Dr. Michael Shermer on Near-Death Experience Science |379|

If the inhibitory networks are active, then there is some brain activity, even if there's less than when they're inactive. But during NDEs, the brain is flatlined. As to psychedelic experiences, one would have to show that the reduced activity was the cause of the sensation of enhanced consciousness. Even if that were true, wouldn't it support the contention that reduced brain activity correlates with enhanced conscious experience?

Being an Idealist, I think the causation would be the wrong way round: it wouldn't be that a material cause (i.e. inhibition) were causing enhanced consciousness, so much as enhanced consciousness appearing to us as an inhibitory process.
Exactly. This all seems to support the hypothesis that the brain works as an inhibitory filter of consciousness. When you inhibit the inhibitor, you get closer to experiencing “pure” consciousness, or your “true” self. Eben Alexander has written/spoken about this a fair amount.

Yes. I am not trying to strike a blow against an idealist or filter model. I’m just trying to point out that reduced net brain activity coupled with a less ‘managed’ experience isn’t necessarily a killer blow for a physicalist/brain based model. My reference above does explain that nicely. The most concise ‘plain English’ bit I included in my post above:

“The results were remarkable because they showed for the first time that characteristic changes in consciousness brought about by a hallucinogen are related to ‘decreases’ in brain activity (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012). The decreases were localised to important hub structures in the brain, such as the thalamus, posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. These structures are important as they are centres for information integration and routing in the brain. Thus, rather than being restricted to the performance of specific functions (e.g. the visual cortex is concerned with visual processing and the motor cortex with motor action) these structures possess a more general, managerial purpose, essentially holding the entire system together; analogous to a capital city in a country, or a chief executive officer of a cooperation. The observed decrease in activity in these regions was therefore interpreted as permitting a more unconstrained mode of brain function (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012).”
 
I’m just trying to point out that reduced net brain activity coupled with a less ‘managed’ experience isn’t necessarily a killer blow for a physicalist/brain based model.

I would agree that isn’t a mortal blow at all. But it’s a blow on some level
 
I believe when people have these symbolic NDE when they are dying is essentially the combination of your energy/life force being funneled out in to the aether. "death" opens up this doorway with which our current "physical" bodies does not have the capability to handle, so what death does is suck this energy in to a sort of "black/white hole" at such an intense rate, which is why life flashed before your eyes in seemingly. Think of child birth for example, the intensity of babies being born, its intense and you seemingly go from nothingness to life. You were "pushed through" into this earthly realm, and now you have this intense experience of LIFE. Now death is the reverse of that (IMO) Your energy is being sucked/transmuted to the aether bringing up these flashbacks in a seemingly timeless manner. Seeing Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed is irrelevant, they are basic spiritual archetypes/tools which humans can use if they get the message and apply it to find their own truth and open up and discover their own divinity.

Religions has turned Jesus and other prophets in to profitable idols to be worshipped. Fundamentalists are missing the basic fundamental principle behind these archetypes.

I haven't watch the Shermer interview, but from some of the context it seem he is coupling the afterlife with the Christian view "The place up there" That is a huge mistake and shows how limited his perception is.

I also believe there are an infinite amount of dimensions out there they can be perceived as paradise or hell, I believe its really a broad spectrum and I'm sorry if that scares some people.

While I agree with Shermer on one point, heaven would be deathly boring if we were just spirits in heaven? Call it a lack of imagination, but living forever in heaven sounds like agony.

I believe we don't know what these dimensions hold and any touched but a few dimensions, the afterlife is something our 3D mind can imagination, because our imagination is limited in a sense
 
Hey Malf, I’m curious to know where you stand on the argument of afterlife vs none. I’ve seen a few of your postings but I don’t think on this specific topic. I could be wrong. I promise I’m not being an ass hat. Genuinely curious.
I find the afterlife debate to be an emotionally charged side dish to the real meat of the nature of consciousness/reality.
So Malf, where do you stand on it? You think NDE’s are real or just a byproduct of a dying brain?

I really don't think it's clear either way. I find even the phrase "Near Death" emotionally loaded. If we were in the habit of calling these states "Altered Brain" or "Compromised Physiology" Experiences, it would add a different texture to the conversation; language matters.

I do find the discussions fascinating (some of you will know me as one of the "founder members" at PsienceQuest). I am an advocate of the notion that we can learn more about the nature of consciousness by studying its appearance (emergence?) and maturation from conception onwards than what happens when we die. It's way easier to study the 'beginning' than the other end (IMO).

That said, AWARE was a beautifully designed study and takes the field much further than the previous attempts at "sciencing" the subject, which hitherto had relied on little more than collating and curating the stories.
 
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Here we have the 4 main elements Air-Water-Fire-and Earth.
Spirit (aether) is the 5th. Tesla and Issac Newton and many other found out a way to access the aether with out destroying themselves through their inventions.

When you see an inverted pentagram it symbolically means you have let your spirit become indulged with earthly desires such as greed, envy, sloth, jealous, survival of the fittest. This is the one (satanists) use many sects of satanist are atheist....inverting the pentagram for them is to rid the spirit from the aether and indulge it in early desires that can destroy our spirit. Of course this is one of many interpretations
 
That said, AWARE was a beautifully designed study and takes the field much further than the previous attempts at "sciencing" the subject, which hitherto had relied on little more than collating and curating the stories.

I think if they are going to do something similar again, they really need to design the visual cue setup a little better. (ie-the signs that those claiming to have NDE's which may be veridically observed)
 
Yes. I am not trying to strike a blow against an idealist or filter model. I’m just trying to point out that reduced net brain activity coupled with a less ‘managed’ experience isn’t necessarily a killer blow for a physicalist/brain based model. My reference above does explain that nicely.

And it's a cogent point (which is more than I can say for anything Michael Shermer said), which I give you credit for. All I would do is reiterate that imo, all noumena have phenomenological appearances. It's a question of where one places the causative role.

Either one believes that phenomena are all that exist, in which case all causation has to arise in interactions of phenomena according to essentially accidental physical "laws" (materialism); or, one believes, as in Idealism, that the noumena (or "things-in-themselves", rather than the appearance of things) are the conscious, causative agent.

The reason why I opt for the latter is the hard problem of consciousness. One can envisage a universe in which there are only physical laws, sure, but then one has to explain how from those something in an entirely different category (i.e. consciousness) arose. The plain fact is that I, and everyone else, is conscious. I can't explain that from a phenomenological point of view, and indeed, all phenomenology arises in consciousness. There is nothing that has arisen in appearance except through consciousness. So for me, consciousness has to be the ontological primitive.

Hence, imo, it isn't that inhibitory processes are the cause of enhanced conscious experience, so much as that inhibitory processes are how we perceive and interpret the appearance of the real cause, the underlying noumena.

Put it this way: all phenomena that we can perceive have an appearance. Everything that we perceive has a counterpart in noumena, or the thoughts/processes of universal consciousness (if it didn't, science would be an impossible and useless enterprise). There is no such thing as magic: everything can have a "rational" explanation where "rational" isn't taken only in its usual, restricted sense of logical deliberation.

We'll never find that explanation within a materialist schema, because it can't explain consciousness. However, in Idealism, there is no hard problem. We don't have to explain how consciousness arose, because it's the ontological primitive, and all theories and hypotheses, at some point have to resort to such an axiomatic primitive. With materialism, the primitive is deemed to comprise material objects and their interactions according to unexplained (and inexplicable) physical laws. This is what seems to create the yawning gap between the material and the conscious.

I'm not sure if I've put that across as I wanted, but it's my best shot at explaining the rationale behind my belief.
 
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I do find the discussions fascinating (some of you will know me as one of the "founder members" at PsienceQuest). I am an advocate of the notion that we can learn more about the nature of consciousness by studying its appearance (emergence?) and maturation from conception onwards than what happens when we die. It's way easier to study the 'beginning' than the other end (IMO).
There is perhaps (though it isn't entirely clear) an assumption here that consciousness has a beginning along with the physical being which does have a beginning and follows the stages from conception onwards.

The two are not necessarily aligned. The physical being is known to have a beginning and an end. We cannot say that either of these are true of consciousness. Almost certainly if it has no end, it has no beginning also.
 
Alex's question at the end of the interview:

What do you think Michael's best point is -- what's his best argument from the many different topics we discussed?
I thought this was a great show. Kudos to Alex for getting to the points he wanted to cover, pushing on Shermer, and sticking to a tight strategy of laying out reasons to falsify the material paradigm on mind = brain, without getting baited into possibly less productive territory.

For whatever reason, I had always thought of Shermer as one of the new atheists, so I was surprised to hear him espousing a strong philosophical agnosticism, especially in the last third or so of the interview. I appreciated his comments about:

*the Mysterians
*some problems may be unsolvable
*we're restricted by the words that we use
*perhaps our frames aren't right
*a brick wall of words
*Wittgenstein
*we don't know what we don't know
*we don't have the words to describe it
*paradox

Even looking back at the rest of the interview, it seems like he's open to the possibility of the continuation of consciousness, he's just not convinced that the research is strong enough to endorse it. I wish he could have been a bit more imaginative with his response to the Dr. Jeff Long clip. One thing I'm not sure about is if when a person is heading into the deep anesthesia or coming out of the deep anesthesia, couldn't an NDE be kind of like a dream that tricks the experiencer into thinking it happened in the deepest anesthesia?

I need to look closely at the Jeff Long research and the Sam Parnia research. Going back to the question of what are Shermer's best points, his question about the research with the photographs on the shelf comes across to me as a strong point. I know Alex was trying to make a different point about truthfully acknowledging and responding to the conclusions that the researchers themselves came up with in their published work, but I think, as a general listener of this conversation, Alex's nuanced point gets lost a bit and Shermer came out strong on that piece of the interview. (I'm thinking about how a first-time listener or general listener might have heard that piece.)

A great moment for me was when Alex calls out Shermer for trying to bait him into laying out a theory of consciousness, and Alex doesn't take the bait and acknowledges he doesn't know exactly how consciousness works, but that he doesn't have to have a complete and coherent theory, because what Alex is trying to do is falsify the existing paradigm, not establish the replacement paradigm. I loved that restraint. It's funny how the ambient sound of San Francisco came into play then, too, and I wonder if it helped Alex gather his thoughts for a moment to come up with that response.

The whole interview reminds me of the last interview with Raymond Moody, where Moody lays out his idea that there seems to be something deep in some partition of the marrow of Western thought that resists penetration of the mystical. As an analogy, you can throw stories or theories of mystical experiences at your banker until the cows come home, but you still owe an overdraft fee because there's some core piece of math that is resistant to what the white light has to say about your checking account. I think Moody suggests devoting some resources away from the stories/theories side, and putting those resources into cracking into that baked-in core, trying to change the frame from the inside out. Of course, there's an extremely important place for stories and peer-reviewed research, but as Moody describes, in his 40+ years of work on the same old story/theory side, there's been scant progress in moving the needle. That's why I liked Shermer saying maybe we need to change the frame, and why I liked that Alex showed a lot restraint in the speculation department.
 
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Alex's question at the end of the interview:

What do you think Michael's best point is -- what's his best argument from the many different topics we discussed?

Shermer at least conceded that he was open to more than materialism - with proof. Beyond that he makes the simple error of thinking that science is the arbiter of the real, and thinking that is a bona approach to knowledge. It is a game in that there are rules to his thinking - what science, or neuroscience, tells us is so in what we can allow. This is not unlike the problem that Christianity created for itself when it established dogmatic pillars of faith that had to be agreed to. Theologians subsequently engaged in intellectual gymnastics to explore ideas without running foul of the umpire.

For me this kind of thinking is pathological. Science is not, and cannot be, the arbiter of the real. Human experience is. The role of science is to explore some things in great detail - usually the easy stuff that stands still enough to be measured. That's an important role, just not a ruling or absolute one. There are many things science has not been engaged to explore in detail, and we depend on them to be human - truth, justice, morality, love, freedom and pleasure may all have had bits subjected to scientific scrutiny, but there is no science of any of them.

So what is the motive to think like Shermer? An illusion of control? A defence against some existential drama or vulnerability? Why excise so much human experience and narrative in order to arrive at a world view that is so tight and narrow? It is, for me, neither reasonable nor rational - hence I see it as pathological.

Shermer clearly has a market, and maybe that's a problem. If he conceded any of Alex's points his credibility in that market would have plummeted. If you make a living being a "Skeptic" (an awful misuse of the word) then that's what you have to be. If you are a theologian confessing openness to atheism is a death sentence. In the same way an atheist confessing openness to the divine is also sunk.

So to what extent does Shermer really believe what he says? We can't be certain, but we can be certain that if he thought otherwise he would not confess it in public - without a life changing event that left him with no existential choice.

So his best point is that he didn't shut and bolt the door against an alternative understanding. Sure he shut the door, but its the bolt bit that is noticeable.
 
Shermer at least conceded that he was open to more than materialism - with proof.

So his best point is that he didn't shut and bolt the door against an alternative understanding. Sure he shut the door, but its the bolt bit that is noticeable.

Absolutely. If you leave open the possibility, then I can sympathize with you. We don't have proof (I think we have VERY nice and compelling evidence), but 1) There isn't incontrovertible proof and 2) To non-experiencers and most everyday folk, the idea seems contrary to every day experience. So I'm not totally unsympathetic towards those views. But when they lack the logic and imagination, (especially in light of the intriguing areas such as NDE/OBE research, Psi research, re-incarnation, ghosts etc) to even admit that there may exist these other realms, I cannot sympathize with that. It's a ridiculous line to tow.
 
I agree with Michael Patterson human experience has to be the arbiter of the real.

What Alex and Michael Shermer didn’t discuss is the personality change that happens after deep spiritual/ mystical experiences and NDEs, this has also been recorded in the psyocybin trials. I have a friend who is a keen member of the skeptics group but can’t explain this.

I think even in an age of materialism and atheism the New Testament might have something to say about such matters! After the crucifixion Peter denies Christ with good reason, then, after their Penticost experience, both he and the rest of the disciples throw caution to the winds and if tradition is correct face very unpleasant deaths.

St Paul talks about being caught up in the third heaven and not knowing whether he was in the body or out, his life after his Damascus experience reflects a typical NDE transformation.

The physical and mental stamina that his journeys (including shipwreck and being in prison) demanded is astounding and how on earth could the Saul of his earlier life, who approved Stephens stoning, and is recorded as breathing out murderous threats towards the disciples, have written the beautiful chapter on love in Corinthians chapter 13 without what Michael Patterson called A life changing event that left him with no existential choice.

No one can talk with authority about an afterlife, NDErs have only been on the threshold, but they do seem to return with a deep trust that death isn’t the end
 
If we were in the habit of calling these states "Altered Brain" or "Compromised Physiology" Experiences, it would add a different texture to the conversation; language matters.

Ok, how about "Heightened, lucid awareness, accompanied by logical thought processes during loss of neuronal function in the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and thalamas while clinically dead" experiences?

At least it's not beating about the bush.
 
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There is perhaps (though it isn't entirely clear) an assumption here that consciousness has a beginning along with the physical being which does have a beginning and follows the stages from conception onwards.

The two are not necessarily aligned. The physical being is known to have a beginning and an end. We cannot say that either of these are true of consciousness. Almost certainly if it has no end, it has no beginning also.

Again, yes. Studying the beginning needn’t preclude any particular model.

If consciousness leaves our body at bodily death, leaving behind those sensory system that it so relied on to give us this rich experience, at what point does it enter do you think?
 
And it's a cogent point (which is more than I can say for anything Michael Shermer said), which I give you credit for. All I would do is reiterate that imo, all noumena have phenomenological appearances. It's a question of where one places the causative role.

Either one believes that phenomena are all that exist, in which case all causation has to arise in interactions of phenomena according to essentially accidental physical "laws" (materialism); or, one believes, as in Idealism, that the noumena (or "things-in-themselves", rather than the appearance of things) are the conscious, causative agent.

The reason why I opt for the latter is the hard problem of consciousness. One can envisage a universe in which there are only physical laws, sure, but then one has to explain how from those something in an entirely different category (i.e. consciousness) arose. The plain fact is that I, and everyone else, is conscious. I can't explain that from a phenomenological point of view, and indeed, all phenomenology arises in consciousness. There is nothing that has arisen in appearance except through consciousness. So for me, consciousness has to be the ontological primitive.

Hence, imo, it isn't that inhibitory processes are the cause of enhanced conscious experience, so much as that inhibitory processes are how we perceive and interpret the appearance of the real cause, the underlying noumena.

Put it this way: all phenomena that we can perceive have an appearance. Everything that we perceive has a counterpart in noumena, or the thoughts/processes of universal consciousness (if it didn't, science would be an impossible and useless enterprise). There is no such thing as magic: everything can have a "rational" explanation where "rational" isn't taken only in its usual, restricted sense of logical deliberation.

We'll never find that explanation within a materialist schema, because it can't explain consciousness. However, in Idealism, there is no hard problem. We don't have to explain how consciousness arose, because it's the ontological primitive, and all theories and hypotheses, at some point have to resort to such an axiomatic primitive. With materialism, the primitive is deemed to comprise material objects and their interactions according to unexplained (and inexplicable) physical laws. This is what seems to create the yawning gap between the material and the conscious.

I'm not sure if I've put that across as I wanted, but it's my best shot at explaining the rationale behind my belief.
Yep, fair enough. If we have to put a coin down we put it where, to us, it smells least like baloney.
 
Ok, how about "Heightened, lucid awareness, accompanied by logical thought processes during loss of neuronal function in the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and thalamas while clinically dead" experiences?

At least it's not beating about the bush.

Sure. Which case is that?
 
I agree with Michael Patterson human experience has to be the arbiter of the real.

What Alex and Michael Shermer didn’t discuss is the personality change that happens after deep spiritual/ mystical experiences and NDEs, this has also been recorded in the psyocybin trials. I have a friend who is a keen member of the skeptics group but can’t explain this.

I think even in an age of materialism and atheism the New Testament might have something to say about such matters! After the crucifixion Peter denies Christ with good reason, then, after their Penticost experience, both he and the rest of the disciples throw caution to the winds and if tradition is correct face very unpleasant deaths.

St Paul talks about being caught up in the third heaven and not knowing whether he was in the body or out, his life after his Damascus experience reflects a typical NDE transformation.

The physical and mental stamina that his journeys (including shipwreck and being in prison) demanded is astounding and how on earth could the Saul of his earlier life, who approved Stephens stoning, and is recorded as breathing out murderous threats towards the disciples, have written the beautiful chapter on love in Corinthians chapter 13 without what Michael Patterson called A life changing event that left him with no existential choice.

No one can talk with authority about an afterlife, NDErs have only been on the threshold, but they do seem to return with a deep trust that death isn’t the end

I disagree with the literal intrepretation
 
Again, yes. Studying the beginning needn’t preclude any particular model.

If consciousness leaves our body at bodily death, leaving behind those sensory system that it so relied on to give us this rich experience, at what point does it enter do you think?
I cannot say. However various others have given widely varying ideas of when consciousness enters - ranging all the way from before conception to after birth. That's not to suggest that these are contradictory. All may be applicable, each individual may be different.

I think Helen Wambach was one of the sources for this. A search of these forums should turn up something.
 
Alex, I heard you reference a study on an earlier Podcast about a group of NDErs and a group of non-NDErs (who DID die and were resuccitated). They were both asked to describe their resucitation, and only those claiming to have an NDE were the ones who gave accurate responses. What study was that? I can't find it.
 
Alex, I heard you reference a study on an earlier Podcast about a group of NDErs and a group of non-NDErs (who DID die and were resuccitated). They were both asked to describe their resucitation, and only those claiming to have an NDE were the ones who gave accurate responses. What study was that? I can't find it.

I think it’s Penny Sartori. Not sure if it’s a journal study or presented in her book. Anyone?
 
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