Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Fiach · 07-20-2002, 07:00 PM

[QUOTE]Originally posted by CHRISGEN2002:
I'm very interested to here why you think you are smarter than some the great Nobel Prize of the past. Even now there are very smart scientists investigating life after death.

[Fiach] Assuming that they are smart they may still violate scientific method and instead begin with the assumption of a parallel life non-biological for which there is no evidence. I am a molecular biologist and neuroscientist. I have not seen one single shred of credible evidence for non-biological life coexisting with known biological life in a human animal or other animal.

If the mind and body are separate then evolution of our reciever body is still true. Why do you act so agressively?

[Fiach] Right. A hypothetical immaterial non-biological life form coexisting with our biologically live body is not excluded in theory. However, the two problems are that a non-biological life force is unnecessary to explain life as we now know it. And the lack of evidence for a non-biological life form would make the true sceptic reject it until evidence is presented.

Is it cause this isn't the religious bull shit that caused your 'knee-jerk reaction' athiest belief's. I believe in science not religion. Science means to seek knowledge, not replace religious crap with athiest crap.

[Fiach] I don't understand what your are saying.

All I want to see is that you understand that you cannot possibly say (unless your a crazy egotistical idiot) there is no life after-death when even your explanation's of how consciousness arises from purely brain function alone are still in there infancy (even thats a complement!).

[Fiach] We can't say that there is absolutely no non-biological life force existing parallel with our biologically live bodies. We could also say that there are two or three of these non-biological entities inhabiting our bodies. One is no easier to prove than three or to deny. We don't know for certain that there are not Leprechauns in the woods of Donegal. That nobody has seen them apart from alcohol withdrawal, doen't disprove them. But the lack of evidence does not support their existence either.

I want you athiest's to fight (farely!) with nothing but scientific evidence that there's no after-life.

[Fiach] You know better. Science cannot prove a negative hypothesis. I cannot disprove souls, leprechauns, goblins, God, invisible pink unicorns, or Nessie. There is no scientific way to show that nothing is there if the entity is defined as unmeasurable, invisible, intangible, inaudible, insensible. Can you prove that I don't see flying pigs over Inverness that only I can see?

Instead of at present with your pathetic 'oh nothing leaves the body it's all in your mind' explanation which does not agree with NDE research if you bother to look at it any great depth and which is rejected by NDEr's in particular. Your Ketamine explanation is crap as most NDE's occur with NO ketamine present in the body. In fact all your matter obsessed theories are crap because parapsychologists have obtained scientific evidence that there participants do leave there body as they observed object's completely outside there range of vision. I don't ask you to suddenly go 'Oh my shit there is a God,praise the Lord'.Just look at the subject. I know that most scientist's, epecially biologist's(who mosly know nothing of physics only mostly macro-atomic chemistry, laugh at the idea of an after-life, but if there is a background sub-atomic medium called ether; that forms neural nets and has abilities that are unheard of while we inhabit our reciever bodies; which limits our mind's power and only gives it five senses to observe this physical place, then why don't you investigate it without prejudice? You say Out-of-body experience's cannot be objectively proven.

[Fiach] We have proven that Out of Body experiences occur. Furthermore, as an epilepsy neurologist I have had many patients with OBE's. I can induce one by putting the patient on EEG monitor with telemetry. Withhold the anti-seizure drugs, and the patient with a mesial temporal electrically excitable focus will have his OBE. We record his EEG and see the spike and desynchronised activity coming from the mesial temporal lobe and spreading to fronto-temporal and posterior temporal lobes. When the electical burst stops, the person is confused but back in his body. During his OBE, some experience hearing God,Jesus, or Brahma depending on his culture. He may see God, Jesus, Brahma, or "the light". These experiences are quite stereotyped phenomonologically and electrophysiologically. We can directly stimulate the episodes with electromagnet stimulators over the appropriate temporal lobe region. We know that they happen and we know with SPECT MRI the regions of the brain that light up during the OBE's and the very similar charismatic religious experiences.

But surely if you design an experiment that proves the mind of the participant has left there body

[Fiach] How do you measure a disembodied mind? If all mind activity (speech, cognitive processes, memory recall, etc. can be mapped in the Brain) and disconnecting synaptic activity with deep anaesthesia in every case has no consciousness recalled. In deep anaesthesia, the patient counts to 5 or 6 and wakes up often saying, "don't cut on me, I'm not under yet." But he had been anaesthised, had a 4 hour operation, and is waking up with no sense of any passage of time.

and observed what they could not possibly see with brain originator theory, then you have proved the mind and body are separate OBJECTIVELY.

[Fiach] No scientist has ever done that.

Many great mind's from the past examined certain apparently gifted medium's and were convinced that they could make contact with etheric minds of various levels of mental development.

[Fiach] None of those were ever proven to be more than chance apart from the obvious scams.

Even now I'm sure that I could get the names of great present day thinkers who reject religion, like Professor Abdus Salam who was discomunicated by the Islamic Mullahs for stating that there could be a scientific explanation for an after-life, but don't reject that science could explain the after-life using ether, not matter.

[Fiach] Name dropping does not impress me. Scientifically credible results do.
1. Brains anaesthetised to isoelectical flat line when awakened do not remember any experiences or passage of time.
2. MRI SPECT has now mapped out uptake patterns for conscious arousal, thinking, language use or even thinking of words, moving a hand or foot, complex destrous movements, emotional states, sense of awe, mystical feelings, etc. We know that it is brain based. That in itself does not rule out a hypothetical non-biological life form parasitising your body, nor three or four of them per person. Lets not be stingy.
3. Temporal lobe epilepsy reporduces the NDE and OBE experiences exactly and those people are not dying. People in shock, near dying have hypoxia to the watershed areas of the brain including the mesial temporal lobe. This precipitates seizures as hypoxia is prone to do. When it is greatest in the temporal lobe, the NDE and OBE occur just as they do in a non-dying person with a minor temporal lobe seizure.
4. The SPECT images are as close as scientists have come to snapping a photo of a transcendent experience. As expected, the prefrontal cortex, seat of attention, lit up in a patient in a charasmatic experience. But it was a quieting of activity that stood out. A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe, toward the top and back of the brain, had gone dark. This region, nicknamed the "orientation association area," processes information about space and time, and the orientation of the body in space. It determines where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. Specifically, the left orientation area creates the sensation of a physically delimited body; the right orientation area creates the sense of the physical space in which the body exists.
5. The burden of proof for those claiming an immaterial entity inhabiting the otherwise biologically alive body, existing separately from a biological substrate must show us the evidence. We have shown you the evidence that cognitive activity, consciousness, emotions, mystical experiences are brain based without need for the hypothesis of a magical entity.

Fiach

ksagnostic · 07-20-2002, 08:34 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Vorkosigan:


You certainly have not. This is why, despite your claims, parapsychological researchers have proven nothing. Because controlled experimentation is impossible where psychic powers are assumed.

Let's imagine that we have a brave volunteer who will accept temporary death in order to have an NDE. Let's further assume that our volunteer, Ned, actually has an NDE and describes for us in minute detail the contents of the room next to the surgery where Ned is being temporarily killed, a room he has never seen.

Well, now we're in the brave new world of psychic powers, and all the bets were off. What are the possibilities?

1) His spirit has left its body and floated over to the next room.

2) His mind has reached out to one of the doctors and lifted the description from the doctor who has been there, and presented it to himself as an NDE

3) One of the doctors, eager for the experiment to succeed, has put the experience in the mind of Ned with telepathy.

4) Ned's mind has looked into some future where he does see the room, pulled up the information, and returned to the present to inform the doctors. Alternatively, one of the doctors has done this and fed it to Ned's mind.

5) No NDE has taken place. Ned has reached into the doctors minds and made them think that he experienced an NDE. Alternatively, one of the doctors has done this.

6) Ned is a telekinetic and reached into the room to re-arrange it so it fits the description generated during his NDE. Alternatively, one of the doctors has done this.

7) Ned's mind is the world.

8) Some combination of all of the above.

Whenever you run into someone making claims that consciousness acts directly on the world outside the brain, you run into this problem. Controlled experiments cannot be done with psychic powers. That is why eventually all experimenters come to:

9) Ned is a fraud, and has somehow tricked the experimenters. Or the experimenters have committed fraud, or the experiment is badly controlled, terminology ill-defined, and methodology full of holes.

Vorkosigan

I don't know if I can entirely buy your argument here. If Ned is put to temporary death, and then is able to describe in minute detail the other operating room, then I think that the experimenters would have something, assuming that there were adequate controls. Several of your alternative hypotheses would require a commonality of psychic powers that would have rendered them noncontroversial, and if Ned didn't routinely have OBE's or claim psychic experiences, then it would be logical to tentatively conclude that Ned's experiences were related to his cessetation of life functions. Especially if specific events in the other operating room were described as taking place during a time when Ned's brain was documented to not have any sort of conscious activity (e.g., Fiach's description of a brain "anaesthetised to isoelectical flat line").

This is assuming, or course, that the doctors were not talking about surgeries that took place in the neighboring room before, during, or after the procedure (i.e., any time when Ned might have heard them), or that there was something especially unique about the operating room that couldn't be anticipated by someone who has a familiarity with operating rooms (such as having a ten year old girl cut open a blue teddy bear on the operating table while Ned is undergoing the procedure). And if Ned's experiences could not be duplicated with others, then the results of Ned's experiments would increasingly be considered an abberation.

Of course, I would be interested in how such a disembodied entity could "see" anything in the first place.

So far as I am aware, however, the status of neurological research into NDE is pretty much how Fiach described it. BTW, it's cool to have an honest to goodness neurologist weigh in on this topic.

[ July 20, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]

07-20-2002, 10:35 PM

The review linked to at the beginning of this thread makes great play with the idea of a "spirit" separate from the biological body. But where is there any convincing evidence of the existence of such an entity? It is quite true that we have subjective experiences that might lead us to feel that we possess a "spirit", but these do not constitute solid evidence. We all bring a lot of cultural baggage to the interpretation of our experience. A scientific approach to the subject of NDEs and OBEs does not therefore need and ought not to start from a position that they reflect the ill-defined "spirit".

I myself have had an out-of-body experience when undergoing an extremely stressful moment, and I would put down some of its features to the adreniline flooding my body at the time.

Vorkosigan · 07-20-2002, 11:01 PM

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ksagnostic:
[QB]

I don't know if I can entirely buy your argument here. If Ned is put to temporary death, and then is able to describe in minute detail the other operating room, then I think that the experimenters would have something, assuming that there were adequate controls. Several of your alternative hypotheses would require a commonality of psychic powers that would have rendered them noncontroversial, and if Ned didn't routinely have OBE's or claim psychic experiences, then it would be logical to tentatively conclude that Ned's experiences were related to his cessetation of life functions. Especially if specific events in the other operating room were described as taking place during a time when Ned's brain was documented to not have any sort of conscious activity (e.g., Fiach's description of a brain "anaesthetised to isoelectical flat line"). [/b]

To a certain extent, I agree with you. For example -- I am shamelessly stealing this critique from Collins and Pinch and their studies of parapsychology research -- if someone hits the cards 25 out of 25 every time, well, something must be going on.

The problem is that the poster wants to claim a specific psychic event is evidence of a specific aspect of reality -- namely, NDEs are evidence that there is a soul. How would you control to eliminate other psychic explanations?

If you were doing an ordinary experiment, say, trying to prove with double blind tests that you new drug T76342 was four times as effective without the side effects, controls would be possible. You could get fifty people, matched for age, gender, etc., and control their diet, exercise, etc, and get something reasonably indicative.

How could you control for some pyschic power and not others? If you could rule out fraud, then you could claim something had happened. But what? How could you ever isolate it? And how could you avoid (7) the world exists only in Ned's mind?

Vorkosigan

ksagnostic · 07-21-2002, 05:56 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Vorkosigan:

To a certain extent, I agree with you. For example -- I am shamelessly stealing this critique from Collins and Pinch and their studies of parapsychology research -- if someone hits the cards 25 out of 25 every time, well, something must be going on.

The problem is that the poster wants to claim a specific psychic event is evidence of a specific aspect of reality -- namely, NDEs are evidence that there is a soul. How would you control to eliminate other psychic explanations?

If you were doing an ordinary experiment, say, trying to prove with double blind tests that you new drug T76342 was four times as effective without the side effects, controls would be possible. You could get fifty people, matched for age, gender, etc., and control their diet, exercise, etc, and get something reasonably indicative.

How could you control for some pyschic power and not others? If you could rule out fraud, then you could claim something had happened. But what? How could you ever isolate it? And how could you avoid (7) the world exists only in Ned's mind?

Vorkosigan

OK, last question first. Number 7 would be ruled out on the basis that it is already ruled out on general principle. That is, the world is not presumed to be existing only in the head of anyone. Presumably, to be selected for the experiment undergoing an induced "temporary death", Ned would have to be in very good health, which would also mean he's probably not that old. As a result, some of the doctors in the room would remember the world before Ned was in it.

I agree with your other questions. If Ned sees the 10 year old girl operating on the blue teddy bear, and controls insured that that information was not leaked to Ned, and if approximately one out of 10 people who undergo a similar experience "see" similarly set up scenarios when undergoing the experiment under the same sort of controls, then I think it is reasonable to suspect that the knowledge of something going on in the next room is related to, and even somehow the result of, the death experience. But as you suggest, then what? Again, I don't think I would be looking for psychic powers on the part of the doctors. If the brain is similarly not reflecting an activity that supports conscious awareness at the time the teddy bear operation was set up in the next room, then the hypothesis that the brain itself may have some sort of extended awareness may not be entirely eliminated, but is probably not likely. So, if one starts looking for a hypothetical soul, what are they looking for? In order to "see" the girl and bear in the next room, it has to have some physical nature because it is interacting with the physical world. Is the "soul" then the immortal "essence" of the consciousness of a human being, or is it something generated by the human brain, maybe a self aware memory somehow written on sub-atomic structure, that won't last more than an hour or so after the brain itself dies. Or maybe it is a previously unknown parisitic or even symbiotic life form that really is unrelated to our own consciouness, but when it was looking for a new host, found the little girl before going back to check on Ned, and somehow the organism communicated what it saw to Ned's brain. In other words, I agree with the basis of your critique, that a documented NDE that could be demonstrated not to be dependent on central neurological activity would still just be the beginning. The hypothesis of an immortal soul would be just one possibility among many.

[ July 21, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]

Coragyps · 07-21-2002, 04:57 PM

I would like to suggest that "out-of-body" experiences are perhaps not a particularly unusual or rare thing. Many people describe dreams in which they see themselves from "outside," and I and at least a couple of my hippy friends (1969, mind you) had such hallucinations while on mescaline, LSD, or one particularly good baggie of pot. And the chemicals that these introduce to the brain are very similar to various ones that are already up there - serotonin, epinephrine,...
I really don't see an NDE as being anything "supernatural" at all. Likely it's a consequence of oxygen starvation in the brain, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead described it so clearly because they're damn near starved for oxygen up there in Tibet already.

CHRISGEN2002 · 07-23-2002, 09:45 AM

Fiach, please! your MRI information DOES NOT CONTRADICT brain reciever theory. Different parts of the brain could be responsible for recieving different characteristics. But the brain obviously isn't just there to recieve otherwise wants the point of being incarnate in the first place? (if you suppose the After-life hypothesis to be true). The brain to me and a lot of other scientists seems to act like a etheric mind sculptor. In each successive life, bad characteristics are removed by mental evolution of the mind through suffering for your mistakes.So Fiach the brain's supossed to uptake new thoughts to teach the etheric mind skill's and build it's character through the many lessons of pain and suffering. The interaction between the brain the etheric mind is a 2-way process.You say it's not important what I believe, then why is it important what Dr Susan Blackmore or any of you believe? Psychology (which literally mean's science of the SOUL) is not a science. Psychology is a mess. There's no agreement between one set of psychologists and another. Dr Susan Blackmore has got a pHD in a bull shit subject. Biology, Chemistry and especially Physics (for other scientists and me) are the subject's that will be responsible for mapping out how the complex matterial brain and even more complex etheric mind interact. In the USA alone millions of people have NDE's in a given year. No one but a few commited loonies have your stupid Pink unicorn 'experience'. Some people have had NDE's for up to 9 hours after brain death having awakened in a Morgue. Some NDEr's have had NDE's together having both the same experience while they were suppossed to be out of there body. These CONFIRMED reports are a enough for matter obsessed science to be shown to be flawed. I'll collect objective evidence and post it later.

Dr Rick · 07-23-2002, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by CHRISGEN2002:
I'll collect objective evidence and post it later.

Good idea.

Sci_Fidelity · 07-23-2002, 02:52 PM

Quote:

Absolutely false; the overwhelming majority of scientists are theists and believe in an afterlife.

References please? The most recent survey in the US that I know of has 93% rejecting the idea of a personal deity.

<a href="http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/news/file002.html" target="_blank">http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/news/file002.html</a>

[ July 23, 2002: Message edited by: Bobby_G ]

ksagnostic · 07-23-2002, 05:18 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bobby_G:
[/b]

References please? The most recent survey in the US that I know of has 93% rejecting the idea of a personal deity.

<a href="http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/news/file002.html" target="_blank">http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/news/file002.html</a>

[ July 23, 2002: Message edited by: Bobby_G ]

I don't know whether Rick has his own figures, but he may be correct nevertheless (although I am not making that claim). Larson and Witham used NAS membership as a criteria for their sample, which is only a small (if considered elite) fraction of working scientists. To quote from the link you provided:

"The AMS no longer makes these designations, so we chose as our "greater" scientists members of the NAS, a status that once assured designation as "great scientists" in the early AMS. Our method surely generated a more elite sample than Leuba's method, which (if the quoted comments by Leuba and Atkins are correct) may explain the extremely low level of belief among our respondents."

Italics added.

Still, I would also like to see other figures on this subject as well.

Not to mention Chrisgen's "objective evidence" regarding "NDE'rs" having had "NDEs together"...whatever that means. I debated about trying to formulate a response to his(?) latest run on rant, and frankly decided against the making the effort.

I need a "throwing up the arms what's the use" graemlin here.

[ July 23, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]

07-20-2002, 07:00 PM	#11
Fiach Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Scotland, UK Posts: 602	[QUOTE]Originally posted by CHRISGEN2002: <strong>I'm very interested to here why you think you are smarter than some the great Nobel Prize of the past. Even now there are very smart scientists investigating life after death. [Fiach] Assuming that they are smart they may still violate scientific method and instead begin with the assumption of a parallel life non-biological for which there is no evidence. I am a molecular biologist and neuroscientist. I have not seen one single shred of credible evidence for non-biological life coexisting with known biological life in a human animal or other animal. If the mind and body are separate then evolution of our reciever body is still true. Why do you act so agressively? [Fiach] Right. A hypothetical immaterial non-biological life form coexisting with our biologically live body is not excluded in theory. However, the two problems are that a non-biological life force is unnecessary to explain life as we now know it. And the lack of evidence for a non-biological life form would make the true sceptic reject it until evidence is presented. Is it cause this isn't the religious bull shit that caused your 'knee-jerk reaction' athiest belief's. I believe in science not religion. Science means to seek knowledge, not replace religious crap with athiest crap. [Fiach] I don't understand what your are saying. All I want to see is that you understand that you cannot possibly say (unless your a crazy egotistical idiot) there is no life after-death when even your explanation's of how consciousness arises from purely brain function alone are still in there infancy (even thats a complement!). [Fiach] We can't say that there is absolutely no non-biological life force existing parallel with our biologically live bodies. We could also say that there are two or three of these non-biological entities inhabiting our bodies. One is no easier to prove than three or to deny. We don't know for certain that there are not Leprechauns in the woods of Donegal. That nobody has seen them apart from alcohol withdrawal, doen't disprove them. But the lack of evidence does not support their existence either. I want you athiest's to fight (farely!) with nothing but scientific evidence that there's no after-life. [Fiach] You know better. Science cannot prove a negative hypothesis. I cannot disprove souls, leprechauns, goblins, God, invisible pink unicorns, or Nessie. There is no scientific way to show that nothing is there if the entity is defined as unmeasurable, invisible, intangible, inaudible, insensible. Can you prove that I don't see flying pigs over Inverness that only I can see? Instead of at present with your pathetic 'oh nothing leaves the body it's all in your mind' explanation which does not agree with NDE research if you bother to look at it any great depth and which is rejected by NDEr's in particular. Your Ketamine explanation is crap as most NDE's occur with NO ketamine present in the body. In fact all your matter obsessed theories are crap because parapsychologists have obtained scientific evidence that there participants do leave there body as they observed object's completely outside there range of vision. I don't ask you to suddenly go 'Oh my shit there is a God,praise the Lord'.Just look at the subject. I know that most scientist's, epecially biologist's(who mosly know nothing of physics only mostly macro-atomic chemistry, laugh at the idea of an after-life, but if there is a background sub-atomic medium called ether; that forms neural nets and has abilities that are unheard of while we inhabit our reciever bodies; which limits our mind's power and only gives it five senses to observe this physical place, then why don't you investigate it without prejudice? You say Out-of-body experience's cannot be objectively proven. [Fiach] We have proven that Out of Body experiences occur. Furthermore, as an epilepsy neurologist I have had many patients with OBE's. I can induce one by putting the patient on EEG monitor with telemetry. Withhold the anti-seizure drugs, and the patient with a mesial temporal electrically excitable focus will have his OBE. We record his EEG and see the spike and desynchronised activity coming from the mesial temporal lobe and spreading to fronto-temporal and posterior temporal lobes. When the electical burst stops, the person is confused but back in his body. During his OBE, some experience hearing God,Jesus, or Brahma depending on his culture. He may see God, Jesus, Brahma, or "the light". These experiences are quite stereotyped phenomonologically and electrophysiologically. We can directly stimulate the episodes with electromagnet stimulators over the appropriate temporal lobe region. We know that they happen and we know with SPECT MRI the regions of the brain that light up during the OBE's and the very similar charismatic religious experiences. But surely if you design an experiment that proves the mind of the participant has left there body [Fiach] How do you measure a disembodied mind? If all mind activity (speech, cognitive processes, memory recall, etc. can be mapped in the Brain) and disconnecting synaptic activity with deep anaesthesia in every case has no consciousness recalled. In deep anaesthesia, the patient counts to 5 or 6 and wakes up often saying, "don't cut on me, I'm not under yet." But he had been anaesthised, had a 4 hour operation, and is waking up with no sense of any passage of time. and observed what they could not possibly see with brain originator theory, then you have proved the mind and body are separate OBJECTIVELY. [Fiach] No scientist has ever done that. Many great mind's from the past examined certain apparently gifted medium's and were convinced that they could make contact with etheric minds of various levels of mental development. [Fiach] None of those were ever proven to be more than chance apart from the obvious scams. Even now I'm sure that I could get the names of great present day thinkers who reject religion, like Professor Abdus Salam who was discomunicated by the Islamic Mullahs for stating that there could be a scientific explanation for an after-life, but don't reject that science could explain the after-life using ether, not matter.</strong> [Fiach] Name dropping does not impress me. Scientifically credible results do. 1. Brains anaesthetised to isoelectical flat line when awakened do not remember any experiences or passage of time. 2. MRI SPECT has now mapped out uptake patterns for conscious arousal, thinking, language use or even thinking of words, moving a hand or foot, complex destrous movements, emotional states, sense of awe, mystical feelings, etc. We know that it is brain based. That in itself does not rule out a hypothetical non-biological life form parasitising your body, nor three or four of them per person. Lets not be stingy. 3. Temporal lobe epilepsy reporduces the NDE and OBE experiences exactly and those people are not dying. People in shock, near dying have hypoxia to the watershed areas of the brain including the mesial temporal lobe. This precipitates seizures as hypoxia is prone to do. When it is greatest in the temporal lobe, the NDE and OBE occur just as they do in a non-dying person with a minor temporal lobe seizure. 4. The SPECT images are as close as scientists have come to snapping a photo of a transcendent experience. As expected, the prefrontal cortex, seat of attention, lit up in a patient in a charasmatic experience. But it was a quieting of activity that stood out. A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe, toward the top and back of the brain, had gone dark. This region, nicknamed the "orientation association area," processes information about space and time, and the orientation of the body in space. It determines where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. Specifically, the left orientation area creates the sensation of a physically delimited body; the right orientation area creates the sense of the physical space in which the body exists. 5. The burden of proof for those claiming an immaterial entity inhabiting the otherwise biologically alive body, existing separately from a biological substrate must show us the evidence. We have shown you the evidence that cognitive activity, consciousness, emotions, mystical experiences are brain based without need for the hypothesis of a magical entity. Fiach

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07-20-2002, 10:35 PM	#13
DMB Guest Posts: n/a	The review linked to at the beginning of this thread makes great play with the idea of a "spirit" separate from the biological body. But where is there any convincing evidence of the existence of such an entity? It is quite true that we have subjective experiences that might lead us to feel that we possess a "spirit", but these do not constitute solid evidence. We all bring a lot of cultural baggage to the interpretation of our experience. A scientific approach to the subject of NDEs and OBEs does not therefore need and ought not to start from a position that they reflect the ill-defined "spirit". I myself have had an out-of-body experience when undergoing an extremely stressful moment, and I would put down some of its features to the adreniline flooding my body at the time.

07-20-2002, 11:01 PM	#14
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	[QUOTE]Originally posted by ksagnostic: [QB] I don't know if I can entirely buy your argument here. If Ned is put to temporary death, and then is able to describe in minute detail the other operating room, then I think that the experimenters would have something, assuming that there were adequate controls. Several of your alternative hypotheses would require a commonality of psychic powers that would have rendered them noncontroversial, and if Ned didn't routinely have OBE's or claim psychic experiences, then it would be logical to tentatively conclude that Ned's experiences were related to his cessetation of life functions. Especially if specific events in the other operating room were described as taking place during a time when Ned's brain was documented to not have any sort of conscious activity (e.g., Fiach's description of a brain "anaesthetised to isoelectical flat line"). [/b] To a certain extent, I agree with you. For example -- I am shamelessly stealing this critique from Collins and Pinch and their studies of parapsychology research -- if someone hits the cards 25 out of 25 every time, well, something must be going on. The problem is that the poster wants to claim a specific psychic event is evidence of a specific aspect of reality -- namely, NDEs are evidence that there is a soul. How would you control to eliminate other psychic explanations? If you were doing an ordinary experiment, say, trying to prove with double blind tests that you new drug T76342 was four times as effective without the side effects, controls would be possible. You could get fifty people, matched for age, gender, etc., and control their diet, exercise, etc, and get something reasonably indicative. How could you control for some pyschic power and not others? If you could rule out fraud, then you could claim something had happened. But what? How could you ever isolate it? And how could you avoid (7) the world exists only in Ned's mind? Vorkosigan

07-21-2002, 04:57 PM	#16
Coragyps Veteran Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Snyder,Texas,USA Posts: 4,411	I would like to suggest that "out-of-body" experiences are perhaps not a particularly unusual or rare thing. Many people describe dreams in which they see themselves from "outside," and I and at least a couple of my hippy friends (1969, mind you) had such hallucinations while on mescaline, LSD, or one particularly good baggie of pot. And the chemicals that these introduce to the brain are very similar to various ones that are already up there - serotonin, epinephrine,... I really don't see an NDE as being anything "supernatural" at all. Likely it's a consequence of oxygen starvation in the brain, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead described it so clearly because they're damn near starved for oxygen up there in Tibet already.

07-23-2002, 09:45 AM	#17
CHRISGEN2002 New Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Europe Posts: 3	Fiach, please! your MRI information DOES NOT CONTRADICT brain reciever theory. Different parts of the brain could be responsible for recieving different characteristics. But the brain obviously isn't just there to recieve otherwise wants the point of being incarnate in the first place? (if you suppose the After-life hypothesis to be true). The brain to me and a lot of other scientists seems to act like a etheric mind sculptor. In each successive life, bad characteristics are removed by mental evolution of the mind through suffering for your mistakes.So Fiach the brain's supossed to uptake new thoughts to teach the etheric mind skill's and build it's character through the many lessons of pain and suffering. The interaction between the brain the etheric mind is a 2-way process.You say it's not important what I believe, then why is it important what Dr Susan Blackmore or any of you believe? Psychology (which literally mean's science of the SOUL) is not a science. Psychology is a mess. There's no agreement between one set of psychologists and another. Dr Susan Blackmore has got a pHD in a bull shit subject. Biology, Chemistry and especially Physics (for other scientists and me) are the subject's that will be responsible for mapping out how the complex matterial brain and even more complex etheric mind interact. In the USA alone millions of people have NDE's in a given year. No one but a few commited loonies have your stupid Pink unicorn 'experience'. Some people have had NDE's for up to 9 hours after brain death having awakened in a Morgue. Some NDEr's have had NDE's together having both the same experience while they were suppossed to be out of there body. These CONFIRMED reports are a enough for matter obsessed science to be shown to be flawed. I'll collect objective evidence and post it later.

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