What If Consciousness Does Not End at the River?
Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, Near-Death Experiences, and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Robert Foreman, MSBA
Doctoral Candidate, Educational Technology
Central Michigan University
Instructor, Business Analytics & Artificial Intelligence
Avila University
forem1r@cmich.edu
“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
These words are traditionally attributed to Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson during the final hours of his life on May 10, 1863. Jackson had survived the amputation of his left arm after being accidentally shot by Confederate troops following the Battle of Chancellorsville, but pneumonia subsequently developed. Accounts of his final hours describe periods of delirium in which Jackson appeared to return mentally to the battlefield, issuing commands to soldiers who were not present. Near the end of his life, however, the battlefield imagery reportedly disappeared. His final recorded words instead described a river, a crossing, trees, and rest.
Jackson was a deeply religious man, making it reasonable to interpret the statement within the context of his Christian beliefs. Death, from such a perspective, represented not necessarily the termination of existence but a transition from one form of existence to another. The river could therefore be understood metaphorically as a boundary between earthly life and what Jackson believed awaited him afterward. An equally reasonable physiological explanation is that a dying brain, under extraordinary biological stress, assembled memories, religious expectations, and familiar imagery into a final subjective experience.
These interpretations appear fundamentally different, yet both lead to a question that remains surprisingly difficult to answer: What exactly was happening to Jackson’s consciousness?
Modern neuroscience has established a powerful relationship between brain activity and conscious experience. Injury to particular areas of the brain can alter memory, personality, language, perception, judgment, and even an individual’s sense of self. Anesthesia can apparently eliminate conscious awareness and subsequently allow it to return. Electrical stimulation, psychoactive substances, disease, sleep, trauma, and oxygen deprivation can dramatically alter subjective experience. The accumulated evidence connecting brain function with consciousness is therefore substantial.
Establishing this relationship, however, is not identical to explaining consciousness itself. Neuroscience has become increasingly capable of identifying neural correlates associated with particular conscious states, but the existence of subjective experience remains philosophically and scientifically difficult to explain. Philosopher David Chalmers famously characterized this distinction as the “hard problem” of consciousness. The problem is not merely determining how the brain processes information, integrates sensory input, retrieves memories, or produces behavioral responses. The more fundamental question is why any of those processes should be accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why should physical processes occurring within biological tissue produce the internal sensation of being a conscious observer?
The question becomes especially relevant when considering claims about the boundaries of consciousness. If science has not yet produced a complete account of why subjective experience exists, then absolute statements concerning what consciousness ultimately is—or what it can and cannot do—should be approached cautiously. This does not diminish the considerable evidence connecting consciousness to the functioning brain. Rather, it distinguishes between demonstrating a strong relationship and providing a complete explanation of the phenomenon itself.
Modern physics provides an additional reason for epistemic humility, although it must be introduced carefully. Quantum mechanics is sometimes invoked in popular discussions as evidence that consciousness can exist independently of the brain or survive bodily death. Current physics does not establish either proposition. Quantum mechanics should therefore not be presented as scientific proof of an afterlife.
Its relevance is more philosophical than evidentiary. Quantum mechanics demonstrated that physical reality at fundamental scales does not necessarily conform to ordinary human intuition. Superposition, entanglement, probabilistic measurement outcomes, and other quantum phenomena challenged the classical assumptions through which human beings had previously understood the physical world. Nature proved considerably stranger than everyday experience suggested.
The appropriate lesson is not that quantum mechanics demonstrates the survival of consciousness. It is that human intuition is an unreliable standard for determining what reality permits. Scientific history repeatedly demonstrates that phenomena can appear impossible when judged according to an incomplete model of nature. The inability to imagine how something could occur is not equivalent to demonstrating that it cannot occur. Applied to consciousness, this distinction suggests caution on both sides of the debate. Quantum mechanics cannot legitimately be used to prove that consciousness survives death, but neither should confidence in our present understanding of reality be mistaken for completeness.
Near-death experiences occupy an equally controversial position at this boundary between established knowledge and unresolved questions. Physician Raymond Moody introduced the term near-death experience to a broad audience during the 1970s and has spent decades collecting accounts from individuals who reported unusual conscious experiences while approaching death or during severe medical crises. In Proof of Life After Life, Moody and Paul Perry (2023) advance the much stronger proposition that accumulated experiences associated with death provide evidence for continued existence beyond bodily life.
That conclusion remains controversial and extends considerably beyond what mainstream neuroscience accepts as established evidence. The underlying experiences, however, remain worthy of scientific examination. Individuals who have survived severe medical crises have repeatedly described phenomena including intense feelings of peace, altered perceptions of time, apparent separation from the physical body, movement through unusual environments, encounters with deceased relatives or other entities, panoramic reviews of life events, and perceptions of entering another realm or state of existence.
There are plausible neurological explanations for many of these experiences. A brain undergoing severe physiological stress is not functioning normally. Hypoxia, altered carbon dioxide concentrations, neurotransmitter activity, medication, disrupted sensory integration, dreamlike processes, memory reconstruction, cultural expectations, and other physiological mechanisms may contribute to the experiences reported by individuals near death. These mechanisms provide important scientific alternatives to supernatural interpretations.
A plausible mechanism, however, should not automatically be treated as a complete explanation. Particularly controversial are reports in which individuals claim to have perceived events occurring around them during periods of severe physiological impairment. Such reports require exceptionally careful investigation. Human memory is fallible, retrospective testimony is susceptible to reconstruction, and extraordinary claims require unusually strong evidence. Skepticism is therefore not merely appropriate but essential.
Skepticism and dismissal, however, are not synonymous.
Science advances by subjecting unexplained phenomena to increasingly rigorous investigation. The appropriate scientific response to an unusual observation is neither automatic acceptance nor automatic rejection, but an attempt to determine whether the observation is reliable, reproducible, and compatible with existing or revised theoretical explanations. Near-death experiences therefore remain scientifically interesting even if their ultimate explanation proves entirely neurological.
Jackson’s final moments provide a historical illustration of this broader problem. His body was failing. His consciousness appeared to fluctuate. At times, he reportedly behaved as though he remained on the battlefield, giving instructions to soldiers who were no longer present. His subjective environment therefore appears to have become increasingly disconnected from the physical environment surrounding his bed.
Then the battlefield disappeared.
There was a river. There were trees. There was rest.
A neuroscientist could reasonably interpret this transition as the activity of a severely compromised brain integrating memories, expectations, religious beliefs, and internally generated imagery as biological death approached. A theologian could interpret the same words as evidence of a devout Christian recognizing the transition he believed was occurring. Neither interpretation can be reconstructed directly from Jackson’s subjective experience because consciousness presents an unusual methodological problem: it is experienced privately.
Researchers can observe neural activity associated with a person’s reported experience. They can monitor blood flow, electrical activity, oxygenation, behavior, and physiological responses. They cannot directly occupy another person’s subjective awareness. Jackson alone experienced whatever was occurring within his consciousness during those final moments, and his death permanently removed the possibility of further interrogation.
The emergence of artificial intelligence makes this distinction between observable information processing and subjective experience even more significant. Contemporary artificial intelligence systems can generate language, analyze images, write computer programs, solve mathematical problems, produce creative works, formulate hypotheses, and engage in conversations that appear remarkably human. Yet sophisticated information processing does not necessarily demonstrate subjective awareness. An artificial intelligence system can generate a detailed description of sitting beneath a tree beside a river, but whether there is anything that it feels like for that system to describe the scene is an entirely different question.
Artificial intelligence may therefore force researchers to distinguish more carefully between intelligence and consciousness. Human beings have historically experienced the two together: individuals who reason, communicate, remember, and solve problems also report possessing an internal subjective experience. Advanced computational systems challenge the assumption that these properties must necessarily coexist. If intelligence and consciousness are separable phenomena, then consciousness may require an explanation different from information processing alone.
This returns the discussion to the unresolved question at the center of Jackson’s final words. Perhaps his experience was entirely the product of a dying brain. Perhaps his religious beliefs supplied the imagery through which his mind interpreted the physiological process of dying. Perhaps future neuroscience will eventually explain such experiences with sufficient precision that the final moments of consciousness can be described completely in neurological terms.
There remains, however, another possibility—not one that should be accepted without evidence, but one that contemporary science cannot yet claim to have conclusively eliminated. Consciousness may contain dimensions or properties that remain outside our present theoretical understanding.
The scientifically responsible position may therefore be less satisfying than either certainty offered by faith or certainty offered by strict materialism: we do not know yet.
History provides ample reason to tolerate those words. Electromagnetic radiation existed before human beings possessed instruments capable of detecting it. Relativistic effects occurred before Einstein described them mathematically. Quantum entanglement did not begin when physicists discovered it. In each instance, reality preceded the theoretical framework humans eventually developed to describe it. Scientific progress occurred not because reality changed, but because human understanding did.
The same may ultimately prove true of consciousness. Future neuroscience may demonstrate that subjective experience is entirely dependent upon and produced by biological processes within the brain. If so, experiences such as Jackson’s final vision may eventually be explained through neural activity, physiology, memory, expectation, and the progressive biological processes associated with death. Such an explanation would represent an extraordinary scientific achievement.
Until the fundamental nature of consciousness itself is understood, however, confidence should not become certainty. Science appropriately demands evidence before accepting extraordinary propositions. The same scientific discipline should also prevent the absence of an explanation from being mistaken for evidence that no further explanation is possible.
More than 160 years ago, a dying man appeared to look somewhere the people surrounding his bed could not see. The battlefield that had occupied his delirium disappeared. The military commands stopped. His final recorded thought was not about war, victory, defeat, or even the physical suffering of his final days.
It was about crossing over.
And resting beneath the trees.
Perhaps Jackson’s words reveal nothing about what happens after death. Perhaps they reveal only what a deeply religious nineteenth-century man expected to happen as death approached. Yet they also illuminate a question that remains unresolved despite extraordinary advances in neuroscience, physics, and computation.
We understand considerably more about the brain than Jackson’s physicians could have imagined in 1863.
Whether we understand consciousness itself is another matter.
References
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
Moody, R., & Perry, P. (2023). Proof of life after life: 7 reasons to believe there is an afterlife. HarperOne.
Additional information on Moody and Perry’s book is available through Goodreads — Proof of Life After Life.