Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
- Papus79
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
It seems like the 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' rubric is in play and part of the problem with it is that the inability to provide extraordinary evidence, or worse define it, may set a bar that has far more to do with overblown human expectations for what these phenomena would do to science or physics when I think we could take it for granted that if we got this far technologically on the assumption of reductive materialism that these effects would, by the lack of major disruptions to material rule of law, suggest that these are very humble and low-level effects of the sorts that you would see evidenced in places like statistical analysis and having relatively weak evidence outside of subjective experience which would mean anything really flashy in the way of evidence would have to come in the form of recounts of subjective experience that could be externally corroborated. Past that, if we hand-wave off the many accounts of flat-lined people (with or without eyes and ears covered) accurately recalling things that happened in the room while they were in that state then we're moving toward a place where a newly departed 'ghost' would just about have to pick up a marker and write something on the wall to demonstrate that they were there (as far as I know that's impossible) and even if they did the controversy would get so hot that it would be written off as some sort of conspiracy or hoax by the medical staff and security camera footage would only deepen the crassness of the conspiracy.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
...none of Reynolds’s reported veridical perceptions happened while her EEG recorded a flat line. They all took place before or after, when she was under anesthetic but very much alive. “Anesthesia awareness” is generally estimated to affect roughly one in 1,000 patients. (See “Awakening,” by Joshua Lang, in the January/February 2013 Atlantic.) Therefore, the skeptical argument goes, Reynolds could have heard snatches of conversation; she might have deduced some things about the bone saw from the noise it made or the vibration of it against her skull; and she might have reconstructed some false memories out of details she’d noticed before or after the operation.
In 2011, a year after Reynolds died (of heart failure), the Journal of Near-Death Studies devoted an entire issue to a debate about her case, in which a skeptic and two believers argued over such minutiae as the duration of the noise played by the speakers in her ears, the way bone conducts sound, and esoteric theories of how exactly a nonphysical mind might be able to perceive physical stimuli. Summing it up, Janice Miner Holden, the journal’s editor, concluded that cases like Reynolds’s “provide imperfect data that probably can never result in definitive evidence.”
Other cases of apparent veridical perception are, at the very least, intriguing—but there are surprisingly few. For a chapter she wrote in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, Holden scoured the literature in search of such accounts. Leaving out sources like the personal memoirs published after Raymond Moody’s 1975 book and focusing mostly on books published before 1975 and systematic studies by researchers and medics, she collected about 100 reports of veridical perception during a near-death experience. Only 35 included accounts of details that the authors were able to verify as fully accurate with a source other than the experiencer. There was not a single clincher—an absolutely inarguable case of someone seeing something that only a disembodied spirit could have seen.
Per forum rules I don't think I can link to the article, but it is called The Science of Near-Death Experiences, by Gideon Lichfield, from the April 2015 issue.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... es/386231/ - mod]
- Papus79
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
- Papus79
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
- Sy Borg
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
Sure, if you try a Google Image search for "heaven" you find sky, clouds and, well, it's supposed to God but, call a spade a spade, its simply the Sun. Basically, despite all the sophistry and nonsense, we still ultimately see the Sun as God. I'm okay with that, given that it created the planets and provides the energy for life and ultimately comprises 99.8% of the solar system's mass.Papus79 wrote: ↑November 27th, 2018, 8:28 am There's another problem in how it's popularly interpreted, from the religious side, that I think also needs a lot of deflation. Whatever it is that people go to it's not 'heaven'. A lot of people would be grieved to discover that integrity and meaning are in about as short supply there as they are here and I'd maybe argue that it might in a way give back some meaning to being here - ie. that with this much pain we have better odds of actually finding integrity. The other part of that is no one really gets away from their problems, either through salvation or by ceasing to exist. The idea that it's 'heaven' is another one of those tacky parade float aspects of the topic that makes it seem ridiculous when it's still a matter of people projecting cultural wishes onto it.
Some heavenly depictions of heaven include bridges, gates and stairways. Presumably these were made by troupes of construction angels with halos over their hard hats. Hmm.
A more true depiction of heaven would be a face in ecstasy. The journey of death is inwards, not outwards. We just don't know whether it goes inwards to blackness or something cool, or if you can influence the result with the way you life.
- Papus79
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
There's such a conglomerate of different issues surrounding this - ie. questions of whether remote viewing is real, questions of whether mediumship or faith healing could possibly be real (all three of these are things NDE'ers don't just claim to come back with but seem to come back with a real gift for convincing other people around them that they do). The problem is it's a topic that doesn't just touch one political third rail, it seems to bundle quite a few together in a very hefty knot.
A really good example of a place where I've really seen skepticism melt into needing adult supervision was the buzz around Morgellons. I knew a few people who were talking about it several years back, I took a look around online and it seems to be a result of really boring mundane causes - ie. immune system compromised by Lyme's disease advantaging a spirochete bacteria that causes fibrous keratin buildups. If something is 'weird' though it seems like skeptic and true believer alike drink the Alex Jones moonshine and capsize into antics about aliens, Illuminati, and chemtrails. It's a really bizarre blinds pot in the human radar that seems to get chloroformed easily and often, you can notice it all your life but it's like it's so ubiquitous you can't talk about it and a person almost stands out as an aberration who can see it from the outside.
This is part of why I look at the near infinite elasticity of 'fear of death', something no one's bothered quantifying (nor likely to try) any time soon, and I have to shake my head because it's not an inroad into any sort of objectivity. I'm at least glad that some people (including you) are willing to put a foot out past dogma or go a few inches past what you think might otherwise yield hysterics from absolutists but I really think most of the buzz around this topic is convolution and distortion with no necessary or vital connection to the content itself. For example if you live long enough with the awareness that your immortal and realize that even if it's true it won't pay your bills, you'll feel ignored and lonely much of your life, have most of your deepest desires whither on the vine, it won't mean that there's some saintly bypass for not having to get ugly with bullies or dog-eats-dog competition (you'll have to get as ugly as anyone else to keep your food), if your life is in an agonizing state the knowledge of 'this' on loop won't bring much comfort (maybe a sense of added responsibility that if you let go the consequences you'll experience will outlive your flesh), and you realize that you're still by and large a helpless chimp living with chimps and that most 'opportunity' is a mirage or illusion - that's nihilist existentialism much more than theism. Even if one takes the idea seriously that there is something to Hermeticism, not something that works like Harry Potter but something that barely works which - to theory - shouldn't work at all, it's interesting but it's still a dash of something fancy spread on a hill of ape dung. Part of why I want to broach topics like these is that I want to bring people in contact with viewpoints that people either didn't know existed or would have imagined couldn't exist and I find myself - without really even meaning to - living most of my life in that zone and maybe it's worth something to someone, maybe it's not, I can only try talking about it and see if it's helpful. Something Eric Weinstein brought up in talking to Joe Rogan recently, and Bret brings this up often as well, is the effect that contact with the unforgiving in nature has on people. I've had a lot of that in my life and for most topics, even what's otherwise way up in the nose-bleed section of new age, I have to pop parade floats when I see them, partly out of disgust with their garishness, partly because I know that self-delusion makes life a heck of a lot worse in the long run (though it can let animals be animals with near internal impunity), maybe it's partly schadenfreude that life never let me have illusions and if I can't have em I won't make it easy for other people to have them, but it's also just maddening to see people make twist ideas into these really bizarre sculptures that have no necessary orientation to their form and then so often all agree on the soundness of the result. That goes right back to politics though - ie. it seems like politics is the one thing that can cut someone's maturity levels and capacity to reason not just in half but sometimes thirds or quarters.
I really wonder if there have been more minds like Schopenhauer, Leopardi, etc. that have tried touching on these things. John Gray dances up the the border, covers a lot of important ground, but stops where you'd figure most accredited professors would need to if they like paying their bills. Maybe it's possible as well that the terror management people have something a bit broader than they realize, ie. that everyone's terrified enough deep down by what they see that rather than running in just one direction (ie. the traditional fear of death-to-theism pipeline) they end up running in all kinds of bizarre directions for similar reasons and want to forget to the best of their ability that they're doing it.
- Count Lucanor
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Sy Borg
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
Rather, in lieu of absolute certainty on anything, if we are trying to be rational and logical, then we consider the probabilities - what seems most likely? While anecdotal evidence in itself doesn't mean much, mountains of anecdotal evidence suggests that something interesting is going on. Given that no one knows for sure what happens after we die, the nature of that "something interesting going on" depends on how one assesses the possibilities.
Those who have had the most profoundly life changing NDEs have more cause than most to feel confident about what might happen to them personally when they die, but that does not necessarily mean that same kind of experience will happen to others when they perish. A significant majority of people, from memory around 85%, who have been revived after their heart and respiratory systems stopped report a total blank between passing out and awakening.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
It's far more reasonable to conclude that the before and after of life's in-between are equal to each other according to the eternal cycles of creation and destruction whether on planetary or cosmic scales. What people imagine scares me a lot more than what has been observed many billions of times that once gone there is no return. Why should they? Has anyone ever been that bloody important to the welfare of the universe?
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
How reasonable it is to assume such ultimately depends on the proportion of reality that we understand thus far, which is unknown.
- Papus79
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
I think that's where I'd have to cut the topic in half - conversation about continuation of consciousness and belief that there's high likelihood of it isn't the same as belief in the supernatural and it should probably only be considered as such by default when the person holding that view is a classic theist.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
That may be the case in an ordinary life, free of inquiries. But if you happen to put the subject on the table, proposing that we get into such depths (as it is the case with whom started this thread), then it's a different game. Here, scientific rules do mean something.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 12:04 am In terms of living a life, scientific rules of evidence don't mean anything, Count. Almost nobody makes decisions based on such things unless experts have done the work first. There's neither enough time nor information available to make truly informed decisions in numerous areas of life (marriage, for instance).
Well, if we are logical and rational, mountains of claims do not make mountains of evidence, not even by calling them "anecdotal". They are just claims. We can agree that such claims suggest a high probability of something interesting, but so far, lacking any real evidence, that interesting thing does not leave the domains of personal or social narratives. Nothing suggests that there is any probability of something happening for real, I mean, in the real world. Lots of people claim astrology works for them, it doesn't add any more probabilities of astrology being true.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 12:04 am Rather, in lieu of absolute certainty on anything, if we are trying to be rational and logical, then we consider the probabilities - what seems most likely? While anecdotal evidence in itself doesn't mean much, mountains of anecdotal evidence suggests that something interesting is going on. Given that no one knows for sure what happens after we die, the nature of that "something interesting going on" depends on how one assesses the possibilities.
Personal experience remains personal, subjective and outside the rational inquiries of other people, unless something objective can be extracted from this process. Perhaps two or more people can believe the same and it becomes intersubjective, but necessarily mediated by discourse. What kind of discourse? A scientific one (or the inductive reasoning proposed in the OP) would require pointing at hard evidence.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 12:04 am
Those who have had the most profoundly life changing NDEs have more cause than most to feel confident about what might happen to them personally when they die, but that does not necessarily mean that same kind of experience will happen to others when they perish. A significant majority of people, from memory around 85%, who have been revived after their heart and respiratory systems stopped report a total blank between passing out and awakening.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
...and if it's the complete reality as it overwhelmingly seems to be, what else is there to know? Can we expect or can it ever be possible to penetrate beyond an absolute in its totality by our quest to confirm itself one way or the other, that is, beyond the observation of it repeating endlessly throughout nature as defined in its evolutionary course. Even logic needs references. Where none exists, it fails to establish anything.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 7:21 am Based on what we understand about reality for sure so far, it's ostensibly reasonable to assume that death is complete annulment rather than an alternative possibility.
How reasonable it is to assume such ultimately depends on the proportion of reality that we understand thus far, which is unknown.
If there's one absolute it's that evolution doesn't require leftovers but living hosts to propagate in which our extra-terrestrial longings, leaps of pure imagination and wishful thinking function as nothing more than anodynes for those who need it. The power and wealth complex, (aka, the will to power) being inherent within the human psyche, it simply conforms to our psychology in continuing that mindset beyond its physical limitations in whatever way imaginable to preempt total personal extinction. Being alive we can imagine any sequel where Being exists in some form without actually having to be alive. If only! That would be infinitely more practical than having to plunder a planet to support our existence.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
Yes, the OP overstretched, hence my reply: NDE reports give the impression that consciousness could continue after death but that's not proof. It might just be an impression caused by the dynamics of dying brains. We will all have to just wait and see when the time comes. May we all spend many more years in the dark about the issue.Count Lucanor wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 10:54 amThat may be the case in an ordinary life, free of inquiries. But if you happen to put the subject on the table, proposing that we get into such depths (as it is the case with whom started this thread), then it's a different game. Here, scientific rules do mean something.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 12:04 am In terms of living a life, scientific rules of evidence don't mean anything, Count. Almost nobody makes decisions based on such things unless experts have done the work first. There's neither enough time nor information available to make truly informed decisions in numerous areas of life (marriage, for instance).
The closer one moves from the communal to the personal, the less meaning scientific rules have. Science is a communal activity - an attempt to bring together all of those competing subjective claims to find patterns - while death is the most personal and individualistic situation possible. While the efficacy of science suggests a grounding in actual truth, it's not always necessarily so.
Personally, I think afterlives are more probable than not, but appreciate that it's only a hunch because the evidence either way is significantly lacking.
The difference between astrology and other pseudoscience and NDEs is akin to the difference between a Toys R Us doll and a living baby, so let's put such comparisons aside. Remember, many a keen materialist has changed their mind after undergoing an NDE.Count Lucanor wrote:Well, if we are logical and rational, mountains of claims do not make mountains of evidence, not even by calling them "anecdotal". They are just claims. We can agree that such claims suggest a high probability of something interesting, but so far, lacking any real evidence, that interesting thing does not leave the domains of personal or social narratives. Nothing suggests that there is any probability of something happening for real, I mean, in the real world. Lots of people claim astrology works for them, it doesn't add any more probabilities of astrology being true.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 12:04 amRather, in lieu of absolute certainty on anything, if we are trying to be rational and logical, then we consider the probabilities - what seems most likely? While anecdotal evidence in itself doesn't mean much, mountains of anecdotal evidence suggests that something interesting is going on. Given that no one knows for sure what happens after we die, the nature of that "something interesting going on" depends on how one assesses the possibilities.
It's clearly naive to implicitly believe that every special sensation within one's consciousness is God or some other supernatural thing, just as it's naive to treat every thought that passes through one's thought stream as a message from "The Source" (as if noise and chaos weren't a factor). One can interpret NDEs any way one likes. Some come away as believers. Some come away believing in an afterlife, but not in God or gods. Some come away from NDEs without those beliefs but having different interpretation of the nature of life and death.
Objectivity could be extracted from the process tomorrow except for the inconvenient fact that dying people and their relatives insist on focusing on cures and comfort instead of the important task of mapping brains during NDE events :)Count Lucanor wrote:Personal experience remains personal, subjective and outside the rational inquiries of other people, unless something objective can be extracted from this process. Perhaps two or more people can believe the same and it becomes intersubjective, but necessarily mediated by discourse. What kind of discourse? A scientific one (or the inductive reasoning proposed in the OP) would require pointing at hard evidence.Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 12:04 amThose who have had the most profoundly life changing NDEs have more cause than most to feel confident about what might happen to them personally when they die, but that does not necessarily mean that same kind of experience will happen to others when they perish. A significant majority of people, from memory around 85%, who have been revived after their heart and respiratory systems stopped report a total blank between passing out and awakening.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?
Is that the complete reality where hominids are infinitesimal, mobile sentient bumps on the surface of a planet created and energised by a star a million times larger again, in a galaxy of a few hundred billions stars orbiting a black hole millions of times larger again than stars, within a galactic supercluster 500 million light years across, see themselves as the the only thing that matters?Jklint wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 5:11 pm...and if it's the complete reality as it overwhelmingly seems to be, what else is there to know?Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 7:21 am Based on what we understand about reality for sure so far, it's ostensibly reasonable to assume that death is complete annulment rather than an alternative possibility.
How reasonable it is to assume such ultimately depends on the proportion of reality that we understand thus far, which is unknown.
I don't know how far civilisations can probe the nature of reality. One issue always is that we are on the inside looking out. Another consideration is the nature of time, and plenty of researchers suspect that our perception of the arrow of time is a perspective effect rather than the actual reality.Jklint wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 5:11 pmCan we expect or can it ever be possible to penetrate beyond an absolute in its totality by our quest to confirm itself one way or the other, that is, beyond the observation of it repeating endlessly throughout nature as defined in its evolutionary course. Even logic needs references. Where none exists, it fails to establish anything.
If one was the take a pretty cynical angle, then sure. However, there are other ways of looking at the situation.Jklint wrote: ↑December 10th, 2018, 5:11 pmIf there's one absolute it's that evolution doesn't require leftovers but living hosts to propagate in which our extra-terrestrial longings, leaps of pure imagination and wishful thinking function as nothing more than anodynes for those who need it. The power and wealth complex, (aka, the will to power) being inherent within the human psyche, it simply conforms to our psychology in continuing that mindset beyond its physical limitations in whatever way imaginable to preempt total personal extinction. Being alive we can imagine any sequel where Being exists in some form without actually having to be alive. If only! That would be infinitely more practical than having to plunder a planet to support our existence.
Putting aside the references to Abrahamic mythology, if death is phase change rather than an annihilation, then I can't see why the situation would preclude other species, plants, fungi and microbes (or geology for that matter, whose significance and influence tends to either be very underestimated or overestimated). We part of the biosphere of a living planet. In a sense, we were once a mat of slimy microbes which has since matured into more complex and sophisticated forms.
As for the loss of the individual personality, in a sense that misses the point. What is it to be an individual? How much of you is "you" and how much of you consists of common traits with your subculture/environment, culture, species, class, phylum and kingdom? How much of you is common with other parts of the Orion Spur, on which we reside, or with other possible life forms elsewhere in the galaxy etc?
My guess is that almost all of what we consider to "I" are just common features of larger aggregations. If you were raised by wolves, in what ways would that person as an adult resemble "Jklint"? In such situations, one can imagine basic attributes such as morphology, aggression, dominance, timidity, restlessness, torpor and so on might be discernible, but not much else. The inescapable and perhaps embarrassing conclusion is that we really are largely meat puppets anyway.
Another aspect I have wondered about is information and its preservation. What if information is never truly lost? There's too many unknowns to be confident in this area IMO. Whatever, it's fair to expect that our deaths will hold surprises for us, one way or another.
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