Thank you Alex for arranging the free viewing, and to Lora & Kevin for granting us the opportunity.
Some comments - forgive my usual obsession with links but there's so much materialist/mechanistic propaganda/ignorance to clear up:
Given the questionable status of Blackmore's work, always surprised she's presented as an expert on anything or that anyone thinks she's qualified to talk about "evidence". If she were a proponent she'd have been ripped to shreds in the media. Ah well, the unjust bias of the materialist faith infecting society I suppose.
Churchland calling herself a "neurophilsopher" still makes me laugh - does she have any degree in the sciences at all? Neuroscientist
Raymond Tallis rightly calls her out as the "Queen of Neuromania". Some of her husband's poor understanding of
Dualism is covered by theologian Edward Feser here.
On Panpsychism, I'd recommend the work of Eric Weiss and Gregg Rosenberg as both, from what I've read so far, make it work contrary to Searle's claim. They seem to represent the spectrum, given
Weiss believes he can extend this idea to explain the afterlife while
Rosenberg figures that though consciousness is what drives/carries causality this life is all there seems to be.
(To be clear I do have great respect for Searle, who has continually shown the fantasy
that a computer is conscious is not even wrong.)
On consciousness as an illusion - as the old chestnut goes, "If consciousness in an illusion,
who precisely is being fooled?" Most of the excuses Dennet and company try to use to explain away consciousness are covered in Andrew Clifton's
An Empirical Case Against Materialism. See also neuroscientist Raymond Tallis's
What Consciousness is Not &
What Neuroscience Cannot Tell us About Ourselves.
Chopra makes a good argument about the relations of science not account for consciousness. Rosenberg gets into that in the linked post, and the physicist Lee Smolin goes into the same realization he had in Time Reborn.
On Free Will - See link to Rosenberg's stuff above for why consciousness has efficacy, and arguably is what drives causation. Also Tallis'
How Can I Possibly Be Free and his defense of the
Present Moment being outside of physics.
I suspect the argument that free will is impossible no matter what is a materialist propaganda trick - since free will is obviously impossible in materialism by spreading this canard they hope to alleviate the moral responsibility on themselves to deny materialism and fight against it until some conclusive evidence comes in.
Good on Hammeroff to call out the
computationalist fantasy. Also Nobel biologist George Wald agreed with him -
in his last lecture Life & Mind in the Universe - that it's arguable even micro-life has consciousness.
Sheldrake brings up whether memories are held in the brain.
Some arguments against that here, one more
by Tallis here.
Like Steven I'm amazed the NDE-is-just-illusion trick is tried. Even in
New Scientist from an agnostic point of view it was noted that despite the different causes of NDEs the experience seems remarkably similar.
There are several hypothesises as to how these events arise, such as lack of oxygen to the brain or
damage to areas that control emotion. “So you’d expect to see differences between near-death experiences after drowning and those of other traumas,” he says.
His team looked at 190 documented events that resulted from traumas including cardiac arrest, drowning, head injury and high anxiety. Using statistical analysis and a measurement called the
Greyson scale to assess the number and intensity of different features of the near-death experiences, the team discovered that surprisingly, the reports shared many similarities.
And I say this as someone who has questioned what we're really getting out of NDEs in terms of knowing the truth of reality.
Searle makes a great point on the MRI studies and how they are used on people who already have consciousness. I think there's a related problem that just looking at a brain scan couldn't tell you whether a person was adding two and two or doing 2 + 2 + (57 - 57). (Goff refers to this as the New Hard Problem.)
Blackmore on evidence....laughable. See above. I'd recommend looking at AI specialist
Ben Goertzel's remarks on how the evidence convinced him Psi was real. I mean this isn't some random layperson like me, this is a guy who has millions of investment capital ->
Hong Kong start-up to bet millions on hedge fund run by artificial intelligence.