Advocate for the afterlife: Fenwick excerpt #3

"Before we can make sense of the idea of Consciousness continuing after death, we need to look at evidence for aspects of consciousness, mind or knowledge extending beyond the physical brain.

So, we call neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick as an expert witness.

Dr Fenwick, what evidence is there that 'mind' extends beyond the brain?"

Peter Fenwick:

Let's look at Consciousness as a ‘Field Structure’ and start with precognition. A precognitive experience is one in which you get knowledge about an event which has not yet happened. It may be something quite trivial, sometimes it carries important information though this is not always recognized at the time.

There are many accounts of premonitions of dying occurring to people who subsequently met their death. After the Aberfan catastrophe, in which a colliery slag tip collapsed over a small Welsh village, burying the school and killing over 100 children and their teachers, several people claimed to have had premonitory dreams of the disaster. One particularly sad story is that of ten-year old Eryl Mai, a pupil at the school, who told her mother, two weeks before the disaster:

“Mummy, I’m not afraid to die,” and added “I shall be with Peter and June,” (two of her school friends). The day before the disaster she said to her mother “Let me tell you about my dream last night. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it!” (Dossey, 2010)

Dreams of disaster are relatively common and can usually be dismissed as due to general anxiety, or simply coincidence. But a few, like the one described above, are so specific that it is hard to dismiss them. Here is another:

“My third daughter was just seven years old, when I woke up in the morning totally upset and in mourning over her death. I was so surprised and confused to see her lying next to me that I actually gently nudged her to see if she was alive. She had apparently gotten up during the night and climbed in next to me. When she moved I cried uncontrollably with relief. She was not dead and I hugged her. I did not tell her I thought she was dead. I could not remember any dream but the feelings were so strong and real, exactly as they were two days later when she was the victim of a hit and run.” (Santana Santos & Fenwick, 2012)

Premonitions suggest that our access to a line of time is not always limited to the present moment, but that we may occasionally get access to the future. And if this is so, then we have to ask whether consciousness is more a field structure than being created by the brain as reductionist science suggests.

Transmission Theories

We've been assuming that everything is created within the brain. An alternative view is that everything is transmitted through the brain.

William James was one of the strongest exponents of transmission theory. He described in his 1897 Ingersoll Lecture (James, 1898) the idea that beyond the 'veil of reality' in this world, and particularly beyond the brain, there is a transcendent reality in which the soul may live. He argued that this beam of consciousness is transmitted through the brain which modifies it. Sense data is transformed by the brain for transmission to an external mind. Mind in its turn can will an action which is transmitted to brain and so is able to initiate brain processes and thus actions. Although memories are held partly within the brain, a large part of memory is stored external to the brain, and in this, personal identity is located.

The attraction of transmission theories is that they allow for the concept of survival of personal identity after death, and thus give a meaning to life beyond the purely biological and cultural. They try to explain something that many people feel intuitively - that human beings, besides being individuals, are part of a greater whole. But once again we come up against the difficulty that at present there is no known mechanism which would link brain to mind in this way, or which would allow memory to be stored outside the brain.

Sir John Eccles, one of last century's most distinguished neurophysiologists and a Nobel laureate, also suggested that there is an interface between brain and mind. Here the 'dendron' (a hypothetical region of the nerve cell processes of the brain) links with the 'psychon' (the hypothetical atom of mind) (Eccles, 1990; Eccles, 1994). However, so far nobody has managed to identify dendrons or psychons, so the theory remains just that, a theory.

Field Theories

The theory of morphic resonance is biologist Rupert Sheldrake's attempt to explain how memory might exist independently of an individual brain, and could be accessed by other brains. He postulates the existence of 'morphogenetic fields' (Sheldrake, 1981). A morphogenetic field is part of the structure of the universe, existing everywhere at once. It is possible for matter to be influenced by this field at the same time in widely separate areas. He suggests that information relating to a pattern of behavior can be transmitted from the brain to this field. The transmitted information modifies the field and the field in its turn modifies other similar brains so that they become more likely to reproduce this particular piece of behavior. He uses this morphic resonance theory to explain, for example, how it is that when rats in one part of the world learned to run through mazes, other rats in other places seemed to acquire this ability simultaneously, and why scientists working in different places and not in contact with each other often tend to make the same discoveries at more or less the same time. Dr Sheldrake believes that experiments which he and other workers have carried out have produced some evidence for his field theory, (Sheldrake 2009) but so far the scientific world is not convinced.

 

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.

The judges enter the court: Fenwick excerpt #2

Dr Moretti            

"Honorable Advocate for the afterlife, please call your first witness."

In this session, before we start reviewing witness statements, we would like to look at the nature of evidence. So we call physicist Dr Pier Francesco Moretti:

“Dear honorable colleagues, today we are here to debate the existence of the afterlife and to identify evidence for this. I do not see or hear in this room any dead people, even if I always feel my father looking at me in these challenging situations.

So let us reflect on what could be an evidence-based demonstration for the existence of an “afterlife”.

In order to adopt commonly accepted scientific methodology, we need to focus on the concepts of “after” and “life”. We need to define time, and implicitly its unidirectional flow so that we can identify a before and an after.

We also need to agree on what we mean by life, at least in this context. We agree that our bodies stop functioning as a network of atoms localized in space when we verify the absence of breath, heart beat and cerebral activity. We are speaking about the identity of an individual that is incarnated in a body capable of interacting with other material entities during a period of time, and we call this period of interaction “life”.

Afterlife therefore refers to the existence of such an identity after an event that has caused that body to loose its capability to interact any longer with the same modality.

The existence of this identity should, ideally, be measurable. However, we do not have, at the moment, any instrument capable of detecting the presence of a dead identity directly: we always detect the interaction of matter with other matter, or energy (Mossio & Moreno, 2010)(Mossio, 2013).

If we adopt commonly accepted scientific knowledge, we cannot “demonstrate” any “afterlife” with an experiment. I want to be honest when referring to commonly accepted scientific knowledge. Let me use famous examples as follows.

Did humans walk on the Moon? We know that that event has changed many things in human history, but can we “demonstrate” it really happened?

If we point a powerful laser on a specific location on the Moon, the light will be reflected by a mirror positioned there by astronauts. We also have kilograms of rocks brought back and demonstrated to be of lunar origin through careful and accepted analysis. In the 1960s we had no robotic technologies to undertake such activities.

The other example is much more conceptual.

Is the Sun at the center of the solar system, or is the Earth?

We all know that for centuries no one had a problem with the Earth being at the center and the Sun rotating around it. Then, new technologies introduced greater accuracy in measurements of positions of stars and satellites. These were better explained if framed in a Sun-centered system. It proved to be a simpler, more useful theoretical framework capable of making accurate predictions. But any human, waking up in the morning, sees the Sun rising and appearing to rotate around us. Similarly, the commonly accepted scientific knowledge is mainly driven by the objectives and the use of that knowledge.

Let me conclude with a reflection. We sometimes believe in concepts assumed to be true. Often we forget the assumptions they are built on. We also neglect other theories that have the same right to be considered. The reality is that some theories are more fashionable. We are not saying that the Earth is flat, but that the Sun can be considered as rotating around the Earth for many applications.

Kepler and Giordano Bruno said similar things, but they used different arguments and in different historical contexts. One of them was burned. This modern era is now dominated by scientific methodology that requires specific, rigid rules to be fulfilled when referring to an evidence-based affirmation. Perhaps it is time to look again at these rules and the assumptions behind them (Bouratinos, 2018) ("Galileo Commission Report", 2019).*

*Galileo Commission Report. Galileo Commission: Expanding the Scope of Science. (2019). Published by the Scientific and Medical Network. Retrieved 1 July 2021, from https://galileocommission.org/report/.  

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.

Best available evidence: Fenwick excerpt #1

Peter Fenwick and his co-authors write in their essay entitled: “To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives”. . .

There is evidence from the whole of the history and much of the pre-history of the Human species of concern for death, respect and reverence for the dead and belief in some form of afterlife. It is an issue central to human thought and culture. But is it something based solely on hopes, fears and beliefs or can we find firm evidence for continued consciousness after bodily death?

This is not a question that lends itself easily to objective experiment or conventional scientific enquiry, so in this essay we are presenting our evidence as we might to a judicial review that accepts the test of it being 'beyond reasonable doubt' rather than scientific proof. In order to give 'reasonable doubt' a chance, we will allow our expert witnesses to be cross-examined with some skeptical questioning.

Let us consider the wording of the question before us:

What is the best available evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?

It seems a simple enough question, but to make sense of it, we need to have a clear idea of what is meant by some rather slippery concepts:

1. What constitutes 'evidence'?

2. What is 'Human Consciousness'?

3. What is inextricably tied to bodily life?

4. What is meant by 'Survival' and 'after'?

1 EVIDENCE

The traditional scientific method involves developing a hypothesis based on observations and then testing and refining it through experiment. A good hypothesis should be falsifiable through such tests and, if it has not been falsified, should lead to predictions which can themselves be tested. Ideally, those tests should be repeatable. It may never be possible to prove a hypothesis absolutely, but if it makes testable predictions that are then upheld by experiment or observation, it becomes the accepted theory. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021; Hepburn & Andersen, 2021; Gower, 1997)

Unfortunately, most of the evidence for the survival of human consciousness comes from personal witness statements, of those dying, of those near to them or of those left behind. As such it is hard to test and not ethical to repeat. Even in a court of law, where witness statements are acceptable, the court must ask if the witness was of sound mind at the time, and being brain-dead or comatose may not qualify!

Nevertheless, we will show that, through their quantity, quality and similarity, such first-person experiences - and some third- person observations - add up to compelling evidence. And science is slowly becoming open to the use of large data sets ('omics') as valid evidence. (Editorial, Nature Methods 2009)

2 HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it manifests in the brain, and its place in the universe are unknown. Consciousness implies awareness - both of a subjective, external world and of an internal entity we call the self, with feelings, choice, memories, language and thought (Velmans, 2009).

There are those who say that consciousness is 'nothing but' brain activity. And, of course, it stops when you die and your brain decays. (Dennett, 1991; Koch & Crick, 1990)

Some follow the dualistic ideas of Descartes and believe consciousness to be something separate from the body. As such its nature is a matter for religious belief and therefore outside the realm of scientific enquiry. (Rosenthal, 1986)

Others, notably Penrose & Hameroff (1996; 2014) have shown that our minds have access to computational powers that lie beyond what is possible using classical physics. They suggest that quantum processes, perhaps in the microtubules in neurons, achieve 'orchestrated objective reduction' - essentially tapping into quantum physics - and that consciousness comes as a result.

Some go further and suggest that consciousness is not uniquely human but that it is a fundamental property of the universe, underlying everything. (Panpsychism) (Kouider, 2009; Goff et al., 2020)

We will return to the question of what might survive in our summing up, but without a body in which to locate, it seems that it must be transcendent; more like a ‘field’ and less like an individual anchored in time and space by senses and memories.

3 BODILY DEATH

For some aspect of us to survive bodily death, it must of course not be part of the body, which decays. So what aspects of us are dependent on the physical body? Most obvious, perhaps, are the senses. Tests in dark, silent flotation tanks suggest that you begin to lose your sense of time and place. It can be a relaxing, de- stressing experience for an hour, but where and when will you be when the senses turn off permanently?

Galileo, Descartes, Locke and many others have distinguished between the primary, measurable qualities such as wavelength, temperature or chemical composition and the secondary, experienced qualities such as color, warmth or smell (Goff, 2019; Ross, 2015 ). Many materialist scientists have tried hard to reduce the secondary qualities to aspects of the primary, measurable ones, but with limited success. Can perception exist without senses - or even without a perceiver? As we will see in the discussion in Chapter 6, we suggest that, through an understanding of non- duality, it can.

Memory too - or aspects of it - seems to reside in the physical brain. So, what are you without your memories? Are you still 'you'? Thought itself seems to have at least correlates in the neuronal activity of the brain. But that is not to say that thought is 'nothing but' neuronal activity, any more than a TV program is nothing but the electrical activity in a TV set.

4 LINEAR TIME AND SURVIVAL

The physicist John Wheeler once quoted the old saying "Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once”, and Leibniz’s dictum "...time and space are not things, but orders of things..." (Wheeler, 1990);

We seem to be dominated by the unavoidable flow of time. There is never enough of it, we can never travel backwards through it, and only forwards at its own, unrelenting pace. But that impression is based on two assumptions: That time is linear and has a direction, and what we focus on when assigning an identity that exists before or after. As we will show, both of these assumptions are rooted in interactions with an external environment. Yet in physics time is a much more fluid concept and, according to Einstein, it's part of 'space-time' and speeds up or slows down depending on how fast you are travelling.

That, in turn, makes the concept of survival after bodily death more complex and possibly meaningless. If what survived was massless, it could travel at the speed of light and seem, to it, to be able to cross the Universe in an instant. If it fell into a black hole, time for it would seem to continue, but for those left behind, eternity would have passed. So, though we hope to provide compelling evidence that we are not restricted to our physical bodies, we may need to stretch the concept of 'after' our death.

We will address the demonstration of the existence of an afterlife using the analogy of a judicial enquiry, addressing the concepts of identity, the human machine, interfaces and filters, collective consciousness and information through different points of view and aiming to identify the evidence that allows us to provide clues or proofs.

There have been dozens of books and hundreds of papers detailing evidence for an afterlife. While we will summarize or reference many of these, we will not simply repeat them. What we aim to add is a credible hypothesis for a mechanism that should support the evidence, lead to paradigm shift in science and in our understanding of the nature of Consciousness.

 

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.

Best evidence: Rousseau excerpt #7

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.

We have argued that the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death is, in fact, a collection of different types of evidence and accompanying arguments, each doing different work. In combination, they defend the plausibility of the survival hypothesis as an interpretation of the evidence.

Veridical cardiac arrest NDEs demonstrate convincingly that there is a phenomenon in need of explanation, and the NDEs of pre-verbal children render the living agent psi hypothesis implausible. Peak-in-Darien NDEs under cardiac arrest reinforce the case for investigating a dualistic model of long-term survival.

We drew on the broader NDE evidence to formulate a more detailed survival hypothesis to be evaluated in the light of the guiderails of science. This raises questions in response to which we added more detailed sub-hypotheses. We turned again to the broader NDE research for clues as to how we could formulate these sub-hypotheses in a way that respects the data while staying within the boundaries of science.

Next we turned to science itself for evidence to support the plausibility of these more detailed sub-hypotheses. At this point, the evidence we used might be surprising. Quasi-crystals, radar systems and autism have no obvious connection to survival, but here they provide useful evidence in support of our contention that the survival hypothesis can be understood within science. In fact, every question we have investigated has resulted in evidence and arguments supporting a naturalistic conception of dualism. This evidence greatly increases the plausibility of our scientific dualistic survival hypothesis.

Along the way, we have identified evidence that suggests that certain qualities normally associated with socially constructed values such as goodness may be an objective feature of reality, and thus that our current cosmological understanding of the nature of persons and their place in the scheme of things may be radically incomplete.

Our analysis suggests that all of the evidence that we used is comprehensible within a scientific and hence naturalistic framework, raising the hope that science can expand our worldview to accommodate the phenomena suggestive of survival in a non-dismissive way.

There are many aspects of NDE experiences that bear deeper thought. For example, not all NDE experiences are positive, and not all entities encountered are benevolent. We have discussed the evidence for resource limits and evolutionary pressures in the psychonic world, which might suggest that the hierarchy of psychonic beings forms a complex ecosystem. Understanding this better would help us to understand our own nature and future potential.

For us, this is the real potential of survival research, going far beyond the survival question itself. Every time that science has asked “What would have to be true about the world?”, and had the answer trigger the addition of a concept that is really new and fundamental, the impact has been tremendous. Such discoveries often lead to insights far beyond the starting problem as well as wildly unforeseen technological opportunities.

Beyond that, this research holds out the promise of a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the natural world. Trying to understand the survival data in the context of a scientific model has already led us to some surprising discoveries. We have come to realize that we have perceptual abilities that we have not remarked on because they are so much a part of our everyday experience. These seem to relate to our spirituality and the authenticity of our moral intuitions. Investigating these capabilities could significantly improve the way we engage with each other and with the natural world. One could hardly hope for a more worthwhile goal for science to pursue.

 

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.

 

 

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.