Stafford Betty, Free Will in the Moment |572|

clinically dead or in comas, but report nothing but a black period of void, it's quite likely that they simply forgot what they experienced, like the way sleep researchers have established that reliably, if you wake someone up during REM sleep, they will report a dream.

That is an anomaly that I've been trying to figure out. What seems to count against the dream analogy is that the most common NDE description is that it's more real than real...
 
Wow, Alex, Dr. Betty got into an area that has always fascinated me: the voices that schizophrenics complain about.

I think you'd find Marty Garza's Brothers of the Serpent podcast ufo sodes especially interesting. Marty talks about this topic, using such examples as the mathematician that Russel Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind
 
I think you’re right. Raising kids myself I can see it… If women had a natural proclivity to stare off into space pondering and mapping out the edges of known reality the kids right in front of her face would suffer. And if men didn’t ponder such things, the kids would starve or the tribe would be conquered.
Exactly! Well said!!
 
...And given that is demonstrably accurate and there's evolutionary psychology to explain it, what does that tell us about free will?

I would have said a decade ago, before appreciating some of the fundamental psychological differences between men and women, that thinking deeply about the nature of reality and ethics would have been one of the most free will activities ever...

But maybe not.......
 
Not only that, there is the evidence of over 2,000 verified cases of rebirth from children ...
I would say the the term "verified" is being used far too loosely there. At best, the only thing that has been verified is that some sort of unexplained information acquisition. It doesn't do anything to verify that the person with the information is the same person who originally had it.
... the massive proof of evidential mediumship, & the fact that Dr. Betty says so.
Again, the word "proof" is being used far too loosely — and for the same reason as above. Even if some unexplained information transfer is taking place, there's no "proof" that the source is what it's assumed to be.
 
Jack seems to have deleted his original post. He made a blunder though. He assumed he knew why many of the guests don't talk about level 2 on the show. There are many possible reasons for this... You're intelligent enough, Randall, to come up with a few reasons why this might be......

I'm not sure that the guests understand @Alex's Levels. I get that Level one is about the data. However what exactly "the deception" in Level 2 refers to is likely to make some people wonder exactly what he's talking about. As I stated in an earlier post, whatever it means, it's an interpretation of the data, and I've made it my job to remove as much noise and fuzzy thinking as possible from any interpretation rather than taking it at face value.

So for me "Level 2" isn't necessarily about "the deception". It's about the interpretation. Interpretations can include the possibility of deceptions, and I think it's entirely possible that deceptions are involved. I've said that from the start — just not necessarily the same sort of deceptions that Alex is theorizing about. Whatever the case, any sort of deception is going to involve a third variable, and there are a range of possibilities for that.
 
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This episode was a great conversation.
I always want to push back when I see too much agreement happening about "evidence" of the after life and patting each other on the back because we 'get it'.
And then totally sloppy arguments arguments for Free-Will like "I get to choose all sorts of little things, but maybe not bigger things I can't control.". That's a level 1 claim. But granted it's difficult not to fall back there when discussing this stuff with people already on the same page.

I listen to Chris Langan, Iq between 195 and 210, total believer in afterlife and a higher power or creator, but I don't hear him claiming that free will is proven by our small everyday decisions. He does claim to "understand" the universe well enough to settle on his theory of everything, but that's a fully separate argument which I'd happily dispute him over.

My favorite argument against these things is Matthew 27:46
"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Jesus doubted. So, to me that sets the bar pretty high for claiming any conclusive evidence about the afterlife.
We have data. I'll debate whether it's evidence.
 
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Like Eben Alexander, M.D. casually said about the ppl who have been clinically dead or in comas, but report nothing but a black period of void, it's quite likely that they simply forgot what they experienced, like the way sleep researchers have established that reliably, if you wake someone up during REM sleep, they will report a dream.
So, when Stafford says, " We can't determine whether or not we're going to survive the NDE," he's making a simple situation unnecessarily complicated. If you return to "waking consciousness" & report a NDE, then you survived death, i.e., you didn't cross that invisible boundary that figures in so many NDEs. Otherwise, the monitor in your room or in the ER is flat lining.
Where such a direct circumstance gets intensely interesting is that now we have reason to believe, according to a varying percentage of the world's shaved apes, that there is an afterlife, a Great Love, & so much more. Not only that, there is the evidence of over 2,000 verified cases of rebirth from children, the massive proof of evidential mediumship, & the fact that Dr. Betty says so.
In the end, though, I take the advice of Alex's skeptical position of wisdom, & again, say, really, what do I know?

Nice!

here's my read of the data
-- we are more... i.e. we are not biological robots in a meaningless universe
-- we are good... the light / love always shines and is always available to us from within us
 
Wow, Alex, Dr. Betty got into an area that has always fascinated me: the voices that schizophrenics complain about. I bought a CD from CBS News years ago that covered 3 really bizarre cases that smacked of the Other Side. One of the 3 was about a family that had 2 daughters that were often tormented by something outside themselves. The recorded moans & screams of these two girls made my blood run cold. If they had been coached, then whoever taught them to do that is a wasted talent. At any rate, the girls also had attempted to murder their parents & each other, & the parents had special locks & other arrangements so that they could rest in safety.
Besides Dr. Tom Zinser, there is the work of the late psychotherapist, Edith Fiore, who wrote "The Unquiet Dead" & other works about her efforts to help patients that found no relief elsewhere. I have little doubt that psychiatry, like virology, is mostly a load of BS.

oh my.
 
Jack seems to have deleted his original post. He made a blunder though. He assumed he knew why many of the guests don't talk about level 2 on the show. There are many possible reasons for this... You're intelligent enough, Randall, to come up with a few reasons why this might be......

I never deleted any posts that I know of.
I assume that's from the "higher powers". I never mentioned level 2. Or level 3 for that matter.
 
This episode was a great conversation.
I always want to push back when I see too much agreement happening about "evidence" of the after life and patting each other on the back because we 'get it'.
And then totally sloppy arguments arguments for Free-Will like "I get to choose all sorts of little things, but maybe not bigger things I can't control.". That's a level 1 claim. But granted it's difficult not to fall back there when discussing this stuff with people already on the same page.

I listen to Chris Langan, Iq between 195 and 210, total believer in afterlife and a higher power or creator, but I don't hear him claiming that free will is proven by our small everyday decisions. He does claim to "understand" the universe well enough to settle on his theory of everything, but that's a fully separate argument which I'd happily dispute him over.

My favorite argument against these things is Matthew 27:46
"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Jesus doubted. So, to me that sets the bar pretty high for claiming any conclusive evidence about the afterlife.
We have data. I'll debate whether it's evidence.

“Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science. Mathematics and logic are both closed, self-contained systems of propositions, whereas science is empirical and deals with nature as it exists. The primary criterion and standard of evaluation of scientific theory is evidence, not proof. All else equal (such as internal logical consistency and parsimony), scientists prefer theories for which there is more and better evidence to theories for which there is less and worse evidence. Proofs are not the currency of science.” - Satoshi Kanazawa, Evolutionary Psychologist.
https://brucefenton.substack.com/p/..._id=74029402&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

I pulled this from a recent and very excellent post by Bruce Fenton. I would add that while proof is not the currency of science " burden of proof" is and I would suggest that the burden of proof regarding Consciousness surviving death has shifted to non-believers.

I'm not sure I get your point/ complaint about local free will... seem self-evident... how could it be otherwise?
 
I never deleted any posts that I know of.
I assume that's from the "higher powers". I never mentioned level 2. Or level 3 for that matter.
I had to delete a couple.

looked like you were trolling. seems like you are sometimes unaware... but you're doing it.
 
I'm not sure I get your point/ complaint about local free will... seem self-evident... how could it be otherwise?

"Local Free Will" is hugely specific. When I hear this phrase, I assume we're talking about something unaffected-by or outside-the-constraints-of Cause and Effect. Rather, I'll insist it must be.
I've never heard an adequate description of the delineation where Cause and Effect ends, and our Local Free Will begins.
 
I'm sure Stafford is one of the good guys, but once again, there's a lot of fuzzy thinking going on, starting with the notion of free will. If we define free will as the ability to make conscious decisions ( as Stafford seems to do ), then there's no such thing as free will. It's been scientifically proven that our decisions are fully formed before we ever become aware of them. Consequently, no "conscious decisions" are being made.

Then there are all the problems with typical notions of afterlives and reincarnation. That's not to say that people aren't having experiences that lead them to believe in such things, but that's just the data, what @Alex calls the "Level 1" discussion. If "Level 2" is "the deception", then the nature of the deception lies in the interpretation, and that's where I've made it my job to remove as much noise and fuzzy thinking as possible.

When Stafford says, "We can't determine whether or not we're going to survive the near death experience." he's either saying that we can't predict the future ( which applies to everything ), or that there's no way to determine if there is an afterlife. The former may be true, but the latter isn't — at least not the way most people seem to interpret it ( as a continuity of personhood following the death of the body ).

If we look at afterlives that way, the best that any "you" in an "afterlife" can be, is some sort of copy. There appears to be no way around that other than a couple of loopholes that end-up with us either not being what we think we are in the first place, or that we're already always copies, in which case the issue is moot. The show and the forum keeps on encountering these same issues over and over again without making any progress past them.

That's not to say that these discussions aren't worth having, because to my knowledge, nobody I'm aware of ( including me ) has made it past them either. But maybe — just maybe, if we keep on having these discussions, some way forward will become apparent. Or at least, maybe these discussions will inspire others to take-up the quest — so good show. Keep them coming !

I still think this is a minor quibble... partly its the boundary around "you" as we already discussed and it also only looks at one decision in isolation whereas we make a long string of decisions in attempt to achieve a goal and your consciousness plays a role in modulating that feedback loop.

Your consciousness is watching the choices your semi-sub-conscious is making and continually guiding it as feedback comes in to direct it towards achieving a goal. You might think of it like riding a horse... the horse starts to sway one way or the other and then you become aware of it and give it a tug back the other direction. You and the horse are acting as a unit under your conscious control even though the horse's actions are not in your conscious awareness until a few milliseconds after the horse makes the choice and then you keep it in line. So if you got from point A to point B on the pony express can you really say that was all the horse's decision and you had no conscious choice about it? Of course not. Likewise it would be equally silly to say your subconscious is solely responsible for all of your decisions and therefore you have no free will.

The question with all the Libet-type experiments being used to argue against the existence of the free will, is one of time and sequence - and a possible psychic retrocausation.

As we know from the lots of experimental research of parapsychology, precognition and presentiment are real, empirically detectable and identifiable phenomena. Presentiment is especially interesting here; unlike precognition, which lies in the area of the psychological - a knowledge of the events that are yet to come in the future, - presentiment deals with physiological responses to the stimuli that are about to appear in the near future, such as one's measurable bodily arousal because of the erotic or frightening image being shown, which starts some time before the image is actually shown.

So - what if the (neuro)physiological markers of a conscious decision that are about to be made in the future are retrocausally initiated by this very future decision? What if they are a presentiment-type retrocausal reaction to a choice that is being consciously made in a moment lying a bit further on a timeline, thus allowing the brain and body functioning to correlate itself with the demands of an active consciousness that manifests this functioning (and is, in turn, being manifested through it) both synchronically (e.g., simultaneously) and diachronically (e.g. sequentially)?

For me, such experiments, if being seen from different perceptual lens and interpreted with a differing set of conceptual assumptions, may tell us something interesting about interaction - synchronic and diachronic - between active consciousness and its manifested-and-manifesting embodiment, rather than be questionably represented as "the disproof of the free will".
 
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"Local Free Will" is hugely specific. When I hear this phrase, I assume we're talking about something unaffected-by or outside-the-constraints-of Cause and Effect. Rather, I'll insist it must be.
I've never heard an adequate description of the delineation where Cause and Effect ends, and our Local Free Will begins.

I always saw it as pointing to a contradiction... i.e. it seems self-evident that I can do what I want in the now, but less so from a big picture Perspective.

again, this isn't meant to move us any closer to an answer just pointing out the apparent contradiction
 
The question with all the Libet-type experiments being used to argue against the existence of the free will, is one of time and sequence - and a possible psychic retrocausation.

As we know from the lots of experimental research of parapsychology, precognition and presentiment are real, empirically detectable and identifiable phenomena. Presentiment is especially interesting here; unlike precognition, which lies in the area of the psychological - a knowledge of the events that are yet to come in the future, - presentiment deals with physiological responses to the stimuli that are about to appear in the near future, such as one's measurable bodily arousal because of the erotic or frightening image being shown, which starts some time before the image is actually shown.

So - what if the (neuro)physiological markers of a conscious decision that are about to be made in the future are retrocausally initiated by this very future decision? What if they are a presentiment-type retrocausal reaction to a choice that is being consciously made in a moment lying a bit further on a timeline, thus allowing the brain and body functioning to correllate itself with the demands of an active consciousness that manifests this functioning (and is, in turn, being manifested through it) both synchronically (e.g., simultaneously) and diachronically (e.g. sequentially)?

For me, such experiments, if being seen from different perceptual lens and interpreted with a differing set of conceptual assumptions, may tell us something interesting about interaction - synchronic and diachronic - between active consciousness and its manifested-and-manifesting embodiment, rather than be questionably represented as "the disproof of the free will".
It's interesting that you should bring those ideas up. I had the same thoughts myself. Ultimately I concluded that they just kick the can further down the road. In other words, if we assume that some information from the future is arriving in our subconscious, whatever decision arises out of that still happens entirely subconsciously. Even worse, it suggests that the future is predetermined, which also makes free will an illusion.
 
And this appears to be a pattern in general in the universe: there is nuance, differentiation, hierarchy.
I asked a sage once, “If everything is preordained, why should we worry about our choices?”
”Do you know what is fated to occur?” he replied.
”No,” I answered.
”Then,” the sage said, “You have choice!”
 
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