Why wouldn’t remote viewing, which doesn’t use the eyes, not work for blind people?
But my point isn’t to convince you about remote viewing. It’s to say that unless you accept the need for extraordinary evidence for things like this, you wind up with lots of possible explanations and no good way to figure out which is true.
BTW, if it happened to me I trust I would look for the appropriate scientific explanation, and not go off to cloud cuckooland. Remember we’re not denying that the experiences happen, just your explanation for them.
Before we go any further remember we have not established that consciousness is a program running in the brain. Since there is no evidence of this, discussing how that program might work is futile.
I have tried to follow your reasoning. Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be saying that personal identity is a user illusion, namely the who in who you are. Again, internal igorance is necessary for this identity. So does that mean if science really does find how consciousness works we would lose our identity. Interesting.
I think remote viewing would work for blind people if they were capable of doing remote viewing. Most people are not capable of doing it. But we have evidence now that consciousness is non-local. It is true for any given situation one could come up with hundreds of possible explanations, that is a given. We must look for the simple, clear answer even if it doesn’t fit into our belief systems. After all, Sherlock Holmes would say, “you eliminate all the possible solutions, and what you have left is the correct solution no matter how absurd it may seem at the time.”
May I remind you that everyone who has introduced a non-mainstream solution to an old problem has been called every name in the book including cuckoo.
A bit off topic, but I suspect that philosophers and AI people don’t know that much about the area of fault tolerance, which is quite active. The Fault Tolerant Computing Symposium started int 1967. Besides simple stuff like error correcting codes and redundancy (which most large servers implement today) there is cool work using FPGAs - field programmable gate arrays. These are basically programmable hardware. If you have a chunk of hardware implementing function Y using an FPGA, and it fails, you can sometimes reprogram it to work around the failure, program a spare to take over the function, or even reprogram an FPGA implementing a less critical function X to take over Y. Since neurons are pretty general purpose, this seems like a good analog to what the brain can do, sometimes, to implement fault tolerance.
I’ve actually written a paper with my wife, a biologist, and a colleague on the similarities of fault tolerance in the human body and computer systems, but it was too weird for the conference. Whenever we figure something out and pat ourselves on the back about how clever we are, we find that the same function has come about through evolution already.
You have not shown why your data can’t be explained by remote viewing. It’s true that not everyone can do it all the time, but not everyone can have OBEs either. Perhaps a near death experience enables remote viewing, just as you think it enables an OBE. Plus, we have hardly eliminated all possible situations yet.
While I have a good indepth page of evidence showing consciousness is non-local, not written by me, I can’t post it here. Perhaps if someone started a thread more conducive to these studies of near death experiences I will post it.
It was written by a young man who has an interest in spiritual things. I just coded it so it could be read. After the main part there are links that lead to other links, more a hundred I would guess. Many of them I have not read myself yet. But it does give a really good overall view of the work and research being done on near death experience, especially veridical NDEs. Sorry, don’t want to take this thread off course.
Yes, well the most obvious reason is that remote viewing is done while one is conscious and concentrating on the subject. In the case of the blind people, they were clinically dead. They had no brain functions to concentrate with, neither did they have a target. I think this study alone is very significant in showing consciousness continues to live after the death of the body and brain.
Is that what you asked for?
Actually, most of the time they appeared embarrassed, after the proof was in.
Clinically dead is not the same as no brain function. Care to give evidence that any of those with NDEs brain function stopped? That doesn’t happen until long after the heart has stopped.
Speculation is a reasonable counter for your assertions that the brain must have an external director. We speculate an alernative possibility, then you get to try to demonstrate that it is wrong or impossible. If you fail, then you concede that you might possibly be incorrect about the brain necessarily needing an external director.
And I think that there is amble evidence for the fact that the electrical and chemical behavior of the brain is correlated with our thoughts and behaviors, and that there is at least a partial causal relationship in the direction of the electrochemical system being in control of those thoughts and behaviors. (IE: we can get drunk.) So the existence of the ‘program’ running on the brain is proven; all that remains is to determine whether the program solely responsible for our consciousness, or whether some spirit has a gamepad plugged into it allowing the spirit limited control.
If we could not think of a way for the program on the brain to do adaptive self-repair under certain circumstances, then that would be a supporting argument for the spirit with the gamepad. We can (easily) think of a way the brain could do it itself, though, so this avenue of inquiry is not a good reason to believe in a spirit.
Futile? Now that’s just silly. Clearly, if one developed something recognized to have the attributes of “consciousness”, it would be an existence proof of (at least one way of) how consciousness works. Granted, it may not be the way human consciousness works, but it would certainly provide clues (if only through a compare and contrast methodology).
But again, I was simply responding to two items you put forth: (1) the idea that is impossible (my paraphrasing) for a program to observe and adjust its own operation and (2) that “science” should look into it.
Don’t sell us short, Voyager. At least, not all of us. As a matter of fact, fault-tolerance is a large part of my dissertation work. Not as it concerns hardware, mind you, but there you have it. As time goes on, more attention is paid to the points of “cranky old men” like Minsky and Sloman about embodied intelligence. Of course, there’s also the work of…oh, crap. I forgot their names; the philosophy duo from Berkeley, one of whom brought the issue of “framing issues” to the political scene not very long ago.
In my opinion, it’s long overdue. The point about embodied intelligence, that is.
If you wouldn’t mind, could I get one or more of citation, copy, abstract, bibliography? I think I have my email/messaging settings set up properly. More exposure from different viewpoints is always good, if only for my own edification.
Yes, I think that “identity” is a “user illusion”. This is a statement with a very narrow applicability; in particular, directed at researchers in “identity theory”, who demand strict consistency and full explanations about what they define as “identity”. It may or may not apply to a common-sense definition of the term.
I do not know if “internal ignorance” (that is, unobservability of at least some internal processes/states) is necessary for “identity”. It seems like a possibility to me, and is an interesting question. Which is just what I said.
No, it does not mean that if science established how consciousness worked it would “erase” our identity. Take as an analogy that knowing how an optical illusion “works” does not suddenly remove the illusion.
I pulled some of Sabom’s stuff off google scholar. He publishes exclusively in the Journal of Near Death Studies. (okay, he has a review article in the Journal of Religion and Health). None of them are actual data articles, but review articles which are basically opinion pieces. He has no peer reviewed stuff. I’m willing to bet the other authors cited don’t score much better.
Well, my Theory of Knowledge professor had a PDP-11 manual in his office (back when PDP_11s were new.) However the FPGA stuff is not well known. I know of it since I set in on grad student seminars at a university where research on this is being done.
I’ll send a pdf version of the paper. It is unpublished - since I work in industry, publishing is more of a hobby than a necessity. I’ve published something almost equally wacky at the same conference, which got real good audience feedback, so I might try it again.
so, let me just see if I got this straight - It’s OK for you to speculate and hypothesise, but it’s not OK for me to do it. Got it.
Your statement about “what if the damage was to the part of the brain that was capable of adjusting itself. Then there would be no improvement, yet there is always improvement.” is like saying “what if we removed the part of the ocean that makes waves and put it in a bucket - then there would be no more waves in the ocean”.
OK, this thread is going as a lot of threads go that I post in – it stops being about the OP and starts being about me. So it is time to leave this thread so those who want can continue discussing the OP.
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From what I’ve read, the big issue (I see) with FPGA fault-tolerance is that the fixes need to be pre-computed and stored in an accessible area on the chip. Is that right? Again, I’m not a hardware guy, and so my knowledge/exposure to this is not only pretty limited, but may also be out of date.
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Thanks. Do let me know if I screwed up my user settings and you can’t locate my email. I’m looking forward to purusing it.
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As a matter of fact, fault-tolerance is a large part of my dissertation work. Not as it concerns hardware, mind you, but there you have it. As time goes on, more attention is paid to the points of “cranky old men” like Minsky and Sloman about embodied intelligence. Of course, there’s also the work of…oh, crap. I forgot their names; the philosophy duo from Berkeley, one of whom brought the issue of “framing issues” to the political scene not very long ago.