Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.
(‘Abdu’l-Bahá – Paris Talks – page 143)
In many ways, in Consciousness Unbound, the treatment of this theme is obviously in tune with my thinking and the fundamental Bahá’í belief in the harmony of religion and science.
The authors absolutely accept the evidence that torpedoes materialism. For example, Presti states:[1]
… if one is open and honest about the empirical data, it is clear that what has been and continues to be experienced by a great many individuals over vast expanses of time goes beyond the personal as conceived within our current biophysical model of reality.
There is a catch though, he feels, in terms of a wider acceptance of this position:[2]
. . . for most scientists interested in consciousness, work will continue to be accomplished solely via investigation of neural correlates, and in that lies what I view as a key obstruction in conceptualising the signs of consciousness more expansively.
William James. (For source of Image see link.)
A key thinker of the past is clear this won’t ever work. Presti brings William James’ perspective into the mix:[3]
To expand a science of mind, one must take seriously the occurrence of relevant empirically verifiable phenomena that do not fit within the standard accepted explanatory paradigm – the anomalies.
I love the phrase James created to capture the nature of the evidence scientism ignores:[4]
He referred to the unclassified, perhaps mystical, residuum as “wild facts”.
. . . more study of what James categorised as the wild facts is essential. . . . they are. . . paranormal only by virtue of their being beyond our capacity to explain within our current framework of biophysical science.
It will, however, be tricky to subject such phenomena to systematic examination:[5]
Here we must take what is given by nature, for [the essential ] emotionally evocative circumstances simply cannot be created in the laboratories or other well-controlled settings.
But if science does not find a way to incorporate the study of such phenomena into its methodology it will continue to fall far short of what should be its mission – the investigation of truth rather than the confirmation of delusion. Here’s James again:[6]
“. . . our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded” (James, 1902, page 388).
We will be looking at the screen or veil effect in more detail when I pick up on the dissociation metaphor in a later post.
It is certainly true that the evidence already gathered by research into the paranormal has, according to Presti, been consistently and unfairly dismissed:[7]
Parapsychological researchers may well be among the best experimentalists in human behavioural science “because they know that they must design more sophisticated, bias-proofed studies than scientists in other fields in order to be believed” (Leary, 2011, page 276). . . . Here is Jessica Utts (2016) in her presidential address to the American statistical association several years ago:
“The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at the data! . . . I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, “probably not.” I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit that they haven’t read any! Now there is a definition of pseudoscience – basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!”
None the less the nature of the evidence will probably remain inevitably and perhaps indefinitely problematic to a convinced materialist.
For example, with research on NDEs, attempts to provide an even more rigorous methodology may have failed, not because the NDEs were inauthentic but because the methods adopted were inappropriate to the task. A good example is the idea of placing targets close to the ceiling in the hope that experiencers would spot them. Consultations with a group of NDE experiencers flagged up the problem with this approach very clearly and, in my view, convincingly. Greyson described what happened:[8]
When I discussed [my] research findings at a conference attended by a large number of people who had had NDES, they were astounded at what they considered my naivete in carrying out this study. Why, they argued, would patients whose hearts had just stopped and who were being resuscitated – patients who were stunned by their unexpected separation from their bodies – go looking around the hospital room for a hidden image that has no relevance to them, but that some researcher had designated as the “target”?
This also resonates with what Julie Beischel writes in Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death about mediumship studies:[9]
The analogy I like to use is that a mediumship study in which the environment is not optimised for mediumship to happen is akin to placing a seed on a tabletop and then claiming the seed is a fraud when it doesn’t sprout.
Alexander and Newell are on essentially the same page:[10]
The elaborate process of setting up a scientific assessment of prayer in a controlled setting often strips much of the spiritual energy out of the endeavour.
No matter how important it is that we change our perspective, Presti provides reasons why this may remain a Bechers Brook for science for some time to come:[11]
If the material universe is enfolded with mind, this idea comes very close to home – as close as it possibly could: our consciousness. This is not a distant abstraction, like dark matter, dark energy, and Higgs bosons. The wild facts really matter on a very personal level. They threaten our worldview.…
In a current physicalist worldview, there is no place for a mind that really matters.
Also we need to remember James’s pragmatic sense that, while we may sometimes end up knowing the truth, we will never be able to absolutely prove it. As David Lamberth puts it:[12]
For James, then, there are falsification conditions for any given truth claim, but no absolute verification condition, regardless of how stable the truth claim may be as an experiential function. He writes in The Will to Believe that as an empiricist he believes that we can in fact attain truth, but not that we can know infallibly when we have.’
According to Marshall the consequences of this denial may be more far-reaching than most of us realise:[13]
Unfortunately, the exclusion of qualitative properties and the more advanced felt characteristics of mind – what it is like, for example, to know, understand, feel, imagine, desire, hope, and will – set up a causal and explanatory gap between conscious mind and the world.
Wishful thinking of this kind may seem to pay off:[14]
The hardest of the physicalisms is a kind of eliminativism that wishes away the mind-body problem by dismissing the awkward qualitative properties as nonexistent. No qualitative properties, no mind-body problem.
But the quantitative methods of physicalism make it qualia-blind:[15]
Felt colours, sounds, tastes do not come out of the equations used to model physical processes and so resist satisfactory integration into the program of quantitative science.
This neglect has serious consequences. Rather in the same way as Kripal describes the situation as the ‘materialist metaphysics of modernity’ being ‘our intellectual heart attack’,[16] Presti chooses a different metaphor with similar implications:[17]
There is something to be said for the idea that humanity is at present in the midst of a collective psychosis – a massive and disabling confusion over what is “real.”
But Presti, looking on the bright side, feels that[18] ‘A scientific revolution is nigh.’
This will inevitably rattle a more than a few cages:[19]
[I]nvestigation of who we are and how we relate to the rest of the universe can bring one into what is generally considered the territory of religion and, some maintain, outside the domain of science. This can be unsettling – to individuals in either camp.
Advocates of scientism, Presti hopes, may soon have to accept that their position is based on a problematic act of faith:[20]
Eccles stated that “we regard promissory materialism as a superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists… It has all the features of a messianic prophecy – the promise of a future freed of all problems . . .
If we were able to shake off this delusion the world might be a better place. Marshall asks some key questions about how we might decide on the value of a new paradigm:[21]
Does the theory offer explanatory insights into processes behind, say, psi and post-mortem survival? Are new lines of enquiry opened up by the theory, and what real-world usefulness might it have? Can it, for example, inspire us to live better lives and build better societies and formulate our long-term aspirations? . . . The importance of including mystical experience in the range of phenomena to be explained cannot be overstated, for there are clear connections between psi and mystical phenomena, and so an adequate theory should address both.
Kripal even makes a brief reference to a possible role for the heart, one of the rare mentions of this organ in this 500 page tome:[22]
Many of the Tantric traditions even locate the cardiac region of the human body as the esoteric door or portal through which this Consciousness beams in, more or less exactly as Federico Faggin describes his own awakening in chapter 8 in this volume.
A fitting place to bring to a pause this exploration of the as yet unaccepted harmony of religion and science is with Kripal’s record of his own experience:[23]
Gradually, over the course of the decades of meetings and interactions, I came to realise, with a growing sense of shock and liberating confusion, that many of the psi phenomena that I had been trying to ignore or dismiss as legends or pious exaggerations – as “miracle,” “folklore,” or, worse, “magic” – and separate from true or genuine religious experience should not in fact be separated and are quite real. They are real in the simple sense that they happen.
. . . I came to see that the data on the rogue phenomena are remarkably robust and more convincing, even if they, too, “do not behave” – that is, even if these phenomena in their most extreme and convincing forms cannot be replicated in a laboratory for some very good reasons… Rogue phenomena tend to manifest spontaneously in life-cycle moments of crisis, illness, trauma, danger, and death, none of which can be ethically reproduced or predicted in a controlled environment.
He even speculates that such experiences are intentionally thrusting themselves on our attention to force a change of perspective:[24]
On the most philosophical and speculative level, I came to see both these mystical experiences and these rogue paranormal phenomena as intentional signs of the fundamental inadequacy of the present Western worldview. I do not use the word ‘intentional’ lightly here.… They want us to look.… They want us to change reality.
I realise that even these compelling approaches may not be enough to convince a sceptic, but what I would at least hope is that sometime soon we’d reach a tipping point where enough thinkers would begin to explore what they don’t want to know, rather than keep dismissing evidence supporting it on the grounds that it could not possibly be true. That is not science.
Next time I’ll be taking a look at perennialism.
References:
[1]. Consciousness Unbound – page 326.
[2]. Op. Cit. – page 330.
[3]. Op. Cit. – page 335.
[4]. Op. Cit. – page 326)
[5]. Op. Cit. – -page 337.
[6]. Op. Cit. – -page 338.
[7]. Op cit. – page 339.
[8]. After – page 74.
[9]. Surviving Death – page 172.
[10]. Living in a Mindful Universe — page 262.
[11]. Consciousness Unbound – page 340.
[12]. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience – page 222.
[13]. Consciousness Unbound – page 410.
[14]. Op. cit.— pages 411-12.
[15]. Op. cit.— page 412.
[16]. Consciousness Unbound — page 376.
[17]. Op. cit.— page 341.
[18]. Op. cit.— pages 351.
[19]. Op. cit.— page 351.
[20]. Op. cit.— pages 352-53.
[21]. Op. cit.— page 421.
[22]. Op. cit.— page 366.
[23]. Op. cit.— page 370.
[24]. Op. cit.— page 372.
Everybody Means Something 