AI 整理 : Dr. Edward Kelly のインタビュー : 意識は物質に先行する

2025年6月27日 · 約99分

前置き

Dr. Edward Kelly のインタビュー発言を AI 整理した。彼も、脳活動がほぼ停止した状態での臨死体験(*1)を主な根拠として「脳が意識を生み出す」という説を否定している。

米軍の遠隔視の後期の責任者だった Edwin C. May (*2)とは真逆の主張。

(*1)

脳活動がほぼ停止した状態で、自分が手術を受けている状況を天井付近から目撃し、その証言が実際の手術状況と一致した…といった事例。

私はそういった脳活動低下状態での臨死体験の正体は、脳活動がある程度回復した段階での無自覚の「手術の遠隔視」だと判断している。つまり、魂的なものが、手術室の天井から見下ろしていたのではなく、当人が自分の（過去に済ませた）手術を遠隔視した…という判断。未来や過去を含む遠隔視の検証済みの科学的データは多数存在するが、魂の類の実在を示す検証済みの科学的データはほぼ皆無。

(*2)

AI 整理 : 遠隔視 : Edwin C. May の長時間インタビュー

情報源 : Youtube 動画(1:37:27)

Legendary Psi Researcher On Telepathy, Reincarnation & Precognition ｜ Dr. Ed Kelly

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KuIugPiHk0

AI 整理

概要

意識、科学、実在の再構築

提供された文章は、エドワード・ケリー博士が長年にわたる心霊現象や変性意識状態の研究を通して、現在の物理主義的な世界観に疑問を呈し、意識が物質に先行するという観念論的な立場に至った経緯を詳述しています。彼は、物理主義では説明できない現象、例えば超能力や臨死体験、多重人格、天才、神秘体験などの膨大な実証的証拠を集めた著書「Irreducible Mind」について語ります。

さらに、彼らは代替となる現実の記述を探求し、多様な哲学的・宗教的システムを検討した結果、リアリズム的観念論、特に進化論的汎神論という結論に達しました。ケリー博士は、この新しい科学的・哲学的な世界観が、現代文明が直面する深刻な問題を解決する希望となると考えています。

音声対話

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/af6da6d2-80be-414a-90ee-fde89f287cfc/audio

要約書：「意識、科学、そして実在の再構築」

概要

この要約書は、エドワード・ケリー博士へのインタビューに基づいています。ケリー博士は、心理学的現象と変性意識状態を50年以上にわたり研究してきた、バージニア大学知覚研究部門の研究教授です。彼の研究は、現在主流となっている物理主義的な現実の認識に挑戦し、意識が脳活動の副産物ではなく、物質に先行するものであるという「理想主義」の立場を提唱しています。このブリーフィングでは、彼の研究の軌跡、主要な証拠、哲学的結論、そしてこれらの発見が科学と社会に与える潜在的な影響について掘り下げます。

心理学的研究と物理主義への挑戦ケリー博士は、彼の研究人生は、既存の科学的枠組みでは説明できない現象、特に「サイ現象」を調査することから始まったと述べています。

初期の確信: 大学院卒業後、J.B.ライアンの研究室で、統計的に非常に成功率の高い被験者との出会いを通じて、サイ現象の実在性に対する疑念が完全に払拭されました。彼は、「過去150年ほどの間に、事例研究、野外研究、そして数千の実験研究から十分な証拠が蓄積されており、合理的にオープンマインドな人であれば、これらの現象が自然の事実として存在することを確信できる」と述べています (0:08:00)。
物理主義への批判: ケリー博士は、これらの現象は「物理主義」、すなわち「現実は私たちから独立して存在し、究極の微小な物質から構成され、私たちの心や意識はその物質から生成される」という見方に挑戦すると主張します (0:12:48)。彼によると、この物理主義的な見方では、精神的なものが脳のプロセスに還元され、死後の生存は不可能とされます。

物理主義の限界を示す証拠

ケリー博士の研究は、サイ現象に加えて、物理主義では説明が困難な他の多くの現象を特定しています。これらの現象は、彼の著書『Irreducible Mind』にまとめられています。

心身への極限的な影響: 物理主義では説明が難しい現象として、暗示性水疱や聖痕（強烈な信仰心を持つ人が体にキリストの傷を模倣したものを生み出す）、皮膚書字（質問の答えが皮膚の内側に現れる現象）、母性印象（妊娠初期の女性が目撃した負傷が、生まれてくる子供の体に似た印として現れる現象）などが挙げられています (0:21:51)。これらの現象は、心が物質に影響を与えることを示唆しており、心理運動現象（サイコキネシス）の文献とも関連しています。
記憶研究の問題: 記憶に関する既存の研究には、概念的・経験的な問題があり、意識を物理主義的に説明することの困難さを示しています (0:23:58)。
意識研究の復興: 1960年代には「意識」という言葉が科学界でタブー視されていたが、現在では意識研究が再登場し、多くの哲学者が意識の物理主義的説明は不可能であると結論付けていると指摘しています (0:24:38)。
多重人格と解離性同一性障害: 複数の人格が同じ身体に共存し、神経メカニズムを共有し、意識を特異な形で共有する現象は、物理主義では説明が困難であるとされています (0:26:28)。
臨死体験（NDE）と体外離脱体験（OBE）: 特に、深麻酔下や心停止といった極限的な生理学的条件下での臨死体験は重要です。これらの状況下では、脳の活動が著しく低下または停止しているにもかかわらず、人々は人生で最も強力で変容的な体験を報告します (0:27:23)。ケリー博士は、これは医学界の意見変化を促していると見ています。
天才の極限的な形態と神秘体験: これらの現象も、通常の物理的枠組みでは説明が難しいとされています (0:28:49)。ケリー博士は、「神秘体験は、通常隠されている現実の一部への窓として捉えられてきた」東洋の伝統とは異なり、西洋科学が神秘体験を軽視・病理化してきたことを批判し、現実の正確な理解のためには神秘体験へのより良い取り組みが必要だと主張しています (0:30:10)。

意識のフィルターモデルと変性意識状態

ケリー博士は、F.W.H.マイヤーズとウィリアム・ジェームズの人間精神のモデルに賛同しています。

日常意識の限界: マイヤーズとジェームズは、日常意識がより大きく包括的な「潜在意識」の中に完全に埋め込まれており、日常的には利用できない能力にアクセスできると考えていました (0:32:41)。標準的な心理学・神経科学の見方は、日常意識がすべてであり、脳内の無意識の神経生理学的プロセスによって支えられているとしますが、マイヤーズとジェームズは、より大きな能力を持つ「潜在意識」の考えを真剣に受け止めていました。
脳の役割としてのフィルター: ジェームズは、脳が心を生成するのではなく、むしろ「伝達する」または「許容する」装置であるという見方を提唱しました (1:23:02)。オルダス・ハクスリーはこれを「フィルター」や「還元弁」に例え、脳が広大な「大きな心」から、日々の経験に必要な「かすかなしずく」を濾過していると表現しました (1:23:49)。
デフォルトモードネットワーク: サイケデリック（特にシロシビン）の神経画像研究では、体験の強度が、自己やエゴを具現化する「デフォルトモードネットワーク」の活動の低下・脱共役と相関することが示されています (1:25:00)。これは、マイヤーズの「潜在意識は、顕在意識（日常意識）の停止に比例して自己を表現できる」という原則と一致しており、瞑想の伝統とも符合します。
記憶の場所: ケリー博士は、記憶は脳には保存されていないと考えています (1:27:59)。マイヤーズやジェームズと同様に、彼は私たちの経験がどこかに存在し続けると信じており、これはアルフレッド・ノース・ホワイトヘッドのプロセス形而上学における「経験の出来事」の客観的な不滅性と関連付けています。

哲学的・形而上学的結論：「リアリスト・イデアリズム」

ケリー博士と彼の同僚は、物理主義に代わる現実の記述を探求し、彼の二冊目の著書『Beyond Physicalism』で多くの哲学的・科学的システムを検討しました。

リアリスト・イデアリズムへの移行: 彼らは、「最高の意識が第一義的である、実質的には物理主義の形而上学的対極」である「リアリスト・イデアリズム」という結論に達しました (0:41:51)。これは、「進化論的汎神論」としても理解され、最高の意識がすべての存在に遍在しつつも、私たちが見出す世界を超えた何かがあるという考えです (0:42:21)。
ジェームズの進化: ウィリアム・ジェームズは、マイヤーズの心理学的理論に基づいて、潜在意識が死後も存続し、より高次の意識へと向かうという形而上学的見方を発展させました (0:44:37)。
物理学における新しい視点: ケリー博士は、物理学者の小さなグループが、物理主義に内在する哲学的前提、特に「実在は実際に存在するもので尽くされる」という前提に疑問を呈していると述べています (0:52:05)。彼らは、ハイゼンベルクの「可能態（potentiae）」の概念を引用し、「現実性（actuality）」に加えて「可能態の領域」が存在し、それが「私たちの経験する現実や、異常な心理的能力の顕現の根源となるプロセスを見出すことができる」と主張しています (0:52:44)。
科学における形而上学の役割: ケリー博士は、「科学は形而上学から自由であると想像しがちだが、実際には常に認識されているか否かに関わらず、哲学的な前提を伴っている」と強調しています (0:50:11)。彼の見解では、「私たちの仕事は、私たちの科学、経験的な科学と自然に整合する良い形而上学を見つけることである」と述べています (0:54:25)。

死後の生存と個性の存続

ケリー博士は、死後の生存、特に個性の存続の証拠を非常に重視しています。

ベルナルド・カストルプとの相違: ケリー博士は、ベルナルド・カストルプの「死ぬと究極の意識と再結合する」という見方に対して、死後の生存の証拠をより真剣に考慮する必要があると指摘します (0:54:40)。
潜在意識の存続: マイヤーズは、日常的なエゴが組み込まれているより大きな自己である「潜在的自己（subliminal self）」が死後も存続すると考えていました (1:29:21)。これは、輪廻転生型の事例で観察される、特定の記憶や性格特性の引き継ぎと整合します。
霊媒現象の証拠: 霊媒を通して伝えられる情報には、検証可能な事実だけでなく、故人の語彙、言い回し、ユーモアのセンス、特定の共通の出来事に関する詳細な知識など、故人の性格が生き生きと再現される場合があり、これが個性の存続の強力な証拠となることがあります (1:31:06)。

広範な影響と今後の展望

ケリー博士は、彼の研究とその哲学的結論が、科学と社会全体に大きな影響を与える可能性があると考えています。

物理主義の終焉: 彼は、「物理主義のバンカーには大きな亀裂が入っており、それが拡大している」と感じており、科学界がこれらの現象を現実として受け入れるのに時間がかかったことについて、将来の社会学者や歴史家が研究するだろうと述べています (1:34:32)。
行動への影響: 物理主義の普及は、「私たちのエゴイズム、消費主義、地球の略奪、潜在的に致命的な兵器の蓄積」といった文明の深刻な問題の根源であると考えています (0:47:42)。「宇宙の根本的な何かとつながりを感じ、満足のいく精神生活を送るのに役立つ、科学的に説得力のある、改善された現実の認識」を見出すことができれば、現在の危険な状況に良い影響を与える可能性があります (0:47:42)。
生物学におけるパラダイムシフト: 理論生物学においても大きな発展があり、20世紀初頭に優勢だった考え方、すなわち「生物を現実の根底にあるものの最良のモデル」と捉える見方が回帰していると指摘しています (1:01:33)。これは、ネオ・ダーウィニズムの進化論的統合の崩壊によって部分的に促されており、ラマルク主義的な要素が進化論に組み込まれる必要があると考えています。
科学と精神性の和解: 彼は、科学と精神性を調和させる方法を見つけようとしており、「神秘体験は間違いなく何らかのイデアリズムの方向を指し示している」と主張しています (1:16:38)。
若者への助言: 心理学的現象や意識を研究したい若者には、主流の神経科学や意識神経科学の学位を取得し、慎重に進路を選択することを勧めています (1:10:10)。
未来の方向性: 彼の研究分野の今後の課題は、「脳内のどのような条件がこれらの能力の発現を許容するのか」を真剣に研究することだと考えています (0:34:42)。瞑想やサイケデリックを介してこれらの状態を促進する方法を見出すことで、個人と集合の両方において大きな進歩が期待されます。

結論

エドワード・ケリー博士の研究は、主流の科学パラダイムである物理主義に対する包括的な挑戦を提示しています。彼の数十年にわたる心理学的現象の調査は、意識が脳の副産物ではなく、物質に先行する根本的な実体であるという「リアリスト・イデアリズム」の概念へと導かれました。臨死体験、心身への影響、記憶研究、意識の性質に関する経験的証拠は、物理主義的な説明の限界を明確に示しています。

ケリー博士は、科学がその哲学的前提を認識し、これらの「異常な」現象を説明できるような、より広範な現実の認識を受け入れることで、科学と社会がよりポジティブな方向へと進化すると確信しています。

タイムライン：意識、科学、そして実在の再構築

このタイムラインは、エドワード・ケリー博士の数十年にわたる心霊研究、哲学的・科学的見解の進化、および関連する主要な出来事を概説します。

1882年: 英国で心霊現象研究協会が設立される。F.W.H.マイヤーズとウィリアム・ジェームズらが創設に貢献。
1890年: ウィリアム・ジェームズが『心理学原理』を出版。当初は哲学的主題を避ける姿勢を取るが、マイヤーズの批判により形而上学の不可避性を認識するようになる。
1892年: ウィリアム・ジェームズが『心理学概要』を出版し、心霊現象に内在する哲学的前提を認める。
1897年: ウィリアム・ジェームズがハーバード大学でイングソル講義を行い、心と脳の関係における「伝達」または「許可」の概念を提唱する（翌年出版）。
1903年: F.W.H.マイヤーズの主著『人間的人格と死後の生存』が出版される。
1909年: ウィリアム・ジェームズが最後の著書『多元的宇宙』を出版。マイヤーズの心理学モデルと潜在意識の概念を発展させる。
1913年: ジョン・B・ワトソンの「行動主義宣言」が発表され、アメリカ心理学界で行動主義が半世紀にわたり支配的となる。
1960年代: エドワード・ケリーが大学院生の頃、意識は科学界で「汚い言葉」とされ、行動主義の影響が色濃く残る。
1972年1月: エドワード・ケリーがJ.B.ラインの研究機関で心霊研究を始める。
1972年2月頃（ケリーのライン研究所到着から6週間以内）: ヘルムート・シュミットが開発した電子テスト装置を用いて、極めて高い統計的成功を収める超能力者と出会い、ケリーの心霊現象の実在性に対する疑念が完全に払拭される。
1980年代後半～1990年代初頭（約14年間）: エドワード・ケリーが家計を支えるため、心霊研究から離れ、ノースカロライナ大学で体性感覚の神経画像研究など主流の神経科学研究に従事する。
1998年: エドワード・ケリーがエミリーと結婚。夫妻はエサレン研究所の共同創設者マイク・マーフィーが立ち上げた「死後生存の証拠」を調査する新しいフェローシップに招待される。
2003年: エドワード・ケリーがバージニア大学に移籍。彼の妻エミリーは、同大学の知覚研究部門（DOPS）の創設者であるイアン・スティーブンソンと協働していた。
2007年: エドワード・ケリーらが共著した書籍『還元されざる心（Irreducible Mind）』が出版される。この本は、物理主義では説明困難な現象を多数カタログ化し、その反論を提示する。
時期不明（『還元されざる心』出版後、数年間）: ケリーの研究グループが、物理主義に代わる現実の記述を探求するため、様々な哲学・科学システム（量子理論、相対性理論、ヒンドゥー教、新プラトン主義、ライプニッツ、ヘーゲル、パース、ホワイトヘッドなど）を検討する。
時期不明（『還元されざる心』以降）: エドワード・ケリーらが共著した書籍『物理主義を超えて（Beyond Physicalism）』が出版される。この本は、多様な視点から「実在論的観念論」という新たな形而上学的枠組みを提案する。
2012年: イギリスの研究グループによるサイロシビンを用いた機能的磁気共鳴画像法（fMRI）研究が発表される。この研究は、サイケデリック体験の強度がデフォルト・モード・ネットワークの活動低下と脱共役と相関することを示し、マイヤーズの「潜在意識は顕在意識の休止に比例して表現される」という原則と合致するとされる。
2021年: エドワード・ケリーらが共著した書籍『解き放たれた意識（Consciousness Unbound）』が出版される。この本は、初期の2冊のテーマを発展させ、死後生存、予知、輪廻転生型ケース、パンエンテーイズムに関する新たな理論的見解を含む。
現在: エドワード・ケリーは85歳で、4冊目の本の執筆に取り組んでいる。意識研究、進化論、生物学理論、心霊研究など、様々な分野で物理主義的見解からのパラダイムシフトが進行中であると認識している。DOPSの研究は依然として私的に資金提供されているが、科学界の大きな変化が起こりつつあると主張する。

主要関係者

エドワード・ケリー（Dr. Edward Kelly）:

主要な語り手であり、インタビューの対象者。
実験心理学と神経科学のバックグラウンドを持つ研究者。
バージニア大学知覚研究部門（DOPS）の研究教授。
50年以上にわたり心霊現象と変性意識状態を研究している。
『還元されざる心（Irreducible Mind）』、『物理主義を超えて（Beyond Physicalism）』、『解き放たれた意識（Consciousness Unbound）』の共著者。
物理主義に批判的であり、現実を「実在論的観念論」として再構築することを目指している。

J.B.ライン（J.B. Ryan）:

アメリカにおける実験心霊学の主要人物。
デューク大学を離れた後も研究機関を運営していた。
エドワード・ケリーが1972年に彼の研究機関で心霊研究を始めた際の雇い主。

ヘルムート・シュミット（Helmut Schmidt）:

物理学者で、ボーイング社の元研究者。
J.B.ラインの研究機関で研究ディレクターを務めていた。
被験者の超能力をテストするための高度な電子テスト装置を開発した。

エミリー・ケリー（Emily Kelly）:

エドワード・ケリーの妻。
バージニア大学知覚研究部門（DOPS）の創設者イアン・スティーブンソンと共に研究していた。
『還元されざる心』および『解き放たれた意識』の共著者であり、極度の心身影響や体外離脱・臨死体験に関する章を担当した。

イアン・スティーブンソン（Ian Stevenson）:

バージニア大学知覚研究部門（DOPS）の創設者。
特に、子供たちの前世の記憶に関する研究で知られる。2,500以上のケースを収集し、2,200以上がDOPSのデータベースに登録されている。

マイク・マーフィー（Mike Murphy）:

エサレン研究所の共同創設者。
死後生存の証拠を検討するためのフェローシップを設立し、エドワード・ケリー夫妻を招待した。
F.W.H.マイヤーズやウィリアム・ジェームズの伝統を受け継ぐ、ルネサンス的な人物として評されている。

F.W.H.マイヤーズ（F. W. H. Myers）:

1882年に英国で設立された心霊現象研究協会の創設者の一人。
主著は1400ページの『人間的人格と死後の生存（Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death）』。
人間の心理に関する独自の理論を持ち、潜在意識（subliminal consciousness）の概念を発展させ、これが肉体死後も存続すると考えた。

ウィリアム・ジェームズ（William James）:

アメリカの著名な心理学者、哲学者。
F.W.H.マイヤーズの友人であり同僚。
マイヤーズの仕事に大きな影響を受け、自身の形而上学的見解を発展させた。
『心理学原理』、『心理学概要』、『宗教的経験の諸相』、『多元的宇宙』などの著書がある。
脳を、意識を「生成」するのではなく、より大きな意識を「伝達」または「表現」するためのフィルターや還元弁として捉える見解を提唱した。

ベルナルド・カストルップ（Bernardo Kastrup）:

意識に関する物理主義的説明の困難さを論じる現代の哲学者。
「分析的観念論」を提唱しており、エドワード・ケリーとは「死後の生存」に関する見解で一部意見の相違がある。
『解き放たれた意識』に章を寄稿している。

アダム・クラブツリー（Adam Crabtree）:

臨床心理学者、哲学者、歴史家。
『還元されざる心』に、多重人格と解離性同一性障害に関する章を寄稿した。

アラン・グールド（Alan Gould）:

記憶研究に長年従事した人物。
『還元されざる心』に、記憶に関する概念的および経験的問題をまとめた章を寄稿した。
記憶が脳に保存されているという見解に懐疑的。

ジョン・B・ワトソン（John B. Watson）:

1913年の「行動主義宣言」で知られる心理学者。
行動主義の主要な提唱者であり、意識研究を科学的対象から排除した。

B.F.スキナー（B.F. Skinner）:

行動主義の主要な人物の一人。エドワード・ケリーが大学院生の頃、同じ建物（ウィリアム・ジェームズ・ホール）の別の階で研究していた。

ヘンリー・スタップ（Henry Stapp）:

量子理論家。
エサレン・サークルエム・グループのメンバー。
「古典的に構想された物質は存在しない」という見解を持つ。

ブラザー・デイヴィッド・ステンドル＝ラスト（Brother David Stendhal-Rost）:

ベネディクト派の修道士。
「スピリットを語る3つの方法」という引用で登場する。ケリーが個人的に会ったことがある人物。

ティム・イーストマン（Tim Eastman）:

物理学者。
エドワード・ケリーが協働している物理学者の小グループの一員。
物理主義に批判的で、現実には「潜在性（potentiality）」のレベルがあると考えている。

ルース・カストナー（Ruth Kastner）:

物理学者。
エドワード・ケリーが協働している物理学者の小グループの一員。
物理主義に批判的で、現実には「潜在性（potentiality）」のレベルがあると考えている。

バーナード・カー（Bernard Carr）:

宇宙論の視点から研究を行う人物。
エドワード・ケリーが協働している物理学者の小グループの一員。
物理主義に批判的で、現実には「潜在性（potentiality）」のレベルがあると考えている。

ヴェルナー・ハイゼンベルク（Heisenberg）:

量子物理学者。
「潜在性（potentiae）」に関する彼の見解が、現在の物理学者たちの議論の源流の一つとなっている。

ハロルド・オットマン＝シュパッヒャー（Harold Ottmann-Spacher）:

『物理主義を超えて』でカール・ユージングとパウリの対話に関する章を担当した人物。

オーロビンド（Aurobindo）:

インドの哲学者、ヨギ、グル。
タントラ的なヒンドゥー教の一形態を発展させ、ホワイトヘッドのプロセス形而上学と関連付けられることがある。

エリック・ワイス（Eric Weiss）:

『物理主義を超えて』でオーロビンドに関する章を担当した著者。

ライプニッツ（Leibniz）:

ドイツの哲学者。
『物理主義を超えて』で彼の西洋哲学システムが検討された。

ヘーゲル（Hegel）:

ドイツの哲学者。
『物理主義を超えて』で彼の西洋哲学システムが検討された。

チャールズ・サンダース・パース（Charles Sanders Peirce）:

アメリカの哲学者、論理学者、数学者。
『物理主義を超えて』で彼の西洋哲学システムが検討された。

アルフレッド・ノース・ホワイトヘッド（Alfred North Whitehead）:

イギリスの数学者、哲学者。
「プロセス形而上学」を提唱し、その基本要素である「経験の機会（occasions of experience）」は客観的に不死であると考える。

グスタフ・フェヒナー（Gustav Fechner）:

ドイツの実験心理学者、哲学者。
ウィリアム・ジェームズの思想に影響を与えた人物の一人。

アンリ・ベルクソン（Henri Bergson）:

フランスの哲学者。
ウィリアム・ジェームズの思想に影響を与えた人物の一人。
脳の主要な機能は感覚運動インターフェースとして機能し、環境に関する情報を収集し、それに基づいて行動することであるという見解を持つ。

F.C.S.シラー（F.C.S. Schiller）:

オックスフォード大学の形而上学者。
ウィリアム・ジェームズの思想に影響を与えた人物の一人。

ローデリック・メイン（Roderick Mayne）:

ユングの研究者。
『解き放たれた意識』に、ユングの晩年の思想的変容に関する章を寄稿した。ユングが自身の臨死体験を経て、パンエンテーイズムの方向へ強く傾倒していったことを示す。

フェデリコ・ファッジン（Federico Faggin）:

物理学者。
『解き放たれた意識』に章を寄稿しており、ケリーは彼の見解がマイヤーズとジェームズの視点と非常によく合致すると感じている。
意識は遍在し、全能であり、還元不可能で根源的であると主張する。

エベン・アレクサンダー（Eben Alexander）:

脳神経外科医。
『プルーフ・オブ・ヘブン（Proof of Heaven）』の著者。
自身の臨死体験を綴ったベストセラーで、『還元されざる心』を推奨したことで、同書の売り上げに貢献した。

ジョン・クリーズ（John Cleese）:

イギリスのコメディアン、俳優。
エドワード・ケリーらの書籍『還元されざる心』を学術界に配布する活動を資金的に援助した。

トマス・ネーゲル（Thomas Nagel）:

アメリカの哲学者。
『心と宇宙（Mind and Cosmos）』の著者。
物理主義では心のすべての特性と意識を説明できないと主張し、ケリーらの研究に間接的に影響を受けた可能性があるとされる。

オルダス・ハクスリー（Aldous Huxley）:

イギリスの作家。
脳を「フィルター」または「還元弁」として表現し、より大きな「集合意識（mind at large）」が脳を介して表現されるというメタファーを最初に用いた一人。

デニス・ノーブル（Dennis Noble）:

理論生物学者。
ネオダーウィン主義的進化論の限界と、ラマルク主義的要素の必要性を提唱している。
生物の認知的・行動的選択が進化に貢献するという見解を持つ。

ジェリー・コイン（Jerry Coyne）:

進化論の正統派の擁護者の一人。
異なる見解を抑圧しようとしていると批判されている。

リチャード・ドーキンス（Richard Dawkins）:

進化論の正統派の擁護者の一人。
異なる見解を抑圧しようとしていると批判されている。

文字起こし

(transcript 1of2)

（以下はインタビューの文字起こしです。長いので 2分割してあります。以下はその前半部分です。）

Welcome to Essentia Foundation channel. (0:01:38)

Thank you for watching. Today I will be speaking with Dr. Edward Kelly about his psychical research, his philosophical and scientific views. Hello Ed. Welcome and thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. Thanks for having me. You've been researching psychical phenomena and altered states of consciousness for over 20 years. Your background is in experimental psychology and neuroscience and you are a research professor in the division of perceptual studies at the University of Virginia. So I wanted to ask you what has your lifelong research shown? Is consciousness a byproduct of brain activity or the mind is primary to matter? And is there reliable evidence that led you to your conclusions? Wow, that's a whopper. (0:02:31)

Yeah, maybe I should kind of sketch the history of this a little bit. I started in psychical research right out of graduate school, basically. I did a postdoc and during that time, late in graduate school, I had become interested in experimental parapsychology. It turned out that my older sister, my only sibling, had developed mediumistic abilities and my mother had been nervous about that and inquired with me since I was a graduate student in psychology. So I went to the library. (0:03:09)

I knew nothing about the subject, discovered for the first time that there's this whole body of experimental research using the same kinds of methods that we were being taught to study garden variety things, using those methods to study things that seem to be impossible if the prevailing picture of reality, science-based picture of reality, were correct. So I was intrigued by that. (0:03:42)

I began corresponding with J.B. Ryan down in Durham, North Carolina. He had a little research institute. He had left Duke University at that point, but this was still kind of the, certainly the American center of experimental parapsychology. (0:03:55)

And so after moving down to North Carolina and writing a book based on my dissertation, I went to work for him in January of 1972. And at that time, I'd have to say I was pretty convinced already that these phenomena must be real. I'd read enough of the literature during my supposed postdoc to be pretty persuaded. It really looked as though the phenomena must be real. (0:04:27)

But then I had, within six weeks of arriving at Ryan's place, I met a guy who was certainly one of the best subjects ever to appear in a parapsychology laboratory. This guy could do pretty much anything we asked him to do, often to extreme levels of statistical success. And he essentially erased any residual doubts I had about the reality of the phenomena. I mean, the very first day he arrived at the lab, we had at the time, our director of research was Helmut Schmidt. He was a former, he's a physicist, former researcher at Boeing in Seattle, had recently taken over as director of research for Ryan. During the time he was at Boeing, he had constructed an electronic test device. (0:05:27)

This was a box that had four big colored buttons and four correspondingly colored lights. And the subject's task is, of course, to guess which one the machine will pick as the target. And the way it did that was extremely sophisticated. It had a four position switch that's going around and around at a very high rate. And after the subject pushed the button corresponding to his guess, the circuitry would change such that when a decay particle arrived from a piece of strontium inside the machine, it would interrupt the stepping of that switch and pick the target. (0:06:03)

And in the absence of a subject, this thing always exemplified the expected chance behavior. Now, Helmut had spent a couple of years looking for people who could do better than that, 25%. And he had found a couple of people who could reliably score either a little bit above or a little bit below chance, a couple of percent. Anyway, this fellow comes into our library. (0:06:31)

He sees the machine sitting there on the table and says, what's that? And Helmut explained it to him. Anyway, and so he then began to tell us his life story. And every so often, he'd reach out and push a button. And it quickly became apparent that he was doing way better than 25%. And I could see Helmut's eyes kind of getting bigger and bigger. (0:06:55)

And by the end of the hour, he had 180 hits in 508 trials, which is a bit over 35% where 25% is expected. And when you do the math on that, it turns out that something that good or better would happen by chance like one in a million times or something of that sort. So we might have sat there for a million such hours before seeing something like that happen by chance. (0:07:22)

And that was really just the beginning with this guy. I've seen him score at rates close to 50% for hundreds of trials. He also turned out to be able to guess playing cards at about three times chance expectation for thousands of trials. That sort of thing. Far beyond what you could expect to happen by chance. Very far beyond. Period. I mean, and in multiple experimental contexts. (0:07:52)

Yeah, let me just say in general, I mean, I have no idea who we're talking to here or what they might know about parapsychology. But I would say simply, to summarize that whole dimension of the subject, that in the past 150 or so years, enough evidence has accumulated from case and field studies, plus a couple of thousand experimental studies, to convince any reasonably open-minded person who takes the trouble to study it, that these phenomena exist as facts of nature, period, and that our science will have to expand in some way that permits it to accommodate them. And I think you can take that to the bank. (0:08:37)

It's a very big literature. It's not a simple thing to learn about it. But there are plenty of good summaries out there. Lots of popular and scientific books. Anyway, that was what started me on this path. And I think like most people coming to the subject from the scientific side, I really hoped at the beginning that some little adjustment somewhere in our scientific scheme of things would make all these problems go away and, you know, enable our system to be healed, so to speak. (0:09:27)

But as time has gone by, I've become more and more convinced that there really is no simple fix, and that what this will ultimately force is a massive overhaul in our science-based picture of reality. (0:09:45)

It's taken me a long time to get there. And by the way, I've been at this for over 50 years, not 20 years. I started in 1972 with Ryan. I had a long digression in the middle of my career. I had two children at the time, had to feed them, wasn't making any money in parapsychology, so I had to go back into mainstream-type research. (0:10:10)

And I did that at the University of North Carolina doing neuroimaging studies of somatosensation in humans. These are tactile stimuli, especially vibrations applied to fingers and things like that. We had a large neuroscience group there, and I worked at that for about 14 years in the middle of my career. Then came back to, well, moved to Virginia, where I am now, came here in 2003. And that was because I had remarried a woman who was working with Ian Stevenson, who was the founder of our division. (0:10:47)

Ian, you probably know, is best known for his development of a new line of research related to the possibility of postmortem survival. That is, cases involving small children who begin speaking or acting as though they're experiencing something from a previous life that happened recently enough that you can actually go check, see whether they really do know things they would have no normal way of knowing. (0:11:29)

And Ian eventually and his colleagues found something over 2,500 such cases, of which about 2,200 are now entered into a big database at our division, DOPS, Division of Perceptual Studies. I want to hear your conclusion from the whole experience that you've had. Are you, at some point, convinced that consciousness is not a byproduct of brain activity? Or are you still doubting that? Or are you saying, with 100% certainty, in my experience as a researcher, you know, for over 30 years, you say you're doing this research, mind is primary to matter. (0:12:12)

What is your conclusion? Well, I'm definitely in the idealist camp at this point. I became convinced. Let me go back just a step here. The picture of the world that is challenged by the existence of these paranormal or psi phenomena, that I was studying experimentally way back at the beginning, is what's generally known as physicalism. It's a kind of austere, modern descendant of the materialism of previous centuries. (0:12:48)

And it says it's the kind of stuff that we all learned growing up in school, that reality exists independent of us. Space and time have been there from the beginning as a kind of container in which things can happen. Reality consists at bottom of some kind of ultimate tiny stuff, self-existent, unconscious, no sentience of any kind, moving around in accordance with mathematical laws under the influence of fields of force. (0:13:26)

And everything else that exists, including our minds and consciousness, is built somehow from that ultimate stuff, whatever it is. And it's changed, of course, over the centuries. So everything in mind and consciousness is manufactured by neurophysiological processes in our brains. We're nothing but immensely complicated biological machines. When the machinery dies, consciousness, personality are necessarily extinguished. They can't be anything like post-mortem survival, period. (0:14:02)

That's the basic physicalist picture. Psi phenomena are one of the things that challenge it, but hardly the only things. And this is where I made my turn toward the theory side. This happened actually in 1998. By that time, I had married Emily, my wife, who was working with Ian Stevenson and moved to Charlottesville actually in 2003. But in 1998, the year that Emily and I were married, we were also invited by Mike Murphy, the co-founder of Esalen Institute, to participate in a new fellowship that Mike was creating specifically to look at the evidence for post-mortem survival. (0:14:58)

Now I should say a little bit about Mike Murphy. He's a really extraordinary character, a Renaissance man, right in the lineage of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 in England. I mean, he had read the masterwork of F. W. H. Myers, one of the founders, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, a 1400-page, two-volume treatise in which Myers put together all the evidence that he and his colleagues had been able to assemble up to that point, and to advance a theory of human personality that is quite different from the kind of thing we have now. (0:15:48)

And among his colleagues was William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. (0:15:56)

They were friends and colleagues. James greatly admired Myers' work, wasn't entirely convinced by it early on, but ultimately advanced his own metaphysical picture that built upon Myers' work. Now, before I get to that, let me say a little bit more about this fellowship that we created at Esalen. As I mentioned, the original intent was simply to look at evidence for survival, and to that end, Mike had brought together about 20 people from across the planet that he knew were actually working in this area. (0:16:52)

Mike was perfectly well aware that if the prevailing picture is correct, there can't be any survival. And he also knew that here were these people here and there who apparently producing evidence supporting the idea. So he wanted to hear about all that in his typical way, and he organized this fellowship. So the setup was that we would go to Esalen for a week each year, as it turned out, and it went on much longer than originally expected. (0:17:18)

And Esalen is kind of perched on a cliff over the Pacific Ocean. It's a fantastically beautiful place, one of Mike's many accomplishments creating that place. Yeah, amazing guy. Anyway, so we did that for the first two years. We mainly presented and discussed various kinds of evidence for survival. And at the end of that second meeting, it had become clear that while we had some somewhat differing views about survival itself, some convinced, others not, we were all completely convinced that physicalism, the prevailing picture, I mean, this is the received wisdom of opinion elites all over the planet, including main central parts of the American, certainly scientific establishment, non-physicists mainly. (0:18:12)

So we were convinced that physicalism has to go, and we decided that we would assault it in a two-stage process. In the first stage, we wanted to put together a whole bunch of empirical evidence against or for things that physicalism could not explain. Well, let me go back one step further even. I mean, the philosophical context here, the mind-brain relation, everybody agrees that normally physical things and mental things go together pretty well. (0:18:58)

And furthermore, we can be absolutely sure that there is physical to mental causation. I mean, if you get hit in the head hard enough, or drink too much, or ingest a psychedelic, or grow an invasive brain tumor, or something of that sort, mental things will change. We know that for absolute certain. So there is physical to mental causation. (0:19:23)

But what about causation in the other direction? Let's say I'm listening to a lecture by a physicalist, and I'm getting irritated and want to ask a question. So I raise my hand. Isn't that mental to physical causation? It certainly seems so, naively. Well, no, says the physicalist. You see, you just misunderstood the causality here, because that idea and that urge to ask a question, those things are all just physical processes in your brain. Physical causes physical, no problem. (0:19:54)

The mental stuff is just kind of there along for the ride. Now, that kind of argument is extremely difficult to refute in normal, everyday kinds of contexts. And the trick is, and this is what Myers was trying to do so long ago, is to find things that unaided brains cannot accomplish, that resist or defy explanation in conventional physical terms. (0:20:20)

So top of any such list, of course, is all the side phenomena. That's what makes them so objectionable to lots of mainstream scientists, especially those for whom physicalism is a kind of secular religion. For people like that to even suggest anything different is to commit heresy and invite excommunication, if not crucifixion. It's really quite astonishing how emotional some people can get about these matters. (0:20:54)

Anyway, lots of psychologists and neuroscientists would like to think that, well, okay, this parapsychology stuff, yeah, it's a problem, but there are lots of questions about it. Maybe we can just kind of put it off in the corner somewhere, ignore it, and go on about our business. But in fact, there are lots of other things that are difficult to explain in conventional physical terms. (0:21:24)

And so we sought to revisit those, a number of which Myers had worked on 100 plus years ago, but to revisit them in light of the subsequent century plus of refereed biomedical research in the main. And so we did that. So we have chapters on things. We wrote a book eventually. First book was called Irreducible Mind, in which we collected a lot of this stuff. (0:21:51)

Emily's got a great chapter in that book on extreme psychophysical influence, starting in a very Myers-like way from easy stuff, where the physicalism still sounds pretty plausible, but moving progressively toward things that are less and less open to that kind of approach. Things like, for example, hypnotic blisters or stigmata, in which devout Christians with vivid imaginations can produce upon their own bodies imitations of the wounds that they believed Christ suffered during the crucifixion. (0:22:28)

There was another phenomenon studied by two eminent French physiologists called skin writing, in which answers to questions would appear in the person's skin, inside the skin, not on the skin. And sometimes the questions were only being asked in the next room, not directly to the subject. It was a woman who had this very unusual ability. There are things like maternal impressions, in which a woman early in pregnancy, in particular, first trimester, sees some ghastly physical injury, and the resulting infant bears a copy or resemblance in its organism to what the woman had witnessed. (0:23:24)

Here, it's actually an effect on another person's body, not your own body. So at that point, it connects with all the literature about psychokinesis or mind over matter in the world of experimental parapsychology. Let's see, then we had a chapter on memory by Alan Gould, a guy who spent a good part of his lifetime studying that subject in relation to the apparent memories of past lives and and mediumistic communications, things of that sort. (0:23:58)

And Alan summarized a variety of conceptual and empirical problems in existing memory research. The arguments he presents in that chapter overlap a good deal with arguments that have appeared more recently, including arguments by people like Bernardo Kostrup about the difficulties of explaining consciousness in physicalist terms. And in fact, let me say parenthetically here that one of the really important things that's happened in the last few decades is the reappearance of consciousness research. (0:24:38)

You know, when I was a graduate student in the 60s, consciousness was a dirty word, but we were still suffering the after effects of behaviorism. In fact, B.F. Skinner and company were on another floor of the same building that I worked in as a graduate student, William James Hall. Anyway, yeah, consciousness was not a word spoken in polite scientific company during that period of time. Are you serious, Ed? Was it really that bad? It was that bad. (0:25:08)

In fact, let me just mention here that if there's anybody out there who has never seen John B. Watson's Behaviorist Manifesto of 1913, it's really worth looking at. It is so bizarre that it's hard to believe that anybody took it seriously at the time. (0:25:27)

And yet, behaviorism ruled the roost in American psychology for at least half a century. It was just beginning to break down at the time I started graduate school. But that's all changed. And I mean, consciousness itself is one of the things that physicalism has great difficulty with. And a lot of philosophers have come to the conclusion at this point that we will never have a physicalist explanation of consciousness. (0:26:01)

And that's been a great boon. I mean, we used to be like, parapsychology people used to be like a little rowboat trying to steer the Titanic and not having very much success. But now at least there are other rowboats, some quite a bit bigger than ours in the same territory, pushing in the same, pulling in the same direction. So we're in better shape now. (0:26:28)

Anyway, let me get back to our developing book. One other, well, two heavily empirical chapters, one was on multiple personality and dissociative identity disorder, secondary centers of consciousness and psychological automatisms. That was by Adam Crabtree, who's a clinical psychologist and philosopher and historian, spent a lot of time in that world. (0:26:56)

And there you have the challenge of explaining how what appears to be multiple personalities can occupy the same organism, sometimes concurrently rather than successively, and sharing neural mechanisms somehow. And sharing consciousness in peculiar ways, where a secondary personality may be a lot more capable than the primary personality and know a lot about what goes on in the primary personality, but not vice versa. (0:27:23)

Then there was another chapter. Emily was again the lead about things like out-of-body and near-death experiences. And let me mention here that there's one class in particular of near-death experiences that I think is of particular importance, and that may, I think, is actually driving changes of opinion within the world of biomedical science. And these are near-death experiences occurring under extreme physiological conditions, such as deep general anesthesia and or cardiac arrest. (0:28:03)

The reason why that's important is that in these conditions, the brain conditions that most neuroscientists believe are necessary for conscious experience are severely degraded or abolished altogether. And yet people report not only experiences of any old kind, but the most powerful, impactful, transformative experiences of their entire lives. They're essentially mystical experiences occurring under suboptimal conditions where you almost have to die in order to have the experience. (0:28:49)

There's a long story to be told about those and the attempts made by physicalists to escape the force of those experiences. But that argument, I think, has held together since we first wrote it down in 2007. We also have chapters on things like extreme forms of genius and mystical experiences themselves. And these are both topics that have been fairly poorly handled by psychology and neuroscience. (0:29:22)

That's true even of creativity, which you might think would be kind of central to an interesting psychological science. But it's even more true of mystical experience. I think one of the main things I've learned in the course of working on these books, and there are more that I'll tell you about in a moment, is that it's really an embarrassment the way our academia and science has dealt with mystical experience so far. That is, they're, for the most part, ignored entirely. (0:30:01)

And even when people pay attention to them, it's usually to marginalize and pathologize them. (0:30:10)

Unlike, in particular, say, Eastern traditions, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, that have taken mystical experiences as windows into normally hidden parts of reality, I think we are going to have to do a lot better in terms of our philosophical and scientific dealings with mystical experience in order to get a correct picture of reality. So that was our first book, Irreducible Mind. There's also a chapter in which I attempt to evaluate Myers's psychological model, which I'll say a bit more about in a moment, and then also sketched out a range of possibilities for an expanded scientific picture that would allow us to explain the kinds of phenomena that we had cataloged in the book. (0:31:13)

Now, there are two aspects to what come out of Irreducible Mind, two things I think we accomplished. One is to add an empirical dimension to the ongoing critiques of physicalism. And it, as I indicated, kind of coheres nicely with the modern revolution in thinking about consciousness, driven mainly by philosophers originally, but now gradually penetrating neuroscience and psychology. (0:31:54)

Now, I think our work has also gone a long way toward supporting the kind of model that Myers and James had of the human psyche, which is very different from what's on offer now. It's related to models that include a dynamic unconscious, such as those of Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts, but with one huge difference. That is, all of these things recognize that there's a part of the psyche that's inaccessible, usually, to the everyday consciousness, and in that sense, unconscious. (0:32:41)

In Freud and Jung, it is literally unconscious, that other dimension of the psyche. For Myers and James, it's quite different. They picture the everyday consciousness as being wholly embedded within a larger, more comprehensive consciousness, having access to what Myers termed adits and operations, that is, capacities of one or another sort, exceeding those normally available to the everyday consciousness. (0:33:17)

You know, the standard psychology neuroscience picture is that everyday consciousness is all the consciousness there is, supported by unconscious neurophysiological stuff going on in the brain. But Myers and James both took very seriously this idea of a subliminal consciousness of greater capacity than the everyday. And, well, James was the one who really explicitly formulated the logic of the situation, saying that most people take these correlations between mind and brain as proof of the standard conception. (0:33:59)

But that correlation can be interpreted in a different way, namely that conditions in the brain permit the expression of these higher capacities that are normally inaccessible to us. That is, the higher consciousness can express itself through the brain under conditions that we certainly don't know much about right now, but we certainly have the means to learn a great deal more about, especially now that we're beginning to have experimental access to those conditions through things, for example, such as meditation and psychedelics. (0:34:42)

So I think that a big part of the future agenda of my field will be to begin seriously studying this issue of what conditions in the brain permit the expression of these capacities. And if we could do that, you know, among other things, we could hope to find ways of encouraging the production of these states in more people. (0:35:02)

I think it potentially is a tremendous step forward, both individually and collectively, to make these kinds of experiences more accessible to more people. For example, one of the things that's become clear about near-death experiences, and which has been clear for a long time about mystical experiences in general, is that those who have them, whether they have them through some kind of deliberate practice or just, you know, blunder into some condition that allows them to happen—near-death experiences being the sort of extreme case of that sort—is that they tend to become better people, less egoistic, less selfish, less preoccupied with, you know, money and status and all that, more communally oriented. (0:35:57)

And lots of people have argued that, wow, if more people could be like that, you know, our whole civilization would probably be a whole lot better off. So that's where it's headed, I think, in terms of future science. And if I were a young person just getting started, that is certainly where I would go, probably to psychedelic neuroimaging research, and meditation neuroimaging, and maybe other things that kind of push in the same direction. (0:36:20)

But now there's also, I mean, this kind of a psychological picture lends itself to alliance with very different philosophical metaphysical ideas than the classical physicalist picture. So the phenomena you mentioned, there is a huge range of it, right? So it's where you see that it appears that the mind influences the body. So the mind is actually primary to matter in this case. (0:37:02)

But have you explored a traditional explanation, traditional, yeah, root causes for such phenomena like skin writing, or multiple personality disorder, and so forth? Isn't there a sort of traditional mainstream explanation that is plausible in your view? There are attempted explanations for many of these things, but I think they fail. And actually, the chapters of our book, Irreducible Mind, explain why we think they fail. (0:37:36)

Those are big subjects, each one of them. But that's the general answer. I mean, the phenomena that we cataloged in our book were chosen specifically because they resist, or in some cases, defy explanation in conventional terms. (0:37:49)

So you're saying that you have a, well, proof maybe, I don't know if it's a good word, sufficient evidence you collected in your lifetime of research to at least say that the explanations, the mainstream science explanations, are not plausible, right? That's what you're saying. Correct, yeah. Now, let me say that that was really the easy part. I mean, that was a huge clerical job, putting Irreducible Mind together. (0:38:26)

But now comes the much harder problem, the conceptual one. Okay, if physicalism is not up to the job, what sort of alternative description of reality would make room for the phenomena that we cataloged in that book? How is reality actually constituted different from the conventional picture? What is it about that that permits these things to occur? So to approach that, we again kind of stumbled around for a couple of years trying to figure out what to do. (0:39:00)

And we then set upon a plan which was basically to look at a number of systems, old and new, that take the existence of the phenomena that we cataloged in Irreducible Mind seriously and attempt to provide some kind of explanation for at least some of them. And of course, we were dependent in pursuing this on the expertise that we happen to have in our group, which by the way, has consisted of something like 50 people over the last 20-odd years, people coming and going for various reasons. (0:39:44)

But we then created a second book, Beyond Physicalism, which mainly consisted of chapters presenting and discussing these other or general points of view. Some came from physics, some from quantum theory, some from one from relativity and string theory, and one via Harold Ottmann-Spacher from Carl Ewing and his dialogue with Pauli. We also looked at mystically inspired religious philosophies, in particular a couple of versions of Hinduism and Neoplatonism, and modern expression in Orobindo, a kind of tantric form of Hinduism, which connects, according to the author of that chapter, Eric Weiss, very nicely with Whitehead's process metaphysics. (0:40:47)

And we also looked at several Western philosophical systems, those of Leibniz and eventually Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Whitehead. And toward the end of that book, Beyond Physicalism, Michael Murphy and I, in our different ways, attempted to kind of see what is the central tendency of all these systems? What do they have in common? What kind of a picture do they tend toward, as opposed to the one that currently dominates expert opinion in most of science and society? And what we came to was essentially a realist idealism, that is essentially the metaphysical opposite of physicalism, in which some kind of highest consciousness is primary. (0:41:51)

Everything else has to come from that somehow, instead of this minute physical stuff. I'm certainly not going to claim that we have a finished theory of that sort, but I think we have a strong sense of direction that it's out there somewhere that the right answer, or a much closer to right answer, can be found. And we're continuing to pursue that. (0:42:21)

But from a kind of natural theology point of view, it goes under the heading of evolutionary panentheism. This panentheism tries to split the difference between traditional theisms, you know, with a kind of all-powerful being who creates everything and lets it run on, may or may not intervene in various ways, and pantheisms in which the ultimate reality is identified with everything that exists in actuality. (0:42:56)

Panentheism splits the difference in the sense that the highest consciousness, whatever it is, is present in everything, and yet there's something left over from what we find around us, here we find ourselves in this world as seemingly independent beings who generally experience the same stuff around us, we can agree about what's there. The trick will be to find a system that, in some detail, allows us to explain how both we and it can come out of this ultimate consciousness, whatever it is. (0:43:46)

William James, and I trace this in the last part of chapter 14 of Beyond Physicalism, William James built explicitly on the psychological theory of Myers, which he held to be empirically justified. But he was also in league with people like Gustav Fechner, and Henri Bergson, and F.C.S. Schiller, another metaphysician at Oxford at the time. James imagined—oh, and let me just say, too, that James kind of previewed where he was headed in Varieties of Religious Experience, which is probably still the best-selling book in the history of psychology. (0:44:37)

And he says multiple times in that book, explicitly, that he is building on the work of F.W.H. Myers, using Myers's psychological model to explain various kinds of religious phenomena. And at the end, he hints at the direction he is going to take this, which is more fully worked out in his last book, A Pluralistic Universe, published in 1909, the year before he died, in which he takes Myers's model with this subliminal consciousness—and by the way, that's the part of the psyche that Myers imagined surviving bodily death. (0:45:13)

He imagines it having a higher environment of its own, possibly several levels of higher integration, leading toward some highest consciousness, which is not quite, however, the absolute of the British idealists of the late 19th, early 20th century. And all this is kind of traced in some detail in that chapter in Beyond Physicalism. So it's in that direction that I've gone. (0:45:51)

We have another book I should mention, Consciousness Unbound, published in 2021, which continues the themes of the first two books. There are empirical chapters, for example, state-of-the-science summaries of things like near-death experiences, precognition, which is theoretically crucial, and cases of the reincarnation type, and then a bunch more theoretical positions that fall into the same general category. A chapter on the late transformation of Jung, for example, by Roderick Mayne, Jung's scholar, who shows clearly that Jung himself, following a near-death experience of his own connection with a heart attack, was moving very strongly in the panentheism direction. (0:46:37)

Then we had chapters by Bernardo Kastrup on his analytic idealism, one by Federico Faggin, which I personally find particularly congenial, mainly because it lines up very well with the Myers-James picture of things. (0:46:56)

And a couple others. And then for the first time, we began at least beginning to look at how ascendance of a picture of this general sort might have positive impacts on both academia and society as a whole. I mean, I think something that we share deeply with Bernardo and a lot of other people is the sense that the prevalence of physicalism and the kinds of behaviors that it encourages is the source of a lot of our gigantic and potentially lethal problems as a civilization. (0:47:42)

Our egoism, our consumerism, our plundering of the planet, our loading ourselves with potentially lethal weapons, all that kind of stuff, I think all has deep roots in the kind of worldview that has dominated until right about now. And that if we can find a scientifically compelling, improved picture of reality that helps people to feel connected with something fundamental in the universe, you know, have a spiritual life of some satisfying kind, that could be a very good, positive contribution to the very dangerous situation that we find ourselves in. (0:48:35)

Anyway, I'm sorry to kind of go off on that tangent, but it is an important part of the current situation. And I think the kinds of theoretical contributions that people like Bernardo and Federico and we are attempting to make could feed into that situation in a positive way. I think it's an important point. (0:49:01)

But I wanted to ask you, does metaphysics play a role in science in your view? And should it play a role in science? Because on one hand, you could say it's useful, metaphysics, because it's an underlying explanatory model of reality that drives essentially the research questions. Now, the opposite view is metaphysics or philosophy is redundant, and science as objective discipline should stay away from philosophy altogether. (0:49:27)

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What is your view? Yeah, well, of course, there are lots of disagreements about these kinds of big subjects. But in my view, and I know it's shared by a number of members of our group, including a number of physicists, by the way, science has tended to imagine itself free of metaphysics, when in fact, it invariably comes together with either recognized or unrecognized presuppositions of a philosophical sort. (0:50:11)

This actually was a subject of conversation between Myers and James at an early date. The reason being that William James, in The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, took the view that he was avoiding all philosophical subjects and talking only about psychological matters. Myers chastised him on that score, saying metaphysics is inescapable. And in fact, in the context of Principles of Psychology, there are built-in philosophical assumptions about what's real. (0:51:00)

James was convinced by Myers's arguments, and in the briefer course, which he published like two years later, he acknowledges that, said, you know, the pursuit—psychology has only the hope of a science at present. It's filled with philosophical presuppositions that leak in at every joint. So he was clear about that at that point, and of course, his own development then proceeded in a more philosophical direction after 1890. Similarly, I'm now working with a small group of physicists who are united in, number one, taking the phenomena that we study at DOPS seriously and wanting to make a place for them in their picture of reality. (0:52:05)

Two, share this view that the prevailing picture comes with a load of philosophical stuff built in, the philosophy of physicalism, basically, which includes a presupposition that the real is exhausted by what is actual, that is, what we find around us. Their view, and they're a minority in the foundations of physics community, but, you know, these are serious people. I'm talking about people like Tim Eastman, Ruth Kastner, Bernard Carr, who comes at it from the kind of cosmology side. (0:52:44)

Hold the view, shared view, that in addition to actuality, what we find around us, there is a level of potentiality normally hidden. A lot of this comes through Heisenberg and his view about potentiae. There's a realm of potentiae, potentiality, that they want to raise to ontological parity with the actual. The actual and the potential together constitute reality. (0:53:26)

And it's in that realm of potentiae that they think we will be able to find the processes that give rise to reality as we experience it, and to the manifestation of these various unusual psychological abilities, mystical experience, genius, psi phenomena, that we've been studying at DOPS, and that are, of course, being studied at lots of other places in the world. (0:53:57)

So, that was a kind of a long-winded answer, but I hope I got to your question eventually. I think you have a third option. I gave you two. You gave me the third one, which is metaphysics is part of science's underlying assumption already, whether you agree, like, or recognize it, right? That's what you're saying. Yes, we will have metaphysics, whether we know it or not. (0:54:25)

And our job is to find a good metaphysics that aligns itself naturally with our science, the empirical side of science. And that's what we're trying to do, and I think what Bernardo's trying to do also. Now, I should say, Bernardo and I do have one big disagreement. (0:54:40)

His view of survival is quite different from mine. He is not so interested in survival and the evidence for survival. He tends to think, I think for essentially aesthetic reasons, based upon his analytic idealism, that what happens when we die is we slip into the shining sea and all that, become reunited with the ultimate consciousness. But, and I fault Bernardo, I've complained to him about it when he was writing his chapter, that he needs to take the evidence for survival more seriously, and that it can be perfectly well accommodated within his own view. (0:55:24)

I mean, if the absolute consciousness can sort of differentiate itself into all of us, there can certainly be other levels of differentiation, including a Myers-James-like higher self, maybe several stages of higher selves associated with each of us, one of which, or one or more of which, might support some kind of a survival conception. So I think where we will ultimately end up is somewhere in between where we are and where Bernardo is on the subject of survival. (0:55:53)

I would like to say one more thing about idealism. Now, for me, at the beginning of my career, idealism was a joke, basically. It was, you know, a crazy idea that some people had had somewhere in the distant past, but no informed scientist could possibly take it seriously at this stage of civilization's development. Well, of course, I've changed radically on that front, and I am now a subscriber to some as yet ill-defined form of idealism. (0:56:32)

We aspire to make it into a full-fledged realist idealism, but haven't gotten there. But something you often encounter from other scientists in particular, and some philosophers as well, is what's sometimes called the inverse hard problem. That is, a physicalist might well say, okay, we're having a hard time explaining consciousness. It's true, but we will eventually, you can be sure. That's the promissory materialism business. (0:57:08)

But look, you idealists, you've got exactly the opposite problem. How do you explain matter from consciousness? And for a long time, I took that argument very seriously. But sometimes, just a few years ago, I was really in the course of working on consciousness unbound. It suddenly occurred to me that the explanatory challenges to physicalism and idealism are not exactly on par. (0:57:44)

And why is that? Well, we know that we are conscious. There is absolutely no doubt that consciousness exists. We all have it. So, the hard problem for physicalism is a real problem. Now, what's the problem for the idealist? It is not, I submit, to explain matter as matter has traditionally been conceived. Matter, as traditionally conceived, is something we dreamed up to help us explain certain regularities in our experience. (0:58:24)

And what the idealist has to explain is those realities in a different way, not matter as classically conceived. Is that intelligible? I've tried saying this in different ways and different times and still haven't got it quite right, but I think that argument is basically sound. Yeah, I could dive into what is matter. (0:58:45)

And then we have a different discussion, wouldn't we? Does matter really exist as we understand it, as materialists understand matter, as this table on the chair I'm sitting on? I was encouraged in this direction, by the way, by Henry Stapp, quantum theorist, who was a member of our ESSELEN CIRCEM group, and who said repeatedly at our meetings, matter as classically conceived does not exist, from his point of view as a major figure in quantum theory. (0:59:31)

Yeah, and Bernardo says it's just a dissociation, a form of dissociation, which we experience with our senses as matter, of course. I have to say that, you know, I mean, I'm just, I'm really just a poor empirical psychologist and neuroscientist accustomed to working down in the trenches. And this philosophy and physics stuff is remote from my natural habitat. I don't profess to be expert in either area. (0:59:58)

But the path you're on, you can't avoid them, I'm afraid. Yeah. Yeah. There is something I came across, a quote, which I wanted to share with you when I was preparing. It's about, it's about evolutionary panentheism. And the quote is by Brother David Stendhal-Rost, a practicing Benedictine monk. And that's what he says. I've met him. Really? Oh, that's interesting. (1:00:33)

Fascinating. Now, speak of synchronicities. Now the quote says, there are at least three ways of talking about spirit. You can say what spirit is like, you can say what spirit is not, or you can have a direct experience of spirit. And the best way to say what spirit is like in today's world is evolutionary panentheism. So I think there are more people who share your view that that's probably the closest model of the truth. Well, or objective reality. (1:01:07)

Like I said earlier, I have a, well, we collectively have a strong feeling that that's the right direction to be poking out in. We're not really quite there yet in terms of having a adequately detailed theory, but we're moving in that direction. And so far, at least, I don't see any insuperable obstacles. (1:01:33)

Let me just mention a couple of other things that have come up more recently. Yeah, I mentioned earlier about how the renaissance and work on consciousness, both in philosophy and psychology and neuroscience, has been one of the strong drivers of the kind of position that we're advocating. I've recently come to realize that there's a huge development taking place in theoretical biology, which really amounts to a reversion to a point of view that was prominent at the beginning of the 20th century, got eclipsed for a while by the rise of molecular biology and so on, but is now coming back very strongly. (1:02:27)

That basically takes the organism as the best model of what's at the bottom of reality, and talking specifically about mental properties of smaller organisms well below the level of those that have central nervous systems, and even down at least as far as single cells and their constituent organelles. (1:02:50)

Things of that sort. It's a big shift, and it's partly encouraged by the impending collapse of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis, which has been dogma for 80 plus years. There are elements of the standard Darwinian picture that are now known to be false, and it is clear that some kind of a Lamarckian-type element needs to be built into evolutionary theory, where organisms at many levels contribute to evolution by the decisions that they make in their existence, some of which can be carried over into the genome and transmitted to offspring. (1:03:48)

This is really a big deal. There's a guy named Dennis Noble, I really should get him on, get him for an interview, who's one of the drivers of this. There's a great paper, I don't have it right in front of me, but in which he summarizes all this. And it's particularly interesting to me because this discussion has striking parallels to the conversation about psi-phenomena within science. (1:04:13)

There's a small group of people who are determined defenders of the evolution orthodoxy, and who have kept conflicting facts out of textbooks, away from grant mechanisms, away from publication mechanisms, who are trying to suppress opposition. People like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, for example. Well-meaning, I'm sure, they think they're defending the truth. And yet, as this person and others have shown, there are facts, established experimental facts, about molecular biology and the genome and so on, that contradict the standard model of evolution at its core. Stuff induced in organisms by their behaviors in their particular environments can get back into the genome and be carried forward in evolution. That's a huge deal. (1:05:21)

How does mainstream science deal with anomalous, so-called anomalous phenomena today? Could it be that we still don't have the tools to measure what's happening in the brain or in the body, for example, during A&E? Nor can we do reproducibility or perform reproducibility, which is a required methodological tenet of science, right? So how can you reproduce A&E if somebody has cardiac arrest? It's just, to begin with, it's unethical, and to end with, it's dangerous. (1:06:02)

So what's the current state of affairs? Well, we're certainly on a steep learning curve still about all this neuroimaging stuff. And hardly a week goes by when some picture doesn't appear in a mainstream media location, a, you know, weekly news source or something of, you know, pictures of brains with colored spots in them supposedly explaining, you know, this or that cognitive capacity. (1:06:40)

A lot of that stuff will vanish with the progress of science. We've got to learn a lot about how to use these techniques responsibly and especially how to do a better job of taking into account what people are experiencing, finding good ways of having them report their experience, and connecting that to the things that we can measure. You know, your question is a very general one. (1:07:03)

It has different answers in different specific contexts, probably, but in general terms, I don't see any reason why we cannot get deep into spiritual matters with the tools of science. That doesn't necessarily mean that we can, I mean, we're never going to be able to visualize conscious experience with a neuroimaging device. These are two kind of separate worlds, distinct worlds, but they can be correlated. (1:07:38)

And I personally think that, as I said earlier, I think there's a big future in neurophysiological, psychophysiological study of conditions conducive to not only psi performance, but the induction and stabilization of unusual states of consciousness. And I do think we'll learn how to do that. There's a big practical dimensions to this science that will appear. (1:08:06)

So do you think this so-called anomalous phenomena will become part of the mainstream science at some point? Because DOPS, the division of perceptual studies where you work, is still probably 100%, correct me if I'm wrong, 100% privately funded. So it's not a mainstream science yet, right? So of course, we encourage people who want to support this research, please feel free to do so. But will it ever become part of mainstream science? (1:08:37)

Yeah, these are questions about the science process. And I've said before in several places, and we'll say again, I think that some future generation of sociologists and historians and philosophers of science will make an excellent living trying to figure out why it took the scientific community so long to take these phenomena on board as real. You know, I think the battle is over, in fact, has been over for a while. (1:09:11)

It's just that most of the combatants aren't aware of it yet. So it's a question of change of changing generation of scientists or something. Science makes progress one funeral at a time, I've heard somewhere. Yeah, Max Plonk, William James said a hundred and something years ago that we have to mark our progress in half centuries. Okay, interesting. (1:09:46)

What advice can we give to people who want to study anomalous phenomena and people who want to study consciousness? Why should we take this research and anomalous phenomena such seriously? Well, they should be taken seriously, in my opinion, because there's an abundance of good evidence for them. But it is true at present that that whole subject is still anathema in a lot of places. (1:10:10)

Now, I personally think what's going to happen is that psychical research will eventually get reabsorbed into a larger science of consciousness. And I would strongly recommend, particularly to young people heading in this direction, that they get a degree in something like either standard neuroscience or consciousness neuroscience, and there are programs now appearing at a lot of places. Get into the field in that way, be very careful who you talk to about interests in parapsychology with the idea that you'll eventually be able to pursue all dimensions of the subject as you wish. (1:10:56)

But it's just smart to be careful at the beginning, in particular. You have a hobby horse called mystical experiences, because you often talk about them and you often mention that the research on mystical experiences, even in non-mainstream science, is largely ignored as a topic. Am I correct? Is that what you're saying? So I wanted to ask you, why is that the case? What do we mean by mystical experience? Because I think it could be a range of phenomena. (1:11:40)

And do you have maybe a couple of interesting examples that could illustrate it? I think mystical experiences have been problematic for science so far, particularly because they clearly come out of this kind of spiritual dimension of human life associated with religion. A lot of scientists see the development of science as overcoming traditional religious pictures of the world. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. (1:12:15)

At the same time, my personal belief is that the rise of secular humanism in particular, which portrays this inevitable conflict between science and religion, has been unfortunate. (1:12:31)

In the sense that it's kind of caused us to throw out the baby with the bath water, as we've grown up scientifically. And I see what's going on now is our beginning to recover the baby and to integrate it with a larger picture of science itself. I mean, you know, there are lots of scientists now, even now, who have a spiritual life quietly, privately, usually kept strictly separate from their day jobs. (1:13:13)

I mean, William James, in his characteristic way, pointed this out 100 plus years ago. He talked about how modern laboratory scientists, good Christian husbands and fathers, as he put it, materialists in their day jobs, and, you know, good Christian fathers at night, holding together thus loosely the two ends of a chain, they are careless of the intermediate connection. Typical James, colorful, beautiful language. (1:13:55)

And I think there's a lot of that going on. I think the level of spiritual interest among scientists is really quite a bit higher than you might think from the scientific literature itself. And I think what we're and our colleagues are doing, basically, is trying to find ways of reconciling science and spirituality, not so much with particular traditional faiths. (1:14:23)

In fact, I mean, a lot of people are, there are a lot of people out there who recognize the evils of physicalism and its contribution to our, the problems of our civilization, and want to find some kind of a re-enchantment of the world. But for many of them, that amounts to going back to some earlier state of things, including perhaps one of the traditional faiths. (1:14:49)

I'm not interested in creating a new religion or anything like that, but I do think that the way forward is to find an expanded picture of reality, drawing upon science that makes room for spiritual experiences, and perhaps helps people to have such experiences. That's where I think we're really headed. The mystical experiences, what's behind it? Is it because people often say that there is this inner drive that sort of brought them to those experiences. Bernard, I call it diamond sometimes. (1:15:27)

Is it our inner nature to have those, at least for part of us? I think, you know, to have a mystical experience is to take a step in the direction of that higher reality that Bernardo and we both think is out there, really. What's behind it? Is there evolutionary advantage? Why do I keep on having it? You know, some of us, or most of us actually, people don't talk about it, about dreams and premonitions and synchronicities. We ignore it, but it's there. (1:16:07)

It's like part of our reality which we completely ignore. But then, what's behind it? Survival? Evolutionary advantage? What is it in your view? Well, one of the points that Dennis Noble makes is that this reconceptualization of biology in terms of cognitive capacities and even very small organisms that can get incorporated into evolutionary advance, that drastically changes things. (1:16:38)

It allows evolution to move in a direction that gradually provides higher access, greater degrees of access, to this underlying higher reality. And it's certainly true. I mean, mysticism is an enormous subject. Mainly, it's been the preserve of religious studies up to now, but I think it lends itself to various kinds of scientific approaches. And the general tendency in terms of impact on philosophy is to push in the direction of idealism. (1:17:15)

And William James, in The Varieties, has already said that in his philosophy chapters that mystical experiences point inescapably in the direction of some kind of idealism. (1:17:23)

Like us, he wasn't real clear about exactly what kind, and I think it's still up for grabs exactly where this will actually come out. But I think that is the clear tendency, philosophically, and what mystical experiences tend to do for people who are lucky enough to have them for whatever reason, is to put them in direct touch with that higher aspect of reality that's normally invisible to us. (1:18:07)

The relationship between the brain and the mind. Are our minds confined to our brains or do they extend far beyond our brains? Well, I think the latter, of course. And our three books explain how we got to that view of things, particularly the first. I think the first is a... I think that's a contribution that will last. (1:18:34)

It has real staying power. It's gotten way more circulation than most books of that sort. I should say that that's partly thanks to Eben Alexander, the author of Proof of Heaven, a neuroscientist who was put in a coma by a bacterial infection of his brain. He says in his book, his first book, Proof of Heaven... that title, by the way, was supplied by the publisher, not by Eben Alexander. Anyway, somewhere in that book he refers to our book as a sort of one-stop source of information about lots of the relevant subjects. (1:19:17)

And when he published that book, which has sold millions of copies, the sales of ours doubled instantly. So he's responsible for a good bit of our success, but it is getting around. And we also, by the way, we were enabled by John Cleese to buy a bunch of copies ourselves and distribute them individually to targeted persons in the academic mainstream, a few of whom responded, including Tom Nagel, who thanked us for a copy. (1:19:55)

And I don't really know this, but I suspected may have encouraged him to write his wonderful book, Mind and Cosmos, a short book. I mean, Tom Nagel doesn't want to embrace any kind of religious doctrine. He's not interested in theology at all, although he admires some theologists like Alvin Plantinga at Notre Dame. But he takes for granted that physicalism cannot account for all the properties of minds and consciousness. (1:20:28)

And his book really goes on from that. That's the starting point. So I think we may have privately encouraged him in that direction, or at least I hope so, because I think that's a wonderful book. And boy, did it cause tremors in the physicalist establishment. Do we have an idea by what mechanism are our minds extended beyond our brains? Would morphic resonance be one of the hypotheses? It's among the contenders, yeah. (1:21:02)

What is the role of the brain? How do you see the brain? Well, in my everyday role as a scientist, I immediately lapse into dualism, think of the brain as a conventional, I mean a complicated, but conventional physical object. And the way I think of it in relation to mind, as what goes on in the brain conditions the expression of a mentality that's much larger than we normally think of it, and is inherently beyond the brain, but expresses itself in conjunction with the ongoing activities of the brain. I tend to think like Henri Bergson, that one of the primary functions of the brain is to act as a sensory motor interface, collecting information about the environment and allowing us to act upon it. And that a lot of the deeper parts of the mind lie beyond the brain. (1:22:08)

The brain for you would be like a filter, or if you use analogy... That's a commonly used metaphor, the filter. James was the one who first explicitly formulated this. (1:22:20)

You know, he gave an Ingersoll lecture at Harvard in 1897, which was published the following year, in which he says explicitly, it was called something like two supposed objections to the doctrine of immortality. And one of those objections was, of course, that mind really is just brain, brain activity. Therefore, when the brain dies, it's gone. And in response to that, he said, well, the correlation between mental and physical stuff encourages a lot of people, particularly scientific people, to think that mind is generated, produced by brain activity. (1:23:02)

But it's possible to think of it in a different way, such that the brain simply transmits or permits activities that originate elsewhere, beyond it. And it was clear that he preferred that interpretation. He alludes to Fechner in that context, and Myers. Filter has come along more recently. I think it was actually Aldous Huxley who first talked about, you know, there's a mind at large, a big mind out there somewhere, which expresses it through our brain. (1:23:49)

And he thought of the brain as a kind of filter, or a valve, a reducing valve. That was what he thought. And that's not really, that's not quite satisfactory, because on that picture, you know, what comes out, the measly trickle that comes out of the reducing valve is of exactly the same sort as the big reservoir behind. But things are really much more complicated than that. (1:24:13)

There's this richer, more complicated kind of mentality behind the scenes that expresses itself only partially and fitfully, depending on conditions in the brain, which we presently don't know much about. But I'll say a little more about that in a moment, but which we have the capacity to learn a whole lot about, and will, I'm sure. Yeah, what I wanted to mention was that in Beyond Physicalism, there's one chapter in there by a neurobiologist, David Presti, from Berkeley, and myself, about physiological conditions related to expressions of psi, genius, and mystical experience. (1:25:00)

And in it, we, at the end of that chapter, we tentatively point it to one aspect of brain function that seems to be especially closely connected with this subject. And it's become clear in particular, not only, but in particularly through the initial neuroimaging studies of responses to psychedelics. In particular, there was a study published in 2012 by a British group using injected psilocybin together with functional magnetic resonance imagery, two kinds. (1:25:43)

And what it showed, which was totally amazing to everybody, was that contrary to expectation, no increases in activity were found anywhere in the brain. And in particular, the thing that correlated best with the intensity of experience was the deactivation and decoupling of major nodes of a brain system only recently recognized, called the default mode network, which can be understood as essentially embodying the everyday self or ego. And this is coherent with Myers's own doctrine. (1:26:29)

Myers had a principle to the effect that the subliminal self can express itself in proportion to the abeyance of the supraliminal or everyday self. (1:26:43)

And this is right in line, of course, with meditation traditions, which tell you that you got to shut down all the normal chatter that's going on inside. And if you can do that, then this higher stuff can begin to flood in. And that's what was seen in this first big psychedelic neuroimaging study. And it's been seen in additional psychedelic neuroimaging studies, and also in studies of things like meditation, some studies of meditation, mediumistic trance, and so on. (1:27:22)

So, that seems to be one component, certainly, of brain activity related to these higher phenomena. Where do you think memories are stored? Oh, boy. Well, I refer everybody to Alan Gould's excellent chapter in Irreducible Mind for the detailed answer to that. But I don't think they're in the brain at all. And I'm not the only person who thinks that way, certainly. (1:27:59)

If there is survival, then memories must be somewhere else. I don't think they're in the form of traces, or at least not traces as we customarily think of them. Like Myers and James, I'm inclined to think that experiences that we have continue to exist somewhere. This is a big part of Alfred North Whitehead's process metaphysics, the basic elements of which are what he calls occasions of experience, and they're objectively immortal. And the entirety of the history of experience is potentially available to the creation of any new experience in his system. I think something like that is the case. (1:28:49)

You do believe that our physical body or we survive death, right? And if so, who or what survives death? Certainly can't offer any definite answer to that question at the moment. In fact, let me say first that we can't even say for sure that everybody does survive for how long or in what circumstances. (1:29:21)

There's no reason to believe a priori that the same thing happens, everybody follows the same path. Maybe what happens to you depends on how you behave while you're in the flesh. But Meyers had a quite definite idea about this. He thought it was the subliminal self, capital S, capital S, that survived. This is the larger self in which the everyday ego is embedded. And that's potentially consistent with what we see in the cases of the reincarnation type. There is some carryover of not only specific memories, but specific personality characteristics, tendencies, and all that from one life to the next. (1:30:06)

Haven't seen any direct evidence of something like karma, you know, where your next life is a kind of moral response to how you behaved in your previous life, anything like that. It may be the case over a larger timescale, who knows. But I think something like that, not necessarily in quite the form that Meyers held, is probably the case. (1:30:34)

And this is the essence of my disagreement with Bernardo, by the way, that I think we have to pay attention to the evidence for survival of personality. I mean, there are some cases in which it looks for all the world as though the entire mind of a certain person is still operative following physical death. (1:31:06)

One of the best cases of that sort is the case of G.P., a young guy who had died in a fall, soon began communicating through the medium Mrs. Piper. William James was a keen student of that subject. Yeah, I mean, sometimes the evidence that comes through is not just a matter of, you know, facts that can be verified, but a kind of verisimilitude in the appearance or the character of the communications that show the same kind of vocabulary, diction, sense of humor, detailed knowledge of specific shared events, that sort of thing. (1:31:47)

It can be quite hair-raising in its best forms. And of course, there's a great deal of mediumistic communication that's just twaddle and rubbish, as many critics have noticed. (1:32:01)

But in this field, you need to be discriminating and be prepared to ignore twaddle in order to get to the good stuff, shall we say. So, you don't think that we are sort of points of view of a large universal consciousness going after death, going back to that field? Yeah, I do share Bernardo's sense that the ultimate aim of the whole process, whatever it is, is to allow us to merge fully with that higher consciousness which exists within us as in all things. But I imagine it as being a longer and harder road, I think, than he does. (1:32:51)

He thinks it happens automatically to everyone when we die. I rather doubt that. Not that we know. Nobody really knows, except those to whom it's happened, whatever it is. Is consciousness fundamental or there is something else underneath it? That's the main idea that people like Bernardo and I share. That the ultimate reality is a higher consciousness of some sort, about which we don't know very much. (1:33:26)

It's irreducible, like what Federico Fadgin is saying. The consciousness is omnipresent, omnipotent, irreducible and fundamental. So there is no reality beyond that, actually. I believe that is true. Okay, so you share that point of view. And that's also part of your theory of the realist idealism, right? Yes. Are you planning to develop that theory further? Are we expecting a new book coming? Well, we are partway into formulating a book four. (1:34:00)

You know, I'm almost 85 years old now and I'm not sure how much time I have left, but I hope to get that out sometime in the next year or two. Okay, that's very good. Do you have any final thoughts or quote or something for our audience that maybe something we should have discussed and we haven't touched upon? Well, not really. (1:34:32)

I mean, what I'd mainly like to emphasize to people is what an exciting time we live in. I think for the first time in my own long career, I really feel that the winds of change are now blowing. The physicalist bunker has big cracks in it and they're widening. The possibility of change is upon us in various interconnected areas, such as consciousness research, evolutionary theory, biological theory, and the kind of stuff that we've been involved in, that all is coherent and leading in a definitely more positive philosophical direction. (1:35:10)

So, it would be great to be a continuing part of that development as it occurs. And I certainly encourage young people looking at all this to take it seriously and look for a path forward in it. We need you. Any online resources or books you mentioned? Anything else that could be helpful? Where people can find more about your books, your work? Well, Irreducible Mind actually had an annotated bibliography of psychical research, pointing people to what we regard as some of the high points of that literature. (1:35:53)

It's really quite a vast subject. Very few mainstream kind of people have any idea how much is there. Hundreds of thousands of pages of serious work by serious people. (1:36:05)

Consciousness, you know, there are consciousness research societies, programs in consciousness research, both philosophical and neuroscientific, appearing in various universities. There's Parapsychological Association in the U.S., which is, it's actually the main scientific organization under the auspices of the AAAS in the United States. There's the Society for Psychical Research in England, has a website. (1:36:43)

They have an encyclopedia, which is a lot more reliable than Wikipedia as a source of information about the subject. So there is information to be found quite easily, really. Lots of it. In fact, that's the real trick. There's so much of it that one needs to be very judicious in trying to pick your way through it. Ed, thank you very much for this interview, for your thoughts, for your challenging, yeah, answers, because people, I think they are thought-provoking, really. (1:37:15)

Thank you for having me. I hope people enjoy it. I hope it serves the purpose. (1:37:21)

(2025-06-27)

前置き​

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情報源 : Youtube 動画(1:37:27)​

AI 整理​

概要

意識、科学、実在の再構築​

音声対話​

要約書：「意識、科学、そして実在の再構築」

概要​

結論​

タイムライン：意識、科学、そして実在の再構築

主要関係者

エドワード・ケリー（Dr. Edward Kelly）:​

J.B.ライン（J.B. Ryan）:​

ヘルムート・シュミット（Helmut Schmidt）:​

エミリー・ケリー（Emily Kelly）:​

イアン・スティーブンソン（Ian Stevenson）:​

マイク・マーフィー（Mike Murphy）:​

F.W.H.マイヤーズ（F. W. H. Myers）:​

ウィリアム・ジェームズ（William James）:​

ベルナルド・カストルップ（Bernardo Kastrup）:​

アダム・クラブツリー（Adam Crabtree）:​

アラン・グールド（Alan Gould）:​

ジョン・B・ワトソン（John B. Watson）:​

B.F.スキナー（B.F. Skinner）:​

ヘンリー・スタップ（Henry Stapp）:​

ブラザー・デイヴィッド・ステンドル＝ラスト（Brother David Stendhal-Rost）:​

ティム・イーストマン（Tim Eastman）:​

ルース・カストナー（Ruth Kastner）:​

バーナード・カー（Bernard Carr）:​

ヴェルナー・ハイゼンベルク（Heisenberg）:​

ハロルド・オットマン＝シュパッヒャー（Harold Ottmann-Spacher）:​

オーロビンド（Aurobindo）:​

エリック・ワイス（Eric Weiss）:​

ライプニッツ（Leibniz）:​

ヘーゲル（Hegel）:​

チャールズ・サンダース・パース（Charles Sanders Peirce）:​

アルフレッド・ノース・ホワイトヘッド（Alfred North Whitehead）:​

グスタフ・フェヒナー（Gustav Fechner）:​

アンリ・ベルクソン（Henri Bergson）:​

F.C.S.シラー（F.C.S. Schiller）:​

ローデリック・メイン（Roderick Mayne）:​

フェデリコ・ファッジン（Federico Faggin）:​

エベン・アレクサンダー（Eben Alexander）:​

ジョン・クリーズ（John Cleese）:​

トマス・ネーゲル（Thomas Nagel）:​

オルダス・ハクスリー（Aldous Huxley）:​

デニス・ノーブル（Dennis Noble）:​

ジェリー・コイン（Jerry Coyne）:​

リチャード・ドーキンス（Richard Dawkins）:​

前置き