Advocate for the afterlife: Fenwick excerpt #3

"Before we can make sense of the idea of Consciousness continuing after death, we need to look at evidence for aspects of consciousness, mind or knowledge extending beyond the physical brain.

So, we call neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick as an expert witness.

Dr Fenwick, what evidence is there that 'mind' extends beyond the brain?"

Peter Fenwick:

Let's look at Consciousness as a ‘Field Structure’ and start with precognition. A precognitive experience is one in which you get knowledge about an event which has not yet happened. It may be something quite trivial, sometimes it carries important information though this is not always recognized at the time.

There are many accounts of premonitions of dying occurring to people who subsequently met their death. After the Aberfan catastrophe, in which a colliery slag tip collapsed over a small Welsh village, burying the school and killing over 100 children and their teachers, several people claimed to have had premonitory dreams of the disaster. One particularly sad story is that of ten-year old Eryl Mai, a pupil at the school, who told her mother, two weeks before the disaster:

“Mummy, I’m not afraid to die,” and added “I shall be with Peter and June,” (two of her school friends). The day before the disaster she said to her mother “Let me tell you about my dream last night. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it!” (Dossey, 2010)

Dreams of disaster are relatively common and can usually be dismissed as due to general anxiety, or simply coincidence. But a few, like the one described above, are so specific that it is hard to dismiss them. Here is another:

“My third daughter was just seven years old, when I woke up in the morning totally upset and in mourning over her death. I was so surprised and confused to see her lying next to me that I actually gently nudged her to see if she was alive. She had apparently gotten up during the night and climbed in next to me. When she moved I cried uncontrollably with relief. She was not dead and I hugged her. I did not tell her I thought she was dead. I could not remember any dream but the feelings were so strong and real, exactly as they were two days later when she was the victim of a hit and run.” (Santana Santos & Fenwick, 2012)

Premonitions suggest that our access to a line of time is not always limited to the present moment, but that we may occasionally get access to the future. And if this is so, then we have to ask whether consciousness is more a field structure than being created by the brain as reductionist science suggests.

Transmission Theories

We've been assuming that everything is created within the brain. An alternative view is that everything is transmitted through the brain.

William James was one of the strongest exponents of transmission theory. He described in his 1897 Ingersoll Lecture (James, 1898) the idea that beyond the 'veil of reality' in this world, and particularly beyond the brain, there is a transcendent reality in which the soul may live. He argued that this beam of consciousness is transmitted through the brain which modifies it. Sense data is transformed by the brain for transmission to an external mind. Mind in its turn can will an action which is transmitted to brain and so is able to initiate brain processes and thus actions. Although memories are held partly within the brain, a large part of memory is stored external to the brain, and in this, personal identity is located.

The attraction of transmission theories is that they allow for the concept of survival of personal identity after death, and thus give a meaning to life beyond the purely biological and cultural. They try to explain something that many people feel intuitively - that human beings, besides being individuals, are part of a greater whole. But once again we come up against the difficulty that at present there is no known mechanism which would link brain to mind in this way, or which would allow memory to be stored outside the brain.

Sir John Eccles, one of last century's most distinguished neurophysiologists and a Nobel laureate, also suggested that there is an interface between brain and mind. Here the 'dendron' (a hypothetical region of the nerve cell processes of the brain) links with the 'psychon' (the hypothetical atom of mind) (Eccles, 1990; Eccles, 1994). However, so far nobody has managed to identify dendrons or psychons, so the theory remains just that, a theory.

Field Theories

The theory of morphic resonance is biologist Rupert Sheldrake's attempt to explain how memory might exist independently of an individual brain, and could be accessed by other brains. He postulates the existence of 'morphogenetic fields' (Sheldrake, 1981). A morphogenetic field is part of the structure of the universe, existing everywhere at once. It is possible for matter to be influenced by this field at the same time in widely separate areas. He suggests that information relating to a pattern of behavior can be transmitted from the brain to this field. The transmitted information modifies the field and the field in its turn modifies other similar brains so that they become more likely to reproduce this particular piece of behavior. He uses this morphic resonance theory to explain, for example, how it is that when rats in one part of the world learned to run through mazes, other rats in other places seemed to acquire this ability simultaneously, and why scientists working in different places and not in contact with each other often tend to make the same discoveries at more or less the same time. Dr Sheldrake believes that experiments which he and other workers have carried out have produced some evidence for his field theory, (Sheldrake 2009) but so far the scientific world is not convinced.

 

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.