Transcending embodied mind: Sommer excerpt #8

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: One of the major upshots of the secularization of modern sciences by professionalization since the 1800s is what historian of neuroscience Fernando Vidal has called ‘brainhood’ – the popular standard view of modern neuroscientists claiming that anything worthwhile saying about humanity can be said by studying the brain. According to this view – parodied by cartoonist Scott Adams with the image of the ‘moist robot’ – our minds and personalities cease to exist with the death of our bodies. As the aforementioned examples of Christian materialists Hobbes and Priestley, and the German ‘scientific materialists’ of the nineteenth century already suggested, the idea ‘mind equals brain’ has long predated modern neuroscience. And as a growing body of sophisticated studies in the history of neurosciences have shown (which, I hardly need to stress, are not usually read by scientists), the fledgling brain sciences of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would become major platforms for political battles driving the ‘soul’ out of scientific discourse. In practical terms, rather than constituting the undisputable result of modern brain sciences, ideas of ‘brainhood’ were on the contrary a significant motivating factor in their very formation. Unsurprisingly, any competing ideas, data and theories, which have always existed as well, fell to the wayside – again not so much for coercively scientific and empirical reasons, but on overtly political and ideological grounds.

One of the most striking psychophysical anomalies reported by physicians since antiquity but ignored by brain researchers from about the mid-nineteenth century until recent years, is called ‘terminal’ or ‘paradoxical lucidity’. These are well-documented cases of a sudden and often full restoration of personality in cognitively impaired, mentally ill or disabled patients, whose loss of cognitive functions has been assumed to be permanent, shortly before death. The anomaly lies in the fact that ‘terminal lucidity’ is reported to occur even in victims of severe neural decay or brain damage following accidents, hydrocephalus, meningitis, dementia, hemispherectomy, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, abscesses, tumors, and so on.

In a typical case, a patient who was in a prolonged state of profound dementia and confusion would spontaneously come to, recognize and communicate with their family and friends in a clear and coherent manner, and appear to be in a state of heightened mood and vitality – only to die within hours or days after the puzzling recovery. Cases of such anomalous recoveries just before death are now again reported in the biomedical mainstream literature and are acknowledged to pose serious difficulties for reductionistic understandings of brain-mind relationships.

As pointed out by authors like nineteenth-century philosopher Carl du Prel and the modern rediscoverer of ‘terminal lucidity’, biologist Michael Nahm, these cases occasionally are reported to come with other anomalies, e.g. patients having visions of deceased loved ones or displaying extra-sensory perception. But even without properly ‘paranormal’ features, cases of terminal lucidity belong to a growing class of anomalies which are threatening to explode practically all models reducing the mind to the brain. If our understanding of mind-brain relationships is at least basically accurate, ‘terminal lucidity’ simply should not occur.

2021 book cited for this paragraph

The same applies to classical NDEs occurring during states like cardiac arrests and deep general anesthesia – including cases in which patients have reported ‘veridical’ perceptions, i.e. often highly specific events taking place while they ‘flatlined’. Cases involving veridical components are occasionally published even in the medical mainstream literature, and in my view there are now too many well-corroborated veridical cases on record to be dismissed as anecdotes. But even if we categorically ignored veridical cases, NDEs often occur during states in which, according to recognized criteria of modern brain sciences, neocortical functions required for any form of coherent conscious experience are abolished

Since 2012, neuroscientists have struggled to make sense of neuroimaging studies which demonstrate another fundamental anomaly. We already noted well-established therapeutic effects of NDE-type mystical states produced by psychedelic drugs. Brain scans made during these experiences have shown that the intensity of these mystical experiences dramatically correlates with a deactivation of all neural regions held to be responsible for conscious experience. These findings have caused quite a stir in the neuroscientific community as they show the opposite of what should happen: conscious experience is normally associated with activation of the neural network in question. Almost a decade later, it seems there is still no conventional solution for this puzzle in sight.

Granted, discussions of these findings are ongoing, and they do not provide strong, direct evidence for personal survival by themselves. But apart from considerably weakening the evidence-base for all models with hold that consciousness inevitably dies with the brain, models which do account for these anomalies, and which also provide a conceptual framework allowing us to integrate these findings with more positive evidence for survival, have existed since the late 1800s.

So let’s turn to such more direct evidence, and begin with indications suggesting that at least some of the aforementioned ‘bereavement hallucinations’, deathbed visions, and encounters with the departed during NDEs are not hallucinations in the ordinary meaning of the word. 

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.