The Disembodied Perspective

Consciousness within, or consciousness without?  Another difficult question that emerges from what philosopher David Chalmers calls  “the hard problem”.  Does consciousness spring purely from brain’s complexity, or do we embrace and share a fundamental awareness beyond our physicality?

An answer might lie in the exploration of three elusive human experiences: near death (NDE’s), out of body (OBE’s) and lucid dreaming.  In these cases, humans are awake/conscious while their body is dead/asleep.  The experience is that of ordinary reality from a disembodied perspective that is fully conscious and equal to what you’re experiencing while reading this post, but in the absence of your body’s sensory input.

Do we have an inherent ability to project our awareness beyond our physical boundaries and witness/experience the same “real world” that the rest of us experience while awake?  Or is it all just a fancy hallucination?

From the spiritual/metaphysical perspective this is nothing new and certainly not a hallucination.  Old news really.  Like thousands of years old.  And you can take it as far as you like beyond birth and death and the physical universe.  But for the scientific types, this is a little bit more novel and exciting… an area in consciousness studies that is increasingly shifting from what was considered fringe quackery to serious work in attempting to understand the source of our conscious experience.

NDE’s are phenomena consisting of common (and cross-cultural) descriptions of events occurring while the brain is “flatlined” (due to an assortment of physical extremes), and have been studied scientifically for decades.  There are cartloads of work, papers, lectures, interviews etc. where conclusions are generally guarded and consider results that support or refute the notion of consciousness originating from the brain or outside of it.  Rather than fill this post with a lengthy summary I’ll take the lazy road and point you to Wikipedia works on NDE’s and OBE’s which are actually pretty good and have updated overviews that also cover lucid dreaming.

I’m intrigued by some of the latest ongoing studies and wonder how they will turn out.   Sam Parnia’s project should prove to be interesting.  For example, he’s considering installation of digital image panels facing 1 ft or so away from hospital room ceilings where clinically dead patients that are revived can only know them if their consciousness was disembodied and floating above.  The images might have to be randomized and the time that individual images were shown to be encrypted for later verification in order to prevent tampering with the information.  There are critics to his approach, nevertheless he’s giving it the old college try.

An interpretation of NDE results that I also find interesting is that of researcher Pim van Lommel who found 18% of 344 cardiac arrest patients he was looking at experienced an NDE.  The argument goes: if NDE’s are a result of physical conditions that the brain is exposed to (such as transient pancerebral anoxia and endomorphin release), why don’t most or all of the patients undergoing the same physical conditions report the same experiences?  Pim van Lommel was criticized for his 2001 Lancet article by Michael Shermer in a 2003 Scientific American column titled “Demon-Haunted Brain” , to which van Lommel later replied.  It is indicative of the difficulties that researchers face today on the subject.

One of my favorite NDE accounts paints the picture of how difficult it is to present “veridical anecdotal evidence”: The Dentures Man Critique and the Dentures Man Rejoinder. And if you have not heard of the Pam Reynold case, it’s worth a look.

Science can certainly help the collective consciousness and the quality of our lives in many ways, but it’s somewhat ironic that we regularly hear about science being “at the forefront of human knowledge”.  In reality, science plays catch-up to individual, bona fide direct experiences that have the potential to transcend scientific or religious dogma, but take a frustratingly loooong time to be accepted.  You know, first apply some healthy open-minded skepticism, then find others sharing similar experiences, then propose a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, arrive at a consensus based on arrays and varieties of test results, etc. etc. until the hypothesis is rejected or widely taken for granted, maybe taking the form of the latest scientific or philosophic standard model.  And so it goes until something else comes along to refine or completely change the theory with a new one.

There you go.  Change.  That is about the most universal truth that I can think of.  Just days ago Walter Breuning, the world’s oldest man, died at 114.  He recently had been asked about the secrets to his longevity.  At the top of his list: “Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. (Every change is good.)”.  And another one: “We’re going to die.  Some people are scared of dying.  Never be afraid to die.  Because you’re born to die.”

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