The failure of five psychical researchers to confront my critique of Bigelow Institute contest-winning essays with counterpoints or concessions responsive to its novel criticisms is disappointing. Their defensive and scattershot reply lost sight of whether the critiqued essays met their directive to provide "hard evidence 'beyond a reasonable doubt'" of the survival of human consciousness. In the critique I also questioned the scientific validity of seeking ostensible evidence for discarnate personal survival without giving due care to potential evidence against it, (...) for no scientific (or even legal) investigation of evidence tips the scales in favor of a preordained conclusion by simply never adding any opposing items to the opposite scale. Survival researchers, though, have consistently proceeded in this partisan way. Those who claim that science should expand its metaphysically conservative picture to include things otherwise not known to exist assume the burden of showing what they claim. My interlocutors' almost exclusively testimonial evidence does not adhere to the long-standing scientific principles required by the scientific community. For the kind of evidence that could be publicly confirmed is simply not the kind that survival researchers have been able to provide, just as we would expect of a hodgepodge of deception, embellishment, malobservation, misreporting, self-deception, and so on; but which would be surprising on the hypothesis that discarnate personal survival occurs. The survival evidence does not even survive elementary scrutiny, let alone outweigh our everyday experience of the biological fragility of our own minds. The totality of the evidence renders discarnate personal survival highly unlikely. Attempts to reinterpret this evidence away through various analogies fail because a hypothesis that makes false predictions, like that of the independence of individual consciousness from a functioning brain, will continue to make them no matter what analogy one uses to illustrate it. -/- 1. The "Best" Survival Evidence: Mental Mediumship -- 2. Testimonial Evidence and the Burden of Proof -- 3. Does Physical Mediumship Provide Good Evidence of Survival? -- 4. Advancing Beyond Eternally Debatable Evidence -- 5. Prospective Experimental Tests of Survival -- 6. Setting the Record Straight -- 7. Rising to the Neuroscientific Challenge -- 8. Conclusion: Reframing Facts Does Not Change Them. (shrink)

Before I respond to James G. Matlock’s comments on my coedited volume, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death (MoA), I would like to thank him for taking the time to review such a large volume—and review it conscientiously—even if we ultimately disagree about its import. I would also like to extend my thanks to Journal of Parapsychology editor John Palmer for inviting this response, as it gives me an opportunity to clarify why many secondary issues (...) (and some significant matters) were untouched in the volume. While I find most of Matlock’s complaints specious, they nevertheless underscore the need to clear up misconceptions about the collection’s purpose, some of which are also found in others’ reviews. 1. Poisoning the Well 2. Mind-Brain Correlations are Data that Test Hypotheses 3. The Prior Probability Diversion 4. Apparent Causal Closure is Incidental Corroboration 5. How Relevant is the Metaphysics of Mind? 6. Theological Critiques do not Assess Survival Research 7. How Much Survival Research Ought One Critique? (shrink)