Quantum Consciousness Redux

I'm not one to shun anomalous possibilities. If enough strange things happen to you, it's difficult to dismiss the uncanny as all in your head. But, I do tend to think that certain people, owing to genetic predisposition and traumatic experiences, are more open to paranormal experiences. What is the most traumatic experience of all? Dying, of course. 

I've just finished reading Pim van Lommel's book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. In 2010, I met van Lommel and heard his presentation at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson. He was a serious, intelligent fellow, noticeably Dutch in his yellow pants. Van Lommel is a cardiologist whose job is bringing people back from cardiac arrest. He had heard so many tales of NDEs in his practice that he began to research further. His book is a laudable effort to explain the unexplainable, to grasp the unknowable.

He says that people undergoing NDEs have heightened intuition, clairvoyance, premonitions as well as increased empathy for others, both during and after their experience. It's as though the mind, once opened, remains open, at least for a while. Children are more prone to NDEs, especially through near-drowning. The aftermath can be negative: hypersensitivity to sense impressions, strong emotions; alcohol or drug problems; ADHD, depression or suicidal tendencies. Van Lommel cites Kenneth Ring's connection between out-of-body experiences (OBEs) resulting from childhood trauma and a later propensity to have NDEs. 

Sensing presences, usually departed relatives, and going toward a light in a tunnel are typical of an NDE in all places and at all times. Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch depicted this in Visions of the Afterlife in the early 16th century. Speech is not necessary in NDEs as verbal communication happens seemingly telepathically. Because of the euphoric sensation, NDErs often do not wish to return to the world of the living until their "spirit" relatives convince them that they must.

Van Lommel spends about half the book describing NDEs, then  explains them scientifically. First he says what they are not (e.g. oxygen deprivation), then what they are: nonlocal, quantum physical events. In an eternal present, past and future are relative and space can be traversed instantaneously. 

I will say that his description of "endless" consciousness as the material world's particle function collapsing into a nonlocal wave function is a useful mental construct that made sense to me. But I'm not sure if I agree that the medium for these messages is in our DNA, as he suggests.

It is well known that environmental effects can either suppress or trigger gene expression. Animals seem to have greater nonlocal connections, witness the tight formations of birds in flight or busy bees following the dictates of their queen at a distance. This is evidence of their genetic unity and of the social composition of their groups. But their brains are much smaller and less complex than ours, making their seemingly robotic adherence to their clustering effects possible. It is also well known that animals can sense dangerous environmental happenings in the near future, like hurricanes, tsunamis, etc. or that their masters are on their way home (Sheldrake). Little gets in the way of their survival instincts.

In human consciousness, in order for the more anomalous features of consciousness to occur, parts of the brain must be offline, shut down or damaged. This is what allows the generally non-verbal visions and knowledge to arise. Dreams, hypnosis, meditation, mental or developmental disorders, epilepsy or altered states brought on with psychotropic drugs are examples. 

A friend of mine is an intuitive healer. In a video interview, she describes how a part of her mind stands aside as she receives inner wisdom that helps her heal herself or others. Van Lommel also cites scientific evidence where fMRIs have registered active changes in the clients of healers who were working at a distance.

Now I'll present my pitch for the right-hemispheric connection in NDEs. First, all of the hypersensitive changes that van Lommel details above, both in the NDE and its aftermath, are aspects of right-hemispheric functioning. It is well known that the left hemisphere processes details, whereas the right's domain is the big picture, broad stroke, associative, emotional and sensorial sphere. Elsewhere, I have written about the right-hemisphere to right-hemisphere connection in telepathy and the mother-infant bond.

Copyright Cartoon A Day / CartoonaDay.com 2009.* 

Doesn't it make sense that the particle function would rely on the logical left, whereas the right would let in the light to both guide and console during our most trying times? Even this beautiful image, frequently seen on the Internet, shows right-brain functioning as "waves." 

Trauma plays a role in opening the mind to the right's associative and/or dissociative wisdom. My friend's experiences with voices began after her mother died and she had started meditating. Both trauma and practice gave her the entry which began, literally, with external fountains of light that she could turn off and on at will. The Sufi poet Rumi once declared: "Don't turn your head. Keep looking / at the bandaged place. That's where / the light enters you."

When I got the startling dream message, "Freud only got it half right. Read the two Hyperion poems," perhaps it was a nonlocal communication from Jung himself. Or perhaps I was dictating to myself through a quantum field what was already known to me in the future. That my dreaming mind could create such wizardry on its own seems unfathomable to me.

In The Secret History of Dreaming, Robert Moss* tells how cigar-smoking Freud, in a dream reported by one of his early patients, got a glimpse of the oral cancer that would cause his death. Unfortunately, Freud failed to recognize what would seem a warning designed just for him. Jung, highly predisposed to voices and visions and practiced in active imagination, had a late-life NDE where he catapulted from his body into outer space during cardiac arrest. The more left-brained father of psychoanalysis sought out the particular sexual underpinnings in the mental illnesses of his clients. The right-brained Jung saw the archetypal dimension that we all share. His notion of the collective unconscious could be explained using the nonlocal paradigm. But maybe the right hemisphere deserves some credit for allowing the magic to happen.

*Moss's bio says he survived three NDEs in his own childhood.


*Content originally appeared on CartoonADay.com (http://www.CartoonADay.com), and is made available through a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/). 

Consciousness of the Future at the TSC

The Toward a Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conference has been going strong since 1994. Faithful followers and newcomers are equally aware that consciousness studies are still evolving, moving closer, albeit elusively, toward an understanding of what consciousness is and how it arises. No one claims it’s some sort of brain substance: it's a process, not a thing and it definitely arises through interaction with others and the environment. What’s nice about this conference is how it explores both the hard scientific and philosophical matters—How does consciousness arise? Do we have free will?—and the other phenomena, harder to prove —Does consciousness survive death? Can we foresee the future (precognition)? Can acts in the future affect the past (retrocausation)? 

The large gathering includes neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, neuropsychologists, anesthesiologists, spiritual types, survival of death advocates and literary people (like me, although a minority). I heard a talk on consciousness in Virginia Woolf this year and had a pleasant interchange with the speaker, a philosopher, afterwards. There was an interesting mix this year of old codgers with dodgy ideas and young things who spoke articulately and with ease at the podium. 

I was especially interested in hearing Daryl Bem’s research on precognition, a psi phenomenon claiming anomalous information or an energy transfer from the future is possible. I’ve experienced it myself whether in dreams, through imagery, or as a startling command in a relaxed moment as a future happening jolting me to consciousness with a clarity beyond words.

Dean Radin’s Quantum Entanglement, Larry Dossey’s The Science of Premonitions and Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home are works already extent in the field. Other researchers, I learned, sometimes just throw out their data rather than put their “weird science” results out there. Bem, though, claimed he was geriatric enough not to worry about his reputation. His method was to tell his college student volunteers that they were in a clairvoyance test. Then he showed them neutral, negative or erotically stimulating pictures. The results showed higher arousal in the students before the negative or erotic pictures were displayed even though the students had no way of knowing which picture the computer would choose. The clever and hilarious Stephen Colbert learned of Bem’s research and invited him on the show to talk about his so-called “Time-traveling porn.”

So, yes, Bem was testing the precognitive detection of erotic stimuli. He determined that the extroverts, the high stimulus seekers, did better on the test: 53% vs. the random 50%, which is significant. The same students were also better at precognitively avoiding negative pictures. The conference attendees seemed very receptive to Bem’s research. David Chalmers said people will claim it is sloppy work or fraud, if they’re not inclined to accept the results. Stu Hameroff said a lot of positive results are being suppressed; at another moment, he said we’ve had backward time effects for thirty years. Hameroff had explained this possibility through quantum consciousness, or “quantiousness” in a previous talk of his own. Both highly influential researchers, the former a philosopher and the latter an anesthesiologist, were the original founders of the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.

Near the end of Bem's session, a woman in the first row raised her hand and said, “Unless you’ve experienced this phenomenon firsthand, you’re not likely to believe it.” She went on to explain how she met the man who would become her husband and instantly knew they would marry. Bem said, “I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard like this and I don’t pooh pooh them any more.”

The previous evening I had explained to a young conference attendee, whose task was to explain free will in a poster session the next evening, my own precognition story. Sitting on a park bench during my college days, I saw a student walk by and instantly knew that I would marry him, even though we had never dated and I had only met him once a few years before. I did indeed marry him several years later, despite intervening events that might well have derailed my fate. Here in the present, the young, "free will" guy from the night before, now sitting a few rows up, turned towards me. I gave him a thumbs up.

I’d like to see consciousness studies take more into account the “anecdotal” stories that seem to confirm that psi events do occur. As it stands, researchers are required to use scientifically verifiable, repeatable experiments, using random number or image generators, to prove that precognition or retrocausation exist. Why not just listen to the stories of people who have actually experienced the startling phenomena, a method in vogue in the 19th century but, regrettably, no longer in use. I’m not saying it’s all real or that everybody can do it. But close couplings and highly emotional stimuli seem to defy time and space somehow--even if it's just the distance between two heads. I’ve written about this before and you can find my article here, published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I might add that there was an absolutely convincing session on remote viewing at the conference. Hameroff, by the way, stands by the theory that consciousness can exist outside of the body at higher frequencies.

You can see Stu Hameroff speaking in a group of four about consciousness after death at 1:04.