Planck was hardly alone in his thinking. The famed cosmologist Sir James Jeans said that he inclined “to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe.” Influential physicist Freeman Dyson said that it appeared to him that “the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature.” And cosmologist Paul Davies has made clear that consciousness seems to him to be much more than some simple, accidental by-product of firing neurons:
Somehow, the universe has engineered not only its own self-awareness, but its own self-comprehension. It is hard to see this astonishing property of (at least some) living organisms as an accidental and incidental by- product of physics...the fact that mind is linked into the deep workings of the cosmos in this manner suggests that there is something truly fundamental and literally cosmic in the emergence of sentience.
The idea that consciousness may be a fundamental, stand-alone element of reality is obviously, therefore, not an inherently ‘anti-science’ idea.
Is it too much to believe that, in the early 21st century, we are laboring under the same illusion that our science is complete, and that it should not be questioned even when there is abundant evidence to the contrary? As Buckminster Fuller once warned, what we think of as ‘reality’ is always up for redefining. “Up to the twentieth century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear,” Fuller pointed out. “Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.”
Numerous alternatives to our current materialist-centered paradigm have been suggested. For example, the French polymath Jacques Vallée has pondered whether our cosmos might be more informational than physical in its fundamental construction, a model which would more easily explain a number of the paranormal events that people regularly experience.
Alternatively, William James, in questioning the scientific ‘truth’ that consciousness is just a by-product of brain processes, asked if “we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function.” In this ‘transmission theory’, our consciousness exists independently of the brain, which acts only as a receiver. Consider, for example, one of the Mars rovers – which to a 19th century human observer might seem like a creature with its own brain that, if damaged, stops the creature from functioning correctly. But its ‘thoughts’ are actually being transmitted to it from another world (and entity) entirely.
And perhaps we don’t even require ‘new’ ways of explaining the cosmos. The distinguished physicist Henry Stapp has stated that in his view, even quantum mechanics allows for “aspects of a personality” to survive physical death:
I do not see any compelling theoretical reason why this idea could not be reconciled with the precepts of quantum mechanics. Such an elaboration of quantum mechanics would both allow our conscious efforts to influence our own bodily actions, and also allow certain purported phenomena such as “possession,” mediumship” and “reincarnation” to be reconciled with the basic precepts of contemporary physics.
These considerations are, I think, sufficient to show that any claim that postmortem personality survival is impossible that is based solely on the belief that it is incompatible with the contemporary laws of physics is not rationally supportable. Rational science-based opinion on this question must be based on the content and quality of the empirical data, not on the presumption that such a phenomenon would be strictly incompatible with our current scientific knowledge of how nature works.
Stapp’s summation gets to the heart of the matter. As we have seen in this essay, we have copious amounts of data from a number of fields that point quite clearly toward survival of consciousness. We have not even considered a mass of data from other fields supporting the primacy of consciousness, such as can be found detailed in well-researched academic books like Irreducible Mind. But due to the materialist paradigm we live within, when we are confronted with the anomalous experiences reviewed in this essay, we are still conditioned to try and impose ‘mundane’ explanations upon them – even when those explanations are overly contrived and ignore the obvious answer (that they are exactly what they seem to be).
As Tom Shroder asked in his book Old Souls, when he found himself reaching for ways to explain the vast number of convincing cases of past-life memories collected by Dr. Ian Stevenson: “Why was I so unwilling to accept the most obvious explanation, that these cases were genuine?” Stevenson asserted that: “Everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed.”
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
No comments:
Post a Comment