There is evidence from the whole of the history and much of the pre-history of the Human species of concern for death, respect and reverence for the dead and belief in some form of afterlife. It is an issue central to human thought and culture. But is it something based solely on hopes, fears and beliefs or can we find firm evidence for continued consciousness after bodily death?
This is not a question that lends itself easily to objective experiment or conventional scientific enquiry, so in this essay we are presenting our evidence as we might to a judicial review that accepts the test of it being 'beyond reasonable doubt' rather than scientific proof. In order to give 'reasonable doubt' a chance, we will allow our expert witnesses to be cross-examined with some skeptical questioning.
Let us consider the wording of the question before us:
What is the best available evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?
It seems a simple enough question, but to make sense of it, we need to have a clear idea of what is meant by some rather slippery concepts:
What constitutes 'evidence'?
What is 'Human Consciousness'?
What is inextricably tied to bodily life?
What is meant by 'Survival' and 'after'?
1 EVIDENCE
The traditional scientific method involves developing a hypothesis based on observations and then testing and refining it through experiment. A good hypothesis should be falsifiable through such tests and, if it has not been falsified, should lead to predictions which can themselves be tested. Ideally, those tests should be repeatable. It may never be possible to prove a hypothesis absolutely, but if it makes testable predictions that are then upheld by experiment or observation, it becomes the accepted theory. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021; Hepburn & Andersen, 2021; Gower, 1997)
Unfortunately, most of the evidence for the survival of human consciousness comes from personal witness statements, of those dying, of those near to them or of those left behind. As such it is hard to test and not ethical to repeat. Even in a court of law, where witness statements are acceptable, the court must ask if the witness was of sound mind at the time, and being brain-dead or comatose may not qualify!
Nevertheless, we will show that, through their quantity, quality and similarity, such first-person experiences - and some third- person observations - add up to compelling evidence. And science is slowly becoming open to the use of large data sets ('omics') as valid evidence. (Editorial, Nature Methods 2009)
2 HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it manifests in the brain, and its place in the universe are unknown. Consciousness implies awareness - both of a subjective, external world and of an internal entity we call the self, with feelings, choice, memories, language and thought (Velmans, 2009).
There are those who say that consciousness is 'nothing but' brain activity. And, of course, it stops when you die and your brain decays. (Dennett, 1991; Koch & Crick, 1990)
Some follow the dualistic ideas of Descartes and believe consciousness to be something separate from the body. As such its nature is a matter for religious belief and therefore outside the realm of scientific enquiry. (Rosenthal, 1986)
Others, notably Penrose & Hameroff (1996; 2014) have shown that our minds have access to computational powers that lie beyond what is possible using classical physics. They suggest that quantum processes, perhaps in the microtubules in neurons, achieve 'orchestrated objective reduction' - essentially tapping into quantum physics - and that consciousness comes as a result.
Some go further and suggest that consciousness is not uniquely human but that it is a fundamental property of the universe, underlying everything. (Panpsychism) (Kouider, 2009; Goff et al., 2020)
We will return to the question of what might survive in our summing up, but without a body in which to locate, it seems that it must be transcendent; more like a ‘field’ and less like an individual anchored in time and space by senses and memories.
3 BODILY DEATH
For some aspect of us to survive bodily death, it must of course not be part of the body, which decays. So what aspects of us are dependent on the physical body? Most obvious, perhaps, are the senses. Tests in dark, silent flotation tanks suggest that you begin to lose your sense of time and place. It can be a relaxing, de- stressing experience for an hour, but where and when will you be when the senses turn off permanently?
Galileo, Descartes, Locke and many others have distinguished between the primary, measurable qualities such as wavelength, temperature or chemical composition and the secondary, experienced qualities such as color, warmth or smell (Goff, 2019; Ross, 2015 ). Many materialist scientists have tried hard to reduce the secondary qualities to aspects of the primary, measurable ones, but with limited success. Can perception exist without senses - or even without a perceiver? As we will see in the discussion in Chapter 6, we suggest that, through an understanding of non- duality, it can.
Memory too - or aspects of it - seems to reside in the physical brain. So, what are you without your memories? Are you still 'you'? Thought itself seems to have at least correlates in the neuronal activity of the brain. But that is not to say that thought is 'nothing but' neuronal activity, any more than a TV program is nothing but the electrical activity in a TV set.
4 LINEAR TIME AND SURVIVAL
The physicist John Wheeler once quoted the old saying "Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once”, and Leibniz’s dictum "...time and space are not things, but orders of things..." (Wheeler, 1990);
We seem to be dominated by the unavoidable flow of time. There is never enough of it, we can never travel backwards through it, and only forwards at its own, unrelenting pace. But that impression is based on two assumptions: That time is linear and has a direction, and what we focus on when assigning an identity that exists before or after. As we will show, both of these assumptions are rooted in interactions with an external environment. Yet in physics time is a much more fluid concept and, according to Einstein, it's part of 'space-time' and speeds up or slows down depending on how fast you are travelling.
That, in turn, makes the concept of survival after bodily death more complex and possibly meaningless. If what survived was massless, it could travel at the speed of light and seem, to it, to be able to cross the Universe in an instant. If it fell into a black hole, time for it would seem to continue, but for those left behind, eternity would have passed. So, though we hope to provide compelling evidence that we are not restricted to our physical bodies, we may need to stretch the concept of 'after' our death.
We will address the demonstration of the existence of an afterlife using the analogy of a judicial enquiry, addressing the concepts of identity, the human machine, interfaces and filters, collective consciousness and information through different points of view and aiming to identify the evidence that allows us to provide clues or proofs.
There have been dozens of books and hundreds of papers detailing evidence for an afterlife. While we will summarize or reference many of these, we will not simply repeat them. What we aim to add is a credible hypothesis for a mechanism that should support the evidence, lead to paradigm shift in science and in our understanding of the nature of Consciousness.
“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.
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