Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Soul Separation
or
Hallucination?

   Post 102.  November 02, 2019

  Out of Body Feelings

   OOBE do, or Don’t

 We don’t normally see or imagine our bodies from a top-down bird’s-eye perspective. Which is why Susan Blackmore entitled her book on out-of-body experiences with a reference to a common feature of such anomalous awareness. At the age of nineteen, while a student at Oxford University, she had a life-transforming occurrence. At the time, such phenomena were well known to occultists as Astral Traveling, but almost unknown to empirical scientists. As a psychology student, she was already interested in understanding the occult under-pinnings of the mind. But, such subjective subjects were taboo in the era of B. F. Skinner’s materialistic objective approach to Behaviourism, so she soon became a Para-psychologist1 specializing in the investigation of fringe-areas of mind-science.

 At first, she was convinced that her spirit had left her body, confirming both her religious training,and the Cartesian dualism of mortal Body & immortal Soul.  But, over the next few years, she became disillusioned by the failures of her research to confirm the implications of that theory. So, she gradually evolved from a believer to a skeptic — not of the reality of the experience, but of its theoretical interpretations. Spiritualists of all kinds had developed intricate theories of how the mind & body were interrelated and how they could operate separately. Centuries of such beliefs, in a variety of cultures, had produced a broad spectrum of drugs and practices that could facilitate the release of the aethereal Soul from its fleshly prison. Therefore, she set about testing many of those theories and techniques to see what actually happened — to separate verifiable facts from anecdotal fictions.

Psychologists at the time were typically Monists2 and Materialists. So they doubted the existence of a sublime parallel realm of ghosts & demons beyond the reach of mundane empirical Science. Parapsychologists tended to be Dualists3 and Spiritualists, who nevertheless felt impelled to find objective evidence to support their faith in an idealized super-reality . But that inherent bias typically blinded them to some disconfirming information, and motivated them to interpret their findings in favor of their own inclinations. But Blackmore’s high standards for truth wouldn’t allow her to fudge the facts in favor of Faith. Apparently, she still had more trust in empirical methods to reveal that which is hidden (occult), than in religious revelations or philosophical speculations.

After a thorough review of world myths, historical records (including scriptures), and of parapsychological research, she concluded that “sadly, none of these occult theories solves the mind-body problem – they just gloss over it.” Moreover, “the difficulty of bridging the gulf between the objective world and subjective experiences is so great that philosophers have called it “the hard problem”. Eastern religions threw-up their hands and simply labeled the mysterious Self/Soul as an illusion. Yet, Blackmore offers her own compromise opinion : “the self is a representation or model of something that does not exist, but the model itself exists.” In my own thesis, I try to clarify the dual meanings of “being” : material things, such as brains “exist” physically, while immaterial ideas, including our self-image “exist” metaphysically as a mental model4. So, physics is “real”, but metaphysics is “ideal”, which is a kind of super-reality5.                                

                   Post 102 continued . . . click Next

4. I am what I think I am :
The Human Soul or Self does not exist in a physical material sense. Instead, its “reality” is metaphysical and immaterial. It is a general holistic concept that refers to specific material parts. The United States exists as the idea of human communities bound together by a common belief. There are actual physical correlates of the US, but none of them is the ding an sich.

5. Super-Reality :
   Plato taught that the ultimate reality, beyond the veil of the mundane world, was the realm of perfect Ideas or Forms. Aristotle tried to refute Idealism, but his treatise on Metaphysics was all about our ideas of reality.  

“Or the self is like a unicorn, a mythical being whose representations exist, but who is actually imaginary.”
___Rick Hanson

“Thought is itself the thinker”
___William James

1. Parapsychology :
   The study of mental phenomena which are excluded from or inexplicable by orthodox scientific psychology (such as hypnosis, telepathy, etc.).

2. Monist, Monism :
   Monism assumes that there is a single “substance” as the foundation of reality. For Spiritualists, that “stuff” is immaterial yet powerful Spirit. For Materialists, the building block of reality is Matter, idealized as Atoms. For Enformationism, the essence of  the world is Generic Information, which has both Physical and Metaphysical properties. All of these proposed poly-morphic substances are capable of taking on many forms, creating the various phenomena we perceive. And all are invisible to the naked eye in their ground state.

3. Dualist, Dualism :
   Dualists believe that the world is inherently divided into two incompatible categories. Mind & Matter, or Soul & Body. They are normally found together in nature, but are only loosely bound, and can exist separately in their true habitats : subjective spiritual or objective physical realms.

Seeing Myself
The New Science of Out-Of-Body Experiences

Susan J. Blackmore
Psychologist & Parapsychologist

Dualism vs Non-dualism
Astral Travel vs Hallucination
Near Death vs Afterlife