The Persistence of Weaponized Psychology on Reddit Science Pages

Reddit (www.reddit.com) is a major web site consisting mainly of a variety of special interest web pages that are called "subreddits." For example, the Science subreddit (www.reddit.com/r/science) gives each day a long list of links to science news stories; and the Psychology subreddit (www.reddit.com/r/psychology) gives each day a long list of links to psychology news stories. There are thousands of different subreddit pages, each dealing with some specialized topic. 

I have noticed on Reddit's science subreddits a deplorable long-standing tendency to display links to what may be called weaponized psychology papers.  When someone trains to be a psychologist, he will typically think that he is learning about the mind to help people, such as people with psychological problems. But the purpose of a weaponized psychology paper is not to help anyone, but only to damage the reputation of some group of people.  Like some sniper putting someone in the crosshairs of his gun, a scientist working on a weaponized psychology paper will pick some group that will be the target of his attack.  Often the group will be some people holding some belief or engaging in some behavior that psychology professors disapprove of.  The goal may be to stigmatize or pathologize or deligitimize some group that is disliked. 

I may describe the type of shoddy methods typically used by the writers of weaponized psychology papers. Some group of people will be queried, usually by having them fill out questionnaires. Some of the questions will be trying to determine how much a subject believes in a variety of different things someone can believe in, or how much someone engages in some particular practice. Other questions will be used to try to find some type of abnormality or personality defect or character flaw in the person.  For example, questions may be asked that are trying to look for signs of anxiety, untruthfulness, anger, jealousy, narcissism, hasty thinking, or any of a hundred similar imperfections.  The questions will very often be what lawyers call "leading questions," designed to get people to confess to things they would never normally confess to. 

The scientists handling the weaponized psychology research project will typically not start out by publicly stating that only one exact hypothesis will be tested, like scientists ideally should. Instead they will be on a kind of fishing expedition, looking for any and all bad things they can report about the belief group that is their attack target.  After the data is gathered, the scientists will look for some kind of correlation that will cause embarrassment for the belief group that has been targeted.  

This will be easy to find. Given a small group of subjects, random variation in answers, and a very large pool of questions, we would expect by random chance that there will be some correlation between answers given by the members of the belief group and some unflattering psychological characteristic or some belief capable of being shamed -- no matter how respectable the belief is.  For example, if I gave 100 people surveys with 300 questions asking about beliefs and looking for psychological flaws, and one of the questions was whether the person believed the moon is round, I could no doubt find some correlation (perhaps only a weak one) between such a belief and some kind of undesirable characteristic or some other belief that was unreasonable.  Random chance will usually produce slight correlations between different things that have no causal connection; and the smaller the sample size, the more likely such false alarm correlations will appear.

Having found a few embarrassing correlations between the beliefs of the belief group they have targeted for attack and some other belief or tendency that is regarded as undesirable or embarrassing,  the scientists will write up their paper.  The abstract will typically highlight whatever correlation is most embarrassing for the belief group that is the attack target.  When the research is presented on a subreddit page of www.reddit.com, we will read some defamatory headline such as these imaginary but typical-sounding examples:

"Republican Voters More Likely to Be Narcissistic"

"Democrat Voters More Likely to Be Psychopathic"

"UFO Believers More Likely to Be Stupid"

"Churchgoers More Likely to Have Dark Triad Traits"

"Atheists More Likely to Have Dark Triad Traits"

Let us take a close look at one of the weaponized psychology studies that was promoted this week by a Reddit science subreddit page, with a headline announcing that research had shown astrology believers are less intelligent than average. The link was to a paper which demonstrates no such thing, but mainly demonstrates the most glaring defects in the methods of its authors.  

The paper's title was "Even the stars think that I am superior: Personality, intelligence and belief in astrology." With a title like that, the authors are making rather clear their animosity and contempt towards their subjects, and after reading such a title we should have little doubt that the paper is an exercise in weaponized psychology.  

In their abstract the authors state "intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology."  How did they determine that? By finding IQ scores for their subjects? No. By doing standardized intelligence tests on their subjects, such as the most widely used  IQ test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test that takes more than an hour to complete? No.  

Instead our scientists most lazily resorted to a ridiculous shortcut. We read in Section 2.24 of their paper that they tested intelligence only by asking 4 questions.  They claimed that there was a correlation between results on this super-shrunken mini-test and IQ scores.  This is a very shoddy procedure that any scientist should be ashamed to be using.  No scientist has any business making claims about intelligence of some group based on results in some laughably skimpy 4-question mini-test rather than a full intelligence test such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test.  Also, the scientists used a very unscientific method of getting survey subjects. We are told "participants were recruited via word-of-mouth on Facebook."  

So their paper tells us nothing reliable about the intelligence of astrology believers, but merely gives us a good example of the shoddy shortcuts and Questionable Research Practices of some scientists.  Referring to their sample of 264 subjects filling out their questionnaire, the scientists confess in their paper that "the sample is not generalisable to a broader population."  So why did we see a link to their paper on  Reddit's main science page, and why did the paper even get published? 

There are all kinds of equally shameful tactics that go on in papers presenting examples of weaponized psychology.  One of the most common is to categorize as a "conspiracy theory" some thinking that is not actually a conspiracy theory.  The strategy is: (1) stretch the phrase "conspiracy theory" like some pizza maker stretching out a ball of dough to make it pizza-sized, so that it applies to things that are not really conspiracy theories; (2) then using this distorted super-expanded definition, try to defame some belief group by saying that there is a correlation between its beliefs and beliefs in conspiracy theories. 

We see such shoddy tactics going on in the weaponized psychology paper here, one which attempts to associate belief in the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID-19 origins with a "dark triad" of "Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy." The authors give us a 5-point "conspiracy theory belief scale" on which you can score 1 point if you think "Coronavirus has escaped from a lab in one of the cities of China, Wuhan," and another point if you think "many dead bodies affected by Coronavirus were secretly burned in China."  Neither one of these is an example of a conspiracy theory. A person can believe that coronavirus (COVID-19) escaped from a lab in China because of ordinary human error and overconfidence, not because of any conspiracy.  Also, believing that dead bodies were secretly burned is not an example of a conspiracy theory, as it does not involve people plotting together to achieve nefarious ends, but simply garden-variety hiding of embarrassing things. 

The same thing goes on in countless other weaponized psychology papers.  Often the scientists writing such papers will be trying to discredit some belief by associating it with a belief in conspiracy theories.  To increase the likelihood that such a correlation can be found, "belief in conspiracy theories" will be described in the widest way possible, so that more people can be discredited as having beliefs correlating with conspiracy theories. Similarly, if you wanted to label as many believers as possible as being "killers," you could conveniently define "killer" in the widest way possible, so that it might include anyone who killed a roach by stepping on it, or anyone who hunted for small game. 

Over the past few years I have noticed very frequent attempts on the Reddit science pages to discredit various parties solely on the basis of a supposed correlation (usually weak) with such persons and belief in one or more conspiracy theories.  Such a deprecation strategy seems very strange and ineffective.  We know historically that there have been some  important conspiracies in history, such as the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. The Holocaust of World War II was a secret conspiracy, and the secret planning resulting in the Holocaust (at the Wanasee Conference) was a documented in a TV production entitled Conspiracy. The plot to assassinate Hitler was another real-life conspiracy, as was the Soviet-Cuban effort in 1962 to secretly construct nuclear missiles in Cuba. This week a committee published credible-sounding accusations about secretive mass mistreatment of an ethnic minority by a major Far East government, which supporters of that government have tried to dismiss as a "conspiracy theory," although the evidence for such accusations seems very substantial. So why would someone think that some belief group can be discredited by merely showing some correlation between that group and a tendency to believe in one or more conspiracy theories?  

A staple of weaponized psychology papers is the arbitrary scale, in which points are assigned based on some belief or tendency. Sometimes a scale may be made up by the authors of the paper, to achieve whatever defamation effect they are striving to achieve.  In other cases very dubious scales invented by others with a similar agenda may be evoked.  Often scales will be designed so that the targeted group will be as likely as possible to score highly on some scale in which higher numbers are represented as signs of pathology. So, for example, if a psychology professor wants to portray UFO witnesses as being "fantasy prone," he may devise or use a scale in which belief in UFOs scores a person a higher score of being "fantasy prone."  Or if a psychology wants to portray people having  out-of-body experiences as being "schizoid," he may devise or use a scale in which a belief in life-after-death or a belief in ever being outside of your body gets you a higher score on a "schizoid" scale. The possibilities for defamatory mischief are endless when professors can use or invent whatever scale furthers their deligitimization agenda. 

Another staple of weaponized psychology papers is the use of questionnaires with many examples of what lawyers call "leading questions," which are often questions designed to get someone to make some confession he would not naturally make. A person asked to describe his personality in a paragraph might never mention anything bad. But ask the same person a long series of questions such as "Do you sometimes stretch the truth to achieve your goals?" or "Do you sometimes feel angry towards others because of their success?" or "Do you sometimes fantasize about sexual behavior you would not want your mother to know about?" and you will probably get a few "yes" answers. This type of thing can be used as a springboard to defame the group that the questioned person belongs to. 

Another staple of weaponized psychology papers is a vague report of differences without any specific numbers being supplied about how great the difference was.  For example, both the title and the abstract of some paper may claim that one group (the group targeted by the weaponized psychology study) is "less intelligent" or "more Machiavellian" or "more selfish" or "less charitable" or "more angry" than control subjects, but we read no specific numbers indicating how great this alleged difference is.  Reading the paper (typically behind a paywall), one will find that the supposedly discovered difference is usually some trivial difference like 1% or 2%.  

A good general rule regarding weaponized psychology papers is that we should completely ignore all claims of differences between groups of people unless a specific degree-of-difference number is mentioned in the paper's abstract. When scientists get significant numbers in their studies, such numbers will be usually stated in the abstracts. When scientists don't get significant numbers, but only minimal borderline numbers such as 1% differences, such scientists will typically avoid telling us (in their paper abstracts) about how big a difference they found. So you should assume that if no exact figure is given about a difference in some group, then probably any difference found was only some tiny borderline difference.  

In recent years the titles and abstracts of weaponized psychology papers have often had a rather racist sound.  Again and again in such papers we hear of "dark traits" and "a dark triad" of characteristics, and such papers may refer to "the dark side" of this or that group or may distinguish normal members of some group and "dark" members of that group (the "dark" members being those who are regarded as having one or more undesirable traits).  In all of this language there is an underlying thinking of "dark=bad" or "dark=dysfunctional" or "dark=inferior," which has a kind of racist dog-whistle sound to it, which may produce a subliminal cascade of hate, fear or suspicion in the readers of the papers. 

I have not kept exact statistics on how many times there will be links to weaponized psychology papers on the Reddit science subreddit (www.reddit.com/r/science). But over the past few years I seem to have seen new links to such papers appear at a rate of about a few  times per week. 

-----

Here is an interesting question to ponder: if there were some deity who wanted to create an inhabited universe that had the fewest possible signs that it had been created or directed, what kind of universe would such a deity create? To answer this question we must imagine the strange hypothetical case of a deity who wants to create a universe with living beings, but who for some reason does not want any of those beings to ever suspect that they were part of a created universe or a designed universe or a directed universe.  I can't imagine why a deity would want to do that. But I do have an idea about the type of universe such a deity might create so that the fewest possible minds would get suspicions that they were in a universe that had been designed or created or directed. We can call such a universe a "no design appearances" universe.  

We can imagine this universe as consisting mainly of a featureless black plane, infinite in width and depth. The living beings in such a universe might consist of merely featureless balls. All of these balls might have different sizes and colors, leaving no impression that any mind was controlling the size or colors of such balls to create some uniformity. Such balls might float above the featureless plain. Physically about the most interesting thing that would happen in such a universe might be that some of these floating balls might occasionally group rather close together.  In such a universe there might be no sun, and no real concepts such as hot and cold and darkness and light. The temperature might be a constant uniform temperature that no one would notice as being either hot or cold. Any of these floating balls might be able to perceive other balls that were near them, and might also be able to see the featureless plain below them. 

Each such floating featureless ball might be a conscious observer, but none of them would have complex minds and complex memories such as humans have. There would be basically nothing to learn about in so simple a universe. It might be that none of these balls had any memory of anything that had happened earlier than about a week earlier. Each such ball might exist indefinitely. Or it could be that balls would just pop up from the featureless plain, and last a certain number of years. Or perhaps a new ball might arise from an unimpressive process when an existing ball split into two or three smaller balls.  Each of these balls might have a strange simple little life, but none of the balls would have any such concepts such as family, nation, tribe, science, religion and so forth.  

Within such a universe there might be no laws at all. There might be no law of gravity, with these balls floating around at random distances above the featureless plane. There might not be any type of laws of motion similar to Newton's laws of motion.  If two balls approached each other, they might simply pass through each other, like little ghost balls.  There might not even be a law requiring the balls to be above the plane, and the balls might exist both below and above the plane, passing through the featureless plane often. 

Now imagine yourself as one of these strange little featureless balls floating above such a featureless plain. There would probably never arise in your mind any such concept as the idea that your little universe of floating balls and a featureless plain had been created. For one thing, no one in your universe would ever have done any such thing as creating anything. So the whole idea of creation or design would probably be utterly foreign to you. Also nothing that you saw around you would look like anything that had been designed or created. The featureless plain below you would not look like anything that had been made with care. And neither yourself nor any of your fellow floating balls would look anything that had been created or designed. 

There would be nothing special about your mind that would cause you to think that beings such as yourself were caused by something other than yourself.  You would have no mind that analyzed complex facts, and you would probably have no language at all. The universe you inhabited would show no signs of design, no signs of ever having begun at some time in the past. So all in all, there would seem to be no reason at all for you to suspect that there existed anything greater than yourself and the type of floating ball being that you were. 

I think the paragraphs above are a pretty good stab at imagining the type of universe a deity might create if such a deity wanted to minimize the chance of any of the universe's inhabitants suspecting that they were part of a universe that had been created or designed. But now let's consider a question that is the opposite of the one I posed at the beginning of this post. What type of universe might a deity create if the deity wanted to create a universe that would maximize the chance of its inhabitants eventually suspecting that they were part of a universe that had been created or designed or directed, or that they had some great dependency on some metaphysical reality higher than themselves? We can call such a universe a universe that displays hugely demonstrative directedness. A dictionary defines "directedness" as "the state or quality of being directed." A universe with hugely demonstrative directedness would be one in which it was very obvious that some higher power was controlling things, and the source of wonders or order or organization in that universe. 

 What type of characteristics would a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness have? I can list some possible characteristics of such a universe. 

Possible characteristic #1 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: living beings might have fantastically organized bodies that could not be explained by low-level causes.  

 We can imagine here a situation that is the exact opposite of the one described in the "no design appearances" universe imagined above. Instead of featureless balls raising no suspicions of any kind of design, living beings would be fantastically organized structures even more organized than the most organized things humans have made. 

Possible characteristic #2 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: living beings might require for their existence fantastically complex and seemingly directed processes within them.  

Something that is static can be very impressive if it is very organized. For example, if the captain of an aircraft tells everyone to stop moving at noon, the aircraft carrier is still a very impressive example of organization, suggesting design and directedness. But something can be far more impressive if it is both extremely organized and also something in which enormously organized dynamic processes are continually occurring. Consider, for example, a huge factory that is both enormously organized (with many types of specialized machines) and also a center of great dynamic activity, with many different manufacturing processes occurring simultaneously. Such a thing even more dramatically suggests the idea of directedness. 

Possible characteristic #3 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: there might be many complex uniformities and complex repeated patterns suggesting design or directedness. 

In a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness, there might be many uniformities suggesting things were being directed. There might also be many complex repeated patterns of a type that we would never expect chance to produce multiple times. 

Possible characteristic #4 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: there might be many physical laws suggesting design or directedness.

The existence of rules of nature being mysteriously followed for no known reason would tend to suggest that the universe had been created or designed or directed, particularly if such laws were necessary for the living beings in the universe to exist. 

Possible characteristic #5 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: there might be evidence the universe had begun in a state of perfect disorder, or as if it had appeared from nothing, and then progressed to enormous organization and order. 

One way to accentuate design and directedness is to have it mysteriously arising from non-order or chaos or from apparent nothingness. For example, it would be rather hard to make a more impressive display of supernatural power than for someone to pick up a blob of thick paint in his left hand and a blob of thick paint in his right hand, and to then throw them on to a canvas, instantly producing some beautiful painting looking like a purposeful work of art.  

Possible characteristic #6 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: there might be evidence had begun in a state requiring very precise fine-tuning.  

Imagine you grow up living in a giant upside-down pyramid structure. You might have no idea how such a structure originated. But the physical condition would seem to tell you very dramatically that the structure had to have had a very fine-tuned and well-directed origin, or else the pyramid would never have properly balanced so that it could rest on its smallest point. 

Possible characteristic #7 of a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness: minds might have very rich capabilities that could not be physically explained.   

The richer the mental capabilities of living beings in a universe, and the greater the difficulty of explaining such mental capabilities physically, the more the inhabitants would tend to suspect came from higher power.  For example, if all humans had entirely empty skulls, or skulls filled only with sand, they might be more likely to think that their minds came from some high power rather than something inside their body. 

Now, let us consider the question: could our universe be such a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness? It seems that it might. In fact, our universe seems to have each of the characteristics mentioned above.  

Characteristic #1: "living beings might have fantastically organized bodies that could not be explained by low-level causes." 

Every human body is a state of physical organization more impressive than found in any object human beings can construct or manufacture. Humans know how to build fully equipped aircraft carriers from scratch. There is no nation or corporation in the world that knows how to build a living human body from scratch.  We do not understand how the vast organization of any adult body is able to arise. For decades we have told a false story about such a matter: that a human body arises because a DNA blueprint for such a body is read. No such blueprint or program or recipe for making a human body exists in DNA. Containing only low-level chemical information, DNA does contain any anatomy information, and does not tell how to make a human body or any of its organs or cells. 

Characteristic #2: "living beings might require for their existence fantastically complex and seemingly directed processes within them."

Nothing could be more erroneous than to imagine a human body as being like some state of enormous static organization, like some cathedral that is very impressive in its organization but almost entirely static (with the exception of ringing church bells and opening doors).  Instead the human body is as internally dynamic as some city. Imagine all of the internal activity within a city: people going to and from jobs, workers moving around as part of their work, 1000 buildings being torn down every day down in different parts of the city, 1000 other buildings being constructed or remodeled in other parts of the city.  That is a rough analogy for what goes on every day in the human body. Very many of the 200+ types of cells in the human body have relatively short lifetimes, and the average cell has a lifetime of only about seven years. In places such as the brain, protein molecules have an average lifetime of less than two weeks.  So the human body is like some city that is in a constant process of replacing and remodeling itself. Moreover, the continued existence of the human body requires the continual occurrence of fantastically complex chemical combinations and reactions, such as the very-hard-to-achieve thing called protein folding, and the combination of different types of proteins into protein complexes, and the construction of organelles from protein complexes, and the construction of new cells from organelles. 

But there's one big difference between the enormously dynamic internal purposeful activity of the human body and the enormously dynamic internal purposeful activity of a city. That difference is that we know what causes the enormously dynamic purposeful internal activity of a city: the purposeful action of many thousands or millions of intelligent agents inside the city. But we do not know what causes the enormously dynamic purposeful internal activity within a human body. For a long time our biologists told us a gigantic lie, that such activity was occurring because of a DNA script or gene script for how to keep a body alive. No such script or program exists in DNA or its genes. DNA and its genes only contains very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

We do not know what causes the miracle of dynamic activity within the human body needed for a human body to survive. Why do the polypeptide chains (chains of amino acids) that are the starting points of protein molecules form into just the right hard-to-achieve folded 3D shapes needed for protein molecules to be functional? We do not know. Why do protein molecules form into just the right type of protein complexes needed for the body to operate? We do not know. Why do such protein complexes form into the organelles needed for cells to continue to exist and reproduce? We do not know. How is a cell even able to reproduce? We do not know. All of the vast internal purposeful dynamism within the body of humans and other large organisms is just what we might expect in a universe with hugely demonstrative directedness. 

Characteristic #3: "there might be many complex uniformities and complex repeated patterns suggesting design or directedness."  

In our universe there are some dramatic uniformities in the world of physics. All electrons have exactly the same mass. All protons have the same mass, which is 1836 times greater than the mass of each electron. All electrons have exactly the same charge, which is the very precise opposite of the charge on each proton. The speed of the light is the same everywhere. The gravitational constant is the same everywhere. There are numerous other uniformities and fundamental constants that have to be just right for the universe to be habitable. We can imagine other types of universes that might allow living beings to exist without such uniformities. But given the overall arrangement of our universe, each of the uniformities must exist, and must in many cases exist with numerical values very close to their existing values, or life could not exist in our universe. For example, a slight mismatch in the absolute value of the electron charge and the absolute value of the proton charge would make our universe uninhabitable. 

In addition to such purposeful-seeming uniformities in the world of physics, there are a host of purposeful-seeming uniformities or near uniformities in the world of biology.  Among these are the various structures of anatomy used by various different types of organisms. This is something we take for granted,  but something we have no credible explanation for. Why is almost every human born with ten toes, ten fingers, two arms, two legs, one head, two eyes, two lips, two ears and one mouth? Since neither DNA nor its genes have any anatomy specification nor even a specification of how to make a cell, the answer is "because they all started with the same DNA." We could go on and on asking similar questions. Why does every human use the same type of protein complexes, when neither DNA nor its genes specify which proteins belong to particular protein complexes? Why do such protein complexes so often form units of such complexity and apparent directedness that biochemists are now extensively using the term "molecular machines" to refer to them?  Why does every human have the same type of cells, when neither DNA nor its genes specifies how to make a cell? 

Characteristic #4: "there might be many physical laws suggesting design or directedness."  

Our universe is quite the opposite of the lawless universe imagined at the beginning of this post. Our universe has many laws, and most of them seem to be necessary in one or another for our universe's habitability. Some of these laws have names, and many others have no names.  For example, the precise laws known as Coulomb's law and Newton's universal law of gravitation are named laws absolutely necessary for life to exist in our universe, as is the law of the conservation of charge. If the law of the conversation of charge had not been in effect in the early universe, we probably would have ended up with a vast imbalance of positive charges and negative charges, which would have prevented planets and stars from ever forming. There are numerous other laws that have no name, but which seem necessary for life to exist in our universe. One law of nature guarantees that when high energy photons collide, they do not produce stable subatomic particles with a random range of masses, but only produce stable subatomic particles of a few types such as protons, electrons and neutrons. Without such a law the Big Bang would not have produced a habitable universe. I could write a long separate post on all the laws of nature, named and unnamed, which seem to suggest directedness and purpose in our universe. 

Characteristic #5: "there might be evidence the universe had begun in a state of zero organization, or as if it had appeared from nothing, and then progressed to enormous organization."  

Any universe that seems to have appeared from nothing is one that gives a strong sign of directedness, particularly if we track a progression from perfect disorganization to enormous organization. We see such things in the history of our universe. The Big Bang described by cosmologists is either a case of the universe apparently originating from nothing, or a facsimile of such a thing. Involving inconceivable temperatures, the Big Bang was a state of perfect disorganization, which we can define as one with zero systems of any type. From such a state has arisen our planet filled with vastly organized structures. The progression from perfect disorder to enormous order leaves a very strong impression of directedness. 

Characteristic #6: there might be evidence the universe had begun in a state requiring very precise fine-tuning.

Entropy can be roughly defined as the amount of waste mass-energy in a system or universe, energy that is unavailable for work. Entropy is increased when the stars burns up their nuclear fuel to radiate energy into space, and it is also increased when matter gets trapped in black holes. It is a fundamental law of nature that entropy gradually increases as time passes, a principle known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Scientists say this law will eventually lead in the incredibly distant future to a “heat death” of the universe, in which there is no usable energy. We know roughly how much entropy is now in the universe, and if we “rewind the film” backward all the way back to the time of the Big Bang, we then have a universe that begins with very, very little entropy. The diagram below illustrates the point.

Roger Penrose (one of the most famous cosmologists) has emphasized the fantastic specialness of the low-entropy state of the early universe. In the video clip below, he discusses the issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvV2Xzh11r8

At the end of this brief clip Penrose estimates that the chance of a random universe having entropy as low as the entropy in the early universe is some inconceivably small number such as 1 in 10^N, where N is a number greater than the total number of particles in the observable universe. Clearly, our universe matches characteristic #6 super-abundantly. 

Characteristic #7: "minds might have very rich capabilities that could not be physically explained." 

Human minds have an incredibly diverse and rich set of characteristics and capabilities that mostly cannot be explained as being a result of brain activity. The visual below mentions some of those characteristics and capabilities. 

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.

2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.

3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.

4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.

5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.

6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.

7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a mental effect. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.

8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 

9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.

10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.

11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.

12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.

13. The very strong laboratory evidence for psi (most notably extrasensory perception) shows that humans have abilities that cannot be explained by neural activity, and that must involve some higher consciousness reality beyond the brain.

14. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head.

15. Well-documented evidence for apparitions provides evidence that the human mind is not merely the result of brain activity. Such evidence includes (1) more than 100 cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, only to very soon learn that the corresponding person had died (as discussed here, here, here and here); (2) many additional cases of apparitions seen by multiple observers, contrary to the explanation of hallucination (discussed here and here); (3) many other cases of death-bed apparitions as discussed here and documented by researchers such as Haraldsson and Osis. 

16. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.

17.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

The topic of human minds and human mental experiences is a topic of oceanic depth. Besides failing to properly study the topic of brain physical shortfalls (something they should devote the greatest attention to), today's neuroscientists miserably fail to properly study the topic of paranormal phenomena, which provides gigantic further evidence that the human mind is incapable of being explained by anything physical. 

To summarize, our universe seems to have not merely some marginal evidence of directedness, but the most enormous and abundant evidence of directedness. Everywhere is the most abundant evidence of purposefulness and directness. The evidence pervades numerous different fields such as general biology, psychology, biochemistry, developmental biology, physics, parapsychology and cosmology. It seems  justified to use the phrase "hugely demonstrative directedness" to describe such a state of affairs.   

Poltergeists: 12 Dramatic Cases

Of people who experience spooky disturbances, some of the most widely discussed are those who seem to experience poltergeist activity. The average person associates "poltergeist" with the idea of some unseen, uncommunicative and mischievous spooky presence. one that makes itself known by making rapping sounds, tossing around or shaking objects, or opening and closing doors (either full-sized doors or cabinet doors). Let us look at some of the best documented cases of this type. 

The Tedworth Drummer, 1661

In 1682 a Rev. Joseph Glanvil published an account of an apparent poltergeist case he had witnessed in 1661. I cannot find the original text, but the text is reproduced in readable form in a chapter of the book here.  The paragraph here summarizes the strange occurrences:

"There are diverse particulars in the story, in which no abuse or deceit could have been practised, as the motion of Boards and Chairs of themselves, the beating of a Drum in the midst of a room, and in the air, when nothing was to be seen: the great heat in a chamber that had no fire in excessive cold weather, the scratching and panting, the violent beating and shaking of bedsteads, of which there was no perceivable cause or occasion. In these and such like instances, it is not to be conceived how tricks could have been put upon so many, so jealous, and so inquisitive persons as were witnesses of them." 

The Epworth Disturbances, 1716-1717

In 1720 John Wesley (the founder of the branch of Christianity known as Methodism) investigated mysterious sound disturbances reported as occurring between December 2, 1716 and the end of January 1717.  Here is part of the account he wrote up of the investigation, based on family letters and interviews with the family members:

"Presently a knocking began under the table. She took the candle and looked, but could find nothing. Then the iron casement began to clatter and the lid of a warming-pan. Next the latch of the door moved up and down without ceasing.... She heard someone coming down the garret stairs, walking  slowly by her, then going down the best stairs, then up the back stairs, and up the garret stairs. And at every step it seemed the house shook from top to bottom."

Starting at the point here you can read many pages of letters written by the witnesses of this strange phenomenon, followed by John Wesley's account of his investigation. 

The Hinton Ampner Disturbances, 1771-1777

In the April 1893 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 6), there appears an account of a  poltergeist case. Although occurring long ago, the account is based on letters written when the events occurred. The Journal introduces the case like this:

"The following is a case of so-called 'haunting' — inexplicable noises being constantly heard by the tenants of the house during an occupancy of about 6.5 years, and unrecognised phantasms being seen three times, on one occasion collectively, while some time earlier a figure, which was said to have some resemblance to the late master of the house, had been seen there by one of his old servants. A similar case —that of the ' Haunted House at Willington ' — was printed in the Journal, December, 1892, and though the present one is even more remote, it has the same merit of having been fully and carefully recorded at the time by exceptionally intelligent and trustworthy witnesses."

The Journal then gives a very long account, using letters written long ago. 

The "Stockwell Ghost" 1772

In her great long survey of the paranormal The Night Side of Nature, which can be read here, Catherine Crowe quotes a German publication describing dramatic occurrences of the poltergeist type. The pamphlet was entitled "An Authentic, Candid, and Circumstantial Narrative, of the astonishing Transactions at Stockwell, in the County of Surrey, on Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th days of January, 1772, containing a Series of the most surprising and unaccountable Events that ever happened, which continued from first to last, upwards of Twenty Hours, and at different places."

We read this account of the beginning of the affair:

"On Monday, January 6th, 1772, about ten o'clock in the forenoon, as Mrs. Golding was in her parlour, she heard the china and glasses in the back kitchen tumble down and break; her maid came to her and told her the stone plates were falling from the shelf; Mrs. Golding went into the kitchen and saw them broke. Presently after a row of plates from the next shelf fell down likewise, whilst she was there, and nobody near them; this astonished her much, and while she was thinking about it, other things in different places began to tumble about, some of them breaking, attended with violent noises all over the house : a clock tumbled down and the case broke; a lantern that hung on the stair-case was thrown down, and the glass broke to pieces; an earthen pan of salted beef broke to pieces, and the beef fell about: all this increased her surprise, and brought several persons about her, among whom was Mr. Powlidge, a carpenter, who gave it as his opinion that the foundation was giving way, and that the house was tumbling down, occasioned by the too great weight of an additional room erected above,  so ready are we to discover natural causes for everything ! But no such thing happened, as the reader will find, for whatever was the cause, that cause ceased almost as soon as Mrs. Golding and her maid left any place, and followed them wherever they went."

Stranger things later happened:

 "A fresh scene began; the first thing that happened, was a whole row of pewter dishes, except one, fell from off a shelf to the middle of the floor, rolled about a little while, then settled; and, what is almost beyond belief, as soon as they were quiet, turned upside down; they were then put on the dresser, and went through the same a second time; next fell a whole row of pewter plates from off the second shelf over the dresser to the ground, and being taken up and put on the dresser one in another, they were thrown down again....A pestle and mortar, that stood nearer the left-hand end of the chimney shelf, jumped about six feet on the floor. Then went candlesticks and other brasses, scarce anything remaining in its place. After this, the glasses and china were put down on the floor for fear of undergoing the same fate; they presently began to dance and tumble about, and then broke to pieces. A teapot, that was among them, flew to Mrs. Golding's maid's foot, and struck it. A glass tumbler that was put on the floor, jumped about two feet and then broke. Another that stood by it jumped about at the same time, but did not break till some hours after, when it jumped again, and then broke. A china bowl that stood in the parlour jumped from the floor to behind a table that stood there. This was most astonishing, as the distance from where it stood was between seven and eight feet, but was not broke."

We read of more household items violently jumping about:

"A candlestick that stood on the chimney-shelf flew across the kitchen to the parlour door, at about fifteen feet distance. A tea-kettle, under the dresser, was thrown out about two feet; another kettle, that stood at one end of the range, was thrown against the iron that is fixed to prevent children falling into the fire. A tumbler with rum-and- water in it that stood upon a waiter upon a table in the parlour, jumped about ten feet, and was broken."

Later we are told of more astonishing events:

"A nine-gallon cask of beer, that was in the cellar, the door being open, and no person near it, turned upside down. A pail of water that stood on the floor, boiled like a pot. A box of candles fell from a shelf in the kitchen to the floor; they rolled out, but none were broken: and a round mahogany table overset in the parlour."

The pamphlet ends with this declaration:

 "The above narrative is absolutely and strictly true, in witness whereof we have set our hands this eleventh day of January, 1772.

 Mary Golding.

 John Pain.

 Mary Pain.

 Eichard Fowler.

 Sarah Fowler.

 Mary Martin."

The Willington Disturbances, 1835-1847

In 1892 Volume 5 of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research published a diary recording a record of mysterious disturbances starting in 1835 and lasting until 1847. The diary was written around the same time the disturbances occurred. It begins like this:

"Particulars relating to some unaccountable noises heard in the house of J. and E. Procter, Willington Mill, which began about three months prior to the present time, viz., 1 mo. 28th, 1835, still continuing, and for which no adequate natural cause has hitherto been discovered. About six weeks ago the nursemaid first told her mistress of the state of dread and alarm she was kept in, in consequence of noises she had heard for about two months, occurring more particularly nearly every evening when left alone to watch the child [my eldest brother, then about two years old] to sleep in the nursery, a room on the second floor ; she declared she distinctly heard a dull heavy tread on the boarded floor of the unoccupied room above, commonly pacing backwards and forwards, and, on coming over the window, giving the floor such a shake as to cause the window of the nursery to rattle violently in its frame. This disturbance generally lasted ten minutes at a time, and though she did not heed it at first, yet she was now persuaded it was supernatural, and 'it quite overset her.' "

On page 335 we read of apparitions being seen in the same place:

"For about two months previously there had rarely been 24 hours without indications by noises.... not in any other way accountable, of the presence of the ghostly visitant, to some or all of the inmates. A few days previously a respectable neighbour had seen a transparent white female figure in a window in the second storey of the house. On the 13th of last month (November), early in the evening, two of the children in the house, one aged about 8, the other under two years, both saw, unknown to each other, an object which could not be real, and which went into the room where the apparition was afterwards seen, and disappeared there.... Soon after going to her bedroom T. M.'s wife went out of the house for some coals, and was struck with a figure in the window previously referred to [nothing being between the two houses but a kitchen garden and a road] ; she called her husband, who saw the same figure passing backwards and forwards and then standing still in the window. It was very luminous and likewise transparent, and had the appearance of a priest in a white surplice. T. M. then called out the relative of the family and his own daughter. When they came the head was nearly gone and the brightness somewhat abated, but it was fully ten minutes before it quite disappeared by fading gradually downwards. Both when standing and moving it was about 3 feet from the floor of the room."

Later we read of some spooky poltergeist activity: "About the 21st...E. P. and nurse Pollard both felt themselves raised up and let down three times." On the same page we read this: "He said that something under the crib raised him up very quickly many times, and wished to know what it could be."

There follows a long account of many spooky disturbances and inexplicable noises in the house, which dragged on until the family finally fled the house in 1847.  We read this spooky account of the resident's last night in the house:

"Finding life in the house to be no longer tolerable ; fearing also an unhappy effect, if not a permanent injury on the minds of their children should they remain longer in such a plague-ridden dwelling, they finally left it in 1847, and went to reside at Camp Villa, North Shields, social and other reasons also influencing them in taking this step. My parents have both repeatedly told me that during the last night they slept in the old house, the rest of the family having preceded them to the new one, there were continuous noises during the night, boxes being apparently dragged with heavy thuds down the now carpetless stairs, non-human footsteps stumped on the floors, doors were, or seemed to be, clashed, and impossible furniture corded at random or dragged hither and thither by inscrutable agency ; in short, a pantomimic or spiritualistic repetition of all the noises incident to a house-hold flitting."

The Phelps Case, 1850

The Phelps case is reported at length in Henry Spicer’s 1853 book Sights and sounds: the mystery of the day: comprising an entire history of the American "spirit" manifestations, pages 101 to 110. Phelps was a Presbyterian Reverend. 

The case started on March 10, 1850 when Rev. Eliakim Phelps returned to find his doors (which had been locked) unlocked, and that  "a number of figures, probably eight or ten, constructed with great skill by means of various articles of wearing-apparel and bed-room furniture, were found in the middle of the room, in a kneeling attitude." Regarding a boy of about 11, we read, "On one occasion he was fairly lifted from the ground, as though by a powerful man, and borne partly across the room." This was followed by a mysterious rising of a table. 

We read the following:

"The accounts of what was daily transpiring at Dr. Phelps's created, as may be supposed, an immense excitement and curiosity, and in the course of a few days the place was visited and inspected by fifteen hundred persons. The utmost facilities for investigation were afforded. Every nook and corner of the house was explored. Persons known as being the most incredulous on the subject were invited to spend days and nights in the family....So confident was Dr. Phelps himself that there was no trickery or deception in the case, that he issued a sort of public challenge to the effect that, if any one would visit the house and perform similar movements, under similar circumstances, and yet escape instant detection, he would present him with the house itself and all it contained."

One witness to the marvels (not a member of the Phelps family) stated the following:

"I have myself witnessed those phenomena, both alone and in company with others than the family, more than a hundred times, and, in the great majority of instances, under circumstances in which it was absolutely impossible, from the nature of the case, that it could have been done by any member of the family, or by any visible agency whatever....I have myself seen things in motion more than fifty times, and when no power was visible, by which the motion could have been produced. And so in regard to breaking windows. I have been present, and myself seen several panes of glass in the ' very act ' of being broken, and when I knew positively that no person in or about the house, could have done it without instant detection."

Here is what Eliakim Phelps himself had to say about these poltergeist disturbances at his house:

"The troubles at my house continued for at least seven months. During that time, events which cannot be accounted for occurred, to the number of two or three thousand. Many of them, to be sure, were of such a nature that they might have been done by human agency. But, in multitudes of instances, they have taken place in a way which rendered all trick or collusion utterly impossible. I have myself seen articles moved from one place to another; not, as your correspondent says, 'found them moved.'  I have seen things in motion more than a thousand times, and, in most cases, when no visible power existed by which the motion could have been produced. I can produce scores of persons, whose character for intelligence, piety, and competence to judge in this matter, no one who knows them will question, who will make solemn oath that they have witnessed the same things. As to the reality of the facts, they can be proved by testimony a hundred-fold greater than is ordinarily required in our courts of justice in cases of life and death."

The Cideville Case, 1850-1851

The Cideville case is reported in pages 220-225 of Robert Dale Owen's 1860 book "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World." Strange disturbances began on November 20, 1850, and continued until February 15, 1851, typically in the presence of two children.  In the middle of these events there was a court trial involving a defamation case, in which a person accused of being involved in the incidents sued the accuser for defamation. As part of the court trial,  sworn testimony was made of the recent spooky events. From such testimony, Owen tells us the following:

• On Tuesday November 20, 1850 two children started to hear mysterious rappings that continued until the next Sunday. 
• On that Sunday someone requested "Strike louder!" The rappings then grew louder. 
• By December 3 there were mysterious movements of a table. 
• Later tongs were seen leaping from a fireplace.
• Later various people asked for there to occur a number of raps equal to the letters in their name, and they instantly heard the correct number of raps. 
• Various people asked for the raps to be made to the beat of popular songs, and the raps occurred in such a way. 
• The table the children were sitting at was seen to mysteriously move in a way the children apparently could  not have produced. 
• One day "every piece of furniture there was set in vibration... the witness confessed that he expected every moment that the floor of the apartment would sink beneath his feet," and "felt convinced that if every person in the house had set to work, together, to pound with mallets on the floor, they could not have produced such a. racket."
• After a table was seen moving by another witness, the table "moved forward a second time about three meters (about ten feet) into the room, the children not touching it."

The Atlantic Monthly Case, 1867

At the link here we can read the August 1868 edition (Volume XXII No. CXXX) of the Atlantic Monthly, one of America's oldest magazines (now publishing as The Atlantic).  The first seven pages have an article entitled "A Remarkable Case of 'Physical Phenomena.' "  We read an extremely well-documented case of poltergeist activity that dramatically dragged on for two months, with very many astonishing phenomena reported occurring during the months of July and August 1867. The writer (an H. A. Willis) quotes from a journal logging a great variety of inexplicable movements of objects.  Although the writer describes himself as very skeptical about deceased spirits producing effects in earthly homes, he seems to have believed in the physical reality of the inexplicable phenomena he described. One of the most dramatic events reported was the repeated ringing of bells suspended eleven feet high from the ceiling, which occurred only when young Mary Carrick was in the room. This occurred even after the bell wires had been removed, and often occurred with "violent agitation."  

We read the following summary of some of the incidents:

"Loud and startling raps occurred on the walls, door and windows of any room where the girl was at work, and followed the girl from room to room, and could be heard in her bedroom at night when she was apparently fast asleep. A little later, chairs were upset, crockery thrown down, tables lifted and moved, and various kitchen utensils hurled about the room. This was during July. In August a careful daily record was kept. The writer of the article states that he saw the table at which the girl had been ironing suddenly lifted when no one was near enough to touch it. This also happened when a child was sitting on the table, and when the writer and other persons tried to hold the table down."

The Indridi Indridason Case, Around 1905

There were innumerable inexplicable occurrences observed around the medium Indridi Indridason. A special observation society with many members was formed, and a dedicated building was used in Iceland to observe the very diverse spooky phenomena.  The society made careful daily records of their observations, which were the basis of later reports. At page 201 of the document here, we read the following:

"Haraldur Nielsson reported on Indridi’s physical phenomena and mediumship at the First International Congress for Psychical Research in Copenhagen in 1921 (Nielsson, 1922). At the Second Congress in Warsaw in 1923 Nielsson reported on violent poltergeist phenomena around Indridi, much of which took place in full light and involved violent levitations of Indridi and those who tried to protect him from attacks. One night these attacks, such as hurling of objects at Indridi and throwing him around, became so violent that he and his two protectors had to flee the apartment in the Experimental House (Nielsson, 1924)."

Indridi Indridason

The Eleonore Zugun Case, 1926

This case is reported in the August 1926 edition of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Volume XX Number 8, in the paper "which can be read here by scrolling to page 475. The account is written by the widely-read paranormal researcher Harry Price, who witnessed first hand some of the phenomena in May, 1926. We read this about events surrounding the 13-year-old Eleonore:

"Countess Wassilko has divided the phenomena witnessed in her household into several groups: 1. Raps on furniture, etc. 2 . ' Apports' from various rooms in the flat. 3. Stigmatic marks and weals on breasts, arms and wrists; scratches and abrasions. 4. Telekinetic movements and displacement of objects (some large) of true poltergeist type. 5. Automatic writing. 6. Disappearance and reappearance of objects which sometimes are ' lost ' for weeks. ( Comparable to groups 2 and 4 .) 7. Independent voice—very rare. 8. Sudden displacement of pins and needles which are found buried in the medium's hands, arms, etc."

We read the following:

"If the raps are of infrequent occurrence, 'apports' in the shape of ornaments, toys, etc., are transported considerable distances from one room to another. Locked doors seem no hindrance to the transport of these objects. A brush, say, will be carefully put away in its proper place and ten minutes afterwards will drop from apparently nowhere into the midst of the' Countess’s family who are' quietly reading within closed and fastened doors. This has happened over and over again."

We later read this, which ends up using the word "alight" which means "to descend from the air":

"Telekinetic movements and the abnormal displacement of objects constitute the great bulk of the phenomena witnessed through Eleonore, and place this mediumship in the category of poltergeist manifestations. Counting each well-authenticated ' movement ' as a separate phenomenon, the Countess Wassilko has had as many as 67 in one day, and 1,050 in three months....'The objects displaced fly across the room— though no one sees them in transit, and no one sees them commence their journey; they are frequently seen to alight, however."

On page 469 Price gives this conclusion:

"As regards the poltergeist manifestations, I feel convinced that some of the telekinetic phenomena witnessed by me were not the work of normal forces. The falling of the cushion, the flight of the stiletto, and the aerial transit of the toy dog were, I am certain, absolutely genuine and convincing phenomena. No system of springs, wires, etc., could have been installed for the purpose of deceiving me without instant detection on my part. It is not at all easy to propel a heavy object across the room without somewhat elaborate apparatus. I am quite convinced of the impossibility of anyone in the room having had a hand in the movement of the objects. Apart from my own observational periods, the Countess has had Eleonore under her care for months and, as I have stated, she has already witnessed over a thousand different phenomena. We cannot ignore the very careful work of the Countess who has recorded, arranged, tabulated, and dissected the phenomena in a scientific manner....Professor Hahn, of Vienna University, has likewise had some experience of Eleonore’s phenomena and thinks they are genuine."

The Enfield Case, 1977

In an article in the Psi Encyclopedia, we read this:

"In 1977, a house in the north London suburb of Enfield was the scene of violent disturbances of apparently paranormal origin. The occurrences were similar to those reported in other cases of the ‘poltergeist’ type: knockings and other noises with no apparent cause; doors opening and closing by themselves; furniture overturned; small objects hurled across rooms; picture frames ripped from walls; small fires that started and went out by themselves, and suchlike. The events continued for just over a year and in many cases were witnessed by neighbours, investigators, technicians, press reporters and broadcasters, police officers and others."

The Lalm Kindergarten Case, 2010

Below is an astonishing account on page 7 of the March 2019 edition of Edge Science magazine published by the Society for Scientific Exploration:

"In press reports from 2010, Lalm kindergarten in Gudbrandsdalen (meaning Gudbrand’s Valley), Norway, appeared to be a veritable haunted house. Between April 26 and June 15, all 15 employees witnessed diverse objects— cups, mugs, stones, jars, etc.—flying through the rooms! Sometimes these items seemed to appear out of thin air. In addition, doors opened and closed by themselves, figures were drawn with crayons moved by no one’s hand (no human’s hand that is...), feathers used for decoration organized themselves into specific patterns, and so on. More than 90 seemingly inexplicable episodes occurred. And, interestingly enough, many of these events were observed by two or three adults simultaneously. In some cases, there were even as many as 20 witnesses."

Fragment Follies of the Guessing Glue Guys

There were many misleading statements and phrases that helped build the mighty cultural empire of materialist Darwinism, and such duplicity continues to this day. Consider the example of a recent press announcement of the supposed discovery of a Homo naledi skull. No skull was actually discovered. All that was discovered were small bone fragments that some scientists claimed might be from the skull of the same individual (without any good warrant for such a claim). 

A typical credulous and misleading press annoncement of this discovery was an article entitled "First Intact Skull of Tiny Human Ancestor Homo Naledi Discovered." We do not at all know that Homo naledi was a human ancestor, and the small bone fragments in question do not at all make up a skull (which is defined as a framework of bones enclosing the brain). 

A story in the Daily Mail also inaccurately describes these bone fragments as a "skull."  But the story includes a large picture that shows that no such skull was found. We see a speculative skull that looks perhaps 90% black clay, and maybe about 10% old bone material.  There are hundreds of different speculative skulls one could have made from the black plaster, which would have fit with the skull fragments.  So we have no idea whether the skull fragments belonged to an individual with a skull having the shape shown in the photo. We don't even know whether the skull fragments came from a single organism, or a single species. The scientific paper does not claim any likelihood that the fragments are from a single individual, and merely mentions this as a "hypothesis," claiming the results are "consistent" with such a hypothesis. 

In the Daily Mail article (and in a press release) we hear a paleontologist give a very weak justification for the claim that the fragments all came from the same skull: "There were no replicating parts as we pieced the skull back together and many of the fragments refit, indicating they all came from one individual child."  That is not anything like a robust justification for the claim that the fragments are from a single individual.  At the end of this post I will explain why.  And no one "pieced the skull back together," as only small bone fragments were found. 

How did the press get the idea that these small bone fragments constitute a skull? It is because of a misleading university press release that encouraged them to believe them. That press release issued by the University of Witwatersrand includes a very misleading visual. 

The press release is here (the original source server is now acting sluggishly, but when I wrote this post it was behaving okay).  It begins by saying, "Meet Leti, a Homo naledi child discovered in the Rising Star Cave System."  What a flight of fancy, calling the discovery of a few tiny bone fragments the discovery of a child. The press release inaccurately describes the small bone fragments as a "skull." 

Near the top of the press release,  I saw a very misleading visual (the sluggish, erratic performance of the page may prevent you from seeing it). It was artwork showing an almost-full fossil skull. But nothing like such a skull was discovered. All that was discovered were fragments that were maybe a tenth the size of the skull shown in the artwork.  This is like someone who has merely built half of a foundation of a house trying to mislead you into thinking that he built almost a whole house. 

The perhaps 90% black molding clay skull-shaped mockup shown in the Daily Mail story is only palm-sized. So how can someone claim that small fragments of a monkey-sized skull belongs to a human ancestor? Through the speculation that there was a small child corresponding to the sparse fragments.  It's seems more likely that we are seeing some fragments from one or more organisms vastly different from a human, and we have no warrant for believing we are seeing a single skull of a human ancestor. 

What can we call such overenthusiastic duplicity? Maybe we should call it "cheating for Charles," since it is all about trying to back up the explanatory ideas of Charles Darwin. A dubious fossil claim was recently debunked.  The fossil of some animal with four limbs was hailed as a four-limbed snake, and claimed as evidence that snakes had descended from lizards. Further analysis shows that the fossil corresponds to a lizard that was not at all a snake. 

One of the country's leading science publications recently published an article on how a prominent researcher is under a cloud of suspicion for allegedly faking data. The researcher was identified as an ecologist. But a search for his papers on Google Scholar shows that the researcher has published quite a few papers trying to prove claims of evolutionary biology.  Apparently the well-known science publication did not want its readers to be disturbed by suspicions that an evolutionary biologist may be faking things. So rather than referring to the person as an "ecologist and evolutionary biologist," he was merely referred to as an ecologist. 

In order to make skulls or skeletons that are mostly plaster or some similar modeling material, paleontologists or their helpers often resort to gluing pieces of bone together, often making wild guesses about "fitting fragments." Even when not making such mostly plaster skulls or skeletons, paleontologists often glue bone fragments together. A large fraction of such activity should be regarded as cheating.  Glue is often deceptively used to make it look like a big fragment was discovered when only smaller fragments were discovered.  Paleontologists freely admit to engaging in this shady practice of gluing together fragments. Do a Google search for "paleontologist gluing together fragments" and you will find many confessions.  Paleontologists often use resin-like substances to bind together fragments, substances that are kind of like cement, quite capable of binding together fragments that do not naturally fit. 

At one site we read that people are using superglues to bind together fossil fragments, and that "a lot of people use sodium bicarbonate or baking soda to help bulk out the superglue as a fast-drying gap filler that has the same strong bonding properties of the superglue alone." We can imagine how that would work. You might take two bone fragments that do not naturally fit together, apply some gap-filling white-colored baking soda mixed with superglue, and then scrape off some of that filler in a kind of molding manner, to make what looks like a single bone, when the original bone fragments don't really fit together. Very convenient, but with a very high chance of creating visually deceptive results. 

What probably goes on very often is that paleontologists or their helpers are binding together fragments that never were actually close to each other in the same organism. The only honest way for a paleontologist to bind together fragments would be to use some binding substance that had a very non-white color (such as bright red or black), so that anyone could see all the spots where glue-binding occurred. Instead paleontologists typically use binding materials that have a bone-like color (such as baking soda mixed with superglue), which works better for disguising the fragment-gluing, and works better for fooling people into thinking that multiple fragments were found as a single fragment. 

We should not imagine that our lofty professors do the bulk of the messy work of gluing fragments. It is probably done largely by the less accomplished, such as assistants and students. The problem is that when you have bone fragments that might be from any of a large number of species and from any of many individuals from a particular species, there is usually a large element of speculation involved in the decision to glue two pieces of bone together. Such a decision involves presuming that the bones long ago fit together in a single individual.  But such a presumption is often a wild guess without any sound justification. 

Short of gluing bone fragments in a bright distinctive color or black color allowing anyone to see where filler was used, the only honest way for a paleontologist to present fragments is to simply arrange the fragments on a flat surface, without doing any gluing. That is what occurred for the famous Lucy fragments, but it is not what usually occurs. 

Superglue was invented in 1942, but long before that there was shellac. A few coats of shellac will surround something in a rock-like translucent resin, as anyone knows who has used shellac on a wooden floor.  Many old fossil displays were produced by putting  together fragments (possibly from different organisms), gluing them in a not very stable way, and then coating the result in shellac to create a stable structure. 

A Scientific American article in entitled "How Fake Fossils Pervert Paleontology." The subtitle is "A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists." We hear about poor people in distant lands who first heard that you can get lots of cash by finding a good fossil, and who then started to make fake fossils in hopes of getting lots of money.  

It seems that many of the fossils in museums (particularly in China) may be such fake fossils. Even in countries like the United States, a significant fraction of the "fossil exhibits" in museums are outrageous fakes. Museums (often directed by professors) often display structures that countless visitors think are fossils, but which are merely fiberglass or plaster artworks inspired by some data obtained from studying fossils.  One large natural history museum confesses that only 85% of the specimens in one of its exhibit halls are actual fossils. When we consider that a large fraction of all fossils in natural museums were produced by people speculatively gluing together fragments, we should wonder whether most of the fossils in natural history museums are in some sense fakes.  

We should regard as impeached most fossil displays that involved gluing in their construction, and should disqualify them as evidence. Whenever you see a fossil that involved gluing, there should be great doubt that any particular organism had those exact bones, unless the display is accompanied by a description telling us that all of the fragments were found in the same very small area equal to about the length of the organism.  Such descriptions are typically lacking.  Paleontologists or their helpers may gather bone fragments from an area much larger than the length of an organism, and then glue and mortar those fragments together, trying to pass them off as the skeleton of a single organism.   For example,  fragments supposedly coming from a 2-meter tall organism may be found scattered over 10 meters or 20 meters.  Typically a press release will fail to mention how wide and long and deep was the area of gathering, and we will merely be told something like "they were found at the same place." The longer and wider and deeper the area of gathering, the less plausible are claims that the fragments came from a single organism.  

We can imagine an extremely careful protocol that could be used to determine the exact distance between found bone fragments. On a flat surface, a pole might be planted at the center of the gathering area, with an attached tape measure, and with a North and South point marked at the pole. Whenever a bone fragment was gathered, its position would be noted by measuring the distance from the pole, and also the degrees (between 0 and 360) of the position, using those North and South points.  The bone fragment would be put in a plastic bag that included that tape measurement with the degrees estimate.  Using such careful measurements, it could be possible to estimate the exact distance between found bone fragments.  I doubt that so careful a technique is used by most paleontologists or their helpers.  I would imagine it's usually just "gather up bone fragments here and there, and say they were found at the same spot."  But unless the greatest care is taken to measure the distance between found bone fragments, there can be no reliable claims that they all came from the same individual. And what if you are gathering fragments in some cave or ditch where such a method as I described is not practical? Then you probably won't bother trying to keep track of the exact distance between bone fragments. 

I referred above to the weakness of claiming that 28 small fragments are fragments of a single individual, on the basis that "there were no replicating parts." Computing the probability of a replication of parts with 28 small bone fragments is a mathematical problem similar to the famous birthday problem, the problem of calculating the likelihood of two matching birthdays in a group of certain number of people. Mathematicians have well-studied that problem, and have determined that (surprisingly) if there are more than 23 people in the group, there will be a likelihood of at least one matching birthday. 

Now, if the average size of some bone fragments were greater than 1/365 of a skeleton, you might think that there would be a likelihood of one fragment matching the position of another when there are more than 23 fragments. However, with small fragments that have an average size less than 1/365 of a skeleton (as is the case, apparently,  with the Homo naledi fragments recently reported which have an average size of perhaps 1/500 of a skeleton), the chance of a match of any two fragments is much lower. In fact, there would be an unlikelihood of any position match given 28 small random fragments from different individuals when the average fragment size was less than 1/500 of a skeleton.  So the fact that no positional match was found does nothing to establish a likelihood here of the fragments being from a single individual. 

We must also consider another factor: the large possibility of researchers discarding (or differentially classifying) matching fragments. Let us imagine a paleontologist trying to position each of 29 small bone fragments within a speculative plaster skull or skeleton.  He wants to claim that these are all fragments from a single individual. But suppose that two of the fragments seem to be from the same position (for example, two bone fragments looking like part of the right pinky finger).  What would we would expect the paleontologist to do? We would expect the paleontologist to simply put aside the inconvenient match, and write up a paper telling us about 28 bone fragments, none of which matched (or to conveniently describe one of the matching fragments as coming from some other part of the body, so that there is no match).  This is another reason why a lack of match in some set of a small number of bone fragments does nothing to establish a likelihood that the bone fragments are all from a single individual.

For decades we were told that the bone fragments of the famous Lucy fossil find were are all from the same individual. But in 2015 scientific analysis suggested that one of the bones was from an entirely different species, a baboon. In an article discussing this, an expert states, "The co-mingling of skeletons is quite common in the archaeological record and it can often be difficult to separate out different elements if multiple bodies are mixed together." We can only wonder how many other parts of Lucy are not from the same individual. 

The famous Lucy fossil fragments were first discovered by Donald C. Johanson, who describes finding the first fragments (with graduate student Tom Gray) on pages 16-18 of his book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. In the excerpt below the careful reader will find a good reason for doubting claims that Lucy is a skeleton of a single individual:

"That afternoon everyone in camp was in the gully, sectioning off the site and preparing for a massive collecting job that ultimately took three weeks. When it was done, we had recovered several hundred pieces of bone (many of them fragments) representing about forty percent of the skeleton of a single individual."

I can find no description of how long and wide and deep was the size of the area scoured during these three weeks to get these Lucy bone fragments, either in this book or in the original scientific paper reporting the find. But from the fact that it took "everyone in camp" three weeks of work to gather the fragments, we may presume that they were gathered over a rather large area, which is not at all what we would expect if the fragments came from a single individual. 

Acting in an astonishingly credulous manner, science writers seem to almost never bother to ask the crucial question of "how long and wide and deep was the gathering area" when hearing some claim that fossil bone fragments came from a single individual. They seem to have zero interest in such a question, which is crucial to testing the reliability of claims that fossil fragments came from a single individual.  

The lead researcher of the latest Homo naledi paper is the co-author of a book I mentioned in 2019, one entitled Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story." But on page 193 of their book, the authors give us an estimate of the brain size for the Homo naledi organisms corresponding to the fossils they found. It was about 560 cubic centimeters for a male, and about 450 cubic centimeters for a female. The average size of a male human brain is about 1350 cubic centimeters. So far from being “almost human,” Homo naledi had a brain only about 41% of the size of the modern human brain. Judging from brain size, we shouldn't even consider Homo naledi as half-human. So why was the title "Almost Human" used? 

Recent coverage of very small fossil fragment finds has a "grasping at straws" sound to it, along with the same old misleading words we hear so often in coverage of paleontology activity. We hear a LiveScience.com story that refers to "fossils" and "bones." Covering the same story, Phys.org also uses the term "fossils" and "bones" while telling us that none of the 3800 items found was longer than 4 centimeters, about the length of a peanut.  At least there's no glue fakery. On the basis of extremely dubious DNA analysis, in which only tiny fragments of DNA were analyzed, some scientists made  unwarranted conclusions about who had these the tiny fragments of bone.  The DNA fragments must have been tiny, because the half-life of DNA is only 521 years. Tiny fragments of bone plus tiny fragments of DNA do not add up to reliable conclusions. 

Very recently we had quite a confession in a biology paper whose primary author is Tom Roschinger, a CalTech scientist in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering. The paper begins by saying, "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity." The statement stands in defiance of long-standing groundless boasts that scientists have figured out how complex biological things originated. Funny how confessions like this tend to come more often from people who have studied engineering. 

Postscript: The birthday problem calculator here allows me to test the likelihood of a match of at least one fragment in the case I cited below of 28 bone fragments, each having an average size of only about 1 in 500 of the total size of a skeleton. The calculator tells us there is "about 1/2 chance" of a match in such a case.  This confirms my claim that a lack of match of any two such fragments does nothing to show a likelihood that the fragments are all from the same skeleton. 

The Bigelow Prize Essays on the Best Evidence for Life After Death

 The Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (funded by the very wealthy businessman Robert Bigelow) recently published a series of prize-winning essays attempting to answer the question of what is the best evidence for life after death. Most of the results are very impressive. Because there were very large money prizes to be won ($500,000 for first place and $300,000 for second place), the contestants seemed to go the extra mile, typically writing essays that are more like small books rather than mere essays.  These long essays are loaded with references to original sources, which allow you to investigate some of the discussed topics further. The best thing is that you can very conveniently read all of the prize-winning essays by going to the page here.  Each essay must be read as a .pdf file. 

The first prize essay by Jeffrey Mishlove covers a very wide variety of topics such as near-death experiences,  what are called "after-death experiences," evidence for reincarnation, mental mediumship, physical mediumship, and ESP.  There are many links to video clips.  I never knew it was possible to embed video clips in .pdf files. Many of the clips are of people who Mishlove personally interviewed.  I like the technique of including many video clips of eyewitnesses and people who personally experienced the paranormal.  Skeptics sometimes try to portray those who report the paranormal as being unhinged or kooky, but the truth is that people who report the paranormal tend very strongly to be ordinary people who talk in ordinary tones and expressions. You can find that out by playing some of the clips in Mishlove's long essay. 

Mishlove has a notable eyewitness account of his own to report, that before learning of his uncle's death, Mishlove had a very vivid dream in which it was like his uncle was talking to him at length. Concerned, he wrote his mother asking about his uncle's health status, and got a phone call two days later saying that he died on the same day as Mishlove's dream. 

The second prize essay by Pim van Lommel MD discusses mainly near-death experiences, a topic he has researched for many years. He reports observing in 1969 a near-death experience in a man undergoing cardiac arrest, at a time in which the term "near-death experience" hadn't even been coined.  On page 33 of his essay we read an experience personally related to him by someone else, an experience of interest to people such as me who photograph orbs. Here is the account he received:

"At the end of 2000 my eldest son died by suicide. From the police report estimating time of death, I learned it was about the same time a curious thing happened to me. I saw a sphere of light enter my window and then enter my forehead whereupon I was suddenly ‘awareness without a body', in a place profoundly lit, with a sense of spacious depth but without any features. I felt profound warmth and love, felt my son was ok, and heard the words, 'There is nothing wrong and there has never been anything wrong.' Somehow, I knew this to be true with every cell of my body even though he had been suffering with pain for years. The next day I learned of his death."

The third-prize essay by psychologist Leo Ruickbie shows a lot of scholarship about the relevant observational topics such as apparition sightings, clairvoyance and similar topics. I certainly must credit Ruickbie (a psychology PhD)  as having done more to study the paranormal than 99% of all psychology PhD's, who as a whole are very unscholarly on this topic.  

We then have eleven "second tier" essays by contestants who each seem to have won $50,000. The first of these is by Julie Beischel, a PhD who for many years has tested modern-day mediums, apparently finding that some of them stood up very well to rigorous testing protocols. The second "second tier" essay is an essay by Stephen E. Braude that is less powerful than most of the other essays in terms of presenting evidence, and seems mainly devoted to questions such as what qualifies as good evidence. 

The third $50,000 winner essay is by philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, whose title indicates that he will provide "a Rational, Empirical case for postmortem survival based solely on mainstream science." I object to the implied idea,  that we should perhaps not pay attention to that which is outside of so-called "mainstream science." Good reliable observations appearing in large numbers should be respected and discussed and studied, regardless of whether they have been declared taboo by people calling themselves "mainstream scientists," who have a very bad habit of declaring reports of many varieties of human experience as things that are "out of bounds" (mainly because they conflict with the unproven dogmas of such scientists). 

Kastrup's essay is cluttered up with some references to not-very-convincing neuroscience studies that I suspect used Questionable Research Practices (as a large fraction of all experimental neuroscience experiments do these days).  He has some idea that brain function is decreased when you take so-called mind-expanding drugs, but his case for this rests on marginal brain scanning studies that probably are of low statistical power, and probably fail to show robust evidence for a strong effect. Kastrup's case is largely philosophical, and his essay would have been far stronger if he had not started out by deciding to admit only evidence that would be classified as "mainstream science." 

But there is a way to make a case for life after death without leaving so-called "mainstream science."  Following the latter part of the essay here, that way is to concentrate on low-level details of the brain, and to show all of the ways in which the brain is unsuitable for explaining the main mental phenomena of humans, such as instantaneous acquisition of new memories, instantaneous memory retrieval, very fast thinking, very fast recognition, understanding, insight and so forth.  This approach involves a very careful study of things such as the very short lifetimes of brain proteins, the low stability of synapses and dendritic spines, the lack of any actual read or write mechanism in the brain, the absence of any evidence that brains do any such thing as converting learned information to neural states or synapse states, the variety of very high noise levels in the brain which should prevent fast accurate recall, the lack of any coordinate system or indexing system in the brain that would allow instant memory retrieval, the unreliability of synaptic transmission in the cortex, and so forth. The approach leads to a life after death conclusion, because if our brains cannot explain our minds and our memories, there is no reason to think that such things should perish when our brains perish.  But Kastrup fails to take that approach, and his essay ends up seeming weaker than most of the other essays. 

The fourth $50,000 winner essay by Elizabeth G. Krohn is mainly an eyewitness account of remarkable paranormal experience, which includes an account of an apparent gain of psychic functioning after being struck by a lightning bolt. It makes interesting reading, and its autobiographical approach is a nice change of pace from the other essays. 

The fifth $50,000 winner essay by Jeffrey Long MD is by one of the leading researchers of near-death experiences, and is well worth reading. The sixth $50,000 winner essay by Michael Nahm is a discussion of an extremely wide variety of evidence relevant to life after death, one that shows considerable depth of study and scholarship. 

The seventh $50,000 winner essay by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has some fascinating accounts. We read this on page 7 an example of the very common phenomenon called deathbed visions:

"For instance, in one case, a five-year-old girl named Lalani who was dying of leukemia began to talk about her interactions with someone named 'George,' whom no one else in the room could see. Everyone thought she was imagining things until one night when her grandmother went through a photo album with her. Her grandmother turned to a page Lalani had never seen before, and Lalani suddenly exclaimed, 'There’s George!' The man in the photograph was the grandmother’s own godfather, who had died when the grandmother was herself only five years old. Though Lalani had no normal way of knowing it (according to the family), his name was indeed George." 

We read this very interesting account on page 32:

"In another case cataloged by Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, this one investigated by Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, Olga Gearhardt of San Diego, California, was receiving a heart transplant. Her whole family had gathered at the hospital during her surgery, except for her son-in-law, who had a phobia of hospitals. At 2:15am, the new heart would not beat properly and then stopped completely. The resuscitation process took hours, but finally her new heart was persuaded to function properly. Meanwhile, the son-in-law, at home, woke up at 2:15am to see Olga standing at the foot of his bed. She was so lifelike that he thought it was actually her, that her plans must have changed and, instead of getting surgery, she had come to his house. He asked her how she was doing, and she told him, 'I am fine, I’m going to be all right. There is nothing for any of you to worry about.' When she disappeared, he got up and wrote down the time and what she had said. The next morning, when Olga came out of surgery, she mentioned 'the strange dream' she’d had, which appears to have been a near-death experience. She not only had the experience of being out of her body watching the doctors operate, but she went to her family in the waiting room and tried to communicate with them. Unable to get through, she then decided to go to her son-in-law at his home, where 'she was sure she had stood at the foot of her son-in-law’s bed and told him that everything was going to be all right.' ”

The eighth $50,000 winner essay is by a man who devotes himself to describing the career of a Brazilian medium named Chico Xavier, who authored some 450 books, which he claimed were mainly produced with the help of discarnate spirits. A shorter summary of this case can be found here. I haven't studied the case, so I won't comment on it. 

The ninth $50,000 winner essay is a very strange and speculative essay by Nicolas Rouleau, who like Kastrup includes some not-very-convincing brain studies trying to support his ideas.  There's a lot of talk about electromagnetism and geomagnetic fields that I don't find very convincing. On page 37 of his essay he refers to the "electromagnetic forces that give rise to experience and thought," an idea that is as implausible as the claim that brains give rise to experience and thought. 

I recommend skipping the tenth $50,000 winner essay, one by David Rousseau and Julie Billingham. It features a bunch of boldface principles that are sometimes doubtful or untrue. One is the untrue statement that "a hypothesis cannot be proven, we can only argue for its plausibility." Another is the claim that "naturalistic things are the things that science can study," a principle that has long been used as an excuse for not studying the paranormal or the seemingly supernatural. If scientists were to follow such a principle, they would not study global warming, which is presumably an effect produced not by natural causes but by artificial human causes; and scientists would also not be looking for radio signals from extraterrestrials, things which would be of  artificial origin rather than a natural origin.  You won't learn much of anything in this essay that isn't discussed in the other essays. 

Finally in the list of $50,000 winner essays we have a very cleverly conceived  essay by Michael Tymn. Tymn imagines a kind of courtroom battle between two sides, one that believes in life after death, and one that does not. We read the prosecution case in favor of life after death, in which various witnesses are called, all actual people who wrote about the paranormal. Tymn makes up the questions that are asked, but all of the answers given seem to be quotations from the published works of the witnesses.  The overall result is a very readable presentation of evidence for life after death. 

On the same page we have "honorable mention" winners that each won a $20,000 prize.  One of these is an essay claiming to provide "definitive proof" of reincarnation, based on a single case.  The case fails to do that. We have similarities between statements of a child and the career or death of a pilot dying in World War II. The similarities could be the result of coincidence, or of some kind of paranormal knowledge acquisition (clairvoyance or ESP) that does not involve reincarnation, such as telepathy between a living person and a person living in some afterlife realm. A very scholarly and thorough entry in the "honorable mention" category is the almost-book-length essay of Walter Meyer zu Erpen, covering an extremely wide variety of topics (and including some very interesting personal observations).  

Of the $20,000 prize winners, perhaps the best is an essay by hospice doctor Christopher Kerr, who has long studied end-of-life visions and dreams in the dying. Thus far I have only been able to find rather skimpy papers or articles by Kerr on this topic, but here we have a long essay with much data, case examples and links to video interviews. Kerr reports this:

"Shortly before death, the dying have dreams and visions of their predeceased loved ones, scenes of vivid and meaningful reunions that testify to an inexplicably rich and transformative inner life. The phenomenon includes a lived, felt, often lucid experiential reality whereby those loved and 'lost' return to the dying in ways that cannot be explained by memory alone. Children and parents sometimes lost decades earlier come back to put patients back together and help them transition peacefully. At the precise moment we associate with darkness, loss, physical decline, and sadness, their presence helps the dying achieve peace, comfort, and forgiveness, which suggests an existence beyond our bodily form."

Kerr uses the phrase "shortly before death," but I have well-documented reasons to suspect that something along such lines may sometimes get started a year or more before a person's death. Reporting on a study of 1500+ patients in Buffalo, New York, Kerr states this: "The data confirmed that the vast majority of dying patients, shortly before death, have these comforting dreams and visions that most commonly summon predeceased loved ones."   

A cover art illustration by William Blake