Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

Merle, I know you may have little time in your hands, but I suggest browsing other portions of the site about research on those topics and reach your conclusion, and I say this as a individual that is neutral, but admitedly biased for the "skeptic" side.

The Materialist faith is based on denial, a fundamentalist religion that accepts no heresies.

Have to repeat "Consciousness is an Illusion" to one's self, even though that's one of the most ad hoc ideas ever put forward to hold onto a belief...

Is Consciousness Real? Philosopher Daniel Dennett tries, once again, to explain away consciousness

John Horgan (another atheist who doesn't believe in Survival)

Consider how Dennett talks about qualia, philosophers’ term for subjective experiences. My qualia at this moment are the smell of coffee, the sound of a truck rumbling by on the street, my puzzlement over Dennett’s ideas. Dennett notes that we often overrate the objective accuracy and causal power of our qualia. True enough.

But he concludes, bizarrely, that therefore qualia are fictions, “an artifact of bad theorizing.” If we lack qualia, then we are zombies, creatures that look and even behave like humans but have no inner, subjective life. Imagining a reader who insists he is not a zombie, Dennett writes:

Dennett’s arguments are so convoluted that he allows himself plausible deniability, but he seems to be advocating eliminative materialism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines as “the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.”

Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them, which compels him to stake out unsound positions. His belief that consciousness is an illusion is nuttier than the belief that God is real. Science has real enemies—some in positions of great power--but Dennett doesn’t do science any favors by shilling for it so aggressively.

As atheists follow the prediction by Bertrand Russell in my signature, ideally we can get past people evangelizing Materialist Fundamentalism and focus on ideas that are not so easily dismissed as the idea that non-conscious constituents will produce consciousness.

Merle, I know you may have little time in your hands, but I suggest browsing other portions of the site about research on those topics and reach your conclusion, and I say this as a individual that is neutral, but admitedly biased for the "skeptic" side.

I think someone who felt the brain made of non-conscious constituents could produce consciousness would be better off reading works by a neuroscientist-philosopher like Raymond Tallis.

But then I generally feel only when people see the problems of the Materialist faith can they be open to looking at Survival evidence in a more unbiased way.

Is Consciousness Real? Philosopher Daniel Dennett tries, once again, to explain away consciousness

What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion?

My link can beat up your link.

Source?

There are many; some examples:

Haraldsson:
https://www.amazon.com/Saw-Light-Came-He...1910121924
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...52_233-262

Mills:
https://www.amazon.com/Amerindian-Rebirt...080207703X

Jim Tucker:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250781779?tag=macmillan-20 . He inherited Stevenson's project and used the same investigative techniques as Stevenson. 

Masayuki Ohkado:
https://journalofscientificexploration.o.../view/1174

There are many; some examples:

Haraldsson:
https://www.amazon.com/Saw-Light-Came-He...1910121924
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...52_233-262

Mills:
https://www.amazon.com/Amerindian-Rebirt...080207703X

Jim Tucker:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250781779?tag=macmillan-20 . He inherited Stevenson's project and used the same investigative techniques as Stevenson. 

Masayuki Ohkado:
https://journalofscientificexploration.o.../view/1174

Ah, so this is your evidence that controlled studies have confirmed soul survival?

I've looked at the last one, which is the only one readily available on the Internet. From what I see it is all anecdotes, not controlled studies.

Again, multiple controlled studies confirm the conclusion that there is no significant finding for survival above that which is expected by chance.

And yes, correcting what I said previously, scientists do consider anecdotal evidence. But when there are clear controlled studies that indicate otherwise, that carries more weight than these anecdotes.

Again, multiple controlled studies confirm the conclusion that there is no significant finding for survival above that which is expected by chance.

Please do cite your sources, Merle. I'd be interested in reading these studies and how well they hold up to scrutiny in light of the more recent studies.

Since you mention statistics and above chance expectations, let me ask: are you referring to mediumship studies?
Because, in fact, meta-analysis of various studies of information provided by mediums under controlled contidions actually find strong support of anomalous cognition on the part of mediums.

Sarraf, M., Woodley, M., Tressoldi, P. (2020). Anomalous information reception by mediums: A meta-analysis of the scientific evidence. Explore 17, 10.1016/j.explore.2020.04.002.

Again, multiple controlled studies confirm the conclusion that there is no significant finding for survival above that which is expected by chance.

I wonder what sort of statistical methodology are being used to reach a conclusion that cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality?

Ah, so this is your evidence that controlled studies have confirmed soul survival?

I've looked at the last one, which is the only one readily available on the Internet. From what I see it is all anecdotes, not controlled studies.

Again, multiple controlled studies confirm the conclusion that there is no significant finding for survival above that which is expected by chance.

And yes, correcting what I said previously, scientists do consider anecdotal evidence. But when there are clear controlled studies that indicate otherwise, that carries more weight than these anecdotes.

The examples of sources that I have furnished collectively make a very strong abductive reasoning from the preponderance of evidence case for the high probability of some form of at least temporary survival of death. Not for the existence of some sort of Christian-visualized immortal soul (your straw man assumption). 

And a controlled experiment is supposed to be a scientific test done under controlled conditions, meaning that just one (or a few) factors are changed at a time, while all others are kept constant.

For instance, in a controlled experiment in medicine, all extraneous variables are held constant so that they can't influence the results. Controlled experiments require: A control group that receives a standard treatment, a fake treatment, or no treatment. Random assignment of participants to ensure the groups are equivalent. And of course there is the double blind requirement.

My question for you is: how are "controlled studies" supposed to be carried out when the phenomenon being studied is by its very nature rare and is uncontrollable and unpredictable as to when and where and to whom it occurs, such as NDEs and past life memory occurrences in small children?

Before trashing all this evidence I think you had better supply plausible explanations for the multitudes of well documented veridical NDEs, the thousands of well investigated and documented reincarnation memory cases that resulted from lifetimes of work by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues and later successor investigators, and the highly evidential mediumship studies such as Julie Beischel's.  

If all this evidence is invalid and worthless because of being "anecdotal", then surely you can easily furnish plausible "normal" materialistic explanations.

Please do cite your sources, Merle. I'd be interested in reading these studies and how well they hold up to scrutiny in light of the more recent studies.

Since you mention statistics and above chance expectations, let me ask: are you referring to mediumship studies?
Because, in fact, meta-analysis of various studies of information provided by mediums under controlled contidions actually find strong support of anomalous cognition on the part of mediums.

Sarraf, M., Woodley, M., Tressoldi, P. (2020). Anomalous information reception by mediums: A meta-analysis of the scientific evidence. Explore 17, 10.1016/j.explore.2020.04.002.

Interesting link.

My information comes from How Not to Do Survival Research: Reflections on the Bigelow Institute Essay Competition p368.  He references his source as (Holden, 2009, p210). 

Your link comes from Explore, which is a journal that has been highly criticized for not meeting scientific standards. Your link says it includes more studies than the only previous meta-analysis, which probably is a reference to the Holden study. I suspect that the Explore meta-analysis includes a number of controversial studies that the other study excluded. There is a lot of published literature on mediums that is not reputable.

On the lighter side, what do you call a short psychic who escapes from jail? A small medium at large.