The survival evidence suggests that disembodied souls can observe and interact with the physical world by some other means than the normal bodily channels. In living beings, this type of capability is referred to as psi. Could psi be naturalistic?
It is often claimed that psi transcends the limits of time, space and energy, but if that were true psi would be supernatural. The evidence suggests that psi is a capability of the soul, but if the soul really had a supernatural capability, it would be impossible to conceive of it as a naturalistic thing.
One approach to investigating this is to reflect on what would be required of psi for it to work in a naturalistic way and then to see if there is evidence supporting such ideas and models. This a big topic, so for present purposes we will focus on ‘informational’ psi, and consider whether phenomena of this type, e.g. clairvoyance (aka ‘remote viewing’) and telepathy, can plausibly be understood in terms of naturalistic models of how sensory systems work.
Any normal physical sensory channel has certain components. There will be a sensor (e.g. an eye) that picks up some external signal (e.g. light) originating from some source (e.g. an object) and sends it to a data processing unit (e.g. a brain) to convert into data (e.g. an image) that can be evaluated and some meaning extracted. A dog’s sense of smell and a bat’s sonar have this same conceptual architecture, as do manufactured communication channels such as television and radar systems.
For psi to be naturalistic it would require that psi faculties are also facilitated by sensors, signals and data processors that operate in ways that follow a regular pattern that can be investigated. It would mean that the signals to which psi faculties respond are also naturalistic, whether they are physical or psychonic.
The structure of a signal can be characterized by a measure called its Shannon entropy, and the degree of fluctuation in that measure reflects how complex or interesting the signal is. It has been shown that biological sensors are more responsive to complex signals – think about how you tune out a constant sound. Edwin May and colleagues have demonstrated that psi works the same way. In a key series of studies, they showed that success in remote viewing tasks scales with the gradient of Shannon entropy of the target. It has long been claimed that psi works best in situations of meaningful significance, and this regularity reinforces that notion.
In another line of research, it has been shown that success in psi tasks varies in a systematic way with changes in specific frequency bands of the local geomagnetic field. It is common for physical senses to be influenced by environmental factors (e.g. when fog reduces the visibility of a landscape), so again this reinforces the notion that psi is also naturalistic, albeit psychonic or psycho-physical rather than physical.
David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.
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