Thanks for that - a really interesting read.
I'd just like to comment that I'm not a materialist by any stretch of the imagination (currently being much taken with idealism), but nonetheless, I find superpsi a plausible possibility. More plausible, perhaps, than the idea that after death an egoic personality survives and communicates with or via a medium. A personality, moreover, that in some cases can apparently be an observer of what is going on at the present time in, say, the life of a living relative.
It is possible that information is never lost and can in some circumstances be accessed by a living person, either purposely or accidentally. The accessor might merely
personify the information,
interpreting it as a deceased individual.
I'm not denying that mediums and talented psychics can have unusual perceptions that sometimes turn out to be verifiable. I'm rather questioning the necessity of survival of an
egoic personality after death, and by that I mean a personality that is similar to when s/he was alive -- worrying about something unresolved in life, or anxious to communicate relatives, friends or acquaintances. When alive, many of us may have unresolved issues or painful memories or love/hate for certain people, and such things may be part of the ever-accumulating, usually subliminal or unconscious body of information out there somewhere in the ether, so to speak.
For the most part, this information is inaccessible, but some individuals with psychic propensities may be able to access portions of it. What they make of it depends on the way they're inclined to interpret what they experience. Avowed mediums and psychics may interpret it one way, and other people another, sometimes even rejecting it as something that at some level they might have been subliminally aware of.
The information, if it exists, wouldn't necessarily all be true. People think about all sorts of things, including those that are fanciful or speculative. It's mainly the information that turns out to be veridical that tends to draw the attention. If, say, a "spirit" or "ghost" says that incorporated in the foundations of a building can be found a certain object, and subsequently that object is found, that doesn't automatically imply that discarnate entities exist. Rather, it could imply that the accessor of the information in some unspecified way intuited it. Nor, if the object isn't found in the specified place, does it mean that the accessor is mistaken, self-deluded or even lying; maybe at some point, someone thought about secreting the object in such a place, and it is that information that has been accessed.
The reason that I'm rather sceptical about spirits (including channelled ones) and ghosts that seem to exhibit personalities possessed in life is that it conflicts with my ideas about what happens after death. I believe that the egoic personality really does die, but that the true or essential self persists. The last thing on the mind of this essential self, I posit, would be consideration of mundane events. Some might argue NDEs indicate that after death, there is at least some awareness of such events. However, people who've had NDEs, by definition, didn't actually die. They survived to tell the tale.
For me, the NDE is a state poised between life and death;
actual death comes about when an individual's dissociation (at the human level at any rate) from mind at large, or cosmic consciousness, ends and we enter a different "realm" for want of a better word. The twilight experience of an NDE is coloured at least to some extent by what has been experienced in life, coupled with intimations of what is to come.
For an idealist like me,
everything is mental, and that includes human beings, which we all know for sure exist, and which Bernardo Kastrup's version of idealism hypothesises are dissociated alters of universal consciousness. We are its "organs", if you like, for investigating itself in a metaconscious (i.e. self-ware) way, although it itself might well not be metaconscious. Fantastically intelligent, to be sure, but not self-ware (similar to how high-functioning savants can have incredible capacities in mathematics, linguistics or music for instance, without knowing
how they do it -- check out
Srinivasa Ramanujan,
Daniel Tammet and
Derek Paravinci.
If such individuals can have inexplicable ways of accessing information, why not psychics and mediums? They aren't savants in the usual sense, of course, and they would, I suspect, have to have some kind of rationale in their own minds to explain what they do. So they come up with what to them are rational explanations involving life after death, ghosts, spirits and so on. But to me, idealism prompts a simpler explanation for what we think of as unusual perceptions; and in my mind, it isn't incompatible with the general concept of superpsi. YMMV, of course.