Julie Billingham
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.
If souls are distinct from bodies, then to be naturalistic they must be located in space somewhere. However, science has not been able to detect any non-physical things or substances. How do we reconcile this with the claim that kinds of psychonic stuff and things actually exist? This is especially puzzling now we have proposed that souls have physical properties in addition to psychonic ones. Where might the soul be, and why has science not been able to detect its presence?
It is natural for people to think that they are ‘in’ their bodies, viewing the world from ‘behind their eyes’. We think this because that is where our sensory locus is, but the location of the body provides no evidence for the location of the soul. It is logically possible that the body is a sophisticated but nevertheless remotely controlled organic robot interlinked via a secure means of communication with a ‘controller’ (the soul) that is located elsewhere.
This theoretical speculation suggests that we might be able to investigate where the soul is by looking at NDE cases involving out-of-body experiences (OBEs), where the soul is observing the physical world without using the physical senses. We might be able to infer a useful hypothesis from the perspectival location of the soul’s perceptions and/or from the qualities of that perception.
We are fortunate to have many NDE OBE cases with features that are revealing in just the right way. Many NDE experiencers report remarkable perception while in the OBE state. Here are some typical examples:
“I was hovering over a stretcher in one of the emergency rooms at the hospital. I glanced down at the stretcher, knew the body wrapped in blankets was mine, and really didn't care. The room was much more interesting than my body. And what a neat perspective. I could see everything. And I do mean everything! I could see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of the stretcher. I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously. Three hundred sixty-degree spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher. At the time I knew exactly how many hairs there were to look at. But I shifted focus. She was wearing glittery white nylons. Every single shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing detail, and once again I knew exactly how many sparkles there were”.
“I could see behind me, from several sides simultaneously, and through objects. I was able to see what was going on in the room and in the corridor, behind the wall... My sight was very particular6. I don't know how to describe it: I saw everything with a total sight: the lake, the mountain, people along the banks of Evian, the texture of their clothes. I could see in the boats, in the houses, little animals in their burrows, the roots, the blades of grass, I saw all that simultaneously and if I focused on something I could see it through any obstacle and with every minute detail, from its surface to the organization of its atoms. Really a detailed and overall vision”.
“It’s very difficult to explain, but I was able to see the bed and my body simultaneously from all directions. I could see the top of my head and at the same time I saw my left and right sides, and the bed from below and from above, and all the room like that, I was everywhere at the same time, you see? ... I was surprised that I could see at an angle of 360°, I could see in front and behind, I could see underneath, from far, I could see up close and also transparently. I remember seeing a stick of lipstick in one of the nurses’ pockets. If I wanted to see inside the lamp which illuminated the room, I would manage to, and all of this instantly, as soon as I wanted to. I could say how people were dressed, I could see the sandstone wall, and also the stone slabs of the floor. I was able to verify their presence in a photograph later on since I thought it strange and anachronistic to have such slabs in an operating room. It was surprising and I could see, all at once, a green plaque with white letters saying, ‘Manufacture de Saint Etienne’. The plaque was under the edge of the operating table, covered up by the sheet I was lying on. I could see with multiple axes of vision, from many places at once. This is the reason why I saw this plaque under the operating table, from a completely different angle, since I was up there by the ceiling and I still managed to see this plaque located under the table, itself covered by a sheet. When I wanted to check this, we7 realized the plaque really was there and read ‘Manufacture d’armes de Saint Etienne’“.
“I visited various places I managed to identify afterwards. I remember a window in a village, a building with very white plaster, sand-carved windows. My curiosity was attracted to details. This is quite important, since we cannot do this normally, like seeing inside and outside at the same time, an impression of a quasi-holographic vision... Not a panoramic view, but seeing in front, behind, all details simultaneously which is completely different from ordinary sight. It is very rich”.
“I saw all around me, I saw the inside of my body”.
The perceptual phenomena described in such reports include being able to see simultaneously in all directions away from the vantage point and being able to see things from all angles simultaneously as though that vantage point is omnipresent, cosmologists, and philosophers. It is important to note that this view is backed up by detailed and rigorous theoretical work in physics and mathematics and is not just a speculation on the part of these researchers. This distinguishes the present situation from earlier eras in which researchers claimed that hyperspatial geometries could account for psychical phenomena without any credible theories grounded in physics to lend support to their views.
To return to the original question, from this evidence we can conclude that the soul does have a spatial location, which in principle resolves the puzzle of how the unique pairing between soul and body is possible. However, the NDE reports imply a number of interesting other points.
Not only does the vantage point seem to be in a hyperspatial location but also experiencers are able to see with a sensory apparatus that exploits hyperspatial geometries. Seeing the ordinary three-dimensional (3D) world requires a 3D lens focusing an image of a portion of the world onto a 2D retina. By (inadequate) extrapolation, seeing in an omni-perspectival way would require a ‘retina’ that is at least 3D on which an ‘image’ is focused by a ‘lens’ that is at least 4D. Omni-perspectival vision requires not only an ‘eye’ located in hyperspace, but also an ‘eye’ that is itself a hyperspatial structure. By implication the soul is a hyperspatial structure too, since an ordinary-spatial structure cannot incorporate a hyperspatial structure.
This is an important conclusion. A thing cannot fit into a space that has a lower dimensionality than the thing itself, so by implication the soul cannot ever be ‘in’ the body. This suggests that the soul is normally ‘elsewhere’ from the body; when the OBE commences, perception switches from seeing via the body to direct observation by the soul, without it having moved at all. The sense of being somewhere in the physical world during the OBE, or moving around in it, is therefore seen to be a data-processing artefact, an ‘interpretation’ that the mind places on the perceptual data based on psychological interests and expectancy effects.
If the soul is in hyperspace, then this may be part of the reason why science has not detected souls directly. Ordinary physical instruments may just not be able to look in the right direction.
The theoretical possibility that the ordinary world is a 3D membrane in a hyperspatial bulk is helpful, but it would be even more compelling if we had independent evidence that information and influence can flow between these domains. Might wholly physical phenomena exploit such mechanisms, if they exist? A potential candidate is the mysterious “quasi-crystals”, physical crystals discovered in 1982 by Daniel Shechtman, for which he was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These structures are aperiodic in three dimensions, meaning that their ‘stacking pattern’ never repeats. It can be shown mathematically that there is no algorithm for deciding how to complete such a stacking pattern by manipulating three-dimensional components. This makes the existence of such crystals in the real world a puzzle: how could the components stack themselves so as to grow a homogenous crystal? However, the crystals can be mathematically modelled as three-dimensional cross-sections through periodic five-dimensional structures. The implication is that although these crystals are impossible to construct via naturalistic processes restricted to the 3-membrane, their existence would be unproblematic if hyperspatial processes are involved.
The hypothesis that the soul is in a proximate hyperspace that is causally connected to our ordinary physical space is therefore plausible in the light of both NDE evidence and recent discoveries in physics.
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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