Radin’s Challenge to Materialism

Coming at consciousness from an empirical point of view, parapsychologist Dean Radin calls on what he believes to be the overwhelming evidence for psi phenomena in order to infer that “intention affects the physical world.” He characterizes his work as “a tiny part of a century-long legacy of researchers who have reported studies, when meta-analyzed, provide strong evidence for psi” (Radin, 2007).

Radin notes that non-local conscious experiences are commonly reported (prevalence rates well above 10% and as high as 90%). Moreover, cognitive abilities can be retained when the brain is seriously compromised. For example, in terminal lucidity patients with terminal neurodegenerative conditions can display apparently normal cognitive function and mental clarity during the short period preceding death; paradoxical lucidity can occur in dementia due to advanced Alzheimer's disease, brain abscesses, tumors, strokes, and meningitis.^[1]

Psi Phenomena and “Real Magic”

Radin recruits the happy term “magic,” as in “real magic,” to facilitate public appreciation that psi/paranormal phenomena are a natural aspect of reality (Radin, 2018), and he claims strong experimental or empirical evidence for three types of “real magic:”

• (i) “divination,” which in today's world is perceiving through space and time and which is identical to clairvoyance, remote viewing, precognition.
• (ii) “force of will,” which causes “psycho-kinetic effects,” the idea that your mindful intention can affect aspects of the physical world beyond yourself.
• (iii) “theurgy,” by which Radin means the practice of engaging or communicating with spirits, entities that are not human and invisible to most people (Radin, 2022).

Consciousness as Fundamental

Then, Radin says, you start thinking like a scientist and ask how could these phenomena happen? “Well, what are the ‘force beams’ coming out of the head? But we don't see any beams coming out. In fact, even the evidence doesn't exactly look like it's a causal mechanism. These are weird relationships that arise.” Next, Radin says, is to consider some kind of “downward causation” effect. I suppose that's possible, he says, “but it just seems to make more sense if really at the bottom is simply consciousness. There's some kind of ‘ocean of consciousness’ that gives rise to an emergent property, which we may call energy, which gives rise to matter, and then the physical world plays out in a way that we usually see it, except that really at the bottom is consciousness.”

It's much, much easier, Radin says, “to simply imagine that matter is ultimately composed of mind, that mind and matter are ultimately the same thing, than to imagine the complex mechanisms of mind-body/brain interactions” (Radin, 2007).

Radin and colleagues point to specific non-local effects to support their proposal that “post-materialistic models of consciousness may be required to break the conceptual impasse presented by the hard problem of consciousness.” They review several alternative non-physicalist theories: all of which purport to refute the central premise of physicalist theories that consciousness is generated solely and purely by the brain and is only local to the brain. Most of these theories have quantum or panpsychism pedigrees; some even propose that consciousness is more fundamental than energy-matter and spacetime (Wahbeh et al., 2022).

Radin and colleagues propose that “consciousness may not originate in the brain,” although many aspects of human consciousness are obviously dependent on the brain. They also suggest that awareness too extends beyond the brain. While they affirm with conviction that these non-physical, non-local properties of consciousness are observable, they are less confident as to the underlying mechanism of how they work. It may be, they say “due to a non-local material effect, to consciousness being fundamental, or something else we have not yet discovered” (Wahbeh et al., 2022).

Thus, Radin and colleagues propose “specific phenomena that we would expect to see if non-local consciousness theories are correct:” Perceiving information about distant locations (clairvoyance, including remote viewing); perceiving information from another person (telepathy); perceiving the future (precognition); and apparent cognitive abilities beyond the experience/learning/skill of the person exhibiting them (e.g., speaking a foreign language they do not know, i.e., speaking “in tongues”) (Wahbeh et al., 2022).

Quantum-Oriented Nonlocal Mind

In defending their quantum-oriented approach to the mind-brain problem, Stuart Kauffman and Radin cite as evidence for a nonlocal mind the predictions of two types of nonlocal experiences: “The mind would have the capacity to extend beyond the mind-brain system, and the act of observing a distant physical system would, to some degree, directly influence the behavior of that system.” Such effects, they claim, would occasionally result in experiences “where minds interact with other minds, where minds perceive hidden or distant objects or events, and where minds directly influence aspects of the physical world” (Kauffman & Radin, 2020).

The common terms for these psi phenomena are the following: “telepathy for mind-to-mind interactions; clairvoyance for perceptions of inanimate things across space; precognition for perceptions through time; and psychokinesis for mental influence of physical objects.” Kauffman and Radin stress that use of these different terms does not imply that the underlying phenomena are different in kind; “they are just labels used to describe the way the experiences seem to manifest” (Kauffman & Radin, 2020).

While Radin's primary line of argument uses psi phenomena to corroborate a nonlocal mind of a quantum-oriented nature, one can reverse the causal-explanatory direction such that a nonlocal mind could provide a mechanism for psi phenomena (Kauffman & Radin, 2020). (Note that the arrow of causation or explanation can point in either direction, although not in both directions in the same argument, which would be circular.)

Footnote

[1]. In the last two or so years of her life, due to advanced dementia, my mother, Lee Kuhn (née Lena Kahn), who died at 102, formerly a vibrant personality, did not speak at all. However, on four or five occasions, she would suddenly blurt out, in loud and confident voice, complete, articulate, sharply formed sentences. To me, while I was working intensely on my computer: “With all that junk you're doing on that machine, at least are you making any money?” To the caregivers: “It's not that I can't talk. It's that I don't want to talk to you!” (My mother was always, well, feisty). It did not occur to me that this behavior, however startling, could support theories of consciousness that are not brain-bound. While geriatric neurology has ample resources to explain such phenomena naturally, I suppose it could also align with nonlocal theories.