The failure of five psychical researchers to confront my critique of Bigelow Institute contest-winning essays with counterpoints or concessions responsive to its novel criticisms is disappointing. Their defensive and scattershot reply lost sight of whether the critiqued essays met their directive to provide "hard evidence 'beyond a reasonable doubt'" of the survival of human consciousness. In the critique I also questioned the scientific validity of seeking ostensible evidence for discarnate personal survival without giving due care to potential evidence against it, (...) for no scientific (or even legal) investigation of evidence tips the scales in favor of a preordained conclusion by simply never adding any opposing items to the opposite scale. Survival researchers, though, have consistently proceeded in this partisan way. Those who claim that science should expand its metaphysically conservative picture to include things otherwise not known to exist assume the burden of showing what they claim. My interlocutors' almost exclusively testimonial evidence does not adhere to the long-standing scientific principles required by the scientific community. For the kind of evidence that could be publicly confirmed is simply not the kind that survival researchers have been able to provide, just as we would expect of a hodgepodge of deception, embellishment, malobservation, misreporting, self-deception, and so on; but which would be surprising on the hypothesis that discarnate personal survival occurs. The survival evidence does not even survive elementary scrutiny, let alone outweigh our everyday experience of the biological fragility of our own minds. The totality of the evidence renders discarnate personal survival highly unlikely. Attempts to reinterpret this evidence away through various analogies fail because a hypothesis that makes false predictions, like that of the independence of individual consciousness from a functioning brain, will continue to make them no matter what analogy one uses to illustrate it. -/- 1. The "Best" Survival Evidence: Mental Mediumship -- 2. Testimonial Evidence and the Burden of Proof -- 3. Does Physical Mediumship Provide Good Evidence of Survival? -- 4. Advancing Beyond Eternally Debatable Evidence -- 5. Prospective Experimental Tests of Survival -- 6. Setting the Record Straight -- 7. Rising to the Neuroscientific Challenge -- 8. Conclusion: Reframing Facts Does Not Change Them. (shrink)

In this paper, death and immortality ideas of Russian cosmists are in syncretic way put together with key ideas in postmodern philosophy. The problem considered in world philosophy on creating co-evolutionary conditions for the emergence of «immortal» man is illustrated by a wide variety of ideas and concepts. This paper contains innovative ideas of the Russian cosmists as the starting point of the research. Special attention is paid to the extraordinary teachings of N. F. Fedorov, who is the founder of (...) Russian Cosmic philosophy. Using the system-diachronic method and technologies of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, the author compares the ideas of Russian cosmism with manifest concepts of modern philosophy (synergetics, phenomenology, transhumanism). The author also gives the most striking facts of discoveries of modern natural science and draws conclusions about ideas of Russian cosmists that have been put forward ahead of their time and retained their relevance and ontological potential until now. The paper presents the prospects for further studying the heritage of Russian cosmism to search for philosophical tools that could, without going beyond the limits of ethical universals, successfully combine the controversial theoretical directions of modern philosophy for the future positive practical development of society. (shrink)

After rejecting substance dualism, some naturalists embrace patternism. It states that persons are bodies and that bodies are material machines running abstract person programs. Following Aristotle, these person programs are souls. Patternists adopt four-dimensionalist theories of persistence: Bodies are 3D stages of 4D lives. Patternism permits at least six types of life after death. It permits quantum immortality, teleportation, salvation through advanced technology, promotion out of a simulated reality, computational monadology, and the revision theory of resurrection.

This paper looks at embodiment from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The notion that embodiment is an essential requirement for conscious awareness is explored using both a scientific and religious approach. Artificial intelligence, transhumanism and cybernetics are discussed as they force a pragmatic approach to defining and understanding situated embodiment. The concept of human immortality or extended longevity is also investigated as this further exposes the myths of transcending corporeality and also helps to explain the mission of transhumanism.