This is rather remarkable because Epstein is a materialist and for him to acknowledge the possibility of another world, a realm beyond the physical, is quite a concession. Nevertheless, he finds the evidence suggestive.
A transducer is simply a device which converts energy from one form to another. A microphone which converts sound energy to electricity and the speakers which convert electricity back to sound are both transducers. Our sense organs likewise are transducers, and Epstein thinks the brain may be as well.
He asks us to consider this possibility on the basis of some very strange phenomena recorded by neuroscientists. He gives us some examples in this excerpt:
A 2020 study summarizing the observations of 124 caregivers of dementia patients, concluded that in "more than 80 percent of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers of the lucid episode" and that "[the] majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode."About six weeks ago I posted a video of Vicki's story which is even more strange than Epstein suggests. Here it is: Shakespeare has Hamlet say that there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our philosophy. There may well be much more to ultimate reality than we assume. We may be a bit like the boy in the bubble in the movie The Truman Show who's surrounded by a world of which he's completely oblivious.
The periods of lucidity typically lasted 30 to 60 minutes.
Some of the historical reports of lucid episodes are truly extraordinary.
Here is one of many cases reported by the German biologist Michael Nahm and his colleagues in 2012:
In a case published in 1822, a boy at the age of 6 had fallen on a nail that penetrated his forehead. He slowly developed increasing headaches and mental disturbances. At the age of 17, he was in constant pain, extremely melancholic, and starting to lose his memory. He fantasized, blinked continuously, and looked for hours at particular objects…. He remained in the hospital in this state for 18 days.
On the morning of the 19th day, he suddenly left his bed and appeared very bright, claiming he was free of all pain and feelings of sickness…. A quarter of an hour after the attending physician left him, he fell unconscious and died within a few minutes.
The front part of his brain contained two pus-filled tissue bags the size of a hen’s egg (Pfeufer, 1822)….
And another:
Haig (2007) reported the case of a young man dying of lung cancer that had spread to his brain. Toward the end of his life, a brain scan showed little brain tissue left, the metastasized tumors having not simply pushed aside normal brain tissue but actually destroyed and replaced it. In the days before his death, he lost all ability to speak or move.
According to a nurse and his wife, however, an hour before he died, he woke up and said good-bye to his family, speaking with them for about five minutes before losing consciousness again and dying.
If the brain is a self-contained information processor, how can we explain the sudden return of lucidity when the brain is severely damaged?
What if the variability is not caused by changes in processing power in the brain but rather by transduction effects? By changes occurring not in our local universe but in the [Other World]? Or by minor changes occurring at the point of connection? Or by changes occurring in brain structures that are essential to signal transfers?
Experiences of this sort were first summarized in a 1997 paper by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, later expanded into a book called Mindsight (1999). The paper and book describe the experiences of 14 people who were blind from birth and who had near-death experiences (NDEs), some of which included content that appeared to be visual in nature.
Soon after Vicki U. was in a near-fatal car accident at age 22, she remembered "seeing" a male physician and a woman from above in the emergency room, and she "saw" them working on a body. Said Vicki:
I knew it was me.... I was quite tall and thin at that point. And I recognized at first that it was a body, but I didn't even know that it was mine initially. Then I perceived that I was up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird. What am I doing up here?" I thought, "Well, this must be me. Am I dead?"
Vicki had never had a visual experience before her NDE, and, according to the researchers, did not even "understand the nature of light." While near death, she also claimed to have been flooded with information about math and science. Said Vicki:
I all of a sudden understood intuitively almost [all] things about calculus, and about the way planets were made. And I don't know anything about that.... I felt there was nothing I didn't know.
In any case, it seems that with every passing year science is making it increasingly harder to think that the physical, material world apprehended by our five senses is all that there is.
