Mind Beyond Brain by David E. Presti

Author:David E. Presti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL007050, Religion/Buddhism/Tibetan, SCI089000, Science/Life Sciences/Neuroscience
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

PROFESSIONAL AND THEORETICAL INTERLUDE

This was the furthest point of advance of our Duke program as it evolved up through about 1987. We had worked diligently along these lines for over a dozen years and made, I believe, very significant progress, but the computer and EEG technology of that period really was not up to the task, and we had run out of funding. I next took a long and financially mandatory detour through mainstream biomedical research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, primarily conducting EEG and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies of adaptation to natural tactile stimuli in the human somato-sensory cortex. This afforded excellent opportunities to learn about emerging developments in systems neuroscience while also allowing us to continue developing and validating research tools that we intended ultimately to apply to problems in experimental parapsychology.

In 2002 I moved to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in order to resume working full-time in psychical research. The first order of business was to intensify effort on a project that had begun in 1998 under the auspices of the Center for Theory and Research (CTR) of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.16 Esalen’s co-founder, Mike Murphy, had recognized that postmortem survival is a theoretically pivotal issue in the contemporary science/religion debate, because survival beliefs are common to the world’s religious traditions but cannot be true if the current mainstream scientific worldview is correct. To address this issue he had therefore assembled an initial working group of about twenty scientists and humanistic scholars involved with the subject professionally, including several of us from DOPS.

We devoted the first two of our annual five-day meetings mainly to presenting and discussing currently available evidence for survival, but by the end of the second meeting a much more ambitious two-stage plan had emerged: We would first attempt to undermine the physicalist metaphysics that undergirds virtually everything now going on in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, and then go on to identify at least approximately what sort of alternative conceptual framework or metaphysics will be needed in order to overcome its deficiencies.

Let me begin by explaining more precisely what it is that we all found so unsatisfactory about the current mainstream view. Classical physicalist metaphysics is the modern philosophical descendant of the “materialism” of centuries past. It comes in a variety of subtly different shadings, but the basic story common to all of them goes like this: All facts are determined in the end by physical facts alone. Reality consists at bottom of tiny bits of self-existent stuff moving in accordance with mathematical laws under the influence of fields of force, and everything else must derive somehow from that basic underlying stuff. In particular, we human beings are nothing more than extremely complicated biological machines. Consciousness and its contents are generated by (or in some mysterious way identical to, or supervenient on) neurophysiological events and processes in the brain. Our everyday experiences of mental causation, free will, and the self are mere illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery.

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