Its pretty hard to satisfy If ¬B then ¬A if A or B can never be "false."
Yes. Do you have a point that's relevant to the topic at hand? Your starting proposition is itself based on assumptions. And obviously those assumptions seem to be valid within the physical. To then jump to the idea that they must be valid outside the little box is - somewhat paradoxically - illogical. More importantly it's erroneous.
 
Consciousness is non-physical (it is not limited by time and distance). You can't understand it by analogy to anything you know about the physical universe. Scientific, analytic, reductionist thinking can only tell you what consciousness is not, it will never tell you what it is. In order to understand consciousness you have to do something that has nothing to do with analysis. However since you are conscious you can experience your own nature if you would stop thinking.
 
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Consciousness is non-physical. You can't understand it by analogy to anything you know about the physical universe.
I mostly agree but I think it is possible to have sciences that do access the much greater expanse. Of course that means moving beyond the parameters geared to the physical. Since we (and all the physical) is consciousness in expression we can access more (though not all) of it in loosely defined ways.
 
Carl Sagan's explanation involved reliving the experience of traversing the birth canal which Blackmore criticised because the nervous system is patently underdeveloped in newborns,which i agree.Her explanation was a bit more sophisticated,involving increased activation of nervous cells in the retina due to brain anoxia and endogenous release of opioids.Because there is a higher concentration of them in the.middle of the retina,the visual.experience translates into a tunnel of light.Speculative supposition since no research has been done in this area.Interesting to see a systematic deconstruction of her theory by Alex's guests like Jan Holden or Bruce Greyson.
Yes, but think about it - there is far more to a typical NDE experience than a long dark tunnel! It is like trying to 'explain' the symptoms of falling in love using a model that posits that as you get closer to your beloved, you start to breath her expelled air, which is high in CO2 - so you breath faster and feel light headed!

In both cases, the actual value of the experience is totally ignored, as is everything that isn't explained by the hypothesis - so the recollection of the resuscitation process, the awareness of death (the cardiac arrest may be quite sudden) and the meetings with past relatives, etc etc. Likewise the process of falling in love involves more than just fast breathing and feeling light headed!

Also the NDE experience is often very rich - not an encroaching blackness at all. Conventionally you need a lot of controlled neuronal activity to produce such this, even if they are hallucinations.

David
 
Yes, but think about it - there is far more to a typical NDE experience than a long dark tunnel! It is like trying to 'explain' the symptoms of falling in love using a model that posits that as you get closer to your beloved, you start to breath her expelled air, which is high in CO2 - so you breath faster and feel light headed!

In both cases, the actual value of the experience is totally ignored, as is everything that isn't explained by the hypothesis - so the recollection of the resuscitation process, the awareness of death (the cardiac arrest may be quite sudden) and the meetings with past relatives, etc etc. Likewise the process of falling in love involves more than just fast breathing and feeling light headed!

Also the NDE experience is often very rich - not an encroaching blackness at all. Conventionally you need a lot of controlled neuronal activity to produce such this, even if they are hallucinations.

David

Another possibility is that there are neurological changes like those Blackmore described,but they merely reflect what is actually happening while the soul enters the nonphysical dimension.I personally believe that every spiritual experience like samadhi or kundalini activation has a neurophysiological substrate that may reflect something happening on another level of existence.If that's the case then every pretense of a scientific theory of nonphysical consciousness must be dropped,since we cannot prove or disprove it on the basis of current scientific methods.Which is very likely the case.
 
Another possibility is that there are neurological changes like those Blackmore described,but they merely reflect what is actually happening while the soul enters the nonphysical dimension.I personally believe that every spiritual experience like samadhi or kundalini activation has a neurophysiological substrate that may reflect something happening on another level of existence.If that's the case then every pretense of a scientific theory of nonphysical consciousness must be dropped,since we cannot prove or disprove it on the basis of current scientific methods.Which is very likely the case.

It will be interesting to see what neurotheology will tell us about spiritual experiences once more precise brain scanning technologies will be developed,although that will tell us nothing about the nonphysical counterpart.Effective spiritual technologies will be needed for that.
 

If I understand it correctly, she says that when sensory input ceases, the mind creates the "external self" and one are able to view ones own body from an elevated position, and this is due to an hallucination of this absence of input to the senses. Olaf Blankes test of this phenomenon always created an image that was seen slightly from behind, IIRC, and never from above, hovering, as in NDE's.

This created image takes form as of how one perceives ones own body to look like, But in several of reported NDE-cases the person having the NDE-OBE often wonder first who it is lying there beneath them - and when they realise who it is they often get a bit suprised of how they look like from "the outside" - either they say; "OMG, I didn't think I looked that fat" or "I didn't think I looked that old" etc

They failed to have created a image of the self that ones mind perceived how it would look. An image that your mind would be "comfortable" with. This is instead a "new", and surprising, image that they at first doesn't recognize. I think that that flies in the face of her theory of the perceived self.

Also, she says when one tries a sensory isolation experiment one should be able to create this sensation. I have tried that in one of those float tanks and had sound, vision, and smell suppressed as much it was possible, and I was free-floating in salt water that had the exact temperature of my body. One gets the sensation of floating free in an empty space, but I never got the sensation of seeing myself from an external point of view.

PS: Did you have her paper where she explained her theory of the tunnel in NDE's??
 
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If I understand it correctly, she says that when sensory input ceases, the mind creates the "external self" and one are able to view ones own body from an elevated position, and this is due to an hallucination of this absence of input to the senses. Olaf Blankes test of this phenomenon always created an image that was seen slightly from behind, IIRC, and never from above, hovering, as in NDE's.

This created image takes form as of how one perceives ones own body to look like, But in several of reported NDE-cases the person having the NDE-OBE often wonder first who it is lying there beneath them - and when they realise who it is they often get a bit suprised of how they look like from "the outside" - either they say; "OMG, I didn't think I looked that fat" or "I didn't think I looked that old" etc

They failed to have created a image of the self that ones mind perceived how it would look. An image that your mind would be "comfortable" with. This is instead a "new", and surprising, image that they at first doesn't recognize. I think that that flies in the face of her theory of the perceived self.

Also, she says when one tries a sensory isolation experiment one should be able to create this sensation. I have tried that in one of those float tanks and had sound, vision, and smell suppressed as much it was possible, and I was free-floating in salt water that had the exact temperature of my body. One gets the sensation of floating free in an empty space, but I never got the sensation of seeing myself from an external point of view.

PS: Did you have her paper where she explained her theory of the tunnel in NDE's??


Another fact that comes in conflict with her OBE theory is present in OBE accounts where people project in locale 1 or the real-time zone mainly in their bedroom and perceive things that are slightly different than in the real world such as a red carpet instead of a white one or a teddy bear replacing a night lamp.Why would you introduce such things if you already have in your memory store a clear replica of your bedroom.Here is the paper http://newdualism.org/nde-papers/Blackmore/Blackmore-Journal of Near-Death Studies_1989-8-15-28.pdf
 
If I understand it correctly, she says that when sensory input ceases, the mind creates the "external self" and one are able to view ones own body from an elevated position, and this is due to an hallucination of this absence of input to the senses. Olaf Blankes test of this phenomenon always created an image that was seen slightly from behind, IIRC, and never from above, hovering, as in NDE's.

This created image takes form as of how one perceives ones own body to look like, But in several of reported NDE-cases the person having the NDE-OBE often wonder first who it is lying there beneath them - and when they realise who it is they often get a bit suprised of how they look like from "the outside" - either they say; "OMG, I didn't think I looked that fat" or "I didn't think I looked that old" etc

They failed to have created a image of the self that ones mind perceived how it would look. An image that your mind would be "comfortable" with. This is instead a "new", and surprising, image that they at first doesn't recognize. I think that that flies in the face of her theory of the perceived self.

Also, she says when one tries a sensory isolation experiment one should be able to create this sensation. I have tried that in one of those float tanks and had sound, vision, and smell suppressed as much it was possible, and I was free-floating in salt water that had the exact temperature of my body. One gets the sensation of floating free in an empty space, but I never got the sensation of seeing myself from an external point of view.

PS: Did you have her paper where she explained her theory of the tunnel in NDE's??

Olaf needs to give us a diagram of his experiments showing both experient and third parties positions.
 
This is such a difficult and ambiguous subject to tackle that I don't know where to start.We don't know much about the brain.Our imagistic machines(MRI,PET) can't penetrate to the level of individual neurons or groups of neurons.We don't have a workable theory of how memory is encoded and we have no idea how a lump of nervous tissue can produce qualia.Because of our poor understanding,there is no reason why we cannot speculate on a nonphysical consciousness interacting with our brain.But AI's are our creation and by the time they achieve consciousness we will have an almost complete understanding of their functioning.So invoking a nonphysical counterpart that makes them conscious will be superfluous.

I've read Kurzweils books (though it was quite a while ago). I'm not so sure the singularity is inevitable as he posits. Nature is full of exponential growths that eventually hit a limiting factor and collapse. Kurzweil in his optimism fueled by the love of his parents and desire to restore them to life ignores any potential roadblocks on the path to the age of spiritual machines. I'm not saying it can't happen.. Just that I don't think it's inevitable. We could still blow ourselves up for example and have to start the technology growth curve over again in another 10,000 years.

At any rate... After seeing a lot of arguments here over "physical" and "non-physical" I've grown tired of those terms as I think they severely limit our thinking.
 
Do you have a point that's relevant to the topic at hand?.

Its exactly relevant.
There was valid science way before Popper. Falsifiability is often a red-herring that serves mostly to keep people focused on a physicalist paradigm.

Is rhetoric which implies falsifiability is somehow not applicable to spiritual topics, and also implies that its only applicable to physicalism. Both of these assertions are false.
 
At any rate... After seeing a lot of arguments here over "physical" and "non-physical" I've grown tired of those terms as I think they severely limit our thinking.
They're buzzwords by this point. Two or so years ago, there was a high degree of links, whitepapers, and logical (sometimes inductive!) reasoning. Post forum move, "physicalist paradigm" has become a drinking game.
 
The trouble with AI, is that you can always 'fix' it to do something if you are specific enough. Indeed, here is a program that will spout Chopra-ese:
http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/
This means that any assessment of AI has to require some judgement, and some understanding of how it achieved its goal. For example, you could imagine a program that would GOOGLE to find passages to spout about death - so it is essential to understand something of what it did - or at least to exclude certain things.This of course is why Turing made his proposed assessment open-ended.

BTW, the above scenario doesn't make sense from a materialist point of view - though I have seen similar ideas suggested - because from that POV brain mechanisms have to provide some selective advantage, and anything that operates at or near death can't really offer any selective advantage! The other thing to notice from that scenario, is just how little is really understood - I mean DMT, for example, acts by binding to a receptor - so in a sense all it does is to supply one real number - its concentration at the receptor site. What the brain does in response to that receptor is still obscure. This seems to be a general problem with materialistic explanations of sensations - all they do is push the explanation one stage back. A signals B, which signals C, which signals D and E, and E signals F, ................. What else can a materialistic explanation of sensation (qualia) do?

David[/QUOTE
One thing a particular bother me : in an experience with mediums. Some mediums said they did communicate with deceased people. They brought true information. But, in fact, these people were not dead at all. They were alive.


What is your take on dual attribute theories like panpsychism or property dualism?
 
They're buzzwords by this point. Two or so years ago, there was a high degree of links, whitepapers, and logical (sometimes inductive!) reasoning. Post forum move, "physicalist paradigm" has become a drinking game.


There is good reason why the physicalist paradigm is so entrenched in modern science.Many things that in the past were attributed to gods or vital forces(Bergson) were eventually given a satisfying natural explanation.This trend is the principal reason why there is faith in what Popper deemed promissory materialism.Any paranormal or parapsychic experience that challenges the materialist worldview is either explained away or ignored.I haven't to this day encountered an explanation for NDE's or other such phenomena that would convince me of the unassailable certainty of atheistic materialism.
 
Also considering the totality of evidence suggesting an afterlife,what philosophical worldview would it imply?Is it an ontological idealism ala Berkeley and Kastrup or a substance dualism of say John Eccles?
 
Also considering the totality of evidence suggesting an afterlife,what philosophical worldview would it imply?Is it an ontological idealism ala Berkeley and Kastrup or a substance dualism of say John Eccles?
I have thought for some time that the ultimate reality is most probably Idealism.

However, I also think that Idealism may be a rather useless theory at our level of understanding. Imagine if Newton had come up with the full General theory of Relativity, rather than the simple inverse square law of gravity! He would (presumably) have been right, but people would have found its consequences almost impossible to determine (calculus and algebra were less well developed) and he would probably have got nowhere.

I think scientific theories need to form a ladder, and I think Dualism should form a rung in that ladder, even though it is obviously incomplete. By analogy, scientists routinely use GR and QM, even though they are known to be incompatible!

David
 
Agreed,both idealism and substance dualism present problems from a philosophical standpoint.Supposedly a multidimensional reality is incomprehensible to us due to our anthropic bias and cognitive limitations.
 
Agreed,both idealism and substance dualism present problems from a philosophical standpoint.Supposedly a multidimensional reality is incomprehensible to us due to our anthropic bias and cognitive limitations.


Most likely that is why skeptics and scientists are so resistant to extraordinary claims.Science's pretences of some day having a full description of reality will be thrown out of the window if only a fraction of these extraordinary claims are proven to be true,for example the objective reality of "astral planes" or super advanced telepathic extraterrestrials.
 
Its exactly relevant.
:D Care to explain how?


Is rhetoric which implies falsifiability is somehow not applicable to spiritual topics, and also implies that its only applicable to physicalism. Both of these assertions are false.

There's been no rhetoric by me. Not every statement is rhetoric. And there's no somehow - the arbitrary parameter of falsifiabilty is not applicable to the spiritual. (Matter of fact, it isn't applicable to much of the physical either.) You claiming that is false means nothing as that's where you started. It's amusing that you want to wax about the viability of science yet your claims rest solely upon opinion.

I think that most people who have explored expanding beyond relying solely on their intellect are well-aware that the parameter of falsifiability is false. And yes there also people who do rely solely on intellect who are aware of that.

I happen to think it does have it's uses but like almost every guideline - to move from "has its uses" to "is always valid" is a failure. A common failure as many humans do seem to crave absolutes.
 
In my eyes, everything we already know about nature, especially humans and their brains, makes an afterlife quite....improbable and somehow senseless. We already know that we can manipulate humans to a very large extent in many fields, because we know many workings of the brain. It even is sufficient to observe our own behaviour to see that most of it stems from habits and I guess everyone knows how hard it is to change them. We even know that we can manipulate peoples' moods and nature via drugs and other methods. Given all this knowledge I cannot understand why people believe in an afterlife or something like a soul.
 
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