Saturday, May 30, 2009

Scientist talks about reincarnation! Ideas!

An article in the National Post examines the scientific community’s response to reincarnation.

Dr. Jim Tucker, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has carried on research in the field pioneered by the late Ian Stevenson, another psychiatry professor at the college and a Montreal native, said he and colleagues stop short of arguing that reincarnation is a fact.

“My conclusion is that the strongest cases provide evidence that there are times when memories and emotions seem to have survived death,” he said.

“Whether that exactly means what people think of as reincarnation—as sort of a soul moving from one life to another—that’s hard to say ... [But] there is a lot of reason to think that consciousness is sort of an independent force in the universe, and as such it may well exist separate from the physical brain, at least at times. This would be an example of that.”

The cases that prompt Dr. Tucker to remark like this are those in which patients display vivid memories of existences other than their own without any other signs of mental instability. Dr. Tucker says that while the idea of a consciousness that exists apart from the brain runs contrary to the materialist leanings of the scientific community, his own inclination is that at some point, the strictly materialist view will see a strong challenge.

I am not shocked.  Materialism results out of the inability to test that which is not material, not out of a philosophical impossibility of super-material realities.  Hell, for all scientists know, we could be the imagination of some sort of computer program that has managed to simulate a material world perfectly well. Their job is not to figure out if that is true, but rather to learn all they can about the simulation.

I do think, however, that we sometimes display a remarkable lack of creativity when it comes to understanding our own minds.  The understanding of consciousness, it seems to me, is an area well-primed for a paradigm shift.  In the physical world we have come to understand that the lines we once thought were solid are indeed blurred.  This was true when we discovered that all things were made of atoms, and it was true when we learned about quantum theory.

I think that at some point we will learn that the lines we draw between our consciousnesses are similarly blurred, but it will take a long time to figure this out because we are looking at them from the inside.  It is impossible to look at one without also looking through one, and this is a huge problem.

I think though, that just like believing that physical boundaries are discrete is an example of rudimentary thinking, so does believing that your consciousness is surrounded by some sort of brick wall represent a marked lack of creativity.

In Eastern thought, each soul is atman, which is a fractal representation of Brahman, which is the totality of existence, or the Oversoul.  One way of understanding this is to imagine Brahman as a big bonfire with a never-ending source of fuel.  When someone is born, it is like putting a small stick into that fire and letting it catch.  The small flame is atman, it is made of Brahman, but it is also separate and its own entity.

In this way consciousness can be passed, manipulated, extinguished, and absorbed, it is not simply an abstraction created by the firing of neurons, it is an energy, albeit one that we do not yet understand.  I think that we may have an inclination to it, however, and I sure hope that some giant brain figures it out soon because I feel like it is on the tip of my tongue.