Although Victor Zammit does have a very adversarial style (he was a lawyer after all !) he does have some good information on his website.In his latest weekly newsletter (http://www.victorzammit.com/week7/) he was asked the following question:

'Hello Victor, could you help us with this question? We were having a debate as to which aspect of the paranormal is likely to become the most important in the future - important enough that no one would be able to reject the evidence? F. Williams. Ph.D. et al. '

Victor's responce was threefold :

1. When full light conditions are used with materialisations in physical mediumship.

2. When people can converse with discarnates directly and clearly through ITC.

3.Independent Direct Voice mediumship (a la Leslie Flint) which is correlated and verified using proven voice recognition software.

Any comments ?

I'd have to say #2.  1 may be explained away as a hallucination, and 3 can be explained as a form of self-hypnotic trance.  The ability to gather verifiable information from discarnates, however, would be hard to debunk, especially if a skeptic learns to do so.

I think none of these is conclusive because it will take a personal experience to convince most people.

Something that is totally conclusive must also "explain" what happened with someone like Anita Moorjani (assuming her medical information is correct). The scope is too small here.

I think another problem is that people think about this in terms of a "scientific" kind of proof. But that kind of proof appeals only to the initiated. The average person is neither convinced or not convinced by a scientific argument. The average person may enjoy the fruits of those successfull scientific proofs of concept, but they don't understand them.

Here what we want is to convince a large number pf people with a scientific type proof. The average person isn't going to be convinced. They may join the band wagon if a large number of people start talking it up. But only a personal experience will convince them.

Of course, that may bring us back to choice #2 if a large number of people have a convincing experience with that.

http://afterlife-knowledge.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1197399527/0

Wouldn't real time conversations between the physically living and those who have passed be sufficient proof?  Bruce's device should remove all doubt.

R

I think it would be difficult to explain 1) as hallucination if there were multiple witnesses or there was clear video footage but of course there there would be those who would say it was faked in some way. Number 2 would be the strongest proof, I think, if it were in real time like Rondele suggests. However, even that could explained away via the 'skilled impersonator' or super-psi approach for the super-skeptical. I'm not convinced that any evidence would ever be good enough for such a person.

However, I do believe in the idea of the tipping point. This is the point at which a phenomenen ceases to be 'out there' and becomes accepted as part of the mainstream. Continental drift was one such idea once considered as laughable but is now the orthodox scientific explanation for certain geographic anomalies.I think there will be a time when the weight of evidence is simply to heavy to dismiss and then we will have arrived at a tipping point. Maybe other things have to come together first before such a point is reached.

D

I agree with the idea that a tipping point plays a role

but

that also works to explain
Hitler's rise to power
the bustle as a fashin statement (fortunately the tipping point reversed relatively easily)

well..you get the idea

MAybe we can't really "prove" it because proof relies on the existence of an objective reality
and we don't really have an objective realiity

though I do think it would be ...fun... fun to watch as a cultural observer...if and when the device is made usable and available

of ocurse ,prayer and meditation are purported to lead us to states where we find personal "proof" but those turn out to be really hard work; I mean REALLY hard work. The avaerage person won't do that. So if you want the culture to change, go for the device.

Lucy-

interesting to remember that tipping points are not always positive and progress not always linear ! But I do think that the overall evolutionary direction is positive - 2000 years ago the most advanced nation on earth was killing people by the thousand for their personal entertainment in the Colosseum, 1000 years ago Anglo-Saxons were using 'trial by ordeal' to settle legal pursuits. When we see violence and aggression today it stands out as exceptional where once it would just be the norm and so not be particularly noteworthy (Steven Pinker talks about this in his latest book: The Better Angels of our Nature).No room for any complacency though.

Regarding the proof question there is no doubt that personal validation is the most compelling. But the catch-22 situation is that those validations don't tend to come to a closed mind- they are pre-filtered out.But the positive effect of a society at a tipping point is that it in an environment where these matters are taken seriously it is much more difficult to retain a closed-mind stance as its more likely to be challenged.

D

p.s. Summary of the above book:

'We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.
How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? What led people to stop sacrificing children, stabbing each other at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling criminals as forms of popular entertainment? The key to explaining the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is to understand the inner demons that incline us toward violence (such as revenge, sadism, and tribalism) and the better angels that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.'

From the book review above :
"Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism,..."

That list seems incomplete.  Maybe it was the commerce and financial relationships of the spice routes and silken roads, but didn't spirituality have something to do with it? Even then one had to treat their neighbor as their self even to begin their barters and trades.

Betson-

Steven Pinker is well known (along with people such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins) to be focused on materialist explanations so I guess spirituality would be very low on his agenda ! Still, his main point that violence and murder have greatly diminished tallies with much historical evidence. To me this makes it even more incredible that figures such as Jesus should be promoting the radical notion of love and forgiveness considering that violence was pretty much the dominant theme back then.

D

And are the appearance of people like Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Karen Armstrong and others like them, who try to bridge the spiritual world across religious traditions the beginning of a "post religion" spirituality? This seems like the sub-text to much of the progress that we have made, whether the materialists choose to acknowledge it or not.