It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to the Source (...) from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality. (shrink)

What happens to the inner light of consciousness with the death of the individual body and brain? Reductive materialism assumes it simply fades to black. Others think of consciousness as indicating a continuation of self, a transformation, an awakening or even alternatives based on the quality of life experience. In this issue, speculation drawn from theoretic research are presented. -/- Table of Contents Epigraph: From “The Immortal”, Jorge Luis Borges iii Editor’s Introduction: I Killed a Squirrel the Other Day, Gregory (...) M. Nixon iv-xi Research Essays The Tilde Fallacy and Reincarnation: Variations on a "Skeptical" Argument Teed Rockwell 862-881 Death, Consciousness, and Phenomenology, Steve Bindeman 882-899 The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death, Bernardo Kastrup 900-909 Consciousness, a Cosmic Phenomenon—A Hypothesis, Eva Déli 910-930 The Theory of a Natural Afterlife: A Newfound, Real Possibility for What Awaits Us at Death, Bryon K. Ehlmann 931-950 Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment via Quantum Mediated Consciousness: An Extended Version of the Cell-Soul Pathway, Contzen Pereira & J Shashi Kiran Reddy 951-968 On the Possible Existence of Quantum Consciousness After Brain Death, Massimo Pregnolato & Alfredo Pereira Jr. 969-991 Science and Postmortem Survival, Edward F. Kelly 992-1011 Explorations ISS Theory: Cosmic Consciousness, Self, and Life Beyond Death in a Hyperdimensional Physics, Chris H. Hardy 1012-1035 Does the Consciousness End, Remain Awake, or Transform After Death? Radivoj Stankovich (with Micho Durdevich) 1036-1050 Big Bang Spirituality, Life, and Death, Ken Bausch 1051-1063 Death, Consciousness and the Quantum Paradigm, Ronald Peter Glasberg 1064-1077 Living With Limits: The Continuum of Consciousness, Donald Brackett 1078-1098 Mysticism, Consciousness, Death, Mike Sosteric 1099-1118 What Dies? Eternalism and the Afterlife in William James, Jonathan Bricklin 1119-1140 Theories of Consciousness and Death: Does Consciousness End, Continue, Awaken, or Transform When the Body Dies? Roger Cook 1141-1153 It’s the Other Way Around: Matter is a Form of Consciousness and Death is the End of the Illusion of Life in the World, James P. Kowall & Pradeep B. Deshpande 1154-1208 Statements A Feminine Vision for the World Consciousness, & a New Outrageous Ontology, Lorna Green 1209-1217 The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the Afterlife, Iona Miller 1218-1228 Are We Really “such stuff as dreams are made on”? Chris Nunn 1229-1225 Is the Afterlife a Non-Question? (Let's Hope Not), Deepak Chopra 1226-1230 Life After Death? An Improbable Essay, Stuart Kauffman 1231-1236. (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)

Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (first published in 1966) is a classic of 20th-century parapsychology that can still be read with profit. Along with Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001), it is an ideal introduction to Stevenson. The latter work, intended for the educated general reader, provides an overview of 40 years of research and includes capsule summaries of several cases, but Twenty Cases contains detailed reports that illustrate reincarnation-type cases much more fully. The cases reported in Twenty Cases come (...) from India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Lebanon, Brazil, and the United States (the Tlingit Indians of Alaska). They were selected from about 200 personally investigated by Stevenson in order to show the variety of features this type of case presents. The subjects of all were young children at the time they claimed to have lived before. Collectively these twenty cases help define “cases of the reincarnation type,” as Stevenson came to call them, though they vary substantially in detail. (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 my writings on the evidence for postmortem survival. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I consider much of the literature on the subject to be very shabby, usually because the authors are empirically myopic or inferentially-challenged. That is, writers on survival notoriously ignore or treat very superficially relevant areas of research having their own extensive literatures (e.g., on dissociation, savantism, prodigies, gifted under-achievers, and language mastery), and too often they seem unable to formulate valid arguments. In Braude, (...) 2003 I explored these deficiencies in great detail. Here, I’d like simply to comment on a particular class of confusions and a recent eruption of nonsequiturs. (shrink)

Several prominent philosophers, including A.J. Ayer and Derek Parfit, have offered the evidentiary requirements for believing human personality can reincarnate, and hence that Cartesian dualism is true. At least one philosopher, Robert Almeder, has argued that there are actual cases which satisfy these requirements. I argue in this paper that even if we grant the empirical data-a large concession-belief in reincarnation is still unjustified. The problem is that without a theoretical account of the alleged cases of reincarnation, the empirical evidence (...) alone does not license giving up materialist theories of the mind. (shrink)

vol. 28, nos. 1-4, 2001 empirical data-a large concession-belief in reincarnation is still unjustified.

In Persons, Souls and Death, David Lund (2009) presents a cumulative case argument for postmortem survival based on the ostensible explanatory power of survival in relation to data drawn from psychical research. In this paper I argue that the survival hypothesis does not satisfy at least two necessary explanatory criteria accepted and deployed by Lund. First, the data that the survival hypothesis ostensibly explains are not otherwise improbable, as much if not all of the data may be adequately accounted for (...) in terms of psychic functioning among living agents—the LAP hypothesis. Here I argue in considerable detail that Lund’s criticisms of the LAP hypothesis, like those leveled by many other survivalists, are significantly defective. Second, the survival hypothesis does not lead us to expect the data Lund outlines, so it fails with respect to predictive power. Since the “best explanation” is one that leads us to expect what is otherwise improbable, the survival hypothesis i. (shrink)

Books by William J. Crawford: The Reality of Psychic Phenomena: Raps, Levitations, Etc. Hints and Observations for Those Investigating the Phenomena of Spiritualism Experiments in Psychical Science: Levitation, Contact, and the Direct Voice The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle In 1914, Dr. William J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Queen's University of Belfast, Ireland, began investigating the mediumship of 16-year-old Kathleen Goligher. The phenomena surrounding the young girl included communicating raps, automatic writing, trance voice, floating objects, and (...) table levitations. In all, Crawford had 87 sittings over some two-and-a-half years with the Goligher Circle. His first, third, and fourth books, as listed above, deal solely with the Goligher phenomena, while the second-listed book is very general and includes observations with other mediums. Born in New Zealand, Crawford (1881-1920) received his D.Sc. from the University of Glasgow and authored several books in his primary field, including Elementary Graphic Statics and Calculations on the Entropy-Temperature Chart, before undertaking his research of psychic phenomena. (shrink)