What might a soul look like? Rousseau excerpt #3

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

 

Mental states have complex properties and change in complex ways. Naturalistic things exhibit complex attributes and behaviors by means of a complex structure, which also entails having a size and shape. Might souls have such attributes?

In the previous section, we suggested that the soul is a hyperspatial thing with a complex structure, but this is only a hint at what the soul looks like. We also need to decide whether it really is a complex thing or just does things that would require it to be complex if it were a naturalistic thing. What we ideally desire is evidence of what it looks like when looked at by a competent observer.

If the soul has a hyperspatial shape it might be very hard for people to interpret what they see in a way unconditioned by expectation effects. Our minds naturally make sense of what we see by referring to our experiences and focusing on aspects of interest to us. We see such cognitive disconnects very clearly in NDE cases where people encounter a ‘being of light’ and experience it in terms of a familiar mental model such as Jesus, Krishna or Buddha. This is quite common, but some people have sufficient conceptual versatility to mitigate or overcome such effects to some degree. Given the size of the NDE database, we might reasonably hope to obtain some revealing reports, and indeed we do.

In Greyson and Stevenson’s retrospective study of 78 cases*, 58% of the NDE experiencers reported having some kind of ‘body’ during their NDE. According to Raymond Moody in The Light Beyond:

“Most people say they are not just some spot of consciousness when this [the OBE] happens. They still seem to be in some kind of body even though they are out of their physical bodies. They say the spiritual body has shape and form unlike our physical bodies. It has arms and a shape although most are at a loss to describe what it looks like. Some people describe it as a cloud of colors, or an energy field. One NDEer I spoke to several years ago said he studied his hands while he was in this state and saw them to be composed of light with tiny structures in them. He could see the delicate whorls of his fingerprints and tubes of light up his arms”.

Here are some direct reports:

“My being had no physical characteristics, but I have to describe it with physical terms. I could describe it in so many ways, in so many words, but none of them would be exactly right. It's so hard to describe”.

“[When I came out of the physical body] it was like I did come out of my body and go into something else. I didn't think I was just nothing. It was another body ... but not another regular human body. It's a little bit different. It was not exactly like a human body, but it wasn't any big glob of matter, either. It had form to it, but no colors. And I know I still had something you could call hands. I can't describe it. I was more fascinated with everything around me – seeing my own body there, and all – so I didn't think about the type of body I was in”.

“I was still in a body – not a physical body, but something I can best describe as an energy pattern. If I had to put it into words, I would say that it was transparent, a spiritual as opposed to a material being. Yet, it definitely had different parts”.

These reports suggest that a soul is a complex system, having a full complement of spatial properties including size, shape and structure in addition to location. If the soul is a hyperspatial structure it is hardly surprising that people are so often at a loss to describe what they saw, or that different people interpret the experience in different ways. Given their lack of an experiential reference or relevant vocabulary it is impossible for us at present to reconstruct from their reports exactly what they saw, but the evidence is sufficiently clear to support a conclusion that souls are complex systems. This resolves the question about the soul’s spatial properties in a way that is naturalistic. It opens up possibilities for understanding how the soul can have different causal powers at different times and changing ‘mental states’, and undergo changes in mental aspects while remaining the same individual. All of this is consistent with naturalistic requirements.

* B. Greyson and I. Stevenson, ‘The phenomenology of near-death experiences.’, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 137, pp. 1193–1196, 1980. 

 

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.