Dr. Michael Sudduth is the rare academic who takes evidence for postmortem survival seriously – seriously enough, in fact, that he's written a book about it for a scholarly audience: A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Evidence for Postmortem Survival.
I have to admit I haven't read the book. I did start it, but I'm afraid my philosophical education (limited to a couple of introductory courses in college) is too meager to properly read and digest its contents. That's why I was happy to discover an online interview with Dr. Sudduth in which he summarizes his arguments in terms that even a layman like me can (I hope) understand.
I should add that Dr. Sudduth is a good friend of mine on Facebook, and I hope that my critical remarks will be taken as constructive criticism and not merely as bashing his point of view. I also acknowledge that a brief interview can't possibly present the full scope and nuance of his arguments.
With that said, let's take a look at some of what he says in the Q&A.
His basic point, as I take it, is that the philosophical arguments that survivalists make are flawed, and that while the evidence may (at least for the sake of argument) be taken as valid, the conclusions drawn from it are unwarranted. He says that survivalists "haven't provided a good enough reason to believe either of [their] two main claims":
... [first, that] survival is at least more probable than not, if not highly probable relative to the total evidence [and second, that] survival provides the best explanation of the relevant facts. ... [Survivalists] argue that survival is probable or very probable because it provides the best explanation of the data.
He goes on to say that survivalists make unwarranted and self-defeating assumptions.
First, there are general assumptions about what the evidence for survival should look like. In the absence of such assumptions, there's no plausible inference from features of the world to the claim that persons survive death. In much the same way, if I don't know (or reasonably believe) what the evidence that Mr. X committed the crime should look like, I can't plausibly regard any crime-scene fact as evidence that Mr. X committed the crime.
Let's start with this analogy. As I see it, the problem with it is that it has no counterpart in the real world. There is never a case in which you don't know or reasonably believe what the evidence that Mr. X committed the crime should look like. No one is ever quite that much in the dark.
Here are some ways you could know if Mr. X is at least a plausible suspect:
- Mr. X left a signed confession at the scene
- Mr. X left his fingerprints on the murder weapon
- Mr. X's monogrammed handkerchief was found stuffed in the victim's mouth
- Eyewitnesses observed Mr. X leaving the scene.
You can multiply examples indefinitely. The point is, it is impossible to imagine a situation in which an investigator would have no idea whatsoever of what might constitute evidence of Mr. X's involvement in a crime. That degree of ignorance is impossible in the real world.
Let's take a more realistic example. Suppose we're looking for life on Mars, but we don't know what Martian life might consist of. In that case, it might be argued that we can't know what evidence for Martian life should look like, so we can't plausibly regard any discovery as evidence of Martian life.
It's the same situation as the crime scene. But notice that, in the real world, we have made efforts to look for Martian life via robot probes. How is this possible? Well, even though we don't know what Martian life might consist of, we can make certain foundational assumptions, taking care that these assumptions are as conservative as possible. For instance, we might assume that any form of life will exhibit the property of metabolism. Then we would search for signs of metabolic processes. If we find a possible metabolic process, we proceed to make further tests in an attempt to distinguish it from some other type of chemical reaction. None of this requires claiming to know anything in detail about the nature of Martian life, or even being certain that Martian life does or can exist.
Is this assumption ad hoc, arbitrary, and unwarranted? I would say no. It is perhaps the most bare-bones assumption possible. And in any investigation, we have to start somewhere.
How would this apply to postmortem survival? Dr. Sudduth mentions mediumship, NDEs and OBEs, and reincarnation cases as the topics addressed in his book, but for simplicity let's limit this blog entry to the study of mediumship. We need to make just two foundational assumptions in order to begin this study: first, that if consciousness survives death, it can sometimes communicate through a medium; and second, that if such communications take place, some of them can include verifiable information.
Note that we are not insisting that consciousness does survive, or that it can communicate, or that it can retain and convey specific facts. This is an if-then proposition. And the assumptions are not arbitrary. As with Martian metabolism, they are the most conservative assumptions we can make if we intend to make a scientific study. Mediumship can have no scientific value if the medium produces no communications, or if the medium produces communications that can never be verified. Only if there are communications and some of them can be verified is there any point in studying mediumship at all. Our beginning assumptions are the only possible basis on which we can proceed. And in fact, this is the basis on which the earliest serious investigations, sponsored by the (British) Society for Psychical Research, were conducted.
It's true, of course, that as investigations into mediumship continued over the decades, and as thousands of pages of case studies were written up, more characteristics were attributed to postmortem consciousness than simply its existence, ability to communicate, and ability to supply verifiable facts. But those later attributions were the result of the empirical evidence that was being collected. It's similar to finding evidence of a metabolic process on Mars, conducting intensive research on the sample, and learning a host of new things about it. The new things were not part of the original assumption. They were the result of the investigation, not the beginning.
It's necessary to make this point because, later in the interview, Dr. Sudduth says:
... we really can't say with any reasonable degree of assurance what we should expect survival evidence to look like in any particular case. We only get there by making further assumptions. So simple survival does not logically entail (nor make probable) a surviving self that retains all the right stuff: the stock of memories, desires, intentions, and perceptual abilities and causal powers required for ongoing lifelike interactions with our world and that would justify identifying a person as the same as (or the continuation of) some previous personality. We need auxiliary assumptions to bulk up a generic or simple survival hypothesis (or theory) into a more conceptually robust hypothesis or theory) that can plausibly account for the data.
In my opinion, this gets the actual situation backward. It's not the case that investigators have added assumption upon assumption as research has proceeded. What's happened is that they've added empirical fact upon empirical fact. The countless pages of transcripts, with independent verification of many details, have pointed investigators to certain conclusions about the nature of postmortem consciousness. Those conclusions are no more arbitrary than the conclusions reached in any other field of inquiry that depends on facts. It's only natural that, as we learn more about a subject, we'll be able to say more about it. That doesn't mean we're making a host of arbitrary assumptions. We're stating what we know, or at least what we think we know based on the evidence.
The early investigators were looking for any sign of verifiable communications. When they obtained such communications, they proceeded to test them in various ways – by proxy sittings, the use of anonymous or pseudonymous sitters, book and newspaper tests, the so-called cross correspondences (information provided in fragmentary form by different mediums that made sense only when put together by the researchers), etc. The intention was to determine the limitations of this purported postmortem communication and to see if it could be distinguished from "ordinary" ESP. All of this seems perfectly rational to me. In what other way could such studies proceed?
Distinguishing mediumistic communications from ESP has, of course, been an ongoing issue in parapsychology. Because the kind of ESP that would be required to produce the more compelling evidence in medium studies is unusually robust, it has been called super-ESP or, more recently, super-psi. Dr. Sudduth prefers the term living-agent psi. He argues that survivalists are guilty of
a (perhaps unconscious) logical sleight-of-hand … Survivalists routinely contrast a simple survival hypothesis and a robust living-agent psi hypothesis to show that living-agent psi – unlike survival – is overly complex and relies on assumptions that are ad hoc or lack independent support. But when survivalists wish to focus on the explanatory advantages of the survival hypothesis, they contrast a simple living-agent psi hypothesis (which explains very little) and a robust interpretation of survival.
Up to a point, this is a valid criticism. There's a tendency for survivalists, myself included, to minimize the capabilities of psi and to maximize the purported capabilities of postmortem communicators. Exaggeration does come into play.
Moreover, I think it's likely that some – perhaps most – mediumistic communications do, in fact, result from living-agent psi. This same conclusion is reached by Arthur Ellison in his valuable book Science and the Paranormal.
But to argue that living-agent psi is a satisfactory explanation for all mediumship strikes me as implausible. There are cases that fall well outside the range of any known living-agent psi, and which have been examined in scrupulous detail in some of the better-known books in the field. See in particular Mediumship and Survival, by Alan Gauld, and Immortal Remains by Stephen E. Braude.
I can't cover all such cases here, but let's pick one of the more famous ones – the famous case of Runki and his missing leg. Because I wrote up a fairly detailed summary of this case last year, I'll present only a shorter recap here. For details, you can always refer to my earlier post, or even better, to the original report by Ehrlunder Haraldsson and Ian Stevenson. In brief:
Beginning in 1937, an Icelandic medium found his séances repeatedly interrupted by a (purported) spirit who at first refused to give his name, but who eventually identified himself as Runki. Runki said he'd drowned in 1879 (58 years earlier); his body, swept out to sea, was only partially recovered. He was very upset that one of his leg bones had not been properly buried. Sometime later, a new sitter joined the circle. Runki was excited by this new arrival, stating that this man had his missing leg! Eventually it transpired that Runki believed the leg bone had been interred in a wall of the man's house shortly before he bought the place. Inquiries were made, and some locals dimly recalled finding a leg bone during a beach excavation circa 1920, passing it around, and eventually opting to place it inside the wall in 1921, when the house was remodeled. In 1940, in response to Runki's insistence, the wall was opened, and a leg bone was found. It was given a proper burial, after which Runki pronounced himself satisfied, and no longer disrupted the séances, though he did go on to function as the medium's "control."
This case was carefully investigated by Ehrlendur and Stevenson, and appears to be genuine. The various facts about Runki were scattered among different, extremely obscure, archived but unpublished documents; no one document contained all the information. Since Runki died almost 60 years before he announced himself, there were virtually no people left alive who'd known him. (A grandson did remember him as being unusually tall, which was something the communicator had said about himself. The human femur found in the old house belonged to a tall man, though it was never proved to be Runki's.) He apparently was not that well known locally even in his lifetime. Moreover, the Runki communicator had a distinctive personality and clearly defined likes and dislikes, and he was aggressive about insisting on recovery of his leg.
How would living-agent psi account for all this? Initially, the man who owned the house wasn't even part of the circle. Nor did he know about the leg bone hidden in a wall. But let's say he unconsciously became aware of the leg bone via clairvoyance. He would then have to somehow connect the leg with Runki, who'd died six decades earlier. He would need to clairvoyantly access multiple archived documents containing scattered references to Runki's death and burial. Then he would have to influence the medium (whom he had not yet met) to bring out all this information at a séance, even though no one in the circle had any interest in or connection to Runki, and to construct a vivid persona of a low-level earthbound spirit with an obsessive interest in his missing leg bone. Presumably his own decision to join the circle sometime later would have been directed by a subconscious need to resolve the situation.
Dr. Sudduth says:
[Survivalists) miss how the kind of survival hypothesis that adequately accommodates the data requires assumptions that are at least as complex, ad hoc, and lacking in the way of independent support as those adopted by the defender of the living-agent psi hypothesis in the interest of accommodating the data.
Is this true in the Runki case? It seems to me that the living-agent psi assumptions listed above are far more "complex, ad hoc, and lacking in the way of independent support" than the survival hypothesis. Moreover, the "assumptions" made by survivalists are mostly not assumptions at all, but – as we previously considered – the result of an ever-increasing body of empirical evidence.
I concede that the survival hypothesis fails to explain how Runki knew that his leg bone (or any leg bone, whether or not it was actually his) was hidden inside a certain wall. His ability to pinpoint the concealed bone may well qualify as a kind of "super-psi" in itself. It remains mysterious under any interpretation of the case. But in other respects, Runki's knowledge and behavior are consistent with an un-evolved spirit (Runki himself said he had no wish to evolve: "It is fine to be as I am”) who naturally was familiar with the details of his life and death, and who retained his coarse personality and cravings for snuff and rum.
On the other hand, as far as I know, there's no body of empirical evidence to suggest that a living person can perform all the complex psychic gymnastics required in the Runki case. Evidence for living-agent psi is strong and convincing, but nearly all researchers agree that psi is generally a weak, marginal ability that comes and goes, and which is typically detected only by large-scale statistical studies.
There are, of course, standout cases of more dramatic psi abilities, but does any known case incorporate all the abilities hypothesized above?
I concede that it's logically possible that psi could be this robust in a few people. But a logical possibility does not constitute reasonable doubt. (See Chris Carter's Science and the Afterlife Experience for discussion of this point.) If we had to give equal weight to every logical possibility, no matter how far-fetched, we could never get anywhere in our reasoning. A defense attorney might argue that Mr. X's signed confession was forged, that his fingerprints were planted, that the monogrammed handkerchief was stolen, and that the eyewitnesses were bribed by the real killer. All of these are logical possibilities, but unless the attorney can show that they're realistic possibilities, they aren't worth considering.
Let's conclude with a fanciful analogy. Suppose that somebody tells you to find a billaquoot. You ask what a billaquoot is. You're told, "Never mind about that – just find one!" It should be obvious that you'll be at a loss. You literally don't know what you're looking for. You won't know what the evidence of a billaquoot should even look like. If you're determined to do something anyway, you'll have to make assumptions about how a billaquoot might look or what behavior it might exhibit. These assumptions can't help but be groundless and wrong because the term "billaquoot" is meaningless.
Now we have to ask: Is the term "postmortem consciousness" equally meaningless? This seems to be the position taken by Dr. Sudduth, unless I've misunderstood him (which is always possible — again, I'm no philosopher). He seems to be saying that nobody can know anything about postmortem consciousness, and therefore there's no way to find evidence for it without making a host of unwarranted, groundless assumptions that are just as arbitrary as assumptions made about the billaquoot.
I don't doubt that postmortem consciousness is a tricky thing to define or describe, but I disagree that it's as empty of meaning as a nonsense word. Some meaning can be attached to it, and investigations into survival have historically begun with the barest possible definition or description, which has been expanded and refined only as more information comes to light.
Moreover, this is how things work in any area of investigation. How did we ever study gravity or electricity or microorganisms when we knew nothing about them? We started with vague notions and progressively refined them. How is the study of survival any different?
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