Supporting Dualism

A Profound Distortion

In #articles

I just finished listening to this excellent debate. I thought the proponents of dualism were credulous, and ignored the specific requests by the opponents to rule out alternatives. I'll get into that in another post, but I had to respond to this one point immediately, because it is so easy to confirm that it jumped out at me.

At time point 1h26m29s we have the following:

Eben Alexander:

The very renowned skeptic and scientist Carl Sagan admitted that past-life memories in children, the evidence for that is overwhelming. He said that in his book, the Demon Haunted World, on page 302, he says exactly that. (emphasis original)

Steve Novella:

I've read that book 100 times, Carl Sagan did not believe in past lives, he did not believe in anything paranormal or supernatural, that is just not true. (emphasis original)

It turns out that I have that book on my bookshelf, and so it was an easy matter to check this claim. Here is the quote of the entire paragraph referenced from the Demon Haunted World, page 302,

Perhaps one percent of the time, someone who has an idea that smells, feels, and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artifacts of an advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the Solar System. At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation. I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course, I could be wrong.

It is very hard to imagine someone misreading this into thinking that Carl Sagan either believes these claims, or is claiming that they have overwhelming scientific support, given that he directly says he doesn't believe the claims and that the evidence is dubious!. I can see only two alternatives:

  1. the person making the claim doesn't expect anyone to check, and knows better - they are lying.
  2. the person actually believes that Sagan had this stance, from reading this paragraph - they have misread it so profoundly, it defies explanation.

I recognize that it is nearly impossible to determine whether someone is lying, but this claim stands out as such a distortion it is hard to imagine under what circumstances an intelligent person could unknowingly make this claim, or even convince themselves that the claim is true. Perhaps they didn't read it, or stopped at the list of things that Sagan said "deserves serious study" and misread that as an endorsement? Given how specific this is, it is also hard to imagine that Eben Alexander hasn't used this argument before, in which case someone must have tried to correct him on it. If not, he needs to read this blog! If so, and he persists in this quote, then the distortion is almost certainly deliberate. Every way I try to wrap my brain around this exchange, I am perplexed and dismayed.