Prof Ed Kelly – Overcoming the “Immovable Obstacle” to Postmortem Survival
Contemporary opinion elites worldwide generally hold that mind and consciousness are manufactured by neurophysiological processes occurring in our brains and must therefore vanish at death. It was precisely this physicalist or materialist “production” model of the brain/mind relation and the evidence supporting it that prevented Gardner Murphy from accepting what he described as the otherwise “Irresistible Force” of the accumulated evidence for survival. In this talk, Ed Kelly will describe a decades-long project that has already resulted in three large books – Irreducible Mind (2007), Beyond Physicalism, (2015), and Consciousness Unbound (2021) – which demonstrate empirically that physicalism itself is untenable, provide support for an alternative “filter” or “permission” model of the brain/mind relation, and tentatively identify an expanded science-based worldview that can accommodate phenomena beyond the reach of physicalism such as psi and survival, flights of genius, and mystical experiences.
EDWARD KELLYis currently a Professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics and cognitive science from Harvard in 1971, and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in parapsychology, initially at J. B. Rhine’s Institute for Parapsychology, then for ten years through the Department of Electrical Engineering at Duke, and finally through a private research institute in Chapel Hill. Between 1988 and 2002 he worked with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill, mainly carrying out EEG and fMRI studies of human somatosensory cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author of Irreducible Mind (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and Beyond Physicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) and Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). He is now returning to his central long-term research interest – application of modern functional neuroimaging methods to intensive psychophysiological studies of psi and ASCs in exceptional subjects.
Speaker
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Edward F. KellyProfessor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at UVADr Edward F. Kelly is a Professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at UVA. He received his PhD in psycholinguistics/cognitive science from Harvard in 1971, and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in experimental parapsychology, followed by a similar stint with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill where he carried out EEG and fMRI studies of human cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author of Irreducible Mind (2007), Beyond Physicalism (2015), and Consciousness Unbound (2021), all produced under the auspices of Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. He is now returning to his central research interest – functional neuroimaging studies of psi and altered states in exceptional subjects.
