Best evidence criteria: Nahm excerpt #2

Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes: "In order to determine the best available evidence for human survival from a contemporary perspective, I have considered 10 survival phenomena. These are listed below, roughly following the occurrence of significant cases over the course of history.

1.    After-death contacts including near-death visions

     2.    Hauntings

3.    Poltergeist phenomena

4.    Physical mediumship

5.    Mental mediumship

6.    Near-death experiences

7.    Hypnotic past-life regression

8.    Cases of the reincarnation type

9.    Instrumental transcommunication

10. Terminal lucidity

"I used five criteria to determine the evidential strength of these survival phenomena.

1.  Investigability: Possibilities for investigating a single case; duration of the phenomena; accessibility for researchers; potential numbers of independent eyewitnesses.

2.  Repeatability: Multiple occurrences of similar cases at different times and locations; possibilities for involving different researchers.

3.  Quantitative strength: Complexity or richness in details of the provided survival evidence in single cases and case collections.

4.  Qualitative strength: Clarity of observational conditions and reliability of eyewitness testimonies; degree of objectivity vs. subjectivity; (un-)ambiguity of the phenomena with regard to being interpreted in terms of survival but not by alternative models.

5.  Relevance: Degree of the phenomena’s relatedness in meaning to human survival after permanent bodily death.

"For all survival phenomena, I assigned each criterion a score of appropriateness on a simple scale running from 'low' (1), 'relatively low' (2), relatively high' (3), to high' (4). The best evidence for survival from today’s perspective was determined by comparing the sums of these scores for every survival phenomenon, their 'survival scores'.

The survival phenomena that attained the highest scores were cases of the reincarnation type, mental mediumship, after-death contacts including near-death visions, and near-death experiences. This is hardly surprising because these are precisely the survival phenomena that have been most frequently discussed in the more recent literature on survival. Hence, I will only consider these four survival phenomena in more detail below. In the following sections, I describe how the survival scores of the most promising survival phenomena were determined.

 

Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.