Those who change from a purely physicalist/materialist view of reality to some kind of nonphysicalist/nonmaterialist stance, including scientists, often report that their change was due, at least in part, to a profound personal experience: a state of Grand Oneness, a Universal Unity with All Reality – usually triggered by psychedelics or deep meditation, or perhaps by an out-of-body or near-death experience.
I, too, have had a personal experience. But my case, oddly, was something of the reverse. How could a personal experience lead to a greater appreciation of the purely physical world as a candidate for ultimate reality and as an explanation of phenomenal consciousness? What could that possibly be?
Let me explain.
For my entire life, even with a PhD at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, I have felt that reality is more than what science can discern, even in principle. Phenomenal consciousness is a primary reason, as is the mystery of raw existence – why is there Something rather than Nothing? My feelings have been more intuitive than rational, and I’ve never been confident that my intuition reflected veridical reality. I’ve always recognized that the physical could exhaust reality, but my inner sense, for what little it may be worth, felt otherwise. It remains so to this day. If one divides belief systems simplistically into physicalist/materialist and nonphysicalist/nonmaterialist camps, I find myself in the latter.
Curiously, counterintuitively, I’ve had an experience that nudged me, ever so slightly, toward the opposing camp: a purely physicalist/materialist view of ultimate reality and consciousness.
It’s a personal story, and my daughter, Daniella, has given me permission to tell it. After one natural pregnancy at age 46 failed – at that age, a miracle and a devastation all at once – Daniella had only one option remaining. Seven years earlier, she had frozen 21 eggs in New York, harvested from two rounds of ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval. (She also harvested eight eggs in Los Angeles, but after thawing, they were all too damaged to fertilize).
Her younger French husband flew to New York to fertilize the thawed eggs. 17 eggs survived the thaw; 12 fertilized successfully. These were left to grow for five days, until they reached roughly 100 cells and became blastocysts that could be genetically tested. Only three made it to day five. For testing, a few cells are taken from the part of the blastocyst that will become the placenta. One blastocyst was abnormal. One was genetically normal. And one was “mosaic,” meaning the sampled cells were a mixture of chromosomally normal and abnormal cells, a finding associated with a far lower rate of healthy live birth than a fully normal blastocyst. (Just one year earlier, mosaics were considered nonviable and routinely discarded, which shows how quickly the technology develops.)
Months later, after Daniella began receiving hormone treatment to prepare her for embryo transfer, she and her husband flew back to New York so that the one normal blastocyst could be thawed and transferred. But as it turned out, the hormonal protocol was unsuitable for her body – the transfer should not have been attempted at that time – and, sadly, that one normal blastocyst failed to develop.
Daniella was left with only the mosaic and the abnormal blastocyst. My daughter is not one who accepts things as they seem to be. She found an exceptional fertility doctor in Los Angeles, and had her only remaining potentially viable blastocyst – the mosaic, still frozen and only a hundred or so cells – flown from New York to Los Angeles. It was hand-carried; no FedEx for this package.
Because Daniella insisted on carrying the embryo herself (she did not want a surrogate), she underwent months of hormonal trial runs in preparation for embryo transfer (worrying her parents), along with rigorous and repeated testing of her uterine lining (requiring painful biopsies). Every woman is different; a hormonal protocol that works for one may not work for another. Counterintuitively, at her age, she needed lower hormone doses than most because that’s what worked for her body. All of this to give that one mosaic its best chance of survival.
As a trained biomedical scientist and as her father, I always anticipated failure and the devastating emotional cost that would come with it. Once I asked her, “When is too much?” Her clipped, pointed answer shut down any follow-up: “Only I know when I’m done, no one else,” she said. “So don’t ask again.” I did not.
At age 49, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ten years after the egg was frozen and over two years after it was fertilized, Daniella gave birth to our grandson, Louis. He is now six years old and bilingual. He plays the piano, chess, table tennis, tennis and soccer, and he is highly social.
With all my knowledge of biology, with my doctorate in neuroscience, I remain flabbergasted. So many physical things had to be or go just right; among them was the possibility of self-correction in a mosaic blastocyst. The physical world holds so much potential.
I remain a nonphysicalist/nonmaterialist because of my lifelong intuitions about existence and consciousness, just slightly less so.
