Consciousness and its survival

It seems spirits, exist, though there is room for disagreement about their nature and it has not been established whether any spirit was ever incarnated. If any such spirit can be shown to exist then survival of consciousness beyond the death of the body has been proven for at least one person.

    I am taking survival to mean the persistence, beyond the death of the body, of  a conscious entity  that can recognise itself as the previous inhabitant of the body.

    Mainstream Science takes a materialistic notion of consciousness, that consciousness is something that emerges from and depend on firing of neurons in the brain.  In this view survival is impossible. This view is a matter of faith  and no one has yet managed to demonstrate  how consciousness can arise in this way or how consciousness can drive the body.

    Consciousness may arise as in the mainstream picture, from neural activity but once it has arisen can maintain itself even if the brain dies. This makes survival possible but not guaranteed. There is  good evidence for Pychokinesis and given that survival is a priority for most people, it is possible that the mind can create a self sustaining  body that can exist independently of the  physical body.  The fact that spirits can apparently be created would seem to support this possibility. In this case we would be wombs for spirits and the interest the spirit world has in us can be explained in terms of normal self interest.

    Consciousness may be external to the brain and the brain may just be the tool used to drive the body. We may be like characters in a role playing  video game. In this case  there is no such thing as survival because nothing dies.

    Consciousness may, as many religions believe, be injected into the body  and stay there till the body dies after which it is free to move on.

    In  his classic work “Mediumship and survival” published in 1982 Alan Gauld decided that the best evidence from mental mediumship - spiritualist seances -  was equivocal since the evidence could have been gathered using ESP stronger than ever observed in  the laboratory.  Later work by others, for example Schwarz,  tips the balance towards survival.

Another way to look at the  problem is to note that consciousness may  have both a wave and a particle aspect and that the wave aspect may be not be confined to the body.

    At this time I tend to the view held by Chalmers, that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of the universe not reducible to anything else.  This would support the scenario where consciousness enters the body from outside and stays there till the body dies