The Case Against Immortality, by Keith Augustine

[Horia Plugaru]

In his paper "The Case against Immortality," Mr. Keith Augustine gives arguments against the plausibility of reincarnation. Besides giving arguments for the dependence of consciousness on the brain, he also attacks the argument based on past-life memories for reincarnation.

However, I think there is another important argument in favor of reincarnation which Augustine does not discuss: children have instinctive capacities, which seems to suggest that there must be learning prior to birth. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that child geniuses, such as Mozart, indicate prenatal training.

What I would like to know from Mr. Augustine is: how would he respond to this argument in favor of reincarnation?

Thank you,

Horia Plugaru

[-DM-]

[Thank you for your feedback regarding The Case Against Immortality (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html) by Keith Augustine (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/index.shtml). E-mail notification has been sent to the author. Although there are no guarantees, you might want to check back from time to time for a further response following this post. -DM-]

[Hrvoje Butkovic]

While I understand that the article couldn’t deal with its many topics in-depth, the simplistic nature of the discussion gives the impression that the case for the extinction of consciousness at death is stronger than it really is, and that the case for survival is weaker than it really is. To illustrate the nature of the problem, I would like to focus on the question of past-life memories that was brought up in an earlier post.

The article argues that the evidence for reincarnation that is provided by children’s past-life memories is weak because:
- In many cases children stood to benefit from better living conditions of the families that they claimed to have been a part of in their previous life.
- In a vast majority of cases, contact between the two families took place before investigation was begun.
- The evidence is entirely anecdotal in nature.
- The vast majority of cases come from countries where a religious belief in reincarnation is strong.
- Some cases involve memories of a life as a person who only died after the child was born.

What the article doesn’t mention is that:
- Subsequent to Ian Stevenson’s early work in India, several books have been published detailing cases of past-life memories in Europe, North America and the Middle East. Belief in reincarnation is not widespread in these places and is often discouraged, which weakens the claim of cultural conditioning.
- The critical evaluation of Stevenson’s work was itself criticised by Robert Almeder for essentially presupposing that reincarnation cannot be real.
- In addition to collecting testimonies, researchers have also matched birthmarks and birth defects of the children to the wounds and scars of the people that they claimed to be in their previous life. They also reported cases of children who had phobias that were related to the circumstances of their death, talents and interests that they had in their previous life and early craving for substances that they were addicted to in their previous life. This contradicts the claim that the evidence is purely anecdotal.

Inclusion of this information would make a significant difference to the message of the article regarding past-life memories. If this could not be done due to limited space, then why not try to refute the strongest evidence rather than the weakest, or at least mention that stronger evidence exists?

[kaugust]

While I understand that the article couldn’t deal with its many topics in-depth, the simplistic nature of the discussion gives the impression that the case for the extinction of consciousness at death is stronger than it really is, and that the case for survival is weaker than it really is.

Hello Hrvoje,

Thank you for your feedback on my essay of several years ago. First, I disagree with you that the article makes the case for personal annihilation at death appear stronger than it really is, and that it makes the case for survival after death appear weaker than it really is. It is my contention now, as it was then, that the evidence for extinction is magnitudes of order better than any alleged evidence for survival. Indeed, there are several ways in which my neurophysiological case against survival could be made stronger, just as there are several ways in which my cursory critique of the alleged evidence for survival could be made stronger. That essay aimed to be a survey article only, rather than the sort of in-depth critique that you find in my subsequent work Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html). If I were to expand "The Case Against Immortality" into a more in-depth critique, I would significantly extend both the sections on the neurophysiological and parapsychological evidence. Suffice it to say that in both cases there are considerations that support my general contentions both in regard to the positive evidence against survival, and concerning problems with interpreting certain phenomena as evidence for survival.

I am currently in the process of coediting an anthology with Michael Martin, The Myth of Afterlife, which treats each of the sources of evidence for and against survival individually, as well as covering conceptual and theoretical issues. I intend that volume to provide an in-depth and intensive, if not exhaustive, critique of the evidence for and against survival after death.


What the article doesn’t mention is that:
- Subsequent to Ian Stevenson’s early work in India, several books have been published detailing cases of past-life memories in Europe, North America and the Middle East. Belief in reincarnation is not widespread in these places and is often discouraged, which weakens the claim of cultural conditioning.


It is my understanding that such case are significantly rarer in these cultures. Stevenson has argued, as I recall, that this is because cultural norms would tend to discourage people from reporting such incidents in areas where belief in reincarnation is not strong or even actively discouraged, whereas areas where belief in reincarnation is strong would foster their reporting. There is, of course, no way to know whether the incidence of "cases of the reincarnation type" are actually more frequent in reincarnation-friendly societies or simply underreported in reincarnation-hostile societies.

In any case I think the fact that certain phenomena are reported in certain cultures is not evidence, one way or the other, for whether those phenomena represent evidence for survival, or some other phenomena with perfectly "normal" explanations. My point was simply that if cases of the reincarnation type are significantly more common in reincarnation-friendly societies, there is little need to postulate something paranormal to account for them. That they occasionally occur elsewhere does not really cry out for a paranormal explanation. Maybe you feel otherwise, but I haven't really seen an argument that a paranormal explanation would be required.


- The critical evaluation of Stevenson’s work was itself criticised by Robert Almeder for essentially presupposing that reincarnation cannot be real.


I am aware of Almeder's contention in, among other places, his book Death and Personal Survival. Indeed, elsewhere Almeder has (IMO) constructed a straw-man hypothetical critic of survival when summarizing what he takes to be the main arguments against survival, or against the supposed evidence for survival. (He does this in his Skeptiko interview (http://www.skeptiko.com/index.php?id=23), for instance.) As an actual critic of survival, I would list none of the arguments that Almeder offers, and instead offer empirical arguments that are much more challenging either to the survival hypothesis itself or to the interpretation of certain sorts of phenomena as evidence for survival.


- In addition to collecting testimonies, researchers have also matched birthmarks and birth defects of the children to the wounds and scars of the people that they claimed to be in their previous life. They also reported cases of children who had phobias that were related to the circumstances of their death, talents and interests that they had in their previous life and early craving for substances that they were addicted to in their previous life. This contradicts the claim that the evidence is purely anecdotal.


Leonard Angel has responded to the so-called "birthmark" evidence in his Skeptic magazine review of Stevenson's tome Biology and Reincarnation.


Inclusion of this information would make a significant difference to the message of the article regarding past-life memories. If this could not be done due to limited space, then why not try to refute the strongest evidence rather than the weakest, or at least mention that stronger evidence exists?

Some day I would like to update the article to cover specific cases (e.g., the Osis-McCormick combined target identification and detection study during Alex Tanous' out-of-body experiences at will, which Almeder virtually treats as proof that something leaves the body during out of body experiences in his Death and Personal Survival), but for now, you'll have to wait a year or so for the anthology. And once the anthology is done, there is another project I would like to return to, a history of disbelief in an afterlife, particularly concerning how different thinkers advise us on how to come to terms with permanently ceasing to exist. So I don't know when I could update "The Case Against Immortality" itself.

I nevertheless appreciate feedback such as this to give me a better idea of which evidence needs to be addressed in the eyes of my readers. So thank you for taking the time to provide me with your comments.

[aupmanyav]

Hrvoje and Kaugust, nice topic in which I am always interested. Hrvoje would know from NAR&P that I do not believe in re-incarnation except in atomic sense. So, death is for me and not for the matter that makes me up. That would be unaware of my death and merrily join the dust to make sediments and that which goes in the atmosphere would become part of millions of things, living and non-living. I am star-dust, 14 billion years old at the moment and a few more billion years to go.

If re-incarnation does happen then its incidence should be the same all over the world and the reports should not emanate only from the societies which believe in it.

Why I am posting here is to place before you my 'near-death experience' hypothesis (I am a hindu with a reasonable knowledge of neuro-systems as is available to laymen). My contention is that 'near-death experiences' are the result of working of our brain. When the oxygen supply dries up, the brain tries to use whatever is available for the most important thing, and that is consciousness. In that process, supply to pain centers is first to be cut off. Brain knows that it cannot do anything about it, move no muscle of the body, not even to message the part of the body where pain may be located. So, perhaps in the last stage, we have consciousness and the five senses, though the power to blink the eye-lids are gone, they are either closed or open. It seems that hearing and seeing are the last to go. The persons involved in such experiences keep hearing the conversation of the people around. When that goes, along with it goes the power to sense our position, which is connected with the Cochlear bone. That is why people sense themselves to be hovering around the death-bed. Soon, that too goes, and in the last stages only a part of the power of seeing is available. This extinguishing power and the consciousness gives rise to visions of of a fatherly figure holding hands, reassuring the dying, and taking one through a tunnel where the light increases until it reaches a white-out.

I tend to reason that the process of dying is normally quite painless and we should not be afraid of it. And I also think that a similar process occurs even when the animals die. So a dear in the lions jaws also finds itself grazing happily alongside its mother on a green grassy field. Really nature and evolution has taken care of all our needs. I think you understand the scenerio that I have placed before you. :)

[Hrvoje Butkovic]

Hi Keith

I must say that I’m impressed with the promptness of your response. In case my post has created confusion, the thrust of my argument is not that the strongest evidence in favour of reincarnation stands unchallenged (though we would probably disagree on the strength of the challenge), but that in not discussing or even mentioning this evidence, one creates a false impression about the nature of the dispute. This is not an appeal to expand the article (though this would certainly be welcome), but to ensure that the material that is discussed accurately represents the current state of the debate, especially if one is going to draw conclusions about survival of consciousness on the basis of this discussion.

Seeing how promptly you have responded to my enquiry, I hope that you would be prepared to entertain one more question. This one has to do with empirical evidence that supports the dependence of consciousness on the brain. As far as I can tell, none of it can distinguish between the model where the brain is the creator of consciousness and the model where it merely acts as a transformer of consciousness (the coloured glass analogy). Is this is your position as well?

[kaugust]

aupmanyav and Hrvoje might be interested in V. Krishnan's article "A New Perspective on the Afterlife Issue (http://apt.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&issn=0891-4494&volume=022&issue=001&page=0005)," as well Jim Tucker's commentary on it, "Response to 'A New Perspective on the Afterlife Issue (http://apt.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&issn=0891-4494&volume=022&issue=001&page=0015)'."

Krishnan has been a regular contributor to the Journal of Near-Death Studies for over a decade, and unless I'm thinking of someone else, Tucker is the late Ian Stevenson's protégé with regard to reincarnation research.

Seeing how promptly you have responded to my enquiry, I hope that you would be prepared to entertain one more question. This one has to do with empirical evidence that supports the dependence of consciousness on the brain. As far as I can tell, none of it can distinguish between the model where the brain is the creator of consciousness and the model where it merely acts as a transformer of consciousness (the coloured glass analogy). Is this is your position as well?

If you read "The Case Against Immortality" in its entirety, such as my comments on Bill Hasker's immortality-friendly analogies or the postscript I added, it ought to be clear that I think that the neurophysiological evidence does, in fact, support the 'productive hypothesis' far better than the 'transmissive hypothesis'--so I disagree with William James that both models are 'purely' metaphysical on thus on an evidential par. (And this wouldn't be the only thing that James was wrong about (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/raymond_bradley/rivalry.html#snarling).) In fact, I plan on demonstrating precisely why the two models are not on a par in The Myth of Afterlife anthology. Suffice it to say for now that I have familiarized and responded to (in outline) about a dozen different attempts by survivalists to accommodate the neurophysiological facts which so severely undermine the survival hypothesis, from J. M. E. McTaggart in the late 19th century to Stephen Braude in the 21st century. None of those attempts comfortably accommodate those facts.

If I had to say what I take to be the most prominent mistake of these attempts, it is to unduly philosophize the issues so as to make them immune to empirical falsification. To be less cryptic, what I mean is that all such attempts I've seen try to argue that since survival is logically compatible with certain neurophysiological facts, "where's the problem?" But that is a poor way to approach the issue since the vast majority of falsehoods are logically compatible with known facts. Creationism is logically compatible with certain inconvenient facts in the fossil record and elsewhere since God could have "planted the evidence" in order to test our faith, and yet I think it is safe to say that the empirical evidence from biology has by all reasonable standards scientifically falsified creationism.

If logically compatibility is the standard for judging the truth of hypotheses, the bar has been substantially lowered. If we use a standard that is, well, "standard" for evaluating the likelihood of scientific hypotheses, such as inference to the best explanation or Bayesian analysis, the 'productive hypothesis' is a far better explanation of the vast majority of the findings of physiological psychology than is any 'transmissive hypothesis.'

So I would only agree that we 'cannot distinguish' between productive and transmissive models on the basis of the available evidence in the sense that we cannot determine whether creationism or evolution is true--in a trivial sense. In the sense that matters, the evidence clearly favors one hypothesis over another. And I would say that the strength of the neurophysiological evidence falsifying the survival hypothesis is near to that of the biological evidence falsifying creationism.

[Hrvoje Butkovic]

I do agree that the neurophysiological evidence supports the 'productive hypothesis' far better than the 'transmissive hypothesis' (I was confused by the need to refute it if one is to favour the ‘transmissive hypothesis’, as stated in the postscript). If the neurophysiological evidence were all that we had to go on, then I would favour the ‘productive hypothesis’ as well. It is the existence of parapsychological evidence that complicates the matter. As I see it, the pertinent question is not whether the neurophysiological evidence supports the ‘productive hypothesis’ better than the ‘transmissive hypothesis’, but whether it contradicts the ‘transmissive hypothesis’. If it does not, then the strength of this evidence is not pertinent to the discussion and it is only the strength of the parapsychological evidence that matters. If the neurophysiological evidence cannot refute the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ and the parapsychological evidence can refute the ‘productive hypothesis’, then pitting the two against each other to see which one is stronger, as is done in the article, creates another misleading picture.

[kaugust]

As I see it, the pertinent question is not whether the neurophysiological evidence supports the ‘productive hypothesis’ better than the ‘transmissive hypothesis’, but whether it contradicts the ‘transmissive hypothesis’. If it does not, then the strength of this evidence is not pertinent to the discussion and it is only the strength of the parapsychological evidence that matters.

In order for me to answer your question, you'll have to be more specific as to what you mean by 'contradict.' What would it take, in your view, for the neurophysiological evidence to contradict the transmissive hypothesis?

If you mean that the neurophysiological evidence would need to logically entail that the transmissive hypothesis is false, I've already commented that I think that lowers the bar far too much, and that I take it that the evidence is strong enough to have falsified the transmissive hypothesis. Can the transmissive hypothesis accommodate the facts of physiological psychology? Yes, but only in a trivial sense--in the same sense that the hypothesis that "God planted the evidence" can accommodate the facts of evolutionary biology. The strongest way to illustrate this is in terms of predictive success: dualism can accommodate the facts of physiological psychology after the fact, but mind-brain dependence actually predicts the sort of facts we have discovered to be the case, across the board. From a scientific point of view, it is sort of like adding all of these theoretical qualifications to Ptolemaic astronomy in order for the Ptolemaic model to 'output' the observations we in fact find, when a heliocentric model would predict the same observations naturally and much more simply without the need for multiple ad hoc modifications.

I used the evolution-creationism analogy because I think the parallels are striking--the strength of the evidence in both cases is overwhelming, and the sense in which evolution and 'production' might be false given the evidence is the same: it is logically possible, but highly unlikely by scientific standards, that either of these theories are false. Just as there is no good evidence supporting creationism, and there is no good evidence falsifying evolution, so too there is no good evidence supporting 'transmission,' and there is no good evidence falsifying 'production.' When you add this fact to the predictive success and simplicity of the production model, the preponderance of the evidence dictates that mentality is generated by brain activity. This is not some dogmatic materialism or scientism, as is often alleged, but simply an honest assessment of all of the relevant kinds of evidence--evidence offered both for and against survival.

Incidentally, you stated that in your view the parapsychological evidence complicates the matter, but in my view this is much like arguing that, despite all of the evidence that the speed of light is a limit that no object of 'subliminal' velocity can exceed* (supported not just by relativity theory but also by the the absence of any known astronomical object moving towards or away from Earth at faster than the speed of light), subliminal objects must in fact be capable of exceeding the speed of light because UFOs have travelled to Earth from star systems many light years away. The evidence that the latter proposition is true is far weaker than the evidence that no subliminal object can exceed the speed of light. Ditto for the "evidence" for survival after death when compared to the evidence for the dependence of consciousness on the brain. (And there is a further concern about supposed evidence for survival after death I'll mention below.)

*Note that this proposition needs to be appropriately qualified, but I have not done so here for simplicity of illustration. Space-time itself, for instance, is thought to have "inflated" at superluminal velocity itself, carrying objects with it, soon after the Big Bang.


If the neurophysiological evidence cannot refute the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ and the parapsychological evidence can refute the ‘productive hypothesis’, then pitting the two against each other to see which one is stronger, as is done in the article, creates another misleading picture.

This is erroneous. In any sense that matters--a sense that is standardly applied to scientific theories--the neurophysiological evidence can falsify the ‘transmissive hypothesis,' even if it can't compel one to acknowledge the falsehood of the ‘transmissive hypothesis' on pain of logical contradiction.

On top of this, the parapsychological evidence certainly does not compell one to concede that 'production' is false on pain of contradiction, either, for even if one takes parapsychological phenomena to be genuine, they don't logically entail the truth of survival after death. Return to the UFO analogy: UFOs could represent genuine vehicles more advanced than anything humanity has yet developed, yet: (1) originate from unexplored caverns of the Earth or from (2) unexplored deep sea trenches, operated by an unknown terrestrial species; be (3) the human-operated vehicles of time-travellers; or (4) originate from somewhere within our solar system, one of the other major planets, or moons, or other objects in the solar system. And so on. I'm not saying that any of these explanations are particularly likely, but the reality of UFOs would not logically compel or necessitate belief in the reality of extraterrestrial visitation, even if extraterrestrial visitation were the best explanation for them (much as you point out that neurophysiological evidence doesn't compel one to accept the 'productive hypothesis' even if the productive hypothesis is the best explanation of such evidence). Similar alternative explanations are available for alleged survival evidence: super-ESP or the activity of nonhuman spirits (e.g., angels and demons) producting poltergeists, apparitions, and mediumistic communications; certain people's brains occasionally accessing to 'morphic resonance' memories floating around in space a la Rupert Sheldrake to produce 'reincarnation memories' or mediumistic communications; and so on and so forth.

Finally, I have no doubt that parapsychological evidence could refute the ‘productive hypothesis’ in the sense that matters: it could falsify 'production' by scientific standards even if it did not logically compel one to reject production. But what matters for this issue is not what the parapsychological evidence could do, but what it has done. And no rational person maintains that the parapsychological evidence has shown survival to be true by scientific standards. That's why the likes of Ian Stevenson concluded that such evidence at best makes belief in survival "permissible."

[Deleet]

Hi Keith A.:wave:

In your explanation(s) above, is there any reason why you don't just invoke Occam's Razor? It seems that you are nearly using it, just without mentioning it. :Cheeky:

Thanks for some good reads so far, I'm looking forward to the book.

[Off-topic] Additionally I'm currently defending Naturalism in a debate, where I might need some assistance to what you actually meant in the article of yours on that subject.
http://iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=233650

[kaugust]

In your explanation(s) above, is there any reason why you don't just invoke Occam's Razor? It seems that you are nearly using it, just without mentioning it.


I am implicitly mentioning Ockham's razor (roughly "do not multiply entities beyond necessity") in the reference to simplicity, but would add that simplicity is only one evaluative criterion of inference to the best explanation, and that one should take into account other criteria as well (such as scope, fruitfulness, coherence/conservatism, and accuracy/testability, as these terms are used, respectively, in Peter Carruthers' "The Roots of Scientific Reasoning (http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/Roots-of-science.htm)" § 2.1 and Theodore Schick & Lewis Vaughn's How to Think About Weird Things (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0767400135/internetinfidels/), pp. 172-181). I think these other evaluative criteria are needed not only to increase one's confidence in the conclusion, but because the simplicity criteria entails "all other things being equal, pick the simpler hypothesis." But sometimes all other things are not equal--a simpler theory could in principle have far less predictive success than a more complex one, for instance--and in those instances simplicity will not be enough to decide the toss. Moreover, these criteria are heuristics, or rules of thumb, subject to some level of subjectivity rather than straightforward, purely objective numerical values one can just plug in to a probability calculus in order to obtain a result. (Bayesian analysis approaches the latter standard, and instances of its use can be found in select articles (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_gale/swinburne_argument.html) on the Secular Web.)


Additionally I'm currently defending Naturalism in a debate, where I might need some assistance to what you actually meant in the article of yours on that subject.
http://iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=233650

If you provide some specific questions about my position re: naturalism directly to me, I'll be happy to answer them. In the meantime, however, in addition to my master's thesis "A Defense of Naturalism (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/thesis.html)," see the follow-up discussions starting with some critical feedback concerning whether naturalism amounts to a substantial philosophical position in an On Behalf of the Fool (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=1926488#post1926488) post, as well as subsequent feedback and responses about naturalism merged into that thread later. There I state positions and issues re: naturalism that I do not directly address in my thesis, and other naturalists like Richard Carrier, Arnold Guminski, and Evan Fales offer some important contributions as well.

[Hrvoje Butkovic]

I have changed the order of your statements in an effort to produce a more coherent response. I hope you don’t mind.

This is not some dogmatic materialism or scientism, as is often alleged, but simply an honest assessment of all of the relevant kinds of evidence--evidence offered both for and against survival.
I’m not accusing you of that, though I had my doubts when I first read the article. My enquiry has to do with the content of the discussion that was presented in the article, from which the conclusion against survival was apparently drawn, rather than with the conclusion itself.

I used the evolution-creationism analogy because I think the parallels are striking--the strength of the evidence in both cases is overwhelming, and the sense in which evolution and 'production' might be false given the evidence is the same: it is logically possible, but highly unlikely by scientific standards, that either of these theories are false. Just as there is no good evidence supporting creationism, and there is no good evidence falsifying evolution, so too there is no good evidence supporting 'transmission,' and there is no good evidence falsifying 'production.' When you add this fact to the predictive success and simplicity of the production model, the preponderance of the evidence dictates that mentality is generated by brain activity.
While I haven’t devoted much time to studying creationism (the phenomenon seems to be largely confined to the US) I find that the analogy falls short for the following reasons:
- Creationism has no predictive value, whereas the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ makes the same predictions as the ‘productive hypothesis’ with respect to neurophysiological evidence under normal conditions (I don’t see what ad hoc modifications it needs to do this), in addition to making tentative predictions with respect to other ways in which consciousness can manifest (it is weak in this area due to vagueness, based as it is on fragmentary information on what appears to be a parallel reality).
- There is no body of evidence that favours creationism over evolution, whereas the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ is favoured by parapsychological evidence.
- Creationism requires miracles in order to explain evolutionary evidence, whereas the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ doesn’t rely on miracles to account for the neurophysiological evidence.

I find the UFO analogy more appropriate, the only drawback being that the UFO evidence is significantly weaker than the parapsychological evidence.

In order for me to answer your question, you'll have to be more specific as to what you mean by 'contradict.' What would it take, in your view, for the neurophysiological evidence to contradict the transmissive hypothesis?
A conclusive way would be to demonstrate how the brain generates consciousness. I don’t know whether this resides in the domain of neurophysiological evidence as merely correlating consciousness with brain states is not sufficient.

This is erroneous. In any sense that matters--a sense that is standardly applied to scientific theories--the neurophysiological evidence can falsify the ‘transmissive hypothesis,' even if it can't compel one to acknowledge the falsehood of the ‘transmissive hypothesis' on pain of logical contradiction.
I will try to state it more rigorously:
- Neurophysiological evidence can falsify the ‘transmissive hypothesis' by demonstrating how the brain generates consciousness. Until this is achieved,
- Neurophysiological evidence cannot falsify the ‘transmissive hypothesis' in its own right, but only in the absence of sufficiently strong parapsychological evidence. Parapsychological evidence can falsify the ‘productive hypothesis’ irrespective of the strength of the neurophysiological evidence. Therefore the strength of the parapsychological evidence relative to that of the neurophysiological evidence is not relevant to the discussion.

With the UFO analogy, it is not the strength of the subluminal evidence relative to that of the superluminal evidence that proves decisive, but simply the weakness of the superluminal evidence in its own right. If we were to successfully demonstrate that a single object can be accelerated past the speed of light, this would outweigh any number of failures to do so with any number of objects.

Similar alternative explanations are available for alleged survival evidence: super-ESP or the activity of nonhuman spirits (e.g., angels and demons) producting poltergeists, apparitions, and mediumistic communications; certain people's brains occasionally accessing to 'morphic resonance' memories floating around in space a la Rupert Sheldrake to produce 'reincarnation memories' or mediumistic communications; and so on and so forth.
The survival hypothesis is certainly not the only plausible explanation for the alleged survival evidence. The question is whether it is the most convincing. Also, these alternative explanations undermine the ‘productive hypothesis’ far more than the ‘transmissive hypothesis’. If the super-ESP hypothesis is correct, then the mind exhibits abilities that are seemingly unaffected by both time and space, which in itself supports the notion of survival. The same is true if non-human spirits exist in our midst and are able to interact with us without themselves having a physical body.

And no rational person maintains that the parapsychological evidence has shown survival to be true by scientific standards.
This is an interesting statement. Presumably it is aimed at scientists rather than laymen like me. Many of the scientists who personally investigated mediumistic communication, for example, have come to affirm the survival hypothesis, even if they were sceptical of it prior to their investigation. Richard Hodgson and James Hyslop did so on the basis of their investigation of the medium Leonora Piper. Gary Schwartz does so on the strength of the data gathered through the Veritas programme. In what sense were these people irrational to have come to this conclusion?

[LeoM]

I think the evidence strongly supports the transmission theory I have been reading the book the irreducible mind it really is a severe blow to the idea that the brain produces consciousness. Keith Augustine if you are going to try to refute the evidence for survival your going to have to try to refute all of it. There are many lines of evidence Near death experiences, the proxy sittings, the cross correspondences, poltergeist phenomena, reincarnation, out of body experiences, the pye record experiments [electronic voice phenomena, instrumental transcommunication, induced after death communications/afterdeath communications, drop in communicators, some genuine phenomena [physical mediumship], the newspaper tests, deathbed visions, apparitions, mental mediumship experiments done by Professor Gary Schwartz, xenoglossy


There is also tons of evidence in neuroscience that contradicts the view of the production theory such as stigmata, Maternal Impressions, Distant Intentionality Studies: Experimental all discussed in great detail in the book Irreducible Mind

[kaugust]

- Creationism has no predictive value, whereas the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ makes the same predictions as the ‘productive hypothesis’ with respect to neurophysiological evidence under normal conditions (I don’t see what ad hoc modifications it needs to do this)


It seems to me that your perception that the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ makes the same neurophysiological predictions as the ‘productive hypothesis’ is a semantic illusion. Look at the respective positions at the most basic level. The ‘productive hypothesis’ presumes, in a broad sense, some sort of materialism/physicalism--that even if mentality is a nonphysical property (as in property dualism) it must have a physical base (and when that physical base is destroyed, so is mentality). By contrast, the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ presumes that, in some way, the mind subsists independently of a material base, or at least subsists in a very exotic sort of material base like an astral body (produced by an astral brain?) independently of the normal physical body (and brain).

At that basic level, these two theories of the mind-body relationship make very different predictions. Materialism, broadly construed, straightforwardly predicts the tight sort of correlations we actually find between mental states and brain states--in fact, it is precisely because those correlations are so tight that we know that the brain is the 'seat of the soul' rather than the heart (as Aristotle thought) or some other organ. By contrast, substance dualism or popular (astral body) dualism--any dualism where the mind is not generated by any known normal physical system--makes very opposite predictions. As I explained in my review of Whatever Happened to the Soul (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/no-soul.html):


If the mind was an indivisible immaterial substance that could exist independently of the brain then we should not be able to create two minds simply by severing the corpus collosum. Nor should the mind be directly affected by any tampering with the brain. If Cartesian dualism were true the only affect that brain damage could have would be to incapacitate the ability of the mind (or soul) to control the body, but the mind itself would remain intact. We have an enormous amount of evidence that this is false--changes in the brain result in changes in mental states themselves.


I imagine that your reaction would be that this is a straw man: the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ does not itself say that the mind is like a driver and the body like a car, with the brain merely being the steering wheel, brakes, accelerator, etc where the driver interacts with the car. In that analogy, the driver could total his car and still walk away without a scratch.

But this is the presumption of the survival hypothesis: that the body can become food for worms while the soul lives on, finally freed from its lifetime of imprisonment in the body. And the various analogies for transmission used by survivalists presume such a picture: if the mind is to the brain like a television signal at 512 MHz is to one's TV set, one can destroy the set without having any affect whatsoever on that 512 MHz signal. But that's the difference we see in the neurophysiological evidence: destroying the brain a section at a time alters the mind itself, directly--exactly the opposite of what the analogy would predict. It does not merely cause paralysis--the mind wanting to, but frustratingly unable to, control the body, or blindness, bodily signals becoming unable to reach that independently functioning mind. The mind itself is affected.

The ‘transmissive hypothesis’ is nothing more or less than substance/popular dualism plus after-the-fact modifications made in light of evidence for mind-brain dependence. It is substance/popular dualism qualified by 'counterpredictions.' But not only are they contrary to what basic dualism in principle predicts (before such facts are discovered), this ad hoc modification to basic dualism is no help to the survivalist.

The narrow sense in which transmission is compatible with neurophysiological findings might be called, for lack of a better term, "physicalism plus." Consider this analogy: the brain cannot function without oxygen. Yet both oxygen and the brain can exist apart from each other. What you get, however, is a nonfunctioning/dying/dead brain over here, and oxygen over there. In order to get a functional brain, you need to have both. Without oxygen, there is no functioning brain.

Given how tight the mind-brain correlations actually are, if something like transmission is true, then the person/individual/mind known as Hrvoje Butkovic is a combination of brain and extra psi factor. (This is actually C. D. Broad's compound theory (http://www.ditext.com/broad/mpn12.html).) What does that mean for survival, though? What it means is that Hrvoje Butkovic can't possibly survive the death of the brain, because the 'psi factor' is merely something added on to what his brain does. The brain by itself would not be Hrvoje Butkovic, nor would the psi factor by itself be Hrvoje Butkovic. Only the combination of the two would be Hrvoje Butkovic. But since the death of Hrvoje Butkovic entails part of the system being destroyed, Hrvoje Butkovic would just as conclusively be destroyed.

In "The Case Against Immortality (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html)" I cite parapsychologist Douglas Stokes conceding this; in the essay I cited by him, he even explicitly concludes (though I don't quote him on this) that mediumistic evidence, reincarnation memories, etc are actually incompatible (taken at face value) with his position that the 'I Thinker' survives death, because all traces of personality depend upon a properly functioning brain which no longer exists once death has ensued, and those sources of evidence imply survival of personality. But if whatever survives death is not your personality, not what makes up your individuality, then you do not survive death. A 'psi factor' or generic 'I thinker' minus any distinctive characteristics of the once-living person might survive death, but Hrvoje Butkovic would have ceased to exist--just as surely as he would even if his bones were still around (Hrvoje Butkovic's bones surviving the death of the body is not the same as Hrvoje Butkovic surviving the death of the body--by a long shot.)

So the way I see it, there are two intellectually honest ways to take the neurophysiological evidence:

(1) The brain produces individual personality.
(2) The brain + something else produces individual personality.

Both of these, however, preclude the possibility that one's individual personality could survive the death of the brain. The following option, the instrument theory, is clearly contrary to all known neurophysiological facts--and even C. D. Broad concedes this in his discussion of 'the instrumental theory' in the link provided above:

(3) Something else (whether a pure mind or astral body) produces individual personality, and merely uses the brain to communicate with or control the body.

The argument I quoted from my review of Whatever Happened to the Soul? above demonstrates that (3) is not really a live option for anyone taking the neurophysiological evidence seriously. (2) allows psi to have a role in human mentality, but does not allow what Frederick Meyers' wanted to allow: The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. (1) is better because (2) is superfluous--what I characterize as a "soul of the gaps" argument in my postscript to "The Case Against Immortality." But for the purposes of survival getting off of the ground, even this distinction does not matter--because we are no longer talking about personal survival.

And the tighter the correlations between mind and brain, the less individual-like a 'psi factor,' Aristotelian active intellect, or particular transient manifestation of the Interconnected Whole becomes. It is tight enough now that we know that if anything extramental survives death, it is not one's individuality--for one's individuality at least depends upon a functioning brain, even if it depends on that and something more.

To address the creationism analogy specifically, I disagree that on a basic level, special creation makes no predictions--it essentially predicts that we should not see the sorts of correlations that we actually do. It predicts that all animals were created at the same time, so evidence that one species evolved from another falsifies it. It predicts that different animals should have no vestigial organs, but they do (e.g., human beings have tailbones even though they have no tails). The neurophysiological evidence has falsified the survival hypothesis in the same sense that evidence from evolutionary biology has falsified special creation--even though one could say special creation 'predicts' the same correlations because that's just how God did things--to make it look like evolution happened even when it did not happen. That's an after-the-fact qualification, though, and just as ad hoc.


- There is no body of evidence that favours creationism over evolution, whereas the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ is favoured by parapsychological evidence.


I will grant the first clause, but not the second. The 'transmissive hypothesis' (or 'physicalism plus,' if you will) is only favored by the parapsychological evidence in the same sense that the 'extraterrestrial visitation' hypothesis is favored by the ufological evidence. (There is testimony that UFOs have been observed doing things that no natural phenomena or current man-made technology can do.) The substantive issue here is the quality of the parapsychological/ufological evidence.


- Creationism requires miracles in order to explain evolutionary evidence, whereas the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ doesn’t rely on miracles to account for the neurophysiological evidence.


Irreducible Mind takes exactly this stance, but IMO this is just semantic evasion. In my view, psi phenomena are naturalized miracles. You have taken something considered supernatural and said "it must have some yet-unknown natural explanation." Because no successful natural explanation is offered, the natural status of the phenomena in question is merely postulated, not evidenced. This is making these 'miracles' natural simply by definition; we're still talking about the same sorts of events, whether you opt to label them as miraculous/supernatural or merely anomalous/paranormal. Either way, there is no currently known natural explanation of the phenomena at hand--so it is presumptious, IMO, to assume that they will be accomodated by some future science. You could say that about any imaginable event.


I find the UFO analogy more appropriate, the only drawback being that the UFO evidence is significantly weaker than the parapsychological evidence.


Arguably. I am sure that there are many ufologists who would argue the opposite. Who is to decide the toss? I will grant that, in principle, the parapsychological evidence could be better than the ufological evidence for the simple reason that alleged paranormal phenomena are more accessible to direct experimentation than extraterrestrial visits. But unrepeatable positive results, all that parapsychology has been able to produce, are not convincing: repeatability is needed to ensure that there are no design flaws that the experimenter in the initial experiment is oblivious to. There may be normal sources of so-called paranormal information acquisition that an experiment does not in practice rule out even if the write-up of the experiment looks air tight. The walls between rooms can be thin; some go-between between the subject and the experimenter can know what is being sought and inadvertently communicate that to the subject without there being any indication on paper that such a source even existed. And so on.

Only when different experimenters can independently replicate a positive result can we know for sure that that positive result was not due to a methodological fluke or some other normal factor.


A conclusive way would be to demonstrate how the brain generates consciousness. I don’t know whether this resides in the domain of neurophysiological evidence as merely correlating consciousness with brain states is not sufficient.


In principle, I think there could be a 'complete' explanation of how the brain produces consciousness. If we had an explanation that explained all of the correlations we have found, and predicted ahead of time with 100% accuracy all of the correlations that we will find in the future, then I would say that denying that the brain produces consciousness would be akin to denying that your car engine, without the help of a car gremlin, causes the car to run. The truth is that we could have just as much evidence that the brain causes consciousness to exist as we could have that any thing causes any other thing. If you conclude that all we can ever find is correlation in principle, then you are questioning, IMO, the very notion of causation itself--but that is the realm of epistemological philosophy, not science. In principle we can know that the brain produces consciousness as well as we can know that germs cause infectious disease. I'm not saying that we are there yet, but if it is not possible in principle in your view then it seems to me that you are questioning that we can know anything scientifically at all.


Parapsychological evidence can falsify the ‘productive hypothesis’ irrespective of the strength of the neurophysiological evidence.


What is your case that parapsychological evidence can in principle demonstrate anything more than 'physicalism plus'? In other words, what we have been calling the production hypothesis seems to me to be simply the most parsimonious kind of production. What we've been calling the transmissive hypothesis is just a variation on production, with the brain contributing say 90% of one's mentality and some psi factor (or whatever) contributing say 10%. Is that not still production? It is simply partial production rather than full production. If what we think of transmission occurs ('compound theory'), than pure production is falsified--but partial production takes its place. And whatever amount of the 'compound' is extraneural, it is not enough for personal survival.


Therefore the strength of the parapsychological evidence relative to that of the neurophysiological evidence is not relevant to the discussion.


Neuroscience is relevant if we are talking about the parapsychological evidence as evidence for personal survival of consciousness after death, and not more generically for the reality of all things paranormal.


With the UFO analogy, it is not the strength of the subluminal evidence relative to that of the superluminal evidence that proves decisive, but simply the weakness of the superluminal evidence in its own right.


I see your point here, since no one claims superluminal evidence even exists apart from the potential existence of superluminal extraterrestrial spacecraft itself. But if people did claim evidence for superluminal phenomena other than simply UFO sightings themselves, then the issue would still be how good is that superluminal evidence. But the fact that special relativity has withstood repeated tests of falsifiable predictions does provide independent evidence that nothing subluminal to begin with can exceed light speed. So there is a sort of independent evidence that this does not happen above and beyond merely failing to observe superluminal objects--and that would be akin the the neurophysiological case against survival except for the fact that neurophysiological evidence is based more on direct observation of correlation without specific theoretical explanation of why this correlation rather than a slightly different one.


If we were to successfully demonstrate that a single object can be accelerated past the speed of light, this would outweigh any number of failures to do so with any number of objects.


Granted--with emphasis on "successfully demonstrate" for the purposes of the current discussion.


If the super-ESP hypothesis is correct, then the mind exhibits abilities that are seemingly unaffected by both time and space, which in itself supports the notion of survival.


Not if human brains were quantum computers or something able to do things that normal computers could not, but completely within ill-understood physics. (Not that I think this is plausible...)

Survivalists would still need to explain how survival is possible given the correlations we actually find, even if we don't have one-to-one correlations between every mental state and every brain state. How can individuality survive the destruction of the brain all at once if it cannot survival its gradual destruction in Alzheimer's disease?


The same is true if non-human spirits exist in our midst and are able to interact with us without themselves having a physical body.


Not if human minds are not spirits. (In other words, human minds could be purely physical even if other, nonphysical things had minds of a different sort.)


And no rational person maintains that the parapsychological evidence has shown survival to be true by scientific standards.

This is an interesting statement. Presumably it is aimed at scientists rather than laymen like me. Many of the scientists who personally investigated mediumistic communication, for example, have come to affirm the survival hypothesis.... In what sense were these people irrational to have come to this conclusion?


It can be rational to believe X even if X is not the best explanation of the data at hand. There is a different between what is known to be true (2+2=4), what is most probable to be true (continental drift), and what it is rational to take to be true (survival). It can be rational to believe something that is not the most probable explanation, but what matters is what is true--or most likely to be true.

What I meant by my comment, however, was not that survivalists are irrational for affirming survival, but rather than no rational person would claim that the evidence for survival rises to the level of what most qualified experts would call a scientific fact. For instance, the evidence for global warming--even more specifically human-caused global warming--is far better than the evidence for survival. It rises to the level of scientific fact; survival does not.

I think the evidence strongly supports the transmission theory I have been reading the book the irreducible mind it really is a severe blow to the idea that the brain produces consciousness.


From what I have been able to get through of that tome, Irreducible Mind is a well-argued case for its position, but of course that does not mean its authors' conclusions are a slam dunk.

I will state at the outset that I have no intention to produce a book that aims to convince true believers that life after death is false. Many (but not all) survivalists will not even consider the possibility that death might be nothing more than permanent unconsciousness. Anyone who is not even open to the possibility that there may be nothing after death is no concern of mine; I am not going to waste my breath trying to convince 'fundamentalist survivalists.' Rather, my intention is to put forward the best case for the other side of the open debate over whether there is anything after death. Survivalists have reams and reams of books making their cases for survival; by contrast, the case against survival has hardly been made. I want to offer the strongest alternative considerations on the question that survivalists are not taking up so that fence-sitters will actually have the resources in front of them to consider all of the relevant evidence, for and against, when contemplating the question. What motivates me to bother is that there are actually very strong considerations against survival--some mentioned in this thread only constitute the tip of the iceberg--that most people, even those who read up on the subject, have never even heard to consider. And the reason for that is because survivalists have tended to make the best case for their POV, while (almost) no one else has taken up the call to make the best case on the other side. This results in the debate being terribly one-sided, with the average person being able to access more material than he could possibly want to in favor of survival, being oblivious to the fact that there are actually strong--if not fatal--reasons to at least pause before jumping to the conclusion that survival is a reality. The only reason that I know what the evidence on the other side consists of is because I have actively sought diverse discussion of the relevant issues; no single book/anthology ever written before has compiled all of the most important objections in one place before. My aim is to fill that long-too-neglected void: If I don't do it, no one else will--and scores of people will continue to grossly underestimate the force of the evidence against survival. An informed person needs to consider the best of both sides before deciding, but if the side against survival has hardly been made, how can the average person even begin to do that?


Keith Augustine if you are going to try to refute the evidence for survival your going to have to try to refute all of it. There are many lines of evidence Near death experiences, the proxy sittings, the cross correspondences, poltergeist phenomena, reincarnation, out of body experiences, the pye record experiments [electronic voice phenomena, instrumental transcommunication, induced after death communications/afterdeath communications, drop in communicators, some genuine phenomena [physical mediumship], the newspaper tests, deathbed visions, apparitions, mental mediumship experiments done by Professor Gary Schwartz, xenoglossy


If you think that I'm going to try to produce a critical evaluation of the last 150+ years of all of psychical research, you'll be sorely disappointed. And the reason that I gave that little speech above is because I suspect that only a true believer would expect a person to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that every single claim contrary to his position is false in order to produce a worthwhile case. Evidently, providing a strong positive case against survival would never be enough for some people to step back and think: "Given that the strength of the evidence for X is abundantly clear, and that if X is true then Y is highly unlikely to be true, maybe I should take a second look at putting so much stock in the 'infallibility' of the case for Y." If that kind of reasoning will never occur to you (and I know it won't for some people--Robert Kastenbaum actually quoted some survey respondents saying exactly that in his 1986 book Is There Life After Death? The Latest Evidence Analysed), then my book is not going to be for you. I am primarily interested in addressing those who are unsure of the answer, or who believe in survival but not so confidently that they entirely dismiss the possibility that death might just well be the end.


There is also tons of evidence in neuroscience that contradicts the view of the production theory such as stigmata, Maternal Impressions, Distant Intentionality Studies: Experimental all discussed in great detail in the book Irreducible Mind


Ironically, none of the things that you mention above are studied by neuroscientists, and none of them have anything to do with survival per se rather than paranormal phenomena more generally. If you had cited the section after Intentionality Studies, on the birthmark evidence, that would been more relevant, but still constituted parapsychological evidence, not neuroscientific evidence. For the latter you would need to cite high-functioning encelphic individuals (as dubious as the argument for dualism from that is) or Benjamin Libet's experiments (sometimes cited by dualists, but also rather dubious).

I've about finished a three-part critique of whether near-death experiences are best interpreted as evidence for survival in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, and I've closely read the chapter of Irreducible Mind on NDEs since starting that. Suffice it to say that, in light of that chapter of Irreducible Mind, there is only one thing in my exchanges I would alter: my response to Charles Tart on the ~100 dB clicks in Pam Reynolds' ears in light of the details provided on p. 382n21 of Irreducible Mind. That bit of information would have been helpful in my reply to Tart if I had known about it when I wrote the reply, but otherwise I do not feel that I should have addressed anything else in that chapter in order to provide an adequate skeptical critique of a survivalist interpretation of NDEs.

In light of my take on that, I doubt that you will be satisfied with anything I put together on the case against survival. As with other sources, Irreducible Mind is helpful in deciding what purported evidence for survival needs skeptical critique the most (among other things), but I have no interest in writing some sort of critical point-by-point response to it. That's somebody else's project. There is much more to making a strong case against survival than simply responding to alleged evidence for it, so it would be a mistake only to critique the alleged evidence for survival. I want to provide a broader text that looks at the larger picture, taking into account all of the primary reasons to doubt survival, something intended to complement any of the vast literature advocating life after death. So there might be my anthology on the one side of one's bookshelf and Stephen Braude's Immortal Remains on the other. I'm certainly not going to talk about the evidence for indirectly related things like ESP, PK, or stigmata. There's only so much time and so much space to talk about survival; I'd like to stick to the strongest of the typically neglected or only mentioned-in-passing objections to it.

[Hrvoje Butkovic]

It seems to me that your perception that the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ makes the same neurophysiological predictions as the ‘productive hypothesis’ is a semantic illusion. Look at the respective positions at the most basic level. The ‘productive hypothesis’ presumes, in a broad sense, some sort of materialism/physicalism--that even if mentality is a nonphysical property (as in property dualism) it must have a physical base (and when that physical base is destroyed, so is mentality). By contrast, the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ presumes that, in some way, the mind subsists independently of a material base, or at least subsists in a very exotic sort of material base like an astral body (produced by an astral brain?) independently of the normal physical body (and brain).

At that basic level, these two theories of the mind-body relationship make very different predictions. Materialism, broadly construed, straightforwardly predicts the tight sort of correlations we actually find between mental states and brain states--in fact, it is precisely because those correlations are so tight that we know that the brain is the 'seat of the soul' rather than the heart (as Aristotle thought) or some other organ. By contrast, substance dualism or popular (astral body) dualism--any dualism where the mind is not generated by any known normal physical system--makes very opposite predictions. As I explained in my review of Whatever Happened to the Soul (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/no-soul.html):
I’m sorry to be a pain, but I really don’t see how this follows. If the mind exists independently from the brain and channels consciousness through the brain in such a manner that the end product (the consciousness that we observe) is dependent on the physical properties of the brain, then we would also expect a tight correlation between brain and mental states. To return to the coloured glass analogy, defects in the glass will give rise to corresponding defects in the transmitted light, irrespective of whether the light is generated by the glass or merely transmitted through it.

If the mind was an indivisible immaterial substance that could exist independently of the brain then we should not be able to create two minds simply by severing the corpus collosum.
This is an interesting phenomenon that definitely undermines the ‘transmissive hypothesis’. Do you perhaps have more information on it?

And the various analogies for transmission used by survivalists presume such a picture: if the mind is to the brain like a television signal at 512 MHz is to one's TV set, one can destroy the set without having any affect whatsoever on that 512 MHz signal. But that's the difference we see in the neurophysiological evidence: destroying the brain a section at a time alters the mind itself, directly--exactly the opposite of what the analogy would predict. It does not merely cause paralysis--the mind wanting to, but frustratingly unable to, control the body, or blindness, bodily signals becoming unable to reach that independently functioning mind. The mind itself is affected.
This is a shortcoming of the TV set analogy. The coloured glass analogy is better because localised defects in the glass give rise to localised defects in the transmitted light.

But if whatever survives death is not your personality, not what makes up your individuality, then you do not survive death.
If this has been your position all along, I have missed it until now. I apologise for that. :banghead:

It appears unreasonable to require personality to survive death unchanged when personality is a dynamic quality that changes during the course of one’s life. If we apply this criterion to the example of a man whose personality changed as a result of a head injury, then it would be more accurate to say that he was actually killed by the injury, and that another man – with a different personality – took his place. A similar argument could be made for Alzheimer patients – and indeed all people – the only difference being the rate of personality change.

I wouldn’t equate personality with individuality. The difference could be illustrated with the analogy of a stage play. During the play, an actor interacts with other actors in a manner constrained by his role. This character dies at the end of the play, yet the actor continues to live as a distinct individual who retains the memories of the play character and some of the personality (depending on the extent to which the role permitted his true personality to come through). If the question of survival is primarily concerned with survival of the character, then I agree that the survival of the role (brain) is central to it. However, it makes more sense to me to focus on the actor.

Note that I don’t think that survival of individuality is necessary either. I also consider the Buddhist idea of survival sufficient.

Irreducible Mind takes exactly this stance, but IMO this is just semantic evasion. In my view, psi phenomena are naturalized miracles. You have taken something considered supernatural and said "it must have some yet-unknown natural explanation." Because no successful natural explanation is offered, the natural status of the phenomena in question is merely postulated, not evidenced. This is making these 'miracles' natural simply by definition; we're still talking about the same sorts of events, whether you opt to label them as miraculous/supernatural or merely anomalous/paranormal. Either way, there is no currently known natural explanation of the phenomena at hand--so it is presumptious, IMO, to assume that they will be accomodated by some future science. You could say that about any imaginable event.
The ‘transmissive hypothesis’ doesn’t rely on psi phenomena to account for the neurophysiological evidence. The neurophysiological evidence is accounted for by the virtue of consciousness being affected by its transmission through the brain, as per the coloured glass analogy.

Only when different experimenters can independently replicate a positive result can we know for sure that that positive result was not due to a methodological fluke or some other normal factor.
This has already taken place in several branches of parapsychology. For example, five different investigators who worked with the medium Leonora Piper (William James, Frederick Myers, Oliver Lodge, Richard Hodgson and James Hyslop) reached the conclusion that her mediumship abilities were genuine. Still on the subject of mental mediums, the accuracy of readings was rated as significantly higher by the intended sitter than by control sitters in various studies (Pratt 1936, Pratt and Birge 1948, Schmeidler 1958, Schwartz, Russek and Barentsen 2002, Robertson and Roy 2004).

In principle we can know that the brain produces consciousness as well as we can know that germs cause infectious disease. I'm not saying that we are there yet, but if it is not possible in principle in your view then it seems to me that you are questioning that we can know anything scientifically at all.
In my view, it is possible in principle. I left the question open because I wasn’t sure whether neurophysiological evidence can give us more than correlation between brain and mental states, since correlation alone is not sufficient to establish causation.

Neuroscience is relevant if we are talking about the parapsychological evidence as evidence for personal survival of consciousness after death, and not more generically for the reality of all things paranormal.
The strength of the neurophysiological evidence is relevant to the discussion, as is the strength of the parapsychological evidence, but not the strength of one relative to that of the other.

Not if human brains were quantum computers or something able to do things that normal computers could not, but completely within ill-understood physics. (Not that I think this is plausible...)
…
Not if human minds are not spirits. (In other words, human minds could be purely physical even if other, nonphysical things had minds of a different sort.)
Yes, other possibilities do exist. My claim was that these alternative hypotheses strengthen the case for survival rather than prove it.

What I meant by my comment, however, was not that survivalists are irrational for affirming survival, but rather than no rational person would claim that the evidence for survival rises to the level of what most qualified experts would call a scientific fact. For instance, the evidence for global warming--even more specifically human-caused global warming--is far better than the evidence for survival. It rises to the level of scientific fact; survival does not.
I agree with this. I would say that the ‘transmissive hypothesis’ is better able to account for all of the relevant evidence than the ‘productive hypothesis’ without elevating it to the level of scientific fact. This view is shared by some parapsychologists as well as some neuroscientists.

If you think that I'm going to try to produce a critical evaluation of the last 150+ years of all of psychical research, you'll be sorely disappointed. And the reason that I gave that little speech above is because I suspect that only a true believer would expect a person to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that every single claim contrary to his position is false in order to produce a worthwhile case. Evidently, providing a strong positive case against survival would never be enough for some people to step back and think: "Given that the strength of the evidence for X is abundantly clear, and that if X is true then Y is highly unlikely to be true, maybe I should take a second look at putting so much stock in the 'infallibility' of the case for Y." If that kind of reasoning will never occur to you (and I know it won't for some people--Robert Kastenbaum actually quoted some survey respondents saying exactly that in his 1986 book Is There Life After Death? The Latest Evidence Analysed), then my book is not going to be for you. I am primarily interested in addressing those who are unsure of the answer, or who believe in survival but not so confidently that they entirely dismiss the possibility that death might just well be the end.
Sorry to butt in on your conversation with LeoM, but this passage intrigued me. The way I see it, the same reasoning could be used to argue in favour of Newtonian mechanics – Given that the strength of the evidence for Newtonian mechanics is abundantly clear, and that if Newtonian mechanics is true then relativity / quantum mechanics is highly unlikely to be true, maybe I should take a second look at putting so much stock in the 'infallibility' of the case for relativity / quantum mechanics.

I think that you are correct in your suspicion that most of the people who take evidence such as that presented in the book Irreducible Mind seriously are not going to be swayed by your forthcoming book, for much the same reason that most people who take observations at near-light speeds, near massive objects and at quantum scales seriously are not going to be swayed by an argument in favour of Newtonian mechanics, unless this argument also explains how Newtonian mechanics is able to account for these observations.