The following was originally meant to be a comment for the YouTube comment section , so PLEASE expect this to be pitiful when judged by academic standards! For academic standards, contact me.
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To whom it may concern, RE Braude vs Sudduth on survival vs living-agent psi:
UMBC Philosopher Stephen Braude's 2003 book "Immortal Remains" is an in depth philosophical analysis of the empirical arguments for postmortem survival in the form of trance mediumship, NDE/OBEs, alleged reincarnation, and heart/lung transplant cases. Much of the work discussed or alluded to was published by the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and its American branch (ASPR), both of which are still around today and whose members include skeptics and "believers" alike (e.g. arch-skeptic Richard Wiseman was a council member for the SPR for ten years...). Braude shows that, in the best cases (e.g. Kakie sittings and GP sittings among countless others) the mundane "usual suspects" of fraud, malobservation, etc. are unable to even "get a foot in the door." He then explores what he calls "exotic but non-paranormal" explanations in terms of latent savant-like talents that emerge (either only or mostly) in certain dissociative states. Here again Braude shows that the "best cases" can't be explained this way due to the fact (or very high likelihood) of anomalous information acquisition not mediated by the five senses. This leaves only two options:
Either:
A: Genuine instances of survival (with the surviving personality somehow interacting with the empirical world)
or
B: Psychic functioning among living persons that mimics or simulates the appearance of postmortem survival. LAP hypothesis or "super-psi" hypothesis, although the latter term is often taken to be pejorative and misleading. LAP arguments often overlap with arguments over Schizoaffective spectrum and/or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), especially in cases of trance mediumship. It can be argued that, in cases where "normal" non-survival explanations fail, it may still be the case that these personalities are the product of dissociative states that allow the use of latent psychic functioning, which together look an awful lot like someone is really getting intimate information from a departed loved on.
(NO, I am not saying that DID and schizophrenia are the same. Many people mistake the two. They're different conditions)
B comes in a variety of forms, and critics allege that it would require a degree of psi prowess that hasn't been demonstrated in non-survival contexts. Braude questions this claim but also shows that it wouldn't matter that much anyway. Even IF psychic functioning is less refined in all non-survival contexts, one can still argue that LAP is more plausible than actual survival.
In studying the merits of LAP Braude did extensive research into DID and dissociation, resulting in both his book "First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind" (https://tinyurl.com/yyrsrzap) and his receiving the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (you can find his name on their official web site; I'm too lazy to fetch it)
That aside, Braude ultimately ends up concluding that the scales are slightly tipped in favor of survival over LAP, but "it's not a slam-dunk."
ENTER SUDDUTH
Philosophy professor Michael Sudduth argues that survivalists implicitly presuppose certain "auxiliary assumptions" that they haven't shown to be plausible. As a result, among other things, Sudduth thinks that survivalists have not been able to rule out LAP as a competing explanation for the empirical observations. Sudduth himself specifically details (among others) the "34 veridical claims" in the kakie sittings and the impressive hits in the GP sittings. See his book "A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Postmortem Survival." (https://tinyurl.com/y46bddqv)
To be sure, there are alleged survival cases that Sudduth wouldn't even want to invoke LAP for, and my above summary of his "Philosophical Critique" is pitiful given the rich and sophisticated content, but I'm not aware of any place where Sudduth has denied the existence of ESP/psi effects. On the contrary, in several places he seems to imply their existence.
For example, in a blog entry in which he replies to survivalist Christ Carter, Sudduth writes,
[QUOTE]
Most empirical survivalists, and Carter is no exception here, think it’s fairly clear that ordinary-psi cannot account for salient strands of evidence. Hence, Carter speaks of “ESP of the required power and range” (emphasis mine). So survivalists tend to devote most of their energy to refuting the super-psi version of the LAP hypothesis.
Now I’ve argued elsewhere (Sudduth 2013a, 2013b) that survivalists have not adequately grounded the ostensible requirement that psi be of a greater magnitude, potency, or refinement than ordinary-psi in order to pose a problem for survival arguments. In this I’m preceded by and INDEBTED TO THE HIGH CALIBER WORK OF PHILOSOPHER STEPHEN BRAUDE (2003). Part of the problem is that survivalists operate with an implausibly narrow conception of how living-agent psi would challenge empirical arguments for survival, and this is often further based on a weak grasp of the content of the LAP hypothesis. I’ve tried to show how ORDINARY-PSI DOES INDEED pose a challenge to classical empirical survival arguments. This is particularly acute when survival arguments are formulated along Bayesian lines and propose a conclusion about the net plausibility of the survival hypothesis based on the extent to which the survival hypothesis leads us to expect the data, the extent to which the data are otherwise not to be expected, and the initial credibility of the survival hypothesis.
[END QUOTE, caps added for emphasis. see http://michaelsudduth.com/chris-carters-challenge-survival-vs-super-psi/]
Here Sudduth not only praises Braude but also implicitly accepts psi, at least for the sake of argument.
In a 2019 interview with Carlos Alvarado, Sudduth says, "I also benefited from a decade of conversations with parapsychologists and fellow philosophers who have worked and published on this topic. I’ve also joined parapsychologists on some field investigations over the years (with Loyd Auerbach, for example), and I’ve critically examined mediums firsthand. I'VE ALSO PERSONALLY EXPERIENCED a broad range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena." (caps added). See https://tinyurl.com/y3vhwuf8
Finally, see Sudduth's 2009 paper "Super-psi and the Survivalist Interpretation of Mediumship" at michaelsudduth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/jse_23_2_sudduth.pdf . From the abstract:
[QUOTE] According to the survivalist interpretation of mediumship, the existence of discarnate persons provides the best explanation for the data associated with physical and mental mediumship. Others—advocates of what is often called the “super-psi hypothesis”—maintain that the data of mediumship may be at least equally explained in terms of living agent psi (ESP and psychokinesis). Many defenders of the survivalist interpretation of mediumship attempt to deflate the alleged explanatory virtues of the super-psi hypothesis by arguing that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable and lacks independent evidential support. My central contention in this paper is that these frequently encountered survivalist criticisms of the super-psi hypothesis are ultimately self-defeating to the case for survival from mediumship. To show this I first argue in some detail that the survivalist interpretation of mediumship is committed to a kind or degree of psi that is indistinguishable from what is required by the super-psi hypothesis. From this vantage point it can be shown that any attempt to impugn the explanatory virtues of the super-psi hypothesis on account of the kind or degree of psi it requires undercuts the argument for survival itself. [END OF QUOTATION]
