WHEN MICHELANGELO WAS MIDWAY through painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1510, another Italian Renaissance artist, Raphael, was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint four frescoes in the Papal Palace in the center of the Vatican depicting the branches of knowledge. Raphael’s most famous work of the four, The School of Athens, anachronistically depicts a cadre of Greek philosophers who lived in different eras hundreds of years B.C. In the center of the painting, deep in conversation, are Plato and his pupil, Aristotle. While historians do not know what Raphael intended, the depiction of Plato and Aristotle at the center of philosophy in a palace of such religious iconography is telling, because we know that much of what has been debated for centuries regarding the mind, the psyche, the soul, and the essence of who we are has come down to the two differing views proposed by Plato and Aristotle.
In the painting, the elderly Plato, shown with a long gray beard, is carrying his book Timaeus, which discusses human beings’ relation to the physical world and guided philosophical thinking for millennia. His vibrant student, Aristotle, is walking by his side, clutching a copy of his book Nicomachean Ethics, a treatise of how men’s lives were indelibly influenced by the heavens. Plato appears to be pointing to the heavens, while Aristotle appears to be gesturing toward the earth. It is believed that these gestures represent the core of their philosophies, namely that Plato believed in a dual world of existence, while Aristotle’s beliefs focused on the tangible. The two could have easily been discussing the subject of the human mind, psyche, or “soul,” and possibly even the afterlife, because almost every idea that has been debated through the millennia up until today on those subjects was rooted in the discussions and debates that Plato and Aristotle had along with the works of many of the other philosophers in the School of Athens.
Although in today’s modern society, the term soul has taken on a relatively imprecise and mostly religious connotation, in the time of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, the soul—then called the psyche—had a much more precise and specific meaning. The subject of what the psyche was included everything to do with human beings—what made them be alive, what shaped their identity, and what led to their morality. The psyche was considered the distinguishing mark of all living things, and in humans, it included emotional states and mental and psychological functions, such as thought, perception, desire, planning, practical thinking, as well as moral qualities and virtues. Contrary to common perception, the early definitions of the psyche, the soul, or “the self” did not always include belief in an immortal psyche (or soul) or even an immaterial psyche (or soul). And though most people now associate the word psyche with the mind, while the soul is perceived as something vague, esoteric, and even religious, its true meaning is, in fact, the soul or “self.” In studying the psyche, Greek philosophers were concerned with understanding what animates living beings, notably humans, and gives them their unique characteristics. Just as there are today, there were many different and conflicting theories about both the origin of the human psyche or soul and also what happens to it after death.
Plato’s views have helped shape much of modern Western and Near Eastern civilization and philosophical thought. He believed that the material world that we live in, the physical world that we can touch, see, and experience with our five senses, though “real,” is less real and less “perfect” than another domain of existence (that is imperceptible with our senses) and belongs to the realm of the psyche or soul. Thus, the soul was an immaterial substance. He proposed that corresponding to this material world was a parallel world of existence that relates only to the mind and psyche or soul. By definition, that domain is perfect and eternal. So for everything that exists in the world of “matter,” he believed that there is a corresponding “perfect” blueprint or archetype that exists in another realm of reality, and that perfect reality corresponds to the psyche or soul of the entity whose material form is visible to us. In other words, even though the concept of a human being is perfect, the reality is that because our world is contingent and reliant on many other factors, what we see in this world is not always perfect and that real perfection exists only in that other domain. Humans can get diseased, for example, or an animal can lose its leg. Plato called this the theory of forms.
The scholar David Banach, a professor of philosophy at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, explains that Plato’s theories sought to define the divide between perception and reality. “The world we perceive through the senses seems to be always changing,” Banach wrote. “The world that we perceive through the mind, using our concepts, seems to be permanent and unchanging. Which is most real and why does it appear both ways? The general structure of the solution: Plato splits up existence into two realms: the material realm and the transcendent realm of forms.”
Plato’s position was that the forms of all beings are eternal and immutable, and it is these forms that “mold” the physical matter of the being. By analogy, Plato said that when you look at a horse in the physical world, the idea of that horse (a specific form) is perfect. There is a blueprint or a mold for what an ideal horse would be like. If something happens and the horse breaks its leg and therefore becomes defective, that occurs in the physical domain. But in that other domain, or dimension, there remains a world of perfectness—a world of perfect “archetypes” from which all physical manifestations of beings emanate.
Plato believed that what the Greeks called the psyche, which was later translated as the soul in English, is eternal. It is the ultimate substance from which—like the world—the typical body is created. Plato believed that the ultimate reality was that domain, and what we see in the physical domain is an imitation that isn’t as perfect as the one in that other domain. Based upon that concept, everything that we are is a by-product of that world of reality, and our physical body and our brain are secondary components of that ultimate reality. The psyche or soul, in essence, is the more real matter than the brain. The debate among scholars and scientists over this central point—does the brain contain or create the psyche?—continues to flourish and provide new avenues of thinking to explore to this day.
To describe his theory of forms, Plato put forth an allegory about a group of people who are living in a cave. Imagine, hypothetically speaking, that these people have been chained to the walls of this cave since birth and cannot leave. Above them is a tall wall and at the top of the wall is a small gap where light shines through. Every once in a while people outside of the cave that the cave dwellers have never seen walk past and cast a shadow on the wall. As long as the cave dwellers are stuck in the cave, they will perceive these shadows as real, and therefore that perception of the shadows is the ultimate reality that they can fathom of those people.
Now imagine that one of the men breaks free and climbs up to see where the light is coming from. When he looks out, to his astonishment he sees people walking around who are not black and white but are three-dimensional and have different colors and shapes. Excited at his discovery, he runs down to tell the cave dwellers that what they have been seeing is not the actual reality; although it is real, there is an even higher reality to it. However, because the other cave dwellers haven’t seen it, they don’t believe him. They think he has gone mad with this ludicrous idea. Their perception of what is real is separated from the true reality. Although for many people, just like the chained cave dwellers, reality is only limited to what they can perceive with their five senses, there is in fact a higher domain of reality.
Aristotle came up with a different line of thought. Many would describe Aristotle as being perhaps the first great biologist, because he is the one who first created the taxonomy of biology that has formed the basis of the classification systems we use to this day. Though he was Plato’s student, Aristotle did not believe that Plato’s view was correct. He believed that the matter and the form of a being cannot be separated but can be distinguished from each other, and that the form of any being simply results from the characteristics of its matter. Therefore, a horse may have a specific form, but that form arises from its physical matter and not from some other archetype or nonphysical entity. He theorized that the psyche, or the soul, is actually a by-product of the activity of the physical matter.
By analogy, Aristotle said that the soul is to the body what vision is to the eye. If the eye works perfectly, then as a by-product you have the phenomenon of vision. However, vision isn’t the same as the eye; it is the soul of the eye. Further, he said that the soul in humans—their thoughts, their feelings, their psychological makeup, everything that makes them who they are—is simply a by-product of the perfection of their physical matter. For as long as the body works, you have a soul. But when the body ceases to function, you no longer have a soul.
Clearly, these ideas are in stark contrast when applied to the question of the psyche, or the soul, and what happens when we die. Plato’s view was that when you die, that’s not the end because the body was not the principal matter of the soul and that the more real domain of reality is the psyche, or the soul, which will continue to exist after we die. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that when you die, that’s the end because the soul was produced by the body and therefore cannot exist apart from the body. However, despite the fact that Aristotle largely believed the soul does not survive without the body, he also believed that a part of the soul, the intellect, might if perfected be separate from the body and remain after death, while the rest of the soul perishes.
In addition to Plato and Aristotle, many other great philosophers like Pythagoras and Democritus also debated the nature of the soul and what happens to it after death. Though no consensus was ever reached, an enduring theory was put forward by Democritus, who was the first person to have been associated with the theory of atoms. Democritus’s theory, called the atomist theory, was that everything is made of atoms and the atom is something that cannot be divided further (amazingly, this was proposed some twenty-four hundred years before modern scientists discovered the atom). According to him and his followers, our body, our psyche, and our soul are all made up of indivisible components, and when we die, those atoms disperse in a void. If our mind, psyche, or soul is also made up of so-called soul atoms, they disperse as well, and nothing remains. In some ways, this may be similar to the views of those people who now believe that when you die, there’s nothing left; you are gone. In contrast, Pythagoras, who lived before Plato and whose theory Plato supported, also believed that the entity of psyche or soul, that which makes us who we are, is eternal; therefore, when you die, it is not extinguished.
Today, if you were to ask people if they believe in the existence of the psyche, they would say, yes, of course. They may even look at you in amazement for asking the question. Few people would debate the existence of the psyche, because the psyche is probably universally accepted to exist because it is generally believed to be synonymous with the mind. However, if you were to ask, do you believe in the soul?, you are likely to get an answer that corresponds more with a person’s personal or religious conviction or lack thereof. Most people are unaware that the terms soul and psyche actually corresponded with the same thing, which is really the “self.” The reasons for the current religious connotations and associations will become clearer, but in reality, if individuals really say they don’t believe in the soul, it’s like saying they don’t believe in themselves because the word soul means nothing more than the self, which is who we are. The debate has been over whether the psyche or soul is a by-product of the body and therefore dies with the body, as Aristotle believed, or whether it is in and of itself a real entity that can be separated from the body at death and therefore continue to exist, which was Plato’s view (and is called dualism because there are two dual realms of reality). So the question they asked is: Does that thinking, conscious entity who is currently reading and contemplating the ideas in this book, which we refer to as “me” in daily conversation, come about through a physical process in the body, or is it some other entity? If so, what happens to it when we die?
Today, many who believe in the idea of a soul that continues to exist after death in the form of an “afterlife” don’t realize the origin of their beliefs can be traced to Greek philosophy and in particular to Plato. During the Roman Empire, Christianity emerged, and by the end of the Roman Empire, it became the dominant faith. This caused the Greek ideas about the soul from Plato and Aristotle and many others to merge with those of the Christian faith. The church largely supported Plato’s views because they seemed to fit more closely with the Christian beliefs of eternal life and resurrection.
St. Augustine, the theologian whose writings helped shape Western Christianity, was influenced by Platonic philosophy. He considered the soul to be a “rider” on the body, suggesting it is the soul that is the true “self” and is immaterial. He believed that man was “a rational soul” making use of “a material body.” Today, people have very firm ideas about what is life, what is death, what is the afterlife, and what is the soul, whether they are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, or even atheists. So if we believe that when we die, our self becomes nonexistent and disappears, we may be following a tradition left by the atomists or Aristotle without being aware of it. Or if we believe our psyche, soul, or “self” lives on after death, we may be following the tradition of Pythagoras or Plato and the Neoplatonists. But the fact is that whatever personal view we have regarding the self, psyche, or soul, it is likely that belief has been debated and developed by numerous scholars dating even further back than the ancient Greek philosophers. Although some beliefs may not be what science eventually proves to be correct, others may be.
AS STRANGE AS IT may seem, this idea of the nature of the psyche, or the soul, is being investigated by scientists. Today in science, it is referred to as “the problem of consciousness.” In other words, how do our thoughts, emotions, feelings, and essentially everything that makes us into who we are arise? A few decades ago, this topic wasn’t even considered to be in the scientific realm. Now, scientists can be divided into two broad categories: those who support a view that broadly speaking corresponds with Aristotle’s view, and those who broadly speaking support Plato’s view. The essential question comes down to, Does the brain create the mind, psyche, and soul, or is the mind, psyche, and soul—in other words that entity that makes us humans into who we are—separate from the brain but interacts with it?
Each camp has very distinguished scientists, though today there are more who support Aristotle’s view than Plato’s. The most notable Nobel Prize winner who supported the view that everything we consider the “self” or soul arises from the brain—that when you die the body stops functioning and therefore the soul is extinguished—was Francis Crick, who was the codiscoverer of DNA. The most prominent scientist in the other group—which considers the essential reality of the human psyche or soul to be a separate entity from the brain and body and believes that when you die the psyche or soul continues as a different type of matter much like an electromagnetic wave—was Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Sir John Eccles.
Today, science has largely come to grips with the mechanisms that lead to various signals and messages being transmitted in the brain and the connections between the brain and the rest of the body. But the question that still remains and fuels the scientific debate is, Where in the midst of all this electrical activity and chemical processes that we know take place in the brain do thoughts and the self lie? Since our true reality is that we are all thinking, conscious beings and it is our thoughts that lead to our daily actions, where do thoughts come from, and more precisely, how do they come about? How does the passage of electricity across a cell lead to feelings? When we experience a feeling, such as love or benevolence, or even jealousy, scientifically we can track all the pathways that mediate the feeling, but how do these chemical and electrical processes turn into feelings and thoughts?
David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, has summarized it very well: “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.” In his books, Chalmers has called this the “hard problem” of consciousness. This is in contrast to the “easy problems,” which essentially involve understanding the mechanisms that allow the brain to deal with the various sets of information that it receives.
Modern medicine has helped answer some of the questions regarding the relationship between thoughts and the brain; namely, the specific areas that are involved with certain feelings, emotions, and thoughts, but not the question of how thoughts are actually produced from brain cells.
Methods of analyzing thought processes now involve special brain scanners called functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) scanners. These work on the principle that brain cells have a constant need for blood, which carries with it all the vital nutritional substances that they need to work, including oxygen and glucose. So the scanners essentially detect and follow the movement of blood to various parts of the brain. This way, they can tell us which part of the brain is working more actively at any time.
In addition to detecting changes in blood flow, specialized scanners can also detect the areas of the brain that have increased their consumption of oxygen and glucose. So by following the changes in flow of blood and the consumption of oxygen and glucose to various parts of the brain, scientists can understand which areas of the brain are involved with certain thought processes. This is called “mapping” the brain. To do this, scientists place someone into a scanner and scan the brain while the person is having certain thoughts.
As I read what I have written, changes are constantly taking place in the flow of blood to certain parts of my brain. I am also enjoying music, and this pleasant feeling is accompanied by a reciprocal change in the pattern of blood flow to the part of my brain involved with this sensation. If I really get into my music and stop paying attention to the screen, the areas that had been receiving more blood while I was reading will now receive less blood, but other areas will then start to receive more blood. Interestingly, brain scans have shown that for any thought, many areas of the brain become active and that it is therefore multiple areas of the brain that mediate thought processes. This is a very important point. However, identifying blood flow changes or increased metabolism of certain parts of the brain during an experience doesn’t answer the big problem, which is: How does a physical collection of cells give rise to conscious experience?
One method of studying this area that has been introduced by scientists in the last fifteen to twenty years has been the effort to determine the brain-based changes that take place under certain conditions and correlate them with conscious experience. In other words, scientists have attempted to study the biological processes that take place in the brain when someone has a conscious experience, such as seeing an object or thinking. These processes have been called the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), which could thus also be called the neural correlates of the “soul.”
These discoveries led some to believe they had discovered the “seat of the soul” in the brain and that clearly the soul was nothing much more than what they could see with their scanners. But an important point highlighted by other researchers and scientists was that just because something correlates with something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that thing caused it. This is a basic law of studying correlations in any field of science. When any correlation is observed between two events, there are three possible explanations. Let’s take the example of two actions, A and B. If there is a correlation, then either A is causing B, B is causing A, or some other process is causing both of them. So when correlations are found between brain-based events and conscious experiences, all the possibilities must be considered. Although we know that brain-based events correlate with thoughts, no one has been able to demonstrate whether A causes B, B causes A, or both. In other words, perhaps the brain-based events cause conscious experience, or maybe conscious experience causes the brain-based changes—or something else causes both of them.
In medical and scientific literature, a number of different theories have been proposed to account for how human consciousness or the psyche or soul comes to exist from the brain. The most commonly held view is that it is simply a by-product of brain activity, just as, for example, light arises from the action of electricity passing through a lightbulb or heat arises from the burning of coal. Hence they were not the same as the underlying processes that take place in the brain, in the same way that light coming off a lightbulb is not the same as the activities that are taking place in the lightbulb. As Aristotle would have said, vision is to the eye what soul is to the body. It is through the activities of the physical processes in the body that the soul arises.
Although experimental scientific evidence or even a plausible biological theory demonstrating how this can happen is still lacking, a number of different theories have been proposed to account for it. These theories have attempted to tackle different aspects of the problem of consciousness, such as how conscious experience may arise from brain cells, or how the different aspects of consciousness may bind together to form a single, unified sense. This is a particularly interesting and mind-boggling problem. We may not realize it or have ever thought about it, but all that we experience at any one moment is part of one conscious state, yet the different aspects of what makes us have one thought or feeling are actually mediated by many different areas of the brain.
Take vision, which is itself divided up into color, motion, and form processing. It is mediated by several areas in the brain at the same time. Now imagine that we are watching a movie and thinking about it at the same time, or experiencing a certain feeling of happiness or nostalgia. Each feeling or thought itself is also being processed by many different brain regions. Therefore, if we take a snapshot of what we are experiencing at any one moment, we realize that while each aspect is being mediated by a multitude of areas in the brain simultaneously, remarkably the “I” experiences it all as “one” and not hundreds of different and separate things. This is what neuroscientists call the binding problem.
Several views have been proposed to account for how conscious experience may arise and how the binding of consciousness into “one” may occur. It has been suggested that mental states simply arise from specific patterns of activity within networks of brain cell connections, or that this may be related to a specific pattern of synchronized and rhythmic electrical activity in networks of brain cells. Some others have proposed that consciousness emerges as a novel property simply out of the complexity that is going on among brain cells. Others still have further argued that conscious experience emerges when a critical level of complexity is reached in the networks of brain cells that are connected together. So although connections among a handful of brain cells may not give rise to conscious thoughts and feelings, conscious experience may arise when many more cells connect together, say a few million or billion cells. In addition to the mechanisms proposed in these theories, many other areas of the brain have been proposed as the potential neural correlates of consciousness. However, although very interesting, all these theories seem to share the same limitations.
IN GENERAL, SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE to back up the concept that mind and consciousness, or in other words the psyche or soul, arise from the brain has come from the clinical observation that specific changes in function such as personality or memory are associated with specific areas of damage to the brain, such as those that occur after head injury or a stroke. This finding has been further supported by the results of studies using functional MRI and PET scanning, in which (as described above) specific areas of the brain have been shown to become active in response to a thought or feeling. However, although these studies provide evidence for the role of neuronal networks as an intermediary for the manifestation of thoughts, they do not necessarily imply that those cells also produce the thoughts. It still doesn’t answer the question of whether Plato’s concept of a psyche or soul that is separate from the body but interacts with it was correct or Aristotle’s idea that it is the body that produces the psyche or soul. In fact, many scientists have argued that brain-based theories cannot fully explain the observed features of consciousness or soul.
The limitations of the conventional theories can be divided into four broad categories. The most obvious and most important limitation of such theories is that, first, they do not provide a plausible mechanism that may account for the development of consciousness, thoughts, and all that makes up the human psyche or soul from brain cell activity. The theories simply propose potential intermediary pathways that may be mediating consciousness and the soul but do not answer the fundamental question of how thoughts and consciousness or human experience may arise from the activity of neurons. This is a big challenge in neuroscience. We know we all exist as thinking, conscious beings and that if we take the original and more precise definition of the psyche and soul (rather than some of the vague concepts that some people have today of the soul), then we know it exists. But the question remains, How?
We also know that brain cells like any other cell can manufacture protein-based chemical substances. They can even be linked with electricity, but the nature and substance of thought (the amalgamation of which comprises the self) seem inherently different from electricity or a chemical or any protein-based substance we know. Most scientific theories simply say thought exists and it comes about from the brain but can’t specify how, where, or why. This is a point that has been summarized very well by Professor Susan Greenfield. She concludes in her article “Mind, Brain and Consciousness”: “Just how … the bump and grind of the neurons and the shrinking and expanding of assemblies actually translate into subjective experience … is, of course, another story completely.” Second, another limitation relates to the issue of how brain activities that are distributed and are occurring within multiple different areas of the brain and more precisely billions of individual brain cells at any one time can eventually bind into a single unitary sense of self that leads to the notion of “I.” Third, how do occurrences that are preconscious (in other words, chemical or electrical events that are continuously going on in the brain but are not part of our “conscious” awareness, such as the effect of hormones, or other events that are instead occurring in the unconscious domain) become conscious, other than to say that it somehow does occur at a critical point?
Finally and perhaps most important, we know that a fundamental part of our lives involves the notion of free will. We are judged in society based upon our intentions and actions, and the brain-based views expressed above cannot account for this. If correct, they would mean that our lives would be completely determined by our genes and environment and hence there would be no place for personal accountability. Can you imagine the situation that would arise if everyone claimed that everything they did was due to the action of their genes in combination with their environment? No one could be held accountable for anything.
THESE AND OTHER LIMITATIONS with the conventional views have led some scientists to seek alternative explanations for consciousness. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthetist at the University of Arizona, and Roger Penrose, a mathematician from the University of Cambridge, have raised many of the limitations of the theories above. In particular, they argue that they cannot fully explain the observed features of consciousness. They have put forward a theory using quantum physics. Their theory is based on the principle that there are two levels of explanation in physics: the familiar, classical level used to describe large-scale objects, and the quantum level used to describe very small events at the level of existence so small it is even smaller than an atom (called the subatomic domain).
At the quantum level, superimposed states are possible—meaning that two possibilities may exist for any event at the same time—but at the classical level, either one or the other must exist. So, for example, we can either go right or left, but not both. When we make an observation, we are working at the classical level, so although there may be subatomic processes going on at any one time with the potential of different superimposed states, when we make an observation, the superimposed states must collapse into one.
Hameroff and Penrose propose that consciousness arises from tiny, tubelike structures made of proteins that exist in all the cells in the body, including brain cells, and act as a skeleton that allows cells to maintain their shape. They propose that these small structures are the site of quantum processes in the brain due to their structure and shape. They argue that consciousness is thus not a product of direct brain cell to brain cell activity, but rather the action of subatomic processes occurring in the brain. In support of their theory, they further argue that there are single-celled organisms, such as amoebas, that, despite lacking brain cells or any connected assemblies of specialized brain cells, seem to have consciousness and are able to swim, find food, learn, and multiply through their microtubules. Hence they suggest this may be a more advanced structure leading to consciousness.
So Hameroff and Penrose propose that consciousness, or what the Greeks called the psyche or soul, may arise from subatomic quantum processes occurring in the protein structures that make up the microtubules. Some have, however, argued against the theory by pointing out that microtubules exist in cells throughout the body and not just in the brain. Also, there are drugs that can damage the structure of microtubules but appear to have no effect on consciousness. More important, it has been argued that although the theory may potentially account for how the brain carries out complex mathematical problems, it still fails to answer the fundamental question of “how” thoughts, feelings, emotions, and what makes us into who we are arises.
This limitation of all the theories has led to the suggestion that human consciousness or the soul may in fact be an irreducible scientific entity in its own right, similar to many of the concepts in physics, such as mass and gravity, which are also irreducible entities. The investigation into consciousness has been proposed to be similar to the discovery of electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century or quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, both of which were inexplicable in terms of previously known principles. Some, such as philosopher David Chalmers, have argued that this new irreducible scientific entity is a product of the brain, whereas others have argued that it is an entirely separate entity that is not produced by the brain.
The late Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles, considered by many to be one of the greatest neuroscientists in the world, was perhaps the most distinguished scientist who argued in favor of such a separation between mind, consciousness, and the brain. Eccles’s theory was well described in his book The Self and Its Brain. He argued that the unity of conscious experience was provided by the mind and not by the neural machinery of the brain. His view was that the mind, consciousness, or soul itself played an active role in selecting and integrating brain cell activity and molded it into a unified whole. He considered it a mistake to think that the brain did everything and that conscious experiences were simply a reflection of brain activities, which he described as a common philosophical view. “If that were so,” Eccles said, “our conscious selves would be no more than passive spectators of the performances carried out by the neuronal machinery of the brain. Our beliefs that we can really make decisions and that we have some control over our actions would be nothing but illusions.”
Eccles further argued that there was “a combination of two things or entities: our brains on the one hand and our conscious selves on the other.” He thought of the brain as an “instrument that provides the conscious self or person with the lines of communication from and to the external world” and that “does this by receiving information through the immense sensory system of the millions of nerve fibres that fire impulses to the brain, where it is processed into coded patterns of information that we read out from moment to moment in deriving all our experiences—our perceptions, thoughts, ideas, and memories.”
According to Eccles, “We as experiencing persons do not slavishly accept all that is provided for us by our instrument, the neuronal machine of our sensory system and the brain; we select from all that is given according to interest and attention and we modify the actions of the brain, through ‘the self’ for example, by initiating some willed movement.” However, he acknowledged that he was still unable to explain how the mind carried out these activities and how it interacted with a separate brain. This is a point on which he was criticized by others.
Professor Bahram Elahi, a distinguished professor of surgery and anatomy with a strong interest in the question of consciousness or the soul and its nature, has expressed the view that although the psyche or soul and the brain are separate, the entity we are referring to as psyche or soul is not immaterial. Rather, it is composed of a very subtle type of matter that, although still undiscovered, is similar in concept to electromagnetic waves, which are capable of carrying sound and pictures and are governed by precise laws, axioms, and theorems. Therefore, in Professor Elahi’s view, everything to do with this entity should be regarded as a separate, undiscovered scientific discipline and studied in the same objective manner as other scientific disciplines. He argues that as science is a systematic and experimental method of obtaining knowledge of a given domain of reality, then human “consciousness” or soul can and should also be studied with the same objectivity. Each scientific discipline such as chemistry, biology, and physics has its own laws, theorems, and axioms, and in the same manner that which pertains to “consciousness” or the “soul” should also be studied in the context of its own laws, theorems, and axioms. In his view, consciousness or soul is also a scientific entity and a type of matter, though it is a substance that is too subtle to be measured using the scientific tools available today. Therefore, in his view, the brain is an instrument that relays information to and from both the internal and external worlds, but “consciousness” or the “soul” is a separate and subtle scientific entity that interacts directly with it. Furthermore, as the human soul or consciousness is a separate yet entirely real entity that determines the true reality of a person, it continues to exist after death. Therefore, when one dies, one is left with the same level of knowledge, understanding, and perception as on earth. This is why people with actual-death or near-death experiences may interpret what they see based on their own level of education and thought. Thus, the level of perception of reality that exists after death is directly proportional to that acquired on earth. After a profound ADE, an atheist may maintain the same viewpoint, whereas someone of a particular faith may interpret what he sees based on what he already believed. Based on this school of thought, it is also therefore possible to educate oneself and hence correctly expand one’s field of perception through the application of correct ethical principles during life on earth. The process by which one’s depth of cognition pertaining to the realities that exist after death expands on earth (through the practice of correct ethical principles) is the purpose of our life.*
We know from the history of science that scientists have often been confronted with problems that had been unsolvable when examined using the scientific principles of the time. For example, when the Scottish scientist James Maxwell first discovered electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century, electromagnetism had to be described as a scientific entity in its own right, as it could not be explained according to known scientific principles. It was many years later that the first radio waves (which are electromagnetic waves) were recorded by the German scientist Hertz, and now we have a whole area of science that is based upon them, not to mention numerous devices such as radio, television, microwaves, and infrared cameras. Maybe consciousness or that entity of the human psyche or soul that Plato, Aristotle, and numerous others had debated is also not reducible in terms of currently understood mechanisms of brain cell activity, and its true nature will only be discovered when our science progresses.
AT THE SAME TIME that this debate on the nature of the soul has been taking place, from the days of the early Greek philosophers pictured in the School of Athens through the time of Nobel Prize winners like Crick and Eccles up until today, there has also been a related debate about what happens when we die, and by extension, what death is. As discussed previously, death has long been perceived as being irreversible and finite. But, as we are coming to learn and as has been described in some detail, in the twenty-first century we now have the means and technology to reverse death, and our ability is likely to expand even further in the coming years.
These new avenues of learning that have come about through advances in resuscitation science are very broad and have far-reaching implications that may not have been fully understood at the time they were first studied. Scientific exploration needed to be performed so that we could objectively study the entire process of resuscitation, its implications, and the questions it raised. One of the most profound questions was, If there is a period of time after death in which people could be brought back from death, what would happen to their minds, their psyches, their souls during that period that by definition corresponds to a time that is after death? Could we scientifically explore if the brain and the mind are separate—and therefore determine if the psyche still exists when the brain is not functioning? It would be time to set aside the philosophical and religious beliefs and see what the science would tell us. Science, by its nature, should have a completely open and objective mind-set. But how would we study this in any comprehensive way?
According to some experts, such as Professor Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist from the University of Virginia, the situation parallels the developments in physics, which had to discover a new paradigm of study when advancements were made. For centuries after Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries, the entire world of physics relied solely on Newton’s laws of motion and the principles he laid down, and the most eminent physicists of the nineteenth century believed that there were only minor variations to be discovered. This was the prevailing view until the twentieth century when the atom was discovered. Scientists began to notice that while Newton’s laws were applicable to the larger questions of physics such as the planets and the stars, a problem emerged when they tried to examine the world of the atom and a level smaller than the atom, a subatomic level. Newton’s laws did not apply to this subatomic world, and his equations and formulae didn’t work. This caused physicists like Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr to search for alternatives. Their work led to a scientific paradigm shift and the discovery of a whole new field of physics called quantum physics, which relates to the world of subatomic particles.
What this process showed was that with new discoveries there was a need for a new science and a new definitional reality. The Newtonian sciences worked for a particular area, but they weren’t sufficient to explain what was seen in the subatomic world. On the macroscopic level, the old ideas worked, but when scientists looked at those ideas in detail on the microscopic level that corresponds to things that exist and are smaller than atoms, they didn’t work. Some have suggested that the same thing, as we will come to see, may be true in the ideas that we have long held about the mind and brain and consciousness.
The paradigms we hold in science may not always be absolutely correct; they are the best that we can consider for any given time with the information we have. When we make further discoveries, we need new ways to explore these discoveries and amend our theories and specific paradigms. So although many (myself included) previously assumed that death was the end, we have come to realize that death is not the end we once considered it to be. While all cells, including the brain cells that mediate our thoughts, feelings, memories, and emotions, are going through their own processes of death, they are still viable for a period of time after we die. So now the question is, When someone dies, what really happens to his or her psyche or soul? Is it annihilated like many believe, or does it continue to exist for a period of time, and if so, for how long?
The discovery of resuscitation science would lead to the first reports of people who had died and been brought back to life telling us what they experienced. People related their astonishing experiences in the time after they had died and before they had been brought back to life. So although we once believed that there was nothing else to question about death, that it was black and white, like a century of physicists who said there was nothing to question about Newtonian physics, some have started to argue that we may now have the need for a paradigm shift regarding what happens when we die and the period after death. These realizations have only really started to come about after humankind’s gradual discovery of the means to successfully reverse death itself—something that had always seemed impossible until now.