How consciousness affects reality
The evidence converges on a simple hypothesis: what we currently model as “random” is not truly random
A few hours ago, there was a post in a facebook group that I’m part of that expressed concern that people who meditate show a tendency to come away with such “unhinged” and “delusional” beliefs as “past-life memories”. Here is how I responded:
Are you aware of the evidence for memories of other lives? That evidence alone is a good enough reason why people might take such wordviews seriously without being “unhinged” or “delusional”. I have linked the evidence below. But first, a few points worth establishing:
There is considerable evidence that people can have lucid, organized and accurate experience even when their brain is deprived of oxygen (i.e. during cardiac arrest), which basically means their brain lacks an energy source. This calls into question the assumption that the brain is the only entity capable of creating signals within our conscious experience. Specifically, subjects who report out-of-body experiences during such near-death experiences are able to describe their own resuscitation procedures substantially more accurately than subjects who do not report an out-of-body experiences. Claiming that the brain is able to synthesize those detailed, organized and accurate experiences even when deprived of oxygen is akin to claiming that a VR headset can create a detailed and accurate representation of the external reality even when you take out the power source.
In light of evidence that lucid, organized and accurate experiences can occur even when the brain is basically non-functional, it is much more sensible to shift to the (more parsimonious) model where the brain is NOT the only entity capable of creating signals within conscious experience. It certainly appears that the brain creates the majority of signals within our consciousness for the duration of our lifetime, akin to how a VR headset creates the majority of signals in my conscious experience for the duration that I am wearing the headset; this by no means is evidence that experiences can’t occur when the headset (brain) goes offline.
Another reason to be skeptical that the brain is the only object capable of creating signals within our conscious experience is that we are at a loss to explain features of our conscious experience while we are alive based on brain function alone. Specifically, consider what’s called the “subjective unity of perception”, a variant of the Neural Binding Problem — quoting from this article published in the journal Cognitive Neurodynamics:
Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole… There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry
This is pointing us squarely towards the idea that signals from different neural circuits are integrated outside the brain, within the medium of our conscious experience, which naturally leads to the question of what other signals that may not originate from the brain at all can be integrated in our conscious experience.
Finally, we do not know where memories lie; it’s one of the biggest mysteries of memory. In light of the evidence that the brain is not the only entity capable of creating signals within our conscious experience, it is worth asking whether memories are “stored” in the brain (something that we don’t have evidence of) or merely accessed in a way that can be mediated by the brain; the latter model can begin to address why “terminal lucidity” can occur days, hours or even minutes before death in patients with severe neurodegenerative diseases, in that terminal lucidity has a lot of similarities to near-death experiences (NDEs) and one of the characteristics of NDEs is accurate recall of long-forgotten memories that occur during “life reviews” (“life reviews” are present in 14% of NDEs, and during life reviews, events are experienced from the perspectives of everyone involved, like consciousness has become depersonalized).
Ok, having established those bits of information, let’s discuss the empirical evidence on memories of other lives. Here is an article written in Scientific American by a skeptic who took the time to actually look at the evidence:
Here’s an excerpt:
Here’s one of thousands of cases. In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath” — that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way…
…Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg…Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.
Here’s a paper on unusual birthmarks/birth defects linked to injuries on the autopsy photographs of the deceased, if you’re interested. They are present in about 35% of children who claim memories of other lives.
The birthmarks/birth defects observation also aligns with observations from Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts that found organ development appears to to be “goal driven” (that is, organisms appear to have an idea of an “end state” and develop towards that end state); in the “Picasso Frogs” experiment, the initial locations of organs in a Frog embryo’s face were scrambled, yet it still managed to form a pretty normal-looking frog face; so basically, it is as though the children who have these abnormal bleedthrough memories also have a template in their consciousness that causes their organs to develop abnormally. It’s like the placebo effect, but the sad version.
Also, because of how gruesome the past life memories are, these children often show PTSD symptoms. Luckily, the memories usually fade around the same time as other childhood memories. I wonder if childhood amnesia evolved to seal away potentially traumatic memories of other lives at the minor cost of losing early memories from the present life (childhood amnesia doesn’t appear to be necessary; hyperthymesics can remember back to when they were newborn:
As for the mechanism for how consciousness can affect matter: this has already been pinpointed by the experiments cited in this article (“Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: A hypothesis with supporting evidence”) published in Biosystems: consciousness seems to affect what we currently model as “randomness” by creating deviations from the Born rule of quantum mechanics (the Born rule is a postulate about the randomness of quantum mechanics; it is not something that is derived). It remains an open question in quantum mechanics whether there exist “hidden variables” i.e. hidden states which, if known, would eliminate the inherent indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Based on the experiments cited in that Biosystems article, it appears that these hidden states are quiet real and have something to do with the state of consciousness. For a description of other experiments, see the article below:
