From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Jan 02 2003 - 14:24:38 MST
I've just forced myself to read all the way through Dr Gary Schwartz's THE
AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS, and found the experience somewhat unsettling. Despite
the non-stop treacle and warm fuzzies and horrendous physics, Professor
Schwartz [prof of--take a deep breath--`psychology, medicine, neurology,
psychiatry and surgery at University of Arizona and director of its Human
Energy Systems Lab'] and his medium and scientist (or perhaps `scientist')
colleagues appear to have provided some intriguing data.
Is what's reported reliable? Well, even though skeptical reviewers like Ray
Hyman have attacked the program's many experimental weaknesses and
inadequacies, they appear not to have explained away the most surprising
results, nor shown, as one might expect, that the whole thing is a
concoction.
If the material is indeed worth taking seriously, you'd think a
parapsychologist-manque like me would find the data congenial and easy to
account for *without* any appeal to discarnate entities who apparently have
nothing else to do except whiz over and provide random mediums and their
desperate sitters with blurry replies and big hugs and news of faithful
doggies that have `passed'. But as Schwartz points out in his closing pages,
the *personalized* and sometimes grumpy nature of the alleged information
source seems to contest any standard psi explanation.
Of course there are many alternatives to `living info-energy systems' (LIES,
oddly enough, is the luckless acronym) that Schwartz does not even mention--
for example, the familiar one to extropes that we all dwell in a
higher-level simulation, in which mediums have partial superuser access and
their information is handled by robotic agents, etc--but his cited material
does seem far more detailed, non-coincidental and interesting than most of
the published results even from ganzfeld or remote viewing protocols.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:50 MST