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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Milestone in Survival Research, July 1, 2003
Folks who are not afraid of looking at what are still regarded as intellectually obscene phenomena (mediumship, apparitions, past live experiences, etc.) will be pleased to have such an able and sharp thinker as philosopher Stephen Braude examining the evidence for life after death. Braude demonstrates how essential it is to acknowledge dissociative disorders and latent creative abilities when looking at some of the best cases suggesting survival, as well as the respective psychological settings in which those investigations are carried out. An implicit but also vital lesson to learn from "Immortal Remains" is how emotionally detached an author can and must be from this truly existential question (at least when dealing with it scientifically), as obviously managed by Braude, who permanently and cool-headedly weighs the arguments pro and con. If you're out for easy answers, this book is not for you; if you enjoy brain-racking argumentation combined with a down-to-earth humor, "Immortal Remains" has certainly earned a place on your bookshelf. In my view, this book is the legitimate successor of Alan Gauld's "Mediumship and Survival," and at the same time raises the standards of scientific survival research on an overdue next level.
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21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Incompleteness Remains..., October 9, 2004
Stephen Braude did an excellent work in this book. Since this topic is amazingly vast, there is no escape from making a highly "incomplete" work. Nonetheless, he managed to achieve a level of quality that, in my view, makes this book a must in the field. It did help me enormously, both with its empirical feedbacks and with its theoretical ones. The main strength of it is its deep and detailed evaluation and comparison of the "life after life hypothesis" (also known as "survivalist hypothesis") vs the "super paranormality hypothesis" (usually known as super psi or super ESP).
I would like to comment on some flaws, however.
The first chapter, "Preliminaries", gives a theoretical background of the issues involved. It is a good chapter indeed, but I think it should have been better. Braude makes a witty distinction between "epistemological survival" vs "ontological survival" (a distinction that, curiously, I myself had come to some time ago, in the form of "objective survival" vs "subjective survival"). But I think he should have dealt more deeply with what is meant by "survival", and especially HOW we survive both after death and BEFORE death (probing these issues leads one to curious and insightful conclusions...). Tightly linked to this previous issue is the question of "identity" or "what we really ARE and what makes each one of us really US" (that is: what is it to be an "individual"?). Further, I found him lacking for not dealing with the problem of "what is consciousness?". There is a huge body of discussion, both in phylosophy and in science, about the true nature of consciouness; that is: is consciousness really produced by the brain (materialism) or is it a fundamental element of the Universe (Brahmanist Panpsychism)? Many, like me, claim that materialism is on very poor and even self contradictory theoretical and logical grounds, and on rather cracked empirical grounds too: almost a "Paradigm Lost". Also, some background on the current discussion about the possibility of "machine consciousness" would have been handy.
Braude could have made his work more "acceptable" to skeptical readers. For example, he treats ESP (extra-sensory perception) as a proved fact (something with which I fully agree!), but he does not show WHY it is already proved. It would have been easy to give a concise exposition of, say, the current status of the experiments on "telepathy" using Ganzfeld protocols, and therefore show why ESP is so strongly based and why and how skeptics (CSICOP et al) have simply nothing to say contrary to it (James Randi, Susan Blackmore, and Ray Hyman included...).
In the chapter on reincarnation and possession (chapter 6), Braude says that Ian Stevenson has 33 cases of the "strongest" type suggestive of reincarnation (page 182), which Braude called "early bird cases" (cases with written records made BY THE RESEARCHER before attempts to identify the previous personality). I believe this figure is wrong, and actually it refers to the slightly weaker cases (maybe not so slightly...) where there are written records before identification of the previous personality, but not written down BY THE RESEARCHER: these records were in these instances written down (and the previous personality found) usually by members of the families involved. He comments on the Schouten & Stevenson 1998 article as if it compared only the strongest case types with the "weakest" (cases with NO written records made by anyone before identification of the previous personality), but actually this article does include the "slightly weaker" case types that I mention above!
I didn't very much like the chapter 8 on "out-of-body experiences" (including near-death experiences). Braude did not analyze very well the data from Near-Death Experiences, both in its possible strengths and in its possible weaknesses! He says, on page 274, that Pam Reynolds had a flat EEG (and also no blood in her brain plus body temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit - 15 degrees Celsius - and no brainstem activity) FOR ABOUT AN HOUR. Also, he says that she did have veridical perceptions WHILE IN THIS EXTREME STATE. Both these statements are incorrect. A careful reading of the very same book that Braude cited for this (Light and Death, Michael Sabom, 1998, chapter 3) clearly indicates that this extreme condition probably did not last longer than half an hour (I guess it actually lasted about 20 minutes or less) and that she had ABSOLUTELY NO verifiable perception while in this state! Surprisingly enough, this misreporting of the Pam Reynolds case is extremely ubiquitous on the internet (including www near-death com). Braude's is not the only scholarly work that misreports it. Van Lommel et al's article (The Lancet, 2001), also does! (But Emily Kelly, Bruce Greyson, and Ian Stevenson reported the case correctly in 2000, Omega Jounal of Death and Dying, vol 40(4) pp. 513-519, 1999-2000). At the same time, Braude did not mention some potential strengths pointed out both by van Lommel et al (The Lancet, 2001) and by Sam Parnia et al (Resuscitation, 2001). Further, I think Braude downplays the significance of NDE cases for the survival issue. It is true that NDE is not about "after death", but about "during dying" instead. However, it is the only empirical data in this field that can possibly move us from the "epistemological (objective) survival" arena into the "ontological (subjective) survival" scenario.
Braude even comes to the extreme of considering that the evidence from NDE-OBE "gives us no reason to believe that the mind is more substantial, resilient, and self-sustaining than a fart" (page 276). I think it is too extreme a comparison because he is comparing the mind with what we have of most disorganized, volatile, and short living (gases). I know of no case of anyone ever reporting being able even to sense (see, hear, etc) through his/her farts...
Despite all these comments above, it is necessary to stress that Braude's book is indeed a must in the field, and that although naturally incomplete, it is a work that deserves to be... Immortal!
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly insightful analysis of the evidence for survival, June 17, 2004
A reviewer on this page was obviously frustrated by the lack of a conclusion in 'Immortal Remains'. But the response, "I don't know", or "I'm not 100% sure", is a perfectly good one when investigating a diverse and complex subject such as survival after death. A book like Braude's, which grapples in great conceptual depth with ostensible evidence for survival and the various hypotheses that have arisen around this evidence, will not seem at all palatable to people with presupposed opinions on the issue. In any case, the current evidence for survival is not strong enough that one can fully commit oneself to any particular hypothesis.Prof. Braude, to his credit, fully explores some of the best ostensible evidence for survival without any evident bias or coyness. He compares it against the evidence for psychic functioning among the living, motivated ESP, hidden capacities, creativity, linguistic skills, dissociation, and considers whether, and to what extent, they can help explain cases such as Runki's Leg, Mrs. Piper's trance mediumship, Cagliostro, Patience Worth, Sharada and others. In the best cases the evidence is so remarkable that, ultimately, one must adopt either survival or super-psi (coupled with other abilities) as the most likely interpretation. But how do we decide? This is where Braude's book really shines through. He fully explores both hypotheses in their strongest and most plausible forms. Although most cases end in a stalemate between survival and super-psi, Braude hesitantly favours survival since super-psi would inevitably suffer from "crippling complexity" - i.e. super-psi requires multiple casual chains which would be vulnerable to a huge array of obstacles, unlike the survival hypothesis which requires only the integrity of a single causal connection between the psychic subject and a post-mortem individual. Whatever difficulties people find with Braude's analytical style, books like his are essential to advance the study of this vital issue and give it the intellectual and philosophical depth it deserves. Essential reading.
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