Ghosts are not illusions: Ruickbie excerpt #6

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

A common argument against the objective or independent quality of apparitions is that they are the product of the mind of the person seeing them, an illusion, in fact. This is plausible. We know that people see hallucinations under a range of conditions, such as sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, drug intoxication, extreme stress, and mental derangement. So what should be different about ghosts? It is important to note that Martindale [see Ruickie excerpts 3 and 4] was not under the influence of any of these factors, but how else could we test this?

People have tried to record ghosts using photography, film (video) and audio, with occasionally surprising results; however, almost all of these can be explained as artifacts or manipulations of the media, even if they may not be. We had best leave that Pandora’s Box alone.

We have seen that apparitions can reveal information to the witness that they did not already have and often did not know they needed. This seems like cast-iron proof that apparitions cannot be in the mind of the witness; however, we could still argue that this was the percipient’s psi (the general term for telepathy, precognition, etc.) working unconsciously to manifest what the conscious mind required. It seems a bit strained, but even so, we could argue that.

What if a ghost were seen by more than one person? Would that test the percipient psi theory? There are two classes of possibility here: the same ghost seen by different witnesses at different times; and the same ghost seen by different witnesses at the same time. There are plentiful examples for both situations.

The Martindale case has already supplied an example of the former, but, of course, there are many more. A young medical student, Rosina Clara Despard (1863–1930), conducted a detailed investigation of the haunting of her family home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. A ghost was seen or heard over a number of years from 1882 to 1889 by at least eighteen people (independently, sometimes consecutively, and on four occasions at the same time), and by the family dogs (judging from their reactions). Frederic Myers was also involved, interviewing witnesses, and encouraging Rosina to investigate further. Andrew Mackenzie, another figure connected with the SPR [Society for Psychical Research], collected reports of continued paranormal phenomena up until the 1970s.

In the Census of Hallucinations there were 283 cases where the percipient was not alone (and the other person was awake). The other person also saw the apparition in 95 cases (33.6%). There were also another auditory cases experienced by more than one person at the same time. Hart et al., used stricter criteria to identify 46 cases “in which more than one person was in a position to be a percipient” and of these found that 26 (56%) were “collective.” Stevenson looked at other research to conclude that approximately 30% of visual hallucinations were seen by more than one witness.

Gurney still tried to explain collective apparitions as the psi effect of a principle percipient telepathically causing everyone else to see the same thing, what he called “psychical affection,” and Stevenson “telepathic infection.” Stevenson pointed out that this leaves the perplexing question of why the group should suddenly become telepathic on the occasion of the ghost’s appearance, and on no other; Tyrell also argued that the witnesses all saw the same apparition, but differently because it was from their individual viewpoints, thus not like an image received from one mind. 

Although immaterial, we can rule out that apparitions seen by mentally normal people not under the influence of drugs are illusions because they can be seen by several people at different times and at the same time: they demonstrate a realness that would be widely accepted if it did not contradict our dominant ideas about the nature of reality.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Analyzing ghost evidence: Ruickbie excerpt #5

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: 

Ghost photo: Mary King's Close in Scotland  

In my survey, I also wanted to know what the ghost hunters thought ghosts were. The largest number of people believed that ghosts were ghosts in the traditional sense of the word, that is, the spirits of those who have passed on. However, the second largest group gave non-spiritual answers, ranging from quantum theory to extra dimensions and parallel worlds, to powers of the mind and environmental recordings. Some people also believed in both spiritual and non-spiritual theories, commonly expressed as describing one level of haunting as a recording (or residual haunting) and another as the spirit of the deceased to account for seemingly repetitive and interactive phenomena. While most ghost hunters had experienced something that they would call a ghost, not all of them saw that as evidence for life after death.

Ghosts as recordings, residues, imprints or impressions has been debated for some time. Archie Roy, Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University and President of the Society for Psychical Research (1992–1995), put it best when commenting on the Martindale case:

You have to postulate that in the case of a typical haunt some very emotion-laden scene or some very important scene from the point of view of the humans that took part in it, has in some way become registered on the environment. [...] a sort of psychic video that has been created. And someone who comes along who’s sensitive enough to act as a “psychic video player” will actually play that tape and see the figures, or perhaps even hear voices or hear sounds. [...] it is nothing to do with the people who were originally there, who are no longer there. It is simply a record.

Whilst superficially plausible, the recording theory is only using a modern technological metaphor in place of earlier spiritual theories: it is not a theory in itself because it does not adequately propose what the recording medium is, or how the playback mechanism works (or in most cases does not). Nor does the proposition address what is known about recordings. To make a visual recording one requires a recording device, a medium on which to record it, a means to develop that medium in the case of film, and a means to replay that medium on another, different device from that making the recording, either by displaying it on a screen, or projecting it; audio recording requires its own process of recording and playback. In the Martindale case, or others like it, there is no obvious recording or playback device and no obvious medium. Furthermore, Martindale witnessed a life-like, three-dimensional, full-colour event with sound that moved through space. It was not displayed or projected and was of a quality beyond our current technological level. Typically, a recording will degrade significantly over time as a consequence of the instability of the original recording medium and the effects of the environment in which it is stored, yet Martindale described an undegraded, pristine scene.

The emotional mechanism is also contradicted by Martindale’s experience. The apparitions he witnessed were engaged in a normal, undramatic and unimportant activity (for soldiers, at least). He described no emotional content to the scene itself. Nor was Martindale especially “sensitive:” as far as we know, he had no other experiences like this during his lifetime. What Martindale saw was not like any sort of recording as we know it, and none of the features said to be required to make or receive such a recording – emotional intensity and exceptional psychic sensitivity – were present. We can rule out that it was a “simply a record.”

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Roman legion ghosts: Ruickbie excerpt #4

The Treasurer's House

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Eighteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, Harry Martindale, was in the cellars of the Treasurer’s House, an historic house in York, UK, working on the central-heating system, when he heard the distant “blaring of a note,” in his words. Perched on a ladder, Martindale continued his work as the sound grew louder. Looking down, he saw a figure wearing a plumed helmet and holding a trumpet-like instrument come through the wall followed by a horse and rider, and a column of Roman soldiers. Martindale fell off his ladder with fright and watched as about twenty soldiers marched across the cellar.

Martindale’s description [see Ruickbie excerpt #3] seemed in complete contrast to his Hollywood-level understanding of the Roman military. In particular, he described the use of a round shield. We think of the legions equipped with the large rectangular scutum; however, the original infantry shield was the round clipeus, later being replaced by the defensively superior scutum, only to come back into use during the crisis of the third century. It had a distinctive projection in the centre. After the Roman conquest of Britain in the first century AD, Roman auxiliaries (usually locally raised troops) continued to use the clipeus. In the second century AD, there were over 25,000 auxiliaries deployed in the Roman province of Britannia. According to the National Trust, which now owns the property, later research showed that the Sixth Legion was withdrawn from York during the fourth century AD and replaced by soldiers armed with round shields (presumably auxiliaries).

The cellar where Martindale was working had been built over an old Roman road, the Via Decumana. Over the centuries, this had resulted in a height difference of some 15 to 18 inches. As Martindale had observed during the experience, the soldiers appeared to march through the newer floor until reaching an excavated portion where he could see their feet touching the ground. The old Via Decumana had no obstructing walls, so it was again instructive that Martindale witnessed the troops enter through one stone wall and exit out another, exactly as if the walls had not been there. In addition to their appearance, their behaviour also strongly suggested that Martindale had indeed witnessed a body of Roman soldiers marching along the Via Decumana, almost 2,000 years after they had physically done so.

Given the witness’s age, it might be thought that here was a youth having a lark, but, after finding his story met with ridicule and disbelief, including being pressured by a local church to stay silent, Martindale kept quiet about it until interviewed for television in the 1970s. Described in the press as a “modest man,” Martindale went on to become a policeman and was remembered by the Lord Mayor of York, Ian Gillies, as a dedicated officer. Property manager for Treasurer’s House, Jane Whitehead, said of Martindale’s experience, “Unless he had done a lot of detailed research into the soldiers that belonged to that section of the Roman army he could not have known the level of detail he used to describe the soldiers he saw.”

Not only is Martindale’s account detailed and corroborated by other sources, but he is not alone in having had this experience. In addition to the then curator’s admission about the ghosts, there have been at least three other sightings of Roman soldiers in the cellar. Around 1900 a party guest of the industrialist Frank Green, then the owner of the Treasurer’s House, complained about finding her way barred by someone she took to be in fancy dress, wearing the uniform of a Roman soldier – Green knew nothing about it. 

A visiting American professor in the 1930s is also reputed to have seen the ghosts in the cellar. In February 1956, the then housekeeper for the National Trust, Joan Morsen, went down to the cellar to check on the central heating and saw the Roman soldiers. Living in the house at the time with her seven-year-old daughter, Morsen kept quiet about what she had seen to avoid frightening the girl. It was only when Martindale’s story became more widely known in the 1970s that she told her story. Her daughter then confessed to having heard the horn on several occasions and being woken up in the night by it.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Historical ghost evidence: Ruickbie excerpt #3

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

“Only one thing is certain about apparitions,” wrote Andrew Lang in 1894, “namely this, that they do appear. They really are perceived.” But ‘apparitions,’ originally from Latin apparere ‘appear,’ are only appearances, and, as we know, appearances can be deceptive. When I saw my first ‘apparition,’ I was not looking for one, and, Scrooge-like, certainly did not ‘believe’ in it, but when I went looking for ghosts?

I had good odds, about 1 in 10, of finding one. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), especially founded to investigate claims of the paranormal, launched its “Census of Hallucinations,” asking 17,000 people by postal survey:  

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?

This had happened to 1,684 people (9.9%) at least once, with 1,112 reporting visual hallucinations, including realistic human apparitions (830 cases) of the living (352 cases), the deceased (163 cases), and unrecognized (315 cases) – the rest being incomplete (143), or “other” (139).

The odds are better for those who purposely set out to find them. In 2012, I surveyed self- professed paranormal investigators (‘ghost hunters’). The data showed that the average ghost hunter was a white male in his early forties, who had spent nine years investigating almost a hundred cases. Collectively, the people I surveyed had spent 490 years investigating 4,861 cases. One individual claimed over a thousand investigations during thirty-four years. It was an astonishing amount of time and dedication, but had they found anything?

When asked “have you ever experienced what you would call a ‘ghost,’” 89% said “yes.” In total, 238 separate events were reported. These experiences were visual (40%), non-visual (45%), and anomalous encounters of an indeterminate nature (15%). The reported phenomena were not always independent events, sometimes taking place concurrently or simultaneously. When I joined a group of ghost hunters to investigate 30 East Drive, Pontefract, today’s top contender for the “most haunted house” title, I saw the process of such investigations firsthand, but Scrooged my own experiences as psychological and coincidental.

We must conclude, that if you go ghost hunting, you will most likely experience something that you might think of as a ‘ghost.’ It may take several investigations over many years, but the probability is high that you will at least convince yourself. But what would constitute the case most likely to convince others? And more particularly, where in time are apparitions?

“They Were Coming Out of the Wall”

Eighteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, Harry Martindale, was in the cellars of the Treasurer’s House, an historic house in York, UK, working on the central-heating system, when he heard the distant “blaring of a note,” in his words. Perched on a ladder, Martindale continued his work as the sound grew louder. Looking down, he saw a figure wearing a plumed helmet and holding a trumpet- like instrument come through the wall followed by a horse and rider, and a column of Roman soldiers. Martindale fell off his ladder with fright and watched as about twenty soldiers marched across the cellar. Martindale described the scene:

[...] They were coming out of the wall, the wall didn’t exist as far as they were concerned. The only other Roman soldier I’d seen prior to this, is what we call, or I call, the Charlton Heston type – riding a beautiful horse, very smart. These were the complete opposite. The first thing that struck me was how small they were, they were very small indeed. Another remarkable thing when they first came out of the wall – I couldn’t see them from the knees down, until they came to where the Roman road had been excavated – then I could see them from their sandals up. [...] I wouldn’t say they were all that smart, although they did all [have] the same uniform on. [...] On the top on the material were strands of leather all the way round, and the only thing I can say they had on was a green-coloured skirt. All of them carried a short sword on the right had side, the side nearest to me, and it was a short sword like an oversized dagger. [...] One was carrying a long, like a lance affair, and one of the soldiers I saw walking out the wall carried a shield. Now in the centre of the shield it was like a raised bulb.

As the last soldier passed through the opposite wall, Martindale made his escape. He was found by the museum’s curator, who said “By the look of you, you’ve seen the Roman soldiers.” Martindale went home and called his doctor, telling him what he had seen, and was signed off work with shock. Years later, when Martindale gave his first interview about the incident, he could not remember when it had taken place, but the doctor was able to provide the date from Martindale’s medical records. When asked “Are there such things as ghosts?”, Martindale’s unequivocal answer was “Yes.” 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Falsification of ghosts? Ruickbie excerpt #2

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

Logically, if we are going to become ghosts after death, then we must have this ghost potential now; and, if ghosts after death, then why not also before life? Therefore, ‘ghosts,’ as an immaterial identity format, or IIF (that will be our working definition), must also be implicated in things such as mediumship, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and even reincarnation, expanding our evidential base and scope for theoretical modelling.

When Scrooge sees the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, he finds that Marley in death is just like Marley in life. Scrooge might not believe in him, but he does recognize him. For the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body to be recognizable as such, then it, too, must involve the experiences, personality traits, and self-awareness that characterized the person in the living body, that strange sense of ‘I’ that we have floating inside our heads.

However, if Scrooge did not believe in Marley, will one piece of evidence be enough? Although William James famously asserted in connection with the supernatural that one ‘white crow’ is sufficient to prove that not all crows are black, which is entirely correct, the existence of one white crow did not change Scrooge’s mind, and has not changed our materialist paradigm. What we must do is gather a flock of white crows.

The ‘best’ evidence, then, is not one single piece of evidence – we have plenty of that, and herein also lies a problem. The sheer amount of evidence has become too much for the average person to sift through, too diverse in its content to grasp, too contested to judge easily; simply, all too much to take in. This cognitive challenge defaults to denial. We need to find structure in the evidence, if we are going to be able to make sense of it.

The way in which apparitions present themselves to us tells us something about them and in doing so will raise questions about the nature of reality. Dickens again provided us with an interesting structure in A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Marley opens a supernatural journey involving “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” “The Ghost of Christmas Present,” and “The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.” We tend to think of ghosts as things of the past, yet, if anything of ourselves should survive physical death, then it must also be capable of spanning temporality. This creates a new way of approaching the question of survival that will lead us to a new conclusion.

All of what we will look at will seem outrageous, individually, but taken together will form something more than the sum of its parts. The best evidence must also include a theory. It is a frequent counter-argument against parapsychology in general that it has no theory. Importantly, the theory should not, like the carthorse, come before the facts; however, simply arranging the facts has led me to my theory, and it is important to show them in that order to demonstrate how I have arrived at my conclusions.

As often claimed, does the evidence need to be ‘extraordinary?’ We cannot even define what that should mean. Is the evidence for anything in science actually ‘extraordinary?’ And what if we only had ‘ordinary’ evidence, would that be ruled out? A common standard for deciding cases where the stakes are high – life after death would seem to qualify – is found in the legal system: it must be “beyond reasonable doubt.” The problem is, that like ‘extraordinary evidence,’ ‘reasonable doubt’ is a circular definition and law courts have conspicuously refused to define it.

In a rare attempt to make ‘reasonable doubt’ understandable to jurors, the Federal Judicial Center made the following instruction:

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you firmly convinced of the defendant’s guilt. There are very few things in this world that we know with absolute certainty, and in criminal cases the law does not require proof that overcomes every possible doubt.

It could be argued that “firmly convinced” is just as circular as “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but the crucial clarification is that proof does not need to answer “every possible doubt.”

Are Scrooge’s doubts reasonable? He does not believe in Marley’s being a ghost because he believes that “a slight disorder of the stomach” may cause hallucinations. It should be easy to establish that slight disorders do not cause much, apart from wind perhaps, and certainly not realistic, interactive hallucinations, therefore, Scrooge’s doubts are not reasonable, but still he persists in them. We cannot define exactly what a reasonable doubt is, but we can show when a specific doubt is groundless.

What sort of witnesses will we be dealing with? What type of evidence is being presented? Is it direct, circumstantial, primary or secondary, or hearsay? In most cases we will be dealing with eyewitnesses giving direct evidence, that is, “personal experience through their senses.” In the same way that witnesses giving direct evidence are not dismissed by the court as repeating anecdotes, so our witnesses should not be accused of the same: what we are dealing with is testimony. Witness testimony has its own drawbacks, which is why we will also seek corroboration and supporting evidence. We will also hear from expert witnesses with specialized knowledge in the matter.

At the outset of this project, I believe that the mind is simply a product of the brain and that nothing of the person can continue after death. But I have some niggling doubts because I am not unaware of the evidence. As I said, I am like Scrooge, too, but I am going to see if I can prove myself wrong. This, in itself, is a good scientific principle, what Sir Karl Popper called ‘falsification.’

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

The Scrooge Paradox: Ruickbie excerpt #1

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?” “I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You might be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Leo Ruickbie

That is the problem. Not just Scrooge, many people have seen ghosts, but modern science does not believe them because the human senses are fallible. The paradox is that all the sciences are founded on the human faculties – either the physical senses or mental reasoning – and all are fallible, yet still we have split the atom, sent men to the moon, and eradicated smallpox. We have more than two thousand years of recorded testimony (excluding religious teachings) that death is not the end of the human personality or consciousness, so the question is not where is the evidence for ‘life’ after death, but why science will not accept it. At the heart of this is, not that we lack the evidence for consciousness being independent of the physical body (not just as apparitions, but also as out-of- body and near-death experiences, among other things), but that we doubt the experience – a case of seeing not being believing – what I will call the ‘Scrooge Paradox.’

Over a hundred and fifty years on from Dickens, polls regularly find large numbers of people believing in ghosts. In the UK, 34% believe in ghosts. In the US, between 31 and 33% of adults believe in ghosts. What this means is that of the nine or so people you call friends, three of them believe in ghosts. Interestingly, more people in the UK believe in life after death: between 45 and 47%. More than a quarter (27%) of those in the UK thought it possible to communicate with the deceased, compared to 21% in the US and 24% in Canada. Polling in the UK went further and asked people whether they believed that they had communicated with the deceased: 9% said yes. These are large proportions of the population and may be greater in other parts of the world.

Unexpectedly, the statistics doubled when people were asked whether they had seen a ghost. A 2018 survey of 2,000 people in the US found that 60% said that they believed that they had seen a ghost.. Although these were different studies, what this pattern seems to indicate is that more people believe that they have seen a ghost based on their own experience, but fewer are prepared to commit to saying that they believe in ghosts as a fact. In a sense, then, people do not even believe themselves – just like Scrooge.

I confess that I am like Scrooge, too. As someone involved in research in this field, scientifically investigating alleged hauntings and mediums, amongst other things, the experiences I have had that could be interpreted as encounters with spirits, I have explained away as random coincidence, even trickery, or due to psychological factors. Our identification with the body is so strong as to make existence without it seem ludicrous. So this essay is not just about the ‘best’ evidence – the best evidence has already been published – but about whether I could convince Scrooge, or myself, that there is sufficiently compelling evidence.

Some of the greatest names in parapsychology have also doubted the evidence for life after death. In 1972, the famous reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson chaired a symposium with the subject “What evidence, if you had it, would convince you of survival?” Karlis Osis from the American Society for Psychical Research was there, as was Germany’s foremost parapsychologist at the time, Prof. Hans Bender of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie (Institute for the Border Areas of Psychology), also Dr. John Palmer of the University of Virginia, and Dr. W.G. Roll of the Psychical Research Foundation. Bender was forthright: “I actually see no way for cogent proof.” Roll argued that “Since the dead cannot be directly observed and since we do not know whether the entities which speak through mediums are who they claim to be, we are unable to tell whether consciousness continues after death.” Finally, Stevenson reported that the prevailing theory among parapsychologists (at least in 1972) was that extrasensory perception (ESP) of the living accounted for what had previously been regarded as evidence of life after death (what came to be known as the ‘super-psi’ or, better, the living-agent psi hypothesis). Many parapsychologists are like Scrooge, too.

Dickens did not make Scrooge have a near-death experience, an out-of-body experience, a religious revelation or a scientific discovery, he had him see a ghost because ghosts are the common currency of any discussion about the afterlife. Everyone knows what a ghost is, it needs no further explanation (at least superficially). When considering what the best evidence for the continuation of the human personality after permanent physical death is or could be, the question of ‘ghosts’ must be the first one to examine because it is the most common and well-known experience across both human history and culture. As far as the extent of our current knowledge allows, we may state that there was never a time when ‘ghosts’ were not talked of and never a people who did not talk of them. This means that it must provide the most documented evidence from the greatest range of people, including the most credible and reliable witnesses.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Survival of consciousness: Rawlette excerpt #22

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—"We’ve now looked at a wide variety of evidence for survival of death, both from third-person and first-person perspectives. Each phenomenon we’ve examined—apparitions, dreams, mental mediumship, poltergeist phenomena, phantom phone calls, synchronicity, near-death experiences, memories of previous lives, and intermission memories—provides some evidence for survival when taken alone. But the real strength of the evidence lies in the fact that not only are experiences of postmortem consciousness exceedingly common but, across their many forms, they display consistent evidential qualities and a cohesiveness that’s hard to explain except by appealing to the actual survival of consciousness beyond the death of the body.

"Some people are likely to still reject the idea of survival because it doesn’t fit today’s mainstream scientific views about the physical world and the connection between consciousness and the brain, but it would be a serious mistake to ignore the well-substantiated evidence described in this essay just because it doesn’t match currently popular theory. This evidence has a lot to teach us, and its clearest lesson seems to be that we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding consciousness and its relationship to the physical world.

"Fortunately, there’s an increasing number of researchers and theorists who take the evidence for survival seriously and who are formulating theories about the mind-brain relationship that account for this evidence as well as making new, testable predictions. The most promising kind of theory, in my opinion, regards consciousness as the primary reality and understands physical reality as just one type of experience that consciousness can have. 

"Consciousness is the hardware, if you like, and physical reality is one kind of software it can run. Another analogy I find useful is to think of physical reality as a dream consciousness can experience. This fits well with the observations of NDErs who say dying is like waking up from a dream. It also explains why there seem to be other ways, besides dying, of taking a momentary break from the experience of the physical world: for instance, through the altered states of consciousness facilitated by meditation or psychedelic substances.

"Maybe the most important advantage of a consciousness-based theory of reality is that it dissolves many of the puzzles that arise when one studies the evidence for survival of death. For example, investigators have long been stymied by the fact that apparitions sometimes and in some respects seem like physical objects (for example, by having solidity and opaqueness, appearing appropriately from multiple angles, causing physical effects) while at other times and in other respects seem like projections of the mind (the fact that they wear clothing, often appear younger than the deceased’s age at death, sometimes appear transparent, dissolve, or walk through walls). 

"If all physical objects are fundamentally patterns of conscious experience, then there’s no need to choose between apparitions’ being physical and their being mental. Apparitions are in consciousness just like everything else, and while they sometimes play by the same rules as the phenomena we call “physical,” they can also deviate from them and be more fluid and responsive to intention, more like the experiences we have while, well, dreaming.

"Theories in which consciousness grounds the physical world are not new. In fact, they’ve been around for millennia, even in the Western world. In philosophy, they go by the name “idealism,” to reflect the primacy of ideas over matter. Idealism has had staunch defenders even during the scientific era, in philosophers such as George Berkeley, Brand Blanshard, and most recently Bernardo Kastrup. Consciousness is also understood as playing a central role in the determination of physical properties under some interpretations of quantum mechanics.

"But whether or not idealism proves to be the most productive path to understanding the physical world and the not-so-physical phenomena we’ve seen in this essay, taking seriously the evidence for survival of consciousness will be of vital importance in the development of future theory. And that’s not just because of what it tells us about what awaits us beyond death, but also because of what it reveals about the world we live in right now."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.