To preserve naturalism, we have to assume that souls are psycho-physical things and interact with bodies via shared physical properties. This is interesting because it implies that soul-body interaction is mediated by physical fields rather than some other more exotic phenomenon.
The challenge now is to find evidence to indicate that in practice physical forces are involved in this and to give clues about the nature of the force(s) involved. There is suggestive evidence in some NDE cases.
To understand this point, we must think about a living person as a complex system. A system is a structure that functions as a whole in virtue of the causal relationships between its parts [90].
The body is of course a complex system in its own right, but we will focus on the person being a system comprised of a soul and a physical body. When a complex system works well it is sometimes difficult to tell how it works due to the many interdependencies between its parts. Properties can emerge that do not belong to the parts individually but only to the system as a whole.
A feature of complex systems is that if you take them apart, the emergent properties disappear, e.g. the parts of an aircraft cannot fly. To restore the original functionality the parts have to be carefully reassembled so that everything goes together correctly and we end up with a properly and fully integrated system. If in this process parts are lost, damaged or misaligned, the system level properties will be proportionately compromised. The more complex the system, the higher the risk of something going wrong during reintegration.
Given this model, we can now conceptualise the NDE as an event in which soul-body integration is disrupted and then restored when the person recovers. With very rare exceptions, the onset of an NDE is accompanied by a very rapid loss of all control over the body and sensation of bodily states. These are rapidly regained when the NDE ends. NDE experiencers notice this primarily because while they are in the OBE portion of their NDE, they lose the sensation of pain and also find themselves unable to communicate physically with people around their body. The following cases are typical:
“...there was the most searing pain in my arm... Then I was aware that I was losing consciousness and of people rushing around me, knocking things over in the rush to get emergency equipment set up. Then there was nothing – no pain at all. And I was up there on a level with the ceiling...I could see...my body, down there on the bed... the light... I...was being drawn into it...I had the most wonderful feeling of peace... And then suddenly, I was pulled back, away from it, back, slammed into my body again, and back with the pain, and I didn’t want to go” ([64], our emphasis).
“I began bleeding badly after the birth of my daughter and I was instantly surrounded by medical staff who started working on me. I was in great pain. Then suddenly the pain was gone and I was looking down on them working on me. I heard one doctor say he couldn’t find a pulse. Next I was travelling down a tunnel toward a bright light. But I never reached the end of the tunnel. A gentle voice told me I had to go back... I hit the hospital bed with an electrifying jerk and the pain was back. I was being rushed into an operating theatre for surgery to stop the bleeding” ([91], our emphasis).
The very sudden transition from a state of intense pain to complete painlessness at the onset of the NDE, and the immediate return of pain when the NDE ends, is remarkable. Natural endorphins can suppress pain and engender feelings of well-being, but their effects last for hours whereas NDEs last only seconds or minutes [77], so it is unlikely that these effects are due to exclusively bodily mechanisms. This point is reinforced by the cases in which a person can see their body receiving electric shocks, their chest being pounded, their face stroked, and so on, while they themselves feel no relevant bodily sensations [28], e.g. [64], [92]. Greyson reported an interesting case in which the patient could see their body reacting to hallucinogenic drugs while they themselves were mentally lucid [93].
If this model of NDEs as disruptions of soul-body integration is correct, and if the way the connection is made is naturalistic, then we can foresee the possibility that reintegration can sometimes go wrong. This gives us an opportunity to learn about how the system normally works. For complex natural systems, studying failure modes is in general a useful route to understanding them better. For example in medical research, correlating injured or diseased brain parts with functional deficits is an important way of working out which parts of the brain are involved in which cognitive or motor functions.
We can regard a healthy person in ordinary life as closely integrated so that influences can be smoothly exchanged between their mind and their body. If this integration is compromised, then a number of interesting consequences might be expected. Some influences from the mind might no longer reach the relevant parts of the body (e.g. the brain), and so some physical control might be lost, manifesting for example as kinds of paralysis, tremors or coordination problems. Likewise we might expect that information about some states of the body is no longer properly conveyed to the mind, manifesting for example as inattentions to parts of the body or compromises of some kinds of sensory awareness. Medically, such signs are known as ‘neurological deficits’ and assumed to be caused by damage to the brain or nervous system.
Other effects are possible too: influences directed from the soul towards the body might ‘miss their target’ and cause unintended physical changes beyond the body, while attempts by the soul to restore ‘missing’ information about the body might result in the soul mistakenly processing information from bodies other than its own. These latter two problems would manifest as psi phenomena.
Therefore we might anticipate that some people might, after an NDE, exhibit what look like neurological deficits and acquire psychic abilities. Intriguingly, many people who have had NDEs experience exhibit both neurological deficits and new or enhanced psi abilities.
There is substantial evidence in the professional NDE literature for experiencers afterwards having both enhanced functional psychic abilities of the informational type (e.g. spontaneous telepathic impressions) and dysfunctional PK abilities (e.g. unintentional disruptions of nearby electronic equipment).
The neurological deficits are difficult to judge because people may have acquired them due to brain or nervous systems damage caused by the physiological trauma of their NDE incident, for example oxygen starvation. However, there is much general medical evidence for people exhibiting neurological deficits without having any relevant nervous system damage. Medically, these are known as ‘conversion disorders’ and attributed to psychological causes. Such cases are well known in medical practice, where the prevalence of unexplained neurological symptoms typically ranges between 30 and 50% of presenting cases and in some specialities approaches 70%. In orthodox models, the flows of information and influence are between the brain and the body, so it seems mysterious how there can be deficits without physical damage. By postulating a pathway between the brain and the soul, we have opened up the possibility of another mechanism that can malfunction and lead to neurological symptoms.
That said, the disruptive physical psi effects provide the clearest evidential clues, so we will concentrate on those at this stage. NDE experiencers widely report that since their NDE, their presence causes interference, malfunctions or failures in electronic and electro-mechanical equipment such as radios, light sources, cell phones, security systems, toasters, VCRs, TVs, and so on. Here is an example report:
“Watches do not keep time for me. But mechanical things seem to work, even for no reason. If I get too close to FM radio frequencies I raise Cain with reception. Electronic equipment functions strangely around me. I touch electrical appliances to make them work. They start up with my energy. I blew my computer terminal when I got excited. [I] have burned up three cassette recorders [and] one overhead projector”.
Melvin Morse has found that wristwatches were unreliable for 25% of adults who survived childhood NDEs, whereas the same is true for only 4% of adults who have never had an NDE or paranormal experience. In fact, NDErs reported every kind of such effect more frequently than these control groups. Nouri also found that the depth of the NDE correlated with the frequency of these after-effects.
Overall, the electromagnetic nature of these side-effects supports the idea that soul-body interaction is mediated by physical forces and that these involve at least electromagnetic fields. We therefore infer that it is logically plausible that the soul has physical properties in addition to psychonic ones and that soul-body interaction, being based on physical fields, is naturalistic.
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.
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