Final Reply: When Will Survival Researchers Move Past Defending the Indefensible?

Abstract

The failure of five psychical researchers to confront my critique of Bigelow Institute contest-winning essays with counterpoints or concessions responsive to its novel criticisms is disappointing. Their defensive and scattershot reply lost sight of whether the critiqued essays met their directive to provide “hard evidence ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’” of the survival of human consciousness. Those who claim that science should expand its metaphysically conservative picture to include things otherwise not known to exist assume the burden of showing what they claim. My interlocutors’ almost exclusively testimonial evidence does not adhere to the long-standing scientific principles required by the scientific community. For the kind of evidence that could be publicly confirmed is simply not the kind that survival researchers have been able to provide, just as we would expect of a hodgepodge of deception, embellishment, malobservation, misreporting, self-deception, and so on; but which would be surprising on the hypothesis that discarnate personal survival occurs. The survival evidence does not even survive elementary scrutiny, let alone outweigh our everyday experience of the biological fragility of our own minds. The totality of the evidence renders discarnate personal survival highly unlikely. Attempts to reinterpret this evidence away through various analogies fail because a hypothesis that makes false predictions, like that of the independence of individual consciousness from a functioning brain, will continue to make them no matter what analogy one uses to illustrate it.

Beyond the BICS Essays: Envisioning a More Rigorous Preregistered Survival Study

“…This paper thus does not close the exchanges between Augustine (2022aAugustine ( , 2022b and Braude et al (2022) in this special subsection with a polite but feeble statement to the effect that the disputants simply "agree to disagree." Rather, we present an adversarial collaboration that favors practical next steps over endless conceptual debates.…”

“…Taken altogether, an accurate interpretation of reliable AIR effects could prove to be an intractable problem even from a sympathetic, parapsychological perspective. Thus, this adversarial collaboration and the prior exchanges about evidence and outlook (Augustine, 2022a(Augustine, , 2022bBraude et al, 2022) perhaps ultimately unite on two important conclusions, namely that (a) the quest for a conclusive, unambiguous experiment or study to confirm discarnate personal survival might be ill-conceived from the start, or else that (b) researchers from both the survivalist and mortalist camps have a long way to go to settle the matter scientifically once and for all. Perhaps an iterative process of developing and implementing rigorous and innovative mediumship-testing techniques, continuously updated in response to new evidence, will result in a metaanalytic database that indicates a convergence towards one source of psi over others (Jamieson & Rock, 2014).…”

“…Although the preceding exchange in this special subsection of the Journal (Augustine, 2022a(Augustine, , 2022bBraude et al, 2022) has highlighted the differences between skeptics and proponents of discarnate personal survival, there is much more in common between us that often goes unsaid, such as a common respect for sound reasoning and for investigating matters empirically whenever possible. We also agree that this topic warrants further empirical investigation, and of a quality superior to that found in the extant survival literature.…”

Answering More of the Same: A Reply to Nahm

“…In any case, if Nahm had misunderstood why I quoted Spenard at the end of my 2015 chapter, that misunderstanding should have been corrected by the explicit clarifications that I've made in print since (Augustine, 2016;2022a;2022b;cf. Sudduth, 2021) and of which Nahm is aware.…”

A Guardian Angel Gone Astray: How NOT to Do Survival Research

“…But because Augustine (2022b) found their arguments likewise inapt, it is very likely that the debate which covered already 57 (!) pages by Augustine (2022aAugustine ( , 2022b plus 13 pages by Braude et al (2022) would merely continue in the same vein in case I would now explain why I consider his arguments inapt. We would simply continue to explicate why we continue to disagree, which would not produce much of noteworthy value in addition to what has already been said.…”