October 2024
A long-form article in The Daily Mail constitutes an interesting hybrid between a physicalist worldview and a more open-minded stance towards paranormal phenomena and evidence of a nonphysical reality. The piece might represent a ‘stepping stone’ in mainstream media’s approach to covering these topics.
The ambiguity shows in the long headline:
Why scientists think there’s a ‘third state’ beyond life and death that could explain so much. One neuroscientist reveals incredible near-death experience.
The article by health and science reporter John Naish begins with a conversation with neuroscientist Christof Koch, one of the world’s leading consciousness researchers. Koch’s own Near-Death Experience prompted him to author “Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand it”. He believes the experience is the ‘mind at large’, “a form of consciousness that may pervade the entire universe”.
Naish attempts to connect subjective nonphysical experiences like NDEs with a fascinating new finding in biology: Petri dish experiments have shown that cells can survive longer than previously thought after their host has died, and they can multiply and begin to act as renewed, separate creatures — as if reverting to an earlier evolutionary stage, before cells began to co-work end merge to create more complex living entities.
This is the ‘third state’ referred to in the headline of the article. While the discovery is undoubtedly mind-boggling, it remains unclear how it relates to subjective experiences of continued consciousness after clinical death.
Is the writer implying that some form of panpsychism is at work? This ideology postulates that consciousness is an integral part of every individual building block of the universe. If this is Naish’s meaning, it would still not explain the coherence or clarity of the experience. (This is the FJN’s guess as to what is implied as it is not expressed in the article.)
The story also includes Koch’s comments about a 2023 study led by Dr Sam Parnia at New York University. It has been claimed inaccurately in mainstream media that the study shows that people who have NDEs display some brain activity, which is contrary to Dr Pim van Lommel’s prospective study published in 2001. The Daily Mail allows Koch to point out the inaccuracy of these claims. The participants in the Parnia study who exhibited (limited) brain wave activity were not the ones who had the experiences and vice versa.
The piece ends in an open-minded way, quoting respected academics who study mysteries of human phenomenon such as terminal lucidity.
“We are very open to the idea that we can explain it biologically or neurologically”, University of Northampton psychology professor Chris Roe says. “Nevertheless, its explanation may lay beyond the realms of current science”.
And Peter Noble, a professor of microbiology at the University of Alabama adds, “I’ve lost count of the number of times that people have reacted by calling this work ‘Frankenstein science’. But I don’t mind, because it sparks public interest in what’s being done here to explore something mysterious – something that could prove vitally important to our lives”.
All in all, The Daily Mail article does a fairly good job of describing theories (that used to be regarded as pseudoscientific), and relating non-physical experiences (that used to be discarded as impossible) now being investigated by a growing number of scientists.
Anders Bolling
