Postscript

In the wake of my previous post about Michael Sudduth's critique of survival arguments, I looked up some other critiques online. I'm linking to three of them, with some excerpts. Of course, to get a full appreciation of each article, you should read the whole thing.

The first, which is the shortest, comes from the old Paranormalia blog run by Robert McLuhan. Titled A Philosopher Tackles Survival, it's a response to a written interview that Sudduth published before his book had come out. McLuhan writes:

I see [Sudduth's] point – up to a point. Writers like [C.D.] Broad, [C.J.] Ducasse, and [Alan] Gauld get to grips with the data in an appropriately skeptical fashion, whereas some recent books – David Fontana's Is There an Afterlife? comes to mind – take the view that the meaning of survival phenomena is so blindingly obvious it's perverse to take any other view of it. I don't think that works; for most of us the logic has to be clearly spelled out.

But what does it mean for the logic to be spelled out? McLuhan quotes part of Sudduth's argument:

Let's suppose that Pr(DMAX/S&K) = Pr(DMAX/C&K). That is, the predictive power or likelihoods of S and C are equivalent. The survival hypothesis might still have a greater posterior probability than C (maybe even be more probable than not) if its prior probability is greater, especially if the prior probability is much greater. From a Bayesian viewpoint, if Pr(e/h1&k) = Pr(e/h2&k), then Pr(h1/e&k) > Pr(h2/e&K) just if Pr(h1/k) > Pr(h2/k)....

There is more to the passage, but this gives the flavor. McLuhan comments:

I understand what is being said here (I think), I'm just not convinced that this approach puts the matter on a more sound footing.… When analytical philosophers go at each other hammer and tongs in their specialist lingo it doesn't settle the matter for anyone, apart from peers who understand it. They may triumphantly claim to have spotted a logical flaw that makes a nonsense of their opponent's argument – the rest of us just have to take their word for it.

Surely such life-and-death questions are never settled on narrow technical grounds.

He adds, though, that he is "glad to see a philosopher taking an interest in survival phenomena – it's very much to be welcomed."

I would suggest that such complex calculations of probability may apply in the hard sciences, where outcomes can be predicted with great precision, but I'm not sure how well they apply in matters of psychology and consciousness, which are inherently ambiguous and nuanced, and which are – to date – poorly understood.

A second article is by Edward F. Kelly, perhaps best known for his work on the comprehensive academically-oriented tome Irreducible Mind. This article is a review of Sudduth's published book; it appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 30, #4. Kelly notes that the issues involved in postmortem survival are

at least in part philosophical, revolving around deep subjects such as the metaphysics of personal identity, and professional philosophers have made important contributions to the debate throughout its long history, from persons such as [F.W.H.] Myers's colleagues William James and F.C.S. Schiller through mid-20th-century figures such as Kurt Ducasse, H.H. Price, and C.D. Broad. The present era is no exception. Philosophers Almeder (1992), Carter (2012), Griffin (1997), Lund (2009), and Paterson (1995), for example, have published books strongly supportive of survival, while Stephen Braude (1997, 2003) has taken a more conservative approach …

Kelly appreciates Sudduth's entry "into the fray," saying that "Sudduth has definitely carried the historical contest between [living-agent psi] and survivalist interpretations of currently available evidence to a new level of analytical sophistication." He agrees with Sudduth that the term "super-psi" should be replaced by the more neutral "living-agent psi." He finds other merits in Sudduth's presentation and notes that Sudduth has "militated effectively … against premature triumphalism about the strength of the positive case for survival."

On the other hand, Kelly finds fault with Sudduth's "reliance upon confirmation theory, which he simply adopts without discussion or justification as though it's the known and universally agreed-upon 'gold standard' for investigations of the sort he is undertaking."

His characterization of what it means to "expect" or "predict" or "accommodate" or "explain" observational data in a manner approved by confirmation theory seems to me much more appropriate to a hard-science context than to those dominating psychology and the behavioral sciences generally, and his descriptions sometimes come across as unrealistically precise …

Though I know nothing about confirmation theory, the gist of this objection seems to dovetail with my own reservations about trying to calculate with mathematical precision the likelihood of phenomena relating to psychology and consciousness.

Kelly goes on:

The book's central arguments are extremely abstract and proceed at a great distance from the raw empirical observations, sometimes leaving me with the odd sense of looking through the wrong end of a telescope. By contrast, most survival investigators, historically speaking, have begun with the detailed data of intensively studied individual cases, and attempted to guess, "abductively," what sort of model might in a relatively rough common-sense or folk-psychological manner account best for their observed properties, i.e. without presuming such a narrow and formal concept of scientific explanation. What I take Ducasse to have done, for example, is to posit the postmortem existence of more or less intact minds as the source of the most challenging observed data – a single and in some sense "simple" survival hypothesis which already incorporates most if not all of what Sudduth treats under the heading of auxiliary assumptions.

This objection seems to get back to a point I made in the earlier post – namely, that if an investigation of, say, mediumship is to be done at all, it must begin with the assumption that the minds of the departed can continue to function and can communicate with the living. This assumption, of course, may be disproved, but it is the claim being tested, and it is the only possible claim that can be tested if mediumship is to be tested in the first place. I don't see why complicated auxiliary assumptions need to enter the picture, but I may be missing the point.

Kelly takes issue with "the repeated claims" by both Sudduth and Braude

that the survival hypothesis entails exercise by discarnate persons of psi capacities essentially identical in scope and power to those attributed to the medium by the [living-agent psi] hypothesis. I don't think we have any realistic basis for quantitatively precise parity assertions of this sort, which again flow from a very abstract argument remote from real data. Mrs. Piper's GP control, for example, recognized all and only the 30 anonymous sitters that GP had actually known in life, and for many of these delivered copious amounts of intimate personal detail with great verisimilitude, while showing only relatively modest amounts of knowledge about ongoing world events above and beyond what might plausibly have been gleaned directly from the medium.

In other words, in her trance state, the medium Leonora Piper did not exhibit a wide-ranging or universal knowledge, but specific knowledge of specific people purportedly known to her spirit control. The spirit control would not have needed super-psi, or living-agent psi, or whatever you want to call it, in order to possess this information. He would merely need to remember what he had already learned during his lifetime. As Kelly puts it:

nearly all the information needed to support the performance of the GP persona can plausibly be imagined as resident in the discarnate mind of GP himself, should it exist.

Finally, Kelly deals with the issue of the "prior probability" of survival. Noting that "survival-deniers Martin and Augustine (2015) make that negligible prior probability a cornerstone of their own quasi-Bayesian approach to the survival question," and that "earlier scholars such as E.R. Dodds, C.D. Broad, and Gardner Murphy had viewed the apparent success of classical physicalism as the major obstacle to acceptance of positive evidence for survival," he points out that any weakening of the case for physicalism weakens the argument for survival's "negligible prior probability." Citing chapter 6 of Irreducible Mind, Kelly lists a number of "rogue" empirical phenomena, not limited to parapsychological studies, which, in combination with developments in physics and philosophy,

contribute to demonstrating clearly, I believe, that the classical physicalism of the late 19th Century sort which dominates contemporary psychology and neuroscience is not simply incomplete but false.

Despite these disagreements, Kelly ends his review on a positive note, restating his "fundamental admiration for this fine and very unusual book … dense with hard, clear, sustained, and provocative critical thinking, and rich in penetrating observations about the state of play in contemporary discussions of postmortem survival."

A third article is titled simply Review of Sudduth (2016), and it appeared in the blog Signs of Reincarnation. The blog is maintained by Jim Matlock, a researcher into the past-life memories of children. Matlock's review is less positive than the others. Unlike Kelly, he is not prepared to jettison the term "super-psi." He writes:

Sudduth dislikes the term "super-psi," which he considers pejorative. His alternative, "living agent psi," is hardly an improvement, though. It is, in fact, a step backward, because it lumps together simple, regular psi, for which there is a great deal of independent evidence, with complex super-psi, for which there is little if any independent evidence. If this is not a move designed to make super-psi seem more credible than it is, it will have that effect on the reader unaware of the paucity of evidence for super-psi.… Toward the end of the book, Sudduth [introduces] the term "robust living agent psi" in the sense of super-psi, but if we need this concept, why not simply call it by its old and familiar name…?

Again and again Sudduth reveals that he does not appreciate what is asked of super-psi as the explanatory principle, especially in relation to reincarnation cases. His living agent psi hypothesis "does not postulate unlimited psi, only psi sufficiently potent to accommodate the veridical features of the data," he tells us (p. 285). Fine, but in addition to veridical memory claims, there are emotional, behavioral, and physical aspects to the reincarnation cases. Children identify with the previous persons they speak about, they behave like those persons, and they may bear physical resemblances to or have physical traits in common with those persons. Physical features include birthmarks corresponding to fatal wounds but are no means confined to them, as Sudduth seems to think (pp. 132-133).…

Matlock takes issue with the idea that the subject (e.g., a child) is the more motivated party with regard to past-life memory-recall than the previous personality.

Stevenson (2001, p. 212) noted that in almost all of the cases he studied, the previous person died prematurely, often leaving some sort of unfinished business. There may be a desire to return to young children left behind, to collect or repay debts, to show widows where money is hidden, etc. There are several cases in which people stated before their deaths where they wished to be reborn, then apparently succeeded in carrying out their intentions.

I would add that, from my own reading, it seems clear that the majority of these premature deaths came about through violence, which could easily prompt the discarnate personality to seek justice for the crime. Indeed, some of the children studied by Stevenson and his successors have vehemently insisted that a certain individual was guilty of their murder in a previous life. This behavior is more consistent with the motivation of the deceased than any possible motivation pertaining to a young child who is a total stranger to the dead person.

Matlock criticizes Sudduth's concern with low-probability "auxiliary assumptions" that increase the complexity of the survival argument. He writes:

Against this tendency [Sudduth] thinks living agent psi fares well, but how can it fare well, when it becomes more and more strained as the complexity of the phenomena for which it is asked to account increases? Braude (2003) calls this "crippling complexity," and the crippling complexity faced by super-psi explanations is the main reason he wound up favoring a survival interpretation of at least some of the data (2003, p. 306).

Moreover, is the antecedent probability of survival really so low? The existence and attributes of psi (regular psi) suggest what many parapsychologists have come to call "nonlocal consciousness." To the extent that this phrase has meaning, it implies that consciousness exists independently of the body; and if consciousness exists independently of the body, the door is wide open to its survival after the body's demise.

Matlock concludes:

I do not see how one can fairly charge that the classical survival arguments have failed to show survival is the best interpretation of the evidence as a whole, but Sudduth is correct in saying that this is not the same as showing that the survival interpretation is justified on independent grounds. For that we need something more. We have a considerable amount of data, and many ideas about what these data mean. We need to move beyond the explanatory, exploratory stage in survival research and begin to construct proper theories of survival, reincarnation, and past-life memory. Properly-constructed theories, with well-substantiated premises generating hypotheses that can be rigorously tested, will do much to address Sudduth's concerns about unsupported and ad hoc auxiliary assumptions and they may help us finally to settle the question of whether survival or super-psi provide[s] the better accounting of the evidence.