Paradigm Explorer 2018/2
Consciousness and the Shifting Scientific Paradigm Eben Alexander MD After more than 20 years spent as an academic neurosurgeon, my personal near-death experience (NDE) in a week-long coma due to overwhelming gram-negative bacterial meningo-encephalitis in 2008, during which neocortical destruction led to a paradoxical enhancement of phenomenological experience, challenged my prior notions of materialist neuroscience suggesting that the physical brain might somehow create consciousness out of purely physical matter.
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Based on responses to my reports of a near-death experience (NDE) to my physicians, who were quite shocked to see me recovering from what should have simply been a lethal illness, I initially felt my experience had been “way too real to be real,” and thus just a fantastic hallucination. However, my early forays into my medical records and scans, and discussions with the physicians who had cared for me, revealed a more perplexing scenario. My neurological examinations, laboratory values and MRI and CT scans suggested a level of destruction of my neocortex (the outer surface of the brain, the part that, according to conventional neuroscience, is most involved in our detailed human conscious experience of the world, and the primary target of such an infection) that would not permit any dream, hallucination or drug effect. Yet my experience had been of a reality far more vibrant, alive and real than any I had witnessed in this material world. That ultra-reality seemed a common feature as I reviewed hundreds of similar cases of NDEs. How to reconcile such experiences with my scientific knowledge? Early on, I was forced back to first principles in my efforts to fathom what I had experienced. I would define these first principles as
starting with: “the only thing any human being knows is the inside of her/his own consciousness.” As much as human brain and mind might be exceedingly clever at convincing us otherwise, we have never experienced any part of the “world out there” (which includes our brains and bodies, which are “out there” in the perceived world) directly – we have only experienced the internal construct, the model within mind, that we presume to be a fairly accurate representation of the reality “around us.” One cannot lose sight of this “supreme illusion,” as I often refer to it, if one is to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness, and of reality, itself. Renowned Stanford physicist Andrei Linde summarized this as follows: “Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions. ... Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions. This model of material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful
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