When someone we love dies, are they really gone?
That question led my guest Liz Entin into an investigation of life after death.
Liz is the author of WTF Just Happened? A Sciencey Skeptic Explores Grief, Healing, and Evidence of an Afterlife. Raised atheist and describing herself as logical and skeptical, she assumed there was essentially no chance that consciousness continued after death. When her father was dying, the question suddenly became personal and she started looking at the evidence.
Years later, she has reached a different conclusion.
That's what interested me about having this conversation with her. We're both curious about unusual claims. Rather than debating whether there is or isn't life after death, we explored a different question:
What evidence is there, what can we reasonably conclude from it, and what would we need to know to reach stronger conclusions?
Children Who Appear to Remember Previous Lives
One of the first areas we discussed was research involving young children who report memories that appear to belong to someone who previously lived. Researchers, including psychiatrists Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, have investigated cases in which children's statements were compared with details from the lives of deceased individuals.
The age of the children makes these cases particularly interesting. An adult claiming to remember a previous life has spent decades absorbing information from books, television, conversations, the internet, and countless other sources. A young child has had fewer opportunities to do that.
What does a child knowing unusual information establish?
Not necessarily reincarnation. Other possibilities include: coincidence, information obtained without anyone realizing it, parental influence, selective memory, or details becoming altered as the story is repeatedly told.
We don't have to choose between: "This proves reincarnation."
and "The child made it up."
There's a more useful question: How could we make the evidence stronger?
One way would be to record a child's statements before anyone attempts to identify a deceased person. Independent researchers could try to match those statements, without knowing who the family thinks the child might have been. The more specific the information, the more accurately it matches, and the more ordinary information transfer can be eliminated, the harder the result becomes to explain as coincidence.
Even then, we wouldn't have proved reincarnation. We would have established: The child appears to possess information we cannot readily explain. Then we investigate further: was this due to actual experience or acccess to information?
Near-death experiences present a similar problem. People who come close to death sometimes report vivid experiences: leaving their bodies, traveling somewhere, encountering deceased relatives or beings, and observing events occurring around them.
The experience doesn't prove life after death. A person's brain could potentially produce an extraordinary experience during the process of dying, losing consciousness, or recovering. The more interesting cases are those involving verifiable information.
If someone reports observing something that happened while they were apparently unconscious—and they had no ordinary means of knowing about it—that moves the question from subjective experience toward testable evidence.
What does it establish? Perhaps consciousness left the body. Perhaps the person perceived something through a mechanism we don't understand. Perhaps they acquired information conventionally at some point and incorporated it into their memory.
We need a way to distinguish those explanations.
That suggests an experiment.
Researchers could deliberately place information where it could not normally be seen by a patient. If people who report observing the room from outside their bodies can repeatedly identify that hidden information at rates significantly above chance, we'd have stronger evidence that something unusual is occurring.
Would that prove life after death?
No.
It would give us something specific that our existing explanation would have to account for.
Can Mediums Really Know Things They Shouldn't Know?
Mediumship offers a traightforward opportunity for testing. The obvious problem is information leakage. A medium can research someone beforehand. Social media contains enormous amounts of personal information. Cold reading can extract information from someone's appearance and reactions. General statements can sound surprisingly specific when we apply them to our own lives.
Fraud exists.
If we want to know whether mediums are actually obtaining information through some unexplained mechanism, those possibilities have to be removed. Liz described taking precautions herself, including using fake names and having other people arrange readings. She has had readings she considered terrible and others containing surprisingly specific information.
One involved her deceased father. When Liz told her father she loved him, he apparently didn't normally respond with the conventional "I love you too." His response was closer to: “You know what I think of you.” During a reading, a medium gave herthat same unusual response. What can we conclude?
At most, we have evidence that the medium apparently obtained unusually specific information. We haven't established where it came from.
Design a Better Test
This is where mediumship becomes interesting and we don't have to argue about whether we believe it.
We can test it.
Remove contact between the medium and the person receiving the reading. Don't give the medium the person's name. Have someone independent record the reading. Then give the recipient several readings without telling them which one was supposedly intended for them.
Can recipients consistently identify their own readings?
If they can't, that tells us something. If they can at rates substantially greater than chance, repeat the experiment with tighter controls. If the result persists, we've established something interesting: Information appears to be transferring through a mechanism we haven't identified.
That wouldn't prove communication with dead people. Perhaps there's another mechanism we haven't considered. The experiment would establish the phenomenon first. Determining its cause would be the next problem.
Can We Measure What Happens to the Medium?
That led us to another possibility. Instead of measuring only the information coming from the medium, what if we also measure the medium? Liz discussed research in which brain activity has been examined while mediums perform readings. That creates another potential experiment. Measure the same person's brain activity while:
- having an ordinary conversation,
- imagining something,
- deliberately performing a cold reading,
- attempting mediumship,
- and producing readings later judged to contain accurate information.
Does anything reliably change?
Does a particular neurological pattern correlate with successful readings rather than the person's belief that they're communicating with someone?
If nothing differs, that's useful information. If something does differ consistently, we still haven't discovered an afterlife, we've found another measurable phenomenon to investigate. That's how the question can move away from belief and toward evidence.
Ghosts, EMF Meters, and the Problem of Interpretation
We discussed hauntings and equipment commonly used to investigate them. This is where it's especially easy to confuse a measurement with an explanation.
An EMF meter measures electromagnetic fields. If the meter suddenly shows a high reading inside a supposedly haunted building, we've learned that an electromagnetic field was detected. We haven't learned that a ghost caused it. Electrical wiring, appliances, current on conductors, and other ordinary sources can create electromagnetic fields.
Likewise, an unusual pattern on an infrared camera tells us there's a temperature difference. It doesn't tell us why. Calling an unexplained measurement a ghost simply replaces:
"We don't know what caused this."
with:
"A ghost caused this."
without providing the missing evidence.
This may be one of the most important principles in investigating unusual phenomena:
Measurement ≠ meaning.
First establish what was measured. Then investigate what caused it.
Are All "Ghosts" Supposed to Be the Same Thing?
Some accounts describe interactive entities. Others describe the same event happening repeatedly—a person walking through the same hallway or a sound occurring in the same location.
One hypothesis we discussed is that these could represent entirely different phenomena. A repetitive event might be analogous to a recording—a "place memory"—rather than a conscious entity. An apparition that responds to someone would imply something different.
We didn't conclude that either exists.
Separating the claims matters because they require different evidence.
Using one word—ghost—for everything unexplained can prevent us from asking what we're trying to explain.
Experience Isn't Necessarily Interpretation
Near-death experiences introduce another complication. People sometimes report seeing figures consistent with their religious or cultural beliefs. Does a Christian seeing Jesus establish that the figure was Jesus?
Not necessarily.
The person may have experienced something and then interpreted that experience using concepts already available to them.
Liz discussed an account involving a child who initially described encountering a "wizard" during a near-death experience. After adults interpreted the experience through a religious framework, the figure was subsequently described as Jesus. We can't know from that story what the child actually experienced. It raises an methodological problem:
The experience and the explanation of the experience may be different.
That's true far beyond near-death experiences. Humans experience something unusual and almost immediately ask:
"What was that?"
Our brains supply an explanation. It can become difficult to separate what we actually observed from the story we've constructed to explain it.
Consciousness
These questions run into a bigger one: What is consciousness? The conventional model assumes that the brain produces consciousness. There is considerable evidence connecting brain function with conscious experience.
Change the brain through injury, anesthesia, drugs, disease, or electrical stimulation and you can change perception, memory, personality, and awareness.
Another hypothesis we discussed is that the brain could somehow receive, filter, or interact with consciousness rather than exclusively creating it. I compared it to cloud computing. Destroying your computer doesn't necessarily destroy information stored elsewhere.
That's an analogy, not evidence that consciousness works that way, and we need to be careful. The fact that we don't completely understand how consciousness arises from the brain doesn't establish that consciousness exists independently of it.
Neither should we pretend we've completely solved the problem of consciousness. Once again we're left with a question: What experiment could distinguish between consciousness generated by the brain and consciousness that can exist independently of it?
That's a much harder experiment to design. Perhaps it's the most important one.
So, Is There Life After Death?
We didn't prove it.
We didn't disprove it..
There are several categories of observations, each with different strengths and weaknesses.
- Children report information connected with deceased people.
- People experiencing near-death states report events they shouldn't have been able to observe.
- Mediums appear capable of providing surprisingly specific information.
- People report apparitions and unusual experiences.
Researchers have attempted to study some of these phenomena scientifically.
None individually gets us all the way from observation to: “Therefore, consciousness survives death.” These observations tell us what to investigate next.
A child knows something they seemingly shouldn't know? Document the statements before searching for a match.
Someone claims to leave their body during a near-death experience? Create information they could only perceive from the location they claim to occupy.
A medium knows things they shouldn't know? Remove every conventional source of information and see whether the ability remains.
Something unusual happens while a medium performs a successful reading? Measure it and see whether it's repeatable.
When we encounter something we can't explain, resist the temptation to label it either proof of the paranormal or nonsense. The accurate conclusion is : We don't know yet.
Liz's investigation changed her mind about life after death. The evidence she encountered accumulated such that she now considers survival of consciousness highly probable. Whether the same evidence is sufficient to convince someone else is another question. For me, that's what makes the subject worth exploring. We don't have to begin by deciding whether life after death is real.
We can begin with the evidence, ask what else could explain it, identify what we don't yet know, and design better ways of finding out.
The most interesting question isn't:
Do you believe in life after death?
It's:
What evidence would it take for you to know?
About the Host / Author
Daniel Stih is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. Through engineering, investigations, and interdisciplinary research, he explores how people define problems, interpret evidence, and make conclusions when there's uncertainty. Learn more in Why I Think This Way.