Well, let’s take some examples. You are on jury duty, and the defendant argues that the explanation for the CCTV pictures showing him murdering the victim, and accompanying genetic forensic evidence, is that it was his long lost identical twin whose birth was conspiratorially covered up. We cannot necessarily prove that wrong, we must “arbitrarily” choose one explanation or another. Would you agree that the defendant’s explanation is extraordinary?
And why should they not be considered neuropsychological, in absence of any evidence of the required calibre which indicates such a mode of explanation to be incorrect?
I can assure you that I have had personal experiences, even religious experiences, which changed my worldview at the time - it was only gradually that I came to incorporate them into my current physicalist position But people, sadly, become deluded all the time. I would not say that the schizophrenic didn’t hear voices, but neither of us would consider a non-neuropsychological explanation more probable, agreed?
Like the schizophrenics and their voices. The veridical-or-not evidence is crucial to our consideration of their nature.
Absolutely agreed. So we must all try to make it crystal clear that we’re not asking “Are these things a glimpse of the honest-to-goodness Afterlife, then?” when we discuss NDE’s, unless evidence of a radically different calibre emerges in future.
Powerful dreams, I said. Make that very very powerful, even temporal-lobe-epileptic powerful, if it’s more acceptable.
…case law, science, evidence, Ockham’s Razor and unnecessary entities.
That word is OK, but “extremely unlikely” seems to me to be the path of mental least resistance. “Extraordinary,” semantically speaking, seems to be used most often to describe one’s personal opinion about matters: one’s degree of being impressed, etc. It has uses in other phrases, of course: extraordinary measures, etc. I don’t agree that there is a well-though-out, well-defined type of evidence called “extraordinary evidence.” That has parlance only in the skeptic’s vocabulary.
The problem is that it “neurophysiological” is just a fancy way of saying “the brain does it”; applying the term gives us the warm feeling of having added information without actually doing so. NDEs and AAs are beguiling in their difference from ordinary experience combined with internal coherence (they are not chaotic like dreams) and similarity across experiencers. They require a deeper explanation that simply “the brain does it.” Everything the brain requires one, for that matter.
I would be curious to hear about them and how you gradually processed them. Can you share a bit?
The deep question here is in precisely what sense NDEers are “deluded.” If their experience convinces them, how are they being fooled?
We see how schizophrenics are fooled because their beliefs and behaviors clash as crudely against their environment as seemingly possible. I’ve talked at length and on several occasions with a schizophrenic. The state is simply revealed as “wrong” and “out of harmony.” It is ugly and sad. He knew he was fucked up, too. That is one important qualitative difference between a mental illness and the NDE experience. NDEers are empowered by their “delusion.”
[quote]
I would not say that the schizophrenic didn’t hear voices, but neither of us would consider a non-neuropsychological explanation more probable, agreed?
[quote]
Right, the brain does it. We can say dopamine is involved. I worked in the drug industry and on a psych meds project. You look these thing up the the PDR and they’re all “mechanism of action unknown.” Just sayin’.
Agreed. And I agreed to your experiment of having the patients check for numbers in their rooms. Their not seeing anything would not be desirable, of course, but their seeing wrong numbers consistently would be a big minus. And I believe that their seeing numbers aright would change your view, non?
If someone has a coherent, stable experience, then that’s counts as “real” in my philosophy. For example, dreams are not stable. I can’t enter the same dreamworld every night. But if I could, then it would be a “real” world that I had to deal with, wouldn’t it? Even if it was all in my head.
But is “powerful dream” the best choice of words to describe it? And do we even understand what dreams are for that matter? I don’t think so.
And things that keep rapping on the door in the middle of the night when they have no right to do so…
I see your point, and agree in general, but since the SDMB is a community I think it is accceptable{maybe nessecary} to challenge the posting style and honesty of frequent posters, especially when those posters insert their view in numerous threads on the same subject. I prefer debates that provide information and thoughtful insight rather than unfounded prejudice claims. It is reasonable to expect a person making a claim to provide support, in fact it is this boards tradition, which any member who is a frequent poster should know.
If every debate turns into a bitter battle perhaps** lekatt** should modify his approach and is deserving at least in part of some of the criticism.
And so do dreams, optical illusions and even so demonstrably physical a mechanism as memory formation. That’s why I said a neuropsychological mode of explanation.
Sure. Note that this was when I first arrived here a few years ago, when I had still not yet formulated my position in as much detail, but I’m sure you’ll find it interesting nonetheless.
They are convinced of some external element of their experience, in the same way that schizophrenics (or some, at least - let’s try to avoid “some/all” nitpickery here, since we both largely trust each other’s honesty) really really think that the voices come from “outside”, that they are emphatically inot* effectively talking to themselves. Again, if I dream that I’m on Concorde then I would be deluded if I believed that I had been on Concorde.
Yes, but not important in terms of whether they constitute evidence requiring a non-neuropsychological mode of explanation. We could similarly examine temporal lobe epileptics and their delusions, positive and ‘cosmic’ as many of them are.
Of course, just as the mechanism of gravity and biological life has not yet been fully explained: they are still not “paranormal”. Science has not completed the natural explanation of the entire universe and everything in it including all human experiences and abilities, for then we could close down every university department on Earth as redundant.
Yes - at least, it would require some revolutionary paradigm shift involving quantum entanglement or something (if I didn’t just go ahead and believe I was in the Matrix!). While still “natural” or “physical”, these are certainly just as extraordinary in my book so, yes, their effect would be equivalent to me considering them as evidence of an Afterlife or other “supernatural” entity.
People have recurring dreams all the time. Again, we seem to be juggling dictionaries over whether dreams are “real” if they are purely neuropsychological phenomena. I’m sure I could accommodate either into my position, as could you, so it’s really not that important - I’ll go along with your choice for the sake of argument.
Come, is it not serviceable? I’ll offer flowery prose for you to critique if I must, but I’m not much of a poet.
OK, so you want to say the brain “does” NDEs. Fine, the brain does 'em. And once we know how consciousness works, then we’ll really know something about NDEs, I guess. And once we know how matter works.
Not to put words in your “Reply to Thread,” but I sense that the difference between your manner of thought and my own is that you feel you can point to that matter “out there” and say, “See, plain as day how it works!” I just don’t feel that. Matter, mind, our understanding of things and the degree to which our concepts mirror the Truth (which we can say as a word but can never point to directly, as an object)–these are all fluid, tricky, crafty. Hence my example about Freud. Dammit, that stuff really seemed real 50 years ago! Universal Newtonian time was just a given. Skinner had the mind totally sussed–it’s just reflexes and learned responses, man! And so on.
You know what my biggest fear is? You know what would be the biggest joke? One day I have an NDE and I’m the only one on the whole planet who’s had one who immediately and unequivocally sees it as a bullshit hallucination. That would be irony.
No doubt. I’ll study up.
Actually, am I mistaken in thinking that schizophrenics generally perceive the voices as being “real” and not the self but nevertheless “in their head”?
That’s nitpicky, but I have a problem with the internal/external dichotomy here if internal is assumed to be a subset of “not real.” Also, the internal and external interact and influence each other concretely. It’s tough to draw a boundary.
But the thing is dreams don’t delude us–they’re “marked” in some mysterious way as dreams. I think to say that NDEers are “deluded” or “mistaken” in some way you have to demonstrate a disharmony between the content of their experience and something that we trust. If someone had an NDE and said that they saw me living in Alaska in the present and wasn’t that neat, then that would be a disharmony. They would indeed be deluded. But just to say they’re deluded because they came to believe in the Afterlife which we know doesn’t exist, then that’s question-begging.
I’m not sure I’m track with the “mode of explanation” concept. I don’t think there “are” such modes.
How are they fooled, a prerequisite for the delusion label?
Well then, we have our experiment.
I have recurring dreams, too. I’ve had dreams that hinted at stable worlds of mentality. I one experience that pretty much commanded me to believe that worlds of pure mind exist (I see mind and matter as not being opposites at all, but simply different mathematical constructs–the same substance, as it were). No point there, I guess–just an observation.
You’ve conflated two separate issues, here, with a direct bearing on the ability of science to pursue an explanation.
At this point, there is no evidence that NDEs can be produced. There is no method by which a condition can be created in which the outcome will be an NDE. The study in The Lancet had to go out and poll numerous hospitals to seek out large numbers of people who underwent (externally identical) physical events and were only able to find reports of NDEs among 18% of the respondents. That is not producing NDEs and that limits the ability of researchers to identify the actual phenomenon.
I am not claiming that there is no way to examine NDEs. (I liked the computer monitor facing the ceiling idea mentioned a couple of weeks ago.) I am simply pointing out that part of scientific inquiry includes replication and we do not (yet?) have a way to reliably replicate the phenomenon.
I’d suggest that we do largely know how matter works, and that NDE’s and other physically-correlatable phenomena tell us how consciousness works as much as the other way around.
How would you explain the astonishingly accurate predictions our “how it works” explanations yield for matter (at least)?
And then evidence came along for which their explanations were not simply incomplete but radically incorrect. Veridical NDE’s would show today’s cognitive science to be the latter. Non-veridical NDE’s would only show it to be the former.
I guess it depends on how well acquainted they are with psychiatry and mental illness as a whole. Certainly, some of the poorly educated ones I have known simply cannot accept that it is all in their head.
Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the title of the thread anymore here, are we?
But they could be in Alaska at that moment - their spirit or pattern or whatever could have travelled there while their waking consciousness was diminished. And the schizophrenic’s voices could be real: other spirits or patterns literally talking to them from “Beyond”. Yet again, we must ask ourselves what modes of explanation, what paradigm, we accept without evidence of the calibre required to radically shift it.
Well, I’ve given my identical twin example, and I’m not sure I can think of a better one. I could try a different one, I guess. Shall we discuss 19th century vitalism, or something?
Only the NDEr’s who think they are literally looking at themselves in the present (from above or wherever) are ‘fooled’. The soldier who realised that, because the African physically lying on top of him wasn’t visible, it could not have been a genuine external perspective, was not “fooled”. Nor was James Randi when he realised the bedsheets he’d ‘seen’ were not on his physical bed.
Agreed. Again, it seems such an odd place for what I consider to be the last bastion of the “paranormal” to stand, but I will concede with good grace if the experiments reveal a verifiable external perspective (ie. words and numbers can literally be viewed where the physical eyes can’t see them). Note also that cheating is very easy in this case (just tell the guy later what the words and numbers were), so I’ll need the experiments to be closely scrutinised by people I trust (Sue Blackmore would do).
The brain does NDEs, but what does the brain? That’s what we oughtn’t pretend to know.
We know how matter works to a degree, but we have no idea what percentage (as it were) of the total knowledge we have. My guess: Small. And the philosophical question of what matter is is open. We’ve argued about that before, as you know.
We understand matter in terms of mathematical models, about which we also disagree.
A lot of our understanding is also not fundamental but simply at the we-learned-this-through-trial-and-error level.
Dear Sentient, please partake of the Meat of my argument (hah, I jest!). I said that Freudian psychology was crappy science from the get-go and not in keeping with the scientific method. Any disagreement?
The question is why it seemed true at the time. My point here is not that the scientific method is flawed and allows false positives, though it does, but that Freudian psychology was “true” in its time, and the fluid forms our individual and group consciousnesses take can make it so and make it not so, as the era may present itself.
A counter to this may be, “But matter–boron and helium–are the same across all eras.” Well, virtually so. There was no matter during several of the “eras” of the Big Bang (according to our current myth), but yes. I say, there are different orders of stability possible and readily apparent in That Which Is, and differing degrees of replicability-difficulty of phenomena (incandescent light turns on, NDE, difficult piano concerto, and so on).
Which all fits my (and many others’) idea of That Which Is as a mathematical construct. And the Afterlife is, quite simply and elegantly, the persistence of the concept (including the concept of the physical body–there is no different “spirit” unless we call the concept/pattern removed from the set called “Earth Life” “spirit”) of an individual person.
Not sure what you mean by the latter sentence, but the fact that some NDEs have been verifiably veridical (you dispute the claim, recognized) is icing on the cake for “my side.” False and deluded NDEs, however, would be shit spread on the cake, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Despite your “Hallucinatory NDEs” link, I say that such cases are a miniscule, weensy percentage of the total (and I disagree with 80% of the examples in that article as proof against). But we have our experiment to sort things out, don’t we?
No, but to be clear, I mean that schizophrenics, whether they believe the voices are “real” or not, actually experience the voices as clear voices IN their heads–real, loud, not-the-self, but nevertheless inside. Generally?
I think we are. A general theory of the paranormal will have to be a general theory of everything, I should think. We’ve got a lot of work to do, you and I.
[/quote]
But they could be in Alaska at that moment - their spirit or pattern or whatever could have travelled there while their waking consciousness was diminished.
[/quote]
And if they concluded I was living there, it would be a “disharmonious experience” in that they ended up thinking something that wasn’t true. That would not mean that the experience was worthless, however. For example, they might have seen a picture of Alaska that was largely accurate but nevertheless wrong in some respects.
[quote]
And the schizophrenic’s voices could be real: other spirits or patterns literally talking to them from “Beyond”.
[quote]
Actually, that is something well worth considering. Schizophrenics might be tuned into a “bad place” full of low vibrations, scraps of consciousness, etc. We are accustomed to thinking of “spirits” as entire consciousnesses like our own, but it may be that mind can be fragmentary. For example, in AA experiences, the aliens are sophisticated eidolons, but they do not exhibit what we would deem full sentience.
[quote]
Yet again, we must ask ourselves what modes of explanation, what paradigm, we accept without evidence of the calibre required to radically shift it.
[quote]
I don’t have a “paradigm.” (I hate that word by the way–it really means series of verb tenses, but then people jumped on the phrase “paradigm shift” and the rest is jargon history.) My guiding light is Reason.
[quote]
Well, I’ve given my identical twin example, and I’m not sure I can think of a better one. I could try a different one, I guess. Shall we discuss 19th century vitalism, or something?
[quote]
Isms are pointless, except as a way of telling someone quickly how one thinks. A semantic tool.
You say they’re fooled because they can’t be having that experience. But they’re not fooled unless the information they receive is disharmonious with their overall situation.
Dunno. Can’t put thoughts in his mind and don’t know what he experienced, but most on my side of the debate would not find the example very strong. He could have simply been envisioning the situation without even being OBE. That’s what Sue Blackmore’s experience seems to have been, yet she thinks she can invalidate every NDE and OBE with that tool. Etc.
Oh dear me there’s a big assumption there.
Ja, bring it on! And I in turn will consider it a BIG MINUS if people have confidence they’ve seen the numbers clearly but get them wrong.
Ms. Intellectual Honesty herself.
I read about your experiences. Fascinating! Would you mind talking about them, or would that be a rehash. Actually, what you had to say about them I found not to conflict much at all with my own understanding of Reality.
If their experience involved observations which were proven false, they were fooled. If they are convinced their experience could only be produced by actual spiritual OBE, but their experience can be reproduced through drugs or other means, they were fooled.
(Any particular reason you picked schizophrenia?)Not all the time, you sometimes find people who seem normal and rational until they confide that they are the last hope of the Jedi.
Not all schizophrenics are aware that they are mentally ill.
Whether a schizophrenic is empowered by their delusion or not depennds on the delusion. People who believe that they are the reborn Christ certainly feel empowered. Paranoid delusions are also empowering. There is a massive conspiracy of the government/big business/extraterrestrials/demons/etc. They have sunk tendrils into all parts of society. The schizophrenic is the only smart enough to see the conspiracy and the only one capable of fighting. EG Francis E Dreck Esquire was convinced of the existence of a World Wide Frankenstein Government Gangster Conspiracy and that he was “Your only hope for a future”. He went from being a retired man living off of his brother, to the only one brilliant enough to see the mind control antennas, the Men In Black, and the evil plot of Czarina Franklin Delano “Rosenfeld”, and the only one who could fight the conspiracy and save the world. I’d say that’s pretty darn empowering.
Re Atheist Materialist
The first explanation I look for is material. I will not accept a non-material explanation until all other possibilities have been ruled out. However, I’m no atheist. If I am an atheist, I’d like to know why I didn’t eat or drink today, and why I spent all that time praying in Hebrew.
What does the stomach, or the eye, or the skin? Evolution, of course.
And on a scale of “total happiness”, we’re uncertain how happy we are, and in “total uncertainty” we’re uncertain how uncertain we are. I suggest that “total knowledge” is a category error.
I can’t remember that argument, but I would have argued that general relativity and high energy physics provide far better answers than “philosophy”.
But those predictions are accurate, against all the a priori odds.
If that were the case, the predictions would not be so accurate.
No - I was addressing behaviourism and Newtonian gravitation, which were radically impugned by eg. neonatal subitising ability, slow atomic clocks, bent starlight etc.
What? Matter was there for those 14 billion years. And the Big Bang is not a myth - yet again, the evidence falsifies the alternatives.
Can you offer a test which could prove that hypothesis false? It sounds pseudoscientific to me.
Well, you go for it. I’ll stick with cognitive science, thanks.
Dreams are not yet completely explained by cognitive science. Very[sup]N[/sup] powerful dreams aren’t either. But we don’t seek non-neuropsychological explanations for normal dreams or, heck, memories.
I disagree.
Yes, as Ramachandran says in Phantoms in the Brain - they really really think someone else is talking to them.
No, I meant that non-veridical NDE’s are not “paranormal” unless all dreams or memories were “paranormal”. Of course, if you don’t think there is any such thing as the paranormal, then we either agree entirely or we’re on yet another semantic carousel.
This is crucial. WHY DON’T YOU THINK IT’S TRUE? It might be true that your pattern literally travelled to Alaska in your dream (just as it literally hovers near the ceiling in a veridical NDE), but for some reason you assume that you didn’t. Why do you consider that less likely than the proposition that it was just a dream?
What?? Schizophrenics are literally hearing fragments of other people’s utterances or thoughts? I hear the sound of an oncoming train in the distance.
You at least have a “basis of probabilities”, since you consider the identical twin case “extremely unlikely”. That is what I mean by the word.
Very well, shall we discuss the 19th Century proposition that biological science hadn’t explained the life of living things, the elan vital, but only the behaviour of living things?
Then how do you explain the absence of the African, or the difference in the bedsheets, or the inconsistencies in supposedly veridical NDE testimonies when you really get down to them?
As could everyone, even NDEr’s.
I said it seems that way - I’m not assuming it. I would hope I could tell you my opinion without you assuming that I am setting forth a demonstrable proposition.
Or, like Pam Reynolds, they can’t even get the shape of the equipment right.
Since Pam Reynolds surgery has been attacked I would like to supply a few quotes of what she actually said. She gave this “report” to the doctors after they brought her back to life. Her body was dead, the blood removed from her head during the time she is “seeing” this. The whole thing is at:
And to clarify, when I say a “remembered dream” I mean what her visual cortex supplied as an imaginary accompaniment to what she could hear (through her ear plugs - they really only protect from loud noises like the drill rather than render you completely deaf) in her not-quite-standstill-yet state.
Skeptics will grab any straw available and make up the rest.
The time line has been researched many, many times and what she remembers happened after she was dead.
She accurately described the instrument as would any lay person who had never seen it before. What I quoted was only a small part. I hope most people will read the whole of it. I know skeptics are not really concerned with truth only with protecting their precious beliefs.
And as to whether her vortex supplied anything or not is only opinion. I wore earplugs for seven years at a manufacturing job and you couldn’t hear anyone talk without removing them. But I am sure you will think up more reasons, and more reasons, all of them as lame as the ones you offered.
Here is another one, watch how more excuses are manufactured.
I could post a hundred of these just as good, and then there are the veridical NDEs, those that have been verified by researchers. The truth will win.
And, Aeschines, a small modification to the experiment occurs to me which makes it far more cheatproof and easy to carry out, but yields a similarly firm conclusion either way.
What if, as in the case of the woman mishearing the surgeon refer to the “mayo” next to the bed and seeing in her NDE an item of mail next to the bed, surgeons were told to deliberately say things during their procedure like “hey, her hair’s turned green” or “someone get that sheep out of here”, or other strange events with no basis in fact.
If the NDEr returned and said they’d seen these things happen, their account could be categorically labelled “hallucinatory”, agreed?
Now this is what lekatt claimed after I posted the link to Dr. Woerlee’s discussion of Ms. Reynold’s experience:
Interestingly, having claimed that Ms. Reynolds “did not say the things listed in this account,” we find that the quotations provided in the account lekatt produced are identical to the ones quoted in the article he dismissed. In fact, we can note from Dr. Woerlee’s article that Dr. Woerlee is quoting them directly from Dr. Sabom’s book which lekatt’s article relies upon (although lekatt’s source does not bother to actually cite the book, simply mentioning Dr. Sabom’s name and then providing a quotation).
So, when we consider who “never tells the truth” because they are concerned “only with protecting their precious beliefs,” I am afraid that the evidence as presented by lekatt leans very much in the direction opposite his claims.
Now, just to be clear on one point: I am not yet persuaded in either direction regarding NDEs or any other experience outside the normal (or material or whatever word we can all not agree is accurate at any given moment). I have encountered odd events that do not seem to be easily reconciled with our current state of knowledge and I am willing to consider sources of information that we have not yet discovered. However, I am not willing to jump on every odd claim as “true,” particularly when its proponents have a propensity for lying.
Let me answer this one: If the patient had been semi-conscious and heard the conversations he still would not have been able to describe and doctors and put names to the descriptions.
I will quit trying to debate on these things, you are not interested in finding solutions only in belittling others and calling them names, the same goes for Tom’s post. Pam was not quoted accurately by the skeptic except in your skeptic minds and eagerness to bully others.
