Dr. Long's NDE surveys: Ruickbie excerpt #8

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: 

For his 2011 book Evidence of the Afterlife, radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long worked with a sub-set of 613 cases submitted between 2004 and 2008 – the “NDERF survey.” He found twelve common points of agreement in near-death experiences, although other studies have used more extensive scales – Bruce Greyson’s “near-death experience scale” is sixteen items long. Four of Long’s questions related to aspects of direct interest in this present study, concerning the location of consciousness, and the experience of space and time.

Long’s survey found that three-fifths (60.5%) said that they had had a sense of altered space and time, with a third (33.9%) saying specifically of time that “everything seemed to be happening at once.” About one in five people (22.2%) also said that they had experienced a review of past events in their lives. Long concluded that: “The NDERF study makes it clear that the events seen in the NDEr’s life review are real” and “further strong evidence for the reality of near-death experiences.”

In most cases, the NDE will involve some change in the perception of time, showing that our normal perception of time is not the only one. The life review challenges normal time to an even greater extent because the experience is not like ordinary memory recall, where you remain in your own viewpoint, but a transcendent view of the totality of past events, often with sound, emotion and even actual thoughts, from an external perspective. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. 

NDE life reviews: Ruickbie excerpt #7

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: 

Albert Heim

In 1871, the Swiss geologist Albert Heim (1849–1937) was mountain climbing in the Appenzell Alps in northeastern Switzerland. Leading a party down a steep snowfield on 2,502 m (8,209 ft) high Mt Säntis, he lost his footing and went over a cliff. As he tumbled more than 60 ft in free fall, a curious thing happened, time slowed down: “What I felt in five to ten seconds could not be described in ten times that length of time.” He had time to plan what to do before he hit the ground – keep hold of his Alpenstock or let go, take off his glasses, or keep them on? – worry about missing his inaugural university lecture in five days time, and wonder how his loved ones would take the news of his death.

His train of thought was suddenly interrupted: “I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance.” When he hit the snowfield below, he lay unmoving. His companions must have thought him dead, but he recovered consciousness and was fit enough to give his lecture. Despite pursuing a glowing career in geology, Heim never forgot his experience on Säntis and collected thirty similar accounts told to him in person by fellow mountaineers (including the British physicist John Tyndall), soldiers, construction workers and others who had had what today we would call near-death experiences. His was the first systematic study of such experiences and he discovered that many others had felt that “time became greatly expanded,” often with “a sudden review of the individual’s entire past.”

Since then reports of what has become known as “life review” have increased dramatically. In 1998, Dr. Jeffrey Long established the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) to collect firsthand accounts of people’s near-death experiences using an online questionnaire. In the first ten years of running this project he received over 1,300 reports of NDEs. As of 14 June 2021, NDERF has now received 4,929 reports from people all over the world.

The first case he documented was that of Dr. George Rodonaia, with an MD and PhDs in neuropathology and the psychology of religion, Rodonaia was just about the best qualified person to have a near-death experience and had one of the most astonishing near-death experiences on record. Before emigrating to the USA in 1989, Rodonaia was a research psychiatrist at the University of Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union. In 1976, he was hit by a car and pronounced dead at the scene. Near-death researcher Phyllis Atwater, who got to know Rodonaia well, said he had been assassinated by the KGB. Being dead he was taken to a morgue and remained there for three days, only showing signs of life when a doctor started to perform an autopsy. As a scalpel cut into his abdomen, he felt his consciousness being forced back into his body. Among other things, he described this experience:

I underwent what has been called the ‘life-review process,’ for I saw my life from beginning to end all at once. I participated in the real life dramas of my life, almost like a holographic image of my life going on before me – no sense of past, present or future, just now and the reality of my life. It wasn’t as though it started with birth and ran along to my life at the University of Moscow. It all appeared at once. There I was. This was my life.

Atwater could understand what he was talking about, she had experienced three NDEs following a miscarriage. During the second episode she experienced a profound life review:

I remembered hearing stories of past life reviews, a particular feature of dying common to all, where your life passes before you at great speed for final review. Remembering this, I expected some kind of theatrical showing of my life as Phyllis or perhaps something like a television replay, but such was not the case. Mine was not a review, it was a reliving. For me, it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus the effect of each thought, word, and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street); plus the effect of each thought, word, and deed on weather, plants, animals, soil, trees, water, and air. It was a reliving of the total gestalt of me as Phyllis, complete with all the consequences of ever having lived at all. No detail was left out.

What is evidentially important here is that her experience did not match her expectations; she could not be said to have had a life review because she expected to have one. And then there’s the quality of her life review itself. What is also remarkable is that life review often involves, as in Atwater’s case, a total and immersive re-enactment at a transcendent level. It is not a simple replay of the past, which would situate the person’s consciousness within their past self, but an experience with depth, an actual reality, often extended beyond what would have been the person’s perspective in life, whilst maintaining an ordinarily impossible exterior conscious awareness.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Ghosts are not illusions: Ruickbie excerpt #6

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

A common argument against the objective or independent quality of apparitions is that they are the product of the mind of the person seeing them, an illusion, in fact. This is plausible. We know that people see hallucinations under a range of conditions, such as sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, drug intoxication, extreme stress, and mental derangement. So what should be different about ghosts? It is important to note that Martindale [see Ruickie excerpts 3 and 4] was not under the influence of any of these factors, but how else could we test this?

People have tried to record ghosts using photography, film (video) and audio, with occasionally surprising results; however, almost all of these can be explained as artifacts or manipulations of the media, even if they may not be. We had best leave that Pandora’s Box alone.

We have seen that apparitions can reveal information to the witness that they did not already have and often did not know they needed. This seems like cast-iron proof that apparitions cannot be in the mind of the witness; however, we could still argue that this was the percipient’s psi (the general term for telepathy, precognition, etc.) working unconsciously to manifest what the conscious mind required. It seems a bit strained, but even so, we could argue that.

What if a ghost were seen by more than one person? Would that test the percipient psi theory? There are two classes of possibility here: the same ghost seen by different witnesses at different times; and the same ghost seen by different witnesses at the same time. There are plentiful examples for both situations.

The Martindale case has already supplied an example of the former, but, of course, there are many more. A young medical student, Rosina Clara Despard (1863–1930), conducted a detailed investigation of the haunting of her family home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. A ghost was seen or heard over a number of years from 1882 to 1889 by at least eighteen people (independently, sometimes consecutively, and on four occasions at the same time), and by the family dogs (judging from their reactions). Frederic Myers was also involved, interviewing witnesses, and encouraging Rosina to investigate further. Andrew Mackenzie, another figure connected with the SPR [Society for Psychical Research], collected reports of continued paranormal phenomena up until the 1970s.

In the Census of Hallucinations there were 283 cases where the percipient was not alone (and the other person was awake). The other person also saw the apparition in 95 cases (33.6%). There were also another auditory cases experienced by more than one person at the same time. Hart et al., used stricter criteria to identify 46 cases “in which more than one person was in a position to be a percipient” and of these found that 26 (56%) were “collective.” Stevenson looked at other research to conclude that approximately 30% of visual hallucinations were seen by more than one witness.

Gurney still tried to explain collective apparitions as the psi effect of a principle percipient telepathically causing everyone else to see the same thing, what he called “psychical affection,” and Stevenson “telepathic infection.” Stevenson pointed out that this leaves the perplexing question of why the group should suddenly become telepathic on the occasion of the ghost’s appearance, and on no other; Tyrell also argued that the witnesses all saw the same apparition, but differently because it was from their individual viewpoints, thus not like an image received from one mind. 

Although immaterial, we can rule out that apparitions seen by mentally normal people not under the influence of drugs are illusions because they can be seen by several people at different times and at the same time: they demonstrate a realness that would be widely accepted if it did not contradict our dominant ideas about the nature of reality.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Analyzing ghost evidence: Ruickbie excerpt #5

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: 

Ghost photo: Mary King's Close in Scotland  

In my survey, I also wanted to know what the ghost hunters thought ghosts were. The largest number of people believed that ghosts were ghosts in the traditional sense of the word, that is, the spirits of those who have passed on. However, the second largest group gave non-spiritual answers, ranging from quantum theory to extra dimensions and parallel worlds, to powers of the mind and environmental recordings. Some people also believed in both spiritual and non-spiritual theories, commonly expressed as describing one level of haunting as a recording (or residual haunting) and another as the spirit of the deceased to account for seemingly repetitive and interactive phenomena. While most ghost hunters had experienced something that they would call a ghost, not all of them saw that as evidence for life after death.

Ghosts as recordings, residues, imprints or impressions has been debated for some time. Archie Roy, Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University and President of the Society for Psychical Research (1992–1995), put it best when commenting on the Martindale case:

You have to postulate that in the case of a typical haunt some very emotion-laden scene or some very important scene from the point of view of the humans that took part in it, has in some way become registered on the environment. [...] a sort of psychic video that has been created. And someone who comes along who’s sensitive enough to act as a “psychic video player” will actually play that tape and see the figures, or perhaps even hear voices or hear sounds. [...] it is nothing to do with the people who were originally there, who are no longer there. It is simply a record.

Whilst superficially plausible, the recording theory is only using a modern technological metaphor in place of earlier spiritual theories: it is not a theory in itself because it does not adequately propose what the recording medium is, or how the playback mechanism works (or in most cases does not). Nor does the proposition address what is known about recordings. To make a visual recording one requires a recording device, a medium on which to record it, a means to develop that medium in the case of film, and a means to replay that medium on another, different device from that making the recording, either by displaying it on a screen, or projecting it; audio recording requires its own process of recording and playback. In the Martindale case, or others like it, there is no obvious recording or playback device and no obvious medium. Furthermore, Martindale witnessed a life-like, three-dimensional, full-colour event with sound that moved through space. It was not displayed or projected and was of a quality beyond our current technological level. Typically, a recording will degrade significantly over time as a consequence of the instability of the original recording medium and the effects of the environment in which it is stored, yet Martindale described an undegraded, pristine scene.

The emotional mechanism is also contradicted by Martindale’s experience. The apparitions he witnessed were engaged in a normal, undramatic and unimportant activity (for soldiers, at least). He described no emotional content to the scene itself. Nor was Martindale especially “sensitive:” as far as we know, he had no other experiences like this during his lifetime. What Martindale saw was not like any sort of recording as we know it, and none of the features said to be required to make or receive such a recording – emotional intensity and exceptional psychic sensitivity – were present. We can rule out that it was a “simply a record.”

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Roman legion ghosts: Ruickbie excerpt #4

The Treasurer's House

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Eighteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, Harry Martindale, was in the cellars of the Treasurer’s House, an historic house in York, UK, working on the central-heating system, when he heard the distant “blaring of a note,” in his words. Perched on a ladder, Martindale continued his work as the sound grew louder. Looking down, he saw a figure wearing a plumed helmet and holding a trumpet-like instrument come through the wall followed by a horse and rider, and a column of Roman soldiers. Martindale fell off his ladder with fright and watched as about twenty soldiers marched across the cellar.

Martindale’s description [see Ruickbie excerpt #3] seemed in complete contrast to his Hollywood-level understanding of the Roman military. In particular, he described the use of a round shield. We think of the legions equipped with the large rectangular scutum; however, the original infantry shield was the round clipeus, later being replaced by the defensively superior scutum, only to come back into use during the crisis of the third century. It had a distinctive projection in the centre. After the Roman conquest of Britain in the first century AD, Roman auxiliaries (usually locally raised troops) continued to use the clipeus. In the second century AD, there were over 25,000 auxiliaries deployed in the Roman province of Britannia. According to the National Trust, which now owns the property, later research showed that the Sixth Legion was withdrawn from York during the fourth century AD and replaced by soldiers armed with round shields (presumably auxiliaries).

The cellar where Martindale was working had been built over an old Roman road, the Via Decumana. Over the centuries, this had resulted in a height difference of some 15 to 18 inches. As Martindale had observed during the experience, the soldiers appeared to march through the newer floor until reaching an excavated portion where he could see their feet touching the ground. The old Via Decumana had no obstructing walls, so it was again instructive that Martindale witnessed the troops enter through one stone wall and exit out another, exactly as if the walls had not been there. In addition to their appearance, their behaviour also strongly suggested that Martindale had indeed witnessed a body of Roman soldiers marching along the Via Decumana, almost 2,000 years after they had physically done so.

Given the witness’s age, it might be thought that here was a youth having a lark, but, after finding his story met with ridicule and disbelief, including being pressured by a local church to stay silent, Martindale kept quiet about it until interviewed for television in the 1970s. Described in the press as a “modest man,” Martindale went on to become a policeman and was remembered by the Lord Mayor of York, Ian Gillies, as a dedicated officer. Property manager for Treasurer’s House, Jane Whitehead, said of Martindale’s experience, “Unless he had done a lot of detailed research into the soldiers that belonged to that section of the Roman army he could not have known the level of detail he used to describe the soldiers he saw.”

Not only is Martindale’s account detailed and corroborated by other sources, but he is not alone in having had this experience. In addition to the then curator’s admission about the ghosts, there have been at least three other sightings of Roman soldiers in the cellar. Around 1900 a party guest of the industrialist Frank Green, then the owner of the Treasurer’s House, complained about finding her way barred by someone she took to be in fancy dress, wearing the uniform of a Roman soldier – Green knew nothing about it. 

A visiting American professor in the 1930s is also reputed to have seen the ghosts in the cellar. In February 1956, the then housekeeper for the National Trust, Joan Morsen, went down to the cellar to check on the central heating and saw the Roman soldiers. Living in the house at the time with her seven-year-old daughter, Morsen kept quiet about what she had seen to avoid frightening the girl. It was only when Martindale’s story became more widely known in the 1970s that she told her story. Her daughter then confessed to having heard the horn on several occasions and being woken up in the night by it.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Historical ghost evidence: Ruickbie excerpt #3

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

“Only one thing is certain about apparitions,” wrote Andrew Lang in 1894, “namely this, that they do appear. They really are perceived.” But ‘apparitions,’ originally from Latin apparere ‘appear,’ are only appearances, and, as we know, appearances can be deceptive. When I saw my first ‘apparition,’ I was not looking for one, and, Scrooge-like, certainly did not ‘believe’ in it, but when I went looking for ghosts?

I had good odds, about 1 in 10, of finding one. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), especially founded to investigate claims of the paranormal, launched its “Census of Hallucinations,” asking 17,000 people by postal survey:  

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?

This had happened to 1,684 people (9.9%) at least once, with 1,112 reporting visual hallucinations, including realistic human apparitions (830 cases) of the living (352 cases), the deceased (163 cases), and unrecognized (315 cases) – the rest being incomplete (143), or “other” (139).

The odds are better for those who purposely set out to find them. In 2012, I surveyed self- professed paranormal investigators (‘ghost hunters’). The data showed that the average ghost hunter was a white male in his early forties, who had spent nine years investigating almost a hundred cases. Collectively, the people I surveyed had spent 490 years investigating 4,861 cases. One individual claimed over a thousand investigations during thirty-four years. It was an astonishing amount of time and dedication, but had they found anything?

When asked “have you ever experienced what you would call a ‘ghost,’” 89% said “yes.” In total, 238 separate events were reported. These experiences were visual (40%), non-visual (45%), and anomalous encounters of an indeterminate nature (15%). The reported phenomena were not always independent events, sometimes taking place concurrently or simultaneously. When I joined a group of ghost hunters to investigate 30 East Drive, Pontefract, today’s top contender for the “most haunted house” title, I saw the process of such investigations firsthand, but Scrooged my own experiences as psychological and coincidental.

We must conclude, that if you go ghost hunting, you will most likely experience something that you might think of as a ‘ghost.’ It may take several investigations over many years, but the probability is high that you will at least convince yourself. But what would constitute the case most likely to convince others? And more particularly, where in time are apparitions?

“They Were Coming Out of the Wall”

Eighteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, Harry Martindale, was in the cellars of the Treasurer’s House, an historic house in York, UK, working on the central-heating system, when he heard the distant “blaring of a note,” in his words. Perched on a ladder, Martindale continued his work as the sound grew louder. Looking down, he saw a figure wearing a plumed helmet and holding a trumpet- like instrument come through the wall followed by a horse and rider, and a column of Roman soldiers. Martindale fell off his ladder with fright and watched as about twenty soldiers marched across the cellar. Martindale described the scene:

[...] They were coming out of the wall, the wall didn’t exist as far as they were concerned. The only other Roman soldier I’d seen prior to this, is what we call, or I call, the Charlton Heston type – riding a beautiful horse, very smart. These were the complete opposite. The first thing that struck me was how small they were, they were very small indeed. Another remarkable thing when they first came out of the wall – I couldn’t see them from the knees down, until they came to where the Roman road had been excavated – then I could see them from their sandals up. [...] I wouldn’t say they were all that smart, although they did all [have] the same uniform on. [...] On the top on the material were strands of leather all the way round, and the only thing I can say they had on was a green-coloured skirt. All of them carried a short sword on the right had side, the side nearest to me, and it was a short sword like an oversized dagger. [...] One was carrying a long, like a lance affair, and one of the soldiers I saw walking out the wall carried a shield. Now in the centre of the shield it was like a raised bulb.

As the last soldier passed through the opposite wall, Martindale made his escape. He was found by the museum’s curator, who said “By the look of you, you’ve seen the Roman soldiers.” Martindale went home and called his doctor, telling him what he had seen, and was signed off work with shock. Years later, when Martindale gave his first interview about the incident, he could not remember when it had taken place, but the doctor was able to provide the date from Martindale’s medical records. When asked “Are there such things as ghosts?”, Martindale’s unequivocal answer was “Yes.” 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Falsification of ghosts? Ruickbie excerpt #2

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

Logically, if we are going to become ghosts after death, then we must have this ghost potential now; and, if ghosts after death, then why not also before life? Therefore, ‘ghosts,’ as an immaterial identity format, or IIF (that will be our working definition), must also be implicated in things such as mediumship, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and even reincarnation, expanding our evidential base and scope for theoretical modelling.

When Scrooge sees the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, he finds that Marley in death is just like Marley in life. Scrooge might not believe in him, but he does recognize him. For the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body to be recognizable as such, then it, too, must involve the experiences, personality traits, and self-awareness that characterized the person in the living body, that strange sense of ‘I’ that we have floating inside our heads.

However, if Scrooge did not believe in Marley, will one piece of evidence be enough? Although William James famously asserted in connection with the supernatural that one ‘white crow’ is sufficient to prove that not all crows are black, which is entirely correct, the existence of one white crow did not change Scrooge’s mind, and has not changed our materialist paradigm. What we must do is gather a flock of white crows.

The ‘best’ evidence, then, is not one single piece of evidence – we have plenty of that, and herein also lies a problem. The sheer amount of evidence has become too much for the average person to sift through, too diverse in its content to grasp, too contested to judge easily; simply, all too much to take in. This cognitive challenge defaults to denial. We need to find structure in the evidence, if we are going to be able to make sense of it.

The way in which apparitions present themselves to us tells us something about them and in doing so will raise questions about the nature of reality. Dickens again provided us with an interesting structure in A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Marley opens a supernatural journey involving “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” “The Ghost of Christmas Present,” and “The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.” We tend to think of ghosts as things of the past, yet, if anything of ourselves should survive physical death, then it must also be capable of spanning temporality. This creates a new way of approaching the question of survival that will lead us to a new conclusion.

All of what we will look at will seem outrageous, individually, but taken together will form something more than the sum of its parts. The best evidence must also include a theory. It is a frequent counter-argument against parapsychology in general that it has no theory. Importantly, the theory should not, like the carthorse, come before the facts; however, simply arranging the facts has led me to my theory, and it is important to show them in that order to demonstrate how I have arrived at my conclusions.

As often claimed, does the evidence need to be ‘extraordinary?’ We cannot even define what that should mean. Is the evidence for anything in science actually ‘extraordinary?’ And what if we only had ‘ordinary’ evidence, would that be ruled out? A common standard for deciding cases where the stakes are high – life after death would seem to qualify – is found in the legal system: it must be “beyond reasonable doubt.” The problem is, that like ‘extraordinary evidence,’ ‘reasonable doubt’ is a circular definition and law courts have conspicuously refused to define it.

In a rare attempt to make ‘reasonable doubt’ understandable to jurors, the Federal Judicial Center made the following instruction:

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you firmly convinced of the defendant’s guilt. There are very few things in this world that we know with absolute certainty, and in criminal cases the law does not require proof that overcomes every possible doubt.

It could be argued that “firmly convinced” is just as circular as “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but the crucial clarification is that proof does not need to answer “every possible doubt.”

Are Scrooge’s doubts reasonable? He does not believe in Marley’s being a ghost because he believes that “a slight disorder of the stomach” may cause hallucinations. It should be easy to establish that slight disorders do not cause much, apart from wind perhaps, and certainly not realistic, interactive hallucinations, therefore, Scrooge’s doubts are not reasonable, but still he persists in them. We cannot define exactly what a reasonable doubt is, but we can show when a specific doubt is groundless.

What sort of witnesses will we be dealing with? What type of evidence is being presented? Is it direct, circumstantial, primary or secondary, or hearsay? In most cases we will be dealing with eyewitnesses giving direct evidence, that is, “personal experience through their senses.” In the same way that witnesses giving direct evidence are not dismissed by the court as repeating anecdotes, so our witnesses should not be accused of the same: what we are dealing with is testimony. Witness testimony has its own drawbacks, which is why we will also seek corroboration and supporting evidence. We will also hear from expert witnesses with specialized knowledge in the matter.

At the outset of this project, I believe that the mind is simply a product of the brain and that nothing of the person can continue after death. But I have some niggling doubts because I am not unaware of the evidence. As I said, I am like Scrooge, too, but I am going to see if I can prove myself wrong. This, in itself, is a good scientific principle, what Sir Karl Popper called ‘falsification.’

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.