Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science

By: John H. Buchanan and Christopher M. Aanstoos

with a Foreword by Stanley Kripper

Telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis—psi abilities consistently rejected by science despite widespread acceptance by the general public.

In ten chapters, contributed by leading parapsychologists and philosophers, these essays explore experiences that present significant challenges to the modern scientific worldview, in particular, to its insistent refusal to reconsider its underlying commitment to a materialistic, mechanistic, atheistic metaphysics. Philosophically, Alfred North Whitehead’s process view of experience is described as being more congenial not only to extraordinary experience, but to the current state of scientific research, which has revealed that activity, selection, and response are facets of every level of reality from the quantum event to the neural cell. Ironically, the only part of our world whose synthetic responsiveness—whose “subjectivity”—is regularly called into question by the academy is the human subject. And the primary reason for this most peculiar situation is modern science and philosophy’s largely unconscious metaphysical allegiance to one-half of an abandoned Cartesian dualism, which in practice is no longer accepted by any scientific discipline. Nonetheless, try to assert some idea that does not cohere with this assumed notion of reality and prepare to be informed it is “impossible,” while at the same time being told that this response is not related to any preexisting metaphysical sentiments. read more