A spirituality built on science
Dr Adam Barrett is Deputy Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science and researches the neural basis of consciousness. Drawing from this, and his experience of studying fundamental physics, he explains the scientific basis for a certain kind of spirituality, namely one of ‘panpsychism’ plus ‘eternalism’.
A common perception in Western culture is that science and spirituality are totally separate pursuits. A key reason for this is that when we do science, we place ourselves outside whatever it is we are observing. And we only measure the physical aspects of nature. That is, science is about the behaviour of all the objects that are out there. Science doesn’t usually consider consciousness, i.e., subjective experience, or the inner world. Thus, it seems science can’t have anything to say about the big metaphysical questions: what happens to us when we die? Is there a God?
In recent years, we have developed a nascent science of consciousness, and have uncovered `neural correlates’ of certain conscious experiences. We can measure the `complexity’ of brain activity and use this to more or less figure out how conscious an adult human is, when hooked up to some brain imaging machine. But there is no way to prove there is consciousness beyond human brains. Hence, most scientists struggle to accept as proper science any theory of consciousness that pertains beyond human brains, or that says anything about what happens to our own consciousness after we die. However, if we put together all the scientific data and knowledge we have, certain conclusions on spiritual matters are possible. In particular, it is highly likely that death is not the end of your existence.
What actually are we?
Descartes famously observed that “I think, therefore I am” — your first-person experience proves that consciousness exists. A basic faith in science reveals that the most likely generator of your consciousness is the brain inside your head (maybe working together with some other parts of your body). You can trust that other people really are conscious when they say they are, because other people look more or less like you, and have brains that behave more or less like yours. But curiously, there are no atoms with your particular name on them. Atoms come and go from your body. So, you are just a bundle of conscious experiences, being generated by a bunch of atoms connected in a certain way. This suggests that consciousness is just a property of the matter in this universe. If matter arranges itself in a certain way, conscious experiences happen.
Where does this bring us? In the words of the philosopher Philip Goff:
“We know that some material entities — brains — have an intrinsically consciousness-involving nature. We have no clue as to the intrinsic nature of any other material entities. And so the most simple, elegant, parsimonious hypothesis, is that the nature of the stuff outside of brains is continuous with that of brains, in also being consciousness-involving.”
Another way of putting this is that we are in some sense part of a continuous mass, that has a load of conscious experiences all over the place, at many different times.
This ‘panpsychist’ position is easy to ridicule at first. But it doesn’t say that rocks and trees are having big experiences, the way you or I are. They’re made of the same stuff as you and me, and so there is nothing implausible about them having some very elemental form of consciousness. If their atoms were to become part of certain regions of your brain, then these atoms would contribute to the generation of rich conscious experiences.
A common objection to panpsychism is the ‘combination problem’ — if everything is conscious, how do multiple small things join together to create one big conscious human being? We don’t yet have a mature theory of consciousness, or a solution to this, but one can imagine it being solved. Integrated information theory — a controversial yet intriguing theory, best viewed as being in its infancy — offers one potential mechanism, with ‘complexity’ being crucial. A theory based on quantum field entanglement is also plausible in the future.
From a scientific perspective, there appears to be no realistic alternative to panpsychism. Despite decades of studying the brain, neuroscientists have found no evidence for any kind of mechanism through which we each obtain our own personal soul at the beginning of our lives. Nor is there any neurological phenomenon suggesting a magical conscious light switching on when we reach a certain stage of maturity.
Nevertheless, most neuroscientists say they don’t like panpsychism. You can’t prove it. You can’t do any science with it. For example, it doesn’t help us learn anything new about how to link aspects of conscious experiences to aspects of brain activity. Or find a cure for cancer. However, this misses the value of arriving at a panpsychist position. The fact that panpsychism is likely given our scientific observations is fascinating information about our place in the universe. This has implications for our search for meaning, our behaviour, and our mental health.
Untimely time
A second key insight that science has given us regarding spirituality is the illusory nature of time. Einstein’s theory of relativity did away with this. You cannot say what time it is right now across the whole universe. You can approximately do this on Earth. But clocks on two bodies moving at different speeds relative to some large static object will tick at different rates. Neither time they show is correct in some absolute sense.
Sabine Hossenfelder gives a great example in her book Existential Physics, where she does a thought experiment involving two different observers floating in space and moving in different ways. They each observe you and an exploding star (supernova). Following the rules of special relativity, one of them sees the supernova and your birth at the same time, and one of them sees the supernova and your death at the same time. That this is possible has profound consequences for what one should believe about the afterlife. It means there is no such thing as ‘before you’re born’ or ‘after you die’. Outside your individual existence, there is no one time. There is only all of time, all over the place. Relativity theory is hard to understand, and often considered irrelevant to everyday life, because we don’t need it to calculate the physics of everyday objects on earth. But its conclusion on the nature of time has profound implications for our existence and place in the universe. Time and space give rise to the experience that each and every conscious experience is separate from all the others, but with there being no universal now, there is no way to order them objectively along a single timeline. This position is a form of eternalism.
Insights from neuroscience and physics thus lead to panpsychism plus eternalism. Everything has potential for consciousness, and everything is in some sense the same being because it’s made of the same stuff, and consciousness arises from configurations of matter. Plus, past, present and future all co-exist. This is the simplest metaphysical theory one can concoct that is consistent with the data we have.
If we think carefully about these insights, they can bring spiritual meaning and comfort to our lives. It’s only an illusion we’re separate from others, and we will never die in a total sense. One way of summarising this spiritual perspective is:
“Consciousness is a mirror, through which the universe looks at itself.”
It can be hard to swallow all this for a committed atheist, or someone brought up in Western monotheistic religion. But the last few decades have seen increasing interest in contemplative practices, and it appears that through this, many in the West are tentatively embracing ideas that sit comfortably with the scientific position laid out in this article. We don’t have all the answers, and science is probably not capable of providing answers to all the metaphysical questions. For example, there are no data on whether there is purpose to existence. However, knowing that science does support it, perhaps more people can embrace some form of spirituality, and reap benefit from this.
The simplest plausible model
A form of ‘Bayesian reasoning’ is common in machine learning and AI. The model you believe in is the one that combines being a good fit to the data with being simple. The position outlined here is as simple a model as one can come up with. A position where we are all truly separate beings with individual souls is more complicated. It would need an explanation of how all these individual souls interact with all our individual bodies, and how exactly they die when we die. And a position that includes an omniscient God who cares about us would also be more complicated. How would that God gain access to the contents of each of our individual conscious experiences? There would need to be a whole other mechanism that is outside of current physics.
Another pathway to accessing these insights, increasingly being employed by scientists and practitioners in experimental protocols with promising mental health benefits, is through psychedelics. A high dose of psilocybin, LSD or DMT, can temporarily alter or reduce one’s sense of self. In this scenario, the experience is still being generated by the same brain. But a first-hand experience and survival of ‘ego-dissolution’ often leads to belief-shift in the direction of panpsychism.
Science has often been seen as a destroyer of spirituality, and increasingly relegating our place in a cold, dark universe. However, this century is starting to see a dramatic reversal to this. While not everything that is published is rigorous, this should not deter us from building bridges between science and spirituality. In the words of Albert Einstein:
