People who argue that suffering on the earth is evidence against the afterlife are making a religious argument. They are making assumptions about the afterlife and rejecting empirical evidence because it does not support their assumptions. It is much more scientific to form an understanding about the afterlife based on the empirical evidence.

What we think we know about the afterlife should be based on empirical evidence. The biggest obstacle to understanding what NDEs, evidential mediums, and other sources of information about the afterlife tell us is the misunderstanding propagated by mainstream religion: that if you are good and worship God correctly He will watch over you and take care of you like a loving father. There is no empirical evidence that this is true. The evidence points to the understanding that the purpose of incarnating is to learn by solving problems. This means we need psychopaths to give us problems and we need to be psychopaths in turn to experience the problems psychopaths have.

Suffering as a necessity for human soul evolution,afterlife logic.I guess it makes sense.Heard of souls incarnating as abusive spouses,rapists even bloodthirsty vikings just to experience the sensations.Seems that karma doesn't work the way buddhists and hindus envision it.
 
One thing a particular bother me : in an experience with mediums. Some mediums said they did communicate with deceased people. They brought true information. But, in fact, these people were not dead at all. They were alive.

Maybe it involved super-ESP which is an alternative theory to the afterlife hypothesis where information is received through psychic channels instead of the soul leaving the body.There is one dutch parapsychologist named Dick Bierman who is an atheist but believes in psychic phenomena.
 
Well yes, and there are people that start to behave differently (usually worse) after injury or disease to their brain.

The problem is that there doesn't seem any way to incorporate consciousness into a materialist philosophy because consciousness isn't just computation - it includes (and is probably dominated by) sensation - qualia.

I guess someone needs to study lengthy NDE's of psychopaths!

David

The most interesting cases of brain injury affecting conscious experience are split brain patients.These people have their corpus callosum,the.bundle of neurons that connect the two cerebral hemispheres,transectes because of incurable epilepsy.No change in behavior or IQ was seen and the procedure continued until Roger Sperry and Gazzaniga did some clever experiments that illustrated their functional differences.For instance when a word or image was flashed only to the right eye,the person would immediately verbally recognize the object or word,since the left hemisphere is involved in analytical thinking,language and mathematical reasoning.When an object is flashed to the left eye,since the hemispheres cannot communicate,the person reports seeing nothing,but when a collection of objects is presented before them,they always pick the correct object.Sometimes the hemispheres are in conflict,for instance one man was hitting his wife with his left hand,at the same time comforting her with his right,or a woman with her left hand was trying to dress herself while the other hand was undressing.Some believe that this suggests the existence of two conscious selves in one brain.I wonder how you explain this phenomenon in the context of the filter theory of consciousness.
 
The most interesting cases of brain injury affecting conscious experience are split brain patients.These people have their corpus callosum,the.bundle of neurons that connect the two cerebral hemispheres,transectes because of incurable epilepsy.No change in behavior or IQ was seen and the procedure continued until Roger Sperry and Gazzaniga did some clever experiments that illustrated their functional differences.For instance when a word or image was flashed only to the right eye,the person would immediately verbally recognize the object or word,since the left hemisphere is involved in analytical thinking,language and mathematical reasoning.When an object is flashed to the left eye,since the hemispheres cannot communicate,the person reports seeing nothing,but when a collection of objects is presented before them,they always pick the correct object.
I have become somewhat wary of experiments like this, because I think the experimenters have to be careful to avoid drawing any evidence that contradicts materialism otherwise they won't get it published. For example, one thing seems clear (I think) - it isn't possible to keep two distinct trains of thought going inside such a person for more than an instant. For example if one eye were to see a faked picture of the assassination of the current president, and then some time was allowed to elapse, would the two halves of the brain retain inconsistent ideas? I think I have read that cutting the corpus callosum doesn't sever all connections, so these inconsistencies don't last! Now whether that makes sense is another matter because the meaning of signals down neurons are supposed to depend on the nerve in question (as opposed to audio telephone lines, where any one could host the same message), so it seems strange that the information can leak across via another route!

These experiments may be more like optical illusions that then get over interpreted in a strictly materialistic way.

One thing that one hears repeatedly about these unfortunate people, is just how normal they appear! That seems to be the really remarkable fact - that these patients with a completely artificial damage to their brains, still behave like normal human beings.

David
 
I have become somewhat wary of experiments like this, because I think the experimenters have to be careful to avoid drawing any evidence that contradicts materialism otherwise they won't get it published. For example, one thing seems clear (I think) - it isn't possible to keep two distinct trains of thought going inside such a person for more than an instant. For example if one eye were to see a faked picture of the assassination of the current president, and then some time was allowed to elapse, would the two halves of the brain retain inconsistent ideas? I think I have read that cutting the corpus callosum doesn't sever all connections, so these inconsistencies don't last! Now whether that makes sense is another matter because the meaning of signals down neurons are supposed to depend on the nerve in question (as opposed to audio telephone lines, where any one could host the same message), so it seems strange that the information can leak across via another route!

These experiments may be more like optical illusions that then get over interpreted in a strictly materialistic way.

One thing that one hears repeatedly about these unfortunate people, is just how normal they appear! That seems to be the really remarkable fact - that these patients with a completely artificial damage to their brains, still behave like normal human beings.

David

There is still communication at the subcortical levels though it is limited and only for certain kind of input.Another interesting thing found in split brain research is that the left hemisphere acts as an interpreter.A picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a snow scene to the right.From a collection of objects the pacient chose with his left hand a shovel and with his right a chicken.When asked why he did these things he said that the chicken goes with the chicken claw and the shovel is needed to clean the chicken coup.In essence the left hemisphere confabulates,makes up a story about what the right hemisphere is doing when there is no integration of visual data.Similar things happen in hypnosis.I remember a philosophy of mind course done by John Searle when he told a story about a friend who hypnotized a subject and commanded him to kneel and stare at the floor tiles.When he awoke from the trance and asked why he was kneeling at the tiles,he said that he was thinking about going into the floor tile business.Admittedly these things don't tell us very much about the origin of consciousness but are interesting facets of brain-consciousness interaction.The arguments against a benevolent God or an afterlife are mainly philosophical.The ruthless principle of natural selection,nature "red in tooth and claw",human beings as simple gene receptacles,the denial of free will,religion and spirituality as mere byproducts of the need for social control and cohesion,spiritual experiences being treated as mere hallucinations or anomalous phenomena.Materialists and atheists incorporate these things into their worldview and ignore or snicker at empirical data that suggests the existence of a nonphysical domain,content in the belief that natural explanations are sufficient for explaining the whole of reality.
 
There is still communication at the subcortical levels though it is limited and only for certain kind of input.Another interesting thing found in split brain research is that the left hemisphere acts as an interpreter.A picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a snow scene to the right.From a collection of objects the pacient chose with his left hand a shovel and with his right a chicken.When asked why he did these things he said that the chicken goes with the chicken claw and the shovel is needed to clean the chicken coup.In essence the left hemisphere confabulates,makes up a story about what the right hemisphere is doing when there is no integration of visual data.Similar things happen in hypnosis.I remember a philosophy of mind course done by John Searle when he told a story about a friend who hypnotized a subject and commanded him to kneel and stare at the floor tiles.When he awoke from the trance and asked why he was kneeling at the tiles,he said that he was thinking about going into the floor tile business.Admittedly these things don't tell us very much about the origin of consciousness but are interesting facets of brain-consciousness interaction.The arguments against a benevolent God or an afterlife are mainly philosophical.The ruthless principle of natural selection,nature "red in tooth and claw",human beings as simple gene receptacles,the denial of free will,religion and spirituality as mere byproducts of the need for social control and cohesion,spiritual experiences being treated as mere hallucinations or anomalous phenomena.Materialists and atheists incorporate these things into their worldview and ignore or snicker at empirical data that suggests the existence of a nonphysical domain,content in the belief that natural explanations are sufficient for explaining the whole of reality.

Even belief and disbelief are based I thing on personal preference.Baptist christians have that "chosen" mentality and try to preach God's message to the ignorant.Muslims are greeted by unspoilt women and rivers of nectar when they die.Atheists are horrified at the concept of eternity in heaven or hell so they reject the faith.My opinion is that the afterlife doesn't cater to human whims and wants.To truly advance spiritually one must transcend the ego or the self,through hard work,discipline,forgiveness and renunciation.Too many books about higher dimensions,new earths,spiritual aliens,2012 transcendence preach that "feel good" spirituality where spiritual advancement is guaranteed and doesn't require effort on behalf of the practicioner.The only exceptions I know of are buddhist books and Gary Renard's "The Disappearance of the Universe".
 
There is still communication at the subcortical levels though it is limited and only for certain kind of input.
Right - now I question what that means. I mean the conventional idea - as in neural net models - is that the pattern of activation in a bunch on neurons means something specific - e.g. the concept of a teddy bear. This surely means that you can't transmit something down any old set of neurons because each neuron has its own significance. That is what seems zany about these experiments. On the one hand we are being told that there are two separate hemispheres as shown in these experiments, and in the next, we are told that the information leaks between the two halves anyway!

As a first step, I wonder if anyone has demonstrated (preferably under fully blind conditions) that these experiments can reliably distinguish between ordinary people and those with split brains?

BTW, I gave up Christianity at age 20, and I am certainly not pushing any other religion, but I have become extremely sceptical of many of the claims of modern science, and I am very open-minded as to what the mind really is.
Admittedly these things don't tell us very much about the origin of consciousness but are interesting facets of brain-consciousness interaction.The arguments against a benevolent God or an afterlife are mainly philosophical.The ruthless principle of natural selection,nature "red in tooth and claw",human beings as simple gene receptacles,the denial of free will,religion and spirituality as mere byproducts of the need for social control and cohesion,spiritual experiences being treated as mere hallucinations or anomalous phenomena.Materialists and atheists incorporate these things into their worldview and ignore or snicker at empirical data that suggests the existence of a nonphysical domain,content in the belief that natural explanations are sufficient for explaining the whole of reality.

Since you brought up the subject of evolution by natural selection, you should find this interesting :)

http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/survivalOfTheFakest.pdf

Many years ago I pursued chemistry to PhD level before I decided to move into software development. Even so, I kept a love of science, but I have become increasingly aware that a great deal of science is not as it is presented - as the above link illustrates.

You are right, the arguments against non-materialist ideas (I don't like the word 'God' because it is utterly overloaded. How many discussions start with, "To me, God is.............") tend to be as you describe, and often the real evidence is distorted in order to bolster materialism.

I'd also suggest you read a few NDE accounts, and see if you think there is any way these (relatively common) events could be incorporated into the conventional picture of reality.

David
 
I read a lot if NDE accounts in my high school days when I was initiated in spirituality through Michael Newton's Journey of Souls.Phenomenologically
NDE show the departure of the soul and its journey through the tunnel of light into another plane.A month ago I read Blackmore's Dying to Live where she presented her "dying brain" theory.Although her materialistic prejudice is shown from the preface,I think she did a good job explaining the various NDE stages in physiological terms.Of couse some explanations were stetched quite a lot.Two things need to be done so that this issue could be settled(I don't think it will ever be,
both believers and skeptics are entrenched in their beliefs).One is to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt veridical perception in NDE's.There are strong cases like Maria the social worker,the man with dentures from Van Lommel's study and the Pam Reynold's case,but most think them unconvincing.Secondly,there is need for in depth studies on the dying brain and I'm talking about more than just EEG.MRI,PET,
CT,magnetoencephalography are recommended.The assumptions of the dying brain hypothesis will be affirmed or denied by careful electrophysiological studies.
 
I read a lot if NDE accounts in my high school days when I was initiated in spirituality through Michael Newton's Journey of Souls.Phenomenologically
NDE show the departure of the soul and its journey through the tunnel of light into another plane.A month ago I read Blackmore's Dying to Live where she presented her "dying brain" theory.Although her materialistic prejudice is shown from the preface,I think she did a good job explaining the various NDE stages in physiological terms.Of couse some explanations were stetched quite a lot.

Wasn't she the one who said that the travelling down a bright lit tunnel was all due to that, (paraphrasing) "When one faints, or die, ones field of vision gets narrower, and it feels like you are looking down a tube, or a tunnel? And that would explain all the NDE'rs feeling of travelling down a tunnel." An exceptional inane "explanation", that makes you wonder if she has read through any greater deal of the NDE-cases available!, at all?!

Or maybe it was Carl Sagan who said the above, and it was Blackmore who said that; (paraphrasing) "The "feeling" of travelling down a tunnel was because the dying brain is reducing its mental faculties, and what's remaining is ones earliest memory - which is; travelling down the birth canal of ones mother as one is born"

It doesn't matter who said which one of those "explanations" - they are equally inane.
 
Wasn't she the one who said that the travelling down a bright lit tunnel was all due to that, (paraphrasing) "When one faints, or die, ones field of vision gets narrower, and it feels like you are looking down a tube, or a tunnel? And that would explain all the NDE'rs feeling of travelling down a tunnel." An exceptional inane "explanation", that makes you wonder if she has read through any greater deal of the NDE-cases available!, at all?!

Or maybe it was Carl Sagan who said the above, and it was Blackmore who said that; (paraphrasing) "The "feeling" of travelling down a tunnel was because the dying brain is reducing its mental faculties, and what's remaining is ones earliest memory - which is; travelling down the birth canal of ones mother as one is born"

It doesn't matter who said which one of those "explanations" - they are equally inane.

Carl Sagan's explanation involved reliving the experience of traversing the birth canal which Blackmore criticised because the nervous system is patently underdeveloped in newborns,which i agree.Her explanation was a bit more sophisticated,involving increased activation of nervous cells in the retina due to brain anoxia and endogenous release of opioids.Because there is a higher concentration of them in the.middle of the retina,the visual.experience translates into a tunnel of light.Speculative supposition since no research has been done in this area.Interesting to see a systematic deconstruction of her theory by Alex's guests like Jan Holden or Bruce Greyson.
 
Carl Sagan's explanation involved reliving the experience of traversing the birth canal which Blackmore criticised because the nervous system is patently underdeveloped in newborns,which i agree.Her explanation was a bit more sophisticated,involving increased activation of nervous cells in the retina due to brain anoxia and endogenous release of opioids.Because there is a higher concentration of them in the.middle of the retina,the visual.experience translates into a tunnel of light.Speculative supposition since no research has been done in this area.Interesting to see a systematic deconstruction of her theory by Alex's guests like Jan Holden or Bruce Greyson.

Her explanation would be valid if people had their eyes opened when the feel the travelling down a tunnel. The tunnel-travelling is often an experience that comes after period of other sensations an NDE'r experience. Like seeing themselves on the ground/bed etc, and seeing what people around them are doing and saying. Many times they often float around in places in the vicinity of their body and see/hear other things going on etc. Then, after that, many see a tunnel forming near them, and are sucked in to it.

Blackmore's explanation hardly match these experiences.
 
Her explanation would be valid if people had their eyes opened when the feel the travelling down a tunnel. The tunnel-travelling is often an experience that comes after period of other sensations an NDE'r experience. Like seeing themselves on the ground/bed etc, and seeing what people around them are doing and saying. Many times they often float around in places in the vicinity of their body and see/hear other things going on etc. Then, after that, many see a tunnel forming near them, and are sucked in to it.

Blackmore's explanation hardly match these experiences.

They don't need their eyes open because the visual experience is generated internally by neuron firing.The OBE aspect is explained by the collapse of the current mental model and the recreation of a new one from imagination.In Beyond the Body she goes into great lenghts explaining this.There are holes in her theory and she is a shameless self-promoter as Chris Carter correctly asserts.Her current deep involvement in the skeptical community is a result of her cognizance of the fact that parapsychology isn't a lucrative and popular domain.Her parapsychological research was reviewed and found to be replete with methodological errors and suffering severely from the file drawer effect.Yet she is the only one in the skeptical community who takes into account all the aspects of these phenomena and tries to give them a materialistic explanation,at the same time taking into consideration other competing theories.While many of you can't stand the green-haired woman,she is the best a skeptic could be,at least until now.
 
They don't need their eyes open because the visual experience is generated internally by neuron firing.The OBE aspect is explained by the collapse of the current mental model and the recreation of a new one from imagination.In Beyond the Body she goes into great lenghts explaining this.There are holes in her theory and she is a shameless self-promoter as Chris Carter correctly asserts.Her current deep involvement in the skeptical community is a result of her cognizance of the fact that parapsychology isn't a lucrative and popular domain.Her parapsychological research was reviewed and found to be replete with methodological errors and suffering severely from the file drawer effect.Yet she is the only one in the skeptical community who takes into account all the aspects of these phenomena and tries to give them a materialistic explanation,at the same time taking into consideration other competing theories.While many of you can't stand the green-haired woman,she is the best a skeptic could be,at least until now.

Examples of inane explanations for NDE's are Kevin Nelson's REM intrusions and Woerlee's cardiac massage.They are the epitome of inane explanations.As I've said,a clear peer-reviewed study showing veridical perception of OBE's beyond a shadow of a doubt will falsify her theory or any other materialistic explanation of NDE's.After that the real fun will start.Science will be confronted with a nonphysical realm of existence accessible only through altered states of consciousness.
 
They don't need their eyes open because the visual experience is generated internally by neuron firing.The OBE aspect is explained by the collapse of the current mental model and the recreation of a new one from imagination..

And she propose that experiencing such a tunnel would explain why the tunnel is small at first, end then gets bigger, and finally engulfs you, and you feel like travelling down it fast? It doesn't matter really because what comes after the tunnel has hardly something to do with the retina. Not to mention, the accounts of people born blind, who got their vision, and could see for the first time in their life, during their NDE

Regarding "the collapse of the current mental model of self" is hardly an explanation, since we see how very limited that sensation is in Olaf Blanke's tests. It hardly scratch the surface on the NDE-OBE.
 
She also explains what comes after the tunnel,although I don't recall exactly her explanation.There is a paper by her on the net that resumes her explanations,as well as a critique of her dying brain theory which I will get around reading when I have the time.I agree with you regarding Blanke's research which just mimics the feeling of being out of body,nothing more.You can tell that contemporary science is in the thrall of materialism when Blanke's findings are touted as the ultimate explanation for OBE's.
 
Any successful scientific theory has two main strenghts among others:it makes predictions and can be falsified.
There was valid science way before Popper. Falsifiability is often a red-herring that serves mostly to keep people focused on a physicalist paradigm.

The "afterlife" is an actuality. More fundamental than physical existence. To use physicalist parameters as the main guidelines to researching/exploring it seems ridiculous to me.
 
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Replication is the bigger issue in psi and NDE research.Popper himself was an atheist,yet he co-wrote along with Christian neuroscientist John Eccles a paper criticizing what Popper dubbed "promissory materialism".As to the afterlife and physicalist parameters I agree,yet a scientific methodology for exploring this "afterlife" must be developed if more people were to pay attention to this very important domain.
 
Replication is the bigger issue in psi and NDE research.Popper himself was an atheist,yet he co-wrote along with Christian neuroscientist John Eccles a paper criticizing what Popper dubbed "promissory materialism".As to the afterlife and physicalist parameters I agree,yet a scientific methodology for exploring this "afterlife" must be developed if more people were to pay attention to this very important domain.

For example experiments can be done with veridical perception in the out of body state.Slips of paper with numbers or letters written on them will be placed in a secure location where no sensory leakage is possible.The contents will be unknown to the experimenters to exclude super-ESP.The OBEr will then project and attempt to read what is written on them.Alternatively one can devise experiments that involve the OBEr using his tactile senses in the out of body state.Obviously a talented OBEr will be needed who can control for reality fluctuations.
 
And she propose that experiencing such a tunnel would explain why the tunnel is small at first, end then gets bigger, and finally engulfs you, and you feel like travelling down it fast? It doesn't matter really because what comes after the tunnel has hardly something to do with the retina. Not to mention, the accounts of people born blind, who got their vision, and could see for the first time in their life, during their NDE

Regarding "the collapse of the current mental model of self" is hardly an explanation, since we see how very limited that sensation is in Olaf Blanke's tests. It hardly scratch the surface on the NDE-OBE.

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/PDFs/JP 1984.pdf This is Blackmore's theory and the critique http://visitunderthetree.com/alice/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/critique_dying_to_live_greg_stone.pdf
 
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