Perceiving soulful qualities: Rousseau excerpt #6

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

 

The ability to objectively project and directly perceive such qualities seems unlike anything we normally expect to find in the ordinary world. However, as we know from the models explored earlier, if the soul has a power in the out-of-body state then that power might still be present in the normal embodied state, albeit rather weakened. This is something we can look for beyond the NDE evidence.

Many philosophers have in fact argued that that when we encounter other beings, we are directly aware of more than what is physically present before us or can be inferred from it. Here is Wittgenstein:

"In general, I do not surmise fear in him - I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something inside from something outside; rather it is as if the human face were in a way translucent and that I was seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own."

Talents are unevenly distributed in the population, so some people might have this ability to an extraordinary degree, and perhaps be recognized as ‘spiritual’ or having high ‘emotional intelligence’. Others might have less of it than usual and so perhaps be perceived as having a syndrome such as autism. As we explore this topic, we can also look for evidence that these unusual abilities are naturalistic.

Interestingly, we do have data suggestive of the direct emission and perception of value-oriented qualities in ordinary life. A striking example of a deficit is provided by the neuropsychiatrist Oliver Sacks, describing his encounter with the well-known autist Temple Grandin:

“I was struck by the enormous difference, the gulf, between Temple's immediate, intuitive recognition of animal moods and signs and her extraordinary difficulties understanding human beings, their codes and signals, the way they conduct themselves. One cannot say that she is devoid of feeling or has a fundamental lack of sympathy. On the contrary, her sense of animals' moods and feelings is so strong that these almost take possession of her, overwhelm her at times. She feels she can have sympathy for what is physical or physiological - for an animal's pain or terror - but lacks empathy for people's states of mind and perspectives. When she was younger, she was hardly able to interpret even the simplest expressions of emotion; she learned to 'decode' them later... Temple had longed for friends at school and would have been totally, fiercely loyal to a friend..., but there was something about the way she talked, the way she acted, that seemed to alienate others... Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing - an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of these social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly...”.

From this it looks as though people really can be, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘aspect blind’. Grandin has learnt to infer such properties from body language by asking others to explain the correlations to her, so she could memorize them. She clearly has the ability to note non-verbal cues and to associate meanings with them, but this is a poor substitute for the faculty non-autistic people have and not a model of how they do it.

From a naturalistic perspective, we know that perception is mediated by fields that are emitted or reflected by the thing perceived and absorbed by the percipient’s sensor. This means that if this ability is naturalistic, a field must exist capable of carrying such information. There was a suggestion of this in some of the experiences quoted above, where people reported the ‘being of light’ as sending warmth and benevolence, or radiating love, joy, and warmth.

Here are two credible and telling anecdotes. The first comes from the journalist Dominic Lawson, talking about the chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov:

“I first met him as a teenager in 1983 when I helped to organize a world chess championship semi-final in London. He was quite unlike anyone I have met before or since – and it didn't take any understanding of the rules of chess to appreciate his exceptionality. Waves of mental energy and, yes, aggression, emanated from his body in a way that intimidated everyone in his presence”.

Such influences have also been seen in formal research and personally experienced by researchers. For example, people report being affected by encounters with seasoned meditation practitioners or simply by being in the presence of ‘naturally good’ people like the Dalai Lama.

The psychologist and expert researcher into emotions Paul Ekman, in a meeting with the Dalai Lama, experienced a spontaneous remission of his quickness to anger, a problem that he had struggled with for more than forty-five years:

I had a very strong physical sensation for which we do not have an English word – it comes closest to “warmth”, but there was no heat. It certainly felt very good, and like nothing I have felt before or after... As a scientist, I cannot ignore what I experienced... I think the change that occurred within me started with that physical sensation. I think that what I experienced was – a non-scientific term – “goodness”. Every one of the other eight people I interviewed [who reported similar experiences] said they felt goodness; they felt it radiating and felt the same kind of warmth that I did. I have no idea what it is or how it happens, but it is not my imagination. Though we do not have the tools to understand it, that does not mean it does not exist.

These cases strongly suggest that people can both project and perceive such qualities. The implications of this could be far-reaching. If people and other beings can have such qualities objectively, there is an implication that people and beings, and perhaps places and substances, can be good or bad in an objective sense, not just as a matter of culturally conditioned judgement. We know that qualities such as emotional intelligence can be developed, so perhaps there are ways for people to grow into persons that are objectively better or worse. Perhaps such qualities survive across contexts, including the transition from embodied life to an afterlife and whatever lies beyond. If that is the case, our cosmological understanding of the evolutionary journey that we are on is far from complete, and exciting discoveries await us as we further investigate the evidence for survival beyond death. 

 

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.

How would souls matter? Rousseau excerpt #5

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

Our exploration so far is of things and contexts that are in many ways analogous to how things are in the ordinary world; it looks as though the soul is a kind a of body with means of perception and action analogous to physical ones, that exists in a kind of place and environment that is unusual but not radically strange. Overall, this looks like an enlarged perspective but not a transformative one. Or so it seems.

We know that we are vulnerable to an array of perceptual traps and hazards that lead us to experience things in ways that are conditioned by our expectations and prior mental models. We can also miss important details in a scene because we focus our attention closely on aspects that particularly interest us. We should suspect that such effects may have hidden from us key aspects of the NDE experience and its meaning. Perhaps it all looks rather familiar because that is all we able or likely to notice, rather than that there was not much more to see. It is very likely that key aspects of the meaning of the evidence remain to be uncovered.

This being the case, we should look for ways in which we can shift our perspective to where we can see more clearly. Can we find ways to look for evidence of phenomena that have no familiar analogue in ordinary experience?

There are techniques for doing this. One way is to try to look beyond the immediately apparent content of the experiences and reflect on what the attributes of the experiences might reveal. Perhaps we might find interesting insights ‘hiding in plain sight’. We will offer one example of this.

A central theme of the NDE narrative is a meeting with a ‘being of light’, often identified by the experiencers as the central deity of their religion. Of course, there are expectation effects at work here, so the real nature of the ‘being of light’ is mysterious to us. However, that identification issue is only about the immediately apparent content of the experience. Something else is going on here that is equally interesting, something remarkable that lies at the heart of the transformative power of the NDE experience. Here are some typical examples:

“...I floated...up into this pure crystal light...it was beautiful, and so bright, so radiant, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It’s not any kind of light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light, and yet it has a special identity, it definitely does. It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love”.

“I recall thinking to myself ‘This is it – Death.’ And ‘looked around’ to see straight ahead a bright light, sending warmth and benevolence...”

“All the time I was up there I never felt afraid, or alone. There was someone or something up there. A presence that radiated love, joy, warmth and deep awesome spiritual feeling... It was the most beautiful experience I have ever had, and I will always cherish it.”

“Around me, as the tunnel began to lighten, there were presences. They were not people, and I didn’t see anything, but I was aware of their minds...There was total wisdom and goodness in them”, (emphasis in original).

These experiences are remarkable, not just for what was encountered but for how it was perceived, which is even more astonishing. We see here that souls have the ability to directly perceive qualities that we normally only experience subjectively, such as love, benevolence, goodness and wisdom. Besides the fact that these qualities are directly observable, they were perceived in a context with which the experiencer had no prior experience. There would have been no cues about how to interpret the beings’ nature or intent. As this perception is direct, it has objective qualities like the redness of a rose.

Any suggestion that people are simply jumping to positive conclusions fails due to reports of encounters with beings and presences that are observed in a negative way. Here are examples:

“I seemed to arrive in a huge, broad place like a void of pitch-black darkness....in the darkness, I sensed the most incredible coldness and fear coming over me.... I began to sense evil in the darkness. The darkness seemed not just physical but spiritual. I felt like I was being watched. A cold encroaching evil seemed to pervade the air around me. I knew there was something around me”.

“I was going down, deep down into the earth. There was anger and I felt this horrible fear. Everything was grey... There was this terrible feeling of being lost. ...there were two beings of some kind near me. I believe one was evil, maybe the Devil. He was the force that was tugging me down into that awful place. I felt enveloped by dark, black evil”.

Contrary to these, we have many cases of people reporting being ‘embraced’ or ‘enveloped’ by love or goodness. These accounts are mirrored in the broader literature on spontaneous religious experiences, where love, beauty, joy or sacredness is often experienced as a power and/or an influence.

The objectivity of these impressions appears to be confirmed by the fact that exposure to them appears to generate lasting and commensurate effects. For example, an encounter with the ‘being of light’ during NDEs appears to have a lasting positive effect on a person; more than 80% of NDErs report a strong positive change in their attitudes  and Morse has found that “the deeper the experience of light, the greater the transformation”. 

 

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.

 

Naturalistic soul perception? Rousseau excerpt #4

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

The survival evidence suggests that disembodied souls can observe and interact with the physical world by some other means than the normal bodily channels. In living beings, this type of capability is referred to as psi. Could psi be naturalistic? 

 

It is often claimed that psi transcends the limits of time, space and energy, but if that were true psi would be supernatural. The evidence suggests that psi is a capability of the soul, but if the soul really had a supernatural capability, it would be impossible to conceive of it as a naturalistic thing.

One approach to investigating this is to reflect on what would be required of psi for it to work in a naturalistic way and then to see if there is evidence supporting such ideas and models. This a big topic, so for present purposes we will focus on ‘informational’ psi, and consider whether phenomena of this type, e.g. clairvoyance (aka ‘remote viewing’) and telepathy, can plausibly be understood in terms of naturalistic models of how sensory systems work.

Any normal physical sensory channel has certain components. There will be a sensor (e.g. an eye) that picks up some external signal (e.g. light) originating from some source (e.g. an object) and sends it to a data processing unit (e.g. a brain) to convert into data (e.g. an image) that can be evaluated and some meaning extracted. A dog’s sense of smell and a bat’s sonar have this same conceptual architecture, as do manufactured communication channels such as television and radar systems. 

 

For psi to be naturalistic it would require that psi faculties are also facilitated by sensors, signals and data processors that operate in ways that follow a regular pattern that can be investigated. It would mean that the signals to which psi faculties respond are also naturalistic, whether they are physical or psychonic.

The structure of a signal can be characterized by a measure called its Shannon entropy, and the degree of fluctuation in that measure reflects how complex or interesting the signal is. It has been shown that biological sensors are more responsive to complex signals – think about how you tune out a constant sound. Edwin May and colleagues have demonstrated that psi works the same way. In a key series of studies, they showed that success in remote viewing tasks scales with the gradient of Shannon entropy of the target. It has long been claimed that psi works best in situations of meaningful significance, and this regularity reinforces that notion. 

 

In another line of research, it has been shown that success in psi tasks varies in a systematic way with changes in specific frequency bands of the local geomagnetic field. It is common for physical senses to be influenced by environmental factors (e.g. when fog reduces the visibility of a landscape), so again this reinforces the notion that psi is also naturalistic, albeit psychonic or psycho-physical rather than physical. 

 

 

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.

What might a soul look like? Rousseau excerpt #3

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

 

Mental states have complex properties and change in complex ways. Naturalistic things exhibit complex attributes and behaviors by means of a complex structure, which also entails having a size and shape. Might souls have such attributes?

In the previous section, we suggested that the soul is a hyperspatial thing with a complex structure, but this is only a hint at what the soul looks like. We also need to decide whether it really is a complex thing or just does things that would require it to be complex if it were a naturalistic thing. What we ideally desire is evidence of what it looks like when looked at by a competent observer.

If the soul has a hyperspatial shape it might be very hard for people to interpret what they see in a way unconditioned by expectation effects. Our minds naturally make sense of what we see by referring to our experiences and focusing on aspects of interest to us. We see such cognitive disconnects very clearly in NDE cases where people encounter a ‘being of light’ and experience it in terms of a familiar mental model such as Jesus, Krishna or Buddha. This is quite common, but some people have sufficient conceptual versatility to mitigate or overcome such effects to some degree. Given the size of the NDE database, we might reasonably hope to obtain some revealing reports, and indeed we do.

In Greyson and Stevenson’s retrospective study of 78 cases*, 58% of the NDE experiencers reported having some kind of ‘body’ during their NDE. According to Raymond Moody in The Light Beyond:

“Most people say they are not just some spot of consciousness when this [the OBE] happens. They still seem to be in some kind of body even though they are out of their physical bodies. They say the spiritual body has shape and form unlike our physical bodies. It has arms and a shape although most are at a loss to describe what it looks like. Some people describe it as a cloud of colors, or an energy field. One NDEer I spoke to several years ago said he studied his hands while he was in this state and saw them to be composed of light with tiny structures in them. He could see the delicate whorls of his fingerprints and tubes of light up his arms”.

Here are some direct reports:

“My being had no physical characteristics, but I have to describe it with physical terms. I could describe it in so many ways, in so many words, but none of them would be exactly right. It's so hard to describe”.

“[When I came out of the physical body] it was like I did come out of my body and go into something else. I didn't think I was just nothing. It was another body ... but not another regular human body. It's a little bit different. It was not exactly like a human body, but it wasn't any big glob of matter, either. It had form to it, but no colors. And I know I still had something you could call hands. I can't describe it. I was more fascinated with everything around me – seeing my own body there, and all – so I didn't think about the type of body I was in”.

“I was still in a body – not a physical body, but something I can best describe as an energy pattern. If I had to put it into words, I would say that it was transparent, a spiritual as opposed to a material being. Yet, it definitely had different parts”.

These reports suggest that a soul is a complex system, having a full complement of spatial properties including size, shape and structure in addition to location. If the soul is a hyperspatial structure it is hardly surprising that people are so often at a loss to describe what they saw, or that different people interpret the experience in different ways. Given their lack of an experiential reference or relevant vocabulary it is impossible for us at present to reconstruct from their reports exactly what they saw, but the evidence is sufficiently clear to support a conclusion that souls are complex systems. This resolves the question about the soul’s spatial properties in a way that is naturalistic. It opens up possibilities for understanding how the soul can have different causal powers at different times and changing ‘mental states’, and undergo changes in mental aspects while remaining the same individual. All of this is consistent with naturalistic requirements.

* B. Greyson and I. Stevenson, ‘The phenomenology of near-death experiences.’, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 137, pp. 1193–1196, 1980. 

 

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.

Where might a soul be? Rousseau excerpt #2

Julie Billingham

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

If souls are distinct from bodies, then to be naturalistic they must be located in space somewhere. However, science has not been able to detect any non-physical things or substances. How do we reconcile this with the claim that kinds of psychonic stuff and things actually exist? This is especially puzzling now we have proposed that souls have physical properties in addition to psychonic ones. Where might the soul be, and why has science not been able to detect its presence?

It is natural for people to think that they are ‘in’ their bodies, viewing the world from ‘behind their eyes’. We think this because that is where our sensory locus is, but the location of the body provides no evidence for the location of the soul. It is logically possible that the body is a sophisticated but nevertheless remotely controlled organic robot interlinked via a secure means of communication with a ‘controller’ (the soul) that is located elsewhere.

This theoretical speculation suggests that we might be able to investigate where the soul is by looking at NDE cases involving out-of-body experiences (OBEs), where the soul is observing the physical world without using the physical senses. We might be able to infer a useful hypothesis from the perspectival location of the soul’s perceptions and/or from the qualities of that perception.

We are fortunate to have many NDE OBE cases with features that are revealing in just the right way. Many NDE experiencers report remarkable perception while in the OBE state. Here are some typical examples:

“I was hovering over a stretcher in one of the emergency rooms at the hospital. I glanced down at the stretcher, knew the body wrapped in blankets was mine, and really didn't care. The room was much more interesting than my body. And what a neat perspective. I could see everything. And I do mean everything! I could see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of the stretcher. I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously. Three hundred sixty-degree spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher. At the time I knew exactly how many hairs there were to look at. But I shifted focus. She was wearing glittery white nylons. Every single shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing detail, and once again I knew exactly how many sparkles there were”.

“I could see behind me, from several sides simultaneously, and through objects. I was able to see what was going on in the room and in the corridor, behind the wall... My sight was very particular6. I don't know how to describe it: I saw everything with a total sight: the lake, the mountain, people along the banks of Evian, the texture of their clothes. I could see in the boats, in the houses, little animals in their burrows, the roots, the blades of grass, I saw all that simultaneously and if I focused on something I could see it through any obstacle and with every minute detail, from its surface to the organization of its atoms. Really a detailed and overall vision”.

“It’s very difficult to explain, but I was able to see the bed and my body simultaneously from all directions. I could see the top of my head and at the same time I saw my left and right sides, and the bed from below and from above, and all the room like that, I was everywhere at the same time, you see? ... I was surprised that I could see at an angle of 360°, I could see in front and behind, I could see underneath, from far, I could see up close and also transparently. I remember seeing a stick of lipstick in one of the nurses’ pockets. If I wanted to see inside the lamp which illuminated the room, I would manage to, and all of this instantly, as soon as I wanted to. I could say how people were dressed, I could see the sandstone wall, and also the stone slabs of the floor. I was able to verify their presence in a photograph later on since I thought it strange and anachronistic to have such slabs in an operating room. It was surprising and I could see, all at once, a green plaque with white letters saying, ‘Manufacture de Saint Etienne’. The plaque was under the edge of the operating table, covered up by the sheet I was lying on. I could see with multiple axes of vision, from many places at once. This is the reason why I saw this plaque under the operating table, from a completely different angle, since I was up there by the ceiling and I still managed to see this plaque located under the table, itself covered by a sheet. When I wanted to check this, we7 realized the plaque really was there and read ‘Manufacture d’armes de Saint Etienne’“.

“I visited various places I managed to identify afterwards. I remember a window in a village, a building with very white plaster, sand-carved windows. My curiosity was attracted to details. This is quite important, since we cannot do this normally, like seeing inside and outside at the same time, an impression of a quasi-holographic vision... Not a panoramic view, but seeing in front, behind, all details simultaneously which is completely different from ordinary sight. It is very rich”.

“I saw all around me, I saw the inside of my body”.

The perceptual phenomena described in such reports include being able to see simultaneously in all directions away from the vantage point and being able to see things from all angles simultaneously as though that vantage point is omnipresent, cosmologists, and philosophers. It is important to note that this view is backed up by detailed and rigorous theoretical work in physics and mathematics and is not just a speculation on the part of these researchers. This distinguishes the present situation from earlier eras in which researchers claimed that hyperspatial geometries could account for psychical phenomena without any credible theories grounded in physics to lend support to their views.

To return to the original question, from this evidence we can conclude that the soul does have a spatial location, which in principle resolves the puzzle of how the unique pairing between soul and body is possible. However, the NDE reports imply a number of interesting other points.

Not only does the vantage point seem to be in a hyperspatial location but also experiencers are able to see with a sensory apparatus that exploits hyperspatial geometries. Seeing the ordinary three-dimensional (3D) world requires a 3D lens focusing an image of a portion of the world onto a 2D retina. By (inadequate) extrapolation, seeing in an omni-perspectival way would require a ‘retina’ that is at least 3D on which an ‘image’ is focused by a ‘lens’ that is at least 4D. Omni-perspectival vision requires not only an ‘eye’ located in hyperspace, but also an ‘eye’ that is itself a hyperspatial structure. By implication the soul is a hyperspatial structure too, since an ordinary-spatial structure cannot incorporate a hyperspatial structure.

This is an important conclusion. A thing cannot fit into a space that has a lower dimensionality than the thing itself, so by implication the soul cannot ever be ‘in’ the body. This suggests that the soul is normally ‘elsewhere’ from the body; when the OBE commences, perception switches from seeing via the body to direct observation by the soul, without it having moved at all. The sense of being somewhere in the physical world during the OBE, or moving around in it, is therefore seen to be a data-processing artefact, an ‘interpretation’ that the mind places on the perceptual data based on psychological interests and expectancy effects.

If the soul is in hyperspace, then this may be part of the reason why science has not detected souls directly. Ordinary physical instruments may just not be able to look in the right direction.

The theoretical possibility that the ordinary world is a 3D membrane in a hyperspatial bulk is helpful, but it would be even more compelling if we had independent evidence that information and influence can flow between these domains. Might wholly physical phenomena exploit such mechanisms, if they exist? A potential candidate is the mysterious “quasi-crystals”, physical crystals discovered in 1982 by Daniel Shechtman, for which he was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These structures are aperiodic in three dimensions, meaning that their ‘stacking pattern’ never repeats. It can be shown mathematically that there is no algorithm for deciding how to complete such a stacking pattern by manipulating three-dimensional components. This makes the existence of such crystals in the real world a puzzle: how could the components stack themselves so as to grow a homogenous crystal? However, the crystals can be mathematically modelled as three-dimensional cross-sections through periodic five-dimensional structures. The implication is that although these crystals are impossible to construct via naturalistic processes restricted to the 3-membrane, their existence would be unproblematic if hyperspatial processes are involved.

The hypothesis that the soul is in a proximate hyperspace that is causally connected to our ordinary physical space is therefore plausible in the light of both NDE evidence and recent discoveries in physics.

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.

Soul-body interaction? Rousseau excerpt #1

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

To preserve naturalism, we have to assume that souls are psycho-physical things and interact with bodies via shared physical properties. This is interesting because it implies that soul-body interaction is mediated by physical fields rather than some other more exotic phenomenon.

The challenge now is to find evidence to indicate that in practice physical forces are involved in this and to give clues about the nature of the force(s) involved. There is suggestive evidence in some NDE cases.

To understand this point, we must think about a living person as a complex system. A system is a structure that functions as a whole in virtue of the causal relationships between its parts [90].

The body is of course a complex system in its own right, but we will focus on the person being a system comprised of a soul and a physical body. When a complex system works well it is sometimes difficult to tell how it works due to the many interdependencies between its parts. Properties can emerge that do not belong to the parts individually but only to the system as a whole.

A feature of complex systems is that if you take them apart, the emergent properties disappear, e.g. the parts of an aircraft cannot fly. To restore the original functionality the parts have to be carefully reassembled so that everything goes together correctly and we end up with a properly and fully integrated system. If in this process parts are lost, damaged or misaligned, the system level properties will be proportionately compromised. The more complex the system, the higher the risk of something going wrong during reintegration.

Given this model, we can now conceptualise the NDE as an event in which soul-body integration is disrupted and then restored when the person recovers. With very rare exceptions, the onset of an NDE is accompanied by a very rapid loss of all control over the body and sensation of bodily states. These are rapidly regained when the NDE ends. NDE experiencers notice this primarily because while they are in the OBE portion of their NDE, they lose the sensation of pain and also find themselves unable to communicate physically with people around their body. The following cases are typical:

“...there was the most searing pain in my arm... Then I was aware that I was losing consciousness and of people rushing around me, knocking things over in the rush to get emergency equipment set up. Then there was nothing – no pain at all. And I was up there on a level with the ceiling...I could see...my body, down there on the bed... the light... I...was being drawn into it...I had the most wonderful feeling of peace... And then suddenly, I was pulled back, away from it, back, slammed into my body again, and back with the pain, and I didn’t want to go” ([64], our emphasis).

“I began bleeding badly after the birth of my daughter and I was instantly surrounded by medical staff who started working on me. I was in great pain. Then suddenly the pain was gone and I was looking down on them working on me. I heard one doctor say he couldn’t find a pulse. Next I was travelling down a tunnel toward a bright light. But I never reached the end of the tunnel. A gentle voice told me I had to go back... I hit the hospital bed with an electrifying jerk and the pain was back. I was being rushed into an operating theatre for surgery to stop the bleeding” ([91], our emphasis).

The very sudden transition from a state of intense pain to complete painlessness at the onset of the NDE, and the immediate return of pain when the NDE ends, is remarkable. Natural endorphins can suppress pain and engender feelings of well-being, but their effects last for hours whereas NDEs last only seconds or minutes [77], so it is unlikely that these effects are due to exclusively bodily mechanisms. This point is reinforced by the cases in which a person can see their body receiving electric shocks, their chest being pounded, their face stroked, and so on, while they themselves feel no relevant bodily sensations [28], e.g. [64], [92]. Greyson reported an interesting case in which the patient could see their body reacting to hallucinogenic drugs while they themselves were mentally lucid [93].

If this model of NDEs as disruptions of soul-body integration is correct, and if the way the connection is made is naturalistic, then we can foresee the possibility that reintegration can sometimes go wrong. This gives us an opportunity to learn about how the system normally works. For complex natural systems, studying failure modes is in general a useful route to understanding them better. For example in medical research, correlating injured or diseased brain parts with functional deficits is an important way of working out which parts of the brain are involved in which cognitive or motor functions.

We can regard a healthy person in ordinary life as closely integrated so that influences can be smoothly exchanged between their mind and their body. If this integration is compromised, then a number of interesting consequences might be expected. Some influences from the mind might no longer reach the relevant parts of the body (e.g. the brain), and so some physical control might be lost, manifesting for example as kinds of paralysis, tremors or coordination problems. Likewise we might expect that information about some states of the body is no longer properly conveyed to the mind, manifesting for example as inattentions to parts of the body or compromises of some kinds of sensory awareness. Medically, such signs are known as ‘neurological deficits’ and assumed to be caused by damage to the brain or nervous system.

Other effects are possible too: influences directed from the soul towards the body might ‘miss their target’ and cause unintended physical changes beyond the body, while attempts by the soul to restore ‘missing’ information about the body might result in the soul mistakenly processing information from bodies other than its own. These latter two problems would manifest as psi phenomena.

Therefore we might anticipate that some people might, after an NDE, exhibit what look like neurological deficits and acquire psychic abilities. Intriguingly, many people who have had NDEs experience exhibit both neurological deficits and new or enhanced psi abilities.

There is substantial evidence in the professional NDE literature for experiencers afterwards having both enhanced functional psychic abilities of the informational type (e.g. spontaneous telepathic impressions) and dysfunctional PK abilities (e.g. unintentional disruptions of nearby electronic equipment).

The neurological deficits are difficult to judge because people may have acquired them due to brain or nervous systems damage caused by the physiological trauma of their NDE incident, for example oxygen starvation. However, there is much general medical evidence for people exhibiting neurological deficits without having any relevant nervous system damage. Medically, these are known as ‘conversion disorders’ and attributed to psychological causes. Such cases are well known in medical practice, where the prevalence of unexplained neurological symptoms typically ranges between 30 and 50% of presenting cases and in some specialities approaches 70%. In orthodox models, the flows of information and influence are between the brain and the body, so it seems mysterious how there can be deficits without physical damage. By postulating a pathway between the brain and the soul, we have opened up the possibility of another mechanism that can malfunction and lead to neurological symptoms.

That said, the disruptive physical psi effects provide the clearest evidential clues, so we will concentrate on those at this stage. NDE experiencers widely report that since their NDE, their presence causes interference, malfunctions or failures in electronic and electro-mechanical equipment such as radios, light sources, cell phones, security systems, toasters, VCRs, TVs, and so on. Here is an example report:

“Watches do not keep time for me. But mechanical things seem to work, even for no reason. If I get too close to FM radio frequencies I raise Cain with reception. Electronic equipment functions strangely around me. I touch electrical appliances to make them work. They start up with my energy. I blew my computer terminal when I got excited. [I] have burned up three cassette recorders [and] one overhead projector”.

Melvin Morse has found that wristwatches were unreliable for 25% of adults who survived childhood NDEs, whereas the same is true for only 4% of adults who have never had an NDE or paranormal experience. In fact, NDErs reported every kind of such effect more frequently than these control groups. Nouri also found that the depth of the NDE correlated with the frequency of these after-effects.

Overall, the electromagnetic nature of these side-effects supports the idea that soul-body interaction is mediated by physical forces and that these involve at least electromagnetic fields. We therefore infer that it is logically plausible that the soul has physical properties in addition to psychonic ones and that soul-body interaction, being based on physical fields, is naturalistic. 

 

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality.

Beyond a reasonable doubt: Beischel excerpt #20

When I asked the Windbridge mediums, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” as part of the ‘secret media project’ they knew nothing about, Traci Bray, who worked in and around law enforcement prior to focusing on her mediumship full time, chose to respond this way: “Yes. Were I presented this question in a court room, I would vote along with beyond a reasonable doubt.” But how does scientific evidence fit in a court system? 

 

Although “they evolved independent of each other to serve similar functions,” the decision-making schemes in both law and science share extensive similarities. For example, the threshold level of probability used by scientists to determine whether or not to reject a null hypothesis can be equated to the ‘standard of proof’ threshold used in a court system to determine whether or not proof beyond a reasonable doubt has been established. Furthermore,  

 

The structure of the decision situation is the same. Each reflects a true state of reality, which can never be known directly, but must be inferred (that a defendant is innocent or guilty; that a null hypothesis is true or false). 

 

When scientific findings are used as evidence in court, their “falsifiability,” the extent to which they can be contradicted by observation, is considered “the supreme criterion of authenticity”. 

 

There are also important differences between law and science. The philosophy stating that ‘law seeks justice and science seeks truth’ has been “announced by many legal authors and applied by several courts” and is based on the fact that courts will exclude evidence (such as that which has been illegally obtained) and science will not (as long as ethical and methodological standards are adhered to). In addition, 

 

Law relies primarily on what scientists would consider unreliable anecdotal evidence in the form of oral testimony. Science finds its truths by making generalizations from a mass of events. Thus, its focus is often at a population level. In contrast, law seeks to resolve disputes between certain named parties. 

 

As stated above, this is a significant advantage of mediumship research in establishing evidence for survival: we can assess the phenomenon as demonstrated by multiple skilled participants, using peer-reviewed methods and controlled laboratory conditions, which result in generalizable conclusions; we do not need to rely solely on anecdotal testimony about individual reported experiences. 

 

Using these comparisons to law, it is clear that the statistically significant scientific evidence described above, collected under randomized, controlled conditions in order to address falsifiable hypotheses, meets if not surpasses what could be considered proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a court system. 

 

I will leave you with the rest of Traci’s response to my afterlife question: “In my personal life, I am very calm and assured about where at least parts of our soul travel to after the death of the physical body and I have no fear of death itself.” 

 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics.  For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).