john_e

Scientific theory is almost as bad as religion for the amount of faith and conjection invovled.

I've not had enough time to read more about Sheldrake's theories, Oxymoron, so if you have any links to sites discussing his theories in a more balanced way (ie not an interview with the guy), then it'd be great to read them. After all, we are only as good as our sources.

I think Sheldrake's theory appeals to certain people because it nicely explains remote viewing, etc. Plus I've been reading too much of Bearden's work than is strictly good for me.

Take care all.

Gooch's dad

john_e: What remote viewing? Do you happen to have any documented evidence, such as double-blind studies, that support remote viewing?

And you base that bizarre opinion on what, exactly? And you find no irony whatsoever in typing that out on a modern computer, which was engineered based on those same scientific theories that you mock? Delicious, that sort of irony. I love seeing those that mock science, do so by posting on the internet. How rich!

abe smith

Answering the OP qy w/ another qy:
What happens to the electricity in your house, when you throw the main switch to "OFF" at the main?
: The connexion to the circuit is disconnected. The "electricity" doesn't "go" anywhere. It *stops*. (Early-on, naive consumers feared the "electricity" would leak-out from open sockets...)

I always do mistrust attempts such as the OP one-here, to equate biological processes w/ non-biological ones.....

The "death"process here in question may be (rather) more-similar to taking a pair of wire cutters (WELL-INSULATED!!!) to the house-wiring and cutting the whole pattern into tiny bits
= scraps of severed BX. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!

Biological death, of a multicellular organism (like us for example), is progressive; and (Probably!) consists in the sequential severing of the interior network as the organ-systems and then the individual body-cells DIE, >> most-probably of anoxia. When the ME pronounces you "dead", you're *not*really
dead "all-over" yet; altho the main large-scale organs's "disconnection " makes resuscitation or consciousness extremely-improbable. Luckily few persons are buried-alive, because the
funeral processes carefully KILL you , in part to prevent that. There have been several good books w/in the last half-decade wh/ have discussed & described the (human) death-process.
I can't recall titles & authors. Sorry. Try your local.

Feather

Bzzzzzzzt!! Wrong answer.


Scientific theory is based on many observations by many different people under many different conditions. Conjecture is involved--but only until experiment demonstrates the futility/validity of the conjecture.

Faith is involved only insofar as an established scientist might have "faith" that his graduate slav...er...students are competent enough to trail about on his coattails and do his work for him so he gets more recognition. (Note facetious tone of last statement before flaming, plz.)

cricket

The theory that ‘nicely explains’ it all for me is that people are *wrong*. Look around at how often in everyday life people make mistakes, miscommunicate, misunderstand, or attach meaning to insignificant coincidences. The stories that get re-told are those that are exaggerations - that are deemed ‘interesting’ to others because they feed their dreams - even though they are widely speculative and usually *wrong*.

john_e

Whoa, easy there! How about I rephrase it to "those who believe in remote viewing and some kind of sixth sense exist".

OMG! I made spelling and word use errors. Sue me.

What I meant to imply is that when you are taking about scientific theories that deal with things on the boundaries of what is observeable, the scientists invovled must have a strong degree of faith in their work to pursue it their whole lives, knowing it may be disproved by generations to come.

Yes, a slightly rash statement, when only the broadest comparisons are justified. It was meant to be taken in the context of Oxymoron's statement that Sheldrake was "out on a limb" (faith, you see?). I assume you did actually read all the posts above and note that the winking smilie next to that statement denoted a none-serious tone. Happy now?

Take care all.

excreationist

peacenik:
As far as the conservation of energy/mass goes, there are different types of energy and you can change one into another... e.g. electricity can be converted into heat or movement... some matter in an atomic bomb can be destroyed to released huge amounts of energy, etc. I only know some high school physics, but I think that electricity involves moving electrons... that move from one place to another. (The negative place to the positive place) The cells in our nervous system would cause those electrons to move, and when those cells die, the electrons wouldn't move so much... BTW, I am a materialist... I only think there is matter and energy and time (or at least the illusion of time)... I don't think other things exist - or at least I haven't come across any convincing evidence for it. See this consciousness thread for some of my ideas about what awareness and consciousness is (as I have defined it). (I mostly talk about awareness)

john_e:

If it is *independent* of time, does that mean that our future memories are floating around somewhere?

Have you heard about other theories about how memory/recall works, such as "neural networks"? They have even been artificially recreated on a primitive scale... see near the bottom of this site.

I think computer memory is a useful thing to compare our memory to (although artificial neural network style memory is a closer match)... so do you think the memory of computers is stored as little bits of magnetic fields on a hard-drive, etc, or is it "independent of space and time"? (BTW, a decoding and encoding mechanism is also needed in order to cause the hard-drive to function as a memory store).

I think our memories are stored using our 100 billion neurons (brain-cells) (which each connect to about 10,000 others). What do you think all of those neurons are used for? Also, why exactly do our brains only seem to be able to access certain memories when the memories are supposedly independent of space? It sounds like the memories are attached to the brain somehow... I think the reason is because the structure of the brain is all the memories are, and when the brain moves or is destroyed, that's where the memories go. (like a hard-drive).

Do you think that it could be possible for someone's memory tuner to accidently tune into someone else's memories if they had the right kind of brain damage? They probably would have no memory of their original self - otherwise they would be accessing two memories simultaneously... so they'd get a surprise when they discover themselves in a new body... and two bodies would be sharing the same memory pool... or maybe the memory pool would split in two...

BTW, what do you think happens during dreaming? Does the brain wander around and half tune into other people's memories?

john_e

Eek. My last post should've gone straight after Gooch's dad 's. Editing it must've messed the timing up.

excreationist :
I'm afraid I was just quoting that theory to add to the general debate simply because I've read it. Unfortunately I don't have a physics degree, and I have very little spare time to study the subject further.

I'm not discounting neural networks at all, as they represent the most rational theory if you take a materialist point of view. Must've lost some brain cells since I read the other articles relating to this, since I can't find the damn things.

You've actually succeeded in getting me all interested in neural networks now, as I think more about the issue. Just to try to clear my own fuzzy thinking up a bit, would this be how it is assumed neural networks work?...

Say I look at a picture. The input (RGB, light/dark) is processed by my optic nerve, and is stored as an arrangement of neurons. When I try to recall that picture, the brain somehow finds the right neurons and processes the information. Fuzzy recall occurs due to degradation of the neurons over time. Some memories gradually degrade as the brain "over-writes" particular areas (does this actually need to occur, given the brain's huge capacity?). I so need to read more about this.

http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-mor...hgnicflds.html

That's also a bizarre link I stumbled across which is used to support the morphogenetic field theory.

Right, I'm off to read more on neural networks.

Take care all.

Jobar

Let's put this one in Science & Skepticism.

(peacenik, one of a moderator's main tasks is to try to put topics in the proper forums. You'll get the hang of where best to put things if you hang around a while. J.)

excreationist

I guess it is kind of related. According to Rupert Sheldrake, he has quite an impressive list of achievements - at least in the beginning. I haven't heard of the recent book awards he got... they sound scientific but perhaps they're not. In his "experiments" section there is an interesting page about homing pigeons. It claims that scientists still aren't sure how homing pigeons home.
I went to the Straight Dope web site and found they had an answer to a question about this... they talked about Sheldrake in the answer.
I haven't read through his site very carefully, but I'm skeptical of many of his experiments that supposedly provide evidence for his theories.

In classic neural network simulations, the artificial neurons have "weights" which represent pattern fragments and when they are trained, the weights are adjusted. That link I gave has a demo program... I haven't tried it yet but it probably involves you teaching a neural network some patterns. You could think of the visual input as being some patterns... and sometimes the data-types (visual/audio/etc) of the inputs get mixed up (e.g. when people use LSD or have synesthesia) - i.e. neurons can process visual patterns and other patterns in the same way - and get them mixed up. (e.g. Some synaesthetes even see coloured letters)

The brain would reconstruct the picture from stored patterns. Those patterns would define the approximate shapes, colours, textures, etc, that make up the picture.

Perhaps it is due to the memories being pushed to the "back" of the brain... (being less readily recalled) I think we automatically recall the strongest associations first (e.g. things we were recently thinking about, or strongly related memories) - then the second strongest associations, etc... I haven't read much on the subject.

Perhaps they've been reused to store other patterns... e.g. I can't remember some of my old teacher's names... maybe I've got a fuzzy idea of what their names are - so if someone gave me a multiple choice quiz about it I might do quite well... but the information is too weak for me to reconstruct what the names were from scratch. Maybe the information is still there, it is just spread across the parts that I mostly used when I went to school at that time... and to reconstruct the names I have to access all of those areas of memory. I've read about experiments where people would vividly recall experiences when parts of their brain was stimulated during brain surgery... stimulating the same area in a person caused them to recall the same event... maybe our experiences are encoded vividly but we just can't access them very well... I think we can only access memories that we have associated (directly or fairly directly) with the contents of our short term memory. If the association isn't strong enough (or non-existent), then we don't recall the memory.
A lot of that was just some ideas... that aren't necessarily supported by science or neural network theory.