by Sudhir Kakar
But is reincarnation the only explanation? Whatever their explanation(s) individually, these rebirth cases collectively suggest, at minimum, that memories, behavioural dispositions and even physical characteristics have sometimes been carried over, in some unknown way, from one person, now deceased, to another, now living.
Concluding Remarks
Now that we have quickly surveyed the range of evidence related to the question of survival after death, we hope at least one thing that we said at the beginning is clear: The case for post-mortem survival does not depend on a few isolated experiences or even on one type of experience. Innumerable cases—some very strong—and multiple lines of research are converging towards the same idea: that something of mind, personality, consciousness may survive the death of the body. But how do we reconcile such an idea with the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists and philosophers that mind and consciousness are generated by the brain and utterly dependent on it? No one denies the close correlation between the state of the brain and the state of consciousness, and as neuroscience has advanced, details of that correlation have been specified ever more exactly. But as one of the founders of psychical research, Frederic Myers, cautioned 120 years ago, ‘as to the origin or essential significance of this close connection … we avowedly know nothing at all … The exacter correlation can tell us little more than the vaguer told us—little more than we had always known’ (1891, p. 635).
Many people, including Myers, his close friend William James, the philosopher Henri Bergson, Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman and others have pointed out that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. An equally valid way of viewing the correlation is, not that brain produces mind, but that it restricts or constrains it in such a way as to allow optimal functioning in the physical environment in which we live. The best evidence for this ‘filter’ view of mind—body relations comes from NDEs occurring during cardiac arrest or under general anaesthesia. As explained earlier, the conditions considered necessary for consciousness by most neuroscientists are completely abolished, deliberately with general anaesthesia and spontaneously with cardiac arrest. Nevertheless, mental functioning is often not only not absent or diminished, but actually enhanced.
We also mentioned earlier the revival cases, such as that of David, in which the mind seems to break free from its diseased brain shortly before death and briefly function normally again. It is also important to note that many of the other experiences we have talked about happen when the person is in some kind of altered state, such as a dream, a drowsy state, meditation, a trance, or another state of absorption. Even the young children who seem to remember a previous life often do so when in a drowsy or quiet state, and the memories occur nearly always between the ages of two and seven or eight, after which they usually fade. One might argue that in a very young child, the brain has not yet settled into the more fixed habits of an older child or adult. And one of the most successful experimental methods for producing evidence of psi, or ESP, has been the Ganzfeld, when the experimental subject is in a mildly altered state produced by sensory deprivation. All these observations suggest that as the ‘filter’ of the brain is altered in some way, prior constraints on consciousness are relaxed.
In sum, there is a mass of empirical evidence suggesting post-mortem survival, which many people either do not know about or cannot offer any valid explanation for and therefore too often dismiss out of hand. There is also a theoretical view of mind-brain relations alternative to the prevailing physicalist position that can make sense of these data. What we need now is to make both the evidence and the alternate theoretical position more widely known, and thus stimulate more people to take the idea of survival after death seriously and provide even better observations and assessments of it.
But why should we do so? We return to the questions we raised in the first paragraph of this paper. As individuals, how we live, and how we die, depends to an enormous extent on how we answer—consciously or unconsciously—the question of post-mortem survival. As a society, however—especially one as fragmented and contentious as ours has become in many arenas—addressing this question in an open and honest manner can help promote what we call the ‘tertium quid’ approach, that is, the recognition that large questions and issues are best dealt with, not by an ‘either/or’ polarization, but by bringing the strengths of all sides together for an enlarged and more comprehensive view. Of particular importance is the need to apply this approach to the increasingly acrimonious conflict between science and religion, and to recognize that the two are not fundamentally in opposition, but are complementary approaches to great questions about our place in the universe.
Plato’s Phaedo and the Near-Death Experience:
Survival Research and Self-Transformation
Michael Grosso
An incident when I was a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University awakened my interest in the problem of mind. Strolling on the campus lawn at 116th Street in New York City with a friend, I started to describe an experience I had that was clearly what you’d call ‘paranormal’. My quick-witted fellow-student was taken aback, and said with a nervous rasp, ‘But that’s impossible—it would imply dualism!’ I was not in the least shaken by this declaration; but I was struck by the dogmatic confidence with which he was prepared to invalidate and in effect destroy my experience. It was both amusing and infuriating to listen to somebody calmly try to whisk away something I plainly knew from my own experience to be quite real. In general, the situation is pretty much the same today. There continues to be a widespread close-mindedness among academics to anything that smacks of unusual powers of the human mind. Certain phenomena in the present dispensation are officially verboten.
The murder of an entire mode of being! A dramatic way of putting it, I suppose, but it seems accurate enough. Of course, I could have been deluded in my student days; I therefore began to explore and study, as systematically as I could, things strange and anomalous, the paranormal and the supernormal—the supposedly ‘impossible’. This was not the practice of most philosophers who, whenever they examine the mind-body problem, typically invoke examples of itches, patches of colour, or after-images to make their points. It seemed to me that it was a mistake to suppose that ordinary experience was the only reliable measure of the possible. I learned that different people have different kinds of experience, and that often the most unusual experiences occur under unusual circumstances. This brings me to the topic I want to discuss: the near-death experience (NDE).
In the academic world today there is a general bias that favours a form of naive neuro-fundamentalism: it is automatically assumed that the brain can explain everything about human performance. There are signs, however, that this bias is under attack. To mention one example, in the New York Review of Books,1 Colin McGinn recently criticized a very respectable and knowledgeable neuroscientist for not understanding a simple point that any college student who took Philosophy 101 should know: correlation is not causation. The point sometimes eludes people who write about neuroscience. Reductive materialism tends to be automatically assumed by the bulk of scientific workers, medical practitioners and journalists. Certain questions in particular are especially avoided. For example, any attempt to make a scientific case for survival would threaten to revolutionize the established outlook; evidence for conscious survival of death would be a severe blow to whole families of reductive ontologies.2 Apart from survival, moreover, other forms of evidence call into question the ruling assumptions of mainline materialism.3
Needless to say, politics and economics shape paradigms, which in turn dictate what is believed to be scientifically authentic topics of investigation. We might, for example, ask how much a nation spends on military research and technology (which is about killing people) and compare it with how much it spends on survival research (which is about the advance and enlargement of life). We know the amounts are ludicrously disproportionate. What are we to infer from this? One might be tempted to say that th
e culture at large is more driven by and devoted to Thanatos than Eros. One thing is clear: there is little academic encouragement to do survival research.
Among those who pursue the subject, the need of working theoretical frameworks is periodically underscored. The cry is less for more data but for new theories, new ways of looking at the data we already have. A miscellany of anomalies is not anything we can call a science; what is needed is a foothold to help us engage the material more actively.
The critical phenomena almost always take place in the context of spontaneous life, often during special times of personal or social crisis. In the real world, what parapsychologists call ‘psi’ is used, embedded in, and implied by all sorts of magical, folklorish, medical, and religious beliefs and practices. The shaman’s beliefs and self-described practices are thoroughly parapsychological. According to Herbert Thurston, the most powerful psychic phenomena are found among mystics and ascetics.4 All religious miracles are psi writ large, J.B. Rhine once noted. But there are problems here. I met a woman in Assisi who told me of the favours she owed to Saint Joseph of Copertino, the saint-shaman of her hometown who died in 1663! Her world was immersed in the paranormal and informed her, but I sensed her recoil as I plied her with requests for details. It was obvious she lived in a different mental space than mine. Perhaps in order to approach these metaphysical outlaws we need to try to enter into the kind of interior world that is conducive to producing them.
Let me then sketch a model that may help us think more resolutely about the possibility of human consciousness post-death. There are three points I will draw on from Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue supposed to reproduce a conversation with Socrates in prison while awaiting his execution. The first concerns some points about the nature of the soul; the second looks the paradoxical but practical nature of philosophy, according to Socrates-Plato;5 and the third concerns a mythos about the ‘true earth’ that Socrates narrates before we witness his execution.
Nature of Soul in the Phaedo
In the Phaedo, the conversation centres on the fate of Socrates after death. One of the more famous arguments for immortality is also a statement about the nature of the soul. Before I get to it, let me mention two other, related arguments. One is found in the Meno where we learn that the soul pre-exists the body because it seems to know things that derive from a prior existence. Then there is this: the soul rules the body, Plato writes, as the divine rules and transcends the mortal. Our ability to take a stand against our bodies proves we are different from our bodies. The freedom to rule and mould the body is proof of a divine, and therefore immortal, element in us.
The third argument is from the simplicity of the soul. In brief, a material object can be destroyed because it has parts, structure, complexity; the parts and structure can be disassembled, disorganized, and thus destroyed. If you break off the legs of a chair and hammer the seat to bits, you don’t have a chair any more; you have a pile of wood. No chair can be immortal. The story of the soul is different, says Socrates; apart from being invisible, the soul is a simple substance, it has no parts that make it what it is. According to the Phaedo, the ultimate substance of the soul is one, same in essence, pure; its functions (rational, appetitive, etc.) and forms of expression may be multiple, but not the bare intangible soul ‘stuff’ (which we never directly observe but must infer); since the soul has no parts, no distinctive structures, it cannot come apart or disintegrate. Ergo, the soul is immortal.
Plato was pre-eminent as a philosopher who made the sharp (in the modern sense) logical distinction between mind and body. The sharp distinction makes the argument possible: the soul will not die with the body because it was not born with the body; by its nature and origins, it is not associated with the body—it merely uses the body. The early Greek philosophers thought that matter had mental properties (like some double-aspect theorists of today); Thales, for example, was famous for his remark that ‘All things are full of gods’. Matter and divinity were intimately interwoven. As late as Epicurus, this was true; his system, robustly in the materialist (atomistic) mould, still allows for the existence of gods and phenomena we would call psychic. This leads me to suspect that Epicurus, like other ancient thinkers and prophets, had direct experience of supernormal events, which he just fit into his atomic theory.
Plato’s move towards the purification of mind from any material properties is the mother of the ‘filter’ theory whose fundamental assumption is that of an irreducible mental factor operative in nature. ‘For the first time we find in the Phaedo a recognition of the fact that consciousness is not extended and does not have shape and is not made of partes extra partes, and therefore, that, whatever be its relation to the body, it is not to be confused with the body.’6 On this view, when a man dies his body may turn to dust, but his interior self or soul is, from a logical point of view, free to carry on. As far as current mind-brain discussion, a problem that dogs reductionists just doesn’t come up for this Platonic take on the problem: how do mind and consciousness emerge from complex physical structures like brains? For Plato this is not a problem. Mind and consciousness (as a potential of mind) don’t ‘emerge’ or ‘derive’ from matter—after hundreds of years still an ineffectual hypothesis—but are somehow built into the fundamental fabric of being.
This view of the independence of the Platonic soul is out of favour today. It represents an example of the worst of heresies: substance dualism. However heretical this presumed ontological autonomy of consciousness, near-death studies provides some provocative evidence for it. In my view, the near-death phenomenon was one of the most interesting discoveries of the 20th century.7 NDEs provide material that supports the assumption that a logically independent realm of mental being is a fact of nature. However, this does not imply anything ‘supernatural’ or religious in itself; but it may help us understand the genesis of certain religious beliefs.
Near-death data suggest we are witnessing a return of the repressed; the more the aficionados of physicalism dig in their heels, the more nature throws up roadblocks that have to be confronted. If, in fact, the claims about the NDE hold up, I would compare it to the discovery of quantum mechanics earlier in the century. Quantum mechanics overthrows the mechanistic, and indeed materialistic conception of nature; the near-death phenomenon overthrows the view, first insinuated by Galileo, then evolved into dogma by most natural scientists, that subjectivity, mentality, the riot of forms of consciousness that make up our interior life, are in some way ontological dependents: derivative, epiphenomenal; a little boisterous perhaps and oh-so narcissistic, but definitely nugatory in the great scheme of things.
The NDE, however, does not support the epiphenomenal view of the character of mind in relation to brain. Mind comes out of the near-death saga not as a lowly, metaphysically insulted, epi-phenomenon—a mere echo, shadow, wisp of smoke—but as a phenomenon unto itself, original, underived, logically primitive. If the argument is sound, it is also simple. There are specific parts of the brain, according to mainstream neuroscience, that must be interacting functionally for an organism to experience consciousness. During cardiac arrest and anaesthetized states, it is known that these parts of the brain cease to function. ‘During cardiac arrest the cerebral cortex, thalamus, hippocampus, and brain stem as well as all the connections between them stop functioning … which prevents information from being integrated and differentiated—a prerequisite for communication and thus for the experience of consciousness.’8 This is the mainline assumption. Nevertheless, patients who undergo cardiac arrest and/or anaesthesia, do report having experiences.9 Moreover, they report having heightened, accelerated, and super-meaningful experiences. But this is contrary to what you would expect if the mainstream view were correct, as Bruce Greyson10 has repeatedly pointed out. As the Dutch cardiologist, Pim Van Lommel wrote, ‘We appear to have scientific proof that the cerebral cortex and brain stem are devoid of measurable activity during a cardiac arrest and that the clinical picture also reflects a loss of all bra
in function.’11 Moreover, there are times during the out-of-body phase of the NDE when the subject observes some event or fact about the external environment later on proven to be correct. Finally, there is a mystical dimension to the near-death phenomenon, and all the profound, radical and lasting after-effects. Again, I repeat: all of this is happening at a time when mainstream neuroscience tells us there should be no experience whatsoever.
Near-death phenomena are curiously consistent with Plato’s idea of the simplicity or partlessness of mental entities, like souls. The parts assumed to be the basis of consciousness are rendered dysfunctional because of the instantaneous stoppage of oxygen flow to the brain, etc., but have no averse effect on the potential for consciousness; on the contrary, disintegration has a releasing effect. The potential for consciousness appears more deeply ingrained in the mental structure of nature than is routinely supposed by the majority of physicalists.