Consciousness isn't material: Ruickbie excerpt #25

Leo Ruickbie

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: For mainstream science, the living body is like a haunted house. We can scan the brain and find out which parts are used when this or that happens, like flipping light switches on and off in 30 East Drive, but we have still not met the owner of the house – consciousness remains elusive. And when we die, the doctors can only observe that the lights are no longer working.

For mainstream science, the living body is like a haunted house. We can scan the brain and find out which parts are used when this or that happens, like flipping light switches on and off in 30 East Drive, but we have still not met the owner of the house – consciousness remains elusive. And when we die, the doctors can only observe that the lights are no longer working. 

To be meaningful the survival of consciousness must mean the survival, not just of “awareness,” but of the thing that is “aware.” Since early attempts with ill-fated phrenology, medicine has been trying to pinpoint our psychological functioning in specific areas of that grey mass between our ears, what the philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers called the “easy problem” of consciousness. Whilst successful to an extent, we have still not found where “I” comes from, what Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness. Philosophy professor Alva Noë argued that “Consciousness does not happen in the brain. That’s why we have been unable to come up with a good explanation of its neural basis.” 

The defeat of Cartesian Dualism (Descartes’s idea of the “ghost in the machine”) at the hands of Enlightenment materialism (all machine) has left no philosophical room for a mind that is not the product of the physical. But just as Descartes prepared the way for materialism by excluding recourse to unprovable spiritual explanations, so materialism finds itself challenged by evidence that has only become possible due to both the scientific method and advances in science (especially medicine). 

People are seen outside their own living bodies. People are seen when they no longer have bodies. People report conscious experience when clinically dead with no measurable physiological activity. That experience is usually reported as more vivid and meaningful than ordinary consciousness, so it is not some residual as-yet-undetected brain activity, the end-effects of the dying brain or due to anaesthetic drugs, all of which, where known, produce a diminished consciousness, and certainly cannot be explained as a reconstruction of birth memories (Carl Sagan’s contribution to the debate). 

During these altered states (apparitions, OBEs, NDEs, premonitions, etc.), the witness is not seeing and hearing in the ordinary sense. In extreme conditions (NDEs), this perception must act independently of the physical sense organs because they are unavailable, effectively shut down in a dead body, and is also sometimes described in ways that are impossible for the visual system even when operational, such as 360-degree vision. If this perception functions independently of the senses, then it cannot use the information normally processed by the senses, that is, light and sound. Consciousness can only ‘use’ consciousness under these conditions. 

Other researchers have also noticed this. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper interviewed thirty- one people who were severely visually impaired or blind, including blind from birth, who had experienced consciousness beyond the body during an OBE or NDE. Most of them also claimed to have been able to see during these experiences, and in some cases their observations were verified by others. Ring and Cooper termed this ability “mindsight.” The same ability must be involved in all cases of extra-sensory perception, or whatever we might call it, from Victorian gentlemen projecting themselves into ladies’ bedrooms to government agents remote viewing secret Russian facilities (Star Gate). 

There is still a default tendency, often implicit, to think of extra-sensory perception (ESP), or psi more generally, as some ‘sixth sense,’ as it was formerly thought of, when the evidence points to it not being a ‘sense’ at all, but a feature of consciousness, that is, of ‘being’ itself. Terms such as mindsight perpetuate this and are demonstrably theoretically limited, since ‘mindsight’ involves mind-hearing and mind-feeling (emotions), just as much as mind-seeing. The psychological primacy of sight in normal individuals has led to a psychological primacy of sight in abnormal conditions. 

What the evidence shows is, not that we have some hidden super power, but that consciousness is super-extended in a way that is normally hidden from us. Thus, all these scattered bits of information labelled clairvoyance or premonitions, apparitions or OBEs, are parts of a jigsaw puzzle that, when put together, provide a fuller picture of this consciousness. And what this picture shows is a level of consciousness (or, the real extent of consciousness) that operates outside of physical space and time, including the physical structure of the brain. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.