The nexus between science and transcendent experience

Canon Michael Perry

So far in this seminar, we have deprecated scientism and atomism; and we have talked about what a science of consciousness might deal with, and how; but we have not said a great deal about the nexus between science and transcendent experience. I believe that we live in a coherent universe, and that behind it there is one Supreme Principle. As a Christian, I believe that that Principle is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that he is at least personal, so that human persons can talk intelligibly about Him. But that is well beyond provability, and I shall take that idea no further forward than simply to confess it, though theologians such as Keith Ward in his God, Faith, and the New Millennium [Oneworld 1998] have done a great deal to show that Christian and scientific ideas are coherent the one with the other.

To speak of a single Principle behind the phenomenal and noumenal world alike means that we seek for a unity of explanation of what lies behind both hard physical science and a science of consciousness. Truth may be two-eyed, but the two eyes are two ways of gaining understanding about particular aspects of one uni -verse.

I think we may best reach an appropriate understanding through considering a hierarchy of complexities. At every level we get a better understanding by using an appropriate methodology, but the methodology appropriate to a lower level remains true, even if not so useful, at a higher level. For example, quarks are useful entities when we are talking sub-atomically. They are a constituent of DNA. But if we talk about DNA it is more useful to discourse about four particular amino-acids and the order in which they occur in a gigantic chain within a double helix, than it is to talk about the way in which quarks constitute the individual atoms of that system.

Similarly, we use an appropriate methodology to construct a science of consciousness, but it does not invalidate a lower level within the hierarchy of complexities. That lower level remains true, even though it does not yield the same kind of insights as are got by operating at the higher level.

Thus, whilst we are incarnate, every thought, every emotion, every transcendent experience, and every free decision of a free agent has a concomitant brain event to which it corresponds. You cannot make a decision as a free agent without there being a concomitant brain event. Mind states and brain states are closely correlated. We cannot speak of consciousness as though it were a thing in itself, unrelated to a brain state.

I believe that the development of artificial intelligence will, over the next decade or so, enable us to copy the brain mechanism (and understand it) so well that we shall have to decide whether a man-made computer has become self-conscious. (I say that, despite the fact that the computer works on a binary system and the brain doesn't. The next generation of computers may well use a system more akin to that pioneered by Nature.)

There must therefore be in theory a neurophysiological way of describing the making of any human decision. It will probably deal with concepts such as neuronal pathways and synaptic firings. It will be coherent and complete - and intellectually satisfying - within the discourse of neurophysiology. To the neurophysiologist (as neurophysiologist) it will be a complete explanation of what has happened. But to us, as the agents who have made that particular decision, it will seem as if we have had that thought or made that decision, and when we come to a science of consciousness, the synaptic and neuronal explanations will be only as useful - and as limiting - as talking about quarks as components of DNA.

We will have used two different explanatory paradigms, the neuronal and the personal. Both are true. Both are aspects of one reality. Each requires its appropriate methodology. Using the wrong methodology, or assuming that only one methodology is legitimate, makes the personalist accuse the neurophysiologist of reductionism or the neurophyiologist accuse the personalist of metaphysical obfuscation.

'Ah', you say; 'you just said that every thought or every decision has an appropriate concomitant brain event. What about the out-of-body experience, or the near-death experience, or the evidence for human survival of bodily death?' If they are evidence for what they are prima facie evidence for (and that's the $64,000 question!), we have to find a way of detaching consciousness from brain states under certain conditions. We may be able to do this using the concept of multiple dimensions, though I realise this is only at this stage an attempt to give the inexplicable a name and kid ourselves that we have thereby explained it. Brain states may overlap our perceived three/four- dimensional universe and spill over into a fifth, sixth, . . . dimension. If the brain state in our four dimensions is destroyed, it may be that the concomitant state in the further dimensions is preserved. In that case, the consciousness and the experience continues - but in a transcendent state of which we catch glimpses in (for example) the NDE or in mystical experience.

I would also have to postulate that there were beings (God? Angels?) normally perceivable only by beings in those further dimensions, but able to act through the brain and mind of man because that brain and mind straddles our dimensions and the further dimensions. They could be the source of those transcendent experiences we have in mystical awareness or the NDE. That would enable us to say that those experiences were perceptions of reality and not hallucinatory.

Perhaps such entities could also act on non-mind as well as on mind, and perform what we call 'miracles'. I am agnostic about that. Some people believe in miracles and others don't.

I am speculating, and have already gone beyond the bounds of what many people will think permissible. But some sort of speculation is going to be necessary if we are to have a science of consciousness which can deal with transcendent experience, and yet be compatible with the science we have so far discovered, which has been so conspicuously successful in the last two or three centuries. Do better if you can; but try!