NDES and OBES: dreams are the key

Looking through 6 journals I have mentioned the word telepathy just once, in that instance I singled it out because it was different than my general dream experience. The fact that a type of communication which is different from that in waking life is reported in the majority of NDE accounts in this regard is clear. The individual would not make the distinction otherwise
 
Your missing the genuine gravitas of this point (I dare humbly say). Even if you showed electrical activity you would have to make the jump that the consciousness recollection is from that time. Regarding "hearing when the brain is demonstrated as being non-fcuntoinal" runs into this same problem. Hence we are both subject to interpreting data, and hence also you cannot again use the argument against the veracity of the experience that "we don't know what time it happened" because by your logic, we can never know, as I have demonstrated.

No you wouldn’t have to make the jump Dan. If you hear my saying “boo” at a time when your brain is absolutely nonfunctional, then we can say with 100% certainty that consciousness was functioning at that time because your nervous system (including your auditory pathways) were nonfunctioning.

It has already been demonstrated that one can hear without blood flow running to the ears and see without bloodfllow running the eyes according to overwhelming circumstantial testimony but we both apprehend that data differently to state it again.

This hasn’t been demonstrated. People simply assume that it has. People forget too that partial reperfusion is ongoing in almost any cardiac crisis.

I do accept though that in practical terms, this is going to be an extremely *extremely* difficult thing to formally demonstrate.
Alright, so are you now retracting your claim that we know the brain to be remolded “at the behest of thought itself”? Or are you still intending to furnish some kind of evidence for that?

Evidence? It's called neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to change in reaction to it's environment including the act of thought, thinking of something creates electricity in the brain, it's not rocket science

No no, that’s not evidence that “thought itself” remodels the brain; it is evidence that the brain is capable of restructuring, and that is not the same statement at all.

It's not about whether or not we have detected this "data stream", it's about the analogy! That we may not have detected it is the WHOLE POINT of using the analogy in the first place, to bring a

But the analogy has to be coordinate with the claim it is making, or else it fails as an analogy. I have said repeatedly, the analogy does not have the requisite features as explanatory tool for the real life scenario is is supposedly an explanation for…the degradation of all mental activity by brain damage.

No, this is for your version of my analogy to work, my analogy does not require what yours does because I do not assume the exact nature of picture and sound with respect to its capaciy to manifest in a reciever as compeltely analagous with the nature of the relationship between the "consciousness data stream" and the brain as you do. It is that simple. This is literally the WHOLE POINT of analogy. It is not to equate things exactly, it is to speak generally about possiblities. It's like saying that because we use the word "design" in describing the origin of a complex biochemical, that it has to have actually been designed, please stop demanding such particularities from an elegantly simple analogy

This paragraph does no philosophical work. In order for the “receiver” analogy to be appropriate in the survival of mind, you need the same thing outside the receiver as is manifest upon it, otherwise the claim inherent in the analogy is simply void from the outset. But they are not the same thing. One is “potential picture” and the other is “picture.” You would need to show how “data stream” can be considered “picture” when there is no receiver…but you cannot show this.

Oh I see, your making definitive statements again and implying only your definition of plausible is relevant

No. I am encouraging you to see what hundreds of years of the best knowledge acquisition have led us to by careful and considered evaluation.
So then, where is the “electrical activity” caused by billions of afterlife beings?

My point has been made and I don't feel the need to even assume such eletrical activity exists

You were the one who said that thought created electrical activity. I naturally wondered then how it miraculously stopped creating it come the onset of the "afterlife"...or is this to be another ad hoc dimension added on to the many already existing in this case?
 
Behind all our fancy language, it boils down to that fact that we both have different opinion based on different interpretations of the data and we are both convinved that the other is misstepping to some degree, we need more input from others!
 
Thank you for bringing this thread back to where it started. This is another example of very strong evidence against the extremely weak dream hypothesis. Let's get back to addressing this more directly.

To be honest, I can't see very much point in your continuing discussions anyway... JCearly put it quite simply in the opening sentence of the second post on this thread. However I just thought I'd drop in Ken Rings alternative opinion, which looks quite reasonable to me.

We don't know whether the congenitally blind experients in Rings paper are actually 'seeing' in the way the sighted 'see', indeed there is a great deal of doubt about that. However, their condition makes them an interesting group to study, as it's quite well documented that the congenitally blind don't appear to dream 'visually'. So whether they were 'seeing' in the way the sighted 'see' or not doesn't really interest me. What interests me is that these experients seem very sure that whatever they experienced during their OBE NDE, it contained perceptions which were distinctly different, from their non-visual dreams.
 
No you wouldn’t have to make the jump Dan. If you hear my saying “boo” at a time when your brain is absolutely nonfunctional, then we can say with 100% certainty that consciousness was functioning at that time because your nervous system (including your auditory pathways) were nonfunctioning.

I see what your saying, it seems like it would be quite a controversial experiment. Define non functional, do you think the consciousness principle can re-enter if the brain is truly "Non functional".

This hasn’t been demonstrated. People simply assume that it has. People forget too that partial reperfusion is ongoing in almost any cardiac crisis.

"It has been" is my interpretation of Data, "it has not been " is yours.


No no, that’s not evidence that “thought itself” remodels the brain; it is evidence that the brain is capable of restructuring, and that is not the same statement at all.

Restructuring in response to thought, hence thought can remodel the brain, simple

This paragraph does no philosophical work. In order for the “receiver” analogy to be appropriate in the survival of mind, you need the same thing outside the receiver as is manifest upon it, otherwise the claim inherent in the analogy is simply void from the outset. But they are not the same thing. One is “potential picture” and the other is “picture.” You would need to show how “data stream” can be considered “picture” when there is no receiver…but you cannot show this.

HOw does this refute me? Note my critique of your demands of the analogy in relation to my example of the design in nature analogy, it's straightforward stuff and saying "this statement does no philosophical work" doesn't do anything to change that.

You were the one who said that thought created electrical activity. I naturally wondered then how it miraculously stopped creating it come the onset of the "afterlife"...or is this to be another ad hoc dimension added on to the many already existing in this case?[

To refer back to the analogy and show again the contradictions in your thought processes, the fact that thought can precipitate electrical activity in a biological brain does not mean the a "consciousness data stream" would be required to precipitate random electrical discharges at all because by your own admission, these two things are "different" in the same way that the pucture and sound is different in nature inside and outside the receiver hence your qualm here is easily explained
 
I could accept that OBEs and NDEs are continuous with dreams, especially if we accept that dreams are continuous with waking, but I do not care. I do not care because this is left untreated the most important of NDEs: some NDEs have some traits that make them evidence of an afterlife and dreams have not something similar.
 
Again, high brain activity is correlated with dreaming, low to zero is correlated with the NDE. The idea that we can dream in a way that is strangely similar between cultures and across time during a time of low to zero brain activity and in many cases cease of bloodflow to the brain is just not based on anything at all


In the *normal waking state* significant cortical activity is correlated with dreaming, but as I have told you, dreaming is by no means limited to cortical activity. Indeed, to the extent that “speech” enters into dreams, as per your claim, this is one example of something that may be contributed by the cortex in normal waking state. Also, as I said above, we don’t know that there is zero brain activity at time of NDEs, and you simply repeating this unestablished fact on numerous occasions isn’t making it progressively more true, whether you believe it is or not. We still need 1) formal time-stamped monitoring, and 2) real time deep brain monitoring, before this discussion can even sensibly be had with proper data.


Yes the same imaginal aptitude with totally different features and correlated brain activity, again completely baseless. Your analogy here is weak, many interviews are not highly focused and are rather more spontaneous while not all household conversations are sporadic, this has no comparison to the relative differences between dream and NDE content whatsover

Not totally different features. Many more features in common, as I said before, than the waking world has in common with NDEs. I think any observer given a sample of 10 job interviews and 10 random conversations, based on audio tapes only on which obvious cues (such, as “hi and welcome to this job interview” :) ) were removed, would have no difficulty in identifying the job interviews nonetheless. You seem to be trying to make a kind of *a priori* case that NDEs cannot be a form of imagined activity, but your case supposes that imaginal activity is not a flexible range, when we already *KNOW* that it is a flexible range, crossing from waking state to dreams and drug visions (among other things).


Yes there is, this is EXACTLY WHY that distinction is made by the only people who matter in this regard, those whom have had the NDE, if there was no distinction, why do they make it? During the dream we know you are not actaully "talking with your mouth", but that is "emulated". Clearly. Hence if we feel thisis not being emulated during the NDE, we make note of it and again, it is a massive discrepancy that you are failing to address beyond making speculatie statements that disregard the accounts themselves

I really don’t know what you mean here. First of all, as I explained to you before, I almost never have speech in dreams, so your point is highly eccentric to me from the beginning…albeit that I am trying to honor it seriously, it is just not my experience. My point is that the underlying architecture of speech involves a lot more than the cortex, so again, in a deeper form of dreaming in which the cortex was anomalously offline, temporarily, we might have an absence of speech in that form of dreaming, just as there is often an absence of faces in NDEs, presumably because the brain’s face recognition aptitudes (cortical for the most part) are not functioning properly either.

My own dream journal, my brothers, 3 of my close friends and speaking to many others. I would be happy to provide a selection of these dreams at any point. People do not regularly make note of speaking in a manner that feels "telepathic" but rather in a manner that emulated waking life.

Okay, but I meant actual studies and what not. Otherwise it’s a “your word against mine” kind of thing. As I said, I would be hard pressed to even remember the last dream I had in which ‘speaking’ featured at all. I suspect that almost all of my dreams feature what I think you are calling “telepathy” in this context…and which I would call nonverbal associations of meaning.

.Because man of them have seen before and were not blind from birth, it's that simple

But if they have seen before, then their brains already have learned contexts for visual imagination.


Of course you don't it goes against your hypothesis. That fact remains that this is a discrepancy in the experienced ontological nature of the experiences and you can only attempt to reconsile it in a way that fits your ideas.

As it goes against your hypothesis to assume that it does. I don’t see any “ontological” discrepancy at all, I only see a variation in degree. If beings in NDEs were capable of flying helicopters and landing them at Congress, that would be an *ontological* discrepancy with dreams ;)

Your missing the point, if the systems of the brain which produced dreams produce the NDE, it is strange that the dream is not had during deep General Anaesthesia yet the NDE is.

But you are missing my point…there is no such thing as normal anaesthesia once the brain starts to malfunction, because anaesthesia is a drug delivery process. As soon as the heart stops, for example, such delivery is impaired in ways that project the drug’s efficacy into unpredictable terrain.
 
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I could accept that OBEs and NDEs are continuous with dreams, especially if we accept that dreams are continuous with waking, but I do not care. I do not care because this is left untreated the most important of NDEs: some NDEs have some traits that make them evidence of an afterlife and dreams have not something similar.

But here is a case where you may actually be doing yourself more harm than good. Because if there is a *continuity* across all mental states, it becomes much more likely that a function of awareness is fundamental to reality. Don't you see this?
 
The difference in power / range is not between natural psi and lab psi, but between psi in survivalists contexts and psi in non-survivalists contexts (inside and outside of lab).

I don’t think that’s true. I think the real difference is natural v artificial, thus the likely reason why Sheldrake had some success with his animal experiments and so on. I think that crisis apparitions, for example, are every bit as “powerful” as anything in a “survivalist” context.


Only fragments but maybe helps it:

http://books.google.es/books?id=_Y5CuRH5u-wC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v=onepage&q&f=false

Well, I’ll have a look, but normally if you quote someone’s position, the onus is on you to illustrate where and how the person said it.
 
n the *normal waking state* significant cortical activity is correlated with dreaming, but as I have told you, dreaming is by no means limited to cortical activity. Indeed, to the extent that “speech” enters into dreams, as per your claim, this is one example of something that may be contributed by the cortex in normal waking state. Also, as I said above, we don’t know that there is zero brain activity at time of NDEs, and you simply repeating this unestablished fact on numerous occasions isn’t making it progressively more true, whether you believe it is or not. We still need 1) formal time-stamped monitoring, and 2) real time deep brain monitoring, before this discussion can even sensibly be had with proper data.

Yes, so again you are appealing to something baseless, that one can dream without the capacity for brain activity that we have at the only time we actuaully know we are dreaming






Not totally different features. Many more features in common, as I said before, than the waking world has in common with NDEs. I think any observer given a sample of 10 job interviews and 10 random conversations, based on audio tapes only on which obvious cues (such, as “hi and welcome to this job interview” :) ) were removed, would have no difficulty in identifying the job interviews nonetheless. You seem to be trying to make a kind of *a priori* case that NDEs cannot be a form of imagined activity, but your case supposes that imaginal activity is not a flexible range, when we already *KNOW* that it is a flexible range, crossing from waking state to dreams and drug visions (among other things).

Fundamentally different experiences yes as evideved by the NDE'ers themselves, connected in the sense that all forms of consciouss awareness invariably will be but again, as with my point on Ayahuasca which you have forgotten about it seems, we can still separate them.




I really don’t know what you mean here. First of all, as I explained to you before, I almost never have speech in dreams, so your point is highly eccentric to me from the beginning…albeit that I am trying to honor it seriously, it is just not my experience. My point is that the underlying architecture of speech involves a lot more than the cortex, so again, in a deeper form of dreaming in which the cortex was anomalously offline, temporarily, we might have an absence of speech in that form of dreaming, just as there is often an absence of faces in NDEs, presumably because the brain’s face recognition aptitudes (cortical for the most part) are not functioning properly either.

I don't belive that you almost never have speech in dreams, I really don't, if you were to send me your journal I could examine the veracity of that claim. Also again that you rarely speak, (assuming thats the case) as I already addresed, has NOTHING to say on the nature of what happens when you DO speak..


Okay, but I meant actual studies and what not. Otherwise it’s a “your word against mine” kind of thing. As I said, I would be hard pressed to even remember the last dream I had in which ‘speaking’ featured at all. I suspect that almost all of my dreams feature what I think you are calling “telepathy” in this context…and which I would call nonverbal associations of meaning.

Prove it with your journal, I would be happy to send mine in return



But if they have seen before, then their brains already have learned contexts for visual imagination.

So its all imagination now according to you and conveniantly they imagine the same things as people who have always seen. So now any claim of seeing during an NDE is just imagination to you, we are truly at a standstill and I don't think we can move this forward at least between the two of us beyond this.




As it goes against your hypothesis to assume that it does. I don’t see any “ontological” discrepancy at all, I only see a variation in degree. If beings in NDEs were capable of flying helicopters and landing them at Congress, that would be an *ontological* discrepancy with dreams ;)

But that IS the discrepancy, the degree itself as told by the NDE'er



But you are missing my point…there is no such thing as normal anaesthesia once the brain starts to malfunction, because anaesthesia is a drug delivery process. As soon as the heart stops, for example, such delivery is impaired in ways which projects the drug’s eficacy into unpredictable terrain

Im not talking about anaesthesia during brain malfunction,
 
To be honest, I can't see very much point in your continuing discussions anyway... JCearly put it quite simply in the opening sentence of the second post on this thread. However I just thought I'd drop in Ken Rings alternative opinion, which looks quite reasonable to me.

We don't know whether the congenitally blind experients in Rings paper are actually 'seeing' in the way the sighted 'see', indeed there is a great deal of doubt about that. However, their condition makes them an interesting group to study, as it's quite well documented that the congenitally blind don't appear to dream 'visually'. So whether they were 'seeing' in the way the sighted 'see' or not doesn't really interest me. What interests me is that these experients seem very sure that whatever they experienced during their OBE NDE, it contained perceptions which were distinctly different, from their non-visual dreams.

We are fleshing out our argument hopefully for the benefit of readers, that said I think we have gone as far as we can in that regard and that its descending into a wordy exchange of Opinon vs Opinion and neither of us are budging on our own opinions and interpretations of data. So I will, in the Spirit of both MaxB's words and my own continuing sanity, withdraw from further commenting and allow Kai the last word, for I doubt it would be had of its own accord :)

Although I will reserve the right to comment again if some really interesting and new datapoint comes up in relation to the actual original these of Kai's.
 
I see what your saying, it seems like it would be quite a controversial experiment. Define non functional, do you think the consciousness principle can re-enter if the brain is truly "Non functional".

Well you are asking the wrong person, because I don’t think that there is something “in” the body. The difficulty is getting such measurements, because we are nowhere near the ability to monitor like that, and such monitoring is likely to be medically dangerous, requiring probes deep in the brain.
"It has been" is my interpretation of Data, "it has not been " is yours.


It has nothing to do with interpretation. Since we don’t have safe, operational deep brain monitoring, it is simply a *fact* that it hasn’t been demonstrated.

Restructuring in response to thought, hence thought can remodel the brain, simple

Or thought and the living brain are the same thing, doing away with the need to imagine an unoccamish scenario of a “second thing” acting on a “first thing.”

HOw does this refute me? Note my critique of your demands of the analogy in relation to my example of the design in nature analogy, it's straightforward stuff and saying "this statement does no philosophical work" doesn't do anything to change that.

Look Dan. YOU are the one who is deploying the analogy, not me. The onus is on YOU to show that it is applicable to the scenario you originally applied it to. I have tried to show you why it is not applicable. I don’t know what more I can add if you simply refuse to see my points.


To refer back to the analogy and show again the contradictions in your thought processes, the fact that thought can precipitate electrical activity in a biological brain does not mean the a "consciousness data stream" would be required to precipitate random electrical discharges at all because by your own admission, these two things are "different" in the same way that the pucture and sound is different in nature inside and outside the receiver hence your qualm here is easily explained

I’m not talking about the TV analogy here, I am talking about your claim that “thought creates electrical activity.” Does it or doesn’t it, in your opinion? Or is it one of those situations where it can choose to or choose not to as it pleases…kind of like it can be free of all energy needs if it chooses ;)
 
Yes, so again you are appealing to something baseless, that one can dream without the capacity for brain activity that we have at the only time we actuaully know we are dreaming


Of course the observant reader will note that this is not remotely what I said. What I said was that dreams involve a much larger swathe of the brain than just the cortex.

Fundamentally different experiences yes as evideved by the NDE'ers themselves, connected in the sense that all forms of consciouss awareness invariably will be but again, as with my point on Ayahuasca which you have forgotten about it seems, we can still separate them.


Of course there are differences across a range, but as I said before, this does not refute the very considerable possibility that one imaginal aptitude underlies the entire range.


I don't belive that you almost never have speech in dreams, I really don't, if you were to send me your journal I could examine the veracity of that claim. Also again that you rarely speak, (assuming thats the case) as I already addresed, has NOTHING to say on the nature of what happens when you DO speak..

What? No. I almost never have verbal experiences in dreams. If you don’t believe me, there’s nothing I can do about it…it remains true nonetheless. It’s not really something I can say that I worry about though ;)

Prove it with your journal, I would be happy to send mine in return

No that’s just getting silly. First of all, I no longer keep a dream journal. I stopped when I desisted from lucid dream and “out of body” experiments. Second, what one writes in such a journal is always in the waking state. Even if I were to write in such a journal “and then he said…” that doesn’t necessarily reflect what happened (anymore than it does in an NDE, as I’m sure you’d argue).

So its all imagination now according to you and conveniantly they imagine the same things as people who have always seen. So now any claim of seeing during an NDE is just imagination to you, we are truly at a standstill and I don't think we can move this forward at least between the two of us beyond this.

I don’t know how you get that from what I said. These are real concerns Dan. Let’s say that someone without eyes (anopthalmic) were to say “I saw blue for the first time during my NDE!” Can you tell me how you could evaluate that claim? For that matter, how could we even evaluate that they were “seeing” for the first time? If the brain already has some learned visual experience, then there are already memory traces to construct that experience, which can be called upon during an NDE.

But that IS the discrepancy, the degree itself as told by the NDE'er

But this is not an ontological discrepancy. I have had dreams, and I have had a few *extraordinary* dreams…but those aren’t ontologically discrepant either.

Im not talking about anaesthesia during brain malfunction,

But you are. Because you spoke of NDEs occurring under general anaesthesia. You perhaps have a tentative case when there is no other evidence of a medical crisis during the anaesthesia, but not really otherwise.
 
We are fleshing out our argument hopefully for the benefit of readers, that said I think we have gone as far as we can in that regard and that its descending into a wordy exchange of Opinon vs Opinion and neither of us are budging on our own opinions and interpretations of data. So I will, in the Spirit of both MaxB's words and my own continuing sanity, withdraw from further commenting and allow Kai the last word, for I doubt it would be had of its own accord :)

I don't need the "last word" Dan; I was enjoying the conversation. If you want to bow out, fair enough.

As to Max's comments, I can't say I see much of anything that was resolved in the post he refers to near the start of the thread.
 
I don't need the "last word" Dan; I was enjoying the conversation. If you want to bow out, fair enough.

As to Max's comments, I can't say I see much of anything that was resolved in the post he refers to near the start of the thread.

I didn't mean it that way, I just meant that I literally couldn't imagine it coming to an end naturally. I enjoyed the discourse too and although we perhaps became a little heated at times, this is fine and normal and I appreciate the general tone of the conversation and that lack of ad hominen stuff that generally comes with these kinds of things.

I will probably speak with you again on this forum in the future so best of luck Kai.
 
I didn't mean it that way, I just meant that I literally couldn't imagine it coming to an end naturally. I enjoyed the discourse too and although we perhaps became a little heated at times, this is fine and normal and I appreciate the general tone of the conversation and that lack of ad hominen stuff that generally comes with these kinds of things.

I will probably speak with you again on this forum in the future so best of luck Kai.

And to you Dan, and Haruhi, and anyone else who participated. It's been a blast!
 
But here is a case where you may actually be doing yourself more harm than good. Because if there is a *continuity* across all mental states, it becomes much more likely that a function of awareness is fundamental to reality. Don't you see this?

I do not know what that means. Never mind that "a function of awareness is essential to reality", some NDEs suggest that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife. I thought JCearly put it all clear with his / her first comments on this thread.

I don’t think that’s true. I think the real difference is natural v artificial, thus the likely reason why Sheldrake had some success with his animal experiments and so on. I think that crisis apparitions, for example, are every bit as “powerful” as anything in a “survivalist” context.

No, natural psi in survivalists contexts is much more robust than natural psi in non-survivalists contexts. And the crisis apparitions are in survivalist context because they are instances of people who have nearly died or who just died.
 
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