Almeder on Stevenson

I read an article today by Robert F. Almeder, retired professor of philosophy at Georgia State University, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration titled “A Critique of Arguments Offered Against Reincarnation” (link). In the article Almeder makes the point that strong cases that provide empirical evidence for reincarnation—which the work of Ian Stevenson does—that evidence per se falsifies the modern theory that minds are the product of the brain, thus shattering the materialistic stance on human experience.

I got to thinking about that. What other empirical evidence do we have that “mind” or “soul” or “personality” are radically different from bodies and their functions? Near Death Experience reports fail on that score because, while technically the person undergoing an NDE may be dead (“clinical death”), he or she comes back to life to render an account, hence that “death” was not really final. Reincarnation cases are very different. Those who remember a prior life most definitely died but retain memories of another life in a current and new body. My conclusion, in effect, is that reincarnation cases may be the only evidence for the agency’s survival of death, evidence of the kind that may be called empirical, thus discoverable multiple times by different researchers, as has indeed been the case.

My own views on this subject are scattered throughout this blog and may be gathered by clicking on Reincarnation under Categories to the left. Almeder’s article requires some time and attention. A summary of his views is presented in the YouTube I show at the beginning of this post.

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.

Reincarnation: Western Perspectives

Modern cases of reincarnation studied by westerners mostly involve children who remember a previous life in detail. They remember the names of previous family members. In many such cases, the child reports dying of violence or early in life in some traumatic fashion—while giving birth, for instance. The previous (remembered) family may live in the same or in a distant town. The child usually insists. It says that it does not belong here, in its current family. Some children carry birthmarks at those sites where they were injured in their supposed previous life.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, then at the University of Virginia documented such reports in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University of Virginia Press, 1974) and in Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Praeger Publishers, 1997). He maintained a database of some 3,000 reported cases; of these 200 were “suggestive” of reincarnation in his opinion. Stevenson was an original, erudite, and courageous figure. He was trained in medicine, worked in biochemistry, and, with a partner, made a discovery about oxidation in kidneys. He later took another degree and qualified as a Freudian psychoanalyst; but dissatisfied with Freudian approaches, he eventually began investigating paranormal phenomena. In the process he became the leading scientific investigator of reincarnation. I ought to put “scientific” in quotes because he was treated as an outlaw by many would-be spokesmen for science, described (because he had to be) as objective, careful, and disciplined—but he was said to entertain an “unacceptable hypothesis.” Here is a classical case of the clash between the search for truth on the one hand and of an orthodoxy on the other.

Stevenson labeled only those cases as suggestive of reincarnation where no other explanation of the data seemed as plausible. Even so he studiously avoided making any claims. Hence he used the word “suggestive” rather than some stronger term like “evidentiary.”

All such cases rely on memories—of children. The memories are vivid, including, for instance, the location where some money was buried or what the names of the reincarnated person’s children were. The child recognizes previous locations, the layout of residences and neighborhoods it had never visited before, and people who were its claimed relatives in the previous life. The child greets these people by name, sometimes by nickname known only in narrow family circles. In all of these cases, the will not to believe causes doubters to reach for concepts like telepathy to argue for an alternative means whereby information may have reached the child.

The cases are much more persuasive than the “super-psi” explanation, outlined here, used to explain them away. Indeed the raw data become almost banal, and the birthmarks, where present, suggest that the minds appearing now in new bodies actually participated in their formation along lines that remind one of stigmata, but here caused by unpleasant memories.

Stevenson’s cases come from all over the world, but many more from cultures where reincarnation is accepted. In cultures where the doctrine is taboo, children are shushed when they first begin to talk about such things. They are certainly not believed. No doubt they sense their parents’ anxiety and disapproval. In any case, these memories tend to fade away as the children grow older, no matter which culture they inhabit.

Now for some older western views of reincarnation. The concept has been around from very early on and seems to have been widespread. It was and is held by Hindus and by followers of the Jewish Kabbalah today. The Kabbalah calls the process gil-gul. One of the greatest if also admittedly one of the more controversial of the Church Fathers, Origen (185-254), taught the preexistence of the soul. Origen had an, ah, original view of the scriptures too, declining to follow the “letter” of the scripture strictly where he judged it unfit to be the word of God. He wrote: “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life.” One source is here, on p. 42.

Platonist ideas influenced Origen, but he seems to have held his belief in “preexistence” as a matter of logical necessity based on an argument I personally find silly. Origen thought that souls coexist with God and thus have no beginning. Origen argued that God could not be omnipotent without subjects. No one is master without servants. Souls therefore had to coexist with God. Origen’s father died as a martyr; Origen himself was tortured for his faith. He was a teacher of great renown and wrote many books—a shining light, in other words, much admired by numerous people who were later canonized. He was not.

Belief in some Christian version of reincarnation seems to have been held by various groups for at least 300 some odd years in the West—dated from around the time when Christianity formed. With the coming of the Emperor Constantine (reigned 306-337), the Church gained power and began consolidating its ideological rule. The process took the form of various councils, the first of which Constantine organized himself. Bishops gathered at various places and hammered out the shape of orthodoxy. Until then all kinds of sects coexisted uneasily, snarling at each other in their tracts. All this had to be organized. Competing groups now morphed into heresies. At the Second Council of Constantinople, held in 553, “preexistence” was finally rooted out. Souls had to be created within time and only went round once. The council published some 13 anathemas in the summer of that year. One dealt with the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” and condemned those who asserted the “monstrous restoration which follows from it.” If the belief had not been common, it wouldn’t have required quite so firm a sanction. This event, in the sixth century, was not really a philosophical but a political resolution of an article of faith. It is well to hold that in mind. The organization of churches, while deeply intertwined with ideas and their meanings, is an expression of social force aimed at regulating society, not at clarifying thought.

Forgetting

Let me use the analogy of a person who descends into a very deep cave on an elaborate spelunking expedition. He carries a radio. His team of supporters is above ground monitoring his progress below; they’re leaning into computer screens. Now the explorer has reached such a depth that the interfering rock formations cause him to lose communications. The radio sputters, here and there he can make out a phrase, but not enough to carry on a meaningful conversation.

Let me apply the analogy. The cave and the rock that forms it represent the material order. The surface represents the order of the soul. The explorer is one soul descending into the density of matter. The radio is his mind communicating rather well with his base camp at first, but then interference all but cuts off his contact. His descent is what Wordsworth means by our birth; the failure of the radio is our “forgetting” of a previous existence. The analogy isn’t perfect. It merely illustrates that “interference” may explain our forgetting. A situation like the one described might be elaborated to explain plausibly the Hindu concept of reincarnation, structurally an emanationist concept. To make this case we need just a few elements.

These are (1) some evidence that souls have really preexisted before; (2) an understanding of memory as a field phenomenon, and (3) a conceptualization of orders based on some kind of density.

Evidence for Preexistence. In eastern culture people accept reincarnation as a traditional belief; it’s been around a long time, not least in the West, if we go far enough back. The first westerner to give it scientific study was the Canadian, Ian Stevenson, a professor at the University of Virginia. The late Stevenson’s studies of people who claimed to remember an earlier life represents an opus of evidence not as extensive but as persuasive as the corpus of NDE reports. It represents empirical proof, as best as we can get it, for preexistence. Others have continued such studies after Stevenson.

Memory. No one questions the role of the brain in memory, but the subject of where memories reside is more controversial. The orthodox answer is that tissue holds memories, but proof of that is speculative. New theories therefore keep springing up. The Austrian, Karl Pribram, has been the latest theorizer, suggesting a holographic storage of memory across tissues. This suggestion has not firm proof either. The British biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, is the chief proponent of a theory that memories reside in what he calls morphic fields, thus fields analogous to the electro-dynamic kind, but not detectable by our instruments. He offers some intriguing empirical support for this suggestion (see The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature (Park Street Press, 1995). This alternative fits a metaphysical perspective better—without in any way denying the role of the brain.

Concerning memory, especially in this context, it’s worthwhile reminding ourselves that in daily awareness we don’t actually remember our entire life in full detail. What we have is a very compressed précis of our past. But if we want to remember something, we have potent powers to evoke those things by effort. The day-to-day functioning of our memory is in response to stimuli. Those things not “evoked” by something lie dormant. We have enormous stores of memory that we never visit—and when we do, we tend to be amazed. I’d completely forgotten that, we say—but evidently we have not. We need to keep this in mind in reflecting on the subject in this context.

Orders of Density. There is ample philosophical as well as experiential evidence for a subtle reality—that which I keep calling the “soul-order.” Its most obvious proof is human consciousness. I include life itself as an element of proof—although that’s more controversial. Tradition supports the concept. People believe in other words, and NDE reports appear to back up those beliefs. If such orders exist, however, science cannot prove them by definition. If those world are more subtle, our physical instruments can no more detect them than they can detect consciousness.

With these elements in mind, let me suggest the following model for explaining why we can’t remember previous lives. I assume, for starters, that when a soul is born (unites with matter), it enters a realm of greater density. The soul-order is subtle, in other words. The “noise” of this environment, to change the metaphor, overwhelms the channel by means of which we gather knowledge (memory is knowledge). What we hear across this channel reaches us almost too faintly to decode: intuitions, intimations. When our souls form new memories, our brain mediates their storage. But when the brain retrieves memories in response to stimuli, it always fetches the most recent deposits to this store, especially as we age. In rare cases only, the brain may actually bring back memories created in times predating our current life, but these would have less context. After we die, presumably, we shall recover our older memories, but only after appropriate stimuli, those arising in the soul-order, actually evoke them. What I’m suggesting as a reasonable assumption is that we never really lose contact with our continuous memories, but our ability to evoke them from within this dark spelunking cave becomes much weaker.

How then can some people remember earlier existences while the great majority do not? While I’m into idle speculation, why not tackle that one too. The remembering of some is no idle claim of this or that small thing remembered. On the contrary. Stevenson’s work indicates that the recovery of memories is quite complete and quite detailed. One explanation might be that, in childhood, many of us do remember previous lives but too fragmentarily. We’re unable to link up enough of them to reproduce a sense of forgotten self-awareness. The shock of entry into this world may have been greater for most than some. Other explanations might be that the tuning powers of the brain are better is some than others, that the environmental stimuli are sharper for some, and finally that some have been gone but a short time. Concerning the last point, the point is that the memories remembered would be more current. In most of the cases Stevenson reports, the life remembered had been lived but a few miles away and ended just a few years earlier. For most other people, possibly, the last stretch of existence may not have been physical but “subtle,” thus in a quite different order, the soul-order. Physical stimuli here may not evoke memories of that one, except perhaps for feelings. The two orders may be very different in character. Remembering lives may therefore be rare because the conditions necessary to evoke earlier memories may also be rare.

What I’ve managed here, perhaps, is to show that some element of plausibility attaches to the reincarnation scheme and, therefore, indirectly, to the proposition that another realm might be invading matter or—what may be a rougher row to hoe—may have been caught here involuntarily.