Irreducible Mind by Edward Kelly and Emily Kelly, et al

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This book was recommended to me with great claims about what it proves. It indeed makes great claims, but it fails to prove them.

The Kellys propose to resurrect the project of F.W.H. Myers and re-establish psychology on an older basis. A primary target is "biological naturalism" and the theory that consciousness and the mind are manifestations of the brain. It argues that various elements of parapsychology and psychic phenomenon prove that the mind must extend beyond the physical body.

It is a bad sign when a book takes idiocy as its guiding principle. The authors repeatedly refer to "Wind's principle": "the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but the exceptional cannot be understood as an amplification of the commonplace." While this may have a Sphinx-like appeal, it is generally false. The exceptional is most often an unusual, extreme, or misunderstood case of something very common. Normal distributions have tails. If you understand how combustion works, you have a principle that applies to spaceships as well as automobiles.

Maybe there is some compelling reason for using a line from Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance to guide psychological research. And this reason would lead us to believe that exceptional memories are of a different kind, not just degree, than normal memories. Maybe I skimmed past that reason. It must be really compelling.

Just to be clear, exceptional events happen all the time and should be expected from normal random processes. In a world of about seven billion people, there are about seven thousand one-in-a-million cases for each and every one-in-a-million chance. When millions of people have cancer, we should expect some spontaneous remissions, including some very quick remissions. I should also be able to find someone who has won the lottery more than once or who has been struck by lightning a few times.

Coincidence is a description, not an explanation, but that is the point: there is nothing to be explained. If you pick out events after the fact, yes, each is quite unlikely; if you take all the possible unlikely events, it is nearly certain that some will happen. Think of survivorship bias or publication bias: you never hear the millions of times that no one considers the coincidence un-notable.

Have you ever thought of someone then received a call from them? Odds are, neither of you are telepathic. Did you just hear something that reminded you of that one time you two... or something else that might have made you both think of one another? Better yet, have you ever thought of someone and then not received a call? If you think of 100 people over the next hour and none of them call, it probably will not strike you; and if one does call, you had 100 chances. If you can reliably summon phone calls by force of will, you might have something there.

But finding one really unusual case out of millions of people should not be shocking. Go get 10 standard six-sided dice and roll them all, with a firm intention that they all come up 6s. You have about a one in 60 million chance, so good luck. But if everyone in the United States does that, we should expect 5 people to pull it off. Those 5 people are not special. They are the result of dividing 300 million by 60 million. If we all flip a fair coin 25 times, 18 people should get the same result every time (remember: 25 heads or tails would be "notable," so we get twice as many).

The broader your range of "notable," the more successes you get. So if a "staring study" counts it as a success if the subject becomes uncomfortable, comfortable, anxious, relaxed, or aroused, you have many chances to show an "effect." If having a birth defect somewhat like any curse ever placed on the family counts, you get more cases. If you count it as a reincarnation if the child has a birthmark, defect, freckle pattern, illness, or habit like that of any recently deceased person in the family or neighborhood, you find a lot more reincarnations.

Having a paragraph saying, "This can't just be chance!" does not change the probability. Nor does, "I do not think that this would be seriously questioned by anyone, with a reasonably open mind, who had made a careful study of the recorded facts and had had a certain amount of experience of his own in these matters" (p. 283).

This is even before doubting whether the evidence is any good. Add in lies, mistakes, and wishful thinking.

The authors frequently say, "There is a wealth of evidence," without actually presenting it. They just point to 100+ pages of references and wish you luck. They often present claims without showing why we would accept those claims or even how they further the argument. A book that purports to overthrow the orthodoxy needs that.

Several places confuse explaining and explaining away. I would elaborate, but the link does it well enough. Just read the first half of that post, and you will get the idea. Also, some of these things should be "explained away" as hallucinations and mistakes.

Another confusion is the occasional use of "god of the gaps" reasoning. Not all the authors seem clear on the distinction between "this has not yet been fully explained" and "this is impossible to explain even in theory," or between "there is no explanation" and "this has not been explained in a way that satisfies me." It is a bad enough practice to seek permission to keep believing an unlikely premise ("this has not been completely ruled out"), and it is worse to then take that lack of p=0 and treat it as "it has been established that..." (If you are holding the opposing camp to a much higher standard of evidence than your own, you are probably defending a poor belief.)

The arguments are poorly made and poorly evidenced. Some points are so bad that I needed to remind myself that they were true despite the argument. You might be able to use some of the scrap heap to construct something better, but it is not promising.

The best thing I can say is that Ian Stevenson may have been on to something, although it seems more likely that he was just cataloguing the thousands of one-in-a-million cases that happen with a population of billions. Even if a case seems potentially worth pursuing at greater length, its presence amidst such dreck suggests that it is less than it seems. As with Bertrand Russell's crate of oranges, there seems little reason to hope for better if we dig deeper, given the quality of the items most prominently presented for our attention.

I was tempted to give a 1 rating, but this is merely useless rather than doing much to make the world a worse place.

Amazon link