Rouleau writes: The Ingersoll
Lectures, which have been hosted by the Divinity School at Harvard University
since the 1890s, are delivered every year between the end of May and the
beginning of December on the subject of human immortality. Consistent with
requests made when it was originally endowed, lecturers can be professors,
clergymen, or laypeople but should not be limited to any one group. Notable
thinkers and scientists including William Osler, Alfred North Whitehead,
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Stephen Jay Gould are among the long list of
distinguished speakers associated with the Ingersoll Lectures series. While the
specific topics vary according to expertise, many lecturers have offered
insights on the survival of human consciousness following bodily death.
In 1897, the
famous “Father of American psychology” William James – who was also a notable
physician, philosopher, and psychical researcher with a profound interest in
the paranormal – delivered the second annual Ingersoll lecture entitled “Human
Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine”. In his lecture, the
transcript of which was published in 1898, James outlined what I submit is the
definitive case for the survival of human consciousness. The main arguments put
forward in the lecture are as relevant today as they were then; however, over a
century of neuroscientific research has provided the benefit of empirical
support, which makes his argument significantly more compelling. As I am
convinced William James’ formulation of the problem of survival is critical to
appreciating the proposed solution, I will summarize his lecture and its implications
here. Once the concept is characterized, the remaining sections of the essay
will be comprised of a systematic description of the empirical support for
James’ hypothesis.
William James
structured his groundbreaking lecture as a reply to two reasonable objections
to the doctrine of human immortality. The first objection to which he replied
is the same we concerned ourselves with in the previous section: If the brain
is the seat of consciousness, how can it survive brain death and decay? After
re-stating the objection, James began with a throat-clearing about the
dependence of memory, thought, and consciousness on the brain:
The first of
these difficulties is relative to the absolute dependence of our spiritual
life, as we know it here, upon the brain. . . . How can the function possibly
persist after its organ has undergone decay? . . . Every one knows that arrests
of brain development occasion imbecility, that blows on the head abolish memory
or consciousness, and the brain-stimulants and poisons change the quality of
our ideas. . . . various special forms of thinking are functions of special
portions of the brain.
When we are thinking
of things seen, it is our occipital convolutions that are active; when of
things heard, it is a certain portion of our temporal lobes; when of things to
be spoken, it is one of our frontal convolutions. . . . For the purposes of my
argument, now, I wish to adopt this general doctrine as if it were established
absolutely, with no possibility of restriction. . . .Thought is a function of
the brain.
Having firmly
adopted the position that thought – including consciousness – is a function of
the brain, James accepted the challenge of reconciling its survival with death.
To that end, he explained why most of his contemporaries believed immortality,
or the survival of consciousness after bodily death, was impossible and why
their reasoning was flawed:
The supposed
impossibility of its continuing comes from too superficial a look at the
admitted fact of functional dependence. The moment we inquire more closely into
the notion of functional dependence, and ask ourselves, for example, how many
kinds of functional dependence there may be, we immediately perceive that there
is one kind at least that does not exclude a life hereafter at all. The fatal
conclusion of the physiologist flows from his assuming offhand another kind of
functional dependence and treating it as the only imaginable kind.
Next, James
described three types of functional dependences: productive, permissive, and
transmissive. He argued that objections to human immortality – the survival of
consciousness after death – are based upon the widely-held assumption that
brain functions including consciousness are consequences of productive function.
That is, the function is “inwardly created” or caused by endogenous
neurobiological events – as is the current dogma in the modern field of
neuroscience. He elaborates:
When the
physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces
the phrase, ``Thought is a function of the brain,'' he thinks of the matter
just as he thinks when he says, ``Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,''
``Light is a function of the electric circuit,'' ``Power is a function of the
moving waterfall.'' In these latter cases the several material objects have the
function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function
must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the
brain. Engendering consciousness in its interior, much as it engenders
cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul's life must
also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the
function, then when the organ perishes, since the production can no longer
continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed
inevitable from that particular conception of the facts.
Having rejected
the conclusion that consciousness necessarily arises from a productive
functional dependence of the brain, James then described permissive or
“releasing” function, which is derivative of Newton’s first law of motion,
where function is inevitable unless obstructed by a barrier. To clarify the
point, he cited the example of a crossbow, where the release of the string
returns the bow to its original shape, thus firing the arrow. However, we will
be primarily concerned with James’ third type of functional dependence:
transmission.
In James’ view,
transmissive function is like a filter or sieve that, by dint of its own
structure, organizes the shape and character of existing but separate forces
into parcels, units, or subdivisions of the whole. Stating his thesis, William
James considered the possibility that consciousness is dependent upon a
transmissive property of the brain rather than a productive one. In his own
words:
In the case
of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have transmissive
function. The energy of light, no matter how produced, is by the glass sifted
and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a certain path and
shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They
open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in
various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of
air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The
organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for
letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes.
My thesis is now this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a
function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function
only; we are entitled also to consider . . . transmissive function.
Staying with
the metaphor of transmitted light, James then asked his audience to consider
the possibility that “the millions of finite streams of consciousness known to
us as our private selves” are part of one infinite Thought that, like
white light through a prism, is shattered into an infinite spectrum of waves.
Considering the possibility that brains selectively obstruct the transmission
of consciousness, and that this process explains the unique features of human
individuality, James described how his proposed mechanism might track changing
mental states, death, and the survival of consciousness after brain decay:
According to
the state in which the brain finds itself, the barrier of its obstructiveness
may also be supposed to rise or fall. It sinks so low, when the brain is in
full activity, that a comparative flood of spiritual energy pours over. At
other times, only such occasional waves of thought as heavy sleep permits get
by. And when finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special
stream of consciousness which it subverted will vanish entirely from this
natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would
still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it
was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.
William James
conceded that no known mechanism at the time of his lecture could explain
transmissive functional dependence in brains; however, he enjoined his audience
to consider that a productive mechanism had also not yet been demonstrated – a
fact that remains true today despite an embarrassment of riches with regard to
correlational data (e.g., neural correlates of consciousness). James then
concluded that the productive theory was only regarded as more likely than the
transmissive theory because it was more popular – a point that also remains
true today. Finally, he described some perceived advantages of the transmission
theory:
Consciousness
in this process does not have to be generated de novo in a vast number of
places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval with the world. The
transmission-theory not only avoids in this way multiplying miracles, but it
puts itself in touch with general idealistic philosophy better than the
production-theory does. . . . It puts itself also in touch with [Gustav
Fechner’s] conception of a `threshold' . . . Before consciousness can come, a
certain degree of activity in the movement must be reached. . . . but the
height of the threshold varies under different circumstances: it may rise or
fall. When it falls, as in states of great lucidity, we grow conscious of
things of which we should be unconscious at other times; when it rises, as in
drowsiness, consciousness sinks in amount. . . . [and] conforms to our notion
of a permanent obstruction to the transmission of consciousness, which
obstruction may, in our brains, grow alternately greater or less.
James then
dedicated some attention to the important point that transmissive brains could
account for phenomena that are conceptually marginalized by the assumption of
productive functional dependence. Specifically, he listed several psi phenomena
that are made mechanistically plausible by the adoption of a theory of
transmission:
The
transmission-theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences
that are with difficulty explained by the production-theory . . . [such] as
religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous
healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or
impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of
still more exceptional and incomprehensible things. . . . On the
transmission-theory, they don't have to be `produced,'--they exist ready-made
in the transcendental world, and all that is needed is an abnormal lowering of
the brain-threshold to let them through. . . . All such experiences, quite
paradoxical and meaningless on the production-theory, fall very naturally into
place on the other theory. We need only suppose the continuity of our
consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally
pouring over the dam.
William James
ended his lecture by addressing the second of the two objections to the
doctrine of immortality: If immortality is true, and consciousness continues
after death, the number of immortal beings would be unimaginably large. He
quickly dismisses the objection as a failure of imagination before summarizing
his view, which is potentially inclusive to all living organisms across time
and space:
For my own
part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that ever grew
in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is
purely a question: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract quantity, and the
abstract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of things so much
alike, have no connection with the subject. For bigness and number and generic
similarity are only manners of our finite way of thinking.
One important
point that James did not discuss was the intercompatibility of functional
dependences. Based upon his descriptions, productive and transmissive
functional dependences should be able to co-exist and interact within the same
system. Indeed, just as James cites examples of objects or devices that express
one form of functional dependence – the prism, the pipe organ, and the tea
kettle – it is immediately apparent that there are equal numbers of such
devices that can be said to have multiple functional dependences. Clock radios,
for example, are dependent upon both electric circuits (James cites internal
circuitry as productive) and the reception of transmitted information by way of
their antennae. A clock radio does not create music de novo – it is a
conduit for information that, when coupled to a speaker, can transduce
electromagnetic waves into mechanical vibrations that are perceived as
organized patterns of sound. If the clock radio were to fall and shatter or be
unplugged from its power source, the electromagnetic equivalent of the music as
radio waves would “survive”. Repairing the device or re-establishing its power
source would seem to resuscitate the music that had never really been lost.
Therefore, it
is also possible that brains, with their numerous and complex internal
structures, are functionally multi-dependent, expressing both productive and
transmissive properties. Just as the information content of music is
preserved in the case of a broken radio, it is conceivable that the
information content of experience is preserved upon the death of the brain.
In this way, the highly predictive contemporary models of neurobiology do not
need to be abandoned to reconcile consciousness with transmission and survival
but may instead require a modest amendment.
James’
functional dependences may also be less distinct than described. After all,
while he points to “steam as a function of the tea kettle”, “light as a function
of the electric circuit”, and “power as a function of the waterfall” as
examples of productive functional dependences, it is unclear why the causes of
these processes cannot equally be attributed to external events. Is the electricity
running through the light bulb’s circuit not a function of the power generator,
which is a function of the waterfall, which is, in turn, a function of gravity?
While it is useful to consider the proximate cause as the starting point of any
process, further examination will always lead to the discovery of an ultimate
cause outside of the system itself. Therefore, the concept of productive
dependence is likely an artifact of our perception rather than an actual
property of systems and this illusion has defined our intuitions about how
brains function. In fact, all functions of the body are subject to this
misapprehension. Muscles do not create heat – heat is a biproduct of twitching
cells, which is itself a product of chemical reactions driven by reactants or
their precursors that were at some point ingested as food. The iron in our
blood that facilitates oxygen transport throughout the body was synthesized in
the core of a star, not the body. Albeit a minor digression, it should always
be remembered that the ultimate causes of all bodily events are not found
within the body at all.
James, W. (1898). Human immortality: Two supposed objections to the doctrine. Houghton, Mifflin.
Nicolas
Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at
Algoma University in Canada. He received an award from the Bigelow Institute
for Consciousness Studies "An Immortal Stream of Consciousness" in
response to its search for "scientific evidence for the survival of
consciousness after permanent bodily death." Footnotes and bibliography
are omitted from these excerpts from his essay, but the full essay is available
online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.