Sharon Dirckx vs Emily Qureshi-Hurst • Do consciousness & near death experiences prove an afterlife?

the mind and brain are connected but the scientific data doesn't enable you to establish the nature of that connection or the relationship just because science can't demonstrate that physical processes and mental processes are the same thing that in and of itself doesn't give you any evidence that that's not the case either some people talk about seeing deceased relatives and communicating with them this idea of floating up out of your body and watching things happen and being able to describe it afterwards that could be formed in your imaginative mind conscious experience and brain processes are to fundamentally different things I wonder if we're talking about me to go out for a bit you guys seem really happy if you want more from today's conversation register now and you'll receive the ebook of Sharon diricks and Ian mcgilchrist debating brain science and God and also tell us who persuaded you in our survey with today's show hello and well welcome to the big conversation from Premiere unbelievable brought to you in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation I am your host Andy kind the big conversation is all about having large chats sprawling chats about those big issues around Faith science philosophy and culture bringing together some of the brightest and most Ardent thinkers across the belief Spectrum today we are discussing the brain Consciousness and near-death experiences are ndes proof of an afterlife in an age where opinion is very much divided on the nature of Consciousness and the human mind or Soul if there even is one or if even that's a proper term to use might ndes provide proof of an afterlife should we give them Credence as supporting evidence or do we just need to accept that once it's the end of the brain it's the end of the game well joining me today to definitively answer this question are two illustrious and distinguished guests Sharon Dirks and Emily cureshi Hurst welcome thank you we've got a lot to talk about but what I wanted to do was start gently and just get your background and backstories uh a little bit you are both academics both doctors so could you talk about your route into your chosen subject and how your world view has changed or influenced where you've got to at this current state so Sharon we'll start with you yeah thank you Andy um so I I guess I I began life uh well um my my earliest childhood memories I I didn't really have a particular beliefs uh about about the world I I remember um as a child um having a thought as I was just sitting watching the rain uh Splash against the pain one day being slightly bored I I remember a series of thoughts coming into my head why can I think why do I exist why am I a living breathing conscious being now the thing that's helpful to know uh about me at that point was that I I wasn't raised in a religious home and so those thoughts were seemingly coming from a kind of neutral vantage point on life um and I suppose later on I began to absorb a what you call a materialistic uh perspective from you know the news from books from the views of my friends from radio and TV and so on um I knew that I was a scientist from quite early on I decided to continue in The Sciences from from my teenagers um and um I remember my a-level biology teacher handing me a copy of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and this was a long time ago and so this book was fairly hot off the press and I remember reading this book and um this view that we are essentially material beings in a material world and and not really questioning it just kind of absorbing it um and it wasn't really until I arrived at University that I began to really think about whether there was more to to it than that and yeah I essentially arrived at University with the view that um God didn't exist and that being a credible scientist was certainly not compatible with belief in God that's really interesting yeah so what then changed for you what was the what was the crossing the Jordan moment for you well I wouldn't say there was a moment I would say there were there was a process with certain kind of key moments along the way um in my very first week I was invited to an event called gorilla Christian which is not nothing to do with barbecuing as we know um but there were Christians who you could address questions to one evening so I went along and I um spent the evening listening to other people's questions and then about halfway through I plucked up courage to ask my own question and asked surely you can't believe in God and be a credible scientist at the same time and was actually told you know something along the lines of one of the things we're discussing today which is that these are both ways of looking at the same reality but just from different perspectives and and that of course you don't need to choose it's like asking someone to choose between the existence of Jeff Bezos and the programming and processing languages underneath undergirding Amazon of course you don't need to choose between those two things and together they give a more complete picture of reality well this for me opened up a whole Vista I thought well okay if there's a persuasive credible answer to that question how many other responses are there out there that might be able to help me in my journey so I spent the next 18 months grilling a lot more Christians asking a lot more questions and eventually and including about the person of Jesus Christ and eventually became persuaded not that I had every question answered and I still don't there's there's a lot of mystery there but that I I became convinced that Jesus was real that he had risen from the dead and that he loved me and I was actually going to flourish most as a human being in a relationship with him and so I actually changed my views about God in my 20s while at the age of 20. studying biochemistry yeah and that was just a couple of months ago wasn't it so of course but that's great so you came to this conclusion that science and religion are not at War don't have to be or it's not a Turf War they can both live quite happily in the neighborhood absolutely great well we'll talk about that more Emily welcome to the show thank you first time yep so do you want to give your backstory yeah so um don't start from birth okay so uh I'll start a little bit after birth just the Highlight yeah um so I come from a sort of Christian family we have Christian grandparents my granddad was a priest so I spent a fair bit of time as a child in church in Sunday school I was always exposed to the Christian religion but it didn't really seem to resonate very deeply with me but I was I was always interested in it as a perspective as a world view but it just I I didn't connect with it I didn't think that it was true um and then my dad always used to talk to me about the universe and he was really interested in science so I think actually from a very early age I was raised in an environment where both science and religion were seen as fascinating ways of understanding the world so I came to I went to Oxford to study philosophy and Theology and to prepare myself for that I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins so he features in my story as well and I was totally convinced that he was absolutely right I mean the mind of a 17 year old is very black and white so I was like yeah this is this is it and I came to came to University and very early on when I was there I think in my first term Richard Dawkins did a talk at the union I was like oh great chance to meet him so I went and I got to talk to him and um I got I asked him because I was studying Theology and in his book he says theology something along the lines of theology isn't a real discipline or you know and I said to him you know I am an atheist I agree with a lot of the stuff you say but I'm here studying theology you've said it's not a real discipline can you respond and he couldn't really and I think that was the first time that I saw this kind of new atheist world where you start to fall apart and uh from there on I've been interested in basically the intersection between philosophy Theology and physics and trying to look at all of the different ways that these can interact I no longer think science and religion are incompatible although I am an atheist so I do think religion is false but I find it fascinating so I'm yeah ever since then I've been researching and learning more about science religion and philosophy that's fantastic well it's great that we've got two academics who are coming at it from a different perspective but again we are not in some kind of pitched battle here so let's talk first of all about the the areas of convergence where do the two Venn diagrams overlap you don't think that they're incompatible no I don't know do you think that with science you would say that religion religious belief is is incorrect is flawed so how do you then compare that to science is science simply a best guess of what we've got and what we know about the universe or would you would you dig down a bit deeper into certainty with with science and how does that how do those two magisteria converge in your mind it's a very good question but I think before I answer it we need to take a step back one what take one step back and really think about what we actually mean by the terms science and religion we use them all the time with certain assumptions about what they mean but actually when you start to unpick those definitions of Science and religion the conceptual categories start to fall apart or at least they start to Freight the edges so let's start with religion what what do we mean when we say religion in the west we typically think of religion as a system of beliefs particularly surrounding belief in God but of course that doesn't capture all types of religion there are certain religions that aren't organized around a particular God or Gods there are also religions that aren't primarily determined or shaped by belief there are religions that are shaped by Community by practice by ritual so when we start to dig down into what religion really is we realize maybe it's a family of things maybe it's a category that we can't actually draw neat boundaries around so that's my that's the first thing I'd like to say and then with science it's it's also the same we also have conceptual problems there so do we think of science as a body of knowledge and if we do what knowledge is included and what knowledge is excluded there's always disputes between scientists rightly so about different interpretations of data so it's definitely not as clear to me to say that science is a body of knowledge and that's it so one of the other definitions is that science is a methodology but of course the methodologies of science are multifarious so the way that you do geology and the way that you do quantum mechanics are completely different so I think we also need to be really careful when we use the term science that we're being really careful and clear about what we mean by it so and the way that we Define these two terms massively goes on to shape how we think that their relationship should go so if you think of religion as a system of beliefs and science is a body of knowledge then you can look at the beliefs in the body of knowledge and see okay well they seem to hit up against each other and we seem to have areas of incompatibility if you see science as a methodology a way of coming to understand the world and religion as a set of rituals and community-based things and they can't really talk to each other at all so that's a long and maybe quite fluffy answer but I think it really really matters how we Define these terms and what we think of when we're using them and that will inform how we understand their relationship it's all about long-form answers here so you you take your time that's fantastic yeah you're in the right place Emily uh Sharon do you want to respond to that is it too simplistic to say that science and religion obviously vague terms is it too simplistic to say that science is about mechanism and religion is about meaning is that too vague I mean I think different layers and levels at which you can respond to the question um I definitely agree with Emily in the sense that there are many different ways in which we approach The Sciences there are many different religions and we my friend are you know more helpful in our discussion to focus on theology as opposed to religion there's a question as to because there are so many different kinds of religion do they all lend themselves to the practice of science in the same way that the judeo-christian framework does and I think there's a whole conversation to be had there about the uniqueness of judeo-christianity in the very fact that it enables The Sciences to proceed and historically has kind of an um kind of paved the way for that um but I I guess in its broader sense if we're thinking about definitions um I see um The Sciences and theology both as an exploration of reality their ways of exploring what is real and true in the world and as Einstein put it you know a scientist is a Seeker after truth what is true in the world whether that is in the natural world or in the spiritual realm if indeed there is one um and so that's why I I would take the view that they are I I really like um Aleister McGrath's view of mutual enrichment that actually they're both looking at the same reality and therefore we it doesn't it doesn't help us to separate them off from each other and see it see them as different categories um even if that lends some Credence to the existence and credibility of theological perspectives I think that they should be seen as overlapping because they both describe the same reality but from different perspectives and I know that um you know the philosopher Mary Midgley talks about these maps of meaning you know if we want to look at a map of the UK we could look at it from you know we could look at a political map in terms of like the the political positions of people around the country or we could look at a religious map of people and their religious beliefs or we could look at an economic map or um you know all kinds of different ways and no one of those Maps is um a kind of a conclusive summary of the country as a whole but you gain greater understanding by layering them again you know one on top of the other and with the addition of each one you gain more insight into the UK and what it what it's like as a country and that's how I see the interaction of Theology and and the sciences that together they give a more complete picture of reality um yeah and presumably you would say that they're in that respect they're both they're both true aren't they they're both I mean you were as a Christian they're both means of exploring what is true yeah in the world yeah and and I guess well what's interesting about what we'll get to today that it seems to be that could there be that there are kind of spiritual aspects of the world that we can observe within a scientific context which is what's kind of fascinating about near-death experiences that's another area of deep purple I mean we've got so much to come we're going to talk about the mind we're going to talk about near-death experiences for you then Emily is someone um who is an atheist but also a very humble and cogent writer and not disinterested at all in theology your book is called God salvation and the problem of space-time so it's about the intersectionality isn't it of of of these things where would you say is that is the is the greatest sort of conflict between Theology and science is is there is there an impasse at some point where you think you know what at this point we we do need to we do need to separate the two yeah um so I think it the conflict lies in um I'm trying to think of the right term fundamentalist religion or biblical literalism taking the particularly the creation narratives in Genesis as factually and historically accurate the type of um of Christianity that takes those as the final word on matters of history is not compatible with science so young Earth creationism or a denial of evolution I mean they're at that point science and religion are coming into con conflict with each other in a way that can't really be resolved because the two besides the science and the religion are they're starting from completely different points and so there isn't really a place where there isn't a common framework by which you can assess the claims that each are making if religion rejects the findings of science if that form of religion rejects the findings of science then you can't use the scientific method to say well hang on we've got really good evidence that the Earth isn't six thousand years old and the animals did evolve when humans that evolve as well so I think that's where there could be some potential well a definite conflict but you don't have to interpret the Bible that way so the conflict absolutely isn't necessary but there are areas of conflict that are present for sure so it's this idea of a fundamental Turf War these two old firm enemies going at it hand into is that quite a modern invention do you think Sharon um I I think that it it may have I think it probably is uh quite a recent phenomenon um in terms of my own story I um actually one of the things that was kind of keeping me from and that concerned me about any exploration of the Christian faith was that I was going to be asked to kind of turn my back on the kinds of things that I was learning about in and studying biochemistry and specifically the question of evolution and of course it was it was a great relief to me to to hear actually one of my biochemistry lecturers was a Christian and the church that I ended up becoming involved with he was a member of that church and it was you know really helpful to hear that there are thinking Christians that the whole different views on on the age of the Earth and indeed the mechanisms through which kind of well cosmological Evolution and biological evolution ocean took place now there's a whole conversation around you talked about definitions earlier what do we mean by Evolution I mean that's a vast term and how it distinguishes from evolutionism which is what we see in a lot of scientific literature where people are using a kind of a naturalistic evolutionary naturalistic worldview to interpret scientific data that doesn't necessarily go there that's the whole conversation but stepping back from that you know Christians can hold all kinds of views and theistic evolution as you know is one of them that actually the opening chapters of Genesis are not a scientific textbook were never intended to be about the how long ago and by what means did God create the the world that we see around us in fact they're about the who of creation if you look at the the kind of surrounding context it was polytheism um where there were belief that you know nature was itself Divine and the author of Genesis trying to say no actually that the heavenly bodies are not themselves deities God is distinct from nature but yet made the material world and it's that God that I'm trying to make clear to you and so that the days of Genesis are not um you know commented on in terms of how long they are in fact there are parts of the Bible that say a day to the Lord is like a thousand years a thousand years like a day and and so they could could be sexy evolutionary long periods of time in which what we now you know know to be seem to be have observed naturally that evolutionary processes could take place during those days and there are many Christians that hold that view as well as Christians that might say we're going to accept cosmology and geology but we also believe there were still Supernatural processes as well as natural processes involved that will be old Earth creationism and then of course you mentioned young Earth but there are a variety of views and people discuss and debate I personally I I do I do feel that we need to um you know accept and and then is precisely because it's important to have dialogue between scientists and theologians scientists that have done hard work and uh you know have drawn conclusions about the natural world well theologians and religious communities ought to listen to that and respect each other's discipline that's absolutely yeah absolutely fantastic and we're going to go on to talk about the mind and the brain and the relationship between the two we're going to talk about near-death experiences but what I think is great is to have this Foundation of uh cozy collusion if you like and both of you coming at it from different World Views you are both curious you would both agree I think that in order to do what both of you do you need to have a belief in the intelligibility of of the universe and also a curiosity so none of this is again what we're sort of issuing here and what we're sort of rejecting is that very binary approach of it's either completely black or it's either completely white it is one or it is zero there is a Venn diagram where we can have these um great intersections we're going to go into a break in in a while but let's just start let's just sort of open up and we can drill down into this after the the break about the brain and the mind Emily what is the mind that is a good question and uh philosopher's been thinking about this uh as long as there have been philosophers I think um I maybe we should talk about some different positions you can have on the relationship between the mind maybe we should at some point but our reflection I am a skeptic about the our ability to know for sure so um I think I'm gonna remain agnostic on some of the issues about the relationship between the mind and the Brain but I'm certainly rejecting dualism dualism I don't think there is a brain and a mind and that these two can be completely separated uh one can and one can live without the other so I am some form of materialist I think but whether I'm a reductive materialist or a non-reductive materialist and we'll get into what those are um I am not entirely sure I what I will say though before we get started is that all positions have significant problems with them still which is why no firm conclusions have been reached so uh there's there's lots to talk about with all of these different views and lots of objections we can discuss as well well there's a whole buffet for you to get into after the break Sharon but we're going to have a a little break now just to tantalize people are watching you both splendid thanks for that wonderful opening section on the big conversation today we are talking about the Mind Consciousness and near-death experiences are ndes proof of an afterlife and my guests already having a wonderful time and a fascinating conversation are Sharon DivX and Emily cureshi Hurst we will be back after this short break are you enjoying the conversation why don't you tell us who persuaded you in our survey plus if you want more from today's conversation register now and you'll receive the ebook of Sharon Derricks and Ian mcgilchrist debating brain science and God welcome back to the big conversation with me your host Andy kind and today it's a great topic we're talking about the Mind Consciousness and near-death experiences are ndes proof of and afterlife and we've already had a fantastic conversation with our two guests Sharon Derricks and Emily cureshi Hurst before the break we got onto the massive contentious potentially subject of mind and brain dualism and we left you tantalizingly hanging wanting to respond there Sharon Emily you're saying that you reject the the dualism you are absolutely absolutely I'm a physicalist you're a physicalist material some sort of materialist um what is your response to that shown but also could you outline for us some of the ways that we can think about mind and brain yeah absolutely well first of all it's worth kind of setting the scene a little bit and the reason why we find ourselves talking about this is because you know the view exists out there that your neurons Drive everything about you um your personality your choices even your religious beliefs you know they're all dictated by the neurons in your head um is that the case is and is that the best story that can be told about what a human being is um and so that led me to you know write a book am I just my brain um and to think about this this question in more depth and of course we've already started to sort of dig in um to this because we don't just have a brain we also have a mind um and the question what is the mind is is another thing along the way and ultimately you know we we don't just have a brain we have neurons um chemicals transmitters and so on but we also have a mind with its thoughts feelings emotions memories and so on in other words um there's something that it's like to be you that's something that it's like to be me um and how do you get from one to the other and that is known as the mind brain problem how do you get from neurons in your head to what it's like to be you the kind of inner life that we seem to have or the stream of Consciousness that seems to be going all the time and this is what Philip board described because he's written a lot about the the mind this aboutness right reducing it to the idea that having a mind means that there is something it is like to be that thing yes and that's again yes seems a bit vague and and non-mathematical yes but is that the best we've got in terms of yes mind identity right and um and I suppose a reductive um physicalist at its kind of sharpest end and I recognize there's a kind of a spectrum it's essentially saying that mental states are brain states that mental processes are brain processes which is kind of like saying there isn't something that it is like to be you there's just brain activity um at its sharpest Edge now of course I know you'll want to respond to me on that and there are different different ways of of looking at it but um the reason why I'm not persuaded by that is uh is to do with something what philosophers refer to as qualia um so if um if I were to ask you to describe to me for example the smell of coffee yeah and we just we all we have at our disposal our physical descriptions well you may offer me you know the chemical structure of caffeine but that doesn't get you any closer to the smell of coffee and the inner experience of joy and things like right as you drink it depending on the level of your dependency yes um dependent on it otherwise yeah we can talk about that um and you know you might describe the physiology as you digest it but that doesn't get you any closer to the smell of coffee if you want to understand the smell of coffee you need to smell it there's no way of capturing that experience physically in terms of physical descriptions and this is why many philosophers atheists and agnostics as well as theists argue that um actually experience conscious experience and brain processes are two very different things and one does not capture the other nor is one synonymous with the other and so this is why uh alternative ways of looking at the mind brain relationship are needed because this doesn't capture the ultimate qualia of what it's like to be you as a person and it's great and there will be we'll let you come back on that in a moment Emily and it's fantastic because although this is a very gracious and charitable conversation there is a lot at stake in your book your most recent book am I just my brain by uh Sharon Durex that's you you say we don't merely secrete to brain chemicals we also think thoughts and we don't think with our brains but with our minds but what exactly is the mind and how does it relate to the brain and herein lies the rub essayist Marilyn Robinson in her book absence of Mind reads the situation well by pointing out that whoever controls the definition of the Mind controls the definition of humankind itself it's a bit like the Battle of Waterloo where Napoleon said whoever controls The Farmhouse wins the battle is it is it that serious is is that why we're having this conversation because well there are all implications that go Way Beyond just those of the interest of the neuroscientist and philosopher um if we are just our brains if it's true that mental states are brain States then there are implications for free will um are we just our brains and if so do we just do what our brains tell us and if so what are the implications for moral responsibility can anyone be held morally responsible for any action if it's not actually coming from them it's coming from forces beyond their control but we don't seem to live in that kind of world we seem to live as though people live as though their choices mean something and we fight for our rights and the rights of other people precisely because we're not just packs of neurons we're conscious beings who live meaningful there are implications for AI implications for ethics I could say more about that yeah well I mean feel free to Circle back to that but Emily do you want to respond to what you've heard so far and give your give your feelings and thoughts yeah so speak from the mind it certainly does feel to us like we have a mind that is distinct from our brain um we we've we've always been aware of ourselves as thinking conscious creatures as far back as philosophical reflection goes but as we learn more and more about the brain we learn that there are certain areas of the brain that do certain things and also when you injure certain parts of the brain you undergo significant changes in personality and capability Etc so it's clear at the very least there's a strong and profound connection between the sorts of things we experience the quality of the thoughts the emotions and the physical brain that sits in our heads I mean there's somebody who you discuss in your book and who comes up a lot in these kinds of conversations known as Phineas Gage who um was around 200 years ago 150 years ago and experienced an accident where a poll uh there was an explosion and a poll went through his eye socket through his brain and cause significant damage and now what happened to Phineas is he lost whatever it was according to the stories that made him him his personality changed he stopped being able to hold down a job his personal relationships broke down there was something fundamentally about who he was that was changed because of damage to the brain and we know this with patients who are undergo lobotomies and also something much more mundane every day you know people take medication for psychiatric disorders for mental illness so there is clearly a deep connection between the mind and the brain and so I guess my question to you is the question you asked me what is the mind and how can we be sure that it is something distinct from the brain when we know that physical impacts on the brain have profound consequences on the mind yeah absolutely I actually agree with you on that and I think that that's partly why we have this conversation and why many neuroscientists have sought to find more holistic ways of describing the mind brain relationship precisely because of the close correlation nation that we see one of my postdocs was in study of human cocaine abuse and we put someone in an MRI scanner and you give them cocaine which generates a certain experience you see networks lighting up in the brain of course these two things are connected and you know one of the biggest challenges that we face as a society is how we care for an aging population because we have people whose brains are in a state of degeneration with very clear impact on the mind and the personality of the person yeah there's a question there that was as about personhood if there's a person that's beyond their brain then even if the brain changes is there still a person there and that's that's why that's one of the reasons why this question is so important but the thing that I find to be really helpful and really interesting is that the science gets you to connection you know the all of the examples you've just quoted and the ones I've given so that the mind and brain are connected but the scientific data doesn't enable you to establish the nature of that connection or the relationship for that you have philosophy but the science doesn't get you to philosophy which is why it's very frustrating to to read sometimes in scientific journals and interpretation for example the the front cover of Scientific American in 2017 talked about how the mind arises very enticing title and then underneath it said Network interactions in the brain create thought as if some scientific study has shown that Network interactions in their brain create thought but there's actually no study you can do that will enable you to draw that conclusion the study will have been that networks in the brain correlate with certain aspects of thought but not that it one creates the other that's a philosophical assumption or interpretation that's been imposed upon the data and we see this happening all the time in all kinds of areas and in this area of mind and brain so the science doesn't get you to the nature of the connection it simply says the two are correlated so then we have the question what is the best way of making sense of how these things are related but that's not from science that's from philosophy and theology yeah absolutely I mean there is there are fundamental limitations to science and we have to recognize that um but just because science can't tell us the nature of the connection between mind and brain or at least it can't demonstrate that physical processes and mental processes are the same thing that in and of itself doesn't give you any evidence that that's not the case either so I think you're right we have to look to philosophy yeah yeah I think qualia give you a good reason to believe that that's not the case that conscious experience is is not the same thing as the the processes that are involved you know when you experience pain that's you know we can describe that physically but the experience is not is not the underlying processes there are two things happening there I spoke well I suppose that's the open question isn't it because I would I would say that they probably are the same thing but it's just one of them gives you an experience of what it's like in a scientific sense and the other is what that feels like what that physical process feels like to the person I don't I don't think that there we have to say that because you can feel I mean you know we feel we can feel physical pain we can give a physical explanation for it and you know I don't I don't think that the um the fact that it has an impact on us necessarily shows that there are two separate things going on um I think we probably can at some point give a physical explanation for all of it just because we aren't able to right now uh yeah maybe maybe we will in the future or at least could in principle even if there are limitations to what science could tell us there is an explanation in principle there I wonder if psychologists might take you to task on that a little bit because I mean you know if you want to access what's in someone's mind you need to ask them you can't simply measure their brain well you know we we can't at the moment but science uh science isn't finished we don't have perfect technical capabilities so maybe we could at some point maybe I don't know again I think that's something that I want to remain agnostic on but I think we should be careful not to say that because we can't do it now because our brain imaging technology isn't there now it couldn't ever be but just to respond but actually underlying that is the assumption that it has as a physical basis that can be objectively measured but even now you know the fields of Psychiatry and psychology are the only way they proceed and function um to the maximum is if the the patient or the volunteer is asked about their experiences there are some aspects of our Humanity that can't be objectively measured in an empirical scientific sense and that's why we're even having this conversation if I wanted to do a study of what it's like for you to write your next book and I said you know put an EEG cap on you and put you in an MRI scanner measure the data from your brain is that going to tell me what it's like for you to go through that process no it's not and so we need access to a different category of information in order to access your mind we can't measure your brain and that for me and for many uh philosophers puts that in a completely different category conscious experience and brain processes are two fundamentally different things and one is not synonymous with the other I wonder if we're talking uh I'd like me to go out for a bit you guys seem really happy sorry um I I think we might be confusing uh questions of epistemology with questions of ontology so questions about knowledge and understanding with questions about the way that things are in themselves I agree that there are two different types of explanation going on which is the epistemic point that we explain mental processes and physical processes differently I think we can't go from the epistemic point to the ontological or metaphysical point that those two things are different because we explain them differently I think I think that's where the argument breaks down for me but for me it's actually that we experience one and we measure the other yeah okay so so I think that that yeah is it is if it's fine I'm uh watching this wonderful non-fatal sparring match between the two of you but it's great we've got areas of convergence areas of Divergence but a wonderful sort of gentility towards one another is it fair to say that at the moment the best we have is the sort of Mapei Mundi these sort of old you know like old maps of the world and the closer you are to home the easier it is to map out the landscape but the further away you get the more obscure and sort of gratuitous some of the maps become it is that the case with what we're talking about here we've got some observable points some navigable points but there's actually a lot of Uncharted Territory which you're thinking presumably we will start to chart as we as we go along yeah uh yeah I think that's absolutely right and um we may also be fundamentally Limited in how much we can come to understand the brain I remember hearing a quote and I I can't remember who said it but it was if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand we would be too simple to understand it so maybe um the brain coming to understand itself is just one of those things that science will never be able to to tell us and of course we might draw different conclusions from that I might say well there is in principle of physical explanation for what's going on in the brain but we Havas of these brains can't get there and you might say well that's because we can't give a physical explanation for everything that goes on in the mind would that be fair to say um I think that I think fundamentally where I'm coming from is that simply looking at human beings through the lens of their brain gives you a diminished view of what it means to be a human being that we are more than just neurons and there are more than physical explanations in this world and in reality and we need to access those and in order to have the most holistic view of what a human being is and therefore we need to draw not just from Neuroscience but also from um you know from the clinic from from theology from Philosophy from and actually when you start to look at Patients things get really interesting um you know you've got patients who have recovered from childhood and carefully who are missing 95 of their cortex and yet function normally as adults or you've got um well we've got the near-death experiences that we will get to come yeah almost imminently yes or or we have things like psychosomatic illness where there are illnesses that are born in the mind that have no organic cause or very no detectable organic as far as we know fascinating things when you look at actual people neurons are not enough to expect I'm not I'm not I'm not diminishing the Neuroscience I was one and I loved my research but on its own to make sense of human beings I don't believe it's enough well I don't I think there is actually a difference between saying that you are a physicalist and that neurons explain everything so there's there's an emerging field known as embodied cognition which talks about the the or I guess it's trying to unpick this idea that the brain can explain everything it says cognition actually extends beyond the brain we are fundamentally embodied we can't understand the whole of human experience just by talking about the brain but the body is still physical so I do think that there's a different I think it might be a bit too reductive to say that everything about the human is on is neurons and I don't want to endorse that position but I do think that we could probably at some point or at least there's an in-principle physical explanation of everything and maybe embodied cognition is one of the ways that we can move towards a more holistic understanding of the human person that still doesn't propose this kind of ghost in the machine this disembodied Soul living in the body and somehow causing things to happen let's move in that direction and that and actually um I I don't want to uh imply that the only alternative view to what we've talked about is that because actually there are other forms of looking at the mind brain relationship that offer a more holistic and actually I love the word embody because actually that Christian perspective on human beings is that they are embodied beings and so yeah well let's use that as a segue into what we want to talk about part of the topic of the conversation is near-death experiences and we've talked about the mind and the Brain I don't want to be the cut that spoils the broth but can I introduce the word Soul into that now Julian Alfred delametri said that the soul is an empty word to which no idea corresponds so we could we can speak to that and we'll start now and again we'll carry on after the break but you use this word embodied and obviously near-death experiences we want to talk about the history what counts as one and and where they come from but this idea of a near-death experience presumably has something to do with a disembodied experience which is not located in the mind not located in in the brain Sharon can you just start to unpack that for us well I think that um one of the assumptions around a physicalist position whether it is embodies cognition or a reductive approach is that the mind is still tied to the physical brain and so when the brain dies conscious awareness and the mind dies with it um but it seems to be that since the 1970s um with since resuscitation Technologies became available there have become um a page there seem to arise patients who have been in a state of clinical death who when were revived started to tell stories about being conscious during this experience and there's an example that goes back as early as 1943 um from someone called George Richie who's a medical student who ended up getting severe pneumonia and at the time they didn't have many antibiotics so he he actually died he was dead for nine minutes and then someone persuaded the attendant doctor to inject adrenaline he he actually revived and um he went on to describe a very Vivid experience that he then wrote about and then when he qualified as a doctor began to share it with his medical students and some of those got fascinated and and so people then began to systematically investigate this phenomenon of when you are in a state of clinical death where there is no cardiac signal and in some cases no detectable EEG signal no brain stem signal patients are reporting being vividly conscious and what do we do with this data is it evidence that the mind can exist without the body and what I want to say probably at the offset is that I don't see it as a proof of heaven I don't I'm not resting all of my kind of uh beliefs on this particular phenomenon but it's certainly interesting and it's particularly baffling if you are just your brain but of course I know there are kind of various critiques of it um but is it evidence of that there's more than just our brains that there's a non-physical realm it's it's a fascinating data set so help us with that distinction again what counts as a near-death experience what is classified as an ND just go over that again well so one of the um there are a number of features actually and one of the things that's quite persuasive about them is that these features seem to be very consistent across many patients from different cultures and of different beliefs as well so some key features are um uh being kind of out of their body and having a perspective on what's happening with some details that can be corroborated in also and not being confined to the limitations of their physical body there's no pain anymore from whatever they were needing to be operated on that the pain is gone um talk about a a being of light uh and which um this is where different people of different beliefs uh interpret this being of light differently and they might bring their religious beliefs to bear on that being um but nevertheless in each case there's a being of light in some way that interacts with them some people talk about um seeing deceased relatives and communicating with them um and then others also another key feature is perception of a border that there's a point Beyond which if they cross that it's the point of no return and then there's a return a life review where they they actually review a shown their life back to them and they become aware of things they did and said and and then there's a return to the body which often is against their will because they were actually preferring this disembodied State and then the final feature is a life transformation some actually undergo a dramatic change in how they live their life and their per their kind of purpose and meaning has has changed and shifted and these features are actually common to all ndes I think or certainly um lots of them not and I think NDS are are rated on the number of these different features that that make up at any given person's nde that's wonderful well we have reached a near break experience and there's lots to talk about in the final section it's not the point of no return we are coming back from this we are talking and it's spectacular thank you so much for the substantive and uh supremely good conversation we're having I feel so privileged to be witnessing it as well as to be moderating it so we are talking today on the big conversation about the Mind Consciousness and near-death experiences our ndes proof of an afterlife join us for the final section shortly where we will we will solve this problem once and for all are you enjoying the conversation why don't you tell us who persuaded you in our survey plus if you want more from today's conversation register now and you'll receive the ebook of Sharon Derricks and Ian mcgilchrist debating brain science and God welcome back to this third and final part of the big conversation featuring my guests Sharon Dirks and Emily cureshi Hurst and today we have been discussing and are continuing to discuss the Mind Consciousness and near-death experiences are ndes proof of an afterlife and we may have to disagree on this but that that's okay because you know there's method in the madness and iron sharpens iron and all of that so that is really good we talked for a long time about the mind and the Brain I then threw a complete spanner in the works by mentioning the soul Emily as as a as an atheist what do you think when you hear people talking about the soul is it a helpful fiction is it something that you think should be completely disregarded because I think there are the there are these phrases that we use in sort of common parlance people say follow your heart or go with your good we're not really telling people to just do that so how do you feel and how would you respond when someone says oh my soul hurts or that's my soul mate or anything what is a soul for you as an atheist I think it's rich with symbolic meaning and I think we all know what somebody's talking about when they talk about a soul mate or soul food or that nourishes my soul I think it's a beautiful metaphor and I don't think it's any more than that okay okay Sharon I think that Soul varies depending on who you're talking to in the context of our current conversation some might see it as synonymous with mind whatever that inner reality is that some people think is distinct from the physical brain it's that theologically uh it depends who you ask that there are those that would say that the soul is the that which integrates the mind and the will um and that kind of inner inner self what we definitely don't want to say and when often we think of Soul we might go back to ancient Greece and think about Plato as this kind of immaterial but Eternal um Immortal part of the person that one day floats off to Heaven which is particularly unhelpful when we kind of think about you know Neuroscience which seems to show kind of mind and body or body and soul to be so integrated actually Christian theology offers a very different View and a Hebrew notion of soul is very embodied and very Holistic For example in Genesis 2 verse 7 when it talks about God creating a human being he talks about creating the man from the dust of the earth breathing into his nostrils the breath of life and the Hebrew where there is neshama or ruach which is Breath of Life or life force or Spirit the product of that is a living nephesh which is the Hebrew word for soul so soul in a Christian context is actually not some immaterial part of you that floats off to Heaven indeed Heaven is not immaterial it's physical and spiritual um and so whatever it is it's embodied and holistic which agrees with everything that we've been saying so far about any persuasive argument for what a human being is needs to match those criteria so for your point of view Sharon do ndes and we're talking about best guesses here do they sign posts towards the truth of theism or Christian theism more than they Point towards atheism and we'll let Emily respond but from your point of view yeah I think that if the accounts are accurate and if people are actually have genuinely had these experiences and it seems that they have and we can talk about the kinds of evidence and how reliable that is um then that gives us pause for thought in in line of the view that the physical mechanisms of mechanisms of the brain drive and determine the person um because you know if there is a subset of data where there is no signal no detachable signal from the brain in the cortex or in the brain stem and yet the person is vividly conscious um and so I think that we have to wrestle with these kind of data sets that surely point us to at the very least that human beings are complex that when you start to look at people you see a more complex more Rich tapestry than simply when you look at data in a laboratory or indeed um you know ideas in philosophy and so um I I think it deserves to be looked at there's Now 50 years of research um you know dozens and dozens of studies from clinicians who have no interest in gaining a reputation in this area from people who have actually changed their position based on their near-death experience so one example would be Eben Alexander who was a former Harvard neurosurgeon who was a strict physicalist and his patients upon resuscitation used to tell him they'd had ndes and he would dismiss them because if you don't have a functioning cortex you can't be conscious until he himself developed severe bacterial meningitis at the age of 54 and went into a coma and was not expected to survive all of his near cortex had shut down his family were told to put their Affairs in order um because he wasn't going to make it and yet extraordinarily he pulled through somehow and then went on to describe a very Vivid um near-death experience which included meeting a sister that he never knew he'd had that had died before he'd had a chance to meet her and then when he was shown a photo of her it exactly matched the person he went on to become a jewelerist he's not a Christian but he dramatically changed his View and actually why would you do that in a very physicalist neurosurgery environment where everyone else is a physicalist why would you do that unless something happened to you that you consider to be genuine and real so those kinds of things are fascinating to me when people undergo position changes based on their experience that gives me thought that's great well let's ask Emily about that then because at least on the surface as Sharon herself said it's not proof of heaven it's not proof of proof of the truth of Christianity but it does seem to slightly undermine materialism and naturalism maybe maybe so come on then well I I think that these experiences are clearly extremely significant for the people that have them I don't doubt their credibility in terms of what was experienced by the individual but I think we need to be really careful about what we do with that information what we do with that data set as you called it so one of the things that I would like to mention first is that when we're looking at different types of evidence the most unreliable is what philosophers call first-person experience and what the courtroom will call eyewitness testimony we know that we are notoriously fallible we remember things incorrectly there have been studies about um looking at what people can remember from scenes of crashes and all of that sort of stuff and our memories are not very reliable in those environments particularly when we're under a lot of stress so I think we need to be careful about what we do with this information we need to view it with a healthy amount of skepticism I think and also I would like to say that when we're talking about near-death experiences clearly there has been no death this person these people haven't died we know that death is reversible is irreversible sorry so even if there's no detectable activity in the brain that doesn't mean there was no activity in the brain our instruments are not perfect so there could have been a lot of stuff going on it's definitely possible that people could be seeming to be completely unconscious but actually aware of what was going on around them so this idea of floating up out of your body and watching things happen and being able to describe it afterwards that could be formed in your imaginative mind almost like a dream from things that you hear going on around you I mean perhaps a silly example but when I was younger I had a very very Vivid dream that me and my friend who's a songwriter were writing a song and I remember waking up thinking wow that song was incredible I need to write it down I don't want to lose it and then I realized that it was playing on the radio and so I thought that I had this experience that I was writing this song and that it was coming from me and it was mine and actually my mind was forming images experiences out of the auditory information that I was that was going into my brain that I wasn't really aware of so I I do think that it's possible that these descriptions people give of what doctors did to them could be formed out of this auditory information that they have being built into something that forms into a more coherent picture as they wake up like when you wake up and you form the narratives out of your dreams so but it's a fascinating fascinating stuff but I do think we need to view it with as I said a healthy amount of skepticism yeah and everyone needs to bring scientific rigor to it yeah and but what's fascinating about it is it seems that spiritual realities are now being observed in a clinical context and that's why some you know clinicians have given it time and have been surprised one of the the things that has been notable is the consistency across uh different testimonies that people have there are these common elements that we listed earlier are across all kinds of people from different cultures with different religious beliefs there's something about the consistency that means that actually maybe it's not as unreliable as we thought yes and actually you know your example about dreaming in order to dream you have a functioning brain but we do have to be real here that these These are people who whose brain is shutting down yeah but not shut down I agree there's no detectable signal and we need to actually exercise caution that you know if we're in in time the technology improves that signal can be detected but nevertheless there's a discontinuity between the Lucid Consciousness that people have in these situations compared with the the sort of disordered state of their brain which is in the process of dying there's a disproportionality there that needs explanation their brain is shutting down but they are more of it more awake more alive and more free than ever how do we make sense of that on the point of eyewitness testimony I feel you do a discredit to the whole discipline of History which rests on eyewitness testimony there's no way that a historian can access the event itself unless they rely on this people are sent to the electric chair people's whole lives and destinies are determined on the basis of eyewitness testimony there is such a thing as reliable eyewitness testimony That's the basis the gospels are considered reliable as well yeah so we do we need to be really careful about that because there are there are cases where people have misidentified suspects in certain uh saying this person was there when they weren't there are we we miss things in our visual perception all the time so it is an it is notoriously fallible and so we I'm not trying to do a disservice of the whole discipline of history but I am trying to say we need in the courtroom for example we need to take these things with a pinch of salt and so you know when somebody is in a state of trauma when they're as you say their brain is shutting down they've got lots of medication in their system maybe what they're reporting is not as reliable uh as you know we might as what we are seeing right now and I'd also like to push back on this idea that there's complete agreement in near-death experiences actually the figures that people see and interact with are often very very culturally informed so Christians will report seeing Jesus and Hindus will report seeing Gods from their particular Faith so actually in in my view that undermines the idea that there is some that God is community communicating with you in these moments and actually what what's happening these are visions of a from a dying brain and you're filling in your own cultural expectations into those experiences I think I suppose my point is that the fact that they're experiencing anything at all is noteworthy um let's let's use that to make some concluding statements and you you've both expounded and exposited your views respective views so lucidly and beautifully so the question is in in the last couple of minutes we want to sort this out do near-death experiences offer proof of an afterlife maybe Emily you would say no if it's a one-word answer Sharon and I'm going to give you time to unpack that a bit more or at least give a concluding statement might you say Sharon well no they don't they don't offer proof but they might offer an inference to the best explanation yeah I would say that um I'm not I'm not expecting near-death experiences to offer proof of heaven and I also agree that they're in the brain in a state of approaching death not final full biological death itself however if we are just our brains they pose more of a challenge to interpret arguably they're impossible um if if if there's truly no detachable signal in the brain um then they're a complete anomaly if we are just our brains if God exists then we already have within that framework that there is a non-physical realm the whole conversation about how that interacts with the brain normally is is one that we haven't been able to have but there's a non-physical realm and so we have a framework for making sense of these that we are more than just our bodies and brains that we are physical and non-physical arguably Spiritual Beings in this life and that there is a life to come and the reason that we know that is because Jesus bodily rose from the dead as the kind of Forerunner of all who want to follow him that that is the same will be true for them final word from you so I don't think near-death experience is a proof of anything they're absolutely fascinating and we should definitely do more work investigating them we need better scientific tools to be able to do that we need to be able to measure the brain much more accurately than we can measure it now our fmri scanners are good but they are definitely not uh very they can't measure the brain with a huge amount of fine fine structure so we need to uh I think we need to suspend our judgment about what this means and I think skepticism is the the best way to view it fantastic well we are now at the point of no return will we go on after this after the cameras have shut down who's to say but we will continue to look into that but it's been absolutely amazing thank you so much to both of you Sharon's book am I just my brain is amazing and worth getting Emily's book your first book it is yep God's salvation and the problem with space-time is also fantastic worth reading and worth getting uh you've been a wonderful guests thank you so much we've talked today on the big conversation about the Mind Consciousness and near-death experiences are ndes proof of an afterlife well maybe not but um there may be something in them anyway my name is Andy kind thank you so much and we'll see you next time thanks so much for watching if you want even more from today's conversation register now and you'll receive the ebook of Sharon Durex and Ian mcgillquist's big conversation on brain science and God and tell us what you thought in our survey with today's show thank you

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 7,638

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible, big conversation, Sharon Dirckx, Emily Qureshi-Hurst, mind, brain, consciousness, near death experiences, NDEs, afterlife

Id: 8ArBwnouHs8

Length: 66min 34sec (3994 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023