Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience.

In Beyond Physicalism, an interdisciplinary group of physical scientists, behavioral and social scientists, and humanists from the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research argue that physicalism must be replaced by an expanded scientific naturalism that accommodates something spiritual at the heart of nature.

Building on the groundbreaking research of Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism, Edward Kelly and Paul Marshall gather a cohort of leading scholars to address the most recent advances in the psychology of consciousness.

Dramatic modern advances in emergency and resuscitation medicine, starting perhaps with the development of effective mechanical ventilators in the mid-20th century, have created a large class of persons who in earlier times would almost certainly have died, but who can now go on existing, suspended at least temporarily in a state somewhere between death and the conscious life they formerly pursued. A very wide range of brain injuries lead first to coma, in which the patient shows no sign of conscious (...) awareness, or even of wakefulness, in which eye openings and closings indicate the presence of a sleep/wake cycle unconsciously mediated by structures in the brain stem. Following emergence from coma, which may take days to months or more if it happens at all, patients typically show signs of wakefulness without conscious awareness – they are then in a so-called vegetative state (VS). For many this state becomes permanent, but some go on to a more recently described condition called the minimally conscious state (MCS), in which signs of conscious awareness can be detected by careful neurological examination (see Laureys & Tononi, 2009, chapter 14). A very few such persons ultimately progress to more or less full recovery, but another and particularly horrifying possible outcome is the “locked-in” state, in which a patient is fully conscious but has extremely little or no capacity for voluntary motor action. A famous modern example is that of Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, who suffered a stroke to his upper brainstem and awakened 20 days later to find himself fully conscious but capable only of blinking his left eye. A tiny fraction of surgical patients find themselves in similarly terrifying conditions caused by the combination of muscle relaxants with insufficient levels of anesthetic agents (Kelly et al., 2007, p. 387 n. 18). (shrink)

This slender volume is the twentieth member of a series entitled “Toward Ecological Civilization,” organized under the leadership of distinguished process philosopher and process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. It grew directly from the 10th Whitehead International Conference, held in Claremont, California, in June 2015, and more particularly from a single conference track (out of the more than 80 making up the program) devoted specifically to various kinds of “extraordinary experiences” (especially, parapsychological and transpersonal experiences) that directly challenge the materialist/physicalist (...) worldview which arose in the 17th century and still dominates the contemporary scientific, educational, and cultural mainstream. The central premises of the series as a whole, the 2015 conference, and the present volume are that postmodern civilization faces life-threatening crises rooted in that impoverished physicalist worldview, that we desperately need a more commodious, life-affirming, and ecologically sound alternative to it, and that Whitehead’s metaphysical vision can help take us in the needed direction. Like Stanley Krippner in the book’s brief Foreword, I am strongly sympathetic to these views. (shrink)

This information-packed volume, without doubt a landmark event in the developing neuroscientific study of consciousness, deserves the attention of anyone interested in this subject. It is a sequel and companion to an earlier collection, The Boundaries of Consciousness: Neurobiology and Neuropathology, also edited by Steven Laureys (2005), which contains the proceedings of a 2004 conference sponsored by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). Published initially as a special issue of Progress in Brain Research (volume 150), Boundaries has (...) been reissued in paperback and appears on the ASSC website as one of its official titles. Both volumes include many prominent figures in contemporary neuroscience, and the two volumes together constitute about as clear, comprehensive, and authoritative a picture as one can find anywhere of the current state of mainstream neuroscientific thinking about consciousness and the brain. Like classical physics of the late 19th century, it is a picture of great power and beauty; nevertheless, just as discordant phenomena such as black-body radiation and the photoelectric effect presaged the rise of quantum mechanics, this book, precisely because of its clarity, reveals signs of trouble ahead. (shrink)

Psychical researchers have long recognized the difficulties posed for interpretation of ostensible evidence of postmortem survival by paranormal interactions and other psychological processes involving only living persons. Myers (1903, Vol. 1:8–9), for example, says It became gradually plain to me that before we could safely mark off any group of manifestations as definitely implying an influence from beyond the grave, there was need of a more searching review of the capacities of man’s incarnate personality than psychologists... had thought it worth (...) their while to undertake. Myers himself of course became convinced that he had obtained compelling evidence of survival, but others in his own circle, familiar with most if not quite all of the same evidence, remained unpersuaded. That early episode pretty much set the pattern for the subsequent history of the subject: Despite the advent of more and better evidence of types Myers and his colleagues already knew about, and additional kinds of evidence not as well-known or even unknown to them such as drop-in mediumistic communicators and cases of the reincarnation type (CORT), serious and open-minded students of the survival literature have remained deeply divided right to the present day as to whether the available evidence justifies rational belief in the possibility of survival, and if so to what degree. (shrink)