Carl Sagan and True Fringe-ology

Sagan in Leather

(This first appeared on the Daily Grail)

I wrote Fringe-ology with the aim of being equally skeptical of both paranormal claims and skeptical explanations for them. In other words, I think it is incumbent upon believers in the paranormal to present evidence for the phenomena they describe. But I think there comes a point in the debate where the burden of proof shifts. In practice this means anyone touting the Near Death Experience as evidence of an afterlife needs to bring something to the party. A "hit" in the Aware study, for instance, would be fabulous. That would mean one of the patients in Dr. Sam Parnia's vast pool of candidates would have to be able to name the random, controlled target that had been present when they were resuscitated and "out of body." Failing that, I do find Janice Miner Holden's research paper, "Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences," which documents the accuracy of reported out of body perceptions, compelling enough that all but the most die-hard skeptics should be convinced to do more than simply keep an open mind. They should, in fact, be convinced that it is time for them to do a better job of explaining the NDE than they have to date.

After all, at this stage, no one disputes that the Near Death Experience is a real phenomenon. The data pile for the NDE is robust enough that we can even make testable predictions based off the accumulated literature: Conservatively, five-percent or more of resuscitated patients will remember an NDE. And in each case, the NDE will contain similar content. A majority of experiencers will report feelings of peace and joy, an out of body experience, a perception of white light and reports of visiting another world. Further, of those people, the vast majority will take the experience to be objectively real. They will also change for the better as a result. The prospect of death, for instance, will hold considerably less sting.

In light of this, it seems plain to me that the NDE is well founded enough that it deserves a similarly well-founded explanation. This means any claimed explanation for it should face some scientific scrutiny. Problem is, it is precisely when the current skeptical model(s) for NDEs are subjected to questioning that they most readily fall apart.

I write a far longer argument about this in Fringe-ology. But in short, brain-based explanations require skeptics to develop a working model explaining how the different circumstances NDErs find themselves in at the time of their experience produce predictable changes in the content and character of what they report. People lacking oxygen should report something different than people who had plenty of oxygen and people under anesthesia should describe something different than people under the influence of no narcotics at all. The current lack of such a model for how Near Death Experiences are produced doesn't mean no such explanation or combination of explanations will emerge. But because skeptics have thus far failed to make a convincing case the NDE continues to represent a real mystery.

The problem is, we human beings don't seem to like mystery very much. So where mystery exists we often force the data at hand toward some conclusion. Because the NDE and the afterlife are so tied up in claims about religion and heaven and hell this tendency is further exacerbated by all the emotion involved. The NDE is unwanted by a lot of fundamentalist believers in religion, while others of a mystical bent are likely to embrace the NDE as slam dunk evidence of an afterlife. Further, to materialists who believe that in the end, there's nothing—that the brain, as Stephen Hawking recently put it, is a kind of computer and there's no afterlife for computers—the NDE is an affront to their worldview.

We all know what happens next: People tend to look at the data that confirms their point of view, but not the data that doesn't. And in this sense, the NDE becomes a kind of wishing pool: We stare into it and resolve its mystery by perceiving in it a reflection of the world we most expect or wish to see.

This line of argument is usually directed solely at believers. But in researching and writing Fringe-ology I found numerous examples of skeptics engaged in prolonged and public bouts of self-deceit.

The late great Carl Sagan, for instance, proposed an explanation for Near Death Experiences that never had a chance. Just a few years after the phrase Near Death Experience was coined by Raymond Moody, Sagan proposed that the source of tunnel reports in NDE stories was a replay of the birth experience. At the time of our death, he wrote, a repressed memory of the birth experience may surface. The sensation of passing through a tunnel and floating into another world and a mystical white light is a mirror of the experience of passing through the birth canal and emerging into a bright delivery room and the waiting hands of doctors and nurses.

From the beginning, this idea (to be clear, Sagan picked it up from another researcher—and ran with it) worked solely in a poetic sense. Our medical understanding at the time of Sagan's writing suggested an infant's visual system and memory aren't capable of registering the birth experience in the manner necessary for this explanation to be viable. And of course, the experiences don't really match up.

Is being smashed and struggling inside the birth canal anything like the peaceful, floating tunnel experience people describe in their NDEs? In fact, said baby is usually delivered with the crown of its head emerging first while its eyes remain closed and mashed against the vaginal wall.

In short, Sagan's favored theory never had anything to support it beyond his famous name. Others before me have soundly refuted it. (Most damningly, if Sagan's idea was right we'd expect people born by caesarean to report far fewer, if any, tunnel experiences. But people removed from the womb surgically are as likely to report tunnels as those born by vaginal delivery.) We're well past the point, though, where simply knocking Sagan's argument down is enough. I think we need to ask ourselves a further question:

Namely, why did Sagan ever propose such an obvious nonstarter of an idea?

My proposed answer is at once simple and surely incendiary for those who revere Sagan as a scientist, thinker and skeptic.

You ready?

He liked it.

In fact, Sagan liked the idea so much he wrote an entire essay, "The amniotic universe," describing how "birth trauma" and repressed memories thereof might influence us in various ways throughout our lives. More to the point, as a committed skeptic and non-theist he was so predisposed to dismiss the prospect of life after death that he was willing, even eager, to subject the NDE to the rigorous critical thinking skeptics like to proclaim. Problem is, once he had an "explanation" he liked he clearly shut his own critical faculties off.

This is how the human machine often works, leading us to commit to the answers that best fit our worldview. And this state of affairs makes true Fringe-ology—determining what we really know about the subjects we push to the fringe—tremendously difficult at best. Of course, being aware that we have a problem here is half the battle. And the Sagan example strikes me as foundational in understanding that in discussions of the paranormal, we—believers and unbelievers alike—are up against ourselves, our common humanity, our inclination to support our pre-existing beliefs.

What we might do about this is a subject for a later time…