Really? Could you point me out a study that shows consciousness continues after, say, 10 years of death?
Oh man, before this goes any further, can I just say, don’t bother with Lekatt? He’ll provide repeated links to his pet sites, claiming all the evidence one needs is there if we’ll only believe. Then other dopers will come along, point out all the flaws failures and lies associated with those “studies” and quite fairly demand real evidence. Lekatt will then repeat his assertions that we’re all just blind to the truth and refuse to accept anything that anybody else says who disagrees with him. Like the guy in the Bullshit episode about conspiracy theories nothing anybody says will ever convince him he’s wrong.
So let’s just ignore him and move on, please?
Ha, finally found out what you were talking about. Can’t show you a study, but can point out that those who were studied talked to family and loved ones that had been physically dead for over 10 years showing their consciousnesses had survived more than 10 years.
Move on to where, where are we going?
That’s why I said process, not program. A program may be written on paper, but a process is what is getting executed on the computer, including the memory and register states, the state of the pipeline, and the contents of all flip-flops.
I wish it was as easy to understand as you naively think. My job involves figuring out what went wrong when a processor has an error in the field, and I assure you it is no simple matter. Not bad software - bad hardware.
So, try again at refuting the analogy. And don’t even try to argue - my PhD is in computer architecture, so it won’t go well for you at all.
I’ve read lots by cosmologists, not planetary scientists. Not that Sagan’s stuff was wrong, if a bit out of date now. Ever read Demon Haunted World? If you say science has made no progress on the origins of the universe after reading any of these books, you clearly don’t read with much comprehension - so I find it plausible that you’ve read, but not understood, Sagan.
How do you explain the experiment which indicated that the impulse to move your arm came before the thought to do so?
Do you really think that the impulse to move your hand away from a hot stove involves thought? That’s been disproven many, many times.
But all that proves is that they believed they were talking to their loved ones - were we to be mean and cynical, we could point out that them lying is a possibility (though I personally don’t think that’s always the case). That people say they talk to loved ones is not proof that those loved ones are actual. Evidence, certainly, but I would say it’s pretty poor evidence, taken alone.
Even if you don’t agree with me on that point - let’s change the time period to 200 years. Is there any evidence showing consciousness lasts that long after death? Feel free to believe what you want, but you can’t say research has shown that consciousness lasts forever. I would amend your claim downwards somewhat, if I were you.
Hmm, you didn’t answer my reply. Go look up autonomic nervous system.
All of them? Every single one? Cuz if what you claim is true, then no brain injury is beyond recovery and all of them would heal. Since that obviously isn’t true it puts a big hole in your theory.
All this link says is brains are different, and has nothing to do with anything we’re talking about.
No, tis true I can’t say research, at least not scientific research shows consciousness lasts forever. However, during a couple of my trips to the spirit world I did talk to Jesus (2000 years), and on one occasion I talked to God (forever), maybe I should say God talked to me to be more accurate.
Many other people have also talked to their relatives, Jesus, and God. I realize this is all personal experience. I know my personal experiences are real because I have tested them in the physical world as best I can. I don’t know about others. I realize there are some who say God told them to do harmful things to others, I believe that was a different voice. There are ways of telling, but I have run out of time.
A PhD, I will be very wary. I worked at a Typesetting plant for 31 years, and the last 15 years I owned it. We had five computers, each bigger than a refrigerator. Part of my job was to keep them running and do programming. I used volt/ohm meters to check the values when something went wrong. I used schematics to determine the circuit board or boards that controlled the part that didn’t work. Then pulled the board to check for burnt or hot components like transitors, condensors, resistors, and pots, among other things. In the software I am familiar with octal and binary math, I did programs concerning the characters of the fonts we used. Here you can look at print outs, memory dumps, register dumps and single execution. I look for problems by the process of elimination. Changing program expressions until I found out what happened, hopefully. Then if nothing worked I called the repairman, but not very often.
The point being that there are things to look at, visible references to help, therefore this is a material thing.
The mind is not material, nor thoughts, thinking, emotions and other processes concerned with the mind, better known as the spirit. The spirit (you) uses the brain as an interface to program the body. This is done by thought, when you enter the human body at birth you must learn to gain control of it. This process takes years and years. When your body dies you simply return to the spirit world to try again or something else.
Yes, I am familiar with the autonomic nervous system, among other things it keeps you from holding your breath until you die. It will keep your body alive when you are out of it for a long time. But did you know that thought can override the autonomic nervous system. Biofeedback has shown us we can use thoughts to raise and lower our blood pressure, raise and lower our heart rate and other small stuff. The Yogas of India have taken that to a higher level. They can stop and start their hearts, and even put themselves into a state of suspended animation. One Yoga was buried in a coffin underground for 30 days and lived to tell about it. His vital signs were monitored from about ground. He lowered his heart rate to one beat a minute. Learning to control and use our thoughts is what physical life is all about. There are hundreds of accounts.
Yes, I do, or does the brain think for you. You know you could keep your hand on the stove if you really want to disproving your bypassing the thought process. When you learn a new task you must think through all of it, after you have learned it the execution goes faster and smoother, but thought is still an essential part of it. If you were asleep would your brain pull your hand from a fire without awaking you first, of course not.
Nothing can be done without thought first.
Sometimes.
Shrug, so what? You can use your physical body to affect your physical body.
Very amusing. I’m sure you saw great 1 MHz waveforms on your voltmeter. :rolleyes: Ever use (or hear of) a logic analyzer?
I’d guess that the computers you used were minis of PSP-11 vintage or before. Discretes on boards today are so small you can hardly see them, let alone get acces with a probe. (You’d also screw up the function due to capacitive loading.)
The register dumps you saw were only a small part of the machine state. I taught PDP-11 assembler, and we provided the students with a simulator that ran on top of the actual hardware to let them get dumps, and also to make it harder for them to crash the machine. But even on those simple machines a lot was going on that was not programmer-visible. That’s even more true today. When you do an ADD instruction, you don’t know which of several adders in the FPU is executing it. You don’t even know that it is getting executed before another instruction appearing after it which has no data dependency on the ADD.
To a certain extent you can (and we do) simulate the processor at a low level, but even that is not accurate. Two signals that are close to each other might interfere with each other, which simulators don’t catch.
When two people read a page of a book, different things go on in their minds. When two processors execute the same program, different things may be happening inside the computer, depending on what else is running, the patch level of the OS, the rev of the processor, the temperature, and a zillion other things. A process and a program are two different things.
You looked at voltages. We can look at EEGs. if the voltage makes the signal physical, doesn’t the EEG make the brainwaves physical?
No brain, no thoughts. As for reflexes, we know that the non-thinking part of the brain, the part that controls our automatic systems, controls reflexes. I definitely expect that we’d pull our hands way from a fire when we’re sleeping. Any cite that we wouldn’t? After all, we hear things in our sleep - how else would we wake when we hear a noise?
Sure we can affect our heart rate - I’ve done it myself. We can’t stop ourselves from breathing - that is hard wired.
Apparently elephants also indulge.
If only the bartender had simply cut them off.
Then again, maybe elephants also know that they are going to die.
Well, your physical body is operated by the autonomic nervous system, or so most people believe. But your physical body does not, can not affect your physical body. How would your body know when you wanted to move your arm and to where. Would your brain make this decision or would you make the decision?
Well, your physical body is operated by the autonomic nervous system, or so most people believe. But your physical body does not, can not affect your physical body. How would your body know when you wanted to move your arm and to where. Would your brain make this decision or would you make the decision?
If you say your brain made the decision then how would your brain know when and where to move your arm unless you told it. Thinking logically about this if you think your brain made the decision would that mean you are the brain? If you are the brain then how can millions of people leave their bodies and look down upon them? Interesting.
You are right, my computers were ancient by today’s standards. No, I never used a logic analyzer. Now I didn’t mean to inply that troubleshooting computers was an easy job. It certainly wasn’t easy for me either.
The signals produced by the EEG are real and physical, but since the human body is not connected to electric current what generates this signal. Does the brain generate this signal or is the signal produced by spirit. Is the signal going to the brain or coming from it. I know what you will say, but we now have some evidence. When the brain is dead it produces no signal, but research shows the consciousness continues to live which indicates to me that the signal is going to the brain from the consciousness.
I have to break here, someone needs me. Think about it.
To be fair, if we assume that God and Jesus exist, we’re also assuming their other attributes, and it’s reasonable to suggest that what applies to them probably doesn’t apply to us also.
You can’t know something by testing it “as best you can”. That’s reason for believing something. Knowing something requires you to have tested it completely - both pretty much impossible to do and measure. After all, if you know something, you don’t have faith.
Well, i’m still in disagreement, but we’re into beliefs now and not statements. All I really wanted was an agreement that your statement of “Scientific research has shown consciousness lives on after death” for “forever” is incorrect - at the least you should probably add some conditionals in there. “Scientific research has shown consciousness lives on after death for an hour”, or something.