In science, plenty of problems are hard. But perhaps just one is so gruesomely trying that scientists themselves have termed it, well, “the hard problem.” How does consciousness arise—the living, aware experience of being?Some theories hold that it comes from, or is even identical to, electrical and chemical processes known to unfold in the brain. Others say it arises elsewhere: in some even subtler, yet-undiscovered brain processes, or perhaps a mind-stuff quite distinct from the brain—some call it a soul.Few on either side claim to have final answers. But they often argue passionately over who’s at least in the right playing field.Now a group of researchers has begun a study that they say might settle the issue. “We can actually test this, and put and end to all these debates,” said Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. Parnia has spent years studying reports that some cardiac-arrest patients keep having clear, distinct thought processes after they’re clinically dead and detectable brain activity has ceased. Patients commonly recount these mental experiences, which often include seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, after being revived.Parnia and colleagues aim to put these reports to a test: specific sounds will be played to such patients, and they’ll be asked to recall the sounds after reviving. If they do, it would confirm the accounts of thoughts without brain activity—supporting the claims that “consciousness is a separate, yet undiscovered scientific entity” from the brain, Parnia wrote in a paper in the the April 23 advance online edition of the research journal Medical Hypotheses.The study “looks like an interesting proposal,” wrote David Chalmers, a philosopher and director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, in an email. If the claims are confirmed, it would “pose an interesting challenge for scientists to explain,” remarked Chalmers, author of several books on consciousness.
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That is easy. Simply study Psychical Research dealing with reincarnation. There are two major areas of investigation. One is the spontaneous comments of small children, 2.5 to 5 years old, about details of a former lifetime. If the Psi Researcher finds this family, then he is ready to study the case in detail, as Prof. Stevenson did in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The other major area of scientific investigation of reincarnation is the study of Responsive Xenoglossy. If you find a really good hypnotic subject that can be put into a deep trance, they will be able to carry on conversation in languages they do not know in this life...sometimes dead languages, but if you know a linguist who specializes in that dead language, a conversation can be had. Prof. Ian Stevenson was good at this line of investigation as well.
This shows the power of Worldviews, which we pick up with our mother's milk, so to speak. Only powerful personal experiences can crack the Worldview. I am surrounded by intelligent people, college professors mostly, who are simply incapable of accepting the possibility of Psychical Research, Ufology, metaphysics, Toynbeean History or mysticism. I am lucky enough to also be a mystic, more or less by accident it seems. That does not refer to a philosophy. It just means that I have had mystical experiences, such as "Cosmic Consciousness." Thus we can put together a list of "forbidden sciences." I wonder if the extraordinary stupidity of our own academics may just be ignorance. Almost all the significant books in the forbidden sciences are long out of print and hard to find. Still, the Web may spread Enlightenment and it may be the light that illuminates the world. I hope you are right that the great reversal will happen within ten years. I might live to see it.
Galileo had the same kind of experience. When he first developed a 20 power telescope and pointed it to the night-time sky, he was amazed, and quickly published. He was unable to get a single colleague at the U. of Padua to look through the telescope, or even AT the telescope. Fortunately, the commercial princes who ran Italy in the Renaissance were not so "extraordinarily stupid" (see partial quote from a letter to Kepler at the bottom of this and all my posts). The Princes (often Princes of the Church) gave Galileo all he needed to live productively the rest of his life, even after put under house arrest at 70 by the Inquisition. That did not slow down his research or his writing. The spread of telescopes and microscopes around Europe in the 17th Century may have helped trigger the scientific revolution. The Universities did not join the bandwagon until the 19th Century.