Biconsciousness: Could There Be a Part of Your Mind Living Outside of Earth?

We have some ideas about the self that may not be warranted. One idea about the self is that your self is whatever corresponds to the perceptions of your body. But near-death experiences challenge that assumption. In a near-death experience a person may report having perceptions as an entity outside of his physical body.

Another idea about the self is that your self consists only of whatever you are experiencing now on planet Earth, and whatever your earthly mind can remember, think about and see at this moment. This idea may seem axiomatic, and it is probably true. But it's just possible that this idea is wrong. It is possible that your current self could consist of much, much more than what you are experiencing now in your earthly body, and what your earthly mind can remember, perceive and think about.

In this post I will consider an extremely unusual possibility. The idea is a concept I will call biconsciousness. I do not think this possibility is likely to be true, but it is an interesting scenario to ponder. Pondering this possibility will be a mind-stretching exercise that may make your head hurt.

Let us consider a man who dies and then finds his soul preserved. After undergoing some near-death experience, the man may find himself in some post-mortal realm. For referential convenience, I will mainly call this post-mortal realm “heaven,” although perhaps it is very different from conventional ideas about heaven. After enjoying many years of heavenly bliss, the man may be encouraged to return to Earth for an additional life. The man may do that multiple times. We can imagine a person who died, went to some post-mortal realm for 200 years, then chose to return to Earth to be reincarnated, then died again to go back to the post-mortal realm.

The diagram below illustrates the idea. 

 

The scenario above is fairly easy to understand. First, you live on Earth as a regular human, then you die, then you live for maybe 200 years in heaven, then you are born again on Earth, then you die, then you live for maybe 200 years in heaven, then you are born again on Earth, then you die, and then you live for maybe 200 years in heaven.

But let us imagine a radical possibility. Suppose when you went to reincarnate on Earth again, it wasn't your entire self involved in that. Perhaps you might have a strange kind of mental state we can call biconsciousness, in which your self splits up. So half of your self might go to live on Earth, while the other half stays in heaven.

The following diagram illustrates this radical idea.

The weird possibility of biconsciousness

We can describe this strange scenario like this. During your first earthly life, only half of your total self may have gone to live on Earth, while the other half was living in heaven. Then after you died you lived in heaven for 200 years. Then you reincarnated again, but with only half of your total self living on Earth, while the other half kept living in heaven. Then after you died you lived in heaven for 200 years. Then you reincarnated again, but with only half of your total self living on Earth, while the other half kept living in heaven.

This possibility is very hard to grasp. It is very easy to imagine that there might be some being like yourself living in heaven while you live on Earth, some being who is a separate self. But it is very hard to imagine that these two might be parts of the same self. We tend to assume that a self is a single stream of thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and feelings located in one place. But we don't know really know how consciousness and self-hood and souls work. It could conceivably be that a self can be split up so that two simultaneous existences can be experienced by the same self.

It could be that what you experience on Earth is a mere fragment of the total existence that your total self is currently having. If you had some expanded consciousness in heaven, you might be able to experience simultaneously your heavenly existence and your earthly existence. Whatever sadness you felt here on Earth during any moment might be overshadowed by the happiness your total self was feeling in heaven. Being bad at multitasking and at thinking about more than one thing at a time, we cannot imagine such a reality. But it could be some greatly more intelligent version of yourself in some heavenly realm would have no problem at all experiencing two simultaneous lives, a heavenly life and an earthly life.

Under this scenario we can refer to the heavenly part of your consciousness as Major You and the earthly part of your consciousness as Minor You. How might consciousness be for this heavenly Major You? There's a thought experiment we can do to get a crude idea of such a thing.

Let us imagine a future technology in which fancy electronic glasses provide a real-time video feed of your experience, which appears as a window in the right corner of the fancy electronic glasses worn by your spouse. So your spouse is getting a real-time feed of your experience in a little corner of the visual field, and you are getting a real-time feed of your spouse's experience in a little corner of your visual field. Besides being a good way for spouses to keep each other from straying, this would almost be a method of living two lifetimes at once. You might be stuck doing some boring job, but might enjoy seeing the video feed of something more interesting that your spouse was doing, seeing that in the right corner of your fancy electronic glasses.

Conceivably it could be a little like that for Major You living in some heavenly realm. That aspect of your consciousness might have a kind of real-time feed of everything you were seeing, feeling, thinking about and experiencing here on Earth. For this Major You it might be kind of like having two blended streams of experience, one of a heavenly life and one of an earthly life.

Under this biconsciousness scenario, accounting for life after death would be particularly easy. We would not even need to imagine that some kind of special soul transit occurs, in which a soul travels from Earth to a heavenly realm. It would simply be that your life would continue after your earthly death, because only Minor You has perished, while Major You continues to live.

Could this concept of biconsciousness be useful in some sense? I can think of one use for such a concept. Consider the hypothesis of reincarnation, an idea many would prefer to avoid. The problem is that there actually seems to be some evidence that reincarnation may well actually occur for some people. The strongest evidence are cases gathered by people such as Ian Stevenson, in which young children claim they are reincarnations of people who lived before. Surprisingly, there is often corroboration. For example, a child may claim to have been a particular person who experienced particular events. An investigation may show that just such a person lived and experienced such events. The child may be able to recognize the names of relatives of the person who died, who the child claims to have been in a previous life.

But there's a problem with the idea of reincarnation. If someone were to be reincarnated, it would seem that there could be no real continuity of identity. A person's identity seems to be tied up with his memories, outlooks and feelings. If that person is then reborn as a baby, there seems to be break in continuity, so much that it's like you can't really say the reincarnated baby is the same person who lived before.

The hypothesis of biconsciousness may offer a potential solution to this problem. Let us imagine that after you die, you find yourself living for 200 years in a heavenly realm, and then decide to reincarnate on Earth. Imagine if your self is split up into parts, one staying in the heavenly realm, and another being reborn on Earth as a baby. In that case (the biconsciousness scenario we have discussed), there would be a continuity of identity and self-hood. Your memories, feelings, and outlook would be preserved in the Major You living on in the heavenly realm.

There's another potential use for the hypothesis of biconsciousness. Consider the theological problem of evil, as to why an omnipotent God might allow various types of earthly suffering. It could be that every time such suffering occurs, we are merely seeing suffering in a fraction of a self, with the other fraction of the self enjoying heavenly bliss because of biconsciousness. It might therefore be that the current net happiness of every person is always positive rather than negative. The sorrows of the earthly Minor You may be always greatly outweighed by the happiness and pleasure of Major You existing in some blissful heavenly realm.

Although the hypothesis of biconsciousness may be somewhat useful for these reasons, it still seems like a rather unlikely possibility. We have nothing that directly suggests that biconsciousness ever occurs. Until then we should not embrace biconsciousness as a likelihood. It is, however, an interesting possibility to ponder. 

Perhaps such a possibility may be relevant to the concept of guardian angels. Many a person thinks that each of us has a guardian angel. But perhaps rather than being a separate being,  a guardian angel may be simply the heavenly Major You that might co-exist with the Minor You existing here on Earth. So your guardian angel might be a higher aspect of yourself.  Of course, such a notion involves heaping a speculation upon a speculation, and is merely something remotely possible.  

Their “Darwin's Aliens” Aren't Really That

Recently a scientific journal published a paper entitled “Darwin's Aliens” that was a strange inconsistent mishmash with highfalutin pretensions. The authors claimed in their synopsis that they would “show how evolutionary theory can be used to make predictions about aliens.” But their paper is an odd blend of orthodox recitations from the Darwinist catechism, statements that conflict with Darwinist claims,  misleading graphics, and discussions of marvelous cooperation and sudden transitions that are non-Darwinian or in conflict with Darwinian ideas.

The paper starts out by discussing Darwin's theory of natural selection, but the diagram it gives to illustrate the idea is misleading. We see three animals, one of which has a tiny neck, the other a medium-sized neck, and the third with a long neck like a giraffe. These are given as examples of “variation.” There's some lines under the long-neck giraffe, labeled “differential success," leading to three similar animals with very long necks.

This visual gives the completely erroneous idea that you might see some huge beneficial change in the structure of an organism due to some random variation within a generation. That is untrue. If there were a horse-like species with a small neck, it would need very many muscle and bone changes to become an animal with a long neck like a giraffe – not merely many changes in the neck, but changes in the main skeletal structure to support such a neck. It could never be that some random mutation or variation within a generation would cause such a change. You would need many random mutations across multiple generations, all coincidentally conspiring to achieve the same end – something vastly harder to account for than what is shown in the visual the paper provides. The paper's visual is a kind of visualization of the discredited idea of “hopeful monsters” (also called saltations or macromutations), which many evolution experts have rejected as unrealistic, and which is inconsistent with the Darwinian slogan that “nature does not make leaps.”

The paper occasionally states some standard Darwinist dogma, such as the claim that natural selection can produce design without a designer, something that has not actually been demonstrated as we have no proof that any complex visible biological innovations have been produced by natural selection. And why should we be so eager to believe in design without a designer, like someone believing that the cooking he is served comes from no cook, or that the heat in his apartment comes from no heat source? What is the intellectual virtue in believing that nature is some huge counterfeiter, that has engaged in some gigantic fake-out by making all these thing that look like designs, but are not? You cannot answer with some anti-theistic answer, seeing that you could still postulate a design source for some earthly organism by imagining extraterrestrial visitors as the design source.

The paper contradicts its earlier claims about natural selection and design by stating that “The theory of natural selection itself is silent about whether complexity will arise.” How's that? If natural selection actually could produce design (which is functional complexity), then how could natural selection be silent about whether complexity will arise?

The paper then considers the origin of complexity. It attempts to argue that complexity increases during “major transitions,” an idea that is pretty vacuous. For example, if simple cells evolved into far more complex eukaryotic cells, or one-celled life evolved into multi-cellular life, those would be “major transitions,” but by classifying them as major transitions we are not shedding any light on how such things happened.

The paper also suggests the idea that complexity increases when there is an “alignment of interests.” The authors speak rather like someone describing soldiers selflessly enlisting or September 11^th volunteers selflessly sacrificing their individual interests for the common good, in some altruistic way. The paper states this:

For example, the evolution of multicellularity involved a transition from an entity with one part (the single-celled organism) working for the success of itself, to an entity with many parts (the multicellular organism), working for the success of the whole group. The cells can now have very different functions (a division of labour), as each is just a component of a multicellular machine, sacrificing itself for the good of the group, to get a sperm or egg cell into the next generation....The rise in complexity on Earth has been mediated by a handful of such jumps, when units with different goals (genes, single cells, individual insects) became intricately linked collectives with a single common goal (genomes, multicellular organisms, eusocial societies)...Major transitions involve the original entities completely subjugating their own interests for the interests of the new collective. This represents an incredibly extreme form of cooperation.

You will be excused for having a big chuckle while reading this excerpt, which is kind of a sociological-sounding attempt to explain biological organization. Unlike human beings with minds, cells don't have individual goals, interests, or self-interest drives, and don't nobly engage in self-sacrifice. We cannot explain cells entering into fantastically more organized systems as some form of altruistic loss of selfishness, similar to that of volunteers joining up to form a search party looking for lost mountain hikers, or a soldier volunteering to join an army. What we have here is a kind of fallacy of personification, as when the authors say, “Complexity requires multiple parts of an organism striving to the same purpose.”

Not a good explanation for biological organization

Even if there were to be some noble self-sacrifice among cells, that still wouldn't explain biological organization. You may nobly join an army for the common good, but there's always higher planners who come up with a plan, and direct the volunteers into particular functions, telling one volunteer to fly a plane and fight at some location, and another to become an infantryman and fight in some other location. If we had a trillion volunteer self-sacrificing cells, how would we account for their organizational orders directing them to so many different complex specific purposes, according to such intelligent plans?

We may also note that what the authors are talking about sounds like cooperation, goals and purpose within nature, and there's nothing Darwinian about that. Darwin was constantly emphasizing the opposite idea of the “struggle for existence,” in which life is always at war with other life in a dark purposeless struggle. I think the authors have given a title of “Darwin's Aliens” to ideas that are largely non-Darwinian, like a Chinese leader in 1980 saying, “Let's do something very Marxist and Maoist: we'll let people own their businesses, own their apartments, and let many of them become millionaires.”

In their conclusion, the authors (claiming to be using “evolutionary theory to make predictions about extraterrestrial life”) say that “complex aliens will be composed of a nested hierarchy of entities, with the conditions required to eliminate conflict at each of those levels.” But this cannot be claimed as something that Darwinism predicts about alien life.

Life on our planet is organized in an extremely hierarchical way, with the hierarchy going from organelles to cells to tissues to organs to organ systems to organisms, as shown in the diagram below. 

But such hierarchical organization is a thorn in the sign of Darwinism, which does nothing to explain it. Darwinism is not a theory of organization, but merely a theory of accumulation (that life evolves when favorable variations or mutations accumulate). Organization is something vastly more complicated and hard-to-explain than accumulation. A heap of auto parts in a junkyard is an example of accumulation; your car parked in the junkyard parking lot is an example of organization. As an evolutionary biologist confessed recently, referring to the “modern synthesis” that is Darwinism combined with genetics, “Indeed, the MS [modern synthesis] theory lacks a theory of organization that can account for the characteristic features of phenotypic evolution, such as novelty, modularity, homology, homoplasy or the origin of lineage-defining body plans.”

We can actually imagine a type of alien life-form that would be the most compatible with Darwinian theory. It would be some life form that might have appeared because of gradual accumulations. For example, we can imagine some ocean life form consisting of a giant blob of cells. It might be the size of a dolphin, but consist only of a blob of tiny little units, kind of like the type of rock that is called a conglomerate, and merely consists of an accumulation of little pebbles. There would be no organized body plan like we see in typical mammals, the type of thing so hard-to-explain under Darwinian assumptions. Such an organism would not at all consist of a “nested hierarchy of entities.” We can imagine an organism simply starting out as one tiny little unit, and then simply growing bigger and bigger as more of these units appeared. 

Such an organism would have no organ systems and no appendages, both of which are very hard to account for using Darwinian explanations. The problem is that the first tenth of an appendage or the first tenth of an organ system will always be useless, and Darwin assured us that nature is always discarding useless variations or mutations; hence the difficulty of explaining how a useless tenth could ever evolve into a functional unit by Darwinian natural selection. 

Interestingly, there are very few earthly organisms with such a simple arrangement, even though we can imagine 1001 relatively easy ways for large-scale life to progress to such simple arrangements. The only examples I can think of are jellfyish and sponges, which are pretty simple from a structural standpoint. It is as if earthly life was following some law of maximum complexity, almost always having an arrangement the least likely to be explicable through very simple ideas such as natural selection.

The authors give an illustration of a hypothetical creature they call the octomite. Was this some organism that resulted from a computer experiment they did, an experiment simulating evolution? No, it is merely an imaginary organism they drew (or had drawn) rather like kids doodling a monster picture during a boring class. But that's fine. When a science paper is speckled with dubious logic, it's a nice improvement to add a cool drawing of an imaginary alien creature.

Their imaginary creature has about 12 appendages protruding out of its thorax. Since appendages are hard-to-explain by Darwinian explanations, for the reason previously given, their imaginary organism is exactly not what we should be calling one of “Darwin's aliens.” 

Synaptic Density Studies Contradict Prevailing Memory Model

The leading doctrine concerning how memory is stored is the doctrine that memory is stored by a process of the strengthening of synapses of brains. But what we know about the lifetimes of proteins and synapses contradicts this doctrine. The proteins in synapses have lifetimes no longer than a few weeks (this paper finds that they have turnover at a rate of about 17% per day). The synapses themselves are short-lived compared to the 50-year time span that human memories can last.

The two main structural components that can increase in size or number when a synapse is strengthened are called boutons and dendritic spines. Stettler and his colleagues found that the boutons of synapses turn over at a rate of about 7% per week. Dendritic spines in synapses last no more than about a month in the hippocampus, and less than two years in the cortex. This study found that dendritic spines in the hippocampus last for only about 30 days. This study found that dendritic spines in the cortex of mice brains have a half-life of only 120 days. 

So what we know about the lifetime of synapse components contradicts the claim that human memories (lasting as long as 50 years) are stored in synapses. There is another neuroscience finding that contradicts such a dogma: the finding that there is no increase in synaptic density corresponding to an increase in human knowledge.

What should we expect from the idea that our memories are stored in synapses? We would expect that the density of synapses in the brain would increase as more memories accumulated. But that is not what we observe. In 1979 a scientific paper by Huffenlocher reached these conclusions:

1. Synaptic density was constant throughout adult life (age 16 to 72 years), with a density of about 1100 million synapses per cubic millimeter.
2. There was only a slight decrease in old age, with density decreasing to about 900 million synapses per cubic millimeter.
3. “Synaptic density increased during infancy, reaching a maximum at age 1--2 years which was about 50% above the adult mean.”

So according to the paper, the density of synapses sharply decreases as you grow up. The following image from a US government web site tells essentially the same story. The red line shows spine density, roughly the same as synapse density. We see this density declining after age 5. 

Here is a comparable graph from a National Academies Press online book. We see synaptic densities declining after age 5:

 

Why are such findings inconsistent with the idea that memories are stored in synapses? If our memories are stored in synapses, synaptic densities should increase as memories accumulate. A 40-year old has many more memories than a 5-year old. But instead of synaptic densities increasing between age 5 and 16, we see synaptic densities falling sharply.

But what about that study of London cab drivers, the one that supposedly showed they had “bigger brains” after learning lots of location information? To become a London cab driver, you have to memorize a great deal of geographical information. A study followed London cab drivers for 4 years, taking MRI scans of their brains.

But the study did not find that such cab drivers have bigger brains, or brains more dense with synapses. The study has been misrepresented in some leading press organs. The National Geographic misreported the findings in a post entitled “The Bigger Brains of London Cab Drivers.” Scientific American also inaccurately told us, “Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets.” 

But when we actually look at a scientific paper stating the results, the paper says no such thing. The study found no notable difference outside of the hippocampus, a tiny region of the brain. Even in that area, the study says “the analysis revealed no difference in the overall volume of the hippocampi between taxi drivers and controls.” The study's unremarkable results are shown in the graph below. 

The anterior part of the left half of the hippocampus was about 25% smaller for taxi drivers (100 versus 80), but the posterior part of the right half of the hippocampus was slightly larger (about 77 versus 67). Overall, the hippocampus of the taxi drivers was about the same as for the controls who were not taxi drivers, as we can see from the graph above, in which the dark bars have about the same area as the lighter bars. So clearly the paper provides no support for the claim that these London cab drivers had bigger brains, or brains more dense with synapses.

In this case, the carelessness of our major science news media is remarkable. They've created a “London cab drivers have bigger brains” myth that is not accurate. 

The facts in this matter are completely at odds with the "synapses store memory" dogma that neuroscientists keep teaching (like theologians promulgating some tenet in their creed). The structural materials in synapses are way too short-lived for synapses to be a plausible place where 50-year-old memories could be stored. And instead of our synapses growing denser and denser as we accumulate memories, we have synapses much denser when we are very young with few memories than when we are adults with many times more memories.  Why do our neuroscientists keep advancing an unproven theory inconsistent with the facts?  Perhaps because otherwise they might have to concede that memory may well involve some spiritual component that cannot be explained through  neuroscience. 

See here for 10 posts explaining why current ideas about mind and memory are in need of radical revision. 

Duplication Plethora: A Science Fiction Story

In the year 2052 Marcia Griffin made her first trip to New York City, to meet a college friend of hers named Monique who had got a job in the city. Marcia got out of the train station around noon, and walked into a crowded little cafe near Times Square, to get some lunch.

After sitting down to eat at a table with two chairs, she was soon approached by a man about 30 years old, who asked, “Mind if I sit here?” Before she could say anything, the man sat down. The man started to talk, telling Marcia all about himself.

“I work for a financial firm, and make damn good money, if I do say so myself,” said the man. “My friends all say that I'm the most intelligent person they ever met. So I'm sure you'd find it extremely interesting to have dinner with me, and I'd treat you to a real nice meal. How about giving me your hologram number so we can set something up.”

Not interested in this pushy egotist, Marcia said, “No, thanks.” She picked up the rest of her food, and left the cafe. Using her wristband, she summoned a driverless taxi to take her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum was much more computerized than in the old days, when the Greek section would only have old sculptures and vases. Marcia entered a holographic projection room in the Greek section, and saw the walls kind of appear to dissolve. She now was in a holographic projection that gave her a 360 degree view showing just what it looked to be outside the Parthenon in Athens just after it had been built.

The man next to her began to talk, saying, “You know, I have a master's degree in history, and I know all about this history stuff.” Marcia looked to her right. The man looked exactly like the same man she had seen in the cafe. But now his clothes looked different.

“I went to one of the absolute top universities, and got a master's degree in art,” said the man, carelessly changing his story. “Got top-notch grades. What do you say we see the rest of the museum together? I could give you all kinds of fascinating insights.”

“No, thanks,” said Marcia. Another brassy egotist, she thought to herself. She saw some more of the museum, and then left. After walking around in Central Park, she decided to walk to the subway, which she had never been on before.

It was now rush hour, and the subway was very crowded. The commuters were packed together tightly. On the subway Marcia was surprised to see right next to her a man whose face looked just like that of the man she had talked to in the cafe and the man she had talked to in the museum.

“You're giving me that kind of 'I've seen his face before' look,” said the man. “I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you're so lucky to be seeing me again."

Marcia felt the man's hand moving up her skirt, and squeezing her behind. Marcia slapped the man's face.

“Keep your filthy paws to yourself!” Marcia barked. “How dare you take such liberties!”

“What are you talking about?” said the man. “I never even touched you.”

Marcia got off on the next stop, and walked up to the street. She thought to herself: I can't believe the bad luck I'm having with men here in New York City.

Marcia asked herself: how could the same man have appeared in three different places in the city?

Then she remembered something that made her anxious. She remembered an old episode of the television series The Twilight Zone. In the episode a woman was driving her car, and kept seeing the same creepy hitchhiker, no matter where she drove. The woman finally found out that she was dead, and that the hitchhiker was actually Death itself, who had come to pick her up. Marcia thought to herself: maybe something similar has happened to me. Maybe I've died, and this sleazy pick-up artist I keep seeing is really Mr. Death here to pick me up and take me away to the realm of the dead.

When Marcia met her friend Monique, she mentioned her experiences that day, and told what she had thought. She asked Monique: “Do I look kind of pale or transparent, like someone who died?”

“Don't be silly, that wasn't Mr. Death you were seeing,” said Monique. “You merely ran into a few of the Trump clones. They're all over the city, many thousands of them.”

“The Trump clones?” asked Marcia.

“Way back in the days, decades ago, one of the last things that Donald Trump did as president was to sign the Cloning Authorization Act making the cloning of humans legal,” explained Monique. “After Trump died, they examined his will. It specified that most of his money should be used to make 50,000 genetically identical clones of himself, so that there could be Donald Trump clones on television for the next 80 years. No one was very surprised when they found this out.”