Transmissive Consciousness by Nicolas Rouleau

0:00 I'll move on to the last topic. This is the topic of the brain as a potentially transmissive organ. In Grass School, I was working with Michael Persinger on the idea of brain electromagnetic interactions, and I was reading about William James's research and his thoughts on consciousness from the turn of the century. He gave this great speech on human immortality, where he asked the question, "What would be necessary for consciousness to survive bodily death?" Basically, the answer that he came up with, which I think is the right way to approach this scientifically, is the idea that if the brain is a productive organ, if consciousness is just a property of what the brain is doing as such, neurons firing signals to one another, electrical, chemical, or combination, you know, if that either realizes or

0:45 from which consciousness emerges, then consciousness can't survive death, because when the brain dies and it decays, uh consciousness would dissolve with the matter that gave rise to it. But, he proposed that there are other kinds of functions, other kinds of functional categories that could exist that if if it was discovered that the brain was within this category of function, consciousness could survive bodily death. And he proposes transmissive function as the main function that would allow for the survival of consciousness. What is transmissive function? Well, it looks a lot like um these two examples. So, the pipe organ, for example. So, there's air in the room, and the air isn't music, but when that air is sifted through various compartments and compressed, it can become oscillating pressure waves, which are experienced as music. And in the same way, when you shine light

1:32 through a prism, when it's split into its constituent colors, the colors are not a result of the prism producing anything. The prism is simply filtering the light. You wouldn't ask the question, "Well, where was the color in the prism before it was filtered by the prism?" These are sort of nonsensical questions in the context of transmissive function. And I wrote an essay that was a response to a challenge by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies that had the same question, you know, what is the best scientific explanation, the best scientific evidence for the existence of consciousness after bodily death. Those who produced essays in this competition often drew on examples like, well, we can look at things like mediumship, postmortem apparitions, right? Like the existence of ghosts and things like this. I thought that William James basically got the question right,

2:18 and so it was just a matter of identifying what kinds of scientific evidence existed that could be in support of the idea of transmissive consciousness. What I identified was that the brain's interactions with electromagnetic fields constitute a genuine transmissive function of the brain. These are transductions and transmissions that are occurring without a intermediate sensory modality. They're happening directly at the level of the brain. They're changing brain function, and they're changing experience. So, I'll get into a couple examples of this.