Neal Grossman on Super-ESP or Super-PSI hypothesis

The following is a paper by professional philosopher Neal Grossman originally published in the Journal of Science and Religion (which has since changed its name to the Journal of Spirituality and Parapsychology). This article is published on this blog with Dr.Grossman's kind permission.

Further Thoughts on Super-psi: A conversation.

Shortly after I finished writing what I thought would be my final words on the so-called “super-esp” hypothesis(1), I found myself having second thoughts. Although I did not disagree with what I had previously wrote, I felt that perhaps there was more to say on the subject, but I didn’t quite know what. Now in recent years I have learned that, whenever I find myself in philosophical perplexity, I can focus my awareness within my own mind, and recreate in my imagination, as it were, the characters of Plato and Socrates. And so the following conversation, or something like it, took place in the theatre of my imagination(2):

Plato: Greetings, my friend, and let me say at the outset that you should know better than that.

Neal: Better than what?

P: You should know better than to think that the “final words” on any subject will ever be written down, either by you or by me or by anyone else.

N: Abstractly I know this, but when I find myself holding a strong opinion on something, it does seem like the “final word”.

Socrates: Yes, that’s just how the fundamentalists feel.

N: Huh? Oh, it’s you, Socrates. Why are you bringing them up?

S: Because the fundamentalists are your cultures’ best example of people who sincerely believe that they have the “final word” on everything. But the seeds of fundamentalist thinking are alive in every human being, and you water those seeds whenever you think your opinion on anything is the “final word”.

P: Socrates never passes up an opportunity to instruct. However, even though human opinion is never “final”, that doesn’t mean that your opinions have to be expressed with a wishy-washy tentativeness. If you have a perspective on any issue, it is fine to get behind it and express it as forcefully as you can, as long as you keep in mind that there are always other perspectives.

N: OK. So I acknowledge that my “forceful” presentation of my opinions on the super-esp hypothesis represents my perspective. What have I left out?

P: You have left out my perspective. And Socrates’ too.

N: What? This issue has nothing to do with your philosophy. It has to do with whether or not a large body of anomalous data can be explained without making essential reference to the hypothesis of disembodied spirits.

P: (laughing) You misunderstand, my friend. I was not referring to the “perspective” I had when I was embodied; nor was I referring to what people take “my philosophy” to be. I was referring simply to my present perspective as a center of consciousness unencumbered with a material body.

N: Oh.

P: You see, human language strongly predisposes you to conceive of everything in terms of the physical. For example, the phrase you used above, “the hypothesis of disembodied spirits” ignores the actual perspective of such spirits.

N: I don’t get it.

P: Yes you do; you just need a reminder. From my perspective, there is nothing hypothetical about my existence.

N: Granted. So from the perspective that pure consciousness is primary, you are real, not hypothetical. But still, from the human perspective, the reality of disembodied consciousness is hypothetical.

S: Even so, it is a hypothesis that you personally believe to be true?

N: Yes, of course.

S: Then you must try it on, not just entertain it mentally.

N: What do you mean, Socrates?

S: Try pretending, if you will, that you are pure consciousness, just like us.

N: OK.

P: That’s what you are, from our perspective.

S: From that perspective, would you ever refer to yourself as “disembodied”?

N: Huh? Wait, oh my goodness, no. The word “disembodied” suggests that the body is somehow necessary for consciousness, that the spirit is somehow extracted from a body.

S: So the very word “disembodied” presupposes that body, not consciousness, is primary. (with humor) It implies that first you have a body, then you “dis” it in some way to get spirit, sort of like “dismembering” or “disemboweling” or “disassociating” or….

P: We get the point. From our perspective, consciousness is primary, so it is the body that must be explained through consciousness, not vice versa.

N: OK, but I think you’re being a bit picky here. From either perspective----the human or the spiritual----it is useful to distinguish between a consciousness that is embodied and one that is not.

P: The distinction is really much more useful to you than it is to us. From your perspective, you perceive your own body and the bodies of others. You know that you and other humans are conscious, or rather, that you are consciousness. You do not know whether this consciousness that you experience yourself to be is something that is produced by the body or not. Thinking hypothetically, you reason that, if the latter, then consciousness must survive the death of the body, since the body had nothing to do with its generation. That is, you identify the consciousness that survives the death of the body as “belonging to” this or that body.

N: I think I understand. So when we humans say such things as “Mary’s soul has left her body and gone to heaven” or “Mary’s soul will be reincarnated”, etc. we are identifying a specific soul, not in terms of what it really is in itself, but rather in terms of its association with a physical body.

P: Exactly. From our perspective, particulate consciousness, or the soul, has its being and its identity completely independent of the body. If anything, the body belongs to and is “in” the soul, not vice versa.

S: (with humor) Yes, and I assure you, that when we greet our friends over here, we do not have to first enter the theater of spacetime to find their body before we can recognize and identify them as the unique soul, or center of consciousness, that they are. (more seriously) That is why the expression “disembodied soul” is rather inappropriate from our perspective.

N: Hmmm, I want to go in two directions at the same time. I want to ask what you mean by saying the body is “in” the soul, but I fear that will take us too far away from our objective, which pertains to epistemology, not metaphysics. So I’ll ask an easier question instead: given that it is appropriate for we humans to make the distinction between consciousness that is embodied and consciousness that is not embodied, what expression should we use? Human language is woefully inadequate when it attempts to describe consciousness

S: That is so. But even though, as Rumi put it, “language is a tailor shop where nothing fits”, we philosophers must be vigilant, and use language in such a way that it serves as a constant reminder of our connection with spirit. The term “non-embodied”, although it cannot characterize the individual identity of any given center of consciousness (since the expression is wholly negative), is at least somewhat neutral, and does not, unlike “disembodied”, carry with it connotations of prior embodiment.

P: I know you are eager to discuss the main topic, which is whether humans are compelled by so-called anomalous data (there is nothing anomalous about it to those of us who are non-embodied)to hypothesize the existence of non-embodied consciousness, or whether the data can be explained in terms of esp or superesp without assuming such consciousness to exist. But the first question you ask above is quite relevant. I’ll tell you a little story about it later, but for now, we must not assume that metaphysics is not relevant for epistemology. For if one is gathering data with some instrument, it is necessary to know something about the instrument in order to assess the significance of the data. Do you not agree?

N: Of course.

P: And the data of which we speak is being gathered by human beings?

N: Again, of course.

P: And a human being is embodied consciousness?

N: Yes, I see your point. The “instrument” here is embodied consciousness, and so the data cannot be adequately evaluated without some understanding of embodied consciousness.

P: And since “metaphysics” is the name of that discipline which strives to understand, among other things, the nature of consciousness and its embodiment into human form…..

N: ….it follows that metaphysics is relevant for epistemology.

P: Good. Now we are ready to explore the epistemological issues concerning this “evidence and the afterlife” question, but with the understanding that we will be free to shift back and forth between the two perspectives.

N: And, to recapitulate, the first perspective is the human perspective, from which we experience ourselves to be embodied consciousness, or conscious bodies, and from which we are investigating whether there is compelling evidence to infer that consciousness exists independent of the body. It is in this context that skeptics assert that the evidence can be explained by ESP, or super-ESP, consistent with their belief that the brain generates consciousness, and without recourse to survival. The second perspective is that of souls, or non-embodied centers of consciousness, from which perspective consciousness experiences itself as it is, without essential reference to bodies.

S: (with humor) Indeed, from our perspective the question is not whether consciousness survives the death of the body, but rather, whether it survives the birth of the body.

N: Huh?

P: Socrates is being facetious …..

S: ….but only partly. (to Plato) Have we not often amused ourselves by wondering together whether our friend here, who has fallen asleep and dreams he is a body, is still conscious? The consciousness that accompanies embodied experience is of such a low order that it hardly deserves the name. But we must grant it the name because, ultimately, consciousness is all there is.

N: I am reminded of an account of a Near-Death Experience that I recently read. The person reported that while out of body she experienced a realm of unlimited knowledge, which knowledge she experienced herself to be. When it was time to return to her body, she said that the part of her that knew everything stayed behind, and the remainder joined with her body.

S: (laughing) Well put! And it makes the serious point that, from our perspective, a human being is a sort of “remainder”, entirely derivative and dependent upon the consciousness that creates it. Now, as we proceed with our discussion, I wonder if you would be so kind as to indulge me a little.

N: Certainly. How?

S: Well as you know, I like to discuss the philosophical questions in the context of specific examples. Could you give me some examples of human experience that you and others believe indicate, from your perspective, the independence of consciousness from the body. Then, using the same examples, tell me how ESP is supposed to explain the matter, and perhaps tell me also, if you can, the difference between ESP and superESP.

N: OK. One kind of case involves mediums. A person, say X, visits a medium and inquires after a deceased friend or relative, say Y. The medium provides X with accurate, detailed information about Y, including names, dates, circumstances of death, and many intimate details of the relationship that existed between X and Y. This has recently been done under tightly controlled laboratory conditions(3), so that the sitter (X) was not known to either the medium or the experimenter. The medium claims to be getting the information directly from the spirit of the deceased, but the skeptic argues that, since the information is contained in the mind of the sitter (X), it is possible that the medium obtained this information telepathically, by reading the mind of the sitter. The second “explanation” does not involve the hypothesis of a disembodied ---- excuse me, non-embodied --- mind.

A second kind of case involves children who have spontaneous memories of what appears to be a “past life”. In a typical case, a child, say X, recalls the name, say Y, of his former life, together with the names of Y’s friends and family members. X provides accurate information about many details of Y’s life and death, information which is independently verified by checking with hospital and police records and interviewing Y’s surviving family members(4). The skeptic attempts to explain X’s extraordinary knowledge of Y, not in terms of real past life memories (which would require postulating that consciousness is independent of the body), but rather in terms of clairvoyance, or some other form of ESP.

S: This skeptic of yours is a most interesting fellow. But tell me about what you called “superESP”, and the difference between that and ordinary ESP.

N: Certainly. Contemporary philosophers distinguish between two kinds of knowledge, called “propositional” and “non-propositional” knowledge respectively. Now propositional knowledge is factual knowledge; it is knowledge that something or other is the case. Non-propositional knowledge involves skills and abilities, for example, the ability to speak a language, play a musical instrument, or dramatically impersonate another person.

S: Could you give a few examples that illustrate this distinction?

N: I was about to. Let’s say I visit a medium and ask about my grandfather. The medium gives me his name, the names of his siblings and children, details of his immigration to the U.S., and so forth. All of this falls under the heading of propositional knowledge. But under some conditions ---- conditions under which the medium enters into a trance and allows my grandfather to communicate directly ----the voice coming out of the medium’s mouth will reflect the personality of my grandfather.. That is, the factual knowledge above will be conveyed in a manner appropriate to the personality of the deceased, perhaps even with a thick Yiddish accent. Needless to say, this occurs under conditions where the medium knows absolutely nothing about my grandfather. Or, to consider the past-life cases, a child X will not only remember accurate details of his past life Y, but will have skills and abilities appropriate to Y. Cases have been documented in which X can speak Y’s language or dialect, can play a musical instrument that Y played, and can spontaneously identify Y’s family members. Since ordinary ESP involves only propositional knowledge, extraordinary ESP, or “superESP”, is invoked to explain such cases of non-propositional knowledge.

S: And you find this a bit irritating, do you not?

N: Why yes, I do. The skeptic is invoking the ridiculous hypothesis of superESP for one purpose and one purpose only: to avoid the obvious and straight forward inference from the data to the hypothesis that consciousness is independent of the body.

S: You are right to point out that the skeptic wants to use the hypothesis of superESP for purposes that are, shall we say, somewhat devious and a bit short of complete intellectual honesty. However, there is nothing ridiculous about the hypothesis of superESP in itself.

N: What do you mean? Is it not ridiculous to suppose that a human being has the ability to dramatically impersonate someone they have never met or heard about. And we have to add that this alleged impersonization is done subconsciously, since the medium often has no conscious recollection of the process. Or in the past-life cases, one skeptic has argued that the best way to explain the memories and skills of children who remember past lives is that they were abducted by aliens who implanted false memories in their brains. If that is not ridiculous, then I don’t know what is!

S: Well I can understand your frustration. The skeptic is not really a skeptic, is he, since he is quite prepared to believe in all kinds of wild and crazy things, as long as it does not involve the concept of consciousness existing independent of the body. But still, my point remains. The examples you have given are examples of a misapplication of the hypothsis of ESP and superESP, but they do not impugn the hypothesis itself.

N: Huh?

S: (playfully) What would you say if I told you that there are lots of individuals that you respect and admire who believe in the reality of superESP?

N: Really? Who?

S: Why, I do. And so do you. And so does Plato here. Am I not right, Plato?

P: (laughing gently) Yes indeed, as usual.

N: Well, I hope you two are having fun. I’m totally confused.

S: No, you’re not really confused. You’re just pretending to be confused, or shall I say, (with great humor) your soul is subconsciously dramatizing confusion.

P: Socrates has set you up beautifully for this. The way out of your confusion is to apply the primary principle governing all philosophical discourse.

N: The primary principle governing all philosophical discourse?

P: That’s what I just said.

N: I know that’s what you just said. What is the principle?

P: It’s the very same principle you are always admonishing your students to follow, especially when you give them writing assignments.

N: Well, the main thing I tell them is that they should define their terms as clearly and succinctly as possible.

P: Exactly. So now, define the terms “ESP” and “superESP” for me. You have given examples of how these terms are used, and the kinds of phenomena to which they are applied, but you have not yet defined them.

N: Well, ESP stands for “Extra Sensory Perception”. It refers to any perception, or information, or knowledge that a person has but does not come through the usual five senses. Hence it is called “extra-sensory”. Does this satisfy you?

P: No, it does not.

N: No?

S: Now it is Plato who teases you. I’ll give you a hint: change the prefix “extra” to “non”.

N: OK, we can do that, since “extra sensory” means the same thing as “non-sensory”. Both refer to perceptions that are non-sensory in their origins. So you want me to give a definition of “non-sensory perception”.

S: Yes, we do.

N: Well, a non-sensory perception is, hmmm, it is …..wait a minute, wait a minute, oh my goodness…..

S & P: Ah, a flicker of light…..

N: The term is entirely negative, and hence cannot be defined except by indicating what it is not.

S: And is saying what something is not equivalent to saying what it is?

N: Of course not. To say that something is “not water” conveys minimal information about what it really is. To say that something is “not white” is not the same as saying what color it really is.

P: And so, to say that a given perception occurred through ESP is to convey no information whatsoever about how the perception occurred. To say that it did not occur through ordinary perception is not to say how it did occur. The case here is similar to that involving the expression “spontaneous remission”.

N: Yes. A cancer patient, for example, will sometimes respond positively to a physicians treatment. The cancer is then said to be “in remission”. But occasionally, a cancer patient that had been diagnosed as terminal gets better spontaneously, without treatment. This is called a case of “spontaneous remission”. But that term is wholly negative; it means only that the remission was not in response to anything the doctor did. …….

P: …..and conveys absolutely no information regarding how and why the tumor disappeared. And yet the term “spontaneous remission”, like the term “extra-sensory perception”, carries with it the illusion of understanding.

N: Some doctors may actually believe they have explained something by calling it a case of spontaneous remission, whereas in fact, such a case is one where they really have no explanation at all.

P: Yes, but now observe what follows from our discussion so far. When we say that a medium or psychic or child acquires information “by ESP”, we are saying nothing more than that the information was not acquired by means of the usual sensory channels. Do you agree?

N: Yes.

P: Then if the medium is receiving information from a non-embodied mind, would this not be an example of extra-sensory perception?

N: I suppose so.

P: Then it would seem that the question is not well put.

N: I think I understand what you mean. The question has been put in the following way: we have two hypotheses (1) survival and (2) ESP and superESP to explain anomalous data that involves accurate information received in ways other than the five senses. The skeptics try to avoid the first by arguing that the second accounts for the data; but even researchers who believe the former feel that they must eliminate the latter before they can legitimately assert that survival is the proper conclusion. But if our analysis is correct, to put it this way -----“either (i) or (2)” above ---- is a false dichotomy.

P: Yes, because communication from a non embodied consciousness is itself and instance of extra-sensory perception.

S: So when Plato and I have a little chat, so to speak, you might say that we communicate “by ESP”. But this, of course, does not in any way say how we do communicate.

N: It says only that, however you two communicate, it is not through the five senses.

S: And it would be extraordinarily difficult for us to communicate through the five senses. We’d have to go and find ourselves some bodies again……..

P: (jokingly) Anything but that! So, we won’t say things like “non embodied minds communicate by ESP”, since the form of the sentence suggests that it is telling us how non embodied minds communicate, whereas………

N: ..….whereas all the sentence says is that the communication is not through the five senses.

P: But we can assert the following: If survival is the case, that is, if consciousness exists independent of the body, and if non embodied centers of consciousness communicate with one another, as we are always doing, then ESP and even superESP is also the case.

S: ….and even superduper ESP!!!

N: “superduper ESP”??

P: Ah, Socrates is escalating the negative.

N: I don’t understand.

S: Sure you do. Look, none of these terms has any positive meaning. “ESP” means “not through the usual sensory channels”, “superESP” means “really not through the usual sensory channels”, and “superduper ESP” means “really, really, really not through the sensory channels”.

P: He’s joking, of course……

N: Yeah, but there’s always a serious point behind his puns and jokes.

S: Well, sometimes a joke is just a joke.

P: Yes, but not this time. The point is that you initially explained the difference between ESP and superESP in terms of the kinds of communications to which the terms are applied. Ordinary ESP is to be invoked when propositional knowledge, or matters of fact, are acquired by means other than the usual sensory channels. SuperESP is to be invoked when skills and abilities are manifest that were not acquired in the usual way. But from our perspective, there exist communications that are vastly more remarkable and profound than anything that falls under ESP and superESP.

N: What are they?

P: Well, we won’t attempt a real definition, but suffice to say that a non embodied mind can align its own center, if you will, with the center of another non embodied mind, each becoming the other. In such case, the term “superduper” might be appropriate, since much more than just skills and abilities are communicated.

S: And a center of consciousness can go further and align itself with the ONE and experience itself as All-There-Is. I think we might even need another term for this…..

N: OK, you’ve made your point. But nothing we have said here addresses the concerns of the skeptic. Even the skeptic would agree that if non-embodied minds exist, then they would not communicate via the usual bodily senses. They want to account for all human experience, including mediumship and children with “past-life” memories, in terms that do not involve the hypothesis that mind or consciousness can exist independent of the body.

P: Ah, so when the skeptic refers to “extra-sensory” perception, he does not mean “extra-bodily” perception.

N: Exactly. The skeptic believes, or wants to believe, that all communication can be explained by means of the body and its nervous system.

P: Really? I suppose they assume that there are hidden, undiscovered sensory channels.

N: Most of them don’t suppose anything. They just say that the medium acquires her information through ESP, by reading the mind of the sitter.

P: But this is an incoherent position, is it not. In the first place, as we have just shown, the sentence “the medium acquires her information through ESP” means nothing more than “the medium does not acquire her information through ordinary sensory channels”. So they must believe, if their position is to be coherent, that there exist extra-ordinary sensory channels. But you say they make no effort to uncover what these extraordinary sensory channels might be? Or even to speculate what the general features of such channels might be. Moreover, they can’t mean that the medium gets her information by reading the mind of the sitter, because they don’t believe that minds exist independent of the brain.

N: Well, the skeptics are quite vague on the details of just how ESP is supposed to work within the context of a materialist metaphysics. I think most open-minded people would take the existence of robust cases of ESP as evidence that Materialism is false. But, if I may argue for a moment on their behalf, I think they might advance an explanation schema along the following lines: the brain is very complex, and no one has yet determined the limits of what it can or cannot do. We do know, however, that the brain emits low amplitude waves. Like all electromagnetic waves, brain waves spread through all space. These waves presumably carry information that is unique to the specific brain from which it originated. It might be possible that the brain of another person, say the medium, is so finely attuned that it is sensitive to and can decode the information contained in the brain waves of the sitter.

P: Now you have just used the word “possible”, about which you made a big deal in a previous paper. You mean of course “logically possible”, that is, one can consistently imagine that the medium acquires her information in this way.

N: Yes. It is not an “empirical possibility” because there is not a shred of evidence that this is the case.

P: And how would the materialist ---- a much better word than “skeptic”, since, as Socrates observed, the materialist seems willing to believe all kinds of far-fetched hypotheses ---- explain well-documented cases in which the medium obtains information that is not in the brain of anyone living.

N: I suppose they would say that, although the brain of a deceased person no longer exists, the brain waves still do. And if those brain waves carry all the information about the deceased person, then, when those waves interact with the brain of the medium, the medium (falsely) believes she is in contact with the deceased. The fact that no one has ever detected the brain waves of a deceased person does not seem to bother them.

P: That is one reason why they are not really skeptics. However, I can think of several testable consequences of their hypothesis. Shall I tell you?

N: Go ahead.

P: OK. Consider the simplest case, the case where, according to the materialist, the medium is getting her information from the waves emanating from the sitter’s brain. Now is it not a fact of physics that all electromagnetic waves are distance sensitive? That is, the strength or amplitude of a given wave is strongest close to the source, and diminishes the further one goes from the source. Thus it should be easier for a medium to read a sitter who is close by than one who is far away. This would appear to be a necessary consequence of any theory that postulates brain waves as the mechanism by which the medium receives information.

N: Yes, Plato, your physics is correct. And as a matter of fact, experiments were recently done(5) that tested for the effects of distance on the accuracy of the mediums.

P: And……?

N: And the accuracy rate was the same, whether the medium and sitter were in the same room, or in different cities hundreds of miles apart.

P: So much for the brain wave theory! Let’s look at the more exceptional cases in which the medium receives accurate information that is not stored in the brain of any living person. I suppose such a case would be where a person has hidden something without telling anyone, and then, after his death, a medium tells the family members where to find the object.

N: Yes. The medium of course claims to be receiving the information directly from the no longer embodied deceased. The materialist, I suppose, would have to say that the medium extracts the information from the residual brain waves of the deceased, or something like that.

P: And I suppose they would also have to say that the medium extracts this information subconsciously.

N: Yes, since the medium is not conscious of doing this.

P: So the brain of the medium can subconsciously extract information from the residual brain waves of the deceased. Is this what they believe?

N: Well I think they are forced to believe this, or something like it, if they are to be consistent materialists. How else could materialism account for the medium’s astounding accuracy in such cases?

P: Very well, then. This hypothesis also has testable consequences. We know that brain waves attenuate with distance. Do they also attenuate with time?

N: Yes. All elecromagnetic waves propagate at the speed of light. So the greater the time that has elapsed since the wave left its source, the greater distance it has traveled, and hence, the weaker it becomes. But before you describe the testable consequences you mentioned above, there are some further assumptions that the materialist must make for his explanation schema to be consistent with physics.

P: What are they?

N: Suppose I were to light a match. The match eventually goes out, but the light from the match continues to propagate through space. This light contains sufficient information to reconstruct its source. An observer X light years away from the source would need to wait X years for the light to arrive, but when it does, he would be able to know everything about the source.

P: And this is what the materialist believes: that the residual brain waves contain all the information about its source.

N: Yes, but notice the light from the match is long gone from the Earth. After X years, the light is available only to an observer who is X light years from the source. It would not be available to anyone on the Earth.

P: Ah, so the materialist must postulate some sort of mechanism that keeps the residual brain waves circling around the Earth, much as satellites bounce radio waves back to the planet. Is there any viable candidate for such a mechanism that could keep residual brain waves Earth-bound?

N: No, there isn’t. I suppose they could wave their arms and say that perhaps the residual brain waves interact with gases or particles in the upper atmosphere in such a way that they get reflected back to the Earth.

S: And they would need to wave their hands an awful lot. This is why I said that the materialist is by no means a skeptic. He must add epicycle after ridiculous epicycle ---“auxiliary hypotheses” is what you call them, I think….. to the original hypothesis in order to “save” his materialism. And he is quite gullible when it comes to entertaining these auxiliary hypotheses.

P: Even so, let us grant our materialist friend all the auxiliary hypotheses he needs to “save” his original hypothesis that the medium obtains her information by subconsciously extracting information from the residual brain waves of the deceased. Suppose now that the medium’s brain is now interacting with the residual brain waves of a person who died ten years ago. These residual brain waves would have traveled a distance of ten light years, and so should be considerably weaker than the brain waves being emitted by a living brain.

N: Yes. Then your point is that the medium’s brain would be overwhelmed by the much stronger signals coming from the brains of people now alive, and that these signals would effectively drown out the residual brain waves, which would be orders of magnitude weaker.

P: Exactly. And what does the evidence show on this point.

N: The evidence clearly shows that the medium is just as accurate getting information about someone who died twenty or thirty years ago as she is getting information about someone who died yesterday. Neither distance nor time seems to have any effect on the medium’s abilities, and the stronger brain waves coming from people in close proximity to the medium in no way interferes with the medium’s ability to connect with long deceased individuals.

P: So again, the materialist hypothesis fails to meet the tests of empirical adequacy.

N: There is yet another empirical test worth mentioning here.

P: What is it?

N: Let’s consider the case in which the information given by the medium is known to the sitter, so that we don’t have to worry about “residual brain waves” from the deceased.

P: This is what you called ordinary ESP.

N: Yes. In this kind of case, the skeptic, or I should say, the materialist, tries to account for this by saying that, even though the medium claims to be getting the information from the deceased, he is merely reading the mind of the sitter, and hence, it is not necessary to hypothesize that the deceased has survived physical death.

P: OK, but we have to hold the materialist to an acceptable standard of logical rigor.

N: What do you mean?

P: Strictly speaking, he cannot call it “mind-reading”, because he does not believe that mind has any existence apart from the brain. So to be consistent with his own position, he should talk about “brain-reading”. A consistent materialist position would have to assert that the brain of the medium is able to retrieve information stored in the brain of the sitter. Brain waves, presumably, would be the mechanism by which this information is retrieved.

N: You state the materialist position with greater clarity than they do themselves. Now it turns out that this has some remarkable testable consequences that we have not mentioned. There is data that shows that when two people are communicating with each other, their brain waves exhibit mutual synchrony, to some extent.

P: This is interesting, but hardly surprising. After all, when two humans are interacting in the usual sensory way, light reflects off of one person and enters the eyes of the other. Or sound waves produced by one person enters the ears of the other. But what enters the eyes and ears of a person necessarily affects the brain of the person. Hence the brain of the second person is affected in a way that involves the first person, and vice versa. Now, what are the testable consequences of this?

N: Well, suppose that, before the medium begins to retrieve information we measure the degree of synchronicity between the medium’s brain waves and that of the sitter. The empirical question is: will the degree of synchronicity be greater or lesser when the medium begins to retrieve information?

P: Ah, ingenious! If the materialist theory is correct, then the brain of the medium must attune itself to the brain of the sitter to retrieve the information, hence the degree of synchronicity should increase. But if the sitter is getting her information from the spirit of the deceased, then, as the medium’s attention focuses away from the sitter and towards the non-embodied spirit, the synchronicity should become less. Has this experiment been done.

N: Yes. Preliminary results show a decrease in brain synchronicity, thereby falsifying the materialist position(6).

P: Do you think it is fair to conclude that all testable consequences of the materialist position have tested against the materialist position?

N: Yes, and actually, there is one more testable consequence of the materialist hypothesis that I’ve forgotten to mention.

P: Go ahead. This is a lot of fun.

N: Consider a case where the medium is reading a sitter under blind, and even double-blind conditions. The sitter walks in with all the information about her personal relationships stored in her brain. Some of these personal relations are with individuals who have died, but most are with individuals who are still alive. Now, under the materialist hypothesis, all this information, about all the sitter’s relationships, emanate from the sitter’s brain in the form of brain waves…..

P: ……Ah, I see where you’re going. Under the materialist hypothesis, one would expect the medium to be able to decode information, contained in the sitter’s brain waves, that pertain to her relationships with the living.

N: Yes, but it appears to be the case that this does not happen, that the medium can pick up information only about the sitter’s relationships with the deceased.

P: So the materialist has to explain how it is that, of all the brain waves emanating from the sitter’s brain, some carrying information pertaining to the deceased but most carrying information pertaining to the living, the sitter’s brain manages to select only those brain waves that pertain to the deceased. And subconsciously at that.

N: Now the materialist could attempt to explain this by saying that the sitter’s grief, which would be only for the deceased, in some way marks the brain waves, so that the medium’s brain responds only to those brain waves that are marked with grief…….

P: But this explanation won’t work in cases where sufficient time has elapsed since the death so that there is no more grief. Has this been investigated?

N: Sort of. Recently someone posed this question to several dozen parapsychologists. There appear to be a few historical cases in which the medium was getting accurate information from the spirit, say, of the sitter’s father. The medium believed the father was deceased, but it turned out that the father was alive. But for the most part, the medium almost never confuses the living with the deceased. One researcher reported that, in over six hundred sessions he observed with a given medium, all involved information only from the deceased.

P: This is very interesting………But what conclusion do you draw from this.

N: Well, if the medium were reading the mind of the sitter, then one would expect the sitter to “extract” information pertaining to the living as well as the deceased. But since this is not the case, it suggests that the medium is not reading brain waves, but rather, is communicating with the deceased directly.

S: But now, if this were the case, that is, if the medium obtained information about the living as well as the deceased, what would that show?

N: It would show that ESP or superESP does in fact exist to the degree required to account for the data; that is, it would increase the plausibility of the materialist hypothesis: that the medium is extracting the information from the brain of the sitter, and falsely attributes the source of the information to a “spirit”.

S: Do the researchers reason in this way?

N: I think so. The negative response to the question (whether mediums ever get information they attribute to a deceased spirit who turns out to be very much alive) was taken to count against the superESP hypothesis and in favor of the survival hypothesis. Is there something wrong with this reasoning?

S: Well, I can see that it appears this way from your perspective.

N: But not from your perspective?

S: From my perspective, that is, from the perspective of a non embodied center of consciousness, the hypotheses of survival and ESP are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we previously argued, did we not, that if survival is the case, that is, if non-embodied minds exist, then ESP, as well as super ESP and superduper ESP, must also be the case. Do you still agree with that conclusion?

N: Yes, I do. Although we should be careful to observe that, if survival is the case, then the mechanism for how ESP and superESP work is not in terms of one brain interacting with another person’s brain waves, as the materialist supposes, but rather, it involves direct communication between minds unmediated by the body.

S: Good. So even if there were cases in which the medium got information from a mind that turned out to be still embodied, that would in no way confirm the materialist’s position.

P: For, and again, this is from our perspective, a mind is a mind, whether it is embodied or not, and even when embodied, the mind has potentially all the powers and abilities of mind per se. I did say “potentially”, because the full potential of mind is rarely activated while it is having a human experience. But in principle there is no reason why one embodied mind could not communicate directly with another embodied mind, unmediated by the bodies they are “in”, so to speak.

N: Wow! So the hypothesis of survival would be able to account for cases in which the medium gets information from the mind of the living.

P: Yes. The absence of such cases must count against the materialist hypothesis, but the presence of such cases would in no way establish the materialist position.

N: And indeed, the hypothesis of survival would explain such cases much more elegantly since it does not have to attribute strange and dubious powers to the brain and its waves.

S: Agreed. But now, I find myself wondering about something.

N: What are you wondering about?

S: Well, we have established that, if survival is the case, then ESP must exist.

N: Yes. This is because non-embodied minds do not communicate via the bodily senses, so however they communicate and perceive things, it is extra-sensory by definition.

S: Yes. Now what I’m wondering is whether you think we can show the reverse.

N: The reverse?

S: Yes. Can we argue that, if ESP and super ESP exist, then survival must be the case.

N: The argument would be very powerful, if it could be made. The argument would have to show the impossibility, dare I say the logical impossibility, of ever accounting for ESP and superESP in terms consistent with materialist metaphysics.

P: Yes, this would be interesting and worthy of the attempt. For the empirical argument has already been established, and it might be useful to summarize our results thus far.

N: Go ahead.

P: First of all, we stated that the two rival hypotheses to explain the data from mediumship and other phenomena that appear to involve communication with the deceased, are (1) survival, or the hypothesis that consciousness exists independent of the body and (2) materialism, or the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness. We insisted that the second hypothesis ought not to be called “ESP or “superESP” because (i) the latter phenomena are compatible with survival, not opposed to it, (ii) the terms are wholly negative (they mean nothing more than “not via the senses”), and (iii) the materialist uses these terms as if they explained something, whereas they really just demarcate, without explanation, a class of phenomena (i.e. the reception of veridical information that does not come through the ordinary sensory channels). We insisted that the materialist should not be allowed to get away by waving his arms and muttering “ESP” and “superESP”, as if these terms explained something, but instead we said he is logically committed to explaining the phenomena demarcated by “ESP and “superESP” in terms consistent with his materialist metaphysics.

N: Yes, and hence the materialist must explain the phenomena demarcated by the terms “ESP” in terms of the brain and brain waves, for I know of no other possibility consistent with materialism.

P: And when we tried to put some flesh on the materialist hypothesis, and derive some test implications, we discovered that every such test implication falsified the materialist predictions. And so we were right to conclude that the materialist hypothesis is empirically inadequate.

N: Yes, and there are even more empirical factors against materialism than the ones we have discussed here. But we have discussed enough cases to conclude as we have. However, no scientific hypothesis established by empirical data can rule out the logical possibility of some other hypothesis being true. Hence it will be interesting to explore the question of whether materialism can be ruled out, not only on empirical grounds, as we have done, but also on logical grounds.

P: And it is at this point that our discussion moves from empirical science to abstract philosophy. For, as you pointed out in a previous paper(7), empirical possibilities are the domain of science, whereas logical possibilities are the domain of philosophy.

N: Agreed. But how shall we proceed with our discussion? For Materialism, by itself, is a perfectly consistent hypothesis. It states that everything that exists is made up of matter, a corollary of which is that consciousness is produced by the brain. The theory may be false, but it is hardly inconsistent.

P: What you say is true. However, we need not argue that Materialism is inconsistent by itself. Perhaps it will suffice if we can advance an argument to show that “if ESP and superESP exist, then Materialism must be false”.

N: That would be a strong result, for it would show that, far from being a way to “save” Materialism, the very occurrence of ESP and superESP renders Materialism false. But I ask again, how shall we proceed?

S: I have a suggestion. Earlier you stated that we had not discussed all the empirical evidence against Materialism. I have in mind a certain kind of empirical possibility……

N: What is that, Socrates?

S: Let’s begin with the kind of case we have already discussed: (1)a medium gets information from an ostensibly deceased individual. (2) the information is not known to the sitter or to anyone living, but is later verified as true. There exist such cases?

N: Definitely.

S: In analyzing these cases from the materialist perspective, we said that since the sitter’s brain could not have extracted the information from the brain waves of any living person, she must have extracted it from what we called the residual brain waves of the deceased. Correct?

N: Yes, unless the materialist has some other plausible physical mechanism, other than residual brain waves, for how the information is stored.

S: It will not matter, for the point I wish to make, whether the information is stored in residual brain waves or in some other physical device. The important point is that the materialist believes (i) the information is stored somewhere in a physical form, and (ii) the personality or mind to whom that information previously belonged no longer exists and is not “stored” anywhere.

N: Yes, I believe that this, or something like, has to be the materialist position. But where are you going with this?

S: I am going to ask you if there are any cases in which the medium gets information that, not only is not known to the sitter, but was not known to the deceased person prior to his or her death.

N: Yes, I believe that such cases, although infrequent, nevertheless exist. I can think of several kinds of cases that would meet your two conditions.

S: I’m listening.

N: Suppose the sitter has a friend or relative who is missing. Suppose that, unknown to any living person, the missing person had suffered a massive heart attack while driving down a lonely country road. The car, let us suppose, goes off the road and falls into a deep ditch, or off a mountain, and there is no trace of the car or body. The medium gets accurate information about the cause of death, location of the car, and so forth.

S: Good. Now in such a case, the knowledge of where the car is could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to have been contained in the brain of the deceased, because the car went off the road after the person’s brain stopped functioning. Hence the medium could not be getting this information from the brain waves of the deceased.

N: Because the brain waves of the deceased could not possibly contain information about events that happened after the death of the brain. So it would seem that the materialist, in principle, cannot give an account of how the medium obtains veridical information about events that (i) are not known to any living person and (ii) happened after the death of the deceased.

P: Unless, of course, he postulates that these residual brain waves can somehow acquire information that wasn’t present to its brain when the latter was alive.

N: A postulate that even the materialist ought to label “far-fetched”.

S: Agreed, but aside from being far-fetched, this postulate ----required by the materialist to account for the data-----seems to involve the concept of mind or consciousness.

N: Why do you say that?

S: Here is what I have in mind: the brain, of course, can and does acquire novel information all the time. According to materialism, it does this entirely from its interactions, via the senses, with the physical world in which it exists. Brain waves, residual or not, lack sensory channels and hence cannot acquire information about the world. The materialist must now postulate that brain waves can by themselves acquire veridical information about the world, without any sensory channels linking it to the world, as is the case with a living brain.

N: These residual brain waves must be unusually intelligent.

S: You joke, but this is just the point of the example. For is not intelligence associated with the ability to absorb and process new information?

N: Yes, I see. So these residual brain waves must be intelligent in some way, just like the living brain.

S: And where there in intelligence, is there not consciousness?

N: Ah, not so fast. Computers can process information and respond to novel situations. But we do not infer that they are therefore conscious. Of course, the situation is more complicated, because computers can’t do a damn thing until they are built and programmed by people who are conscious. So the so-called intelligence of the computer is derivative upon the intelligence of conscious humans.

P: OK. But the question before us now is: must the materialist, in order to account for all the data, ascribe, in addition to information processing, qualities like agency, intentionality, purposefulness, etc.----qualities that are usually associated with consciousness ---- to these residual brain waves, or to whatever other physical mechanism he has in mind for the storage of all the information that was in the deceased’s brain?

N: Good. The evidence from mediumship and past-life cases clearly show that information, or what we called “propositional knowledge”, survives death. The materialist holds the rather far-fetched belief that this information is stored physically, in the form of what we called residual brain waves. When this information is retrieved somehow by a living brain ---- that of a medium or a child who “remembers” ---- the owner of the living brain, says the materialist, misinterprets the information as “coming from” a presently existing non-embodied mind. We should now, I think, examine in more detail cases involving non-propositional knowledge, since such knowledge is much closer to what we call “personality”, “agency”, or, if you will, “consciousness”, than is propositional knowledge.

P: Very well. But before we proceed, I wish to make two preliminary observations.

N: Go ahead.

P: First of all, it is not “far-fetched”, as you suggested above, that all information concerning any individual, living or deceased, is stored physically.

N: No? I don’t understand. Are you agreeing with the materialist?

P: On this point, yes. And so, my friend, do you.

N: I do?

P: Most definitely. (smiling) You should read that book you wrote on Spinoza.

N: Huh? Oh, wait, of course. A consequence of any holistic system of thought is that the whole is, how shall I put it, embedded in all of its “parts”, and hence knowledge of the whole can be extracted from any of its parts.

P: And this is a principle that your scientists make great use of. Your knowledge of the physical universe is constructed out of electromagnetic radiation that falls on the lenses of your telescopes and other instruments. Even though a distant galaxy may no longer exist, the tiniest amount of residual radiation from that galaxy allows scientists to obtain detailed knowledge about the galaxy.

N: Point well taken. So it is not far-fetched for the materialist to claim that information pertaining to a deceased individual is (i) stored in some physical form and (ii) is rich enough to yield a detailed portrait of the deceased individual, in the same way that scientists can get a detailed portrait of a no longer existing galaxy. Now, what is the second preliminary point?

P: Do you recall the discussion we had a while ago on compassion?(8) We distinguished between what we called a real definition and an identifying definition.

N: Yes, a real definition is non-anthropomorphic, and states what a given thing is in itself, whereas an identifying definition is anthropomorphic, and gives properties by which humans identify a thing as the thing it is. I believe we illustrated this distinction with the example of water. Water is identified in terms of its effects on humans as a colorless odorless liquid essential for life. But its real definition involves the concept of its molecular structure, and has nothing to do with human beings.

P: Good. So we will now use the term “superESP”, or “superpsi” to identify a class of phenomena that we wish to discuss. But we will not be giving a real definition of the kind of phenomena designated by that term.

N: I understand.

P: So with that understanding, could you give, again, an identifying definition of superpsi?

N: Well, there is probably no clear agreement as to exactly what kind of phenomena fall under its scope, but roughly speaking……

S: ….and all human speaking is rough.

N: Pun noted. As I was saying, roughly speaking, the term “superpsi” is used to designate the kinds of cases that appear to involve non-propositional knowledge. It is quite impressive, for example, when a child has propositional knowledge of an individual he has never met. He accurately states facts about the deceased individual he claims to have been: name, date and circumstances of death, occupation, relationships with others, names of family members, and the language spoken by the deceased. All of this, it is claimed falls under the scope of propositional knowledge. But if the child should actually be able to speak the language, without having been taught, then this would be an example of non-propositional knowledge, and would be an example of superESP.

P: So knowing how to do something is quite different from knowing that something or other is the case. Are there other kinds of cases besides children who remember past lives?

N: There are well-documented cases in which the medium, rather than just relaying information from the deceased to the sitter, allows her body to be “possessed” by the spirit of the decease directly. In such cases, not only is veridical factual information conveyed, but it is conveyed in the manner appropriate to the deceased.

P: By that I suppose you mean that the manner in which the information is conveyed involves language, gestures, tone of voice, sense of humor, and so forth.

N: Yes, so that close friends and family members come away feeling that in the give and take of spontaneous discussion, the medium behaved exactly as their deceased friend used to behave in such discussions.

P: And what do the skeptics say about such cases, besides waving their hands a lot?

N: Well, aside from hand waving, there’s not very much they can say. They say first of all, that the propositional knowledge given by the medium is obtained as we have described above, that is, her brain somehow picks up data stored in other peoples’ brains, or stored in residual brain waves from the deceased. They then have to add that the medium has the ability to organize the information she is receiving and put it into a dramatic form appropriate to the deceased. Since the medium is not doing this consciously, the skeptic says she must have the ability to subconsciously dramatize the personality of the deceased. Moreover, the medium usually has no prior knowledge of the deceased, so we have to add that the skeptic believes that the medium has the ability to subconsciously impersonate someone she does not know, to the satisfaction of the deceased’s close friends and relatives.

S: The skeptic believes all this? What a gullible fellow he must be!

N: He will believe whatever he has to believe to avoid arriving at the conclusion that consciousness survives the death of the body. I can see why you don’t want to use the word “skeptic” in this context. He is “skeptical” only with respect to the belief in an afterlife, even though some of the things he must believe in order to save his Materialism are quite absurd. Clearly, the most parsimonious hypothesis to account for all the data is the hypothesis of survival, according to which the mind of the deceased individual operates and controls the body of the medium directly.

S: But we must be gentle with our materialist friends, for it is an all too human trait to cling to the beliefs one cherishes, no matter what the evidence. And we shouldn’t blame them too much for being merely human. After all, we have a certain advantage over them.

N: What do you mean?

S: There is an interesting epistemological asymmetry between what the materialist believes and what we believe. For if there is an afterlife, they will come to know it with certainty upon the death of their body; but if there is no afterlife, then after their body dies there will be no one left to know anything. So their belief can be proven false, but never true. Whereas it is quite the opposite for us. If we are right, you will definitely know it; but if wrong, you never will.

P: Let’s return to our main argument. We must see what happens when we put a little more flesh on the materialist’s position. In particular, we must investigate whether “superpsi” and all this “subconscious dramatic impersonization” business can be accounted for in terms consistent with the materialist position.

N: Good. I suggest we inquire into what might be a plausible physical mechanism for how the skills and abilities, in phenomena that we call “superESP”, get transferred from the deceased individual to the medium.

P: Yes. And we should note at the very beginning that a kind of explanation that is logically possible for ordinary ESP cases is not possible for cases involving superESP.

N: What do you mean?

P: In cases of ordinary ESP, where only propositional knowledge is involved, the materialist alleges that the medium gets her information telepathically, by reading the mind of the sitter. The possible physical mechanism by which the information, stored in the mind of the sitter, reaches the mind of the medium, is conjectured to be brain waves.

N: Yes, and we should stress that the sense of the word “possible” here is logical only, for there is no empirical support for the materialist’s conjecture, and considerable empirical evidence against it, as we have discussed.

P: But this logical possibility is not available to the materialist in the case of superpsi, where non-propositional knowledge is involved.

N: Oh, I think I understand what you mean. The knowledge, in the sitter’s mind, that a certain deceased individual spoke a certain language, told jokes in a certain way, or loved to philosophize about abstract metaphysical questions(9), does not confer upon the sitter the ability to do those things. So there is absolutely nothing in the sitter’s brain, and hence nothing in the sitter’s brain waves, that could possibly convey to the mediums brain, the skill or ability that the medium in fact demonstrates.

P: So the physical mechanism by which the medium acquires skills and abilities appropriate to the deceased cannot originate in the brain of anyone living.

N: It must therefore originate in the brain of the deceased, who has, or had, these abilities. So we are back to the hypothesis of residual brain waves.

P: And these residual brain waves must have wonderful and remarkable properties. For they must encode, somehow, the skills and abilities of the deceased in such a way that, when they interact with the brain of the medium, they instantly confer upon the medium those very same skills and abilities.

N: Quite remarkable indeed.

P: It is even more remarkable, if my hunch is right.

N: Which hunch?

P: Are there cases in which the medium experiences the feelings and emotions of the deceased?

N: Oh yes, all the time. Mediums often report experiencing the emotions of the deceased.

P: I mean, do they report just knowing that the deceased was experiencing certain emotions, or do they actually feel the emotions themselves?

N: They report both kinds of cases. The latter can be difficult for the medium, when they themselves experience the pain, anger, sadness, whatever, that was experienced by the deceased at the time of his death.

P: Then it would seem my hunch is right, and we have to add this to the properties of these marvelous residual brain waves. That is, it seems that these residual brain waves must encode not only (1) all facts about the deceased, and (2) skills and abilities of the deceased, but also (3) the actual emotions and feelings of the deceased.

N: So it would seem.

S: Hmmmm, I think I can see where you are going with this, Plato, but I have a little hunch of my own I would like to explore.

P: Explore as you will.

S: Thank you. Are there cases in which the medium reports having the memories of the deceased? I mean cases where the medium not only reports facts about the deceased, but reports those facts in the first person, as memories.

N: No, not that I know of. But, wait a minute, yes of course, there are thousands of such cases, but not involving mediums.

S: Please explain.

N: Well, there are two kinds of phenomena that appear to involve the transference of living memory from one mind to another. One involves children who have spontaneous memories of deceased individuals, and the other involves people who, under hypnosis, report having detailed memories of a deceased person.

S: And, if my hunch is right, both the children and the hypnotized adults report their experiences in the first person, as living memories, rather than as facts about some deceased individual.

N: Your hunch is entirely correct.

S: Hence we must postulate that these wonderful residual brain waves of ours……

N: They are not “ours”. They belong to the materialist.

S: Point well taken. Well, it would seem that the materialist’s magnificent residual brain waves, originating from the brain of the deceased, has the property of inducing in the brain of the recipient ----whether small child or hypnotized adult -----the living memories of the deceased.

N: This would have to be the case. For the child, and hypnotized adult, reports what they experience, not as events that happened to a certain deceased individual, but as events that happened to themselves. They report it in the first person, as memories of events that they themselves experienced.

P: And so we must add a fourth property that these miraculous residual brain waves must possess if they to be are the physical mechanism by which the materialist accounts for all the data. The residual brain waves, or whatever physical mechanism the materialist postulates to link the brain of the deceased with the brain of the recipient, must contain within itself (1) all propositional knowledge pertaining to the deceased, (2) skills and abilities of the deceased, (3) the actual feelings and emotions appropriate to the deceased, and (4) the actual first person memories of the deceased. And we must not forget a fifth property that we have already discussed.

N: Which property?

P: The residual brain waves have the ability to acquire information about events that happened after the death of the deceased.

S: These magical residual brain waves appear to be coming to life before our very eyes.

P: My point exactly. These five properties, especially the last four, when taken together, constitute the personality of the deceased, or do you think a personality is anything over and above memories, emotions, skills and the ability to learn new things?

N: No, especially if we keep in mind that by memories here we mean not just factual information, but first person memories, which include the feeling of “I-ness”, or consciousness.

P: So if the materialist postulates, as it seems he must, that residual brain waves have encoded within themselves the above five properties ---- which, as you point out, involve the feeling of “I-ness”----- and that these residual brain waves survive the death of the brain itself, then it seems that the personality itself survives the death of the brain.

N: This would seem to be a consequence of the materialist’s position. For if conscious memories, emotions, and abilities survive the death of the body, and if by “personality” we mean “conscious memories, emotions and abilities”, then it follows logically that personality survives the death of the body.

P: So it seems that we have established a bi-conditional: For earlier in our discussion we showed that (1) if consciousness exists independent of the body, then ESP and superESP must also exist. What we have now demonstrated is that (2) if ESP and superESP exist, then personality also continues to exist, independent of the body.

N: This is a most ironic result, if it holds up. For the “explanation” that the materialist offers as an alternative to that of survival turns out to actually entail survival by itself. However, there is still a major difference between the materialist position and our own.

P: What is that?

N: Even if we are right to believe that the materialist position entails that personality survives the death of the body, it does not entail what we believe, namely, that consciousness can exist independent of matter. For the materialist can still consistently believe that a material substratum is necessary for consciousness to exist. In the case of a living person, the material substratum for consciousness is the living brain, for a deceased person the material substratum is the residual brain waves. The materialist can still assert that, no brain, no consciousness, and no residual brain waves, no surviving consciousness.

P: Ah, ingenious! Except for one little thing, it would seem that the materialist can accommodate the fact of survival.

N: I have a feeling this “one little thing” of yours may not be so little. What is it?

P: It is just this: we have stated, have we not, that in order to account for the data, the information and personality encoded in the residual brain waves do not dissipate or diminish over time?

N: Yes, because past-life memories and personalities can be retrieved regardless of how long the person has been deceased.

S: And if you were willing, my friend, to entertain the thought that you are not making up this conversation by yourself, your brain is now receiving communications from brain waves that have been residualling around the Earth for twenty five hundred years. I for one feel in no way diminished or dissipated. How about you, Plato?

P: (laughing) Quite the contrary! I feel vastly augmented, as does everyone as soon as they quit the body.

S: So you see why I referred to these residual brain waves as “wonderful” and “marvelous”. Not only do they carry the personality embedded within, but they confer to that personality an exaltation, an ever-increasing sense of its own I-ness, or whatever we called it.

N: And the literature on the Near Death Experience entirely supports your view. People report feeling more alive, more themselves, more real, while out of the body than while in it. So if the mind of the deceased is encoded in the residual brain waves, as the mind of the living is supposedly encoded in the living brain, then it would appear that these residual brains generate the mental much better than does the brain itself.

P: An awkward result for the materialist. But tell me, are there any known physical mechanisms whose effects do not dissipate and diminish over time?

N: No. Such a system would violate the Laws of entropy.

P: Whatever. The point is that there are no physical systems that could serve as a substratum, or carrier of post-mortem information and personality, since the former always dissipates over time, whereas the latter appears to be unaffected by the passage of time.

N: So it would seem.

P: So it looks like any physical mechanism the materialist proposes for being the carrier of the five properties we discussed above would be inconsistent with the laws of physics. And so, until such time as the materialist can explain how brain waves can carry memory, emotion, abilities, etc. in such a way that the latter suffer no diminishment over time and space, it seems fair to conclude that the materialist position collapses under its own weight, so to speak.

N: And so the phenomena of ESP and superESP, instead of providing the materialist with an alternative hypothesis to that of survival, actually destroys the materialist position.

S: Now, we should not insist that our argument is fool-proof, because no earthly arguments are. No doubt a dedicated materialist will discover things in our argument to find fault with.

N: No doubt.

S: So we cannot claim to have said the “final word” on this subject.

N: No, we will not make that claim.

S: It will be sufficient if serious seekers of truth find something useful in what we have discussed. Perhaps serious researchers will take heart, and will no longer be frightened when the materialists dismiss their findings with fancy jargon and shouts of “it can all be explained by ESP”. For we have examined the materialist position and found it to be empty, “full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing”.

N: I agree.

P: So are we complete for now?

N: Not quite. I seem to recall that you promised to tell me a story. You had said that it is incorrect to think of the soul as being “in” the body, and that is better to think of the body as “in” the soul.

P: Ah yes, I remember. Well, let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier in our conversation. Recall that I teased you about not taking my perspective ---- the perspective of non-embodied consciousness ----into account.

N: Yes.

P: From the human perspective, you identify a body very competently, through how it looks, fingerprints, DNA, and so forth.

N: Yes, and since we have no way to identify mind or consciousness per se, we identify a specific mind through its association with a particular body.

P: And there is nothing wrong with identifying a mind through the body with which it is associated. The problem is that your language compels you to use expressions like “the mind of Peter”, or “Mary’s soul”, or “John’s consciousness”. The proper names here denote the bodies together with their Earthly histories, and the linguistic form of the expressions causes you to think that the soul is just a possession of the body.

N: Yes, it makes us think that Mary “has” a soul in the same way that she has, say, blond hair, a car, and two children. We do not see that Mary’s soul----excuse me, we do not see that the soul that is associated with Mary’s body is uniquely what it is independent of its association with the body.

P: Whereas from our perspective, that is exactly what we do see. We, that is to say, centers of non-embodied consciousness, experience other souls as the unique beings that they are, and through the soul, we identify the various “bodies” and personalities that the soul may have “had”.

N: I understand.

P: Then Socrates urged you not to just agree with our perspective, but to actually try it on.

N: How do I do that, Plato?

P: You might begin by thinking of yourself, not as a person who has a soul, but as a soul who has a human person. For the soul is the greater thing, is it not?

N: Of course.

P: And the human being is the lesser. So the lesser is contained in the greater, not vice versa.

S: And recall the Near-Death Experiencer who reported that, when it became time to return to her body, the part of her that knew everything stayed behind, and the remainder returned to her body.

N: Yes, I recall.

S: Then think of yourself in that way. The part of your soul that knows everything is, you might say, sitting up here with us. The remainder is what you take yourself to be.

N: Hardly a flattering conception of a human being.

S: Ah, but it can be quite liberating, when you think it through.

P: Now reflect on the influence of language. When Socrates used the expression “your soul” above, you immediately thought of something inside of your self, not, to be sure, of something inside of your body, but as something inside of your conscious mind or personality, something akin to a thought or a feeling perhaps.

N: Yes, something like that is what came to mind immediately when Socrates used that expression. But from your perspective, what I experience as my personality, or my conscious mind, is contained within my soul, not vice versa.

P: For the “self” that you now take yourself to be is contained within the self that created you. We call the latter “soul” and the former “human mind” or “personality”. But these things cannot be adequately expressed in human language. That is why I thought I would tell you a little story.

N: Go right ahead.

P: Once upon a time…..

S: …..a rather inauspicious beginning, don’t you think?

N: Huh? All our stories begin this way.

S: But our stories have nothing to do with time.

P: Quite right. Let me begin again. Once upon an eternity, there was a soul that fell asleep….

N: Souls can fall asleep??

P: Now don’t get literal on me; this is just a story. To continue,,..….and while asleep it had a marvelous dream. It dreamed that it got separated from its own source, the World-Soul, and got lost in a body, whose personality it took itself to be. From his body’s perspective, he looked around and examined his surroundings. Some things appeared to be external to himself, and he called those things “physical” or “material; other things appeared to be inside himself, and he called those things “mental”. A kind of vague memory permeated his being ---- a memory that he was somehow incomplete, and was lacking for something, but he knew not what. At first he sought for his completion among the glitter of the outer world, but he did not find anything fulfilling in the so-called material world. He then turned his attention to the inner world, the world of his own thoughts and emotions. And again, he did not find the “soul” he thought he had lost. Indeed, the inner world seemed just as confused and confusing as did the outer world. At times he seemed to hear a voice coming from his inner world. At first he thought the voice was just his own thinking, that he was sort of talking to himself. But somehow, and no one knows just how, he began to entertain the very remote possibility, that maybe the voice he occasionally heard did not originate in his own mind, that is, in the mind he took himself to be.
How do you like my little story so far?

N: Interesting. But where did the voice come from, and what did the voice say?

P: The voice ----or voices, for there was more than just one, were coming from the soul’s friends, who were not asleep, and they were trying to remind him of his true situation, sometimes communicating with words, but more often in the form of intuitions and inspirations.

S: The situation is very much like the following: suppose, Neal, that a good friend of yours had fallen asleep, and that you had the ability to insert yourself as a character in his dream.

N: This would make for a good science fiction movie. Go on.

S: What, if anything, could you say or do that would cause your friend to remember his true situation, that in fact he was just dreaming?

N: Very little, because anything I could say or do in his dream, he would interpret as just another character in his dream.

S: And if you described to him his true situation, for example, that his outer world and his inner world were one and the same, that both are “the stuff dreams are made of”, and lack any substantial reality……

N: He would laugh out loud, for from his perspective, that would be tantamount to saying that the material world and the mental world are ontologically one and the same, and that both lack substantial reality. Nothing could appear more absurd to him than that.

S: Except if you tried to tell him that the self that he took himself to be in the dream is also, like his outer and inner worlds, made up of the stuff that dreams are made of, and also lacks any substantiality.

N: He would think I was insane.

P: Now suppose that this dream-consciousness acquires a taste for philosophizing, and entertains the belief that he has a soul. Should he conceive of this soul as something that is inside of him, or should he conceive of himself ---- the consciousness that he takes himself to be ---- as something that is within the soul?

N: Definitely the latter. The consciousness that he takes himself to be while in the dream belongs to, is part of, is created by, is dependent upon, the consciousness that is having the dream.

P: And yet, when spiritual teachers advise seekers to look within, they need not be interpreted as saying that the soul, God, or the kingdom of heaven, is literally inside of the mind of the seeker, rather than vice versa. Instead, they should be construed as saying that what he is seeking for is more akin to himself-----the consciousness that seeks ---- than it is to any of the “objects” experienced by that consciousness. Do you agree?

N: Yes. So, if I understand you correctly, from the perspective of non-embodied consciousness, what we humans call “matter” and what we call “mind” are not really different, but both originate in and are constituted by, the consciousness of the soul who has fallen asleep.

P: Yes.

N: But Plato, how does your story end?

P: There are no endings in eternity, but if there were, all our stories would end happily. Very happily!

S: (with compassion) Ah, my friend, I understand your question. You already know the answer, of course, but here is a little reminder: imagine yourself in your friend’s dream again. Suppose that somehow, your friend has grasped what you have been telling him about his true situation. He has what Plato calls “right opinion”.

N: OK

S: Your friend quite naturally forms the desire to wake up from his dream. He tries to wake up from within the dream…..

P: …..or perhaps he just dreams that he is trying to wake up.

S: ……and after trying a little, he falls into a sort of despair, and becomes anxious about whether, or when, or if, he will ever awaken. Assuming you can speak to your friend from within his dream, what might you say to him that would console his anxiety and bring some solace?

N: I would say something like this: my dear friend, the power to wake up from a dream depends not on you, or the self you take yourself to be in the dream, but on the person who is having the dream. When sleep is sufficient, the person who is dreaming you will wake up of his own accord, and so will you. In fact, when he does wake up, you will experience the self that you take yourself to be merging seamlessly with the self who is now dreaming you. So the despair, the anxiety, and all the other kinds of grief you so generously bestow on yourself simply because you have not yet awakened is of absolutely no use. No matter how guilty you feel about still being asleep, it will not cause the dreamer to awaken one second earlier. So relax, my friend, enjoy the dream, for the time and manner of its ending are not within your control.

S: Sound advice. Do you think your friend will listen?

N: I hope so, unless even the time and manner of his listening are also not within his control.

P: Well said. No one would ever suggest that dreams are “wrong” or “sinful”. They are essential for human health, the health and well-being of both bodies and minds. Likewise, the dreams of the soul, that is, the whole material world as it appears to “you”, as well as the “you” to whom the world appears, are essential to the overall health and well-being of the soul. But at this point, we will bring our conversation to a close, for we have reached the limit of what can be said in words, even if those words are just in the form of a likely story.


Neal Grossman
June, 2005


(1) Some Thoughts on Superpsi: Journal of Religion and Psychical Research, summer 2005
(2) To anyone who is skeptical of this claim, I cannot of course prove that what follows is merely the product of my own imagination.
(3) The Afterlife Experiments, by Gary Schwartz
(4) See the many books and articles by Ian Stevenson
(5) The Afterlife Experiments, by Gary Scwartz
(6) Schwartz, op.cit
(7) “Some Thoughts on superESP”
(8) “On Compassion: A Convrsation”; unpublished
(9) For an example of the latter, see accounts of Mrs. Willett’s mediumship under the Myer’s control


Links of interest:

-Interview with professor Neal Grossman; and Dr.Grossman's article "Some considerations against materialism" (excerpt of Dr.Grossman's book)

-Gary Schwartz's triple blind study with mediums (and long rebutting to Ray Hyman's misrepresentations of a previous research).

-William James' lecture on human immortality.

-My post on William James' prism analogy and Corliss Lamont's objection to it.

-Interview with Robert Almeder (and video in youtube)

-Chris Carter's article on consciousness.