New study linking brain activity to NDE's

That does not track, for instance:
- I can track and analyze how people (presumably conscious beings) react to various situations.
- I can analyze how people answer questions and look for patterns matching their answers to their observed behavior (psychometric testing)
- I can study how people who have brain anomalies differ in their cognition from 'normal' brains and infer how those areas work in 'normal' brains
There are whole areas of science that deal with these very questions: psychology, sociology and anthropology. How is this denying consciousness?
Well the trouble is that such observations are selective, so they aren't quite like physical observations. All the wild cards get filtered out - like the NDE's, or the fact that traditional tribes regularly report that they learn about medicinal plants from the spirits, or much else.

With physical observations, the extraordinary observations are (at least sometimes) taken more seriously.
Occam's razor.
Which is simpler, more plausible, and does not require the unnecessary multiplication of elements:
Occam's razor is not a physical law, it is a practical aid to making reasonable deductions.
Sorry, let me shift gears.
That would be hugely welcome - I am sick of hearing about rabbits, lunar cheese, Magical Giant Squirrels, etc. They trivialise discussions and most of us don't want to waste time in discussions at that level.
Can you see consciousness as an emergent property of a complex dynamic system?
I can't, for the reason that was put most clearly by David Chalmers - his so called "Hard Problem". The really difficult thing is to see how complex dynamical systems actually have experiences. We don't attribute feelings to our computers, so why should we attribute them to complex dynamical systems? Indeed, strangely enough being a hard nosed materialist means laughing at anyone who attributes feelings to anything other than humans and animals (some would even deny animals have feelings), but insisting that (somewhat vaguely specified) complex dynamic systems must have them!
These systems cannot be understood, at our current level of technology, by working from the small bits to the big picture. We can understand the bits (neurons), but the whole is so complex (emergent) that developing the 'calculus of the mind' might be far in the future. But does that mean impossible or just, "In the future"?
Why is "ghost in my head" the best default position to take?
Because calculations don't mean experience. There is also some circular reasoning going on here. All the things that minds seem to do sometimes (like NDE's and ψ-phenomena) are ignored because it is 'known' that minds are just emergent phenomena of complex systems, and therefore you can discard the "ghost in your head" as being an unnecessary hypothesis.
If consciousness isn't "in" the brain, why do hormones affect things like attachment (oxytocin) and mood (dopamine)? Energy level affected by glucose? Physical trauma sometimes lead to changes in personality/perception? Wouldn't an external consciousness be unaffected by changes like these?

Well the emerging (sorry for the pun) hypothesis here and elsewhere, is that the brain somehow communicates with a non-material mind and constrains or filters it in some way. Clearly those hormones and actual trauma affect the filtering action. There are some fascinating hints that this might be so. As well as NDE's (which are remarkably often reported) there is a rarer phenomenon in which people close to death - including those with severe dementia - recover the power of coherent speech for a short period before they die.

Ask yourself how a brain ravaged by dementia can do that!

I'd recommend that you listen to some of the podcasts to get a flavour for some of the evidence - perhaps starting with Alex's interviews with Rupert Sheldrake (a former director of studies in biology at Cambridge University).

BTW, in case you are wondering, I am not religious, and I can see the humour in the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion!

David
 
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Consciousness arises from complexity.
We are learning more about this complexity every day.

OK - so obviously we must know:

1) How complex must a system must be to show consciousness?

2) Does it need a special structure - or will my computer do - or maybe the internet?

3) How can you detect conscious awareness in a machine?

Most of what we know about the workings of the brain seems to come from various scanning techniques. This is really crude and doesn't involve any real understanding at all. Imagine if we didn't know how computers worked, so we collected data on which chips warmed up most when particular programs were run. That would be a recipe for lots of data but no theory!

David
 
OK - so obviously we must know:
1) How complex must a system must be to show consciousness?

We don't know, but there are several large scale experiments underway to find out. There is also a lot of work in this area trying to work out the how and the possible consequences of this (I cannot create links in this forum), such as the Whole Brain Emulation project. If I read you correctly, this work is moot because:

Well the emerging (sorry for the pun) hypothesis here and elsewhere, is that the brain somehow communicates with a non-material mind and constrains or filters it in some way.

So, an obvious question here is, "Could the theory of an external mind be dis-proven by the creation of an artificial intelligence?" If such a machine could pass the Turing test, would that falsify the theory?

2) Does it need a special structure - or will my computer do - or maybe the internet?
I am intrigued by this, I sometimes wonder if we missed the boat by going to a purely digital paradigm. Biological systems are analog (many of them, anyway), maybe a mix of analog and digital 'circuitry' would get us there faster. Purely digital emulation would, perforce, miss many possible advantages of physical hardware interaction, I'm thinking of the work of Dr. Adrian Thompson on hardware evolution, fascinating subject, I highly recommend it.
But, again, whatever the solution is, would the creation of this intelligence disprove the non-material mind hypothesis?
In this hypothetical future, would you be satisfied that brains are consciousness-bearing systems, or would you move to a meta denial by saying that the machine, itself, is acting as a communication device for an external mind?

3) How can you detect conscious awareness in a machine?
I haven't seen anything better than Turing's test. Do you have an alternate proposal? How do you know I am a conscious being, or that you, yourself carry (or filter from outside or whatever) consciousness?

Most of what we know about the workings of the brain seems to come from various scanning techniques. This is really crude and doesn't involve any real understanding at all. Imagine if we didn't know how computers worked, so we collected data on which chips warmed up most when particular programs were run. That would be a recipe for lots of data but no theory!
Oh, I agree that methods need to be refined, the field of neuroimaging is under constant development. With the rapidly increasing pace of change and innovation (in this field and in associated sciences) I think it is entirely possible that we will see techniques capable of imaging 10's of neurons (instead of the 10's of thousands) in my lifetime. In your metaphor, that would be equivalent to putting voltage meters on all the wires in the computer as well as seeing averages of voltages in areas of the chip. I could do a whole heck of a lot with that much information, it was a regular exercise in my electronic engineering education :)
 
Occam's razor is not a physical law, it is a practical aid to making reasonable deductions.
Yes, I understand that.

Because calculations don't mean experience. There is also some circular reasoning going on here. All the things that minds seem to do sometimes (like NDE's and ψ-phenomena) are ignored because it is 'known' that minds are just emergent phenomena of complex systems, and therefore you can discard the "ghost in your head" as being an unnecessary hypothesis.
Yes, I don't see where the extra entity (an external mind) needs to be part of the picture.
Or, let me rephrase this objection.
Do you know of any testable proposition for the mechanism for this communication with an external mind?
Are you positing an unknown/unknowable communication medium? If so, why is this field undetectable by any other means?
What predictions would it be possible to make (and, bonus, maybe test) if the external mind hypothesis is true?

As well as NDE's (which are remarkably often reported) there is a rarer phenomenon in which people close to death - including those with severe dementia - recover the power of coherent speech for a short period before they die.
Ask yourself how a brain ravaged by dementia can do that!
I have examples of other chaotic systems producing unexpected and seemingly incredible results. Am I more justified in saying, "Well, that doesn't happen in people's brains." or "That might happen in people's brains, too." Emergent, I get a lot of mileage out of that. (see Rogue Waves as just one example of chaotic systems producing inexplicable results).

BTW, in case you are wondering, I am not religious, and I can see the humour in the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion!
Good for you! I was wondering, actually. Thank you for clarifying.
 
We don't know, but there are several large scale experiments underway to find out. There is also a lot of work in this area trying to work out the how and the possible consequences of this (I cannot create links in this forum), such as the Whole Brain Emulation project. If I read you correctly, this work is moot because:
I suspect if you could actually simulate a human brain inside a computer, QM included, you would find that within a second there would be finite probabilities for a whole range of possible developments - in other words it would tell you nothing.

Many years ago, I was initially quite excited by the prospects of AI in the 1980's. I developed some software somewhat related to this, and after a while I became hugely disillusioned because there was really no deep ideas other than the idea of computing with a kind of logic known as first order predicate calculus. This proved massively inflexible and despite being hyped to an incredible degree, is now almost forgotten. There was less computer power then than now, but the real problem was what to do with that power - and I don't think that has changed.
So, an obvious question here is, "Could the theory of an external mind be dis-proven by the creation of an artificial intelligence?" If such a machine could pass the Turing test, would that falsify the theory?
Remember that Turing devised his test in the early days of computing. If he had lived, I suspect his ideas would have developed a lot. In particular, he would have realised that various kinds of mimicry could pass the test, such as ELIZA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

I would make the Turing test longer, but even then I'd be cautious - particularly if the machine were given access to the internet.
I am intrigued by this, I sometimes wonder if we missed the boat by going to a purely digital paradigm. Biological systems are analog (many of them, anyway), maybe a mix of analog and digital 'circuitry' would get us there faster. Purely digital emulation would, perforce, miss many possible advantages of physical hardware interaction, I'm thinking of the work of Dr. Adrian Thompson on hardware evolution, fascinating subject, I highly recommend it.
Remember that digital computers are awfully good at doing floating point operations in hardware.
But, again, whatever the solution is, would the creation of this intelligence disprove the non-material mind hypothesis?
In this hypothetical future, would you be satisfied that brains are consciousness-bearing systems, or would you move to a meta denial by saying that the machine, itself, is acting as a communication device for an external mind?


I haven't seen anything better than Turing's test. Do you have an alternate proposal? How do you know I am a conscious being, or that you, yourself carry (or filter from outside or whatever) consciousness?
Well I think the best bet would be to try to disprove the concept of the material mind. There is already good evidence for a variety of ψ phenomena, each of which, more or less by definition, disprove the idea of a purely physical mind. I think applying a little money and effort to explore the best ψ experiments would show beyond doubt that brains do something that should be impossible given their physical composition.
Oh, I agree that methods need to be refined, the field of neuroimaging is under constant development. With the rapidly increasing pace of change and innovation (in this field and in associated sciences) I think it is entirely possible that we will see techniques capable of imaging 10's of neurons (instead of the 10's of thousands) in my lifetime. In your metaphor, that would be equivalent to putting voltage meters on all the wires in the computer as well as seeing averages of voltages in areas of the chip. I could do a whole heck of a lot with that much information, it was a regular exercise in my electronic engineering education :)

Well possibly we will, but we don't know what will be revealed. A lot of people think it would be rather like trying to understand a television set without any knowledge of how they work. Imagine trying to discover the source of the various people on the screen. You would search for correlations between what was on the screen and the electrical signals - and you would find them - it could take a long time to dig down far enough to realise that the content of the images and sounds were coming in on invisible waves - particularly if the science of televisions was dominated by the idea that everything came from within! Now imagine that you were researching not an analog television, but a modern digital one - think how hard it would be to realise what was going on starting from scratch!

My guess is that conscious control of a brain is somehow operated by biassing certain quantum wave-function collapses in the brain. It has always seemed to me remarkable that beyond a certain level, physical matter is unpredictable! Indeed, some at least of the founders of quantum mechanics felt the same way - hence its formulation in terms of observations collapsing wave-functions.

David
 
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Yes, I understand that.


Yes, I don't see where the extra entity (an external mind) needs to be part of the picture.
Or, let me rephrase this objection.
Do you know of any testable proposition for the mechanism for this communication with an external mind?
Are you positing an unknown/unknowable communication medium? If so, why is this field undetectable by any other means?
What predictions would it be possible to make (and, bonus, maybe test) if the external mind hypothesis is true?
I am positing an unknown communication medium - possibly related to the indeterminate outcome of wave-function collapses. Perhaps we see statistical outcomes to quantum experiments because these are not usually performed inside brains! Indeed Dean Radin claims to have evidence that meditators can influence a double slit experiment!
I have examples of other chaotic systems producing unexpected and seemingly incredible results. Am I more justified in saying, "Well, that doesn't happen in people's brains." or "That might happen in people's brains, too." Emergent, I get a lot of mileage out of that. (see Rogue Waves as just one example of chaotic systems producing inexplicable results).
I'd be interested to know what they are,typical emergent properties seem remarkably unremarkable - such as piles of sand slumping down under gravity!

Good for you! I was wondering, actually. Thank you for clarifying.

Most people here are not members of any religion, and are suitably cautious of modern science, which is in danger of becoming too dogmatic in a lot of areas. You need to be a bit open minded to enjoy this place.

David
 
Turing thought a computer would not pass the test because a computer would not have ESP.

https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers#researchers_turing
In a paper where he describes his Turing Machine, Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460, Turing wrote:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.​
Turing recognized that the lack of ESP would prevent a computer from passing the Turing Test.​
 
http://www.uncommondescent.com/inte...sends-hay-to-his-cow-up-north/#comment-559710

As atheist Thomas Nagel says:


To qualify as a genuine explanation of the mental, an emergent account must be in some way systematic. It cannot just say that each mental event or state supervenes on the complex physical state of the organism in which it occurs. That would be the kind of brute fact that does not constitute an explanation but rather calls for an explanation.


If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, expect for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic.​

 
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"Veridical Nde's"? The quality of the hallucination makes it real?
So, when I experienced sleep paralysis and the huge wolf with googly eyes was threatening me and it seemed very real, that was real?
Am I misrepresenting this standpoint?

In effect, you are misunderstanding that standpoint, because you confuse veridical NDEs with the quality of some NDEs of being "more real than real". The first relates to data in the NDEs has been correctly corroborated. And the second concerns some NDEs are more lucid than waking awareness. That quality does not rule out that NDEs are hallucinations, but goes against that NDEs are caused by the brain mainly for the critical state of body.
 
I don't intend to continue discussing with Richard, but I'll just add that most of us here have already stood in his shoes and at some stage supported his viewpoint to a greater or lesser extent. Certainly the idea of "shaking people up" from their delusions was something I very much felt it my responsibility to do at one stage. But we all move on. I will simply repeat a comment I made earlier in another thread, quote:

I think it is important to remember that most of us - possibly not you - were pretty hard core materialists at one time. There are a lot of things that such people need to discover - and it does take time:

1) Science ignores a lot of evidence about consciousness that doesn't fit the conventional picture. It doesn't really make an effort to research these areas, though it may claim to have done so.

2) Even very conventional science is frequently less than honest and well executed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

3) Hard core materilism leads logically to nihilism - but people who are wedded to materialism endlessly fudge this issue for obvious psychological reasons.

4) The alternative to hard core materialism is still extremely uncertain - this isn't a religious site! In fact I would not be surprised if Christians and Muslims aren't warned off our site. Most of us are not certain of anything, except perhaps that materialism is somehow incomplete, we simply want to get a little nearer to the real truth.

If sceptics engage in serious dialogue, I think it is worth responding.

David
 
If sceptics engage in serious dialogue, I think it is worth responding.
Of course - and I'm pleased to see that a few members here are willing to do so. Personally I have little patience for the task. Mostly I argue from personal experience rather than logic alone. However that makes it much harder as I end up on the verge of sharing my life story on here, which frankly is a step further than I'm willing to take. Though if I meet someone face to face I'll be rather more open about such matters.
 
Of course - and I'm pleased to see that a few members here are willing to do so. Personally I have little patience for the task. Mostly I argue from personal experience rather than logic alone. However that makes it much harder as I end up on the verge of sharing my life story on here, which frankly is a step further than I'm willing to take. Though if I meet someone face to face I'll be rather more open about such matters.
That might be something for a private conversation.

David
 
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I am positing an unknown communication medium - possibly related to the indeterminate outcome of wave-function collapses. Perhaps we see statistical outcomes to quantum experiments because these are not usually performed inside brains! Indeed Dean Radin claims to have evidence that meditators can influence a double slit experiment!

That work by Radin was almost immediately debunked when it came out. Or rather, the conclusions and his methodology were. (search for 'barenormality' and 'radin for a rerun' to see a thorough analysis. Most damning is the fact that researchers have been 'paying attention' to quantum level experiments for decades. If the affect is so noticeable, why haven't all these other researchers been plagued by unexpected noise in their results?

The outcomes of quantum level events, when looking at groups of interactions, is known to an extremely high level of certainty. I remember Richard Feynman equating it to being able to accurately describe the distance between New York and Los Angeles to within a meter. If it exists, this external consciousness is probably not using quantum mechanics to communicate with the brain. I get the feeling that this area is clearly illuminated, with lots of attention. The results match the models, no extra 'consciousness' floating around in there.

I'd be interested to know what they are, typical emergent properties seem remarkably unremarkable - such as piles of sand slumping down under gravity!

It's really cool stuff! Of course, some of the fuzziness is in defining your terms. I recommend two papers:
1) Several examples of emergent phenomena were put forth in this paper by Bonabeu, Dessalles, and Grumbach: "Characterizing Emergent Phenomena: A Critical Review". It was published in the Revue Internationale de Systemique in 1995 and is available online.
2) A mathematical formulation for determining where the line between 'decidable' and 'undecidable' might exist can be found in the paper "Emergent Phenomena and Complexity" by Vince Darley. This paper is also available for free viewing on the internet.

An emergent phenomena is one that, no matter how much we understand the basic steps and details, the end result will be incalculable. The only way to find the result is to run the experiment/simulation/brain.

Consciousness could be an emergent phenomenon. The pieces are all there:
1) we know, to a very high degree of certainty, how all of the individual pieces work (neurons, neurotransmitters, etc)
2) the pieces are connected to each other and feedback to each other constantly
3) the number of pieces and variables is extreme (~100 billion neurons)
Darley even says in his paper, "The brain itself, of course, is an extremely complex system, which I would suggest lies far beyond the phase change". The 'phase change' being the flip between a knowable system that can be decided beforehand and an undecidable system that must be 'run' to get an end result.

Even if you know how all the bits work, you would not be able to figure out the result.
What you guys seem to be suggesting is that we know how all the bits work, something 'other' is added, and we get an incredibly interesting output: consciousness.
It seems to me that we still get from A to B without adding the extra unknown.
 
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Turing recognized that the lack of ESP would prevent a computer from passing the Turing Test.
He wrote that in 1950. Much research was poured into these areas during and after this time. They did not find anything that did not turn out to be a hoax or an effect that was not reproducible or did not regress to the mean. (I understand that many here vehemently disagree with this last sentence)

The man was brilliant, not omniscient. You think and work with the information you have, Newton spent more time on alchemy than he did on physics.
Newton did not know why Mercury regressed in its orbit, that took another 236 years and an Einstein to explain.
 
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3) Hard core materilism leads logically to nihilism - but people who are wedded to materialism endlessly fudge this issue for obvious psychological reasons.

Bippy made this same point, but I don't know where it's coming from. Is this a dogma? Can you perhaps suggest some sources on which you base this assumption? It seems to be correlated with his insistence that atheists are immoral. I know that religion is not the basis for your statement, so I am wondering where you got it.
 
In effect, you are misunderstanding that standpoint, because you confuse veridical NDEs with the quality of some NDEs of being "more real than real". The first relates to data in the NDEs has been correctly corroborated. And the second concerns some NDEs are more lucid than waking awareness. That quality does not rule out that NDEs are hallucinations, but goes against that NDEs are caused by the brain mainly for the critical state of body.
Do I understand that you are saying that the 'realness' of the vision must be an indicator that NDE's are real, because a brain going through trauma would not be able to produce such an elevated state of experience?
 
Do I understand that you are saying that the 'realness' of the vision must be an indicator that NDE's are real, because a brain going through trauma would not be able to produce such an elevated state of experience?
Hi Richard.

For an NDE to have "veridical elements" refers to the fact that there are stories of experiencers becoming privy to information whilst near death (details of their procedure etc) that they couldn't have a gleaned by more mundane means.

This is what Sam Parnia was trying to investigate in his AWARE study (under more controlled conditions).
 
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Bippy made this same point, but I don't know where it's coming from. Is this a dogma? Can you perhaps suggest some sources on which you base this assumption? It seems to be correlated with his insistence that atheists are immoral. I know that religion is not the basis for your statement, so I am wondering where you got it.

Yes, this is very interesting. Usually it comes down to "social darwinism leads to Nazis, so science is evil". Or another personal favorite of mine, "why is torturing babies for fun wrong under materialism?". What I find interesting is that the proponent/materialist debate is nearly identical to the theist/atheist debate, and like you I have no idea how to parse this. It seems that under the "proponent paradigm" there is something equivalent to God but not bound by particular religious dogma. For all intents and purposes it sounds like God. Maybe the "obvious psychological reasons" David is talking about is really proponents wanting God as part of the equation but experiencing enough cognitive dissonance (because of the horrid rap organized religion has) that they don't want to use the term "God"?
 
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Yes, this is very interesting. Usually it comes down to "social darwinism leads to Nazis, so science is evil". Or another personal favorite of mine, "why is torturing babies for fun wrong under materialism?". What I find interesting is that the proponent/materialist debate is nearly identical to the theist/atheist debate, and like you I have no idea how to parse this. It seems that under the "proponent paradigm" there is something equivalent to God but not bound by particular religious dogma. For all intents and purposes it sounds like God. Maybe the "obvious psychological reasons" David is talking about is really proponents wanting God as part of the equation but experiencing enough cognitive dissonance (because of the horrid rap organized religion has) that they don't want to use the term "God"?

Just listen to the hateful scorn this guy pours out here. Just because people dare to believe in something more than this materialist loser.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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