[Mike]

Paul,

I feel you have taken certain quotations out of the context of the whole book and thus distorted the overall thrust of the book. It was perhaps unfair of me to ask you for comments on the book.

My sense of the book is that he believes that the existence of psi has not been proven and he attempts to rigorously lay out summaries of various studies and theories of psi, as well as skeptical criticisms of these studies and theories. He also strongly believes that one's personality and memories cannot survive the death of the brain because modern cognitive neuroscience has demonstrated the complete dependence of these on the brain. He does, however, seem to be open to a kind of "survival" of consciousness which does not entail survival of one's personality and memories. He approvingly cites skeptics like Susan Blackmore without necessarily completely agreeing with everything they've written.

I think that in pulling quotes out of the context of the whole book, one runs the risk of distorting his argument as a whole.

When I think of a type of survival of death as a kind of pure consciousness without aspects of one's personality and memories persisting for at least a time, I wonder how one would even know that one had survived.

At any rate, I regret I even brought this up, due to the length of the book. It popped into my mind when I read your comments in a recent post about the brain.