Criteria for surviving death: Rouleau excerpt #4

Rouleau writes: Though I have now defined the major terms of life, death, and consciousness as they relate to the brain, one additional consideration should be addressed. When discussing the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death, we are often implicitly talking about more than just a capacity for experience or awareness. Across cultural traditions, conceptions of an afterlife are often (but not always) personal, and what survives is thought of as an imprint or engram of the formerly living person complete with memories and even desires, fears, and love.

Of course, some cultural traditions have provided versions of survival that are distinctly impersonal, and the view that we are all one mind or soul divided across bodies that return to a common origin upon death is well-subscribed. However, it is certainly worth considering the possibility of memory surviving death.

Consistent with modern neurobiology, memories are stored as patterns of connections between cells in the brain, punctuated by protruding spine-like membrane structures along the tree-like branches of neurons. Each cell is connected to thousands of others in what has been described as an “enchanted loom” which weaves a network in excess of one hundred trillion connections. We know that memories are not stored in any one particular area, but rather are distributed isotropically across the surface of the cerebral cortex. If you remove a part of the brain, no particular memory is erased but many or all memories will incur a loss of resolution or detail. While we may naturally lose up to 10% of our brain cells over a lifetime, what we gain is the benefit of an incredible orderliness to our connections within which our personalities and past experiences are encoded.

Despite lifelong brain degeneration, with age we tend to know more about the world as information accumulates within our neural networks. What happens to these connections upon death? Conventionally, it is assumed that as the cellular structure of the brain decomposes, so too do these connections, and the individual as represented by their neural patterns is forever lost. It is conceivable that the survival of consciousness is independent of memory and that brain decomposition erases the only physical representation of the individual. However, in light of new models of brain function that will be discussed later in this essay, we will consider both the post-mortem survival of consciousness and, to a lesser but significant degree, memory.

Now that the question has been appropriately framed and before offering a solution to establish survival, I will outline what does and does not constitute scientific evidence in support of my thesis. In Edgar D. Mitchell’s influential 1974 book entitled “Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, Understanding the Nature and Power of Consciousness”, the prominent psychical researcher William Roll addressed this very question in his chapter on survival research. Based upon decades of work on the subject, he summarized his view on the hierarchy of evidence in the following statement:

When we ask whether consciousness continues after death, we usually assume that a surviving self will exist in some kind of body and will include the personality familiar from waking experience. In the course of their work, however, psychic researchers have encountered mediumistic communicators and apparitions that were apparently created by the living but not inhabited by their consciousness. These communicators and apparitions are indistinguishable from those representing the dead. It does not seem possible, therefore, to discover whether there is a continuation of experience after death by the study of communicators, apparitions and other surviving residues of the living. We must look elsewhere for evidence of the survival of consciousness.

Since the consciousness that may continue after death presumably exists before, we may explore it in the living. An examination of parapsychological research with living subjects suggests that consciousness is not private to any individual but can be shared by others. If a person’s consciousness does not “belong” to him, it is unlikely that it will disappear at his death. 

Roll went on to suggest that if consciousness can survive death, it will display three major characteristics: 1) there will be evidence of experiences of the self that can extend beyond the body, 2) this extended self will be able to interact with events and objects in the world, and 3) it will be able to function independently of the central nervous system.

To reiterate the main points, William Roll argued that if consciousness survives death it must not be private, can be shared, and can interact with the world independently of the central nervous system. He explicitly singled out information acquired by mediumship and apparitions as unproductive or weak forms of evidence given our inability to distinguish them from identical phenomena that can apparently be conjured by the living.

Roll considers OOBEs and the ability of consciousness to affect events at a distance as strong supportive evidence of the possibility of survival. He also suggests exploring survival in the living rather than attempting to access consciousness post-mortem since any consciousness that survives death is one that formerly existed in the living.

One reasonable interpretation of this summary is that a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of consciousness would test and potentially validate the survival hypothesis. More specifically, if we were to discover that the brain functions of living people including consciousness could be shared, accessed, projected, transmitted, or channeled to transfer information or deliberately affect events, then survival after death would be quite likely because we would have verified its independence of and ability to extend beyond the nervous system.

These putative properties of consciousness effectively describe classical psi phenomena such as telepathy, remote viewing, and psychokinesis. In other words, if consciousness interacts with but is independent of the brain, it will likely both survive brain death and explain other previously unexplained phenomena which are only conceivable as realistic under the new constraints. In fact, they may share fundamental mechanisms that remain to be fully elucidated.

I will, however, offer a partial criticism of Roll’s criteria in the interest of maintaining a high scientific standard and to address the elephant that is not in the room. That is, though it might be tempting to base an argument in support of the survival hypothesis on vivid personal accounts of an afterlife, experiences should only be included sparingly as an integral but minor part of the grand explanatory narrative.

This point should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the validity or importance of individual experience. Indeed, Roll’s criteria identified experiences as essential to the big picture, and it can never be said that a particular experience of the afterlife is false since verification is impossible. However, it is for this same reason that I claim we can never exclude the possibility of illusion or hallucination.

Furthermore, if experiences can be shared, how might we distinguish the subjective accounts of one person from the channeled accounts of another? That is, subjective experiences can be both meaningful and true and still not qualify as strong scientific evidence. Therefore, I submit that experiences can only partially corroborate but never fully validate survival since the content of experience cannot be empirically measured yet. Of course, there may one day be a technology that measures the raw content of experience in real-time; however, no such technology currently exists.

 

Nicolas Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada. He received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies "An Immortal Stream of Consciousness" in response to its search for "scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death." Footnotes and bibliography are omitted from these excerpts from his essay, but the full essay is available online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.