Science Expanded

I noted with some interest in Osis and Haraldsson’s book† a history of the study of deathbed visions. It shows a definite trend in culture, namely the very gradual establishment of at least one segment of paranormal studies, those dealing with survival. We really are entering a new age. It is, of course, barely discernible because the vast overhang of a dying secularism shades it from view.

For such studies to proceed, the meaning of science must also change and, indeed, is changing. And for that change to be successful, an even more basic doctrine will have to be revised. It is the assertion that our only possible source of knowledge is the sensorium, thus vision, hearing, smell, and touch. These four, of course, are directly traceable to physical causes and in due course yield materialism. To enlarge the concept of science, however, we need not really have to go too far into some kind of mystic fog. All we need do is base science on experience. The moment we do that, we immediately include as legitimate subjects for study those experiences that reach us by means for which no sensory pathways are discoverable. That would include the entire range of the paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, near-death experiences, precognition, and more.

Arguably this range of experience is rare. Its systematic study, however, beginning in the nineteenth century, has painstakingly accumulated evidence that such experiences are not reducible either to chance, mental delusions, or bodily malfunctions. They can be studied. The disciplined collection of data and their rational analysis is no less science than the same activity massively deployed to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.

What emerges from such an “expanded” science is knowledge, if not control, but the knowledge, especially from the death-related experiences of humanity, also greatly expands our conceptions of the possible meaning of life, something that a science operating in the straitjacket of materialistic monism has quite failed to deliver.

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†Osis, Karlis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At The Hour of Death, Avon, 1977, Chapter 3, “Research on Deathbed Visions: Past and Future.”

Science, Materialism, and Beyond

In the course of looking into a very curious corner of science, an examination of the “weight of the soul,” I became aware of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE), a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Both SSE and JSE are serious entities, the latter a peer-reviewed and genuinely scientific journal in existence since 1987. SSE’s website is here, and a listing of publicly available articles from JSE (in pdf format) is here. Looking at many of the articles caused me to update my sense of trends in the area, meaning now the intersection between matters of the borderzone and serious science. But first about the weight of soul—and how I stumbled upon the JSE.

In 1907 a physician in Massachusetts, Duncan MacDougall, published results of a research study in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and shortly after that in American Medicine. He continuously weighed six terminal patients before and after their death. He rejected one of the six observations but used the other five and concluded that at or very near the point of death the body lost weight, very rapidly or in a very short time, ranging between half and three-quarters of an ounce. He also conducted tests on dogs and found that they did not lose any weight. What material I found on the web emphasized that nobody had been able to duplicate MacDougall’s results. This bare statement on repetition of the investigation intrigued me. I saw no citations of these studies. But in that process, lo and behold, I discovered a 2010 paper by Masayoshi Ishida titled “Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death” in JSE Volume 24, No. 10, 2010. It turns out that people refuted but did not replicate the studies. So there you are. That issue is accessible here.

Now for me the fascinating issue here is that in an age of materialism, a doctor would have been inspired to try to find a material proof for the soul’s existence—which was MacDougall’s aim. The fact that nobody bothered to replicate his study did not surprise me. People like me who are certain of the soul’s existence, wouldn’t be interested in its weight—and those convinced of its non-existence would not bother organizing a technically and sociologically difficult venture like that. My own interest was, and is, in the conjunction, namely the attempt to link the transcendent back to the physical in some way—which to me testifies to the narrowness of the materially-focused mind. And in that context, the JSE turned out to be a gold-mine.

For decades now (certainly since the 1950s) I’ve watched with fascination both the astounding increase in genuine experiential evidence for the soul’s survival of death and a parallel development whereby some people have attempted to make use of the ambiguities of quantum theory to materialize these phenomena. The positive evidence arose from near death experience (NDE) studies on one hand and scientific studies of reincarnation on the other. The late Ian Stephenson of Virginia University, largely associated with the latter, was also involved with the former. Another development in this period, indeed arising from the very cumulation of evidence, is a delightful debate about the nature of science, or, rather scientism, led on the one side by those who’ve presented the evidence and work in these fields and the professional skeptics who feel themselves called to conduct an on-going inquisition to stamp out such heretical claims.

The JSE, like a good scientific journal should, presents papers on all sides of this issue. Not, I hasten to say, ideologically motivated debunkers who simply “refute,” but those who wish to explain the experiential using approaches like quantum physics. The general stance of the journal, however, is openness and objectivity. Those who have evidence to present are welcome—if they are, as it were, well-behaved. Therefore we find, in the JSE, the very best presentations of actual evidence favoring the reality of things beyond the border stripped of the attention- (and money-) seeking tendencies of virtually all popular sites on such subjects.

One of the genuinely interesting facets of this subject that I encountered in three days of reading journal articles is that the hard, ideologically-motivated scientism so seemingly firm in the saddle in the United States seems not at all to dominate science as practiced in Asia, India, and in the Near East. An example of that, reporting on some truly astonishing research in China, is Dong Shen’s article, “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness” in the same issue in which I found Ishida’s article.

Second the Motion

The New York Times today brought a story titled “The Burning Bush They’ll Buy, But Not ESP or Alien Abduction.” “They” refers to the body of religious scholars generally and specifically to those attending the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion that recently concluded in Atlanta. But the article is actually the review of a book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice. I haven’t read the book myself; I didn’t know about it until today. The article tells me that it is about four writers on the paranormal, two going back a ways and two who focus on UFOs. Kripal, evidently, advocates the inclusion of paranormal phenomena in religious studies and the inclusion of such writers as Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bertrand Méheust among the scholars.

“According to Dr. Kripal,” says the article, “their omission is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.”

Good point, there, Dr. Kripal. I’ve made the same point on this blog myself, expressing the same regrets, although I directed my attention more generally at science rather than restricting it to religious studies. Kripal also identifies the ultimate problem underlying this avoidance of the paranormal, be it by science or by the humanities. The paranormal is, alas, a borderzone phenomenon. It bridges the material and the mental spheres, each of which has its well-established professions. It is uncomfortably real, as I might put it. People stay on their respective reservations because that’s more secure than wandering in the desert in the twilight. We might actually advance our knowledge if more talent were dedicated to the study of this uncomfortable interface.

Where Rigor is Necessary

In certain contexts rigor is simply understood as part of the situation. Mathematics comes to mind. If a famed mathematician claimed that he’d discovered rational irrational numbers (say numbers simultaneously odd and even), the world of mathematics would sadly assume that senility had set it. In other contexts rigor is present in the logical operations, but if no agreement exists about the elements of the argument, so what? Such is the case in philosophy where the crucial issue is agreement on a definition. Suppose a person refuses to accept that there is such a thing as an “accident,” thus that an attribute of something has a different mode of existence than its essence. Such a person might asserts that the redness of this apple and the greenness of that one is, in each case, part of each apple’s essential reality. For that person logical handling of essences and accidents in argument is neither here nor there.

But rigor is necessary for establishing the facts of reality, thus in reaching definitions or in determining the course of a series of events. We expect rigor in scientific and in legal investigations. The interesting difference between the two is that legal investigations are more comprehensive than the scientific. The latter excludes subjective testimony unless it can be corroborated by physical findings; in legal investigations one person’s subjective testimony may be corroborated by another’s; to be sure, the more people corroborate an alibi, for instance, the better. The legal world recognizes the reality of deliberate deception.

In the regions of the borderzone especially—and that region includes the paranormal—rigor is particularly necessary for establishing whatever claims are made. The claim that reincarnation really happens serves as an illustration. There are two approaches, both claiming scientific validity. One consists of the collection of past life memories from individuals and, once these are recorded, work to corroborate them. The corroboration takes two complementary paths. One is the discovery of evidence that the remembered life really did leave something behind. The complement is to establish that the person making the report could not have reasonably learned about that evidence in the course of his or her current life. The late Ian Stevenson (see elsewhere on this blog) undertook such studies. The other approach is to use hypnotic regression. People are put into trances and are then coaxed to “remember” earlier and earlier experience until they pass the threshold of their birth and remember an earlier existence. Once such trance reports are recorded, the corroboration takes the same route.

Now I submit that the first of these methods is at least potentially rigorous. The second contains a major flaw. Hypnosis is very poorly understood and powerfully associated with suggestion. People can be told to do things while in trance, told to forget that they were told these matters, and will then be observed to perform the actions suggested in trance after they are brought out of it. Hypnotic regressions, therefore, cannot be rid of the suspicion that the subject in trance is merely obeying the subtle suggestions of a credulous hypnotist. Now the famous cases of remembered lives all come from the second approach, not from the first. But that’s not a surprise. You might say that it is rigorous proof of human gullibility.

The Random Element in Borderline Phenomena

The word stochastic, nowadays routinely used as a synonym for random, comes from the Greek root for the word “guess” or “aim.” Since guesses have a hit-and-miss character, the association with randomness is natural. In the realm of psychic powers—certainly one of the routes of access into the Borderzone—on-and-off performance is usual; moreover, even those who’ve learned to trust these abilities have major difficulties confirming them. Outer events must come to the aid of the experience. An example will make this plain. Suppose that you find yourself thinking of somebody you haven’t thought of in a while. If five minutes later the telephone rings and that person is on the other end of the line, saying: “It’s been a while,” the case for either telepathy or precognition may be inferred. But suppose that no one calls. In that case a telepathic contact may still have taken place—but there is no way to tell for sure.

In the world of paranormal research, it is common knowledge that a phenomenon of decay takes place. A particular test or procedure, say a remote viewing experiment, will have very good results at first, meaning statistically significant results above a chance distribution, but, with time, and often when more subjects are drawn into the experiment, results not only decay but may, in fact, develop a negative significance: they become worse than chance would predict. This phenomenon, along with the general rarity and weakness of psi phenomena, is presently at the forefront of some investigations in the paranormal field. A leading and very original figure is J.E. Kennedy. A link to Kennedy’s important papers is here; anyone wishing to delve into this subject in some depth might learn a great deal from the contents.

As Kennedy astutely notes, the very character of the psi phenomenon may be viewed in a positive way rather than as an obstacle by serving as an indicator of the nature of this phenomenon. We have to ask ourselves why it is that psi phenomena are weak, unreliable at times, stunningly accurate at others, and not only rare but on-again and off-again. Some hypothetical models of reality accommodate this phenomenon better than others. Therefore the missy or lossy character of the psychic is itself a kind of evidence.

It is also very exploitable—for gain. People use the paranormal to gain money and attention; some use it to attract those people who want to be stimulated, entertained, or reassured; others exploit the field as a target for debunking. The number of skeptical sites on the web is almost as large as the number of flaky or commercial promoters. This exploitive activity (it’s a free country, it’s a free market) makes it quite difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. Whether in the library or on the Internet, the same confusion reigns. Those who want to penetrate to the core of this matter in a genuine quest to understand are a tiny minority with very limited resources.


The Rorschach inkblots, used in psychiatric practices to induce spontaneous reactions from patients, viscerally demonstrate how the paranormal range of experiences can be used “for profit,” as it were. The inkblot shown (courtesy of Wikipedia, here) has a purely ambiguous meaning—if any. Similarly, psychic experiences, while they have an outer story and a meaning, are scientifically ambiguous precisely because they are subjective, stochastic and therefore resistant to repetition and experimental verification, and therefore uncertain. Such experiences are also, I must underline, opaque to the psychic as well in one sense: the psychic is no wiser about the regions from which visions or cognitions come than those who hear the psychic’s pronouncements. The field therefore serves as a general-purpose ink blot in which believers and skeptics both can see what they please.

My own approach is based on understanding the patterns of things. It is a structural approach. I am inclined to imagine how reality might be structured to accommodate all of the observable phenomena within it—not least the experiences of psychics but also those of the believers and the skeptics—and those of organic nature, of the inorganic, and so on. This preoccupation, entirely not-for-profit, is motivated by curiosity. What I get is useless knowledge, in the usual sense of the word. But it is useful to me—and in the public domain because others like me might find it equally…useless. In future posts I’ll go deeper into aspects of the paranormal from this perspective—trying to see where pieces of it might fit a pattern.

Communications with the Beyond

Although the title will immediately suggest contacting the departed by the mediation of a medium, I would suggest at least two other modes whereby communications from the soul-order beyond reach people. One mode is fairly routinely experienced and not viewed as unusual, transcendental, or weird in any way. The other one depends upon the extraordinary powers some few people develop or carry from early years. But let me first address the obvious, talking to the dead.

Spiritualistic Phenomena. Let me start here by explicitly expressing my own opinion on such communications so that those seeking positive reinforcement can avoid irritation and just click away to somewhere else. True: the rather extensive literature persuades me that such communications do indeed take place, but I’ve come to think of them as almost useless means of learning anything useful beyond knowledge much more easily obtained by other means—namely that another world (or worlds) beyond exist. The analogy I would suggests is learning something about China by means of interviewing derelicts and unfortunates on the margins of Chinese society in great cities like Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong. Real mediums exist, I think, but the field is ripe with temptations to exploit gullible people. In the paranormal domain, spiritualism is almost impossible, therefore, to study in structured and rational ways.

I come to these conclusions for a number of reasons. What reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) suggest is that disembodied souls have a devil of a time communicating with the living—and the reason for this that I’ve suggested is that they lack access to the instruments by which to reach people in bodies. Those people are equally “blind,” as it were, to the other reality because the functioning of their bodies interferes with seeing the soul dimension. This suggests that unusual circumstances are required for any kind of communication. The central figure here becomes the medium. Virtually all mediums go into trances while they “channel” the other world. That word is suggestive. It suggests that the medium is a tool rather than an agency. The medium absents herself (most mediums are women). She gets out of the way. The spirit on the other side appears to take over the medium’s “instruments,” principally her vocal chords and, presumably, certain functions of her brain. Hence mediums often speak in strange voices. And there are rare cases where the other party in fact comments on the difficulties of using the medium’s body. Many mediums also make use (or are made use of by) a guide or a “control,” thus another spirit on the other side, who is well matched to the medium and in turns transmits information from a third party—the departed.

This suggests to me that some minimal form of at least partial possession is a necessary aspect of the spiritualistic phenomenon. A spirit must gain access to a living person; that person has to get out of the way, accomplished by the trance; then communications of a sort commence. The maintenance of this strange duality—two agencies using the same body—is difficult, chancy, and tiring to the medium. I for one see the medium’s gifts as ill-used in such communications for reasons that have to do with the other aspect of this phenomenon: its fundamentally banal content.

In years of looking at this phenomenon from time to time, I have yet to discover anywhere any information regarding the “beyond” which cannot be found with much less hocus-pocus in the writings of speculators, moralists, and other authors on values or cosmologies. There is nothing much there. What a person can discover is proof that life continues after this stint on earth, but for that we do not need to talk to some departed grandpa who still remembers the pet dog’s name. If the reader is interested in confirming this, I would suggest the excellent web site of SurvivalAfterDeath.org.uk accessible here. This site reproduces many original papers and extracts from the psychical literature reaching well into the nineteenth century; there is much else there as well on psychical research beyond spiritualism.

I will defer discussion of the other two categories of communications to future posts because this entry, as I observe, has already reached its appointed length.

Precognitive Dreams

I had one unambiguous dream of the very near future, an event that came to pass two or three days after my dream of it. The matter was rather ordinary in a way, and the only reason I became aware of the dream, and able to check that it had come true, was because, at that time, I’d just read J.W. Dunne’s book, An Experiment with Time. Dunne, who published this work in 1947, is probably the best-known expositor of precognitive dreaming. Having read the book, I set myself the task of recording dreams when I remembered them on waking. I wanted to test Dunne’s assertion that most everybody occasionally dreams the future. But just because the future is pretty much like the past, we don’t notice the fact. Record your dreams, Dunne had urged. Compare them to later events. You’ll convince yourself. I took up the challenge. This was in the early 1960s. I had my proof within about a week. As soon as I did I stopped my experiment because recording dreams was tedious. The intention to do so kept waking me up.

The dream itself developed as follows. I dreamt that I was in my office with my door closed so that I could concentrate on writing a final report on what had been a long and painful research project for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My office happened to be next to the conference room. As I was laboring at my typewriter, this is still in the dream, noises penetrated through the wall and gave me the impression that people were arguing. After a while the argument ceased. Someone then knocked on my door. I rose and opened it. Outside stood the head of our Washington office. He was in the company of a tall black and rather distinguished-looking gentleman. With that the dream ended.

I noted this dream and went back to sleep. I promptly forgot it again—until, some days later, I actually lived the actuality. Events in reality developed almost exactly the same way. The only difference was that, instead of an argument next door, I heard muffled conversation and the persistent clicking of chalk on the blackboard. The noise disturbed my concentration enough so that I grew quite incensed. And, yes. My door was closed. Then the dream-event actually happened. A knock sounded on the door, I opened it. The head of our office stood there with a tall, black gentlemen. He wanted to introduce me to his visitor. The man was the president of the National Bar Association, then a body of black lawyers. The American Bar Association, at that time, had only white members. This was the 1960s, after all. The gentleman was the only black person I ever remember seeing in that office as a visitor in the course of the year I then spent in Washington, D.C.; thus it was an unusual and memorable event. After a few words of conversation, my chief took the gentleman to lunch. I sort of staggered back to my chair, sat down and shook my head: I’d actually dreamt the future. The dream had come rushing back the moment I’d opened the door. And my notes, still there at home, confirmed it with a date.

As Dunne pointed out, precognitive dreams are still dreams; they use symbolical representations of future events. They’re not always as boringly literal as my dream had been. Brigitte had a precognitive dream of Kennedy’s assassination two days before it happened. We lived in a second-storey apartment at the time. She dreamt that she was upstairs looking down at the street below. I came driving by in a convertible. We didn’t own a convertible then; we drove a VW beetle. Then she heard a shot and saw, in horror, that my head was rolling on the pavement down below… In her dream-vocabulary, the President was symbolized by a stand-in, someone who had the role of “head of household” in her own immediate life.

The literature on precognitive dreaming is extensive, some of it recent. Nine-eleven produced a rash of these that some people have collected and made available on the Internet. Mere laziness prevents me from giving links here. But they’re available. Great public events always seem to ease such dreams out of hiding; people recognize, from the news of the events, that they’d actually dreamt them. Thus there were also people who dreamt of the Titanic’s sinking before it actually took place. Denial of this sort of thing is literally impossible if they happen to you or to immediate members of your family. This then lends credence to more distant reports because we are sensible and rational in knowing what we know. Here I refer back to an earlier entry on epistemology.

Precognitive dreams, therefore, represent a dimension of dreaming which goes far, far beyond the more ordinary explanation, which I’ve presented already, namely that dreams are (and most certainly are) the automatic presentation of memories by the awakening brain. What precognitive dreams indicate, at minimum, is that our conceptualizations of time and space, however useful they are in everyday life, do not exhaust the possibilities available to a transcendent function that I call consciousness or mind.

Super-Psi?

The notion that souls depart and live on in another world comes to every child sooner or later as a cultural transmission. It may be negatively slanted (“Ignorant people believe…”) or positively; the fact remains that people don’t discover this point of view; they inherit it. Any kind of investigation thereafter is thus a second-order activity. Some people in every generation get engaged in the debate; they seriously ask themselves if the tales they’ve heard are true or false; if individuals go much beyond that, they’re part of a kind of enterprise.

Assuming my own experience is average, most people learn about these things from figures of authority (grandmothers, impressive aunts, etc.). Outer circles of adults confirm what they have heard. There is broad consensus on the matter. It’s part of the culture. Thus it is disbelief in the cultural transmission that requires initiative, not acceptance. But that initiative is also aided by processes of enlightenment. In our day “achieving” disbelief is a part of growing up; we discover that it’s not the storks that bring the babies—and that the dead stay in the grave. Human personalities, however, are interestingly layered. The cynical, bright, adult layer floats on top of an archaic world of childhood feeling, and in certain circumstances people can descend again and, from within a deeper layer, they can actually believe what they deny on their brittle surface— namely that mother, dad, or the child is still alive up there, somewhere, in heaven. We are more complex than we seem.

Two Approaches. But let’s look at the more conscious processes of resolving the debate. Two alternatives are open; they are both used in a mixed form. One is a process of reasoning from patterns of reality; that’s the philosophical approach. The other is based on experiencing or evaluating empirical evidence. In the West that evidence is usually associated with communications with the dead, with apparitions and, since the 1970s anyway, with near death experience reports. Reincarnation studies, although pioneered by Ian Stevenson from the West, are predominantly based on reports of experiences provided by people in the eastern world.

I will explore the philosophical approach some other time, but note here that that approach produces as strong an argument as any; indeed, in my opinion, it is the most persuasive. Those who think this way, however, can point to the best empirical evidence as confirmation.

What Constitutes Evidence? How do we know that NDE reports are true, that mediums are really communication with someone dead, or that apparitions are the dead? Interestingly enough, mere reports of having been to heaven, claims by mediums that Grandpa sends his love, or statements, however amazed, that Joe appeared to me and held out his arms as if to embrace me—none of this is hard evidence. Hallucination, self-deception, or fraud may be the explanation. The only thing that constitutes real evidence is some kind of information from the dead (or near-dead) to the living of a certain kind. But of what kind? The information must contain something only the personality on the other side could possibly know or could only obtain over there.

I stress the centrality of information on purpose. The very fact that such information is necessary to establish the evidentiary value of the seeming contact has led to a positivistic interpretation of such phenomena. Before we get to that, some examples now to make these matters more concrete.

• A person, a teenager, say, reports an NDE. As part of that account, she claims to have seen Aunt Elizabeth in heaven. Aunt Lizzy was part of a group, including grandma and grandpa, receiving the teenager up there. Now it so happens that the teenager’s family had just recently heard of Aunt Lizzy’s death in California. The death took place some time after the teenager was hospitalized in a severe accident. The teenager didn’t and couldn’t have known that Aunt Lizzy had passed on. The teenager’s knowledge, therefore, is taken as hard evidence of another world.
• In a séance a woman, Jean, learns, listening to a medium, that her late husband is very much upset that Jean sold what the medium calls the “leather bindings” which had been Jean’s husband’s pride and joy. Jean had met the medium for the first time this very evening. Jean is bowled over by this information. Her husband had owned a very valuable set of old leather-bound books, antiques that he had purchased as a young man. And, indeed, Jean had recently sold them to an antiquarian at a very decent price with lots of second thoughts.
• A woman, Margaret, awakens at night. In a dim light, but unmistakably visible, she sees the figure of her husband standing there in combat uniform. His left hand is extended toward her in a gesture of greeting. The whole of her husbands left side is covered in blood; he appears to be standing on one leg. Weeks later she learns that her husband died after emergency amputation of his left arm and leg necessitated by the explosion of an improvised explosive device. The date of his death coincides with the date of her vision.

In each of these illustrative cases—they are not actual cases although just such cases are common—an element of information is present apparently proving that only a paranormal or spiritual faculty could have conveyed the information from sender to recipient.

Super-Psi. Indeed such cases, and such evidence, are powerfully indicative of the truth of survival claims. It strikes me as rather interesting that one element of humanity simply can’t accept such evidence. Thus from within the very center of paranormal studies has arisen a new explanation to discount the evidence; that’s super-psi. This doctrine emerged in the twentieth century as a counter to the survival hypothesis; in effect it materializes the spiritual.

To put the matter as simply as possible, the advocates of super-psi explain all paranormal phenomena, not least cases indicative of survival, by means of telepathy and other similar so-called psychic powers. These are considered to be universally present in humanity but overlaid by sensory information. Super-psi would explain each of the three cases above. The teenager did not see Aunt Lizzy in heaven but, instead, picked up the fact that she had died telepathically from other members of her family and had then woven that fact into a fantasy while in a semi-conscious state; the entire near-death experience was nothing but a fantasy. In the second case, the medium managed to pick up information about the leather-bound antiques Jean had sold, her misgivings about the sale, and the value of those books to her husband, by telepathic means from Jean herself. No communication with the dead needs to be assumed here. In the third case, Margaret’s vision of her husband was simply her own telepathic reception of his final agonies. Super-psi, therefore, is able to explain it all using what its proponents envision as ordinary but usually hidden human power. No heaven, no beyond—and death retains its sting.

Super-psi proponents can and do make claims for psi far more fantastical than any survival hypothesis. The very fact that such an explanation could emerge and get some traction at all, especially in a field traditionally comprehensive in its approach, suggests that in the case of survival, as in every other, the empirical approach must be judiciously combined with a philosophical inquiry to produce the total picture.