lpetrich

A lot of evidence has been offered; I'll make a list. Does anyone care to evaluate the quality of each bit of evidence?

* Communication with the dead, variously called necromancy, spiritualism, and channeling.

* Other interactions, such as seeing ghosts, hearing them make noise, etc.

* Memories of past lives; this evidence of reincarnation can easily be extrapolated into the future.

* Dreams, out-of-body experiences, etc., which represent having experiences outside of one's body. These may include visits to some realm of the dead.

* Near-death experiences, suggested to be a variant of the above.

* Mystical experiences. (?)

Some of these lines of evidence depend on mind-body dualism, the hypothesis that mind/consciousness/soul is a different sort of stuff than the body. In this view, a mind can leave a body that is no longer a suitable host for it, such as a dying one.

Doubting Didymus

I can tell you about the first one, communication with the dead.

A techinique called cold reading is employed by the people who claim to be able to do this, and whether they are knowingly fraudulent or not, this technique is capable of some incredibly surprising results. I personally, have had several people completely convinced of my own ability to communicate with the dead. If I can do it, anyone can.

The area of ghost evidence is notorious for fraud. Any examples of this must be sceptically examined by one of many trained investigatory teams, which must include at least one stage magician. If you have any such exaples, produce them.

Memories of past lives? How does someone verify that a given memory is of a past life? I have Deja Vu all the time, and it seems to me to be just a memory glitch. What should we consider neurological and what should we consider supernatural?

Dreams, out-of-body experiences, etc.

Could these be just dreams? How do you make the distinction between a 'real' out of body experience from a simple dream of one?

Near death experiences are generally considered by the scientific community to be a hallucination caused by a dying brain. This is supported by studies that reproduce such effects under laboratory conditions.

Mystical experiences? What mystical experiences?

lpetrich

I agree with Doubting Didymus's assessments of the purported evidence.

In fact, there is an abundance of evidence that suggests that mental functions are essentially brain functions. Evidence such as:

* Effects of psychoactive drugs

* Effects of injuries and damage to parts of the brain

* Effects of electrical stimulation of parts of the brain

* Association of brainwaves with mental states

* Association of brain activity with mental states; the mental activity being revealed by Positron Emission Tomography and similar techniques

Consciousness continues to remain a riddle, but I don't think that that indicates the existence of a special "consciousness stuff"; the association of many mental functions with brain functions clearly indicates the lack of a special "mind stuff".

So it's very hard to picture the mind/consciousness/soul/whatever surviving the death of the body. One can get around that problem by supposing life after death to be a miracle, but that sort of hypothesis can explain anything, and thus really nothing.

Now for some details.

One good way to test the hypothesis of communication with the dead is to ask questions that the putative ghost could answer but that the ghost's accessor could not, like arcane questions of mathematical physics in the case of Lord Rayleigh and Albert Einstein.

About Einstein, I read somewhere that someone claimed that his death experience erased his memories of his mathematical-physics knowledge.

There is also the question of what languages that long-ago people had spoken; those languages with long written histories show an abundance of change over the millennia. Linguists can often fill in some of the blanks with the help of various sorts of detective work; thus, it would be possible to recognize bad high-school Latin from someone who claims to channel Julius Caesar -- complete with some glaring present-day-language accent.

Radcliffe Emerson

What about if you ask someone a question in your mind, not speaking a word out loud, or making any gestures, or lip movements, etc, and the person answers your question with frightening clarity?

lpetrich

That someone may have made a lucky guess, based on his/her estimation of what you had likely been thinking about.

But even if mental telepathy is real, it would not be as strong evidence of life after death as some of the other purported evidence I had mentioned. Mental telepathy is consistent with the consciousness dying with the body, while out-of-body experiences suggest that the consciousness may be capable of departing from the body when the body becomes an unfit host for it.

mibby529

Most of those memories of past lives are what they WANT. Whatever's glamorous, and with media-induced inaccuracies. (Horned Viking helmets, anyone?)

I always ask anyone who remembers a past life to speak the appropriate language. Usually, they can't.

echidna

Heh, I once went to a channelling session by the mother of one of my friends who has quite a following here.

I mean, really I was struggling to keep a straight face as she channelled the spirit of Si Cheng, a long-dead Tibetan monk. She’s European & the contortions her face went to, to appear Tibetan, were laughable, eyes squinted, and of course the eastern accent was attempted.

Really it was quite pitiful, but voicing my thoughts would have wrecked my friendship, so I said nothing.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind so much, except that through another friend, I know several of her followers have left the cult & been emotionally traumatised for long periods.

Doubting Didymus

I love that one! I know a few cold readers who are really good, I go green with envy when I see them do things like this. I have never approached that level of proficency myself, but rest assured that you don't need to be psychic to do this. To really test it, an excellent mind reading test is the one The Amasing Randi uses, which is to do it via phone with no responses from the person being read. Then get the person to give a rating out of ten. (you can expect a high response).

Heres the trick: you then play a recording of the reading the psychic gave, to a bunch of other people as well. If the person is truly psychic, they should be able to give an accurate reading to the first person, that isn't accurate for all the other people. They would get one million dollars for doing this.

P.S. Has anyone here seen Randi's coldreading act? Is he any good?

echidna

Likewise. I have a friend who is a retired Uniting Church minister (liberal needless to say), and also an excellent cold reader.

No sleight of hand, with a full deck face up, without fail he will progressively select the card you are thinking about. Quite disturbing, but he’s brazenly honest about it. Quite a character, he also counts cards whenever he visits Las Vegas (although not while wearing the dog collar). I remember one friend being firmly convinced he was psychic, despite John’s adamant denial.

I've also seen him intuitively anticipate the card exact which a person would think of, purely his personality asessment from a dinner conversation. (He told me in advance & explained the reasoning, quite remarkable.)

Bear in mind that subconscious prompting or leading is an extrmemly common cold reading tool of illusion. The subject will be quite unaware that subtle leads and wording is actually pushing their thought processes in a pre-determined direction.

Note that this is also the key to successful marketing.

Another case might be the supposed “mathematical horse” who could perform addition and multiplication, giving answers by stamping its hoof. His owner was honestly unaware that all the horse was doing was stamping until the oblivious owner gave off minute facial expressions at which point he would magically stop at the right answer.

It’s interesting that this ability does not seem to be more predominant in an evolutionary sense, given its obvious advantages.