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Crossing Over

Crossing Over

Last updated on: September 27, 2025 at 11:10 am by Dan Peterson

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Crossing Over 2025-09-27T11:10:51-06:00 Dan Peterson

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An 1855 engraving of Nauvoo, Illinois, from the western shore of the Mississippi. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image) The original Nauvoo Temple is shown as still partially standing; the Latter-day Saints had been driven out nearly a decade before.

I recently read the 2024 book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), written by Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D. I found it both enjoyable and fascinating. I may even re-read it, and I heartily commend it to the notice of anybody who is interested in the problem of consciousness and/or in near-death experiences (or in what Dr. Parnia himself prefers to label “recalled experiences of death”).

As I’ve mentioned here before, the Anglo-American Dr. Parnia is an associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, where, additionally, he serves as director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He also leads the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton, in England. He received his medical degree in 1995 from the medical school of King’s College London and then earned a doctorate in cell biology from the University of Southhampton in 2007. He also received fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of London and at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Water lilies in the Mississippi River, near Nauvoo, Illinois (LDS.org). I myself will shortly cross over the river — but, if all goes according to plan, I’ll do so literally rather than in the metaphorical sense that some of my critics might prefer.

I share here a small handful of the passages that I marked while reading Lucid Dying. The first of them refers to Sir John Eccles (1903-1997), an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse:

Sir John’s theory was that the brain, in particular an area toward the front of the brain called the supplementary motor cortex, acts as a liaison through which the mind interacts with the brain. Yet the mind does not reside within it. That is to say, no one knows where the mind is, or from where our conscious self emerges, and no one since his remarkable discoveries has been able to give a clear answer.

In essence, Eccles argued that who we are—our mind, our selfhood, consciousness, and awareness—is not the brain but is intricately linked to the brain, and in turn modulates the brain. The key is that while brain processes affect our mind and consciousness, they don’t produce them. (233-234)

Dr. Parnia turns to an analogy that will already be familiar to many Latter-day Saints because of its use by Elder Boyd K. Packer, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in a talk that he gave during the April 1973 General Conference of the Church. (See “Behold Your Little Ones.”) Here is Dr. Parnia’s version:

We can use an analogy of a hand in a glove to explain this better. When we place our hand in a glove, the two become intricately linked together. Yet they are inherently two different substrates. Imagine yourself wearing a glove. Of course, the shapes of your hand and glove look alike, and they intimately follow every movement together. If, one day, the glove is too tight, it will impact your hand, as it will create a sense of discomfort. At the same time, the movement of your hand also impacts and modulates the movements of the glove. These two modulate and interact with each other. In fact, the two are so intricately tethered to each other that to an outsider, they may appear the same. Yet they are not. How the “hand” and “glove” separate is a key idea in understanding the experience of lucid hyperconsciousness in the grey zone. (234)

In the next quotation, a lengthy one, Dr. Parnia refers to the English mathematician, mathematical physicist, and philosopher of science Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931). Sir Roger Nobel Laureate in Physics. is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an honorary fellow of both St John’s College, Cambridge, and University College London, and a Nobel Laureate in Physics. Stuart Hameroff (b. 1947) is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona who is known for his studies of consciousness:

Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have grouped the limitations of the conventional or “physicalist” (reductionist) theories in four broad categories. The first and most obvious limitation is that they do not provide a plausible mechanism to account for the development of consciousness or thoughts from brain cell activity. The theories propose potential intermediary pathways but still do not answer the fundamental question of how brain cell activity might create thoughts and consciousness or human experience. Remember the man who was missing 90 percent of his brain but still had normal consciousness? Brain cells, like any other cell, can manufacture protein-based substances. They can even be linked with electricity, but the nature and substance of thought seems inherently different from electricity or a chemical or any protein-based substance in the brain, as Eccles highlighted. Second, another limitation relates to how activities distributed all over the brain—through the actions of billions of individual brain cells at any one time—can eventually bind into a single unitary sense of self that leads to the notion of “I” and our selfhood. This was also highlighted by Eccles. Remember, we see ourselves as one person, not billions and billions of tiny selves, each linked to one of our billions of brain cells. I see myself as one person, not a fractured amalgamation of infinite tiny selves. Probably you do, too. Third, how do chemical or electrical events that are continuously taking place in different parts of the brain—such as the release of various hormones—but are not part of our “consciousness” suddenly become conscious, other than to say that it somehow does occur at a critical point? Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, we know that a fundamental part of our lives involves the notion of free will and our choices. We are judged in society based upon our intentions, actions, and choices. Yet the brain-based views cannot account for this reality. If correct, they would mean that our lives are completely determined by our genes and environment, and hence there would be no place for personal accountability. (235)

This limitation of all the brain-based theories has led some to suggest consciousness may in fact be an irreducible scientific entity in its own right, similar to many of the concepts in physics, such as mass and gravity, which are also irreducible entities. Other discoveries, such as the discovery of electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century or quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, were also inexplicable in terms of previously known principles. (237)

I hope that you’ve found these ideas as intriguing as I have.

Posted from Quincy, Illinois

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