The recent Bigelow Institute contest rewarding the "best" evidence for life after death epitomizes much of what's wrong with the current state of survival research, its participants constituting a who's who list of contemporary survival researchers. Cases that are regularly hyped as among the best evidence for an afterlife are all too often easily susceptible to normal explanations--if only survival researchers would give them a chance. The consistently negative results of 121 years of experimental survival research ought to have spurred (...) soul-searching questions for survival researchers by now. And if we treat discarnate personal survival as a scientific hypothesis, then researchers are rationally obliged to seriously consider biological facts that tell against it, too. Limiting one's inquiry to attempts to only collect data that might confirm survival is one of the chief hallmarks of pseudoscience, and it's sadly a feature, not a bug, of the survival literature. This systematic review reveals that survival researchers would better serve science by setting aside their feelings and heeding what the data are telling them, for the probabilities should drive our beliefs, not the other way around. Is discarnate personal survival likely to occur in light of the total available evidence? The overall evidence doesn't even make personal survival more probable than not. -/- 1. Introduction 2. In Science the Quality of the Evidence is Paramount -- 2.1 Prospective Experimental Tests of Survival -- 2.2 Where Have All the Deceased Survival Researchers Gone? -- 3. What Does the Total Available Relevant Evidence Tell Us? -- 4. Ranking the Survival Evidence -- 5. The Mind-Body Problem, Botched -- 6. Conclusion: Not Much Better than Religious Faith. (shrink)

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)

In a 2022 critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay competition on the “best” evidence for life after death (“the survival of human consciousness”) and in replies to two commentaries on it, I made passing reference to the parallels between the arguments provided by survival researchers—psychical researchers ostensibly investigating evidence for an afterlife using scientific best practices—and the well-worn fallacies repeatedly committed by creationists and other Christian apologists. In this essay, I highlight several parallel fallacious arguments found among (...) both those at the forefront of “scientific” research into an afterlife and those engaged in Christian apologetics. (shrink)

In 2021, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (hereafter, BICS) sponsored an essay competition (hereafter, the Contest) designed to solicit the best evidence for the hypothesis that human consciousness survives bodily death, and more specifically, evidence that would prove this hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt. The summer 2022 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration featured a special subsection on the BICS contest and its winning essays. Robert Bigelow and Colm Kelleher outlined the motivation, design, and judging criteria for the (...) competition. Keith Augustine provided an extensive critical commentary on the contest design and eight of its prominent winning essays. Stephen Braude and several coauthors responded to Augustine’s criticisms, and Augustine provided a reply to Braude and his collaborators. Finally, the subsection concluded with a collaborative paper in which Etienne LeBel, Adam Rock, and Augustine proposed a more rigorous experimental design for testing the survival hypothesis. Augustine presented important criticisms of the Contest and several of its prominent winning essays. Moreover, many of his criticisms apply to survival literature in general and so are instructive for the wider survival debate. And Braude, one of the most important contributors to the survival debate since C.D. Broad and C.J. Ducasse, was at the helm of the reply to Augustine. Although the response to Augustine raised important concerns about skeptical assessments of the evidence for survival, it was hamstrung with several defects. 1. Preliminaries 2. Problematic Aspects of the Reply to Augustine 3. What is the Question? Honing in on the Actual Disagreement 4. Inference to Best Explanation 5. Confirmation Approaches to Evidential Support -- 5.1 Evidential Justification -- 5.2 When Does an Observation Favor One Hypothesis Over Another Hypothesis? The Law of Likelihood -- 5.3 When Should We Up Our Confidence in a Hypothesis? Incremental Confirmation -- 5.4 How Can We Determine the Net Plausibility of a Hypothesis? Bayes’ Theorem and Posterior Probabilities -- 5.5 Which of Two Hypotheses is More Probable than the Other? Principle of Contrastive Posterior Probabilities -- 5.6 When Does Evidence Justify Believing a Hypothesis? Principle of Absolute Confirmation -- 5.7 Survivalist Confusions about Bayesian Analyses -- 5.8 The Washing Out of Priors -- 5.9 The Subjectivism Objection -- 5.10 Summing Up Insights from Confirmation Theory -- 6. Back to Braude 7. Varieties of Skepticism 8. Neurophysiological Evidence and the Survival Hypothesis 9. The Data from Mediumship 10. The Alleged Improbability of Fraud and Other Counterexplanations 11. Mediumship and the Logic of Confirmation 12. The Significance of Failed Tests 13. Survivalist Rescues and Contrastive Confirmation 14. Evidential Support without Predictions -- 15. The Testability Problem -- Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Michael Nahm's preceding commentary accuses me of seven misrepresentations. One of these is an acknowledged good-faith error about a peripheral detail, while the remaining six are demonstrably accurate descriptions of Nahm's statements. At the same time, Nahm verifiably misrepresents me frequently and intentionally over issues that he takes to be consequential, which is a much more serious offense. All authors should call out when an interlocutor get their points wrong, but only when they can definitively back up the charge. Where (...) Nahm weakly attempts to show that I misrepresented him, I will show that, if anything, his showcase consists of six verifiably accurate characterizations of his Bigelow Institute contest-winning essay's conclusions. His commentary exemplifies the truism that one can appeal to a million frivolous reasons to dismiss what an opponent has to say if one is absolutely determined not to hear him. Though committed survivalists will undoubtedly be satisfied that survival researchers have responded to me regardless of whether they have responded well, those that care about the underlying issues will hopefully find value in my reply. -/- 1. Introduction -- 2. My (One) Accidental Misattribution -- 3. Nahm's (Repeated) Intentional Mischaracterizations -- 4. Nahm's Mischaracterizations to Shift the Burden of Proof -- 5. Nahm's Seven Wonders of the World -- 6. Conclusion: Assertions Should be Supported. (shrink)