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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Sudduth

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

One Love

I. 

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

– Michael Sudduth

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

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

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

Are these kinds of experiences evidence for life after death?

I. NDEs as Weak Evidence for Life after Death

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

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

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

II.  Stronger Evidential Claims

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

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

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

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

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

III.  The State of the Debate 

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

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

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

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

Michael Sudduth

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Zen, and by this I mean,

your practice and your goal,

must sink in the ocean,

must drown in the vast sea

of dark unconsciousness,

from whence you shall emerge

reborn, not in another

body, space, or time,

but into the non-seeing,

non-feeling, non-thinking

that remains after the

dissolution of your mind.

1. In Zen, there’s no interest in extinguishing our desires. Quite the contrary, they’re given their rightful space, along with all thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Zazen [Zen meditation] is about the non-encroachment of mental material upon the Self. In Zazen all mental story-telling comes to an end. Mental material remains, but there’s no effort or interest in creating some kind of identity out of this material. This is the encroachment of the Self upon the mind. Here the mind has its voice, and it may speak very very loudly indeed! Yet at the same time, it’s equally true that the mind has been silenced. That silence is the Self. You are that.

2. In zazen I experience samsara – the cycle of death and rebirth, for I observe the emergence, development, and dissolution of one thought-form after another. And yet, while my essential emptiness is clearly seen, it’s simultaneously clearly seen that I am, and I am more than I could ever imagine myself to be. Therefore, I am utterly beyond all death and birth. We may choose to call this an “awakening” or “enlightenment,” but it’s really nothing special at all. 

3. In zazen one observes the rising and falling of thoughts, sensations, and feelings. One need not practice very long before noticing the gaps between the rising and falling of a particular thought, sensation, or feeling. Eventually one may fall into that gap and then one observes nothing at all, yet awareness persists. You are that awareness, and the gap is your essential emptiness.

4a. Speaking of being on “the outside” of one’s thoughts, feelings, or sensations is just a convenient way of speaking of observing them.  The importance of this is that in the observation process the “I” is distinguished or dissociated from mental material. To be on “the inside” of the thoughts is thus to have identified oneself with them, to simply *be* that thought, feeling, or sensation.  But you are not that, as the unqualified formless I is more fundamental than qualified I, the I qualified or limited by forms of thought, forms of feeling, and forms of sensation.

4b. Now it is a truism of the non-dual traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism, that we must simultaneously acknowledge that the Self both is and is not the body-mind.  When we look closely into experience we see that it is only the fact of awareness that is enduring, but the body-mind is not enduring.  Neither the body nor mental material in the form of thoughts, feelings, or sensations are enduring.  While these objects of awareness are temporary, awareness itself abides.  The Self as pure awareness is thus distinct from body-mind.  Nonetheless, the mental material arises from the Self and may in this sense be identified with it, as so many modes or manifestations of the Self.

4c.  This qualified identification of mental material with the Self is important in order to avoid introducing a separation between what I am essentially and how it is that what I am manifests.  The import of neti-neti (the Upanishadic “not this, not that”) is to free us from an uncritical or naive identification of Self with the mind-body and bring us back to the idea of the Self as the abiding presence of awareness.  But having done this, it is necessary to see that the thoughts, sensations, and feelings that do not exhaust or limit what I am nonetheless arise from and are part of the inexhaustible, unlimited reality that is the I.

5a.  The metaphor of the ocean and waves is therefore most frequently given to communicate the simultaneous identity and non-identity of the Absolute and the Relative, the One and the Many.  The wave is distinct from the ocean, but only as a temporary, limited, modulation or manifestation of a vaster, enduring reality.  But the wave is never without the ocean, and the ocean – inasmuch as it is alive with current, is never without waves.  The waves arise from, ride upon, and dissolve back into the ocean.  So also, all you think, feel, and sense comes out of you, rides upon you, and dissolves back into you.  This movement is at the heart of what we call “love.”

5b. Love therefore seeks no permanence other than Itself.  Personal love cannot endure because persons don’t endure. Indeed, “person” is just the name we give to what is a dynamically evolving dance between elusive “partners.”  One person loving another person is just a shared and often clumsy dance to a common song that plays for a time. Dance, and dance with passion. But know that your dance is born of the eternal Dancer, and your love, which abides only for a moment’s breath in eternity’s play, is born of the eternal Lover.

5c.  “You are not the same as me, but you have come from me, from a movement in the depths of my own being. You are here but for a time, and then you pass away.  But while you are present, you are from me and of me. And I love you with all the vastness of myself, regardless of the form you take. And when you pass away, whether in the light of a hot summer day or the darkness of a cold winter night, you dissolve into my love.” So said the ocean to the wave. So said I to my thoughts. 

6. Give your thoughts, even your most unpleasant thoughts, your deepest love, even as you give your love to a rebellious child.  Seek not to correct his ways, but only to embrace him, for you will thereby calm the otherwise unbearable current of fear that drives him.

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It’s been a month now since my blog “Chocolate Nirvana,” in which I provided some preliminary observations on the symbolic nature of what at the time was a temporary suspension of my nearly two-year sugar abstinence. As an introverted intuitive, I live deeply in the symbolic realm, and my involvement with “chocolate” has been a wonderful example of the dance between symbol and new life orientation.

(3) When a woman so inspires me that I totally forget about her, I know that I’ve found a new, unique, and powerful form of love. And while this love naturally flows outward and is capable of tremendous enlargement and evolution, it’s sufficient that it fully and completely possesses itself. This is the “full cup” kind of love.

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