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Title : Visions of the Impossible
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Visions of the Impossible

by Jeffrey J. Kripal
The Chronicle of Higher Education

How 'fantastic' stories unlock the nature of consciousness

the greatest taboo among serious intellectuals of the century just behind us, in fact, turned out to be none of the "transgressions" detail of postmodern thinkers :. It was, rather, heresy to challenge a materialistic world view
'Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of the Marionettes (2002)

Consider two impossible stories.

Scene 1 . Mark Twain was famous for making fun of each orthodoxy and conventions, including, it turns out that the conventions of space and time. As recounts the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the boat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While in the port of St. Louis, the writer had a dream:

in the morning, waking had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, which has deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream he had seen a corpse Henry. He lay in a metal case burial. He was dressed in a suit of my clothes, and on his chest was a large bouquet of flowers, mostly white roses with a red rose in the center.

Twain awoke, dressed and he prepared to go to see the coffin. I was walking to the house where he thought the coffin lay before realizing "that there was nothing real about this, it was just a dream."

Unfortunately, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then died accidentally when some young doctors gave him an overdose of opium for pain. Normally the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised $ 60 to put Henry in a metal. Twain explains what happened next:

When I returned and entered the room of Henry dead lay in the open case, who was dressed in a suit of my clothes. He had borrowed without my knowledge during our last stay in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream for several weeks before it is reproduced here exactly, to the extent that these details were, and I think I missed a detail; but that one is delivered immediately, at that time an old woman entered the place with a big bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the center was a red rose, and she put it on her chest.

Who would not be permanently marked, both inspired and delighted by a series of such events? Who of us, if this is our dream and our brother, I could honestly dismiss it as a series of coincidences? Twain could not. He was obsessed with such moments of his life, of which there were many. In 1878 some of them in a trial and even the theory described how they worked. But he could not bring himself to publish, fearing that "the public would treat the matter as a joke while he was serious." testing the North American Review with the condition that it be published anonymously offered. The magazine refused to do so. Finally, Twain published an article in Harper, in two installments: "Mental Telegraphy: A manuscript with a story" (1891) and "Mental Telegraphy Again" (1895)

Mental telegraphy.. Technological metaphor points to the conviction that such events were connected Twain acts of reading and writing. In fact, it is suspected that the mental processes involved this telegraphy had any relation to the sources of his literary powers. The "manuscript with a story," the title of the first test refers to a detailed plot of the story of some silver mines of Nevada came one day burning in his mind. Twain came to believe he had received this idea from a friend 3,000 miles away through mental telegraphy.

Scene 2. American forensic pathologist book Janis Amatuzio beyond knowledge it is full of extraordinary stories of impossible things that generally occur around death. Here is one of these stories.

started one night when Amatuzio found a hospital chaplain with many problems, which asked if he knew how they had found the body of a young man recently died in a car accident. Amatuzio said their records showed that the Police Department Coon Rapids had recovered the body in the frozen stream bed at 4:45 a.m.

"No," replied the man. "Do you know how they are actually found?" The chaplain then explained that he had spoken to the wife of the dead man, who relates a vivid dream he had that night her husband standing beside her bed, apologizing and explaining that he had been in a car accident, and his car was in a ditch where you could not see from the road. He woke up immediately, at 4:20, and called the police to tell them that her husband had a car accident not far from his house and his car was in a ravine that could not be seen from the road . the body 20 minutes later recovered.

Most scholars have no idea what to do with this kind of poignant and powerful stories, aside from dismissal with lazy words like "story" or "coincidence ". Or maybe we could study their textual stories and prove that they are not as simple as they seem. That would be a relief.

As with the heads of Hercules' Hydra of Lerna, however, with each story so decapitate, three, or three thousand more will appear. We are swimming in a sea of ​​stories like this, if we can only recognize our situation. We do not know how many stories like this can not be, much less what they might mean. We do not know because we have never tried to find out. Why, after all, we would have to study something that does not exist? "Water?" asks fish. "What is water?"

is worse than that, however. It is not just that we are told that this sort of thing happening all the time, can not happen at all. It is that they are not subtle and not so subtle, penalties in place for those who take seriously such events, that is, for those who let stand the Hydra. Note that both stories have a kind of professional fear. I twain struggled for years with the possibility of having their experiences in print. Even the hospital chaplain was shaken to the core by what he found. Clearly, these facts violate something basic about our world view and our established ways of knowing. So Amatuzio titled his book Beyond knowing.

It's not just our fault, though. There are inherent in the fundamental experiences ambiguities, ambiguities that make it difficult to put and keep these experiences in our academic tables. To begin with, these things are not things. Nor they are replicable and measurable. And then there is the key role of human imagination in these visions.

I counted two empirical cases, quite simple, but the records are filled with more difficult, it is, frankly mythical most symbolic accounts or whose strangeness stun even the most generous minds. Finally, the count even empirical cases is changed often in small forms (missing an important detail or provide a non-person), suggesting that these visions are accurate anomalous cognitions that have been "filled" with unimagined details you mix . of trick and truth

researchers from the early Victorian was right. they called dreams as the two with which I started, "veridical hallucinations," or hallucinations that correspond to real facts

we are not very good at this kind of paradoxical ways of thinking today. We tend to think of the imaginary as imaginary, ie, composite, imaginary. But more shines through, at least in these extreme cases. Somehow the dreaming imagination of Twain knew his brother would be dead in a few weeks even know what kind of bouquet would sit on the chest breath of his brother. Similarly, the vision of the dream of the wife knew her husband had just died and where his body lay. In these events, words like "imaginary" and "real", "inner" and "outer", "subject" and "object", "mental" and "high material" to have much meaning. And yet these words to name the most basic of our knowledge structures.

O not know.

Both stories are a kind of traumatic stake, a visionary warping of space and time made by the gravity of intense human suffering. Even these "categories of understanding," as Emmanuel Kant more basic calls, give up his kingdom before the needs of the human heart. As much as Kant argued, these seem to be our own cognitive filters, not a perfect example of what is really there, or reflection, I dare to add, what we are really capable of.

There were more fundamental vision Kant that philosophical precision. On August 10, 1763, the philosopher marveled (in a private letter) to clairvoyant abilities of scientific seer Swedish Emanuel Swedenborg, who, in 1756, in relation to some dinner guests in Gothenburg, the precise details of a fire advance on the southern outskirts of Stockholm, 50 miles away. From 6 to 8 pm, he reported on the progress of the fire until it was finally put out, only three doors of your own home. In the coming days, the account of Swedenborg was investigated and confirmed by the political authorities after the news spread and the governor got involved

But here's the catch:. Kant can be clearly accepted in private truth empirical such an extraordinary event, but mocked and laughed at Swedenborg in public. There are fears that once more professional.

debunkers understand stories such as the brother soon-to-be-dead, the appearance of the fatal victim, car crash, and the spread of fire, all which occurred in extreme circumstances, when raised, grimacing, why all psychics do not get rich in the stock market, or why robust psychic phenomena can not be made to appear in the controlled laboratory.

leaving aside for the moment the fact that psychics sometimes do not get rich, and forms statistically significant, but humble of psychic phenomena, in fact, they appear in the laboratories, the answer to why the robust events as Twain's wife, widow, Stockholm and fire do not appear in the laboratory it is simple: no trauma, love, or loss of there. No one is in danger or dying. Your neighborhood is not on fire. The insistence of professional debunker, then, that the phenomena play by their rules and view all appear in a safe and sterile lab is little more than a brand of their own ignorance of the nature of the phenomena in question. To play by these rules is like trying to study the stars at noon. It's like going to the North Pole to study those legendary beasts called zebras. Surely just anecdotes.

The context is important. The methods are based on extreme conditions or favor are employed in science all the time to discover and demonstrate knowledge. As Aldous Huxley noted long ago in his own defense suggestive "mystical" experiences of spirit or soul, we have no reason to infer that water is composed of two gases glued together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing the water to extreme conditions, traumatize her, and then by detecting and measuring gases with technology that no ordinary person owns or understand. The situation is similar with weirdly impossible scenarios like Twain, the wife, and the Swedish seer. They are usually available only in traumatic situations, when the human being is being "boils" in disease, stroke, coma, danger or near death.

I can update Huxley. Nothing in our everyday experience gives us no reason to suppose that matter is not material, which is composed of strange forms of energy that violate, much like the spirit, all our normal notions of space, time and causality. However, when the matter subject to certain drastic conditions, such as the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see that the matter is not material at all. But, and this is key-we get to that point only through a lot of physical violence, such extreme violence and so precise that cost billions of dollars and decades of preparation to inflict and then analyze it.

Because we have invested our energy, time and money in particle physics, we are discovering all sorts of impossible things. But we will not invest those resources in the study of abnormal states of cognition and consciousness, and so it will continue to work with the most banal models materialistic and mechanistic mentality. While it is true that some brain research has gone beyond assuming that "the mind equals brain" and that the psyche works like, or a computer, you still afraid of the probability that are almost as strange how the quantum world, and we have great capabilities we have left to imagine only in science fiction, fantasy literature and comic books.

Take my own discipline, history of religions, which it is filled with countless stories that make my two stories are ordinary opening. We are told constantly, and rightly, that the religious experience of all "built" by local languages, rituals, practices, and institutions. therefore, we insist on the "contextualization" all experiences and events, which the locking means until it is released to a physical particular point in space-time and therefore not allowing them to inform how we understand other experiences, events, obviously similar in other parts of space-time.

for example, people have been seeing dead loved ones (or loved ones to death at a distance) for thousands of years, strongly suggests that experiences like Twain's wife, widow, and Swedenborg are a very important part of our world and not simply constructed by culture. These comparisons are deeply suspicious these days, especially because they end up suggesting something at work in history that is not strictly materialistic as a mind who knows what will happen before it happens, or departed soul appears her sleeping wife.

in the same vein, we are told, again rightly, that religion is about power and politics, or economics, or patriarchy, or empire and colonial oppression or psychological projection, or the denial of death, or now the last-cognitive templates, evolutionary adaptation, and computerlike synapses. And ultimately, of course, what religion is really about anything, because we are nothing but meaningless, statistically matter organized bouncing around in space, dead space.

The rules of this materialistic game, the student of religion can never take seriously what makes an experience or religious expression, since that would imply a truly fantastic view of human nature and destiny, some transhuman deification, some mentally telegraphy, the soul of dreamy, clairvoyant seer, or cosmic consciousness. All of that is taken off the table, in principle, is not appropriate for academic project. And then we are told that there is nothing "religious" of religion, which, of course, is true, and just off all those other things.

We are aware intellectuals who tell us that consciousness does not really it exists as such.

Our current models have made plain that human nature something like the protagonist of Scott Carey in the film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). With each passing decade, human nature gets smaller and smaller and less significant. In a few years, maybe we'll just blip of existence (like poor Scott at the end of the film), reduced to nothing more than cognitive modules, DNA replication, the sensitive quantum microtubule synapses brain, or whatever. we are constantly reminded of the "death of the subject" and said repeatedly that we are basically walking corpses with computers on top of technological effects, zombies, robots wet, meat puppets. We are in the ridiculous position of having conscious intellectuals tell us that consciousness does not really exist as such, there is nothing to it except cognitive networks, software loops, and hot brain matter. If this were not so absurd and depressing, it would be fun.

Humanists have paid a high price for their act of contraction. We are more or less ignored now by both the general public and our colleagues in the natural sciences, whose disciplines, of course, makes no sense at all out of universal observations, and they often work from cosmic visions bold, wildly models contrary to intuition (think ghostly multiverse and teleporting particles), and evolutionary span of time that make our "stories" seem insignificant and boring in comparison.

I am aware, of course, that there are signs of life in the humanities . I think, in particular the development of the "big story" in historiography and new materialism, vitalisms and panpsychisms of contemporary philosophy, as is evident in recent highly publicized doubt Thomas Nagel on the adequacy of neo-Darwinian materialism, expressed in his mind book and Cosmos.

these are all positive signs, but I wonder if they are bold enough. A new materialism is, after all, remains materialism, and great stories are still allergic to any hint that humans can be more than the historical being. In short, these new movements still maintain evidence of game-changing table.

I also wonder if there are good reasons to ignore the humanities. Why, after all, someone should hear the truth claims of a set of disciplines whose main arguments are often reduced to the claim that the only truth is that there is no truth; that all efforts to truth are nothing more than grab power; and that all deep conversation through cultural and temporal boundaries is essentially illusory that we are all, in effect, locked in our games local language, condemned to see shadows in the head, which is going nowhere and mean nothing?

I'm chained to the floor like everyone else brain. I'm doing some metaphysical claims no here, although I am saying that our present ones have cleared large areas of human experience and in doing so, have impoverished our thinking. I have, as a hero of Plato, he escaped from the cave of the senses and seen the sun outer mind. However, over the past three decades, I have read and talked to many who have described any indication or brightness of exactly such a brilliant intellect

I suggest a way out of our current impasse. We must these extreme narratives, these stories impossible, in the middle of the academic table. I would also like to make a bet, here and now, once we put these forms currently disapproved of knowledge in our academic table, things that were previously impossible to imagine that soon it will be possible not only to imagine, but also to think, theorize, and even try. My bet is, in other words, we really need these so-called impossible things to find better answers to our most pressing questions, including the most important question of all. The nature of consciousness

For the same purpose I propose that reimagine the humanities as the study of consciousness encoded in culture. I'm not suggesting that we can study consciousness directly, or that any ego can never know what is consciousness itself. I understand that we can study the consciousness only as reflected and refracted in cultural artefacts such as texts, art, languages ​​and social institutions, or, as cognitive scientists have, in cognition.

but I think it matters a lot if we are willing to imagine that consciousness might exist in their own right and may well be more a function of brain matter or local historical and cultural processes. Even admitting this possibility would be enough to bring the humanities and humanistic consciousness back to the academic table as central and valued participants. Humanities would no longer be, as my colleague at Rice University, Timothy Morton says, "candy sprinkles" scientism cake. Quite the contrary: Our texts, our narratives, and our methods of interpretation function as ideal guide, as pointers to where anyone interested in the nature of mind could go in search of answers

after all. , consciousness is the foundation of everything we know or will never know. It is the basis of all sciences, all the arts, the social sciences, all the human sciences, in fact, knowledge and experience of every man. On the other hand, we can say, sui generis this presence. It is its own thing. We know of nothing else like it in the universe, and anything we know later we will know only through this same consciousness. Many want to claim the exact opposite, that consciousness is not your thing, is reducible to warm, moist and brainhood tissue. But no one has come to show how it could work. Probably because it does not.

historical perspective abroad could help here. As scholars as the American literary critic Victoria Nelson, in The Secret Life of the Marionettes, or Dutch historian Wouter Hanegraaff, in esotericism and the Academy have demonstrated, the intellectual history of the West has seen enormous changes back and forth between the Platonism and Aristotelianism: between a philosophy rooted in mystical and visionary experience (Platonism that helped produce, among other things, the conviction that deep mathematical and philosophical truths are "remembered" or "discovered" and not "built") and an empirical rationalism that bases its knowledge in the sense data and linear logic. With the rise of science, rational empiricism has been dominant over the past centuries.

The solution is not simply to re-adopt some kind of pure Platonism, but to make a synthesis of the two ways of knowing . Science is a great help here, for two reasons. First, because they can challenge humanists to abandon its absolute constructivism, and secondly, because the sciences have completely failed to explain consciousness.

Now we have two models of the brain and its relationship with mind, one Aristotelian and Platonic, both of which fits the data of neuroscience well enough: the model of prevailing production (mind equals brain), and much higher transmission but now removed or filter model ( mind is experienced through or mediated, fit, reduced or translated by the brain, but exists in its own right cavity of the skull "off").

whether can eventually address both disk problem of consciousness and its codification made in human culture depends on whether we can integrate the Aristotelian and Platonic models, resisting one or the other solution. So far we have not been able to resist. The rules of what is counted in the academic world are defined by the predominance of the production model and the suppression of transmission model. In short, today can admire Plato Aristotle, but Aristotle ridicules Plato.

That's probably not the end of the story, however. Note the reflections of a contemporary neurologist, David Eagleman, teaching and research at Baylor College of Medicine. At the end of his book Incognito, Eagleman returns to the question of the soul and expresses reservations about the promissory materialism, the claim is often heard that, although not yet know how to explain mind through material processes, with the time will. In fact, all the time will be explained in a materialistic frame, because everything is only matter.

Perhaps Eagleman concludes. Or maybe not. It is very unlikely that just happened to be living at the time will soon explain all things. Previous generations claimed the same, and all were pretty bad. The most likely scenario, he notes, is that the more we learn about the brain and consciousness abroad, not simpler, things will get. This is where one of his thought experiments comes in a parable.

Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You may pick it up, turn the knobs, and suddenly, to his surprise, heard voices coming from this little strange box. ... Now let's say you start a careful, scientific study of the causes of voices. It is noted that each time the green wire is disconnected, the voices stopped. When the wire back into contact puts the voices begin again. ... You reach a clear conclusion: The voices are entirely dependent on the integrity of the circuits. At some point, a young person asks how some simple loops of electrical signals can generate music and conversations, and to admit he does not know, but who insist that their science is about to break that problem at any time.

Assuming you are really isolated, what does he know about everything you need to know: radio waves, electromagnetism, distant cities, radio stations, and modern civilization, all outside the radio box. You would not have the ability to imagine such things. And if you could, Eagleman says, "you do not have the technology to prove the existence of the waves, and everyone rightly points out that the onus is on you to convince them." Could convince almost anyone, and yourself, probably it rejects the existence of such waves of spiritual, mysterious aspect. It could become a "materialistic radio." Eagleman points at the end of his book: "I'm not saying that the brain is like a radio, but I'm saying that could be true Nothing in our current science that governs this."

Innumerable tracks. They suggest that the human brain can function as a receptor of any transhuman imperfect signal.

William James, Bergson, and Aldous Huxley argued all the same long before Eagleman. Bergson even the same analogy radio is used. This is where the historian of religions, it, anyway, by the stairs. There is, after all, a number of other tracks in the history of religions that govern the theory of radio, and suggest that while just to show that the human brain can function as a super-evolved radio or neurological television and, in rare moments, but they reveal when the channel suddenly "switches" as an imperfect receiver some transhuman signal that simply does not play by the rules as we know them.

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