Imants Barušs
I’m interested in all aspects of consciousness studies but, in particular, questions about the fundamental nature of consciousness and reality. The following is a summary of my research program. All references in square brackets are to the publications page.
Logic. For my master’s thesis in mathematics I looked at forcing in topoi and, in particular, my interim advisor, Robert Woodrow, and I were able to show that a Kripke-Joyal semantics over an arbitrary category can be reduced to forcing over a complete Heyting algebra, thereby implying that, even in the most general semantics, truth values can be considered to range between true and false. Subsequently, as a doctoral student in psychology studying consciousness, while reading Smith & McIntyre’s interpretation of Husserl’s intentionality in terms of classical logic, I realized that Husserl’s conception of conscious mental acts lent itself to the use of intuitionistic logic and could be effectively modelled using Grothendieck topoi [P4].
Quantum Mind. Duncan Blewett, who taught me a graduate course in consciousness, was particularly interested in the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, so I wrote a term paper about that topic, which ended up being my first academic publication [P1]. Recently, I have returned to questions about the relevance of consciousness to physical manifestation, writing overviews of collapse-type quantum mind theories [P21; P24], implications that such theories have for consciousness [P26], and a review of one of Henry Stapp’s books [R14]. During my third sabbatical I sat in on an undergraduate applied mathematics course, Quantum Mechanics II, at the University of Western Ontario, and then a graduate applied mathematics course, Quantum Field Theory for Cosmology, taught by Achim Kempf, at the University of Waterloo. The quantum field theory course gave me some fresh ideas, particularly with regard to the possibility that the influence of deep aspects of the psyche could be tracked with the creation and annihilation operators describing a quantum field [P28].
The Study of Consciousness. While studying for my doctorate, my dissertation advisor, Robert Moore, and I noted that there was a great disparity of ideas about consciousness in the scientific and philosophical literature about consciousness. So, rather than studying consciousness, we ended up studying the study of consciousness, finding that notions of consciousness fall in line with positions along a material-transcendent dimension of beliefs about reality. This work appeared in the proceedings of a conference in which we first reported it [P5] as well as in my dissertation, which was published as a book [B1]. Some of my doctoral research has been reported also in other publications [P2; P3; P7; P12]. A summary, including quantum mind, beliefs about consciousness and reality, and problems with materialism, can be found in [P29].
Beliefs about Consciousness and Reality. Ideas about consciousness and beliefs about consciousness are so interwoven that Moore and I simply referred to them as beliefs about consciousness and reality and reconceptualized the factors found in our survey through various multivariate analyses as scales constituting a Beliefs about Consciousness and Reality Questionnaire (BACARQ) [P6]. Whereas the original data were gathered in 1986, in 1996 we had an opportunity to distribute the questionnaire to the participants of an academic consciousness conference held in Tucson, Arizona [P10; P11]. We also hypothesized that students’ beliefs would change in the direction of their instructors’ beliefs and found that to be the case in some courses [P12]. One of my undergraduate thesis students looked for personality correlates of beliefs about consciousness and reality and found that transcendent beliefs were correlated with a more rational and curious approach to the world, the opposite of the usual assumption that those with transcendent beliefs are irrational [P14]. Because there are small correlations between openness and IQ, the question then became whether correlations exist between IQ and transcendence, and, indeed, that proved to be the case in another student project [P19].
Problems with Materialism. In following this line of research, the question arises of whether or not there is any point in examining the existence of transcendent beliefs, except as a curious social phenomenon, if materialism is, in fact, correct. However, materialism appears to be based on a simplistic billiard ball schema as an explanation of reality, even though such a schema is known to be an incorrect depiction of physical phenomena. That is to say, naive versions of materialism cannot explain matter, let alone anomalous phenomena, or provide adequate answers to existential questions [P9; R1; R2; R4; R5], yet remains entrenched in academia apparently for largely political reasons [P15]. I don’t have much to add to the arguments against materialism that I have already made, although I have summarized them again recently [B4; P25]. It seems to me that it is time to focus on the positive program of trying to develop suitable transcendent theories rather than repeatedly pointing out the same problems with materialism.
Altered States of Consciousness. I became interested in altered states of consciousness when I started teaching about them in undergraduate courses in consciousness. Indeed, I had no textbook for an altered states of consciousness course, so I wrote one [B3]. In addition, I have written about the psychopathology of altered states of consciousness [P13], the implications for science of alterations of consciousness [P15], and the relevance of alterations of consciousness for spirituality [P20]. One of my students identified the characteristics of spontaneous musical imagery [P27]. I have also reviewed books about altered states of consciousness [R10; R12; R17] and anomalous phenomena, which frequently occur in the context of altered states [R6; R7; R8; R13; R15; R16]; pointed out the non-local properties of consciousness [P8]; and conducted an experiment of electronic voice phenomenon [P17] and another of instrumental transcommunication [P22], neither of which yielded much by way of interesting results.
Self-Transformation. Self-transformation refers to the deliberate effort made by people to change themselves, usually by moving toward greater existential meaning, authenticity, moral integrity, exceptional well-being, and transcendent states of consciousness. That can occur either inside or outside a spiritual context and, in either case, has received little scientific attention. I have written fairly extensively about these issues [B2; R3; R11]. One of my students looked at the expression of spirituality in late adulthood and found that its characteristics were quite different from its expression in young adulthood [P16]. Another of my students did an experiment to see whether past-life regression improved a person’s psychological well-being [P18]. Of particular interest to me has been the contention by Franklin Wolff that mathematics, by virtue of its abstract nature, is the most facile approach to transcendent phenomena for those who are scientifically oriented [B2; B4; P23; R9]. The induction of transcendent states of consciousness, with its accompanying notion of liberation, continues to be of research interest for me.