Can Near-Death Experiences Point Beyond the Brain? | Alex Gómez-Marín

[00:00:00]People get sometimes very nervous when I mention the word evidence. They They think that evidence is a logical mathematical proof that's whose conclusion is unavoidable. No, this is like in a in a jury, in a case where you bring piles of evidence. And so there there's this constellation of phenomena, near-death, after-death, even before birth, that I would say they all point point, suggest, make more plausible the idea that something about ourselves survives after we die.

[00:00:38]>> From Barcelona, the 2025 Science of Consciousness Conference, I'm speaking with Alex Gomez Marin, a physicist turned neuroscientist who explores the edges of consciousness. Alex, I'm happy to say, works with me on Closer to Truth's new Landscape of Consciousness website, Alex, it's always good to see you. Uh tell me about your presentation at the conference.

[00:01:06]>> All right. Hello, my friend.

[00:01:08]It was a blast. I'm I'm blessed. I'm lucky.

[00:01:12]I had this opportunity to speak at a plenary session on brain activity and mind activity in near-death or close-to-death.

[00:01:22]Um the room was packed, and there was a really good energy. I presented without slides, and I and I did much more that than was suggested in the title. I didn't only speak about what happens with the mind when the brain dies, but I then zoomed in and speak spoke about evidence, different lines of evidence about the survival of consciousness after bodily death, and then I even zoomed out to what I call a science of the impossible and the many other phenomena that really interest me. And I then mentioned beyond the empirical, the theoretical, and where we are now with this explosion of theories of consciousness. So, it was It was a tour from my personal history, my NDE, the historical account of Galileo all the way back here, the empirical, the theoretical, and I ended up with socio-political remarks about It's not only necessary that you bring the good data and the good theory. There are also other constraints that will shape where consciousness goes. My my take home was let's not ask what science can do for consciousness, but specifically what consciousness can do for science.

[00:02:36]>> Yeah, I'll with a tip of the hat to John F. Kennedy.

[00:02:40]>> Yes, correct. I'm paraphrasing here, yes.

[00:02:43]>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. Um just go through with me some of those steps.

[00:02:47]Give me a little color of each one. You had about five steps, your own personal experience, the data, the the the the the theory of for consciousness, life after death and then the the broader theories.

[00:03:00]>> Correct. So, I started with my personal near-death experience, not because I want to be dramatic, but just to tell people that that's really what spurred my interest and more than the interest, the importance of investigating this.

[00:03:15]Um and also because I nearly died and I didn't. Since then, that was 4 years ago. Since then, I feel I'm living a second life.

[00:03:25]And and so, I'm going to go for it even if people call me a pseudo-scientist.

[00:03:30]So, that was kind of the telling them I was there at the tunnel, I saw beings of light at the other side, I came back.

[00:03:36]And the crucial point for this first part, Robert, the personal part is not only did I attempt to integrate that personally, as we all should when we have some traumatic experience, no big deal here. I also decided to integrate it professionally. And so, I asked to my my two legs as a scientist, I'm a theoretical physicist and a neuroscientist, I turned back to physics and I say, "Hey, what do you have to say about this experience?" And I turned back to neuroscience and I asked, "Well, what about that?" And that was kind of the springboard to then go into the other parts of the presentation.

[00:04:12]>> Okay. Uh and then the second part is is the data and uh just give me an overview of that.

[00:04:18]>> All right. Um well, if you allow me, maybe be before that, so it was the personal part, then there was historical part, and then the evidence. Okay. Really, the historical is what does physics say about that? Not at all or nothing because I jokingly and seriously say, "Theories of everything, physical theories of everything, are about everything except what really matters to us." And I'm a physicist, so forgive me for saying that, but love, pain, death, chocolate, all of those things are really not captured at all by any productive theory of everything, I would say. And then I told the story from Galileo, how Galileo decided that we would start that beautiful thing we call science by studying what lends itself to mathematization and measurement first. And we forgot for 400 years until maybe 30 years ago, simplifying a lot. And then for neuroscientists, I spoke about the difference between a productive and a permissive brain, going back to William James. So, basically, the physics question is answered by understanding the story since Galileo. And the neuroscience uh question is answered by going back to William James and rescuing this essay of his on human immortality when he says, "There's no doubt that the brain plays a key role in everything you want, perception, memory, thought, consciousness."

[00:05:36]The question, the key question is what's the nature of that function. And so, once I have that ready, once I put on the table that there's another P, the productive and the permissive brain hypothesis, then I can jump into the data.

[00:05:50]>> Okay, so what is a permissive brain?

[00:05:52]>> Okay, so I call this these are kind of meta metaphors because we could ask what is a brain?

[00:06:00]What is a brain? It's this piece of flesh that does amazing things and some people would say well it's a computer.

[00:06:04]Well it's it's not a computer it's more like the internet. We we know that other metaphors were used before like a a telephone station.

[00:06:11]>> Right. Right.

[00:06:12]>> Right. And even Cajal Ramon Cajal my Spaniard hero said it was a garden beautiful.

[00:06:19]>> Yeah.

[00:06:19]>> These are all metaphors. But then there's a higher class of understanding which asks is the brain producing all of those cognitive faculties and consciousness? Is it like a steam machine and consciousness or thought would be the smoke produced a byproduct even an epiphenomenon even something that doesn't exist if you go hardcore to the to the eliminities eliminativist Sorry I never say this word right.

[00:06:44]Elimini- You know.

[00:06:46]Eliminitivist.

[00:06:48]>> Take illusionism it's easier to say.

[00:06:50]>> Yeah illusionism.

[00:06:52]So is it like a steam engine and consciousness is the steam or is it more like a prism? I like the other meta- the other meta metaphor of the prism. Light goes in that would be the mind or consciousness and then the prism which is the brain reflects and refracts the beam of light into many colors. So is red produced by the prism?

[00:07:14]No it's kind of filtered facilitated Huxley called the brain kind of the reducing valve and this changed the entire discussion if you adopt this class of metaphors the productive ones or the permissive. And the productive ones have dominated 99% of neuroscience and that's what I realized when I had my experience that if you adopt the other one and it's not yet clear what the data it's not clear that the data has decided on the first on the first one on productive brain. If you adopt the second one, a great deal of impossible phenomena become possible, even plausible.

[00:07:50]>> Okay. So, very quickly then on the the data and the implications of it broadly.

[00:07:57]>> All right. Okay, quickly. There's a lot there. So, a big hole in the wall of the materialist {slash} productive brain ideology, a big hole in that wall are near-death experiences.

[00:08:15]Um and within it, if we double click, we need to speak about the experiences themselves. I'll go quickly and then you can tell me if you want to hear more about any of these. Then we have the what the experiences themselves say.

[00:08:26]And this is important because if we're doing a science of consciousness, experiences should matter. These are not second-class phenomena. What they say, including mine, what I saw. But of course, these these could be just anecdotes. Now, if you study them systematically, you realize there thousands of them, they're more prevalent than usually thought, and they have a structure. People typically have a life review, feeling of bliss, meet deceased ones, and so on.

[00:08:54]Of course, they are colored by by social context. But this is interesting from a phenomenological, even neuro-phenomenological point of view.

[00:09:02]Lots of experiences, structured, conserved. They're also transformative.

[00:09:07]These these change people's lives.

[00:09:09]Now, we go to a second round, which is some of these near-death experiences are happen together with an out-of-body experience. People see themselves maybe when they're in the operating room and so on. And some of these out-of-body near-death experiences have an element have some elements of veridicality, which means that they're not only seeing the beyond, if you allow me. They're seeing things that are happening in the physical world. And you could say, "Well, whatever. They may be recasting from memory or imagining when they tell the story to the surgeon, the neurosurgeon, and things that are obvious, but no, people and there are few cases, but they're spectacular. And and dogmatic skeptics don't want to talk about them, but there cases in the literature verified where the person was saying, "I I was hearing this this song that was being played while they I was undergoing surgery." And there was no way that person was conscious while this was happening. Another instance, somebody really in a comatose state and her her teeth were removed or his teeth were removed and he remembered that later. Another one saw something outside that very same room that then could be verified.

[00:10:13]Uh this is at the edge. And then there's one more step to make things even harder. People who die are resuscitated in the hospital, had a near-death experience, remember it, are willing to tell it, it's veridical. And then the last thing is and somebody comes with an electro- electroencephalogram and an EEG and records at least the superficial, the cortical activity and it's flat. So, you see, we're trying to get to that hardcore anomaly where it seems that when a brain is off or quasi off, the mind can be experiencing this incredibly rich structure and transformative experience.

[00:10:51]>> Okay, uh let's go to the conclusion uh to keep us uh tight. Um what then are the uh are the fundamental conclusions that you came to?

[00:11:00]>> Well, the conclusion is that the conclusion is that there's no conclusion. That That's the way to say it. The conclusion is and that's why I need to go back to history. For many decades, they've said in the name of science, "We know that there's nothing after after the brain stops." Why?

[00:11:19]Because if you're a materialist, brain equals mind, end of the question.

[00:11:23]If one ends, the other two. And now, instead of saying, "We know there's nothing," they start to say, "Well, maybe maybe we need to investigate more." So, this is a huge change. I'm not studying near-death experiences to tell people there's an afterlife. This is proof of the soul. I don't want to go that fast. I'm just saying now we have another big option on the table and there's evidence there.

[00:11:44]Then there's more evidence about the key question, which is survival of consciousness after bodily death.

[00:11:50]Near-death experiences, as I was telling you, are a big hole in the wall, but there are other phenomena like the ones that were studied at the at the University of Virginia, children who remember previous lives, for instance, by Ian Stevenson. And there are other sorts of weird phenomena that sometimes we're shy of even mentioning them because they they sound like pseudoscience, but at the end of the day this one can do a science of this and there's evidence. People get sometimes very nervous when I mention the word evidence. They They think that evidence is a logical, mathematical proof that's whose conclusion is unavoidable. No, this is like in a in a jury, in a case where you bring piles of evidence. And so there there's this constellation of phenomena near-death, after-death, even before birth that I would say they all point point, suggest, make more plausible the idea that something about ourselves survives after we die. And that's only possible theoretically, that's why I also had to speak about theory. That's only possible theoretically if the brain is permissive. If it was productive it's just it's just not even impossible, it's inconceivable to scientists and maybe that's why there's so much resistance to even entertaining the data.

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