Shermer, Michael

Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the director of the Skeptics Society. With a Ph.D. in the history of science, he is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things; How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science; The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, and Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. His monthly column “Skeptic” appears in Scientific American. At the core of Michael’s worldview is the centrality of critical thinking, a logical approach to evidence and reasoning protected from insidious wishful thinking and sloppy thought. Here is how he deals with claims of life after death: “I once saw a bumper sticker that read: ‘Militant Agnostic: I Don’t Know and You Don’t Either.’ This is my position on the afterlife: I don’t know and you don’t either. If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we would not fear death as we do, we would not mourn quite so agonizingly the death of loved ones, and there would be no need to engage in debates on the subject. Because no one knows for sure what happens after we die, we deal with the topic in diverse ways through religion, literature, poetry, science, and even humor…. Humor aside, since I am a scientist and claims are made that there is scientific evidence for life after death, let us analyze the data for that doubtful future date, and consider what its possibility may mean for our present state…What is it that supposedly survives the death of the physical body? The soul. There are about as many different understandings of the nature of the soul as there are religions and spiritual movements. The general belief is that the soul is a conscious ethereal substance that is the unique essence of a living being that survives its incarnation in flesh…. In science we define our terms with semantic precision. I define the “soul” as the unique pattern of information that represents the essence of a person. By this definition, unless there is some medium to retain the pattern of our personal information after we die, our soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of proteins, coded by our DNA, so with the disintegration of DNA our protein patterns are lost forever. Our memories and personality are stored in the patterns of neurons firing in our brains, so when those neurons die it spells the death of our memories and personality, similar to the ravages of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, only final. Because the brain does not perceive itself, it imputes mental activity to a separate source — hallucinations of preternatural entities such as ghosts, angels, and aliens are perceived as actual beings; out-of-body and near-death experiences are sensed as external events instead of internal states. Likewise, the neural pattern of information that is our memories and personality — our “self” — is sensed as a soul. In this sense, the soul is an illusion….. Here is the reality. It has been estimated that in the last 50,000 years about 106 billion humans were born. Of the 100 billion people born before the six billion living today, every one of them has died and not one has returned to confirm for us beyond a reasonable doubt that there is life after death. This data set does not bode well for promises of immortality and claims for an afterlife….” In addressing (in the same context) Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas of morphic fields, Michael writes, “Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to do a newspaper crossword puzzle later in the day? Me neither. But according to Rupert Sheldrake it is because the collective wisdom of the morning successes resonates throughout the cultural morphic field. In Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance,” similar forms (morphs, or “fields of information”) reverberate and exchange information within a universal life force. ‘As time goes on, each type of organism forms a special kind of cumulative collective memory,’ Sheldrake writes in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. ‘The regularities of nature are therefore habitual. Things are as they are because they were as they were.’ Morphic resonance, says Sheldrake, is ‘the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species,’ and explains phantom limbs, homing pigeons, how dogs know when their owners are coming home, and such psychic phenomena as how people know when someone is staring at them. ‘Vision may involve a two-way process, an inward movement of light and an outward projection of mental images,’ Sheldrake explains. Thousands of trials conducted by anyone who downloaded the experimental protocol from Sheldrake’s Web page ‘have given positive, repeatable, and highly significant results, implying that there is indeed a widespread sensitivity to being stared at from behind.’ Let’s examine this claim more closely. First, science is not normally conducted by strangers who happen upon a Web page protocol, so we have no way of knowing if these amateurs controlled for intervening variables and experimenter biases. Second, psychologists dismiss anecdotal accounts of this sense to a reverse self-fulfilling effect: a person suspects being stared at and turns to check; such head movement catches the eyes of would-be starers, who then turn to look at the staree, who thereby confirms the feeling of being stared at. Third, in 2000 John Colwell from Middlesex University, London, conducted a formal test utilizing Sheldrake’s suggested experimental protocol, with 12 volunteers who participated in 12 sequences of 20 stare or no-stare trials each, with accuracy feedback provided for the final nine sessions. Results: subjects were able to detect being stared at only when accuracy feedback was provided, which Colwell attributed to the subjects learning what was, in fact, a nonrandom presentation of the experimental trials. When the University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman also attempted to replicate Sheldrake’s research, he found that subjects detected stares at rates no better than chance. Fourth, there is an experimenter bias problem. Institute of Noetic Sciences’ researcher Marilyn Schlitz (a believer in psi) collaborated with Wiseman (a skeptic of psi) in replicating Sheldrake’s research, and discovered that when they did the staring Schlitz found statistically significant results, whereas Wiseman found chance results. Sheldrake responds that skeptics dampen the morphic field’s subtle power, whereas believers enhance it. Of Wiseman, Sheldrake remarked: ‘Perhaps his negative expectations consciously or unconsciously influenced the way he looked at the subjects.’ Perhaps, but how can we tell the difference between negative-psi and non-psi? As it is said, the invisible and the nonexistent look the same.”