces which are endlessly malleable and come into contact with any one our mind is drawn to. It's called dreaming. And to lucid dreamers, I'm told (never had one myself), once conscious and aware inside a dream it has all the sense of concrete reality as this waking life.

In other words it all happens in the realm of consciousness, of mind itself, and physical limitations and considerations are irrelevant. A sceptic might leap on the use of the word dream and say this just demonstrates that paranormal encounters suggestive of an afterlife are effectively dreams, hallucinations of some kind. But it does nothing of the kind. It says rather that if we survive physical death it just means - can only mean - that our minds carry on independently of our physical bodies..and that we already know that the world of the mind has and is capable of all of the qualities of experiencing senses and interactions that the authors of the above-reviewed book declare to me illogical and problematic. Clearly they're not.

[chel]

Oh, hey, comments made on paranormal topics have included the idea of the brain as inhibitor. Here is an article saying "a more complex brain isn't always a better one": https://hbr.org/2015/01/rats-can-be-smarter-than-people
Probably not connected, but... Thoughts?

[Alan]

"Even so, it's a pretty lame excuse for conditioning students to pull the wool over their own eyes."

Hi. Maybe spirituality as a module in religious studies, parapsychology in A level psychology and something relevant in physics? Should help I guess though the first is more likely and I'm uncertain if it's being done already.

[Ted Dixon]

Robert: I completely agree with your assessment of The Myth of an Afterlife, of both its strengths and weaknesses. A while before reading it, I wrote in a letter to someone approaching the end of his life and regretting what he saw as almost certain extinction:

In my view, survival (at least for some of us and perhaps on a very episodic basis, coming in and out of time) is not only possible in principle but, on the basis of the empirical evidence we have, slightly more likely than not in practice. This may be because at a deep level I want to believe - but I don’t think it is.

My line of reasoning for the likelihood of some form of survival:

1. Any view of reality that denies the possibility in principle is mistaken - in particular, the view that the empirical world as studied in the hard sciences is all there is.

2. The fact that well-known accounts of what an afterlife is supposed to be like seem preposterous to most of us does not mean that there cannot be an afterlife of a different sort, outside of anything we can conceive of.

3. There is a huge amount of evidence for phenomena highly suggestive of psi among the living and/or the agency of discarnate beings.

4. It is just about possible to account for all of this evidence in terms of psi on the part of the living (the super-psi hypothesis) but some of it is much more plausibly accounted for in terms of the agency of discarnate beings.

5. Some if not all of these discarnate beings are likely to have been formerly living humans. If the possibility of survival is not to be ruled out a priori, then the balance of the evidence is at least slightly in favour of it – however improbable the idea may seem.

How well does this line of reasoning stand up to that presented by Keith Austine and co? In broad terms I see no reason to change my position and, in broad terms again, there is nothing new to me in what Augustine calls the case for mortalism. But in 600 pages there is a huge amount of detailed fact and argument that any believer in the paranormal such as myself has to take seriously and engage with. I say ‘ believer in the paranormal’ rather than ‘believer in an afterlife’ because Augustine says there is nothing to chose between survivalist explanations (or as he says, non-explanations) and non-survivalist explanations. His position is that it is much more likely than not that all the purported evidence for the paranormal has a normal explanation. In Stephen Braude’s terms he attributes everything to the ‘usual suspects’ (hallucinations and mis-reporting etc) and rejects both ‘unusual suspects’ (psi in one form or another) and survival.

[Ian Wardell]

I've read the book in its entirety. I was going to write a review, but haven't found enough time. I have written a review of one of the chapters by Keith Augustine and Yonatan I. Fishman:

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/keith-augustine-in-myth-of-afterlife.html

I've been in contact with Keith and he's aware of my mini-review and he and Fishman might write a rebuttal at some point.

[Ian Wardell]

As well as the above blog entry, I talk about specific chapters on the myth of an afterlife in another couple of blog entries:

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/why-scientists-and-philosophers-reject.html

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/is-after-death-possible-if-we-are.html

Also in a fair number of facebook posts, but obviously in a much more slapdash manner.
Quite a few, but I'll just post 2 of them:

https://www.facebook.com/iwardell/posts/10153682957088555
https://www.facebook.com/iwardell/posts/10153517188903555

[Ian Wardell]

Lawrence B said:
"But I have to pause and realise if I read the book reviewed here its arguments may convince me that all the stuff I've read before now was bunkum".

As I mentioned above I've read the whole book. I can't say it convinced me of anything, or even made me pause for thought. Everything they mention I've come across or thought about myself. Most of it is devoted to talking about the way the mind is heavily influenced by brain states. This does indeed provide powerful evidence, but yet they fail to mention the most powerful evidence (at least in my opinion) which is general anaesthetic where people do not even experience any time as having passed!

And this huge book of 700 pages almost completely fails to mention the mind-body problem, and more specifically that consciousness cannot in principle be explained by science as it is currently conceived (see an essay of mine where I argue this http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/neither-modern-materialism-nor-science.html). Indeed many of the authors maintain that science tells us that consciousness is a product of the brain. But their assertion here amounts to basically that if x affects y, then x produces y. I think the authors need to get educated about what a scientific theory involves -- it involves more than merely noting correlations.

Also all the authors' conception of what might survive is simply untenable. They think that what must survive is what we are like *now* eg our current memories, interests, intelligence etc. Obviously it's very easy to argue against such a self surviving! Their position has the consequence not merely that there's no "life after death", but also we don't survive from childhood to what we are now. Indeed we don't survive from our sober selves to our drunk selves!

There's all sorts of silly points brought up such as what is the power source of souls to enable them to travel around Heaven! They're thinking that "Heaven" or an afterlife realm will be subject to the same physical laws as our world, so souls will need a form of physical energy to move around etc. But the afterlife realm, not being a physical realm, will not be subject to physical laws. Maybe they are subject to other natural laws, but how do we know they would rule out the ability of souls to travel anywhere simply by wishing it?

The transmission/receiver hypothesis is mentioned by Keith, but the problem here is that he seems to misunderstand it, or at least his conception of this hypothesis is not the same as mine (I talk about this in a comment at the following link http://pelicanist.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/what-lies-beyond.html).

Anyway, I've written loads of stuff on fb. I can give further links in addition to the one's above if anyone is interested.

[chel]

Lawrence, allow me to applaud your analysis.

[Keith Augustine]

I don't know if it is wise to comment here after intentionally keeping silent for so long (here and elsewhere), as I realized some time ago that it unnecessarily stirs up hostility to engage one's opponents directly on an issue for which there is so much emotional investment, especially online. My default view now is that it is better to leave people to their own devices, at least on this issue, and let those open to hearing what you have to say come to you directly, as those hostile to your thoughts will not seek out your take in the first place. Despite having once written an entry here titled "Sceptics Welcome," I think Robert's own description of my published engagement with near-death researchers as setting "the cat among the pigeons" in his review confirms that for many survival proponents, skeptics are in fact unwelcome--that is, after all, what the saying means. So I post the following with some hesitation.

Although I did not find out about the JSPR review until months after it was published, when I did read it I was fairly satisfied with what Robert had written despite some areas of disagreement/error because given the venue, I anticipated a much more vociferous response, which I had earlier discovered even print publication does not always correct for. (For one, book reviews are not peer reviewed.) So although I was never invited to respond in the JSPR (somewhat surprisingly since Susan Blackmore and Paul Edwards had been published there before), I did not necessarily feel a response was necessary, otherwise I would have crafted a letter to the editor for a future issue. So despite some continuing areas of disagreement, I give Robert a great deal of credit for being fair in his review, which is more than I can say for some other reviewers (including Ian in his partial blog review and comments here for reasons I'd probably best not get into here).

I'm momentarily breaking my silence here (wisely or not, we'll soon see) to let anyone who does care know that the Fall issue of the Journal of Parapsychology, out shortly, will contain a more detailed review of The Myth of an Afterlife (perhaps a "critical notice" is a more accurate description) followed by my response to the review (as well as that of two other contributors) and the reviewer's reply, ending on a wrap-up of the whole exchange by the JP editor. My response summarizes some of the main argument of The Myth of an Afterlife in the process of correcting the reviewer's misconceptions, but focuses on misconceptions about and mischaracterizations of the point (and argument) of the volume, some of which are evident in the comments on this entry, as well as in others' reviews of the volume. I don't have any illusions that this response will prevent others from mischaracterizing the volume in the future, but at least those who would hear now have something to listen to.

In the interest of avoiding setting the cat among the pigeons again, it's probably best to leave things at that, leaving unsaid what I could say in response to the other comments left on this entry. So please don't take my prudential decision not to engage you directly personally.

As a sort of erratum, though, I should note that, contra Robert, Internet Infidels has never had anything to do with editing Wikipedia articles (something that I would have thought a journalist could discover about an online organization fairly easily), and indeed I personally feel like doing so would be a waste of time since anything one might add is likely to be qualified, amended, or cut by those with another POV multiple times in short order, editing away one's original point beyond all recognition in the end. While those within parapsychology like to paint this as a skeptic problem (nothing unites like a common enemy), I think that if you checked the editing histories and/or talk pages for other issues, you would find in short order that this problem exists for any Wikipedia topic of controversy, and probably even more so for issues other than parapsychological ones, such as political topics.

I should also note that, out of the thousands of articles that we've put online, the Secular Web only has something on the order of a half-a-dozen papers on paranormal topics or even life after death; almost all of our papers concern traditional topics within the philosophy of religion, and very few of them say anything, except perhaps incidentally, about the paranormal or even survival after death. So it is not quite accurate to describe Internet Infidels as "dedicated to combating pseudoscience and paranormal belief on the Internet" (although such a common enemy makes for better rhetoric). Most of our authors are simply not that interested in parapsychology; I am one of the exceptions.

[Robert McLuhan]

Keith, thanks for posting here, which I hope readers will take advantage of, in a spirit of free and fair debate. As far as I know, the SPR Journal doesn’t invite responses to book reviews, but authors are welcome to respond by letter, and some do so at length. I look forward to seeing the reviews in the JP - I’ll do a round-up here when the time comes.

Of course I’m aware that many topics on Wikipedia are controversial besides parapsychology. But I wonder how many of them are as one sided in the way they’re represented. It’s unlikely that anything you were to insert in a psi-related article would be reverted, and conversely, vanishingly improbable that anything I were to add would last more than a few hours.

[Robert McLuhan]

Ted, all good points.

The one that interests me especially is the ‘preposterous’ nature of the afterlife as offered by mediumistic accounts. I remember thinking this when I was at university, a more or less unreflective agnostic, knowing nothing of psi research, or even dreaming it existed. The idea of a happy heaven with people living in houses and going about their daily business just seemed so *obviously* false. When I started to actually read the accounts years later I still grappled with it. But over the years, I’ve started to see how this superficial ‘reality’ obscures a deeper truth. The key word here is ‘subjective’. So in a sense, this would be a ‘different’ sort of afterlife, as you say, but one that’s embedded in familiar concepts, and not necessarily beyond what we can conceive of, once we truly start to contemplate it.

[Julie Baxter]

@Keith Augustine: in your response, I can find nothing that addresses the shortcomings of your book as outlined here. Instead you have (somewhat petulantly) declared yourself a victim of injustice. Well, if I may be forgiven for this most direct engagement, you are not a victim at all, you are more accurately described as an intellectual predator.

Along with the rest of the hard-core sceptic movement, your self-appointed role is to hoodwink the less well-read and informed into believing that what you are offering is rational objectivity, when the truth is that your approach is an oxymoron of that description. Of course you will attract hostility; your approach to the subject you denigrate is, in itself, deliberately hostile.

However, I will agree with you on one thing and that is that Robert has been very kind and generous to you in his review.

[Julie Baxter]

My use of the term 'oxymoron' relates to the 'Rational Wiki' approach. Does anyone here know who is directly behind that third-form joke of an online encyclopaedia?

[Keith Augustine]

Thank you for so quickly proving my point, Julie. Had I simply thanked Robert for reviewing the volume in a single sentence, would your reaction have been any different?

1. I stated at the outset that I'm inclined not to engage specific criticisms here because even just showing up at all (like Hillary Clinton at a Donald Trump rally, or vice versa) will antagonize Paranormalia posters. Past experience has taught me that engaging specific points of Robert's review or the comments here will only antagonize posters more. Obviously I could further comment on Robert's review or others' comments here if I thought doing so would be productive, since I have already done so in the forthcoming JP.

In making this statement I was not fishing for sympathy; if I were going to do that, this would be the last place that I would do it, don't you think? Rather, I was preemptively warning posters not to expect my engagement on matters of substance for the reasons given. If posters didn't react so emotionally on this issue, then it wouldn't be so imprudent for me to say something of substance. After all, I just got an emotional reaction even when I intentionally avoided saying anything of substance.

Since you see me as a hard-core skeptic, I have to wonder: in your world, is there any other kind? If you are pro-life on the abortion issue, is every pro-choice person a "hard-core pro-choicer"? Or if you are pro-choice on that issue, is every pro-life person a "hard-core pro-lifer"? Which skeptics are the good ones, the ones who take the label but are not in fact skeptical of the existence of the paranormal?

2. I thanked Robert for the fairness of his review relative to other critical reviews, even though I do not agree with everything that he said. One can respectfully agree to disagree with someone instead of treating him like a mortal enemy. Disagreement is not denigration. Imagine how much worse life would be if everyone had to toe an official line for fear that merely having a different POV would be considered offensive.

3. I pointed Paranormalia readers (and lurkers) to the JP exchange for anyone who is genuinely interested in my response to specious criticisms, although these are not necessarily going to be the same complaints that Robert makes in his separate review. The point of doing so was to put some distance between me and "haters" who aren't really interested in what I have to say anyway, as they are not particularly likely to even read my response. At best, for such persons my response is only there to be refuted, not considered. The volume was not assembled for such persons.

4. I corrected two purely factual mistakes in Robert's review. I only addressed those mundane points because I knew that going any further than that was likely to stir up a hornet's nest. And Robert is entitled to his own opinion in any case, just as you and I are.

Perhaps it would have been better for me to post under a pseudonym that the JP exchange was forthcoming. Coming from someone else, the exact same message might not have been so objectionable.

P.S. RationalWiki is maintained by Trent Toulouse, a Canadian neuroscience postdoc the last time I checked (which was many years ago).

[Julie Baxter]

The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.

[Ian Wardell]

Keith Augustine said:
"I give Robert a great deal of credit for being fair in his review, which is more than I can say for some other reviewers (including Ian in his partial blog review and comments here for reasons I'd probably best not get into here)".

Keith, it does not seem to me that in any shape or form could my mini-review be deemed to be unfair, nor my other 2 blog entries regarding this book.

Robert says:

"the book is impressively clear, thorough and detailed. It is also forcefully argued".

No doubt this has had a large influence in your assessment Keith, that his review is "fair". Sorry, but I simply don't agree with Robert, nor all of the other reviewers on the net who pretty much universally express the same sentiments. For sure, it is impressively clear, it is detailed, it is forcefully argued. But to describe it as thorough might arguably be a tad misleading. Thorough in the area it covers, yes. But not thorough in the assessment of all pertinent reasons and evidence which might gravitate one towards a belief in survival, or alternatively, annihilation/extinction.

We have this thing called the mind-body problem. It's been around a while, like a few thousand years, and made particularly acute with the birth of modern science and the adoption of the mechanistic philosophy. Essentially the material world was defined in such a way to make the existence of the mind or consciousness *impossible*, at least if consciousness is considered a physical thing or process.

hence we have absolutely no idea how consciousness is related to the physical world. We not only lack a scientific theory, but *in principle* we could not have one (see my essay: http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/neither-modern-materialism-nor-science.html).

So the mind-body problem and all the issues it raises is absolutely essential to this whole question of whether consciousness can or/and does survive. How many words are devoted to the mind-body problem in this book? Scarcely any . .

Another crucial question is what can survive. How many words are devoted to this topic and addressing the question of what would need to survive to be meaningfully still be called *me*? None at all! It's simply assumed by all the authors that what survives would have to be what we are like *now* i.e our present interests, memories, intelligence etc. Sighs . .I'm speechless . .

Moreover, many of the chapters in this book I simply regard as irrelevant. For example, one chapter attacks reincarnation by attacking the concept of karma. Er . .how exactly does reincarnation entail karma? Indeed why couldn't reincarnation be a blind "mechanistic" process? Such questions are not addressed at all. This is not to mention the preposterous concept of karma this author has.

Anyway, I could write many many thousands of words, but I'm not writing a review here. If you could specify in what way you consider my review to be unfair then I'll respond.

[Ian Wardell]

Another fb thread I started about the book:

https://www.facebook.com/iwardell/posts/10153655753458555

(jus' in case you're interested Keith! :-) )

[Alan]

With some of the best cases of so-called physical mediumship I'm just genuinely interested how Keith Augustine responds (I was very interested to read his response above!). Prof. David Fontana details some in his book Is There An Afterlife, which I have. I mean, there's so many "in your face" phenomena during the Scole investigations, e.g. the light phenomena, that no-one has proposed *any* alternative within the conditions of the investigation but the suggestion of some kind of intelligence (s) operating. And not the people watching/investigating. One is left with 1. Complete and utter fraud or 2. Genuine. And 2. opens up everything.

[Steve001]

Alan, physical mediumship isn't evidence for an afterlife. That sort of thing has seriously discredited afterlife research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediumship#Fraud

I don't know of a single physical medium not caught in fraud in the past. They used to use cheesecloth, gauze as 'ectoplasm' or have secret accomplices dress up in bed sheets. This sort of thing is highly embarrassing and does harm to parapsychology. Many parapsychologists have come out against it in the past.

G. N. M. Tyrrell for example a convinced believer in ESP and telepathy, dismissed physical mediumship in a chapter entitled "Physical Mediumship: Is there Anything Besides Fraud in the Physical Séance Room?" in his classic "The Personality of Man" (1954) as a "happy hunting ground of tricksters and charlatans." Hereward Carrington a convinced believer in paranormal powers dismissed physical mediums as 98% fraudulent in his classic volume on physical mediums. Even hardcore believers admit this stuff was bogus, so the skeptics have no problem with dismissing it.

When modern day parapsychologists or afterlife researchers such as Benjamin Steigmann, Stephen E. Braude or Michael E. Tymn with strong spiritualist bias write articles for this new psi enclyopedia or else where claiming fraudulent mediums like Eva C, Henry Slade, Helen Duncan and Kathleen Goligher were genuine it just gives ammo to the skeptics because all those mediums were actually caught in fraud, even reported in top psychical journals of the day.

All you have to do is Google these mediums names and look at their séance room images. The stuff looks absolutely ridiculous. There is even tissue paper in one photograph coming out of Helen Duncan's nose, yet Michael E. Tymn to this very day claims those photographs are of spirits. The SPR recently posted about a museum display for Duncan's 'ectoplasm', yes you can go and see it in person, it is nothing more than a piece of cloth.

The scole experiment was performed in a dark room in the medium's house. If you want to believe Extraterrestrial intelligence was responsible that is up to you, but Alan Gauld of the SPR said fraud was likely because the controls has many loopholes.

The right way forward is to study these near-death experiences, not stuff that has discredited the field and long been debunked. Remember every time you defend these cases of fraudulent mediums you give ammo to the skeptics and actually damage the progress of parapsychology. Now I know I may sound hard here, but parapsychology in recent years is on the decline and it is not hard to see why. The field is invested with a lot of nonsense and it gives the whole field a bad name. Take care.

[Julie Baxter]

I feel obliged to state here that having, personally, experienced, on several occasions, the light phenomenon described by the Scole team, there is no way, in any honesty, that I could ever doubt the veracity that phenomenon. It has even been witnessed by others in my presence,

Clearly, my testimony cannot provide solid, scientific evidence. However, it is the truth. Make of that what you will. I make no claims as to what it represents; only that it exists as an objective phenomenon.

[Ted Dixon]

The book has to be judged in terms of what it sets out to do – to present the authors’ best case against survival – and I would say it does this very well. As Keith Augustine says, there are plenty of books making the case for survival. There is also a huge scientific and philosophical literature on the mind-body problem generally. The book does not purport to give an even-handed summary of the debate. It quite reasonably presents just physicalist case against survival (in Part II).
Well, there isn’t just one case but different incompatible cases. Although physicalists agree that for a disembodied afterlife to be possible, mind-body dualism must be correct, they disagree about why mind-body dualism is incorrect. For example, in chapter 15, David Papineau argues for mind-brain identity, denying mental causation, whereas in Chapter 11 Raymond Bradley argues for the evolutionary emergence of our mental properties and is scathing about those who deny mental causation. They could both be right in thinking the other’s case mistaken. If so, this leaves the argument for mind-body dualism intact.

[chel]

I should also point out the bit about correlation equalling causation in other organs isn't a very good simile either. No, nobody would debate the kidneys' role in filtering urine; however, the kidneys certainly don't produce urine out of thin air. In the transmission hypothesis, personality is the toxin content and consciousness is the water.

[Ian Wardell]

Ted Dixon
"The book has to be judged in terms of what it sets out to do – to present the authors’ best case against survival – and I would say it does this very well".

God help us all if you're being serious?? Have you read my blog entries? Have you read my comments above?? I just give up . . .

[Keith Augustine]

Alright, Ian, I will respond solely to what you've posted here thus far, as briefly as possible:

1. "And this huge book of 700 pages almost completely fails to mention the mind-body problem...."

It is briefly surveyed in the brain damage chapter, but Ted is absolutely right: the volume is not an introduction to the philosophy of mind, of which there are many to choose from. In assembling the collection, I focused on what the extant literature lacked, not on what was already abundant in the literature. Why repeat the efforts of others who could do a much better job than I could on introducing the philosophy of mind? If you're truly interested in this issue, there are good, up-to-date, accessible introductions by Jaegwon Kim and John Heil that I could refer you to.

And just how relevant is the mind-body problem to survival or extinction? Given that one might cease to exist (because one's mind still cannot persist without brain activity) even if some form of substance dualism were true, why would one need to take a position on the mind-body problem at all? The reason I find this sort of criticism unfair coming from you is because you already know what I have to say about this but repeat the complaint anyway as if I had never responded to it, and say nothing in reply to my response.

There is a section of my JP response titled "How Relevant is the Metaphysics of Mind?" that dives into this point further.

2. "...and more specifically that consciousness cannot in principle be explained by science as it is currently conceived."

Suppose that the above is true in the most robust sense that you want to maintain (as "materialists" like Joseph Levine themselves argue in introducing the "explanatory gap"--see the brain damage chapter on this). Would this fact entail that consciousness must survive bodily death? If not, how does it undermine the conclusion that consciousness does not survive death because it cannot persist in the absence of brain activity? The inability of science to explain consciousness, and the fact that consciousness cannot persist without brain activity, could both be true at the same time. You could still have strong evidence for the latter even without having an explanation of what consciousness is. If you think otherwise, you need some argument to that effect, not just an assertion that both could not be simultaneously true.

3. "They think that what must survive is what we are like *now* eg our current memories, interests, intelligence etc. Obviously it's very easy to argue against such a self surviving! Their position has the consequence not merely that there's no "life after death", but also we don't survive from childhood to what we are now. Indeed we don't survive from our sober selves to our drunk selves!"

Here, too, one need not delve into personal identity issues (although a chapter about half-way through Shelly Kagan's Death does so accessibly if you really want to explore this). No contemporary survivalist argues that his personality will die with his brain, but his Aristotelian active intellect might survive. Rather, they argue, a la Frederick Myers, for the human personality's survival of bodily death. Survivalists claim that deceased loved ones will recognize us, and we them, on "the other side." That when we "leave our bodies," we are essentially the same as when we were in them. And so on. So it is spurious to complain that I don't address a kind of survival that no one believes in. And I explicitly state in the Introduction that the volume is only concerned with this sort of survival. You evidently want me to refute the idea that a soul might persist for all eternity with advanced dementia when no one, including you, argues that any souls persist with advanced dementia. I address the kind of survival people actually believe in. This stuff is all on page 1 of the Introduction, where I point out that by survival we all mean survival as conscious individuals who have a life that is at least comparable to a life before death. It's not my obligation to refute impersonal survival, which is just as bad as personal extinction as far as survivalists are concerned anyway.

4. "There's all sorts of silly points brought up such as what is the power source of souls to enable them to travel around Heaven!"

You're referring to a response in the brain damage chapter to an analogy made by Stephen Braude. Since Braude is the one who brought the "power source" issue into the discussion in his analogy, my contributors can hardly be faulted for responding to what he said. For this they are tarred as being silly, when they only ever said anything about this possibility because Braude brought it up in the first place. If he had not, they never even would have mentioned it. But you hang on to this mischaracterization because you offer no other legitimate criticisms of anything else that they say in the brain damage chapter, and of course you can't come away agreeing with it, so you have to say something critical.

5. "The transmission/receiver hypothesis is mentioned by Keith, but the problem here is that he seems to misunderstand it, or at least his conception of this hypothesis is not the same as mine..."

This is an assertion rather than an explanation of exactly how I supposedly misunderstood the filter theory. I think I understood it quite clearly, thank you very much, since I explain my reasoning steps explicitly in the volume. If you think I misunderstood something, it would be up to you to show exactly what I said that was wrong, and then explain why what I said was wrong. This you do not do, quite possibility because there is nothing to show. A bare assertion is not a demonstration.

6. "But not thorough in the assessment of all pertinent reasons and evidence which might gravitate one towards a belief in survival, or alternatively, annihilation/extinction."

I address what you're getting at in my JP reply, so I will just say this here. Yes, there are weaker arguments for extinction that I could have made, but did not make. I chose only to present the strongest arguments for personal extinction. I can hardly be faulted for not making weak arguments!

7. "It's simply assumed by all the authors that what survives would have to be what we are like *now* i.e our present interests, memories, intelligence etc."

Indeed. See my response to #3 above. And then tell me how you no longer think that OBEs/NDEs, or supposed communications from the dead through mediums, are evidence for survival, since those sources of evidence prima facie presuppose that "our present interests, memories, intelligence etc" persist discarnate. If anything, those with such experiences claim that their mentality is heightened, not inebriated. They evidently keep their memories of their earthly lives when viewing the operating room from the ceiling. So what do you really believe here, Ian?

8. "For example, one chapter attacks reincarnation by attacking the concept of karma. Er . .how exactly does reincarnation entail karma?"

Another unfair complaint, one I address in my JP response. Let me just quote the response here:

"As the Preface and Introduction make abundantly clear, the purpose of the contributions to Part III is to examine “inconsistencies between principal theological conceptions of an afterlife and widely held and theologically central ethical principles” (p. xxx; cf. p. 11). Consequently, to portray Ingrid Hansen Smythe’s chapter on karma and rebirth as intended to “undermine the idea of reincarnation by linking it to karma” widely misses the mark. Granted, “reincarnation does not entail karma”—but no one here ever claimed otherwise.... He could have just as well complained that Raymond D. Bradley’s chapter on whether a morally perfect being could in principle send people to Hell failed to engage research on “hellish” NDEs, as if such research were relevant to answering that conceptual question."

9. Alan: "there's so many "in your face" phenomena during the Scole investigations..."

Did you read why parapsychologists themselves concluded that the Scole phenomena were fraudulent?

[Ian Wardell]

I'm not by any means sure there's a "life after death". I think the mind-body correlations provide powerful evidence against an afterlife.

Having said that I think this is a waste of my time if people think this book presents compelling arguments . .

I'm kinda throwing my arms up in despair . .

[Ian Wardell]

Keith Augustine said:
"And just how relevant is the mind-body problem to survival or extinction? Given that one might cease to exist (because one's mind still cannot persist without brain activity) even if some form of substance dualism were true, why would one need to take a position on the mind-body problem at all?"

I was well aware of this type of response. I was thinking of addressing this precise issue, but I'm trying to limit the length of my responses. But if you *really* don't *know*, then this speaks volumes . .

Very late . .2.30am. .I'll respond further tomorrow.

[Alan]

Steve001, Keith ... In respect of the Scole light phenomena (the whole range) one would need very specialized technical electronic equipment (not invented yet) to produce these and operated somehow very close to the investigators in the dark on multiple occasions. And I believe a detailed reply to other people's objections was included in the investigators Report.

[Keith Augustine]

In my haste to get my list over with, Ian, I forgot to address one of the very first comments that you made:

0. "Most of it is devoted to talking about the way the mind is heavily influenced by brain states. This does indeed provide powerful evidence, but yet they fail to mention the most powerful evidence (at least in my opinion) which is general anaesthetic where people do not even experience any time as having passed!"

The very first quotation opening Part I comes from former SPR President C. D. Broad: "At death there takes place completely and permanently a process of bodily destruction which, when it occurs partially and temporarily, carries with it the destruction of part of our mental life. The inference seems only too obvious." (p. 49)

And my contributors do not in fact fail to mention the point that you make (you might try consulting the Index next time):

A. "As he lapsed into a coma, what was there to make of his illness? We saw neuronal machinery breaking down. In parallel, his mind broke down, rendered first aphasic, then vegetative, and finally gone altogether. | A fractured leg could no more support a load than Mr. McCurt’s brain could support linguistic ability. Where did his linguistic ability go? Nowhere. Once his language circuitry was destroyed, his linguistic ability was erased, rendered void. And once all brain functions cease, the brain cannot support a mind; the mind is rendered void as well. The process does not go anywhere; it simply ends" (pp. 91-92).

B. "Indeed, the most essential aspect of any soul would be the overall capacity for conscious awareness, both of the external world and of internal states. For instance, the soul should have access to information relating to its internal mental states and be able to process and use this information. In the case of dreamless sleep, general anesthesia, and coma, conscious awareness may be minimal or absent. All of these states involve corresponding changes in spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity (for instance, as reflected in the EEG). Thus, it is not surprising that conscious awareness both of the external and internal worlds can be compromised or obliterated by brain damage (as illustrated by many of the neurological syndromes described above)" (pp. 118-119).

C. "Defining “consciousness,” let alone localizing it, would require many volumes to do it justice. | Within these few inadequate pages, we will understand consciousness to be the difference between the way that we feel when we are normally awake or dreaming—when we undergo conscious experience—and the way that we fail to feel when we are in a nondreaming sleep, fainted, or in a coma—when we experience nothing. Current evidence suggests that consciousness arises from the coordinated activity of many brain structures in specific functioning modes" (p. 151).

D. "To begin with, the brain seems to do what is necessary for consciousness. And after a dreamlessly deep sleep, there is only a light sense of how much time has passed. Furthermore, after waking up from a general anesthetic operation, there seems to have been . . . nothing. So, some say, “Ah, after death occurs, there is no afterlife at all.” | But others will protest, “That doesn’t quite do the job.” And perhaps they’re right. The main question is, “Is there a conscious being that goes to a place called the afterlife?” It would be good to generate a tighter argument." (p. 377)

E. "For instance, if you could remain conscious despite the total destruction of your body, you could certainly remain conscious after comparatively minor and temporary damage to your brain.... You would be unable to move. Everything would go black and silent and numb. The soul itself, though, would be undamaged, and ought to remain fully conscious. You would find yourself effectively disembodied, wondering what had caused the condition and how long it might last. Yet that is not what happens: a sharp blow to the head makes you completely unconscious. General anesthesia does the same thing in a gentler way. But if such a minor alteration to your brain invariably causes unconsciousness, how could you remain conscious when your brain is totally destroyed?" (p. 412)

So, again, all that we have here is yet another pseudocriticism from you. This accidental omission has relevance to what you've subsequently said, in particular:

"I think the mind-body correlations provide powerful evidence against an afterlife. Having said that I think this is a waste of my time if people think this book presents compelling arguments."

I never could get exactly what your position was given the juxtaposition of the two seemingly contradictory sentences quoted immediately above.

On the one hand, you admit that mind-brain correlations provide strong evidence against an afterlife--and these are the subject matter of the entire first part of the book. But then you go on to deny that there are any compelling arguments in the volume. How do those two positions jibe?

It would seem that to defend both, you would have to argue either (1) that the correlations that my contributors mention are simply not the ones that provide evidence against an afterlife, and so they must have picked wrongly or (2) they do offer examples of strong evidence against an afterlife, but each and every one of them is so incompetent in their argumentation that they are unable to construct an effective argument using these powerful examples. (Or possibly you could argue for some combination of both 1 and 2.)

Since my contributors' arguments are so wanting by your lights, I'd be curious as to how you think they ought to have argued. What strong arguments did they miss, arguments that they could have made if they had had the wisdom to consult you before writing their chapters? You seem to dismiss their arguments as missing the obvious without ever stating what the obvious is.

Incidentally, if you truly feel that "this is a waste of my time if people think this book presents compelling arguments," you can feel free to say nothing further, or barring that, have the last word on the issue. I did not come here to debate you, but to point out the forthcoming JP exchange for those interested in taking the possibility that death ends consciousness seriously. As I said before, if your goal is to defeat that conclusion at all costs, then the volume is simply not for you. It's a big world with a lot of books; no one is compelling anyone to read mine if you don't want to go there.

[Alan]

Steve001, Keith ... Sir William Crookes FRS published this ... Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual, Quarterly Journal of Science, January 1874. In this are similar light phenomena ...
"I have seen luminous points of light darting about and settling on the heads of different persons; I have had questions answered by the flashing of a bright light a desired number of times in front of my face. I have seen sparks of light rising from the table to the ceiling, and again falling upon the table, striking it with an audible sound."
Obviously before even the *possibility* of technical equipment being around to produce these. There's much more on these and other luminous phenomena in his report. Available on the web. A bit of repeatability there?

[Troy]

I haven't read the book, but I noticed from a quick word search in Google books that "idealism" doesn't make an appearance. This is a major weakness, since it appears most of the contributors attack a metaphysical position - dualism - that leading non-physicalists, such as the SURsem group, do not espouse. Also, a lot of the work seems to be older and readily available in other places. (Susan Blackmore's contributions on OBES, for example, were written before I was born!) That said, I'd be interested in reading Keith's chapters.

[Lawrence B]

Hi Keith. I've not read the book so speak in ignorance, and you'll get no impassioned argument from me. But I'm drawn to one of the quotes you cite above about the brain breaking down . " In parallel, his mind broke down, rendered first aphasic, then vegetative, and finally gone altogether.(....) Where did his linguistic ability go? Nowhere. Once his language circuitry was destroyed, his linguistic ability was erased, rendered void. And once all brain functions cease, the brain cannot support a mind; the mind is rendered void as well. The process does not go anywhere; it simply ends"

In essence - I'm assuming,so forgive me if putting words in your mouth - this kind of observation is the very core of the argument from your "team's" point of view. But the question that occurs to me is how do you know? That is how do you know that the mind goes? Because surely this "aphasic, vegetative, gone" sequence is describing the deterioration of the physical body's physical ability to communicate with the outer world...how and to what extent the mind as we personally experience it goes surely can't be determined as the only person in a position to inform you if they're still in there by definition can't do so. Their physical capacity to communicate their thoughts disappear but it doesn't tell you - does it? - that the thoughts themselves aren't there. Why would it? How could it?

On a purely personal note which is not meant to settle the argument for science by any means, I recall when my mother had a minor stroke a number of years ago. It affected her speech centre. Suddenly she was speaking but gibberish was coming out...either the wrong words or gobbledygook. What was of interest is that she was unaware of it. She was thinking perfectly clearly..her thoughts were complete thoughts, fully intact, she could understand what was being said to her, but appeared to perceive the words coming out of her own mouth as being the correct ones. The internal world was intact, but its external ability to communicate and express itself - and its awareness that it couldn't - was impaired.

These days she has dementia..perhaps ultimately as a result of that incident...and her life has reduced significantly in terms of adult communication. Her comprehension of spoken and written word is dramatically impaired...but there is absolutely no sense to me that "she" , in the personal sense,is gone or no longer at home.

My point is only that, from the selective quotes and broad impression of the argument presented in your book (as I understand it) there seems to be a false correlation between the presence of mind and its ability to interact with the outside world...a correlation whose justification isn't obvious.

[Ian Wardell]

Oops, bit rude last night with my comment about throwing up my arms in despair! I'd been drinking Stella in the pub. Seems to have a worse effect than my normal booze!

I only read the first part of your comment Keith. Will read later and respond if appropriate.

[Ian Wardell]

Keith said:
"Incidentally, if you truly feel that "this is a waste of my time if people think this book presents compelling arguments," you can feel free to say nothing further, or barring that, have the last word on the issue".

OK OK! I'm a tad embarrassed about last night. I shouldn't have said that and I apologize.

[Ian Wardell]

What's this "JP response" you keep talking about Keith? Reading a 700 page book is not sufficient, I am obliged to seek out everything you've ever written on the net as well?

I've now read your response . .and I really don't know where to start. For a kick off you clearly have never read anything by me! You might have a much better idea of my position if you read some of my essays. I appreciate that quite possibly you can't be pestered. That's fair enough, but then to a large measure I'll essentially simply be rewriting here what I've written elsewhere.

Regarding the receiver/filter hypothesis. This is what I've said elsewhere:

Keith Augusine and Yonatan I. Fishman say in the book:

"It doesn’t take much reflection to see that a television receiver is a terrible analogy for making sense of known mind-brain correlations. For the analogues would have to be:

Broadcast station → Electromagnetic signal → TV receiver → TV program images
External soul ↔ Interactive forces ↔ Brain ↔ Behavior

On this analogy, mental activity itself occurs in the external soul, just as the images of a television program originate from the broadcast station. But no damage to the local circuitry of your TV set can have any effect on the television program recording playing at the remote broadcast station, or on the signal that the station puts out".

My own metaphors would be:

Electromagnetic signal → TV receiver → TV program images

Soul or Self → Brain → Mind

Damage to a TV set doesn’t affect “the television program recording playing at the remote broadcast station, or on the signal that the station puts out”. But on the “filter” model, likewise damage to the brain doesn’t affect the self/soul, only the mind. The problem here that Keith Augustine conflates the mind with the self/soul. This harks back to the position of what actually survives. What I propose survives differs from what all the authors of the myth of an afterlife allege would have to survive. They all think that it would have to be what we are like *now*. Our *present* personalities. Our *present* interests, intelligence, memories, dispositions etc.

I, in contrast, hold that the self is that underlying reality making one the very same individual from when one were a toddler, to the present time when we are adults, to when one is drunk and so on and so forth. Throughout these different times our interests, intelligence, behaviour and so on all change . Therefore these latter attributes cannot *constitute* the self since that would entail that the self quite literally changes after, for example, one has had a few alcoholic drinks. The self changes when one is drunk, but only in a comparable manner to which a table might change if we paint it a different colour (alterational change), and not change in the sense of smashing the table up and replacing it with a similar one (existential change).

So the self is the TV programme. Not the quality of the picture itself which Augustine et al hold.

[Keith Augustine]

Alan: If I could put in a nutshell why I'm suspicious of these older reports of physical manifestations by physical mediums, it would essentially be the same reason that I'm suspicious of Old Testament reports of miracles like the parting of the Red Sea. It is reasonable to expect that the same phenomena that happened back then ought to continue to happen today. Unlike then, however, we now have all sorts of technological ways to document the occurrence of events that biblical authors (or early psychical researchers) did not have. Why, then, is it still debatable whether these sorts of events occur at all? Doesn't it strike you as suspicious that just when the infrared cameras were to be installed, the Scole phenomena had to abruptly come to an end? (To say nothing of all of those other direct indications of fraud that I'd previously linked.)

Troy: I address the issue of whether we should have critiqued idealism in my JP response. In part, I don't see why we would be expected to, since the best arguments for either personal survival or personal extinction do not depend on whether or not idealism (or any other metaphysics of mind) is true. There are other more basic reasons why I think idealism in particular should be given short shrift that I note in the forthcoming JP response, namely that it offers no advantage over granting that physical objects exist, and that the reasons for affirming idealism would also be reasons for affirming that one's own mind is the only mind that exists (solipsism), and yet nobody believes that (so why should anyone believe idealism, either?)

The older material that is reprinted in The Myth of an Afterlife is also not material that has become out of date with time. (I get more specific about this in the JP response.)

Lawrence B: On the question of how we know that those whose brains break down become progressively more mentally disabled as well, I can hardly improve upon what survivalist David H. Lund has already said about this. Paraphrasing/partially quoting Lund for brevity in The Myth of an Afterlife, I write: "For the effects of drugs and Alzheimer’s disease on mental states are not simply inferred by others, but “directly experienced by their victims, at least in the incipient stages,” allowing “the person whose consciousness is being affected . . . to witness directly the effect on consciousness” (Lund, 2009, p. 24). Since it is far-fetched that individuals are as profoundly mistaken about their own mental states as the instrument theory requires, it is not surprising that contemporary proponents want to distance themselves from its predictions. And if introspective reports corroborate that patients’ behavior in the incipient stages of brain deterioration faithfully reflect actual mental functioning, we have every reason to infer that when mental functioning appears so diminished as to make introspective reporting impossible, it really is extensively diminished" (pp. 229-230).

Ian: This "JP response" I keep referring back to is the only reason I originally posted here, to let those who care know that I would be explaining the volume's main line of argument and defending it against inaccurate criticisms in an exchange forthcoming in the next issue of the Journal of Parapsychology (hence "JP"). You are certainly not obliged to seek out this response, just as you were never obliged to read the volume in the first place. Your comment seems to misconceive my first post on this entry as meant for you specifically, when it was in fact meant for any poster or lurker willing to consider what I have to say, and not meant for any poster or lurker only interested in rebutting what I have to say. That's why I was initially hesitant to engage either Robert's or your specific criticisms; but unlike Robert, you wanted to know what I might say, so I answered you on that.

I think I'll pass on responding to your TV analogy since my comments did not specifically concern whose analogy was more accurate, but whether or not you actually believe that, at death, you will be stripped of all of your memory and personality traits. For if you do not believe that, then I don't see why it would do anyone any good for me to try to refute a position that no one holds.

I'm thinking of a kind of personal survival in which the minute you die, you "awaken" disembodied rather than in a (normal) body anymore, with your mind then being about as continuous with your premortem mind as your mind is between going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning. This is the kind of survival presupposed by every survivalist interpretation of apparitions, OBEs, NDEs, cases of the reincarnation type (at least if there is discarnate existence between incarnations), and mediumship.

All this "self" talk is irrelevant since the issue here is whether that "relatively the same" continuity goes on after death or not. In the parlance of personal identity theory, the issue is whether what matters in survival is preserved, not whether the "same self" continues in some generic sense. The "same bronze" continues to exist when you melt down a statue, but the statue that it constitutes does not survive being melted down. If your "same self" continues but your mind is effectively lobotomized so that you have no idea who you are, then what matters about you (your memory, your personality, your dispositions, etc.) has not survived death. Again, since no survivalist believes that this happens to individuals after death, I don't know why you would expect any nonbeliever to argue against it.

Anyway, in the forthcoming JP exchange that will be out soon, there is a review of the volume, my (and two others') response to the review, the reviewer's reply to these responses, and a summing up of the whole exchange by the JP editor; so anyone who is interested in it but has not seen the volume can get a good sense of what the underlying issues are. Robert's review obviously gives you a taste of this, but an exchange between opposing authors gives you an even broader idea of what The Myth of an Afterlife does and does not contain since we are made to engage each other about the volume.

I obviously cannot share any portion of the exchange prepublication, as this would be unfair to others involved in the exchange, as well as the Journal of Parapsychology itself. But it should be available in a matter of weeks for anyone who is interested, possibly online (depending on the JP's pleasure since I will abide by their desires about that).

[chel]

"Their physical capacity to communicate their thoughts disappear but it doesn't tell you - does it? - that the thoughts themselves aren't there."

I know this isn't what was meant by anyone in this thread, but the argument responded to by this sentence is reminding me very uncomfortably of nasty comments I've heard about autistic people. Usually used by middle-class suburban parents to justify neglecting and occasionally killing their autistic children on the grounds that "they can't speak or understand speech, clearly they're braindead vegetables and it doesn't matter" when the kids in question are fervently trying to be understood and are perfectly capable of learning sign language or writing if someone bothers to teach them. I know of a lady who's completely nonverbal and processes other people's speech as painful noise, but can write more eloquently than I can and holds down a job doing complicated programming. As I said, I know this isn't what was meant, but it does come unpleasantly close - as an autistic person, I'm pretty sensitive to those implications.

Getting off-topic here, but I think my point is just because someone can't communicate in the way you understand doesn't mean they're not mentally there.

[Ian Wardell]

You say:
"As the Preface and Introduction make abundantly clear, the purpose of the contributions to Part III is to examine “inconsistencies between principal theological conceptions of an afterlife and widely held and theologically central ethical principles” (p. xxx; cf. p. 11). Consequently, to portray Ingrid Hansen Smythe’s chapter on karma and rebirth as intended to “undermine the idea of reincarnation by linking it to karma” widely misses the mark".

So I'm not sure of the purpose of this chapter then. Even if
a) people subscribe to karma
b) they subscribe to the ludicrous concept of karma she articulates,

this is simply attacking the weakest position and hence is pointless.

One can always attack the most naive concept of x -- whatever x might stand for -- and show it to be untenable. Surely, what you and the other authors ought to be interested in is getting to the *truth*. To that end, what in fact ought to be done is to address the *strongest* or most *compelling* articulation of a belief, and try to show that it doesn't hold water.

[Alan]

Keith, You're just not addressing the full scope of the light phenomena seen. Prof. Ivor Grattan-Guinness (mathematician) details here and read the Report.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsu49unCjzg

His suggestion of a parallel reality is an interesting one if you listen. Look, one must really focus on two possibilities, fraud or real. There's no in-between. As to "older" reports, e.g. Prof. Crookes, this is an outstanding scientist reporting. So ... models are now needed.
The "debate" about these particular events occurring could be because the very idea of a non-physical intelligence invading our reality is just too much. But the witnesses called real on these events.
In a different way, multiple universes are postulated within current physics quite readily though quite different to those needed here. And it clearly was something highly organised to gently and subtly connect with the space we inhabit.

[Ian Wardell]

Keith said:
"It is briefly surveyed in the brain damage chapter, but Ted is absolutely right: the volume is not an introduction to the philosophy of mind, of which there are many to choose from".

It's a book arguing against the notion there is an afterlife. The suggestion that it doesn't need to deal with the mind-body problem is utterly bizarre in the extreme.

To repeat. We have the mind body problem. Consciousness cannot in principle be scientifically explained. So there are various proposed solutions. There are various flavours of reductive materialism, non-reductive materialism, property dualism, substance dualism, idealism etc.

Now, if it is the case that no flavour of materialism, or any position where mental states simply follow physical states, is tenable (which I believe), then that severely curtails the number of metaphysical positions that are available. Indeed, one might well conclude that the only viable metaphysical position on the mind-body problem are those that have consciousness as being fundamental. If consciousness is fundamental that clearly makes the prospect of it surviving the brain that much more likely. So the fact the mind-body problem is virtually completely ignored in your book is risible. I really shouldn't need to point out this stuff out.

[Lawrence B]

" "For the effects of drugs and Alzheimer’s disease on mental states are not simply inferred by others, but “directly experienced by their victims, at least in the incipient stages,” allowing “the person whose consciousness is being affected . . . to witness directly the effect on consciousness”"

I'm interested that you say you can't improve upon that argument as it strikes me as a very poor one.

Certainly it appears to take no heed of its own implications ..that there remains a detached unaffected self which is able to observe the changes in ones own brain and behavior.

The qualifying phrase "at least in the incipient stages" tells us no more than that the person reaches a point where their physical ability to communicate their detached awareness of the change is too impaired...the possibilty that the self observant mind continues is not undermined in that argument as far as I can see.

Of course only a person with Alzheimers etc knows the truth of that..but that's the point. Neither you nor I do. All we can do is infer it from our own experiences. For my own part I have noticed that separate detached self observant self, fully functioning, fully aware, whenever my own brain chemistry has been altered by alcohol or emotional upset such as grief...I behave outwardly, instinctively, perhaps compulsively as a drunk or grieving person would, yet am always totally aware of doing so, with a separate running commentary going in my head analyzing -and fascinated by - my own behaviour and just as aware that I could if I so chose stop it. And I do.

I didn't drink socially till I was 30..and even then not much..but it meant that I got to observe my own internal and behavioral changes as they were happening and it fascinated me to the point of being almost fixated with the conumdrum of whether I really was drunk or merely acting the role. Similarly with the death of family members seemingly uncontrollable bursts of sobbing were accompanied by an unmoved inner self watching this spontaneous behaviour dictated by my brain. I could stop mid tear whenever I chose. So which is the "real" me.. the one behaving in a particular way, dictated by brain chemistry...or the one who is aware of the fact as it happening and observing these changes with cold detachment?

[Ian Wardell]

Keith:
"I think I understood [the filter/transmission hypothesis] quite clearly, thank you very much, since I explain my reasoning steps explicitly in the volume".

And in another post Keith says:

"I think I'll pass on responding to your TV analogy since my comments did not specifically concern whose analogy was more accurate, but whether or not you actually believe that, at death, you will be stripped of all of your memory and personality traits. For if you do not believe that, then I don't see why it would do anyone any good for me to try to refute a position that no one holds".

You seem to just make things up as you go along. I certainly don't believe this. The type of self we are predisposes us in having certain personality traits. And I think that we would have potential access to all our own personal memories after death.

But anyway, to get back to the issue at hand. What I'd like you to do is to point to someone who subscribes to the filter hypothesis who subscribes to your interpretation of it.

[Alan]

Keith, you said "If I could put in a nutshell why I'm suspicious of these older reports of physical manifestations by physical mediums, it would essentially be the same reason that I'm suspicious of Old Testament reports of miracles like the parting of the Red Sea."

On reflection, I found this amusing. No doubt in 142 years (2016-1874 ... Crookes report) some skeptic will say the same about Scole or even the video interviews of the witnesses, "knowing" we can dismiss them as similar to the Red Sea parting. Ah, the benefit of time.

[Ian Wardell]

There's a chapter in teh book by a certain Raymond D. Bradley called "Why Survival is Metaphysically Impossible". I sent him an email over a year ago. I said:

"Hello, I’m just reading this book and have reached your chapter. You say:

{Quote}
"That a human mind, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, has a different mode of existence from its bearer, namely, a human body and a cat’s body, respectively;

That a mind, like a grin, is a property (or set of properties) of its bearer, and hence cannot continue to exist after its bearer does not;

That the property of having a mind, like the property of having a grin, is one that emerges when the purely physical constituents of their respective bearers are appropriately configured.

I take myself to have accomplished the first two goals".
{/quote}

I’ve read your chapter up until this point. I haven’t seen any arguments by you, merely a series of unsubstantiated assertions. Assertions moreover which I profoundly disagree with.

So where did you establish that the relationship of the mind to one’s body is analogical to a cat’s grin to its body? Can we talk about a specific conscious experience such as a pain rather than the mind? Clearly we cannot conceive of a grin without a face. But we can conceive of an agonising pain without a body. It might be impossible to experience a pain without a body – and indeed I think it is – but such an impossibility is simply because of the way the world is. It’s not conceptually impossible like the cat’s grin is. Hence it’s not analogous.

Oh yes and of course a pain or any other conscious experience is not a thing or a process, least of all a substance (although the self is a substance). Nor is a pain the same thing as any correlated physical activity since the latter is wholly quantitative and the former is wholly qualitative. But a cat’s grin is just its face, or at least a certain modification of its face (i.e the face doesn’t cause the grin, the grin is simply a certain state of the face). To say we’re reifying pain and other conscious experiences is just so much meaningless twaddle. The pain is immediately given. It has a certain characteristic feel. I agree that it is brought into being by a modification of the brain. But, in contradistinction to the cat’s grin, it is not the modification of the brain itself.

In fact any flavour of materialism rules out the existence of consciousness. I recommend you read my essay Science, the Afterlife, and the Intelligentsia. Whatever difficulties dualism might have, this cannot negate the fact that any flavour of materialism is simply incompatible with the existence of consciousness. Since we know with absolute certitude of our own consciousness, then necessarily materialism is false.

[AndyTheGrump]

I found this debate because it has been listed on a skeptic forum. So let me weigh in on the unreliability of Sir William Crookes.

"Sir William Crookes FRS published this ... Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual, Quarterly Journal of Science, January 1874. In this are similar light phenomena ..."

Sir William Crookes? He was short-sighted, many of the 'experiments' performed in dark conditions in his own home. He claimed the stage magician Anna Eva Fay was a genuine spiritualist medium. He claimed a 'spirit' photograph of the fraudulent photographer William Hope was genuine.... this is your reliable witness?

He claimed Florence Cooke a fraudulent medium was genuine, he claimed the fraudulent Fox sisters were genuine... the list goes on.

Leonard Zusne in "Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking" writes:

"The fact is that William Crookes, although very good at physics experiments, was rather weak on drawing inferences and on theorizing. Besides, he was gullible. He endorsed several mediums in spite of their demonstrated trickery. Having witnessed a single seance with Kate Fox, he became convinced that the Fox sisters' rappings were genuine."

M. Lamar Keene in his book "The Psychic Mafia" writes: "The most famous of materialization mediums, Florence Cook-- though she managed to convince a scientist, Sir William Crookes, that she was genuine-- was repeatedly exposed in fraud. Florence had been trained in the arts of the séance by Frank Herne, a well-known physical medium whose materializations were grabbed on more than one occasion and found to be the medium himself."

In short William Crookes is not a reliable source Alan. He was great at physics but he knew nothing about the powers of deception or trickery.

[bsanch123]

Andy who cares about fraudulent physical mediums or William Crookes 100 years ago?

Many parapsychologists have embarrassed themselves look at Guy Lyon Playfair endorsing fraudulent psychic healers in Brazil such as Zé Arigó, but this does not represent the entire field of parapsychology. The fact of the matter is, there is solid evidence from NDE that humans survive death. Why don't you skeptics look at that evidence instead of trying to debunk things which proponents don't even care about or cite as evidence anymore.

[Juan]

Very good comments. I have not read that book, but it does not deal with anything not discussed previously.

"Proponents who appeal to uncharacteristic cases as evidence for the independence thesis … suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, latching on to any data potentially favorable to their own point of view, heedless of the fact that the exceptions prove the rule. And in focusing on the rare neurological outliers while disregarding the immense body of neuroscientific evidence unfavorable to their perspective, independence thesis proponents frequently overlook the comparatively poor quality of the data thought to support their point of view (p. 251)."

Mortalists also have a tunnel vision when they do not examine the data of psychic research that point to the existence of an afterlife. In addition, the supervivencialists do not disregarding neurological data, but draw conclusions from neurological and psychic data.

"Thus for instance, ‘correlation is not causation’ is countered by the observation that the effects of other organs – the kidney’s role in filtering toxins, for instance – is not disputed, and that it’s highly selective to apply different reasoning to the brain (p. 102). "

I accept that neurology proves that the brain is a cause of consciousness, but does this exclude us from being conscious after death? No, because mortalism assumes that the brain is the only cause of consciousness. An assumption not proven by any science. The consciousness may have other causes that are maintained after death. This mere possibility refutes the argument, but is this plausible? Yes, if we take into account all the data of the psychic research.

On dualism, let us say everything that is a red herring, because the soul or cause of consciuoness after death can be physical and belong to the subcuantic level, so that it does not violate any physical law and would not be part of the physics currently known.

"They expose logical absurdities such as the idea of God condemning a person to an afterlife in hell, and the incoherence of notions of heaven: How would a soul move from place to pace? How would it recognize other souls? What would disembodied souls do all day, since presumably there would be no need to sleep? A third essay addresses the intrinsic unfairness of karma, as a moral law that inflicts horrible punishments on individuals in the form of disease, disabilities and poverty for alleged previous wrongdoing they have no recollection of ever committing."

As Robert writes, that is too iffy: the existence of an afterlife does not imply God or Heaven or Hell. Souls move as the world moves, having experiences of movement (think of idealism). What do they do? Whatever they want do, it can be love, power and knowledge. The existence of reincarnation does not imply karma; in fact Stevenson's research showed that reincarnation seems mechanical, without a teleology.

"The very first quotation opening Part I comes from former SPR President C. D. Broad: "At death there takes place completely and permanently a process of bodily destruction which, when it occurs partially and temporarily, carries with it the destruction of part of our mental life. The inference seems only too obvious." (p. 49)"

That is true, except when we enter the data of psychic research.

"But if such a minor alteration to your brain invariably causes unconsciousness, how could you remain conscious when your brain is totally destroyed?"

I can answer that. If you lightly tap a faucet, perhaps no water comes out, but if the faucet is totally destroyed, the water will flow.

"For the effects of drugs and Alzheimer’s disease on mental states are not simply inferred by others, but “directly experienced by their victims, at least in the incipient stages,” allowing “the person whose consciousness is being affected . . . to witness directly the effect on consciousness”".

The mind may be repressed by the damaged brain, but released after brain death. Once again, we must take psychic research seriously in the picture.

"There's a chapter in teh book by a certain Raymond D. Bradley called "Why Survival is Metaphysically Impossible"."

Which asumes that the mind has only one body - the visible body - but this assumption has not been proven. And the existence of the astral body is not so implausible with the investigations of Karlis Osis, NDEs, apparitions, etc.

[Ian Wardell]

AndyTheGrump said:

"I found this debate because it has been listed on a skeptic forum".

Which skeptic forum?

[Keith Augustine]

While I've got a moment to say something relatively light, I wanted to respond to your last comment here, Robert, rather than simply ignore it (as I had been doing up until now).

Since I don't follow psi-articles on Wikipedia, let alone check Wikipedia in general all that often, I can't speak to how often psi proponents' edits are reverted there, while psi opponents' edits are kept. So I can't confirm that the balance of edits are against psi proponents; perhaps you see what you expect to see.

On the other hand, there certainly could be an editorial bias against psi proponents: ideologically driven fake news stories on Facebook almost all had a conservative bent leading up the the 2016 presidential election here in the US, so it would not be out of the norm for something like that to happen in other contexts.

Moreover, since scientists in general (not just skeptics) view parapsychological studies more suspiciously than, say, material published in The Journal of Cell Biology, it would not surprise me if, in general, Wikipedia editors deemed material from a parapsychology journal to be insufficiently reliable to cite as a source, at least when by itself, just as a matter of policy. But if so, this would be no different than treating cryonics organizations' publications more suspiciously than material written by cryobiologists (hopefully readers know the difference).

I can tell you that when the metaphysical naturalism entry first appeared on Wikipedia (maybe 10 years ago?), there were a huge number of arguments for naturalism listed. Not too long after that (I didn't check it regularly, so I don't know exactly when), I noticed that someone new had come along and added about an equally huge number of arguments against naturalism. (There are mercifully only two arguments pro and two arguments con now!) You can probably see this by comparing old versions of the page against each other. In this case no one "side" was given free reign to suppress anything posted by the other.

I just now checked the "Pam Reynolds case" Wikipedia entry, too, which used to have links to my first lead JNDS paper from 2007 concerning specific points about the case, sometimes described inaccurately (probably around 2008 or 2009), followed by material intended to undermine those points inserted a little later by some psi proponent/s, and now any mention of my 2007 paper is removed altogether (though a general "External Links" link to my online version of the paper is listed at the end). (This removal is somewhat ironic given that someone else came along and inserted "[full citation needed] where a point in question was thoroughly documented in my previously cited 2007 JNDS paper.)

So evidently there are Wikipedia editors that will remove skeptical citations, too.

[Ian Wardell]

I might as well address this evidence issue since you're still here Keith. Yes, the fact that the mind is damaged when the brain is damaged provides strong evidence that consciousness and/or the self is produced by the brain.

However, it is not *scientific* evidence. Scientific evidence only obtains in the context of a certain scientific hypothesis. Scientific hypotheses entail we should observe certain things should that hypothesis be true, and when we do indeed observe these things, then this provides evidence for that hypothesis. Scientific hypotheses also relate the various entities known to science via causal chains of causes and effects resulting in the phenomenon in question.

But we're not in possession of any such causal mechanism which might explain the existence of consciousness. There is no scientific hypothesis therefore which explains consciousness. Note I'm not saying there have been hypothesis that haven't squared with our observations. Rather that no such scientific hypothesis is *in principle attainable*, at least as science is currently conceived (for those who are interested in why I conclude this then read my essays:

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/science-afterlife-and-intelligentsia.html
http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/neither-modern-materialism-nor-science.html)

However, we do of course have *metaphysical* hypotheses of the relationship between consciousness and the brain. Hence, we have the various varieties of reductive materialism, non-reductive materialism, ephiphenomenalism, property dualism, the various varieties of interactive dualism, the various varieties of idealism etc.

Note that all these hypotheses are consistent with the evidence. So the mind-body correlations provide evidence for *all* of them. Of course you Keith, and other materialists, will object that something like interactive dualism is dreamt up *after the fact*. So a person likes the idea of a life after death. But wait! The mind is obviously very affected by the brain . . hmm . . so they dream up a convoluted hypothesis to accommodate the facts. Namely, that consciousness is constrained by the brain, but when it detaches from the brain, it regains its full cognitive powers!

So one might conclude that materialism simply more straightforwardly seems to accommodate most of the facts (the facts it doesn't appear to accommodate must not really exist, or be illusory etc. So all anomalous cognition, all the evidence for an afterlife). Materialism is the simpler more straightforward hypothesis. Or, strictly speaking, one of the varieties of materialism, or epiphenomelism/property dualism, and maybe even interactive dualism (but an interactive dualism where the mental entity could not exist without the brain) more straightforwardly accommodates most of the facts. In short, any metaphysical hypothesis which has the brain all by itself somehow producing consciousness.

Now, there's a problem here. Let's imagine we observe a programme on a TV set, and we have no idea how it achieves the output i.e a moving picture constituting some TV programme. Tinkering with the sets internal components influences the quality of the picture in certain characteristic ways, so we advance the metaphysical hypothesis that the TV set, *all by itself*, produces the picture concerned. Or we observe coloured light coming from a prism, and advance the metaphysical hypothesis that the prism, *all by itself*, produces the coloured light. But, of course, we know that the TV set and the prism *couldn't possibly* produce the respective phenomena in question. So all the evidence_is_simply_irrelevant.

I suggest we have a similar issue with the brain and consciousness. Lots and lots of evidence for the hypothesis that the brain produces consciousness. But I regard most (not all) of this evidence as irrelevant! Because the brain, *all by itself*, couldn't possibly produce the phenomenon in question i.e consciousness. It's kinda magical, the brain all by itself producing consciousness . .poof! . .jus' like that! No, the brain plays a crucial role in shaping the form that our consciousness takes, but an *extra ingredient* is required -- a mental entity or soul/self.

Now of course you and the other authors might disagree with me here. You might think some form of materialism is indeed tenable, and indeed even plausible. But wait! Guess what? **The entire 700 page book is almost wholly devoid of any arguments establishing the intelligibility of materialism or any other position where the brain, *all by itself*, can produce consciousness**. !!!

You claim I should read books devoted to the mind-body problem. But why? Either they successfully argue for materialism -- or something like materialism -- or they don't. If they do, this then kinda makes your entire book redundant. That is to say that if they successfully argue for materialism (in its broadest sense) then ipso facto your book is pointless. On the other hand, if they *don't* successfully argue for materialism, then *you* and your fellow authors need to establish it. The evidence all by itself is insufficient. You had 700 pages to do so. But, nevertheless fail to address this issue, instead preferring to attack the most infantile conceptions of the afterlife imaginable. e.g. the chapter attacking "karma" (where the heck she got such a ludicrous conception of karma God only knows).

Of course I'm aware of the objection that the *mind itself* is changed by brain injuries. So we have, for example, Phineas Gage who developed a more aggressive personality after his brain injury. But this harks back to what survives. At the outset you and the other authors simply *assume* that what survives is the mind as it is shortly before we die. But if I deny that a prism *all by itself* produces the coloured light, am I thereby saying the coloured light exists anyway? No I'm not, only the white light exists without the prism. Likewise, what survives is not what I am exactly like now; not like I was as a child, not as I am when drunk etc. Rather what survives is that enduring aspect, that *substantial* self which makes the child, the drunken self, the adult self and so on, *the very same individual*.

The whole point of the filter/transmission hypothesis is to illustrate the notion that something *all by itself* might not be sufficient to produce some phenomenon, but an extra ingredient is required. You discuss the filter/transmission hypothesis, but utterly fail to understand it . . .

So, I'm afraid, in short, I have a very negative view of your book. It leaves out the most crucial aspects which ought to be examined, attacks a ludicrous conception of souls or that which might survive. Attacks ludicrous conceptions of the afterlife realm (such as the denier of an afterlife supposing that it must be similar to physical reality and be governed by physical laws), fails to understand the filter/transmission hypothesis, and, more generally, treats the whole question of whether we survive as being a scientific issue, where as it is a philosophical one.

Actually I might clean this up a bit and put it as a blog entry. Also in a Amazon customer review of this book.

[Keith Augustine]

One does not need to defend materialism, or any particular theory of mind, in order to argue that having a functioning brain is a necessary condition for having consciousness. Indeed some of my contributors are explicitly not materialists, but they do not believe that the mind can survive absent a functioning brain.

The dependence thesis is compatible with different theories of mind. It is not compatible with personal survival, however. So if there is strong evidence that that thesis is true, then there is strong evidence against personal survival--regardless of whatever theory of mind is true. Michael Sudduth makes the same point in his recent book (pp. 26-27), and he is hardly either antithetical to psychical research or philosophically naive.

You say that mind-brain correlations constitute evidence, but not scientific evidence. But this distinction is something that you just made up; there is nothing in, say, the philosophy of science literature that makes your distinction. So why should I? The evidence for the dependence thesis is just as good as the evidence that, for example, people dream during REM sleep. You want to say that this is not scientific evidence for some idiosyncratic reason, but then all of psychology would not be science--which is a view more extreme than anything that even most materialists would argue.

The dependence thesis (or "hypothesis") does "entail we should observe certain things should that hypothesis be true, and when we do indeed observe these things, then this provides evidence for that hypothesis." This is argued throughout Part 1 of the book, but you just wave it away without so much as an attempt to show that the evidence for mind-brain dependence is not scientific evidence. You just stipulate that it doesn't count as such because you don't want it to count.

You add that "Scientific hypotheses also relate the various entities known to science via causal chains of causes and effects resulting in the phenomenon in question. But we're not in possession of any such causal mechanism which might explain the existence of consciousness."

Do you realize that this "mechanism objection" would deem all of parapsychology (in addition to all of psychology) nonscientific? What's the mechanism for PK, or clairvoyance, for example? A mechanism certainly helps strengthen one's understanding of what's going on, but lack of a mechanism does not mean that evidence can or cannot confirm a hypothesis, period. One can have evidence for quantum entanglement (e.g., the results of Bell inequality experiments), for example, without understanding how it is possible. Indeed, there is more than one "metaphysical" interpretation of quantum mechanics in general, and thus of quantum entanglement in particular, and yet this fact does not make entanglement something that cannot be confirmed by observation (it can and has been confirmed, despite disagreements about what its confirmation means), nor make the evidence for entanglement "evidence, but not scientific evidence."

I'm afraid that your objection that any hypothesis concerning the mind must be metaphysical and not empirical does not hold water. You may not have noticed it, but plain old physical-to-physical causation invokes a metaphysical relation called causation. There are doctoral dissertations in philosophy solely on physical-to-physical causation. Questions about necessitarian vs. (Humean) regularity theories of causation, for starters. Questions about the difference between causal laws and mere accidental generalizations. And so on. And yet scientists continue to produce scientific evidence that one physical event caused another--with or without your blessing.

If you want to know where Smythe gets her conception of karma from, it is the minimal core idea of karma dubbed the classical karma theory of India by Indologist Karl Potter. She notes this in her first endnote. A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (p. 644 among other places), edited by Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn, also relies on this not-approved-by-Wardell conception. Perhaps you should petition their respective university deans to ensure that next time, they consult you first.

I could say more in response to what you've written, but I think I've said too much already. I said that I would address the 10 points that you made in your comments here, and I've done that already, directly and to the point. I did not change the subject, as you have done in your replies. If you're going to be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian, I don't think further addressing you would be a constructive use of my time. After all, you give some frivolous objection to addressing karma in a critique explicitly of a central religious concept of rebirth, something that the volume makes quite clear at the outset, and then merely change your objection to a different one when I point out that your objection attacks a straw man. As I said before, I did not come here to debate you when I pointed out the forthcoming JP exchange, which is directly relevant to Robert's review since it covers the same subject matter but goes beyond that review. Not everything is about you, Ian.

[Alan]

Keith, you said ... "One does not need to defend materialism, or any particular theory of mind, in order to argue that having a functioning brain is a necessary condition for having consciousness."

But you mean present consciousness as I experience now?

Just in respect of Michael Sudduth (you mentioned), he says in his "Personal reflections on life after death" essay that he has no doubt that consciousness will continue after death, but doesn't seem to believe in personal survival. Worth looking up. How many philosophers are willing like this to make the kind of fine distinction he does?
So how about having a brain is *sufficient* for consciousness but not necessary? But this too implies something else is going on with my present experience, as I experience now, that is not to do with the function of the brain.
Besides, you seem to have ignored the evidence for "consciousness without a brain" I gave above, if you've read the Report.

[Ian Wardell]

Keith, surely saying x produces y can't be judged to be scientific purely by systematically noting correlations and patterns? I mean if we note that prodding the innards of a TV set produces certain characteristic effects eg ghosting or whatever, that certainly wouldn't be a scientific explanation of why the TV set outputs what it does. Surely we need some *conception* of how the TV outputs what it does? But we don't have a clue without the notion of TV waves!

The same goes for the mind and body. I think we need a mental entity before we can begin to make sense of consciousness and how it relates to the physical world. But certainly not only materialism holds that consciousness cannot exist without the brain! It could be that substance interactive dualism (not necessarily Descartes) is broadly true, but that this mental entity is somehow entangled with the brain and couldn't live without it. I do think we can have a scientific explanation of consciousness, but not as science is currently conceived. Consciousness has to be considered to be fundamental (even though it might depend on the brain).

I don't know what you mean about me changing the subject! I've addressed most of the pertinent points you've raised I think.

Regarding that chapter about karma. As I said before, I think your book should address the strongest arguments/reasons for survival, not attack the weak silly positions. I mean it's like when atheists talk about how ridiculous the notion of God is, and they attack the most fatuous conceptions of God imaginable! It might rally the atheist/skeptics, but does little to establish the truth!

[Julie Baxter]

I did warn you, our Ian, about verbal gymnastics, eels and buckets etc.. This arrogant fellow flicks away challenging discourse as if swatting flies. Nietzsche did the same thing - but with considerably more justification. Never mind old chap, your efforts are commendable - if somewhat futile.

[Ian Wardell]

Keith said:
"I'm afraid that your objection that any hypothesis concerning the mind must be metaphysical and not empirical does not hold water. You may not have noticed it, but plain old physical-to-physical causation invokes a metaphysical relation called causation. There are doctoral dissertations in philosophy solely on physical-to-physical causation. Questions about necessitarian vs. (Humean) regularity theories of causation, for starters. Questions about the difference between causal laws and mere accidental generalizations. And so on. And yet scientists continue to produce scientific evidence that one physical event caused another--with or without your blessing".

The problem is you say things, and its meaning is unclear. The *relationship* between mind and body might be empirical rather than metaphysical? But what does that mean?

It might be a brute fact about reality that when certain physical processes occur, this elicits consciousness. But there are still questions such as is this consciousness distinct from the underlying physical processes? Is it causally efficacious? You can't say that doesn't matter, because the notion of a causally inefficacious consciousness is simply not coherent! Oh yes, and a few of the authors who contributed to your book don't seem to realise this...

Yes, this notion of *physical* causality is metaphysical and we impose it on the world and certainly can't know of its literal existence (unlike mental causality since we immediately experience mental causality). We could simply talk about physical laws instead. Or we could say that physical events have a certain propensity to point to certain ends. None of this is science, it's metaphysics.

I'm not a contrarian just for the sake of it. It's just that the modern western metaphysical conception of reality is so utterly preposterous and transparently false! So I can't help commenting.

I agree this isn't constructive use of your time. I wouldn't have bothered posting in the first place if I were you.

[chel]

Can I ask what the issue is with the portrayal of karma?

[Ian Wardell]

@Chel,
Well, perhaps it might be useful if I paste in here a post I made in a reincarnation group on facebook on the 19th Nov 2015:

{quote}
I'm reading a book called "The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death". Each of the chapters is written by a different person. I've now reached a chapter called "Objections to Karma and Rebirth" by Ingrid Hansen Smythe.

Before even starting the chapter I thought to what avail is it to object to Karma since rebirth doesn't entail karma? But anyway. Ingrid says:

"Let us begin this investigation of the twin concepts of karma and rebirth by imagining the following scene, in which a man named Lenny is visiting his friend Pedro in the hospital after discovering that Pedro has recently been run over by a bus.

“Wow, that looks incredibly painful,” says Lenny, setting a basket of fruit on the bedside table. “You’ve got sixteen broken bones, damage to your internal organs, and look at those battery acid
burns all over your face. That must hurt like the dickens.”

“I never knew this kind of agony was possible,” groans Pedro.

“Oh yes, and worse besides,” says Lenny, pausing for a moment’s reflection. “Of course you deserve it, after what you did.”

“What?” Pedro replies. “What did I do to deserve this?”

“I don’t know, but look at the state of you! You’re a complete mess! You must have done something really awful, you scoundrel. Or maybe you had some really depraved thoughts, or you said some
wicked and sinful words. Or maybe you did a whole bunch of bad little deeds over countless lives and the consequences have accumulated and now—bingo—it’s payback time.”

My response:
What a ludicrous interpretation of Karma. Surely people don't think karma can subvert physical laws?

I see Karma as not being rewarded or punished for our actions. First of all we do many good things because it serves our self-interests. The good actions (and indeed bad actions) have to come from the heart, one's essence. And one wouldn't be rewarded or punished, rather what we do from the heart is a reflection of our essence, and our essence will gravitate us to good or bad environments, or good or bad circumstances.

I confess I know nothing about karma, but surely it can't mean punishment, least of all getting knocked over! What happens to physical laws etc?
{/quote}

Since then I've come across a webpage which outlines a much more sensible conception of Karma. Here:
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/01/21/karma-not-the-mainstream-version-the-real-one/

[MaterialScientist]

I don't have time to read all these posts but let me just say when your dead your dead. Once the brainstem dies, consciousness ceases to exist. It is human ignorance and bias from our anthropomorphism that causes us to want to believe in a life after death.

Think about nature, there is bacteria, insects, plants, animals dieing every second, every minute, every day. People don't think about other organisms and a 'life after death'. The whole thing of an 'afterlife' is a misnomer. There is life and there is death.

Sure an afterlife would be great, but we have to be brave and accept reality. I will not delude myself into fantasy and wishful thinking. The limited time we have here on earth is all we have and then we are nothing more than a skeleton rotting under the ground or tiny ashes blown into the earth. I know this is an emotional topic to some and believers need to believe and I respect that but you should not pretend science is on your side. Take care.

[MaterialScientist]

"And the existence of the astral body is not so implausible with the investigations of Karlis Osis, NDEs, apparitions, etc."

Apparitions and the NDE can be explained by neurological or physical factors.

Karlis Osis? None of his 'experiments' were ever independently verified. So science is not on your side Juan.

"Osis also conducted experiments with volunteers in a soundproof chamber in an attempt to get them to move a pendulum from a distance. Magician Milbourne Christopher has written that none of Osis's "out-of-the-body experiments can be properly evaluated; complete data about them have never been published." Science writer Mary Roach suggested that Osis was a "deluded or sloppy researcher."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlis_Osis

[Juan]

"Apparitions and the NDE can be explained by neurological or physical factors."

Some do not.

"Karlis Osis? None of his 'experiments' were ever independently verified. So science is not on your side Juan."

Wikipedia is not trustworthy in this topic, troll.

[Juan]

"It is human ignorance and bias from our anthropomorphism that causes us to want to believe in a life after death."

Fallacy of origin: the origin of a belief tells us nothing about the truth of that belief.

[Juan]

All these trolls must be one, because they write the same, "take care", etc. You have already been refuted in Prescott's blog and once again here.

[Ian Wardell]

MaterialScientist, Keith should have invited you to write one of the chapters. It would have fitted in very well!

I regard this notion that only human beings survive their deaths as being extraordinarily implausible. Stop attacking the weakest targets!

[chel]

[citation needed that is not a source any idiot can edit and that we haven't argued against a thousand times before], kid.

One could argue that many materialists are also clinging to their beliefs out of fear. Often a fear of the unknown or of being harshly judged, which is reasonable, but in many cases it seems to be a fear of being wrong, which is far, far sadder than fear of death.

Anyone who says "people don't think about other organisms and a life after death" has never owned a pet, nor apparently met anyone who has. Pets show up in NDEs and ghost sightings all the time, and while it's really glurgey and hardly a scientific source, everyone who's spent five minutes online has read the Rainbow Bridge story. Plenty of people say things along the lines of "if pets don't go to heaven, I don't want to go".

[Julie Baxter]

Amazing to think the following was written almost 100 years ago:

"I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the skeptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject."

— James H. Hyslop, Life After Death (1918)

[Ian Wardell]

It's just utterly ludicrous this notion that only humans survive. I presume a dog's brain is very similar to a human being's, albeit less complex. If only human beings have an afterlife this means that a dog's brain produces consciousness, but that a human being's brain does not -- the human being's brain merely "filters" the self or consciousness. But surely the similarity between our brains and dogs brains suggests they perform a similar function, irrespective of whether this function is producing or merely "filtering" consciousness? Moreover, if one brain produces and the other brain merely "filters" consciousness, then it seems to me that it ought to be the more complex brain which produces consciousness!

There is another consideration. If we exist both before conception and after death (it seems to me highly implausible we spring into existence at birth and then exist forevermore!), this at least opens up the possibility that there is some ultimate purpose to our existence. By ultimate purpose I mean something over and above the meaning we ourselves bestow on our lives. The word "purpose" connotes the idea that we have some ultimate teleological destiny.

But if only human beings survive their deaths, this means only our lives could have this ultimate purpose, and that other animals whose intelligence is not too far behind our own -- for example dolphins, apes and elephants -- do not have any such ultimate purpose. But why would human beings be *special* in this way? Taking both considerations into account I'm afraid I can't make much sense of this notion that only human beings survive their deaths and no other animals.

[Julie Baxter]

Lawrence writes:

"I didn't drink socially till I was 30..and even then not much..but it meant that I got to observe my own internal and behavioral changes as they were happening and it fascinated me to the point of being almost fixated with the conumdrum of whether I really was drunk or merely acting the role. Similarly with the death of family members seemingly uncontrollable bursts of sobbing were accompanied by an unmoved inner self watching this spontaneous behaviour dictated by my brain. I could stop mid tear whenever I chose. So which is the "real" me.. the one behaving in a particular way, dictated by brain chemistry...or the one who is aware of the fact as it happening and observing these changes with cold detachment?"

Yes, I'm often aware of exactly that kind of inner dialogue - particularly so when undergoing emotional experiences. We all joke about talking to ourselves but, in truth, that's exactly what we do. When we question ourselves we literally do so in the form of a dialogue between two people. Is this simply different parts of the brain (the two hemispheres) communicating their different perceptions? Or is it something more? :/

[chel]

That doesn't really happen to me - I'm always very immersed in my emotional experiences, and even when I do something stupid it always seems at the time to be what I should be doing. Does this happen all the time to other people? Why doesn't it happen to me? Autism? Lack of practice?

[Julie Baxter]

Are you autistic, Chel? That aside, I think the distinction is that we can hear the dialogue only as long as we're not entirely immersed in an extreme emotion. People sometimes do and say things when in a fit of rage, for example, that they would certainly not do or say were they able to hear the voice within.

One of life's greatest challenges is to learn to anticipate and recognise powerful emotions before they take us over completely. Sometimes I know that it is healthy for me to seek a quiet spot and blubber to my heart's content. Likewise, there are times when I know that to express anger in the manner that my immediate impulse directs would be unhealthy in the extreme. It sometimes feel to me as if I'm monitoring the infant inside. :)

[chel]

Yes, I am. And oh, yes, sometimes I can recognise and control emotions in the way you're describing here - it's just really really hard.

[Julie Baxter]

It's really, really hard for me too, at times! I am, by nature, very 'up-front' and outspoken. It sometimes gets me into trouble . . . . . but I do my best. :)

[Robert McLuhan]

‘Since I don't follow psi-articles on Wikipedia, let alone check Wikipedia in general all that often, I can't speak to how often psi proponents' edits are reverted there, while psi opponents' edits are kept. So I can't confirm that the balance of edits are against psi proponents; perhaps you see what you expect to see.’

Keith, it’s hard to believe an active psi-sceptic like yourself really is so heroically detached from what’s been going on as these statements suggest. But OK. You might take a look at some psi-related articles on Wikipedia, eg Parapsychology, Leonora Piper. You’ll see that after years of vigilante editing, almost all the sources cited are now sceptics. If I knew nothing about the subject, I’d come away thinking that hostile commentators like Terence Hines and Michael Shermer were the real experts. (Terence Hines, for heavens sake!)

Under Wikipedia’s weird rules, any slander can be quoted as a source, as long as it’s been published somewhere. It can then be trotted out by some nitwit as gospel truth, like fundamentalist Christians quoting Bible passages, eg elsewhere in this thread, ‘Science writer Mary Roach suggested that Osis was a "deluded or sloppy researcher."’

These guardians of scientific orthodoxy, whoever they are, are obviously well organised and committed to combating heresies. They’re well trained in wiki-lawyering, and will quote any number of Wiki rules at you if you dare to make edits supportive of parapsychology. If you stand up to them, they’ll keep repeating that Wikipedia can’t be used as a platform for fringe beliefs (the only rule that they really take seriously). And if that doesn’t make you give up, they’ll get you banned for ‘trolling’. Most admins have no idea what the issues are and aren’t impartial (although to their credit a few have been.)

This is particularly difficult for working scientists like Dean Radin, who are represented on Wikipedia by biographies mainly consisting of hostile comment. They can’t do a thing about it, unless they have a small army of supporters willing to argue endlessly with the gremlins (they really do call themselves things like GoblinFace) and hope that some of it pays off. That’s more or less what happened in the case of Rupert Sheldrake some years ago, where as a result there is some semblance of balance.

In short, Wikipedia readers aren’t being informed about psi research, or given any chance to make an independent assessment. They’re being protected from it and urged to disregard it. That’s one of the reasons for creating the Psi Encyclopedia (www.psi-encyclopedia.org), where they can at least understand the reasons why responsible researchers argue as they do.

[chel]

Also, MS, why would we "have to" do anything? I hardly see why it would matter if we believed something you didn't, given that by your theory nobody's exactly going to be in a position to find out.

[Dbrodbeck]

Actually I think the Wikipedia page is spot on regarding that deceased parapsychologist and a flawed experiment he performed:

"In 1980, Osis carried out another experiment with Tanous. He would attempt to leave his body to a shielded chamber to identify a target that contained strain gauges which would detect mechanical activity. Osis reported that from the results Tanous had left his body and was present at the target location. This conclusion has been criticized. The baseline activity of the device was not measured and the overall hit rate was not reported by Osis. According to Blackmore when she calculated the hit rate from the data "overall the subject made no more hits than would be expected by chance. This implies that any hits made were likely to have been due to chance and not an OBE. Osis's conclusion therefore seems quite unjustified and the results do not unambiguously support the idea that Alex Tanous was able to influence the strain gauges with his OBE presence."

That is well sourced criticism from Susan Blackmore. Everything on Wikipedia is sourced, there is no libel. If you have a problem with content take it up with the authors, not Wikipedia editors who are only citing the publications.

Yet Juan you kept posting this Karl Osis on various forums claiming this experiment has demonstrated life after death. It hasn't. The reason psi believers do not like Wikipedia is because it is pro science. It supports the naturalist skeptic point of view.

The psi Encyclopedia is written by believers and does not contain skeptical coverage of the frauds, for example the article on Henry Slade misses three of his exposures where he was caught in fraud.

Look for example at it's page on D. D. Home. even Guy William Lambert's excellent paper in the SPR journal "D. D. Home and the Physical World" is not cited on the article (1), neither is Count Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo's skeptical paper on Home (2).

References

(1) Guy William Lambert. (1976). D. D. Home and the Physical World. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 48: 298-314.

(2 ) Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo, Count. (1912). On the Alleged Exposure of D. D. Home in France. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 15: 274-288.

Basically anything skeptical (even if it is written in the SPR journal) is 'filted out' from this new psi encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the complete opposite it is pro-skeptic. Neither of these Wikipedia's are 'neutral' on the topic of the paranormal.

I am a Wikipedia editor by the way. Been on there for years. It is a great place to learn if you are pro-science. Ian asked what forum has this thread been advertised on, on a private part of the International Skeptics Forum.

Dbrodbeck

[Dbrodbeck]

My friend has covered the problems with the psi encyclopedia on his blog here if any of you are interested:

https://badthinking.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/spr-has-a-new-website/

[chel]

Hey, Robert, is the IP address of that guy above me the same as MS's?

[Julie Baxter]

Robert, rise above it!

Ps. I know you will. I was speaking more to myself. x

[chel]

Anyone mind picking at this?: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/11/05/the-brain-doesnt-cause-lying/#.WDoGluaLQ2w
The way I see it, you can't have it both ways. If people are their brains, you don't get to blame them for anything because they couldn't have done anything different.

[Troy]

Hey, Robert, is the IP address of that guy above me the same as MS's?

I wouldn't be surprised. A troll with a very similar writing style has been showing up here and at Michael Prescott's blog for a long time. I'd bet money this is the same person.

[chel]

Y'know, I'm not so sure my comments about autism are as irrelevant as I thought. It isn't entirely clear what causes autism but it's confirmed there are brain structure differences in the language centres; language is often inaccessible to us, but other things happen *more* strongly. Sensory overload is a big problem for us, and many of us feel emotions very strongly while not showing them at all, which gets us stereotyped as emotionless robots. I'm sure there's a point to be made on the mind-brain issue with that, but I don't know what.

[Bucky]

LuckyLouie and MaterialScientist are both wikipedia editors and militant skeptics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/LuckyLouie

I am pretty sure they are member of Susan Gerbic's Wikipedia skeptic group:

http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.co.uk/

They also post on the JREF forum and have edited articles on Rationalwiki claiming all paranormal believers are gullible fools.

[chel]

They say we're the pathetic sheep and yet they're the ones who type indistinguishably from each other and repeat the same arguments dozens of times in a row?

[Keith Augustine]

"Keith, it’s hard to believe an active psi-sceptic like yourself really is so heroically detached from what’s been going on as these statements suggest."

I'm not sure why you see anyone who does not believe in the paranormal and argues the point as some sort of "activist skeptic," unless doing so is all that it takes to be considered an activist skeptic--the way that all that it evidently takes to be a militant atheist is to argue for your disbelief instead of keeping silent about it.

In certain chapters, Theologian John Hick extensively appealed to psychical research material in his Death and Eternal Life to the extent that it was relevant to the issues that he was addressing, but that did not make him any sort of "psi activist." (I give Hick credit for this since most philosophers, of whatever persuasion, simply ignore psychical research altogether: consider what disappointingly little Richard Swinburne has to say about psychical research material in books like The Evolution of the Soul.)

Why would researching and referencing both psychical research and skeptical material (as I do) on an issue where such material is obviously relevant make one either an "activist skeptic" or a "psi activist"? Labels like that assume that those on either side make their position on psi central to their identity. I think that maybe because you make advocating the existence of psi so central to your own identity (being on the SPR Board, editing the psi encyclopedia, etc.), you see others through the same lens, assuming that they share the same obsession. I don't think that every skeptical author necessarily does share it (though you are certainly free to disagree if it means that much to you).

Personally, I'm interested in parapsychology to the extent that it is relevant to the survival question (and I am interested in survival for basically the same reason that everyone else is: death is unavoidable). But beyond the survival question, my interest in the paranormal drops off sharply; that's why you never see me commenting on such things as the Global Consciousness Project, presentiment experiments, dogs that "know" that their owners are coming home, and so on. I'm not sure how much it matters whether such effects exist or not, at least relative to how much it matters whether we survive death or not. I put these other things on the same level as whether Bigfoot exists or not: a somewhat curious issue, but nothing to get all worked up about one way or the other.

To give an example, I don't really see Leonard Angel as an "activist skeptic" merely for criticizing Ian Stevenson's work in print every 6-8 years instead of being silent about it, even though he publishes in skeptical sources once in awhile since that audience is likely to be the only one to care about what he has to say (his Enlightenment East and West, where he first criticized Stevenson, if I recall correctly, was not a "skeptic publication," but was published by the State University of New York Press). I would imagine that the bulk of what Angel does concerns his work as the Director of the Institute for Ethics and Global Justice at his college. Since that work doesn't interest you, you don't notice it, instead only noticing where he criticizes Stevenson. And he makes no bones about not believing in the paranormal in general in The Myth of an Afterlife. But does that make him an "activist skeptic"? I've never seen him say anything, except perhaps incidentally, about psychokinesis, morphic resonances, remote viewing, and so on. (In fact, I have barely heard from him at all since before The Myth of an Afterlife was submitted in September 2014, presumably because he is busy doing things having nothing to do with "skeptical activism".)

[Waller Joel]

Helen Duncan was a fraud, skeptic Jon Donnis has debunked those cheeseclothes. No idea why McLuhan and Michael E. Tymn keep claiming all these frauds are genuine.

Just face it death is the end. People talkin about apparitions in the 21st century lol. You are no different than flat earth believers.

Waller Joel

[Alan]

New ideas in physics and the way present science sees ourselves (just material meat robots, as is often said) are implied by parapsychological and esp. the physical phenomena given above so when Keith Augustine uses the word "obsession" in pursuit of these phenomena, I'd say it's more a powerful interest searching for something elusive yet real that researchers/writers have, which will lead to new directions in what it means to be a living agent in this universe.
Perhaps in the bigger picture every intelligent agent in the universe at or beyond our stage of development (considered certain to exist in respect of the number of stars with planets already found) has probably gone through this stage of a kind of "opening up".
The rather silly behaviour of the organised skeptics? And there *is* organisation. Perhaps to be seen as a natural psycho-social reaction against such "opening" in our present time, for our society.
When you think about it, truth will out and science will be key in this discovery. Science isn't a friend of the un-truth.

[Keith Augustine]

Ian: "The problem is you say things, and its meaning is unclear. The *relationship* between mind and body might be empirical rather than metaphysical? But what does that mean?"

You tell me what that means since those are your words, not mine. Before you attribute that idea to me, you quote what I actually say, which was that the idea "that any hypothesis concerning the mind must be metaphysical and not empirical does not hold water."

One could describe various, simultaneously true metaphysical relations between mind and body (existential dependence, supervenience, realization, emergence, nomologically necessary connection, and on and on), and there could be empirical evidence for some of those relations even if there could not be for others. I argue that there is empirical evidence for, at a bare minimum, existential dependence. You want to have that evidence thrown out of court because it is so damning to the possibility of life after death, which even you acknowledge by saying that it's powerful evidence, but not scientific evidence, whatever that means. Since it's not historical evidence, I'd be curious as to what kind of evidence you think it is. It's data derived from experience, is it not? What do you think empirical means?

Now you might argue that it is impossible to have empirical evidence for a metaphysical relation, but I've already shown that this is false for relations like causation and entanglement. (Note that the point would apply to any kind of causation, not just physical-to-physical causation. I used that example because most people are hard pressed to deny, for example, that a flock of birds entering the engines of a plane caused the engines to stop. But even on idealism, there is causation, with one mental event causing another. So there can be evidence for causation itself, even if you characterize what looks like physical-to-physical causation as really being mental-to-mental causation because only mental things really exist, and we just think that they are physical. Unless you care to argue that no one ever discovers the causes of anything at any time, then you have to grant that there can be empirical evidence of the metaphysical relation called causation. When you type on a keyboard and then a new post appears on this blog, the one event caused the other, no?

If there can be empirical evidence that one event caused another, then in principle it is possible for there to be empirical evidence for other metaphysical relations, too. So your idea that one cannot answer a question about such a relation without delving into metaphysics is false: in the "miracle on the Hudson" case everyone grants that birds caused the engines to stop. Thus your "But it's metaphysical!" objection invites the response "So what?" just in general.

Thus the only way for you to proceed would be to argue that one cannot have empirical evidence for or against existential dependence in particular (which in turn means that one cannot have empirical evidence that the mind is *independent* of the brain, either). Good luck with providing an argument for that that does not beg the question. So far you have not even tried to produce such an argument. You just again assert that one cannot have empirical evidence that a relation between consciousness and the brain holds because science cannot in principle explain consciousness, when the latter does not entail the former--unless you can produce an argument showing otherwise. We have empirical evidence that a certain kind of brain activity causes dreaming consciousness, regardless of whether or not science can explain what consciousness is, or what exact metaphysical relations hold between consciousness and the brain.

Ian: "What a ludicrous interpretation of Karma. Surely people don't think karma can subvert physical laws?"

This is another idea that you project onto Smythe. Where does Smythe say that karma invisibly "pushed" Pedro in front of the bus (which would involve new momentum popping out of nowhere against physical law)? The idea that Smythe is critiquing is that the history of the world would unfold in such a way that this event would ultimately happen to Pedro because of the earlier history where he committed some moral violation, with no violation of physical laws necessary (except when you, not Smythe, introduce that idea because you need a straw man to defeat). Granted that this would have to give karma God-like powers, but who is to say that this is not what (at least some) karma-believers think?

One final comment: That you are contrarian for the sake of it is obvious in your manner of response. I directly responded to 9 of your initial points (I said 10 points earlier forgetting that point #9 was to Alan about Scole), which as the first objections you had to offer, ought to have been your best ones.

In an honest debate your reply should have addressed only my response to those 9 points directly. For example, you should have granted that I am correct about points #0, #4, #6, and #8 (as these are undeniable purely factual claims), but doubled down on (if you can actually defend them) points #1, 2, 3, 5, and 7.

But this you did not do, instead deciding to offer up new objections like that Smythe thinks karma requires violations of physical law (which she doesn't), or that she uses some nonstandard conception of karma (which a standard-bearer like A Companion to Philosophy of Religion also uses). This is changing the subject, offering up red herrings, instead of responding to the points actually made. It is the behavior of someone looking for anything critical to say in order to tribally impress kindred spirits, not the behavior of someone who honestly professes interest in "getting to the *truth*." Were this debate to continue, your original nine points would simply multiply with the addition of new ones in each response.

Just to give a simple example of this, I already answered that one need not endorse any theory of mind in order to provide evidence for mind-brain dependence, and you never showed that in order to accept existential mind-brain dependence, one must also accept reductionist materialism, or functionalism, or even just the negation of substance dualism. All of these mind-body positions are compatible with mind-brain dependence being true--you have yet to show otherwise, anyway. But personal survival is not compatible with mind-brain dependence being true. So if one has evidence for mind-brain dependence, one has evidence against personal survival, period. It doesn't matter what theory of mind or of personal identity is true since none of those theories entail that we must survive. The best case scenario is that it is logically possible for us to survive, which is not the same thing as reason to think that we actually do survive. For we still might not survive even if survival was merely logically possible. (It's logically possible that I can fly just by flapping my arms, but I would still fall despite that possibility.) This makes any particular solution to the mind-body problem irrelevant, except that some rule out survival (like reductionist materialism) and thus could be used to argue against survival. The problem for you is that one does not need to start from any such theory to argue against survival. One can argue against survival on purely observational grounds, ignoring any theoretical grounds someone else might want to appeal to. Since there is no general consensus about what theory of mind is true, why would anyone make such a theoretical argument? On the other hand, hardly anyone denies that severe brain damage typically does damage the mind. So why wouldn't one start from that unimpeachable observational evidence instead of from contentious theories of mind?

[Robbie]

It's funny whenever people say there is no evidence for life after death or psi phenomenon then you know they they either haven't engaged with the evidence or are too biased so admit there's something going on.

The evidence for psi is at the level of many mainstream areas and the work is often to a higher standard due to the criticism it receives in comparison to more normal areas. Heck if you look at the stargate files yourself they say remote viewing is proven, so what are we debating for? People are having psychic experiences and the evidence is pretty robust.

I also think there is a lot of powerful evidence for materialism but there's a lot that tells us it's at the very least incomplete, and that the mind and brain are much more complex then we want to admit. Also a lot of neuroscience work is low powered and poorly replicated, so it's worth bearing that nun mind too.

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