My response to Penn & Teller
(So I wrote this super-long response to Adam's Penn & Teller link that ended up not fitting into the response space provided. Having gone to all that work, I decided to put it here.)
The fault with programs like these is that, as entertainment masking a crucial intellectual debate, they are not responsible to either side -- it's just cruel skepticism derived from a materialistic worldview.
First, consider the statement "No they're not! [the same people]. On one side you have charlatans, believers and people trying to make a buck, while on the other side you have scientists and professors." Um, did they do *ANY* research into this? First, the association that first started looking into paranormal activity was funded by and ran by professors at Oxford and Harvard. Perhaps they've heard of William James, one of the most respected historical figures in both philosophy and psychology? He ran the American branch of investigations into psychical research for nearly a decade. Today, doctors of cognitive science in both America and Europe (see Charles Tart, UC Davis, as the most famous example, though the work of Loyd Auerbach, William Roll and Alan Gauld helps flesh out the actual case for disembodied existence) have continued the nearly century and a half of work into paranormal phenomena, including these NDE's.
What has been discovered -- again, in scientifically controlled environments, sans any possibility of New Age charlatanism to sell books -- is that certain psi-phenomenon have significant empirical foundations. There have been a substantial number of experiments in which persons who self-identified themselves as "psychics" were able to predict random outcomes (early on, the roll of dice; as science became more sophisticated, a random number generator on a computer) at a significantly greater than statistical rate. (that meaning, if a person 'guessing' would have a 1 in 6 chance of being correct, they would typically score in the area of 40% accuracy). This was often done in a different building than the psychic was sitting in, indicating presence of both clairvoyance and telepathy in remarkable degrees.
But what does this mean, in regards to NDE's?
The issue I take with this special is that it has taken one example -- the white light, the euphoric flood of good emotion, the images of one's own body -- and assumed not only that this is the only form of survival, but that the materialist-nuerological explanation is the only explanation. Consider, in the context of the scientific investigations into clairvoyance and telepathy, the cases of mediumship, hauntings and reincarnation.
First, reincarnation. The Bishen Chan case, India, 1920. A child, 2 years old, begins acting in a remarkably strange manner. He speaks in a different dialect from his current home, carries himself like a young rogue, begins accosting young women -- trying to "get into their pants" as it were -- hounding the streets, getting drunk on whiskey (and commenting "this isn't as good as I used to drink!") and generally showing the dispositions and mannerisms far beyond a 2 year old. He tells his parents to take him to a certain town he/the family has never been to before. Once there, he is able to relate not only how the town actually *is* laid out, but how it was laid out -- details which could be confirmed such as what had been painted, what roads had opened up and what new plants had been put up. Going to his "old home," he is able to relate the names of all the servants as well as personal anecdotes he and his past life would have shared. With his mother -- who he refers to as mother through the entire encounter, and, after relaying much information back to her, she becomes convinced -- he is able to bring up the sorts of information (eg "i'm sorry that I left the jar of eggs to rot) that nobody would know outside of themselves.
How do Penn and Teller explain that?
Again, the Lois of Livermore case. Around 1985, a family moves into a home of a deceased widow. The son begins to relay to his parents that a woman keeps visiting him -- not in his sleep, but in a full waking state. She is able to induce an apparition and speak with them telepathically (especially the child, Chris), relaying, again, information about her life, he family life, the home, the neighborhood and the like that cannot be found in any community records. She is also able to relay the content of entire conversations had in the car or in the house, between the family, in which she did not seem to be present. Now, within this context, paranormal investigators have asked the obvious questions: what happened when you died, what were your experiences, why are you here, etc. Turns out she had the glaring white light, the life review and such when she was gripped by enormous fear and "just wanted to go home." So there she is, still communicating with the family (who still lives there), and, according to her own testimony, planning on living there until they move, after which she'll finally move on.
Or what about mediumship cases? Again, in the context of telepathy and clairvoyance being statistically provable hypothesis, how does one explain further cases where people identified as mediums have been able to telepathically "speak" to a given personality which has provided verifiable memory claims about themselves and others? Or cases where, having no demonstrable connection between themselves and the individual, when in the 'medium-state' adopting characteristics, mannerisms, dispositions, nervous tics and the actual voice/body-language of the person, easily identifiable by their family? Or what of the case of one of the last directors of the American Associations for Psychical Research who said, at his death, he would attempt to contact all of the psychics he could with pieces of a puzzle and would ask them to call this puzzle piece in to the AAPR -- and, that after his death, within 6 months, FORTY THREE psychics turned in said messages to the AAPR with no motivation other than "so and so told me to turn this into you guys."
The point is that this is an incredibly complex and rich issue, with a number of outstanding variables and elements one has to deal with. What is one's perspective on philosophy of mind? Is there a mind-body dualism, or is the entirety of our mental life reducible to nuerological functions? The issue is, we -- meaning the cognitive psychologists and nueroscientists that both sides of the debate rely on -- have no explanation of consciousness. None. There is no apparent reason why this particular sequence of firing synapses should create the sense of "i am," the sense of understanding anything is happening whatsoever. With this unexplained, and the combination of scientifically controlled experiments into psi-phenomena and cases of mediumship, hauntings and reincarnation cases, how incredibly intellectually irresponsible it would be to dismiss out of hand the possibility that all is not reducible to simple materials.
This being said, the correspondence between pilot-experiments and NDE's is, while not totally statistically sound, is nonetheless significant enough to take note of. . .but doctors such as Charles Tart of Alan Gauld, who have conducted a remarkable amount of research in this field, would not take issue with this -- it's just science. There is definitely a relationship between nueral functioning slowly coming to a hault and this particular imagery, but to explain it as a coping mechanism for the halting of biological apparati begs the question. Could this not be, rather, another form of conscious experience -- such as hallucinogens, sensory deprivation or certain ascetic practices -- that is predicated upon the disruption of the survival mechanism that prevents much of reality from becoming conscious? How could we possibly accept hallucinogens as "naked reality," yet say that NDE's, telepathy and clairvoyance are merely fantastical constructs of a single brain?
If we are locked into a survival pattern that is dependent upon physical reality being the only reality, than our scientific worldview will simply be a manifestation of that disposition. However, when data begins to become available that is inconsistent with the material reductionism hypothesis, and this data is consistent with a state of mind wherein the survival mechanism is disrupted and the blinders focused solely on material reality is removed, then materialism must find a way that successfully explains how this is simply some nuerological illusion. But until these things are explained, especially the fact of consciousness itself, this is a rich intellectual enterprise and fruitful debate, not a tee-ball to be battered by some obscene skepticism. What Penn and Teller are doing, as entertainment, is fine. But as people investigating the subject they are no better than Christian fundamentalists -- they're just the mirror image, one which most people I know would agree with. The whole black versus white, we're right and they're wrong tactic wherein the whole dialogue is reduced to a straw man versus a certain belief system is, to me, as embarrassing to being a liberal as the belief the earth is 6000 years old is to intellectually responsible, open-minded and thoughtful Christians -- especially when it's coming from a couple of shit-stirring magicians.
The fault with programs like these is that, as entertainment masking a crucial intellectual debate, they are not responsible to either side -- it's just cruel skepticism derived from a materialistic worldview.
First, consider the statement "No they're not! [the same people]. On one side you have charlatans, believers and people trying to make a buck, while on the other side you have scientists and professors." Um, did they do *ANY* research into this? First, the association that first started looking into paranormal activity was funded by and ran by professors at Oxford and Harvard. Perhaps they've heard of William James, one of the most respected historical figures in both philosophy and psychology? He ran the American branch of investigations into psychical research for nearly a decade. Today, doctors of cognitive science in both America and Europe (see Charles Tart, UC Davis, as the most famous example, though the work of Loyd Auerbach, William Roll and Alan Gauld helps flesh out the actual case for disembodied existence) have continued the nearly century and a half of work into paranormal phenomena, including these NDE's.
What has been discovered -- again, in scientifically controlled environments, sans any possibility of New Age charlatanism to sell books -- is that certain psi-phenomenon have significant empirical foundations. There have been a substantial number of experiments in which persons who self-identified themselves as "psychics" were able to predict random outcomes (early on, the roll of dice; as science became more sophisticated, a random number generator on a computer) at a significantly greater than statistical rate. (that meaning, if a person 'guessing' would have a 1 in 6 chance of being correct, they would typically score in the area of 40% accuracy). This was often done in a different building than the psychic was sitting in, indicating presence of both clairvoyance and telepathy in remarkable degrees.
But what does this mean, in regards to NDE's?
The issue I take with this special is that it has taken one example -- the white light, the euphoric flood of good emotion, the images of one's own body -- and assumed not only that this is the only form of survival, but that the materialist-nuerological explanation is the only explanation. Consider, in the context of the scientific investigations into clairvoyance and telepathy, the cases of mediumship, hauntings and reincarnation.
First, reincarnation. The Bishen Chan case, India, 1920. A child, 2 years old, begins acting in a remarkably strange manner. He speaks in a different dialect from his current home, carries himself like a young rogue, begins accosting young women -- trying to "get into their pants" as it were -- hounding the streets, getting drunk on whiskey (and commenting "this isn't as good as I used to drink!") and generally showing the dispositions and mannerisms far beyond a 2 year old. He tells his parents to take him to a certain town he/the family has never been to before. Once there, he is able to relate not only how the town actually *is* laid out, but how it was laid out -- details which could be confirmed such as what had been painted, what roads had opened up and what new plants had been put up. Going to his "old home," he is able to relate the names of all the servants as well as personal anecdotes he and his past life would have shared. With his mother -- who he refers to as mother through the entire encounter, and, after relaying much information back to her, she becomes convinced -- he is able to bring up the sorts of information (eg "i'm sorry that I left the jar of eggs to rot) that nobody would know outside of themselves.
How do Penn and Teller explain that?
Again, the Lois of Livermore case. Around 1985, a family moves into a home of a deceased widow. The son begins to relay to his parents that a woman keeps visiting him -- not in his sleep, but in a full waking state. She is able to induce an apparition and speak with them telepathically (especially the child, Chris), relaying, again, information about her life, he family life, the home, the neighborhood and the like that cannot be found in any community records. She is also able to relay the content of entire conversations had in the car or in the house, between the family, in which she did not seem to be present. Now, within this context, paranormal investigators have asked the obvious questions: what happened when you died, what were your experiences, why are you here, etc. Turns out she had the glaring white light, the life review and such when she was gripped by enormous fear and "just wanted to go home." So there she is, still communicating with the family (who still lives there), and, according to her own testimony, planning on living there until they move, after which she'll finally move on.
Or what about mediumship cases? Again, in the context of telepathy and clairvoyance being statistically provable hypothesis, how does one explain further cases where people identified as mediums have been able to telepathically "speak" to a given personality which has provided verifiable memory claims about themselves and others? Or cases where, having no demonstrable connection between themselves and the individual, when in the 'medium-state' adopting characteristics, mannerisms, dispositions, nervous tics and the actual voice/body-language of the person, easily identifiable by their family? Or what of the case of one of the last directors of the American Associations for Psychical Research who said, at his death, he would attempt to contact all of the psychics he could with pieces of a puzzle and would ask them to call this puzzle piece in to the AAPR -- and, that after his death, within 6 months, FORTY THREE psychics turned in said messages to the AAPR with no motivation other than "so and so told me to turn this into you guys."
The point is that this is an incredibly complex and rich issue, with a number of outstanding variables and elements one has to deal with. What is one's perspective on philosophy of mind? Is there a mind-body dualism, or is the entirety of our mental life reducible to nuerological functions? The issue is, we -- meaning the cognitive psychologists and nueroscientists that both sides of the debate rely on -- have no explanation of consciousness. None. There is no apparent reason why this particular sequence of firing synapses should create the sense of "i am," the sense of understanding anything is happening whatsoever. With this unexplained, and the combination of scientifically controlled experiments into psi-phenomena and cases of mediumship, hauntings and reincarnation cases, how incredibly intellectually irresponsible it would be to dismiss out of hand the possibility that all is not reducible to simple materials.
This being said, the correspondence between pilot-experiments and NDE's is, while not totally statistically sound, is nonetheless significant enough to take note of. . .but doctors such as Charles Tart of Alan Gauld, who have conducted a remarkable amount of research in this field, would not take issue with this -- it's just science. There is definitely a relationship between nueral functioning slowly coming to a hault and this particular imagery, but to explain it as a coping mechanism for the halting of biological apparati begs the question. Could this not be, rather, another form of conscious experience -- such as hallucinogens, sensory deprivation or certain ascetic practices -- that is predicated upon the disruption of the survival mechanism that prevents much of reality from becoming conscious? How could we possibly accept hallucinogens as "naked reality," yet say that NDE's, telepathy and clairvoyance are merely fantastical constructs of a single brain?
If we are locked into a survival pattern that is dependent upon physical reality being the only reality, than our scientific worldview will simply be a manifestation of that disposition. However, when data begins to become available that is inconsistent with the material reductionism hypothesis, and this data is consistent with a state of mind wherein the survival mechanism is disrupted and the blinders focused solely on material reality is removed, then materialism must find a way that successfully explains how this is simply some nuerological illusion. But until these things are explained, especially the fact of consciousness itself, this is a rich intellectual enterprise and fruitful debate, not a tee-ball to be battered by some obscene skepticism. What Penn and Teller are doing, as entertainment, is fine. But as people investigating the subject they are no better than Christian fundamentalists -- they're just the mirror image, one which most people I know would agree with. The whole black versus white, we're right and they're wrong tactic wherein the whole dialogue is reduced to a straw man versus a certain belief system is, to me, as embarrassing to being a liberal as the belief the earth is 6000 years old is to intellectually responsible, open-minded and thoughtful Christians -- especially when it's coming from a couple of shit-stirring magicians.