Abstract
In this article, I explore near-death experiences (NDEs) within the context of the philosophy of mind. Specifically, I compare some of the most common philosophies of mind with the observations of NDEs in an effort to determine which philosophies these observations tend to support. I begin by outlining some of the broader categories of mind, and then move to more specific ideas that seem to best represent the features found in NDEs. My primary conclusion is that the observations made during an NDE are incompatible with materialism, and instead suggest a form of interactionism. I also note that NDEs also have many features that point to panpsychism and cosmopsychism, with cosmic idealism in particular appearing to give the most satisfying account of the features found in NDEs.
KEY WORDS: philosophy of mind; consciousness; near-death experience
Introduction and Terminology
The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that attempts to provide a framework for the mental world and explain the nature of consciousness. Given that near-death experiences (NDEs) are conscious experiences that people have between the brink of life and death, for any philosophy of mind to be successful, they must be able to incorporate these experiences into that philosophy. Additionally, because of the special boundary condition NDEs provide, it seems natural to think they may provide special insight to how consciousness works. The goal of this writing is to examine NDEs within the context of different philosophies of mind, and determine which philosophy, if any, best accounts for NDEs.
NDEs are profound experiences that people can have as their physical bodies begin to die. They frequently encompass feelings of intense peace and love, and often contain otherworldly or mystical features. It is typical for near-death experiencers (NDErs) to have out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in which they find themselves seeing from elevated vantage points. They often describe floating above their bodies below, and being able to see and hear everything around them with crystal clarity. Afterward they commonly transition over to an otherworldly realm of beauty or intense light. There, they describe meeting with deceased loved ones, or encountering what are described as angels or beings of light. NDErs may also undergo life reviews in which they re-experience events from their earthly lives. Eventually, the NDErs are sent back, often either because they are told it is not their time or because they themselves choose to go back. It is then that they wake back up in their bodies (Zigrone & Alvarado, 2009).
These experiences are well documented, with thousands of recorded accounts coming from all around the world. Though no two experiences are exactly the same, NDEs have been shown to happen to all peoples, regardless of age, gender, or culture (Sutherland, 2009; Kellehear, 2006). These experiences are reported to be incredibly lucid as well. Rather than describing them as being dreams or hallucinations, NDErs overwhelmingly describe these experiences as real, with continuing and profound impact many years later (Long, 2014; van Lommel et al., 2001). This lucid awareness does not seem to be limited by a person’s physical senses either. For example there are accounts of blind people who declared that they were able to see with perfect clarity during their NDEs (Ring, 1999).
Perhaps most interestingly, NDEs have features that do not seem compatible with the current understanding of the brain. For instance, these lucid experiences can happen when such a level of awareness should not be physically possible at all, such as under general anesthesia or during cardiac arrest. According to current neuroscientific models, the brain has such little activity in these states that lucid awareness is not achievable (Greyson, 2010b). Furthermore, the observations made during an NDE appear to be veridical (Holden, 2009; Rivas, et al., 2016). That is to say that the observations that NDErs describe having during their OBEs, such as those of the steps of their own operations, or the behaviors of doctors and loved ones, have been confirmed to be accurate. Additionally, information gained while an NDEr is experiencing the otherworldly realm, such as learning that someone the NDEr thought to be alive was actually dead, has been found to be accurate as well (Greyson, 2010a).
If these features are what they appear to be at face value, then there is evidence that consciousness is not completely coupled with the physical world, and may even survive bodily death. If this is the case, there is much NDEs have to say that could impact the philosophy of mind. To that end, it is the intention of this article to explore which philosophies of mind, if any, best support the features of NDEs. I will be writing under the assumption that the reader has limited experience with the philosophy of mind, and will therefore outline general definitions of the various philosophies as they are brought up. I will also be writing under the assumption that NDEs are more than hallucinations, and will acknowledge here that if this assumption is wrong, my conclusions will likely be wrong as well. Nonetheless, I believe there are interesting parallels between some of the philosophies of mind and NDEs that are worth noting, even for someone who believes NDEs are simple hallucinations.
In order to present a productive discussion, I will be using a few terms that will require more precise definitions. Perhaps the most important is the term consciousness itself. Here, I will be using the word as it applies to the philosophy of mind. This definition is distinct from the sensory description of someone being conscious or unconscious. For example, it is common to say that someone who is awake and alert is conscious and someone who is in a coma is unconscious. Such a description fits with their physical behavior. However this description of consciousness is not the same as what will be used here. When consciousness is discussed here, it is meant to refer to the raw feelings and perceptions a person has. These are personal sensations such as joy, pain, sound, and taste. For example, it may be that during a coma, a subject still experiences color or sound, although from an outside perspective, they appear to be completely without feelings or perceptions. For the purposes of this discussion, that subject in a coma would still be considered to have consciousness.
Another term that will play an important role in the following analysis is physical. When I refer to the physical world, I do so in a broad context. The physical world contains all matter, such as chairs, cells, and rocks. The physical world is also made up of forces, such as electromagnetism and gravity. Thus, when I mention the word “physical,” I do not mean the tangible world. Things that are intangible, such as computer software or radio waves, would also qualify as being physical, as they are ultimately built from the particles and waves described in physical theories. By contrast, concepts such as mathematics and morality would not be considered physical.
Another important term to define is the mind. When I refer to the mind or to mental experiences, I am talking about phenomena that are related to personal experience. These may be the experience of pain, or of joy, or of seeing the color red, for example. Any experience a person can subjectively perceive is a mental experience, and the subject of this experience would be that person’s mind. By contrast, when I reference the brain, I will be referring to the physical organ that exists within the human skull. There are some who believe the brain and the mind are the same; this viewpoint will be addressed in the following section about materialism.
Lastly, for ease of discussion, it is necessary for me to give a term to the beliefs that a person would hold if they were to accept that NDEs are more than hallucinations of a dying brain. Given the importance of love in NDEs, I will be using the term agapism to refer to this belief, and the term agapist to refer to one who supports this belief. For instance, an agapist would find the OBEs of NDEs compelling evidence that the mind can leave the physical body. An agapist would also claim that there exist otherworldly realms filled with beings of light. In essence, an agapist is someone who believes NDEs contain veridical features, and who also believes in the general themes and lessons of NDEs.
Materialism
Materialism, also known as physicalism, is the thesis that everything is physical, or that all concrete facts about the world are grounded in physical facts. This means that all objects in the world depend on physical laws, and for anything to change states or properties, there must be some development at the physical level. Materialism is a simple and elegant philosophy in that it does not require any special rules of consciousness beyond the physical properties found in brains. Materialism meshes very well with scientific theories, and as such, it is generally easy to describe. As an example of this, I will describe clouds within the material mindset.
Clouds are physical objects, in that they can be described using physical building blocks such as atoms and fit nicely into physical views of space-time, electromagnetism, and other physical concepts. For any change to occur in a cloud, say for the cloud to start raining, there needs to be a change in its physical properties. For instance, the changing of a cloud into a rain cloud results from a shift in its condensation level. This change in condensation can be described entirely by chemical and physical processes, such as how water molecules condense together and how gravity causes these molecules to fall from the sky. Because of this, the changing of a cloud to a rain cloud appears to be an entirely physical process. This does not just apply to clouds, of course. Nearly everything in the world can be described by simply listing its physical properties, which strongly supports the validity of materialism.
According to a poll conducted by Bourget and Chalmers (2014), slightly more than half of philosophers tend to accept or lean towards materialism. Given the great success physics has had in predicting the natural world, it seems easy to see why this might be the case. One can hardly deny the power of physics to describe the world, and the general content of NDEs does not deny these physical observations. However there does seem to be a breaking point between NDEs and materialism, and this breaking point comes into play with the mention of consciousness.
In materialism, all states of consciousness are ultimately grounded in the physical world. This includes experiences such as pain, joy, or the desire to eat. Though it is possible to analyze human behavior using psychology, materialism argues that all mental experiences and behaviors are entirely reducible to physical states. From a materialist perspective, experiences such as pain or joy are the same as specific biological brain states. In this way, materialism supports the idea that the brain and the mind are identical. It is here that agapism throws up its objection.
For an agapist, the best interpretation of NDEs is likely that mental states are distinct from, and not reducible to, physical states. Features such as the OBE seem to suggest there is a mind that is separate from the body, and claims of having a heightened sense of awareness during times when the brain seems to be physically impaired support this as well. In addition to this, the otherworldly realms NDErs claim to travel to do not seem to be in any way physical. They often contain abstract features that are quite unfamiliar to the physics that is known on Earth. If NDEs are more than hallucinations, materialism would also have to try and find a way to fit these realms into some location in spacetime, which seems difficult to say the least. And perhaps the most important feature of NDEs in regards to materialism are the veridical perceptions potentially acquired during an OBE. Whether this is new knowledge gained about loved ones, the ability to describe surgery procedures in detail, or learning about the locations of far-away items, these perceptions are impressive precisely because of how difficult they are to fit into a purely physical worldview.
The idea that the physical world is not enough to explain mental experiences is not unique to NDE research. In the philosophy of mind, this viewpoint is often brought up when discussing what is known as the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem is a term popularized by philosopher David Chalmers (1995), who has argued that even if a person knew all the physical facts of the world, it would not be enough to know all of the mental facts of the world. For example, the hard problem claims that no amount of knowledge of physics, chemistry, or biology would be enough for a person to know for certain what it feels like to be a bat. This is because all of these sciences only describe features of the world from a third-person perspective. They do nothing to explain any features a person might understand as a result of their own first-person awareness.
Most features of NDEs tend to strongly accord with the assessment that there is a hard problem of consciousness. Though it seems clear that brains have large input into how a person experiences things, from an agapist perspective, they fail to tell the full mental story. Because of this, there is a large rift between materialism and agapism. This rift is big enough that I believe it makes the two philosophies irreconcilable. At best, one would be able to state that these experiences interact with the physical world, but are not completely reducible to it. There seems to be no reason to suggest these experiences are physical in nature except advance the idea they are hallucinations generated by a dying brain.
Such a viewpoint is not without merit, as it would certainly make for a simple way to integrate NDEs with the current understanding of the brain. There are some, such as Susan Blackmore (1991), who have attempted to put forth explanations for NDEs that are consistent with a materialism world view. However, such explanations require that NDEs be a type of hallucination, and are insufficient for anyone convinced by the veracity of perceptions made during an NDE. For the purposes of agapism, it seems that if one is to find a philosophy of mind that best fits the features of NDEs, they must look elsewhere.
Interactive Dualism
Interactionism is a philosophy of mind that holds the brain and the mind are distinct entities that are able to casually interact with each other. Interactionism is a form of dualism, which is simply a broad classification of all philosophies which hold that the mental and the physical are fundamentally distinct. An important historical example of interactionism comes from René Descartes. Descartes believed the mental and the physical were ultimately made of different substances, and that a mental substance, such as a person’s spirit, could physically affect a person’s body. For example, if a person were to place their hand on a hot stove, their hand would send a physical signal to their brain. This physical signal would cause the mind to feel a sensation of pain. The mind would then react to this pain and tell the body to move the hand away. The body would understand this intention and then move the hand off the stove. Thus, under interactionism, at least some of a person’s behavior is determined by their mind. This type of interactionism is an example of substance dualism.
Now not all forms of interactionism hold to the commitment that the mental and physical must be made of different basic substances. For example, property dualism believes all things may be made of the same substance, but there are two distinctly different properties that they can hold. One might believe that there is a single fundamental physical substance, but that single substance could have both mental and physical properties. For the purposes of this section, however, I will focus on interactive substance dualism, and discuss other forms of dualism in later sections.
There seem to be many features of NDEs that tend to suggest some form of interactionism. The OBE part of an NDE suggests that the mind can leave the physical body and has some ability to perceive the world around it. NDErs also claim to enter into a purely spiritual state where they are able to travel to a new realm using only their thoughts and intentions. They explain that they were able to think and feel with a new sense of heightened perception during their experiences. When they are eventually revived, they remember the features of their experiences and contrast those with how it feels like to be back in their bodies.
On face value, these features all appear to showcase examples of minds existing outside of a physical body and interacting with other mental phenomena. It appears that humans may have a sort of mental spirit that is not completely dependent on the survival of a physical brain, and that this spirit has some ability to think and act on its own. Ultimately, when an NDEr returns to their body, their mind is then able to interact with their brain, allowing the NDEr to be able to tell what they have witnessed through their physical body. This type of description of events aligns with ideas of interactionism and substance dualism, making such a philosophy appear to be a good fit for an agapist.
However, interactionism faces some challenges. Perhaps the biggest of these is what is known as the causal closure of physics, which is the thesis that all physical effects have purely physical causes. For example, it would mean that all properties of a basketball, such as its weight, volume, and movement, are determined purely by physical things like gravity and electromagnetism.
For the purposes of this discussion, the place where casual closure is most important is in the brain. If all the physical features of the brain, such as its cellular structure or electrical activity, can be attributed to purely physical causes, then there is no room for mental states to have any causal effect. It would seem that all possible physical actions of the brain can be described without taking conscious thought into the equation at all. Thus, if it is the case that casual closure is true, it would seem interactionism must be false. One might point out that there is a way out of this problem by supposing that physical and mental forces could overlap by using a sort of over-determination, but as far as I can see, there is no reason for an agapist to hold to such a belief except to accept defeat on the question of casual closure. But even in this case, I think parallelism would be a more viable approach, as will be discussed later.
It is easy to see how someone might support casual closure. Science has given us an incredible power to predict the physical events in the world, and the theories that these predictions are made from, such as special relativity, generally don’t mention consciousness at all. Additionally, there is an attractive simplicity to the belief that only physical states can influence other physical states. This simplicity gives hope that there may be an elegant way to describe all of the physical universe using only a handful of fundamental physical theories.
For the time being, however, physics remains incomplete and casual closure is not certain. Indeed, there are a number of unsolved phenomena in physics that leave the door open for some outside force to play a role in the physical world. There is still much to be discovered regarding theories of dark energy, or of how gravity works at a micro level. Quantum mechanics in particular is still very open for discovery and interpretation. Mathematician Roger Penrose and physicists Henry Strapp have dug deep into the quantum world, and have independently argued that to complete a theory of quantum mechanics one must bring consciousness into the picture (Kane, 2011). Ultimately, it may be that none of these specific ideas end up having anything to do with consciousness, but the fact that physics remains incomplete still leaves pathways for consciousness to play a causal role in the world. And so long as such pathways remain open, it seems preferable for an agapist to support some form of interactionism on the basis of veridical OBE perceptions and other NDE phenomena.
Truly, it seems to be that the strongest reasons to believe in agapism are also reasons to reject casual closure. As noted, people being able to see while physically blind, people verifying events they experienced while out of their bodies, people gaining knowledge of those they thought were alive being deceased, and people retaining lucid consciousness during cardiac arrest and general anesthesia all point to there being some features of consciousness that can play an active role in physical brains. These features all manifest on a macro human level, so how they impact physics on a micro level is up for debate. But if these features of NDEs are what they appear to be, then describing them in a physical context would require one to give consciousness a hard physical role in the universe. Thus, because there are physical pathways that are still open for consciousness to play a role in the physical universe, and because of the NDE accounts that suggest mind-body interaction, it seems that causal closure is not a hard stop for an agapist.
However, proving a physical theory that includes a clear description of mental interaction at the brain level seems quite difficult. Given the difficulty of formulating exactly how conscious interaction might work in the body, and given that there are no features of NDEs which explain specifically how interaction takes place, it is at least possible that one could call themselves an agapist and yet deny causal interaction. For example, one might argue that though mental states and physical states seem to interact, this perceived interaction is only an illusion, and in truth only the mental can affect the mental and only the physical can affect the physical. I believe such a view can coexist with agapism, in the form of a philosophy known as parallelism.
Parallelism and Epiphenomenalism
Parallelism, like interactionism, holds that the world contains both physical states and mental states, and that one cannot be reduced to the other. In this way, parallelism also falls nicely under the larger category of dualism. Where parallelism differs from interactionism is on the question of mental causation. Unlike interactionism, parallelism holds that mental states and physical states do not interact causally, but work in complete parallel, without influencing each other at all.
For example, a parallelist would argue that all physical states are determined solely by other physical states, in keeping with the causal closure of physics. They would then suggest that all mental states are caused solely by other mental states. When a person places their hand on a hot stove, feeling the burning sensation of their hand may cause the mental desire to pull their hand away from the stove. Independent of this, the electrical inputs the brain receives when the person places their hand on the stove causes their brain to message their body’s muscles to move the hand away. The person’s desire to move their hand away and the physical act of the brain messaging their body to move their hand away occur simultaneously. Thus, the parallelist view is that mental states and physical states are set up in such a way that they always appear to be in sync, but do not actually affect each other at all. This idea is not only in agreement with casual closure, but it also leaves the door open for the conscious mind to survive physical death, since ultimately the mind is not in any way dependent on the body.
Another view that takes a somewhat similar approach to causation is epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism, like parallelism, supports the idea of casual closure and is dualistic. However, traditional epiphenomenalist beliefs state that causation only goes in one direction, from physical to mental. An epiphenomenalist would suggest that physical brain states determine related mental states, but that the reverse is not the case. For example, when a person touches a hot stove, physical signals are sent to the brain to cause it to enter into a physical state of pain. This state of physical pain in turn causes a painful mental sensation. The brain then sends signals to the hand to react to this physical state of pain. The person’s mental desire to move their hand away is generated by this brain state as well. Thus, under epiphenomenalism, the physical brain causes a person to experience the mental sensation of pain. However their feeling of pain has no impact on the physical action of them moving their hand away from the stove. In this way, one could say that although the physical and mental are fundamentally different, the physical world ultimately completely determines the mental world.
Epiphenomenalism has recently become more popular than parallelism. I suspect that this is at least partly due to the fact that it still maintains a form of superiority for the physical world. However, it seems there is a major issue for this philosophy in regard to NDEs, namely the fact that for epiphenomenalism, all mental experiences only exist because they have physical causes. This generally denies the possibility that a conscious subject could survive a physical death, since the mind would be completely dependent on the physical brain, even if it was not reducible to that brain. This seems to make parallelism the approach that is more favorable to agapism.
However, parallelism has its own problems, the chief of which is that it fails to explain why mental states and physical states correlate so well in the first place. For instance, visual information that is captured by a person’s eyes has an appropriate 3D mental quality associated with it, which seems to accurately reflect the physical information their brain receives. Similarly, eating food when their body is in a state of hunger provides them with appropriately satisfying mental experiences relating to the texture and content of the food. There appears to be an intuitive coherence between the physical information states of brains and their associated mental states, so much so that it seems absurd to believe that the level of coherence between these states could simply be a coincidence. Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz recognized this, and attempted to remedy the situation with what he called a pre-established harmony.
In Leibniz’s view, when God created the universe, it was set up intentionally so that physical states and mental states would always correlate with each other. This pre-established harmony would then guide the universe to be in sync, so that when a person’s hand touched fire, the physical brain state of pain and the mental state of pain would line up perfectly. This solves the problem of coincidence by adding on the ontological cost of God. For many philosophies, this would be a very large cost indeed. However, that is not so much the case for agapism.
Two big features of having an NDE are experiencing a presence of God and coming to believe that life has meaning (Flynn, 1982). Given this, it seems reasonable for an agapist to hypothesize that human life could have been set up in some form of pre-established harmony, where a person lives out life with planned meaning to learn specific life lessons or somehow achieve spiritual growth. With this in mind, it certainly seems possible that the world could have been set up with a harmony between the mental and the physical precisely to achieve these goals. Thus, it seems that the biggest drawback of parallelism can be negated by adding God into the equation, making it at least a viable option.
However, although parallelism is a viable option, it seems to me that interactionism is simply a better intuitive fit. NDE features such as the life review seem to highlight that actions are important, and that minds are capable of freely choosing how one interacts in the physical world. This theme would be undercut by parallelism, since under such a philosophy, human minds would be unable to impact the world around them. Interactionism also seems to accord with the veridical perceptions of OBEs. These experiences seem to suggest that there is a spirit that can leave the body, have an assortment of perceptions and mental sensations, and then return to the physical body to describe these sensations. Under parallelism, one would have to dismiss these cases of apparent body and mind interaction as an illusion. Though this is possible, it seems to me that the only real reason for an agapist to accept parallelism over interactionism is if they are determined to hold onto the belief that physics is causally closed. For anyone not completely convinced of casual closure, interactionism seems to be the preferable philosophy.
Emergentism
Another philosophy of mind that may be relevant to agapism is emergentism. Emergent phenomena can be broken down into two categories: strong emergence and weak emergence. Strong emergence is the belief that there are high-level features in the world that are created by, but not reducible to, low-level features. That is, those who support strong emergentism believe that there are features of high-level phenomena which cannot be completely described by the combination of their lower level parts. By contrast, weak emergence describes features in high-level phenomena that do not obviously seem to be present in their lower-level parts, but under careful examination, can nonetheless be completely described by them.
Typically, when emergence is discussed in everyday conversation, it is weak emergence that is talked about. One can encounter many examples of weak emergence in their day-to-day life. One example of a weakly emergent feature is weather. Weather is a phenomenon that is made up of a collection of features such as temperature, wind, pressure, and moisture. One can see from a high level that there is a hurricane going on, but determining the low-level cause of that hurricane is often very complex, involving all of the aforementioned features. In this way, the concept of weather emerges from these features in a way that is not immediately obvious, but is nonetheless ultimately reducible to these features.
Another example of weak emergence is the compound salt emerging from its parts, sodium and chlorine. Sodium is a highly reactive metal, and chlorine is yellow-green gas that can be poisonous to humans. Despite these elements being highly reactive and potentially dangerous, the two can come together to form salt, which is a stable compound that is perfectly safe and edible by humans. Given the reactive nature of its parts, the stable features of salt can be surprising to human intuition.
However, though the features of salt may be surprising, they are ultimately reducible to the same physical ones that characterize sodium and chlorine. That is because all of the features of sodium, chlorine, and salt can be reduced to the interactions of protons, neutrons, electrons, and the fundamental forces that guide these particles. There is no need to invent new physics to explain why sodium and chlorine are able to combine and form the compound of salt. If humankind had never discovered salt before, but knew the complete physical properties of sodium and chlorine, it would be possible to predict that the combination of sodium and chlorine would yield the stable compound of salt. Thus, although the formation of salt is surprising, it is nonetheless an example of weak emergence.
Strong emergence is a completely different case. Under strong emergence, the truths of a high-level domain cannot be deduced from a lower-level domain, even in principle. Rather, the high-level domain contains completely new features that are literally more than the sum of its lower-domain parts. An example of this would be if when sodium and chlorine combined to form salt, that salt suddenly started to emit its own photons. This phenomenon would both be highly unexpected and impossible to predict given the laws of physics as they are currently known. One would have to create a brand new theory to explain why this happened specifically to the compound of salt, and not other chemical compounds. Whether or not strong emergence actually exists in the world is up for debate, as there are no known instances of it occurring. However, due to the difficulty of solving the hard problem of consciousness, it is possible that strong emergence needs to be invoked to provide a sufficient solution.
When applied to consciousness, emergentism argues that mental sensations are generated from the complex neurological structure of the brain, without being reducible to those structures. This means that at some unknown point during the development of the brain, consciousness strongly emerges. Emergentism is still a form of dualism, in that it contends there are ultimately mental states which cannot be reduced to physical ones. However unlike the substance dualism discussed above, emergentism is a form of property dualism. Property dualism is different from substance dualism in that consciousness is simply a property the physical world has, rather than a fundamental substance. Therefore, although the mental world is not reducible to the physical world, it is ultimately dependent on the physical world to exist.
In some ways, emergentism appears to make intuitive sense. Conscious experiences seem to be coherently correlated with high-level brain states. Thus it seems that only when a creature has sufficiently complex high-level brain states would they be able to be conscious. By contrast, it is difficult to see how things with much less complexity, such as a rock or a lamp, would be able to have any conscious features at all. Asking how a rock feels about rolling down a cliff seems like a strange question, because rocks do not share the complex behavioral patterns or brain states that human beings do. Emergentism agrees with this sense of intuition, suggesting that rocks simply lack the high-level structure necessary for consciousness.
One could certainly try to apply emergentism to agapism. A key observation of NDEs that supports emergentism is the fact that brains lose high-level complexity when a person dies. It is during this dying process that NDErs claim to lose bodily consciousness and begin experiencing their NDE. Thus, one could argue that it is this high level complexity that is responsible for human consciousness.
In addition, emergentism may help resolve some interactionist problems for agapism as well. As was discussed above, a large problem for interactionism is explaining how subjects have causal power at the lowest levels of physics. But through emergentism, this problem is significantly reduced. This is because under emergentism, the basic particles of physics would largely not experience any interactive influence at all. It would not be surprising that in a controlled lab environment one would be able to accurately predict the motion of particles without the need to describe the impact of mental intentions, because only in the complex environments of brains would one be able to see the physical effects of interactionism. This certainly does not eliminate the problem of causal closure, but it at least explains why it is possible to describe much of the physical universe without describing the physical impact of conscious intentions.
However emergence faces its own list of problems. Perhaps the most notable is that strong emergence does not seem to exist in the physical universe. There are as yet no physical laws that depend on the existence of strong emergence. This suggests either that strongly emergent things are either impossible or that they simply do not exist. Thus at the very least, if consciousness strongly emerges from the physical world, it would require rules that are both seemingly arbitrary and unique from the other laws of the universe. Such a notion is not particularly appealing for anyone hoping for an elegant universe.
For agapism, however, there is an even larger problem that may render the two philosophies incompatible. This is the fact that NDEs tend to suggest humans have enduring spirits, one that are not tied to the physical world. If consciousness can survive physical death, as NDEs suggest, then destruction of high-level brain coherence is not the end of conscious awareness. Additionally, some NDE features tend to suggest that the creation of this high level coherence was not the beginning of awareness either. Some NDE experiences suggest that humans may have some sort of eternal spirits, ones that have existed before life on Earth (Lundahl, 1992). It therefore seems as though any theory that suggests conscious subjects are produced by high-level physical complexity would clash with agapism.
It should be noted that not all forms of emergentism hold to the idea that a completely new subject must emerge in the brain for the theory to be true. One could make the case that the idea of a specific subject always exists, and when a certain kind of brain complexity is reached, that specific subject begins to experience new strongly emergent mental sensations. That subject could then physically die and theoretically have their experiences tied to a new set of high-level complexities elsewhere. However this does weaken the general spirit of strong emergence, and as it allows for an enduring subject, it seems as if the hard problem may be better solved using weak emergence.
Another issue that puts at least some doubt on emergentism from an agapism perspective is the fact that emergentism tends to work best within the context of a universe that is primarily physical. Under emergentism, the majority of existence is mentally dead, as there is not enough complexity for strong emergence to happen. Human beings are conscious subjects because of their complex physical structures, but little else in the universe has the same type of complexity as brains. This makes emergentism ideal for one who believes that the universe is ultimately primarily physical with little sparks of life within it.
However, agapism suggests that there is a far larger world out there full of mental experiences. The otherworldly features of NDEs, as well as their timelessness and cognitive features, imply a universe that is ultimately governed by the mind, or at the very least a universe in which the physical world and the mental world are on equal footing. There does not seem to be any features of the otherworldly realm NDErs travel to which suggest that realm is physical in nature. It also seems highly unlikely that this otherworldly realm strongly emerged from a separate complex physical structure. Though the physical world may very well have an interactive role to play, agapism suggests there are fundamentally mental forces that play a role in the world as well. The existence of these mental forces would make it unnecessary to suggest that strong emergence is needed to explain consciousness.
All things considered, I do not believe that emergentism is a strong fit for agapism. One could certainly try to add some deflationary account of subjects and mental experiences, and attempt to show how the otherworldly realm may be more physical than it appears. But such an effort seems doomed to fall short. Overall, agapism seems to be better suited to a philosophy of mind that can better embrace the idea of an enduring subject, and one that requires less dependence on arbitrary physical structures. I do believe such a philosophy exists, and is found in panpsychism.
Panpsychism
Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a universal feature of the world. It denies that consciousness is reducible to physical states, and instead suggests that some of the fundamental features of the universe include elements of consciousness. This does not necessarily mean human-level consciousness exists fundamentally, but it does mean the building blocks of consciousness exist at a very basic level and can be found throughout the universe. Thus, a panpsychist would argue that objects such as beach balls, chairs, or table salt would likely have some sort of mental qualities.
As the only familiar form of consciousness is human awareness, this sort of view of consciousness can be highly counterintuitive. Human awareness seems to be highly complex and well fitted to human bodies. Human consciousness is capable of including complicated sensations and experiences, such as the experience of vision or experiences of memories. These experiences seem to be heavily connected with the brains, and thus it seems impossible that a beach ball, for example, could have any sort of mental qualities. However, a panpsychist would argue that although a beach ball may have conscious features to it, these features are likely completely alien to the consciousness with which humans are familiar. They would suggest that by comparison to humans, whatever mental features a beach ball has would likely be very basic and perhaps even unrecognizable.
In a way, panpsychism is really not so different from a physical understanding of the world. In physics, all objects in the universe are ultimately made up of the same set of particles, such as electrons and photons. The physical difference between objects can largely be reduced to their numbers of particles and configurations in spacetime. Similarly, a panpsychist would argue that the fundamental building blocks of consciousness pervade the universe, and that these blocks can be found both in beach balls and in human beings. The difference is that the blocks of consciousness human beings have are arranged in such a way that they generate a far more complex state of awareness.
Panpsychism is an ancient philosophy, and there are many different forms that it can take. To investigate the potential relationship that panpsychism may have with agapism, it is necessary to explore some of the categories of panpsychism. Two broad categories that panpsychism can be placed into are constitutive panpsychism and emergent panpsychism. Many of the same points mentioned in the emergentism section above apply to emergent panpsychism as well, so here I will focus on constitutive panpsychism.
Constitutive panpsychism is the thesis that mental states can combine, or perhaps separate, to form macro conscious beings such as humans. Typically, such a view holds that the microphysical world contains many mental features, and that just as microphysical structures combine to form macrophysical structures, so too are there micromental structures that can combine into macromental structures. For example, on a physical level, the brain is made of many micro physical elements such as atoms. Together, these vast numbers of atoms form the structure of neurons, and in turn, the vast numbers of neurons create the physical structure of the brain. Constitutive panpsychism would say that in a similar manner, conscious states may be the result of many micro elements of consciousness being combined to form macro conscious states.
By using tiny forms of consciousness to constitute larger forms of consciousness, the hope is that the mental world may ultimately be describable by using small building blocks from which all mental features can be made. In this way, one may be able to define rules of consciousness in the mental world that are analogous to quantum mechanics in the physical world. This type of constitutive panpsychism is called micro panpsychism, because it holds that the microphenomenal features of the universe build on each other to be responsible for all of the macrophenomenal features of the universe.
There is an alternative constitutive approach to panpsychism as well, which is known as cosmic panpsychism. In such a view, the universe is made of a single cosmic structure that contains many macro parts. In essence, this means that the entire universe is the only fundamental element, and all the planets, stars, and people exist as parts of that single cosmic entity. All perceivable objects exist as subsections of the overall universe. Thus, a person who supported a cosmic view of the physical world might suggest that atoms in the brain behave the way they do because of the way the entire universe behaves. Going back to consciousness, someone who supports a cosmic view of panpsychism would argue that consciousness cannot be completely described without taking into account some sort of cosmic mind.
A key attractive feature of panpsychism is that it allows for a monistic solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Monism is the belief that there is only one fundamental substance that makes up the universe. It thus promises a simple way for all substances to impact each other, and in so doing, offers a very elegant solution to the hard problem. Materialism qualifies as a type of monism, as it holds that ultimately, the only true substance of the universe is physical substance. By contrast, the substance dualist views of epiphenomenalism and interactionism would not be monist, as they take the mental and the physical to be fundamentally different. As a result of this, these dualist views have an additional task of explaining how the mental and physical substances can interact at all.
Supporters of panpsychism often support monism by suggesting that the fundamental substance of the universe is neither entirely mental nor entirely physical, but rather a substance that has both mental and physical properties to it. This is referred to as neutral monism, as it holds that neither the mind nor the body is more basic. Neutral monism allows for the building blocks of the universe to all fit together in the same substance category. This not only provides a more elegant solution to the hard problem, but as will be discussed later, it also seems to have at least some parallels with agapism. Before going into these parallels, however, I will take a look at a common objection to panpsychism that will be relevant to the topic of NDEs.
One of the most serious objections to panpsychism is known as the combination problem. The combination problem is the issue of determining how exactly it is that mental states combine to form macro level beings and experiences. It seems to be the case that all human experience occurs at the macro level of the universe. Humans as subjects appear to exist at the macro level of brains and experience macro-level information states. Such awareness does not seem to directly experience quantum-level particles, nor does it seem to experience the entirety of the universe. This leaves consciousness to exist somewhere between the micro world and the scale of the whole universe.
The problem is that neither cosmic nor micro panpsychism take macro-level subjects to be basic. Both philosophies depend on more fundamental features of consciousness to be the base for the macro experiences that humans have. Thus, for micro panpsychism, the combination problem is the problem of determining how micro consciousness can combine to form the macro-level conscious states of humans. For cosmic panpsychism, this problem is explaining how a universal subject is able to split into macro subjects and experience.
The issue is that there does not seem to be any obvious way to achieve the combination necessary to achieve human level consciousness. For example, in the physical world, things do not seem to truly combine into macro objects. When one takes numerous elements of gold and forges them together into a ring, property-wise the ring is not a brand new object. It still has all the properties of the individual elements of gold, simply arranged in the spatial orientation of a ring. Though the macro object of the ring may have special high-level significance to some, the distinction at the physical level of when the elements of gold become a golden ring is completely arbitrary. In the grand scheme of physics, there is no combined golden ring, just a collection of elementary particles arranged close enough together that it is called a single object.
If one were to apply this reasoning to consciousness, it would mean that by gathering together some elements of consciousness, each individual element would retain its individual properties and subjects. Though it may be conceivable to arrange these mental elements into different relations, there does not seem to be any reason to believe a new combined subject is suddenly created. Like the elements of gold, it seems that mental qualities continue to only exist as individual micro elements, or continue to be part of the cosmic subject in the case of cosmic panpsychism.
Let us suppose, for example, that there are ten different people standing closely together in a room. It seems that no matter how close together these people stand, each person would continue to be their own conscious subject. One would not suddenly assume that because these subjects are standing close together, there is now suddenly an eleventh conscious person that exists as a combination of the other ten. It seems like no matter how closely these ten people stand together, they still remain as ten individual subjects from a consciousness perspective. Any idea that an eleventh conscious mind suddenly appears seems unfounded. In a similar way, there does not seem to be any reason one should think that many micro elements of consciousness should suddenly produce a single, coherent macro subject.
This example highlights what is often referred to as the subject combination problem. In addition to the subject combination problem, philosophers have identified a number of related combination problems as well, such as the grain problem, the structural mismatch problem, and the pallet problem (Chalmers, 2016). A detailed discussion of these problems is outside the scope of this paper, but at the highest possible level, they seem to stem from two primary issues.
First, subjects appear to exist at an arbitrary macro level of the universe. Specifically, humans appear to observe the universe at the level of brains. It is because of this that micro panpsychism requires some form of combination to exist, and cosmic panpsychism requires some form of separation to exist. One could suggest that macro subjects are simply fundamental in the universe; however, doing so seems to require a very arbitrary set of rules to work, and fits much better into the ideas of emergentism or interactive dualism than it does panpsychism. I will call this first problem the macro subject problem.
Second, consciousness appears to be intelligently correlated with the arbitrary information structures housed within brains. As mentioned previously, there seem to be an intuitive coherence between mental states and brain information states. Pleasure and pain have appropriate positive and negative experiences associated with them, audio experiences have appropriate loudness and direction, and touch gives back appropriate distinctions between rough and smooth objects. In all instances, consciousness appears to give appropriate correlated experiences of the specific information structures found in the brain.
In addition to physical and mental states being well correlated, consciousness seems to be appropriately bounded only in the high-level information states of brains. For example, a person does not directly experience the information structures of their DNA. Nor do they directly experience the flow of blood in their brains. Only the information states of neurons that are experienced. The problem here is that, at the physical level, there does not appear to be anything special about the information states of brains. They are as arbitrary as tables, rocks, or any other physical structure in the universe. Thus there needs to be an explanation as to why consciousness is bounded by information states, and does not appear to exist in other physical states. I will call this issue, together with the issue of intuitive coherence between physical and mental states, the macro structure problem.
Together the macro subject and macro structure problems mean that for panpsychism to be correct, there must be some sort of method for either micro or cosmic mental elements to yield macro subjects, and there must be some reason why consciousness thrives specifically in the information structures of brains. These are indeed hard problems to answer. From a purely physical standpoint, brain states are unimportant and arbitrary, and it appears on the surface that the type of combination needed to define the brain as a single macro structure does not exist. However, it is here that NDEs enter the picture again, as it seems there are quite a few similarities between them and general ideas of panpsychism. NDEs may even have some features that may be able to shed light on possible solutions to the macro subject and macro structure problems.
One such feature that is reminiscent of panpsychism is the feeling of connection or unity with the universe. This feeling of connection is one of the more common features a person can have during an NDE, and is often described, very generally, as a sense of being united or one with the world (Greyson, 1983). A person might state that they understand how they are connected with God, or are one with nature, or might claim that they know and feel every atom in the universe. This connection is often difficult to describe, but it leaves the experiencer with clear knowledge that there is a great unity that exists in the world.
More specific cases of connection are also sometimes described. For example, after they transition to the realm of light, NDErs tell tales of being able to feel the thoughts and emotions of beings that exist there. They describe simply knowing these beings’ intentions without any verbal correspondence, and they feel that the beings of light understand their own intentions completely as well. For example, an experiencer might claim to know that a being loves them immensely, and that this being can feel their emotional state and understand their thoughts as soon as the NDEr thinks of them.
NDErs also claim to have enhanced awareness and understanding once they have died. (Greyson, 1983). In addition to being able to feel the intentions of others, they often claim to be able to think more clearly, faster, and in a more focused manner. They may describe being able to be aware of many things at once, being able to see an object from many angles simultaneously, being able to experience an entire review of their life, or being able to think far more rapidly than during their life. In some fashion or another, the NDEr will describe how their consciousness expanded in a way that surpassed the awareness they had when in their earthly body.
What do these features have to do with panpsychism? On the surface, there seem to be many similarities. The claim that all things are connected fits in very nicely with the themes of cosmic panpsychism. If all things really were connected in some fashion, as NDErs claim, then at the very least there would be a great relation between all things that could serve as a basis for a cosmic entity. Indeed, it does not seem possible to hold a belief in cosmic panpsychism without also believing that the cosmic entity connects all things together in some fashion. Additionally the claim of being able to feel all the universe is something that may suggest a cosmic interpretation as well. If there was a single cosmic entity, the claim that a person might be able to experience the rest of the universe in some fashion through this entity would at least be coherent.
Furthermore, the idea that people are able to feel the thoughts and emotions of others during an NDE suggests that consciousness can somehow expand beyond what is currently thought. This is bolstered by the fact that experiencers also claim to have an increase in awareness and understanding. It may be that there are ways for the mind to grow and connect with other things. Having a consciousness that can increase and decrease in its levels of awareness makes a lot of sense in the context of panpsychism, since under panpsychism, consciousness should be able to combine or separate with other mental elements.
Another feature of NDEs that is relevant here is the knowledge that experiencers gain about love, light and God. Oftentimes during an NDE, a subject will gain very broad knowledge about existence. This knowledge is either told to them by a being of light, an unidentified voice, a presence of light, or simply knowledge that they gain intuitively. This knowledge is often summed up as saying that everything is one, or everything is God, or everything is love. (Long, n.d.; Long, 2021a; Long, 2021b)
Statements such as these seem like they could easily be made to work within a panpsychism framework. They suggest there is ultimately a single unit that all reality is made of, namely light, love, or God. And since agapism generally denies that the underlying nature of the universe is primarily physical, it would make sense to say that this single building block of the universe has mental features to it. Thus, it would suggest that everything is capable of supporting at least some sort of mental properties. This strongly reinforces the concept of monism. For example, one could support micro panpsychism in this context by suggesting that there is a fundamental element in the universe which NDErs refer to as light, and that this light has some mental qualities to it and acts as the basic element from which all things in the universe are made.
Alternatively, one could also use these features to support a cosmic view of panpsychism. In a similar fashion to the ancient beliefs of anima mundi, one could suggest there is a great world soul that unifies the universe. Each human’s consciousness would exist as a segment of this world soul, and ultimately every conscious experience would in some way be reducible to the one world soul entity. Such an entity, whether it be called the light, God or simply love, seems to perfectly embody the ideas of cosmic panpsychism. This entity would act as the basic structure of existence, while everything one experienced in life would be arbitrary subsections of this fundamental entity. Additionally, this cosmic interpretation seems to be reinforced further by one of the most exceptional experiences one can have during an NDE.
Sometimes during an NDE, the NDEr will undergo what has been called a mystical unitive experience (Rousseau & Eng, 2011). During such an experience, their sense of identity and ego is lost to differentiating degrees as they merge with some greater state of consciousness. In extreme cases, the NDEr may be given the chance to meld themselves fully into some great source. In this experience, the NDEr loses their singular perspective and becomes something more. Whoever they were before this melding appears to become just a small part in a grand completeness of the source they have merged with. This is quite a powerful experience even within the context of NDEs, and is by all accounts beyond conventional description. Below is a revelation from an NDEr going through this merging.
Then, in a magnificent instant, I found myself within the center of the sea of light, the heart of the light. This was to me the essence of all essences, the source of all life, all reality, and all existence. I felt that this light was also the source of all goodness, beauty, mercy, and all of the compassion we could ever imagine in our lives. As I entered into this sun, it was as if I were mere spider silk in the solar wind. I felt as though I was completely devastated by bliss, rapture, and ecstasy; and yet I was not. It was as though I became one with the light; as if I had become the quintessential phoenix. It was the most excruciatingly beautiful experience, beyond anything one could ever imagine. Entering this sun became the instant of the dissolution of self, a dissolving of the separate reality we know to be ourselves. This was a state of nothingness as an individual. This was a state of being in, of, and because of the light, which was to me the apex of everything that I could have ever hoped for. (Pasarow & Acosta, 2018, pp. 27–28)
From a panpsychist standpoint, it seems that the most intuitive interpretation of this merging is that NDErs really are able to combine with the cosmic subject in some fashion. These experiences seem to describe a world in which all things are ultimately part of that entity. Although humans may have additional features to distinguish themselves at a high level, during an NDE it seems an NDEr is able to shed many human features of themselves and gain a more clear connection to the cosmic entity. This dissolution of self seems to peak during this melding experience, where the difference between the singular person and the cosmic entity becomes unclear.
If this is the case, it may very well be that regardless of whether or not one can conceive of subjects combining or separating, there may be personal records of such things actually happening. This would be a huge step forward in terms of solving the macro subject problem from a cosmic standpoint. There would still be the issue of determining how this process of separating and merging with the cosmic entity works, and this problem may still be too difficult to answer. However, it would be possible to proceed knowing that the distance between human consciousness and the cosmic entity, although vast, is one that can be closed.
One could certainly advance different interpretations of these experiences. Even if it is granted that NDEs are more than hallucinations, one could argue that although a subject feels merged with a cosmic entity, this is ultimately just a feeling of being merged rather than the level of mental combination panpsychism requires. The truth is that the rarity and ineffability of the melding experience makes any interpretation of it far from conclusive. Thus, it may be that more experiences or a greater understanding of NDEs will give a superior alternative interpretation for this experience.
Where agapism seems to support panpsychism with greater confidence is in explaining why mental states are so well correlated with brain states. As mentioned above, it is quite common for NDErs to come to believe that there is a God and that life has meaning (Flynn, 1982). NDErs may report that they believe their life experiences help them grow their spirits, teach them life lessons, explore more about themselves, or learn to embrace love. They describe this physical world as being a place where they can gain experience that they can bring back with them when they die.
Whatever the reason, it seems very clear that such meaning would be more easily achievable in a world where brain information states and mental experiences were well correlated. It is certainly difficult to understand how one could learn life lessons in their body if their brain and their mind were a disorganized mis-match of experiences. Thus an agapist may claim that, when the universe was set up it was established with purpose, in a similar fashion to pre-established harmony, and as part of its purpose, it is necessary for minds and bodies to be well correlated. This does not explain how it is that consciousness thrives in the brain, but it does at least give a reason why there is great coherence between mind and body. This allows for a good boost in solving the macro structure problem.
To sum up, there seem to be many reasons to think NDEs point toward a panpsychist interpretation of consciousness. The feeling of connection or unity with the universe can be interpreted to mean humans are a part of a universal soul such as that described by cosmic panpsychism. Being able to feel the thoughts of others or have a heightened sense of awareness is consistent with the panpsychist idea that the mind may be able to combine with other mental elements. And the general knowledge experiencers gain that ultimately all things are one accords with ideas of monism, which is a key part of panpsychism. Perhaps the most impressive support for panpsychism here, however, is the melding experience. Suggesting that there is a great source that all has come from, and that all can merge with, echoes the core notions of cosmic panpsychism. And in the case that these experiences are what they seem, then there is also at least some explanation why mental states are well correlated with bodies.
Now it should be noted that even if these observations are correct, they are not compatible with all forms of panpsychism. Russellian monism, for example, is a form of panpsychism that holds that consciousness exists as the intrinsic features of physical matter. In this way, Russellian monism does away with the substance dualism of mental and physical, and instead replaces them with a single substance with both mental and physical properties. Thus, a Russellian monist might claim science can describe all the physical dispositions of electrons, but only consciousness can explain what an electron is intrinsically. I think there is a lot of promise in keeping with the monist approach for agapism; however, I believe this specific approach to consciousness does not go far enough to explain the features of NDEs.
This is because for agapism, subjects must be able to leave behind their physical bodies altogether and enter into what intuitively seems to be a purely mental world. Although one could potentially argue that this other world is more physical than it intuitively appears to be, it still becomes very difficult to reconcile the out-of-body experiences of NDEs with a Russellian framework. One would have to describe why the subjects, as collections of physical particles, would be experiencing the world from a vantage point that may be quite far from the physical body. One would also need to locate the otherworldly realm that experiencers travel to within spacetime, since that would appear to be a key feature of this neutral substance. Alternatively, one might suggest that the otherworldly realm is physical in nature, but has completely different physical laws than those one is used to. Such a suggestion, however, seems to add an excessive number of ad hoc physical rules. Nonetheless, I do believe there is a form of panpsychism that fits the features of NDEs very well, by turning toward a philosophy known as idealism.
Idealism
Idealism is a philosophy that can mean widely different things depending on its context. Here, I will define it as the thesis that all concrete things are ultimately mental. This means that all things which are typically thought of as physical, such as rocks and chairs, are in fact reducible in some way to conscious states, or other mental building blocks. The tangible world would still exist under the idealism proposed here. The elements of the world that are described as physical would still exist independently of a person’s own awareness of them. It would simply be that at the most basic level, these elements would be built on completely mental features. In this understanding, idealism is essentially the antithesis of materialism. There are many forms of it that exist. However, here I will only focus on the one that seems to best fit the discussion above, namely cosmic idealism.
In the cosmic idealist framework, all of the universe is ultimately part of a single mental cosmic entity, and everything that appears to be real exists as part of the mind of that entity. Such a description meshes well with the thought that everything is God. Additionally, the idea that all things are connected together also seems to fit very well into cosmic idealism. Since all concrete things exist within the mind of the cosmic entity, there is a clear subject to which all things are connected. Furthermore, idealism, as a form of monism, also carries with it the advantage of being simple. Accordingly, it does not need to contend with the possibility of different types of substances playing off each other. This further affirms the statements of experiencers claiming that everything is one.
Being monist also gives idealism another advantage in that it allows for a relatively simple path towards interactionism. This is not interaction in the substance dualism sense. Rather, since all concrete things are a single mental substance, interaction would simply be mental forces interacting with other mental forces. Since there is a cosmic subject, all forces in the world may simply be changes in the mind of that subject. This seems to allow interactionism to flow naturally. How this interaction would work goes in hand with what I believe to be the biggest reason why an agapist may adopt idealism, which is a lack of dependence on the physical world.
It seems that anyone who truly wishes to embrace NDEs must also embrace the idea that the spirit is ultimately able to leave behind what is called the physical world completely. This is why a purely Russellian approach would not work for agapism, since such an approach still leaves consciousness and the physical world tied together. However, with some modifications, a form of Russellian monism could work—specifically, a type of monism that Chalmers (2019) has called enriched Russellian cosmopsychism.
In traditional Russellian monism, the structure of the mental and the physical are closely related, as the basic matter of the universe ultimately has both mental and physical properties. Thus, one can learn something about the structure of consciousness by examining the physical world. In enriched Russellian cosmopsychism, the structure of the universe is purely mental. One can still look to what is called the physical world to tell one something about the structure of the mental world because, in this idealist philosophy, the physical world is part of the mental world. Doing so, however, creates the issue that the universe that is observed does not appear to be very mind-like at all. The stars and planets that make up said universe seem to give no indication that they are part of some cosmic mind, nor do the galaxies or asteroids seem to point to any stream of thought. It is this observation that makes the idea of a cosmic mind seem so absurd to begin with.
The enriched variety of Russellian cosmopsychism addresses this problem by stating that there is much more to consciousness than what is revealed in the observable universe. In enriched Russellian cosmopsychism, the mind of the cosmic subject reaches beyond the universe as it is currently known, containing other features and experiences outside of the visible universe. Though the structure of the known universe is still part of the mind of the cosmic subject, it may be just a single thought in an ocean of other thoughts the cosmic subject may be experiencing. Thus, there would ultimately be many features of the cosmic subject that would not be represented by what can be observed.
As Chalmers (2019) has noted, this option of enriching Russellian cosmopsychism comes at the cost of additional complexity. It requires that the observable universe be a very small part of all mental reality. However, because agapism is already committed to a world beyond this one, this extra cost seems trivial to anyone devoted to NDEs. This move to enriched Russellian cosmopsychism then allows the structure of the cosmic subject’s mind to be one that is perhaps more mind-like then the physical universe. It also allows for an otherworldly realm of purely mental states to exist. It may ultimately be that the majority of the cosmic subject’s structure is the light with which experiencers claim to meld. Meanwhile physical laws and the physical universe would simply be an imagined world that the cosmic subject decided to think of.
This view would also entail that the cosmic subject could have mentally constructed the physical world in such a way that it appears that macro subjects are interacting with a mentally dead physical universe, the purpose of which is to experience and grow from. However, instead of interactions with a mentally dead world, what would really be going on at the most basic level is that the cosmic subject would be interacting with itself. The cosmic subject would be able to perceive and intuitively understand human intentions, as such intentions would be part of its own mind, and it could then think and react accordingly. This allows for a relatively straightforward account of causal interaction.
This idea that the world may simply be an idea that exists in the mind of a cosmic entity can certainly be difficult to fathom. But making this move to enriched Russellian cosmopsychism allows for a satisfying account of many NDE features. There would be a reason the universe feels connected: because it ultimately is, and everything is reducible to the same cosmic property. There would be a simple way for mental-to-mental interactionism to work. There would be support for the existence of an otherworldly realm as well as support for the idea that consciousness could survive physical death. And there would be hope in eliminating the biggest drawback of panpsychism, namely the combination problem.
There are, of course, still some issues that would need to be resolved. A primary concern is that there would still need to be an account of how casual interaction works at a physical level. Simply suggesting that physics is a mental structure thought up by the cosmic subject does nothing to explain how one’s mental intentions would be able to influence atoms. This would mean that idealism is in the same boat as dualistic interactionism with regard to the causal closure of physics. Without an account of causal interaction, it seems that one must either accept a form of mental parallelism, or reject agapism altogether.
Another issue is that the specifics of how macro subjects can split, or meld with, the cosmic subject would still need to be explained. It is hard to see how one might be able to show that the experiences of melding are truly the combination needed to solve the various problems of panpsychism, as opposed to simply feeling the sensation of being merged. It may even be that some form of emergentism is still needed to be true for this to work. And due to the fact that this combination described in NDEs only happens under such extreme circumstances, the tools needed to be able to describe exactly how this process happens may be forever beyond reach. Without these specifics, agapism may end up headed towards a philosophy that is impossible to describe mechanically. Though this would not be fatal to the philosophy, it would indeed be a disappointing notion.
However it seems to me that the biggest problem for cosmic idealism, from an agapist perspective, is the ineffable nature of NDEs. Though cosmic idealism does seem to be able to give a satisfying account of NDE features, it is clear that there is not a solid understanding of such experiences. This is because even if they are what they literally appear to be, these experiences take place in a realm that is beyond human ability to observe or perhaps even comprehend. In future there may be a greater understanding of such experiences, or at the very least have a larger pool of accounts to pull from to give better insight. But for now, it seems that making conclusions about the structure of the world based on the features of NDEs should only be done with the acknowledgement of a large amount of uncertainty.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems that if agapism is true, then materialism must be false. There are simply too many aspects of NDEs that suggest minds are in no way bound to the fate of physical bodies. Given the OBE features of NDEs it also seems very probable that if agapism is true then mental states can casually interact with the physical world. OBEs seem to perfectly demonstrate what one would expect to see in an interactive universe. Denying this would require one to adopt some form of pre-established harmony to account for the way mental states and physical world are always in sync. Though this is admittedly possible, it seems that interactionism is a better intuitive fit for the features of NDEs.
Beyond this, the features of NDEs seem to point toward some form of cosmic panpsychism. This option meshes well with experiences of universal connection, discovering that everything is one, and melding with light. Additionally, these experiences may even provide some insight into solving the combination problem. A worry here, however, is that these experiences are open to interpretation. The features that support panpsychism are often difficult to describe or they take place in a world that is unearthly in nature. But if one is prepared to take these experiences to be what they intuitively seem to be, a philosophy of cosmic idealism can give a satisfying account to all features of NDEs. An enriched Russellian cosmopsychism, in particular, seems to be able to give the world the physical structure it needs, while also keeping with the otherworldly themes and experiences of NDEs.
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