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.
(2021-11-28, 04:17 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]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 Most of the essay is stuff I think this thread covered, though he makes an odd mention of an unpublished paper by Sudduth that will supposedly challenge some of Tucker's conclusions in a particular case.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:
Quote: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...
Quote: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.
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:
Quote: 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]
Quote: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.
Quote:“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]