Hello everyone!
I am new here, and I would very much appreciate some critical feedback on a long-term family experiment I am currently designing.
My interest in survival after death is both intellectual and deeply personal. The questions I am ultimately interested in are quite simple:
Do we really survive bodily death as the same individual person? Will we meet our families again, recognise one another, and be able to continue our relationships with the people we love?
I hope that the answer is yes, and I think there is interesting evidence suggesting survival. But I would like, if possible, to move from belief and hope towards personal evidence strong enough that I could reasonably trust it myself.
This is especially important to me because I do not want to wait until after a bereavement to begin looking for reassurance. I have older family members, some of whom are not in the best of health, and the prospect of future loss can already cause anxiety. I would rather prepare something together while we are all alive which might, many years from now, provide meaningful evidence if one of us dies before the others.
Precisely because the question matters so much personally, I want the experiment to have reasonably strong controls. I don't want to convince myself through coincidence, information leakage, cueing, overly generous interpretation or other normal explanations.
The basic idea
There would probably be five members of my family participating, all of us alive when the target material is prepared.
Each person would privately prepare a set of information containing:
1. A shared family memory
A real event known to several members of the family, described with specific identifying details — for example a particular place, unusual object, phrase, event and approximate date/year.
2. A genuinely private memory
Something autobiographical known only to the person writing it, again containing several concrete details that could later be compared with a purported communication.
3. An invented code
Each participant would invent and memorise a completely arbitrary codeword combined with digits, unrelated to birthdays, family history, places or anything else that could reasonably be inferred.
Examples of the form (not actual targets) might be:
GraniteSea1999
CedarWing6912
CobaltStar4578
4. Relationship-specific memories
Each participant would also choose one specific personal memory involving each of the other four participants.
Thus, if five people participate, each person would prepare four relationship memories in addition to the shared memory, private memory and code.
The two people involved would not have to choose the same event. For example, I might choose one particular memory involving my brother, while he independently chooses an entirely different memory involving me.
The purpose is to test not merely whether apparently hidden information can be obtained, but whether the communicator appears to retain autobiographical identity and memories of specific individual relationships.
Sealing and storage
Each participant would place his or her completed material in an individual sealed envelope, marked with identity and date.
All five envelopes would then be placed in a locked metal cash box or similar secure container. The box itself would be externally sealed with tamper-evident material and marked so that it is not to be opened until predefined conditions have been met.
One possibility is to divide custody — for example, one family member keeps the box while another keeps the key.
I am also considering creating a duplicate sealed set stored at another location, simply to protect against fire, theft, water damage or accidental loss over what could potentially be several decades.
Importantly, the box would not automatically be opened when somebody dies.
What would happen after a death?
After an appropriate grieving period, the surviving family members would arrange a predefined number of sittings with independent mediums.
Ideally:
• the mediums would have no contact with one another;
• sittings would occur at different times and preferably with geographically separated mediums;
• the medium would receive as little identifying information as practically possible;
• if possible, the medium would not even be given the deceased person's name;
• the medium would not be told that sealed memories or a code exist;
• the sitter would provide no confirming or corrective feedback during the sitting;
• remote audio-only sittings might be preferable to reduce visual cueing;
• every sitting would be recorded in full and transcribed;
• neutral responses such as “Please continue” would be used rather than confirming statements.
All sittings, including unsuccessful ones, would be preserved and reported so that the overall history of the experiment remains transparent and there is no selective reporting. However, I would not assume that failures by other mediums necessarily cancel out the evidential value of an exceptionally specific result from a different medium. These are partly separate questions: the complete series is relevant when assessing the experiment as a whole, while the evidential strength of an individual sitting should also be evaluated on its own merits.
This is one issue on which I would particularly welcome methodological advice. For example, if nine independent mediums produced nothing of evidential value but a tenth medium, under the same blinded conditions, produced several highly specific pieces of sealed information, I would not want either to hide the nine failures or simply assume that they automatically negate whatever evidential value the tenth sitting might possess.
The box would remain sealed
The sealed material would remain unopened while the sittings were being conducted.
Before any sittings begin, I would like to have fixed:
• the total number of sittings in the experimental series;
• what counts as a hit, partial hit and miss;
• how specific a memory correspondence must be;
• how accurately a codeword and its digits must be reproduced;
• how many independent mediums must produce corresponding information;
• the threshold that must be reached before the envelope may be opened.
Those rules could not be changed after the results begin arriving.
If the predefined threshold were eventually reached, only the envelope belonging to the deceased participant would be opened. The envelopes belonging to the four living participants would remain sealed and unread for possible future use.
The opening would preferably be filmed, and the original target material would then be compared with the complete verbatim transcripts of the sittings — including both hits and misses.
How high should the evidential bar be?
I don't think it should be either too low or unrealistically high.
It should be demanding enough that an apparently successful result cannot easily be explained by chance, information leakage, cueing or overly generous interpretation, while not being so rigid that genuinely remarkable but imperfect evidence is automatically discarded.
I am therefore also considering whether it would be better to define different degrees of evidential strength beforehand rather than treating every outcome simply as either “proof” or “nothing”.
The difficult problem: survival versus other psi
This is one of the areas where I would particularly value the opinions of people here.
Even if a medium accurately reproduced information from the sealed material, I realise that this would not automatically establish that the information came from the deceased person.
At least several competing explanations would need consideration:
• chance/coincidence;
• cold reading or sitter cueing;
• deliberate or accidental information leakage/hot reading;
• telepathy from a living sitter or another living person;
• clairvoyant access to the sealed target itself;
• broader living-agent psi or “super-psi” explanations;
• survival and genuine communication from the deceased.
Consequently, I do not want to reason:
“The information was anomalous, therefore it was necessarily a spirit.”
What interests me is whether the overall pattern could eventually favour the survival hypothesis over reasonable alternatives.
A possible competing-source test
I have also considered an optional control aimed particularly at the sitter-telepathy problem.
A living sitter could deliberately memorise and concentrate upon a false memory and false code, while the deceased person's genuine target remained sealed and unknown to the sitter.
If the medium repeatedly reproduced the false information held strongly in the sitter's mind, that would support sitter telepathy, cueing or another living-source explanation.
If instead the medium produced highly specific information corresponding to the genuinely sealed target that nobody present knew, that would argue against simple sitter telepathy — although I realise it would not eliminate clairvoyance of the target or more expansive super-psi hypotheses.
I would be particularly interested in suggestions for improving this part of the design.
What the experiment is — and is not — intended to test
I am deliberately keeping the central question fairly narrow.
I am not trying to establish an entire theory of the afterlife, its structure, mechanism, “planes”, or metaphysics.
The main question is whether evidence can be obtained suggesting the continued existence of the same recognisable individual, retaining:
• autobiographical memory;
• distinctive personal information;
• memories of relationships with particular surviving family members.
Nor would a negative result prove that survival is false. It would simply mean that this experiment failed to provide convincing evidence under these conditions.
Why do this if survival experiments already exist?
I certainly don't imagine that I have invented the idea of testing survival through sealed information, codes or controlled mediumship. I know that related ideas and experiments have a long history.
Existing research may provide important evidence and, perhaps even more importantly for this project, methodological lessons.
But previous experiments cannot provide quite the same kind of personal evidence as information prepared by my own family while we are alive and potentially communicated back after one of us has died.
So I am not trying to reinvent survival research. I am trying to learn from it and apply the best lessons I can to a long-term personal family test.
What I would particularly like you to criticise
Before my family actually prepares and seals anything, I would very much like people here to try to find the weaknesses in the protocol.
In particular:
• Where could information leakage occur?
• Is the blinding sufficient?
• How should hits, partial hits and misses be defined without subjective interpretation?
• How should the number of sittings and stopping rule be determined?
• How should unsuccessful sittings be taken into account when assessing an exceptionally strong individual sitting, without either ignoring failures or allowing them automatically to “cancel out” strong evidence?
• What would constitute a reasonable threshold for opening the envelope?
• Is the codeword useful, and how should imperfect code matches be scored?
• Would separate inner envelopes for different target types improve the design?
• Is there a better way to distinguish survival from sitter telepathy, clairvoyance or other living-agent psi?
• Are there historical or modern experiments that I should study before finalising this?
• Is there some obvious flaw that I have simply failed to notice?
I am particularly interested in criticism from both survival and psi perspectives. If apparently successful results could still be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance, super-psi, information leakage, cueing, chance, flexible scoring or weaknesses in the experimental design, I would much rather identify those problems now, before my family prepares and seals anything, than discover them twenty or thirty years from now.
Although I am designing this primarily for my own family, I have also wondered whether, after the methodology has been thoroughly criticised and improved, the basic protocol could become a simple model that other interested families could independently adapt.
Families could prepare and seal their own private targets without ever sharing those targets with us or with other participants. People who eventually conducted such tests could exchange experiences about procedures and about mediums willing to work under blinded, no-feedback conditions, while the actual target information remained completely private.
My goal is not to create a perfect philosophical proof of survival. It is to make a private family experiment as methodologically strong and future-proof as reasonably possible — so that if something remarkable does happen many years from now, I can have reasonable confidence that I have not simply fooled myself.
Thank you very much for reading this rather long post. Any criticism, suggestions, relevant research or attempts to “break” the protocol would be greatly appreciated. 🙂
I am new here, and I would very much appreciate some critical feedback on a long-term family experiment I am currently designing.
My interest in survival after death is both intellectual and deeply personal. The questions I am ultimately interested in are quite simple:
Do we really survive bodily death as the same individual person? Will we meet our families again, recognise one another, and be able to continue our relationships with the people we love?
I hope that the answer is yes, and I think there is interesting evidence suggesting survival. But I would like, if possible, to move from belief and hope towards personal evidence strong enough that I could reasonably trust it myself.
This is especially important to me because I do not want to wait until after a bereavement to begin looking for reassurance. I have older family members, some of whom are not in the best of health, and the prospect of future loss can already cause anxiety. I would rather prepare something together while we are all alive which might, many years from now, provide meaningful evidence if one of us dies before the others.
Precisely because the question matters so much personally, I want the experiment to have reasonably strong controls. I don't want to convince myself through coincidence, information leakage, cueing, overly generous interpretation or other normal explanations.
The basic idea
There would probably be five members of my family participating, all of us alive when the target material is prepared.
Each person would privately prepare a set of information containing:
1. A shared family memory
A real event known to several members of the family, described with specific identifying details — for example a particular place, unusual object, phrase, event and approximate date/year.
2. A genuinely private memory
Something autobiographical known only to the person writing it, again containing several concrete details that could later be compared with a purported communication.
3. An invented code
Each participant would invent and memorise a completely arbitrary codeword combined with digits, unrelated to birthdays, family history, places or anything else that could reasonably be inferred.
Examples of the form (not actual targets) might be:
GraniteSea1999
CedarWing6912
CobaltStar4578
4. Relationship-specific memories
Each participant would also choose one specific personal memory involving each of the other four participants.
Thus, if five people participate, each person would prepare four relationship memories in addition to the shared memory, private memory and code.
The two people involved would not have to choose the same event. For example, I might choose one particular memory involving my brother, while he independently chooses an entirely different memory involving me.
The purpose is to test not merely whether apparently hidden information can be obtained, but whether the communicator appears to retain autobiographical identity and memories of specific individual relationships.
Sealing and storage
Each participant would place his or her completed material in an individual sealed envelope, marked with identity and date.
All five envelopes would then be placed in a locked metal cash box or similar secure container. The box itself would be externally sealed with tamper-evident material and marked so that it is not to be opened until predefined conditions have been met.
One possibility is to divide custody — for example, one family member keeps the box while another keeps the key.
I am also considering creating a duplicate sealed set stored at another location, simply to protect against fire, theft, water damage or accidental loss over what could potentially be several decades.
Importantly, the box would not automatically be opened when somebody dies.
What would happen after a death?
After an appropriate grieving period, the surviving family members would arrange a predefined number of sittings with independent mediums.
Ideally:
• the mediums would have no contact with one another;
• sittings would occur at different times and preferably with geographically separated mediums;
• the medium would receive as little identifying information as practically possible;
• if possible, the medium would not even be given the deceased person's name;
• the medium would not be told that sealed memories or a code exist;
• the sitter would provide no confirming or corrective feedback during the sitting;
• remote audio-only sittings might be preferable to reduce visual cueing;
• every sitting would be recorded in full and transcribed;
• neutral responses such as “Please continue” would be used rather than confirming statements.
All sittings, including unsuccessful ones, would be preserved and reported so that the overall history of the experiment remains transparent and there is no selective reporting. However, I would not assume that failures by other mediums necessarily cancel out the evidential value of an exceptionally specific result from a different medium. These are partly separate questions: the complete series is relevant when assessing the experiment as a whole, while the evidential strength of an individual sitting should also be evaluated on its own merits.
This is one issue on which I would particularly welcome methodological advice. For example, if nine independent mediums produced nothing of evidential value but a tenth medium, under the same blinded conditions, produced several highly specific pieces of sealed information, I would not want either to hide the nine failures or simply assume that they automatically negate whatever evidential value the tenth sitting might possess.
The box would remain sealed
The sealed material would remain unopened while the sittings were being conducted.
Before any sittings begin, I would like to have fixed:
• the total number of sittings in the experimental series;
• what counts as a hit, partial hit and miss;
• how specific a memory correspondence must be;
• how accurately a codeword and its digits must be reproduced;
• how many independent mediums must produce corresponding information;
• the threshold that must be reached before the envelope may be opened.
Those rules could not be changed after the results begin arriving.
If the predefined threshold were eventually reached, only the envelope belonging to the deceased participant would be opened. The envelopes belonging to the four living participants would remain sealed and unread for possible future use.
The opening would preferably be filmed, and the original target material would then be compared with the complete verbatim transcripts of the sittings — including both hits and misses.
How high should the evidential bar be?
I don't think it should be either too low or unrealistically high.
It should be demanding enough that an apparently successful result cannot easily be explained by chance, information leakage, cueing or overly generous interpretation, while not being so rigid that genuinely remarkable but imperfect evidence is automatically discarded.
I am therefore also considering whether it would be better to define different degrees of evidential strength beforehand rather than treating every outcome simply as either “proof” or “nothing”.
The difficult problem: survival versus other psi
This is one of the areas where I would particularly value the opinions of people here.
Even if a medium accurately reproduced information from the sealed material, I realise that this would not automatically establish that the information came from the deceased person.
At least several competing explanations would need consideration:
• chance/coincidence;
• cold reading or sitter cueing;
• deliberate or accidental information leakage/hot reading;
• telepathy from a living sitter or another living person;
• clairvoyant access to the sealed target itself;
• broader living-agent psi or “super-psi” explanations;
• survival and genuine communication from the deceased.
Consequently, I do not want to reason:
“The information was anomalous, therefore it was necessarily a spirit.”
What interests me is whether the overall pattern could eventually favour the survival hypothesis over reasonable alternatives.
A possible competing-source test
I have also considered an optional control aimed particularly at the sitter-telepathy problem.
A living sitter could deliberately memorise and concentrate upon a false memory and false code, while the deceased person's genuine target remained sealed and unknown to the sitter.
If the medium repeatedly reproduced the false information held strongly in the sitter's mind, that would support sitter telepathy, cueing or another living-source explanation.
If instead the medium produced highly specific information corresponding to the genuinely sealed target that nobody present knew, that would argue against simple sitter telepathy — although I realise it would not eliminate clairvoyance of the target or more expansive super-psi hypotheses.
I would be particularly interested in suggestions for improving this part of the design.
What the experiment is — and is not — intended to test
I am deliberately keeping the central question fairly narrow.
I am not trying to establish an entire theory of the afterlife, its structure, mechanism, “planes”, or metaphysics.
The main question is whether evidence can be obtained suggesting the continued existence of the same recognisable individual, retaining:
• autobiographical memory;
• distinctive personal information;
• memories of relationships with particular surviving family members.
Nor would a negative result prove that survival is false. It would simply mean that this experiment failed to provide convincing evidence under these conditions.
Why do this if survival experiments already exist?
I certainly don't imagine that I have invented the idea of testing survival through sealed information, codes or controlled mediumship. I know that related ideas and experiments have a long history.
Existing research may provide important evidence and, perhaps even more importantly for this project, methodological lessons.
But previous experiments cannot provide quite the same kind of personal evidence as information prepared by my own family while we are alive and potentially communicated back after one of us has died.
So I am not trying to reinvent survival research. I am trying to learn from it and apply the best lessons I can to a long-term personal family test.
What I would particularly like you to criticise
Before my family actually prepares and seals anything, I would very much like people here to try to find the weaknesses in the protocol.
In particular:
• Where could information leakage occur?
• Is the blinding sufficient?
• How should hits, partial hits and misses be defined without subjective interpretation?
• How should the number of sittings and stopping rule be determined?
• How should unsuccessful sittings be taken into account when assessing an exceptionally strong individual sitting, without either ignoring failures or allowing them automatically to “cancel out” strong evidence?
• What would constitute a reasonable threshold for opening the envelope?
• Is the codeword useful, and how should imperfect code matches be scored?
• Would separate inner envelopes for different target types improve the design?
• Is there a better way to distinguish survival from sitter telepathy, clairvoyance or other living-agent psi?
• Are there historical or modern experiments that I should study before finalising this?
• Is there some obvious flaw that I have simply failed to notice?
I am particularly interested in criticism from both survival and psi perspectives. If apparently successful results could still be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance, super-psi, information leakage, cueing, chance, flexible scoring or weaknesses in the experimental design, I would much rather identify those problems now, before my family prepares and seals anything, than discover them twenty or thirty years from now.
Although I am designing this primarily for my own family, I have also wondered whether, after the methodology has been thoroughly criticised and improved, the basic protocol could become a simple model that other interested families could independently adapt.
Families could prepare and seal their own private targets without ever sharing those targets with us or with other participants. People who eventually conducted such tests could exchange experiences about procedures and about mediums willing to work under blinded, no-feedback conditions, while the actual target information remained completely private.
My goal is not to create a perfect philosophical proof of survival. It is to make a private family experiment as methodologically strong and future-proof as reasonably possible — so that if something remarkable does happen many years from now, I can have reasonable confidence that I have not simply fooled myself.
Thank you very much for reading this rather long post. Any criticism, suggestions, relevant research or attempts to “break” the protocol would be greatly appreciated. 🙂
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