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

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

That's a bit like like asking what I think L.Ron Hubbard's best argument was. Truth is, Shermer's views are just so naive and pedantic that it's impossible to hold a productive conversation with him.

As someone with an historically low bar for slapping fellow posters on "ignore", I'm not sure what a "productive conversation" with you would look like. :D

He isn't in the same intellectual ballpark as people like Bernardo Kastrup or David Chalmers.
They are in different ballparks for sure, but I'm not sure they are intellectual ones.

I was screaming out at Alex to say that extended consciousness experiences correlate not with increased or even normal levels of neural activity, but with reduced levels thereof. Shermer hinted at it himself when he talked about cerebral anoxia. I would have concentrated on that...
A large part of brain function has been shown to be inhibitory. Lower activity in these (predominantly cortical) inhibitory circuits may well result experiences that feel richer, hypervivid, etc. It's just not that simple.
 
A large part of brain function has been shown to be inhibitory. Lower activity in these (predominantly cortical) inhibitory circuits may well result experiences that feel richer, hypervivid, etc. It's just not that simple.

So wheres the disagreement then? (with regards to the poster that you seem to be exclaiming a disagreement with)? You seem to be stating that a dysfunction leads to function and that this is normal and inherently explanatory, in a strict and materialistic sense.
 
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There may be none.

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.
 
As someone with an historically low bar for slapping fellow posters on "ignore", I'm not sure what a "productive conversation" with you would look like. :D

How do you know I ignore more people than others? It may be simply that I'm a tad more open about it than some others are. At any rate, I'm not ignoring you, plainly. And for once you make a cogent comment:
A large part of brain function has been shown to be inhibitory. Lower activity in these (predominantly cortical) inhibitory circuits may well result experiences that feel richer, hypervivid, etc. It's just not that simple.

I'm not so sure about that: I said neural activity and made no mention of the type of that activity (inhibitory vs. excitatory). If you can post a link or two to evidence that heightened inhibitory activity leads to lowered overall neuronal activity and heightened extended consciousness experience, it might be helpful. Can you?
 
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How do you know I ignore more people than others? It may be simply that I'm a tad more open about it than some others are. At any rate, I'm not ignoring you, plainly. And for once you make a cogent comment:


I'm not so sure about that: I said neural activity and made no mention of the type of that activity (inhibitory vs. excitatory). If you can post a link or two to evidence that heightened inhibitory activity leads to lowered overall neuronal activity and heightened extended consciousness experience, it might be helpful. Can you?

To be clear I’m saying decreased inhibitory action may lead to ‘less managed’ or’unfiltered’ experiences.

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-27/edition-9/how-do-hallucinogens-work-brain

“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).”
 
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I couldn't finish listening to it, too frustrating. Here's a fantastic video showing how his treatment of another subject misrepresents what's actually going on. He went to the Electric Universe conference a few years ago and basically misunderstood everything. Fortunately the EU people didn't take that lying down and shot back with the video below. It's really worth watching.


I really wish Alex would interview Wal Thornhill or David Talbott of the Thunderbolts Project, it's another area that fits into the milieu of Skeptiko.
Yea we need more guest besides shermer and that dude who scammed people
 
This has all just inspired me to create a new thread here called "Dark Matter"

It's not that at all (what one may conjure from the title) it's really very light and *yawn* boring, however it is factual.

... and it's up, called Dark Matter, in Extended Consciousness and Spirituality.
 
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To be clear I’m saying decreased inhibitory action may lead to ‘less managed’ or’unfiltered’ experiences.

Not sure you meant to say that. Decreased inhibition would seem to be equivalent to increased excitation, and if this leads to less managed/unfiltered experiences, then it appears one would expect that extended consciousness experiences would accompany more excitation rather than less excitation/more inhibition. I suppose that would imply that, if excitation is associated with increased neuronal activity, it would be the opposite of extended consciousness being associated with decreased neural activity.

And yet, the authors seem to be agreeing that: 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.

I gotta admit, I found the paper a bit confusing and could have it wrong. If you know of anything that puts it more simply, please do let me know.
 
Not sure you meant to say that. Decreased inhibition would seem to be equivalent to increased excitation, and if this leads to less managed/unfiltered experiences, then it appears one would expect that extended consciousness experiences would accompany more excitation rather than less excitation/more inhibition. I suppose that would imply that, if excitation is associated with increased neuronal activity, it would be the opposite of extended consciousness being associated with decreased neural activity.

And yet, the authors seem to be agreeing that: 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.

I gotta admit, I found the paper a bit confusing and could have it wrong. If you know of anything that puts it more simply, please do let me know.

See the bolded bit in the quote on my last post. The inhibitory/management networks do their inhibiting when active. Therefore less activity = ‘richer’ experience.
 
See the bolded bit in the quote on my last post. The inhibitory/management networks do their inhibiting when active. Therefore less activity = ‘richer’ experience.

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.
 
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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 to 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.
 
The "body" is an energy conduit a sort of tool. If it is overcharged it can extend itself and burn out or "explode" That is why you only see blips of PSI, PRE-COG, Telekinesis. In shows and movies, (Stranger things) The character 11 for example has Telekinetic power. When she uses too much her nose bleeds,she loses energy and almost faints if I'm not mistaken. Its actually very similar to that. Us as humans can only access so much energy especially people untrained in the arts. There are ways to safely harness more energy......I can't speak on it, but I can point you to someone who can Tesla. Study his inventions.......

*Sacred Geometry
 
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 interview and progress was actually made.

His best argument is that the hard problem of consciousness may be "insoluble" (or unsolvable) because of the way it is framed and the limitations of language... I agree 100%.

His next best argument is that conscious experience is invariably tied to a body. I don't believe consciousness has any meaning without a body from which to perceive and a "material" world with which to perceive and interact. (the definition of "material" can be stretched broadly) People with "out of body" experiences still experience themselves as being in some kind of body... it has been called various names.. the light body, the etheric body, the astral body, the resurrection body. The perceptions of remote-viewers are symbols which are grounded in physical interaction with the material world through the viewer's body (for example: "I'm getting the impression of something sharp" ... the concept of "sharp" is grounded in the human physical bodily experience of hard things that cut soft things). Remote viewers don't perceive from the perspective of a different physical body like that of a bat or a slug or a star... they get impressions that would only make sense in a human body. If consciousness leaves the body at bodily death and inhabits a new body then this could be the reason why so many NDEers say that they cannot adequately use words to express their experience... being in a different body means symbols are grounded differently.

Michael doesn't accept any evidence for "extended consciousness" as being evidence of extended consciousness because he is stuck on the need to fully explain how the "extended body" works... so maybe we should try a new tactic with him and say all of this evidence is really evidence of an "extended body" and we are trying to figure out how the "extended body" that is dreaming up our current reality actually works. Or maybe the VR analogy provides a better metaphor: maybe Shermer's real body is sitting in a bean bag chair with a higher-tech X-box and plugged into this game of life. Maybe its a dream within a dream... a simulation within a simulation.. maybe its bodies all the way down. I'm not a fan of saying "it's all consciousness" and neither is it "all material" because nothing in reality is unipolar. Consciousness is the point where subject and object merge and that isn't possible to adequately express in our language which is why the "hard problem" we have framed is impossible to solve.

We know that veridical non-local and asynchronous perceptions and interactions are real... plenty of evidence for that. Shermer dismisses it all because he doesn't understand how it could work so he prefers to cling to implausible mundane explanations. He cherry picks data that supports his beliefs. In this regard he is no better than the priest or young-earth-creationist with whom he prefers to contend. And that's a shame because there is a genuine mystery here and I believe it is possible to progress towards a better understanding of it. None of us understands how it works. That is how knowledge progresses: we admit we don't understand how it works before we can try to figure it out. Shermer thinks it is already all figured out.

And Alex did a great job of pointing that out... that first we have to acknowledge a gap in our understanding before we can make progress towards understanding it. If we had to fully explain how something works before we admit it is happening... we would never progress at all.
 
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So Malf, where do you stand on it? You think NDE’s are real or just a byproduct of a dying brain?
 
Shermer has a real talent for making a point and then immediately undermining it.

In one breath, he claims that uniformity in NDEs proves it's all neurological, because everyone's basic brain structure is the same. In the very next breath, he says that variation in NDEs proves it's all neurological, when he talks about people going to "different Heavens". So which is it? Also, I think it's easy as hell to explain why some people report going to different places: It's because they did go to different places, places that exist as parts of a larger afterlife, spirit world, or whatever you want to call it. Just like how Earth has New York on one side of the planet and Beijing on the other.

Then there's the part where he demands to know how a spirit sees without eyes. He won't accept the possibility of non-physical consciousness unless you can give him a detailed explanation of the exact process by which a disembodied consciousness sees things. Less than a minute later, he admits that materialists can't provide a detailed explanation of the exact process by which a brain creates consciousness. But he believes the brain creates consciousness anyway, even though there's no more explanation for that than there is for spirits seeing without eyes.

I'm also struck by how Shermer seems to be making a deliberate attempt to make the idea of non-physical consciousness sound as dumb as possible. He keeps using loaded words like "Heaven" and "floating around", and he keeps going back to Deepak Chopra, a favorite easy target of materialists. It seemed like he really, really wanted Alex to agree about consciousness "floating around up above" just so he could reply with "Come on, doesn't that sound really stupid?"



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?
His best point was the argument about how "copying" a person's consciousness wouldn't be an effective way to preserve what he called the "point-of-view self". In that, he's entirely correct. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to realize that, if anything, that's a point against materialism. The whole segment about the "logistics" of the afterlife is him applying physical logic to non-physical things and then believing that when that naturally doesn't work, he's disproven the idea of consciousness beyond death. He lays out a bunch of problems with proposed methods of physical immortality and thinks those are effective arguments against non-physical immortality. He seems to lack imagination. He just can't get out of his strict materialist paradigm, even when he thinks he's trying to be open-minded about other ideas.

And he just had to sneak in that old chestnut about how Heaven is an authoritarian nightmare, because apparently there are no other concepts of Heaven and God except for those of red-state Christian fundamentalists. Probably part of the reason why he couldn't imagine the afterlife having diverse regions within it - because red-state Christian fundamentalists don't think so.
 
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