Five allegedly hard to swallow facts about Paranormal Research

From here:

1. "If it’s a phenomena (and not just an event), it will or can be repeated".

Depends what the author means by "can be repeated". In principle, for sure. But the precise circumstances which elicit a "paranormal" phenomenon might be extraordinary difficult to specify.

2. "[P]eople are exceedingly hard to convince when it comes to doubting their own perceptions".

That will generally speaking be so. However, I suspect this will not generally pertain if some anomalous phenomenon is observed. One is more likely to suppose that one cannot possibly be seeing what they seemed to see. Indeed, it might well be that anomalous phenomena is far more prevalent than we generally think, but we implicitly assume we're just "seeing things".

3. "Everyone – you, me, your spouse, children, siblings, co-workers, best friends, teachers, employers and even your sweet old grandmother have told lies".

A catch-all dismissal which can be advanced no matter how prevalent an anomalous phenomenon might be. Certain types of anomalous phenomena are universal e.g. crisis apparitions, telepathy etc. It is extraordinary implausible to suggest that they are all lying. Or indeed, given the similarity of the accounts, that they are all due to folly, delusion, cognitive illusion or pathology.

5. "There has never been any credible, demonstrable research to even suggest the plausibility of life beyond death".

The plausibility of the survival hypothesis, or perhaps rather implausibility of the survival hypothesis, has more to do with our implicit metaphysical convictions than what the scientific research suggests. People in our modern western society are generally educated to believe that we are purely physical beings and any notion of an afterlife is foolish. Having said that, and having argued for this on my other blog here, "life after death" has a certain plausibility since consciousness (or/and the self) cannot in principle be accommodated by science, at least as science is currently conceived. The brain producing consciousness goes against everything we understand about the way reality operates. It is somewhat more implausible than suggesting a TV set produces the programmes being screened. 


We cannot perceive anyone else's consciousness, we can only infer it from their bodily behaviour. This underlines the fact that consciousness is not physical i.e it is not empirically detectable. Once the body fails how can we infer consciousness has ceased to exist?


And of course there is "credible, demonstrable research" which not only suggests its plausibility, but its reality. I'm especially thinking here of the research conducted to ascertain whether children's ostensible memories of a previous life match up to events that really happened.

Update:  I originally said all of the above in the comments under the article.  The author deleted my comment describing it as "harassment".