Death is certainly the end of phenomenal experience, which by definition depends on the physical senses and their attendant neurochemical processes. But death may also be an experience in itself. Near-death experience seems to happen in the liminal space between the two.

Death seems beyond our ken to comprehend and certainly to research beyond the mortal veil. Yet the stunning results of recent neurological research conducted at the University of Michigan, combined with modest inferences drawn from logic and our own incorrigible personal experience, suggest some new perspectives on the experience of death — in particular, whether experience persists beyond the time at which brain activity ceases irrevocably, and what may underlie such experiences. This presentation reviews that research and explores such inferences concerning what each of us can reasonably expect to experience when our physical bodies meet their inevitable demise. More particularly, a hypothesis is advanced that evolution may transcend its biological limits.

jvp@CTFolk.com

It has been more than six decades since Gilbert Ryle, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, coined “The Ghost in the Machine,” in his book The Concept of the Mind, as a way of criticizing what he saw as Descartes’ absurd mind-body dualism. Since then the nature of consciousness has been largely explored only from the assumption that it was an as yet not understood neurophysiological process entirely resident in the organism. Its inherent physicality became an ironbound axiom. However, a growing body of experimental research now challenges this and a fundamental transition is underway in science. Still a minority position, it is nonetheless the trend direction in a wide range of disciplines, from medicine to biology to physics. Whole new sub-disciplines have emerged driven by the results of this research since Ryle’s dismissive words. This work is pushing toward a new paradigm, one that is neither dualist nor monist, but rather one that postulates consciousness as the fundamental basis of reality…

‡  Stephan A. Schwartz is a Research Associate of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research.
Correspondence: saschwartz@earthlink.net