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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Bioelectricity Becomes 'Subtle Energy'

A Critical Reply to John Abramson

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

John Abramson's response to my review of Ken Wilber's Subtle Energies is interesting precisely because he does not attempt to defend Wilber's subtle-energy theory on its own terms. Instead, he performs a translation. The etheric, astral and psychic energies disappear; reincarnation is cordoned off as an entirely separate hypothesis; chakras are transformed from putative energy centres into phenomenological or interoceptive maps; and Wilber's hierarchy of increasingly subtle energies becomes a story about the increasing organization of ordinary bioelectric phenomena. What remains is considerably more plausible than Wilber's original theory.

But that is also the problem.

Abramson has produced an interesting account of contemporary developmental bioelectricity. He has not demonstrated that Wilber's theory was prescient. Indeed, the more successful his reinterpretation becomes, the more clearly it shows how far Wilber's original claims were from what biology actually supports.

The problem with retrospective rescue

Abramson begins by conceding most of my central criticisms. Wilber's “specific ontology of etheric, astral and psychic energies” was not established; the three genera were not demonstrated; the developmental signatures were not measured; and reincarnation was introduced without adequate evidence. So far, there is little disagreement.

The disagreement begins when Abramson says that “an unestablished ontology is not the same thing as an absent phenomenon.”

Of course not. But that formulation subtly changes the burden of proof. The question in my review was not whether living organisms exhibit electrical activity, whether fields can influence biological development, or whether subjective states correlate with bodily physiology. Those facts are well established and scientifically interesting. The question was whether those facts substantiate Wilber's particular theoretical interpretation of them.

They do not.

This distinction matters because virtually any failed scientific or metaphysical theory can be retrospectively rehabilitated in this fashion. Suppose someone in 1930 proposed that organisms contain invisible “vital fields” that coordinate development, and contemporary biology subsequently discovered bioelectric mechanisms involved in morphogenesis. One could then say that the original theorist had been “groping toward” developmental bioelectricity. But unless the original theory actually predicted, specified or otherwise constrained what was later discovered, this is historical reconstruction, not scientific vindication.

A theory should not receive credit for discoveries merely because its vocabulary can be stretched until it accommodates them.

And that is precisely what happens in Abramson's response.

Burr does not become Wilber

Abramson's most important example concerns Harold Saxton Burr. I used Burr to illustrate a distinction between a genuine empirical observation and the metaphysical interpretation subsequently attached to it. Abramson counters by invoking Michael Levin's sympathetic assessment of Burr's historical importance and the modern revival of developmental bioelectricity.

That is perfectly legitimate as intellectual history. Burr deserves more serious consideration than he has sometimes received. And Levin's work is indeed important. But none of this establishes Burr's—still less Wilber's—subtle-energy ontology.

The relevant question is not whether Burr measured electrical phenomena in living organisms. He did. Nor is it whether contemporary biology has demonstrated that bioelectric signals can play instructive roles in morphogenesis. It has. The question is whether these phenomena constitute evidence for etheric bodies, astral energies, psychic energies or subtle vehicles capable of surviving bodily death.

They do not.

In fact, Abramson himself eventually concedes this point. He writes that modern bioelectricity provides “one medium, put to progressively higher-order use.” But this is almost the opposite of Wilber's proposed ontology. Wilber did not simply propose that the same electrical medium becomes increasingly organized. He presented a hierarchy of qualitatively distinct levels of existence, associated with different forms of subtle energy and embedded in a larger metaphysical architecture of gross, subtle and causal dimensions.

Replacing three hypothetical substances with one known biological medium is not a confirmation of Wilber's theory. It is a substantial revision of it.

The bait-and-switch from “energy” to “organization”

Abramson's most revealing sentence is perhaps this one:

“If Wilber's ladder is read literally—three distinct physical energies switched on in sequence—the biology weakens it. If it is read as one bioelectrical medium acquiring new levels of differentiation and functional significance, the biology strengthens it.”

But why should we accept the second reading as an interpretation of Wilber rather than a reconstruction of Wilber?

This is the central issue.

Scientific concepts have meanings. “Bioelectricity,” “membrane potential,” “ephaptic coupling,” “gap-junction communication” and “developmental bioelectric signaling” refer to experimentally investigable phenomena with identifiable mechanisms. “Etheric,” “astral” and “psychic” energies, as Wilber employs them, do not simply mean increasingly complex bioelectric organization.

If they did, Wilber could have said so.

Indeed, one of the most striking features of Wilber's writings on subtle energies is precisely his insistence that ordinary physical explanations are insufficient. His hierarchy was intended to take us beyond conventional materialism, not merely to redescribe increasingly sophisticated forms of physiology. The metaphysical vocabulary was not decorative. It was doing theoretical work.

Abramson therefore faces a dilemma. If Wilber's terms mean what Wilber appeared to mean, contemporary biology does not vindicate them. If they are redefined to mean something contemporary biology can actually demonstrate, then they become considerably less Wilberian.

That is not a minor semantic adjustment. It is the difference between metaphysics and biology.

“Field organization” is not “subtle energy”

There is another conceptual slippage here. Abramson repeatedly moves between “field,” “energy,” “information,” “organization” and “constraint” as though these concepts naturally form a continuum.

They do not.

A biological electric field is a physical field generated by known physical processes. Its magnitude, spatial distribution and temporal dynamics can in principle be measured. It can be described within electrophysiology and biophysics. Its causal effects can be investigated experimentally.

Calling such a field “subtle” does not reveal an additional property.

Likewise, saying that bioelectric patterns carry information does not imply that information constitutes a new kind of energy. In contemporary biology, “information” is generally a relational and functional concept. A voltage gradient can carry information because its state makes a difference to a system's subsequent behavior. That does not turn information into an occult substance.

Nor does increasing organizational complexity automatically imply movement toward a metaphysically “higher” level.

This is important because Wilber's hierarchy is not merely a hierarchy of complexity. It is a hierarchy of ontological depth. Gross matter, subtle mind and causal consciousness occupy different places in his Kosmos. They are not simply three increasingly complicated descriptions of the same physiological system.

Abramson's proposal quietly eliminates precisely that metaphysical claim.

The evolutionary argument is particularly revealing

Abramson notes that contemporary bioelectricity also undermines Wilber's proposed sequence because bioelectric signaling is evolutionarily ancient. It predates nervous systems and occurs in embryos, plants and non-neural tissues.

This is a significant point, but it has larger consequences than Abramson acknowledges.

Wilber's rhetoric frequently suggests a progression from physical matter to life to mind and beyond, with corresponding increases in subtlety. But if bioelectric organization is already deeply embedded in life before nervous systems arise, then the supposed correspondence between ontological levels and newly appearing energies becomes much harder to sustain.

The modern picture is not:

matter → new etheric energy → nervous system → new astral energy → higher consciousness → psychic energy.

It is closer to:

physical processes → increasingly sophisticated biological organization → specialized signaling systems → nervous systems → increasingly complex forms of information processing.

There is no obvious point at which a new ontological energy enters the picture.

And this is precisely what makes modern biology interesting. It explains increasing complexity without requiring the insertion of additional substances at successive developmental stages.

Abramson therefore identifies a genuine tension between Wilber and contemporary biology, but then softens its significance by describing the surviving resemblance as a “field-story.” The problem is that a “field-story” is not what Wilber actually proposed.

The reincarnation escape hatch

Abramson is commendably explicit that bioelectricity does not establish reincarnation. He argues that the experimentally accessible fields are gross and mortal, whereas Wilber's transmigrating vehicle belongs to the subtle domain.

But this move exposes rather than solves the evidential problem.

The subtle body is protected from empirical refutation by assigning it to a level of reality that ordinary instruments cannot detect. If a field is measurable, it is declared gross and therefore irrelevant to reincarnation. If the hypothesized surviving field is not measurable, its absence of detection is declared unsurprising because it is subtle.

That is a classic problem of unfalsifiability.

A theory cannot gain scientific credibility by defining its crucial entity in such a way that empirical evidence is automatically classified as pertaining to something else.

Abramson says that transmigration “stands or falls on evidence of its own.” Exactly. And there is no such evidence presented here.

Consequently, contemporary bioelectricity contributes nothing to the reincarnation claim. The latter remains exactly where my review placed it: an unsupported metaphysical hypothesis.

The chakra problem returns in another form

The discussion of chakras follows the same pattern.

Abramson invokes interpretations in which the traditional chakra system is understood as an interoceptive map or a phenomenological representation of bodily and nervous-system relationships. This is certainly a potentially fruitful subject of research. Meditation can produce measurable changes in autonomic regulation, respiration, heart-rate variability and neural activity.

But once again, the interesting scientific proposition is not that chakras have been discovered.

It is that humans have developed traditional conceptual maps for organizing bodily experience, attention and contemplative practice.

That is potentially fascinating. But it is a very different proposition.

The historical chakra systems are neither uniform nor stable. Different Indian traditions describe different numbers, locations, colors, functions and correspondences. Later Theosophical and New Age traditions further modified them. This historical plasticity is not easily reconciled with the idea that the systems constitute a single objective subtle anatomy awaiting discovery.

If the chakras are instead interpreted metaphorically, phenomenologically or as culturally elaborated body maps, much of the scientific difficulty disappears.

But once again, that is not evidence that Wilber's literal subtle-energy interpretation was correct. It is an alternative interpretation that makes the tradition compatible with contemporary science.

The “wrong map, right territory” argument

Abramson concludes with an attractive metaphor: Wilber had the wrong map but accidentally stumbled upon a corner of the right territory.

This is rhetorically effective. Scientifically, however, it requires much more evidence.

There is nothing remarkable about a speculative theorist noticing that living systems are organized, that electrical activity is important to life, that consciousness is associated with complex biological systems, or that contemplative practices affect bodily physiology. These are broad observations available to many intellectual traditions.

The interesting question is what Wilber uniquely predicted or explained that later research confirmed.

Abramson does not provide such a case.

Instead, he extracts a general intuition—“living systems are held together by distributed fields that organize and constrain their parts”—and identifies it with Wilber's intuition about subtle energies. But this is a very weak form of confirmation. General similarities between metaphysical speculation and later scientific findings are cheap. Specific predictions are expensive.

If Wilber had predicted that bioelectric fields would be found to guide morphogenesis before the discovery of the relevant mechanisms, that would be a different matter. If he had predicted specific electrophysiological signatures corresponding to his etheric, astral and psychic levels, that would be stronger still. If he had developed experimental protocols capable of distinguishing these levels from ordinary bioelectricity, we would have a genuine scientific research program.

He did none of these things.

What actually survives?

There is, nevertheless, something worth preserving from Abramson's argument.

My criticism should not be interpreted as a denial of the reality or importance of biological fields. Modern developmental bioelectricity is a remarkable research area. It demonstrates that biological organization cannot always be understood simply by examining genes, proteins and local biochemical interactions in isolation. Electrical states and spatial patterns can have causal and regulatory significance at the level of tissues and organs.

That is genuinely interesting.

It may also have philosophical consequences. It complicates simplistic versions of reductionism and provides striking examples of how global constraints can influence local biological processes. The organism is not merely a pile of molecular components; organization matters.

But none of this requires “subtle energy.”

Indeed, one could argue that the scientific achievement of developmental bioelectricity is precisely that it makes some of the phenomena that once invited vitalistic or occult interpretations scientifically tractable without invoking occult entities.

That is not a disappointment. It is the success story.

The history of science contains many examples in which mysterious phenomena eventually received ordinary physical explanations. Lightning did not require a supernatural electrical spirit. Disease did not require demonic invasion. Heredity did not require a vital force. And biological organization need not require etheric energy simply because earlier thinkers found ordinary mechanism conceptually inadequate.

The more we understand the mechanisms, the less explanatory work mysterious substances have to perform.

The real residue of Wilber's theory

So I am quite happy to accept Abramson's invitation to look for the “residue” left behind after a theory has been dismantled. But the residue should be identified carefully.

What survives Wilber's subtle-energy theory is not etheric energy, astral energy, psychic energy, a subtle body, reincarnation, or a measurable chakra system.

What survives is a set of much more modest questions: How does biological organization emerge? How do distributed electrical patterns constrain cellular behavior? How does information become integrated across scales? How do organisms maintain coherence despite continual molecular turnover? How do neural, autonomic and bodily processes interact? And how should we understand the phenomenology of contemplative experience in relation to these physiological systems?

Those are excellent questions.

But they belong to developmental biology, systems biology, neuroscience, physiology, cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. They do not need to be smuggled back into Wilber's metaphysical hierarchy to become interesting.

Abramson is therefore right about one thing that deserves emphasis: an inadequate theory may sometimes be responding to a real phenomenon. But the existence of a real phenomenon does not retroactively validate the theory that originally described it.

In fact, the more completely we translate Wilber's subtle-energy claims into contemporary scientific language, the less of Wilber's original ontology remains.

That is not “Wilber vindicated.”

It is Wilber's metaphysics being replaced by better science.

SEE ALSO

Frank Visser / ChatGPT, "Harold Saxton Burr and the Electric Blueprint of Life", www.integralworld.net, August 2026.