Posted: Sep 13, 2012 9:15 am
DrParisetti wrote:Aw-right, then. No immediate explanations for how a non-functioning brain produces a highly structured conscious experience, remembered in vivid details at 25 or 30 years' distance. I'm sure some will come soon.
Now, we should also consider explanations for the fact that this consciousness appears to be operating from outside the physical body, a fact corroborated by vast anecdotal AND experimental evidence. This data also accounts for the fact that the NDE occurs WHEN the brain is not functioning, and not before or after.
(one little digression: it seems that anecdotes here are considered like utter shite, nonsense, fantasy and akin to child pornography. Were you ever hospitalised? Did you ever give your clinical history to a doctor? That's an anecdote, and your life depends on it. Have you ever given evidence in a court? That's an anecdote, and people can be sentenced to death for it. Anecdotes can be false or wrong, but cannot so easily be discarded.)
And we should consider explanations for the fact this highly structured experience is strikingly similar, independently from age, race, sex, language, historic period and - crucially - religious beliefs.
And we should consider explanations for the fact that children as young as three or four have the same highly structured conscious experience as adults do, with exactly the same key features.
And we should explain that this experience induces the same profound, life-transforming psychological changes in all those who had it, regardless of all the variables mentioned above, and that these changes remain at 10, 15, 20 years from the experience itself.
And we should explain that the congenitally and adventitiously blind actually see during a near-death experience.
And we should explain that one of the key features of the experience is meeting dead relatives, including those who were believed not to be dead at the time of the experience.
I am all ears. I look forward to possible explanations. Please do not give me the old shite about the fear of death, the CO2 levels, the drugs, the low oxygen levels and the temporal lobe stimulation. All that has been done away years ago, and anyway doesn't mean anything when you consider that THE BRAIN IS NOT THERE.
I much less look forward to attempts to ignore, discredit, misinterpret the evidence.
We're not discussing people who are dead, only who are near-death and this definition of when they are dead is simply limited by our technological ability to detect something which we do not yet know how it works i.e. human consciousness.
Canonically someone who is conscious is always considered to be not dead (ignoring P-zombies), but someone in a coma is also not dead by any standards as long as their heart is still functioning and they are breathing (or this function is provided by machines). They can remain years in that state.
We do not understand (yet) how consciousness works. We do know that it is a function of brains and not any other organ because organ transplants have been performed on just about every other organ (obviously not the brain).
We know chemicals affect consciousness and with general anaesthetics we can turn consciousness off on a whim. Do you accept that you, we all, do not know how general anaesthetics work on consciousness ? The answer is we do not know. If we look at a chemical like Propofol then it is claimed to induce euphoria, sexual hallucinations and disinhibition and people remember these even though they were not conscious.
So given we do not know how consciousness works but chemically we can turn consciousness off using chemicals that we do not fully know how they work (because we do not know how consciousness works) and given we can chemically induce people to report experiences that are cross cultural (sexual hallucinations and euphoria) we are now expected to believe that a non-physical mind which has persisted before the person is alive is expressed through this feature (consciousness) of a brain ?
There seems to be an irrational leap of faith here over our gaps in knowledge. Whilst we do not fully comprehend the mechanism that creates consciousness or chemically makes people unconscious or what causes memories and whilst we have only the first person reports of NDE this is insufficient untrustworthy as evidence of a persistent non-physical mind that survives a person's death.
Now we can argue the subjective reports of NDE for years and like anything subjective they remain evidence for what is happening in that brain but they will never be evidence for what is outside of that brain whilst we accept physicalism. Your argument is that given NDE et al we must discard materialism and methodical naturalism. That seems a very high price to pay to fill the gaps in our knowledge on consciousness and memory storage. Such a leap of faith wipes out the past few hundred years of science and the scientific method. It resets us back to Newton, the last of the magicians.
Now you may deny that is the case but that is the alternative reality you are saying is more probable. So can I trust what you say ? Well given that the implications of for instance, RNG, being affected by the mind this is an extraordinary claim that has multi-trillion dollar implications from everything from engineering through to casinos through to options, derivatives and stock markets. With the gearing in some of these markets, 1% is 100 basis points and as big traders in say forex work on spreads of a few bp i.e. hundreds of a percent, a deviation of the hidden hand of the market of even a tenth of a percent i.e. 0.1% is the opportunity to make a vast fortune. It seems incredible that this happens and in secret and over decades of massive market turmoil.
On the other hand I read - http://www.skepdic.com/pear.html and I notice the results for the mind-over-matter on the RNG are not as fantastic as you make them out to be in your book. You re-present only one side of the argument. So it is not as extraordinary as I imagine and we're reduced to rather mundane misapplication of statistics.
This is not enough by a long way for humanity to go back to the failed doctrine of supernaturalism.