Stephen E Braude

Stephen Braude is an American philosopher and parapsychologist whose work focuses on the analysis of historical cases of macro-psychokinesis and trance mediumship. He evaluates these phenomena in the context of what we know about hypnosis, dissociation and exceptional human abilities, and he is well-known for defending the strength of the living-agent psi hypothesis for apparent evidence of survival of death, though he believes that the evidence does slightly favor survival overall. He has also conducted field studies of subjects who claim to produce reliably impressive PK, with mixed results.

Life and Career

Stephen E Braude (b 1945) earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in 1967 and as an undergraduate spent time studying at the University of London University College. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1971.

Braude began teaching at the University of Maryland Baltimore College (UMBC) in 1971 as an assistant professor of philosophy and was appointed full professor in 1987. He chaired the department from 1998-2005 and again from 2009-2011.

It was while a graduate student that the formerly materialist Braude first became interested in the paranormal. In 1969, some friends invited him to participate in a game of ‘table up’, and he was surprised (and frightened) to witness multiple convincingly paranormal table movements.1 However, it was not until the summer of 1975 that he began to seriously investigate parapsychology,2 and he waited until he had been awarded tenure before publishing on the topic.3

Braude began by studying the laboratory evidence for psi and laid out his findings in his first book, ESP and Psychokinesis, published in 1979. At that time, he still ‘accept[ed] uncritically the received view that laboratory evidence was inherently cleaner, and more respectable and reliable, than the non-experimental evidence’.4 But this was soon to change. A few years later, he had been ‘bowled over’ by the historical evidence for macro-psychokinesis (PK),5 and he became one of parapsychology’s staunchest advocates for the importance of spontaneous psi phenomena.

Most of Braude’s contributions to the field have been by way of analysis and theorization of existing case material, specifically with regard to macro-PK and the evidence for survival after death. Nevertheless, he has also undertaken a fair amount of fieldwork, almost exclusively concentrating on individuals who claim to be able to produce macro-PK with some regularity. He attributes this choice of specialty to his preference for ‘the drama and immediacy of seemingly paranormal physical phenomena’ as well as the fact that, as a philosopher who was also a professional musician after hours,6 he did not have time for poltergeist or haunting cases, where investigators were frequently left sitting around for long stretches waiting for something to happen.7

Braude has been president of the Parapsychological Association, served as editor-in-chief of the Journal for Scientific Exploration from 2010-2021, and received numerous awards and research grants.

Braude is known for his strident criticisms of other scholars and researchers. For instance, Braude makes no bones about his disenchantment with the mainstream intellectual community and its refusal to acknowledge the vast evidence for psi. In multiple prefaces that he himself describes as ‘truculent’, he makes clear his contempt for the ignorance, cowardice, and plain bad faith he believes many intellectuals and self-described ‘skeptics’ to have demonstrated.8 Braude has also shown little patience for the oversights, conceptual confusions, and lack of boldness he attributes to fellow parapsychologists,9 and he acknowledges that some of his colleagues have found the tone of his criticisms ‘rude and offensive’.10 But, he says, ‘[i]f criticism is too polite, it becomes too easy to brush off’.11

In his late fifties, Braude – who was previously married and divorced – wed Djurdjina ‘Gina’ Ruk,12 a native of the former Republic of Yugoslavia and a former professor of psychology at the University of Novi Sad.13 In his postscript to The Gold Leaf Lady, he chronicles Ruk’s apparent ability to make extraordinarily precise astrological predictions, including predictions about the unfolding of professional sports matches and the optimal time to play slot machines.

Braude is now retired from UMBC, where he holds the title professor emeritus. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Psychokinesis (PK)

Braude argues that the evidence for macro-PK is substantial and convincing and that the best of it comes from cases of physical mediumship – in particular, the phenomena produced by DD Home and Eusapia Palladino, which were carefully investigated and documented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to providing a thorough account of the best phenomena produced by each of these mediums, Braude’s 1986 book The Limits of Influence (revised and expanded in 1997) explores more theoretical questions related to PK, such as the best conditions for studying it (which he argues are ‘in the wild’, not the laboratory) and its potential magnitude, ubiquity, and covertness. Braude concludes that PK needs to be taken much more seriously as a possible explanation for such disparate phenomena as collective apparitions, persistent bad luck, and apparent precognition.

In addition to his analysis of historical cases, Braude has also conducted fieldwork investigating ostensible PK agents. The majority of these subjects (but not all) have been disappointing, though Braude has found the process of investigating them informative in various ways. In addition to the Gold Leaf Lady and the Felix Experimental Group described below, Braude investigated other subjects described in his 2007 book The Gold Leaf Lady. He also reports in that book on some casual observation he did of psychic thoughtographer Ted Serios and describes how he found a home for the Jule Eisenbud collection on Ted Serios at UMBC.

The Gold Leaf Lady

Braude calls his observations of Katie – aka the ‘Gold Leaf Lady’ – his ‘most fascinating paranormal investigation’.14 He first learned about Katie in 1987 and investigated her abilities from 1988-1990. Katie was reputed to have many intriguing psychic capacities, including the ability to channel quatrains from Nostradamus in medieval French, but Braude focused on her most unprecedented ability: the materialization of gold-colored foil directly on her skin, as well as sometimes on her clothing or nearby objects. This phenomenon was not under her conscious control and was frequently embarrassing to her as well as physically uncomfortable.

Unlike all other psychic materializations of which Braude was aware, Katie’s foil had the unique property of not dematerializing afterward. This made it available for laboratory analysis, which showed it to be brass – copper and zinc in a ratio of roughly 4:1.

Skilled magician Christopher Chacon confirmed that the clinginess of the foil made it exceedingly difficult to manipulate in a deceptive fashion, but Braude concluded that the foil could not have been exuded through Katie’s skin, as this ‘would have required lethal amounts of the metals in her system’ and her blood work turned up no suspicious abnormalities.15 Furthermore, members of the Johns Hopkins Department of Materials Science and Engineering examined the foil’s structure and determined that it ‘had the same granular structure as ordinary pressed or rolled leaf’ and did not have the crystalline structure that would be expected if Katie had dissolved brass in a solution and applied it to her skin as a liquid.16

Braude conducted several carefully controlled observations of Katie, before which he and co-investigator Berthold E Schwarz would search her person and clothing. Braude only once saw the foil appear on Katie’s body in plain view during these controlled sessions, but he also saw it happen in a more natural setting, when Katie was greeting him and his wife. In both the controlled and natural settings, the initial materialization was quite small but then grew noticeably larger.

Braude would have liked to investigate and document Katie’s abilities further but was prevented in this by the resistance of her psychologically abusive husband. Ironically, Braude thought it likely that Katie’s difficult domestic situation actually provoked the materialization of the metal foil in the first place, in the same way that emotional distress is thought to provoke poltergeist phenomena.

Despite Braude’s inability to investigate Katie’s abilities as thoroughly as he would have liked, he concludes that ‘the evidence for the paranormal origin of the golden leaf is compelling, even in its current and still somewhat preliminary state. The anecdotal testimony is too extensive, and the conditions of observation have been too clear and straightforward, for the reports to be attributed to malobservation, fraud, or collusion’.17

Felix Experimental Group (FEG)

In 2014 and 2016, Braude published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration reports of his investigations of the Felix Experimental Group (FEG), a physical mediumship circle organized in 2005 by Kai Mügge of Germany, who became the circle’s medium and began deriving his living from public demonstrations.18 With the help of various co-investigators, Braude supervised several sittings with Mügge: three in Hanau, Germany, in August 2012; four in Austria in May 2013; and another four in Hanau in October 2015.

Mügge submitted to a fair number of controls (eg searching and locking of the room, strip searches, sitters to his right and left remaining in physical contact with his hands and feet), but he was not amenable to a cavity search or to more than sporadic lighting and videography. Thus the evidentiality of his sittings was limited. The phenomena observed during the sittings supervised by Braude included table levitations, object movements, apports, moving lights, and the production of apparent ectoplasm, which in one of the (less well-controlled) 2012 sessions could be watched slowly taking on the form of an arm and a hand.

As Braude describes in his reports, there was considerable suspicion regarding the authenticity of Mügge’s phenomena. Following the 2012 and 2013 sessions, it was established by testimony from Mügge’s circle leader Jochen Söderling (a pseudonym), as well as photographic analysis conducted by co-investigator Michael Nahm,19 that Mügge had at least on some occasions in the past used a magician’s device similar to the one known as the ‘D’Lite Flight’ to produce the moving lights observed during his demonstrations. The evidence did not specifically point to duplicity during the sittings that were supervised by Braude, but the fact that Mügge had been caught in fraud at any time clearly underlined the necessity of strict controls. Mügge also eventually admitted (after first denying) that he had purchased from a Halloween store some luminous cobwebby material that, in Braude’s opinion, looked ‘very much like the glowing green ectoplasm’ that figured in one of the demonstrations Braude witnessed.20

Braude, however, was unwilling to conclude from this that none of Mügge’s phenomena were genuinely paranormal, as he felt there were several occurrences during the sittings he had witnessed that defied normal explanation. Though Nahm chose no longer to work with Mügge after the revelation of fraud, both Nahm and Braude agree that genuinely gifted mediums sometimes fake phenomena. In fact, Braude says that ‘some of the best evidence for macro-PK comes from cases of mixed mediumship’, because of the way it elicits stricter controls from investigators.21 Hoping to get better evidential documentation of Mügge, Braude decided to return to Germany in October 2015 for a follow-up investigation, in which he was assisted by journalist Leslie Kean.

In the 2012-13 sessions, Braude had been particularly impressed by the table levitations, so he decided to concentrate his efforts in 2015 on getting better video of this phenomenon. While the desired footage was not obtained, Braude felt that certain phenomena experienced during the 2015 sessions were nevertheless clearly genuine. He remarks on the swimming motions of a levitating table, the ringing of a bell that was far from the controlled physical positions of Mügge and his wife, a loud bang on a drum that no one could have reached, and an explosive noise apparently coming from the table.22

Braude says that he would ‘gladly work with [Mügge] again’.23

Evidence for Survival of Death

Braude’s most comprehensive analysis of the evidence for life after death is his 2003 book Immortal Remains, although he has published some shorter analyses as well, including his article ‘Postmortem Survival’ in this encyclopedia and his essay ‘A rational guide to the best evidence of post-mortem survival’, which was a runner-up in the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay contest. Much of Braude’s other writing also bears on the question of survival in various ways.

Living-Agent Psi Hypothesis

In Immortal Remains, Braude concludes that ‘the evidence most strongly supports the view that some aspects of our personality and personal consciousness, some significant chunk of our distinctive psychology, can survive the death of our bodies, at least for a time’.24

What sets Braude apart from many other parapsychologists, however, is his belief that this is not an obvious conclusion and that a careful evaluation of the evidence for survival requires wrestling with some important alternative explanations, including the ‘living-agent psi’ hypothesis (sometimes called the ‘super-psi’ hypothesis),25 which conjectures that apparent evidence for survival may be the result of ESP and PK on the part of incarnate humans, who unconsciously produce phenomena that simulate survival.26

While Braude is sometimes misunderstood as endorsing the living-agent psi explanation for all apparent evidence of survival, his goal has rather been to emphasize the necessity of taking this hypothesis seriously and not facilely accepting psychic feats as necessarily the work of discarnate spirits.

In addition to using macro-PK as a demonstration that human psi can be much more robust than what is seen in laboratory experiments, Braude argues that the evidence for survival cannot be properly evaluated without a thorough understanding of the phenomena of dissociation. ‘[I]t takes only a casual acquaintance with hypnosis and multiple personality’, writes Braude, ‘to see striking similarities between their manifestations and the behavior of many mediums’.27 Braude has done independent research in the field of dissociative identity disorder, much of which is conveyed in his book First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind,28 and this thoroughly informs his evaluation of the evidence for survival. In tandem with the phenomenon of dissociation, Braude emphasizes the plausibility of the idea that people are regularly utilizing ‘covert’ psi abilities and that it may be in our interest for these abilities to stay concealed.29

Braude maintains that living-agent psi has to be considered as a possible explanation for even the most impressive cases of apparent survival, including those in which mediums, or those claiming to be reincarnated, speak a language they have not learned in any normal fashion (xenoglossy) or play chess in the manner of a particular deceased grand master.30 He points out that ‘prodigies and savants (and even ordinary people) can display abilities without undergoing a normal process of learning and practice, and (perhaps more important) in the absence of other skills and capacities that we would normally expect to occur alongside them’.31

Braude also emphasizes that the ‘complexity’ of a particular task may be irrelevant to how easy it is for an incarnate agent to perform psychically. According to what he terms the ‘magic wand’ hypothesis, psi may operate without any underlying process: it may proceed straight from the need or intent of the psi agent to the production of the desired result, with no intermediate steps, much the way that psychosomatic symptoms can be produced without a person’s having any idea of their underlying physiological nature.32 Thus incarnate agents could produce phenomena simulating survival merely by virtue of wishing for it, and without any effort, conscious or otherwise.

Nevertheless, Braude points out that ‘super-psi’ may be self-defeating. Although psi may in some sense work like a ‘magic wand’, if we are assuming that psi abilities are strong and ubiquitous among incarnate humans, this means that, in any particular case, there may be not only psi agents who want to see phenomena simulating survival but also psi agents who do not want to see such phenomena. That is, psi blocking will likely be a real and consistent obstacle. This insight forms the basis of Braude’s ‘Argument from Crippling Complexity’, which suggests that ‘ESP faces too many natural obstacles to be consistently successful, at least to the degree required by the best cases of mediumship’.33

Indeed, Braude says that ‘what makes the best cases [of mediumship] so impressive is both the amount of correct material and the consistency with which subjects provide it’.34

And yet, at the same time, Braude also points out that the psi abilities of discarnate agents would presumably be at the mercy of the same complex causal nexus, making it similarly puzzling how discarnates would be able to communicate so reliably through a medium. He concludes that the idea that any agent’s intentions would be able to consistently trump all potentially thwarting intentions and produce a reliable channel of psi information is impressive on both the living-agent psi and survival hypotheses.35

Braude also makes the point that, when considering the relative explanatory ability of these hypotheses with regard to any particular set of evidence, it is important to consider the ‘needs, interest, history, and behavior of the principal figures of the case’.36 If the phenomena observed in a particular case serve the people involved, living-agent psi must be taken very seriously as a possible source. As Braude says, ‘The challenge then, as always, will be to judge—or guess, really—which [hypothesis] accords more neatly both with our aesthetic instincts concerning explanatory simplicity and with many (usually very abstract) background assumptions, which themselves do not enjoy absolute certainty’.37

Mediumship, Reincarnation, and Possession

Against this sophisticated philosophical backdrop, Braude assesses the relative evidential value of various survival-related phenomena.

In Immortal Remains, Braude finds the best evidence for survival to be certain highly impressive cases of mediumship and reincarnation/possession, so he understandably focuses his analysis on these. His discussion of mediumship centers on trance mediumship, and in particular the well-documented historical investigations of Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard. His discussion of reincarnation and possession ranges over several historical cases investigated by Ian Stevenson and others, including the Thompson-Gifford case investigated by James Hyslop in the early twentieth century. It should be noted, however, that in his 2021 BICS essay, Braude reports no longer being as enthusiastic about the evidence from apparent past-life memories, which he says is plagued by the ‘Problem of Investigative Intricacy’, among other issues.38

Braude also discusses a relatively recent phenomenon involving organ transplants that appear to transmit memories and preferences from donor to recipient. Braude argues that transplant cases cannot be neatly categorized as either cases of reincarnation or possession, but his provisional recommendation is to view them as ‘supplementing the evidence for possession’.39

Braude’s conclusion about the evidence for survival is perhaps a bit less certain in his BICS essay than it was eighteen years previously in Immortal Remains, though it is not easy to tell, given how qualified his conclusions are in both cases. However, perhaps this sentence from the final paragraph of his BICS essay best sums up his most recent views on the matter: ‘even if the best actual evidence does not warrant a reassuring confidence in the reality of survival, at the very least it encourages optimism on the matter’.40

Criticism

Criticisms of Braude’s defense of the living-agent psi hypothesis include Robert Almeder’s charge that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable,41 to which Braude has replied that, while it is unfalsifiable in a strict sense, it is still ‘weakly’ falsifiable in the sense that there can be evidence that makes it appear less likely to be true than the survival hypothesis, all things considered.42

David H. Lund has argued that ‘the appeal to the merely possible existence of super-psi, independently of positive evidence that super-psi is in fact being exercised in the case in question, fails to show that the survivalist interpretation of these cases is not the most plausible one’,43 but this point appears to be consistent with Braude’s own emphasis on considering the ‘needs, interest, history, and behavior of the principal figures’ in the particular case at hand. It appears that Braude and Lund simply come down in different places regarding how much motivation for living-agent psi they see evidenced in their surveys of the case material.

David Rousseau has criticised Braude’s neglect of the evidence provided by near-death experiences (NDEs), to which Braude devotes only six pages in Immortal Remains44 and even less in his BICS essay. Rousseau argues that the hypothesis of need-motivated super-psi cannot explain – and in fact is incompatible with – NDEs involving very young children and committed atheists, as neither group desires, pre-NDE, to have their survival-suggestive experiences.45

Retrocausation

Retrocausation – causal influence of the future on the past – is often invoked to explain apparent precognition: the knowing of something before it happens. In Chapter 5 of The Limits of Influence,46 Braude argues that retrocausation is ‘deeply unacceptable’ from a conceptual point of view and that there are much simpler ways to understand what’s going on in cases of apparent precognition.

Braude considers the idea that retrocausation might be just like normal, forward causation but work in the opposite direction. However, he concludes that this cannot be the case, for two reasons. First, ‘[n]o other sort of putative causal connection lacks an extensive surrounding causal history running temporally in the same direction’.47 And second, in forward causation, a third event can always intervene between a cause and its effect, preventing the effect from occurring. If this is possible in the case of retrocausation, Braude argues, it would mean not just affecting the past but changing it. Anyone who wants to defend the existence of retrocausation, he says, will have to greatly revise the existing conceptual framework of causation that has otherwise proven so useful.

Braude proposes that it is more parsimonious to understand supposed precognition as (1) conjecture from information available in the present (perhaps via psi), (2) the result of telepathic influence and/or PK, with the supposed ‘precogniser’ telepathically and/or psychokinetically causing the future event they have supposedly ‘foreseen’, or (3) a combination of (1) and (2).

Mechanistic Explanation and the Appeal to Inherent Similarity

Throughout his work, Braude consistently criticises mechanistic theories of mind and psi for resting on a ‘deep philosophical mistake about the nature of similarity—namely, assuming that similarity or dissimilarity is an inherent, rather than positional and context-relative, relation between two things’.48

To determine whether two objects are similar, Braude says, we need criteria of relevance: eg which properties of the objects we are paying attention to and what degree of congruence in those properties counts as making the objects ‘similar’. Without specification of these criteria, the question of whether two objects are ‘similar’ has no answer, and thus cannot (alone) form the basis of an explanatory theory.

Braude argues that this deep conceptual mistake can be found in mechanistic analyses of ESP,49 PK,50 and synchronicity,51 as well as in trace theories of memory52 and Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance.53 Braude writes, ‘Only when the life sciences stop trying to mimic the methods of physics, only when they recognize that there’s more than one way to be scientific, will we begin to see theories adequate to the domains of organic phenomena’.54

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has critiqued Braude’s argument against inherent similarity as insufficient and suggested that Kolmogorov complexity could be used to provide an objective measure of similarity.55

Professional Posts and Honours

  • Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (1979-80)
  • Parapsychological Association President (1991)
  • International Society for the Study of Dissociation Distinguished Achievement Award (2003)
  • Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (2010-2021)
  • Parapsychological Association Outstanding Contribution Award (2009)
  • FWH Myers Memorial Medal from the Society for Psychical Research (2014)
  • Runner-up in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies Essay Contest (2021)

Works

Articles and Book Chapters (Selected)

  • Telepathy (1978). Noûs 12, 267-301. [Reprinted in Braude (2002).]
  • Objections to an information-theoretic approach to synchronicity (1979). Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 73, 179-93.
  • Mediumship and multiple personality (1988). Journal of the Society for Psychical Re­search 55, 177-95.
  • ESP phenomena, Philosophical implications of (1996). In Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Supplement, ed. by D.M. Borchert, 146-47. New York: Macmillan.
  • Les psychographies de Ted Serios (2004). In Le Troisième Oeil: La Photographie et l’Occulte, ed. by C. Chéroux and A. Fischer, 155-57. Paris: Gallimard. [Reprinted 2005 as The thoughtography of Ted Serios in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, ed. by C. Chéroux and A. Fischer, 155-57. New Haven, Connecticut, USA: Yale University Press.]
  • Personal identity and postmortem survival (2005). Social Philosophy and Policy 22/2, 226-49. [Reprinted 2005 in Personal Identity, ed. by E.F. Paul, F.D. Miller, & J. Paul, 226-49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]
  • Dissociative identity disorder (2009). In The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, ed. by T. Bayne, A. Cleeremans & P. Wilken, 234-5. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • My career on the margins (2013). In Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections: Esprit (vol. 2), ed. by R. Pilkington, 89-102. San Antonio, Texas, USA: Anomalist Books.
  • The possibility of mediumship: Philosophical considerations (2014). In The survival hypothesis: Essays on mediumship, ed. by J. Rock, 21–39. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland & Co.
  • Macro-psychokinesis (2015). In Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century, ed. by E. Cardeña, J. Palmer & D. Marcusson-Clavertz, 258-65. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland & Co.

Web Posts and Blogs (Selected)

Lectures, Podcasts, Videos (Selected)

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

Literature

Almeder, R. (1992). Death and Personal Survival: The Evidence for Life After Death. Lanham, Maryland, USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Beischel, J., Mosher, C., & Boccuzzi, M. (2017). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of mediumistic and psychic experiences. Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies 1/2, 51-91. 

Braude, S.E. (1986). The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Reprinted 1997 by University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland, USA.]

Braude, S.E. (1994). The language of improvisation. International Jazz Archives Journal 1/2, 4-13. [Reprinted in Braude (2020).]

Braude, S.E. (1995). First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind (rev. ed.). Lanham, Maryland, USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Braude, S.E. (2002). ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination (rev. ed.). Parkland, Florida, USA: Brown Walker Press.

Braude, S.E. (2003). Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life After Death. Lanham, Maryland, USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Braude, S.E. (2007). The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Braude, S.E. (2014a). Crimes of Reason: On Mind, Nature, and the Paranormal. Lanham, Maryland, USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Braude, S.E. (2014b). Investigations of the Felix Experimental Group: 2010-2013. Journal of Scientific Exploration 28/2, 285-343. [Reprinted in Braude (2020).]

Braude, S.E. (2016). Follow-up investigation of the Felix circle. Journal of Scientific Exploration 30/1, 27-55. [Reprinted in Braude (2020).]

Braude, S.E. (2020). Dangerous Pursuits: Mediumship, Mind, and Music. San Antonio, Texas, USA: Anomalist Books.

Braude, S.E. (2021a). A rational guide to the best evidence of post-mortem survival. Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. [Web page.]

Braude, S.E. (2021b). Matlock’s theoretical offenses. Review of Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory by James G. Matlock. Journal of Scientific Exploration 35/1, 155-65.

Braude, S.E. (forthcoming). The conceptual unity of dissociation: A philosophical argument. In Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: Past, Present, Future, ed. by M.J. Dorahy, S.N. Gold, & J.A. O’Neil, 39-49. New York: Routledge.

Carlson, S. (2008). The truth is out there. The Chronicle of Higher Education 54/18, January 11, B11-13.

Lund, D.H. (2009). Persons, Souls and Death: A Philosophical Investigation of an Afterlife. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland & Co.

Nahm, M. (2014). The development and phenomena of a circle for physical mediumship. Journal of Scientific Exploration 28/2, 229–83.

Nahm, M. (2016). Further comments about Kai Mügge’s alleged mediumship and recent developments. Journal of Scientific Exploration 30/1, 56–62.

Rawlette, S.H. (2019). The Source and Significance of Coincidences: A Hard Look at the Astonishing Evidence.

Rousseau, D. (2012). The implications of near-death experiences for research into the survival of consciousness. Journal of Scientific Exploration 26/1, 43-80.

Sudduth, M. (2009). Super-psi and the survivalist interpretation of mediumship. Journal of Scientific Exploration 23/2, 167-93.

Endnotes

  • 1. Braude (2003), ix-x; Carlson (2008).
  • 2. Braude (2002), xi.
  • 3. Braude (1986), x; Braude (2003), x.
  • 4. Braude (1986), x.
  • 5. Braude (1986), xi.
  • 6. Braude has written on the topic of music in Braude (1994).
  • 7. Braude (2007), xi.
  • 8. Braude (1986, 2007).
  • 9. On parapsychologists’ lack of boldness, see Braude (2014a), 23-24.
  • 10. Braude (2014a), 199.
  • 11. Braude (2014a), 199.
  • 12. Carlson (2008).
  • 13. Braude (2007), 157.
  • 14. Braude (2007), 1.
  • 15. Braude (2007), 8.
  • 16. Braude (2007), 8.
  • 17. Braude (2007), 23.
  • 18. Braude’s reports on his investigations of the FEG, Braude (2014b, 2016), are also included in revised form as Chapters 2 and 3 of Braude (2020).
  • 19. For Nahm’s conclusions about Mügge, see Nahm (2014, 2016).
  • 20. Braude (2020), 60.
  • 21. Braude (2020), 64.
  • 22. Braude (2020), 93.
  • 23. Braude (2020), 98.
  • 24. Braude (2003), xi.
  • 25. Braude (2020, 2021) credits Michael Sudduth (2009) with proposing to exchange the term ‘super-psi’ for what Braude considers the more accurate term ‘living-agent psi’. However, Beischel, Mosher & Boccuzzi (2017) take issue with the latter term, as it implies that discarnates are not living.
  • 26. For Braude’s discussions of super-psi/living-agent psi, in addition to Braude (2003), see chapters 6 and 7 of Braude (2020).
  • 27. Braude (2003), 23.
  • 28. Braude (1995). Braude stills writes on the topic today. See Braude (forthcoming).
  • 29. Braude (2020), 148.
  • 30. Braude (2014a), 141-79.
  • 31. Braude (2003), 24.
  • 32. Braude (2020), 159.
  • 33. Braude (2003), 90. For a recent outline of Braude’s Argument from Crippling Complexity, see Braude (2021b), 159-60.
  • 34. Braude (2003), 91.
  • 35. Braude (2003), 92-95.
  • 36. Braude (2020), 161.
  • 37. Braude (2020), 161.
  • 38. Braude (2021a), 29-34.
  • 39. Braude (2003), 244.
  • 40. Braude (2021a), 52.
  • 41. Almeder (1992), 51-53.
  • 42. Braude (2020), 159-63.
  • 43. Lund (2009), 213.
  • 44. Braude (2003), 270-76.
  • 45. Rousseau (2012).
  • 46. This chapter is the basis for Braude’s article for this encyclopedia on ‘Precognition Without Retrocausation’.
  • 47. Braude (1986), 267-68.
  • 48. Braude (2014a), 37.
  • 49. Braude (1979).
  • 50. Braude (1986), Chapter 4.
  • 51. Braude (1979), II.B; Braude (2007), Chapter 7.
  • 52. Braude (2014a), Chapter 1.
  • 53. Braude (2014a), Chapter 2.
  • 54. Braude (2014a), 46.
  • 55. Rawlette (2019), 384-86.