Would proof of Psi substantially change Science?

I am not completely sure how a transmitting experiment would work. Let's think in terms of entangled electrons with opposite spins. It A and B measure using the same axis (say Z), then the answers should be opposite (ignoring experimental imperfections), but if A and B measure using different axes, the answers would be random. Maybe some attempt at transmission using oblique axes would help.

David
David, measuring entanglement is a one time shot.
 
Master Wu, here are some examples of 'hallucinations' from Sartori's book.

I was lying in ITU on the bed with the nurse looking after me and the doctors were there. Then I just sort of…saw myself for a long time lying on the bed. Then there was like a warm air, warm air and a light and I just drifted into the warm air, towards the light…Lovely, lovely place there…so serene and calm…oh it was lovely up there is was..It was like something from um, what’s that kid’s book called? My Little Pony, it was full of glitter and rainbows, lovely it was, beautiful where the kids were.


I thought that people were trying to make me take drugs, I could feel myself slipping…I was just slipping and then I was telling myself that everything was alright and the feeling tends to repeat itself as well. It wasn’t just a once off, it was a game, these people were publicly trying to force drugs into me.


P: So these dreams were different from normal dreams, is it?
45: Yes, yeah.
P Did they seem real?
45: Oh, it seemed very real yes, yes.
P Was it like any other experience you’ve had, like hallucinating or other drugs that you’ve had – medicines that have made you feel like it?
45: No, no. It seems like I was there – it was happening. I was actually afraid sometimes.
P: What sort of things made you afraid?
45: Well, that [a story he’d previously described] trying to run home on time, um being taken to prison in a helicopter, I couldn’t understand that and the helicopter pilot was the Dr. that introduced that new drug wasn’t he. He was selling drugs to me – I must have seen him see before I went to sleep.

45: I actually watched the surgeon taking the scar off here, you know it was a dream but it was the same doctor who came up to see me on the ward then. [ITU consultant did not remove any scar]. You know this was the first time I was meeting him but I actually watched him with the scalpel taking the skin off and putting it onto the table…
P: And you watched that?
45: I was watching it all, yeah.
P: Well, you’d have definitely been unconscious.


I was going from hospital to hospital. There was this different hospital the one and there was loads of stuff, like an avalanche. Um, we were being pulled around by reindeers. Un, the ice had got to a certain bit and if we went any further we’d crash.


P: So what was the first thing that you remembered about being in ITU?
53: Well, paranoia I suppose. I was reminded of that um and the subsequent things like the pending doom and on some occasions my mind just went uh crazy, silly, no not crazy it just went off at a fast speed as I told you the other night that uh, I’d be lying back in bed but suddenly I could see what was nice. Bright red and yellow lights that were comforting um, and then fast speeds as if in a helicopter which took be across landscapes – some which I obviously recognized – not recognized, seemed that could be Middle Eastern deserts uh, other landscapes were then more dark, more ugly or frightening. I particularly remember seeing small creatures without faces.


Anyway they moved me to another ward, a quieter ward in the same place and um…I still didn’t get any sleep and I could see writing on the walls, moving on the walls and things like that and early in the morning I looked through the window, one of the windows and I could see this beautiful picture. I was a huge lake and at the back of the lake was…uh, a typical Wales scene. A beautiful lake and a hill a big hill at the back with sunshine….When the nurse came to give me my bath she closed the curtains. It would be about twenty minutes before she pulled them back, all that was there was the ward next door (the main unit) and all the nurses that were there. No sign of the lake or signs of the most beautiful picture.


I remember dreaming but not believing I was dreaming because I was awake. And I believed that I was edging nearer death. It was…in front of me. Eventually I came to feeling that death was a certainty. I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But when I woke, I was astonished to find that I was in bed. I’d though surely that I had gone on, so the second night something very similar happened and this night I was dea again. And I was in the, I could hear my wife and my daughter in funeral service in a chapel that doesn’t exist. And there was a gospel choir, you know and there were um, there was a Pakistani shop behind. There was no wall between the Pakistani shop that was selling curtains and what have you and the Chapel.

Each paragraph is from a different patient. "P" is Penny (Sartori) and the number is the subject number for that patient. Square brackets represent information Penny is adding. The first account is from an "NDE", and the remainder are from the section she calls "hallucinations" in the non-NDE patients. I just took the first excerpts from the first six, but they represent a tiny portion of all the descriptions and I didn't seek out weird or crazy excerpts.

Linda
 
If I remember right from the past, your take on this, Linda, is that people are having a lot of different types of experiences and that we take some experiences that have certain attributes (like a light tunnel) and we call those NDEs and then the experiences that don't have the common attributes we call hallucinations or dreams.

Am I remembering correctly?
 
If I remember right from the past, your take on this, Linda, is that people are having a lot of different types of experiences and that we take some experiences that have certain attributes (like a light tunnel) and we call those NDEs and then the experiences that don't have the common attributes we call hallucinations or dreams.

Am I remembering correctly?

Well, I think it's unfortunate to call them "hallucinations or dreams" as those terms come with a lot of baggage that doesn't necessarily apply. For example, a lot of people think "hallucination" means that the experience doesn't feel like its real. It's probably best to say that those experiences which don't have any attributes in common with our preset list are non-NDE's. And those experiences which have some attributes in common with our list are NDEs. And the list represents attributes which sounded like they were related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife. Nobody should object to that.

Linda
 
And those experiences which have some attributes in common with our list are NDEs. And the list represents attributes which sounded like they were related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife. Nobody should object to that.

Obviously I would object... If the experient is near death - a good example would be cardiac arrest - and they recall an experience, then it should probably be called an NDE.

In my view the Greyson scale is really about attempting to measure the depth of a patient's experience. That the Greyson scale includes an arbitary scoring cut-off to decide whether an experience is/is-not classified as an NDE isn't of much interest to me... unless perhaps I'm trying to investigate... say... any correlations between the length of time the patient has been in cardiac arrest, against Greyson's depth of NDE scale.

As for claiming that experiences classified as NDE's under the Greyson scale are "...related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife...", these issues might be related to the NDE for some people, but neither of them reflect my own position.
 
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Well, I think it's unfortunate to call them "hallucinations or dreams" as those terms come with a lot of baggage that doesn't necessarily apply. For example, a lot of people think "hallucination" means that the experience doesn't feel like its real. It's probably best to say that those experiences which don't have any attributes in common with our preset list are non-NDE's. And those experiences which have some attributes in common with our list are NDEs. And the list represents attributes which sounded like they were related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife. Nobody should object to that.

Linda

I know very little about the writing on the NDE. But I would not object to your way of looking at it. We classify things by their attributes all the time. People are bound to have all kinds of experiences near death that both aren't recorded as being interesting or fall outside the accepted attributes of the experience we label the NDE.

That isn't to say that there can't be value in studying the cluster of experiences that are labelled the NDE.
 
Obviously I would object... If the experient is near death - a good example would be cardiac arrest - and they recall an experience, then it should probably be called an NDE.

Well, I don't disagree with you. In terms of validity, it would be better to categorize these experiences independently of their content, if we want to try to draw any conclusions about their content (which I think we (you and I) do). However, you have to take this up with Greyson and the rest of the NDE researchers, as it was their idea to classify them in terms of content.

In my view the Greyson scale is really about attempting to measure the depth of a patient's experience.

Then it would need a different scale. As it is, it measures content, not depth. I think it would be very interesting to look at the relationship between content and depth, though.

That the Greyson scale includes an arbitary scoring cut-off to decide whether an experience is/is-not classified as an NDE isn't of much interest to me... unless perhaps I'm trying to investigate... say... any correlations between the length of time the patient has been in cardiac arrest, against Greyson's depth of NDE scale.

As for claiming that experiences classified as NDE's under the Greyson scale are "...related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife...", these issues might be related to the NDE for some people, but neither of them reflect my own position.

Well then, you should get busy making your own scale :)

Linda
 
Then it would need a different scale. As it is, it measures content, not depth. I think it would be very interesting to look at the relationship between content and depth, though.

You'll have to take that up with Greyson... Lol... as far as I'm aware the his scale is an attempt to measure the depth of the experience.

...and I definitely object to the idea the NDE's categorized on the Greyson scale are somehow "...related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife...". My point being that your claim that "...nobody should object to that...", is - in at least my own case - therefore wrong.
 
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You'll have to take that up with Greyson... Lol... as far as I'm aware the his scale is an attempt to measure the depth of the experience.

My comment about "taking it up with Greyson" referred to your idea of classifying experiences by their nearness to death, independently of their content. I'm not sure why you brought up "depth of the experience"? As far as I can tell, by "depth of experience" the researchers are referring to the amount of specific kinds of content, not nearness to death.

...and I definitely object to the idea the NDE's categorized on the Greyson scale are somehow "...related to the survival of consciousness or an afterlife...". My point being that your claim that "...nobody should object to that...", is - in at least my own case - therefore wrong.

Oh, you don't think seeing God relates to an afterlife, or separation from your body relates to survival? Okay, I sorta thought that was a given, but I take that back, then. I would say instead that the attributes of the NDE relates to survival and the afterlife to the extent that transcendent, paranormal, heightened cognitive and transformative emotional experiences are felt to be related to survival and the afterlife.

Linda
 
Oh, you don't think seeing God relates to an afterlife, or separation from your body relates to survival?

Nope, I don't believe the NDE / OBE has anything to tell us about what happens (if anything) after we die.

That's never been my position, which is quite the opposite. I think it tells me plenty about what might be going on before that point.
 
Nope, I don't believe the NDE / OBE has anything to tell us about what happens (if anything) after we die.

That's never been my position, which is quite the opposite. I think it tells me plenty about what might be going on before that point.
Oh, sorry. I think we were talking past each other. I didn't mean that you had to buy the idea that transcendent, paranormal, heightened cognitive and transformative emotional experiences are related to survival and the afterlife. I only meant that these elements were selected by the researchers because of a more general perception that they might. I doubt you could get much interest in near death experiences if the selected elements were whether the subject visited Middle Eastern landscapes, was visited by their co-workers, and had a sensation of warmth. When I said that I didn't think anybody would object, I just meant that I think everybody recognizes why the researchers and their audience are interested in these elements. I didn't mean that you had to agree with their interest or the conclusions that get drawn.

I'm with you on your concerns about how these experiences are selected and categorized. I think you are on to something with the idea of looking solely at a narrow type of event ("cardiac arrest") and then looking at the content of all of the experiences, rather than excluding the bulk of them for not conforming to some people's preconceptions. However, that's neither here nor there, as at the moment NDE researchers call experiences which conform to those preconceptions "NDEs" and those which don't "non-NDEs". If you try to use their terminology, I think it will be both confusing and a bit of an uphill battle to get your point across.

Linda
 
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