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I emphatically endorse Deepak Chopra's reply to Michael Shermer in the
debate below. Michael Shermer is first, but imo a bit of a bore in a recalling of the stereotypical semantics of the skeptic.
So I advise tthe less skeptical reader to read Deepak Chopra first to get a good grasp of the background information.
Tony B.
Skeptic: Extraordinary Claims, Revolutionary Ideas, and the
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The Great Afterlife Debate:
Michael Shermer v. Deepak Chopra
The following debate between
Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer came
about after the widely read and referenced debate the two had last
year
on the virtues and value of skepticism. Deepak has a new book
out on the subject, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
(Harmony,
2006 ISBN 0307345785), and Michael has written extensively about
claims of evidence for the afterlife,
so the two of them thought it
would be stimulating to have a debate on the topic. Michael read
Deepak's book
and goes first in the debate, offering his assessment
of the 'proofs' presented in Deepak's book, then Deepak
responds.
Shorter blog-length versions are published on
www.HuffingtonPost.com, with the longer versions presented
here and
on www.intentBlog.com.
----------------------------------------------------------
Hope
Springs Eternal
Science, the Afterlife & the Meaning of Life
by Michael Shermer
I once saw a bumper
sticker that read:
Militant Agnostic: I Don't Know and You Don't Either.
This is my position
on the afterlife: I don't know and you don't
either. If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we would
not fear death as we do, we would not mourn quite so agonizingly the
death of loved ones, and there would be no
need to engage in debates
on the subject.
Because no one knows for sure what happens after we die, we deal
with the topic in diverse ways through religion, literature, poetry,
science, and even humor. The perpetually
anxious Woody Allen has
this workaround: 'It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want
to
be there when it happens.' Steven Wright thinks he's figured out
a solution: 'I intend to live forever.
So far, so good.'
Humor aside, since I am a scientist and claims are made that there
is scientific evidence
for life after death, let us analyze the data
for that doubtful future date, and consider what its possibility may
mean for our present state.
21 Grams: The Nature of the Soul
What is it that supposedly survives the death
of the physical body?
The soul. There are about as many different understandings of the
nature of the soul as
there are religions and spiritual movements.
The general belief is that the soul is a conscious ethereal
substance
that is the unique essence of a living being that survives
its incarnation in flesh.
The ancient Hebrew
word for soul is nephesh, or 'life' or 'vital
breath'; the Greek word for soul is psyche, or 'mind';
and the Roman
Latin word for soul is anima, or 'spirit' or 'breath.' The soul is
the essence that
breathes life into flesh, animates us, gives us our
vital spirit. Given the lack of knowledge about the natural world
at
the time these concepts were first formed, it is not surprising
these ancient peoples reached for such ephemeral
metaphors as mind,
breath, and spirit. One moment a little dog is barking, prancing,
and wagging its tail, and
in the next moment it is a lump of inert
flesh. What happened in that moment?
In 1907 a Massachusetts physician
named Duncan MacDougall tried to
find out by weighing six dying patients before and after their
death. He reported
in the medical journal American Medicine that
there was a 21-gram difference. Even though his measurements were
crude and varying, and no one has been able to replicate his
findings, it has nonetheless grown to urban legendary
status as the
weight of the soul. The implication is that the soul is a thing that
can be weighed. Is it?
In science we define our terms with semantic precision. I define
the 'soul' as the unique pattern of
information that represents the
essence of a person. By this definition, unless there is some medium
to retain
the pattern of our personal information after we die, our
soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of proteins, coded
by our
DNA, so with the disintegration of DNA our protein patterns are lost
forever. Our memories and personality
are stored in the patterns of
neurons firing in our brains, so when those neurons die it spells
the death of our
memories and personality, similar to the ravages of
stroke and Alzheimer's disease, only final.
Because
the brain does not perceive itself, it imputes mental
activity to a separate source - hallucinations of preternatural
entities such as ghosts, angels, and aliens are perceived as actual
beings; out-of-body and near-death experiences
are sensed as
external events instead of internal states. Likewise, the neural
pattern of information that is
our memories and personality -
our 'self' - is sensed as a soul. In this sense, the soul is an
illusion.
Can Science Save Us?
There are many scientistic scenarios for how we might cheat death
that I have
evaluated in my books and columns, but here I wish to
focus on the latest claim for evidence of an afterlife presented
in
Deepak Chopra's 2006 book, Life After Death: Burden of Proof.
According to Chopra, there are six lines
of evidence that convince
him that the soul is real and eternal:
Near-Death Experiences and Altered States
of Consciousness. There
are thousands of people who have been pronounced dead, usually from
heart attacks, who
are subsequently resuscitated and report
experiencing some aspect of the afterlife - floating out of their
bodies,
passing through a tunnel or white light, and seeing loved
ones or witnessing God, Jesus, or some manifestation of the
divine
on the other side. If these patients were brain dead, then their
conscious 'self,' their 'soul,'
must survive the death of the body.
ESP and Evidence of Mind. Here Chopra relies on psi research in
remote viewing
and telepathy, in which subjects locked in a room
alone can apparently receive images from senders in another room
without the use of the five senses.
Quantum Consciousness. The study of the actions of subatomic
particles through
quantum mechanics produces what Einstein
called 'spooky action at a distance,' where the observation of a
particle in one location instantaneously effects a related particle
at another location (which could theoretically
be in another
galaxy), in apparent violation of Einstein's upper limit of the
speed of light. Chopra takes
this to mean that the universe is one
giant quantum field in which everything (and everyone) is
interconnected
and can influence one another directly and instantly.
Deepak and others also apply quantum mechanics to the study of
consciousness to explain how the brain represents the entire
tangible world through biochemical signals. Through
quantum
consciousness 'we may find out how the brain might create subtler
worlds, the kind traditionally known
as heaven. If the secret lies
not in brain chemistry but in awareness itself, the afterlife may
turn out to be
an extension of our present life, not a faraway
mystical world.'
Psychic Mediumship and Talking to the Dead.
Deepak reviews the
extensive studies on psychic mediums and their apparent ability to
communicate with the dead,
and then reveals that he participated in
an experiment in which contact was apparently made with his father,
whose
recent death triggered his research and writing of this book.
Prayer and Healing Studies. Chopra discusses research
on distant
intercessory prayer, in which patients who are prayed for from a
distance by strangers appear to get
well faster and more often than
non-prayed for patients. This implies that action at a distance
through thought
alone - whether through the intervention of a deity
or through some cosmic force - is real, can be manifested, and
connects us to the cosmos and everything in it.
Information Fields, Morphic Resonance, and the Universal Life Force.
Chopra claims that nature preserves data in the form of information
fields, and he cites experiments conducted
by the Cambridge
University-trained scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who presents evidence
that people can sense when
someone is staring at the back of their
head and neck, that dogs know when their owners are coming home,
that
it is easier to complete the Sunday crossword puzzle later in
the day because others have already solved it, and that
these and
many other mysterious psychic phenomena can be explained by 'morphic
resonance fields' that
connect all living organisms to one another.
Information cannot be created or destroyed, only recombined into new
patterns, so our personal patterns - our 'souls' by my definition -
are packages of information that precede
birth and survive death.
For Deepak Chopra, these six lines of scientific evidence point to
something already
described thousands of years ago by the rishis, or
sages of Vedic India, first spiritual leaders of Hinduism. 'The
rishis believed that knowledge wasn't external to the knower but
woven inside consciousness. Thus they had
no need for an external
God to solve the riddle of life and death,' Chopra explains. Our
essence is what the
rishis called Atman, and what we call the
soul. 'Soul and Atman are a spark of the divine, the invisible
component
that brings God's presence into flesh and blood. The
biggest difference between them is that in Vedanta the soul
isn't
separate from God. Unlike the Christian soul, Atman cannot come from
God or return to him. There is
unity between the human and the
divine.'
I confess that my Western scientific worldview makes it exceedingly
(and often frustratingly) difficult for me to truly grasp what
Deepak is talking about. I am quite sure that he
will correct me on
the following summary, but near as I can figure this is what he is
saying. The universe is
one giant conscious information field of
timeless energy of which all of us are a part. Life is simply a
temporary
incarnation of this eternal field of consciousness, whose
properties, he says, include: 'The field works as a whole.
It
correlates distant events instantly. It remembers all events. It
exists beyond time and space. It creates entirely
within itself. Its
creation grows and expands in an evolutionary direction. It is
conscious.' Chopra says
that what the rishis discovered long ago is
consistent with the findings of modern science: 'The field of
consciousness
is primary to every phenomenon in Nature because of
the gap that exists between every electron, every thought, every
instant in time. The gap is the reference point, the stillness at
the heart of creation, where the universe correlates
all events.'
In Chopra's theory of the afterlife, birth and death are merely
transitions to and
from different manifestations of
consciousness. 'Without death there can be no present moment, for
the last
moment has to die to make the next one possible.' Thus, he
deduces, 'We live in an endlessly re-created universe.'
There is no
need to fear death, because 'Death isn't about what I possess but
about what I can become.
Today I see myself as a child of time, but
I may become a child of eternity.' Finally, Chopra concludes, 'We
move from one world to another, we shed our old identity to
experience `I am,' the identity of the soul, and
we assemble the
ingredients of a completely unique life in our next body.' Chicken
soup for the New Age soul.
Reality Check: What Science Really Says
Okay, back to earth. Here is the reality. It has been estimated
that
in the last 50,000 years about 106 billion humans were born. Of the
100 billion people born before the six
billion living today, every
one of them has died and not one has returned to confirm for us
beyond a reasonable
doubt that there is life after death. This data
set does not bode well for promises of immortality and claims for an
afterlife. But let's review them one by one.
Near Death Experiences and
Altered States of Consciousness
Five centuries ago demons haunted our world, with incubi and succubi
tormenting their victims as they lay asleep in
their beds. Two
centuries ago spirits haunted our world, with ghosts and ghouls
harassing their sufferers all
hours of the night. Last century
aliens haunted our world, with grays and greens abducting captives
out of their
beds and whisking them away for probing and prodding.
Today people are experiencing near-death and out-of-body
experiences,
floating above their bodies, out of their bedrooms, and
even off the planet into space.
What is going on
here? Are these elusive creatures and mysterious
phenomena in our world or in our minds? New evidence indicates that
they are, in fact, a product of the brain. Neuroscientist Michael
Persinger, in his laboratory at Laurentian University
in Sudbury,
Canada, for example, can induce all of these experiences in subjects
by subjecting their temporal
lobes to patterns of magnetic fields. I
tried it and had a mild out-of-body experience.
Similarly, the September
19, 2002 issue of Nature, reported that the
Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues discovered that
they could bring about out-of-body experiences (OBEs) through
electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in
the temporal
lobe of a 43-year old woman suffering from severe epileptic
seizures. In initial mild stimulations
she reported 'sinking into
the bed' or 'falling from a height.' More intense stimulation led
her
to 'see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs
and lower trunk.' Another stimulation induced
'an instantaneous
feeling of `lightness' and `floating' about two meters above the
bed, close to the
ceiling.'
In a related study reported in the 2001 book Why God Won't Go Away,
researchers Andrew
Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili found that when
Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray their brain scans
indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal
lobe, a region of the brain the authors have dubbed
the Orientation
Association Area (OAA), whose job it is to orient the body in
physical space (people with damage
to this area have a difficult
time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted
up and running
smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self
and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode - as in deep meditation and
prayer - that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the
lines between reality and fantasy, between feeling
in body and out
of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who experience a
sense of oneness with the universe,
or with nuns who feel the
presence of God, or with alien abductees floating out of their beds
up to the mother
ship.
Sometimes trauma can trigger such experiences. The December 2001
issue of Lancet published a Dutch
study in which of 344 cardiac
patients resuscitated from clinical death, 12 percent reported near-
death experiences
(NDEs), where they floated above their bodies and
saw a light at the end of a tunnel. Some even described speaking to
dead relatives.
The general explanation for all of these phenomena is that since our
normal experience
is of stimuli coming into the brain from the
outside, when a part of the brain abnormally generates these
illusions,
another part of the brain interprets them as external
events. Hence, the abnormal is thought to be the paranormal. In
reality, it is just brain chemistry.
More specifically, NDEs and OBEs have biochemical correlates. We
know, for example, that the hallucination of flying is triggered by
atropine and other belladonna alkaloids, some
of which are found in
mandrake or jimson weed and were used by European witches and
American Indian shamans. OBEs
are easily induced by dissociative
anesthetics such as the ketamines. DMT (dimethyl-tryptamine) causes
the feeling
of the world enlarging or shrinking. MDA
(methylenedioxyamphetamine) stimulates the feeling of age regression
where
things we have long forgotten are brought back to memory. And,
of course, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) triggers
visual and
auditory hallucinations and gives a feeling of oneness with the
cosmos, among other effects. The fact
that there are receptor sites
in the brain for such artificially processed chemicals, means that
there are naturally
produced chemicals in the brain which, under
certain conditions (the stress of trauma or an accident, for
example)
can induce any or all of the feelings typically described
in a NDE. Thus, NDEs and OBEs are forms of wild 'trips'
induced by
the extreme trauma of almost dying.
Psychologist and paranormal researcher Susan Blackmore has
taken the
hallucination hypothesis one step further by demonstrating why
different people would experience similar
effects, such as the
tunnel. The visual cortex on the back of the brain is where
information from the retina is
processed. Hallucinogenic drugs and
lack of oxygen to the brain (such as sometimes occurs near death)
can interfere
with the normal rate of firing by nerve cells in this
area. When this occurs, 'stripes' of neuronal activity
move across
the visual cortex, which is interpreted by the brain as concentric
rings or spirals. These spirals
may be 'seen' as a tunnel.
Similarly, in the OBE the experience of visualizing things from
above is actually
just an extension of a normal process we all do
called 'decentering' - picture yourself sitting on the beach
or
climbing a mountain and it will usually be from above looking down.
These studies are evidence that mind
and brain are one. All
experience is mediated by the brain. Large brain areas like the
cortex coordinate imputes
from smaller brain areas such as the
temporal lobes, which themselves collate neural events from still
smaller
brain modules like the angular gyrus. This reduction
continues all the way down to the single neuron level, where highly-
selective neurons, sometimes described as 'grandmother' neurons,
fire only when subjects see someone they
know. Caltech
neuroscientists Christof Koch and Gabriel Kreiman, in conjunction
with UCLA neurosurgeon Itzhak
Fried, have even found a single neuron
that fires when the subject is shown a photograph of Bill Clinton.
The
Monica neuron must be closely connected.
The search for the neural correlates of consciousness begin at this
fundamental level, and then we ratchet up from there, as we look for
emergent properties of complex systems of thought
that arise from
these simpler systems of neuronal connections. Of course, we are not
aware of the workings of
our own electrochemical systems. What we
actually experience is what philosophers call qualia, or subjective
states
of thoughts and feelings that arise from a concatenation of
neural events. But eventually even the grand mystery of
consciousness will be solved by the penetrating tools of science.
This is the fate of the paranormal and
the supernatural - to be
subsumed into the normal and the natural. In fact, there is no
paranormal or supernatural;
there is only the normal and the natural
... and mysteries yet to be explained.
ESP and Evidence of Mind
For over a century claims have been made for the existence of psi,
or psychic phenomena. In the late 19th century,
organizations like
the Society for Psychical Research were founded to employ rigorous
scientific methods in the
study of psi, and they had many world-
class scientists in support. In the 20th century, psi periodically
found
its way into serious academic research programs, from Joseph
Rhine's Duke University experiments in the 1920s to
Daryl Bem's
Cornell University research in the 1990s.
In January 1994, for example, Bem and his late
University of
Edinburgh parapsychologist colleague Charles Honorton
published 'Does Psi Exist? Replicable
Evidence for an Anomalous
Process of Information Transfer' in the prestigious review journal
Psychological
Bulletin. Conducting a meta-analysis of 40 published
experiments, the authors concluded: 'the replication rates
and
effect sizes achieved by one particular experimental method, the
ganzfeld procedure, are now sufficient to
warrant bringing this body
of data to the attention of the wider psychological community.' (A
meta-analysis
is a statistical technique that combines the results
from many studies to look for an overall effect, even if the results
from the individual studies were insignificant; the ganzfeld
procedure places the 'receiver' in a sensory
isolation room with
ping pong ball halves covering the eyes, headphones playing white
noise over the ears, and
the 'sender' in another room psychically
transmitting photographic or video images.)
Despite finding
evidence for psi (subjects had a hit rate of 35
percent when 25 percent was expected by chance), Bem and Honorton
lamented: 'Most academic psychologists do not yet accept the
existence of psi, anomalous processes of information
or energy
transfer (such as telepathy or other forms of extrasensory
perception) that are currently unexplained
in terms of known
physical or biological mechanisms.'
Why don't scientists accept psi? Daryl Bem
has a stellar reputation
as a rigorous experimentalist and he has presented us with
statistically significant
results. Aren't scientists supposed to be
open to changing their minds when presented with new data and
evidence?
The reason for skepticism is that we need both replicable
data and a viable theory, both of which are missing in psi
research.
Data. Both the meta-analysis and ganzfeld techniques have been
challenged. Ray Hyman from the
University of Oregon found
inconsistencies in the experimental procedures used in different
ganzfeld experiments
(that were lumped together in Bem's meta-
analysis as if they used the same procedures), and that the
statistical
test employed (Stouffer's Z) was inappropriate for such
a diverse data set. He also found flaws in the target randomization
process (the sequence the visual targets were sent to the receiver),
resulting in a target selection bias: 'All
of the significant
hitting was done on the second or later appearance of a target. If
we examined the guesses
against just the first occurrences of
targets, the result is consistent with chance.' Richard Wiseman from
the
University of Hertfordshire conducted a meta-analysis of 30 more
ganzfeld experiments and found no evidence for psi,
concluding that
psi data are non-replicable. Bem countered with 10 additional
ganzfeld experiments he claims are
significant, and he has
additional research he plans to publish. And so it goes ... with more
to come in the data
debate.
Theory. The deeper reason scientists remain skeptical of psi - and
will even if more significant
data are published - is that there is
no explanatory theory for how psi works. Until psi proponents can
explain
how thoughts generated by neurons in the sender's brain can
pass through the skull and into the brain of the receiver,
skepticism is the appropriate response. If the data shows that there
is such a phenomena as psi that needs explaining
(and I am not
convinced that it does), then we still need a causal mechanism.
Quantum Consciousness
Deepak
Chopra and others will counter that there is, in fact, a
perfectly cogent theory of psi, and that is quantum consciousness,
which was recently featured in the wildly popular and improbably-
named film, What the #@*! Do We Know?! Artfully
edited and featuring
actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make
sense of an apparently
senseless universe, the film's central tenet
is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum
mechanics. I met the producers of the film the weekend it opened
when we were both on a Portland, Oregon television
show, so I got an
early screening. I never imagined that a film on consciousness and
quantum mechanics would succeed,
but it has grossed millions and a
created cult following.
The film's avatars are scientists with strong
New Age leanings,
whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what
Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate
Murray Gell-Mann once described
as 'quantum flapdoodle.' University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit
Goswami,
for example, says: 'The material world around us is nothing
but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing
moment by
moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only
tendencies.' Okay, Amit, I challenge
you to leap out of a 20-story
building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely
through the ground's
tendencies.
The work of a Japanese researcher Masura Emoto, author of The
Message of Water, is featured
to show how thoughts change the
structure of ice crystals - beautiful crystals form in a glass of
water with the
word 'love' taped to it, whereas playing
Elvis's 'Heartbreak Hotel' causes a crystal to split into
two. Would
his 'Burnin' Love' boil water?
The film's nadir is an interview with 'Ramtha,'
a 35,000-year-old
spirit channeled by a 58-year-old woman named J. Z. Knight. I
wondered where humans spoke English
with an Indian accent 35,000
years ago. Many of the films' producers, writers, and actors are
members of Ramtha's
'School of Enlightenment,' where New Age pabulum
is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.
The attempt
to link the weirdness of the quantum world (such as
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that the more
precisely you know a particle's position, the less precisely you
know its speed, and vice versa) to mysteries
of the macro world
(such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to connect
the two comes from physicist
Roger Penrose and physician Stuart
Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much
heat but
little light in scientific circles.
Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like
structural
scaffolding. The conjecture (and that's all it is) is
that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave
function
collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing
neurotransmitters to be released into
the synapses between neurons
and thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby
creating thought and
consciousness. Since a wave function collapse
can only come about when an atom is 'observed' (i.e., affected
in
any way by something else), neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another
proponent of the idea, even suggests that
'mind' may be the observer
in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to
consciousness
to mind to atoms....
In reality, the gap between sub-atomic quantum effects and large-
scale macro systems
is too large to bridge. In his book The
Unconscious Quantum, the University of Colorado particle physicist
Victor
Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described
quantum mechanically the system's typical mass m, speed v,
and
distance d must be on the order of Planck's constant h. 'If mvd is
much greater than h, then the system
probably can be treated
classically.' Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter
molecules, and
their speed across the distance of the synapse, are
about three orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to
be
influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Subatomic particles
may be altered when they are observed,
but the moon is there even if
no one looks at it. So what the #$*! is going on here?
Physics envy. The history
of science is littered with the failed
pipedreams of ever-alluring reductionist schemes to explain the
inner workings
of the mind - schemes increasingly set forth in the
ambitious wake of Descartes' own famous attempt, some four centuries
years ago, to reduce all mental functioning to the actions of
swirling vortices of atoms, supposedly dancing their
way to
consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty,
but they quickly fade in the face of
the complexities of biology. We
should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher,
where the arrow
of causal analysis points up toward such principles
as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy.
Psychic
Mediumship and Talking to the Dead
Deepak Chopra recounts his experience of participating in a
university study
of three psychics who claimed that they could
communicate with those who had already 'passed over' to the other
side. Even though none of the psychics were told that Deepak was
present, two of them identified him by name,
two of them told him
that he wanted to contact his recently deceased father, and one knew
his childhood nickname
in Hindi. He declared it a genuine
experience, even while admitting that he had his doubts, especially
since 'My
`father' knew things I knew, but nothing more.'
That is more skepticism than most people muster, especially
in
emotion-laden readings that promise people a connection to a lost
loved one. How do psychics appear to talk
to the dead? I have
written about this extensively, but in short, it's a trick that
involves utilizing two
techniques:
Cold Reading, where you literally 'read' someone 'cold,' knowing
nothing about
them. You ask lots of questions and make numerous
statements and see what sticks. 'I'm getting a P name. Who
is this
please?' 'He's showing me something red. What is this please?' And
so on. Most statements
are wrong. But as B.F. Skinner showed in his
experiments on superstitious behavior, subjects only need an
occasional
reinforcement to be convinced there is a real pattern
(slot machines need only pay off infrequently to keep people
involved). In an exposé I did on psychic medium John Edward for WABC
New York, for example, we counted about
one statement per second in
the opening minute, as he riffled through names, dates, colors,
diseases, conditions,
situations, relatives, keepsakes, and the
like. It goes so fast that you have to stop tape and go back to
catch
them all. His hit rate was below 10 percent, but those handful
of hits were all his subjects needed to feel that they
had made
contact with a loved one.
Warm Reading utilizes known principles of psychology that apply to
nearly
everyone. The British mentalist and magician Ian Rowland's
insightful and encyclopedic book on how to do psychic
readings, The
Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, provides a list of high probability
guesses, including identifying
such items found in most homes that
are sure to convince the mark that their loved one is in the room: A
box of
old photographs, some in albums, most not in albums; old
medicine or medical supplies out of date; toys, books, mementoes
from childhood; jewelry from a deceased family member; pack of
cards, maybe a card missing; electronic gadget
that no longer works;
notepad or message board with missing matching pen; out of date note
on fridge or near the
phone; books about a hobby no longer pursued;
out of date calendar; drawer that is stuck or doesn't slide
properly;
keys that you can't remember what they go to; watch or
clock that no longer works. Here are some common peculiarities
about
people that are bound to give the impression that something
paranormal is at work: Scar on knee; the number
2 in the home
address; childhood accident involving water; clothing never worn;
photos of loved ones in wallet
or purse; wore hair long as a child,
then shorter haircut; one earring with a missing match, and so
forth. Mediums
such as James Van Praagh, Sylvia Browne, Rosemary
Altea and others on whom I have conducted extensive investigations
are also facile at determining the cause of death by focusing either
on the chest or head areas, and then exploring
whether it was a slow
or sudden end. They work their way through the half dozen major
causes of death in rapid-fire
manner. 'He's telling me there was a
pain in the chest.' If they get a positive nod, they continue. 'Did
he have cancer, please? Because I'm seeing a slow death here.' If
they get the nod, they take credit for
the hit. If the subject
hesitates, they will quickly shift to heart attack. If it is the
head, they go for stroke
or head injury from an automobile accident
or fall.
I played a psychic for a day for a television special and
found it
remarkably easy to convince my subjects that I was really talking to
the dead. Of course, anyone can
talk to the dead. The hard part is
getting the dead to talk back. Psychic mediums use trickery to give
the illusion
that the dead are communicating with us, and because
people who come to mediums for help are emotionally fragile, they
are also vulnerable to such effectual methods.
Prayer and Healing Studies
In April, 2006, The American
Heart Journal published the most
comprehensive study ever conducted on the effects of intercessory
prayer on the
health and recovery of patients. Directed by Harvard
University Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson, a long-time
proponent of the salubrious effects of prayer, and partially funded
by the Templeton Foundation, known for its
support of research
linking science and religion, the findings were eagerly awaited by
members of both communities.
There were a total of 1,802 patients
from six U.S. hospitals that were randomly assigned to 1 of 3
groups: 604
received intercessory prayer and were told that they may
or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory
prayer
and were also told that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601
received intercessory prayer and were
told they would receive
prayer. Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued
daily for two weeks after.
The prayers were allowed to pray in the
manner of their choice, but they were instructed to ask 'for a
successful
surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no
complications.'
The results were unequivocal: there were
no statistically
significant differences between any of the groups. Prayer did not
work. Worse, there were slight
elevated complications (although not
statistically significant) for the patients in the group who knew
that they
were being prayed for - a 'nocebo' effect. Case closed.
As for previous studies in which the positive
effects of prayer were
claimed, there were numerous methodological problems with all of
them, including:
Lack of Controls. Many of these studies failed to control for such
intervening variables as age, sex, education, ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, marital standing, degree of religiosity, and
the fact that most religions have sanctions
against such
insalubrious behaviors as sexual promiscuity, alcohol and drug
abuse, and smoking. When such variables
are controlled for, the
formerly significant results disappear. One study on recovery from
hip surgery in elderly
women failed to control for age; another
study on church attendance and illness recovery did not consider
that
people in poorer health are less likely to attend church; a
related study failed to control for levels of exercise.
Outcome differences. In one of the most highly publicized studies of
cardiac patients prayed for by born-again
Christians, 29 outcome
variables were measured but on only six did the prayed-for group
show improvement. In related
studies, different outcome measures
were significant. To be meaningful, the same measures need to be
significant
across studies, because if enough outcomes are measured
some will show significant correlations by chance.
File-drawer
problem. In several studies on the relationship between
religiosity and mortality (religious people allegedly live longer),
a number of religious variables were used, but only those with
significant correlations were reported. Meanwhile,
other studies
using the same religiosity variables found different correlations
and, of course, only reported
those. The rest were filed away in the
drawer of non-significant findings. When all variables are factored
in
together, religiosity and mortality show no relationship.
Operational definitions. When experimenting on the effects
of
prayer, what, precisely, is being studied? For example, what type of
prayer is being employed? (Are Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist,
Wiccan, and Shaman prayers equal?) Who or what is being prayed to?
(Are God, Jesus,
and a universal life force equivalent?) What is the
length and frequency of the prayer? (Are two 10-minute prayers equal
to one 20-minute prayer?) How many people are praying and does their
status in the religion matter? (Is one priestly
prayer identical to
ten parishioner prayers?) Most prayer studies either lack such
operational definitions, or
there is no consistency across studies
in such definitions.
Theological difficulties. If God is omniscient and
omnipotent, He
should not need to be reminded or inveigled that someone needs
healing. And what about all those
patients who were prayed for and
died? Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to
bad science
and worse religion.
Information Fields, Morphic Resonance,
and the Universal Life Force
Have you ever noticed
how much easier it is to do a newspaper
crossword puzzle later in the day? Me neither. But according to
Rupert
Sheldrake it is because the collective wisdom of the morning
successes resonates throughout the cultural morphic field.
In
Sheldrake's theory of 'morphic resonance,' similar forms (morphs,
or 'fields of information')
reverberate and exchange information
within a universal life force. 'As time goes on, each type of
organism
forms a special kind of cumulative collective memory,'
Sheldrake writes in his 1981 book A New Science of Life.
'The
regularities of nature are therefore habitual. Things are as they
are because they were as they were.'
Morphic resonance, says Sheldrake, is 'the idea of mysterious
telepathy-type interconnections between
organisms and of collective
memories within species,' and explains phantom limbs, homing
pigeons, how dogs
know when their owners are coming home, and such
psychic phenomena as how people know when someone is staring at
them. 'Vision may involve a two-way process, an inward movement of
light and an outward projection of mental images,'
Sheldrake
explains. Thousands of trials conducted by anyone who downloaded the
experimental protocol from Sheldrake's
Web page 'have given
positive, repeatable, and highly significant results, implying that
there is indeed a
widespread sensitivity to being stared at from
behind.'
Let's examine this claim more closely. First,
science is not
normally conducted by strangers who happen upon a Web page protocol,
so we have no way of knowing
if these amateurs controlled for
intervening variables and experimenter biases. Second, psychologists
dismiss
anecdotal accounts of this sense to a reverse self-
fulfilling effect: a person suspects being stared at and turns to
check; such head movement catches the eyes of would-be starers, who
then turn to look at the staree, who thereby
confirms the feeling of
being stared at. Third, in 2000 John Colwell from Middlesex
University, London, conducted
a formal test utilizing Sheldrake's
suggested experimental protocol, with 12 volunteers who participated
in
12 sequences of 20 stare or no-stare trials each, with accuracy
feedback provided for the final nine sessions. Results:
subjects
were able to detect being stared at only when accuracy feedback was
provided, which Colwell attributed
to the subjects learning what
was, in fact, a nonrandom presentation of the experimental trials.
When the University
of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman
also attempted to replicate Sheldrake's research, he found that
subjects detected stares at rates no better than chance. Fourth,
there is an experimenter bias problem. Institute
of Noetic Sciences'
researcher Marilyn Schlitz (a believer in psi) collaborated with
Wiseman (a skeptic of
psi) in replicating Sheldrake's research, and
discovered that when they did the staring Schlitz found
statistically
significant results, whereas Wiseman found chance
results.
Sheldrake responds that skeptics dampen the morphic
field's subtle
power, whereas believers enhance it. Of Wiseman, Sheldrake
remarked: 'Perhaps his negative
expectations consciously or
unconsciously influenced the way he looked at the subjects.'
Perhaps, but
how can we tell the difference between negative-psi and
non-psi? As it is said, the invisible and the nonexistent look
the
same.
Middle Land
So where does this leave us? I am, by temperament, a sanguine
person,
so I really hate to douse the flame of that doubtful future
date with the cold water of skepticism in this present state.
But I
care what is actually true even more than what I hope is true, and
these are the facts as I understand them
to be.
I want to believe Messrs. Chopra, Bem, Goswami, Sheldrake, and the
others. Really I do. I gave up
on religion in graduate school, but I
often catch myself slipping back into my former evangelical fervor
now directed
toward the wonders of science and nature. But this is
precisely why I am skeptical. What they offer is too much like
religion: it promises everything, delivers nothing (but hope), and
is almost entirely based on faith, the very
antithesis of science.
I am especially skeptical whenever people argue that the Next Big
Thing will save
us, in our lifetime, and fulfills our deepest
emotional needs. Evangelicals never claim that the Second Coming is
going to happen in the next generation (or that they will be 'left
behind' while others are saved). Likewise,
secular doomsayers
typically predict the demise of civilization within their allotted
time (and, of course, that
they will be part of the small surviving
enclave). In parallel, prognosticators of both religious and secular
utopias
always include themselves as members of the chosen few, and
paradise is always within reach.
Where is paradise?
It is here. It is now. It is within us and
without us. It is in our thoughts and in our actions. It is in our
lives
and in our loves. It is in our families and in our friends. It
is in our communities and in our world. It is in the
courage of our
convictions and in the character of our souls.
Hope springs eternal, even if life is not.
----------------------------------------------------------
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Taking the Afterlife Seriously
by Deepak Chopra
'The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the
sensation of the
mystical. It is the power of all true science.'
-Albert Einstein
I. Thanks for Coming - or Did
You Even Show Up?
I have put Michael Shermer at a disadvantage by writing a book that
bases the afterlife on the
survival of consciousness. He has little
interest in consciousness compared to his interest in laboratory-
induced
hallucinations and altered states. It's a shame that he
doesn't grasp that the afterlife is about nothing but
consciousness.
(I don't offhand know anyone who took their bodies with them.)
Shermer's focus on God is
irrelevant to the argument. I give seven
versions of life after death in my book, collected from every
religious
and philosophical tradition. He fails to address them or
to realize that certain traditions (Platonism, Buddhism, Taoism,
Vedanta) do not posit a personal God.
Shermer's retelling of the flaws in prayer studies is germane
to my
argument but only to a small degree - it by no means forms a sixth
of my book, more like three pages. I
must point out, however, that
the 2006 Benson-Harvard refutation of prayer is far from being
authoritative. Critics
have found methodological flaws in it, and
there are 19 other studies in the field that arrive at differing
results,
11 of them showing that 'prayer works.' Now to the holes in
Shermer's own approach. It may be curious that
stimulating some area
of the brain can induce out-of-body experiences or the feeling of
sinking into a bed, or
that Buddhist monks have low activity in
their Orientation Association Area (OAA), as cited by Shermer.
Unfortunately,
these experiments have little bearing on the
afterlife. Induced states are quite feeble as science. I can put a
tourniquet on a person's arm, depriving the nerves of blood flow,
and thereby eliminate the sensation of touch.
This doesn't prove
that quadriplegics with paralyzed limbs aren't having a real
experience. I can induce
happiness by giving someone a glass of wine
and having a pretty girl flirt with him. That doesn't prove that
happiness without alcohol isn't real. The point is that a simulation
isn't the real thing or a credible stand-in
for it.
Shermer doesn't adhere to the scientific impartiality he so vocally
espouses. Loading the dice
turns out to be fairly standard for him.
For example, he cites the December 2001 issue of Lancet that
published
a Dutch study in which, out of 344 cardiac patients
resuscitated from clinical death, 12 percent reported near-death
experiences. (The actual figure was 18 percent, by the way.)
Immediately he skips on to say that near-death experiences
can be
induced in the laboratory. Hold on a minute. Did Shermer miss the
point entirely? The patients in the Dutch
study, who suffered
massive heart attacks in the hospital, had their near-death
experiences when there was no
measurable activity in the brain, when
they were in fact brain dead. Did he quote the astonishment of Dr.
Pin
van Lommel, the Dutch cardiologist who observed this effect? No.
Did he go into the baffling issue of why the vast majority
of
resuscitated patients (over 80 percent) don't report near-death
experiences? That's pretty important
if you are claiming that all
this near-death hokum can be induced in the lab with a few
electrodes.
Leaving out the heart of the matter, as Shermer does, smacks of
unfairness, for I rely on this same Dutch study and
give all the
particulars. Skepticism is only credible when it's not being
devious. But Shermer often deliberately
misses the point. I cite a
University of Virginia study that to date has found over 2,000
children who vividly
remember their past lives. In many cases they
can name places and dates. The facts they relate have been verified
in many cases. Even more astonishing, over 200 of these children
exhibit birthmarks that resemble the way they remember
dying in
their most recent lifetime. (One boy, for example, recalled being
killed with a shotgun, and his chest
exhibited a scatter-shot of red
birthmarks). Unable to refute this phenomenon or imagine a counter-
study, Shermer
fails to mention it. He snipes at the easy targets to
bolster his blanket skepticism. I wish Shermer realized that true
skepticism suspends both belief and disbelief. Being a debunker of
curiosity is something science doesn't
need.
This points to a broader problem with his arguments: the problem of
dueling results. Let's say
a skeptic offers in evidence a study that
asks five children to describe a previous incarnation, and let's say
that only those who are coached, either by parents or researchers,
come up with such stories. Has skepticism refuted
the original
research? Of course it hasn't. The first study stands on its own, by
sheer force of numbers,
demanding explanation. But by Shermer's
logic if some children don't remember a past lifetime, those who do
must be categorically dismissed. By analogy, if I study twenty
mothers who smile when shown their baby's picture,
anyone can find
twenty others (suffering from post-partum depression, for example)
who don't. But that doesn't
prove that mothers don't love their
babies. The second experiment is an anomaly.
No doubt Shermer will
want to lecture me on the need for replication
in science. Yet this is the very thing he conveniently ignores.
Studies
on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, memories
of past lifetimes, remote viewing, and so forth - all crucial
to the
reality of life after death - have been well replicated. Shermer
finds one study that induces similar states
('similar' being a very
tricky word here) and he walks away satisfied. He already knows a
priori that
'paranormal' findings must be false, so why bother to
engage them seriously? Extending our understanding of
normal doesn't
interest him.
The focus of science should be on the survival of consciousness
after
death, not on the sideshow of fraud, pseudoscience, religious
dogma, and the other straw men Shermer knocks down. For
example, I
rely a great deal on the possibility that mind extends outside the
body. This is obviously crucial,
since with the death of the brain,
our minds can only survive if they don't depend on the brain.
There
are astonishing results in this area. One of the most famous,
performed at the engineering department at Princeton and
validated
many times over, asked ordinary people to sit in the room with a
random number generator. As the machine
printed out a random series
of 0s and 1s, the subjects were instructed to try to make it produce
more zeroes.
They didn't touch the machine but only willed it to
deviate from randomness. Did they succeed? Absolutely. Did other
identical or similar experiments succeed? Over and over. Does
Shermer even touch on this matter, so crucial to
my argument? No.
He displays an amazing ability to avoid the important stuff. He
writes, for example, 'The
ultimate fallacy of all such prayer and
healing research is theological: If God is omniscient and
omnipotent,
He should not need to be reminded or inveigled that
someone needs healing.' This is simplistic theology at best
second-
guessing an omniscient and omnipresent God is a tautology by
definition, since such a God, being everywhere
and performing all
acts, makes no choices at all. Such a consciousness encompasses good
and bad, disease and health,
equally. (As much as possible I avoid
using a personal pronoun for God, but it's awkward since 'It'
doesn't work in English. I am referring to a God that is closer to a
universal field than anything else we can
imagine.) Does an
omnipotent God even need a creation to begin with? The question is
logically unanswerable. Fortunately,
Shermer's Sunday School God, a
patriarch with a white beard sitting above the clouds, plays no role
in my
argument - or in the traditions of Buddhism, Vedanta, etc.
mentioned at the outset. Did my book defend the Judeo-Christian
God?
Did it argue for a physical place called heaven (or hell)? Did I
praise the joys of the hereafter in order
to denigrate life here on
earth? Not for a moment. I specifically rooted the afterlife in
ordinary states of consciousness
that no one doubts, such as dream,
imagination, projection, myth, metaphor, meditation, and other
aspects of awareness
that give us clues about the workings of the
mind overall. Shermer doesn't engage those connections, either.
Since he often lumps me in with other authors whom he disdains and
treats cavalierly, I can only assume that
he uses the same slipshod
reasoning on them, too. I certainly know for a fact that Shermer
misrepresents and distorts
the groundbreaking work of Rupert
Sheldrake, a biologist who graduated with first-class honors from
Cambridge
and whose curriculum vitae (not to mention acumen,
curiosity, and intelligence) a gaggle of skeptics can only envy.
But let's concede that Shermer knows he's preaching to the choir and
can afford all this rhetorical
by-your-leave. His review hasn't
actually offered anything beyond a self-indulgent expansion on his
first
sentence, borrowed from a bumper sticker: I DON'T KNOW AND YOU
DON'T EITHER. He takes this to be humorous; in
fact it is
distressingly dogmatic. Is he so proud of his skepticism that
literally he can tell what someone else
doesn't know? Without
dragging him into philosophical deep waters, I must point out that
dismissing opposing
views even before they are stated seems like
fairly spooky solipsism.
In the end, debating tactics offer
entertainment value but are a
dubious way to get at truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the true
test of any
scientific or philosophical system is how much it can
explain. I believe that Shermer sincerely agrees with this, despite
his often unfair tactics and his condescension to spirituality in
general. The old-fashioned materialism that
underlies his opinions
stands in stark contrast to quantum physics, which long ago opened
up an unseen world where
linear cause-and-effect no longer operates,
where intuition has made more breakthroughs than logic. Virtual
reality,
populated with virtual photons and subatomic interactions
that operate beyond the speed of light - a realm where events
are
instantaneously coordinated across billions of light years - is the
foundation of our physical world. Pace
Shermer, the possibility of
intelligence and consciousness in the universe is completely viable;
we must arrive
at new theories to account for life after death
(among many other mysteries) by opening ourselves to the origins of
our own consciousness. It's all very well to watch various parts of
the brain light up on an MRI, but to claim
that this is true
knowledge of the mind is like putting a stethoscope to the roof of
the Astrodome and claiming
that you understand the rules of
football.
If Shermer wants to have a serious debate about the persistence
of
consciousness after physical death, I eagerly invite it. But I must
in all candor ask him to look at consciousness
first. He hasn't made
the slightest effort so far, and yet that was the entire subject of
my book.
II. Science and the Afterlife
To catalog how much Shermer gets wrong isn't the same as proving
that the
afterlife is real. But the proofs that it isn't are not
very sound. Hamlet refers to death as 'the undiscovered
country from
whose bourne no traveler returns.' For all intents and purposes,
this argument has sufficed for
materialists ever since. But people
do cross the boundary between life and death only to return - the
number of
near-death experiences is many thousands by now. (For
anyone who wants an in-depth exposure to the phenomenon, see
www.near-death.com. Contrary to what Shermer claims, these aren't
artifacts of an oxygen-deprived brain; they
are meaningful
experiences full of detail and coherence, and often they appear
after the brain ceases all activity.
The existence of studies in
which people do not have such experiences seems irrelevant. I can
offer experiments
where people can't identify the notes of the
musical scale, but that doesn't mean perfect pitch is an illusion.
I was particularly interested in the resemblance between modern near-
death experiences and those reported
for hundreds of years in Tibet.
People who return from the dead in that culture are known as delogs,
and what
they experience isn't a Christian heaven or hell - in this
country 90 percent of near-death experiences, by the
way, are
positive - but the complex layers of the Buddhist Bardo. In our
society heaven is generally reported
by those who have near-death
experiences as being like green pastures or blue skies; children
tend to report a
child's heaven populated by scampering lambs and
other baby animals.
This made me realize that Hamlet
was right to call death an
undiscovered country, not because the living cannot reach it but
because heaven's
geography keeps shifting. If we look at how various
cultures perceive the afterlife, there are roughly seven categories:
Paradise: Your soul finds itself in a perfected world surrounding
God. You go to Paradise as a reward and
never leave. (If you are
bad, you go to Satan's home and never leave it.)
The Godhead: Your soul returns to
God, but not in any particular
place. You discover the location of God as a timeless state infused
with his presence
The Spirit World: Your soul rests in a realm of departed spirits.
You are drawn back to those you loved in this
life. Or you rejoin
your ancestors, who are gathered with the great Spirit.
Transcendence: Your soul performs
a vanishing act in which a person
dissolves, either quickly or gradually. The pure soul rejoins the
sea of consciousness
from which it was born.
Transmigration (or Metempsychosis): Your soul is caught in the cycle
of rebirth. Depending
on one's karma, each soul rises or falls from
lower to higher life forms - and even may be reborn in objects. The
cycle continues eternally until your soul escapes through higher
realization.
Awakening: Your soul arrives
in the light. You see with complete
clarity for the first time, realizing the truth of existence that
was masked
by being in a physical body.
Dissolution: Eternity is nothingness. As the chemical components of
your body return
to basic atoms and molecules, the consciousness
created by the brain disappears completely. You are no more.
There
is no common denominator here except one: consciousness
itself. We have to shift our notion of the afterlife from being
a
place to being a state of awareness. Once we do that, life after
death becomes much more plausible. Instead
of arguing over religious
beliefs, we can ask rational questions:
Can consciousness survive the body's
death?
Is there mind outside the brain?
Can we know the states of consciousness that belong to the afterlife
without dying?
Does consciousness have a basis outside time and space?
To me these are rational questions, and
we can devise experiments to
answer them. But before going into that, the issue most people want
to settle is
'What happens after we die?' Since this remains such a
pressing question, let me offer the evidence that surfaced
when I
looked at cultures East and West. Leaving aside the place a person
might go to (my position is that there
is no 'where' after death;
everything is projected in consciousness, including heaven and
hell), the afterlife
appears to unfold in the following stages:
The physical body stops functioning. The dying person may not be
aware of this but eventually knows that it has occurred.
The physical world vanishes. This can happen by degrees;
there can
be a sense of floating upward or of looking down on familiar places
as they recede.
The dying
person feels lighter, suddenly freed of limitation.
The mind and sometimes the senses continue to operate. Gradually,
however, what is perceived is non-physical.
A presence grows that is felt to be divine. This presence can be
clothed in a light or in the body of angels or gods. The presence
can communicate to the dying person.
Person
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