Super-Psi & some notes from Braude's Immortal Remains

Looking at Mishlove's essay which won the Bigelow prize.

He goes through varied types of Survival Evidence, some of it overlapping with what we covered in this thread. He also takes an interesting position that supports Idealism but unlike Kastrup rejects Super-Psi type explanations.

Braude's Bigelow essay lays out his case for Super Psi and where he thinks it falls short. Most of the essay is stuff I think this thread covered, though he makes an odd mention of an unpublished paper by Sudduth that will supposedly challenge some of Tucker's conclusions in a particular case.

Additionally he doesn't address the evolutionary question of Super Psi, and how this conspiratorial set of powers would suggest Intelligent Design by non-material entities and/or some kind of Idealism. If either is true then it would just further provide a place for conscious entities to reside without their "physical" bodies. Additionally he doesn't address something Mishlove brought up in his essay and I mentioned earlier in this thread, that "sub-personalities" that Super Psi invokes actually at times seem to behave like spirits themselves - to the point of being exorcise-able.

What he does bring up is the issue that if Super Psi exists why is human civilization not a smoking ruin:

Skeptics sometimes wonder why, if thoughts can kill or maim, so many of us are still alive and intact... 

... Once we allow psi interactions to be part of the overall causal picture, we need to entertain an immense range of potentially countervailing factors—in particular, the full spectrum of under-the-surface psychic activity. After all, both experimental and anecdotal evidence—not to mention common
sense—suggest that psychic processes can be triggered unconsciously, presumably to serve various deep and genuinely motivating needs and interests. For example, that might be one way people ordinarily and subconsciously orchestrate their lives to either frustrate or promote their avowed interests. But in that case, every person could be making multiple attempts throughout the day to influence the world psychically or scan for desired information. Unless we think in these terms, we won’t be taking seriously the possibility of psi and its role in nature. But once we do allow for this vast reservoir of potentially interfering factors, we might reasonably expect few (if any) of our psychic
“efforts” to succeed, no matter how unlimited or powerful psi might be in principle. It may not be miraculous when one of those efforts successfully navigates the dense web of hindrances confronting it. But it might be more remarkable for it to succeed than for it to fail...

My argument about Crippling Complexity can be presented stepwise, as follows.

(1) Most (if not all) of our abilities or capacities are situation-sensitive–including
ordinarily subconscious and involuntary capacities and even virtuosic abilities.

(2) Therefore, it’s reasonable to think that the manifestation of psychic capacities would
also be situation-sensitive.

(3) The parapsychological evidence supports that conjecture.

(4) Therefore, it’s reasonable to think that no matter how extensive, refined, or virtuosic
psychic capacities might be, like other capacities they will also be subject to actual
case-by-case limitations.

(5) The hypothesis that humans have psychic capacities presupposes a vast underlying
network of both normal causality and (typically covert) psi-processes initiated both
consciously and unconsciously. 

(6) The denser and more extensive that network is, the more obstacles any particular
psychic inquiry or effort must navigate in order to succeed (e.g., the more likely it is that
an effort will be caught in the crossfire of underlying, and possibly unrelated, causal
activity.) 

(7) Therefore, the greater the range, pervasiveness, and refinement of psychic
functioning (i.e., the more “super” we take it to be), the more vulnerable one’s psychic
efforts will be to paranormal interference from within the surrounding causal nexus, and
the less likely it becomes that any given psychic effort will succeed, much less that a
series of such efforts will succeed.

(8) Therefore, the more potentially wide-ranging and virtuosic we take psi to be, the less
likely it becomes that a person’s psi could produce an extended and accurate trance
persona, or provide all the detailed, intimate information found in the most astonishing
survival cases—and even more so, to do these things consistently.

I think this idea that we are always trying to manipulate reality but all our powers cancel out doesn't really hold up either. It's hard to see how all desires have near perfect cancellation, or use up some kind of psychic energy pool in just such a way that we don't see macro-level object indeterminacy as a usual/natural occurrence.

One would also expect that as human population increased we'd either see an increase or decrease in the kind of shifts of fortune we'd expect if all of us were exercising Super-Psi all the time.

Braude's Bigelow essay lays out his case for Super Psi and where he thinks it falls short...

Continuing this theme:

The Case for the Afterlife

Chris Carter

I argue in this paper that the theory of Super-ESP has no rational foundation, and
that it is nothing more than an excuse to not accept the most straightforward
inference from the data. I further argue here that the reason the theory of Super-ESP
has stubbornly persisted as a seemingly-legitimate counter-explanation to survival is
due to on-going confusion over several fundamental yet intractable issues, and to
the fact that proponents of Super-ESP never explicitly deal with these issues, but
simply ignore them.

Another Bigelow Essay, this one by Michael Nahm.

Goes into some really interesting cases, with additional sections refuting both pseudo-skeptic "explanations" and Super Psi attempts.

Some good passages:

The Japanese were hated in Burma, where occupying troops had committed many atrocities. The last thing any Burmese parents would want to suggest was that they were harboring the reincarnation of an Imperial soldier...

‘One rather pathetic child was caught by the villagers and burned alive,’ Stevenson said.
‘And not only are these children born into Burmese families who want nothing to do with
a Japanese child, they frequently long to ‘go back to Tokyo,’ think the Burmese food is too
spicy, the climate too hot. They complain all the time: ‘I want raw fish and sweets and want
to dress like a Japanese.’ ‘ “[48,p.120]

The case of deaf-mute Süleyman Zeytun is also worth mentioning here. He displayed a
phobia of water from early on. It is difficult to imagine how the parents coached little
Süleyman or otherwise induced his quite specific past-life memories. He couldn’t even
hear their words.

“How else one can explain [her] emotions in the presence of Minu, who is eight years her senior, or wifely feelings for a man of 42 years in a girl under six [...] A girl of five cannot
be tutored to simulate these feelings and that too not for an hour or two but for days and
months.”[59,p.21]

Jeffrey Mishlove dialogs with himself about the history of maps related to the afterlife. He reflects upon the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, the writings of Allan Kardec, and the book ostensibly channeled from Frederic Myers through the automatic writing of Geraldine Cummins, The Road to Immortality. Then he poses the question: how can we improve upon the work already done?

Considering the various "maps of the afterlife" that have been channeled or intuited or otherwise adduced and in part invented over past centuries, it seems to me that there are so many, and such great, differences that it may only be possible to come up with a few main central elements that are fairly consistant between the various visions. It seems to me much of these conceptions or maps must be essentially human imagination fueled by contemporary cultural beliefs, ideas and fears. 

It needs to be kept in mind how so many of these supposed features of the afterlife appear very likely to be human imagination strongly influenced by then current ideas and concepts and fears. Just one example is Myers' supposed communications through Geraldine Cummins that there are living beings inhabiting the Sun and other stars in the universe, and also inhabiting the other planets, and that these are different facets of the grand afterlife journeys of all sentient beings. 

I think that given the apparent unreliability of all this material, not much can be done to improve the accuracy of a "map" synthesized just from this material. The best that can be done, it seems to me, is to for the greatest part depend on actual first hand reports of experiences and communications from the beginning stages of the afterlife journey afforded mostly by NDEs (which generally amount to glimpses not complete visions).  And I think there is some consistency and plausibility in the glimpses given by the "Peak in Darien" powerful mystical experiences or visions in some of the accounts documented by for instance Richard Maurice Bucke in his book Cosmic Consciousness. And of course there are the many apparent communications with the dead through mediums. I think these should be considered, but are much less reliable, both since they are transmitted through the psyches and culturally conditioned minds and subconsciousnesses of the mediums, and because the content has been so variable , ranging all over the canvas.

I think that the most we can say with any certainty on this matter of the true nature and anatomy of the afterlife is that it exists and that it somehow is a very good thing for human beings.

Considering the various "maps of the afterlife" that have been channeled or intuited or otherwise adduced and in part invented over past centuries, it seems to me that there are so many, and such great, differences that it may only be possible to come up with a few main central elements that are fairly consistant between the various visions. It seems to me much of these conceptions or maps must be essentially human imagination fueled by contemporary cultural beliefs, ideas and fears.

Apparently in Beyond Human Personality Myers tells Cummins that a portion of the afterlife is made up of our own belief systems.

But yeah I'm not sure what to make of all the disparate claims of the "spirit world"...I doubt they can all be the same place though the threads between varied afterlife reports - as Carter notes - weave together in ways that suggest at least in the cross section with this "mundane" world there are important commonalities.

I'm increasingly taken with the somewhat Dualist, somewhat Neutral Monist idea that our reality is a cross section between some kind of Imaginal reality and a realm that is much more "mundane" and in accordance with our "physical" world...of course quantum mechanics has shown this "mundane" reality has wonders of its own...

Claims of Past-Life Memories in Near-Death Experiences (Starts on page 5)

Bruce Greyson

For the past half century, the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia has been investigating phenomena that challenge mainstream scientific paradigms regarding the nature of the mind/brain relationship. Researchers at DOPS have focused on studying phenomena related to consciousness functioning beyond the confines of the physical body, and phenomena that suggest continuation of consciousness after physical death, through objective documentation and rigorous analysis of empirical data. Among the human experiences studied at DOPS are young children’s claimed memories of past lives and accounts of near-death experiences. Both of these phenomena have been controversial topics in academia, as they challenge contemporary models of the mind-brain relationship and may be open to multipleinterpretations. Some scholars are willing to accept one of these phenomena but not the other, but are the two linked in some way? Both bear on the question of postmortem survival of consciousness. Can data from the two phenomena complement each other and form a bridge to a new understanding of mind and brain and of the survival question? 

I think these cases are too strong to be written off as fantasy and wish fulfillment, but I’m not sure that our current ideas about reincarnation are the best explanation for them—and
neither was Ian Stevenson. All this evidence may be taken as supporting a belief in reincarnation. There are, however, some cases in the University of Virginia collection that sug-
gest that the matter is not straightforward. For example, in a few cases, we have two or more children who recall the same past life.

The flashes of a past life in Anita Moorjani’s life review included no specific details that could be corroborated by objective investigation. That was not the case, however, with David Moquin’s NDE, when he was hospitalized with double pneumonia at age 48. He described for me these visions as he was in and out of coma for several days...

We get a hint of this kind of ambiguity in Anita Moorjani’s
account of her NDE:

"Before my NDE, probably because of my culture, I use to think that the purpose of life was...to evolve beyond the reincarnation cycle of birth and death...But after my NDE, I feel differently. This is primarily because the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form of a progression of lifetimes, running sequentially one after the other, wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our bodies and minds..."

Going to post some stuff from Shushan's latest book:

Many excellent books and articles investigate the evidence of NDEs, mediumship, and reincarnation, outlining the pros and cons of their support for the survival hypothesis. While the present book will not cover such ground in depth, it will examine how the cultural dimension impacts the debate, both on empirical and metaphysical levels. It explores the relationships between afterlife beliefs and NDEs in history and across-cultures, and in light of shamanic experiences, reincarnation memories, and mediumship. It contains both an overview and the conclusions of over two decades of research into cross-cultural afterlife beliefs, NDEs, and other extraordinary experiences. I’ve reached these conclusions by combining ideas and methods from a variety of disciplines, with a background in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, Egyptology, and the historical Study of Religions which itself is an interdisciplinary field, drawing largely on anthropology and sociology. Unlike any of these disciplines, however, I also cross over into metaphysics, philosophy, and parapsychology.

Shushan, Gregory . The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife (p. 23). White Crow Productions Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I'll mostly be summarizing, and where I can linking to sources describing the cases. Ideally Psi Encyclopedia will have some record of the many of the cases referenced, and if not them at least some record will exist on the Net.

Also possible we've covered some of the cases he references, but looking at the first part of the book I don't think I reference the historical record of NDEs in this thread as many are new-to-me:

In mid-3rd century BCE China, a man “sickened and breathed his last.” After several days, however, he revived “and said he had witnessed all sorts of things relating to kwei [demons] and shen [deities] in the heavens and on earth, with the sensation of being in a dreaming state, and by no means dead” (de Groot 1892: IV, 127). This is just one of over a hundred similar narratives from ancient and medieval China. Over 700 years later and over 5000 miles distant in Greece, Plutarch recounted the experience of Thespesius of Soli who, in c. 81 CE, apparently died then returned to life three days later. Thespesius claimed that his soul had left his body and traveled to a place where stars radiated light “on which his soul was smoothly and swiftly gliding in every direction.” He “could see all around himself as if his soul would have been a single eye.” He met spirits of deceased relatives, one of whom took him on a tour of otherworldly places of reward and punishment. Previously wicked, avaricious, and given to “lewd and illegal acts,” Thespesius returned transformed into an honest, devout man and “altered the whole course of his life” (Plutarch in Platthy 1992: 74). At least a dozen such narratives survive from Classical antiquity. Some 2,000 miles away and 500 years later, a Spanish monk named Peter apparently died and was “restored to life again.” He described seeing men who knew suffering various torments in hell, then being rescued from the same fate by an angel. The angel sent him back to his body, instructing him lead a better life, which he did after “waking out of the sleep of everlasting death.” This is one of five such accounts found in the Dialogues of Pope Gregory I (c. 593/4) (Gardiner 1989: 47-50), followed by dozens of others from throughout medieval Europe.

Shushan, Gregory . The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife (pp. 24-25). White Crow Productions Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Continuing this theme:

The Case for the Afterlife

Chris Carter

I argue in this paper that the theory of Super-ESP has no rational foundation, and
that it is nothing more than an excuse to not accept the most straightforward
inference from the data.

Going back in this thread to an issue I don't think was fully explored:

Re. "super-Psi" or Living Agent Psi (LAP) as a general explanation for the afterlife evidence and therefore denying the reality of the afterlife: 

I think it is DOA for many reasons, probably the most telling one being the empirical evidence of veridical NDEs. Which are first-hand accounts of vivid "realer-than real" paranormal experiences of enhanced consciousness while out of body that would require detailed and absolutely impossibly convoluted and unlikely mechanisms to have been generated by LAP rather than being actually what they clearly have been experienced as by the NDEers.

NDE features needed to be synthesized by LAP would have to include in addition to the investigated and verified veridical evidence, the common feature of a profound life-changing transformation in personality including loss of fear of death and fundamental change in orientation, toward love and spirituality, and conviction that they are not their body (engendered by vivid realer-than-real first-hand experiences of being out of body). 

Using LAP to debunk NDEs is exceedingly implausible.

I think that the underlying motivation of most proponents of LAP is to adopt a less career-threatening stance vs. the modern secular religon of materialist reductionist scientism. To adopt a model that since it denies the reality of any afterlife, therefore less dramatically challenges the prevailing mainstream paradigm. After all, to explain psi and esp naturalistically may be at least remotely possible and less of a challenge to scientism than a model containing an afterlife and the existence of an immaterial mobile center of consciousness (i.e. spirit) that can survive physical death, which is absolute heresy to scientism.