The Survival Hypothesis: Essays on Mediumship, ed. Adam J. Rock (McFarland Publishers, 2013) is now available from Amazon.  Some of the book content is available at Google Books.

“Contemporary parapsychology tends to be preoccupied with ESP (telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition) and psychokinesis. In contrast, this cutting-edge anthology assembles an international team of experts from the fields of psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience to examine critically what is referred to as the survival hypothesis: the tentative statement or prediction that some aspect of our personhood (e.g., consciousness) persists subsequent to the death of the physical body. The appraisal of the survival hypothesis will be restricted to the phenomenon of mediumship; that is, humans who ostensibly communicate with the deceased. The book has been divided into four main sections: Explanation and Belief; Culture, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy; Empirical Approaches, and The Present and Future. The issue of postmortem survival is supremely relevant to us all because in our consensual space-time reality the human encounter with death is, of course, a certainty.” – Book Description (from Publisher)

This newly published collection of essays on mediumship features my article “Is Postmortem Survival the Best Explanation of the Data of Mediumship?”  It also opens with philosopher Stephen Braude’s essay “The Possibility of Mediumship: Philosophical Considerations.”

Adam Rock put together a good collection of essays. The book provides a well-rounded assessment of the nature of mediumship and its implications for the hypothesis of postmortem survival.

Michael

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In my previous blog (2/11/14), I argued that (i) empirical survival arguments depend on the survival hypothesis having predictive consequences and (ii) the survival hypothesis has no predictive consequences unless it’s supplemented with various auxiliary hypotheses.  A substantial part of the discussion was devoted to laying out eight different assumptions required by survival arguments based on the data of mediumship.  If we were to look at survival arguments from cases of the reincarnation type or near-death experiences we would find a similar need to adopt other kinds of auxiliary hypotheses, but the focus on mediumship at least illustrates the auxiliary hypothesis requirement.  This will suffice for the line of argument in the present blog, which is that the auxiliary hypothesis requirement generates a problem for empirical survival arguments. 

The problem of auxiliary hypotheses arises from the fact that the auxiliary statements needed by survival arguments are not independently testable.  If this is correct, then we don’t actually know whether postmortem survival as such would lead us to expect any empirical phenomena, much less what the general or specific observational features of the world should be.  If the justification of the claim that there is empirical evidence favoring the hypothesis of survival depends on the survival hypothesis having predictive consequences (of even a general sort), then empirical survival arguments face a formidable difficulty.  It would appear that we are, at best, at the mercy of conjecture, which of course serves competing hypotheses equally well.

The situation is parallel to arguments from complex adaptation in organisms to an intelligent designer.  In the first blog of the present series, I looked at Elliott Sober’s critique of intelligent design arguments.  On this view, we cannot determine whether postulating an intelligent designer would lead us to expect the salient features of living organisms.   The reason:  we cannot independently test the range of auxiliary hypotheses that would, in conjunction with the hypothesis of an intelligent designer, lead us to expect the observational data.  In particular, we cannot test hypotheses about the designer’s requisite abilities and goals.  How, then, can we justifiably say anything about what the hypothesis of intelligent design as such would lead us to expect? 

In the present blog, I’ll explore the problem of auxiliary hypotheses for survival arguments, again illustrating this with survival arguments based on the data of mediumship.  What I hope to show, at least in a preliminary way, is that there is a genuine and serious problem here that undermines classical empirical arguments for survival, especially where postmortem survival is treated as a scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis.

1.   The Independent Testability of Auxiliary Hypotheses

As explained in the previous blog, single hypotheses rarely have significant predictive consequences. The Duhem-Quine thesis in the philosophy of science highlights the point that predictive consequences depend on content provided by sets of statements taken together.  This is true in both scientific theorizing and in a variety of everyday inferences.  If we treat evidence collected at a bank robbery as evidence that Mr. Phinuit robbed the bank, this depends on establishing a connection between the evidence and Mr. Phinuit being the robber. Auxiliary hypotheses are enlisted to make this connection, e.g., hypotheses about Mr. Phinuit’s physical traits (e.g., fingerprint pattern, height and weight, facial features, speech patterns and accent), the make/model of his vehicle, and his whereabouts at the time of the robbery.

The dependence on auxiliary hypotheses introduces a minor wrinkle in the procedure of hypothesis testing.  In testing some hypothesis by its predictive consequences, we are trying to evaluate or assess the merits of the hypothesis by way of its connection to observational evidence.  If hypothesis H makes the observational evidence O unsurprising (i.e., leads us to expect O), then—to that extent—O evidentially supports H.  If O is not what we would expect, then O counts against H to some extent. If some different hypothesis H* renders O less surprising than H, then O favors H* over H.  These relations capture some widespread intuitions about how evidence supports hypotheses.  However, the role of an auxiliary hypothesis a is such that, in its absence, we can’t really say what H would lead us to expect.  It’s H + a that leads us to expect observational evidence O, not H alone. 

The importance of testing auxiliary hypotheses arises here.  If we had no way to test a, we would not be able genuinely to test H itself by means of predictive consequences.  This is most apparent in cases where the observation we would expect given H + a doesn’t pan out. What do we conclude?  Does the failed prediction count against H, a, or both?  Which statement(s) should carry the burden of epistemic culpability?  Suppose I adopt the hypothesis that Mr. Phinuit, a Frenchman, robbed the Bank of America in New York City.  It would be natural to expect that if the robber spoke during the robbery, witnesses would report that the robber spoke with a French accent.  Suppose, though, that the witnesses all report that the robber spoke with a thick Bronx accent.  Does this count against the hypothesis that Mr. Phinuit robbed the bank?  It’s not clear because our expectation that the robber would speak with a French accent is based not merely on the hypothesis that Mr. Phinuit robbed the bank, but on the additional assumption that, being French, Mr. Phinuit would speak with a distinguishable French accent.  But in this case, the failed prediction (i.e., the robber would speak with a French accent) might indicate that Mr. Phinuit is not the robber or that Mr. Phinuit, though a Frenchman, does not always speak with a French accent.  In other words, the auxiliary hypothesis may be what needs to rejected or modified in some way, not the hypothesis concerning who actually robbed the bank.

If we had no way to test the auxiliary hypothesis about Mr. Phinuit’s accent, it would be difficult to decide what the hypothesis that Mr. Phinuit robbed the bank would lead us to expect with respect to the accent the robber reportedly used.  How do we know whether it’s surprising or not that the robber spoke with a Bronx accent, given the supposition that Mr. Phinuit is the robber?  However, now suppose that we had a way to test the auxiliary hypothesis about Mr. Phinuit’s accent.  Perhaps further investigation turns up evidence that Mr. Phinuit, though he normally speaks with a French accent, has the ability to speak convincingly with a Bronx accent.  Suppose that video documentation is uncovered that shows Mr. Phinuit in an acting gig two years earlier in which he played a New Yorker and displayed an impressive Bronx accent.  Here we acquire evidence that the auxiliary hypothesis is false, or at any rate in need to modification.   Our ability to test the auxiliary hypothesis concerning Mr. Phinuit’s accent enables us to determine that the hypothesis that Mr. Phinuit robbed the bank is at least consistent with evidence that otherwise seems quite surprising.  Furthermore, while we might have simply modified the assumption about Mr. Phinuit’s accent, the ability to do so on the basis of independent evidence helps avoid ad hoc adjustments to a theory to retrofit data that are otherwise not to be expected. 

2. Survivalist Auxiliary Hypotheses

Now let’s return to the survival hypothesis.  

As I argued in the previous blog, a simple hypothesis of survival—positing the postmortem survival of the self or individual consciousness—is not robust enough in content to lead us to expect any of the data associated with mediumship.  We must adopt various assumptions about the knowledge, powers, and intentions or purposes that some persons would have if they were to survive death.  We must also make some minimal assumptions about the process of discarnate communication, for example, assumptions that account for “communicators” providing incorrect information on matters we would otherwise expect them to know. The specific auxiliary hypotheses I sketched were as follows:

[A1] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would be consciousness in a discarnate state, where “discarnate state” refers to a state of existence without a physical body. 

[A2] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would retain many of the detailed and highly specific memories of their ante-mortem existence.

[A3] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would possess knowledge of events taking place in our world after their death or the states of mind of living persons.

[A4] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would possess the desire and intention to communicate with the living.

[A5] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would possess the ability to communicate with the living. 

[A6] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would exhibit efficacious psychic functioning in the form of extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis.

[A7]  There are some living persons P* (where P* is a subset of P) such that, if P* were to survive death, P* would retain some of their significant general and particular skills and personality features. 

[A8]  Either C₁, C₂, or C₃, where

C₁: There are some living persons P such that if P were to survive death and communicate with the living at postmortem time t₁ . . . t_n, P’s cognitive and causal powers would become attenuated during t₁ . . . t_n.

C₂: There are some living persons M such that if M were to receive information from some discarnate person P_i at time t₁ . . . t_n, the information would be subject to a cognitive process in which filtering and interpretation by the medium’s own mind lowers the accuracy and reliability of the content of the communications.

C₃: There are some living persons P such that if P were to survive death and communicate with the living, certain modes of communication would produce more accurate and reliable information than others.

I refer readers to “Getting Sober about Survival II” for a more detailed discussion of these auxiliary hypotheses as requirements for arguments for survival from the data of mediumship.

3.  The Testability of Survivalist Auxiliary Hypotheses 

Some philosophers might wish to argue that we have evidence against some of the above auxiliary hypotheses, even if we don’t have evidence against survival as such.  For example, one might object to [A1] on the grounds that consciousness is dependent on a functioning brain. Or we might suppose that, even if consciousness were to persist after death in a discarnate state, it would be substantially discontinuous with our ante-mortem consciousness.  We might not remember much of our ante-mortem life.  Our purposes might be different.  We might not have any epistemic access to postmortem events taking place on earth, much less causally interact with the world or living persons.  Hence, even if the self were to survive death, it would not be capable of a rich conscious life, at least not in the absence of a body or some appropriate physical substratum.

However, the force of the above objections depends on the assumption that survivors would not have bodies of any sort.  And that’s just not clear.  And if communicators in mediumship are who they say they are, many of the deceased are at least of the opinion (rightly or wrongly) that they have bodies of some sort.  The problem, as I see it, is not that we have evidence that these auxiliary hypotheses are false.  The problem is that we have no way to determine that they are true, that is, no way to justifiably determine this independent of the hypothesis of survival and the data that are being adduced as evidence of survival.  

But let’s look more closely at the problem of the testability of survivalist auxiliary hypotheses.

I stated the auxiliary hypotheses above in the subjunctive mood, as subjunctive conditionals, specifically as conditional statements that state what would happen (or probably happen) if such-and-such were true, where the antecedent is entertained as a hypothetical situation, not a contrary to fact condition (a so-called “counterfactual”). 

To understand the difficulty with the independent testability of the survivalist auxiliary hypotheses, consider first the justification we have for many kinds of similar subjunctive conditionals.  I can say with relative ease what would happen to a glass jar if I dropped it from my second-story window onto a concrete driveway.  After all, there is independent evidence that jars of “this sort” break when impacting surfaces “like this” after being dropped from a distance “like this.”  The hypothetical situation closely resembles others that have actually taken place.  But even in the absence of this, if I understand the properties of the glass jar and the concrete, I can deduce that the jar will shatter on impact against a concrete surface if the glass jar impacts the ground with a certain velocity.  Our justifiably believing what would happen to the jar under the specified conditions is based on background knowledge, including various empirically testable claims about the properties of the objects in question.

But let’s take an example that’s a bit closer to home.  Survivalist auxiliary hypotheses involve claims about what human persons would know, desire, intend, and do in some hypothetical situation, namely in a postmortem state.  We’re often justified in believing what living persons would (probably) do under certain “hypothetical” circumstances.  We may believe that if John saw a person drop a $20 bill, then he would (probably) take it, or if Mary visited Oxford during the summer, then she would (probably) tell me about the Bodleian library.  To the extent that statements like these are justified it’s because we already know about the character or behavioral patterns of John and Mary, and we also know enough about the hypothetical situation to relate it in the appropriate way to the character or behavioral patterns of Mary and John. Maybe we have independent evidence that Mary likes libraries and tells friends about the details of her trips. Perhaps I’ve watched John pick up money people drop and pocket it himself.  So we can extrapolate what to expect of them under hypothetical situations, especially if they closely resemble actual, past circumstances.  Otherwise stated, what I independently know (or can test) about Mary and John, and what I independently know (or can test) about features of various hypothetical situations, gives me good independent reason to believe something about what persons would or would not do in a range of hypothetical situations. 

But are we in a similar position with respect to subjunctive conditionals that state what some (indefinite) living persons would remember, know, desire, intend, and efficaciously execute if they were to survive death?  Here it would seem that we don’t have access to the right stock of background information against which our conjectures could be empirically tested.  We know a lot about living persons, and we can extrapolate much about what they would probably know, desire, intend, and be able to efficaciously execute in fairly diverse range of hypothetical situations, but this is because we’re assuming that they are living persons in situations that, while hypothetical, are known to bear enough resemblance to actual life situations for us to have the appropriate background knowledge or procedures for empirical testability.

To see the difficulty here with greater clarity, consider our epistemic situation vis-à-vis an exotic hypothesis designed to explain the mysterious disappearance of massive amounts of sugar from a sugar factory in Santa Rosa, Texas.  We could postulate the covert operation of invisible time travelers from earth’s distant future to explain this datum.  Of course, the datum would be unsurprising given this hypothesis only if we embedded it in a certain story supplied by various auxiliary hypotheses: (i) humans have powerful cravings for sugar, (ii) there is an abundance of sugar in the world today, (iii) sugar will become increasingly scarce in our distant evolutionary future, (iv) environmental conditions in our distant evolutionary future will make the mining of natural resources for fructose impractical, and (v) new advancements in technology will make it possible for future humans to travel to earlier time periods in human history when sugar was produced in abundance and transport limited amounts of sugar back to the future. 

The time traveler theory is implausible in part because some of the auxiliary hypotheses are unwarranted and untestable.  One of these concerns the physical (and some would say “logical”) possibility of time travel. More subtly, though, the time traveler theory makes a crucial unstated assumption, namely that the human species will retain its current degree of craving for sugar into our distant evolutionary future.  However, the kinds of desires and intentions humans form in the distant future will be based on their actual needs and interests at that distant stage in their biological evolution. This is neither observable nor subject to extrapolation from anything we presently observe.  Our biological and psychological needs are shaped, in the long term, by many unpredictable environmental and technological changes. This cannot be predicted with any accuracy over millions of years into the future.  Our evolutionary descendants are just as likely to have developed a powerful aversion to sugar, for example, if it leads to health problems that threaten the survival of the species.

The time traveler theory illustrates how difficult it is to know or justifiably believe what human persons would know, desire, intend, or have the capacity to efficaciously execute in highly exotic hypothetical situations.  The reason for this is that we cannot assume that conventional aspects of ordinary life at present would obtain in these exotic situations.  We not only lack the relevant kinds of background knowledge, but testing procedures elude us.  In a similar way, empirical survival arguments require that we adopt assumptions about what living persons would know, desire, intend, and have the capacity to efficaciously execute in a highly exotic hypothetical situation: the persistence of consciousness after the death of the body.  That this consciousness would be personal, retain much of the knowledge, desires, and intentions that characterized its ante-mortem identity and phase of existence, be endowed with extremely potent powers of psychic functioning for efficaciously communicating with the living, and yet also be incredibly inept at either remembering basic facts concerning its ante-mortem existence or communicating such information to living persons—all of these assumptions are little more than untestable conjectures at this stage. 

4.  C.J. Ducasse’s “Plane-Crash Survivor” Argument

Even the better literature on survival has often been blind to the covert dependence on unsupported and untestable auxiliary hypotheses.  And this has given empirical survival arguments a deceptive appearance of cogency.  I’ll illustrate this with one of my favorite philosophical explorations of empirical survival arguments, C.J. Ducasse’s classic work A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death (1961).  

Unlike many other writers on survival, Ducasse was deeply conscious of and gave attention to the evidential criteria at work in assessments of the data allegedly suggestive of survival.  Hence, Ducasse asked, “What would prove, or make positively probable, that survival is a fact?” (1961: 199). Ducasse attempted to answer this question by exploring evidential criteria we would sensibly use to determine that someone had survived a plane crash.

Let us suppose that a friend of ours, John Doe, was a passenger on the transatlantic plane which some months ago the newspapers reported crashed shortly after leaving Shannon without having radioed that it was in trouble.  Since no survivors were reported to have been found, we would naturally assume that John Doe had died with the rest. (1961: 200) 

Ducasse went on to propose three situations in which we would acquire evidence that would convince us that John Doe had survived the crash. 

(1) We encounter a man on the street we recognize as John, he recognizes us, he has John Doe’s voice and mannerisms, and he is conversant about things that John Doe would have known, including information of a highly personal matter familiar to each of us.  

(2) Instead of physically encountering a man on the streets who resembles John Doe, we receive a phone call from a man who sounds like John Doe, and who freely exhibits the kind of first-personal perspective knowledge that would be characteristic of John Doe including private matters familiar to each of us. 

(3) We receive a phone call from someone who informs us that John Doe survived the crash and he wants us to know about his survival, but for some reason John Doe cannot come to the phone.  We’re told that John Doe is in need of money and wants us to deposit money into his bank account.  To acquire assurance that John Doe is indeed alive, we request through the intermediary, information of a sort freely disclosed in scenarios (1) and (2).  The intermediary provides us with the names of John Doe’s friends, various personal matters with which John Doe would be familiar, and we discern in the intermediary’s responses some of the peculiar features of John Doe’s thoughts and phraseology. 

Ducasse argues that in cases (1) and (2), we would take ourselves to have sufficient evidence to believe that John Doe had survived death.  He further argues that in case (3) we would be convinced of John Doe’s survival if we had robust evidence, that is, if we had no conclusive proof that John Doe had not survived death.  What I’m calling “robust evidence” captures Ducasse’s claim that the evidence would need to be abundant, sufficiently detailed, and of diverse kinds.  Ducasse essentially argues that we can imagine cases like (3) arising where we would be confident on the basis of the evidence that John Doe had survived death. 

Ducasse connects the discussion to survival in this manner.  He contends that the evidence for survival from mediumship duplicates the essential features of the evidence we could have that would convince us that John Doe survived the plane crash. 

Ducasse wrote:

This parallelism between the two situations [mediumship and plane-crash scenario (3)] entails that if reason rather than religious or materialistic faith is to decide, then our answer to the question whether the evidence we have does or does not establish survival (or at least a positive probability of it) must, in the manner of survival of death, be based on the very same considerations as in the matter of survival after a plane crash. That is, our answer will have to be based similarly on the quantity of evidence we get over the mediumistic “telephone;” on the quality of that evidence; and on the diversity of kinds of it we get. (1961: 203)

Ducasse goes on to argue that “the balance of the evidence” favors personal survival, and by this he appears to mean favors survival over various competitors (cf. 1961: 199). 

While Ducasse’s analogy is an interesting one, I think it commits a crucial mistake.  It’s true that in case (3) we would depend on the evidential factors Ducasse cites. However, the evidential force of these factors depends on a fourth factor not acknowledged by Ducasse: dependence on independently testable and/or supported auxiliary hypotheses.  And this is where the evidence for survival from mediumship is significantly different than the evidence we might have for a person having survived a plane crash.

If we return to Ducasse’s scenario (3), it must be acknowledged that we would evaluate the ostensible evidence in the light of various additional but independently plausible assumptions.  The list of specific assumptions would vary depending on various details of the scenario, but here are some illustrations of the kinds of assumptions that would plausibly be operative. 

a.  If a person survives a plane crash, we are positing the survival of their body.  Given that bodies have spatial location, the hypothesis that John Doe survived the plane crash yields the prediction that John Doe is located somewhere on earth.  Hence, we would be justified in supposing that if John Doe survived the plane crash, then his body would be spatially located somewhere on earth.

b. If we receive a phone call from an intermediary originating from Windsor, Connecticut, and the intermediary is allegedly relaying information to us from John who is present, it follows that John Doe is in Windsor, Connecticut.  This is an auxiliary hypothesis that can be independently tested.  Hence, we would be justified in supposing that if John Doe survived the plane crash and the intermediary is telling us the truth, then a physical body of a particular sort (matching the description of Joe Doe’s body, though perhaps missing a limb or two) would be presently located in Windsor, Connecticut.  This can be independently tested.  If John is there, others can in principle observe a body matching his there, etc.

c.  Based on our background knowledge, we already know that some people survive plane crashes, and we also know that the majority of plane-crash survivors have contacted, directly or indirectly, family members or friends, to let them know they are alive. Hence, this background knowledge provides an empirical basis for supposing that if John Doe survived the plane cash, then he would probably seek to communicate this information to family and friends.

d. Depending on the location and specifics of the crash, as well as background knowledge about other plane-crash survivors, we could be justified in supposing that if John Doe survived the plane crash, then we would probably receive communications from him during a relatively specific period of time.

e.  Regarding the communications, we assume a limited and very specific range of media through which John Doe would initiate communication with family or friends: phone, email, letters, or another human person as a messenger.   Hence, we antecedently know that if John Doe survived the plane crash and had the intention and power to communicate his survival to family and friends, then he would do so by means of specified media that fall within very narrow parameters.

f.  We assume that plane crashes are likely to produce varying degrees of trauma in survivors that affect memory and character, so we would expect communications to exhibit varying degrees of inconsistency and incoherence.  If John Doe survived the plane crash and successfully communicated with friends or family, then the content of the communications would be a mixture of detailed accuracy and significant inaccuracy.

Our assessment of the evidence for John Doe’s survival depends on the kinds of auxiliary hypotheses contained in (a) through (f).  These assumptions, though, are empirically testable, and indeed many of them are already independently supported by our background empirical knowledge.  If the auxiliary hypotheses lacked this quality, we could not sensibly take the evidence Ducasse cites as evidence for John Doe’s survival.  It’s only because we have warrant for the relevant auxiliary hypotheses that we can say what kinds of evidence we would expect to find if John Doe survived the plane crash.  Independent of the details of John Doe’s plane crash and the supposition of his survival, we have good reasons to suppose that there are plane-crash survivors, the majority of them have an interest to communicate, many will have the ability to do so, and we can say in advance the kinds of media they would use, etc.

Now when it comes to the hypothesis of postmortem survival, we’re simply not in a sufficiently similar epistemic situation.  That we can have evidence that someone has survived a plane crash depends crucially on what we already know, not just the quality and quantity of information deriving from the plane crash scenario.  We know about plane-crash survivors.  We can formulate predictions here because we have a stock of independently testable assumptions that tell us what we should expect to find in the way of evidence if our hypothesis is true.  None of this obtains in the case of possible postmortem survivors.  So the cogency of Ducasse’s case for postmortem survival from mediumship depends crucially on our ignoring a highly salient difference between plane-crash survivors and postmortem survivors. 

5.  Gertrude Schmeidler’s “Testable” Survival Hypothesis

Interestingly enough, the covert dependence of survival arguments on untestable auxiliary hypotheses is found even in literature that is conscious of the need to develop a survival hypothesis with testable predictions.  In the 1970s, parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler emphasized prediction as a crucial aspect of future survival research, and she also proposed a way of formulating a survival hypothesis open to such testability (Schmeilder 1977).  Other parapsychologist such as Bill Roll subsequently appropriated several of Schmeidler’s insights to further develop an allegedly “testable” survival hypothesis.

       Schmeidler wrote:

Suppose we try to test a hypothesis that makes three assumptions: (1) that there is survival of consciousness after bodily death; (2) that there is some continuity of personality, so that soon after death a surviving entity is recognizably similar to what the living person had been; and (3) that communication from the surviving entity is possible through a medium and in other ways. (1977: 5)

Schmeidler thought that we could rely on information collected from persons in their ante-mortem state as a basis for formulating predictions regarding which living persons should be expected to communicate (and which not) in their postmortem state, as well as the conditions under which postmortem communications from such people should be expected (and when not).

First, if prior to death person A has said that he has no intention under any circumstance to communicate with those still living after his death, then this provides the basis for a testable hypothesis: we should not expect any communications from A under any circumstances.  She adds a second point: “This immediately leads to a specific, testable subhypothesis. If mediums attempt to establish communication with the dead, evidence for such communications will be stronger for those who said while alive that they would want to communicate than for those who had said they would not” (1977: 5).  Finally, if prior to death another person B has said that he has an intention to communicate with those still living only under particular conditions, then this leads to another prediction: if person B survives death, then we should expect ostensible communications from B under the specific circumstances and not others.  As Schmeilder says: “The specific prediction would be that attempts to make contact with such persons after their death would shift between success and failure according to whether or not the conditions which had been stated were present” (1977: 5).

Schmeilder’s suggestion is interesting but nonetheless problematic.  One rather clear problem is that Schmeidler’s suggestion conceals rather than subjects to scrutiny highly questionable assumptions on which the efficacy of the suggested testing procedure depends.  Schmeidler’s project can’t get off the ground unless we make some crucial assumptions about what consciousness would be like if it were to survive death.

If person A informs us that he has no intention to communicate with the living under any circumstances after his death, predicting that we should not find communications ostensibly originating from this person depends on a strong assumption of continuity of conscious attitudes after death.   But there’s no reason to suppose this, at least not independent of the cases allegedly suggestive of personal survival.   Why not assume that the majority of survivors, having survived death, would be profoundly affected by their death and therefore differently motivated in their postmortem existence? Perhaps ante-mortem attitudes about what I would do if I survived death are very different than the purposes I would actually have if I did survive death.  After all, people change their purposes after relatively less extreme experiences in the course of their ante-mortem existence, sometimes over the course of a week.  Of course, the point here is not that we have good reason to suppose that any survivor would change his or her purposes concerning communicating with the living, only that we simply don’t know what would be the case with survivors.

The same holds with respect to Schmeidler’s claim that we should find more communications ostensibly originating from persons who expressed this interest while alive.  Again, why is this?  The operative assumption of substantial continuity of purposes and interests is highly questionable. It requires independent support.  The interest I express about communicating with the living after my death is an interest I now express as a person situated in a mundane though perhaps very exciting earthly existence.  This feature of my present psychology, contextualized as it is, may or may not persist if I survive death.  I don’t know, nor does anyone else.  It’s only by a subtle projection of our current psychology into the afterlife that we suppose we can know now what it will be like for us then.  But what is the empirical basis for this?

Carefully exploring Schmeilder’s proposal, then, at best forces the problem of auxiliary hypotheses to the surface.  It does not resolve the problem for the empirical survivalist.

6.  Concluding Remarks 

I have devoted three blogs now to discussing the role and implications of auxiliary hypotheses.  Let me briefly retrace the path.

In “Getting Sober about Survival I,” I outlined one of Elliott Sober’s interesting criticisms of empirical arguments for the existence of an intelligent designer based on features of organisms allegedly indicative of intelligent design.  His criticism focused on the untestable nature of necessary auxiliary hypotheses concerning the abilities and purposes of the postulated designer.  I began here since Sober’s criticism of intelligent design arguments seem particularly applicable to empirical arguments for postmortem survival.  They too depend on untestable auxiliary hypotheses, and this has important consequences for the assessment of the force of empirical data allegedly suggestive of survival. 

In “Getting Sober about Survival II,” I argued that empirical arguments for postmortem survival depend on various auxiliary hypotheses, in the absence of which the hypothesis of survival would have no empirical consequences.  The hypothesis of personal survival of death, like the hypothesis of an intelligent designer, is subject to an auxiliary hypothesis requirement.  I illustrated the point specifically in connection with survival arguments from the data of mediumship.  I sketched eight required auxiliary hypotheses concerning the purposes, powers, and knowledge of postmortem survivors, as well as assumptions concerning the nature of the process of ostensible communications from the deceased.

In the present blog—“Getting Sober about Survival III”—I have argued that, unlike paradigmatic empirical hypotheses, the auxiliary hypotheses involved in survival arguments are not at present independently testable, much less actually supported by our stock of empirical knowledge.  This generates what I’ve called the problem of auxiliary hypotheses.  This is a problem for empirical arguments in favor of the survival hypothesis, for in the absence of independently testable auxiliary hypotheses, we do not know what the hypothesis of survival should lead us to expect with respect to features of the empirical world.  There are, as I argued in the second blog of the present series, lots of different survival scenarios. Most of these scenarios, if true, would not lead us to expect any empirical evidence for survival, much less the data from mediumship and other ostensibly paranormal phenomena.  Only auxiliary hypotheses can produce a survival hypothesis that discriminates between survival scenarios with predictive consequences and those with none, and only a considerably robust version of such a hypothesis could possibly lead us to expect the actual data.  However, only independently testable auxiliary hypotheses can reasonably ground the desired assurance that our theory is a genuinely empirical one, rather than an attempt to accommodate or retrofit the data to our preferred metaphysical theories.

Where does this leave the empirical survivalist?

I’ve noted several times now that survival literature is plagued by what Sober called “lazy testing.”  Here one attempts to support one’s preferred hypothesis simply by showing that explanatory competitors fail.  That empirical survivalists are driven to this tactic is no coincidence.  It’s the strategic corollary of not being able to show the predictive consequences of one’s own theory.  So empirical survivalists routinely reinvent the wheel of misplaced criticisms of proposed non-survival explanations of the relevant data.  For example, some of the data of mediumship are allegedly surprising or improbable given living-agent psychic functioning, unless of course that hypothesis is stretched into a “super-psi” hypothesis for which there is no independent support.  But, of course, however low the probability of the data given some competing non-survival hypothesis, this does not suffice to show that the data are more probable given survival.  And as I’ve noted repeatedly, if empirical survivalists are epistemically entitled to adopt fantastic and far-reaching conjectures to account for the data, non-survivalists are permitted to do the same.  So-called “super-psi” hypotheses only appear incredible to empirical survivalists who remain unconscious about just how “super” their own survival hypothesis is.

My central claim—the probability of the relevant data (allegedly suggestive of survival) is actually inscrutable given the survival hypothesis, unless the survival hypothesis is stretched into a robust survival hypothesis.  However, since there is no independent support (or testability) for the auxiliary hypotheses that constitute a robust survival hypothesis, the probability of the data given survival remains inscrutable.  The alleged improbability of the data given competing hypotheses is a red herring that distracts from the core issue in the empirical survival debate: we do not know what the evidence for survival should look like, or whether there would be any evidence for survival, even if the survival hypothesis were true.

As explained in “Getting Sober about Survival I,” Likelihoodism is an approach to evidence assessment according to which evidence E favors or supports hypothesis H1 over H2 just if Pr(E / H1) > Pr(E / H2).  It’s not necessary that H1 confer a high probability on the evidence, only that the evidence is more probable (or less surprising) given H1 than H2.  In that case, though, if we don’t know what a hypothesis would lead us to expect in relation to evidence, we certainly won’t know whether the evidence is more probable given one hypothesis than another.  It follows, given Likelihoodism, that we won’t know whether the evidence actually favors the one hypothesis over its competitor. 

Applying this to the survival hypothesis, where S = the survival hypothesis, ψ = the hypothesis of living-agent psychic functioning, and D_M = the data from mediumship, my contention is that we don’t know whether

Pr(D_M / S) > Pr(D_M / ψ) 

More generally, where C = any nearby competing non-survival hypothesis, we don’t know whether

Pr(D_M / S ) > Pr (D_M / C) 

It may appear that the situation changes once we add survivalist auxiliary hypotheses.  Where S_R = a simple survival hypothesis amplified or augmented by the kinds of assumptions outlined above and discussed in the prior blog, we might suppose that there is at least justification for supposing that:

Pr(D_M / S_R ) > Pr (D_M / C) 

Perhaps so, but until the problem of auxiliary hypotheses is addressed, the natural and plausible skeptical rejoinder is that:

Pr(D_M / S_R ) = Pr(D_M / C_R), where C_R = the nearest competing hypothesis amplified or augmented with its own range of auxiliary hypotheses.   

If empirical survivalists wish to show that the evidence favors survival, they must adopt a robust survival hypothesis and compare it to a robust competitor.  Doing so, of course, only highlights the point that the resultant comparative Likelihoods, to the extent that they can be determined at all, float on an unstable ocean of conflicting conjectures.

Empirical survivalists have largely ignored rather than squarely faced the pivot of their whole project:  what changes, if any, are likely to happen to consciousness if it should survive death?  The inability to locate an empirically grounded answer to this question, for a single person or an indefinite number of them, floats on a larger sea of ignorance—our ignorance about the nature of consciousness itself.  The real question here is not whether we will survive death, but “what is the nature of consciousness itself?”  When the latter question has been answered, the question concerning postmortem survival will probably no longer be asked.

Michael Sudduth

REFERENCES

Ducasse, Curt J. 1961. A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Schmeidler, Gertrude. 1977. “Looking Ahead:  A Method for Research on Survival.”  Theta 5: 2–6.

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In my prior blog (1/28/14), I surveyed one of Elliott Sober’s objections to organismic design arguments—arguments that purport to show that physical features of organisms, features like complex adaptation, provide evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer.  Sober argues that the hypothesis of intelligent design is an untestable hypothesis because it depends on untestable auxiliary hypotheses, that is, assumptions in addition to the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.  Without these additional hypotheses the hypothesis of intelligent design would make no actual predictions. Sober contends that this prevents us from justifiably believing the comparative likelihood claim: 

Pr(Observational evidence / Intelligent design ) > Pr(Observational evidence / Darwinian evolution),

that is, the probability of the relevant observational evidence given intelligent design is greater than the probability the same evidence given Darwinian evolution.

The range of possible auxiliary hypotheses that bear on the likelihood expressed on the left side of “>” produce varying results, from unity to zero.  If we can’t independently test the auxiliary hypotheses, then we’re pretty much in the dark about what the likelihood of the design hypothesis is in relation to any competitor, including Darwinian evolution.  According to a Likelihoodist account of the evidential favoring relation, evidence e favors hypothesis h1 over h2 just if Pr(e / h1) > Pr(e / h2).  Hence, it follows from Sober’s analysis that we’re not justified in believing that the relevant evidence favors intelligent design over Darwinian evolution.

From Sober to Survival

My interest in Sober’s critique is its implications for assessing empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research, for example, data drawn from the phenomenon of near-death experiences, living persons (mediums) who claim to receive and convey communications from the dead, and living persons who claim to remember past lives.  During the past two years, I’ve drawn attention to how traditional empirical arguments for survival from such phenomena depend on various auxiliary hypotheses, for in the absence of such assumptions the survival hypothesis has no explanatory power. While empirical survivalists begrudgingly acknowledge their dependence on auxiliary hypotheses, at least if pressed on the point, the implications of this for the critical assessment of the empirical survival arguments has been ignored and therefore unexplored.  On my view, satisfying the auxiliary hypothesis requirement generates various problems for empirical arguments for survival—what I’m designating “the problem of auxiliary hypotheses” (hereafter, PAH).  In fact, I think PAH generates the most formidable challenge to empirical arguments for personal survival.

Succinctly stated, my view is that the survival hypothesis makes no significant predictions unless it’s supplemented with various auxiliary hypotheses, including a range of statements about what consciousness would be like if persons should survive death.   This is problematic because most, if not all, of the required assumptions are not independently testable.  More broadly speaking, they don’t carry the appropriate kind of “epistemic credentials,” especially if survival is supposed to be a scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis. As Sober argued with reference to the intelligent design argument, I argue with reference to empirical arguments for survival:  we’re actually not in a position to assess whether the survival hypothesis has a higher likelihood than rival hypotheses vis-à-vis the body of relevant data.  This in turn undercuts the modest claim that the evidence favors the survival hypothesis over the competitors. 

In the present blog I’m going to sketch the first phase of this argument, which involves showing that empirical arguments for survival depend on a range of auxiliary hypotheses. E.R. Dodds drew attention to this import fact in his 1934 article “Why I Do Not Believe in Survival.”  As Dodds said, “the spiritualist [i.e., survival] hypothesis is hydraheaded. It is in fact not one hypothesis at all, but a series of hypotheses” (Dodds 1934: 170). Unfortunately, most of the survival literature since Dodds’s time has systematically suppressed this fact, together with its significant implications for the assessment of the empirical case for survival.  Although I’m going to look specifically at survival arguments from the data of mediumship, my main argument can easily be extended to empirical arguments for survival from other kinds of ostensibly paranormal phenomena. In the next installment in the series, I’ll show how this dependence creates significant problems for empirical arguments for survival.

1.  Why Likelihoods Matter

Sober’s critique of design arguments construes such arguments as Likelihood arguments.  I suspect some empirical survivalists will question whether this is the optimal framework in which to formulate the empirical case for survival.  So let me explain why likelihoods are essential to empirical arguments for survival.

First, as explained in my prior blog, “likelihoods” or the “likelihood of a hypothesis” refers to the probability the hypothesis, h, confers on observational evidence e, or the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, formally represented as Pr(e / h).  This is not the same as the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence (and background knowledge), formally represented as Pr(h / e & k).  The former concerns how probable the hypothesis makes the evidence; the latter concerns how probable the evidence (together with background knowledge) makes the hypothesis.  These probabilities may vary considerably.

So why should an empirical survivalist be concerned with the likelihood of the survival hypothesis?

First, the most common form of the empirical argument for survival depends on likelihoods.  The argument is usually stated as a basic inference to best explanation.  The central claim of such arguments is the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of some relevant range of data, where the data are drawn from phenomena such as near-death experiences, alleged past life memories and other features suggestive of reincarnation, and mediumistic communications.  Why is the survival hypothesis the best explanation of the data collected from these phenomena? The reason is that it fits with or accounts for the data in a way superior to various competing hypotheses.  However, upon examination these kinds of claims ultimately concern how well the survival hypothesis leads us to expect the relevant data.  Otherwise stated, the survival hypothesis has predictive power.  The data are supposed to be what we would expect if survival were true, and less so, perhaps considerably, given competing hypotheses. Some authors make it clear that the predictive power of the survival hypothesis is essential to its “testability.”  (See Almeder 1996a, 1996b: 532–533; Becker 1993: 33; Berger 1987: 203; Gauld 1983: 73–75, 77 110; Hyslop 1919: 51, 330; Roll 2006: 167–170; Schmeidler 1977.)

Embedded in the basic explanatory survival argument, then, is a “likelihood” claim: the probability of the relevant data (D) is greater, perhaps much greater, given the survival hypothesis (S) than given the nearest competing hypothesis (C).  More precisely, the arguments are concerned with the comparative likelihood of the survival hypothesis and its competitors.  Formally stated:  Pr(D / S) > Pr(D / C), or—more strongly—Pr(D / S) >> Pr(D / C).  This also shows us that the basic explanatory argument can be restated without using the language of “explanation,” “explanatory power,” “explanatory virtue,” and so forth.  The basic explanatory argument can simply be stated as a Likelihood argument. While this would not be sufficient to show that the evidence is strong enough to warrant rational acceptance of the survival hypothesis, it at least allows the survivalist to make the more modest claim that the relevant data evidentially favor or support the survival hypothesis over the nearest competitor(s).

Now there’s a strengthened form of the basic explanatory argument, favored by several philosophers, that adds considerations of prior probability to the inference to survival, largely because they aim for a verdict about the net plausibility of the survival hypothesis. In my recent interview with Jime Sayaka I discussed this Bayesian-style argument.  It’s worth noting that likelihoods would still be important here because on the Bayesian view the posterior probability of a hypothesis depends in part on values assigned to likelihoods.  However, in what follows I intend to focus only on a Likelihood version of the empirical argument for survival.  One of the advantages of doing so is that we can bypass the thorny problem of prior probabilities so frequently introduced to defeat survival arguments.  I’ll take up the implications of my argument for Bayesian-style survival arguments in the next blog.

So there’s considerable precedent for seeing likelihoods as essential features of evidence assessment in traditional empirical arguments for survival.  This is not to say that empirical survivalists can’t propose new rules of evidence assessment.  If they wish to propose criteria of evidence assessment that exclude likelihoods, they should do so.  For the moment, though, I’m content to consider the implications of arguments that have actually been proposed. 

Now likelihoods link a hypothesis to observational evidence by way of expressing the latter as predictive consequences of the former.  It should be clear here that by “predictive power” I mean only the modest claim that a hypothesis leads us to expect the relevant data.  The data need not be novel, nor need the data be logically entailed by the hypothesis.  Moreover, it’s not essential to the argument about to unfold that the survival hypothesis has great predictive power.  The focus is the more modest Likelihood claim that Pr(D / S) > Pr(D / C), or—more strongly—Pr(D / S) >> Pr(D / C).  My question is not whether this is true.  My interest is in exploring the logical and epistemic requirements for showing that it’s true.  Are we adequately situated to reach a verdict here?

In the light of the discussion from the final section of my previous blog, it should be clear that to support the claim that Pr(D / S) > Pr(D / C) it will not do to argue that the likelihood on the right side is very low.  If a five-year old boy suddenly exhibits remarkable talent as a percussionist, begins speaking with a British accent (though he was born in Memphis), expresses a desire for drinking large amounts of Jack Daniel’s, provides detailed information about the personal life of John Bonham (the drummer of the classic rock band Led Zeppelin), and claims to remember being John Bonham, this certainly seems very surprising given the hypothesis of living-agent psi.  However, this fact does not establish that Pr(D / S) > Pr(D / C).  The survival literature is replete with what Sober has aptly called “lazy testing”:  declare one’s preferred hypothesis the winner by simply refuting competitors. What this “beat down” tactic does is merely evade the burden shared by the survivalist to show that the probability of the data is greater given the survival hypothesis than the competitor.  What the survivalist needs to do is justify the likelihood claim by showing that the survival hypothesis would lead us to expect the data and would do so in a way superior to the competitor(s). 

2.  The Data of Mediumship as Evidence for Survival

Once we attempt to show that the survival hypothesis leads us to expect the data, it doesn’t take much reflection to see that the survival hypothesis leads us to expect absolutely nothing, unless it’s supplemented with various auxiliary hypotheses.  To develop this in a way that’s as concrete as possible, let’s focus on some crucial kinds of data drawn from the phenomena of mental and trance mediumship, where deceased persons appear to communicate through living persons.

(m1)  Some living person exhibits robust knowledge of facts concerning the public and private ante-mortem life of some particular and identifiable deceased person, where “robust knowledge” = knowledge that is specific in nature and ranges over many different facts about the ante-mortem life of the deceased.

This datum-type captures an essential feature of the data collected from the better cases of mediumship.  The data from mediumship is prima facie suggestive of survival because the medium’s knowledge of the deceased is the sort of knowledge that the deceased would be in a privileged position to have. It must therefore consist of more than very general facts about the deceased, isolated and random bits of information, or information that is publicly accessible.  It should be qualitatively strong by being as specific as possible and ranging over both the private and public life of the deceased.  It should also be quantitatively strong by consisting of as much information as possible.

(m2) Multiple living persons independently exhibit knowledge of facts concerning the public and private life of some particular and identifiable deceased person, where the information from one source corroborates the information from another source, and the information collectively considered is robust and/or exhibits various structural coherence relations.

There are also cases in which no single medium exhibits robust knowledge of the deceased, but the information provided by multiple mediums is robust when collectively considered.  There might be various points of corroboration between independent sources, and the body of information collectively considered may exhibit various kinds of coherence relations, e.g., by different strands of information being connected by inferential or explanatory relations.

(m3) Some living person exhibits knowledge of events or facts related to the private life of friends or family members of some particular and identifiable deceased person, where the events took place or facts obtained after the death of the deceased.

Ostensible “communicators” often provide information about the present goings on in the lives of family members and friends.  This datum-type suggests, under a survival interpretation, the ongoing presence and involvement of the deceased in the lives of loved ones.  This was a prominent feature in the mediumship of Mrs. Warren Elliott.

(m4) Some living person exhibits behavior, skills, or personality features similar or identical to those exhibited by some particular and identifiable deceased person during their ante-mortem life.

Trance mediumship is often regarded as impressive, not merely because of the accurate information conveyed by the medium, but also by the manner in which the information is conveyed, through convincing personations of the deceased.  The medium employs mannerisms and turns of speech characteristic of the deceased, exhibits personality traits of the deceased, and various cognitive and linguistic skills, including the skill of identifying “by name” family or friends of the deceased who are present at a sitting, where these were characteristic of the deceased.

For ease of expression, I’ll use D_M for the conjunction of m1, m2, m3, and m4.  In accordance with Likelihoodism, we’re interested in comparative likelihoods, so we’re interested in the claim that Pr(D_M / S) > Pr(D_M / C), where C = some competing hypothesis.  It won’t ultimately matter for the kind of criticism I’m going to make, but let’s just assume for the purposes of discussion and in the interest of concreteness that the competing hypothesis is the widely discussed appeal to psychic functioning (extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis) in living-persons, which I’ll appropriately designate ψ.  Empirical arguments for survival will then be construed to make the modest claim that the evidence favors the survival hypothesis over the living-agent psi hypothesis.  So from a Likelihoodist perspective, these arguments are committed to the claim that Pr(D_M / S) > Pr(D_M / ψ).

Now the standard survivalist argument in favor of this favorable likelihood goes roughly like this.  If persons survive death, then D_M isn’t all that surprising, but given ψ it is, for even if ψ should lead us to expect that living persons would possess some knowledge about the private and public life of deceased persons, say by telepathically mining this information from living friends and family members, ψ would not lead us to expect robust knowledge of the lives deceased persons.  ψ might also lead us to expect that a medium might have knowledge about events taking place in the lives of friends and family of the deceased, but the joint occurrence of m1 and m3 seems very surprising given ψ.  The ψ hypothesis would also leave unified streams of data from separate mediums very surprising.  What we know about ψ doesn’t really lead us to expect this.  And finally, while ψ may account for living persons knowing things about other people in non-conventional ways, ψ would not lead us to expect the personation data found in the better cases of mediumship. So, at the very least, S renders D_M considerably less surprising than does ψ.  So D_M favors S over ψ. 

While survivalists usually support the favorable likelihood by arguing how improbable D_M is given ψ, I want to explore the assertion (rarely supported with argument) that the survival hypothesis would lead us to expect D_M.  It may seen intuitively obvious to many that this is so, but upon careful reflection this intuitive obviousness rests on the implicit acceptance of various assumptions beyond the simple idea of individual consciousness surviving death.

3.  A Simple Survival Hypothesis has No Predictive Consequences

What kinds of considerations are needed to determine whether or not Pr(D_M / S) > Pr(D_M / ψ)?  As already noted, not simply adducing reasons for supposing that Pr(D_M / ψ) is low.  We need reasons for supposing that, whatever the approximate value assigned to Pr(D_M / ψ), the value assigned to Pr(D_M / S) is greater.  In other words, we need reasons for supposing that D_M is more to be expected (less surprising) given S than given ψ.  But in that case S must lead us to expect D_M.  Does it?  This is going to depend on the content of S.

On the whole, I don’t find Antony Flew’s criticisms of empirical survival arguments all that compelling, or even interesting, but he was surely correct on this observation. 

. . .until the concept “spirit” is made a great deal more specific than it is at present, the spirit account cannot serve as a scientific hypothesis. To use it as such we should have to be able to deduce from it definite and testable consequences. We should need to say that, if it were correct, such and such tests would yield such and such results. We cannot, because with spirits anything goes; nothing is definitely predictable. Or, to put it less misleadingly, the concept of spirit is hopelessly indeterminate. (Flew 1953/1973: 126)

Flew’s point would apply equally to alternative versions of the survival hypothesis that replace “spirit” with “a personal stream of consciousness with its memories of past earthly life” (Hyslop 1919: 53), “the continuation of conscious life” (Ducasse 1961: 11), or the postmortem persistence of a “non-physical subject of conscious states” (Lund 2009: 62, 83).  A simple survival hypothesis—which posits the postmortem persistence of the self, the soul, the person, or even one’s individual consciousness—does not lead us to expect D_M. 

The point can be easily demonstrated.  A priori there are various possible “survival scenarios,” each logically consistent with the simple supposition of survival as illustrated above.  Here are five such possible scenarios.

S₁: Some persons survive death (as discarnate souls), but in the absence of a functioning brain they do not exhibit any mental states or exert causal influence on our world. 

S₂: Some persons survive death as conscious beings, but have minimal memorial or character continuity with their ante-mortem existence.

S₃: Some persons survive death as conscious beings, desire and intend to communicate, but they lack the ability to communicate.

S₄: Some persons survive death as conscious beings, possess the ability to communicate, but they lack the desire and/or intention to communicate.

S₅: Some persons survive death as conscious beings, but they lack the ability, desire, and intention to communicate.

In each of these survival scenarios, only some persons are postulated to survive death.  Naturally, there are variations on these scenarios in which (a) everyone survives death and (b) S₁ through S₅ are scenarios indexed to different individual survivors so that there would be a distribution of varying powers, desires, intentions, degrees of knowledge and memory, etc. over the range of various survivors.  Perhaps one person’s survival scenario is S₂, and another person’s survival scenario is S₄.  There are also many possible survival scenarios that can be constructed from the above five, for example by conjoining S₂ and S₃ or S₂ and S_4, but there’s no need to explore these possibilities to appreciate the central point here.  The above scenarios are unfavorable to likelihoods for the survival hypothesis, for though they are compatible with the simple survival hypothesis, they deflate the likelihood of the survival hypothesis.  If we accept any of these five survival scenarios, the data are not what we would expect.  In fact, on some scenarios, the likelihood of the survival hypothesis would be zero; for example, if survivors did not have the ability to communicate with the living, the probability of D_M would be zero.  If we assumed S₂, then the probability of m1 or m2 would be zero (or close to zero) because we wouldn’t expect deceased persons to communicate robust knowledge of their lives if they don’t actually retain such knowledge in the afterlife.

To illustrate further, it’s not difficult to construct alternative hypotheses with higher likelihoods than any of the above survival hypotheses.  Consider the following alternative hypothesis:

(DH) There is some demonic entity, with significant power and detailed knowledge of the lives of formerly living persons, and who wishes to masquerade as deceased persons for the purpose of engaging in deception. 

Survivalists are likely to jeer at (DH), though Evangelical Christians find it perfectly sensible.  In both cases, prior probabilities are influencing judgments.  But we’re not interested in prior probabilities, only likelihoods.  And it’s quite evident that the probability of D_M is considerably greater given (DH) than given any of the survival hypotheses above.  The same conclusion follows if the competitor is the living-agent psi hypothesis (ψ).  Perhaps Pr(D_M / ψ) is not very high, but it’s not plausible to suppose that Pr(D_M / S₂) > Pr(D_M / ψ), and so forth.  This is also consistent with the prior probability of the ψ hypothesis being very low.  The point is that the likelihood of ψ is not lower than the likelihood of the survival hypothesis, if the latter is understood in any of the five ways above.

The problem here can be simply stated:  a simple survival hypothesis does not discriminate between survival scenarios that would lead us to expect the data and those that don’t, or more radically that confer a probability of zero on the data.  There simply are no predictive consequences for a survival hypothesis that might fall into the logical space of any of the scenarios above.  Merely postulating “survival of the self” or “survival of consciousness” just doesn’t tell us enough.

4. Minimally Required Auxiliary Hypotheses

The survival hypotheses sketched above confer low or zero probabilities on the data because they are more robust than the simple supposition of survival.  This is crucial.  Recall that in connection with his critique of design arguments Sober noted the Duhem-Quine thesis that single hypotheses rarely have (deductive or probabilistic) predictive consequences, unless auxiliary statements are introduced.  Hence, we can only test hypotheses (against their predictive consequences) by embedding them in sets of statements that jointly have predictive consequences.  Hence, predictive derivations depend on incorporating auxiliary hypotheses.  The five survival scenarios above incorporate auxiliary hypotheses that result in predictive consequences that do not fit the actual data.  But herein we find the recipe for the survivalist who wishes to argue that the survival hypothesis has predictive consequences that fit the data.  He needs a robust survival hypothesis with favorable as opposed to unfavorable predictive consequences. 

Given the observations in the prior section above, a robust survival hypothesis with favorable predictive consequences must minimally discriminate between survival scenarios that lead us to expect the data and those that do not.  This implies that a robust survival hypothesis with favorable predictive consequences vis-à-vis D_M must be incompatible with the survival scenarios above.  This can provide a starting point for exploring just what an empirical survivalist must assume for the survival hypothesis to lead us to expect the data.  With respect to the data of mediumship sketched above, the assumptions are as follows.

[A1] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would be consciousness in a discarnate state, where “discarnate state” refers to a state of existence without a physical body. 

[A2] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would retain many of the detailed and highly specific memories of their ante-mortem existence.

[A3] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would possess knowledge of events taking place in our world after their death or the states of mind of living persons. 

[A4] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would possess the desire and intention to communicate with the living.

[A5] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would possess the ability to communicate with the living. 

[A1] affirms that some survivors would be conscious in the absence of a physical body, thereby ruling out survival scenario S₁ above.  The next two assumptions concern what consciousness would be like for at least some deceased persons.  [A2] concerns the degree of self-knowledge the deceased would have, thereby ruling out survival scenario S₂.  [A3] concerns survivors having persisting, though perhaps intermittent, knowledge of states of affair in the world of living persons, thereby ruling out survival scenario S₃, inasmuch as the ability to communicate depends on survivors knowing what is happening in the world of the subjects with whom they communicate.  Just as [A1] is not entailed by positing surviving persons or selves, neither [A2] nor [A3] is entailed by positing the persistence of consciousness in a discarnate state.  These are independent conditions.  Furthermore, [A4] tells us what some deceased persons would want to do, and [A5] tells us that they would be able to efficaciously bring about their purposes.  [A4] rules out survival scenario S₄, and [A5] rules out survival scenario S₃.  [A4] and [A5] jointly rule out survival scenario S₅. 

[A1]–[A5] are auxiliary hypotheses that rule out survival scenarios that prevent a favorable likelihood for the survival hypothesis, and they lead us to expect that there should be evidence of postmortem communications with content suggestive of the identity of the communicator.  So these are minimally necessary. 

5.  Additional Auxiliary Hypotheses

However, further assumptions are plausibly required.  For example, philosophers and parapsychologists have generally acknowledged that, inasmuch as survivors are discarnate persons, a survivor’s epistemic access to the world would need to be a potent form of extra-sensory perception (e.g., telepathy, clairvoyance) and a survivor’s causal influence over the world would need to be a potent form of psychokinesis.  Since discarnate persons are ex hypothesi without physical bodies, their modes of knowing and causal interaction would have to be direct or wholly unmediated by a body or cognitive system associated with a body.  So for any discarnate survivor [A3] and [A5] will logically entail a more specific assumption about the cognitive and causal powers of the deceased, namely

[A6] There are some living persons P such that, if P were to survive death, P would exhibit efficacious psychic functioning in the form of extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. 

But further assumptions are needed. (m4) refers to those strands of data from some instances of trance mediumship in which “communicators” (via a medium) exhibit behavior, personality traits, or skills characteristic of the deceased.  For example, the medium might speak with a particular tone, accent, use particular words or phrases, or physical gestures, where these were characteristic of the deceased.  The medium might even speak with words or phrases in a language foreign to the medium but native to the deceased.   Communicators also are able not only to provide the names of family and friends but are able to pick them out from among sitters.  This implies not merely knowledge that people are present at the sitting (acquired through telepathy or clairvoyance), but arguably the skill of identifying persons present “by name” as former family members and friends.

[A7]  There are some living persons P* (where P* is a subset of P) such that, if P* were to survive death, P* would retain some of their significant general and particular skills and personality features. 

I regard survivors in [A7] as a subset of the larger group of communicating survivors because if the data of mediumship extends to non-trance mental mediumship, the data might not include indications that the communicator is continuous with his ante-mortem life in the manner specified in [A7]. 

But there’s more to consider here. As Hornell Hart explained in his classic Enigma of Survival (1959), when we explore the wider context in which strands of data such as (m1) and (m2) are embedded, we find that there are relevant data of a different sort.  For example: 

(m5) In “trance mediumship” communicators are often unable to provide basic information about their lives requested by sitters, or give inconsistent and incorrect information about their own lives, or they are otherwise mistaken about matters we would expect them to know (at least given A2 or A3).

(m6) Ostensible “communicators” in trance mediumship often lack various cognitive, linguistic, and other skills that characterized the formerly living person they claim to be.

The total evidence requirement for inductive reasoning implies that we must include all relevant evidence, and so data captured by (m5) and (m6) must be included within the total evidence set.  The problem should be apparent.  While [A2] leads us to expect postmortem communications to exhibit the kind of knowledge we would use to identify persons in our present experience, (m5) tell us not to expect a consistent display of such knowledge.  So some further assumption are needed to bring the survival hypothesis into an optimal fit with the total relevant evidence.  

Survivalists have proposed a few different hypotheses at this juncture.  Drayton Thomas said that the locus of the problem was in the communicator who, during communication with living persons, experiences diminished causal power and a temporary weakening of cognition, including memory (Hart 1959: 87-88, 106; cf. Braude 2003: 66). 

C₁: There are some living persons P such that if P were to survive death and communicate with the living at postmortem time t1 . . . tn, P’s cognitive and causal powers would become attenuated during t1 . . . tn.

Alternatively, we might suppose that the locus of the problem is not in the communicator but in the medium (Braude 2003: 54-55, 66-67).  In mental mediumship we might suppose that information originating from the deceased has been filtered, interpreted, or otherwise altered by the medium’s own mind by the time it teaches her consciousness, especially if the information passes through or is influenced by medium’s unconscious mind.  In trance mediumship, the communicators may be “virtual survivors,” a joint product of the medium’s own unconscious construction with information originating from the actual deceased person. 

C₂: There are some living persons M such that if M were to receive information from some discarnate person P_i at time t₁ . . . t_n, the information would be subject to a cognitive process in which filtering and interpretation by the medium’s own mind lowers the accuracy and reliability of the content of the communications.

A third possibility concerns the method of communication.  Perhaps direct control of the medium’s body is a more reliable method of communication than telepathic interaction, or vice-versa. 

C₃: There are some living persons P such that if P were to survive death and communicate with the living, certain modes of communication would produce more accurate and reliable information than others.

So it looks like the survival hypothesis would need to assume at least the disjunction of each of these possibilities, that is, the case for survival would need to assume:

[A8]  Either C₁, C₂, or C₃.

I’ll refer to the conjunction of [A1]-[A8] as A*.  The conjunction of A* and the simple hypothesis of survival S is a robust survival hypothesis, but—unlike S₁, S₂, etc—it’s a robust survival hypothesis that is favorable to the likelihood of survival.  We can now say that the simple survival hypothesis S + A* prevents the survival hypothesis from having a likelihood of zero vis-à-vis the relevant data.  We can also say that this robust survival hypothesis leads us to expect at least the following five very general data:

(i) There will be features of the empirical world suggestive of post-mortem communications originating from some formerly living persons.

(ii) The content of the communications will include specific and detailed information about the ante-mortem life of some particular deceased person.

(iii) The content of the communications will include information about postmortem happenings in the life of friends and family members of the deceased.

(iv) The content of the communications will have indications of the beliefs, purposes, and personality traits of the deceased.

(v)  The content of the communications will not be fully accurate or consistent.

It’s worth noting, though I’ll not develop the significance of it here, that S + A* does not lead us to expect anything regarding other features of the data, for example, the mode or manner of communications, when or where communications will take place, or which deceased persons will communicate.  S + A* does not lead us to expect any general patterns with respect to these features of the relevant data, nor any specific datum within the domain of relevant data.  It only leads us to expect some of the general features entailed by the specific data adduced as evidence for survival. 

6.  Second Phase of Argument: A Preview

In his 1934 paper “Why I Don’t Believe in Survival,” E.R. Dodds noted a number of the assumptions I’ve drawn attention to above.  Dodds argued that on account of such auxiliary assumptions the survival hypothesis is a more complex hypothesis than survivalists acknowledge.  That’s no doubt true. And it’s especially relevant since many survivalists argue that the survival hypothesis is simpler than appeals to living-agent psi.  The shortcoming of all such arguments is that they consider the survival hypothesis in its simple form, and compare it to robust versions of competitors (like the appeal to living-agent psi).  More generally stated, the auxiliary hypotheses (required for the survival hypothesis to have minimal predictive power) lower the prior probability of the survival hypothesis.  To the extent that prior probability counts in evidence assessment, this will be significant.  

However, I’ve been looking at survival likelihoods, and likelihoods are blind to prior probabilities.  So I wish to make a different kind of criticism.  My criticism is that since we can’t independently test the auxiliary hypotheses required by the survival hypothesis (to yield favorable likelihoods), we’re not in a position to say whether or not Pr(D_M / S) > Pr(D_M / C) and hence whether Pr(D_M / S) > Pr(D_M / ψ).  After all, if we have no reason independent of S, C, or D_M to accept the auxiliary hypotheses, we have no independent reason to prefer them to any number of other auxiliary hypotheses that result in survival likelihoods of zero.  Hence, the predictive consequences of survival are inscrutable and so we can’t say that D_M is evidence that favors the survival hypothesis over various competitors.  I’ll sketch this second phase of the argument in my next blog.

Michael Sudduth

REFERENCES 

Almeder, Robert. 1996a. “Recent Responses to Survival Research.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 10: 495–517.

Almeder, Robert. 1996b. “Almeder’s Reply to Wheatley and Braude.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 10: 529–533.

Becker, Carl. 1993. Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Berger, Arthur S. 1987. “A Critical Outline of the Prima Facie Evidence for Survival.” In Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World, ed. Badham, Paul, and Badham, Linda.  New York: Paragon House, 188–213.

Braude, Stephen. 2003. Immortal Remains. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Dodds, Eric R. 1934. “Why I Do Not Believe in Survival.” Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, XLII, part 133, 147–172.

Ducasse, Curt J. 1961. A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Flew, Antony. 1953/1973. “The Question of Survival.” In Immortality, ed. Terence Penelhum.  Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Gauld, Alan. 1983. Mediumship and Survival: A Century of Investigations. London: Paladin Books.

Hart, Hornell. 1959. The Enigma of Survival. London: Rider and Co.

Hylsop, James. 1919. Contact with the Other World: the Latest Evidence as to Communication with the Dead. New York: the Century Co.

Lund, David. 2009. Persons, Souls and Death:  A Philosophical Investigation of an Afterlife.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 

Roll, William. 2006. “On Apparitions and Mediumship:  An Examination of the Evidence that Personal Consciousness Persists after Death.” In The Survival of Human Consciousness: Essays on the Possibility of Life after Death, ed. Lance Storm and Michael Thalbourne. Jefferson, NC:  McFarland, 142–173.

Schmeidler, Gertrude. 1977. “Looking Ahead:  A Method for Research on Survival.”  Theta 5: 2–6.

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Philosopher Elliott Sober is well known for his trenchant critique of design arguments, that is, arguments that aim to infer the existence of God or, more modestly, an intelligent designer from features of the universe allegedly indicative of design.  Sober has focused specifically on organismic versions of the design argument, which postulate an intelligent designer to explain physical features of organisms such as complex adaptation.  Sober’s main objection to such arguments, whether in their classical or contemporary forms, is that the design hypothesis is untestable.  Understood more precisely, his argument is that the testability of a hypothesis depends on the testability of the auxiliary statements on which the predictive consequences of the hypothesis depend, the auxiliary hypotheses required for the design hypothesis to have predictive consequences are not testable, and therefore, the design hypothesis is not a testable hypothesis. 

I don’t want to discuss whether Sober is correct in his criticism of design arguments. What interests me is the similarity between Sober’s criticism of design arguments and one of my criticisms of empirical arguments for life after death from the data of psychical research e.g., arguments for survival from alleged communications with the dead (associated with mediumship and apparitions of the dead), cases of the reincarnation type, and near-death experiences.  In my more recent publications, I’ve drawn attention to what I call the problem of auxiliary hypotheses (hereafter, PAH).

PAH may be concisely stated as follows. 

(1) The evidential force of the relevant data (drawn from psychical research) depends on the survival hypothesis having predictive power.

(2) The survival hypothesis has no predictive power unless it’s supplemented with auxiliary hypotheses.

(1) and (2) jointly entail what I call an auxiliary hypothesis requirement:  empirical arguments for survival are necessarily dependent on various auxiliary statements or assumptions.  This in turn results in a problem for empirical survival arguments because on my view: 

(3) The auxiliary hypotheses required for the survival hypothesis to have predictive power are not independently testable.

It may not be immediately obvious why (3) is a problem, but I think it’s a serious problem for empirical arguments for survival.  In fact, I consider it the nub of the problem for empirical survival arguments.  I think it’s far more serious than the traditional objections from the alleged low antecedent or prior probability of survival and the appeal to various alternative non-survival explanations of the data. 

I’ve decided to devote three blogs to this topic, which will also allow me to sketch arguments that will be more thoroughly developed in my book in progress.

• The first installment (below) looks at Elliott Sober’s critique of design arguments and provides some preliminary observations on its implications for the empirical survival debate. Sober’s critique of design arguments supplies us with both a general conceptual background and a relevant analogue to the survival hypothesis and empirical arguments for survival.

• In the second installment, to be published next month, I’ll look more carefully at empirical arguments for survival in the light of Sober’s critique.  I’ll provide an account of the kinds of auxiliary hypotheses that must be, and typically are at least implicitly, relied upon in classical empirical arguments for survival. I’ll also explain why most, if not all, of them are not independently testable, as well as why this is a problem for empirical arguments for survival.

• In the final installment I’ll consider some possible survivalist responses to PAH, but I’ll argue that these maneuvers are ultimately unsuccessful.  Possible means of circumventing PAH saddle empirical arguments for survival with epistemically toxic residue in the form of strengthened antecedent probability and alternative explanation objections that are immune to traditional survivalist criticisms of these objections.  Hence PAH places empirical survivalists on the horns of a significant dilemma.

1.  Sober’s Critique: What’s Not Wrong with Design Arguments 

In Evidence and Evolution (Cambridge, 2008) Sober considers the force of the hypothesis of intelligent design as an ostensible explanation of the complex adaptive features of organisms. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, most biologists have explained such features by appealing to Darwinian evolution, but the intelligent design hypothesis postulates the agency of an intelligent being as the explanation of complex physical adaptations.  Sober argues that classical and contemporary versions of the design argument fail, but not for the reasons normally encountered among critics of such arguments.

First, Sober does not argue that the design argument is defeated on the grounds that the intelligent design hypothesis has a low prior probability (E&E, p. 121).  (“Prior probability” here refers to a hypothesis’s probability independent of, or prior to, considerations drawn from present data adduced in support of the hypothesis.)  Sober is actually explicit that the evaluation of the intelligent design hypothesis, as well as the rival Darwinian evolution hypothesis, must do without considerations of prior probability. Why? Simply this: there’s no objective way to assign prior probabilities to these kinds of hypotheses.  If we assign prior probabilities, it would amount to little more than an expression of our personal or subjective belief predilections.  Science has more rigorous aims.  Since prior probabilities play a role in judgments about the net plausibility or overall probability of a hypothesis, Sober does not propose to render a verdict on this with respect to either intelligent design or Darwinian evolution. His aim is modest.  Assess whether the relevant evidence favors the design hypothesis over its main rival, Darwinian evolution. 

Sober carries out this assessment on the basis of a Likelihoodist approach to confirmation theory (E&E, pp. 121-122). According to a widely discussed formulation of the Law of Likelihood (LL): evidence e favors some hypothesis h1 over hypothesis h2 if and only if the probability of e given h1 is greater than the probability of e given h2.  Likelihoodism, then, ignores the prior probability of hypotheses, as well as the correlated attempt to justify claims about the probability or net plausibility of a hypothesis.  It’s only interested in determining whether evidence favors, supports, or confirms a hypothesis, and this by virtue of assessing whether a hypothesis better leads us to expect the relevant data/evidence/observation than does some specific rival hypothesis.  More technically stated, Likelihoodism focuses on the likelihood of a hypothesis, which is a technical way of referring to the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis.  This probability, Pr(e/h), should be distinguished from the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence, Pr(h/e).  The first might be high but the latter low.  The hypothesis that there are gremlins bowling in my attic has a high likelihood because it renders the sounds I hear in my attic very probable, easily more probable than many different competing hypotheses, but the gremlin hypothesis has a low probability because it has a low prior probability.

Furthermore, notice that Likelihoodism is a contrastive approach to evidential support.  It explicates the favoring or supports relation by comparing the likelihoods of hypotheses with each other.  While Bayesian approaches to confirmation theory involve contrasting a hypothesis h1 with its negation ~h1, Likelihoodism contrasts a particular hypothesis h1 with some other hypothesis h2.  For any two hypotheses, h1 and h2, and observational evidence e, it aims to assess whether the probability of e is greater given h1 than it is given h2, that is, formally whether Pr (e/h1) > Pr(e/h2).  Note that if Pr (e/h1) > Pr(e/h2) this does not require that Pr(e/h2) be low or that Pr(e/h1) be high, only that Pr(e/h1) is greater than Pr(e/h2), though of course it might be “much greater.” 

Sober takes the view that design arguments are best formulated as Likelihood arguments that compare the likelihood of the design hypothesis with that of a rival hypothesis.  In this way, their aim is modest, the thorny problem of assessing prior probabilities is avoided, and the arguments circumvent some of the traditional skeptical criticisms, for instance some of David Hume’s criticisms in the eighteenth century that assume the argument is an argument from analogy that depends on a high degree of overall resemblance between organisms and human artifacts like watches. 

So, for example, William Paley’s famous organismic design argument, which focuses on complex adaptive features of organisms (O), should be formulated as:

(1) Observation O favors the intelligent design hypothesis over the chance hypothesis if and only if Pr(Observations / Intelligent design) > Pr(Observations / Chance)

(2) Pr(Observations / Intelligent design) > Pr(Observations / Chance)

Therefore:

(3) Observation O favors the intelligent design hypothesis over Chance 

However, an apparent weakness of Paley’s argument, and by implication all organismic design arguments, is that, even if Paley was correct that such evidence favors intelligent design over purely random natural processes, it may nonetheless still be the case that:

Pr(Observations / Darwinian evolution) > Pr(Observations / Intelligent design), 

or even that

Pr(Observations / Darwinian evolution) >> Pr(Observations / Intelligent design). 

Hence, if we contrast intelligent design with a hypothesis other than chance, which in the case of Darwinian evolution Paley himself could not have anticipated, we get a different result.  And in fact, one of the responses to Paley-style design arguments is that Darwinian evolution has the upper hand since the relevant data are more probable, perhaps much more probable, given Darwinian evolution than intelligent design.  Sober notes, for example, that Stephen J. Gould takes this approach (E&E, pp. 127-128).  Gould has argued that imperfect adaptations in nature are very surprising if organisms have been designed by an intelligent being, but wholly expected if Darwinian evolution tells the correct story.  For example, Gould argues that the panda’s “thumb” (that is, the spur bone extending from the panda’s wrist), which together with the panda’s paw is used to strip bamboo stalks for eating, is highly inefficient.  While such inefficiencies are to be expected on the hypothesis of Darwinian evolution, they are not to be expected given the hypothesis of intelligent design.  Therefore, the observation like the panda’s “thumb” (and many others could be provided) favors Darwinian evolution over the intelligent design hypothesis.

Sober, though, has a very different kind of criticism, and here’s where Sober’s approach gets interesting. 

2. Sober’s Critique: What’s Wrong with Design Arguments 

Just as Sober doesn’t think that the Achilles Heel of the design argument rests in the low prior probability of the intelligent design hypothesis, he also doesn’t think that the nub of the problem within a Likelihood framework is that Darwinian evolution has a higher likelihood than intelligent design.  The problem is that we simply are not in position to as much as assess whether 

Pr(Observations / Intelligent design) > Pr(Observations / Darwinian evolution), 

much less whether

Pr(Observations / Intelligent design) >> Pr(Observations / Darwinian evolution), 

These (weaker and stronger) intelligent design hypotheses have inscrutable likelihoods because we can’t really say what the empirical world should look like if the design hypothesis is true.  While we can make claims about the likelihoods found on the right hand of the equation above, we cannot do so for the likelihood on the left side (E&E, pp. 141-147, 189). 

It’s important to more clearly state and explore the nature of the problem here.

First, the problem is not that the hypothesis of intelligent design by itself has no predictive consequences. Sober emphasizes the Duhem-Quine thesis that predictive consequences emerge only when we consider sets of statements, a hypothesis + auxiliary statements (E&E, pp.144-145).  So it’s not a problem that the supposition of an intelligent designer by itself has no predictive consequences.  The same would be true for rival hypotheses. After all, natural selection only makes predictions if it’s supplemented with its own set of auxiliary hypotheses, e.g., about the “targets” of selection and “constraints” on selection processes. 

Second the problem isn’t that we can’t find any statement that, once conjoined to intelligent design, has predictive consequences. As Sober further notes (E&E, p. 129-131), it’s monumentally easy to find auxiliary statements that will assist the intelligent design hypothesis in generating testable predictions.  For example, postulate an intelligent designer, but further postulate that the designer would have wanted everything in the world to be purple.  This generates, by deductive entailment, the prediction that every object in the world should be purple.  Clearly this prediction is false.  Therefore, the design hypothesis is falsified.  We could also suppose that the intelligent designer gave vertebrates their eyes, which of course entails that vertebrates have eyes.  This also results in a specific kind of prediction, so intelligent design turns out to be a falsifiable (though not falsified) hypothesis.

Notice that Gould does something similar to show that Darwinian evolution has a higher likelihood than intelligent design.  He supposes, not that the designer would have wanted the world to consist of only purple objects, but rather that he would have wanted the panda’s “thumb” to be more efficiently constructed.  Therefore, the panda’s “thumb” is very surprising given the design hypothesis.  However, we could just as easily have picked an auxiliary hypothesis that would be favorable to intelligent design, like an intelligent designer who would have wanted humans to have eyes with the features our eyes actually have and pandas to have a spur bone extending from their wrists.  So we can easily pick auxiliaries that result in the observational evidence having a probability of unity, zero, or anywhere in between, given the hypothesis of an intelligent designer and the chosen auxiliaries (E&E, pp. 142-144). 

The problem should now be apparent.  The predictive consequences in each of the above instances are derived from the hypothesis of intelligent design supplemented with an auxiliary assumption that attributes to the designer, if such a being should exist, abilities and desires/goals of a particular sort.  But Gould is no more entitled to make an assumption unfavorable to the design hypothesis here than Paley and company are entitled to make assumptions favorable to the design hypothesis.  Neither adopts an assumption that can be independently tested.  Neither is justified in believing what the abilities and goals of an intelligent designer would be.  (And Sober thinks that same conclusion follows if the intelligent designer is more robustly described as “God,” that is, an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good being). What is relevant for the testability of a hypothesis is that we derive predictions with assistance from independently testable auxiliary hypotheses. And this requires that our justification for believing auxiliary statements does not depend on our believing that either H1 or H2 (the hypotheses whose likelihoods are under consideration) is true, or even that the observational datum is true. (E&E, p. 152).

So, on Sober’s view, the problem with the design hypothesis is that it cannot be tested because we don’t know or have justified beliefs about what auxiliary hypotheses are true. We neither know nor justifiably believe (independent of the hypothesis of intelligent design) what the goals and abilities of the designer would be should such a being exist.   As Sober says, “The problem with the hypothesis of intelligent design is not that it makes inaccurate predictions but that it doesn’t predict much of anything at all” (E&E, p. 154). Hence, we’re not in a position to justifiably claim that 

Pr(Observations / Intelligent design) > Pr(Observations / Darwinian evolution),

much less that 

Pr(Observations / Intelligent design) >> Pr(Observations / Darwinian evolution).

Therefore, we’re not in a position to say that the relevant evidence favors intelligent design over Darwinian evolution. 

3. Sober’s Critique and Empirical Survival Arguments: Preliminary Considerations

Although I’m a philosopher of religion with a long-standing interest in arguments for the existence of God, at present Sober’s central criticism of intelligent design arguments interest me because of its implications for another species of empirical argument at the center of my current work, arguments for postmortem survival or life after death from the data of psychical research. The data here would be data collected from paranormal phenomena such as of out-of-body and near-death experiences, mediumistic communications, cases of the reincarnation type, and apparitions of the dead.  I’ve argued in a few places that the survival hypothesis leads us to expect such data only if we adopt a significant number of auxiliary hypotheses whose epistemic credentials are at best questionable.  Otherwise stated, the predictive power of the survival hypothesis depends on auxiliary hypotheses that lack the appropriate epistemic credentials. This I maintain constitutes a defeater for empirical arguments for survival. 

In the next two blogs I’ll develop this argument.  Here I’ll offer some preliminary remarks. 

As I see it, far too many empirical survivalists are either unconscious of the extent to which their arguments depend on auxiliary assumptions, or they are unconscious of the implications this has for the assessment of the evidential force of the relevant data.  One contributing factor here is the refusal of empirical survivalists to rigorously develop the empirical argument for survival, for instance, by addressing some very basic issues in confirmation theory, or otherwise putting their principles of inductive inference on the table and clearly applying them to the survival hypothesis.  The tendency is to pile up data, in much the same way that many eighteenth and nineteenth century theologians thought they could prove the existence of God by simply piling up alleged examples of design in the world.  But a mass of data does not an argument make. 

However, another reason for this degree of unconsciousness about the relevance of auxiliary assumptions is rooted in a particular strategy of argument adopted by a large number of empirical survivalists.  It’s what Sober calls “lazy testing.” 

“The lazy way to test a hypothesis H is to focus on one of its possible competitors H₀, claim that the data refute H₀, and the declare that H is the only hypothesis left standing.  This is an attractive strategy if you are fond of the hypothesis H but are unable to say what testable predictions H makes.” (E&E, p. 353)

This sums up one of the central strategies of argument found in the bulk of survival literature.  Empirical survivalists routinely think the survival hypothesis has acquired some sort of positive epistemic credential because they identify some particular datum that is allegedly improbable given an alternative non-survival hypothesis. For example, empirical survivalists think they’ve refuted appeals to psychic functioning among living persons by pointing to behavioral patterns or skills exhibited by trance mediums or young children, where the behavior or skills are characteristic of some deceased person.  This sort of phenomenon is allegedly improbable or not to be expected if we adopt a living-agent psi hypothesis.  Well, in the light of Sober’s critique of design arguments, it’s clear that such a tactic only facilitates distraction from the central issues, namely the extent to which the survival hypothesis renders the data probable, and what must be assumed about survival to determine this. 

Notice also that when critics of survival arguments argue that more robust versions of the living-agent psi hypothesis (e.g., Stephen Braude’s motivated living-agent psi hypothesis) challenge the survival hypothesis, survivalists shift to a different debunking strategy.  They try to rack up considerations that lower the prior probability of the counter-explanation.  For example, living-agent psi explanations of the data are often said to be overly complex, or they fail to fit with our alleged background knowledge since they postulate psi of a potency, magnitude, or level of refinement for which there is no independent evidence, or they depend on psychodynamic hypotheses that stand in need of independent support.  Again, the focus is on how competitors fail, not on how the survival hypothesis succeeds. 

As I’ve argued, counter-explanations may indeed have a very low prior probability, but if the empirical argument for survival is construed as a likelihood argument, then it’s irrelevant that the prior probability of motivated living-agent psi, dandy psi, superman-psi, God-potent psi, or whatever, is low.  As Sober emphasizes, Likelihood arguments don’t bring prior probabilities to bear on evidence assessment.  Moreover, as far as prior probability assessments go, the relevant comparison must be between robust versions of all the explanatory candidates, including the survival hypothesis.  So if we are die-hard Bayesians, and we wish to legitimately introduce considerations of prior probability, we can’t sensibly compare a simple survival hypothesis with a robust counter-explanation.  We must compare the prior probability of robust versions of the competitors with robust versions of the survival hypothesis, because it’s only robust versions of the explanatory candidates that have any predictive consequences.

Sober’s observation, derived from Richard Royall, is instructive at this juncture.  There are two kinds of questions that need to be distinguished.  We can pose the question, “What does the present evidence say?”  We can also pose the question “What should you believe?”  The Likelihood approach addresses the first; the Bayesian approach the second.  It’s best that survivalists more clearly distinguish these questions in relation to their assessments of the alleged evidence for survival.  Accordingly, they need more clearly to distinguish between whether they want to defend modest likelihood claims or stronger claims about the net plausibility of the survival hypothesis, based on the joint consideration of likelihoods and priors.

That being said Sober’s critique illuminates what I consider the nub of the problem facing empirical arguments for survival, whether they are formulated along Likelihood or Bayesian lines.  Empirical survivalists need to state the kinds of auxiliary assumptions that are required for the survival hypothesis to establish a genuine connection with the empirical world, specifically the range of data adduced in support of the survival hypothesis.  And they need to show that the survival hypothesis does a better job vis-à-vis its predictive consequences than do the competitors.  In my next blog, I’ll sketch some of the auxiliary assumptions needed for classical empirical arguments for survival, and I’ll also begin exploring why this is a problem.  By the third installment, I hope it’s clear why I think PAH—the problem of auxiliary assumptions—poses the most fundamental kind of challenge to empirical arguments for survival.

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Hello Friends:

I haven’t posted a blog since last spring.  Some of you may have forgotten that you were actually subscribed.  It’s been a very busy past six months, personally and professionally, but I‘m hoping to begin regular blogging as we approach the New Year.

At this time, I have a few announcements and a preview of a forthcoming blog.

First, I’m happy to announce that my book on empirical arguments for survival (in progress) is now under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, and the book is scheduled for completion and submission in November 2014.  The book will be published in the Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion series.  A recently revised Book Prospectus is currently available.

Second, I have two forthcoming articles.  (1) My recently completed article on empirical survival arguments for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy will likely be published in January 2014.  (2) In March 2014, my article on mediumship and survival will appear in Adam Rock’s edited collection The Survival Hypothesis: Essays on Mediumship (McFarland, 2014), which will also feature an article from fellow philosopher Stephen Braude.

Finally, in the next few weeks I’ll be posting a preview of a new article I’m writing entitled “Recalibrating the Empirical Survival Debate: the Role and Relevance of Predictive Power.”  In this article I explore the implications of predictive power for two prominent challenges to traditional empirical arguments for survival: the alternative explanation challenge (which tries to deflate the case for survival by appealing to alternative non-survival explanations of the data) and the antecedent probability challenge (which tries to deflate the case for survival by arguing that the survival hypothesis has a low antecedent probability).  I argue that standard survivalist responses to these long-standing challenges are inadequate when the challenges are reformulated in the light of salient issues surrounding the predictive power of the survival hypothesis.  In this way, I hope to bring greater clarity to some of the fundamental problems that infect traditional empirical arguments for survival.

Michael Sudduth

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Greetings Friends:

I have been busy working on my book Survival and the Empirical World.  As indicated in my prior blog, I had to cut back on my planned blogging on the topic of my book in order to prepare a full project proposal which an interested publisher requested.  Between work on the proposal (which includes chapter drafts and a working bibliography) and my teaching load, there has been precious little time to devote to regular blogging on the topic as I had planned.  This of course will likely change once the semester ends.  I plan to use my blog to provide more regular updates on my book and share excerpts of book material as the manuscript takes shape.  In fall 2013 I may also set up a private online discussion group where chapter drafts will be available and we can have regular discussion of the book, including some live stream seminar-style sessions.

Also, at the end of May or beginning of June I will have completed my entry on empirical arguments for survival for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which—pending permission from the editor—I will make available on my website.  I will post a notice in my blog.

For now I have included the revised book abstract below, which includes a link to the current book prospectus. If you compare the current and earlier outlines of book chapters you will notice that I’ve narrowed the scope of what I’m covering in the book.  The main adjustment here has been the elimination of the final chapter in which I had planned to discuss some positive grounds for affirming the rationality of belief in survival.  For various reasons I have decided to only sketch some suggestions in this direction in the conclusion to the book rather than provide a more developed chapter-length argument.  The topic really deserves a book-length treatment, so I’m going to save a more developed argument in support of the rationality of belief in survival for a possible subsequent book, which will cover the larger territory of the epistemology of belief in survival.

Finally, a word of thanks to those of you who have emailed me about my book and your interest in the topic of postmortem survival.  While the comments section for my blog is currently closed, I do welcome emails from readers and try to answer all of them as time permits.

Michael Sudduth

Survival and the Empirical World (Book Abstract, 5/1/13)

Most broadly stated, Survival and the Empirical World is a philosophical exploration of the empirical approach to postmortem survival—the survival of consciousness or the self beyond physical death.  More specifically, in this book I critically evaluate the contention among many who believe in survival that there is empirical evidence that justifies belief in survival. I argue that the classical empirical arguments for survival as developed by prominent philosophers and survival researchers during the past century are unsuccessful.

My exploration of the classical empirical arguments for survival focuses on the “explanatory axis” of such arguments, specifically the contention that the survival hypothesis provides the best explanation of a wide range of empirical data drawn from the phenomena of mediumship, cases of the reincarnation type, apparitional experiences, and out-of-body experiences.  Although the empirical approach to survival has considerable merit and there is intriguing empirical evidence that is at least suggestive of survival, I raise significant doubt about the force of the classical arguments, especially where these arguments maintain that the survival hypothesis has the kind of explanatory success characteristic of scientific hypotheses. 

The weaknesses of the empirical arguments for survival have largely been masked by the way in which the debate concerning these arguments has been framed, for example, with an emphasis on how certain strands of data are quite improbable but for some hypothesis of survival.  I argue that the central issues of debate concerning the inference to survival from the relevant data must be approached with a particular recalibration of the explanatory axis of such arguments.  Such a recalibration will constellate the central issues of the debate around the predictive power of the survival hypothesis, rather than the alleged failures of alternative explanations of the data and hence the alleged surprising nature of the data but for survival.  This maneuver exposes a range of largely unacknowledged or unexplored auxiliary assumptions on which the explanatory inference to survival crucially depends.  I contend that once these assumptions are isolated and their implications traced out, it will be necessary to substantially rethink the three areas of traditional debate concerning empirical arguments for survival: (i) the content of the survival hypothesis, (ii) the assessment of the antecedent probability of the survival hypothesis, and (iii) how alternative explanations challenge the survival hypothesis.

In the light of the recalibration of the explanatory axis of empirical arguments for survival, I argue my central thesis:  we are not warranted in concluding that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data traditionally adduced as empirical evidence for survival.  To the extent that the inference to survival depends on survival being the best explanation of these data or otherwise embodying a range of ostensible explanatory virtues (in a way superior to various competing hypotheses), the inference to survival suffers from debilitating defects.  I conclude with a call for survivalists partial to empirical arguments for survival to rethink the epistemological presuppositions of the tradition of “scientific” inquiry into postmortem survival.

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In my previous blog (“’Wrong Turns’ in Arguments for Postmortem Survival”) I discussed in a general way my skepticism regarding arguments for postmortem survival construed as inferences to best explanation (IBE).  The initial wave of skepticism concerns problems that infect IBE arguments in general.  The second wave of skepticism concerns a number of problems that infect survival arguments in particular when they are modeled on IBE.  My previous blog primarily discussed the first wave of skepticism, of which I’ll have more to say at a later time.  In the next week or so, though, my blog will begin exploring the second wave  of skepticism, which has been the focus of a number of my papers.  Even if we can get clear of the first wave of skeptical concerns associated with IBE arguments in general, the attempt to fit survival into the IBE template as an ostensible “scientific hypothesis” is subject to substantial and I think fatal objections. 

For the moment, though, I’d like to offer a brief clarification about my position on survival and how my critique of IBE survival arguments is part of a larger program in the epistemology of belief in survival. This is prompted by some interesting emails from subscribers who have asked, for example, whether I think there are any good arguments for survival.  Although in my previous blog I indicated that my critique of IBE survival arguments doesn’t rule out there being good arguments for survival, some subscribers wanted more details about my viewpoint.  This is forthcoming, but for now I’ll offer some clarifications and sketch the parameters of the larger project in which my critique of IBE survival arguments is embedded.

First, to reiterate an important point in my previous blog, I’m not skeptical about postmortem survival. I personally believe in survival.  I think this makes some survivalists uncomfortable because their arguments have been dialectically framed as a response to physicalist objections to survival raised by individuals who are anti-survivalists.  I’m not in this camp, and my critique of IBE survival arguments isn’t committed to the truth of physicalism. Later in the present blog series I’ll discuss the nature and grounds of my personal belief in survival, as well as how these grounds interact with data drawn from research in the areas of near-death experiences, mediumship, apparitional experiences, and cases of the reincarnation type.  But it’s important to remember that I’m not out to debunk belief in survival.

Second, although I’m skeptical about IBE survival arguments, this skepticism does not extend to all forms of argument for survival.  There are different ways of arguing for survival, and different ways of answering objections to this belief by anti-survivalists.  Some approaches are not vulnerable to the kinds of objections I’m raising to IBE survival arguments.  I’d even say that, on my view, explanatory considerations and other inductive criteria (broadly construed) are both relevant and useful; but, with a few important exceptions, survivalists have not exercised caution or care in how they’ve handled their business here.

Third, when it comes to exploring the “goodness” of survival arguments, we should carefully consider the different functions of arguments for survival.  What are we trying to do with these arguments?  And this is particularly important as we explore the empirical arguments constructed from survival research and the data of parapsychology.  Are these arguments supposed to make belief in survival rationally compelling? Or are they supposed to add to the warrant of belief in survival, where other considerations also contribute to the warrant of belief in survival.  Are these arguments supposed to justify the belief that we survive death? Or are they supposed to justify beliefs about what the afterlife is like, given that belief in survival sufficiently warranted on other grounds?  Without exploring the meta-level question, it’s hard to know what it means to say “this is/is not a good argument for survival,” for the “goodness” of arguments is relative to their purported function, that is, what the arguments are trying to do.  “Good” for what exactly?

Fourth, and related to the prior point, it will be important to explore the relationship between inference/argument and other grounds for belief in survival. For example, near-death experiences open up the prospects for an experiential justification for belief in survival for individuals who have such experiences, in much the same way, so I’d argue, that religious experience opens up the prospects for experiential justification of theistic beliefs.  So how might experiential and inferential grounds for belief in survival interface? I explored this with reference to belief in God in my book on arguments for God’s existence.  I aim to do something similar with respect to belief in survival.

So, having said this, it should now be clear that my criticisms of IBE survival arguments are only the initial steps towards a more ultimate goal, which is to articulate an epistemology of belief in survival according to which we may precisely see the sorts of conditions under which belief in survival is epistemically justified or warranted, as well as how its positive epistemic status is related to discursive processes of reasoning and argument.  But to see this in clear relief requires first seeing why and how existing approaches and strategies are unsuccessful.

And so we can now finally return to my critical evaluation of IBE survival arguments.  In the first instance, I’m targeting actual IBE survival arguments that prominent survivalists have presented.  I don’t think these particular arguments accomplish what many survivalists claim they do.  Secondly, when I explore the reasons why these paradigmatic IBE arguments fail, it becomes clear to me that there’s a more general skepticism lurking in my critique. I’m skeptical about survival as an ostensible “scientific hypothesis” for which a justification is sought by trying to make belief in survival successfully conform to explanatory standards and inferential practices employed in the sciences.

I’ll devote my next blog to a critical engagement of the rather common claim among survivalists wielding IBE survival arguments that survival, like other scientific hypotheses, makes predictions.  Since the survival hypothesis allegedly has empirical consequences, it’s supposed to be a testable hypothesis, open to confirmation and falsification.  And of course since the predictive consequences of the survival hypothesis allegedly fit the data, it has great predictive power, and at precisely the points where other hypotheses do not fit the data.  Its predictive power is therefore an explanatory virtue that offers significant support for the claim that survival is the best explanation of the data.  In a week or so I’ll show why this line of argument is one of those “wrong turns” I think survivalists need to avoid.

Michael Sudduth 2/18/13

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I’d like to welcome all the subscribers to my blog. Judging from emails I have received, many of you are excited about my blog and the current and forthcoming resources on my new website.  I’m looking forward to posting blogs every other week, or as time permits.  My current teaching load is pretty heavy and I’m juggling a number of writing projects.  But I’ll do my best to regularly post. If you’re subscribed to my blog, it will be sent to you by email.

Blog Plans

My plans for the blog are to discuss topics and questions related to my research and writing, specifically in the areas of postmortem survival, philosophy of religion, and analytical psychology and its relation to issues that fall into the former two categories.  A lot of people are interested in hearing more about my conversion from Christianity to Gaudiya Vaishnavism, a topic that was discussed by a number of Internet bloggers about this time last year.  I have written a lot of unpublished material on Gaudiya Vaishnavism and my conversion, and I intend to present some of this material in the forthcoming FAQ section of my website.  Some of it will appear in my blog as well. 

Please note that at present posting comments in response to my blog is not permitted. If subscribers have comments or questions they’d like me to address, please email me at vedantinphilosopher@michaelsudduth.com. If you have a question, I’ll try to answer your question in the FAQ or blog. 

Postmortem Survival

My first series of blog posts will be on the topic of postmortem survival, roughly stated, the survival of the self or consciousness after biological death.  I’ve recently finished some articles on the topic (which may be accessed under Sudduth Articles at michaelsudduth.com) and have more forthcoming. I’m also in the preparatory stages of writing a book on the topic.  Forthcoming papers and chapter drafts of the book will appear on my website beginning early summer 2013.  In the present blog I want simply to sketch some of the specific issues I’ll be tackling in subsequent blogs.

Since the launching of my website, I’ve noticed a number of discussions in blogs and Internet discussion groups about a few of my previous and forthcoming papers on postmortem survival.  I hope to use my blog to discuss and clarify my position and arguments, as well as share aspects of argument that are forthcoming in my book on survival but not a part of my current papers.  Hopefully this will also help correct some rather significant errors in how my view and arguments have been presented.  I’m afraid that thinking on this topic among Internet bloggers partakes of many of the conceptual confusions that characterize even some of the professional literature.  So it may be worth trying to further clarify several forks in the road where I think my survivalist critics are taking the wrong turn.  That being said, my main goal is to encourage serious inquiry into a topic that has held my personal and professional interested for the past eight years.

Among the issues I plan on discussing is the concept of survival itself.  What is it that is supposed to survive death? Christian philosophers in the recent and thriving tradition of analytic philosophy of religion have explored the traditional Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection from the dead in the light of central concepts and problems in the philosophy of mind.  However, since my exposure to H.H. Price’s work many years ago, I’ve been interested in disembodied or discarnate survival.  On this view, it is “consciousness” that is postulated to survive biological death and to continue in the absence of a body and functioning brain. Perhaps we must also posit something like a “soul” if consciousness requires a substratum of some sort.  At this juncture, the question of what survives becomes more specifically what we might call a “content of consciousness” question.  What aspects of our consciousness, mental life, or individual psychology continue after death? Does enough of it continue to suppose that I have survived death?

But there’s another reason for focusing on discarnate or disembodied survival, say as opposed to the prominent western religious concept of bodily resurrection from the dead.  It is discarnate survival that is most relevant to the evaluation of alleged empirical evidences for survival drawn from parapsychology. Data collected from near-death experiences, mediumistic communications, and apparitional experiences are—if evidence for survival—evidence for the continuation of consciousness (or at least some part of it) in the absence of a physical body or functioning brain.  Granted, there are also cases where living agents exhibit ostensible past life memories, birthmarks, skills of various sorts, and other features possessed by some formerly living person.  Although these cases of the reincarnation type do not require conscious states in the absence of a body or functioning brain, they do rather naturally suggest the persistence and re-embodiment of a soul or immaterial substance capable of exhibiting consciousness, at least when reunited to a body.

Now there’s another important connection between the concept of survival (as disembodied consciousness or soul survival) and these domains of ostensible empirical evidence for survival.  What we postulate regarding the nature of consciousness or the soul impacts how well the hypothesis of survival can actually account for or explain the observational data drawn from the above four domains of parapsychological research.  The point is worth explaining, especially since one of my main criticisms of empirical arguments for survival depends on this observation.

The most widespread and deeply entrenched method of arguing for survival purports to follow a form of scientific reasoning according to which a hypothesis is justified or warranted for acceptance based on its ability to explain observational data in a way superior to all known nearby explanatory competitors, and where explaining the observational data involves the data being a non-trivial predictive consequence of the hypothesis.  Less technically stated, if our hypothesis is true, then the world should look a certain way and should not look another way.  The survival hypothesis is often treated in this way, as an inference to best explanation, the best explanation of data drawn from near-death experiences, mediumistic communications, apparitional experiences, and/or cases of the reincarnation type.  But the ability of the survival hypothesis to explain anything, including data from these four domains of research, depends largely on the content included in that hypothesis itself or in conjunction with various auxiliary hypotheses that will jointly lead us to expect the world to appear one way as opposed to another.  Among other things, we’ll have to adopt a particular stance on the beliefs, intentions, and powers of discarnate agents, such that their having those beliefs, intentions, and powers (as opposed to not) would lead us to expect particular observational data.  So the efficacy of explanatory arguments on behalf of survival depends on postulating a survival hypothesis with sufficient content to make genuine predictions sensible.

Best Explanations and Likelihood of Truth

It is clear from my current papers on survival that I think empirical arguments for survival, specifically construed as inferences to best explanation, are subject to a number of debilitating, and perhaps even fatal, objections.

To briefly rehearse the form of argument I’ve addressed in my papers.  Many survivalists are quite convinced that data collected from near-death experiences, mediumistic communications, apparitional experiences, and cases of the reincarnation type (severally or jointly) constitute good evidence for survival. More precisely, the evidence makes survival at least more likely than not, if not highly probable.  This judgment of evidential probability rests on the premise that (i) the survival hypothesis is the best or superior explanation of the data from among a small group of known nearby explanatory competitors.  To this explanatory premise is usually added the additional premise that (ii) the antecedent likelihood of survival (i.e., its likelihood independent of the empirical data allegedly suggestive of survival) is not too low.

Although initially confident about this approach, I have come to adopt a more skeptical attitude.  For the past two years I’ve been fairly confident that this way of developing the case for survival faces insurmountable difficulties and should probably be abandoned.  It would appear that some survivalists are less than happy with this conclusion.  I find myself in the rather challenging position of having a significant degree of empathy for these survivalists (as I am—contrary to what some writers have suggested—a survivalist), but I simply don’t share their conviction about the force of traditional empirical arguments, at least not in the form in which they currently exist.  I suspect I also don’t share the epistemological assumptions that appear to drive their interest in turning survival into a “scientific” hypothesis.

Consider some of the general problems with the above form of reasoning that are not as much as acknowledged by survivalists who employ this argumentative strategy in the effort to justify belief in survival.  And I’ll begin by placing the survivalist argument in an optimal position. Let’s grant something that I think ultimately we can’t really grant. Let’s suppose that we’re in an epistemic position conducive to making reliable judgments about survival being more likely than its various explanatory competitors.  OK.  How exactly do we get to absolute judgments of probability on the basis of premises affirming superior comparative probability?  Again, never mind the problem of teasing out comparative probabilities from comparative explanatory virtues.  Even if we grant that the survival hypothesis is more likely than explanatory competitors B, C, and D, how does the survivalist reach a conclusion about the survival hypothesis being likely true, more likely than not, much less very likely?

Mundane examples may help illustrate the difficulty here. It may be more likely that John robbed the bank than Tim, but this does not by itself sanction the stronger claim that it is likely true that John robbed the bank.  It might be of course, but it might also be that the higher likelihood of the one hypothesis is washed out by the fact that both hypotheses are all things considered pretty improbable.  A’s being more likely than B (relative to some body of evidence) doesn’t tell us how likely A is, unless of course we can specify the probability of B (relative to the evidence).  The same holds true for comparative explanatory power.  Hypothesis A may be a better explanation of data than hypothesis B, but this does not by itself sanction the stronger claim that hypothesis A is a good much less great explanation.  Mary may be a better math student than Jane, but if Jane is pretty incompetent, Mary’s superiority is hardly a glowing endorsement of Mary’s math skills.

If I follow the response of one prominent survivalist (shared with me through personal correspondence), the inference from A is more likely than B to A is likely true is sanctioned because all the alternatives besides A and B are highly implausible.  The suggestion seemed to be that, however weak we might judge A and B to be, one of them must be the real deal.  If I know that a bank was robbed, and I have two plausible suspects (John and Tim) and no other plausible suspects, then it must be that either John or Tim robbed the bank.  If it’s more plausible that John robbed the bank than Tim, then surely we can conclude that this is the likely truth of the matter.

I don’t think this works without granting a pretty extravagant assumption, one no less controversial than the survival hypothesis itself.  It should be clear that this line of argument depends strongly on the assumption that all other explanations are highly implausible, and to such a degree that we’re warranted in concluding that it comes down to “either John or Tim robbed the bank, and no one else did it.”  But which explanations are we claiming to be highly implausible?  Clearly, we can only judge as implausible the explanations that have been proposed and inspected.  But the needed assumption must cast a wider net.  We must really have warrant for supposing that the currently available set of explanations contains the real deal, and that we’ve narrowed it down to only two in this set.  Otherwise the entire argument is simply a form of the “only game in town fallacy”: no other reasonable explanation is available, so this explanation is the correct explanation.  But this is one of those forks in the road that I refuse to take.  I don’t see that we have an adequate justification for the claim that our current stock of explanations contains the correct one, nor that we can narrow the candidates down to just two hypotheses within this set, nor can we claim with sufficient justification that one of the hypotheses (survival) has a clear explanatory advantage.  These are all highly questionable assumptions. These are wrong turns, and I’m afraid survival arguments are simply lost as a result at this point.

The Antecedent Probability of Survival

But the problems don’t end here.  Think now about “antecedent probability”? By virtue of what can we say that the antecedent likelihood of survival is not too low? How low is too low?  What even approximate value is being ascribed to the survival hypothesis here? How is this even being determined?  It is typically being determined by arguments that purport to show flaws in arguments against survival.  OK.  Let us grant that there is a particular flaw in this or that argument against survival.  Maybe all physicalist objections to survival are based on defective arguments.  What follows? We lose some reasons for supposing that the survival hypothesis is false. But it’s far from clear how this results in the more general assessment that the antecedent likelihood of survival is not too low.  The antecedent likelihood of survival can be just about anything you want it to be by including or excluding anything you want from your background knowledge and placing greater or lesser weight on other considerations like simplicity. And, apart from the difficulty of determining these initial antecedent probabilities, we might sensibly wonder whether we need explanatory inferences to boost the epistemic credibility of hypotheses that already enjoy a sufficiently favorable epistemic status at the outset.  So if the survival hypothesis has just the right sort of initial favorable epistemic status to make it a good candidate for explanation, it’s at least not clear how its explanatory power is going to improve the epistemic situation.

Of course, a hypothesis that is evidentially probable to degree .5 relative to evidence e might, in principle, have its evidential probability boosted to .7 or .9 by expanding the evidence set to e*.  So in principle the initial or antecedent probability of survival could be increased.  Let’s even grant that explanatory power can do this sort of thing.  The basic problem is that no survivalist is willing to state the initial numerical values being assigned to the survival hypothesis, much less how these could even be approximately determined.   Therefore, we have no idea whether or to what degree explanatory considerations are doing anything other than providing a cover for simply re-asserting an initial judgment about the epistemic credibility of survival.  And this might come dangerously close to what William James said is often dubiously passed off for “philosophy:” a mere rearranging of our prejudices.

Survival as the Alleged Best Explanation

Now I have not to date developed the above two particular problems that survival arguments will face as inferences to best explanation.  I’ve chosen rather to focus on the alleged truth of (i)—survival is the best explanation of the data. More precisely, I’ve examined some fairly widespread arguments that have actually been offered for this claim.  I’m afraid to say that these arguments, even as developed by some capable philosophers, don’t really live up to what is claimed on their behalf.  In fact, they seem to be rather significant failures.

In my next blog I’ll note some of these more serious defects in arguments for survival construed as inferences to best explanation, but I’ll specifically explore the ways in which survivalists have cleverly masked these logical defects.  It isn’t just that the arguments are defective; it’s also that these defects are hidden or concealed as the result of how the arguments are presented. “Masking maneuvers,” as I choose to label them, are not necessarily conscious maneuvers on the part of survivalists.  There’s no plot here to trick people into believing in survival with dishonest argumentation.  Some survivalists really do think that their arguments are strong, even compelling.  And they are . . . to them.  I don’t wish to rob them of what is probably an important bit of doxastic autobiography.  But their portrait of survival arguments is largely a matter of the survivalist “connecting the dots” in the light of his own subjectivity, much of which appears to be unconscious in the dialectical unfolding of argumentation.  For the same reason, people who believe in God clearly see evidences of design in the world, and people who believe in miracles clearly see Jesus Christ in a Turkish coffee stain.

Of course it does not follow that there are no good arguments for (i), much less would it be fair to characterize my dismantling of arguments for (i) as “anti-survival” arguments. A few Internet bloggers seem to have made the mistake of supposing that an argument against an inference from p1, . . . ,pn to c is an argument against c.  But this is transparently fallacious.  Losing reasons for believing c is not to acquire reasons for believing the negation of c.  My arguments are not anti-survival, anymore than someone who argues against Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence is presenting an anti-theist argument.  An “anti-survival” argument would be an argument that purported to show that the survival hypothesis is false.  I have claimed no such thing, which is good since I actually believe in survival, and I’m generally not in the habit of arguing that my beliefs are false.  But I’m also not in the habit of supporting my beliefs through arguments that I judge to be logically defective. With any luck, wheeling away the rubbish might just clear the ground for something more sensible.

I suspect that some readers have drawn the anti-survival inference because I’ve expressed skepticism about whether we will ever be able to effectively argue that (i) is true.  Even this, however, is not a reason to give up on arguments for survival.  There are other strategies of arguing for survival in addition to “best explanation” strategies.  These are certainly worth exploring.  However, let’s take the worst-case scenario. What if all arguments fail? Is belief in survival any worse off epistemically?  I’m afraid that the tacit assumption of many survivalists is old-fashioned evidentialism, roughly, the view that a belief is rational only if it is backed by evidence.  Of course many survivalists, like most garden-variety evidentialists, want their beliefs to conform to evidential standards of a particular sort, standards that will make their beliefs appear scientifically respectable. But this is another one of those “wrong turns.”  And this one leads to a dead end.

I’d say it’s time to rethink the entire epistemology of belief in survival, unless we wish to remain content with a constant reshuffling of subjective probabilities by hands that can, in the final analysis, sign off on nothing more than an embarrassing promissory note of empirical validity.

Michael Sudduth 2/8/13 

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