HYPOTHESIS:
CONSCIOUSNESS CAN AND DOES EXIST OUTSIDE OF LIVING ORGANISMS
As living
organisms, our sense organs function to carry pulses of energy in different
forms from outside our bodies, through neurological pathways to our brains
where energy pulses are converted into images that we accept as representative
of reality. Through our physical senses we experience an awareness of
‘in-here’, versus ‘out-there’, and distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’. Based on
the information we receive through the physical senses, we identify ‘self’ as the ‘in-here’
sensations of the body. The sensations within the boundaries of the physical
body that arise as it interacts with what we take to be separate and distinct
objects out there, give rise to secondary sensations that may be pleasurable or
painful, because of the identification of self with the physical body. The
sensations that arise from encounters that are damaging or destructive to the
body are felt as pain, and those that enhance the enjoyment of the experience
of physicality and preserve the functions of the body, are interpreted as
pleasurable and desirable.
Through
the awareness of sensations stored in the body (mainly, but not entirely in the
brain) the brain can reconstruct past experiences more or less accurately, and
we think of these reconstructions as a record, or memory, of past events. By
comparing images constructed from the filtered stream of energy currently
arriving in the brain with these memories, we quickly learn to make choices
that will enhance and maintain our connection with the physical body. A
side-effect of this survival mechanism is the continual reinforcement of the
belief that consciousness is associated only with the body and is completely
separate from everything else. But is this really true? Let’s look at the
evidence.
We know
that the senses act like reduction valves, filtering out most of the
information in the energy bombarding our senses. With our eyes, for example, we
only see a very tiny portion of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy; and the
same is true with all the physical senses. We know that we are only aware of a
very small part of reality, cut and tailored by the sense organs for use to
preserve our physical bodies in a sometimes perilous environment.
Science
is the effort to ‘see’ and understand more of reality than is revealed by the
physical sense organs, neurological processes and mental images. The
development of technology and equipment that extend the range of the senses,
like telescopes and microscopes, has allowed us to do this. For the past two or
three centuries, science has been primarily the study of the ‘out-there’, the
other-than-self.
The
science of physics is in many ways, the epitome of the study of the
‘out-there’. Even when applied to the study of the ‘in-here’ as in biophysics,
the objects of study are considered to be separate from the consciousness of
the scientist, the ‘observer’. This has come to be defined as ‘objectivity’. This
has happened primarily because the brain, capable of constructing images
representing out-there reality, is also capable of constructing images by
mixing and altering remembered images in ways that may or may not be
representative of reality. These images are called imagination.
Obviously,
care must be taken to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, in
constructing a working model of reality. Everyone has an imperfect model of
reality built up from experience and memory. To some extent, depending on how
accurate that model is, we all live in an imaginary world of our own. But, making
a choice to take action based on an image or model that does not correspond
with the objective reality existing at the moment the choice is made, could be
disastrous. It is, therefore desirable to have a complete knowledge of reality,
because that would provide a level of certainty that would allow optimum
opportunity to avoid pain and experience comfort, security and pleasure.
However, since no physical brain has infinite capacity, we generally fall short
of such certainty, and indeed, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Gӧdel’s
incompleteness theorems strongly suggest that our knowledge of reality will
always be uncertain and incomplete to some extent.
Not
everyone can be a scientist, philosopher or scholar, so members of modern
society have come to rely on the findings, primarily of scientists and
religious scholars, whether they realize it or not, to guide them in
constructing their individual models of reality, which become their belief
systems. Scientists tend to think of their carefully constructed models as
perfect reflections of reality, because they have made every effort to verify
them with repeatable experiments. But even the best model is, to some extent, a
belief system, because, as noted above, they can never be complete.
When the
belief system of any individual, scientist, priest, philosopher, or layperson,
is challenged by new data, that individual will most likely first ignore the
new data, because it threatens his carefully constructed belief system, and
then either accept it and expand or remodel his belief system to accommodate it.
If it challenges his belief system too severely, he may reject it and try to
discredit it and those who accept it. Scientists are no different than anyone
else: they will defend their deeply held beliefs. Scientist in positions of
authority, especially university professors, will defend their belief systems;
perhaps even more vigorously than most because of their investment in them.
After all, their careers were spent developing them, and they are considered to
be experts in their field of study. This is why Max Planck remarked: “Science
advances from funeral to funeral!”
When,
over time, mainstream scientists agree on a model, it becomes the accepted
paradigm, or standard model of reality. If it is eventually overthrown by new discoveries
that require a new model, we have a scientific revolution, or ‘paradigm shift’.
There have only been a few real paradigm shifts in the history of science, the
latest being relativity and quantum physics. It may not be generally known that
even these paradigm shifts were mightily resisted by the scientific
establishment when first proposed. Just as religious institutions denounced the
ideas of Galileo and Copernicus, mainstream scientists denounced Einstein’s
ideas as “utter nonsense” when he published special relativity in 1905. This fact
is not advertised by science now, because any organized and institutionalized
mode of thought will put forward its best, carefully retouched face to the
general public. Mainstream scientists would have us think that science is a smooth,
continuous progression of discovery and enlightenment. In fact, most scientists
plod along for decades, filling in the detail of the current paradigm. Only
rarely does someone discover a new, deeper more accurate and complete model of
reality.
Physics is
defined as the study of matter and energy interacting in time and space, and
until the relatively recent discoveries of quantum physics, science did not
consider imaginary images, or consciousness in general, to have any direct
causal relationship to objective reality. Reductive science, whether applied to
the cells of living organisms, or to molecules of ‘inert’ matter, chooses to
consider the atoms of the elements that make up the physical universe to be
totally separate from consciousness. Particle physics is the epitome of this
objective, reductive approach to obtaining data through destructive testing.
Particle
physicists have found ways to hurl particles at each other at tremendous
velocities in carefully constructed particle colliders, in order to smash them together
and blow them apart so they can look at the pieces as they fly away from the
collision. This has yielded valuable information about the nature of what we
think of as solid matter. But, seeking to isolate and identify the basic
building blocks of the universe in this reductive way, we find that the
ultimate building blocks keep slipping through our fingers and dividing into
smaller and smaller sub-atomic entities that eventually dissolve into waves and
fields of energy. We have found that, to quote Max Planck, “There is no matter
as such.” Einstein showed us that mass and energy are two forms of the same
thing, and now, Close and Neppe, following the clues in quantum physics and
relativistic experiments, have shown that mass and energy are manifestations of
a third, non-physical form of the substance of reality.
Like
materialistic science, our physical senses lead us to believe that we are completely
separate from external objects, that the substance of reality is solid matter,
that space and time are no more than an empty backdrop within which random
physical events play out, and consciousness is nothing more than a property of matter.
It turns out that just the opposite is true. Let’s look at the evidence.
There is
evidence that the consciousness of an observer may have a direct effect on reality
at the quantum level. Quantum experiments like the double-slit and delayed-slit
experiments suggest that, as Nobel Prize winning physicist John Wheeler put it:
“Useful as it is under everyday circumstances
to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no
longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a participatory
universe.” And “No elementary
phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered phenomenon.”
See “Transcendental
Physics”, ER Close, Chapter two (available on Amazon, from Barnes and Nobel and
elsewhere), for a detailed discussion of these experiments. A few theoretical physicists,
notably David Bohm and Eugene Wigner, developed models incorporating the
consciousness of the observer as a participating part of any experiment at the quantum
level. Most mainstream physicists, however, refuse to accept the idea that
consciousness has anything to do with physical phenomena. Their first response
was to ignore the data because if it were to be accepted at face value, it
would mean that materialism would have to be abandoned as a basis for understanding
and explaining reality. Their second reaction was to deny the data, but try as
they might, they have not been able to mount a defensible counterargument.
So,
quantum experimental results provide evidence that consciousness does extend beyond
the boundaries of the body and affects physical reality without any physical
mechanism. But is this the unconscious, or involuntary operation of some form of
consciousness outside the body? Is there evidence of the conscious exit from
the body? Actually, there is, and it is not new. From ancient times, mystics
and aboriginal shamans have reported travelling outside their physical bodies. It
is also a basic tenant of Judaism, Christianity and most other religions that
the essence of the consciousness of a living person survives the death and
destruction of the physical body.
There is
a growing body of evidence that under certain circumstances, the awareness of
an individual can consciously leave the physical body and exist outside the
body as a freely moving conscious observer for extended periods of time. Some
people, a very small minority, claim that they can deliberately leave the body
through a process called astral projection. Many people report experiencing out-of-body
episodes, sometimes called ‘near-death experiences, during life-saving operations
or under other life-threatening situations. Typically, they experience hovering
above the operating table or over the scene of an accident, seeing their own bodies
and other things that they verified after the event. Studies show that as much
as 20% of the general population report out-of-body (OBE) experiences. The real
percentage may be much higher, because many people would not report such an
experience because of the likelihood of being ridiculed and accused of lying.
In my
view, there is valid evidence that consciousness can operate outside of living
physical bodies in at least four modes:
1. The involuntary operation of consciousness as
a participant in the nature of finite reality (double-slit, etc.)
2. The spontaneous exit of the body under normal
conditions
3. The deliberate, willful conscious exit of the
body (Mystic, Shaman, etc.)
4. Exit under life-threatening or stressful
circumstances.
The first
mode listed above suggests that there is a pervasive form of consciousness that
exists beyond the confines of organic life forms; and the application of TRUE
quantum analysis to quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons and the atoms of the elements
of the Periodic Table, as reported in previous posts on this blogsite, has
proved that there would be no stable life-supporting elements without ‘gimmel’
a form of the substance of reality. That form of reality had to exist from the
time of the first particle out of the so-called big bang origin of the universe.
That form cannot be mass or energy, so the only candidate for gimmel is a
primary form of consciousness, containing all of the logic and structure of
reality.
In
addition, there are a number of analyses of several psi phenomena experiments, including
remote viewing, with statistical results showing six-sigma results above chance,
i.e. the probability that these are real phenomena is six standard deviations
above what the results would be if there was no correlation between the results
of the experiments and reality, a far higher standard than imposed on ‘hard
science’ phenomena, like gluons, neutrinos, gravity waves, or the Higgs Boson. See
more detail in “Reality Begins with Consciousness” by Neppe and Close,
available as an e-book on www.BrainVoyage.com. The current scientific paradigm
has no explanation for psi phenomena, while transcendental physics and the
Close-Neppe TDVP theory as presented in previous posts do. They exist because consciousness can and does exist outside the confines of physical bodies.
But why
would I, a mathematician and physicist trained in the traditional manner of Western
scientific materialism, even entertain the possibility that consciousness is something
more than an emergent feature of physical evolution, something that exists
beyond the boundaries of the physical body?
I
discovered Einstein’s special relativity when I was 14, and knew that I wanted
to be a theoretical physicist. But, even as I worked to obtain
degrees in physics and mathematics, I knew there was something more than what I
was learning in the classroom, something
more than matter and energy interacting in space and time.
Several experiments I carried out personally, convinced me that consciousness is more than individual awareness. I will post more about this later.
CONCLUSION:
Based on
the results of the double-slit and delayed-choice experiments, TRUE analysis of
the elements of the periodic table, indicating the existence of a primary form of consciousness prior to the existence of the physical universe, psi experimental results, and personal
experience, I conclude that a primary form of consciousness has always
existed independent of living organisms, and that individualized consciousness,
through its connection with Primary Consciousness, is capable of existing and functioning outside the physical body, and finally, that the non-physical part of individualized
consciousness can and does survive physical death.
Edward R.
Close, PhD, PE, DSPE
