In comments, Coffones called my attention to a Skeptiko interview with Dr. Michael Persinger, the well-known neuroscientist who has said he can reproduce aspects of religious experience, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences by means of transcranial stimulation. In light of this, it is understandable that the interviewer, Alex Tsakiris, begins by describing Persinger this way: "He really is a materialist and very much a mind equals brain guy."
But by the end of the interview, the conversation has gone in a somewhat unexpected direction, and Persinger sounds a lot less like a materialist, or at least any materialist I know.
For one thing, Persinger says he has recently found evidence of telepathy in his laboratory experiments:
What we have found, for example, is that if you place two different brains, two different people at a distance, you put a circular magnetic field around both. There’s a magnetic field going around like a coil, around both brains even at a distance. You make sure both coils are connected to the same computer which means they’re generating the same configuration of two different spaces.
If you flash a light in one person’s eye, even though they’re in a chamber that’s closed up, the person in the other room that’s receiving just the magnetic field now, they’re not aware of the light flashing or not, they will show similar changes in frequency in the room. And we think that’s tremendous because that maybe the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection or so-called quantum entanglement.
This would be very interesting, if the results can be independently replicated. It's worth noting that when a team of scientists attempted to replicate some of Persinger's experiments involving the simulation of NDEs, they met with no success. But the results suggestive of telepathy would seem less subjective — more amenable to objective measurement — than some of the earlier results, which relied on test subjects reporting their subjective impressions.
Persinger's apparent acceptance of telepathy — or something closely akin to it — also crops up in his discussion of how near-death experiencers can relate details of things that happened while they were unconscious, even describing events in distant locations. Persinger suggests something very much like telepathy or clairvoyance or super-psi:
Now to address the issue of things at a distance, that of course, is totally acceptable and expected. Right now you and I are being inundated by cosmic rays, by signals from cell phones, from just literally billions of events but we’re only aware of a couple of them or a few of them per unit time that we call stimuli. So what would happen if you changed the organization of the brain and you became aware of events that were taking place at a distance? It could be anything from, for example, picking up radio signals or something equivalent. If you change the structure of the brain, and that’s what happens in altered states, then of course, you can pick up information at a distance.
The classic example would be when you’re dreaming. All right, the environment, stimuli that you’re not even aware of at quite a distance, for example, a sound from a bell or the temperature of the room can be incorporated into your dream content. So what makes the near-death experience so exciting is that – and indeed, altered states in general – is it opens up a more objective way of trying to understand what has been rejected, sadly, so many years, called parapsychological phenomena, which is simply information obtained from a distance or time through mechanisms not known to date. And if you keep the definition that way it becomes much less mystical.
Furthermore, Persinger says that he and his graduate students are investigating the phenomenon of DMILS (direct mental interaction with living systems):
We’re looking at, for example, how various kinds of patterns of electromagnetic fields generated from the brain may influence cell cultures in terms of influencing their outcome in terms of their molecular chemistry, which may someday add to the understanding of how somebody being nearby can influence the physiology and health of a person. We know about individuals with green thumbs. We know that certain physicians are better than others just by touching the patient. And it’s more than just a placebo effect. What’s the mechanism? We’re trying to understand that.
Finally, Tsakiris asks Persinger, "Are you open to the possibility that maybe the physical structure of our brain is more of a transceiver than the agent that creates consciousness, as some people have suggested? Is that on the table for you, or …"
Persinger answers:
Absolutely. The idea [is] that the brain, of course, is a source of all experiences because the brain, obviously if you terminate it you don’t have experiences, but the counter hypothesis – actually it’s not even counter, it’s a parallel hypothesis – [is] that the brain is microstructured. This infinitesimal, complex pattern, is microstructured so that it can serve as a substrate for electromagnetic patterns.
And those electromagnetic patterns are the behaviors and the experiences, which means technically they could exist somewhere else. That means that if indeed there is an electromagnetic pattern, a complex one though it may be, associated with consciousness, if you recreated a substructure in another kind of setting, for example, a computer or in rocks or in trees, could you have some simulation of that? That, of course, is a hypothesis that definitely deserves testing.
What I would suggest is that these "electromagnetic patterns" can and do "exist somewhere else" — namely, in what we might call, for want of a better name, the etheric (or astral) brain, which is part of the etheric (or astral) body. I'm not convinced that these electromagnetic patterns necessarily are consciousness, but they are clearly "associated with consciousness," as Persinger puts it. And I suspect that these electromagnetic patterns and their associated consciousness persist if the necessary "substrate" continues to exist — which it will, since the etheric body outlasts the earthly body, and may be only one of several closely interwoven bodies that serve as vehicles for consciousness (as many mystical traditions propose).
This suspicion of mine goes far beyond Dr. Persinger's statements, of course, but what's surprising is that his own remarks might be read as leading in this general direction. So is he a materialist? Perhaps such labels are becoming increasingly obsolete in our fast-changing world.
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On an unrelated note, I suggest that readers take a look at the comments thread of my recent post on Ted Serios. A commenter with the screen name Philip A. Centaur pointed me to a YouTube video of Serios in action. Near the end of this clip, right before the closing credits, there is some brief footage that may very well show a slide hidden inside the so-called "gismo" or tube used by Serios to produce his "thoughtographs." I hadn't seen this footage before, and I find it very damning. It is not conclusive, but it is certainly suggestive of fraud.
The Serios case has never struck me as one of the stronger cases for psi (I think I've written only two posts about it), but previously I have been skeptical of the idea that Serios could simply slip a slide into the tube and remove it unobserved in front of many witnesses, especially under controlled conditions. But now I have to wonder.