Strangely, I just posted a quote from this very article, but since it may have some bearing on the observer question – here we go again. The Physics of Symbols
By the 1970s, I believed I had some insight on Pearson's question. These ideas, which I will summarize below, were presented in the four volumes of Waddington's (1968-72) Bellagio conferences on theoretical biology. My first question then was: How can we describe in physical language the most elementary heritable symbols? It has turned out that for even the simplest known case, the gene, an adequate description requires the two irreducibly complementary concepts of dynamical laws and non-integrable constraints that are not derivable from the laws. This primeval distinction between the individual's local symbolic constraints that first appear at the origin of life and the objective universal laws, reappears in many forms at higher levels.6 From von Neumann (1955) I learned that this same epistemic cut occurs in physics in the measurement process, i.e., the fact that dynamical laws cannot describe the measurement function of determining initial conditions.
Later I saw these as special cases of the general epistemic problem: how to bridge the separation between the observer and the observed, the controller and the controlled, the knower and the known, and even the mind and the brain. This notorious epistemic cut has motivated philosophical disputes for millennia, especially the problem of consciousness that only recently has begun to be treated as possibly an empirically decidable problem (e.g., Shear, 1997; Taylor, 1999). My second question was whether bridging the epistemic cut could even be addressed in terms of physical laws.
I can truly relate to your personal experiences. I’ve had several myself over the years and they seem to be increasing exponentially.
Like yours, they usually they take the form of night travel; it is always about pure worship and love; there are no words but always music and both space and proportion collapse or expand as we travel, i.e. they mean nothing. I have had several experiences while wide awake, two of these are recorded on the thread when my sister graduated to heaven. I felt her spirit go through me when she slipped into a deep coma even though I was 4 floors away. It was the same feeling I had outside the emergency room when my mother slipped into a coma. In both cases, it was a calming, reassuring feeling of “I’m alive, I'm happy, see ‘ya later.”
Another one – the first I ever had – I want to mention here because some Freepers had been discussing how nobody had seen the empty tomb. Not so fast. In this one, I wasn’t quite asleep and saw a place, everything dark. In the distance was what looked like a bluff with a large hole, big enough to walk through. People were standing around. When it dawned on me what I had just seen, I sat straight up and praised God!
I write these things fully aware that some might think I’ve gone off the deep end. But to say anything else would be a lie and to not testify to it would be a loss.
I agree with you that science needs to be more open minded on the non-physical, both the temporal and the extra-temporal.
But A-G, I imagine that God is completely outside of time. Yet He can nonetheless work in time -- through human souls. Especially through a beautiful soul like yours: You were made for Him. JMHO, FWIW.