Why Consciousness Might Continue After Death | Àlex Gómez-Marín

So I would say the evidence suggests that the mind can survive the activity of the brain. And when brains are broken or shut off, there can still be mind going on. And that's revolutionary. So you're a theoretical physicist and a neuroscientist, and you've also been fiercely critical of materialist theories of mind and consciousness. So what do you think is the ultimate nature of reality, and why do you believe that? I don't know what the ultimate nature of reality is, but what I try to first assess is whether the stories that they've told us about it are right, or maybe whether there are other alternatives. That's why I've been a fierce critic of materialism, because as a scientist, I realized that they had sold us this idea that in order to be a good scientist, you also had to subscribe to many other isms like materialism, reductionism, and even secularism. And so first, I think one needs to unblock, unmount these isms. And then, as it's happening today in consciousness studies, we have a huge landscape where there isn't only one game in town, the idea that matter is the only thing that really exists. But actually, because we are studying the heart problem of consciousness, it may be the case that other views of reality, like idealism, or even dualism, or other forms like dual aspect monism, I know this is a mouthful, but these are really philosophical ideas that now, I think, have room in science to be taken seriously. How does something like materialism relate to dualism or idealism? What is materialism in its most basic, if you could just say very briefly what it is? Well, materialism is the philosophical position that matter is the only really real thing in the universe. And I think that worked kind of well because science started 400 years ago, and Galileo made that split, I call it the foundational wound. It was a great business move. He said, let's start doing science on that portion of reality that lends itself more easily to mathematization and measurement. So for some reason, like, you know, the solidity of this table, or the movement of planets, lend themselves very well to this foundational idea of science. But as time went on, 400 years later, we realized that we had forgotten the other side, which is what really matters. What really matters is pain, is love, is feeling, sensation, consciousness, which is very hard to define, but very intimate. We all know what it is. It's that thing that disappears when we go into deep sleep and comes back in the morning. What it is like to be, as Nagel said, is the feeling of being alive. So materialism is good to study certain things, but then when it ossifies into this ideology and then is dressed like science, now it's preventing us from understanding these key questions that are, really, that everybody wants to know. Why are we here? Why do we feel reality? Where do we go when we die? And so we need other ways. We need pluralism. I'm only asking for pluralism, actually. I'm only asking for having more options on the table and taking them seriously. Why does materialism fail to explain consciousness? For example, if you were to lobotomize me, I would not be a functional human being, if you didn't, in a certain brain area. So, you know, a lay person on the street might have this view. So what do you say to someone who might think that? Well, here we could speak about different things. We could talk about physics or about neuroscience. I happen to have training on both, which are kind of my two legs. But very interestingly, for instance, for neuroscientists, 99% of them, I'm not included in that portion, believe that the brain can only be a productive organ. It's an organ that somehow, somewhere, consciousness emerges. It's like a lamp. And then something happens, magic happens, and then consciousness emerges. That's the position you need to be if you're a materialist, because if the only really real thing is matter, then you need to say, well, just give us some more time and money and we'll figure out how mind emerges or is produced from matter. And there are many philosophically sophisticated ways of criticizing this. Now, there's another option, which is the brain as a permissive organ. This was said by William James more than 100 years ago. Now, then the brain wouldn't be like this machine, like this, for instance, heat engine, whose smoke is consciousness, which is what we would have in the first big model, the productive model. But in the permissive model, the brain will be a kind of a filter. And so the brain would still have a very important role in consciousness, but it wouldn't be a productive role. It would be a permissive, much like a filter or much like a prism, would receive light. And I'm speaking metaphorically, would receive the light of the mind and then it could reflect it and refract it. And so the prism is not creating the light or the colors. It's letting them go through. Now, with these two big options on the table, I think we can make progress into what I call the edges of consciousness, which are all these experiences, weird experiences that many people have, but we don't tell them to each other, like near-death experiences, precognitive dreams, synchronicities. These experiences are very important for humans and they have a place in the permissive hypothesis and they are literally impossible in the productive hypothesis. So that's yet one more reason to explore alternatives to materialism. And talk about near-death experiences and all these precognitive phenomenon. I mean, what is the evidence for, I mean, there might be anecdotal evidence, but is there robust scientific evidence that would be accepted by the majority of scientists who subscribe to the scientific method, for example? Sure, sure. And the plural of anecdotes, someone said, is data. And there's a lot of data. Actually, this year is the 50th anniversary, half a century since Raymond Moody in the United States, he was a doctor and a philosopher, I believe, as well. And he realized that we have two ears and one mouth and started listening to what his patients or patients in general had to say about their experiences while they were clinically dead. So technically they were dead. The heart had stopped, breathing had stopped. The question about what's going on in the brain, we can discuss whether the brain is flat, but these patients would come back and tell him these amazing stories that some people may say are hallucinations, but for the patients were hyper-real, like seeing light at the end of the tunnels, seeing diseased family members waiting for them, feeling bliss. And so he and others started taking them seriously and writing them down. And then you can do a science based on that material of experience that people have. Now, on the more objective side, and more recently people have started to measure what's going on in the brain when people are clinically dead and brought back. And this has opened a proper field of studies, which is near-death studies. And so what the evidence, and evidence is a difficult word because sometimes people think that when you say evidence, this just is the final proof. Evidence is like in a jury, you bring testimony, you bring pieces of data that point in one direction or another. So I would say the evidence suggests that the mind can survive the activity of the brain, that when brains are broken or shut off, there can still be mind going on. And that's revolutionary. That would entail that when we die, it's not game over, which by the way, is the thesis of materialism. I have this phrase, if consciousness survives, materialism dies. It's game over for materialism if something of us continues after we die. So you think there is mental continuity after death? Well, I think so. And I believe so. And I could also say, I may have experienced it myself because four years ago, I had a near-death experience. I was in the hospital, I lost a lot of blood, and I saw those beings at the end of the tunnel, three beings, and there was yellow light. I was in a well, I was looking upwards, and I hadn't read about NDs by then. But when I came back from this experience, I decided I would try to integrate this also in my professional life. Not just my personal life, of course, but my professional life as a physicist and as a neuroscientist. So I may have had the experience of glimpses of what an afterlife would be, and I'm not ashamed to say it in this way. And then one can do science of it, and then one can do philosophy of it. One can think about what isms we were discussing, what views on reality would allow those experiences to be really real, as opposed to, well, poor guy, the brain was kind of broken, it must have been a hallucination. In your personal experience with the ND that you just spoke about, and also just as a scientist, do you have a view about whether individuality or the ego persists after death, or we sort of merge into some sort of cosmic consciousness? Do you have a view about that? I don't know, but my view will be along those lines you're suggesting. I think we could speak about a kind of universal mind. And then the problem is not how we emerge from matter, but how we fragment from a more holistic consciousness into this individual eddies, you could call that we are. And then when we die, this kind of dissipates, but I'm not very sure, for instance, idealism would promote that view, but then what would survive of us after these eddies just vanish and become again the big sea, I'm not sure what that would be. So I don't commit too early about what may happen after, because I don't know, but I would tell you, I believe something of us survives. And by the way, there are other lines of research, not just near-death experience that can address this really hard question of survival. For instance, there are children who remember previous lives. This was studied by Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia for more than 50 years. It's an amazing research. He went all over the world, especially in the East and collected all these case studies, all these stories in plural. These were data of kids, very young age, who would describe up to 40 items that then he could go and verify. There wasn't internet. There was really no way the kid could know. Why would the kid say that when I was living in this other body and I was a woman and that's how my house would look like or that's how I would die, right? Again, there is evidence, not proof, but there's evidence, not only that something weird and interesting is happening as we cross the threshold, but also when we come back to this life. So scientists should not be afraid of studying this, but they are because there's stigma. There's usually stigma upon the enigma and this is so unfortunate. One of the reasons is because of the ideology of materialism because those things cannot be possible. So what is wrong with the politics of science such that this stigma has happened in your view? So many things, actually. So many things. How to say them quickly? Science is a human activity to begin with. So it falls prey to all our passions and ego and greed, right? That's one thing. Science is a job for the good and for the bad today. So, you know, you need to get a salary. You need to get grants. It's within a mechanism, a selection mechanism that also sometimes reinforces things that are not very scientific, right? And then we didn't have time to unpack this, but science for many years become entangled, as I was suggesting before, suggesting before, to other isms, right? Materialism, secularism. So anything that smells like afterlife, people may think has to do with God and then they freak out. It's like, no way. Anything that suggests that there's something about the mind that may not need a physical material substrate to exist, it smells like non-materialism. So all these isms are ideologically blocking that kind of research. And then there are all these socio-political constraints as to what should be studied and what shouldn't be studied. And that's true. I call it the backstage of science, right? Sometimes we scientists or science communicators seem to speak as if the data is the only thing that matters. I say, well, no, data and theory. But then there's a third leg of this stool, which is all the socio-politics that goes behind the scenes. And we often don't speak about this. And it's quite vicious and petty. And it's very real. Why is materialism so attractive as a view to the majority of scientists? Well, an easy answer is because we've grown up with it. It's what the educational system promotes. And that's what you hear when you go to university. So it's like growing in a culture. It feels like the air in which you breathe. So it's very hard to begin with to detect, well, maybe there's another alternative. Maybe there are other ways of doing science, other environments in which one could do science. That's one reason. And other reasons maybe are more profound. And I'm not qualified to explain them. But I could say, looking at this 400 years history of science, since it started around 1623 with Galileo's book, The Assayer, that could be a birth date, that science went and coupled with all what's going on in the West, right? And so the fall of religion, you could say, and science presented as this new alternative that then could be coupled very well with other isms, and this idea of growth, and then science losing its good twin brother, which was philosophy. There's a whole natural history of science starting as philosophy, kind of emancipating or breaking out from philosophy, and then marrying to technology, and then marrying to other social systems. And so from that point of view, materialism is a very convenient idea to propose. There were attempts, like the German idealists tried to do a more romantic science, if you want, right? But no, the idea always prevailed, like Francis Bacon said, you should pursue nature through all her corners, he said, and make her spit her secrets, right? So our attitude towards nature in the science that dominates is very much reflecting how we treat nature in our society, in our culture, like a resource to extract secrets by force, and then dominate it. How is materialism related to, I guess you hinted at the idea of growth and maybe progress, and why is this a bad thing? What's wrong with having productive citizenry and having the economy grow? This is another very interesting and very difficult question to answer, and to answer briefly, but there's, for instance, this recent book coming out by Paul Kinsnorth, it's called The Machine, right? And in it, he explains this idea of the machine and this idea of progress. And this, again, this conflation of more is better, of we need to go forward always, and convincing us that the way to do that is to continually extract more from nature, and in a way, because we don't have the religious context anymore, because God is dead, then what do we have? We have what we can do as humans with our own gadgets. It's kind of the story of the Promethean fire. We will just build anything to make ourselves God. A good example today is transhumanism. Transhumanism is this pseudo-religion dressed in technoscientific language whose goal is very religious. You know, they promise immortality, they promise redemption, they promise transformation of the entire natural world, but it's done by our means, our human means, through technology. Are you suggesting that we can't have ethics without religion? Well, we should have ethics with or without religion. That's another pruning that has happened in science. You know, we say, well, forget about aesthetics, although some physicists still think that beautiful means probably true, and forget about politics. We pretend there's no backstage of science, and even let's forget about ethics, right? Like scientists, when they become more like engineers, they're just thinking how to make things work so that they can, whatever, go to the moon, go to Mars, make machines that think, but they don't think whether that's a good idea. And even metaphysics, you know, many scientists for a long time pretended, and maybe that comes from the stream of positivisms, that really one doesn't need metaphysics at all, except that materialism is always the metaphysics running the system. So you see, it's not just ethics, it's the pruning of all of these, kind of, you could say, five main legs of philosophy that just makes a kind of unconscious science, a science that doesn't really know what it's doing. It's doing it very well locally, but it just doesn't know what it's doing globally. So do you think science has to have an ultimate vision and purpose behind it for it to be effective or for it to be meaningful and transformative? And what exactly are you doing? Yes. A way I would say that is that science needs to be in the service of mankind. It hasn't been that. And we can see it through, you know, when we discovered the secrets of the atom, and all of a sudden, the Manhattan Project, and then we create nuclear weapons. And now where we're trying to crack how machines may think, and now we're creating this mess, right? So science needs to be in service of mankind, not in service of a few ideas that maybe want to make more money or just dominate upon nature. What about planes, trains, automobiles, and modern medicine? Why hasn't, I mean, hasn't science served mankind in that way? Yes and no. I see where you're going, and it's fair. I came here by plane, and it's a blessing. When I almost died, surgeons did their job, and they saved my life. But this, this, I'm not saying you're doing it, but these two alternative forced choice between luddite and silicon valley types, I think it's, of course, it's a false dichotomy. Progress, in a way, it's good, but we often don't speak about the dark side of the moon. We say the great things that progress has brought, and we don't say, we don't speak about the disasters, the side effects that it has come with. And the same when we promise new technologies. We tend to think that any technology is great, that email is going to save us so much time because we don't need to write letters and send them anymore. Is that true? I spend so many hours a week writing email, right? So let's just balance. Let's just say the great things about it and the bad things about it. And people like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, argue that we've made moral progress over time because of the Enlightenment. Do you think that's totally wrongheaded? What do you think about that? I think he's emphasizing a side of the moon. And he does that very well. And, you know, you can find tons of plots where there's a slope going up and say it's great. But I think he should also tell the not so friendly story. But if your ideology is just to resist and continue to explain that Enlightenment is the best thing ever and reason is the best thing ever and science, capital, all of these are kind of, they feel to me like you're worshipping these abstractions. And it's very destructive to say only reason, only Enlightenment. Now we know. I'm very critical of it and also of these, again, science communicators and scientists that say, oh, science says, in the name of science, experts say. It's like, come on, let's be careful because we can shoot ourselves in the foot by putting forth to the people an image of science that we know it's not really true and it's not the only one. There has been a decline in religion, I think, as you mentioned earlier in this interview. But recently there's been a resurgence of spirituality or people who say that they're spiritual but not religious in Europe and also especially in the United States. What do you think the future is of? Well, I mean, if materialism is going out of the way and out the window, what is going to replace it? Are we going to return to religion? Might that be dangerous if we do that? Is it connected with maybe the rise of the political right? What are your thoughts about this development? I'm not a fortune teller, so I don't know what's going to happen. But yeah, we could say we're in this post-materialist age and even post-secular age. One cannot come back to the past, but maybe just to contact with the roots is a good idea. What do I mean by that? I think we need to do a science 2.0, a science that says thank you to Galileo and thank you to materialism, but we need to reinvent even a new kind of scientific method and do it so in a culture where we realize humans cannot thrive in a vacuum where there's this idea that the sacred has to be removed. Now, how do we do that without bringing in back all the vices of religion? I don't know. I'm from a Catholic country. Here we are in England, so there are differences and interreligious dialogue has always been a challenge. But I think maybe a way of putting it is after all these conflicts and branchings I was quickly alluding to, science from philosophy and then also from religion, now there's a time of reconciliation perhaps. Maybe debates in the proper sense, exchange of ideas in service of learning and getting into something higher than both poles is what we need. We need science to talk to religious people and it's interesting when people say they're spiritual and not religious. I think this is just a way of saying, no, I don't want to go back. I want to go forward. But at the end of the day, religions have offered us practices and grounding that we now desperately need. It's also an individual option. Everybody can and should meditate or pray or do whatever they want, but we're in crisis and it's time for reconciliation. You're not the only critic of materialism who's appealed to a deeper meaning or asking for a more poetic science, for example. What do you say to critics that say we're just projecting our need for meaning onto a fundamentally indifferent universe? Yeah, no, I know that. Typical science communicator, well, science says this, whether you like it or not, so bad luck. But no, we're not projecting. We human beings feed on meaning. It's the other way around. If you're a materialist because the only thing that there is is matter, all what comes next, free will, consciousness, meaning, this is a kind of illusion that, come on, we need to explain. It's terrible, I would say, ignorance and arrogance to treat people as poor guys. They're just craving for meaning, but there isn't really. Get on with it. So it's more like flipping it the other way around. And also reminding my materialist friends that for decades, if not centuries, they've said in the name of science, we know that this and this and this doesn't really exist. I think now they sense they're forced to say, well, actually, we don't know. We've been saying, for instance, that there's nothing after you die. And now probably they need to admit that they don't know the answer. So it's a moment to open up possibilities and also to gently but fiercely critique these claims that I think they harm society. If you say in the name of science, get on with it. When your father dies, you'll never see him again. Well, what the F do you know about it? You haven't studied the literature. You haven't had any of those experiences. And basically what you're doing is you're just doing marketing on ideology. Stop it, please. I don't know. Do you think that it's scarier for some people that there might be life after death than compared to a materialist worldview where you just die, given that there might be consequences for behavior? I mean, many religions talk about the idea of karma or retribution, right? In Christianity, there's heaven and hell. Like, is this a reason that people may want to stay steer clear of a religion? Well, death and dying is scary. It is scary. It's maybe the ultimate ending. It's, again, limits on life. And when we're in this conquest mode, we don't like limits. And it also has... There's a shockwave backwards. So I think if you change your notion of what death is or may be, you live differently. And also it has consequences, as you're saying, for the future because this is not our only go here and we come back in whatever form. And again, different religions would say different things, right? Maybe in this, they're more happy with the idea of reincarnation. And here in the West, there are other preferences. But in any case, it changes. I would say it changes how we live. And that's really what matters. It's not about just projecting or imagining what we'll be after, but how we live now and also how we treat those who are dying. So it goes from the individual to the families, to the hospitals. Now, in the research I do, in the near-death research I do, this has ramifications at all these levels, all the way to society. But our society is thanatophobic, it has phobia of death. We don't want to hear about death. And this is another thing we need to put on the table and be willing to talk about it. Do you think that we might get closer to answering ultimate questions like why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? If we jettison materialism? Yes and no. That's an excellent question, I think, Simon, because two things. We should stop treating reality, I believe, as a great sudoku, as an enigma, as something that with intelligence, money, and time, we will crack, as some people like to say, and treat it more like a mystery. And what you do in front of a mystery is not be the clever guy in the class and say, I'll solve you. It's more like, I will bow and you will transform me. I know this sounds a bit like a scientist speaking like a mystic, but it's this reorientation that I think is needed. So in the end, we won't crack the big questions, but they will transform us. And yet I would add that, sure, if we liberate ourselves from this prison of materialism, the way we will explore those questions will be, I think, yeah, it will be freer, it will be more creative, and it will be in service of mankind. And that's the big news, I think. Do you think that exploring mystery is the reason why we're here? I mean, do you think that there's a reason why all humans are born? I think we're here because, and this is a pseudo-theological argument, I'll make you out of that, but the one, the absolute, if there's such a thing, right? Had everything except limitation. So we are that absolute experiencing and that contingency, if you want. So it's great. It's like an act of divine proprioception, if you take my metaphor. And it's a wonderful adventure. It's just incredible to be alive. And perhaps we've forgotten why we're here, and the whole point is just to experience the flesh. Let me end by saying this. I criticize materialism harshly. I bang on it. I bang on this dead horse, right? Because I think it's dead. But matter is a great mystery. So maybe my invitation, as I was talking about true pluralism, hey, materialist friends, come here. Let's work on materialism 2.0. Because consciousness is a mystery, but matter is also a mystery. The fact that we can have an intersubjective consensus, the fact that we can apply mathematics, that we can measure things, the physical world, we take it for granted, and it's a great mystery too. So maybe that's related to your last question. Why are we here? Why Spirit decided to incarnate? The flesh may be a great thing if Spirit indeed decided to do so. Alex Gomez-Marin, thank you very much. My pleasure.