Cup of Nirvana Philosophical and Contemplative Explorations

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Conversation with Steinhart on Life after Death

ydacoverPhilosopher Eric Steinhart at William Paterson University has published widely in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Among his fascinating contributions is the attention he’s paid to how our digital technologies have provided new and more naturalistic ways of exploring religious topics. “Digitalism,” as Steinhart explains, “is a philosophical strategy that uses these new computational ways of thinking to develop naturalistic but meaningful approaches to religious problems involving minds, souls, life after death, and the divine.”[*] He’s examined the implications of digitalism for life after death in a variety of papers over the past several years, but his most systematic exploration is found in is book Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Traditional philosophical and empirical approaches to life after death are subject to a variety of objections. I’ve discussed some of the more refractory conceptual problems in my own book on life after death. Other problems include substantialist views of the self, mind-body dualism, and immaterialist conceptions of the self. These assumptions have unfortunately constrained discourse on life after death and stalemated dialogue. Steinhart provides an alternative afterlife model which is both physicalist in nature and compatible with visions of the afterlife preserved in the rich heritage of the spiritual traditions of the world – for example, rebirth in Buddhism and bodily resurrection in the western Abrahamic traditions.

In my conversation with Professor Steinhart below, he discusses the limits and defects of traditional approaches to life after death, including the flawed paranormal scaffolding of many empirical approaches to life after death. He outlines the contrasting digitalist view of life after death and how it can make sense of traditional religious ideas like reincarnation and resurrection. 

Conversation with Eric Steinhart on Life after Death

Sudduth: Eric, I was hoping we could begin with you sharing a bit about your academic background and the genesis and evolution of your interest in the topic of life after death.

Steinhart: I grew up in a hard-core evangelical Christian household.  I was very religious, very devout.  And many of my male relatives were ministers.  So I read the Bible very carefully.  I had trouble with the soul – what was it?  Why wasn’t it discussed in the Bible?  I was fascinated with the resurrection of the body.  Eventually, of course, I learned that mind-body dualism is mainly a Greek idea, imposed on a much more materialistic Biblical conception of resurrection.  My fascination with resurrection really drove me to think of human persons as entirely physical human animals.  I rejected mind-body dualism when I was a teenager.  After college, and after I left Christianity, I was a computer scientist for nearly a decade.  One day I picked up Hans Moravec’s book “Mind Children”, and I was struck by the similarities of his ideas to my earlier Biblical ideas about resurrection.  He introduced me to many of the more religious aspects of computer science.

Digital Afterlives

Sudduth: Lots of people tend to presume that if they’re going to survive death or have some kind of life after death, they must be an immaterial being or at least a being whose consciousness has the capacity to continue without any material substrate. In other words, people think that given materialist assumptions, if the brain dies, then it’s unlikely that the mind will survive. How does this view overlook other possibilities?

ecs-nycSteinhart: When it comes to life after death, so many people are caught up in Cartesian mind-body dualism.  So they overlook other options. They forget that material things like brains and bodies have forms.  Material particles are arranged in certain ways to make brains and bodies, and the arrangement carries information.  The form or structure of the body encodes information.  So the main alternative to mind-body dualism is based on information.  Since it’s based on information, it’s a computational view of human animals.  We’re purely material things, but our materiality encodes a form.  This form is analogous to a computer program.  Our bodies are therefore like biological computing machines which run person-programs.  Our programs are abstract objects.  They are like mathematical objects, such as numbers, or functions from numbers to numbers.  Since this view is inspired by digital computing, it can be referred to as digitalism.

Following Plato, our person-programs exist eternally.  When you are alive, your person-program is instantiated by your body, which runs that program.  When you die, your person-program ceases to be run.  But your person-program can be run again, later, by some new body.  On this view, you don’t survive death; nobody survives death.  You can’t live through death.  But you can live again after you die.  This sort of view is found in the old Stoic doctrine of the eternal return of the same: on the next cosmic cycle, your person-program will be run again.  The Stoics thought your old person-program would run again in exactly the same way, thus exactly reproducing your life.  But that’s not necessary: on the next cosmic cycle, your circumstances can vary, so that your person-program runs differently, and your next life differs from your previous life.  This idea about person-programs running again after death seems to be a good interpretation of early Christian ideas about the resurrection of the body.  The early Christian doctrines about resurrection were materialistic. Nobody survives death.  But God knows the form of your body – God knows your person-program.  So, when you are resurrected, God just makes a new biocomputer that runs your person-program again.  Resurrection is recreation.  This also seems to be a good way to understand early Theravadic Buddhist ideas about rebirth.

Sudduth: Somewhat related to the prior question, it’s fairly common for people who are contemplating a life after death to conceptualize life after death as the persistence or continuation of an individual self, some notion of personal survival.  Some earlier philosophers, C.D. Broad and H.H. Price for example, argued that we might also suppose that it’s only some aspect of our psychological profile that will continue after death, even if it falls short of being a self or at least the same self that ceased to exist at death. Could you say a bit more about this latter possibility?

Steinhart: Digitalism says that you won’t survive death.  Of course, some parts of you can survive death.  You might be preserved as a mummy.  Or parts of your body might be preserved like the relics of the saints.  Your bones and skull could persist in a crypt.  Or your DNA might be taken from your corpse and used to make a clone.  That clone would carry lots of information about you.  But it wouldn’t carry your epigenetic information or the information encoded in the interconnections between your nerve cells.  It would be a partial version of you. But now we leave lots of data about ourselves behind on our personal computers, on social media websites.  So an artificially intelligent deep learning algorithm could read your Facebook page, all your emails, your cell phone text messages, and all the data on your personal computer, and it could use all that data to build an approximation to your mind.  It would be a partial version of you.  This would be a crude replica.  But these replicas can be made more accurate. 

The limit of the series of ever better approximations is a replica that exactly duplicates all your information.  It’s far more than mere psychology. Human animals are far more than minds.  The mind is just the part of the body that computes; not all of the body computes.  (Of course, parts of the body that don’t compute can be simulated by computers.)  So to be human is to be more than merely psychological.  If there were purely psychological entities, they wouldn’t be human.  An exact replica of you is functionally equivalent to your whole body.  It is functionally indiscernible from your body.  Of course, it’s a just a copy.  A copy is never identical with its original.  Early theories of the resurrection of the body in Judaism and Christianity were replica theories.  They involved the reassembly of the atoms in your body to make a replica of your body.

Digitalism implies that, after you die, something will exist which is functionally equivalent to your body.  Your person-program will run again on some new machine.  It will be a new human animal, realized, perhaps, in very new physics.  But it will be realized in an environment which is functionally very similar to your present environment.  This is just a consequence of the evolution of complexity: evolution produces sequences of patterns.  Old patterns get recycled into new patterns.  Simpler patterns evolve into more complex versions of themselves.  And this happens at every scale, from quarks to universes.  Your person-program, which is just the abstract functionality of your body, is just another pattern.  It is caught up in the evolutionary logic of pattern production.

Mind-Body Dualism and Parapsychology

Sudduth: Lots of parapsychologists oppose or are at least highly critical of materialist philosophies of mind, or even the idea that consciousness depends on a functioning brain (or some sort of material substrate).  One of the motivations here is the very deeply entrenched belief that materialism or mind-brain dependency can’t account for evidence allegedly suggestive of psychic functioning, be it extra-sensory perception or psychokinesis.  In fact, some parapsychologists think the evidence for psychic functioning is evidence against materialism or mind-brain dependency. You have any thoughts on this?

Steinhart: I think the motivation behind parapsychology is terror management (in the sense of terror management theory).  Death evokes terror; to reduce that terror, some people turn to occult theories of persons.  Mind-body dualism is an occult theory of persons.  Parapsychology is part of the occult theory of persons.  I regard parapsychology as a pseudo-science.  Like other pseudo-sciences, it doesn’t have any theory of its own assertions.  Its claims about mind aren’t even false – they’re meaningless.   For instance, how does extra-sensory perception (ESP) work?  Since it has to involve a flow of information, it falls under information theory.  Some channel exists through which information flows at some rate.  Some number of bits are transmitted and received.  So a theory of how ESP works will involve channels and bits.  It will also involve concepts like entropy and mutual entropy.  Sometimes you find parapsychologists using terms from information theory.  But it’s always vague.  Here’s what you never find: a system of equations.  Dualists, and parapsychologists, never formulate mathematically precise theories of immaterial minds or of psychic functioning.

For well over two thousand years, dualists have been offering their occult theories of persons.  And what do they have to show for it?  Nothing.  Dualists have produced no useful results at all about immaterial minds.  At most they can do some very restricted kinds of introspective psychology.  But introspective psychology is almost entirely worthless.  There are no technologies based on psychic functioning.  Dualism hasn’t led to treatments for mental illnesses.  Dualism is a purely negative theory of what it means to be human.  It is a way of perverting the meaning of human being.  Frightened by death, dualists turn away from the body.  They posit a negative image of the body, that is, an immaterial mind.  This mind is precious to them. The concept of the immaterial mind is a fetish.  By means of ritual inscriptions, the immaterial mind is given an aura and saturated with mana. It has to be shrouded in mystery.  You can’t look at it or touch it.  It is sacred, and its sacredness needs to be protected from scientific examination, which would make it profane.

The immaterial mind is a shadow-person.  It really is a ghost, meaning that it is a purely social construct produced and sustained by fear.  If you start to challenge dualists, or those who believe in parapsychology, what you’ll quickly discover is that they panic.  They become highly aroused and extremely defensive.  They start to repeat the same statements over and over again.  They talk about quantum mechanics, or the hard problem of consciousness, or qualia, and so on.  But they don’t understand quantum mechanics.  Or they don’t understand the philosophy.  They repeat themselves without explaining anything.  They are not actually engaging in the rational defense of their ideas: they’re chanting.  They’re repeating protective spells.  They use concepts from the sciences and philosophy like magic words. The words have no meanings; they cannot be logically analyzed; rather, the words are sounds used in incantations. Dualism really does belong with the occult, in the sense of magic.  Anthropologists have studied magic.  And that anthropological study applies to dualism.

Still, it’s hard for me to understand the hostility to materialist theories of mind.  Materialism has produced detailed and comprehensive descriptions of our minds; it has helped us heal mental illnesses.  But even more: materialism is beautiful.  Just take a look at molecular psychology.  Look at molecules like mirtazapine or psilocybin.  Look at how they bind to receptors.  It’s gorgeous!  All that detail, all that complexity, all that computation!  To turn away from materialism is to turn away from mentality.  Dualists hate the mind.  They hate its reality and want to replace that reality with an empty fiction.  The really shocking thing is just how empty that fiction really is.  Dualists have nothing to say about minds.  I think dualists actually hate mentality.  They despise the mind. 

On Paranormal Phenomena

Sudduth: As you know, in my 2016 book on survival I offered a critique of a particular empirical approach to survival, the attempt to argue in favor of survival on the basis of certain ostensibly paranormal phenomena. For example, I discuss verifiable claims to past-life memories and closely-related phenomena seemingly suggestive of reincarnation.  I also examine mental and trance mediumship, where mediums – who profess to communicate with the dead – have detailed information about the deceased and are sometimes able to convey this information through convincing life-like personations of the deceased.

Traditionally, the arguments for survival based on the data collected from these phenomena tend to rest on substance dualist commitments. At any rate, it’s widely assumed that if these data are evidence for survival or life after death, then physicalism must be false.

Now, to the extent that the data concern the persistence of the psychological profile of some formerly living person, or some significant aspect of their psychology, it’s not obvious to me that a physicalist model such as digitalism can’t accommodate these data in principle.  Your thoughts on this?

Steinhart: Digitalism doesn’t require computers to be material.  The definition of a Turing machine, for example, doesn’t involve any matter.  Logic gates, and networks of logic gates, can be as immaterial as you please.  Likewise connectionist models of massively parallel distributed processing systems can be immaterial.  You can develop precise mathematical theories of immaterial information processing machines of any degree of complexity you like.   And you could go on to define ways those machines would interact with materially realized computers.  Of course, this would involve writing out systems of equations.  It would involve describing lawful interactions among different kinds of systems.  Digitalism does not rule out immaterial minds.  But it requires that those minds be described in precise mathematical terms.  It requires lawful regularities.  On the basis of those lawful regularities, you can do science and build technologies. 

But this is where the conflict with the paranormal starts.  Paranormal phenomena never fall into lawful patterns.  They never exhibit lawlike regularities.  They never appear in patterns which are reliably reproducible.  But that’s what data is.  Data is information that you can reliably gather, in reproducible experiments.   So there really isn’t any such thing as data in parapsychology or the study of the paranormal.  Paranormal phenomena are always noise, never signal.  They can’t be reliably reproduced.  They can’t be used to make any technologies.  There are no laws which describe those phenomena or how they occur.

For a digitalist, sure, there could be mediums.  When you die, your person-program could be run by an immaterial computing machine.  It would be functionally isomorphic to your body.  It would be a kind of immaterial animal.  And there could be information channels linking these immaterial animals to material humans.  But all of that would be lawlike.  There would be equations which describe the channels.  There would be scientifically describable structures in the brains of mediums, structures tuned to receive information from immaterial computers.  There would be textbooks filled with equations.  You could train to be a medium.  Mediums would be able to communicate with the dead reliably, on command, in precisely defined ways.  None of this would be mysterious or controversial.  It would be as reliable as cell phones

So why does the so-called data about the paranormal fail to fall into lawful patterns?  Why is it always noise and never signal?  The answer comes, again, from terror management theory.  They body falls under lawful regularities; it is a structure which exhibits mathematical patterning.  But the immaterial minds of the dualists, the occultists, and the parapsychologists are fetish objects created as magical protections against the fear of death.  They are purely imaginary objects which cannot exist within any lawful structures at all.  They cannot exist within any patterns, because the patterns would subject them to real constraints.  They would stop being sacred, and would become profane.  Microsoft would start to produce software that would let your computer talk to the dead.  There would be industries devoted to it.  Money would change hands.  Death would cease to be shrouded in its mysterious aura; its mana would be gone.  So all paranormal phenomena have to be relegated to the noise.  They have to inhabit the shadow-land of uncertainty.  They have to be irregularities.  Magic requires fear; fear requires uncertainty; and uncertainty is noise.

Digitalism and Testability

Sudduth: Beyond their traditional entanglement in the rejection of physicalism, a more serious problem – indeed a core problem – I find with the empirical arguments for survival from psychical research is that a simple supposition of souls or consciousness surviving death wouldn’t lead us to expect the relevant data, even most generally described.  So, to accommodate the data, we must bulk up the idea of survival with various auxiliary assumptions – for example, the assumption that at least some survivors would retain a significant amount of their memories, interests, desires, and other personality traits characteristic of their antemortem existence, as well as possess the capacity to interact with the physical world.  The problem is that there are many ways the life after death narrative could go.  While some of these narratives would accommodate the data, most of them would not. There seems to be no (non-circular) justification for favoring the narrow band of requisite auxiliaries over the many alternatives.

Now I have to wonder whether this problem of auxiliary assumption selection isn’t less of a problem given digitalism.  And here it seems like there are two salient points.

First, generally it seems that it’s going to rest on assumptions that are in principle testable, for the production of mental states by brain processes (or some similar physical process) seems testable in ways that the purported relationship between mental states and an immaterial soul isn’t.  

Second, if we are material machines running abstract person programs, and psychological continuity is fundamentally informational continuity, it would seem that we could (at least some point) say what kind of patterns produce and sustain particular aspects of our psychology. This would lead us to expect certain continuities in psychological profile given the replication of the organizational material structures.

Steinhart: Digitalism aims to be precise, and to be precise in scientific ways.  It is developed out of the sciences of information, computation, and complexity.  So of course digitalists are at least functionalists about minds: if you make an artificial machine that is functionally equivalent to a brain, it will do what the brain does.  Of course, you’ve got to embed that system in something that is functionally equivalent to a body, such as an artificial robot, or a virtual reality world.  You’ve got to replicate the physicality of the flesh, and the physicality of its environment.  But the claims of digitalism are, as you say, empirically testable.  We’re testing them all the time as we build digital technologies, and as we study the brain.  And so far, all the tests are being passed, every day.  We can and do make artificial replicas of neural networks.  And those replicas perform the predicted functions.  We build artificial vision systems, artificial pattern recognition systems, all based on the study of the brain.  Unlike dualism, digitalism produces useful results.

Digitalism and Reincarnation

Sudduth: In your paper “Digital Afterlives,” you discuss “digital reincarnation.” Can you explain the basic features of this alternative model of reincarnation and how it differs from traditional reincarnation views?

Steinhart: Reincarnation theories usually say the same soul gets repeatedly embodied in different bodies.  It seems to require a soul-body or mind-body dualism.  Often these dualisms are substance dualisms, so that the soul is made of some kind of immaterial stuff.  There’s no need to be a substance dualist in order to talk about reincarnation.  If you copy data from one computer to another, that data gets reincarnated on the new computer.  So if you copy the structure of your brain or body into some software body in some virtual reality like a video game, or into software running on some robot, that’s digital reincarnation.  There’s no evidence that people get reincarnated on this earth, and it doesn’t even make much sense to talk about a human being reincarnated as an non-human animal or vice versa.  But some traditional Eastern theories of reincarnation talk about reincarnation across universes.  If you’ve got a multiverse, this becomes possible.  So the soul is the form of the body, and reincarnation is just reinstantiation.

It’s interesting to think of ways karma might be involved in digital reincarnation.  It might work in cases of multiverse reincarnation, where your body-pattern (that is, your soul) gets reinstantiated in some other body.  Karma is often thought of as punitive or retributive: an eye for an eye.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  The spiritist followers of Kardec, for instance, advocated a progressive sort of karma, in which you are progressively learning moral lessons.  This isn’t retributive punishment, rather, it’s reformation or rehabilitation.  Karma is corrective rather than punitive.  There are lots of interesting ethical ideas here.

Recommendations for Further Reading

Sudduth: What three papers or books – your own or others – would you recommend to people who want to explore digitalism and life after death but who don’t have a very deep background in philosophy or science?

Steinhart: Hans Moravec, Mind Children; Eric Steinhart, Your Digital Afterlives; John Hick, Death and Eternal Life

Sudduth: Thanks for the conversation, Eric. As Jimi Hendrix once said, “If I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one. Don’t be late.”

[*] Steinhart, Your Digital Afterlives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xii.

Correspondence with Bruce Leininger

Leininger Soul SurvivorIn my article on the James Leininger case (forthcoming, the Journal of Scientific Exploration), I refer to correspondence I had with Bruce Leininger as part of my investigation into the case. Due to the length of my JSE paper, I was not able to include my emails to Bruce as appendices to the article. However, I believe the content of these emails is important, though this is likely to be more apparent after readers have my JSE article in hand.

Below I reproduce my last email to Bruce. The email is dated 9/27/21. It was a resend, with attached note, of my previous email to Bruce dated 8/28/21. The email involves a series of questions and follow-up queries related to materials Bruce had said he would look for. Bruce had responded to an earlier email, then without explanation ceased communicating with me.

Brief background. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, Bruce extended an informal invitation to me through a third party to come to Lafayette, Louisiana to view documents and discuss the case with him. The pandemic put this on hold. I also temporarily suspended my research on the case due to personal circumstances and new teaching assignments related to the pandemic.

In late 2020, I resumed my investigation of the case. I postponed connecting with Bruce until I had conducted interviews with several other individuals and completed reviewing interviews others had with the Leiningers. I wanted a good handle on the case before speaking with Bruce.

I wrote Bruce an introductory email on June 5, 2021. I explained that I was working on a chronology of events and had questions Jim Tucker couldn’t answer but which he (Bruce) was best situated to answer for me. Bruce didn’t answer my June 5 email, so I wrote him a follow-up on July 9, 2021. He responded to my email the same day. He answered several questions and said he would get back to me with answers to others, as well as look for specific documents I had requested. Alas, Bruce would never get back to me.

I replied to Bruce on July 10, thanking him for his response and giving him a brief background on my interest in questions concerning postmortem survival. After not receiving a reply to my July 10 email, I wrote Bruce again on August 28, 2021. Again, I received no response. I wrote a follow-up on September 27, 2021. As of today (12/4/21), he has not responded. And, at this point, I’m not expecting to hear from him anytime soon.

The correspondence I reproduce below is my email to Bruce Leininger dated September 27, 2021, which also includes my previous 8/28/21 email. The only redactions are the omission of our email addresses and the name of a former ABC producer with whom I spoke. Naturally, my questions suggest a few things about the content of my forthcoming JSE paper. However, my intention here is simply to document supporting material I reference in the JSE paper.

M.S.

Explanatory notes:

In my email to Bruce Leininger, I make reference to Jim Tucker. I have discussed the James Leininger case with Jim Tucker since 2019. My interest in developing a robust chronology of events was partly the consequence of Tucker declining the request I made to him in December 2019 to send me a detailed chronology. His work responsibilities at the time prevented this, though he was willing to review any chronology I put together. We had many subsequent email exchanges about the case, mostly in 2021. And Tucker and I met for a two-hour zoom session in September 2021. At that time I disclosed to him some of my findings and concerns about the case. I invited him to write a response to my JSE paper.

Question (1) in the email below concerns Andrea Leininger’s correspondence with past-life researcher and therapist Carol Bowman. My question makes reference to “summer of 2000.” The timeframe here was prompted by what Bruce had said in his earlier email to me, and he had in previous presentations of the case used “summer 2000” as the general timeframe for Bowman’s initial involvement with the Leiningers. Bowman subsequently confirmed with me that her correspondence with Andrea Leininger began in February 2001, not summer 2000. 

September 27, 2021 Email to Bruce Leininger

Begin forwarded message:

From: Michael Sudduth <…………………. >

Subject: Research Query – Follow Up

Date: September 27, 2021 at 3:24:45 PM PDT

To: Bruce Leininger <………………..>

Hi Bruce:

Hope you’re well.

Just sending you a follow-up email to the one I sent you about a month ago. Earlier email is below with the questions I had and check-in on some items you were going to look up for me.

Thanks,

Michael

Begin forwarded message:

From: Michael Sudduth <……………..…>

Subject: Re: Research Query – Follow Up

Date: August 28, 2021 at 4:17:44 PM PDT

To: Bruce Leininger <……………….…>

Hi Bruce:

I’m just following up on your earlier helpful email. I see there’s a hurricane heading toward LA. Be safe. You’ve got a hurricane. Here in Northern California, we have fire, smoke, and a lot of ash.

Let me see if I can distill the questions we were discussing earlier. Most of these relate to my working out a detailed chronology of events, especially between February 2000 and late fall of 2002.

(1) You were going to look for the correspondence Andrea had with Carol Bowman, the earliest correspondence. I realize the summer of 2000 was a long time ago, but I’d be interested in looking at that correspondence to help fill out some details for a robust chronology of events.

(2) Do you have a DVD copy of the 2002 ABC TV program that never aired? <……………..> was the producer. I spoke with her and she indicated that ABC would be reluctant to grant access to the show because it was unaired (a bunch of liability issues), but that I’d have better luck asking you or Jim Tucker (whom I’m also asking).

(3) In connection with the 2002 ABC program, Tucker informed me that the segment on James didn’t include his giving the name “Natoma” or “Jack Larsen,” which is why Tucker didn’t include those important items in his list of claims documented in the interviews of the 2002 program. Do you recall why <……….> didn’t include those important details of what James had said to you and Andrea?

(4) After the 2000 Memorial Day visit to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum, did you ever take James back there again? If so, do you remember the approximate dates?

(5) You said you were going to look in your computer files for any early chronologies you put together. I believe you prepared one for John DeWitt and/or his daughter in fall 2003. Perhaps you can locate a copy of that, or any others you put together closer in time to the events.

(6) Do you know anything about Vintage Wings and Things that was located in Lafayette, LA. It was owned by David Jeansonne – a collector of vintage planes and cars – who unfortunately died in an aviation accident near Lafayette in February 2001.

(7) On page 174 of Soul Survivor, you make reference to a summer trip to Hawaii when James was four (hence summer 2002). Did you take him to the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum?

Thanks, Bruce.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Michael Sudduth

Crash and Burn: James Leininger Story Debunked

James Leininger Reincarnation

“Debunk (verb): to show that something is less important, less good, or less true than it has been made to appear.” – Cambridge English Dictionary

Beginning at age two in the spring of 2000, James Leininger began exhibiting behaviors and making claims that his parents later believed resembled the life and death of World War II fighter pilot James Huston, Jr.  Over several years, James Leininger provided information about World War II, especially fighter planes, as well as specific details that seemed to match facts about Huston’s life.

The James Leininger story came to public attention in 2004. ABC Primetime featured the Leiningers’ story with Chris Cuomo as the correspondent. Shortly thereafter the story became all the rage. Various mainstream news networks have featured the story. It’s garnered waves of attention on social media, including dozens of glowing commentaries on YouTube. Then in 2009 Bruce and Andrea Leininger published Soul Survivor. In their book, the Leiningers  document the alleged evidence that their son is the reincarnation of Huston. After the publication of Soul Survivor, leading reincarnation researcher Jim Tucker investigated the case. In his blurb for the Leiningers’ book, Tucker said it’s a “spectacular example of the phenomenon of young children who seem to remember previous lives.”

The James Leininger story remains popular. The 2021 Netflix series Surviving Death featured it in episode six of the series. Scholarly attention, too. In November 2021 the Bigelow Institute announced that it had awarded Bruce Leininger $20,000 for an essay allegedly presenting the story of his son as the “best evidence” for life after death. Mr. Leininger goes as far as to call his story “definitive proof of reincarnation.”

James Leininger – Evidence for Reincarnation?

On the face of it, the Leininger case exhibits many of the strengths of an ideal case of the reincarnation type. First, the case involves a young child in western culture making veridical claims that seem to fit the life of a formerly living person. Second,  the Leiningers documented many of James’s claims before they identified James Huston, Jr. as the presumed previous personality. Third, James Leininger exhibited behavioral patterns resembling the alleged previous personality. Not surprisingly, many researchers and people who believe in life after death regard this case as one of the best documented cases of reincarnation.

Alas, it’s no such thing.

The James Leininger story is not “definitive proof” of reincarnation. It’s not the “best evidence” for reincarnation. It isn’t even modest evidence for reincarnation. It’s no evidence at all for reincarnation, unless, of course, we wish to trivialize the entire concept of evidence. 

There can, of course, be an appearance of evidence for any claim. Such appearances are often psychologically compelling. Be unaware of counter-evidence. Rely on falsehoods and factual distortions. Deploy fallacious or implausible reasoning. This easily makes what is false appear to be true. But what does not survive critical scrutiny should not be regarded as true. Such is the case with the James Leininger story. It doesn’t survive critical scrutiny. Whatever else it might be, it’s not evidence for reincarnation.

My Two-Year Investigation

I first read about the James Leininger case while writing my 2016 book on survival. I began a detailed investigation of the case in 2019. Between 2019 and 2021 I interviewed over a dozen people. I also acquired important documentation concerning the alleged facts of the case. I developed a detailed chronology of the alleged events based on multiple sources. Unlike other chronologies, my chronology includes a variety of contextual details. These include facts concerning plausible, if not obvious, ordinary sources of information which shaped James’s experiences, behaviors, and claims.

On January 17, 2022, the Journal of Scientific Exploration published my 34,000-word critical report on this case – “The James Leininger Case Re-examined” (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2021). My paper is available on the JSE website Journal of Scientific Exploration and on my Cup of Nirvana website “The James Leininger Case Re-examined” (PDF).

My report also provides an analysis of the impact of my findings on Jim Tucker’s favorable assessment of this case. Tucker is a leading researcher on children who claim to have past-life memories. He is also the Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), University of Virginia Health System. Tucker’s investigation of the Leininger case is one of many such investigations Tucker and his DOPS’s colleagues have conducted over the years. They’re responsible for thousands of published pages documenting and analyzing such cases. Other researchers regularly cite the cases in the database at DOPS in their own work. And they cite Tucker’s analyses and conclusions.

Why the James Leininger Story is not Credible

The James Leininger story may seem credible, until you dig a little deeper. Things are not as the Leiningers present them. Their story is based on falsehoods, factual distortions, and fallacious reasoning. Here’s an outline of some of the case’s credibility problems. In my paper I develop and support these points with considerable testimonial, written, and photographic evidence. 

Falsehoods about James’s Experience

Ordinary sources of information which shaped James’s experience, behavior, and claims loom large in this case. Understandably so. As ordinary sources of information increase, the need for an exotic explanation in terms of reincarnation decreases. This is why reincarnation investigators and researchers attempt to rule out such sources. It’s also why the Leiningers have emphasized that nothing James saw or heard could have influenced him. They know their reincarnation story depends on this. And this is where their story, not even half told, already collapses under the weight of modest critical scrutiny.

  • The Leiningers have repeatedly denied that their son James was exposed to videos or images of planes on fire or combat scenes prior. Specifically, he allegedly didn’t see such images proximate to his nightmares of being a pilot trapped in a burning plane. This is false, and my paper discloses the sources and their content. These include the content of videos James watched and aviation museums he visited.
  • The Leiningers have attributed to James nearly two-dozen behaviors and claims occurring between 2000 and 2002. They claim that nothing James saw or read or heard could have influenced these behaviors or claims. This is false, and my paper discloses the sources and their content. The content of videos, aviation museums, and aviation events James participated in play an important role here.
  • The Leiningers indicate that they followed the advice of past-life therapist Carol Bowman. She instructed them to tell their son that what he was experiencing in his nightmares were events that had happened to him before. According to the Leiningers’ official 2009 narrative, they initially connected with Bowman in winter 2001. In the context of the Leiningers’ wider chronology of events, this was six to eight months after James began making specific past-life claims. This obviously raises the concern that the Leiningers, following Bowman’s advice, (unwittingly) influenced the evolving reincarnation narrative.

Narrative Redactions, Adjustments, and Alternative Facts

The James Leininger story nearly everyone knows about is a story the Leiningers evolved over many years beginning in 2002. They altered their story in multiple ways in the light of what they later discovered. Consequently, there really isn’t one James Leininger story. There are multiple versions of the story, and they contradict each other in crucial ways.

The narrative the Leiningers present in their 2009 book Soul Survivor is heavily redacted. The versions of the story they presented between 2002 and 2005 significantly differ from later iterations. These include changes to what James allegedly said and when he said it. Moreover, the changes represented in the 2009 account were made only after the Leiningers had discovered pertinent facts about the life and death of James Huston, Jr. The changes to the narrative result in a better fit with facts about the life and death of the alleged previous personality James Huston, Jr. The official Leininger story is a constructed narrative, crafted to fit facts the Leiningers later learned about James Huston.

Misrepresenting the Circumstances of James Huston’s Death

The Leiningers claim to present historical documentation concerning the circumstances of the death of World War II fighter pilot James M. Huston, Jr. The documentation is important because it allegedly confirms the claims the Leiningers attribute to their son. The changes to the claims the Leiningers attribute to their son provide a better fit with the facts. But the Leiningers also systematically misrepresent the content of primary-source documents and mask material that contradicts their narrative. They misquote or misrepresent several World War II documents and suppress the most detailed 1945 account of Huston’s death. As a result, they bury crucial facts that disconfirm their story. I present these facts and their historical documentation.

Jim Tucker’s Defective Investigation and Analysis

The credibility problems outlined above are not limited to the Leinigners’ version of their story. It extends to Jim Tucker’s presentation and analysis. Tucker investigated this case in 2010, after the Leiningers had published their book. Thereafter Tucker provided a favorable analysis of the case in multiple publications, including a 2016 case report. There are many YouTube videos of Tucker’s lectures in which he discusses the case. (See Tucker video 2016 @35:22, and Tucker video 2020 @42:58.) However, Tucker’s investigation of the case and his subsequent favorable analysis of it fails to consider any of the points above. They weren’t even on his radar. Tucker didn’t uncover the ordinary sources of information that shaped this case. His account also depends on considerable fact-fudging and historical inaccuracies. And he trusts the Leiningers as his primary witnesses. Consequently, Tucker’s claim that this case provides evidence for reincarnation is unwarranted.

The Importance of Conscientious Inquiry

Bruce Leininger has consistently portrayed himself as a skeptic who found the light. This has been one of the sexy selling points of the Leiningers’ story. But Bruce Leininger was never a skeptic. He initially rejected reincarnation – said it was “bullshit” – because of his conservative Christian beliefs. So, he rejected one bad idea because he accepted another bad idea. This isn’t skepticism. He later came to accept both bad ideas for no apparently good reason at all. This isn’t an illustration of a defeated skeptic. It’s an example of a lack of conscientiousness.

The James Leininger narrative is not evidence for the rebirth of a pilot who took his last flight on March 3, 1945. It’s a fiction James’s parents exaggerated into a robust narrative over several years. It’s a compelling story, yes. But not of reincarnation. It’s a compelling story of how confabulation, poor critical thinking skills, and a lack of attention to ordinary sources of information can converge to give the appearance of something remarkable but which is utterly pedestrian.

The habit of drawing bogus inferences from alternative facts has become all too common in our culture. The James Leininger story is a sad example of how this malady has infected inquiry into important questions surrounding consciousness and the prospects for life after death. I applaud Robert Bigelow’s interest in securing the best evidence for life after death. But this search leads nowhere unless we’re clear about what is not good evidence for life after death. This is how we cultivate conscientiousness in our inquiries into matters of ultimate importance. And it’s only conscientiousness that prevents us from promoting bullshit. And by “bullshit” here I mean bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense – that is, any speech act that does not have a proper regard for truth. “Bullshit” in this sense is not used as a term of abuse, but as a way to refer to a particular deceptive use of language (see Hary Frankfurt, On Bullshit.)

Blog Update 1/17/2022

In November 2021, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) awarded Bruce Leininger $20,000 for an essay in which he re-presented his nearly two-decade old story. BICS subsequently published his paper Consciousness Survives Physical Death: ‘Definitive Proof’ of Reincarnation.

On January 17, 2022 I published a detailed critique of Mr. Leininger’s prize-winning essay: Bruce Leininger’s ‘Definitive Proof’ of Reincarnation. This is a supplement to my longer JSE piece. 

Further Updates Spring 2022

In the spring 2022 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I provide a response to Jim Tucker’s reponse to my Leininger paper. Tucker’s reply further illustrates the  logical deficiencies that vitiate his discussions of the Leininger case elsewhere.

“Response to Jim Tucker,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, 36:1 (2022) 

Revised 2/07/2024

Interview on Arguments for Life after Death

Carlos Alvarado recently published an interview with me in his blog. The focus of the interview was my 2015 book on arguments for life after death – A Philosophical Critique of Arguments for Postmortem Survival (Palgave Macmillan, 2015). With Alvarado’s permission I have reproduced the interview below for my blog readers.

Interview

Alvarado: Can you give us a brief summary of the book?

Sudduth: The main objective of my book is to offer a critique of arguments for life after death. There are lots of arguments of this sort. I focus specifically on arguments based on data drawn from phenomena associated with near-death and out-of-body experiences, mediumship, and cases of the reincarnation type. I refer to these arguments as classical empirical arguments for survival.

Unlike other skeptical assessments of such arguments, my critique doesn’t challenge the alleged facts on which the arguments are based, nor do I argue that there is no life after death. Instead, I explore the kinds of assumptions the classical arguments require if they are to succeed in doing what their advocates claim on their behalf, namely, provide good evidence for survival. I argue that we have no good reason to accept these assumptions. Consequently, the classical arguments do not provide good evidence for personal survival.

That’s a general way of stating what I argue, but there are two more specific tiers of argument that make up the structure of my book. To understand these arguments, we should first be clear on what survivalists themselves have claimed about the case for survival. First, there’s an evidential probability claim: postmortem survival has a favorable net probability/plausibility based on the salient facts. In other words, survival is at least more probable than not, if not highly probable relative to the total evidence. Second, there’s an explanatory claim: survival provides the best explanation of the relevant facts. The two claims are interrelated because survivalists often assume that explanatory merit has evidential cash-value. They argue that survival is probable or very probable because it provides the best explanation of the data.

I argue that survivalists haven’t provided a good enough reason to believe either of the two main claims (in italics) above. Here it’s important to emphasize that I don’t argue that survival is not the best explanation of the data, nor that survival is improbable. I only argue that survivalists have failed to make good on their claims. Why? Because the arguments necessarily depend on assumptions that (1) we have no good reason to accept and (2) would be self-defeating to the case for survival, even if we accepted them.

What are these assumptions?

First, there are general assumptions about what the evidence for survival should look like. In the absence of such assumptions, there’s no plausible inference from features of the world to the claim that persons survive death. In much the same way, if I don’t know (or reasonably believe) what the evidence that Mr. X committed the crime should look like, I can’t plausibly regard any crime-scene fact as evidence that Mr. X committed the crime.

But second – and most fundamentally – there are fine-grained assumptions about what consciousness would probably be like if it should survive death. Without these assumptions, we could not say with any reasonable degree of assurance what would count as evidence for the survival of consciousness. These include assumptions about the memories, desires, intentions, and continuing perceptual and causal powers of surviving consciousness, as well as the conditions under which such powers can be exercised. I call these auxiliary assumptions since they’re not intrinsic to postulating the mere continuation of individual consciousness after death.

Since this is a crucial part of my argument, let me clarify. In postulating personal survival we’re postulating the persistence of consciousness and everything essential to individual consciousness. This includes whatever mental processes or content underwrites our sense of self. But this is logically consistent with the persistence of very little autobiographical memory or none at all. Nor is this a mere theoretical possibility. It’s precisely what happens in dream states, dissociative fugue, and other forms of amnesia. And what’s true of memory here is also true of our wider psychology – for example, our desires, intentions, personality traits, and skills. The content in consciousness is very fluid even over short periods of time, as are its behavioral manifestations. So, even if we suppose that postmortem consciousness is likely to exhibit the same general features antemortem consciousness exhibits, we really can’t say with any reasonable degree of assurance what we should expect survival evidence to look like in any particular case. We only get there by making further assumptions.

So simple survival does not logically entail (nor make probable) a surviving self that retains all the right stuff: the stock of memories, desires, intentions, and perceptual abilities and causal powers required for ongoing lifelike interactions with our world and that would justify identifying a person as the same as (or the continuation of) some previous personality. We need auxiliary assumptions to bulk up a generic or simple survival hypothesis (or theory) into a more conceptually robust hypothesis (or theory) that can plausibly account for the data.

I argue that simple survival – postulating the mere persistence of individual consciousness after death – explains nothing because there’s no fact about the world it would lead us to expect or not to expect. For example, simple survival doesn’t lead us to expect on-going veridical perceptions of our world, causal interactions with our world, or any of the individual memory and personality features the data allegedly exhibit and that survival is invoked to explain.

What’s needed is a robust survival hypothesis, but that’s problematic. There are lots of assumptions we can make about what surviving consciousness might be like. After all, as explained above, consciousness in our antemortem state is highly variable, even for the same person. But the assumptions we make about what postmortem consciousness will be like affects the extent to which the data are what we would expect if survival is true. That in turn affects the explanatory power of the survival hypothesis. At present there’s no rational basis for privileging survival assumptions that would lead us to expect the data, and no rational basis for favoring such assumptions over alternative assumptions – equally consistent with survival – that would not lead us to expect the data.

But also, there’s no sufficient reason for favoring the kinds of assumptions needed for a successful survival argument over the kinds of assumptions that would empower proposed counter-explanations of the data and thereby undermine survival arguments. For example, the assumptions that would empower living-agent psi explanations are no less reasonable than as those required for survival arguments. Survivalists will deny this parity, of course, but I’ve tried to show that this denial isn’t plausible.

It’s important to remember that the survival hypothesis will be the best explanation of the data only if it better explains the data than do alternative non-survival hypotheses. I argue that survival can’t explain the data without being bulked up, and it can’t be the best explanation of the data if it’s bulked up. Why the latter? Because the kinds of kinds of reasons survivalists adduce to rule out counter explanations also rule out a bulked-up survival hypothesis.

Let me illustrate the point. Take the standard two-tiered strategy to rule out the appeal to living-agent psychic functioning. On the one hand, survivalists like to point out that living-agent psi can’t account for persons possessing linguistic skills characteristic of a previous personality, the motivation for mediums to impersonate the deceased or confabulate communications with them, or – in cases of the reincarnation type – for persons possessing information about a pervious personality in the form of memories. On the other hand, when a living-agent psi hypothesis is bulked up with assumptions drawn from psychology regarding motivational dynamics, dissociative phenomena, rare mnemonic gifts, and the sudden manifestation of linguistic skills not previously evidenced, then survivalists complain that these assumptions are ad hoc, introduce unnecessary complexity, or lack adequate independent support.

As I see it, survivalists either exploit the explanatory limitations that trivially apply to a simple version of the living-agent psi hypothesis or they object to the assumptions used to bulk up such a hypothesis so that it can explain the data. I show that these objections are equally applicable (if not more so) to the assumptions required for any robust survival hypothesis to explain the data.

What’s especially important to appreciate here is how the survivalist is often engaged in a (perhaps unconscious) logical sleight of hand that masks the self-defeating nature of his reasoning. Survivalists routinely contrast a simple survival hypothesis and a robust living-agent psi hypothesis to show that living-agent psi – unlike survival – is overly complex and relies on assumptions that are ad hoc or lack independent support. But when survivalists wish to focus on the explanatory advantages of the survival hypothesis, they contrast a simple living-agent psi hypothesis (which explains very little) and a robust interpretation of survival. And they usually don’t acknowledge the conceptual cost of achieving the alleged explanatory advantages. As a result, they miss how the kind of survival hypothesis that adequately accommodates the data requires assumptions that are at least as complex, ad hoc, and lacking in the way of independent support as those adopted by the defender of the living-agent psi hypothesis in the interest of accommodating the data.

So, contrary to how some reviewers of my book have presented my position, I do not claim that living-agent psi is a better an explanation of the data, only that survivalists are in a particularly poor position to argue that it’s not. And the same holds for other counter-explanations of the data.

I apply similar considerations to argue that classical empirical arguments for survival as far back as C.J. Ducasse fail to show that survival is more probable than not, much less highly probable. I develop this line of argument in considerable detail using different models of evidential probability used in confirmation theory (the logic of evidence assessment). All three forms of survival argument I consider converge on the same basic conceptual problem: the unjustified inclusion and exclusion of auxiliary assumptions required to underwrite what survivalists have wanted to say on behalf of the survival hypothesis.

Alvarado: What is your background in parapsychology, and with the topic of the book specifically? 

Sudduth: I’m a philosopher by profession and academic training, with concentrations in epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. But I’ve had something of a life-long interest in anomalous phenomena, especially phenomena suggestive of survival, based on personal experiences and philosophical reflection.

I developed an interest in the work on survival by H.H. Price, C.D. Broad, and C.J. Ducasse after reading John Hick’s book Death and Eternal Life in graduate school at Oxford. When I started teaching philosophy and religion courses, I incorporated the topic of survival in a lot of my classes, eventually using it as a regular narrative in some of my classes for many years. During that time, I did the bulk of the research on the topical territory of my book.

While the book reading was helpful, I also benefited from a decade of conversations with parapsychologists and fellow philosophers who have worked and published on this topic. I’ve also joined parapsychologists on some field investigations over the years (with Loyd Auerbach, for example), and I’ve critically examined mediums firsthand. I’ve also personally experienced a broad range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena.

The first half of my academic career was devoted to applying developments in epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science in the exploration of questions in the justification religious belief and arguments for the existence of God. After my first book on this topic, I shifted my focus to life after death, philosophy of mind, and a broad range of issues in psychology.

I think my academic training in Anglo-American philosophy, together with an extensive educational and teaching background in Eastern and Western religious traditions, has enhanced my approach to the topic of survival.

Alvarado: What motivated you to write this book?

Sudduth: Three things.

First, it was the natural result of a decade-long inquiry during which time my views changed. I started as a survivalist who thought the arguments for survival were good. I became a survivalist who thought the arguments were defective upon closer scrutiny. I ended up concluding that the arguments were more defective than I initially thought, unable to accomplish what their proponents claim on their behalf. I’m no longer a survivalist – I neither affirm nor deny survival – though I remain open to future evidence persuading me. I suspect that evidence will come from cognitive neuroscience and technological developments in artificial intelligence, not parapsychology.

Second, following the lead of C.D. Broad and H.H. Price, I wanted to critically explore the conceptual aspects of reasoning about survival. The literature has emphasized the empirical dimensions of research, the so-called facts, but as is often the case it’s not the facts that divide people but the interpretation of the facts. I wanted to go right to that. That’s what philosophers do. We try to unearth the deeper strata of assumptions that drive a line of reasoning. This allows a more effective assessment of the coherence and plausibility of the underlying commitments and argumentation.

Third, and related to the above, I wanted to write a book that treated the topic with more logical rigor than has typically been the case in the literature over the past thirty years. Much of the literature, the bulk of it I’d say, is little more than a heap of facts and a hasty, if not opaque, inference to survival as being “probable” or “the best explanation.” Survivalists place far too much emphasis on how counter-explanations allegedly fail, but they’re deficient in showing how the survival hypothesis succeeds. Even the importance of this distinction is often not on their conceptual radar. As a philosopher, I’m interested in how we make good arguments and justify claims about evidence, probability, and the explanatory merit of hypotheses and theories. I’ve found the bulk of the literature at this juncture underwhelming at best.

It is unclear why survivalists have so frequently lacked logical rigor in their treatment of the topic. My charitable reading is that they’re calibrating their publications for popular consumption. That has its place of course, but it can become a liability, a conceptual bypass that sidesteps the crucial questions rather than advances the discussion with the appropriate critical scrutiny.

Alvarado: Why do you think your book is important and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Sudduth: I think the importance of my book is its approach. It’s a new approach to long-standing, widely discussed arguments. And it provides a new analysis of why the classical empirical arguments for survival are defective. I hope this will encourage survivalists and non-survivalists alike to recalibrate their arguments in the light of my critique. That’s a good way to move the dialogue forward.

Outside academic philosophy, the bulk of the literature on survival since the latter part of the 1960s has been almost exclusively focused on presenting data (allegedly suggestive of survival), but the literature has neglected to adequately engage a variety of conceptual issues involved in evidence assessment and explanatory reasoning. As a result, there’s been a disconnect between the data and the kind of argument that’s required to justifiably maintain that the data are good evidence for survival. My book addresses this head on.

Otherwise put, I’m addressing architectural or structural issues in the reasoning about survival. What’s required for survival to be the best explanation of the data? What’s required to “rule out” out counter-explanations? What does it even mean to rule out counter-explanations? When are we reasonable to conclude that evidence makes a hypothesis probable? When highly probable? What kinds of assumptions are built into such reasoning?

To be sure, other books have provided useful informal explorations of some of these questions, but they’ve neglected to dial-in some of the crucial conceptual issues – for example, the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis/theory testing and how this impacts the argument for survival.

But also, I’ve offered a rigorous formal treatment of the classical arguments for survival, something that Broad and Ducasse hinted at in their day. I’ve addressed the favorable probability claims made on behalf of survival by examining these claims through the lenses of the two most widely adopted models of evidential probability – Likelihoodism and Bayesianism. It’s somewhat surprising that survivalists haven’t already done this. After all, many of them rely on and invoke Bayesian principles – for example, referring to prior probabilities in trying to assess the total probability of survival relative to the evidence. And those who don’t invoke Bayesian principles typically rely on Likelihoodist principles, which provide a metric for determining when evidence favors one hypothesis over another.

Oddly, a few reviewers didn’t care for my deployment of the resources of confirmation theory, but they missed the implications of their own critique. As I show, it’s survivalists who tacitly or overtly rely on the assumptions that confirmation theory explicates and systematizes. The formal techniques of confirmation theory create no problems that aren’t already inherent in the informal assumptions about evidence. So if there’s a problem here, it’s a problem for survivalists who rely on Bayesian or Likelihoodist measures for assessing evidence. Naturally I agree that such assumptions make it difficult, if not impossible, for survivalists to justify their claims about the survival hypothesis. However, in the absence of arguments for survival that rely on different, more plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence and how we assess it, survivalist claims look more like wishes and hopes than the conclusions of serious argumentation.

I would also emphasize how my analysis provides results that are provocative and immune to the typical strategies survivalists deploy in defense of their arguments.

First, on my view, arguments for survival are challenged for reasons that have nothing to do with positions in philosophy of mind. This is important because survivalists routinely devote a lot of space to trying to debunk so-called materialist philosophies of mind. But neither my arguments nor their cogency depends on any particular position in philosophy of mind. For example, I argue that the classical arguments fail to show that survival is more probable than not, but without the assumption that materialism is true. In fact, my arguments work even if we assume that materialism is false.

Second, I show that survival arguments fail even if we don’t treat survival as antecedently improbable. Some prominent survivalists claim that critics of survival stack the deck by assigning a very low initial probability to the survival hypothesis. I don’t do that. For example, I show that the classical arguments will still fail to show that survival is more probable than not, even if we begin with the generous assumption that survival is as probable as not.

Third, survival arguments fail even if rival non-survival explanations are antecedently improbable. This is significant because some survivalists think rival explanations of the data can be reasonably invoked only if we assume that such explanations are initially plausible or even more plausible than survival. Or, at any rate, that such counter-explanations couldn’t pose a serious challenge to survival arguments unless we invested them with initial plausibility. This is not true. For example, I argue that the appeal to living-agent psi can challenge survival arguments even if this exotic counter-explanation strains credulity and is antecedently very improbable.

Finally, I show that classical explanatory survival arguments are self-defeating. They must show that survival explains the data, and that rival explanations do not explain the data as well as the survival hypothesis does. But, as explained above, I show that survivalists typically rule out counter-explanations for reasons that equally apply to any formulation of a survival hypothesis or theory that has a ghost of chance of explaining anything at all.

As I said above, when I set out to write my book, it was my hope that I would provide an analysis and set of arguments that would advance the survival debate, perhaps only a smidgeon. To that prospect I think I must say at present what C.D. Broad said about survival: “one can only wait and see, or alternatively (which is no less likely) wait and not see.”

You: A Review

You_Kepnes

 

“You’re going to be so sorry when you realize what you made me do . . . the good news is I have no regrets.” – Joe Goldberg

I was fortunate to read three great psychological thrillers in 2017. Caroline Kepnes’s debut novel You (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2014) tops the list.

You is an engrossing psychological thriller told from the perspective of a man who skillfully uses modern technology to evolve a romantic relationship with a woman who is his latest obsession. The story is a masterful and witty character-driven thriller rich in its grasp of human nature and portrayal of psychopathology.

 

Synopsis

Joe Goldberg manages a used bookstore in New York. He loves books and he loves the woman who just walked through the door.  Her name is Guinevere Beck, but she goes by Beck. She’s a twenty-something aspiring writer enrolled in a graduate writing program.  Joe is immediately attracted to  her, and after they engage in some literature-centered banter, they’ve bonded. He’s hooked, but his attraction is obsessive, and it quickly evolves into a meticulous and elaborate stalking scheme, which will turn deadly more than once.

The story is written from Joe’s perspective, in the form of an on-going internal monologue directed at Beck, addressed throughout as you. The reader follows Joe’s plotting and the unfolding of events from inside his head, all in the present tense.

Joe knows her name and that’s enough to get him started. With the aid of Internet sleuthing—“the Internet was designed with love,” he says—he locates Beck’s on-line blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, each rich with autobiographical details. He locates where she lives and begins watching her from across the street. Soon he’s sneaking into her apartment, rummaging through her things, getting more information about her, and taking a few mementos here and there too.

It’s not a coincidence when Joe pulls Beck from the subway tracks onto which she falls drunk late one night. He officially befriends her, yes, the guy from the bookstore. He sees her home with a cab ride. Later she’ll realize she’s lost her cell phone. She thinks she dropped it in the chaos of the night. No, Joe has stolen it.  He hacks her emails and social media sites. Now he has direct access to the intimate details of her life, including her whereabouts, likes and dislikes, relationship history, circle of friends, and the guy Benji she’s presently in-and-out with romantically.  This knowledge is power.

Joe is determined to raise their friendship to the next level. The end game is being Beck’s boyfriend, her primary, but this requires overcoming a variety of obstacles created by Beck’s inner circle of friends and her wavering affection for Benji. But Joe is resourceful. He’s as skilled at using information for his purposes as he is at acquiring it. He’s also determined. There are no limits to what he’ll do to get her.  Since he’s convinced Beck needs him as much as he needs her, he perceives his actions as good for her too.  So he neutralizes—and in some cases eliminates—the obstacles. He succeeds, and soon Beck falls for Joe. Boy gets girl.

Joe’s a smart guy. He knows he can lose what he has, and this fear is compelling, especially when another man appears to have entered Beck’s life. Obsessive love is possessive love. So Joe’s pathological manipulation evolves with greater ingenuity to cope with the shifting threats he perceives. Again, despite the risks, there are no limits to what he’ll do to hold onto Beck, to protect her and their relationship. Although the obstacles prove formidable and their relationship becomes turbulent, Joe remains committed. He manages to neutralize and eliminate the obstacles once again. As before, his obsession proves deadly. The boy who gets girl must also keep girl, whatever the cost.

The reader knows Joe’s scheming will not end well, but it’s hard to anticipate the details of just how badly it will end. In the end, there’s a body count and a single mug of piss Joe will regret.

The Psychology of You

As the plethora of raving reviews of You demonstrate, there’s much to praise about the novel. Kepnes’ debut novel showcases her talents as an innovative, insightful, and inspirational writer. She sustains a well-paced and artfully crafted story with a strong, intriguing, and easily likable narrative voice. The story is an unsettling but thoroughly entertaining character study of what happens when a toxic narcissist falls in love. Other characters, though viewed from Joe’s perspective, are also well developed, especially Beck and her pretentious wealthy college friend Peach Sallinger.

Kepnes-164-201x300What’s most interesting about the character development in You is that Joe—obsessed man turned romantic predator turned killer—is a guy with lots of positive qualities. He’s charming, quirky, full of passion, and well read. He’s not all bad. Similarly, the other characters are not entirely good; in fact some of them are quite rotten. Kepnes’ characters are flawed people—pretentious, narcissistic, deceptive, and conniving. Some of them are in the grip of their own destructive psychopathologies. As a result, Kepnes dissolves the traditional clear-cut dichotomy between villain and victim, and replaces it with a more realistic view of human persons and the complexities of moral assessment. Also, in portraying Beck as a strong yet deeply flawed person, Kepnes breaks from the stalker cliché of the powerful male predator victimizing the innocent or virtuous powerless women.

The story’s character development points to what for me is the book’s strongest and most fascinating feature. You is a thriller that skillfully exhibits psychological depth and insight.

Kepnes has created a central character whose dangerous obsessions are intimately connected to the more widespread phenomenon of idealizing love and human relationships. Joe is a special case of this, the inflation of obsession and possessive love. He’s a malignant narcissist, controlled by the on-going need to secure validation of himself and his unrealistic romantic ideals. In Joe we see the fruit of passion eviscerated of empathy: an elaborate and evolving stalking scheme turned deadly. But this psychological dynamic is an inflation of tendencies most of us share.  This is both insightful and also unsettling to the self-aware reader.

Also, true to the narcissist’s cognitive situation, Joe’s mind is a disturbing mix of insight and delusion.

On the one hand, Joe understands what makes people tick. He understands how people’s beliefs, needs, and interests motivate them. Since the story is told exclusively from Joe’s point of view, the reader is privy to his feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, so we can see how his insights into the world and people facilitate his effective plotting. He sees through pretentious rich kids and millennials, and even a therapist who appears later in the story.

On the other hand, recurring delusions fueled by his emotional flux interrupt his otherwise lucid engagement with the world, and his fantasy life takes over. Sometimes he idealizes people and relationships; in other cases he demonizes them. Like the borderline personality type, Joe’s delusions are reinforced and perpetuated by a cycle of inner rumination fueled by his emotional flux. He is easily triggered and can flip on you at any moment.

Of course, it’s not just the robust psychology of the characters in the story I find compelling.  It’s also the level of psychological insight required for this kind of a story to put a deep hook in the reader.

Kepnes knows how to create a narrator who is a horrible person and yet likable. Lots of readers have said how likable—some even say lovable—Joe is.  They enjoyed being in the head of a guy who is a sexual predator who turns serial killer. I remember the WTF moment when I realized “oh shit, I really like this dude.”

Cultivating an intimate connection between the reader and this kind of narrator is difficult, but Kepnes pulls it off. Yes, this is partly fueled by Kepnes portraying Joe’s ostensible victims as narcissistic shit heels whom we love to hate, and some of whom we might even feel deserve  some ruthless punishment.  But it’s also because Joe is a bad guy in whom we find many good qualities too. We like the things he likes and we hate the things he loathes. We like Joe.  He’s funny and insightful, and perhaps we even admire his romantic ideals and his knack for calling out people’s bullshit and getting back at them.  We care what happens to him.  We cheer for him . . . almost all the way.  Yeah, there’s that one thing, the deal breaker in real life. He’s a serial murderer.  Consequently, the story is peppered with brilliant moments of moral ambiguity.

The likability of Joe is interesting from another vantage point. Our attraction to Joe suggests why we might be vulnerable to the traps of malignant narcissists in real life. Joe is smart, charming, validating, funny, and apparently empathetic and sacrificing. Everything we like about Joe is what we like about real people. But like Joe, many of these “perfect” people have a dangerous darker side. The real world abounds with Joes, just as attractive, just as dangerous. Joe could be anyone out there, even our closest friend or partner.  This makes You both compelling and chilling.

We might also find it unsettling to realize how much of Joe is in us. Perish the thought of it, right? Not quite. Why else would we so strongly relate to him and cheer for him?  Some may find this disturbing or terrifying, but it can also be liberating for much the same reason all good horror fiction is liberating. As Robert Bloch said, “Horror is the removal of masks.” You does this. It unmasks everyone, including the reader. It removes masks and reveals the darker territory of our own inner landscape, but it does so in a way that’s romantic, playful, and at times hilarious. You allows us to dance in the dark.

There’s more Joe Goldberg in Kepnes’ sequel novel, Hidden Bodies (You #2), and later this year Joe will come to the screen when the Lifetime network premiers a mini-series based on You.

Michael Sudduth

Behind Her Eyes: A Review

51OdDAMkEtL._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_Sarah Pinborough, Behind Her Eyes (Flatiron Books, 2017).

Behind Her Eyes is an extremely well written thriller with character depth and psychological insight. It incorporates a well-crafted narrative with ostensible paranormal phenomena and edge-of-your-seat twists that will leave your head spinning. You might find yourself slamming the book closed at the end and screaming—what the fuck just happened to me? 

The novel is as captivating as it is emotionally disturbing.  A love-triangle thriller taken to an entirely new level of intrigue and creepiness. You might even say diabolical madness too.

Sarah Pinborough has written a brilliant novel.

Synopsis (Without Spoilers)

Louise is a divorced single mother starting a new part-time job as a secretary in a medical facility. David is a doctor at the clinic and also Louise’s boss. Adele is David’s stay-at-home wife living in a marriage strained from the emotional baggage of distant and not-so-distant past.

It all begins with a kiss, an indiscretion.

Out for drinks one night on the eve of starting her new job, Louise kisses a man she’s fallen for at a pub. On her first day at work, she discovers the man she kissed is her boss and he’s married. After confronting the awkwardness of their situation—David is as surprised as Louise—the two resolve to move forward in their professional roles and pretend the indiscretion never happened. Fail. That’s not going to happen.

Louise has an apparent happenstance encounter with Adele and the two become friends. At Adele’s request, they agree not to tell David about their friendship. Now there are two secrets.  Then another: unable to control their desires, Louise and David end up sleeping together; not once, but repeatedly.

So Louise finds herself in the doubly awkward and morally challenging situation of sleeping with her best friend’s husband and Louise hasn’t told David about her friendship with his wife.  She’s wracked with guilt and confusion. Should she tell Adela about her affair with David? How to end that? Should she tell David about her  relationship with Adele? Her psychological struggle deepens when she begins to suspect that David is an alcoholic who is after Adele’s money and controlling her with manipulative tactics, including keeping her doped up on various prescription drugs.

We discover early on that Adele somehow knows about her husband’s on-going affair with Louise, yet she says nothing to either of them. Why? Because, as she confesses (to the reader), everything is going as she (Adele) has planned. That’s right. Adele has hatched some sort of bizarre scheme, and the affair between Louise and David is part of the plan. She pursues her friendship with Louise with passion and commitment, deepening their emotional bond, going out of her way to help Louise lose weight and conquer a sleep disorder.

Adele learned a technique for curing sleep disorders when she was in a mental institute as a teenager, recovering from a nervous breakdown after the death of her parents in a house fire. Together with a friend named Rob (another patient in the institute), Adele experimented with lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences.   This turns out to be a crucial component of her plan and the linchpin of the wider narrative.

What is Adele scheming? Why?

No spoilers here.  I’ll only say this.  There are several crucial lines in the story that point the reader in the general direction. David says of Adele at one point—one of my favorite lines of the book—“In her own twisted, fucked-up way, she loves me. She always has and she always will” (p. 277).

What’s Great about this Novel?

Behind Her Eyes is an impressive demonstration of story telling, probably the best psychological thriller I’ve read.

The personality and psychodynamics of the three main characters are well developed, and their intentions and behaviors are plausibly motivated. There’s much here that’s rooted in real life.  The behaviors of the main characters serve genuine needs and interests, as well as fuel psychologically insightful conflicts. Then there are all the ambiguities of real life, especially the more extreme manifestations people appearing to be other than they are. Pinborough nicely crafts alternating first-person points of view that convey an intimate portrait of Louise and Adele. Each has a very strong character voice.

img_0062Pinborough masterfully deploys “misleading evidence,” a crucial aspect of a good psychological thriller. Throughout the novel it appears that characters have motives and intentions that we subsequently discover they do not have. Characters are not who they seem to be. Appearances deceive. And not just from the viewpoint of the characters. For much of the novel the reader is a participant in the experience of interpretive ambiguity and misdirection.

One of my favorite quotes from the book sums this up: “It’s strange how different we all appear to who we really are” (Louise, p. 139).  Radical opacity. An inner world standing in complete contradiction to our outer face. The source of much suffering.

For much of the story there’s an intentional ambiguity as to whether ostensible out-of-body experiences are genuine paranormal experiences or merely hallucinatory in nature. However, Pinborough doesn’t leave this aspect of the story open-ended. It’s nicely resolved in the latter part of the story, initially suggested and then directly disclosed.

The book nicely handles backstory, seamlessly weaving it into the wider narrative. Alternating first-person points of view tell the front story. A recurring third-person point of view supplies the important backstory: Adele’s time in a psychiatric institute in her teens, shortly after the death of her parents in a house fire, and the evolution of her friendship with another resident in the institute, a guy named Rob. The digressions into backstory are diachronic in nature.  The reader sees the backstory in brief clips moving forward in time, building up to a pivotal past event that’s the key to the novel’s front story.

Yes, the ending was a stunner. Neither the first nor the second twist is implausible given the wider narrative. It’s a believable ending, but it’s nonetheless surprising. The clues were there all along but well concealed. That’s part of the beauty of this book. The pieces of the puzzle only come together at the end.

When I finished the book, I slammed it shut, threw it down, and blurted out “this fucked me up.” It did. It blew my mind.  I was disturbed, and yet I smiled. A pleasurable mind fuck. That’s what it was. And what a wonderful thing that is.

Michael Sudduth

Gel – New Book Announcement

IMG_0326I’m pleased to announce the completion of my third book, a psychological horror-thriller novel called Gel.

As explained last year in Stephen King and the Path of Fiction, I’ve devoted considerable time to fiction since fall 2015. One of the reasons I’ve not blogged much in the past year is that I’ve devoted considerable time to reading and writing fiction. The discipline helped me produce Gel and make substantial progress on two other novels.

Gel reflects my long-standing interests in abnormal psychology, horror fiction, and phenomena suggestive of life after death. The narrative presents an apparent case of reincarnation entangled in strands of childhood trauma, psychopathology, and sadomasochistic eroticism. The story unfolds around three main characters—three people with three obsessions, yet one shared secret has haunted each of them for twenty-five years. Now their previously separate lives are converging and unraveling under the power of unresolved guilt and the desire for control and personal justice.

The novel also explores some interesting philosophical questions. Throughout I’ve wrestled with closely allied problems in the interface between personal identity and the reality/appearance distinction. People are often pretenders, or they at least have an aspect of their lives that remains hidden or opaque, perhaps even to themselves. This phenomenon looms large in Gel.  The narrative also expresses my curiosity about the moral and psychological complexities of having empathy for perpetrators of evil.

In my 2016 Review of Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts I discussed the horror of ambiguity. Gel is an example of this approach to dark fiction. Unlike much traditional horror fiction, the narrative of Gel doesn’t assume the actual existence of the supernatural (or the paranormal), though the story is replete with the appearance of it. Neither does the narrative deny the existence of supernatural entities or forces. Gel doesn’t resolve the tension that exists between naturalistic and super-naturalistic interpretations of the phenomena within the story. It intentionally deploys ambiguity as a literary device. The reader is left to grapple with the question and to consider the possibility that the origin of the terror eludes our understanding.

For example, one of the main characters in Gel may be the reincarnation of a seductive high school English teacher who died tragically twenty-five years earlier. But it’s also possible that pathological self-deception and improbable circumstances have coalesced to create the illusion of reincarnation. Then there’s the recurring phenomenon of the gel, also the title of the story. Is the gel merely a natural phenomenon—a coincidence in the bluster of human-made madness—or is it the manifestation of an otherworldly diabolical force,  a force ultimately responsible for the madness and the wider narrative of the story?

These questions remain open-ended from the viewpoint of the narrator of the story. The reader must wrestle with the relative merits of competing explanations. The reader must also consider the possibility that their own interpretive preferences at this juncture are a product of their wider psychology, controlled as it often is by their own interests, needs, and emotional life.

At present I’m editing Gel in preparation for a beta-version of the novel that should be available in late July or early August. At that time I’ll post a synopsis of the book. If you’d like to be considered as a beta-reader, please email me. Include some background on authors you’ve read and your literary interests. If you’re interested in horror fiction or psychological thrillers, the novel may interest you. If you’re uncomfortable  with explicit language and graphic sex, Gel is not for you.

Michael Sudduth

Exclusivist Anti-Exclusivist Apologetics

IMG_0326Farhan Qureshi recently posted a video on his YouTube channel in which he discussed my 2011 movement from Christianity to the Indian bhakti tradition of Vaishnavism. Qureshi discusses my  conversion story because he has a broader interest.  He’s interested in raising awareness about the dangers religious exclusivism and challenging the exclusivist paradigm.

The religious exclusivist takes the view that only the narrative of his own particular religious tradition is true, or that his particular religious tradition provides the only path to salvation. Religious exclusivism is also associated with the missionary goal of converting people to one’s own religion.

Qureshi has several interesting and I think correct things to say about the dangers of religious exclusivism. While I agree with some of his criticisms, I have reservations about his approach.

First, though, a preliminary point about my own spiritual journey. I don’t self-identify with any particular religious or spiritual tradition. Yes, I was a Vaishnav for about three years, but I haven’t considered myself a Vaishnav since late 2013. I spent a year and a half living in a Zen community and engaging in Zen practice (June 2014 to December 2015), but I didn’t consider myself a Buddhist then, nor am I a Buddhist now. In Helen De Cruz’s interview with me (2015), I provide the most recent detailed account of my spiritual journey. It approximates where I stand today.  So the title of Qureshi’s video (“Christian Scholar Converts to Hinduism, Dr. Michael Sudduth”) is somewhat misleading.

The more interesting part of Qureshi’s video is his more general discussion of religious exclusivism. He makes it clear that he aims to challenge the exclusivist paradigm. Writing with reference to Suni Muslims and Evangelical Christians in particular, he says that he aims to make these people realize how “deluded” and “selfish” their beliefs are. He illustrates this from his personal experiences of encounters with exclusivists.  Among other things, he says, “With loving kindness and no animosity in mind I told them your beliefs are evil . . . vile . . . demonic.”

While I’m sympathetic to Qureshi’s concern about the dangers of religious exclusivism, I find his goal problematic.  I also think his methodology is going to be psychologically ineffective and potentially self-defeating.

A few things are worth noting here.

First, it’s notoriously difficult to reason people out of their deeply held convictions. Religious exclusivists tend to hold their convictions with considerable tenacity.  So the goal of trying to reason exclusivists out of their beliefs is problematic on general psychological grounds. Moreover, we only compound the general difficulty here if we tell people that their deeply held convictions are demonic, vile, and delusional.  It’s hard to see how such an approach is going to be effective in helping people realize anything. In fact, it’s more likely to entrench them further in their convictions. Labeling people’s beliefs with morally demeaning terminology is bound to validate the fears and suspicions exclusivist beliefs are designed to alleviate in the first place. We basically validate exclusivism by a frontal assault.

Second, I have to wonder whether the passion behind Qureshi’s anti-exclusivist apologetic isn’t itself a species of the same thing he’s opposing. Worse yet, it potentially masks this fact.

Qureshi points out that tribalism drives exclusivism. Indeed, but of course that’s because tribalism is intrinsic to human nature and has been essential to our evolution as a species. It is primitive, yes; but much that is in us is and will remain primitive.  This is not confined to religious exclusivism. Tribalism is bound up in our general psychology, specifically our aversion to fear and insecurity. Attachment to an identity offers a kind of insulator or buffer against perceived threats.  It’s a kind of security blanket in which we wrap ourselves.  The communal expression of this is a social identity. There’s safety in numbers, in being a member of an in-group.  The demonizing of the beliefs and practices outside our group is symptomatic of the power of fear and insecurity.

So I have to ask what is motivating the use of morally demeaning language like “vile” and “demonic” to characterize religious exclusivists. What is motivating this pathos to snuff out the enemy, to rid the world of these delusional beliefs? It’s one thing to characterize people’s beliefs as false, implausible, or unwarranted (and in a clinical sense, we can speak of delusional beliefs), but it’s quite another matter to use terms like “vile” and “demonic.” These are highly evocative, emotionally charged terms. And they are precisely the same terms religious exclusivists use to denigrate the beliefs of non-exclusivists. From a purely psychological point of view, it’s difficult not to see Qureshi as more like his ostensible enemies than he makes himself out to be.

There’s a reason why the mystical traditions have not cared to engage in some large-scale attack on religious exclusivism, a fact that Qureshi appears to lament. It’s because practitioners in those traditions don’t perceive the existence of people with different beliefs than their own as a threat.  This is because they have softened their narcissistic tendencies and cultivated the grace of empathy. They’ve learned to let the exclusivist’s mockeries and criticisms pass through them.

Personally, I have no interest in refuting or otherwise challenging religious exclusivists. Yes, we can play the game of logical chess and sharpen our intellect by wielding our philosophical acumen to beat down our opponent’s “vile” and “deluded” beliefs. But do we really accomplish anything here other than temporarily quieting our own insecurities?

Having been an exclusivist, I understand the appeal it can have. I also understand the futility of trying to force people (intellectually or otherwise) out of their deeply held convictions. And I realize that like all other humans I have my own exclusivist tendencies. To the extent that I’m consumed with assaulting religious exclusivists I may be masking my exclusivist tendencies, tendencies that would plausibly motivate my own attack on exclusivism. This is why I’ve declined to say much about these issues since 2012.

That being said, I do understand Qureshi’s need to assault religious exclusivists.  But I think apologists against religious exclusivism might benefit by asking, “what is my ultimate intention here?” Even the protest against exclusivism can be primitive in origin. Fear can drive exclusivist apologetics, and it can also drive the more virulent opposition to it. Most importantly, it can short-circuit the one thing that’s needed. What’s needed is conversation, not assault. We need to cultivate the art of dialogue not counter-terrorist military-style tactics.

How do we have this conversation?

One precondition would be our becoming more conscious of our own tribalism and the psychology that drives it. What we despise most in the exclusivist may be what we’ve been unable to see and accept in ourselves. If we can tap into our own personal exclusivism, we might have more effective conversation with those who are exclusivist in their own way. Empathy, not argument, is a balm on fear.  In the end, this can help filter and regulate the more deleterious effects tribalism has, whilst avoiding the implausible and self-defeating goal of trying to eradicate it.

The invitation to conversation with exclusivists is at the end of the day an invitation to have a discussion with people who are very much like us in their basic psychology. No one of us is above the fallen angels of our nature. This is the central insight of the mystical traditions Qureshi otherwise lauds.

Michael Sudduth

A Head Full of Ghosts: A Review

51RuP7pBWFL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_The most terrifying movie I’ve ever seen is the Exorcist. I saw it from the backseat of my parents’ car at a Drive-In theater when I was eight years old. For months I imagined Regan MacNeil popping up at the foot of my bed with her disfigured face, eyes rolling back in her head, and her horrendous growling, croaking voice pounding my eardrums. I fell asleep on many nights with my head buried in my pillow and the covers tightly drawn over my head.

I’ve read some scary books too. I was a big Poe fan in high school, and read some Lovecraft too.  I also read William Blatty’s The Exorcist, which allowed me to revisit some of my childhood fears. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and The Shining.  These were disturbing and creepy, especially when I read them alone at night.

The most terrifying book I’ve ever read, though, is Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (William Morrow, 2015).  Well, I should say, “read and listened to.” I experienced parts of Tremblay’s book also as an audiobook. On several occasions I listened to it while falling asleep and had horrible nightmares. On one occasion I listened to it while having a root canal. I can’t be sure how much of the fear came from Tremblay’s book and how much came from the dentist’s drill.  Nonetheless, the audio experience was just as disturbing as reading the book itself.

Stephen King said of Tremblay’s book, “it scared the hell out of me.” Yeah. Me too.  A Head Full of Ghosts is a riveting psychological thriller and masterpiece of literary horror. It transforms the possession motif, and it does so with literary grace and philosophical sophistication. You get it. I loved the book.

The Story: A Synopsis Without (Major) Spoilers

A Head Full of Ghosts tells the story of the Barrett family, a family in contemporary rural Massachusetts whose fourteen-year-old daughter Marjorie Barrett begins to exhibit increasingly aberrant and disturbing behavior. She has unpredictable mood swings, night terrors, and violent outbursts. She speaks in different voices, engages in self-mutilation and animalistic behavior (e.g. makes animalistic sounds, urinates and defecates in the hallway of the family home).  She plays creepy and threatening pranks on her younger sister Merry (short for Meredith), and tells her sister eerie stories in which their dad murders their family and buries their bodies in the basement.  And of course, there are those voices she hears in her head, the ghosts in her head.

Marjorie’s dad John Barrett, a devoutly religious man, is sure his daughter is possessed. The mother, Sarah Barrett, believes Marjorie is just very sick and needs psychiatric treatment.  Mr. Barrett enlists the assistance of a priest (Father Wanderly) to perform an exorcism on his daughter. Unlike traditional possession narratives, though, Mr. Barrett brings in a TV crew to document the possession phenomena and exorcism. The production airs as a six-episode reality TV show called The Possession. The Possession series ends with considerable ambiguity as to whether Marjorie was really demonically possessed. This ambiguity permeates the events that the TV show documents. The controversial climax of the final episode, which appears to show Marjorie levitating at the staircase in the Barrett home, underscores this ambiguity.

The climax of A Head Full of Ghosts, though, is neither the exorcism nor Marjorie’s apparent levitation. The true climax of the Barrett story actually occurs weeks after the TV show has ended, when a horrific tragedy hits the Barrett family. The tragedy is a powerful twist in the story and forces a re-evaluation of the events surrounding Marjorie’s alleged possession.

A Head Full of Ghosts unfolds from the point of view of Merry Barrett, now an adult, recounting the incidents that took place in her family fifteen years earlier, when she was eight-years-old. The retrospective occurs in series of conversations between Merry and best-selling author Rachel Neville. Neville interviews Merry as part of her research for a book she wishes to write about the Barrett family.  On three occasions, two of which serve as transitions to a new section of the book, the novel breaks away from the sequence of Rachel-Merry interviews. The breakaways focus on Karen Brissette’s recent analysis of The Possession in her blog The Last Final Girl. The blog provides an ostensible outsider’s point of view and critical evaluation of the Barrett story and The Possession reality TV show.

Tremblay has written a quite remarkable novel. It consciously assimilates the possession genre with a unique combination of seriousness, wit, and philosophical clarity. But it does more. It also enlarges the possession genre by telling a possession story that will profoundly disturb and terrify many readers even if they don’t subscribe to a supernatural interpretation of the events. In fact, arguably one of the story’s most important strengths and contributions to the genre is how it enlists ambiguity as a literary device. It thereby dials in a form of terror that doesn’t depend on belief in the existence of God or the devil.

Ambiguity and the Space of Possibilities

As a philosopher, I appreciate how the story articulates and deploys uncertainty and ambiguity about the actual cause(s) of Marjorie’s alterations in personality and behavior. The facts simply underdetermine the nature of her condition.

Is Marjorie really demon possessed? Is she suffering from an early manifestation of schizophrenia (or some other mental disorder)? Is she perhaps perpetuating a fraud? Or is she in some way a victim of a malevolent force purely human in origin? The novel creates enough space for the reader to remain open to each of these possibilities as the characters and situations invoke or suggest them in the course of the story. Never quite knowing the truth amidst the space of possibilities keeps the reader off balance. And fear, of course, feeds on the unknown.

As do other works in the possession genre, the novel contrasts supernatural and natural explanations. The latter, of course, are explanations of observational data that invoke no supernatural entities. Fatherly Wanderly attempts to marshal evidence of demonic possession as the events are unfolding. We get the impression that, like many religious people, he’s looking for evidence to lend support to his antecedent convictions. What’s that point philosopher William James makes? In matters such as these, passion leads and intellect follows.  Karen Brissette retrospectively deconstructs the alleged evidence in her blog. And Merry’s recollection of events provides equally good grounds for skepticism.

But the novel also plays different natural explanations against each other.  For example, take Brissette’s blog analysis.  While skeptical of the demonic possession hypothesis, she’s equally critical of less than impressive skeptical attempts to explain away the evidence suggestive of possession.  Brissette ultimately points us to an important feature of our psychology—the needs and interests that influence our perception of the world. We believe there’s something supernatural happening because we want to believe this. Why? Perhaps because the alternative is more horrifying.  Brissette’s comments about the  The Possession’s controversial “levitation” scene underscore this. She says, “You believe because it’s easier than dealing with the idea that you just willingly watched a sick, troubled teenage girl purposefully choose to jump from a ledge” (p. 253).

Is Marjorie suffering from a mental illness?  The novel explicitly identifies schizophrenia as the suspect, though some of Marjorie’s symptoms suggest the presence of a personality disorder, perhaps even dissociative pathology (specifically, dissociative identity disorder). But mental disorders, whether one or many, don’t exhaust the natural explanations. Marjorie tells Merry on multiple occasions that she’s faking the whole possession. Why? To redeem their family from the financial hardship that’s been eating away at their family. The TV show makes her “possession” lucrative.  Merry is initially skeptical of this explanation, but later begins to believe it. By story’s end Marjorie still maintains that she faked her possession, but she provides a different reason for doing so. She succeeds in manipulating her younger sister into believing the revised explanation. This becomes the catalyst for the final twist and disturbing ending of the novel.

Although one gets the impression that a supernatural explanation is unlikely, Tremblay nicely piles on evidence that moves in different directions. We never really know what the hell (no pun intended) is happening. Below I’ll return to the “horror of ambiguity” as an effective and important literary device.

A Head Full of Ghosts vs. The Exorcist

Knowing that there would be obvious similarities between his novel and the Exorcist, Tremblay meets this unavoidable feature of updating older literary themes head-on. Tremblay intentionally deploys the similarities, and the story itself acknowledges them.  Consequently, the novel has considerable self-consciousness. Karen Brissette’s The Last Final Girl blog demonstrates this with comparisons and contrasts between The Possession and other horror films and novels, including The Exorcist.

But if we step outside The Possession and the Barrett family as components of the narrative, Tremblay’s novel is very different from William Blatty’s Exorcist. Take the points above about opening up the space of possibilities, keeping the reader off balance by way of ambiguity, and raising the specter of uncertainty and doubt. Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts stands is sharp contrast to Blatty’s Exorcist. And the point is worth emphasizing.

Blatty designed his narrative to support faith in God. As Friedkin never tires of telling audiences, The Exorcist is about “the mystery of faith.” Although Friedkin is not a Catholic, Blatty is.  So the devil is a real supernatural agent, and Blatty’s objective is to prove this. Consequently, it’s essential that Blatty rule out natural explanations of Regan MacNeil’s symptoms within the narrative. And so Regan’s symptoms increasingly stupefy members of the medical community. Having had their brains (and balls) twisted, they quickly run out of explanatory road. Stress, drug abuse, lesion in the temporal lobe . . . these idiots are clueless. They have no answers because they’re approaching Regan’s condition from outside the perspective of faith. By contrast, Father Merrin has the answer.  

Blatty’s narrative tolerates uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt about as much as it tolerates the devil. These are real, but they must be overcome. As Blatty himself has said, the Exorcist is really about Father Karras’s crisis of faith. Regan’s possession provides the framework for addressing the young priest’s entanglement in skepticism and clinical psychiatry.  Don’t these go hand in hand? Uncertainty and doubt are precisely the problem. They must be overcome. And it’s the message of the narrative that they are overcome. If the devil is real, then angels are real, and if angels are real, then God must exist—something like that. The Exorcist was an exercise in Catholic theology and apologetics, pure and simple. Luckily for Blatty, the story was compelling, even if his logic was not.

Tremblay has no interest in sending a religious message or reinforcing religious dogmas. Father Wanderly and John Barrett are religiously committed, but there’s no attempt to force the reader to be. It’s not necessary for the reader to believe that Marjorie is demonically possessed. There’s evidence suggestive of possession, but there’s evidence that at least equally suggests a different explanation. Again, it’s about finding one’s fears in the possibilities that define the wide boundaries of our ignorance.

On that note, it’s worth adding that Tremblay’s deployment of uncertainty is not confined to the evaluation of Marjorie’s condition. It extends more broadly to the reliability of Merry’s memory as she retells story. She’s unsure of many things, vacillates on others, and acknowledges that she might be misremembering certain events.  Well, she was only eight at that time.  Nonetheless, she says she’s completely sure of a few things. Her sister was very sick, and possibly her dad too. She’s also sure about her own role in the final tragedy of her family.  Rachel Neville is another voice of uncertainty.  She confesses at the end of the story that she’s not sure what really happened fifteen years earlier.

Can we even be sure about Merry herself? Is she (intentionally or unintentionally) spinning the Barrett story? Might she be mentally ill?  Remember, schizophrenia has a strong genetic component.  But Tremblay has written the story in such a way that I have deep empathy for Merry (and Marjorie). Yet, if Merry’s in bed next to me, I’m sleeping with one eye open three nights a week.  It takes a brilliant piece of writing to have the reader naturally, even enthusiastically, embrace a character, and yet feel that it’s not entirely safe to do so.

Dialing in a Natural Fear

Since Tremblay’s novel has no religious agenda, the story easily accommodates more than one viewpoint, religious and non-religious.  It can deploy ambiguity to help the reader experience the fear that lurks in the open space of possibilities. It freely deploy the limits of perspective in the service of dialing in our more primitive fears.

This is worth exploring further.

Throughout the novel, Merry Barrett experiences the increasingly strange, creepy, and even threatening behavior of her older sister.  In all other respects, though, Merry and Marjorie have a deep connection and familial affection for each other. What’s interesting is how many, if not most, of the more frightening scenes are illustrations of the abnormal, not the supernatural.

1) Early in the novel, Marjorie—who enjoys telling Merry scary stories—tells Merry a scary story about unstoppable “growing things” that consume a town. In the story there are two girls (named Marjorie and Merry) who live in a house that resembles the large cardboard playhouse in the actual Merry’s bedroom. In Marjorie’s story, the father poisons the mother and buries her in the basement. The father then begins to poison Marjorie. She begins to exhibit symptoms of sickness, which not coincidently resemble the actual Marjorie’s sickness. While Merry is in the basement, her mother’s corpse rises impaled on the branches of the growing things as they burst through the basement floor of the house. Merry realizes that Marjorie is correct. Their dad is a monster, and Merry’s his next victim.

This is the story the actual Marjorie tells her younger sister. It terrifies Merry, but Marjorie returns to this story throughout the novel as the gap between fiction and fact closes.

2) Marjorie suggests a looming tragedy in a family dinner scene when Merry asks Marjorie if she can borrow her sister’s hat. Marjorie replies—in a low and growly altered voice— “You can’t wear my hat because you’re going to die someday . . . no one here can wear it because you’re all going to die” (p. 79). Shortly afterwards, Marjorie slithers under the kitchen table.  She then scurries off on all fours into the darkness of an adjacent room, while speaking in different voices.

3) In another scene, Merry wakes up to find that someone has drawn vines and leaves all over her large cardboard playhouse. That’s right. These would be the “growing things” of Marjorie’s horrific family murder story.  Merry finds a note that says, “There’s nothing wrong with me, Merry. Only my bones want to grow through my skin like the growing things and piece the world” (p. 54). Merry then notices a “green leaf with a curlicue stem had been carefully etched” on the back of her hand.

4)  Early in the novel Merry says she once woke up and found a note in green crayon left on her chest. It was from Marjorie.

I sneak into your room when you are asleep, Merry-monkey. I’ve been doing it for weeks now, since the end of summer. You’re so pretty when you’re asleep. Last night, I pinched your nose shut until you opened your little mouth and gasped. (p. 30)

5) In one of the more confrontational scenes, Marjorie is angry that Merry has tattled on her, so she threatens to “rip” her sister’s “fucking tongue out.” She provides a detailed description of how she will do this. She then adds:

I’ll keep your tongue and put it on a string, wear it like a necklace, keep it close against my chest, let it taste my skin until it turns black and shrivels up like all dead things do. What an amazing fucking thought that is: your never-ending tongue shrunken and finally stilled. (p. 66)

Marjorie tries to alleviate the fear of her sister by saying she was just kidding.

6) Some other creepy descriptive moments stand out.

I saw Marjorie clinging to the wall like a spider . . . Her arms and legs were spread-eagled, with her hands, wrists, and feet, and ankles sunk into the wall as though it were slowly absorbing her. (p. 52)

She [Marjorie] stopped twisting her spaghetti around her fingers. She opened her mouth, and vomit slowly oozed out onto her spaghetti plate. (p. 78)

Mom wasn’t in the room. Marjorie was. She sat propped up against the headboard with pillows folded and stuffed behind her back. Her breathing was shallow, but rapid, and she grunted, snarled, sighed; a sputtering engine, the dying fan in our bathroom. Her head was thrown back, chin pointed at the ceiling, as sharp as the tip of an umbrella, eyes closed so tight, like she was hiding them deep inside her head. She had on a too-small black T-shirt, tight enough to outline her rib cage. No pants, no underwear. Her hands were between her long, skinny, pale legs. Both hands, and they gyrated up and down, making wet sounds. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there and watched. (p. 85)

Her [Marjorie’s] eyes opened and then rolled into the back of her head, showing off those horrible bright whites with their convoluted red maps . . . Her body shook, and she urinated and defecated right there in the hallway. (p. 86)

Now this shit (no pun intended) is freaky and terrifying just as it stands. But notice that there’s nothing obviously supernatural in anything above. Marjorie clinging to the wall like a spider? Nope. As her mom explains, Marjorie punched holes in the cheap drywall with her fists. So there’s nothing supernatural there. And yet, for many of us, these scenes are no less disturbing and scary.

There’s something unsettling and sometimes downright terrifying about family or friends beginning to act unlike themselves.  We naturally tolerate some degree of this. Even the most stable persons have moments in which they act out of character. But there’s a threshold beyond which the shift in behavior and personality becomes unsettling.  Think of how you feel in the presence of people having an emotional breakdown, who are strongly influenced by drugs or alcohol, or borderline personality types. And beyond unsettling behavioral shifts, there are the more disturbing if not frightening forms of psychological disorder, for example, schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.  I think Tremblay dials in this very natural fear.

Stephen King has often said that his greatest fear is of losing his mind. Madness is really the unconstrained universe of all possibilities, and the inability to say which is yours. Much like Marjorie’s behavior, this is terrifying just as it stands. It needs no devils or demons to make it scary. Indeed, devils and demons potentially alleviate fear.  The devil functions much like God—to make the alien familiar, the irrational sensible, and so on. But the gain here is also a loss. We lose the fear that thrives on the unresolved, all those what-ifs, and the menacing realization of just how little we know. To the extent that we lose that fear, we’re not conscious of the human condition or ourselves.  Fear is an essential part of the human story, and good horror let’s us know it.

Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts is a first-rate contribution to literary horror and the psychological thriller genre. I think we should say of it what Merry Barrett says of her sister’s stories: “It was terrible and would give me nightmares, and yet there was something wonderful in its terribleness.”

Michael Sudduth

Stephen King and the Path of Fiction

I’ve spent most of the past twenty years playing conceptual chess and solving logical puzzles, an essential part of my work as a professional philosopher.  Like finding your way out of a labyrinth, that can be fun, especially if you don’t take it too seriously.  But other modes of discourse, exploration, and expression have also played a prominent role in my life, mainly music, poetry, and story telling.  And in my most challenging hours, I’ve always turned to music and creative writing, not analysis and logic chopping.

During the past decade I have on different occasions happily digressed from scholarly projects to explore fiction writing, something I first broached with the writing of zombie stories in my teenage years. And in the past three years, I’ve regularly supplemented my scholarly writing with contemplative writing and poetry, some of which I’ve published in my blog. In the past eleven months, though, I’ve returned to fiction writing. It’s been a very sustained and concentrated effort, inspired largely by Stephen King. Here I offer some reflections on my movement into fiction, King’s role in it, and what I’ve found beneficial about this new direction in my writing.

My Return to Fiction Writing

Some very unusual experiences while living in an 1817 home in Windsor, Connecticut inspired my first attempt at writing a novel. That was back in 2008. The storyline of the novel emerged from two situations that kept popping up in my head. The first was a very ordinary one: what if a young widow bought an old house and started restoring it, as a way of working through grief after the death of her husband. The second situation was a paranormal one: what if place can absorb and retain the memories and emotions of people who reside there? These two situations gave birth to an interesting story that linked a young woman’s pursuit of psychological healing, a retired philosophy professor’s newfound life as gardener, and the Connecticut witch trials.

I never finished the novel, but the hundred pages I wrote represented my first serious exploration of fiction writing since my teenage years. Back then I wrote zombie stories. That was a great way of throwing some water on the flames of teenage angst. It was also a nice way to exact a little poetic justice on the asshole jocks in junior high and the stuck-up cheerleaders who didn’t give me the time of day.  My friends and I had a good laugh, and—perhaps most importantly—no one got hurt.  

My early exploration of fiction writing was also something of a tribute to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.  I must have watched that film with friends over hundred times by the time I graduated from high school. We had the entire script memorized. That movie was simply the shit.

In high school my creative expressions shifted to music.  After starting a heavy metal band in the 1980s, the writing of zombie stories gave way to lyric writing. The zombies were still alive, but they walked in a larger supernatural field with vampires, ghosts, and demons.

In the past year, I’ve returned to fiction writing. I have two novels and a novella underway.  Each story explores dissociative psychology. One is a straight psychological thriller; two involve ostensible paranormal phenomena and explore the ambiguity between such phenomena and abnormal psychology.  I’ve nearly completed one of them—Shadow at the Door. I’ll have more to say about this in a future blog once the novel is complete.

Inspiration from Stephen King

Why have I returned to fiction writing?

Late last year I happened upon Stephen King’s On Writing (2000) while perusing books at a Barnes and Noble bookstore, appropriately the same venue where eight months later I’d participate in a Q&A with King himself. A protracted moment of lucid disgust with academic philosophy led me to wander aimlessly through the store.  I eventually wandered into the fiction section, and there I saw Stephen King’s On Writing. “Oh yeah, King,” I thought. A series of images lit up my mind—Jack Nicholson slashing through a bathroom door with an ax (Here’s Johnny!), Kathy Bates hobbling James Caan’s cockadoodie legs, and Sissy Spacek using psychokinetic powers to seriously fuck up her cruel high school peers.

I picked up the book and began reading it. Within minutes it melted away my disgust with academic philosophy. In fact, it melted away academic philosophy altogether. What a rush!

It only took five pages to persuade me to buy the book, which was so enthralling that I completed reading it in two sittings. On Writing is a brilliant and inspirational memoir-style exploration of fiction writing, though I think there’s something in it for any writer.  And from On Writing I went on to read King stories for the first time—Salem’s Lot, the Shining, Misery, Bag of Bones, A Good Marriage, and a dozen King short stories.

One of the strengths of King’s writing is his ability to reveal that ordinary life is thin and fragile, like the sheet of ice that covers a lake in thawing season. It doesn’t take much for the ice to break and for us to fall through. The abyss is not far away, and our deeper fears are actually very close to the surface of ordinary life. King’s stories allow us to confront these fears but also to develop a certain liberating relationship with them. I think there’s a certain playfulness there that helps us feel more confortable in our skin, darkness and all.

A precondition of this playfulness is an unobstructed transparency about the human condition, and this is a signature of King’s writings.  He holds back nothing, and he represses nothing. This allows light and darkness to each break out. And there’s no apology for letting the dark express itself, even if the darker side of human nature wins on occasion.  “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too,” King has said. “They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

One must already be okay with the darker side to be fully transparent about it. We hide what we cannot tolerate about ourselves, and that tends to be what we condemn in others.  Shame and guilt are the gatekeepers of unsettling truths. Those gatekeepers are rather stingy when it comes to divulging our deeper secrets, even to our selves.

But therein is the magic of King. He busts it all open. He drops you into the abyss, but there’s something redemptive about it. King once said, “Good writing—good stories—are the imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable” (Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 6).

The point can be expressed in more positive terms. We might say, with a dash or two of metaphor, that writing opens space large enough to allow our laughter and our tears to be and to dance together. In that dance we don’t merely disclose life’s larger movement.  We actually unite with it.  That’s redemptive, but it’s not an escape from the dark.  It’s a reconciliation to it.  It’s Zen on a magic carpet ride.

I’ve always found the dark fascinating and liberating.  So it’s no surprise that I should connect with Stephen King stories.  This also explains my teenage attraction to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and the lyrics of heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath. Of course, it also helps to grow up in the dark—Vietnam, Watergate, the proliferation of serial killers, the rise of horror films, and the threat of nuclear holocaust, if the “big one” didn’t shake, rattle, and roll California into the ocean first. And religion comes in here too. To some extent, I found Christianity appealing in my later teens and early twenties because it acknowledged the more potent devils of our nature.

So King ignites something fairly deep in me. And as a catalyst in my movement towards fiction, he’s really guided a return to something that was very alive for me years ago. Things that were once very alive for us sometimes come back, sometimes many times. They’re not done with us yet. They have something more to say, something more to do, and there’s some new transformation or development awaiting us.

Three Benefits of Fiction Writing

Fiction writing can facilitate personal development and transformation in different ways.  Here I’ll just mention three that are particularly significant to me, especially since they stand in sharp contrast to philosophical writing, at least of the sort I’ve practiced for twenty years.

First, fiction writing, like all expressions of creativity, helps loosen the grip of the ego. Fiction invites us to write as unconsciously as possible, just like music invites us to play an instrument or sing as unconsciously as possible. To some degree the process releases the chokehold of the ego, that is, our attachment to a distinct set of interests, expectations, and beliefs—you know, all that thinking that mediates the toxicity of our lives.

By contrast, scholarship and argumentation are very much about a consciously adopted point of view. There I try to make a point, or many if my reader is very unlucky. Even when I’m doing analysis, I’m keeping track of the number and color of the cows behind the fence, how many times they’ve taken a dump, and where the piles of shit are located.  The less conscious I am here about what I’m doing, the worse off I am. No scholar likes to step into a pile of shit after all. 

Fiction writing moves in the other direction. Throwing oneself far enough into any creative process is similar to the Buddhist experience of “no self.” You can’t be too conscious of what you’re doing while you’re doing it or you’re not going to find any deep satisfaction in it, and you’re also unlikely to do it well.  I still remember the three months I worked as an apprentice for a house painting company. Every time I flubbed something on the job, my boss would say to me, “you’re thinking about it too much!” He was right.  At any rate, I was too much in thought.

When I’ve been most effective in playing guitar or sports, I wasn’t thinking about what the hell I was doing. And whatever thinking might have been going on, was little more than a ballboy on the sidelines. I wasn’t in it.  You have to move from the center, recede into the background so to speak; maybe disappear altogether. That’s the nature of art, whether it’s painting, music, or writing.

The selflessness of the artistic process takes a variety of concrete forms in writing. For example, I have to trust my characters more than myself. I wait for them to say and do things. It’s intuitive writing.  In a certain sense, I’m just watching things play out in my mind and writing down what I see happening. The characters, not my conscious intentions, play the deeper role in shaping the development of the story. And it takes a certain amount of cultivated patience to just go with the flow when the characters have something to say or be at rest (take your fingers off the keyboard) when they’ve fallen silent.

When I tell people I’m writing a novel, they want to know what the plot is. I tell them, I don’t have one. That’s truthful, and of course it’s also a good way to get out of talking about your story. Some fiction writers do plot. I’ve done some of this myself, years ago. It’s just not how I do things now. The writing is now more situation-driven, as King often describes it. And the dynamic is entirely different.

Of course, I understand that some people need a meticulous outline of the details of their story worked out in advance, just like some people need to paint by numbers. What’s your plot? Have you identified the antagonist(s) and protagonist(s)?  Have you planned the story arc in the right way? Have you avoided head-hopping? All those nagging questions, which, for me, just sound like a good way to distract from story writing. I personally prefer just to write the story, let that flow, get in that zone.  There’s plenty of time to address technical questions later and do the needed clean up.

And here’s one of those many points where Stephen King’s observations resonate with me:

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe that plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible . . . I want you to understand that my basic belief about making stories is that they pretty much make themselves. (On Writing, 163)

In the writing of my current novel I’ve seen how a story can make itself or be the direct product of what the characters are doing in a very spontaneous manner, without much or any foresight on my part.   Over and over, I’ve found myself writing scenes or dialogue that I had no idea I’d be writing until the sentences were being typed. And even where I have some bare bones idea of where things may be going, when the characters clothe it with flesh and blood, there’s still considerable surprise.  Nor is the result chaotic or incoherent. What’s amazing is the level of inner coherence that emerges when there’s been no conscious intention to create it. I personally find this more enjoyable than merely filling in the details of an outline.

What is important is that I feel the movement of the story, and that means listening to my characters tell the story. And it’s important not to “push the river.” To the extent that I’m trying to achieve something with the story, I’m not listening to my characters tell the story. And to that extent, I can’t even hear the voice of my characters, much less see them evolve with the story, and that’s all essential to a good a story I think.

Second, there’s a sense in which fiction writing possesses the power to disclose aspects of our inner life, not immediately transparent to us. Someone once asked Albert Camus whether he appears in his own novels as some particular character. He said, no; he’s actually all of them.  Arguably, every character is some part of the author (maybe some are a bigger part of us than others), but the salient point is that those parts come into clarity in the process of writing, even if it’s only at the completion of a work or in subsequent reflection on it. And that means there’s quite a bit of self-knowledge delivered in the writing of a story.

Stephen King has often said that while he was writing the Shining, he wasn’t aware that, in writing about Jack Torrance, he was in fact writing about himself. King was the alcoholic struggling for redemption but slowly losing his mind. That hit him later, no doubt in part because the novel became a mirror that enabled him to see his own face more clearly. Hence, King says, “I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you” (On Writing, 191).

This is not to say that our characters bear no resemblance to persons outside us, but if we look close enough at our most meaningful relationships (the one’s most apt to inspire the creation of our fictional characters), they bear a striking resemblance to aspects of ourselves. The woman you fell in love with it, or the asshole boss you want to punch in the face at least once a week. When you fashion characters after these persons, you’re really writing about yourself.

There’s more to what you call you than what you take yourself to be. The writing process is an activity of this wider field of subjectivity.  As such, it’s largely an incursion from the unconscious, not something conscious at all. Fiction opens that door, for writer and reader alike. Whether by sudden fall (through a trap door) or gradual descent (down the basement staircase), fiction takes us to the underworld of our inner life. And a certain change takes place in that journey, for example, the enriching of our perspective and degrees of emotional regulation.  In a sense, fiction writing can be a form of therapy, very effective therapy. And perhaps that’s why so many people read fiction.

Third, fiction thrives on ambiguity and open-endedness, and that’s not something characteristic of scholarly writing, the process of argumentation, and criticism. Of course, there’s a place for precision and rigorous reasoning in life, and—contrary to what some of my former Zen teachers have said—criticism too. It’s by no means a bad or counterproductive thing to believe something, to critique, or to reason. Try living without these. That’s just a complete denial of life and the human experience.  We can’t escape beliefs, reasoning, and critique, but one can do it with less attachment. And I think that’s what fiction helps cultivate—non-attachment. Perhaps because it sensitizes perspective to its own limitations and thereby opens up further possibilities. And isn’t this true to life?  Don’t we live life in the wider space of unknowing, of mystery? We can contently accept our ignorance and learn to play with it, or we can neurotically reject it and live with it dogging us and spinning us out.

This is particularly significant for me since the topics that loom large in my fiction writing are often the same ones I’ve conceptually explored in my philosophical writing. Take the topic of survival of death. I’ve written at length on whether certain paranormal phenomena are evidence for life after death. But if that’s the question I’m asking, I’m working within narrow parameters the question dictates. I’m looking at criteria for evidence, how we assess explanations, and all that. Here I care, for example, whether survival better explains the facts than some rival hypothesis. Was it an actual discarnate spirit or just some psychic imprint left on the environment from some formerly living person? The virtue of an argument might be that it shows one of these explanations is superior, or it might show why it’s difficult to say which, if either, is a better explanation. But this is all about taking up a position of some sort. And it requires being hard nosed and rigorous in reasoning.

By contrast, if I’m writing fiction, I want to leave things as open as possible.  I’m dialing-in that aspect of experience.  The only positions that matter are those the characters authentically own. And hopefully they don’t agree with each other too often.

Imagine a story in which one character believes a girl is demonically possessed, and another character believes she’s suffering from schizophrenia. As the author, I don’t care which character is correct (hell, maybe they’re both incorrect). I could write that way, but I’m not particularly interested in doing so. I don’t care whether the girl’s really demon possessed, a schizophrenic, or under the influence of pissed off extra-terrestrials. I care about what’s true about the characters, what they believe, and their being true to their own beliefs and acting from their beliefs and intentions.

True, the story might present the skeptic as more reasonable/virtuous than the gullible priest who thinks the girl is possessed. The story might also portray the priest as more reasonable/virtuous than the skeptic. But is that it? I mean, is that the point? Isn’t it rather that the characters are true to themselves? That’s the fertile soil of conflict, and often the path out of it—vital elements of story. And it’s what helps us care about the characters and what happens to them in the story. And maybe, just maybe, this leads the reader into some form of self-realization.  After all, the characters of a story are not just a mirror by which the author may see her face more clearly, but it’s also one in which readers may come to see their own face more clearly.

Dreaming with Eyes Wide Open

King has said, “fiction is the truth inside the lie.”  Fiction has truth to reveal, but ultimately it’s the truth about the author and reader. And it’s the individual author and individual reader who are the only ones who can know what that truth is. Likewise, the consolation, healing, enjoyment, or satisfaction that a work of fiction brings to life is one the author and reader is uniquely situated to determine for herself. Otherwise put, stories are really, or at least fundamentally, about persons. The persons appear in the pages of the book, and they appear as the eyes behind the book.

As I said at the outset, I’ve spent most of the past twenty years playing conceptual chess and solving logical puzzles. And I’ll probably always do that sort of thing.  But I’ve learned that it’s also important to spend a significant amount of time dreaming with my eyes wide open.  That’s how King describes the path of fiction, and that seems exactly right. 

Michael Sudduth

REVISED 11/29/16