Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

I'm not (constantly) bemoaning academia, I understand why "it" can't (in principle that is) recognise NDE as a mind brain separation. There's no mechanism for such. What NDE is pointing to (as difficult as it might be to accept) is that there is an invisible "something" residing in us which leaves the body at death (the commonest situation) That's what the data shows, that's what the people report.

That's the naive perspective. You have an OBE like mine around the time of puberty, and you wonder why the back yard gate that was banging in the wind that night, stayed open - as if held - as you went through it. Why you went across the yard at one height, and looked at the kitchen doorway across the yard, then began looking down at the kitchen step as you approached - just as if you would need to navigate over this threshold carefully in the dark. Why did I have to go through doorways? why did the gate get held open for me? why did I need to bother with navigating a step?

That's what I call a first person perspective OBE, it proved to be a real description of very unique circumstances that I could not have known about, and it was later verified by myself and three witnesses. The only way I can explain it, is that that there was a third party who had done the 'seeing'. All my research points to the sporadic explosions of network creation that occur throughout childhood and adolescence, and which are eroded by non-use, occasionally creating such a variety of new patterns, that one new one is so similar, that it is interfered with by another's quite similar network patterns.
 
My oldest friend who is very high up in academia would disagree with you. You cannot talk about life after death, telepathy, reincarnation and al the rest of it if you want to get up the ladder.

At the very least the resistance to new ideas needs to be studied further:

Study: Elite scientists can hold back science

What's interesting is that the deaths seemed to hurt the careers of the luminaries' junior collaborators, the ones who frequently co-authored papers with them but not in a senior role. "The death of an elite scientist has a negative and seemingly permanent impact on the productivity of their coauthors," the study reports. They published less, while outsiders flooded the void.

(The authors caution that gatekeeping by elite researchers isn't always a bad thing. "Gatekeeping activities could have beneficial properties when [a] field is in its inception," granting scientists more room to take risks.)

All of this is another example of how progress in science is confounded by human behavior. We see this in so many ways. Scientists lie about results. Or they discount insights derived from failures. Science is so obsessed with the rewards of solving complicated problems that it forgets about the simple ones. The field overwhelminglyis biased toward males (experiments have shown "John" gets more accolades than "Jennifer" with the identical résumé).

It's worth remembering: Science may be a noble discipline based on cold logic and rational observation; but humans are animals fueled by emotion and bias. As the NBER researchers conclude: "[T]he idiosyncratic stances of individual scientists can do much to alter, or at least delay, the course of scientific advance."
 
Yes, but that's your OBE, Max. You can't negate all the other thousands of OBE's during NDE that do have the perception of floating, wandering about in some kind of body or whatever you want to call it, soul, spirit, consciousness etc

Dunno why you think that, I'm quite happy that OBE's sometimes contain information that should not have been available to the experient. I'm just suggesting mechanisms (useful ways of understanding), that provide a different way of explaining what's going... People ain't literally leaving the body, rather real external stuff is coming in and causing 'self' to relocate.

That is... that there is a distinction between the location of ones body, and the location of self. Usually the body's senses, force the location of 'self' to be around the body. Creating an individual as a subset of the group, by enclosing the brain within a field of sensory input that forces it to work on behalf of that sensory input. But after that, the experience itself is created from the group (alike patterns), and not the sensory input itself.

This idea (2 mechanisms working in tandem) provides a different (and I think really useful) way of understanding lots of other anomolous phenomena, and a lot of mundane stuff too... Like why we often decorate when we move into a new house, why we take holidays, provides some of the driving force behind mass production & consumption, gives a different slant on the success of brands, and what drives fashion, and why civilisations rise and fall...

It appears that a single organism, working together in this experience, but as individuals, may be useful in both protecting the individual, whilst protecting the group from the individual, in a way that is not possible if the organism works as one without individuals.

My overriding concern is the balance that must be maintained between the individual and the group, and I think that balance may not be quite right at present, and may need some adjustment.
 
Dunno why you think that,

It's just the data, Max, it's how they tell their stories. Have you presented your ideas to someone who has had a floating or a walk-about OBE during a NDE ? If so how did it go down with them ?
 
It's just the data, Max, it's how they tell their stories. Have you presented your ideas to someone who has had a floating or a walk-about OBE during a NDE ? If so how did it go down with them ?

I meant about negating the experience... I'm definitely not doing that. But, I suppose you could say I am negating the naive (traditional) explanations... that would be a bit like claiming the Sun goes around the earth, because we can all see it plainly move across the sky, I'm just claiming this naive explanation is incorrect, and that the earth actually goes round the sun. That is... that something intersects the brain when it is exposed, rather than something actually leaving the body.

Obviously it's more complicated than that... but the general idea is that the brain is not in perfect isolation inside the skull... it can't be, that's just plain nutty... but that's what it appears that neuroscientists seem to assume, when the evidence actually says quite the opposite... some come right out and say it... like David Eagleman in his recent documentary on the brain. Borjigin did much the same, any shielding is used to isolate the equipment, it's unthinkable that you might need to protect the dying brain. It's as if such ideas have been discounted for so long, that it is difficult to now reintroduce them.

Unfortunately, you also probably can't bring yourself to accept that the brain is not isolated...

...and this is what forces people towards either of the two main explanations...
 
I suppose you could say I am negating the naive (traditional) explanations...

But that means the data is effectively naïve, Max and the data is what it is, it can't be altered because it seems impossible. It's true, you can't (usually) observe "anything" tangible "getting out" of the physical body. But based on the data, again, whatever this "consciousness" is that "gets out" and leaves is clearly of such subtlety it would be absurd and counter productive if you could observe it

The data says this "consciousness" tries to make contact with those in the vicinity of it's physical body. Sceptics can't deny this, it's well attested to now. They also report being able to walk through walls, travel instantaneously anywhere etc etc It would be naïve to think that we should be able to observe it...I mean can we observe our minds and thoughts even in the best scanners we have ? All we can see is correlations.

As to your theory, Max it's novel but that's all it is. I've posted NDE's in the past where there was no one else around to transmit etc and I don't want to start all that up again.
 
But that means the data is effectively naïve, Max and the data is what it is, it can't be altered because it seems impossible. It's true, you can't (usually) observe "anything" tangible "getting out" of the physical body. But based on the data, again, whatever this "consciousness" is that "gets out" and leaves is clearly of such subtlety it would be absurd and counter productive if you could observe it

The data says this "consciousness" tries to make contact with those in the vicinity of it's physical body. Sceptics can't deny this, it's well attested to now. They also report being able to walk through walls, travel instantaneously anywhere etc etc It would be naïve to think that we should be able to observe it...I mean can we observe our minds and thoughts even in the best scanners we have ? All we can see is correlations.

As to your theory, Max it's novel but that's all it is. I've posted NDE's in the past where there was no one else around to transmit etc and I don't want to start all that up again.

Aye, but they weren't veridical... we often don't know their physiological condition, and they often saw themselves and their surroundings differently to how they actually were...

But you also are reluctant to countenance the idea that external fields affect the brain, particularly when it's own EM field has lost power... just like the neuroscientists ain't willing to entertain it.

We've got plenty of data showing 'self' can be relocated, if you provide the brain with appropriate sensory data. I'm simply saying that in the absence of its own field, the brain can synchronise it's networks with external fields.

We now have behavioural evidence from birds and turtles that the sort of hyper-weak magnetic fields I'm talking about can affect them, some using fields 40,000 times weaker than the earth's magnetic field. No mechanism has yet been discovered to explain these observations, but they stand as evidence that hyper-weak fields can affect wakeful organisms...

How much more sensitive this mechanism might be to external fields in the absence of the brains own field is simply unknown. But it's bound to be temporarily more sensitive to compatible fields in my view, we already know that the networks themselves are much more sensitive to fields, than individual neurons are.
 
Last edited:
I'm not ignoring anything. I think it's f%&ing amazing that matter could do that without a mind, no matter how many billions of years of "evolution" are involved. More amazing then psychic phenomena being real.

Cheers,
Bill
It's stuff like this that make me feel that mathematical concepts are discovered rather than formulated by human minds.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160628-peter-scholze-arithmetic-geometry-profile/

Unlike many mathematicians, he often starts not with a particular problem he wants to solve, but with some elusive concept that he wants to understand for its own sake. But then, said Ana Caraiani, a number theorist at Princeton University who has collaborated with Scholze, the structures he creates “turn out to have applications in a million other directions that weren’t predicted at the time, just because they were the right objects to think about.”

Cheers,
Bill
 
Back
Top