Bernardo Kastrup - A Rational, Empirical Case For Postmortem Survival Based Solely On Mainstream Science
Bernardo Kastrup - A Rational, Empirical Case For Postmortem Survival Based Solely On Mainstream Science
Bernardo Kastrup - A Rational, Empirical Case For Postmortem Survival Based Solely On Mainstream Science
Introduction
What is the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after
permanent bodily death? For self-evident reasons, this is undoubtedly a central
question for all of us. Yet, the question itself already betrays a ubiquitous but
nonetheless unexamined assumption: that the postmortem survival of human
consciousness isn’t—at least in principle—the expected outcome and, therefore, one
needs the best possible evidence to convince oneself of it.
But is this really the case? Are we correct in assuming that our ordinary observations
of nature’s normal behavior suggest that consciousness perishes upon bodily death?
In this essay, I shall argue that such an assumption—pervasive and vulgarly intuitive
as it admittedly is—is in fact not correct; that the mainstream evidence, when
assessed carefully and rigorously, indicates precisely the opposite.
1
I have undertaken the writing of this essay as part of my work as Executive Director of Essentia
Foundation. Therefore, should this essay win a prize, the proceeds should be donated directly to
Stichting Essentia Foundation, Stadionweg 1, 1077 RV Amsterdam, The Netherlands, RSIN No.
861178555. Essentia Foundation is an official Dutch Public Benefit Organization—i.e. a charitable non-
profit. Donations received by the foundation are taxed in an advantageous manner, so Essentia will
be able to leverage any eventual prize money more effectively than I, as an individual, could.
As a matter of fact, not only does the empirical evidence indicate the primacy of
consciousness over physicality, but simple reasoning—when done rigorously—
already shows that our mainstream, vulgar physicalist intuitions are incoherent:
when looked at carefully, physicalism—the notion that physical entities are all there
ultimately is—fails on all key post-enlightenment epistemic values: it is internally
inconsistent (meaning that it contradicts itself), conceptually unparsimonious
(meaning that it is not the simplest model to account for the facts), empirically
inadequate (meaning that it cannot accommodate the evidence) and explanatorily
weak (meaning that it doesn’t make sense of observations).
Given all this, I contend that it is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to look to the
paranormal for high-confidence validation of postmortem survival. Not that there is
anything wrong with doing so, or that paranormal research is unreliable (often
enough the contrary is the case); but given present-day cultural sensitivities and
prejudices, I believe that an argument for postmortem survival based solely on
rigorous reasoning and sufficiently replicated laboratory evidence—both of which
2
Throughout this essay, what I mean by the word ‘consciousness’ is what is technically called
‘phenomenal consciousness’ in analytic philosophy: the ability to experience, without necessarily
entailing higher-level mental functions such as introspective meta-cognition. Moreover, as is tradition
in Western philosophy, I use the word ‘mind’ interchangeably with ‘consciousness,’ and thus also in
the sense of phenomenal consciousness.
Therefore, this essay shall deliberately overlook evidence of the paranormal and base
its case completely on ‘ordinary’ laboratory results and reasoning informed by
traditional Aristotelian logic. As the reader shall hopefully realize, this self-
constrained approach is already more than sufficient to lead us—with a high degree
of confidence—to vast new horizons regarding the possibility of postmortem
survival.
When we look around ourselves, we see a world of forms distributed across space
and time. Automatically, and without critical reasoning, we assume that these
forms—and the spatiotemporal extension that allows them to exist—are the forms of
the world3 as it is in itself. In other words, we think that the objects we perceive have
standalone reality outside our perceptions; we think that they are indeed the objects
that constitute the world in itself, not just inner representations of ours. To put it as
simply as possible, we regard perception as a transparent window into the world,
which reveals to us—perhaps with some but, at any rate, inconsequential distortion—
the world as it truly is, outside perception.
I shall call this assumption ‘perceptual realism’: the notion that the forms displayed
on the screen of perception are the forms of the world as it is in itself, outside and
independently of perception. Mainstream physicalism is largely founded on
perceptual realism, as the physicalist model presupposes isomorphism—i.e., direct
correspondence of form—between what we empirically perceive and the standalone
structure of the world. Without this presupposition, there would be little sense in
stating e.g., that the world is material, for the properties that characterize
3
Throughout this essay, when I say ‘the world’ I mean by it more than just planet Earth, but also the
totality of our shared environment at a cosmological level.
But does this vulgarly intuitive assumption survive careful scrutiny? Do we have
reasons to believe that nature would have equipped us with a transparent window
into the world, revealing to us the world as it is in and of itself? What does modern
science tell us in this regard?
Research done at the Institute of Neurology of the Wellcome Trust Center for
Neuroimaging, in London, has shown mathematically that perception would be
incompatible with life if it were akin to a transparent window [1, 2]. Here is a
somewhat loose verbal paraphrase of the researchers’ rigorous mathematical
account: for perceptual realism to hold, our internal perceptual states would have to
mirror the external states of the world. Indeed, such mirroring is the definition of
perceptual realism. However, since there is no a priori upper bound to the dispersion
of the world’s states—i.e., our mere perceiving the world cannot constrain what the
world is or does—mirroring them internally would mean that there cannot be an
upper bound to the dispersion of our inner states either. Consequently, simply by
looking at the world our inner states could become so disperse that our nervous
system would dissolve into hot soup. This metaphorical imagery may sound
exaggerated, but it captures the technical facts quite accurately: if perception
mirrored the world, there would be no structural upper limit to our internal entropy
and, therefore, no guarantee of our maintaining our structural integrity. Statistically
speaking, perceiving would be very deadly business indeed. Like Perseus facing the
Gorgon, we would be far better off keeping our eyes tightly shut.
Now, since living beings have been safely perceiving the world for about three and a
half billion years, perception is not a transparent window, but an encoded
4
It is true that, under mainstream physicalism, the real world, as it is in itself, has no intrinsic qualities:
in it there supposedly are no colors, flavors, melodies, smells or textures. Under physicalism, these
qualities are side-effects of brain activity and therefore reside entirely within our skull, not in the
world outside. But the contours of the external world—still under mainstream physicalism—are
assumed to be the same, in principle, as the contours displayed on the screen of perception. These
contours can be fully characterized through abstract mathematical relationships—think of angles and
distances—and thus be defined independently of qualities. The alleged absence of intrinsic qualities
in the real world of physicalism simply means that the contours aren’t ‘filled in’ with e.g., colors. This
is how physicalism can be founded on perceptual realism without contradicting itself on this specific
point.
It is easy to gain felt intuition about all this. Imagine a pilot flying and airplane during
a severe storm: it would be very difficult to fly safely under such circumstances if all
the pilot had were a transparent windshield to see the storm; there would be just too
much going on outside, too much confusion, too much dispersion to allow for safe
flying. Instead, the pilot ignores the windshield and flies by instruments: the dials on
his dashboard present, at a glance, an encoded representation of what is relevant
about the storm outside. Yet, there is an upper bound to the state dispersion of the
dials on the dashboard: the needles can move left or right, the numbers can vary
within their assigned scales, but all these variations fall within predetermined limits.
The dashboard is designed to prevent information dispersion overload, while
presenting to the pilot what is salient about the world outside.
The possible configurations of a storm are virtually infinite: the number, shape, size
and movements of the constituent clouds, the specific spatiotemporal patterns of
rain drops and lightning distribution, etc. But the dashboard of dials encodes what is
relevant about all those possible variations in a neat, compact form, which limits the
dispersion of the data the pilot has to contend with: it presents the pilot with
indications of relevant air pressure variations, wind speed and direction, etc.,
regardless of which particular pattern of cloud, rain and lightning behavior is
unfolding outside. The airplane’s flying manual doesn’t have to tell the pilot what to
do for each of the countless possible configurations of the world, but solely for each
of the possible configurations of measurements displayed on the dashboard. The
entropy of the world outside, as it is in itself, is unbound. But the entropy of the data
the pilot has to work with is bound by design.
Indeed, our very conception of a world of objects distributed across space and time
is but the paradigm of the dashboard: the paradigm of needles moving within dials,
as they make measurements of what is going on outside. Space and time are the
scales of the dials, not the objective scaffolding of the external world. The vulgar
intuition underlying physicalism is thus fallacious: the world isn’t made of material
objects occupying space and time; the latter are just the representational
conventions of our internal dashboard of instruments.
What gives us very high confidence in this conclusion is not only the mathematical
rigor with which it has been derived; it’s not even its self-evident validity once it’s
correctly understood; what really gives us confidence in it is that the exact same
conclusion has been derived from an entirely different and independent line of
argument. Indeed, when independent and seemingly unrelated streams of thought
converge to the same destination, we are justified to feel particularly confident about
the corresponding conclusions.
And so it is that Prof. Donald Hoffman and his team at the University of California,
reasoning from the perspective of evolutionary theory (as opposed to
thermodynamics), have proven mathematically that evolution by natural selection
drives perceptual realism swiftly to extinction [3, 4, 5, 6]. And just like before, while
the mathematics may seem arcane, the conclusion is self-evident once correctly
Hoffman’s team has proven that evolution will always seek to do the same: instead
of showing us the world as it truly is—i.e., the millions of microscopic switches in our
analogy—it presents us with a ‘desktop metaphor’ of the world, a ‘virtual reality
headset’ or ‘user-interface’ that sits in between us and the world. What we call the
physical universe is merely this user-interface, this virtual reality headset. The world,
as it is in and of itself, is neither material nor framed by an objective spacetime
scaffolding.
Although these recent results are immensely important, in that they have provided
us with a level of conceptual clarity and mathematical certainty that wasn’t available
before, the conclusions themselves are nothing new. Already in the late 18th and early
19th centuries, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that what we
ordinarily refer to as ‘matter’ is merely an internal cognitive representation of ours,
not the substance of reality [7, 8]. Both also maintained that space and time are
categories of perception, not an objective empty box where nature places itself in.
Moreover, according to Schopenhauer [8], even Plato himself, two and a half
thousand years ago, already had this insight. Clearly, thus, perceptual realism—a key
The implications of this insight to the question of postmortem survival are as self-
evident as they are inevitable: if spacetime and matter are off the table as
fundamental aspects of reality—for now they are understood to be merely cognitive
representations in human consciousness—the notion that the loss of spatial integrity
of the material body at the time of death implies the end of consciousness loses
whatever couching in logic it might otherwise have. The most we can say is that
death is an event in consciousness: in the consciousness of the dying and of those
observing the dying process and its aftermath. Any extrapolation beyond this is
logically unfounded, regardless of how tempting it might be from a culture-bound
perspective.
More generally speaking, the assumption that bodily death indicates the end of
consciousness is culturally nurtured by mainstream physicalism, a metaphysics that
ties consciousness to the function of living brains. Therefore, an important next step
in my argument for postmortem survival is to show the logical and empirical
untenability of mainstream physicalism, so we can get that out of the way and
explore more promising theoretical landscapes later on.
Physicalists start from where we all start: from our qualitative experience of the world
around us, with its colors, tones, flavors, smells and textures. They then realize—quite
correctly—that it is useful to describe these qualities in quantitative terms. This way,
So far so good.
But then something very strange happens: physicalists start taking the descriptions
for the thing described, the map for the territory. They seemingly forget that the
numbers come after the qualities, merely as a handy way to describe relative
qualitative differences, and—bizarrely—postulate that the numbers are the things in
themselves! They conceptually define what we colloquially call ‘matter’ as an entity
that can be exhaustively described in quantitative terms alone, even though what we
ordinarily refer to as ‘matter’ is eminently qualitative (think of the feeling of carrying
weight, the quality of seeing a color, the loudness of a sound, etc.). In other words,
physicalists maintain that one can say everything there is to say about matter if one
provides a sufficiently long list of numbers; no qualities are needed.
Perhaps even more strangely, having divorced matter from all qualities by definition,
physicalists then proceed to try to explain all qualities in terms of… well, matter. They
maintain that experiential qualities—which philosophers technically call ‘qualia’—are
somehow generated by the particular structure and function of biological nervous
systems, even though these nervous systems—by the physicalists’ own account—are
entirely incommensurable with qualities. The result is what today is called the ‘hard
problem of consciousness’ [9, 10]: there is nothing about physical parameters—i.e.,
quantities—in terms of which one could deduce the qualities of experience. Is this
really a problem to be solved, or merely a glaring internal contradiction of
sophomoric reasoning? Is the fact that one fails to pull the territory out of the map a
problem to be solved by future, improved versions of the map and the process of
pulling, or does it merely show that the very attempt is stupid, and one needs to
revise one’s way of thinking about maps and territories?
Notice that I am not denying that which we colloquially refer to as ‘matter,’ i.e., the
contents of perception. These things we perceive and then call ‘material’ objects
undeniably exist as contents of perception. Only a fool would deny that. What I am
questioning is physicalism’s conceptual, theoretical definition of matter as a
substance outside and independent of consciousness.
So, do physical entities have standalone existence, insofar as modern science can
determine? The answer is ‘no’: from a series of experiments that started in the late
1970s and have been refined and replicated for over 40 years, we now know that
physical entities do not have standalone existence, but are instead an image, an
appearance, a representation of a deeper layer of reality, which is itself nonphysical
by definition.5 The only alternative to this conclusion is to postulate—in a far more
extreme and implausible version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—that countless
bazillions of real physical universes pop into existence every unimaginably tiny
fraction of a femtosecond, for which we have precisely zero empirical evidence.
Let us look more closely at this remarkable series of experiments and discuss why
they refute physical realism. The experimental procedure is the following: two
subatomic particles are generated together, so that they are ‘entangled.’
Entanglement is physics jargon for saying that the particles become interrelated in
such a way that their behavior cannot be described independently of one another.
The particles are then shot in different directions at (near) the speed of light and,
after a certain distance is covered, measurements are done on both particles,
separately but concurrently. What then transpires is that the choice of what to
measure about one particle determines the result of measuring the other. How can
this be? How can the choice of what to observe determine what a particle is?
Shouldn’t observation merely reveal what a particle already was, in and of itself,
regardless of what is observed about it?
5
By definition in the sense that what we define as physicality is the appearance, the image of
something else. That something else is then, by the very definition of physicality, not physical.
Experimentally, however, what we see is that the properties of one particle depend
on what we choose to observe about the other. It is as though the particles’ properties
didn’t have standalone existence but were, instead, created by the very act of
measurement. As a matter of fact, since there is nothing about a physical particle but
its measurable physical properties, it is as though the particles themselves didn’t exist
unless and until they are measured. This, of course, is incompatible with the
physicalist notion that elementary subatomic particles (or their respective quantum
fields) are things in themselves, not just appearances, representations or images of a
deeper layer of reality.
The first well-known experiments in this 40-year-long series were those performed
by Alain Aspect and his team in the early 1980s [11, 12, 13]. Since their results
contradicted physicalist expectations, physicists at the time came up with a long list
of possible experimental loopholes that, if true, would throw doubt on the
experiments’ conclusions and perhaps save physical realism. Over the years, these
hypothetical loopholes became increasingly implausible to the point of sounding
fantastic. For instance, some physicists speculated that the particles could somehow
be secretly exchanging information with one another, so as to synchronize their
behavior. This would, in principle, account for the observed correlations between the
measurements of the two particles while preserving physical realism. It has also
been speculated that the measurement devices themselves could somehow be
tipping each other off, so as to create the measurement correlations in a kind of
conspiratorial manner. Perhaps the most bizarre of the proposed loopholes has been
that there is some undetectable but real physical entity ‘smeared across’ all
spacetime, which is capable of instantaneously synchronizing the measurements
without relativistic limitations (needless to say, there is precisely zero direct
A whole series of experiments then began in earnest to attempt to close the loopholes
and decide, once and for all, if the original conclusions were really correct [14, 15, 16,
17, 18]. The most remarkable in the series were experiments done in 2015 and 2018 [19,
20], which were celebrated by the popular science press as having closed all the
loopholes [21]. Needless to say, the results were the same as the original experiments:
physical properties do not exist unless and until they are measured. In the words of
renowned physicist Anton Zeilinger, “there is no sense in assuming that what we do
not measure about a system has [an independent] reality” [22]. Physicality has no
standalone existence.
Strictly speaking, it can be argued that what some of the experiments refute is not
physical realism per se, but the combination of physical realism with locality. The
latter is the notion that physical influences cannot propagate faster than the speed
of light. Therefore—the argument goes—perhaps physical realism is still true, and it
is just locality that we have to abandon: the universe may be a relativity-transcending
integrated hole at its deepest level.
The problem is that some of the experiments were constructed precisely to test
physical realism in isolation, irrespective of locality [e.g., 23, 24, 25, 26]. And they, too,
refuted physical realism empirically. As a result, the science press went as far as to
proclaim that “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality” [27], “the unreality of the
quantum world” [21] and even that “reality is what you make of it” [22]. Alas,
mainstream science journalism today doesn’t seem capable of conceiving of
anything that is both objectively real and nonphysical. Even if the physical is not
6
I am not providing references to these loophole claims at this point because the claims are
expounded at length in the technical literature of the experiments designed to close the loopholes, as
referenced below.
The surviving interpretation of the experimental results that could, in principle, still
preserve physical realism is called ‘Bohmian Mechanics’ [28, 29]. Alas for physicalists,
this interpretation is plagued by a number of other problems. For instance, unlike
regular Quantum Mechanics with its Quantum Field Theory extensions, Bohmian
Mechanics has no relativistic version and, thus, cannot be true. Physicists Raymond
Streater and Luboš Motl are on record reviewing this and other compelling technical
arguments against Bohmian Mechanics [30, 31]. Finally, recent experiments have
refuted the interpretation empirically, driving the final nail into its coffin [32].
7
The idea here is that, since every physical possibility allegedly does happen in one of these countless
bazillions of physical universes, we just happen to live in the one wherein the particular measurement
correlations we observe take place.
8
Thoughtful physicists acknowledge without hesitation that physics is a science of perception, not of
the world as it is in itself, for we have no access to the latter. Even when we use instruments such as
telescopes and microscopes, we are still limited to perception, for we must perceive the output of such
instruments. Here is how renowned physicist Andrei Linde, famous for his seminal theory of
cosmological inflation, put it: “our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with
perceptions … Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently
formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions … This
assumption is almost as natural (and maybe as false) as our previous assumption that space is only a
mathematical tool for the description of matter.” [37, p. 12]
Again, physical properties only come into existence upon measurement because
physicality is the result of measurement, just as the movement of the needles in the
dials on a dashboard is the result of probing the real world outside. This conclusion
is so natural, so self-evidently rational and empirically inevitable that the dogged
resistance against it from the likes of physicist Sean Carrol—who insists on the
equivalent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in modern physics9—is baffling. Is it really
so incredible that physicality is just the result of our observing our environment?
That it is merely an encoded appearance, a representation, an image of a deeper, by
definition nonphysical layer of reality to which we have no direct access because we
would otherwise die?
The dashboard hypothesis can even make straightforward sense of the correlations
between measurements of two distant entangled particles, as discussed above.
These correlations are only puzzling if we assume that the particles have standalone
existence, not if they are mere images. To see this, consider the following analogy:
imagine that you are watching a football match at home. Because you are such a
great fan of football, you bought two large TVs to follow the same match,
simultaneously, on two different channels. Imagine also that the two different
broadcasters have their own cameras in the stadium, so each channel shows
different images of the same match. And you watch the two different images side by
side.
Now, obviously, the two images will be entirely correlated with one another, for they
are images of the same match, of the same underlying reality. The images have no
standalone existence, only the football match at the stadium—the thing in itself—has.
9
I am being charitable here.
However, if you were a time traveler from the 19th century and didn’t understand how
TVs work, you would conceivably be flabbergasted by the correlations between the
two images: how can the real little men running around inside the two TVs behave
in such an instantly synchronized, perfectly correlated manner? How can that
happen even when the TVs are totally isolated from one another, and no signal can
be transmitted from one to the other? Magic!
Educated but non-specialist readers could contend that these experimental results
are only applicable to the microscopic scale of elementary subatomic particles, and
that the conclusions cannot be extrapolated to the world of tables and chairs wherein
we live. But most physicists know very well that this is a naïve and invalid point.
Although there are undeniable operational differences between the behavior of the
world of tables and chairs and that of isolated microscopic quantum systems, these
differences are per force merely epiphenomenal. After all, macroscopic objects and
events are just compound results of microscopic dynamics. To quote renowned
physicist Erich Joos, a
Joos goes on to say, “whichever interpretation [of Quantum Mechanics] one prefers,
the classical world view has been ruled out” [38, p. 76]. There is no actual boundary
between the microscopic and the macroscopic. The distinction between the two is
arbitrary, nominal, motivated by convenience and purely epistemic. Our everyday
world is quantum.
Admittedly, there are experts in foundations of physics that are both (a) reluctant to
acknowledge the refutation of physical realism and (b) unable to muster the faith
required to follow Sean Carrol into the many-worlds interpretation of the
experimental results. What do they then make of the results?
So far so good for, again, this is entirely consistent with the dashboard metaphor: the
dials’ indications are also relational, not absolute, for they depend—for their very
existence—on the relationships between sensors and the properties of the world
outside. The dials aren’t the world in itself, but the result of an observation of the
world.
After 25 years expressly avoiding this philosophical qualm, Rovelli has decided to
finally bite the bullet and publish his answer [40]. His proposal is unexpected, though
probably not in the way he intended: instead of acknowledging that Relational
Quantum Mechanics implies that there is a nonphysical layer of reality underlying
the physical, he maintains that it’s turtles… err, relations all the way down! According
to him, there are only relations. And since relations are physical, there is then only
physicality.
But if relations are all there is, then physical quantities can only be relations across
meta-relations (for there is nothing else that can be relating); and meta-relations are
relations across meta-meta-relations; and so on. The fallacy of infinite regress is upon
us, and it isn’t even disguised by some theoretical subtlety.
It’s precisely the absurd claim that reality is essentially nothing that gives Rovelli an
excuse to reconcile ‘movement’ with the absence of anything that ‘moves.’ But at
what cost? Adding two absurdities together doesn’t magically erase them; it just
compounds them. Why would Rovelli even attempt such a move? Only he, of course,
can answer this question, but he is open about the subjective motivation behind his
appeal to Nāgārjuna: he describes how relieved he was upon reading the Indian sage,
because it freed him from the pressure of having to find out what the underlying
essence of reality is.
10
No-thing in the sense of no objects separate from, or outside, the subject of experience; no substance
in the sense of no objective substance, as opposed to a field of pure subjectivity.
I shall close this section with a prediction. Confronted with the self-evident
untenability of his case, Rovelli and others will eventually propose an entirely
abstract but allegedly absolute ‘something’ to underly the physical world; something
that could only be said to exist by virtue of ostensibly corresponding to some
convenient, overdetermining mathematical equation. They will then insist that this
purely abstract something—lacking any direct empirical evidence—is physical,
despite its intrinsically not having any of the properties we associate with
physicality, such as mass, charge, spin, momentum, etc. There will be an overt,
unashamed attempt to preserve physicalism by mere word redefinition. In other
words, whatever reality turns out to be, they will wrap an overdetermining equation
around it and call it ‘physical,’ so that physicalism is true by definition. If you think
this would be too obvious a charade, watch carefully. It won’t even be malicious, but
driven instead by unexamined—yet irresistible—subjective belief.
According to physicalists, it’s the particular structure and dynamics of matter inside
our skulls—i.e., our brain activity—that somehow is or generates consciousness. Their
position is based on reliable correlations between patterns of brain activity and inner
experience. Indeed, that these correlations exist doesn’t even require scientific
equipment to be determined: alcohol in the blood stream and trauma to the head
have obvious correlates in inner experience. Physicalists then construe these
correlations as instances of causation: specific patterns of brain activity are thought
to be or generate inner experience.
The problem is that there is a broad, diverse, consistent and repeatable pattern of
brain activity impairments or reductions that correlate precisely with richer, more
intense experience. If experience were, or were generated by, brain activity, then how
could we get more experience out of less brain activity?
For instance, up until 2012 neuroscience and most lay physicalists had always
assumed that psychedelics generate immensely rich and intense experiences—
which subjects report as ranking among the top 5 most significant experiences of
their lives [45, 46]—by lighting up the brain like a Christmas tree. That’s why, when
researchers realized that psilocybin (the active ingredient of magic mushrooms) in
fact only reduces activity throughout the brain, without increasing it anywhere (see
Figure 1) [47], the neuroscience community was surprised [48].
Since that seminal study, the results have been consistently replicated for most other
psychedelic substances [49, 50, 51, 52]. In all cases, the physiological effect of the
psychedelic is to reduce brain activity, particularly in the so-called ‘default mode
network,’ which is correlated with our ego or sense of individual identity (see Figures
2 and 3). The phenomenological effect, on the other hand, is one of the richest and
most intense experiences a human being can possibly have. If one’s brain is
effectively going to sleep during those experiences, where are the experiences then
coming from?
Figure 2. In blue, reductions on brain activity in the default mode network (associated with the
executive ego) induced by the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca. Source: PLoS ONE 10(2): e0118143.
Reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
But if we dig a little deeper into the technical material, things aren’t as they seem.
For starters, what the researchers portentously call ‘complexity,’ ‘diversity’ or
‘entropy’ is just noise; they are talking about unstructured, incoherent brain activity
that forms no discernible pattern. The suggestion that an increase in brain noise
accounts for the highly structured and coherent phenomenology of the psychedelic
state seems highly implausible. No one who has undergone a true psychedelic
experience would describe it as noise or brain fog. Trip reports contain sharp and
highly coherent narratives and insights [56, 57].
Second, if we look at the size of the effect reported, we realize that it is minuscule.11
See Figure 4. We are talking here of an average increase in noise level of about 0.005
in a scale of 0 to 100! See the graph scales in Figure 4. To suggest that such a
minuscule increase in noise accounts for the literally mindboggling intensity and
richness of the psychedelic experience, under physicalist premises, requires a
complete abandonment of any notion of plausibility. It is embarrassing. Moreover,
in several of the cases studied, noise levels actually decreased in the psychedelic
state, although the subjects still did have the experience. What caused the experience
in those cases? It couldn’t have been an increase in brain noise.
11
The researchers’ claim that the effect is statistically significant doesn’t contradict the fact that it is
minuscule. Although there is much debate today about the arbitrariness of the statistical significance
threshold—and the recognition that it is leading to all kinds of spurious conclusions [58, 59, 60]—I am
prepared to grant, for the sake of the discussion, that the effect in question is statistically significant.
But this only shows that the effect exists, not that it is anything more than minuscule.
It is quite safe to say that the psychedelic experience is not generated by minuscule
increases of—of all things—brain noise. The one robust physiological effect of
psychedelics is an overall reduction of brain activity. If brain imaging studies had
shown that psychedelics light up the brain like a Christmas tree, physicalists would
be shouting, “You see?! We told you so!” But now that the result is the very opposite
of what they expected, a significant part of the neuroscience community is prepared
to throw reason and plausibility out the window and entertain embarrassing,
preposterous suggestions with a straight face. This, unfortunately, is the
psychosocial nature of the game.
A prospective study of patients who underwent brain surgery for the removal of
tumors—which often causes collateral lesions to surrounding tissue—has shown
that, post-surgery, patients display significantly higher levels of feelings of self-
transcendence [63]. See Figure 6.
In a study of over one hundred Vietnam war veterans, damage to the frontal and
parietal lobes was shown to increase the likelihood of “mystical experiences” [70].
I could go on and on. Teenagers worldwide play a dangerous game called ‘the
choking game.’ They have realized that partial strangulation—which reduces blood
flow to the head and compromises brain metabolism—can lead to intense and rich
experiences akin to the psychedelic state, but without the drug [71, pp. 310-315]. The
technique of ‘Holotropic Breathwork’ aims to unlock transcendent experiences
through hyperventilation, which constricts blood flow to the brain [72]. Initiatory
rituals in pre-literate cultures worldwide consistently involve severe physiological
stress—through exhaustion, fasting, poisoning, dehydration, exposure to the
elements, etc.—which undoubtedly impair brain metabolism. The rituals are
reported to unlock profound insights about the nature of reality [73]. The list goes on.
In all these cases, there is a robust correlation between brain activity impairment and
enriched, more intense inner experience. In some of the cases—psychedelics, trance—
this correlation is repeatable on demand under controlled experimental conditions.
In the studies involving neuroimaging and permanent brain damage, we know for
sure that the period in which enriched experience is reported is concomitant with
the period of reduced or impaired brain activity. Mainstream physicalism just cannot
account for this.
Therefore, the question now is whether an alternative ontology can do so, while also
accounting for the undeniable empirical fact that, in ordinary circumstances,
experience does correlate with brain activation. I shall shortly discuss an ontology
In analytic philosophy—the academic discipline that deals with the question of what
reality is, as opposed to how it behaves—there are three main types of ontology, i.e.,
theories about the nature of reality. Each of them faces a canonic challenge or
problem.
This leaves us with idealism and its decomposition problem. If we start our theory
by postulating that there is only one, universal consciousness, and that everything
else in nature can be explained in terms of particular configurations and patterns of
excitation of this one consciousness, can we account for multiple, seemingly
separate minds such as yours and mine?
In this context, we must ask ourselves whether there are empirical instances of (a)
physical arrangements generating consciousness, (b) fundamentally separate minds
combining to form a higher-level but seemingly unitary mind, and (c) one mind
seemingly fragmenting itself into multiple centers of awareness. To answer any of
these questions in the affirmative, we must also avoid the fallacy of question-
begging, perhaps better known as circular reasoning.
For instance, if physicalists were to claim that each human brain is already an
empirical instance of matter generating mind, they would be begging the question:
since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, human consciousness can
only be said to be generated by human brains if physicalists presuppose
physicalism—the very point in contention—in their interpretation of the empirical
data. The same goes for constitutive panpsychism: human consciousness is only an
instance of combination if panpsychists presuppose panpsychism in their
interpretation of the empirical data.
What about idealism, then? Are there unquestionable empirical instances of mental
decomposition that do not beg the question? These instances must be ontology-
independent: it must be undeniable that what started as one mind seemingly
fragments itself into multiple, distinct centers of awareness regardless of one’s
Indeed there is, and it is now very well documented. It is called ‘dissociation’ in
psychiatry. In an extreme form of dissociation—a condition called ‘Dissociative
Identity Disorder,’ or DID—what was originally one integrated consciousness
seemingly fragments itself into multiple, cognitively separate centers of awareness
[80, pp. 167-174 & 348-352]. Each fragment is technically called an ‘alter,’ for ‘alternate
personality.’ Alters may or may not be aware of each other’s existence, but they
always have private memories and idiosyncratic character traits. There is even
evidence for different alters having different physical conditions, such as diabetes
and hypertension. There is also evidence for alters being co-conscious, i.e.,
simultaneously conscious within the one host mind [80, pp. 317-322; 81, pp. 67-68].
Dissociation has literally blinding power. In a 2015 study in Germany, a woman with
a variety of alters—some of whom, peculiarly, claimed to be blind—was instrumented
with an EEG cap, so readings of her brain activity could be taken. When the host
personality or a sighted alter had executive control of her body, the researchers could
see normal brain activity in the woman’s visual cortex. But when a blind alter
assumed executive control, brain activity in the visual cortex would disappear, even
though the woman’s eyes were open [82]. This result not only conclusively proves the
existence of dissociation—no subject can fake blindness by voluntarily turning off
their visual cortex—but, importantly, shows that dissociation can be literally blinding.
Indeed, if a psychological condition can make you blind even when your eyes are
open to the world immediately surrounding you, it is no stretch to imagine that it
could also make other people’s thoughts—and whatever is going on in the galaxy of
Andromeda—inaccessible to you.
The hypothesis here is thus that we—along with every living being—are alters of one
universal consciousness. To substantiate this hypothesis, however, we need to
address three important questions regarding its consistency with empirical
observations.
Figure 7. The extrinsic appearance of dissociation when observed through fMRI. Source: PLOS
ONE 9(6): e98795 (2014). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
The answer is, they do. In research completed in the Netherlands in 2014, Yolanda
Schlumpf and her team studied a group of patients diagnosed with DID. The controls
were a group of actors asked to pretend to themselves—a well-established acting
technique—to be in a dissociated state, while lying in a brain scanner. Brain activity
readings of both groups were then taken and compared. The researchers wanted to
know if, by looking at the brain scans alone, they could identify the DID group by
differentiating their scans from those of the control group. And sure enough, they
could [83]. There is indeed something dissociation looks like when observed from the
outside. It can be recognized by external measurement. See Figure 7.
Then the next question arises: people are simultaneously conscious and can interact
with one another while partaking in a common environment. We share the same
To answer this question properly, we have to make sure the analogy between
universal dissociation and human DID is applied and interpreted correctly. From the
point of view of a hypothetical universal consciousness, there is no external world,
since—ex hypothesi—the universal consciousness is all that exists. Therefore, to
compare universal dissociation to human DID, we have to ask not whether a person
with DID can see her alters ‘out there’ in the physical world, but whether the person’s
alters can interact within the mind of the person. In other words, we have to look at
the person’s endogenous, immersive experiences, such as dreams and schizophrenic
hallucinations. But since the clinical overlap between DID and schizophrenia is too
small to study, we must restrict ourselves to the dreams of DID patients. Can the
patients’ alters see and interact with one another when the person is dreaming?
Research done at Harvard Medical School has shown that this is precisely what
happens [84]. Here is an extract from a dream report of a DID patient. The woman in
question had a variety of alters, each going by a different name, such as Annie, Ann
and Jo:
The host personality, Sarah, remembered only that her dream from the
previous night involved hearing a girl screaming for help. Alter Annie, age
four, remembered a nightmare of being tied down naked and unable to cry
out as a man began to cut her vagina. Ann, age nine, dreamed of watching this
scene and screaming desperately for help (apparently the voice in the host's
dream). Teenage Jo dreamed of coming upon this scene and clubbing the little
girl's attacker over the head; in her dream he fell to the ground dead and she
left. In the dreams of Ann and Annie, the teenager with the club appeared,
struck the man to the ground but he arose and renewed his attack again. Four
year old Sally dreamed of playing with her dolls happily and nothing else. Both
Annie and Ann reported a little girl playing obliviously in the corner of the
room in their dreams. Although there was no definite abuser-identified alter
manifesting at this time, the presence at times of a hallucinated voice similar
Clearly, several of the woman’s alters partook in the same dream—a common mental
environment created by the host’s dreaming mind—wherein they perceived and
interacted with one another, even clubbing one another over the head, while being
simultaneously conscious. This is entirely analogous to what, according to the
idealist hypothesis, is happening right now, in the waking world.
But there is a third and final question we must address, if the dissociation hypothesis
is to hold up to its own empirical implications. Before we state the question, though,
some preparation is required. Bear with me.
12
An important observation needs to be made at this point. By saying that our body is what our inner
experiences look like from the outside, I also include in these ‘inner experiences’ those that cannot be
accessed through explicit introspection, but which are nonetheless experienced in the bare
phenomenal sense. Indeed, to be able to introspectively report an experience, to others and even to
ourselves, we must both have the experience, in the phenomenal sense, and know that we have the
experience. This ‘knowing’ of an experience is an internal re-representation of the original qualities,
which requires focused attention and is not always cognitively possible. It entails more than just
phenomenal consciousness, but also what Jonathan Schooler has called ‘meta-consciousness,’ or
conscious meta-cognition [85]. This way, among the experiences whose extrinsic appearance is our
body are those that we cannot re-represent, or access meta-cognitively through introspection, and
therefore know nothing about. They are experiences that, although qualitatively felt, cannot be
reported even to ourselves. The body may also represent experiences that are altogether dissociated
from the executive ego and, therefore, remain ‘unconscious’ from the perspective of the ego. In
conclusion, the body represents more than just the experiences we—i.e., our egos—explicitly know we
have.
Allow me to belabor this for emphasis: brain activity is part of the representation of
our inner experiences on the dashboard of dials we call perception. Do you see how it
all comes together? The thing-in-itself is our conscious inner life; that’s what has
standalone existence. Our physical body, on the other hand, is how this thing-in-itself
appears on the dashboard of dials if probed from outside its dissociative boundary.
As such, our physical body—the dashboard representation that arises from external
observation, or measurement, of our conscious inner life—has no standalone
existence; it is merely a representation of conscious processes. Consciousness is
primary, the body secondary.
Very well. Now, if our conscious inner life has an extrinsic appearance in the form of
a living body, then the inner life of universal consciousness must also have an
extrinsic appearance. Moreover, since the appearances in both cases are appearances
of mental processes, shouldn’t they bear at least some similarities? If our personal
mental processes look like biology, shouldn’t the transpersonal mental processes
underlying nature at large—short of its dissociative alters—also look something like
biology? By the logic of idealism, surely, there should be some similarities. But then,
are there? To answer this question correctly, we need a couple more considerations
to guide our logic.
Notice that most of our body is related to our need to perceive, interact with and
survive in an external environment: our arms and hands are meant to manipulate
the world around us; our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems are meant to
extract energy from the environment; our perceptual systems are meant to collect
information about the environment; and so on. Only our brain correlates with purely
endogenous experiences, such as thoughts, emotions and insights.
Universal consciousness, however, has no environment; it’s all there is. All of its
hypothesized experiences are per force of an endogenous nature. So if we want to
know what nature at large should look like, under the logic of idealism, we need to
compare it to the brain alone, not to the rest of our body. Under idealism, the
inanimate universe—i.e., nature minus its alters—should look something like a
Figure 8. The similarity between the cosmic web and biological neuronal networks. Source:
Mark Miller, Brandels University; Virgo Consortium for Cosmological Supercomputer
Simulations; www.visualcomplexity.com; The New York Times, 18 August 2006.
At first sight, the answer to this third question would appear to contradict idealism:
planets, moons and asteroids drifting about in space don’t look much like neuronal
networks. But the problem here is merely one of scale. If you could zoom all the way
into one of the bazillions of synaptic connections that form our brain, you would see
various types of neurotransmitter molecules drifting about in the synaptic cleft. That
wouldn’t look so different from astronomical bodies floating in space. The right
approach, thus, is to compare the inanimate universe as a whole, at its largest scales,
with whole neuronal networks. And, as it turns out, performing just such a
comparison, under strictly scientific conditions, has been a fashionable thing to do
in academia over the past decade or two. See Figure 8.
Research done at the University of California at San Diego, in 2012 [86], has shown
that “The structure of the universe and the laws that govern its growth may be more
similar than previously thought to the structure and growth of the human brain” [87].
Figure 9. Maps of density contrast for slices of the cerebellum (top row), brain cortex (middle
row) and of the dark matter distribution of the cosmic web (lower row). Source: Front. Phys.
8:525731 (2020). Reproduced here under the Creative Commons CC-BY version 4.0 license.
More recent research, based on the broad arsenal of tools of information theory, has
shown that the similarities go even deeper than thought back in 2012: the
idiosyncrasies of the network topology of both the universe at large and biological
nervous systems are surprisingly similar [88, 89]. See Figure 9. In the words of the
researchers,
It is truly a remarkable fact that the cosmic web is more similar to the human
brain than it is to the interior of a galaxy … the human neuronal network and
So much for form; how about function? Is there anything about how the inanimate
universe works that resembles the operation of neuronal networks? Surprisingly
enough, in a very recent paper, a team of renowned physicists have shown that the
operation of the laws of physics, computationally wise, could be regarded as a
neuronal network undergoing a learning process. In other words, the universe could
be said to be spontaneously learning—just as minds spontaneously learn—how to
behave [90].
So there you have it: surprising as it may seem to many, we do have rather significant
empirical reasons to answer the third question in the affirmative as well. Obvious
differences in scale and medium aside, there is an important sense in which
biological brains and the universe at large are similar, in terms of their respective
network structures and first-principles of operation. And there is nothing under
mainstream physicalism—or physics, for that matter—that could account for these
correspondences. In conclusion, the empirical implications of idealism—with
dissociation as the mechanism of mental decomposition—do hold up under
empirical scrutiny.
It is not by mere chance that the idealist hypothesis is empirically consistent along
all three independent lines of enquiry we have just discussed. It is not by mere chance
that (a) the inanimate universe, at its largest scales, follows the structure of neuronal
networks, and (b) the laws of physics can be modelled as learning neuronal
networks, and (c) dissociative processes have extrinsic appearances, and (d) alters
can experience the same dream from different points of view, while co-consciously
interacting with one another. Each of these empirical facts is, in and of itself, startling
enough. But when taken together, the notion that they are unrelated and
serendipitous seems to stretch credulity; the correspondences are too specific and
detailed. I thus submit to you that all four facts are true because the idealist
hypothesis is true; that’s the only overarching theoretical framework that makes
satisfying sense of all four facts together. As I repeat often in this essay, if you pay
We originally set out to find out if there is a more coherent, empirically substantiated
alternative to mainstream physicalism that could account for (a) the empirical fact
that physical realism is false, (b) the empirical fact that, ordinarily, brain activity
correlates with inner experience and (c) the empirical fact that, extraordinarily, some
impairments or reductions of normal brain activity correlate with enriched, more
intense inner experience. We have found that idealism—with dissociation as the
mechanism of mental decomposition—is a much more plausible ontology that avoids
internal contradictions. We have also found that it can straightforwardly account for
empirical facts (a) and (b) above. What remains to be seen is whether it can also
account for empirical fact (c). I shall now attempt to show precisely that.
We have seen that the living body—with the brain as the locus of endogenous
mentation—is the extrinsic appearance of dissociative processes in a spatially
unbound field of subjectivity; a whirlpool in the stream of universal consciousness,
so to speak. Ordinary brain activity is part of what an alter of universal consciousness
looks like, when observed from across its dissociative boundary.
We can divide the mental processes of the alter into two categories: the dissociative
process itself and the mental contents trapped within the dissociation. The
dissociative process itself is what prevents me from knowing your thoughts and
what is going on in the galaxy of Andromeda. The contents of my dissociation, on the
other hand, are my personal memories, thoughts, insights, etc.—i.e., my private
conscious inner life. Both categories should have extrinsic appearances—i.e., both
categories should, at least in principle, appear to external observation as patterns of
brain activity. Any other expectation would be arbitrary.
We do not yet know with precision—though the technical literature provides some
tantalizing clues in this regard—what kinds of brain activity correspond to the
dissociative process itself or to the contents of the dissociation. But it stands to
reason that some suppressions of brain activity should impair the dissociation itself,
while others—perhaps most of them—should impair the contents of the dissociation.
The first should lead to an expansion of consciousness while the latter to some form
of cognitive deficit. Is this what we observe empirically?
Now, if the living body is the image of dissociation, then death—the end of the living
body—is the end of dissociation. And here we finally address the question of
postmortem survival head on: death is not the end of consciousness, but merely the
end of a particular state or configuration of consciousness—namely, a dissociative
configuration. The end of this configuration is what the end of metabolism is an
appearance of on the dashboard of dials. Just as life is, quite literally, a state of mind,
death is a transition to another state of mind; one that does not correlate with the
localized appearance we call a living body, merely because it is no longer a
dissociative state.13
To understand this properly we need to inquire into our sense of identity. While
many of us conceptually identify with particular contents of consciousness—i.e., a
particular narrative of individual selfhood, such as a place and date of birth,
profession, political views, tastes, etc.—what analytic philosophy calls ‘core
subjectivity’ [91] is what we, when push comes to shove, really feel ourselves to be.
Core subjectivity is “ipseity, or I-ness, by which is meant an implicit sense of self
which serves as the dative ... of experience, namely, as that to whom things are given,
or disclosed, from a perspective” [91, p. 426]. You can visualize core subjectivity as
what would be left of your conscious inner life if you suddenly became completely
amnesic in a perfectly dark, quiet room, before the first new thought arose in your
mind. It is what would remain the same if tomorrow you were to magically acquire
someone else’s memories and character traits, without discontinuity in your
consciousness. It is that pure sense of I-ness, empty subjectivity, unencumbered by
particular narratives or thoughts. And it is the same in you, me and every living
13
Remember: under the logic of idealism, the body is what a dissociative process looks like. Without
dissociation, there is no body (a dead body is just an echo of something nature was previously doing
but no longer is). Without dissociation there is just the inanimate universe, which we could say is the
‘body’ of the non-dissociative, transpersonal processes underlying non-biological nature.
Therefore, both the beginning and end of dissociation do not affect core subjectivity,
for both are just particular configurations of consciousness. If idealism is true, death,
by its very nature, leaves core subjectivity untouched and uninterrupted. From a
first-person perspective, death is thus witnessed. And this is the first sense—arguably
the only relevant one—in which, under idealism, postmortem survival is certain.
Yet, many of us conceptually identify not with our core subjectivity, but with
particular contents of consciousness. We think of ourselves as the person who was
born then and there, who does this or that for a living, who is married to this or that
other person, who has this or that political view, taste, disposition, etc. Is this
idiosyncratic narrative of self lost upon death—i.e., upon the end of dissociation?
Well, any narrative of personal selfhood is largely based on memory, in the sense that
it is a personal history. One could say that tastes and personality traits are parts of
our personal identity but do not depend on memory. Yet, is this really true? Although
most people don’t like Brussels sprouts, I happen to absolutely love them. If a person
who hates them were to magically acquire my memories—including the memory of
my boundless pleasure munching on Brussels sprouts with gusto—would they still
dislike them?14 Moreover, many of my character traits have changed with time and
maturity. My personality test results from 25 years ago were quite different from
today’s. Yet, I feel like I am still the same person. My character traits seem to be more
a part of my history—my memories—than an intrinsic part of my self. I can very easily
14
If you think they would, perhaps you are assuming that the memories transferred from me to the
other person aren’t complete, in the sense that they comprise the memory of the flavor of Brussels
sprouts but not the memory of my felt enjoyment.
Under idealism, insofar as our individuality is our memories, it isn’t lost upon death
either: the end of dissociation just makes our memories available—through re-
association—to a broader, transpersonal, experiential web of cognition; it doesn’t
eliminate them. As a matter of fact, all mental contents of the alter are released into
this broader cognitive context upon the dissolution of the dissociative boundary,
which had hitherto corralled them together; they ‘get out of jail,’ so to speak.
An analogy may help at this point. Ordinary dreams are subtle forms of dissociation:
during a dream, we identify only with our dream avatar, not with the rest of the
dream. We become dissociated from the parts of our mind that are generating the
rest of the dream, for we don’t think we are doing the streets, cars, buildings, trees or
even the other people in the dream. We think we are our dream avatar—a mere part
of what our mind is actually doing—which is immersed in the imagery of the dream.
When we wake up, however, the dissociation ends. We realize we were doing the
whole dream and our dream avatar, as a differentiated and semi-autonomous agent
within our mind, dies; quite literally. Our dream avatar is toast, gone at the very
moment we wake up. Yet we don’t mourn the death of our dream avatar, do we? Why
not? Because the only two things we instinctively care about remain: our core-
subjectivity is intact—it is the same whether we are dreaming or awake—and we can
still remember the dream, at least in principle, from the first-person perspective of
our avatar. In other words, even our avatar’s narrative of personal selfhood is
preserved, although we no longer identify with it. We remember that our dream
avatar was us, not us our dream avatar, so nothing is lost about either of them.
It is important to realize that these considerations are purely analytic, not spiritual
or intuitive. They are derived from reasoning and evidence, not direct experience.
Therefore, we can take their underlying reasoning apart so as to dig into its
implications more explicitly than would otherwise be possible.
For instance, although idealism implies postmortem survival, it doesn’t imply that
our dead self is going to some ‘otherworld.’ In fact, under idealism we stay right here,
in this world, as it is in itself. This is very important to realize. Idealism postulates no
other world. The only difference death makes is this: instead of observing this world
through the intermediation of the dashboard of dials we call physicality—the
dashboard being part of the survival kit of the alter—we reintegrate into this world
as it is in itself. We ‘become’—in scare quotes because we, of course, never cease to be
what we really are—the very world we merely inhabited during life. In other words,
our point of view—along with our memories—just moves to the other side of the
dashboard from the one we occupied during life. Upon death, we can experience this
world directly, without the intermediation of dials. That’s all there is to it.
Allow me to belabor this point, since it differs rather significantly from vulgar
religious expectations. Upon death, people go nowhere. We all stay in this world, but
on the other side of the instrument panel we call physicality. It’s the difference
between (a) sitting inside the cockpit and looking at the dashboard and (b) flying
outside the metal skin of the airplane and feeling the air, clouds, rain and lightning
directly. In both cases the world is the same, just experienced differently.
Moreover, what the dead bring with them upon death—the memories and insights of
a lifetime—changes the whole world at some level, quite literally, even though this
change—given the relative scale of the universe in relation to a person—is far from
being even remotely discernible on the screen of perception. This, under idealism, is
what death means.
Now, I am not a counselor, and my argument aims not at comfort but at truth. That
said, it would be naïve of me to think that comfort and reassurance aren’t important
motivations for interest in postmortem survival. This is only human and, as someone
who has also lost loved ones, I empathize with it. So I will share now, for what it is
worth, my personal way of living according to the ideas I am arguing for in this essay.
Just as a fully diluted drop of dye is spread everywhere in the ocean, to me our
ancestors are ‘behind’ every rock, every cloud, every molecule of air I inhale; just “on
the other side of them from me,” as Owen Barfield put it [92, p. 42]. I touch them when
I step barefoot on the ground or run my fingers along the side of a mountain. I see
them when I look up to the sky on a clear night. I am immersed in them when I dive
into the sea. They touch my skin at all times, for they are the world that envelops me;
literally. And their whole lives, as they have experienced them, are also the world I
inhabit. I may not live their stories, but I live in their stories. Their past is the
First of all, let me acknowledge that, stimulating to the popular imagination as they
are, many anecdotal reports of psi phenomena can be dismissed for a variety of
trivial reasons. I also acknowledge, however, that the same cannot be said of much
of the scientific study of psi. As a matter of fact, good psi research—I think of Dean
Radin’s work at IONS and the work done at the Department of Perceptual Studies at
the University of Virginia, for instance—tends to be far superior, in terms of
methodological rigor, experimental design and execution, as well as the rather
conservative character of the accompanying statistical analyses, to most
mainstream scientific research [93]. This happens because, since psi seems to
contradict mainstream physicalism, these studies are designed and executed so as to
withstand particularly severe scrutiny.
Yet, precisely because they contradict the mainstream paradigm, psi phenomena are
still dismissed even when the research that indicates their existence is more rigorous
and reliable than most mainstream research. Why? The reason is well-known to
history: never is a reigning paradigm abandoned because of ‘mere’ empirical
evidence that contradicts it; it is only ever replaced with another paradigm—another
hypothesis about what nature is—that happens to accommodate the evidence better
[53]. As such, for as long as there is no widely recognized alternative to mainstream
And here is where idealism, particularly the analytic idealism I have been arguing for
in this essay, can play a decisive role in our views regarding postmortem survival.
Not only is it backed by several independent lines of mainstream evidence, but it also
makes sense of otherwise anomalous psi evidence; it provides natural space in a
rational, coherent theoretical framework to accommodate the observations in
question.
So the relationship between idealism and the evidence for psi phenomena is
synergistic: while idealism provides a framework to accommodate the evidence and
prevent it from being dismissed on merely theoretical grounds, evidence for psi also
provides substantiation for idealism insofar as the latter predicts its existence. The
question thus is: can idealism accommodate psi? Does it predict the existence of psi
phenomena while denying that personal agency—i.e., dissociation—persists after
death?
Let us now consider evidence of reincarnation [94], which seems to most directly
contradict the idealist notion that death is the end of individual agency. Here is a
brief thought experiment: imagine that you are a particularly apt telepath and can
As we’ve seen above, when a person dies the contents of their dissociation are
released into the broader, transpersonal web of cognitive activity that constitutes the
world as it is in itself. It is conceivable that newly emerging alters, with dissociative
boundaries not yet sealed, could incorporate those contents in the process of their
development. From a first-person perspective, this would literally mean having some
of a dead person’s memories. Yet, there would be no differentiated agent
reincarnating in the new alter; only a form of memory osmosis. I submit that,
empirically, so-called reincarnation cases are indistinguishable from what I am
proposing here.
I understand that many cases of seeming reincarnation are associated with sudden,
even violent death on the part of the supposedly reincarnated agent. This means that
the dead person’s last memories have particularly high emotional charge. We know
from clinical psychology that emotionally charged mental contents are more
‘reactive,’ in the sense that they are prone to forming complexes through cognitive
associations and attaching themselves to other mental contents. In plain language,
psychological trauma translates into paranoia, compulsive brooding, fantasizing and
memory revisionism, evokes all kinds of other emotions and generally permeates all
facets of an individual’s mental life. Under idealism, it is thus entirely reasonable
that, when the emotionally charged memories of a violent death are freshly released
into the transpersonal cognitive context that constitutes our surrounding
environment, they should also be more ‘reactive’ and attach themselves to new alters
in development—i.e., fetuses, babies and toddlers. Even cases of inherited scars can,
in principle, be made sense of in this manner: as we’ve seen earlier, under idealism
For all intents and purposes, I believe ‘reincarnation’ does happen. But the underlying
mechanism is not quite what the word suggests. For ‘reincarnation’ presupposes a
certain hypothesis about the cause of the phenomenon; namely, that some form of
non-physical, individual agency moves from one body to another, like a Hermit crab
from one shell to another. There is, however, a simpler way to account for the
evidence in a theoretically coherent manner: felt and embodied memories are indeed
transferred, not agency.
Just as in the case of reincarnation, I submit that there is a simpler explanation for
veridical mediumistic reports: the medium—someone with a naturally porous
dissociative boundary, or who has learned how to deliberately influence the
boundary through trance [61]—picks up, from the immediate cognitive surroundings
that constitute our world as it is in itself, felt memories released into it by the dead.
This is even more plausible if one takes into account that telepathy—a psi
phenomenon so common as to be banal—involves the penetration of two dissociative
boundaries, for there are always at least two people involved. But to pick up on what
is available in our transpersonal cognitive surroundings, a skilled medium only
needs to weaken his or her own dissociative boundary. As a matter of fact, this
Conclusions
That the death of the body implies, prima facie, the end of consciousness
surreptitiously presupposes the theoretical assumptions of mainstream physicalism.
Those assumptions do not have an empirical basis if one judiciously eliminates
question-begging from one’s interpretation of the facts. Therefore, postmortem
survival, objectively speaking, isn’t an extraordinary hypothesis that requires
extraordinary evidence; it is instead a perfectly plausible and rational conjecture.
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