After death communication: Fenwick excerpt #5

Advocate for the Afterlife:

"We will now hear evidence that the dead are able to communicate with this world. Communication with the dead gives many of the bereaved comfort. They accept that the person they love has not simply ceased to exist, and that they are all right. We call Dr Peter Fenwick to resume the stand to discuss the ways in which this communication can occur and the varying forms it can take."

What happens when you die?

Is there a transcendent component to the human being; a spirit locked in which can be released at death? It is an ancient idea, but there are many present-day accounts of apparent direct communication between people who have died and those they have left behind. The accounts almost all occur within two or three days of the death, as though there is a transition period before the ‘spirit’ of the dead leaves the consciousness of the living entirely.

“My father died on the 30th April 1989. I could not go to the funeral because I was nine months pregnant. My son was born on the 17th May 1989. Three days later around 3 a.m. my father actually came into my room – I saw him fully. I even remember sitting up in bed because I did not think he was real. He walked over to the cot and looked at my son and smiled.... nodded his head in approval and left. It was a wonderful experience.” (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008)*

One obvious explanation for some of these visits is that they are simply hallucinations. So, the following accounts are particularly interesting because they seem to have been experienced by two family members simultaneously.

“My father suddenly died in August 1998.... One night in a dream my father appeared, looked alive and well and told me that he was fine and happy and staying with his uncle. Since that night I stopped having bad dreams about him and was able to let him go. But the most surprising experience came when my sister told me about her bad dreams about our father’s death, that stopped when one night our father appeared in her dream and said he was fine and happy and staying with his uncle. She was telling me exactly the same thing that happened to me. (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008)

This is another account of such a strange ‘coincidence’, told us by a man whose two year old son had died in 1998, accidentally drowned in a neighbor’s pond.

“In the early hours of Tuesday morning I woke up.... I could see a shadow of a baby’s face looking through the window, I knew it was Matthew. Later I heard a rustling noise (like the noise of a baby walking and his nappy rustling). The noise started near the door and moved across the foot of the bed and up towards my wife. I was reluctant to open my eyes (I was scared, to be honest) but when I did there was nobody there.

I didn’t mention this to my wife at first as I didn’t want to upset her; I told her a couple of days later. She said she had heard exactly the same thing as me, which freaked us both out a bit. Both of us heard the same thing but did not want to mention it in case it upset the other.

Now, Matthew had been doing this for quite a while before he died. He would wake up in the early hours, come into our room pat the foot of our bed and up Janette’s side, and we would hear his nappy rustling. ...One of us would take him back to his own bed later and tuck him in.

I was always a bit skeptical of these stories.... It’s only my own experiences that have made me question what happens when people pass on. It can be a bit daunting mentioning it to other people for fear that they will think you’re crackers.” (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008)

*Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying (2008).

“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 complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Theories of consciousness: Fenwick excerpt #4

Evidence for Nonlocality of Mind

               Dean Radin            

The first possibility is that mind may have a non-local effect - an influence beyond the brain, mediated by some physical principle not yet defined by science. This would mean that brain processes can affect, at a distance, other minds (telepathy) and physical matter (psychokinesis, or PK).

Recent work in the area of parapsychology has produced results which, if they are confirmed, might provide some persuasive evidence for non-locality of mind The most convincing are the Ganzfeld experiments (Radin, 2011), which have examined mind-reading ability in a state of sensory deprivation and Bob Jahn's set of experiments in Princeton’s University PEAR Lab, which have shown the ability of minds to influence a random number generator, or to affect the way balls fall in a large pinball machine. (Jahn & Dunne, 2005a; Jahn & Dunne, 2005b; Jahn & Dunne, 2009) None provided full proof, but they were taken seriously enough for other researchers to try to replicate them (Carter, 2012; Broderick & Goertzel, 2014).

Wackermann et al (2003) investigated the correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects and found that such correlations may occur, although no biophysical mechanism is known.

Fenwick (2019) investigated the claims of Alain Forget, a philosopher who has spent years in meditation. He discovered that he could radiate energy in the form of light to his students and that they saw light surrounding Alain while he was giving it.

Fenwick et al (2018), conducted a hyperscanning EEG experiment to see whether, when Alain gave light, his student’s brain was affected, even if he did not know light was being transmitted. They discovered that, although a group of people could see Alain’s light, no camera could record it. When giving light, Alain’s brain showed a totally different pattern of activity, with frequencies stretching up to 100hz, the limit of the measuring equipment. At the same time, the student’s brain, even though he did not know Alain was giving light, showed responses as well. Of interest is that on Facetime, Alain’s light, when viewed by 100 people from all over the world, could be seen by 75% of them and was very strong in about 30%.

In summary, they found clear evidence that there were unusual electrical and metabolic changes in Alain Forget’s brain which correlated with the giving of the light energy. And that this energy was able to affect other brains. This suggests that the linking of brain activity may provide a physiological basis for altering another person’s brain function and might form the basis for an explanation of parapsychological phenomena such as telepathy.

Wider theories of consciousness

If consciousness is only the mechanical functioning of neuronal nets it can never be non-local. A recent step away from that reductionist position was suggested in a paper published by the Royal Society (Schwartz et al. 2005). The authors, argued that the reductionist mechanical science which assumed that causality within the brain was fully determined by the movement of small Newtonian particles, atoms etc., is now over three-quarters of a century out of date. It has been superseded by the application of quantum mechanical theories of brain function. These follow the mathematics of von Neumann who argued that both the physical world and the conscious world must be considered when looking at a quantum mechanical system (von Neumann J., 1955).

Schwartz et al argue that the brain is a quantum mechanical system, not only because the neurotransmitter junctions are susceptible to quantum effects, but because the von Neumann view of the world stretches from the level of the individual molecules of neurotransmitter to include the whole brain and the mental processes that occur within it. They showed very clearly that mental processes and the mental (social) context in which the brain is embedded are causal agents in their own right as postulated by von Neumann’s theory.

The brain contains two domains, both causal, von Neumann’s Process 1 and Process 2 – those conscious processes, such as thoughts, feelings, beliefs etc, would come to bear on the pure quantum system and are causative in their own right.

Thus, at one stroke consciousness takes its place in its own right in any theory of how the brain works. The matrix of meaning in which the subject is embedded - culture, family relationships and so on - now extends brain function well beyond the physical brain.

Schwartz et al show the causative effect, of conscious processes very simply and elegantly. They point out that a placebo may consist only of chalk and is inactive when taken by mouth. However, if subjects with Parkinson’s disease are told that it is a powerful anti-Parkinson agent and will improve their walking, then they do indeed find that their Parkinson symptoms alleviate when they take the chalk pill. They move more easily and MRI scans show an increase in dopamine, the neurotransmitter in which they are deficient. What this paper showed is that it is not possible when just looking at brain processes, to explain their form and nature only by other brain processes, e.g. from the reductionist point of view.

Multidimensional theories

So consciousness and the cultural setting have to be taken into account when addressing the ‘hard question’ relating to consciousness. When we die it is clear from accounts of the dying that the transcendent role of consciousness is primary, particularly in the movement of the dying into an alternate reality, composed of love and light which is not situated in this physical world. [See Chapter 5 of this essay] It is truly transcendent but it is only detected by consciousness itself. If we are to ask about the location of the dead relatives, the dying would answer that their location is in the domain of transcendence. So the question now becomes, where is this domain?

There are a number of theories in physics that postulate reality cannot be contained in space and time alone. It has been suggested by the astrophysicist Bernard Carr (Carr, 2007) that the world is in fact a five-dimensional matrix and that it is within the fifth dimension that these conscious experiences are stored. Randall & Sundrum, (1999) extending Kaluza-Klein theory, also use a five dimensional model to explain the phenomena we find in dying and David Lawton, who has studied near death experiences, (Kean, 2017) has also argued for a five dimensional structure for NDEs, and suggests that “death is simply the withdrawal of the 4-D part leaving the 5D intact” (Kean, 2017). So it will only be available to the four-dimensional brain on occasions when the structures within the brain weaken and allow it. This is certainly true for the experiences reported during cardiac arrest and as described by Pim van Lommel in Chapter 5 of this essay.

There are other features of the dying process which fit neatly into a five-dimensional explanation of reality, for example the alteration of time as shown by premonitions and in the appearance of dead relatives. Light surrounding the body and shapes seen leaving the body, which do not seem to be physical, would suggest that momentarily, at the time of death, these energies can be sensed by others present in the room of the dying. Alteration of space and linking together of minds are shown by deathbed coincidences, in which the dying establish a link to someone they are emotionally close to. It goes some way towards explaining physical phenomena such as mechanical malfunction, or the stopping of clocks.

Biocentrism and Beyond

Biocentrism was first proposed by Dr. Robert Lanza in 2007. Dr. Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine. His theory of biocentrism consciousness as fundamental to the universe (Lanza & Berman, 2016). It is consciousness that creates the material universe and not the other way round. Therefore, the death of consciousness simply cannot occur.

 

“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 complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

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.