Consciousness is being attuned to the world

Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at the University of California, has written in his 2009 book entitled Out of Our Heads: "to understand consciousness in humans and animals, we must look not inward, into the recesses of our insides; rather, we need to look to the ways in which each of us, as a whole animal, carries on the processes of living in and with and in response to the world around us. You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are."

Noë explains: "In this book I use the term 'consciousness' to mean, roughly, experience. And I think of experience, broadly, as encompassing thinking, feeling, and the fact that a world ‘shows up’ for us in perception.”

 

“Conscious states are typically states that you and I can talk about, that influence what you and I do, and so they are states that you and I can make use of in planning.”

 

"The problem of consciousness, as I am thinking of it here, is that of understanding our nature as beings who think, who feel, and for whom a world shows up.

 

"Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.

"Brains don’t have minds; people (and other animals) do.”

"The world is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it. The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience."

Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads, pp. 9-10, 142.

Unlikely that conciousness emerged from the brain

Psychiatrist Elio Frattarnoli in Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain writes: “As for the idea that consciousness must be biological because it ‘emerged’ through the biological process of natural selection, the truth is that consciousness is entirely different from any biological function that has emerged through natural selection. It cannot be explained the way biological functions can―as a result of genetic mutations producing new proteins producing new biological processes producing a new function. No doubt brain processes that are necessary to support consciousness did emerge in this way through natural selection. But they are only the necessary biological conditions for consciousness, not its sufficient causes.

Frattarnoli reminds us that neuroscientist Wilder Penfield, who mapped the neocortex of patients with epilepsy, reported: “The only sort of conscious experience he was able to evoke electrically was the passive experience of something happening to the patient or impinging on his awareness―what Penfield called ‘brain-action.’ This was not at all what he had expected. He had started out with the materialist assumption that all conscious functions and experiences must be controlled by the brain and would therefore be affected by the brain events he evoked with his stimulating electrode. But what he discovered instead was a presiding awareness in the patient that was utterly separate and unmoved by any of these brain events―that could recognize, remember, compare, and report on the various conscious experiences evoked by Penfield’s electrode but was itself unaffected by them.”

Frattarnoli concludes that consciousness: “simply cannot be explained in physical, chemical, or biological terms. Without a direct causal link between brain processes and consciousness, there is no persuasive reason to believe that consciousness emerged from the brain, or through natural selection, at all. Since it is a phenomenon of a fundamentally different order from any brain process, it would be much more logical to assume―if we are going to assume anything―that consciousness emerged from a source outside the brain.”

Consciousness is a cosmic principle

In an essay entitled “Science, Soul, and Death” Marilyn Schlitz and John H. Spencer assert: “There are many other contemporary scientists” who argue for a postmaterialist paradigm of science, “such as Lothar Schäfer, a retired professor from the University of Arkansas, where he taught physical chemistry for forty-three years. One of the harbingers of this new worldview, Schafer is optimistic that science is reaching a new way of understanding consciousness.

“Like Tanzi and other postmaterialist scientists, he speaks about wholeness as the core of reality, countering the materialist and reductionist worldview that reduces the world to its parts while pretending there is no whole. While he made his career in physical chemistry, measuring, manipulating, and explaining the microscopic world, he sees the basis of matter as nonmaterial and the universe as interconnected.

“’All things are connected,’ Schäfer explains. ‘Not in the empirical world, but in their nonempirical roots. The argument is this: if the universe is wholeness, everything comes out of it, everything belongs to it, including our consciousness. In that case, consciousness is a cosmic principle. The only chance you have that your consciousness survives when you die is that there is some consciousness outside. What may be in us is perhaps not our consciousness, but a cosmic consciousness’ (Schäfer, quoted in Schlitz, 2015)

“In discussing his own cosmology, Schäfer acknowledges that a personal transformation linked his views of death with his scientific worldview. When he was younger, he was frightened about death. Today he finds nothing frightening about it. Not that he has any clear opinion on what happens after; still, he believes that ‘there is a cosmic mind with which we are connected. If there is a cosmic mind, it would be strange if it wasn’t connected with ours’ (Quoted in Schlitz, 2015).”

Marilyn Schlitz and John H Spencer, “Science, Soul, and Death” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Science 2020 (p. 409). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Schlitz, M. (2015). Death Makes Life Possible. Sounds True: Boulder.

Schrödinger affirmed the awareness of our soul

Marilyn Schlitz and John H. Spencer in an essay entitled “Science, Soul, and Death” include these comments and quotes from Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961).

“Schrödinger offers an interesting perspective on why it is so difficult to pinpoint the experiencer or observer in our scientific investigations: he writes that ‘the reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it’ (Schrödinger, 1967, p. 138.).”

“Additionally, any awareness of anything implies that there must be some sort of separation from the physical events that we are aware of, and that anything that can be self-aware must necessarily be nonphysical.”

“Schrödinger even went so far as to argue that consciousness is universal and singular: ‘there is only one thing and what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAYA)’ (Schrödinger, 1967, p. 95 (original emphasis).

“Schrödinger also agreed with psychiatrist Carl Jung that ‘all science...is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted’ (Schrödinger quoting Jung in Schrödinger, 1967, p. 129). Even if Schrödinger would have preferred the word ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness,’ he does not shy away from Jung’s use of the word ‘soul.’

“In either case, they are both referring to the same thing—the very subject of awareness, the nonphysical locus of all experience, the self or being or consciousness that ‘I am.’ While it may be beyond the limits of science to directly access soul, it is not at all scientific to deny its reality. Soul, in this sense anyway, is presupposed by the possibility of being able to do science in the first place.”

Marilyn Schlitz and John Spencer, “Science, Soul, and Death” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, 2020 (p. 414). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Schrödinger, E. (1967). What is Life? & Mind and Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., is a social anthropologist, researcher, writer, and charismatic public speaker. She currently serves as President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

John H Spencer, Ph.D., was awarded his degree from the University of Liverpool, specializing in the Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Physics. He is the multiple award-winning author of The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics, and Ultimate Reality.

Brain imaging evidence with mediums

Alexander Moreira-Almeida, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora) and Founder and Director of the Research Center in Spirituality and Health, Brazil, writes that his research group:

"Performed a functional neuroimaging study with SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) with 10 mediums. We compared writing complexity of the produced texts and brain activation patterns during "psychography" (trance writing) and control writing (non-trance, regular writing).

"Experienced mediums produced texts during psychography with higher complexity scores than during control writing. However, despite this more complex writing, they presented lower activation in several brain areas related to the cognitive processing and writing planning (left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus, and right precentral gyrus).

"These findings are consistent with mediums' reports of automatic (non-conscious) writing and their claims that an ‘‘outer source’’ was planning the written content (Peres et al., 2012)."

Alexander Moreira-Almeida is Chair of the WPA (World Psychiatric Association) Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry and Coordinator of the Section on Spirituality of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association. He is the editor of Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship, and is also a co-founder of the Campaign for Open Sciences to promote the movement toward a Postmaterialist Science.

Alexander Moreira-Almeida, “Consciousness and the Brain: What Does Research on Spiritual Experiences Tell Us?” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, (p. 301-317). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Peres, J. F., Moreira-Almeida, A., Caixeta, L., Leao, F., & Newberg, A. (2012). “Neuroimaging during trance state: a contribution to the study of dissociation.” PLoS One, 7(11), e49360.

 

Research evidence for after death consciousness

Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Brazilian MD and PhD, explains his research on psychic mediums in “Consciousness and the Brain: What Does Research on Spiritual Experiences Tell Us?”  

"Our group (NUPES - Research Center in Spirituality and Health, School of Medicine, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil) recently published a case study investigating the fit and accuracy of mediumistic letters produced by the most prolific Brazilian medium, Chico Xavier (1910–2002) (Rocha et al., 2014). We investigated 13 letters allegedly written by the same deceased personality (J.P.), an engineering student who drowned when he was 24 years old. A special emphasis was put on determining the accuracy of objectively verifiable items of information provided by the letters and the likelihood of Xavier’s access to the information via ordinary means of information (i.e., fraud, chance, information leakage, and cold reading).

"Xavier, who never obtained material profits from his mediumship, used to perform weekly sessions where hundreds of mourning relatives from all over Brazil sought his help, hoping to obtain a “psychographed” letter (i.e., a letter written by the medium allegedly under the influence of a deceased personality). It is estimated that Xavier produced 10,000 of these letters during his life. Relatives usually, after waiting in a long line, exchanged a few words with Xavier. After that they waited, seated in a large room while Xavier, for about three hours, wrote the letters uninterruptedly at a table in front of the audience. While writing the letters, Xavier had no direct exchange with the sitters. In each session, Xavier used to write an average of six letters.

"40 days after J.P.’s death, his parents and his sister traveled 400 km to see Chico Xavier. They had never met previously and, after waiting in the queue, the only thing the sister said to Xavier was that she had lost her brother, that her parents were devastated, and that they would like to receive some news from him or even a letter. She stated definitively that they did not say any names or give any other information to Xavier. At that session, they received the first letter and, in the next five years, they received a total of 13 psychographed letters.

"In the first letter, there were 16 items of verifiable information, including three first names (“Sueli,” “Jair,” and “Elvira”), one surname (“grandpa Basso”), and one date (“Sunday”— in reference to the day of J.P.’s death). It also included a detailed description of the circumstances of J.P.’s death (being with friends, resuscitation procedures, the absence of the use of alcohol and drugs), and references to past activities of the deceased (studying, teaching classes, and being fond of kissing). All information was confirmed to be correct and accurate.

"Out of the set of 13 letters, we identified 99 items of verifiable information; 98% of these items were rated as a “Clear and Precise Fit,” and no item was rated as “No Fit.” Given the circumstances, ordinary explanations for accuracy of the information were only remotely plausible.

"There were some pieces of information that were unknown by the relatives present at the sessions, so their accuracy was able to be checked only later, after some search (e.g., the death of a distant aunt, and some “drop in” communications—situations where allegedly a deceased personality, unknown to the medium or sitters, communicates via the medium without the request of relatives relatives or friends).

"In addition, the letters expressed several of J.P.’s personality traits (e.g., his use of slang, humor, puns, and particular colloquial expressions). As a whole, these results seem to provide empirical support for non-reductionist theories of consciousness (Rocha et al., 2014)."

Alexander Moreira-Almeida, “Consciousness and the Brain: What Does Research on Spiritual Experiences Tell Us?” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, (p. 301-317), 2020. AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Araujo, S. F. (2012). “Materialism’s eternal return: recurrent patterns of materialistic explanations of mental phenomena,” In: A. Moreira-Almeida, F.S Santos, (Eds.), Exploring frontiers of the mind-brain relationship. New York: Springer, pp. 3-15.

Araujo, S. F. (2016). Wundt and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology. New York: Springer.

Beauregard, M., Schwartz, G. E, Miller, L., Dossey, L., Moreira-Almeida, A., Schlitz, M., Sheldrake, R., & Tart, C. (2014). Manifesto for a postmaterialist science. Explore, 10(5), 272-4.

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Peres, J. F., Moreira-Almeida, A., Caixeta, L., Leao, F., & Newberg, A. (2012). “Neuroimaging during trance state: a contribution to the study of dissociation.” PLoS One, 7(11), e49360.

Rocha, A.C., Paraná, D., Freire, E. S., Lotufo Neto, F., & Moreira-Almeida, A. (2014). Investigating the fit and accuracy of alleged mediumistic writing: a case study of Chico Xavier's letters. Explore (NY), 10(5), 300-8.

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Alexander Moreira-Almeida, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora) and Founder and Director of the Research Center in Spirituality and Health, Brazil. He is Chair of the WPA (World Psychiatric Association) Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry and Coordinator of the Section on Spirituality of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association. He is the editor of Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship, and is also a co-founder of the Campaign for Open Sciences to promote the movement toward a Postmaterialist Science.

 

Brains can't explain NDEs and medium research

"Other evidence challenging the materialistic assumption of mind-as-brain," physicist Dean Radin writes, "comes from studies of near-death experience (NDE) and mediums,. In the first case, most orthodox interpretations of NDEs are explained as side effects of a failing brain (Greyson et al., 2012).

"Those explanations are countered by the remarkable vividness and long-lasting memories associated with NDEs, as opposed to the vague memories and dulled cognition associated with brains starved for oxygen (Greyson, 2013). In addition, NDEs can result in dramatic and positive personality changes; this is not the case for those afflicted with hallucinations caused by brain damage (Greyson, 1993).

"When all of the pro versus con arguments are judged, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the NDE represents an unusual state of awareness that transcends current models of brain functioning (Khanna & Greyson, 2014).

"In the case of mediums, double and triple-blind controlled experiments have shown that mediums can obtain verifiably correct information about their clients (Beischel et al., 2015; Kelly & Arcangel, 2011; Delorme et al., 2013). Such experiments are designed to eliminate all known biases and information leakage paths, including any form of direct or indirect contact between the mediums and the clients. Mediums interpret the information they receive as from coming from the deceased, which may or may not be so, but the fact that the information is correct beyond chance expectation raises a problem for brain-based explanations.

The accumulated evidence in favor of the existence of psychic abilities was already persuasive to many academics in the 1950s. But by the second decade of the 21st century, the weight of evidence has become overwhelming to all but the most entrenched skeptics.

Dean Radin, “Reductive Materialism Explains Everything, Except for Two Small Clouds,” Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, (p. 327-341). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Beischel, J., Boccuzzi, M., Biuso, M., & Rock, A. J. (2015). “Anomalous information reception by research mediums under blinded conditions II: Replication and extension.” Explore (NY), 11 (2), 136-142.

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Khanna, S. & Greyson, B. (2014). “Near-death experiences and spiritual well-being.” J Relig Health, 53 (6), 1605-1615.