J. D. Bernal

Birkbeck College, University of London. Ireland, 1901 to 1971

Cosmist Mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it

John Desmond Bernal was an Irish physicist who pioneered X-ray crystallography of proteins at the Royal Institution, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, and who wrote one short book in 1929 that set out the case for taking the human body out of the human. The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (Jonathan Cape, 1929) takes a phrase from Christian hamartiology and treats the three named enemies as three engineering constraints. The book runs to six parts, The Future, The World, The Flesh, The Devil, Synthesis and Possibility, and it is The Flesh that carries the argument this site tracks.

The claim Bernal makes there is more specific than his reputation suggests. He proposes replacing the body with a rigid cylinder holding a perfused brain in cerebrospinal fluid, wired through its nerve endings to external sense and motor apparatus. On the point at issue for consciousness he is unambiguous. He writes that “even the replacement of a previously organic brain-cell by a synthetic apparatus would not destroy the continuity of consciousness”. That is the gradual replacement argument, stated in 1929 and worked out as a procedure in 1988. He reaches the same end-state as Tsiolkovsky, a humanity “completely etherealized” and “resolving itself entirely into light”, and he reaches it without panpsychism.

Bernal is relevant here as the earliest worked example of the substrate-independence claim in English. He also states the limit himself. He calls the account “a fable”, he notes that surgery and physiology cannot yet do what he describes, and he gives no theory of how organisation produces experience. He asserts continuity across replacement without arguing for it. The position is Cosmist in the sense this site uses the term, that mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it, and it is defended by engineering description rather than by a theory of consciousness.

Known for. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929), the Bernal sphere space habitat, and X-ray crystallography of proteins

Coverage on this site

• Bernal Argued in 1929 That a Synthetic Brain Cell Would Preserve Consciousness February 2025

Related researchers

• NF Nikolai FyodorovRumyantsev Museum library, Moscow, from 1878The Philosophy of the Common Task, and space settlement as an obligation owed to the dead Cosmist1 article
• FT Frank TiplerTulane UniversityThe Physics of Immortality (1994) and the Omega Point argument for the resurrection of every conscious being Cosmist1 article
• KT Konstantin TsiolkovskyKaluga, Russia. Self taught, and a schoolteacher for most of his working lifeThe theory of cosmic eras, and the claim that mind ends in a radiant form Cosmist1 article

J. D. Bernal is listed with the other cosmists, who hold that mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers. The argument that mind can leave the planet that produced it is covered on Project Consciousness to Orbit.