(Theatrical poster for a mind reading performance, 1900 wiki)

In this essay Sudduth covers a lot of ground, but mainly considers Keith Augustine’s critique of recent attempts to use the example of a well-known medium Mrs. Piper to argue the soul continues to exist after death. 

The idea of being a medium is generally someone acting as a conduit for people to communicate with deceased loved ones.  Perhaps the best-known medium in our time is Theresa Caputo.  Here are some short examples of her working on the Drew Barrymore talk show:

The most compelling part of the medium survivalist argument is also its greatest limitation: the confirmation of the person of information the medium shouldn’t know but does.  What can we say about it?  Perhaps the medium is a conduit for the undead, but for the sake of argument one might equally suppose they are a psychic who has no access to spirits but simply has access to conscious and unconscious memories of individuals.  If you watch the Caputo videos, the only things the subjects can confirm are memories, and so all Caputo’s talk of access to spirits, if she isn’t a fraud, may just be the way her brain is framing the experiences of others’ memories she is having.  The person can’t confirm Caputo’s experience of souls is true, just that the medium is being consistent with how they remember their loved ones. 

Certainly, the mind is ek-static in various ways (eg encountering “boringness” as a feature of the book like “plot” and “characters” even though the next person need not experience the boringness).  Such a psychic ability may simply be a more developed kind of ek-staticness in some people like Mrs. Piper or Caputo.  It certainly doesn’t imply connection to undead spirits.  I’m not arguing Caputo is psychic, as she might just be a particularly apt mentalist, or a fraud, but medium-ism certainly doesn’t imply soul survival even if there is truth to it, and in fact Augustine’s critique speaks against communication with spirits.  Sudduth notes:

• We saw earlier that neurophysiological data provide one kind of potential counterevidence to the survival hypothesis. According to Augustine, survivalists have not properly weighed this counterevidence in their strongly favorable assessments of the alleged evidence for survival. But they have also failed to properly weigh the counterevidence provided by their own failed experimental results. Augustine contends that this provides additional support for premise [A2] of his basic argument. He surveys a variety of unsuccessful survival tests. For example, mediums have consistently failed to decipher encrypted messages or open user-set combination locks in tests arranged by living persons to be executed posthumously by the formerly living person communicating keywords or phrases through the medium. And despite several decades of attempts to have OBE and NDE subjects identify visual targets, including in various controlled experiments, there have been no consistent positive results… If tests for survival or psi phenomena are not susceptible to ordinary empirical testing, if we cannot say with any reasonable confidence what the evidence for survival should look like, then so much the worse for the BICS essayists who assume otherwise.

Above I supposed for the sake of argument mediumship could be false because mediums are actually just psychics who have mere access to memories.  If a medium simply reads minds of subjects however close or far they are from her, mediums hitting on facts about the dead would result in the same observations whether the medium was (i) indeed in contact with the dead or (ii) just psychic. 

Suppose someone set up a test for a medium where a dead person is asked about, but the person being asked isn’t the real relative but rather someone in another room is.  A psychic who could scan memories would simply have to search out for memories of the deceased person and information would be found with the relative in the other room even though there are no such things as spirits.  In this way, no observed event could ever push the needle toward true mediumship because the conflicting hypotheses of (i) real mediumship and (ii) mindreading predict the same insights from the practitioners.  This would be an incredibly low bar psychic, since psychics don’t win the lottery for the same reason hospitals don’t employ a faith healer department. Again, I am not arguing Caputo is a medium or psychic, just that there are no readings which could count definitively in favor of mediumship.

Augustine further notes on survivalist arguments from NDE (near death experience) and OBE (Out of Body experience) don’t work:

• (1) During an out-of-body experience (OBE) a person seems to view the physical world from a position in space other than that of his normal physical body. The realism of such an experience is understandably convincing to a person who undergoes one. But here our central question is: Do OBEs provide strong evidence that something leaves the body when they occur? Leaving the body—or at least terminating one’s link to the body—is a prerequisite, if not a guarantee, of nonmiraculous survival. Here, too, a number of features imply that OBEs are realistic hallucinations. For example, OBErs often perceive things in remote locations (in what seems to be the physical world) that turn out to be, upon investigation, inaccurate or nonexistent. These out-of-body discrepancies include false perceptions of the physical world; they are not merely unnoticed or misperceived details, but invented ones—such as seeing nonexistent bars on a window (Crookall, 1972, pp. 89-90) or a letter in the room that never existed (Lindley, Bryan, & Conley, 1981, p. 109), or being unable to see one’s normal physical body during an OBE despite looking for it (Fenwick & Fenwick, 1997, p. 41; Fox, 1920/1962, p. 82; Grey, 1985, p. 37). Although OBEs usually begin with the experience of separation and movement away from the body, most OBEs end instantaneously, with no return trip back to the body (Irwin, 1999, p. 222). Finally, there is wide variation in how OBErs perceive their own form while ostensibly out of body; mirror images of the physical body are most common, but some see themselves as amorphous clouds, balls of light, or point-like centers of consciousness with no perceivable body at all (Irwin, 1999, p. 225; Moody, 1975, p. 37). These characteristics suggest that OBEs are abnormal models of reality that draw upon memory and imagination when the brain is under stress or when sense input is disrupted.

• (2) Near-death experiences (NDEs) are seemingly otherworldly experiences precipitated by either an expectation of dying or actual medical proximity to death. In the West, the prototypical Western NDE consists of a number of recurring motifs, such as ecstatic feelings, OBEs, traversing a tunnel or darkness toward a light, meeting deceased (and sometimes living) relatives, experiencing of review of one’s life, viewing a paradisiacal landscape, and encountering a (generally uncrossable) barrier. However, very few Western NDE accounts include all of these features (Moody, 1975, p. 23). And non-Western NDEs which are least influenced by Western sources incorporate entirely different sets of motifs (Belanti, Perera, & Jagadheesan, 2008; Groth-Marnat, 1994). For instance, NDEs from India and Thailand feature a mistaken-identity motif where NDErs are brought before the Hindu god of death only to be returned because the wrong person was retrieved.. As with OBEs, our central question here is whether we have any strong evidence that anything leaves the body during NDEs. The presence of out-of-body discrepancies in at least some NDEs is relevant to this question, but another pertinent characteristic is the lack of uniformity in the initial stages of different NDEs. About three-quarters of Western NDEs, for instance, do not include an OBE (van Lommel, van Wees, Meyers, & Elfferich, 2001, p. 2041, Table 2). But if something literally leaves the body during NDEs and then proceeds to a transcendental realm, we would expect nearly all NDEs to begin with OBEs, and to include a tunnel-and-light motif—or at least some motif of transition from this world to the next one. In fact, though, no single element is found in all or even most NDEs, even when confined to NDEs in the West. And we would expect to find substantial uniformity in NDE elements across cultures and historical eras; but the modern Western NDE is starkly different from the NDEs of much earlier historical eras (Bremmer, 2002, pp. 99-100; Zaleski, 1987), and from those of non-Western cultures with the least exposure to the West (Belanti, Perera, & Jagadheesan, 2008; Groth-Marnat, 1994). And consistent with the interpretation of NDEs as hallucinations, one rare but recurring element (particularly in children) is encounters with living persons while in an ostensibly transcendental environment (Atwater, 2000, p. 12; Blackmore, 1993, p. 227; Fenwick & Fenwick, 1997, pp. 32-33, 79, 173; Greyson, 2010, p. 161; Kelly, 2001, pp. 239-240; Knoblauch, Schmied, & Schnettler, 2001, p. 25, Table II; Morse, 1994, p. 70; Serdahely, 1995, p. 194). These traits suggest that NDEs are hallucinations brought on by expectation of imminent death or medical crisis. (pp. 22-23)