TORONTO – What happens in your brain during an out-of-body experience? Would an afterlife be boring or would it be worthwhile to live forever? If you’ve ever pondered these questions, a California study dubbed The Immortality Project is looking for the same answers that you are, and more.
A US $5-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation has been awarded to University of California at Riverside philosopher John Martin Fischer to fund research on aspects of immortality.
Fischer is organizing competitions, selecting judges and consulting with potential (and actual) recipients of research grants, though won’t be conducting the research himself. Funding for grants will be distributed as follows: $2.5 million for scientific studies and $1.5 million for theology and philosophy projects.
Participants will consist of carefully selected top scientists, philosophers, and theologians from around the world, though proposals must be submitted in English.
The Immortality Project is officially underway, and advertising for the first competition for science research proposals will begin Sept. 1.
So what kind of ideas is Fischer expecting?
On the phone from Germany, he explained that one possibility is taking past reports of near-death experiences and comparing them across countries like the Canada, the U.S., Japan, India and Africa.
Fischer says in the West, people often report seeing a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end when describing near-death experiences, while people in Japan describe tending a garden.
He points to the fact that in most western cultures we have the saying ‘there’s a light at the end of the tunnel’ while in Japan there’s a story of how to keep in touch with loved ones as you age by buying a garden and tending it together.
“It’s pure speculation, but maybe somehow, psychologically, when there’s a tremendous threat to us and it feels like we’re about to die, we can somehow reach for that comfort zone or that idea that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.” Or a garden with friends, if you’re Japanese.
He says another possibility would be simulating so-called out-of-body experiences to test whether people can really ‘see themselves’ from different viewpoints, as is often reported.
In the realm of neuroscience, studies could test if there are features of the brain that predispose people to believe in an afterlife, or if there are scans that can reveal brain phenomena when people are having out-of-body experiences. All experiments using people would have to be approved by ethics committees.
An additional area of study is cataloguing people’s beliefs about the afterlife and finding links to their behaviour e.g. finding out if people who believe in hell are less likely to commit crimes, as some empirical studies have suggested.
In the philosophy and theology realms, the project would support sabbaticals for winners to write articles and books on topics such as whether the conceptions of heaven, hell and purgatory are philosophically defensible, or whether or not it would even be desirable to live forever.
Fischer believes the project came together now because of increasing interest among scientists in the possibility of increasing the human lifespan, but notes that we’ve always been interested in the possibility of defeating death, as evidenced by stories that began with Adam and Eve.
“Even to the present where we have this fascination with vampire literature – the vampires seek a kind of immortality by taking other people’s blood,” he says. “Throughout religion, science-the history of both Western and Eastern science-and literature, we’ve been seeking this kind of fountain of youth.”
Fischer admits that he would be surprised to find definitive answers on the various aspects of immortality, but aims to make progress on what we do know about death. He emphasizes that the primary focus isn’t just near-death experiences, and hopes that by thinking about immortality, we can learn what we value in our finite lives.
While he says he’s “not a religious believer,” he remains open-minded about the possibility of an afterlife.
“My father, who passed away recently, was a cardiologist and my brother is a cardiologist and they both treat patients who are very sick and sometimes die,” he says. “Maybe when I was young I was thinking about these issues, because I saw that my father would really try and help people, and sometimes he couldn’t, and so maybe that got me started.”
The John Templeton Foundation is a private foundation that supports research on subjects ranging from “complexity, evolution and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will.” The foundation’s vision comes from the late Sir John Templeton’s goal of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his “commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship.”
John Martin Fischer serves on the International Board of Advisors of the Templeton Foundation. He is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California Riverside, a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Bioethics at the University of Muenster in Germany and the president of the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division.
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