Since I have mentioned it, I will discuss a little bit of the evidence for the survival of death. It is voluminous, and at this very moment there is a medium named David Thompson who, on hundreds of accounts, can actually materialize spirits of dead people IN THEIR BODIES.
The following quote is taken from Victor Zammit’s website. Lord knows he has his share of critics. Lucky man. You have to have balls to get everybody shooting at you. The site is in my view filled with too much stuff. It is too busy. He talks about being a lawyer too much. But for someone really trying to see what evidence is out there, he is a great resource. Look at his book, and use that as a sort of Bibliography. As you get into it, you find some very evidentiary stories indeed. The story of David Thompson is the most remarkable. It may sound far-fetched. The question I would ask is this: what skeptic who wants to deride these claims has attended one of his seances? None that I can see. If you want to claim a phenomenon cannot be replicated, surely the first step is to attempt to replicate it in the manner decribed by the researcher? This is the most basic element possible of the scientific method.
Anyway, to the story:
We investigated materialization medium David Thompson weekly for 15 months. But the most spectacular evidence for the afterlife was when my wife Wendy’s father materialized announcing his name. He was in the ‘flesh’. He was speaking as when a loved one talks to you. It was his voice. It was his mannerism. No one in the experiment knew of Wendy’s (pictured) maiden name. No one knew about the intimate circumstances raised by Wendy’s father about their early life; no one knew about very special relationship she had with her brother. There was physical contact when her father kissed Wendy on the forehead. Further, Wendy’s father materialised a piece of paper with his signature on it – which perfectly matched his signature on existing documents. Absolutely, that kind of evidence would have sent an accused to the gallows in a courtroom situation. Of course, the spiritually blind, deaf and dumb – and other dummies, would not understand the hugely great value of this magnificent materialization evidence.
A conventionally trained–can I say drained?–mind will of course find that farcical in the extreme. Of course death is the end. What serious person would suggest otherwise? We know what parts of the brain control what. We know, for example, that if your Broca’s area is damaged, that your linguistic capacity is affected. We can track genetic mutation over millions of years. We know what parts of the DNA select for what traits, and our knowledge grows larger daily.
The body is nothing but a complex system of chemical events, and human consciousness nothing but an epiphenomenon of a material evolutionary artifact whose primary purpose is survival. We have no “will”. We have no purpose. And our deaths are no more significant than leaves falling from a tree. We wilt in time. We melt, then are no more. Whether you like it or not, that is the truth: deal with it.
As with most matters that matter in philosophy and psychology, though, William James offered the most common sensical, logically rigorous treatment of the matter I have seen. If you adore athletic Victorian prose, as I do, read this.
The man is brilliant; in my view, he is the best thinker we have produced, after the first generation of Founding Fathers. No one should read Freud. Everyone should read James “Principles of Psychology”.
For the short of attention: the net of it is that James was a trained physician. He was quite up to date on the physiological knowledge of his time, which in important respects has not really evolved that much in the last 100 years. They knew far more than you might suppose.
As he put it, the brain need not be a SOURCE of consciousness, but a TRANSMITTER, where the mind, per se, is separate. This explains why drugs can affect our consciousness, why strokes can permanently damage our capacity to speak, and why genetic traits–including personality traits–can be inherited.
How can this be, you ask? How can a mind exist which consists of us, but is not available to our conscious awareness? Let me ask this: how much of your own desires are you aware of? How much of what your brain processes on an average day are you conscious of? How much of who you are is accessible to you, even in a purely material sense? Have you ever had a dream that you were sleeping, then woken up, then woken up again? Who is to say you are awake now? That is the key point, and of course a standard point expressed by mystics over the ages.
I have argued often on this blog that consciousness is split. In the hypnotic experiments of Janet, he found that psychologically normal people, under hypnosis, could be made to manifest multiple, independent selves, each autonomous. We must accept that in some respects this is the nature of our reality. It is continuous to some part of ourselves, but we have no way of knowing what disparate elements there may be.
In terms of physical reality, the best theorists cannot say in what it may consist. We seem to have an interactive relationship with the physical universe, which we cannot be sure would or could exist if there were no consciousness to be aware of it. This is a primary conclusion of most philosophical extrapolations from Quantum Theory. As I have said before, the experimentally observed fact of non-locality–the potential connectedness of all physical matter in a way beyond space/time–falsified Einstein’s General Relativity as a POSSIBLE explanation for the nature of all reality.
Thus, explanations can be offered for observable facts which are consistent with the hypothesis that mind is separable from brain; and nothing in our current understanding of the nature of reality compels us to reject such ideas. In my observation, almost all scientistic dogmatists are literally stuck in a 19th century view of the universe.
Then you get to evidence. I need to go to bed, but will post a few example of things I found interesting. One sees this idea that the “multiple of anecdote is not evidence”, but of course it is. If 100 people walk up a hill, and claim to see a red bear, then if they are credible people, most people will accept that.
None of us go to the trouble of verifying what we read in scientific journals. I would not know how to verify if neutrinos exist, or how DNA is sequenced, or what happens when I mix chemical A with chemical B. I take people’s word for it. And sometimes, I am wrong. The whole Global Warming thing seems to be a massive hoax. The Earth may be warming, but the efforts to gather evidence for it have been half-hearted, and filled with more or less overt and intentional fraud. We have no temperature monitors in the Arctic regions where we are supposedly experiencing warming. One would think this would have been one of the first things done. What do they do? They estimate temperature using models which in turn assume that warming is going on. That’s another topic, though.
I’ll confine myself to just a couple examples which are readily accessible since I posted them on my Facebook. This is not a thorough or even especially diligent treatment of the topic: this is meant to be illustrative of some of the types of evidence out there. For those with an interest, further research can be done. Start with Zammit’s book, then look up his resources.
Here is one on a woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. I found the part about her cousin quite evidential. This is not compelling, but will be interesting for some.
Here is an effort to separate cold reading-based mediumship from actual communication. Cold reading has its limits, and it can be experimentally defined and eliminated as a plausible causative mechanism for clearly visible patterns.
This is the most evidential Near Death Experience of which I’m aware. There are no plausible explanations within a standard brain=mind paradigm.
This is stating the obvious, but when you are clinically and measurably brain dead you cannot form new memories.
Finally, a well put together intro on Near Death Experiences:
Oxygen deprivation does not work as an explanation because the effects, for example, of drowning are universal. Everyone feels them the same way. Why? Because they are based in physiology. It is precisely the seldomness of NDE’s–perhaps a quarter of the people brought back from clinical death–that speaks for their authenticity.
I will add that creating an explanation for something is not the same as doing science. If you can write a compelling and best selling book about the evolution of human kind from primitive RNA molecules, but offer up not lab or other experiments by which your ideas could be tested, then you are a fiction writer, not a scientist. It really is that simple.
None of the critics of NDE’s seem to have done their due diligence. They look at a few non-representative cases, then come up with an explanation of what MUST BE happening, provided we reject the survivalist hypothesis in advance.
Here are a couple books you might read: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Near-Death-Experience-Consciousness-Survives/dp/1594773564/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298085863&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Near-Death-Experience/dp/0061777250/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298085863&sr=8-1
In this one, cardiologist Pim Van Lommel “provides scientific evidence that the near-death phenomenon is an authentic experience that cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis, or oxygen deprivation.”
And so it goes. Why believe the worst when we have an abundance of evidence to the contrary?