Ex-Stargate Head Ed May Unyielding Re Materialism, Slams Dean Radin |341|

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Ex-Stargate Head Ed May Unyielding Re Materialism, Slams Dean Radin |341|
by Alex Tsakiris | Feb 28 | Consciousness Science, Near-Death Experience, Parapsychology

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Ed May ran the U.S. Stargate psychic spying program for 10 years, but as a materialist, rejects psychic woo.
photo by: Skeptiko
On this episode of Skeptiko…

Alex Tsakiris: And [Dr. Dean Radin] was the first guy to say, “…let’s see if a meditator can affect that photon beam within a double-slit experiment,” and again, an astounding result. I mean, statistically an overwhelming result showing that, yes, human consciousness collapses the wave function.

Dr. Ed May: Dean Radin’s a good friend of mine, he is simply one of the most creative people we have in our field, but I’m sad to report, his idea of consciousness and wave functions are just demonstrably inconsistent with 80 years’ worth of experiment and theory, it’s just simply not the case.

(later)

Alex Tsakiris: …but take the near-death experience science, I mean, there it’s kind of game over, because now we have the brain out of the equation, the brain doesn’t…

Dr. Ed May: No, no, no, no, no, no, no absolutely not. I’ve just been engaged in a huge debate over this issue of near-death experiences, arguing with my colleagues that that is hard evidence for survival of bodily death. First off, there’s nobody that has had a near-death experience, who’s in fact dead. It’s a different category…

Alex Tsakiris: Not true… not true, if we were going to answer that question…

Dr. Ed May: I’ve read the literature in detail, just finished reading a book about it by one of the biggest proponents sir…

Alex Tsakiris: Nope… nope…

————————————

Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Of course, as you know, I always say the same thing at the beginning, I say controversial science, but primarily what this show has dealt with is consciousness science and this battle of the idea of whether consciousness, your minute by minute experience, is more than just your brain, and of course that’s important, because if it is, and it is because we’ve shown it over and over again, but if it is, then it more or less overturns science in some pretty important ways.

Now, for a long time it was always assumed that psi effects; ESP, telepathy precognition, that kind of stuff, that if that was proven true, then the materialist, the mind=brain folks, would have to admit they’re wrong, because the assumption being made, and I always point to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who was famous back in the day when the atheists were kind of running the world and saying “consciousness is an illusion” and along with that was this idea that “consciousness can do no work,” consciousness being this non-physical thing that’s going on up there, well that can’t really “do” anything, that can’t really impact our physical world. So if psi was shown to be happening it was assumed that it would be game over, the non-physical affecting the physical, we can no longer rely on this scientific materialism. This is why there was this tremendous pushback on psi. For example, the James Randi folks and all the very materialistic people would just rail against parapsychology and all the psi stuff as hard as they could. And of course this led to them making up a bunch of crap that we’ve gone over again and again and again on this show. Their debunking of psi was really a shame.

Now, in that long list of things that got the strong pushback from the “skeptics,” was remote viewing. So, if you go back 20 years ago skeptics were saying, “Oh, that never really happened… it never really worked.” Then you had a bunch of people come out of the Stargate program and say, “Of course it worked.” We even had presidents saying, “Oh yeah, it was unbelievable what they found. They found this missing plane,” all these stories came out that made it clear to anyone who was paying attention that, yes, something real was happening.

Now, all this is a lead up to how this show came to be, because the other day I was watching this excellent video from a very excellent parapsychologist, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, who you might recall was on this show a long time ago, probably need to have him back, need to make a note of that, but anyway, on his new revamped version of Thinking Aloud, he had today’s guest, Dr. Ed May and I was rather stunned to find that, here is a guy who is a PhD physicist, ran the Stargate Program for 10 years, is absolutely certain from all his scientific training that this is something that really occurred, that is, psychic spying was real, really happened, they sat in this room and they saw stuff that was going on on the other side of the world. He’s saying, operationally, we know it happened, experimentally, we know it happened. It happened, get over it, but at the same time, what he’s saying is that, “You know what, I’m still a physicalist, I’m still a materialist, I’m still holding to the idea that it’s all in the brain; mind=brain. So, of course, that piqued my interest and I reached out to Ed and was able to get him to agree to come on the show.

Now, it turned out to be quite a contentious interview at times. Ed’s got a lot of strong opinions, he’s not afraid to express them and I, as you know, am generally not someone to back down from asking questions… and I know that sometimes pisses people off.

Now, Ed says a bunch of stuff in this interview that, in the final analysis I think is a little bit out there, but we can discuss that later and pull that apart in the forum, but there’s one thing that he said that I really did want to follow up on directly, and that was his comment about Dean Radin, because I’ve always found Dean Radin to be absolutely one of the smartest guys in the room, when it comes to parapsychology; and certainly a topnotch, careful researcher. So when Ed did his little shtick on Dean Radin’s recent double-slit experiment, I really knew I wanted to follow up with that. I was able to have a little email correspondence with Dean and I will update you on what I discovered at the end of this show.
 
Can't get the podcast to play, either here or on Skeptiko proper Alex.

Says: NO RESULTS FOUND
 
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"I’ve always found Dean Radin to be absolutely one of the smartest guys in the room, when it comes to parapsychology;"

Revised 3/27/17 ...

From the transcript:
Dr. Ed May: No, they cannot report to you while their brain is dysfunctioning. All you know is, beforehand they had some experience, after-hand when they wake up they have some experience, and they report to you afterwards, what they saw while they were “dead”. You don’t know whether they got that after, retro-cognitively by normal ESP way to do it. You can’t do that, you just can’t.

Dean Radin also believes veridical pereptions during NDEs are best explained as clairvoyance and not as out of the body consciousness.

I’ve always found Dean Radin to be absolutely one of the smartest guys in the room, when it comes to parapsychology; and certainly a topnotch, careful researcher.

Dean Radin wrote: ""... the primary anomalies associated with NDEs are reports of veridical perceptions that could not have been known or inferred from the perspective of the patient ... So the OBE aspects of NDEs do not necessarily imply an actual separation from the body, and hence NDEs can be interpreted as a particularly vivid form of clairvoyance in brains that are not operating normally."

I replied to this in another thread:

...

And Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is doing his part to limit the NDE phenomenon:
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2014/03/was-buddha-just-nice-guy.html
Dean Radin said...
...But until we find evidence that memory is not brain-centric, and that it too can persist without a body, then the question about precisely *what* survives remains unresolved.
...
On alternative interpretations of NDEs ...

I was invited to write an article on this topic for Missouri Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Missouri State Medical Association. You can read the journal online here: http://www.omagdigital.com/publication?i=177483. See the Sept/Oct issue for the beginning of a series of articles on NDEs.

My article was published in a 2014 issue, so it isn't available online yet. The bottom line of my argument was that the primary anomalies associated with NDEs are reports of veridical perceptions that could not have been known or inferred from the perspective of the patient.

For someone who is not familiar with clairvoyance, this type of report could be taken as evidence that the mind has literally separated from the body (i.e., gone OBE). The literal interpretation is consistent with survival of consciousness. But veridical reports of distant events is virtually the same as what we know as clairvoyance-in-the-living. So the OBE aspects of NDEs do not necessarily imply an actual separation from the body, and hence NDEs can be interpreted as a particularly vivid form of clairvoyance in brains that are not operating normally.
"... the primary anomalies associated with NDEs are reports of veridical perceptions that could not have been known or inferred from the perspective of the patient ... So the OBE aspects of NDEs do not necessarily imply an actual separation from the body, and hence NDEs can be interpreted as a particularly vivid form of clairvoyance in brains that are not operating normally."
Anyone who thinks veridical perception is the primary anomaly of a phenomenon where a person with no brain activity has a conscious experience doesn't understand the phenomenon. Clairvoyance in brains that are not operating normally cannot explain veridical NDEs because some NDEs occur when the brain is not in an abnormal state and the abnormal brain states associated with cardiac arrest, before, during, and after the event are not capable of producing coherent lucid experiences.

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/07/materialist-explanations-of-ndes-fail.html
Greyson
However, unconsciousness produced by cardiac arrest characteristically leaves patients amnesic and confused for events immediately preceding and following these episodes (Aminoff et al., 1988; Parnia & Fenwick, 2002; van Lommel et al., 2001). Furthermore, a substantial number of NDEs contain apparent time "anchors" in the form of verifiable reports of events occurring during the period of insult itself. For example, a cardiac-arrest victim described by van Lommel et al. (2001) had been discovered lying in a meadow 30 minutes or more prior to his arrival at the emergency room, comatose and cyanotic, and yet days later, having recovered, he was able to describe accurately various circumstances occurring in conjunction with the ensuing resuscitation procedures in the hospital.

Also see the next section below: The experience occurred during CPR
The experience occurred during CPR:
Long
When you talk to the patients who have actually survived CPR, one thing that is very, very obvious is that the substantial majority of them are confused or amnesic, even when they're successfully recovered. They may be amnesic for the period of time following their successful resuscitation or even for events prior to the time of their cardiac arrest.

...

If you read even a few near-death experiences, you immediately realize that there’s essentially none of them that talk about episodes of confusion or altered mental status when they just don’t understand what’s going on. You really don’t see that at all.

Again, for near-death experiences, they're highly lucid, organized events. In fact, in the survey we did, we found 76% of people having a near-death experience said their level of consciousness and alertness during the NDE was actually greater than their earthly, everyday life. So again, getting back to statistics, that’s 3/4 and a substantial majority of the remaining 24% still had at least a level of consciousness and alertness equal to their earthly, everyday life.

So for that to be the statistics that you consistently see during near-death experiences and balance that with a substantial majority of people being confused around the time of their successful resuscitation from CPR, you really have to come away with the conclusion that even if there’s blood flow to the brain induced by CPR, it's a life-saving maneuver. By no means is that correlated with clear consciousness and certainly nowhere near the level of consciousness and alertness with near-death experiences. You just don’t see that.

But also, in addition to that, note that the substantial majority of people that have a near-death experience and have an out-of-body experience associated with cardiac arrest, are actually seeing their physical body well prior to the time that CPR is initiated. Once CPR is initiated, you don’t see any alteration in the flow of the near-death experience, suggesting that whatever blood flow might be going back to the brain is affecting the content, modifying it at all, in any way.

...

When there’s a cardiac arrest, the out-of-body observations that are often described during these near-death experiences certainly correlates to a time prior to CPR being initiated, and prior to a time there should be no possibility of a conscious, lucid, organized experience. And yet that’s exactly what happens.

I'll tell you another thing, too, is if you were doing CPR and that were accounting for memory, I would tell you that you would hear a lot more from near-death experiencers. They would talk about their remembrance of the pain of the chest compressions.

Alex, that’s a fairly painful procedure. It often breaks ribs and hurts. And yet, even when you have a patient who had a cardiac arrest and had a near-death experience, essentially never do you hear them describing as part of their near-death experience the pain of chest compressions.

...

And if their consciousness was really returning during CPR, wouldn't near-death experiencers not have out-of-body perceptions but describe their perceptions from within their physical body? And yet you don’t see that with near-death experiences.

So in other words, if you started CPR and they had a near-death experience and suddenly they started to have some consciousness, you’d expect that instead of having the out-of-body experience where their consciousness is apart from their body, their consciousness would be within their body. You just don’t see that.

Anomalous Characteristics of Near-death Experiences
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/anomalous-characteristics-of-near-death.html
Anomalous Characteristics of Near-death Experiences

Enhanced consciousness such as realer-than-real detail, 360 degree vision, and colors not seen before.

Blind people see during NDEs. (Hogan)

Memories of NDEs are more detailed than normal memories.

Visions of deceased people, sometimes deceased people the experiencer had never met or seen pictures of. (Hogan)

A life review where the experiencer feels how he affected other people from their point of view.

Veridical (verifiable) perceptions where the experiencer perceived something when their brain was not functioning, and or perceived something that they could not have perceived with their normal senses even if they were conscious.

NDEs have been experienced by people not close to death.

"Lucid consciousness, well-structured thought processes, and clear reasoning" (Beauregard), calmness and tranquility (near-death.com), when their medical condition should cause confusion and amnesia, disorientation and fear.

Spiritual transformation.

NDEs involve a subjectively conscious experience while the experiencer is objectively unconscious. Hallucinations almost always occur when the subject is awake and conscious. (near-death.com)

NDEs occur more often during flat EEGs and not during abnormal EEGs. (Hogan)

"NDEs are remarkably consistent across virtually all experiencers regardless of age, nationality, religious background, and all other demographics", including atheists. (Hogan)

"Many parts of the brain must be coherent for lucid experiences to occur yet NDEs occur when there is no EEG activity." (Hogan)

NDErs experience "heightened awareness, attention, and memory at a time when consciousness and memory formation are not expected to be functioning" and "only confusional and paranoid thinking... should occur" (Hogan)

"In some cases, a third party has observed visionary figures seen by the experiencers" (Tymn)

Healthy people attending the dying sometimes share in the NDE. (Facco and Christian)

Because of the way the brain is wired, it cannot produce an NDE. (Alexander)

Many NDEs occur during anesthesia when the patient should be unconscious. (Long)

"The most important objection to the adequacy of all ... reductionistic hypotheses is that mental clarity, vivid sensory imagery, a clear memory of the experience, and a conviction that the experience seemed more real than ordinary consciousness are the norm for NDEs. They occur even in conditions of drastically altered cerebral physiology under which the production theory would deem consciousness impossible. (Greyson)

From the transcript: "when I bring through somebody’s departed grandmother from 1894, and I have her name and I know what she looked like; and then they’ll bring me the picture and I [know] her nickname and everything else…And I bring that through because I’ve learned how to do this, and I’ve spent thousands of dollars traveling the world to learn how to do this for ten years. When I bring that through and the Noetic Society’s testing me and everything else to see how it’s done, they’ll turn around and say, well you’re just reading their minds with ESP."

Scientists are entitled to say what the limits of the scientific evidence are. However science is not the only means to ascertaining the truth. When scientists ignore other sources of information and imply the limited scientific view is the only reliable view, that is a misuse of science it is Scientism.

Superpsi cannot explain the evidence for the afterlife:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2009/06/survival-and-super-psi.html
Evidence For Survival that cannot be Explained by Super Psi:

Drop-in Communicators: A medium might be said to be fulfilling an unconscious psychological need when using super-psi to obtain information about deceased relatives of the sitters. However when the medium brings through spirits who are unrelated to the sitters and who communicate for purposes of their own, there is no psychological motivation. Super-psi cannot explain these cases.

Cross Correspondences: When more than one medium spontaneously, without being prodded by an investigator, brings through parts of a message, and the message only makes sense when the parts are put together, this indicates that spirits are independent of any medium. This also shows that spirits have initiative and the ability to organize complex tasks. Super-psi cannot explain this.

Spirits have to learn to communicate through certain forms of mediumship and some spirits are better learners than others. Super-psi is not a good explanation for this phenomenon.

Other characteristics of spirit communication vary with the spirit not the medium or the sitters.

Some haunting phenomena are not dependent on the presence of any single person, some of which are ended through spirit communication. Guy Lyon Playfair, William Roll, and Ian Stevenson all thought some poltergeist phenomenon were caused by spirits.

Birthmarks: When a child remembers a past life, and has a birthmark at a location of an injury in the past life, it suggests the spirit body may carry information from one life to the next. It would be absurd to believe the fetus was psychic and was fulfilling a psychological need by unconsciously creating the birth mark.

Shared Death Bed Visions, Shared Near-Death Experiences, and Multiple Witness Crisis Apparitions are not well explained by super-psi. You'd have to be a super-duper-psychic not just a super-psychic to induce hallucinations in other people.

Near Death Experiences: Cases of NDEs where the experiencer has vivid realer-than-real experiences when there is no brain activity and no veridical information, cannot be explained as psi from a living person because there is no evidence of psi and no live person during the experience. These experiences cannot be explained as ESP during an abnormal brain state shortly before or after the experience. Near-death experiencers neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung, and military remote viewer Joe McMoneagle, who have special qualifications to judge the phenomenon, all believed their near-death experiences represented evidence for survival after death.

ESP is not Produced by the Brain: ESP is not limited by time or distance. It cannot be explained by the known laws of physics including quantum entanglement. Since human consciousness is capable of ESP, consciousness cannot be the result of any physical process in the brain. Anyone who acknowledges the reality of ESP has already admitted that consciousness is non-physical so they have no grounds upon which to deny survival of consciousness.

Mrs Piper's mediumship cannot be explained by ESP
Hodgson gave these five main reasons why he favored survival after death over telepathy as an explanation for Mrs. Pipers mediumship:
Skill in communicating varied with the spirit not the sitters. If Mrs. Piper obtained information from the sitters by telepathy, the quality of the information should vary with the sitter not the spirit.

Some spirits were never good at communicating.

Some spirits were better than others at communicating names.

During otherwise successful sitting where some spirits were able to communicate clearly, sometimes certain spirits well known to the sitters were not able to communicate clearly. This often occurred with spirits who had suffered from a long illness or a mental disturbance at the time of death. This confusion in a communicator was sometimes unexpected by the sitters particularly when the person was noted for clear thinking in life.

All spirits had trouble communicating at first but improved with practice.

This occurred even when the sitters were experienced and had had other spirits come through.

Difficulty in communicating could be overcome with the assistance of other spirits. Telepathy does not explain this.

Spirits seemed to be confused for a few days just after death.

This confusion was not due to changing the sitters. It occurred when the sitters remained the same.

Stray thoughts from the spirits (not the medium or sitter) seemed to leak through into the communications if the spirit was having difficulty communicating.

These thoughts reflected subjects that would be of particular concern to the spirit such as situations involving living relatives but which were unknown to the sitters.

These stray thoughts were thought to explain some of the seeming failures of spirits to correctly answer questions aimed and proving their identity. This is not explained by telepathy.

When spirits communicated by writing and controlled the medium themselves, confusion was apparent. When spirits communicated indirectly through speech by the spirit control Phinuit, confusion on the part of the spirit was obscured because Phinuit was acting as an intermediate. This explains some of the failures of spirits to correctly answer questions aimed at proving their identity, and explains some instances when Phinuit was inaccurate. This is also not explained by telepathy.

Characteristics of children communicators

The spirits of young children recently deceased had clearer memories of early childhood than spirits who had died many years before. This was not explainable by telepathy because the the sitters often had clear memories of the spirit's early childhood.

Spirits of young children recently deceased tended to communicate more clearly than adults recently deceased. This is not explained by telepathy.

Spirits of individuals who died in childhood express themselves as though they had grown during the intervening time. This occurred even when they were still thought of as young children by the sitters.
Other Evidence Not Consistent With Telepathy...

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/near-death-experiences-and-afterlife.html
Dr. Alvarado said:

For many workers in the field, survival research is not a main interest. To some extent this is academics as usual. People specialize in some areas and develop interests due to personality traits, life experiences, training, and employment opportunities, and parapsychology is no exception. Then there are concerns such as getting tenure and the belief that the area has many methodological difficulties. However, I believe that in some cases there is more than this. In some circles it is more “respectable” to conduct ESP experiments than working with survival-related phenomena such as apparitions or mediumship. I still remember how the director of a parapsychology unit within an university, wanting to keep a conservative image, discouraged students from pursuing topics such as apparitions for dissertation research.

When deciding the best explanation for a phenomenon, the beliefs of experiencers must be considered. They are there on the spot. There is no one more qualified to asses their experiences than they are. NDErs consistently say their experiences are real and that is a strong argument in favor of the reality of their experiences. As shown above, none of the known causes of hallucinations or ESP can explain NDEs.

The opinions of non-scientist experts should also be given due weight. The expertise of mediums is shown above in the links to different forms of mediumship. Mediums live with afterlife phenomena every day. They know all the fine details that do not get published in books and parapsychological studies. Many mediums also experience other forms of ESP and they can tell the difference between spirit communication and ESP. Mediums say they perceive and communicate with spirits. They are the foremost experts in spirit communication and there are no better qualified experts on ESP and survival of consciousness.

"Mediums live with afterlife phenomena every day. They know all the fine details that do not get published in books and parapsychological studies. Many mediums also experience other forms of ESP and they can tell the difference between spirit communication and ESP. Mediums say they perceive and communicate with spirits. They are the foremost experts in spirit communication and there are no better qualified experts on ESP and survival of consciousness."

From my own experiences taking classes as in mediumship:
Once I was in a mediumship class when I felt the presence of a spirit who I knew from previous readings and who now wanted me to give a message to someone in the room. I said to the spirit mentally, "I don't want to give the message now" and I explained my reasons, I was a new student and didn't want to speak out of turn. I didn't say anything about this aloud. A few seconds later a more advanced student said that he sensed the same spirit and gave the message. Mediums routinely experience spirits as people with initiative and purpose capable of solving problems.
Mediums routinely experience spirits not as flat files of information but as people with initiative and purpose capable of solving problems.
Once I attended a trance workshop given by a visiting medium at my Spiritualist church. We didn't have any trance mediums at our church so none of us did this regularly. During the workshop many people I knew from my church and from mediumship class participated. I was a new student at the time so I was only allowed to observe. These people, who I knew well, each took a turn, and after about twenty or thirty seconds of meditation, (we didn't have to dim the lights) would go into a light trance. They were conscious but a spirit would speak through them at the same time. The spirits told us about who they were in life and what they were doing in the spirit world. Some of the spirits were just as amazed that they could speak through a living person as I was to hear them. It seemed to me that there was a personality there and not just information being accessed. Since I knew the people in the workshop I could tell they not making it up consciously or unconsciously and they were not hypnotized.
 
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Dean Radin can't get an effect you can see without a statistical analysis. As far as I know, he has developed no practical applications of psi. That doesn't mean his research is not important, but the people who really understand psi are the people who know how to use it for practical purposes on a daily basis. People like Ed May. And many many others, talented working psychics, who parapsychologists mostly ignore because of the strategy they planned out when the field shifted from psychical research to parapsychology, when they shifted from studying talented psychics to mostly studying ordinary individuals.

Interesting
 
This is an interesting interview. I don't think I have heard Ed May interviewed before...

As regards Radin's study one thing that baffles me is what is the connection between meditation and collapse of the wave function. I get the experimental question "does consciousness collapse the wave function"? But consciousness and meditation are unlikely the same thing. If the answer to the question is "Yes", then any conscious being somehow interacts with reality collapsing wave functions... which is very very vague, but still...

Why would a human meditator have any advantage over, say, a cat or a giraffe in collapsing wave functions?

If Radin's results are correct aren't we just seeing the effects of micro-pk on photons?
Or... I will rephrase this and say... Radin's conclusions only tell us that human meditators can produce a micro-pk effects on elementary particles. That's pretty much all we can say, no?

cheers
 
Dr. Ed May: No, no, no, no, no, no, no absolutely not. I’ve just been engaged in a huge debate over this issue of near-death experiences, arguing with my colleagues that that is hard evidence for survival of bodily death. First off, there’s nobody that has had a near-death experience, who’s in fact dead.

Ed May is ignorant of the research, and he hasn't had an NDE (as far as I know).

Melvin Morse is a doctor who studies NDE's said this (to Alex) about a patient of his who had an NDE:
She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. ... she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her.
Joe McMoneagle who worked as a military remote viewer and has and also had an NDE said this:
One of the things that does occur somewhere in that six month period [after an NDE], you reach a bottom point in that depression where you suddenly realize that, well since you know that consciousness continues, and you don't really cease to exist as an individual

References:

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/05/skeptiko-interview-with-dr-melvin-morse.html
http://www.skeptiko.com/172-melvin-morse-doctors-do-not-listen-to-near-death-experience-accounts/
So by chance or coincidence or fate or whatever, I happened to be in Pocatello, Idaho and there was a child there who had drowned in a community swimming pool. She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. It just so happened that a pediatrician was in the locker room at the same community swimming pool and he attempted to revive her on the spot. His intervention probably saved her life but again, he documented that she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her. This was a very deeply religious Mormon family. They actually did. They crowded around the bedside and held hands and prayed for her and such as that. She was then transported to Salt Lake City. She lived. She not only lived but three days later she made a full recovery.

Alex Tsakiris: And what did she tell you…

Dr. Melvin Morse: Her first words, the first words she said when she came out of her coma, she turned to the nurse down at Primary Children’s in Salt Lake City. She says, “Where are my friends?” And then they’d say, “What do you mean, where are your friends?” She’d say, “Yeah, all the people that I met in Heaven. Where are they?” [Laughs]

The innocence of a child. So I saw her in follow-up, another one of these odd twists of fate. I happened to be in addition doing my residency and just happened to be working in the same community clinic in that area. My jaw just dropped to the floor when she and her mother walked in. I was like, “What?” I had not even heard that she had lived. I had assumed that she had died. She looked at me and she said to her mother, “There’s the man that put a tube down my nose.” [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: What are you thinking at that point when she says that?

Dr. Melvin Morse: You know, it’s one of those things—I laughed. I sort of giggled the way a teenager would giggle about sex. It was just embarrassing. I didn’t know what to think. Certainly, I’d trained at Johns Hopkins. I thought when you died you died. I said, “What do you mean, you saw me put a tube in your nose?”

She said, “Oh, yeah. I saw you take me into another room that looked like a doughnut.”

She said things like, “You called someone on the phone and you asked, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

She described the nurses talking about a cat who had died. One of the nurses had a cat that had died and it was just an incidental conversation. She said she was floating out of her body during this entire time. I just sort of laughed. And then she taps me on the wrist. You’ve got to hear this, Alex.

After I laughed she taps me on the wrist and she says, “You’ll see, Dr. Morse. Heaven is fun.” [Laughs] I was completely blown away by the entire experience. I immediately determined that I would figure out what was going on here. This was in complete defiance of everything I had been taught in terms of medicine.​


http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/notable-near-death-experiencers-prove.html

Joe McMoneagle worked for the US military as a remote viewer and he was involved in the research and development that led to the US military's remote viewing program. Joe also had a near-death experience which convinced him that death does not end consciousness and we continue to exist as an individual after death. The following excerpt from an interview with Jeff Rense shows his views on NDEs:

JOE: One of the things that does occur somewhere in that six month period [after an NDE], you reach a bottom point in that depression where you suddenly realize that, well since you know that consciousness continues, and you don't really cease to exist as an individual, there's no real reason to be depressed about where you are.​
 
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Ed May is ignorant of the research, and he hasn't had an NDE (as far as I know).

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/05/skeptiko-interview-with-dr-melvin-morse.html
http://www.skeptiko.com/172-melvin-morse-doctors-do-not-listen-to-near-death-experience-accounts/
So by chance or coincidence or fate or whatever, I happened to be in Pocatello, Idaho and there was a child there who had drowned in a community swimming pool. She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. It just so happened that a pediatrician was in the locker room at the same community swimming pool and he attempted to revive her on the spot. His intervention probably saved her life but again, he documented that she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her. This was a very deeply religious Mormon family. They actually did. They crowded around the bedside and held hands and prayed for her and such as that. She was then transported to Salt Lake City. She lived. She not only lived but three days later she made a full recovery.

Alex Tsakiris: And what did she tell you…

Dr. Melvin Morse: Her first words, the first words she said when she came out of her coma, she turned to the nurse down at Primary Children’s in Salt Lake City. She says, “Where are my friends?” And then they’d say, “What do you mean, where are your friends?” She’d say, “Yeah, all the people that I met in Heaven. Where are they?” [Laughs]

The innocence of a child. So I saw her in follow-up, another one of these odd twists of fate. I happened to be in addition doing my residency and just happened to be working in the same community clinic in that area. My jaw just dropped to the floor when she and her mother walked in. I was like, “What?” I had not even heard that she had lived. I had assumed that she had died. She looked at me and she said to her mother, “There’s the man that put a tube down my nose.” [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: What are you thinking at that point when she says that?

Dr. Melvin Morse: You know, it’s one of those things—I laughed. I sort of giggled the way a teenager would giggle about sex. It was just embarrassing. I didn’t know what to think. Certainly, I’d trained at Johns Hopkins. I thought when you died you died. I said, “What do you mean, you saw me put a tube in your nose?”

She said, “Oh, yeah. I saw you take me into another room that looked like a doughnut.”

She said things like, “You called someone on the phone and you asked, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

She described the nurses talking about a cat who had died. One of the nurses had a cat that had died and it was just an incidental conversation. She said she was floating out of her body during this entire time. I just sort of laughed. And then she taps me on the wrist. You’ve got to hear this, Alex.

After I laughed she taps me on the wrist and she says, “You’ll see, Dr. Morse. Heaven is fun.” [Laughs] I was completely blown away by the entire experience. I immediately determined that I would figure out what was going on here. This was in complete defiance of everything I had been taught in terms of medicine.​


http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/notable-near-death-experiencers-prove.html

Joe McMoneagle worked for the US military as a remote viewer and he was involved in the research and development that led to the US military's remote viewing program. Joe also had a near-death experience which convinced him that death does not end consciousness and we continue to exist as an individual after death. The following excerpt from an interview with Jeff Rense shows his views on NDEs:

JOE: One of the things that does occur somewhere in that six month period [after an NDE], you reach a bottom point in that depression where you suddenly realize that, well since you know that consciousness continues, and you don't really cease to exist as an individual, there's no real reason to be depressed about where you are.​

Hear the interview, he claims that he is familiar with the research (several times) and also claims that he just finished a book by a proponent. That he clings to the "not really dead" argument is another matter, as is that he misrepresents the postures of several quantum physicists by generalizing. He also goes on a tangent about Stevenson.
 
Hear the interview, he claims that he is familiar with the research

I looked at the transcript and saw that. Part of what I am trying to do with the post you quoted is to show that he is wrong when he says he is familiar with the research. He says he is familiar with it but he is not. If he is familiar with the research, then maybe he is being disingenuous but I don't think he would do that.
 
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You will learn more about parapsychology watching the John Edward show on TV than by reading all of Dean Radin's books and papers which tell you nothing more than psi is real - something ordinary people have always known - at least until so-called "scientists" told them otherwise.

I don't often disagree with you Jim, but to be honest, I find watching Darren Brown much more impressive than watching John Edwards. I know - take a deep breath, maybe some smelling salts. :D I find Dean Radin, on the other hand, very honest in his views. He's a true scientist imo. That's not that I think John Edwards dishonest, just that he's trying to achieve very different objectives from Dean.

You seem to be looking at this from a true believers point of view.

Try seeing it from someone like my own viewpoint, I've no strong personal evidence of psi, no NDE or any other experience. At least nothing that blew me away. But I'm still a proponent, my gut tells me so, as well as the fact that so much makes sense to me. I would have to say I'm not 100% convinced of anything, however 'real' it appears.

So in a way I 'rate' Dean Radin higher than I do John Edwards. Am I making sense?
 
As regards Radin's study one thing that baffles me is what is the connection between meditation and collapse of the wave function. I get the experimental question "does consciousness collapse the wave function"? But consciousness and meditation are unlikely the same thing. If the answer to the question is "Yes", then any conscious being somehow interacts with reality collapsing wave functions... which is very very vague, but still...

Why would a human meditator have any advantage over, say, a cat or a giraffe in collapsing wave functions?
My hunch about this is consciousness communicates routinely with the physical world by collapsing wave functions in the brain. The brain then amplifies the effect massively to produce a limb movement or whatever. Psychics manage to collapse wave functions in other people's brains or in inanimate objects. From that point of view, presentiment might be a vital part of the process, because it lets consciousness see the consequences of collapsing the wave function in particular ways - so the chosen collapse has a purpose.
If Radin's results are correct aren't we just seeing the effects of micro-pk on photons?
Or... I will rephrase this and say... Radin's conclusions only tell us that human meditators can produce a micro-pk effects on elementary particles. That's pretty much all we can say, no?
I agree with that - the experiment would only have proved that consciousness is directly associated with the wave function collapse IMHO if the effect size had been very large. However, I don't think we can make the opposite deduction, because collapsing wave functions outside the brain is probably extremely difficult.

David
 
Regarding Ed's "retro causation" explanation....

Dr. Ed May: No, they cannot report to you while their brain is dysfunctioning. All you know is, beforehand they had some experience, after-hand when they wake up they have some experience, and they report to you afterwards, what they saw while they were “dead”. You don’t know whether they got that after, retro-cognitively by normal ESP way to do it. You can’t do that, you just can’t.

Radin expressed this view too. They are both are wrong. NDE's are lucid experiences. The abnormal brain states, before, during and after cardiac arrest that might hypothetically induce ESP cannot produce lucid experiences. Even if someone has a lucid experience like an NDE "retro-cognitively" due to a cardiac arrest, that still requires out of the body consciousness to explain it.

References:

ESP is not produced by the brain:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/near-death-experiences-and-afterlife.html#facts_esp


http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/near-death-experiences-and-afterlife.html#facts_veridical
Many NDEs occur during cardiac arrest. Residual brain activity is not sufficient to explain memories or conscious experiences that occur during cardiac arrest. And cardiac arrest causes amnesia and confusion shortly before and after the event.

Some people may suggest an abnormal brain state during the onset or recovery from cardiac arrest may produce clairvoyant visions of events that occur during cardiac arrest. If this is true, the clairvoyance must still be due to out-of-the-body consciousness. The same argument by which NDE researchers conclude that the lucid conscious experience of the NDE cannot be explained by it occuring before or after cardiac arrest can be used to conclude that clairvoyance occurring at the onset or recovery from cardiac arrest must be due to out-of-the-body consciousness. That argument is that the brain activity that occurs at the onset to, or recovery from, cardiac arrest is not capable of supporting lucid consciousness or memories. Any lucid conscious memories, such as those characteristic of NDEs, that occur anytime from the onset to cardiac arrest through the recovery from cardiac arrest, whether psychic or mundane, must be due to out-of-the-body consciousness.

In other words, if anyone is going to suggest that an abnormal brain state induced by cardiac arrest is responsible for producing ESP, that ESP must be due to consciousness existing out-of-the-body because the abnormal brain states that occur at the onset, duration, and ending of cardiac arrest are not capable of producing memories or supporting the lucid consciousness that is experienced during an NDE. At other times than the onset, duration, or ending of cardiac arrest, the brain is functioning normally and there is no abnormal brain state that might be attributed to the production of ESP. If ESP can produce conscious experiences that do not require the brain, then ESP must be due to out-of-the-body consciousness. In fact, in a subsequent section it will be shown that the best explanation for all forms of ESP is that ESP is not produced by the brain but is a capability of non-physical consciousness. In consideration of this and of all the evidence (below) that the mind can exist separate from the brain, the best explanation for veridical perceptions during NDEs is the spirit leaving the body and retaining memory of the event.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/07/materialist-explanations-of-ndes-fail.html#residual
Greyson
In cardiac arrest, even neuronal action-potentials, the ultimate physical basis for coordination of neural activity between widely separated brain regions, are rapidly abolished (Kelly et al., 2007). Moreover, cells in the hippocampus, the region thought to be essential for memory formation, are especially vulnerable to the effects of anoxia (Vriens et al., 1996). In short, it is not credible to suppose that NDEs occurring under conditions of general anesthesia, let alone cardiac arrest, can be accounted for in terms of some hypothetical residual capacity of the brain to process and store complex information under those conditions.
...
Greyson
However, unconsciousness produced by cardiac arrest characteristically leaves patients amnesic and confused for events immediately preceding and following these episodes (Aminoff et al., 1988; Parnia & Fenwick, 2002; van Lommel et al., 2001). Furthermore, a substantial number of NDEs contain apparent time "anchors" in the form of verifiable reports of events occurring during the period of insult itself. For example, a cardiac-arrest victim described by van Lommel et al. (2001) had been discovered lying in a meadow 30 minutes or more prior to his arrival at the emergency room, comatose and cyanotic, and yet days later, having recovered, he was able to describe accurately various circumstances occurring in conjunction with the ensuing resuscitation procedures in the hospital.

Also see the next section below: The experience occurred during CPR
The experience occurred during CPR:
Long
When you talk to the patients who have actually survived CPR, one thing that is very, very obvious is that the substantial majority of them are confused or amnesic, even when they're successfully recovered. They may be amnesic for the period of time following their successful resuscitation or even for events prior to the time of their cardiac arrest.

...

If you read even a few near-death experiences, you immediately realize that there’s essentially none of them that talk about episodes of confusion or altered mental status when they just don’t understand what’s going on. You really don’t see that at all.

Again, for near-death experiences, they're highly lucid, organized events. In fact, in the survey we did, we found 76% of people having a near-death experience said their level of consciousness and alertness during the NDE was actually greater than their earthly, everyday life. So again, getting back to statistics, that’s 3/4 and a substantial majority of the remaining 24% still had at least a level of consciousness and alertness equal to their earthly, everyday life.

So for that to be the statistics that you consistently see during near-death experiences and balance that with a substantial majority of people being confused around the time of their successful resuscitation from CPR, you really have to come away with the conclusion that even if there’s blood flow to the brain induced by CPR, it's a life-saving maneuver. By no means is that correlated with clear consciousness and certainly nowhere near the level of consciousness and alertness with near-death experiences. You just don’t see that.

But also, in addition to that, note that the substantial majority of people that have a near-death experience and have an out-of-body experience associated with cardiac arrest, are actually seeing their physical body well prior to the time that CPR is initiated. Once CPR is initiated, you don’t see any alteration in the flow of the near-death experience, suggesting that whatever blood flow might be going back to the brain is affecting the content, modifying it at all, in any way.

...

When there’s a cardiac arrest, the out-of-body observations that are often described during these near-death experiences certainly correlates to a time prior to CPR being initiated, and prior to a time there should be no possibility of a conscious, lucid, organized experience. And yet that’s exactly what happens.

I'll tell you another thing, too, is if you were doing CPR and that were accounting for memory, I would tell you that you would hear a lot more from near-death experiencers. They would talk about their remembrance of the pain of the chest compressions.

Alex, that’s a fairly painful procedure. It often breaks ribs and hurts. And yet, even when you have a patient who had a cardiac arrest and had a near-death experience, essentially never do you hear them describing as part of their near-death experience the pain of chest compressions.

...

And if their consciousness was really returning during CPR, wouldn't near-death experiencers not have out-of-body perceptions but describe their perceptions from within their physical body? And yet you don’t see that with near-death experiences.

So in other words, if you started CPR and they had a near-death experience and suddenly they started to have some consciousness, you’d expect that instead of having the out-of-body experience where their consciousness is apart from their body, their consciousness would be within their body. You just don’t see that.
None of the materialist attempts to explain NDEs can really explain them. NDEs cannot be explained by: a lack of oxygen, a dying brain, hallucinations, religious expectations, cultural expectations, hearing about medical procedures after the fact, hearing during resuscitation, brain dysfunction, retinal dysfunction causing an image of a tunnel, brain chemicals such as ketamine, endogenous opioids, neurotransmitter imbalances, or hallucinogens including DMT, REM intrusions, epilepsy or seizures, psychopathology, unique personality traits, residual brain activity during unconsciousness, the experience occurring before or after brain activity stopped, brain activity during CPR, evolutionary adaptation, depersonalization, memory of birth, medication, naloxone, defense against dying, partial anesthesia, misuse of anecdotes, or selective reporting.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/07/materialist-explanations-of-ndes-fail.html
 
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I have yet to listen to this interview, but i am curious, does Ed May propose a materialistic explanation of remote viewing or precognition? To me, I think all the various 'paranormal' phenomena are linked together by the fact that they employ consciousness in ways that make no sense from a strictly materialist standpoint - so to some extent, the existence of one such phenomenon strengthens the probability that they all occur.

Put another way, any extension of science that could explain remote viewing, could undoubtedly explain a hell of a lot more as well - and since it is claimed to be possible to remote view the past and future, this would probably include life continuing after death via some sort of NDE consciousness separation event.

The materialist view of consciousness (in as much as one exists) is of a statistical computation performed within the brain - it can't review the future, and can't communicate at a distance, or perform micro-PK, or observe stuff remotely without technical wizardry.

David
 
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I looked at the transcript and saw that. Part of what I am trying to do with my post you quoted is to show that he is wrong when he says he is familiar with the research. He says he is familiar with it but he is not.. If he is familiar with the research, then maybe he is being disingenuous but I don't think he would do that.

I see... Carry on then.
 
I don't often disagree with you Jim, but to be honest, I find watching Darren Brown much more impressive than watching John Edwards. I know - take a deep breath, maybe some smelling salts. :D I find Dean Radin, on the other hand, very honest in his views. He's a true scientist imo. That's not that I think John Edwards dishonest, just that he's trying to achieve very different objectives from Dean.

You seem to be looking at this from a true believers point of view.

Try seeing it from someone like my own viewpoint, I've no strong personal evidence of psi, no NDE or any other experience. At least nothing that blew me away. But I'm still a proponent, my gut tells me so, as well as the fact that so much makes sense to me. I would have to say I'm not 100% convinced of anything, however 'real' it appears.

So in a way I 'rate' Dean Radin higher than I do John Edwards. Am I making sense?

Yes you are making sense. I don't disagree with you. If you want scientific evidence to convince you of psi Dean Radin is helpful. That's what I meant when I wrote "all of Dean Radin's books and papers which tell you nothing more than psi is real " But if you want to understand how psi works, I think you would do better watching John Edward.
 
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