What is the Fundamental Nature of Consciousness?

On the contribution of parapsychology to consciousness research

Michael Levin
Department of Cytokine Biology
The Forsyth Institute
140 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02115
Tel. (781) 248-9073
email: [email protected]

"It is almost an absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only

be physical. As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which
we have immediate knowledge is psychic. We might as well say, on
the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we
know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images
mediated by the senses."
Carl Jung (Psychology and Religion:West and East, p. 12)

Abstract

The nature of consciousness is fundamental to philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Science has made very promising progress on the "easy problem" (Chalmers, 1996) - the working
out of the neural mechanisms of behavior and physiological correlates of mental states. However,
despite thousands of years of philosophy and over a hundred years of hard science, the "difficult
problem" - the issue of how first-person experience, and the raw feels of awareness can accompany
the physical processes of neurobiology - remains intractable. A crucial aspect of this problem in the
philosophy of mind is the question of ontology. Does mind or consciousness exist as a real feature
of the world? Materialism asserts that only matter and energy comprise the universe, and all
phenomena are products of their interactions. In contrast, dualism asserts that the universe also
contains "mind", which cannot be reduced to matter or energy, and is responsible for
consciousness. Which (if either) of these basic theories is true is an issue that is crucial to the way
we understand normal and pathological human cognition, and the nature of the psyche. The data of
parapsychology has direct relevance to these and other issues in cognitive science. In this paper I
discuss the contribution that parapsychological research can make to the study of consciousness.
Besides promising approaches to the "other minds" problem, and possible applications to the
evolutionary origins of consciousness, the greatest contribution of parapsychology consists in what
it has to say about materialism vs. dualism. I briefly mention a few arguments against materialism
from the mainstream sciences, and then focus on the powerful implications of parapsychological
research, some of which are very telling against the sufficiency of materialism as a framework
within which to explain consciousness. The paper concludes with major problems which
parapsychology must address to flesh out its contribution to ontology.

Introduction
The question of whether cognition, consciousness, and the human "mind" in general, are a
by-product of the physico-chemical processes in the brain is a fundamental issue in philosophy of
mind (see Churchland, 1988; Dennett, 1991; Foster, 1991; Hodgson, 1991; Lockwood, 1989;
Madell, 1988; Penrose, 1991; Robinson, 1993; Smythies and Beloff, 1989). Modern science
generally embraces materialistic monism, which promises to explain everything in terms of the
interactions of matter/energy.
However, considerations of mental phenomena such as
consciousness and the raw feels of experience ("qualia") seem to suggest that in addition to
matter/energy, "mind" might be a real component of the universe; it may not be reducible to
matter/energy, and would be responsible for thoughts, intentionality, consciousness, and
experiences. This basic position is called dualism, and is popularly associated in the West with
Descartes (1997), who held that the soul is the seat of reason and thought, and interacts with, but is
independent of, the mechanical physical body. This idea is likewise widespread in many Eastern
traditions, and has been supported by modern scientists including John Eccles and others.
Currently, the issues of consciousness are (somewhat) addressed by the field of cognitive
science (Churchland, 1986; Churchland, 1988; Ornstein, 1974). This comprises philosophy of
mind, neurobiology, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Needless to say the nature of individual
consciousness is a basic concern to the study of transpersonal psychology. I will not attempt to
define consciousness here, but it should be clear that by consciousness I mean the raw feels of
experience (qualia), and the first person perspective we all (including the solipsists) enjoy. This is
to be contrasted with any questions of behavior, computational states of the brain, and problem
solving algorithms. The latter issues are called the "easy" problem, and are the province of everyday neurobiology; in contrast, the question of how first-person conscious experience could possibly
arise from (or accompany) purely physical processes in the brain is called the "hard problem"
(Chalmers, 1996).
The easy problem is a very difficult one as scientific problems go, but the hard problem is
infinitely harder because we do not even know what a possible solution might look like. There are
several positions within cognitive science as regards the status of consciousness. Functionalism
(Dennett 1981, 1991) asserts that the hard problem does not exist, and that consciousness and the
sense of self is an illusion. Various identity theories deny the existence of anything but
matter/energy, and hold that consciousness is identical with physical processes in the brain, or their
functional relationships to each other. Epiphenomenalism, the position tacitly assumed by most
working psychologists, asserts that conscious experience exists (in some vague definition of
"existing"), and somehow accompanies physical processes, but that mental states are completely
determined by physical states of the brain, rendering free will an illusion. Interactionist dualism, a
minority opinion, holds that conscious minds are a fundamental building-block of the universe,
exist as surely as rocks and magnetic fields do, and that their workings cannot be reduced to
processes of matter or energy.
The sense of being conscious and experiencing sensory impressions as well as emotions,
thoughts, and exercises of the will, is our primary datum, and perhaps the oldest object of wonder
for man. The contents of our mind seem so clearly and fundamentally different from the thirdperson, objective descriptions of behavior and material processes studied by science. On the other
hand, perhaps we really are mistaken. A conscious self doesn't feel like a billion electrons fuzzing
around a network of neurons; but then again, who knows what a billion electrons in such a system
would feel like, from the inside?

The question of ontology is a crucial one to all science and philosophy. It strikes at the most
basic issue of all inquiry: how many basic, fundamental, irreducible things make up the world? Its
ramifications to fields from physics to sociology are clear. Specifically, psychology and
neurobiology have to address the fundamental nature of the mind, and know whether higher-level
cognition and behavior is generated, or merely altered, by normal brain architecture, illness, drugs,
and surgical intervention. A clear understanding of what person is a necessary part of transpersonal studies. Social issues, such as the ramifications of the nature vs. nurture debates in moral
theory would likewise be deeply affected by these questions. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, personal issues pertaining to the meaning of physical existence and death, rest in part
on the solution to the problem of ontology.
In the remaining text, I will first briefly go over several important scientific arguments that
argue against the sufficiency of materialism in explaining important features of the world. For
some, this will not be nearly enough detail to build any force in arguing against the powerful
mainstream materialist paradigm. For others, who are already convinced (perhaps through personal
experiences of transformation) of the immateriality of mind, this may be icing on the cake. I bring
up these considerations to show that there are already cracks in the materialist program that have
nothing to do with parapsychology and that perhaps its data will dovetail nicely with some progress
going on in other sciences.
Most importantly, I argue that parapsychology provides the most forceful arguments of this
nature, and strongly supports a dualistic world-view. Because of space limitations, the evidence for
the various phenomena will not be dealt with here. In this paper, I assume that parapsychological
results are generally true (i.e., I will not discuss the skeptical position, nor rehash the evidence for
the existence of phenomena such as telepathy etc., as this has been done ad nauseum). Instead, I
will deal with the implications of these data for the study of consciousness. Materialism is thought
to potentially apply to whatever science discovers, and it is often asked what kinds of results, in
principle, would be enough to cast doubt on this world-view. Thus, even if one takes an extremely
skeptical position towards the results of parapsychology, it is interesting to consider whether, as I
argue below, these data represent an example of findings which would be incompatible with
materialism.
It should be noted that there is another possible alternative besides dualism and materialism.
Idealism is the position that there is indeed only one kind of stuff in the universe, but instead of
matter/energy, it is mind-stuff: the universe and everything in it is taken to actually be the content
of a mind (whether your mind, or God's mind). Here, I ignore idealism, because while it may
possibly be true, it is a sterile view to hold. Reality obeys coherent rules, and it is profitable to
discover these rules (i.e., do science) whether or not they are actually just the dreams of some
super-being. It just doesn't seem to matter, as long as we are embedded in them anyway. Also, it is
unfalsifiable: if someone claimed to have broken out of the grand illusion into some other greater
reality, how does one know that this too is not an aspect of the illusion? Finally, I should make it
clear that the problems of consciousness are not restricted to the verbal, voice-in-the-head we all
hear. Faculties of Psi are most likely to be sub-conscious in processing, and perhaps superconscious in source. The important point is that parapsychology provides useful data relevant to
issues of ontology, which are crucial to the question of what consciousness really is.

Two contributions of parapsychology to consciousness research

Before discussing the main contribution of parapsychological research to ontology in

philosophy of mind and cognitive science, two other roles for parapsychology should be
mentioned. The first has to do with the evolutionary origin of consciousness. We can all agree that
human beings are examples of conscious entities (in the extreme solipsistic view, at least You are a
conscious entity). We all suppose that rocks and the robots on an automotive assembly line are not
conscious beings, but rather fully mechanical objects. However, whether chimps, dolphins,
elephants, etc. experience conscious states is a debatable issue; in general, it is interesting to
wonder where in the chain of life from the simplest, almost chemical quasi-living things (such as
viruses) to Homo sapiens, does consciousness appear. If indeed sensitivity to psychic
information/influences is a concomitant to consciousness however dim (Turing, 1950), then
perhaps parapsychology has something to say on this subject. For example, there has been some
research done on mental influence on protozoa and other lower life forms (Richmond, 1952;
Randall, 1970). If it were possible to differentiate an information-sensing ability from a
psychokinetic effect on the microorganisms, perhaps a lower bound on conscious experience can be
estimated, which might support a panpsychist view (Charon, 1986) or perhaps a more humanoriented complexity view (Popper and Eccles, 1977).
Another place where parapsychology may resolve crucial issues in consciousness research
is in the "other minds" problem of epistemology. All that one knows (or thinks one knows) about
the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people is inferred from observing their behavior.
Having no first-person access to their minds, how does one know that they even have minds, and
aren't just properly-behaving automatons with no internal experiences at all? Scientists in general
would argue that whatever gives rise to consciousness in yourself would surely do so in others,
given our shared physical and biological structure. Functionalists would deny that we even have
any special "consciousness", aside from the workings of the information-processing brain, so the
problem is again a non-problem. Nevertheless, our primary datum is our own consciousness, and
all scientific evidence is perceived secondarily; thus it makes sense to wonder about the privileged
access we have to our own consciousness, and to ask whether it is really impossible to know firsthand what some other mind is experiencing. Some phenomena studied by parapsychology may be
directly relevant here. Direct mental empathetic contact, and the sharing of states of consciousness,
has been reported in many spiritual traditions and in some spontaneous cases. While this
phenomena has been little studied by lab parapsychology, the existence of mind-mind contact
which is not at all dependent on inference from outward behavior, and allows the perception of
another being's consciousness with as much privileged first-person access as one has to one's own,
gives hope that perhaps parapsychology can move the other minds problem from the realm of
philosophical speculation.

Anti-materialist arguments in the sciences

The mind-body problem, and the closely-related question of whether minds and mental
contents exist in the same sense as matter and energy exist (and thus should be a fundamental part
of our ontology), is a very basic issue in science and philosophy. Parapsychology has had a special
relationship with this problem, because it is commonly (though not unanimously) thought that it is
the one branch of science which actively supports a dualistic world-view. For example, Beloff
(1985) argues that the existence of psychic phenomena would support dualism. Conversely, some
dualists do not accept the reality of psychic phenomena (J. Eccles, for example). Among many

scientists who do accept the data of parapsychology, there is the feeling that materialist
explanations can be found for such occurrences.
Most working scientists never consider the question of ontology at all; this is a defendable
methodology in most specific cases, since progress is most readily made if one assumes one's
concepts and tools can explain a given phenomenon, until proven otherwise. The question of
whether there is an immaterial soul is simply outside the scope of the day-to-day activities of a
bench physicist or neurobiologist. When asked, however, a majority of scientists would balk at the
possibility and maintain that the world only contains physical things. Since dualism is such a
scientifically unpopular view, it may seem that interpreting parapsychological data to suggest
dualist paradigms is a disservice to parapsychology, and will make it even less palatable to
mainstream science. However, a wider look at the various sciences clearly indicates that there are
cracks in the materialist program.
Due to space constraints it is impossible to do justice to these arguments here, but it is
instructive to see that evidence for dualism crops up in almost every field of science (Dossey,
1989). In mathematics, it has been argued based on Gdel's theorem that the human mind is able to
perform functions which no physical machine can (Lucas 1961, 1968, 1970; MacKay, 1960;
Penrose, 1991). In neuro-psychology (see Wald, 1984), cases such as fully functional patients with
drastic reductions in brain mass (Lorber, 1981) and autistic subjects who perform mathematical
feats without prior training (Smith, 1983) cast doubts on the assumption that all abilities truly reside
in the physical brain. The strongest support for a non-physical substratum for consciousness comes
from physics. Wigner spoke of a return on the part of most physical scientists to the spirit of
Descartes' 'Cogito, Ergo Sum' (Wigner, 1979). Likewise, David Bohm commented on the
abandonment of modern physics of its earlier mechanical basis, and the irony of the fact that just
when physics is moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology are moving towards it
(David Bohm, in Randall, 1975). Consciousness most clearly figures in quantum theory (Davies
and Brown, 1986; Globus, 1998; Walker, 1977; Wigner, 1979). Such quantum-theoretic
considerations have led to interactionist models whereby the non-material consciousness affects
wave-function collapse of critically-poised quantum effects in the synaptic vesicles of neurons
(Bass, 1975; Popper and Eccles, 1977; Stapp, 1985; Wolf, 1985). Besides quantum theory, it is not
usually appreciated that the primacy of a non-physical observer also figures in equivalent
teleological formulations of various physical laws, as well as in thermodynamics, relativity
(Popper, 1956), quantum chemistry (Margenau, 1944), and cosmology (Barrow, 1989).
Parapsychology and dualism
What kind of data would really count against materialism? In a sense, materialistic monism
is infinitely elastic. As we have seen in physics, one is free to postulate the existence of all kinds of
bizarre things (such as empty space with a defined geometry, waves without a medium to wave in,
spaces with an infinite number of dimensions as in quantum theory, etc.). However, in the cases I
describe below, the modifications needed to materialism would result in a world-view so wildly
different from that which materialism is used to, that "materialism" would lose all meaning as a
term. To avoid the charge which is often leveled against dualist theories (that the concept can be
stretched to accommodate any possible objection), it seems reasonable to label as "materialist
theories" those theories which operate with basic concepts (such as causality, locality, various
conservation principles, etc.) as science knows them. This seems all the more a good choice of
definition since one of the main reasons people often disapprove of dualist theories is that they

introduce extra ontological or epistemological elements into the very successful framework of
modern science. A true "dualistic" theory is one which deals with a substance that is radically
different from anything which present-day science studies, whether it is A) because of its radically
different properties, B) because of a completely different methodology being necessary for its
study, or C) because there are two clearly demarcable sets of laws, each of which pertains to, and
only to, one of the two types of substances.
Unlike the scientific arguments for insufficiency of materialism, parapsychology
specifically points to the need for a non-physical substratum (Levin, 1995). While physical models
of many such experiments exist (for example, Dobbs, 1967; Forwald, 1969; LeShan, 1969;
Marshall, 1960; Zohar, 1986), they generally miss the mark because they focus on the energetics
and physics of the situation while ignoring its even more intractable informational aspects (Beloff,
1970).
The first problem concerns the symbol groundings for the telepathic process. That is, if
telepathic information is to be transmitted by some modulation of an energy (as in the basic
"mental radio" model), then one has to show how it is that a person learns the meanings of the
different signals (i.e., the code for different concepts). Since a particular modulation of some
energy wave does not in itself bear any connection to any mental concept (it is an "arbitrary" code,
in contrast to pictographic languages), one has to learn (via example, trial-and-error, or a metalanguage) the mapping of symbols to concepts. The same is true even for vision.
As Beloff points out, this problem is solved for the modality of sound (for example) in
early age, when a child, by instruction, associates various particular modulations of sound waves
with other stimuli and concepts already learned. The question is, if telepathy propagates as
information carried on some physical energy, how is it that a person knows what the various
aspects of the signal represent? This problem is sharpest when non-emotional, propositional
information is transferred, because then universal, inborn, hard-wired "standard" representations
can be ruled out.
The second problem Beloff brings up involves the selective properties of ESP. Specifically,
since telepathy (for example) seems to involve no obvious attenuation with distance, how is it that a
sensitive subject is not swamped with the thoughts of trillions of the members of the biosphere, and
is able to pick out the thoughts of some specific individual?
The mechanism of psychometry (the obtaining of information about the past events
concerning some physical object) lacks any convincing physical theory. For a straight-forward
physicalist model to explain this, one would have to postulate a field of energy around every object
which carries information on not only things which happened in its vicinity, but things like what
certain people thought of the object, etc. This hardly seems like a materialist theory, not because of
a ghostly field of information (which abound in quantum physics anyway), but because the
information is contained based on a semantic relationship to the object, as opposed to being
selected on the basis of some physical property such as spatial location (for example, when a metal
bears traces of magnetic fields it had encountered through physical proximity).
The best evidence for dualism is provided by cases suggesting personal survival of death,
and in general, non-physical intelligences lacking any body whatsoever (Stevenson, 1974, 1997).
Poltergeists are not a very good candidate, as they are usually associated with an adolescent, and
most likely represent a PK effect on his/her part. Mediumistic effects suggest but do not necessitate
such an explanation (distinguishing information obtained from spirits from that obtained from the
minds of those present is at the very least, difficult). Cases of hauntings (of the intelligent entity
type) and OBEs (out-of-body experiences) are more interesting. For example, many cases of people

voluntarily (or more frequently, involuntarily, during operations, where they later report the
activities of the relatives they visited while they were under the knife) leaving their bodies and
floating around the physical world have been reported. This can be interpreted as an illusion
surrounding simpler telepathy, but an interesting series of experiments contradicts this. In some
pilot studies (Alvarado, 1982; Moss, 1974, Tart, 1967), it was shown that OBE practitioners can
"travel to" and report upon waking a target outside the lab. The interesting twist was that when the
target was actually a mirror reflection of the real target, telepaths guess the number (it is usually a
sequence of digits) the way it really is, while most people who report themselves visiting the site
out of their physical body describe the target as it would be seen by someone facing the reversed
mirror image (although this result is not universally found in all such studies).
Clairvoyance is another difficult phenomenon to incorporate into a physicalistic framework
(Mundle, 1965). While there have been few experiments specifically designed to separate pure
clairvoyance from telepathy and other paranormal abilities (a formidable task), there have been
some attempts (for example, Tyrrell's experiments described in Mundle, 1965). A physical theory
of clairvoyance must explain 1) how the carrier medium (radiation, whatever) can penetrate all
known barriers, and yet still transmit visual information about objects (i.e., be affected and
meaningfully modulated by parameters that affect light waves), and 2) why all objects except
brains do not impede the "radiation" (since it is apparently not absorbed by anything except brains),
but all objects seem to "radiate" it. Even more troublesome for physicalism is the semantic nature
of the targeting. That is, it would seem that for certain remote-viewing clairvoyance experiments,
information on a target can be obtained by a subject who has never been there, nor knows how
(physically) to get there. The connection is made semantically (the target is described to the subject
in enough detail to enable him to know what he is to try to observe). This is completely alien to any
other form of energy-mediated information gathering, which always involves a specific spatiotemporal relationship between subject and target.
Biology also speaks against mechanistic explanations of Psi phenomena (Levin, 1996). If
psi abilities were of the same status as the physical senses (that is, derived from the physical
phenotype of the organism and thus subject to Darwinian evolution), they would be greatly favored,
would be selected for in any population, and we would be observing many more successful psychic
events in the animal kingdom than we do now. The objection that psi is an evolutionary novelty is
met by the studies showing that very primitive animals and even plants are sensitive to "mental"
influences. This provides ample evolutionary time for such a useful talent to develop. The dualist
would suggest that different laws are operating with respect to evolutionary time-scale changes of
the mental capabilities of beings, that are not described correctly by the Darwinian theory which
governs physical bodies.
Precognition often exhibits negative-time causality, which is troublesome to say the least,
from the viewpoint of physics as well as logic. Faster-than-light tachyons can translate backwards
through time, but they are prohibited from carrying information (Herbert, 1988). Precognition
directly contradicts science's notion of time and causality (although it is far from clear that this
cannot be fixed up - Broad, 1923, Feinberg, 1974). Such phenomena may be due to the fact that the
mind is processing information outside of the normal fabric of physical space-time.
There have been several studies showing that mental volition can affect quantum
phenomena, in the context of affecting statistical properties of binary bit streams generated by
particle decay (Honorton, 1979; Jahn and Dunne, 1987); this perhaps lends support to the models
(see above) whereby mind interacts with matter at the quantum level. Interestingly, in some
experiments, the device "decided" (as determined by a quantum element) within 10-7 seconds

whether a certain quantum event was going to count as a 0 or a 1. The brain works at time scales of
milliseconds (10-3 seconds). Thus, it would appear that the physical brain simply is not fast enough
to sense the switch and effect a proper response. Even more fundamental is the fact that the device
is being affected despite a complete lack of understanding of its workings by the subject. This has
lead to an "equivalence hypothesis" (Schmidt, 1974; Schmidt, 1997 and references therein), which
points out that the physical construction of the random number generator is irrelevant. This
suggests that the influence is not based on the physical characteristics of the systems involved, but
is rather of a teleological nature, directed by the outcome intended by the subject.
Homeopathy, the treatment of maladies and the psychological adjustment brought about by
means of ultra-high dilutions of various substances is likewise troublesome for materialism (see
also Harald, 1999). This is not because of the efficacy of solutions which have been diluted to the
point where no molecules of the active ingredient remain in the sample, since physicalist models
involving ordered water etc. have been proposed (Endler and Schulte, 1994). The real problem for
materialist explanations of homeopathy is that it uses dilutions of simple compounds to treat
psychological imbalances such as "rudeness" and "feelings of bad luck" (Bailey, 1995). It is not
physically plausible that such elaborate psychological characteristics can be affected by simple
compounds through biochemical pathways. The rule of "like treats like" is also unlikely to admit of
a reasonable chemical explanation.
Finally, consider dowsing and other radionics instruments (Maby and Franklin, 1956;
Russel, 1973). Many energy-transfer models have been formulated to explain how a rod being held
by a dowser walking over an underground cache of water or minerals might be caused to move.
The problem is that it has been seen that this process works just as well when the dowser is
working on a map of the territory as opposed to the territory itself. Once again the connection
between the dowsing rod or pendulum and the target object is not a physical one but a semantic one
(made by the symbolic map which the dowser sees). The same phenomenon has been observed
with radionics devices: they work equally well regardless of what materials constitute the
schematic of the device. Thus, it isn't a precise physical material configuration which matters (as it
does in physical devices such as radios) but rather the abstract functional structure and
interrelationship between the parts (White and Krippner, 1977).
Of course, new progress in the sciences of physiology, neurology, etc. will have much to
say about biological (i.e., physical) correlates of paranormal phenomena. Finer resolution analyses
with modern, non-invasive tools such as MRI and PET scanning during OBEs and other instances
of paranormal cognition are bound to be informative. For any PSI process to occur, there must,
somewhere, be an interface (be it energetic, informational, or other) between the postulated nonphysical reality and the physical organism. Thus, we can expect advances from modern techniques
about the physiological side of this equation. However, I have argued that by their very nature, such
approaches cannot tell the whole story.
In summary, the characteristics of paranormal information transfer are directly opposite
those which we assign to physical signal carriers (see Mitchell, 1974 for descriptions of several
representative studies, as well as Beloff, 1974; Sheldrake, 1985; Sheldrake, 1989; Smythies, 1967;
White and Krippner, 1977). Tart (1969) and Krippner (1977) present many experiments which are
supportive of that view. Almost all psi experiments are more easily explained within a dualist
framework, and some (like the Stevenson cases which support rebirth and hauntings and
apparitions) point quite directly to the existence of non-physical entities. It is seen that problems
with the information coding/decoding aspects of telepathy render hopes for an energy-transfer
explanation unlikely. Moreover, all physical materialist models are based on the fundamental

"primary qualities" of physics: position in space and properties such as chemical composition,
mass, etc. The semantic nature of remote-target clairvoyance, psychometry, homeopathy, and
dowsing demonstrates that some phenomena are best explained by interactions not based on the
physical location and properties of the objects involved, but rather on the semantic role they play in
the mind of the participant. This is echoed in Jung's concept of synchronicity - "meaningfully but
not causally related events", once again, referring to mental properties as opposed to physical ones.
Finally, the time-paradoxical aspects of precognition, the lack of evolutionary spread of psi abilities
throughout the biosphere, and the ability of subjects to affect devices of unknown construction at
speeds far beyond that of biological neuronal processes (discussed above in the context of quantum
bit generators) also point to the possibility that the mind is a non-physical entity.

Conclusion
I have attempted to show that parapsychology provides a wealth of phenomena which
complement some arguments from the traditional sciences in pointing out that materialistic monism
is ontologically incomplete. As important as that conclusion may be, it is only half the puzzle. After
all, a materialist might object that dualism doesn't help at all. Given the existence of a ghostly nonphysical substance, one is still left wondering how it escapes all of the scientific arguments levied
against normal matter. If matter does not seem to provide the substratum for consciousness, qualia,
first-person perspective, etc., how does the mind?
In order to be a viable theory, useful for parapsychology, philosophy, and cognitive science,
it must contain positive, constructive models. Aside from showing that materialism is insufficient,
dualists must provide coherent, testable models of how an immaterial substance can accomplish
what they argue matter cannot (for example, circumvent the problems of the Lucas argument, and
in general, discover what it is that enables "mind" to perform that for which matter has been shown
insufficient). This is not trivial, and is a problem usually ignored by some dualists who blithely
resort to "the soul" when troublesome phenomena are presented. Simple one-soul-one-body
Cartesian dualism also needs to be made more sophisticated to embrace data from split brain
patients (Gazzaniga, 1978; Marks, 1981), multiple personality cases (Braude, 1995), and a wealth
of other data (White, 1991, and see discussion in Dennett, 1991) which suggests that our view of
ourselves as coherent, monadic consciousnesses is in need of amendment.
Dualists are thus badly in need of a theory of how mind-stuff is able to have (or produce?)
several kinds of mental phenomena. One is the issue of intentionality: if a materialist claims that a
particular part of your brain is identical with your memory of an event or your knowledge or belief
of some proposition, one might argue that this piece of neural net may be responsible for your
behavior consistent with this proposition, but it is hardly possible for a piece of matter to, in and of
itself, to instantiate a belief or be about something. But the same problem seems to affect the
immaterial mind. How can a piece of "astral body" be about something? Other issues which need to
be addressed by dualist models are the related problems of first-person perspective (why your
internal view as subject is fundamentally different from objective descriptions of other objects) and
indexicality (the question of why you are the particular person you are, when from a scientific,
third-person perspective all have equal status as objects).
Finally, it would be nice if we had a dualist model for free will (a free will worth having, as
Dennett says). So far our choices seem to be a complete physical determinism, a physical
determinism joined to limitations on our ability to predict this determinism (chaos theory), or

10

ultimate (but random!) unpredictability given by quantum theory. None of these alternatives seem
to capture what we mean by free will (which is not simply about unpredictability, nor about purely
random choices). Perhaps a related issue is that of ethics and moral theory. Do dualists have
anything to say to those who argue that no intrinsic moral values are possible in a purely physical
universe?
Emergence is a powerful concept in the physical sciences (magnetic fields,
superconductivity, correlated states, etc.) as well as biology (e.g., complex behavior of the anthill
which derives from the relatively simple behavioral repertoire of the individual ants). Functionalists
and other materialists in the cognitive sciences argue that behavior and mental processes emerge
from the function of many nested low-level information processing routines, none of which are in
and of themselves conscious. A good dualist theory may be an emergent one, but it may also turn
out that consciousness, experience, and indexicality are first-order, intrinsic properties of Mind (as
position for example is a fundamental property of matter), and are not synthesizable in terms of any
lower-level concepts.
Other problems remain for dualism, and addressing them is best done within the context of
parapsychology. One of the strongest arguments against dualism concerns the precise locus of
interaction between the material and immaterial realm. Of course, purely material causation is
equally mysterious (Hume), but a very specific question is whether interactionism violates
conservation of energy laws (see Morowitz, 1987, but also Averill and Keating, 1981, and Larmer,
1986).
It is thus seen that while dualism is quite likely to be more the more appropriate ontology,
the burden is on it to do much for what materialism has been shown to be insufficient. I would like
to suggest that the modern techniques of parapsychological research, coupled with theoretical
insights from the more analytical of the old dualistic traditions (Besant, 1904; Long, 1948;
Ouspensky, 1931; Steiner, 1961) are needed to begin to address this task, which is arguably the
most important we face, as scientists and human beings.

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