Ok. I will not ask anyone else to watch the YouTube video. I will not provide a link to that YouTube video in this thread again. Others are welcome to do so. But I will not. What I will do is summarize what’s on it and why it is relevant.
In my next post, I will do just that.
It is part of Diogenes schtick, (as well as that of a few others), to simply assert his beliefs without evidence for as long as other posters choose to interact with him. Anyone with any experience in this forum (or most of the SDMB fora) should recognize that characteristic of his behavior.
You have not (yet) established a similar pattern of behavior and I was simply noting that if you actually wish to engage in debate, (rather than whatever it is that Dio enjoys doing), then sending other posters out to look a some video is not the way to do it.
Tell that to Michelson and Morley.
What you apparently meant to say was that there is no way to devise a scientific test to prove that something that is not physical either does or does not exist.
You’d be surprised.
Cite 1
Cite 2.
There are more. IIRC my second term freshman physics correctly, at the time ether fans tried to come up with variants that kept it alive. Relativity of course provided a far better explanation of the results which was testable.
I haven’t gone through the pages, nor do I intend to, but as Boris Badenov said, “never underestimate the power of a shnook.”
Since Stoid did (sort of) provide an answer to my question about what afterlife research she’d find convincing, I’ll respond.
What I had in mind was something like the AWARE study, where a number of physicians and hospitals have been enrolled (in a project which might or might not reveal answers next year or the year after) to try to find whether patients purportedly leaving their bodies during NDEs can identify objects in their hospital rooms visible only to body-leavers (i.e. high up on shelves). If there is reproducible and reliable evidence that the out-of-body folks can identify such objects, one can imaging the NDErs and afterlife proponents crowing loudly (and skeptics like me having to make embarassing concessions that we were wrong). If on the other hand the study fails to show out-of-body insights, would believers (and Stoid, who is Just Asking Questions) accept that as at the very least a severe blow to out-of-body/afterlife hypotheses, or insist that it merely raises more questions?*
The problem here is that “the many people who are or have been researching the subject” are similar to the many who have been doggedly doing “research” to show that homeopathy works, that chiropractic treats heart disease and other internal medical complaints, or trying to prop up other forms of woo. Their consistent failures to back up their claims with evidence are never accepted as showing their woo does not work. Instead, they typically deny the ability of accepted research protocols to investigate their field of interest (“your science can’t measure my woo”), misrepresent the outcome of their studies and/or blithely move on to answer more “questions”.
For devoted wooists, it is unthinkable to give up on their woo. They will never concede being “conquered” by solid science. Stoid’s end point is an illusion.
The irony - it burns.
*Interestingly, while some NDErs remain excited about the study, I’ve seen others reporting suspicions about the motives of the physician leading the project. Is he really a closet skeptic? Thus is the groundwork laid for disavowing the study should its outcome prove to be a bummer. 
To Stoid-pray tell, what kind of study and/or outcome wouldn’t “raise more questions”?
No such cite (that it’s been scientifically proven that consciousness is a physical part of the brain) exists. Asking for one is asking for a smurf. But I think you know that the emergent property argument has been misrepresented as something proved by science. ANd that’s what that meant, because there’s **no one ** (in the realm of consciousness research) even suggesting that consciousness is physical! That’s the point, of course: it’s not.
Seriously Kozmik, the video obviously speaks to you for some reason, but trust me: it’s weak. You need to expand your sources.
And Eccles is one voice - the voice of a dualist. The existence of dualists and physicalists is a given.
Since you’ve been very mysterious in most of your posting, I’m not sure what you’re trying to convince anyone of, but if it is of the existence of an afterlife you should start your own thread - that’s not this one.
If it’s that the existence of an afterlife is not considered an answered question in a general sense, by the people who are studying and researching it, then offering Eccles as a source doesn’t work: he’s one guy with one view. The fact that one guy has one view doesn’t lead to any conclusions generally. Although Eccles’ voice is certainly not to be dismissed out of hand, since he was a Nobel prizewinning neurophysiologist. But he’s just part of the big picture of people who have studied the subject in depth.
I appreciate that you are supportive of the overall idea and I understand your general position is positive towards the idea of afterlife.
But to clarify: I personally find NDEs interesting; they have not been entirely, or even consistently explained. But I do not base any opinion about the nature of consciousness on them. Because I don’t have any opinion…or rather, nothing I feel strongly about. Some days I think one thing, other days a different thing. That’s pretty much why this issue was an issue for me: if someone really knows, I want to hear about it!
And as for my wanting the answer to be yes, there is an afterlife, that’s actually very funny for people who know me. What I want is to live twice as long and age half as fast. What I want is life itself, not some half-assed ethereal existence where I can long for life and mourn not having it. Meat is way easier: if we are meat, then there is actually nothing to be concerned about, because once death comes there will be no me to be aware of how fucked it is that I’m dead. Which probably does explain why any credence I ever give to the possibility refuses to allow for the idea of my personality, the 'me" to persist after death: that would be miserable. I’m not charmed by the idea of floating in the clouds watching the living people I’ve left behind, I’m horrified by it.
Actually, there are logically possible ways that the scenarios I’ve mentioned could be physically possible- mankind doesn’t have the ability to determine that the scenarios are not physically possible.
I assure you, advanced technology is neither sorcery nor magic.
ACC was being facetious.
And you aren’t talking about technology, you’re talking about a wizard.
This is very nearly opposite to how it works.
Anyway, it’s now pretty clear that this whole “debate” can be simplified by ignoring the whole “afterlife” thing, and just concentrating on this notion of “physical” (or “material”, if you prefer), and how it relates to the notion of “evidence”.
Those arguing that the physical is all there is – indeed, that the notions of “existence” and “physical” are essentially interchangeable – naturally agree that any “evidence” of anything will be physical, too.
Those that are arguing that there is something “beyond” the physical may fall ino either of two camps:
They admit that any “evidence” of anything (i.e., anything which would help us decide if something is a fact or not) has to reside in the physical, but that there are ways that the “beyond physical” can sometimes cross over into the “physical” to provide us with such evidence, or
They think that such “evidence”, too, resides beyond the physical, but that we humans are somehow able to cross over and perceive it there.
I agree with Dio and his ilk, that there is no logical reason, nor any direct experience of mine, nor any experiment or observation I’ve read about, which gives me any reason to think either of these “beyond the physical” ways of thinking is a necessary way to explain anything at all.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to me how so many people feel the need to posit something other than the physical, and then defend this feeling so vociferously. I’m sure others (Dawkins?) have come up with ideas of how and why this compulsion has evolved in human brains. But the statements and evidence presented in this thread by Dio and others have convonced me that I need to consciously fight this feeling, just as any scientist learns to fight other illusions, mistakes, and tricks our brains have evolved to play on us (optical illusions, picking out patterns that aren’t there, poor ability to generate random numbers, etc.).
And I thank the poster who contributed the little fact that, from what we can tell at this point, the brain seems to acheive some kind of “consciousness” at about 33 days after conception (but then, if memory is a component of consciousness, why do we only remember back to when we were 2 or 3 years old? I guess that’s a particular kind of long-term memory, one which initiates only after we can start putting memories into words, perhaps…but that’s a question for a different thread, surely already somewhere in the SDMB vault).
Even Dio would admit that the brain is fiendishly complex, and its precise relationship to what we sense as “consciousness” is still quite a mystery. But there is no need to bring magic into the picture, just keep plugging away at serious, peer-reviewable research, as best we can, even if any research is inevitably imperfect.
Sorry, JKellyMap, but I didn’t and don’t claim that there is consciousness at 33 days:
All I was trying to get at was that those are recognizably parts of the brain, and that at 33 days they exist and that we could consider the brain to be there and alive, and therefore to be activated.
As to why we only remember back to the ages of 2 or 3: as far as I know from my reading (and I can’t remember exactly where I got this – I will look it up if asked), it’s because the brain grows so rapidly after birth (to bring us up to speed, after having kept our brains small in order not to kill our mothers at birth) and we, as infants, are soaking up everything in our environments (as we cannot yet discern between what is important for our wellbeing and what is not) – storing everything in memory – that there are many more neural connections made than are needed.
As we grow from infants to children (and on into teenage years) and begin to specialize in various ways, the connections which are used the least (or perhaps not at all) begin to be pruned away; it seems that many of our early memories – memories that are not necessarily important to us emotionally, socially, or for our physical survival – are encoded in those pathways that disappear.
Thank you, Fatwater, for clearing up my misunderstanding. What, may I ask, is “activation”, then? It sounds like a necessary but not sufficient component of what later emerges as “consciousness”. (I’ll be happy with just one or twoposted replies on this subject; if we want to discuss it further than that, we can start a new thread.)
And how fascinating about memory! In other words, memory is about what otherwise would be lost, so you don’t need it until you start “losing” stuff! Makes sense to me. Perhaps roughly analogous to how the earliest computers didn’t need “memory”, because they were built to do just a few simple tasks.
Of course. But please remember that NDEs were presented as part of the picture, some bit of evidence of something, and something which I personally find prevents me from rejecting all possibility of an afterlife in my own search for what I personally believe.
You are still making the mistake of treating this as an argument with me directly about whether an afterlife exists. Your cite says X, my cite says X. You say my site is woo, I say your cite is closeminded - none of it matters to the OP and my point, since it’s obvious that there are differing points of view.
What each of us personally considers more believable or likely is not the topic. Among the people who are studying this, and there are a great many of them, has it been widely accepted that we actually know enough to say with a reasonable degree of certainty, that an afterlife (non-embodied consciousness, etc) *does not *exist? Because I’ve also learned that among the people who are studying this, there is mutual respect between the materialists and the dualists, the philosphers and the neuroscientists. It is false to assert that all non-materialist study, research, theory and thought is considered just as “woo” as anything which has, in fact, been solidly shown to be unworthy of serious consideration. You may feel that way, but people who are far more qualified than you do not, and that’s what I am talking about. Because as hard as you seem to find this to believe, not everyone approaches this with a determination to end up in a particular place.
Your highly-hostile-to-any-non-materialist-consideration cites are just as worthless as any wholly-embracing-of-any-an-all-possibilities cites. Both are the extremes on the spectrum, so they are meaningless noise, especially since the pure science end is still reporting that they have some good ideas and they are trying things, but can’t report that they really have discovered anything solid.
If I’m understanding Fatwater correctly, perhaps a better way to put this is that the way babies process the world (relatively random, constant, unstructured memory-paths) is sufficiently different from how older children do this (as the brain develops a somewhat more hard-wired structure, once we have started to learn what is important and what isn’t), that the memories formed in the first phase don’t survive the transition to the second phase.
If someone hallucinates that they see smurfs, does that prevent you from rejecting the possibility of smurfs?
Why are you so impressed by hallucinations, and where did you get the idea that they were evdience for anything?
This is true, no lie, not facetious. India is filled with anedoctal claims by pople who swear they have seen and spoken to Rama, to Shiva, to Krishna, to Ganesh and to any number of other Hindu deities. Does this mean you can’t reject the possible existence of blue-hued, multi-headed, elephant headed deities?
There is no such thing as a “non-materialist possibility,” by the way. Those are nonsense words. The whole notion of anything being “non-material” is semantic and scientific gibberish.
That’s just a rewording of the same ad populum stuff you tried before. It’s only a “spectrum” with “extremes” demographically speaking, not in terms of methods, or approaches, or logic.
Copernicus, with all his heliocentric blathering, was just an “extreme” on a “spectrum”. So what?
I am not hostile to any non-materialist consideration cites.
I just find them immaterial.
Ba-da-bing! 
What “cite” are you talking about?
Correct. Until you bring evidence (on the afterlife or any claim), it’s just dust in the wind, as the great sage Kansas* once said.
Those performing serious research on brain function with medical implications are tight with the NDE/afterlife crowd? Really? And no, Deepak Chopra et al are not considered “neuroscientists”.
Again, what are my “highly-hostile-to-any-non-materialist-consideration cites”? Einstein? (Still waiting for you to comment on how “wonderful” Albert could be considered quoteworthy until you were made aware of his opinion on afterlife believers).
*as opposed to The Police and their “spirits in the material world” jibber-jabber.