Cup of Nirvana Philosophical and Contemplative Explorations

Author Archives: Michaelsudduth

Book Update 11/22/14

November 22, 2014 6:00 pm ⋅

At present, I’m intensively working on completing my book on empirical arguments for postmortem survival.  I have a benchmark date of December 1, 2014 for the completion of the first half, which due to personal circumstances last spring through summer has taken me a lot longer to complete than anticipated. Most of the material for the second half of the book is completed but needs to be revised and streamlined with the newly reworked first half of the book.

I will have chapter drafts available for interested readers during the first week of December. Although my window for revisions is small, I’m open to comments from interested readers.  I’m also hoping this might be the first stage of an online symposium I’d like to do on the book in spring 2015. 

If you’re interested in receiving chapter drafts, please contact me by email with the request. I’m developing a reader distribution list at present and I will include you on it.  Also, the latest brief abstract of the book appears under Work in Progress on my website. In December I  will post the “Contents” page and an analytical overview of the chapters, and by the beginning of the new year some selections from chapter drafts.
 
Also, I will be blogging more on new material related to my book in the coming weeks, including comments on philosopher Robert Almeder’s work on the empirical arguments for survival and my own hitherto undisclosed personal investigations into mediumship over the past few years.
M.S.
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Interview on Postmortem Survival (Part 2) – repost

November 19, 2014 6:07 pm ⋅

In January 2013 Jime Sayaka interviewed me on the topic of postmortem survival for his now defunct blog Subversive Thinking.  In what turned out to be a lengthy interview (and preview of arguments in my forthcoming book), I outlined in considerable detail my critique of empirical arguments for survival, as well as explained why common survivalist defenses of these arguments lack cogency.  Below I repost my lengthy response to Sayaka’s fourth question, something of an invite for me to share my main criticisms of empirical survival arguments.

4 – Sayaka: “Professor Sudduth, you have been a philosophical critic of the survivalist hypothesis to explain the empirical data from mediumship and other putative evidence for survival of consciousness. What are your objections for the survival hypothesis?”

 
Sudduth: Well, let me begin with some important caveats and clarifications. Unlike many other philosophers, I don’t object to the survival hypothesis itself, nor do I deny that people can be epistemically justified in believing in survival.  I’ve already stated that I subscribe to the eastern philosophical and spiritual tradition of Vedanta.  So I don’t believe that what I essentially am shares in the limits or destiny of my body or individual mind.  I am a survivalist.  I also don’t deny that empirical evidence can add to the justification of belief in survival, for instance, by adding to the evidential probability of the survival hypothesis.  And I think there’s much to be said for how the survival hypothesis may draw support from multiple grounds, for example, empirical, philosophical, and religious or spiritual.  But this requires a very different approach than has been traditionally taken by the majority of empirical survivalists.  My present project is, therefore, concerned with the critique and dismantling of the existing and deeply entrenched tradition of classical empirical arguments for survival. Hopefully it paves the way for new and fruitful approaches to empirical arguments for survival.
 
So let’s unpack some of the details of my argument.
 
As I see it, there’s really no way to make an empirical case for survival unless we can show that the features of the world marked out by the relevant data are what we would expect if the survival hypothesis is true, and furthermore that these features are more to be expected if survival is true than if survival is false (or, more modestly, if some alternative non-survival hypothesis is true).  So what is often called predictive power, at least understood in a broad sense, is essential to an empirical case for survival.  As it happens, most survivalists have either claimed or assumed the same, usually in connection with how the “explanatory power” of the survival hypothesis is parsed.  But it’s more generally relevant because predictive power, or the probability of the evidence given a hypothesis, plays an important role in the two dominant approaches to evidence assessment in confirmation theory, Bayesian and Likelihoodist approaches, both of which I will subsequently discuss.
 
However, predictive salience subjects the survival hypothesis to anauxiliary hypothesis requirement.  Theoretically, this arises from the general Duhem-Quine thesis in philosophy of science that single statements rarely have predictive consequences, unless they’re supplemented with auxiliary hypotheses.  So hypotheses can only be tested via their predictive consequences in bundles or sets.  This is repeatedly demonstrated in the history of science, but I remember first seeing it dramatically illustrated in the old television series Columbo. When detective Columbo tests his hypothesis that Dr. Brimmer murdered Mrs. Kennicut, he relies on a number of additional assumptions, many of which are statements about Dr. Brimmer (e.g., having a particular connection to the victim, being left handed, having a temper, wearing a diamond ring with a unique shape). These auxiliary assumptions, together with the hypothesis that Dr. Brimmer committed the crime, leads Columbo to expect to find the crucial pieces of evidence, which only function as “clues” because they are linked to the murderer by way of a particular set of added assumptions.
 
It’s a central part of my argument that this is true with respect to the survival hypothesis.  The data collected from mediumship or cases of the reincarnation type only serve as evidence for personal survival once various auxiliary hypotheses are introduced to facilitate the link between the data and the continued existence of the deceased person. This is often glossed over, or simply not acknowledged at all, because empirical survivalists routinely treat the survival hypothesis as a generic survival hypothesis, for example, the survival of individual consciousness, the mind, or the self.  But this kind of simple survival hypothesis does not lead us to expect the relevant data, unless it is supplemented with a wide range of auxiliary statements about the knowledge, intentions, and causal powers of postmortem persons, as well as the mechanism or process of postmortem communication (in the case of mediumship) and rebirth (in reincarnation cases).
 
The necessary reliance on auxiliary hypotheses is clear if we carefully read classic works on the empirical arguments for survival such as E.R. Dodds’s “Why I Do Not Believe in Survival” (1934), Hornell Hart’s Engima of Survival (1959) and Alan Gauld’s Mediumship and Survival (1982).  Hence, inasmuch as the empirical case for survival depends on predictive derivations that logically link the survival hypothesis to specific features of the empirical world (captured by the relevant data), the empirical case for survival requires what I call a robust survival hypothesis.   While empirical survivalists usually assume some robust version of the survival hypothesis, they rarely acknowledge this with adequate transparency; much less do they critically explore it.  Consequently, they fail to consider its significance to the overall case for survival.  And this is a crucial issue as I see it because the satisfaction of the auxiliary hypothesis requirement has significant consequences for assessments of both the prior probability of the survival hypothesis and its explanatory power, the two determinants of the posterior probability of the survival hypothesis.
 
Here I make two points.
 
First, I argue that the survival hypothesis can only adequately satisfy the auxiliary hypothesis requirement at the cost of a significant reduction of prior probability.  The predictive power of the survival hypothesis (i.e., its ability to lead us to expect the relevant data) is inversely proportional to its prior probability:  as the predictive power of the survival hypothesis is increased, its prior probability is decreased, specifically as a result of increased complexity and less fit with background knowledge.  So a survival hypothesis with great explanatory power will I’m afraid not have very high prior probability, and certainly not greater prior probability than the nearest competitors.  Within a Bayesian framework, this will significantly lower the posterior probability of the survival hypothesis.
 
Second, the survival hypothesis can only adequately satisfy the auxiliary hypothesis by adopting assumptions that lack independent support and testability.  In this way, they are quite different from Columbo’s auxiliary hypotheses, or the kinds of auxiliary statements employed by scientists.  For example, there is no independent evidence for supposing that persons, should any of them survive death, will have the intention and requisite powers to communicate with living persons, much less in ways that as much as approximate the modality of mediumship or apparitions. We also have no independent reason to suppose that discarnate persons will have awareness of events taking place in our world or the mental lives of living persons, which is required if mediumistic communications genuinely originate from discarnate persons.  Furthermore, we have no good independent reason to suppose that some or all living persons would reincarnate on earth, much less as humans or with past life memories, congenital birth marks corresponding to the manner of their death in a former life, etc.  In short, we don’t know what would happen to consciousness if it should survive death, nor do we know anything about the causal laws to which postmortem existence and agency would be subject.  And, at present at any rate, there is no way to independently test hypotheses at this juncture.  In fact, if the afterlife is anything like dream experiences or some other similar altered states of consciousness—the closest conjectured analogues of the afterlife—I would say the relevant data are actually not what we would expect.
 
Now the lack of independent testability has important implications for the explanatory power of the survival hypothesis.  Since the epistemic credentials of the auxiliary hypotheses are quite weak, they can only be methodologically sanctioned by a very permissive principle governing the inclusion of auxiliary hypotheses to test the survival hypothesis.  The problem here is that it is prima facie implausible to suppose that any such liberal principle will simultaneously entitle empirical survivalists to their stock of auxiliary hypotheses and not entitle others from including whatever auxiliary hypotheses are needed to generate predictive consequences for proposed alternative non-survival explanations.  In other words, the empirical survivalist faces the problem of purchasing predictive power for the survival hypothesis at the cost of indirectly purchasing it for alternative hypotheses as well.  So it won’t be the case that a robust survival hypothesis will lead us to expect data that are otherwise improbable, nor even that the data would be more likely given a robust survival hypothesis than robust alternative hypotheses.
 
Now consider the bearing of these points on run-of-the-mill defenses of empirical arguments for survival.
 
First, consider defenses of the prior probability of the survival hypothesis.  When empirical survivalists defend the prior probability of the survival hypothesis, they consider the hypothesis only in its simple form, for example, the mere supposition of one’s individual consciousness persisting after death.  There’s a lot of expended effort to defend substance dualism, critique materialist philosophies of mind, or dismantle arguments from cognitive neuroscience that purport to show the dependence of consciousness on neural substrates and hence a functioning brain.  Important as these moves are, their success is limited.  While they may remove prominent reasons for supposing that the prior probability of the survival hypothesis is low, they do not show that its prior probability is high.  More importantly, they do not defeat arguments that purport to show that the prior probability of the survival hypothesis is low, not because of the supposition of survival itself, but because of the nature and consequences of the auxiliary hypotheses that are needed to generate predictive power for the survival hypothesis.
 
Next, consider critiques of the nearest explanatory competitors. There’s a pretty widespread consensus in the survival literature that the nearest explanatory competitor, which ostensibly accounts for the relevant data, is the appeal to living-agent psi in the form of extra sensory perception and/or psychokinesis among living agents.  Now among empirical survivalists it’s virtual orthodoxy that this counter-explanation fails, for at least two reasons:  
 
1.  Appeals to living agent psi are rejected since they are allegedly inferior in explanatory power.  For example, living-agent psi does not lead us to expect living persons exhibiting personality traits and skills characteristic of the deceased, as if the case in the better cases of the reincarnation type and trance mediumship.  Also, living-agent psi would allegedly not lead us to expect the complex sets of veridical information found in these cases.  This would require that the data be psychically derived from multiple sources, but outside survival-type cases there’s no evidence that living-agent psi has this kind of efficacy. 
 
2.  The second line of attack is to concede a possible version of the living-agent psi hypothesis that might explain these data.  If living-agent psi were stretched into a “super-psi” hypothesis—positing living-agent psi functioning of a quite extraordinary degree or kind—and further supplemented with various supplemental assumptions about how human abilities and (conscious and unconscious) motivations are likely to play a role in accounting for the data.   But empirical survivalists typically reject this strengthened living-agent psi hypothesis because it’s highly complex and lacks independent support. In Bayesian terms, this explanatory competitor can only purchase predictive success at the cost of significantly lowered prior probability.
 
In the light of my earlier observations, it should be clear why these objections fail.  The strategy suggested by the above objections is essentially to argue that a robust survival hypothesis has greater explanatory power than simple explanatory competitors (e.g., a vanilla living-agent psi hypothesis), and a simple survival hypothesis has greater prior probability than the nearest robust competitor (living-agent psi + auxiliaries).  This may be true, but it’s ultimately irrelevant.  We must compare the values assigned to explanatory power and prior probability of robust versions of each of the candidate explanations.  When we try to do this, I argue that (a) the prior probability of the robust survival hypothesis is either equal to or less than the prior probability of the nearest robust explanatory competitor(s) and (b) the predictive power of the robust survival hypothesis is equal to or less than the predictive power of the nearest robust competitor(s).  From a Bayesian approach to calculating posterior probabilities, I think (a) and (b) significantly deflate the posterior probability of the survival hypothesis.  Consequently, the survival arguments fail to show that the posterior probability of the robust survival hypothesis, given the evidence and usual assignments to background knowledge, exceeds ½.
 
It is, of course, crucial to this argument that the content of the background knowledge and scope of the evidence be carefully spelled out, and I do so in my book. And there’s a thorny problem here concerning just where to draw the parameters that isolate the total available and relevant evidence.  The problem also appears with respect to identifying the parameters of background knowledge.  What we include as evidence and background knowledge has consequences for judgments of the posterior probability of h because it affects the values assigned with respect to prior probabilities (of h and e) and the posterior probability of e given h (i.e., predictive power).
 
For example, I would say that the robust survival hypothesis has greater explanatory power than the robust living-agent psi hypotheses when the parameters of the evidence are more narrowly drawn, e.g., vis-à-vis mediumship—excluding evidence that that communicators provide inconsistent and unreliable information and that mediumistic controls are sometimes fictitious and yet convey accurate information. In fact, evidence within narrow parameters frees the survival hypothesis from the need to adopt a number of auxiliary assumptions, and thereby circumvents conditions that would further lower the prior probability of the survival hypothesis.  So if we pick and choose the evidence, constrain its parameters in particular ways, the case for survival actually looks pretty good.  I suspect this is why some empirical survivalists think that the evidence for survival is good.  In much the same way, it looks like we have a good case for supposing that conditions are optimal for swimming at the beach given that the weather is warm, the ocean water isn’t turbulent, and there are only a modest number of people at the beach.  However, all this changes once we add that several sharks have been spotted in the waters earlier in the morning.  It’s a canon of inductive logic that you consider the total evidence available in assessing the net plausibility of a hypothesis.  I think this is yet another point where survival arguments are vulnerable because they typically operate with implausibly narrow parameters on the relevant evidence.  So one of my interests is to identify and carefully describe the total available evidence, as well as consider the implications of different parameters for background knowledge.
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Standing in the Center of the Fire

November 17, 2014 7:54 am ⋅
(1) What is it to love, to truly love? It’s to embrace the deepest mystery and risk the greatest folly. It’s to bear your unbearable absence and find you inescapably present, recurring apparition of my nostalgic night.  It’s to watch for you at ocean’s edge and see you dancing as the waves. It’s to watch for you at sunset and see you as the light that is gradually transformed into night. What is love, you ask?  It’s to stand in the center of the fire with you and watch our world be burned, and then to be buried beneath the ashes of passion’s tortured expectations.
 
(2) If you wish to open your heart wide to love, open your heart wide to pain, for he who suffers little loves even less.  Therefore kiss with tender lips the center of your sorrow and make love to your relentless pain. Then you shall dance with desire and stand in the center of the fire.
 
(3) What is it to bear the accusation of betrayal?  It’s to be alone with myself in sorrow, not the sorrow of knowing that what you have believed about me is false, but in the deeper sorrow of knowing that you were utterly convinced it was true.
 
(4) I want you to understand, perhaps for the first time, the fire in which I have stood.  So stop running, stop hiding, take a deep breath, inhale, and experience yourself, the flames that burned away my skin and bones, and set my spirit free.
 
(5) What I found unacceptable or utterly reprehensible in you has now become the most beautiful revelation of myself.  In the judgment, I was separate from you and unknown to myself. Being divested of judgment, I can now only observe you and in this there is the clearest seeing of myself.
 
(6) Have you dissolved the need that stood in the way of realizing your own inner fulness? If so, kiss me for the first time, and look upon me as a blind person Christ has given sight.
 
(7) More than healing, I want you to recover. . .love, the very thing you lost the day you were born. So stop your thinking, stop your seeking, and dissolve your delusions with a song, knowing that, like each moment, in this precious moment as the melody leaves your lips everything is OK because “this” is as good as it gets.
 
(8) In my bliss I felt enlarged, and I expanded so far that I believed I embraced the sun and moon.  And then a great emptiness fell upon me, gnawed at me, and hollowed out my soul. In the same awareness in which bliss arose, depression and sorrow found their place too. To contain these opposites is to be larger than the universe itself. In you and me all opposites dance.  We are just that vast.
 
(9) I would reach you with words if I could, but silence is the most faithful lover.
 
(10) If I knew that this would be our last night together, I would give you just one thing, my silence, for this love of mine is not something that can be spoken, nor even understood, not even by the gods.
 
(11) There are places in the world that we can only hope to find in our dreams. I will go there with you.
 
(12) This ground upon which I stand is not solid.  It’s soft like sand; fluid like a river. It’s flowing towards some apparent center of my life.  And there at that illusory center, life’s drama is underway. And there everything is moving as a whirlpool, circular movement flowing downwards into the other side of life, right into the unconscious, from which everything has emerged. The fire in which you and I stood yesterday is where we stand today, and where we stand today we shall stand tomorrow, in the center of this fast fading ember of life’s eternal flame.

 

M.S.
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Remembering Jason Zarri (1986-2014)

November 7, 2014 7:48 pm ⋅

Jason Louis Zarri

This week I was heartbroken to learn of the death of Jason Zarri, long-time philosophy student of mine who was currently pursuing an MA in philosophy in our department. Jason took many of my courses during his undergraduate days at SFSU, and we had many conversations, even recently, outside of class on philosophical topics.  He was a brilliant student whose passion for inquiry greatly inspired his peers and my colleagues.

 
I am deeply, deeply saddened by his sudden death. I was due to offer him comments on a paper he had planned to submit for publication, and when I briefly saw him last, a couple of weeks ago, we made it a point to get together sometime this semester and get current on things.  Sadly this meeting with never happen. His last word to me was “congratulations,” left on my LinkedIn page the day before he died.  This sums up the kindness of his heart.
 
In these moments I’m reminded of the fragility of life, and the importance of returning to our ultimate intention for living. Our drama, our projects, our complaints . . . they are but footnotes in life’s eternal story.  For me I always come back to the storyline, which is love, the love out of which everything is arising, evolving and, yes, passing away.  And it takes the passing away, whether of a lover, friend, family member, or student, to bring us each home again. 
 
“Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” – Kahlil Gibran
 
I send the deepest intention of healing for Jason’s family, whose experience of loss is certainly inconceivably greater than my own sorrow over Jason’s death. I repost here the message I posted for Jason’s memorial, which is my meditation for today.
 
Dear Jason: you were an inspiration not only to your peers but also to your teachers.  Thank you for your gift of inspiring me as your teacher for so many years. I will remember you as a passionate inquirer into truth, but most importantly as a person who carried on this inquiry with a kind and loving heart. To live forever in the hearts of those you have touched in this way is to have achieved an immortality to which even the gods aspire. – With deep gratitude, Michael Sudduth

 

For blog readers who are local and who knew Jason. . . 
Jason Louis Zarri
Jun. 13, 1986 – Oct. 31, 2014
A Rosary will be held on Monday 11/10 at 10:00am with services to follow at 10:30am at St. Joseph Catholic Church, 837 Tennent Ave. Pinole 94564.
A procession will follow to the Queen of Heaven Cemetery, 1965 Reliez Valley Road, Lafayette.
 
M.S.
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Interview on Postmortem Survival (Part 1) – repost

November 6, 2014 10:04 pm ⋅

In January 2013 Jime Sayaka interviewed me on the topic of postmortem survival for his now defunct blog Subversive Thinking.  In what turned out to be a lengthy interview (and preview of arguments in my forthcoming book), I outlined in considerable detail my critique of empirical arguments for survival, as well as explained why common survivalist defenses of these arguments lack cogency.  Below I repost my answers to the first three preliminary questions of the interview. In subsequent blogs I will repost other portions of the interview.  With regard to my book in progress, I’m presently deeply engaged with this project, up against a publisher deadline of end of January 2015.  In early December I intend to  provide an update concerning the book, including details on a possible online symposium to discuss chapter drafts with interested participants.  The description of my book in progress below is an adequate approximation to the project in its current form.  I am also working on plans for a series of roundtable discussions with other philosophers on the topic of the empirical arguments for survival. My aim is to publish these in my blog in the form discussion transcripts.

 
Jime Sayaka Interview with Michael Sudduth (1/19/14)
  
1 – Sayaka: “Professor Sudduth, how and why did you get interested in the paranormal and empirical research into the afterlife?”
 
Sudduth: My interest in the paranormal and postmortem survival originated from a series of paranormal experiences at different times in my life, but the interest has been sustained and shaped in significant ways by my academic interests in philosophy of mind, the nature of the human personality, and western and eastern spirituality.
 
I’d say that my curiosity in survival-related questions began when I was around eight years old.  After having recurrent apparitional experiences in the house I lived in with my parents at the time, I began wondering whether there were real things that I could not normally see but which became visible under certain conditions.  And seeing as I recognized some of the apparitions as deceased members of my family or friends of the family, the experiences prompted the question, is death really the end of our existence?  I never said anything about these experiences to my parents, but I remember feeling encouraged when a couple of years later my grandmother shared with me an apparitional experience she had of my grandfather shortly after his death.  And I recall, on another occasion, overhearing another family member secretly discussing her apparitional experience of my grandfather.
 
In my teenage years I had a variety of paranormal experiences over a two-year period.  Given my prior experiences, I decided to document the experiences in a journal I kept at the time.  I was also inspired by the 1972 television series the Sixth Sense to explore these experiences through various readings in parapsychology.  Interestingly enough, during this time my mother reported an apparitional experience of my grandfather a few days before the death of my grandmother.  Although my mother had no knowledge of my grandmother’s experience several years earlier, her description of the apparition was remarkably similar to what my grandmother had described.
 
After a lengthy hiatus in thinking about these matters during my later teens and 20s, my interest was briefly resurrected when I encountered the writings of H.H. Price while studying philosophy of religion as a graduate student at the University of Oxford.  Price came on my radar through my reading of John Hick’s Death and Eternal Life, a text that had been recommended to me a couple of years earlier by a professor at Santa Clara University, where I did my undergraduate work in philosophy.  Although I was greatly impressed with Price’s reflections on the empirical approach to survival, my conservative Christian views at the time, together with my focus on other topics in graduate school, dissuaded me from a further exploration.
 
Two later events facilitated my shift towards a sustained engagement with the alleged empirical evidence for postmortem survival.  While a professor at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, I assigned readings on survival (including articles by H.H. Price) in my philosophy of religion classes. This eventually evolved into a senior seminar I taught on John Hick’s Death and Eternal Life text.  In 2002 I left Saint Michael’s College and moved into a historic home in Windsor, Connecticut. There my ex-wife and I had a large number of paranormal experiences, which I documented in written form.  After moving out of the house in 2004, I conducted some interviews with prior occupants of the home and learned that they had similar experiences.  I became very fascinated with the nature of these shared experiences, seemingly tied to a particular physical location, and their possible implications for postmortem survival.  So I embarked upon a critical exploration of the topical territory that has defined a central part of my academic research and writing to this day.
 
Since I had developed an independent interest in various questions in the philosophy of mind prior to 2004, my exploration of survival nicely dovetailed with my other academic interests, including my specialization in philosophy of religion, where I had given considerable attention to the nature of religious experience and arguments for the existence of God.  In addition to devouring earlier philosophical explorations of the empirical approach to survival (e.g., the works of C.D. Broad, H.H. Price, and C.J. Ducasse), I also acquainted myself with the works of more recent and contemporary philosophers who have taken an interest in the subject matter, e.g., David Ray Griffin, Robert Almeder, and Stephen Braude. I established a friendship with Braude, as well as with parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach.  I’ve had the added benefit of participating in a number of paranormal investigations and developing friendships with various mediums over the past eight years.  So my thinking on this topic has been shaped by a wide-range of first-hand experiences, as well as my research and training as a philosopher.
 
On my current view, I think there is a legitimate debate about what exactly paranormal phenomena establish about the reality and nature of postmortem survival.  That’s an issue at the center of my present work.  I am a Vedantin philosopher, so I certainly accept the idea of survival, at least broadly understood as the postmortem persistence of consciousness.  I remain skeptical, though, about many of the claims made on behalf of the ostensible empirical evidence for survival.  For me, the most relevant aspect of the inquiry into this topical territory is the role it plays in my own journey of self-exploration.
 
2 – Sayaka: “You’re working [on] a forthcoming book on survival of consciousness. Can you tell us when it is going to be published, and how it differs from the rest of the survival literature?”
 
Sudduth: Yes. I’m presently working on a book on survival. It’s a philosophical engagement and critique of the traditional empirical arguments for survival, very much in the tradition of Broad, Ducasse, and Price, and the sort of project that John Hick and H.D. Lewis encouraged philosophers of religion to take up back in the 1970s. I anticipate its completion by fall 2014 [revised: January 2015].  Palgrave Macmillan will be publishing the book in the Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion series.  As you know, I’ve published a number of papers on the topic since 2009, but I’ve actually had the idea of writing a book on survival for sometime now.  It’s been a gradual process of digesting the large body of material in the subject area, deeply processing various aspects of the debate, and letting my own thoughts reach a certain level of maturity.
 
Quite naturally, the book is motivated by my personal and professional attraction to the topic, but it’s more specifically motivated by my interest in sharpening the empirical survival debate in several ways.  Quite honestly, much of the literature on the topic since the 1960s has been disappointing.  Apart from a small number of publications, the literature has lacked the philosophical sophistication that characterized the works of Broad, Ducasse, and Price.  To be sure, there have been some good works on the topic, for example, Alan Gauld’s Mediumship and Survival, R.W.K. Paterson’s Philosophy and Belief in a Life after Death, David Ray Griffin’s Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration, and—most importantly—Stephen Braude’s Immortal Remains.  On the whole, though, since the 1960s, the literature has stagnated. Most of the publications simply overwhelm the reader with information, not conceptually clear and carefully reasoned argument.  Survival is typically asserted as an ostensible conclusion drawn from a mass of empirical data for which there is apparently no better explanation, to which some authors append facile dismissals of materialist philosophies of mind and arguments from the data of cognitive neuroscience purporting to show the dependence of consciousness on a functioning brain.
 
The widespread claim among empirical survivalists—survivalists who endorse empirical evidence for survival—is that the survival hypothesis provides the best explanation of the data.  But what does it mean for a hypothesis to explain data?  How does a hypothesis explaining data convert the data into evidential cash value? What logical principles are being enlisted to show this and assess the weight of the evidence relative to competing hypotheses? And how do we arrive at judgments concerning the net plausibility of the survival hypothesis?  These are crucial questions for evaluating the empirical case for survival, but you’ll find a deafening silence with respect to these questions in survival literature since the 1960s.  One gets the impression from much of the literature that the survival hypothesis simply wins by explanatory default:  since nothing else explains the data, survival explains the data.
 
The lack of conceptual clarity and logical rigor in the literature is particularly unfortunate when compared with how, during the past forty years, debates in the Anglo-America philosophy of religion have advanced to increasing levels of sophistication, as illustrated by the application of developments in modal logic, confirmation theory, and general epistemology to traditional arguments for the existence of God. For example, there’s nothing in the survival literature comparable in logical rigor to philosopher Richard Swinburne’s the Existence of God (Oxford University Press, 1979, 2008), in which Swinburne uses Bayesian confirmation theory to argue for the existence of God. Probability in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Jake Chandler and Victoria Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2012), highlights many such developments in Anglo-American philosophy of religion during the past forty years.
 
So my book is largely a conceptual exploration of the survival hypothesis itself and a critical examination of the logic of empirical arguments for survival.  It’s an exploration in the philosophy of postmortem survival focused on the prospects for a logically rigorous and successful empirical argument for survival.  Naturally, I draw on my training as an analytic philosopher well acquainted with the conceptual territory of Anglo-American metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science.
 
3 – Sayaka: “Could you outline the central argument of your book?”
 
Sudduth: Certainly.
 
My central thesis is that traditional empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research—what I call classical empirical arguments—do not succeed in showing that personal survival is more probable than not, much less that it is highly probable, especially where the survival hypothesis is treated as a scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis.  So my objection is first and foremost a criticism of what I take to be unjustified claims regarding the posterior probability of the hypothesis of personal survival, that is, it’s net plausibility given the relevant empirical data and standard background knowledge.  Consequently, the classical arguments, at least as traditionally formulated, do not provide a sufficiently robust epistemic justification for belief in personal survival.  That’s my thesis.
 
Why do I take this position?  Traditionally, the empirical case for survival has been based at least in part on the ostensible explanatory power of the survival hypothesis. From this viewpoint, the posterior probability of the survival hypothesis will be favorable only if the hypothesis has great explanatory power.  In more conceptually sophisticated accounts, survival is inferred from its explanatory power assisted by a favorable judgment concerning its antecedent or prior probability (i.e., roughly, how likely the survival hypothesis is independent of the empirical data it is adduced to explain).  My view, simply stated, is that proponents of the classical arguments make one or more of three mistakes.  They significantly overestimate (i) the explanatory power of the survival hypothesis, (ii) its prior probability, and/or (iii) the posterior probability of the survival hypothesis given the (approximate) values they assign to (i) or (ii), or both.
 
To fill out my critical evaluation a bit more, consider the following formulation of a widespread version of the empirical argument for survival:
 
(1) There is some data set D.
(2) The survival hypothesis, S, is the best explanation of D.
(3) S has a prior probability that is either not too low or greater than the nearest explanatory competitor(s).
Therefore, it is at least more probable than not that:
(4) The survival hypothesis is true.
 
The argument is an inference to best explanation supplemented by a favorable judgment concerning the prior probability of the survival hypothesis.  I call this the “strengthened explanatory argument” for survival (hereafter, SEA) to distinguish it from a similar explanatory argument that depends solely on explanatory considerations, with no consideration of the prior probability of the survival hypothesis.  I don’t think the basic explanatory argument can show that survival is more probable than not, so SEA is the most appropriate generic version of the empirical argument for survival when it comes to the stronger claims made on behalf of the evidence.  So SEA considered here explicitly takes it that the survival hypothesis has a favorable posterior probability, specifically a probability greater than ½.
 
Following the tendency of recent parapsychologists and philosophers, I formulate the empirical case for survival as a cumulative case argument.  So D = the relevant set of data drawn from five kinds of paranormal phenomena:  near-death and out-of-body experiences, apparitional experiences, mediumistic communications, and cases of the reincarnation type.  Furthermore, with respect to premise (2), I take the “explanatory power” of the survival hypothesis to be a function of the extent to which it leads us to expect the relevant data, as well as the extent to which the data are otherwise surprising or improbable.  As for premise (3), I understand the prior probability of a hypothesis h, where h is being proposed to explain observational evidence e, to be the probability of h independent of e, as determined by criteria such as h’s simplicity and h’s fit with background knowledge.  According to premise (3), the survival hypothesis has a prior probability that is not very low or at least greater than the nearest explanatory competitor(s), where the nearest competitor is a non-survival hypothesis that purports to lead us to expect much if not all of the relevant data.
 
If we formulate the empirical argument for survival as SEA, then my criticisms can be more precisely stated.  I argue that there are overriding reasons for supposing that we are not justified to believe (2) and (3) or, even if we accept premises (2) and (3), (4) is not more probable than not given these premises.  In either case, it follows that we are not justified to believe the conclusion (4) on the basis of (2) and (3), where (4) is assigned the value greater than ½.  Hence SEA does not succeed in showing that survival is more probable than its negation.
 
SEA, of course, needs careful unpacking and analysis.  There’s much that needs to be said about how empirical survivalists have tried to support the premises of the argument.  In my book I employ a Bayesian approach to confirmation theory to provide a more precise articulation of SEA, as well as to illuminate why the argument fails. I also consider the implications of alternative approaches to evidence assessment for the prospects of a good empirical argument for survival. As we continue the interview, I’ll fill out some of these details.

 

The next repost installment of this interview will appear next week. – M.S.
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Confessions of a Bullshit Philosopher

September 27, 2014 10:04 pm ⋅

I’m a philosopher by profession, but only because I’m one first by nature.  More importantly, the particular kind of philosopher I am at present is a reflection of my total life situation and total life history.  It has always been this way.  For much of my adult life philosophy was solely a matter of conceptual analysis and logical argumentation, served with a side dish of historical information. Those who have followed my career in philosophy have noticed that philosophy has widened a lot for me in the past five years, partly as a result of my engagement with psychology, partly as a consequence of my embracing eastern spirituality, and partly from being in personal relationships that have profoundly showed me, in the words of Carl Jung, that “the judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth.” My “Cup of Nirvana” blog is an illustration of this widening conception of philosophical inquiry.

For much of my career, analytic philosophy, the particular form of philosophy I embraced early in my philosophical education, was a tool to prove that I was correct about something and that someone else was mistaken in a view that contradicted my own.  This activity masqueraded in the guise of wanting to know the truth “for its own sake,” but this was simply a clever form of self-deception or – more aptly – bullshitting myself.  I now see that I wanted to know the truth because life would be unmanageable if I didn’t know the truth, and a certain disaster if it turned out that I was mistaken.  For me, the affect associated with unanswered questions was the same as answers incorrectly answered.  

The whole force of the compulsive drive for clarity and reasoning was the expression of a deep unacknowledged psychological need to control my world, a need rooted in a childhood destabilized by trauma.  Intelligence gave it form as philosophical inquiry, a particular mode of philosophical inquiry.  This need emerged, not because philosophy was seen to be an intrinsically joyful exploration.  Philosophy may begin in wonder, but it’s often taken up or ends up under the control of fear.  For me, the attraction to philosophical inquiry came under the influence of fear and the need for safety. Safety required finding an identity, specifically one that would allow me to exert a high level of control over my world. Logic and reasoning gave promise to answering this need. While the attachment to logic chopping created something of an identity with resources that helped regulate my life at one level, like many defense mechanisms it’s also caused considerable trouble in other respects, especially in the interpersonal domain.  That which is unconsciously motivated by aversion is likely to characterize our conscious lives as depression, anxiety, and addictive behavior.

This need for identity and security, appearing as the seeker of clarity and agent of reasoning, has taken different forms, from embracing religious traditions that advertise some kind of “certainty” to enlisting philosophy to defend such religious traditions from attack, to “steam rolling” people with logic when I felt attacked. Psychologically this remains one of the greatest challenges for me, but for sometime now it has been made conscious. Having been made conscious, needs and motivations don’t necessarily dissolve, but the prior relationship to them is changed in their coming into realization. It begins the process of dissolving the otherwise neurotic engagement with the world.

Conceptual analysis and logical argument remain an important feature of how I do philosophy, but the interests and motivations have shifted since seeing through what I’ve been doing most of my adult life.  The urge to know because not knowing is scary remains a voice, but it’s now seen to be that and as such it’s only one voice in the choir called “self.”  In this seeing, a new love of the process of inquiry and reflection is born, not as a means by which to control the world but simply as part of the process of inner exploration.  And there can be joy in the process, regardless of the outcome, because it’s seen that ignorance is OK. It’s OK even if we learn nothing from it. It’s OK just as it is, with no interest in doing anything with it.

From this position, I’m a hell of a lot more likely to have an attitude of acceptance towards people who differ in their opinions from my own.  If I’m OK about being mistaken, it’s OK that others are mistaken.  I’m simply not going to feel threatened by opinions that contradict my own. For most of my life I was not OK with others being mistaken because I wasn’t OK about being mistaken myself. The attitude towards others was a direct reflection of myself.

I suppose for some people this attitude might move them completely out of the business of philosophical inquiry, or specifically the business of logic chopping and conceptual analysis. Or for some people maybe they lose all conviction of truth if they have this attitude. That’s not the case for me.  I can have conviction that a certain statement is true or false or that an argument is poorly constructed or nicely constructed.  I can evaluate opinions and arguments, and I certainly haven’t lost the interest in doing so.  Yes, I can even feel strongly that an opinion or argument is bullshit.  The crucial thing is having the disposition to feel no different in this moment if I came to see I was the one who was endorsing bullshit.  There’s a growing part of me that actually welcomes the realization that I’m full of shit or that I’ve made some huge mistake in an argument.  In a sense, I’m a bullshit philosopher, but so are others, as I find it hard to believe that I’m someone special here, an exception to the rule.  But is it OK to be a bullshit philosopher?  This would seem to be the real question.  For me, it is. Bullshit and truth are equally OK. Or, to be more precise, life is no less OK when bullshit is present than when truth is present.  What makes bullshit and truth equally OK is to see that they are each part of life as it is happening, and I’m not something separable from life as it is happening.

Am I not without conviction for all of this though. For me, the problem has never been the strong conviction that I was correct. It was the force behind this conviction.  What about having confident assertion, not because I can’t afford being mistaken, but because – from the perspective of my ultimate intention for living – I don’t give a shit if it turns out that I’m mistaken.  Even in the telling of this, there is just a story being told.  Fundamentally, no one knows most of the shit they claim to know. But we play the “knowing game.”  Now I don’t tell myself “stop playing the game.”  This would just be another form of aversion. No: this is what my mind does, and I understand it has a need to play this game. It wants to treat life as a perpetual drama whose essence can be captured by tidy definitions, numbered propositions, and the rest of the paraphernalia of formal logic.  Maybe some truth enters into this drama, of course.  For me, though, the thing is to see it as a game.  This introduces a certain playfulness that breaks the edge of the neurotic personality that loves to take this business, like everything else, more seriously than it actually is. 

I aim to make rigorous arguments, and I love conceptual analysis and logic chopping. You’re not about to find me soft-pedaling my critical engagement of survival arguments. Why not, if it doesn’t ultimately matter?  Well, it matters and it doesn’t matter.

It matters in the sense that in the doing of it there’s an important part of me that is acknowledged and seen.  There’s a security that I give to a part of myself, and this is important.  The need that is met in this process comes from hitherto unconscious parts of the self being seen in the conscious life of the self.  Others cannot give this, but this is what I was previously seeking. So there’s an interesting transition from philosophical inquiry as a way to be seen and validated by others (because of what it produces) to philosophical inquiry as a way of seeing and validating oneself in the activity itself (regardless of what it produces or where it goes). In the latter, “being seen” dissolves in the joy of seeing. Philosophy has become spiritual and therapeutic, but only because it’s reflecting a transformation already in progress.

In other sense, it doesn’t matter.  What I am, even in my individual person, is much larger than this part that gets security from dropping into logical analysis, and loving engagement with these parts is just as essential. Neurotic behavior is just compensation  arising from psychological one-sidedness. So at some point, the analyzer steps back and just watches the rock guitarist step forward and do his thing. And then there’s the poet writing poetry. There is also the lover connecting with women and the feminine.  There is the child playing mini-golf and pinball machines. There is the comedian cracking jokes, generating laughter in some and irritation in others.  Here is the choir I call “self.” Let them sing, and let them sing together.  Singing and dancing is what really matters, for this has the power to reveal our deeper nature and its connection to the transcendent, which is why Rumi called it a path to God. 

Carl Jung once noted that philosophy taught him that all psychological theories, including his own, were a subjective confession. I suspect that philosophy too, the form it takes and how it’s implemented, is fundamentally a subjective confession. At any rate, it has been for me. Even when I’m dealing with conceptual analysis and formulating precise arguments, I am necessarily encountering and speaking about myself. Perhaps this is the most important truth to be realized, the truth about one’s personal story. To get there requires penetrating everything we have erected to keep us from ourselves.

Michael Sudduth

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Ode to Autumn – the Sweetest Freedom

September 24, 2014 4:50 am ⋅
So today is the first day of Autumn, just when I thought she was in the past. But Autumn always returns, and I’m learning to embrace her presence afresh each time with an open acceptance, whether accompanied by joy or sorrow.  She’s just a season, though Keats perhaps thought she was a goddess. Like the waves upon the sea, the breath upon my lips, the rising of a craving, the blooming of a flower, the passion of a lover, Autumn comes and goes. Impermanence. That’s the basic truth. That’s the deal. And yet she remains my beautiful teacher, and my love for her abides.  She nails this painful truth into my heart. I let her cut me and bleed me into gratitude and peace, and then I am free – the sweetest freedom.
 
(1) My pursuit of personal healing was suspended the moment my attention was drawn to the deer outside my window. In the clear seeing of the deer, the clear hearing of a Blue Jay, or the clear tasting of a piece of chocolate, all seeking stops, if only for a moment, because it’s known in that moment that nothing, absolutely nothing, is in need of repair. This is the sweetest freedom.
 
(2) It’s difficult, if not impossible, for my mind to accept that there is no “me” at the center of my life. Indeed, even in the confession of this, it’s assumed that there is some “center,” that there really is something there called “my life.” In fact there isn’t. There is just life happening. And in the clear seeing of this there is nothing left but surrender – the sweetest freedom.

(3) In these moments when we are the silent surrender, the nameless, formless watcher, our personal story dissolves and we are utterly present.  There is a clear seeing of life as it is, free from “should haves” and “could haves.”  It’s seen that there is life happening all around us – fish swimming, children laughing, waves crashing, seasons changing, sun setting, despair rising – a dynamic unfolding that is veiled by the mind’s self-propelled drama.  It prevents us from seeing this beauty and dancing with it, and yet the dance continues.  Our personal story is but one movement in life’s eternal song. Play on and be free – the sweetest freedom.
 
(4) The mind will be utterly disturbed by the possibility that its pursuit of “healing” or “recovery” is just the addict re-appearing in a new form. The core psychological element in all addiction is the compulsive seeking of happiness, completion, or satisfaction in something outside oneself.  The path of healing or recovery is often simply another form of this. Identity-seeking under the guise of “personal healing” often reproduces, howbeit in a more subtle form, the intrinsically anxiety-ridden project of making life OK.  So I just relax.  I hold on to nothing. I let go of nothing. Everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be.  This is the sweetest freedom.
 
(5) Strive for your freedom, but then simply stop it.  Work for your personal healing, but then just stop it.  Do the 12-Step Program, but then just stop it.  Practice Zen, but then just stop it.  Pray to Jesus, but then crucify him.  Chant Hare Krishna, and then jump into the ocean and swim.  Whatever you’re doing, especially whatever you’re doing for attainment, just stop it.  I want you to see your search as a lie, your quest for psychological wholeness as a deep delusion, your god as really the devil, and ‘Zen’ as just a word.  I want you to throw away the japa beads, incense, holy books, daily affirmation cards, and murtis  When the curtain finally falls on your little drama, there’s only one thing left to do.  It’s what you’ve been doing all along. It’s what you’ve been looking for all along. Breathe – this is the sweetest freedom.
 
(6) What’s in a breath? A child playing in the sand. A young woman singing to her cat.  The philosopher deconstructing arguments.  The gardener planting flowers. The lover laughing.  Cook cooking. Actor acting.  Dancer dancing.  Poet writing. Tear drop falling. Lover leaving.  Gods dying. Devils being born.  What’s in a breath? Your redemption. Your Self – the sweetest freedom.
 
(7) Everything you are in this very moment – your love, your hate, your joy, your sadness, your health, your addiction – it’s all an expression of the Absolute – the sweetest freedom.
 
(8) Recovery and healing take no effect until you reach the other side of nothing.  And having reached the other side of nothing, everything – music, therapy, cooking, and even your deep delusion – is a celebration and exploration of the beauty that has always been your nature.  There is nothing to recover, only the present to discover. This is the sweetest freedom.
 
(9) Ride upon the wings of the seagull as it soars through the air and then crashes into the sea. The bird that carries you also drops you into the deep. And there you sink into the cold frigid depths and die in the silence of a perpetual unseen night. Your final moments pass, not in fear or rage, against the ocean or the sky, or against the feather that dropped you like a stone. No. Your final moments pass in the warmth of your lover’s embrace, for the last thing remembered is the first thing known, God’s loving kiss: the memory of having soared the skies with birds, indeed having seen your face upon the waves of yesterday’s tears into which you passed and eternally dissolved. You are free – the sweetest freedom.
 
(10) The darkness is one man’s suicide; the other man’s salvation. But it’s undeniably everyone’s nature. This darkness, whether appearing as sorrow dipped in chocolate or joy rising into a night sky, is the sweetest freedom.

(11) Sometimes truth appears as a gentle butterfly.  Sometimes truth appears as a raging hurricane.  Sometimes truth appears as a butterfly in a hurricane.  Sometimes truth appears as the realization that the butterfly and hurricane are non-different, just as ocean and wave, singer and song, lover and beloved, life and death, samsara and nirvana are one.  This is the sweetest freedom.
 
(12) Now dear Autumn, having taught me these fundament truths, I kiss the night into which you passed.  I closed my eyes and entered  silence.  I opened my eyes and you were there.  I now see you as you truly are.  You are emptiness in which longing has taken form, but you must ever change the color of the leaves.  Form is emptiness, and so form can be reborn, form into form, emptiness dancing.  Change is the thing.  So kiss me one last time, like a butterfly that lands upon my nose.  Sing to me one last time, as the music stops our minds.  Give me your frigid breath, which chills me to life and then to death.  Like you, I too dance as emptiness taking form, form into form, dependent and yet independent, eternal shapeshifter perpetually reborn in karma’s trembling hand.  Dance with me or dance but not with me. Either way, you’re a lover, and I’m a lover.  And every lover is essentially a dancer. This is the play, and this is how the drama plays out.  This is life happening.  This is the sweetest freedom.

Michael Sudduth
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One Love

September 20, 2014 8:49 pm ⋅

 

This is a poem I composed earlier in the summer. Like all material from the unconscious, what is revealed at a particular time is more clearly understood retrospectively at some later time. – Michael Sudduth

 

 

 

 

 

 

One Love

I. 

In the movement of the city night, 
the foot of silence takes its pace 
from the fragile orchid
in the hand of grace.

Now loving hence knowing hence being
all things as they arise and fall,
formless, shapeless spirit
Consciousness of all. 

Manifested here as you and me,
krishna-radha, shiva-shakti,
lovers dancing behind
the veil of beauty.

II.

Hand in hand this concrete path we walk.
Each step’s symbolic power
Transforms our dream into
Petals of a flower 

Falling like rain upon our desires
Soaking us with the scent of roses
Our wet bodies touching
Whatever the “I” discloses.

My eye, your eye, our eye is one eye.
Projecting out and taking in
this world of dualities
and returning within.

III.

Penetrating each other’s mind
we conceive the portrait
drawn by the Force’s hand.
this drama of past and future,
whose boundary is Now,
in which an entire life is lived

And so we walk the pathless path,
as breath falls upon breath,
on tranquil shades of night,
the brilliant shades of light,
as the black upon the white

Here is the center of the world,
the foot of the sacred cross,
where the two become one,
The beating of the sacred heart,
the center of the sun.

IV.

Let us take the forward step,
You and me – face to face,
gentle touch of our feet upon the ground,
where truth is realized without a sound.
And the Force called God or the Absolute,
is playing here as you and me,
laughing at the feet of Christ,
dancing on pineapples,
drinking the sweet nectar
that flows from our beating hearts.
Our legs and arms intertwined,
whether on concrete slabs or moistened grass,
the laughter and tears are one.

Feeling the beauty of detached love,
wholly you, wholly not. 
Chanting Yes and No
to the call of our bodies,
suffering and then dissolved.
Our two minds, our two hearts,
two halves of a single face
that has descended from above,
Self into self, self into Self
one seeing,
one knowing,
one love.

– Michael Sudduth

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Near-Death Experiences – Evidence for Survival?

September 10, 2014 2:11 am ⋅

I’ve commented rather extensively in earlier blogs and various publications over the past few years on empirical arguments for postmortem survival from the data of mediumship. A number of people have asked me about near-death experiences, which constitute another strand of alleged empirical evidence for life after death.  Although it receives extended treatment in my book in progress, I wanted to offer some brief comments here on near-death experiences, or more specifically on the formalities of the argument from near-death experiences to the conclusion that consciousness, our individual consciousness, survives the death of our body.

In the paradigmatic near-death experience (NDE), at least those adduced as evidence for life after death, a living person has an out-of-body experience, typically in the context of some medical crisis such as cardiac arrest. The person seems to view the world from a position outside his or her body, and he often has some “other worldly” experience of a tunnel and encountering a being of light. Encountering deceased friends and/or loved ones and having a life review are also common features of these experiences.

The more interesting cases are those in which subjects are able to provide accurate descriptions of events that took place while they were unconscious or events that were outside their sensory perceptual field during the incident, for they claim to have “seen” or “heard” what was happening, even though they apparently could not have acquired this information through any ordinary means.  The events might be conversations that took place in the operating room between the medical staff or between family members in the waiting room. Or they might report “seeing” some incident that took place nearby or “seeing” a certain object in a particular location, though they have no sensory access to the events or objects.

Are these kinds of experiences evidence for life after death?

I. NDEs as Weak Evidence for Life after Death

I’ve argued in several places that empirical arguments for survival, which include arguments for survival from NDEs, lack cogency. By this I don’t mean that the empirical facts are not evidence for life after death, only that they don’t provide very good evidence for this claim. More precisely stated, survivalists who claim that NDEs provide good evidence for survival have not adequately shown this to be the case. 

As I see it, there is no real debate about whether there is evidence for life after death. And this is true also for the data collected from NDEs.  The data are evidence for life after death, but in much the same way that the existence of blue objects is evidence for the existence of a god with a blue-object fetish who created the world. How so?  

On a widely held view of evidence discussed in confirmation theory, if a hypothesis H leads us to expect some datum, D, and D is borne out by experience, then D is evidence for H. Otherwise stated, D raises the probability of H in this situation. Most of the recent literature on survival of death from near-death experiences at best shows that the experiences of people who have had near-death experiences is what we would expect if consciousness survives death and retains many of its current properties.  In much the same way, the observation of blue objects is what we would expect if a god with a blue-object fetish created the world. If you don’t like this hypothesis, choose another, like a god who has a suffering, four-legged animal, or rock fetish.  If you don’t care for gods, how about a demon hypothesis:  my drawing an Ace of Spades from a deck of cards is evidence that there exists a very powerful demonic entity who intended me to pick that card as an omen of my quickly approaching demise.

II.  Stronger Evidential Claims

There being evidence for a hypothesis in the sense just outlined above is a weak kind of evidential support. It does not show that the hypothesis in question has a net plausibility that would suffice for its rational acceptance. In the case of the survival hypothesis, it’s the stronger claim that the majority of survivalists want to make on behalf of the alleged evidence for survival.  Indeed, some of them – Robert Almeder for example – want to claim, that the evidence for survival is so strong that it would be irrational to reject the hypothesis. (Almeder argues this specifically with reference to the data suggestive of reincarnation). I find these kinds of claims implausible and extravagant to say the least, and the arguments offered on their behalf are not very well thought out.  Indeed, in much of the literature, the argument for survival from NDEs is at best implicit, not carefully laid out, which of course allows a host of questionable assumptions to go wholly unnoticed.

If we return to the comparison between inferences to survival (from NDEs) and inferences to blue-color fetish makers of the world (from the existence of blue objects), an important shared feature of these two inferences is that they each involve a prediction about the way the world should look if the hypothesis is true, but – and this is the crucial part – the relevant prediction depends on an auxiliary hypothesis for which there is no independent evidence. The existence of demons does not lead us to expect the selection of any particular card in the deck, and the existence of a world maker or god does not by itself lead us to expect the existence of blue-colored objects in the world.  One must add something extra, fill out the basic hypothesis with additional hypotheses, in these cases hypotheses that attribute certain intentions to the entity whose existence the observational datum is supposed to confirm.

The survival of the self or our individual consciousness does not lead us to expect the data associated with NDEs. Survivalists must also assume that if consciousness should survive death, then it would have substantial continuity with our present consciousness, and that (at least some) survivors would retain their ante-mortem ability to acquire knowledge about the empirical world, but in the absence of their physical body. Without these minimal assumptions we would not expect even the most general features of NDEs. Similarly, blue-object fetish theologians must assume that the postulated Maker has intentions that are strongly continuous with the kinds of intentions that terrestrial makers have, for example, preferences for certain colors, shapes, etc.  But neither assumption can be independently tested.  We don’t know the relevant properties of consciousness if it should survive death anymore than we know the general or specific intentions of possible world-designers if they should exist.

And the matter is more dire for the survivalist, for there is virtually no limit to the kinds of auxiliary hypotheses one can think up such that (a) they are not independently testable and (b) when added to some non-survival hypothesis, they lead us to expect precisely the same kinds of observations as the survival hypothesis.  This is why survivalist criticisms of appeals to living-agent psychic functioning, like extra-sensory perception, carry little force. If the survivalist is free to postulate whatever auxiliary hypotheses are needed to bring observational data into the right fit with the survival hypothesis, those proposing “counter-explanations” are free to do precisely the same thing.  Consequently, it cannot plausibly be argued that the evidence clearly favors the survival hypothesis over non-survival counter-explanations.

Finally, there are many non-independently testable auxiliary hypotheses such that if we were to add them to the hypothesis that “individual consciousness survives death,” the expanded hypothesis would not lead us to expect any of the near-death experience data adduced in favor of survival. Maybe survivors will not be able to recognize deceased loved ones, communicate with them, have perceptual experiences of the empirical world, whether from above the hospital bed or anywhere else for that matter, or perhaps they would not retain knowledge of out-of-body experiences after being revived.

III.  The State of the Debate 

The moral of the story, which I think best captures the state of the empirical debate concerning survival, is as follows:

First, it’s pretty easy, all too easy, to generate non-survival hypotheses that lead us to expect the same data that the survival hypothesis leads us to expect.  So, if we can’t test the auxiliary hypotheses enlisted to derive the relevant predictions, we don’t know that the relevant observational evidence favors a particular survival hypothesis over any number of non-survival hypotheses.

Second, it’s pretty easy, all too easy, to generate survival hypotheses that don’t lead us to expect the relevant data borne out by experience.  So, if we have no way independently to test auxiliary hypotheses, we don’t know whether the relevant observational evidence confirms or disconfirms the idea that consciousness survives death.  Everything depends on what assumptions are made  in addition to the simple supposition that consciousness, even my individual consciousness, survives death.

The problem of auxiliary hypotheses remains the most formidable challenge to formulating an empirical argument for survival, that is, if survivalists wish to produce an argument that amounts to something more than presenting reasons for a conclusion that no one, survivalist or skeptic, is prepared to deny.

Michael Sudduth

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Dancing Lovers

August 29, 2014 8:39 pm ⋅
“You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.”
                                              – Paul McCartney

 

I. Love is a Dance

When I strip away all the romantic drivel and idealistic bullshit that buries our ability to distinguish fact from fiction, I see very clearly that one person loving another person, even in the most committed relationship, is just a shared and often clumsy dance to a common song that plays for a time. The dance may be brief, or it may last many years. It may even occupy a large period of one’s overall life.  Eventually, however, it will end, because, in the words of the Buddha, “whatever arises also passes away.”  So enjoy the dance with all the passion you can muster, but remember, it’s just a dance, just a dance.
 
You and I are utterly irrelevant in this thing called “love,” just as we are utterly irrelevant in the vastness of the cosmos, its evolution, and eventual annihilation.  The cosmos is the dance.  What is happening right now is this dance.  What you call your “self” is a movement in the dance, and so in the dance and expressing it, but in an important sense utterly irrelevant to it.  It isn’t that you exist and this “you” is irrelevant.  It’s that there is no “you” there in the first place to be either relevant or irrelevant.  Phenomena we call thoughts, feelings, and sensations – Yes. But at the heart of these experiences there is no “you” to be found. An apparent you – Yes.  There is only emptiness that manifests now and then as the person you take yourself to be.  When it is clearly seen that “I” am absent, life becomes playful, and this playfulness is the precondition for experiencing love as the dance.

 

For a long time I thought that what made love so difficult was impermanence, the impermanence of the world, self, and thus all relationships.   I’ve concluded that what makes love so difficult is actually the belief and subsequent interest in permanence and the acquisition of an identity from the apparent other.  The problem isn’t that the world (or our experience) is a particular way, namely impermanent.  It’s that we are attached to it being something or someway other than it is.  From this arises the belief that impermanence threatens rather than enhances or enriches love and relationships.

II. She is not My Other Half
 

What does this “being in love” mean?  Among other things, a most powerful, very powerful attraction.  What does this attraction mean? 

If I truly understand what my attraction to her means, I will clearly see that it’s not a call to get something from her that I lack within myself; rather, it’s a revelation of what must be sought within myself.  Her beauty truly lies concealed within my own heart as my own inner beauty. She is perhaps a poet, maybe a singer, a repository and transmitter of eternal wisdom, or a healer of the psyche.  Maybe she’s a wonderful cook, someone with a contagious sense of humor, or someone who quotes my favorite authors. The irresistible attraction I feel towards her is my very self beckoning me to return to the depths of my inner life and find her beauty as my own.  It’s the inner invitation of my unconscious life to discover myself as the poet, singer, philosopher, healer, or cook, and then to cultivate this beauty as my own, as a lotus flower arising from my own heart.

If I take this path, I become a giver of the beauty I find within myself, not one who steals the beauty of another.  My love becomes a movement of myself, clearly seen, towards another also clearly seen.  I see her as she is because my projection is withdrawn, and I need nothing she freely gives. She cannot complete me. This is know. I’m already complete in myself.  I cannot love her on account of what she gives. I can only love her for who she is.

She is not my other half. I’m not her other half.  We are each already whole.  Therefore, our love lacks nothing, needs nothing, not even each other. This love, and this love alone, is capable of consciously and richly giving itself.

 
III. The Self Searching for Love is Searching for Itself
 
When there arises in you a desire for another to complete you, inquire into the origin of this desire. The desire to be completed by another is none other than some part of you seeking completion beyond itself. The essential thing to see is that beyond this part is the whole, and you – not another person – are that.
 
The search for love “out there” in a person or relationship will always disappoint.  It isn’t that love is not found out there, but there really is no “out there” in which love is found.  If you find love in another, it’s because it has been first realized in yourself.
 
When your attraction to another repeatedly brings you back to yourself, to your own inner depths, to experience your inner life, however blissful or painful, with utter clarity and the most intimate tenderness, you are prepared to give love to another like never before.  You are prepared to dance.  You are prepared to be a dancing lover.

 

 Michael Sudduth

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