Sharon Hewitt Rawlette Ph.D.

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, Ph.D., is a writer, philosopher, and consciousness researcher. She earned her doctorate in philosophy from New York University, taught at Brandeis University, and currently serves on the board of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, as well as being a supporting researcher for the International Centre for Reincarnation Research. She has published four books and was named a runner-up in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay contest for her essay “Beyond Death,” on the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.

Dr. Rawlette’s research and writing range over many different types of extraordinary human experience and explores what they have to tell us about consciousness and the deeper nature of the world we live in. Her research in this area began with the phenomenon of “coincidences”: those strange, enigmatic experiences that are so often personally meaningful but push the boundaries of what we consider scientifically possible. Her May 2019 book The Source and Significance of Coincidences presents a wealth of evidence concerning the statistical importance of coincidences, their range of probable causes, and how we can best interpret their implications for our lives.

Her current research is moving in a more theoretical direction, focusing on what afterlife research, as well as parapsychological research in general, tell us about the nature of the world in which we live. She hopes to clarify how insufficient the physicalist, mechanistic paradigm is and how vital it is to widen our conception of reality to include the wide variety of properties instantiated by consciousness, including causal efficacy and intrinsic value. This new research dovetails with some philosophical work she did at the beginning of her career, and which she published in her 2016 academic work The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness.