The dead continue to exist: Sommer excerpt #13

Historian Andreas Sommer concludes his review of the evidence for conscious life after physical death: After Part 1 cleared the path for an ideally unbiased recognition of a serious research tradition which most educated people are unaware of, it seems there are only two interpretations of the empirical evidence discussed in Part 2: We can either assume some kind of cosmic conspiracy by a Neoplatonic ‘world-soul’ or Absolute Mind bent on perpetually tricking us, or adopt the more natural and simpler view that the dead continue to exist, and sometimes – under conditions whose exploration will need to be part of continuing research – are able to manifest, either sporadically as suggested by the best cases of apparitions and mediumship, or through rebirth into a new life.

Note that I do not claim personal survival is scientifically proven. However, unlike our alternative hypothesis, the idea of survival can be put to work for the purpose of developing new avenues of research, whose results may eventually engender techniques or devices which might allow us to communicate with the ‘other’ side in much the same reliable and robust ways we communicate with the living today. But for that to happen, not only will we need to actively work to remove the immense social stigma associated with this kind of research, but also raise a question which is practically never raised by survival researchers: Who is our audience?

This question brings us back to the concrete context of F. C. S. Schiller’s sarcastic comment on fundraising for survival research vs. medical care for leprous cats at the beginning of this essay. Schiller’s article was in fact part of an appeal to fellow academics to help him tackle questions that had never been addressed in a systematic manner: Is it true, as it has been asserted by advocates and opponents of survival, that the question was felt by most humans to be of fundamental importance? And was there really a universal preference for survival – or a ‘will to believe’ in it, which, it has often been argued, inevitably contaminated any supporting evidence? Schiller – you probably guessed it already – was a member of the SPR. And like his friend William James, he was on the fence regarding survival but still a vocal advocate of impartial survival research.

To obtain an informed picture of actual attitudes to survival in the educated public, Schiller designed a questionnaire which was sent to around 10,000 participants. The project was quite different from more recent sociological surveys, which have assessed the prevalence of belief in life after death. Among the key questions was if survival was desirable in the first place, while others tried to tease out how common not just a ‘will to believe’ in it was, but also a ‘will to disbelieve’. Most crucially for survival researchers, Schiller wanted to find out how common the ‘will to know’ was. After all, the question whether or not there is an audience for the findings of empirical studies regardless of results, was and is now vital for the future of research funding.

The results of Schiller’s questionnaire study predicted a rather bleak future for survival researchers: Not only was there a high ambivalence in attitudes regarding the desirability of survival. Most significantly for investigators, the results suggested a striking lack of interest by most respondents to have their beliefs or disbeliefs informed by solid evidence. The results were met with silence then, and there has never been a discussion of their implications in the dwindling community of survival researchers up to the present day.

I think this silence spoke, and continues to speak, volumes. The practical point I’m trying to make is this: To the majority of educated Westerners, what I may think is evidence for survival ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ can never be as straightforwardly persuasive as, say, evidence for the discovery of a new butterfly species. The question of survival goes straight to the essence of what we believe, hope, and fear we are. I doubt that anything resembling mathematical proof for survival is possible, but as long as the problem of the ‘personal equation’ is simply ignored, such proof would fall on deaf ears just the same way as the already existing volumes of published empirical evidence has. After all, as Schiller observed, if there is resistance you can’t make someone even add 2+2.

Biases either way do exist and must be dealt with in a systematic way, before there can be any tangible progress. Rather than exclusively focusing on empirical research, I therefore think that public education concerning the nature and history of both conventional and unorthodox science will be just as important as the actual empirical research.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.