I have experienced being separate from my body more than once. I know I am not my body, millions of others have had the same experience and also know they are not their bodies. Now if you want to record “being” you will first have to detect “being” as energy. There have been some small successes in this by parapsychologists but hardly enough to record any personalities.
Possibly. I don’t disagree that thought is so complex that we may never get it all totally worked out, but I still think we’re doing better in this regard than you imply. Electrode implantation studies have proven to be particularly interesting in this regard. Consider this study for example. It’s pretty well established that we can evoke memories by electrical stimulation. Your objection in this case may be that it’s all quite scattershot, and that while we can hit a particular brain cell and get back, say, the Flinstones theme song (as in the article), we wouldn’t have known to do that in advance. This I do not deny. I just think you underrepresent what we can do to some extent.
I admire your spirit of optimism and hope for success as much as you, but I can think of quite a few, from time-travel to immortality to zero-point energy to building a biological cell out of separate atoms. In this case, I’d suggest that such specific telepathy is as computationally intractable as predicting the path of next month’s hurricanes.
I would never suggest out-of-body experiences are supernatural. Nothing is supernatural, there are just a lot of things we don’t understand. I am familiar with brain scans, and the various forms of them. However, they only show activity, they don’t prove the activity is generated by the brain, no more than activity on the TV proves the TV generated the activity.
There is research available right now that indicates consciousness lives after the death of the brain, and that near death experiences begin after the brain is dead.
If you care to know more, please start here and follow the links.
http://www.aleroy.com/wildcard/
If you don’t then just skip it.
I am aware of those experiments, nameless, and I too am amazed and awestruck at the achievements and pace of progress of cognitive science. But this is only like pressing they keys on the Enigma machine and being surprised by how specific the output message is. If that person didn’t tell us that the Flintstones theme tune was activated, how would we know, ever? And if the telepathy device needs the person to tell it what they’re thinking, why bother using it at all since its entire utility comes from guessing what you’re thinking?
This I agree with. Brain imaging studies, are, by their very nature, correlative. Sadly that’s the best we can do. But if you don’t put faith in an individual’s ability to report their feelings when hooked up to a PET, why do you trust them when they talk about NDEs?
The link between physiology and consciousness is strengthened by the fact that inflicting a particular physical state (via drugs or electrical stimulation) can generate changes in consciousness. I know enough about philosophy to say that this argument is far from airtight, but again, it’s the best we can do with the technology we’ve got.
As for your link, I find it somewhat laughable. The author discusses a belief in a separate consciousness that amounts to “Nobody can disprove it! So there!” Fine. Take it on faith, that’s OK. But there’s no solid evidence for it. The author presents a single case study in which he essentially says: “She described everything in the room! And her EEG was flat! QED!” However, the case study itself is written by the patient, and I’m not inclined to believe her on matters of medicine just because she says so.
And this just makes me laugh–
Science has to disprove our convoluted and extraordinary claim that violates Occam’s Razor on its face! And if they don’t, we’re correct! Also, science has disproved evolution!
(I mean seriously, WTF?!)
SentientMeat, I see what your objection is now. While it’s true that all our research is probably going to have to be built on correlation and self-report, I don’t think it’s impossible that some day, our knowledge of thought will permit us to infer a certain thought from a physiological state.
Take for example, the discovery of the “homunculus”, or the somatosensory map. The map was discovered in electrode implantation experiments, and the data was self-report. But it was found to be consistent in almost everyone studied, and though there are some subtle nuances to the phenomenon, essentially we can link up touch on any part of the body with a specific part of the brain that varies only slightly from person to person. Though the sensation of touch is certainly not as complex or interesting as consciousness and thought, scientists were, using self report data, able to construct a near-perfect map of how the brain deals with touch localization. Now, this map is so widely understood and accepted as to be rather unremarkable, but I think it’s additional reason to hope that we can make some headway.
A quiet word, nameless…
As for the “possibility” of guessing specific thoughts, as I said to Captor, I share your hope but not your optimism. I think anything more than extremely vague generalities are just computationally intractable.
I see they have Kevlar for words now. What an amazing world we live in.
I rather expected that kind of reply, I take it you didn’t follow the links either.
Pam Reynolds did far more than just describe the room, and there are dozens of other accounts also. The proof is there for existence outside the body. But I know skeptics will never consider they could be wrong. So the research will go on and on and on until the general public decides not to finance it anymore.
During the Korean war research was done trying to fly airplanes with brain waves. Never heard any more about it. Fifty years ago psychiatrists were predicting the cures of depression and mental illness in months not years. Never heard any more about that either.
I read the link you provided. I’m not going to go on a wild goose chase through an NDE webring to find out what you’re trying to prove. If you have such great research, make it simple for me. If you want to win converts, make it easy for them to see what you believe
Cite? Also, what’s the point? The government has also researched a pigeon-guided missile system, exploding bats, and gay sex bombs.
Actually, psychopharmacology being what it is today, relief can certainly be provided to people with mental illness with great rapidity. I wouldn’t call it a cure, but many of the psychiatrists I’ve talked to value their job because you can see quick turnaround. I don’t think months is an unreasonable descriptor of the abilities of modern medicine to treat mental illness.
Maybe it would be wisest of me to just let this whole thing drop since history has shown that you’re unwilling to reconsider materialistic monism on its merits, and barring some really dazzling peer-reviewed journal articles to the contrary, I’m not going to consider adopting dualism as a good paradigm for consciousness. “Look at us, we had NDEs” is not sufficient evidence for me. Sorry.
Yes, I agree, let’s drop it. You, like most skeptics never read past the first sentence you disagree with, and probably never will.
I’ve been doing research work in Computer Vision and have tried to keep up with the relatively recent work on human and computer cognition and it makes me shudder to think just how complex it would be software wise to achieve even some of the most basic things you have put on that list.
We’re talking manhatten project sized research just to even be able to do 1% of the easiest things on that list. And some of them might turn out to be in practise impossible (specifically, telepathic interfaces here) because theres just so much variation and variance in the human brain. How do we know a memory you have can be transferred to someone else? For it to make sense, how much other stuff do you have to transfer over? Say you have a memory of smelling roses, is your smell of roses stored in the same place as their smell of roses? Can we even find where their smell of roses is located or do we have to transfer your smell of roses over to them as well? Can your smell of roses exist in isolation or is it a gestalt of similar smells? In that case, will you have to in effect transfer your entire brain over for them to be able to feel what you feel?
The human brain is not a well designed and thoughtfuly laid out piece of machinery, instead, it’s just a giant agglomoration of various hacks that seemed to work well at the time. Anybody who’s worked on a software project which has started off in an informal manner and has eventually just grown into a giant ball of mud knows how complicated it can be to make even the simplest thing modifications. Try imagining that times a billion and without the ability to refactor any of the modules. Now imagine the very real possibility that each brain you want to interface with has it’s own unique layout which you need to learn.
What spirit of optimism? I’m just predicting that technological change will continue at the same rate it has in the last century, into the next century. What’s so friggin’ optimistic about that? It’s not like I’m predicting a technological singularity or anything. While it’s hard to say any specific tech will be realized in that timeframe, it’s reasonable to think a lot of tech will. Jeebus, the notion that technological change will continue to happen isn’t Pollyanna stuff, it’s just acknowledgement that historical trends will continue.
Your claim that you are working in Computer Vision is credible, as your post definitely sounds like a programmer looking to get a bonus and pad the parameters before he’ll sign up for a project.
Interesting news from Science Daily, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050718234252.htm:
Back to the OP, and along the lines of the torture mentioned above:
#13 (I think): New forms of imprisonment and/or punishment for breaking the law.
Many ways to pull this off, but think about the people who are home-monitored. Now expand that to, say, being forced to stay in your room for 23 hours a day (only being able to move to go pee or ???) and having 1 hour a day to eat, exercise, etc.
Or being forced to relive what you done did- like being ‘raped’ for a rapist (probably way too cruel and unusual).
Court ordered brain control…ick.
-Tcat