Physicalism is the doctrine that the real world consists simply of the physical world. It is the close cousin of materialism, the creed that nothing exists except matter, its movements and modifications, as well as the doctrine that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency.
So far, science has been dominated by this recalcitrant materialism, but this articles is the proof it has its days numbered. If we want to advance in the scientific knowledge we have to search for new lines of thought, we must leave physicalism behind and admit there is something we can’t explain: the existence of consciousness and its more than likely survival after physical death. This is a mantra I have been repeating over and over again in various places on the internet. In the nearly five years I have been investigating reincarnation and remembering past lives, I have had multiple arguments with skeptics. The most blatant are those I have had with scientists... but the most surprising thing is that they were not skeptics, but believers in reincarnation. However, they were totally incapable of leaving behind obsolete theories that don’t lead anywhere and are not useful to explain all the paranormal phenomena that are mentioned in the article.
Reading it, I have realized I am not the only one that thinks this way. Maybe they can call me an extremist, they can ignore me or think I don’t have the sufficient knowledge to elaborate hypotheses on the mechanics of reincarnation just because I don’t hold any chair in a university, but it seems I haven’t made this up. What I say is true, and maybe that is why it hurts. Let’s remember that beside being a researcher, I remember past lives, and that makes me someone who must be considered as crazy in the great majority of scientific communities, and my opinion has no validity, because I haven’t published any paper in any scientific journal. At the same time, I realize my hypotheses keep being one of the most advanced to explain how it is that our consciousness can return in a new body and not only that, but also how out-of-body experiences, NDE’s, precognition or déjà vus are possible. Anyway, my hypotheses are not completely original. I just share the same viewpoint with many other unorthodox researchers.
But the objective of this post is not to speak of my hypotheses but the article, as it matches a lot of my thoughts. The complete article can be found here: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/267/2016/01/Dossey-BP-review-for-Explore2.pdf. It was published in August this year, so it is one of the most recent works we have. I think it gives a quite accurate vision about the point in which science is at the moment, in regards to all these supposedly paranormal phenomena that are related to consciousness. I have extracted the excerpts I consider more interesting, and I have added my personal comments. To ease the reading, I have highlighted in colour the parts I find more interesting.
Scientists acknowledge they don’t know what consciousness is or how it works.
Steven A. Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard University, on how consciousness might arise from something physical, such as the brain, states, “Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else.”
Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive scientist at University of California, Irvine: "The scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness.”
Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist and complex-systems researcher: "Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is... I don't have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.”
Roger W. Sperry, Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist: "Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.”
Eugene P. Wigner, Nobelist in physics: "We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind.”
Physicist Nick Herbert, an expert in nonlocality: “Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”
Physicist Freeman J. Dyson: “The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.”
Mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: “My position [on consciousness] demands a major revolution in physics... I've come to believe that there is something very fundamental missing from current science... Our understanding at this time is not adequate and we're going to have to move to new regions of science....”
Sir John Maddox, the editor for 22 years of the prestigious journal Nature: “What consciousness consists of... is... a puzzle. Despite the marvelous successes of neuroscience in the past century... we seem as far from understanding cognitive process as we were a century ago."
There are no convincing theories that explain how the brain produces consciousness.
[A] growing number of scientists are now busily rummaging around in the brain trying to explain how the trick of consciousness is done. Researchers of the stature of Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, Gerald Edelman, and Roger Penrose have recently come forward with a range of ingenious theories. All purport to explain, in one way or another, consciousness as an epiphenomenon of physical and chemical processes taking place in the brain and all fail utterly. They fail not because their models are insufficiently accurate or detailed, but because they are trying to do what is, from the outset, impossible.
The truth is that no account of what goes on at the mechanistic level of the brain can shed any light whatsoever on why consciousness exists. No theory can explain why the brain shouldn't work exactly as it does, yet without giving rise to the feeling we all have of 'what it is like to be'. And there is, I believe, a very simple reason for this. The brain does not produce consciousness at all, any more than a television set creates the programs that appear on its screen. On the contrary, the brain filters and restricts consciousness, just as our senses limit the totality of experience to which we might otherwise have access."
Materialism still dominates many scientists.
Many physicalist skeptics consider the idea of survival of bodily death so dangerous that it must be put down at all costs. These efforts can shade into a deliberate cover-up that masquerades as an effort to protect science. Harvard psychologist William James reported that a leading biologist once told him, "Even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.
Luckily, there are other much less arrogant scientists.
The physicalists' certainties —that these issues are settled and the verdict is in: materialism reigns, and spirituality and any form of survival is self-delusion— is regarded as over-heated swagger by the contributors to Beyond Physicalism. As co-editor Kelly says, “We believe it takes astonishing hubris to dismiss en masse the collective experience of a large proportion of our forebears, including persons widely recognized as pillars of all human civilization, and we are united in believing that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of meaningful reconciliation of science and religion... [W]e believe that emerging developments within science itself are leading inexorably in the direction of an expanded scientific understanding of nature, one that can accommodate realities of a 'spiritual' sort...”
This ludicrous situation was parodied by astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington in his 1927 Gifford Lecture: 'The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena arise from electrons and quanta and the like controlled by mathematical formulae, must presumably hold the belief that his wife is a rather elaborate differential equation, but he is probably tactful enough not to obtrude this opinion into domestic life.'"
Paranormal phenomena unexplained by current science.
1. Psi phenomena of all the currently recognized types, including in particular true precognition and macropsychokinesis (PK);
2. Postmortem survival, including survival of a full-fledged mind or personality;
3. Phenomena of extreme psychophysiological influence such as stigmata, hypnotic blisters, or other skin markings induced by suggestion or vivid imagination; maternal impressions in which psychological experiences of a mother are apparently conveyed to a newborn; mental influence on distant living systems; and unusual birthmarks and birth defects in apparent cases of reincarnation, as in children who remember previous lives;
4. Prodigious memory and calculation abilities, as seen in the savant syndrome, eidetic imagery, and related phenomena;
5. Phenomena of dissociation and superior forms of secondary personality, including concurrent streams of consciousness and overlapping and sometimes asymmetrical relationships between them;
6. Deep, life-transforming near-death experiences (NDEs), especially those occurring under extreme physiological conditions such as deep general anesthesia, cardiac arrest, and coma, in which cerebral conditions regarded by contemporary neuroscience as necessary for consciousness have been grossly degraded or abolished altogether;
7. Extreme cognitive phenomena associated with the inspirations of true genius, including novel and complex forms of imagination and veridical intuition of previously unrecognized properties of the natural world;
8. Life-transforming mystical experiences of both extrovertive and introvertive forms, and their connections with genius-level creativity, psi phenomena, and NDEs occurring under extreme physiological conditions; and
9. The central phenomena of our everyday conscious mental life including meaning, intentionality, and consciousness itself with its built-in features of unity, qualitative or phenomenal content, and subjective point of view.
“...here I will simply say that in our collective judgment the thousands of field and laboratory studies carried out by competent scientists over the 130-plus years since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research cumulatively provide an overwhelming body of evidence —for those who will take the trouble to study it with an open mind—that these phenomena really do exist as facts of nature.” He adds, “The italicized qualifications are important, however, because public discussion is being systematically distorted at present by a small cadre of highly vocal, entrenched professional skeptics —deniers, really— who conspicuously lack those credentials”.
Many readers may be surprised to discover the depth of the empirical evidence favoring the existence of some of the targeted categories. Recent analyses show that there are at least six areas in consciousness research that resoundingly demonstrate the non-local, beyond-the-brain actions of consciousness. Experiments in these areas have been replicated repeatedly in labs around the world, each area giving odds against chance of around a billion to one, or combined odds against chance of 10 to one, a truly astronomical number. Although too complex to be reviewed here, these areas of research are remote viewing, random number generator influence, Ganzfeld, the Global Consciousness Project, presentiment, and precognition."
Final reflections.
The basic conundrum is not how a particular so-called paranormal event —telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, or the survival of bodily death— could be valid, but how we can consciously be aware of ordinary experiences. In other words, the primary mystery is the very existence of consciousness. We breezily ignore the role of consciousness in the mundane events of our lives —how we decide what to have for dinner, say, and how we choose to raise a fork of spaghetti while opening our mouth at the same time, and swallowing soon thereafter, and how we can experience the redness of the sauce, the taste of the garlic, the satisfaction of a lovely presentation, and the bouquet of the wine —feats beyond the ability of the most sophisticated robot.
Although physicalists offer a flurry of explanations in sensorimotor terms for how these accomplishments happen, their explanations are empty of the crucial role of consciousness in all such sequences. Any experience in which consciousness is involved is mysterious, whether deciphering the Lorenz equation or deciding to pick our nose. Commonplace events are as enigmatic as any of the so-called paranormal pyrotechnics that provoke incredulity among physicalists. There are not two categories of consciousness-related phenomena, normal and paranormal. They are all “para”—or normal, as the case may be. If we were sufficiently awake, we might realize that the lifting of a finger or the experience of love is as astonishing as the survival of bodily death. When physicalists bridle at the extraordinary and ignore the commonplace, in biblical imagery they are “straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.”
Voltaire —no friend of spirituality— realized this. He observed, “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once.” He understood that the marvel is life and consciousness themselves, not how many turns they make on the wheel of life.
Resistance to change.
Open minds toward the evidence displayed throughout Beyond Physicalism can be hard to come by. Closed minds, of course, are nothing new —not just toward consciousness-related phenomena, but toward new developments in the physical sciences as well. During the early 20th century, continental drift and plate tectonics were hotly debated in the field of geophysics. Looking back on this debate, the eminent geophysicist Sir Edward Bullard observed, in words that apply to the current arguments about consciousness-related phenomena, “There is always a strong inclination for a body of professionals to oppose an unorthodox view. Such a group has a considerable investment in orthodoxy: they have learned to interpret a large body of data in terms of the old view, and they have prepared lectures and perhaps written books with the old background. To think the whole subject through again when one is no longer young is not easy and involves admitting a partially misspent youth... Clearly it is more prudent to keep quiet, to be a moderate defender of orthodoxy, or to maintain that all is doubtful, sit on the fence, and wait in statesmanlike ambiguity for more data...”
Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics, confronted this problem. He famously said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Or as Planck's view is often paraphrased, “Science changes funeral by funeral.”