Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Count Lucanor
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm
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.
I might agree, although right when one begins to ask whether consciousness could continue after death, I think one should take a few steps back and ask: when in life, is consciousness independent of the body? I mean, unlike the supposed mysteries behind NDEs, here we have everything in our hands to figure out. Why are we supposed to spend time in that other darkness, while spending no time in the essential problem that solves it once and for all?
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pmThe 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.
Again, I agree that at a personal level, reality becomes less objective. People can believe whatever they feel like believing and there's nothing anyone can do about it, while it remains a personal, private matter. Of course that ends at the moment the subject communicates with others. Then it stopped being a personal,individualistic issue, and became a social issue, a communal activity with implicit and explicit intentions of establishing objective truths. And there, science or rational methods of inquiry become necessary, hardly justifiable to avoid.
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm
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.
A fan of astrology would not agree. Every believer in a particular field of pseudoscience will say that his own is not to be compared with the others. But cold reading from psychics is no better or worse evidence than NDE testimonials.
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm Remember, many a keen materialist has changed their mind after undergoing an NDE.
And some saw Jesus Christ and accepted him as their savior. :lol: I mean, no one is exempt from the possibility of any type of experience, whether it is illusory or real. That they can go through such experiences and believe they are real, doesn't give them any more probability of being real.
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm 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.
As I said and agreed, those are personal matters of people dealing with their own private thoughts, and I wouldn't try to mess with that. Let people believe what they want. As soon as they come forward and socialize their views, it's a different ballgame.
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm 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 :)
I'd say focus on bodies while people are still alive and find out if consciousness can live independently. Alternatively, get rid of the body completely, cremate it, anything, and then look up for consciousness. But why just wait until the body is half dead/ half alive and then it speaks a little about itself going through some experience.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Count Lucanor wrote: December 10th, 2018, 10:59 pm
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm
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.
I might agree, although right when one begins to ask whether consciousness could continue after death, I think one should take a few steps back and ask: when in life, is consciousness independent of the body? I mean, unlike the supposed mysteries behind NDEs, here we have everything in our hands to figure out. Why are we supposed to spend time in that other darkness, while spending no time in the essential problem that solves it once and for all?
Your question as to when consciousness is independent of the body raises the problem of other minds that Nagle famously illustrated. If, say, the Earth, the Sun, the solar system or the galaxy are conscious systems, how would or could we know?

"Supposed" is the wrong qualifier in referring to the mysteries of NDEs. "Arguable" or "apparent" would be more logical. When humans can create life from scratch from base chemicals in a laboratory and create genuine sentience within a complex machine, then we are in a position to have an informed opinion on the matter.

In the light of this, all definite views about life after death - pro and con - are just wishful thinking, a gambler's punt made without having anything like enough information.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 10th, 2018, 10:59 pm
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pmThe 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.
Again, I agree that at a personal level, reality becomes less objective. People can believe whatever they feel like believing and there's nothing anyone can do about it, while it remains a personal, private matter. Of course that ends at the moment the subject communicates with others. Then it stopped being a personal,individualistic issue, and became a social issue, a communal activity with implicit and explicit intentions of establishing objective truths. And there, science or rational methods of inquiry become necessary, hardly justifiable to avoid.
Tests have not been devised because, as noted, dying people are too busy dying to be measured. Still, I think the topic is important enough to warrant discussion, even if the claims in the area are contestable and the science undeveloped.

You see only one correct possibility. People like to make up their minds, figuring that they have enough data. This has been the attitude behind so many great science mistakes, the idea that the models of the day won't be radically changed in the future.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 10th, 2018, 10:59 pm
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pmThe 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.
A fan of astrology would not agree. Every believer in a particular field of pseudoscience will say that his own is not to be compared with the others. But cold reading from psychics is no better or worse evidence than NDE testimonials.
A misrepresentation. Can you see your logical error here?
Count Lucanor wrote: December 10th, 2018, 10:59 pm
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pmRemember, many a keen materialist has changed their mind after undergoing an NDE.
And some saw Jesus Christ and accepted him as their savior. :lol: I mean, no one is exempt from the possibility of any type of experience, whether it is illusory or real. That they can go through such experiences and believe they are real, doesn't give them any more probability of being real.
However, when the respiratory and circulatory systems shut down and one heads towards death then at that point the subjective is real and reality the dream. Once your senses go, the outside world becomes unreal, ineffectual like dreams during life, while the dream world - the subjective - becomes a new all-encompassing and all-important reality. For how long? Apparently at least a few minutes until the oxygen runs out. From there, decide what you will. I personally haven't decided anything.
Count Lucanor wrote: December 10th, 2018, 10:59 pm
Greta wrote: December 10th, 2018, 6:18 pm 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 :)
I'd say focus on bodies while people are still alive and find out if consciousness can live independently. Alternatively, get rid of the body completely, cremate it, anything, and then look up for consciousness. But why just wait until the body is half dead/ half alive and then it speaks a little about itself going through some experience.
As I said before, let's see if we can create life from chemicals without growing from parts of microbes, and let's see if we can create genuinely sentient consciousness with metal, plastic, carbon fibre and silicon chips. Until then we can hardly speak on the matter with any authority.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Consciousness is only possible with a live, reactive, experiential body. With no body, there is nothing to be conscious of. Think about it, what is it specifically that we are actually conscious of, when conscious? We are only conscious of our bodily reactions. That's all. Sensory organ reactions paint our conscious interpretation of reality. Brain/memory interactions create our thoughts, feelings, and urges. Without a reactive body, there would be nothing for consciousness to be conscious of; hence no consciousness.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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RJG wrote: December 11th, 2018, 7:41 amConsciousness is only possible with a live, reactive, experiential body. With no body, there is nothing to be conscious of. Think about it, what is it specifically that we are actually conscious of, when conscious? We are only conscious of our bodily reactions. That's all. Sensory organ reactions paint our conscious interpretation of reality. Brain/memory interactions create our thoughts, feelings, and urges. Without a reactive body, there would be nothing for consciousness to be conscious of; hence no consciousness.
Orthodoxy. Once such unimpeachable logic was used to reason why the Sun orbited the Earth, and most went along.

The issue is that we know a very tiny portion of reality and understand much less of it again. At most we know 5% of nature (normal matter), and without much understanding, more a loose connection of loosely connected factoids. In fact, we do not understand normal matter either; we just detect and measure it, but we don't know what the energy that comprises matter actually is, nor how it arose or from where, now how it became matter or its ultimate future.

Nor do we know if all matter is conscious or protoconscious to some degree. Nor do we know what consciousness is or how it is generated. We don't even know how life is generated either - otherwise we'd be busy generating life and consciousness, but we are still testing. With all of these profound gaps in human knowledge, the declaration of certainty about the nature of life and death by individuals suggests an emotional, rather than rational, approach.

Let's not forget that the idea of oblivion is as comforting for many as the idea of eternal life and thus may simply be another case of the wishful thinking that is so common in this area of inquiry. The issue is that there's nothing much to discuss because there appears to be nowhere near enough information available to hold a respectable view about the ultimate nature of subjectivity.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Greta wrote: December 11th, 2018, 4:23 pm Let's not forget that the idea of oblivion is as comforting for many as the idea of eternal life and thus may simply be another case of the wishful thinking that is so common in this area of inquiry. The issue is that there's nothing much to discuss because there appears to be nowhere near enough information available to hold a respectable view about the ultimate nature of subjectivity.
I'm throwing my hat in with Greta and the NDE agnostics rather than the OP or the pure skeptics here. The limits of our observational tools and techniques are the limits of scientific inquiry. While each of us probably can point in one direction or the other to the result coherent with our personal experience and beliefs, it remains clear that certain topics are currently not well-suited to examination via the scientific method. Heisenberg famously observed once with his Uncertainty Principle that one cannot precisely determine the simultaneous position and velocity of an object even in theory. Perhaps there will someday be a similar Mortality Principle that will explain with scientific formality why we cannot both observe and be dead at the same time...

What I'm curious about, Greta, is how far your agnosticism extends as one begins to explore the litany of controversial topics in parapsychology, like all the literature about psi and ESP research with roots straight out of the Men Who Stare At Goats, or the reincarnation guys out of the University of Virginia DOPS who study kids who can recall precise details of past lives. What do you think -- pseudoscience, or reasonable directions of inquiry?
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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ktz wrote: December 11th, 2018, 9:38 pmWhat I'm curious about, Greta, is how far your agnosticism extends as one begins to explore the litany of controversial topics in parapsychology, like all the literature about psi and ESP research with roots straight out of the Men Who Stare At Goats, or the reincarnation guys out of the University of Virginia DOPS who study kids who can recall precise details of past lives. What do you think -- pseudoscience, or reasonable directions of inquiry?
I don't know, ktz. Sometimes I think it depends on the day. I do think that parapsychism is a reasonable area, or perhaps more correctly, proto-parapsychism. One can either see the emergence of "high level" (as far as we know) consciousness as either entirely novel or, as I suspect, an exponentially developed version of that which came before, giving the impression of being entirely novel.

Ian Stephenson's research work in India with children is apparently of a high standard. Peers cannot criticise his methods, because he defensively ensured that the work was transparently clean, but they cannot bring themselves to accept his findings. There must be a catch, a fatal error that we missed! Then again, maybe something was missed? I'm in no position to say.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Greta wrote:Your question as to when consciousness is independent of the body raises the problem of other minds that Nagle famously illustrated. If, say, the Earth, the Sun, the solar system or the galaxy are conscious systems, how would or could we know?
Talking about famous illustrations, if we are to admit wild guesses, how would or could we know that a flying teapot in an unknown orbit is not the one thing running the whole show in Earth. Whoever claims consciousness is independent of bodies, has the burden of proof. The proof does not go along the line of "anything goes until we have reached 100% of empirical knowledge about the universe".
Greta wrote:"Supposed" is the wrong qualifier in referring to the mysteries of NDEs. "Arguable" or "apparent" would be more logical.
But that was not the point. It seems taken for granted that the problem is figuring out whether or not the "independent" consciousness (aka the soul) leaves the body for a trip into another "independent" dimension (aka the spiritual world) and then comes back. If the whole "mystery" of NDE is to know if consciousness actually did that, it's obvious that some important things are overlooked, or better said, neglected. First thing to look is whether there's an independent consciousness at all, and you don't need dying person to research that, although a certified, long-time defunct person could certainly work. Where is that research? Perhaps in Theology seminars or medium sessions.
Greta wrote:When humans can create life from scratch from base chemicals in a laboratory and create genuine sentience within a complex machine, then we are in a position to have an informed opinion on the matter.
Humans cannot create solar systems in the laboratory and I don't think anyone will believe that we are not in a position to have an informed opinion on the matter of planets and stars.
Greta wrote:In the light of this, all definite views about life after death - pro and con - are just wishful thinking, a gambler's punt made without having anything like enough information.
That's the wrong approach: thinking that it is either life after death or not. What could make that possible would be the separation of mind and body, so the real problem is either they are separated or not. And so far, most odds should be in favor of not being separated. The evidence from everyday is overwhelming: bodies are destroyed and their former consciousness does not reappear. Still not enough information? Compare it to the scarce, unreliable information that makes some people believe there's a chance that consciousness reappears somewhere.
Greta wrote:Tests have not been devised because, as noted, dying people are too busy dying to be measured.
Back to my first argument: that's a poor excuse for not researching what needs to be researched. Typical of pseudoscience: it will be stuck precisely where it cannot make progress, so that its claims remain alive, untested.
Greta wrote:However, when the respiratory and circulatory systems shut down and one heads towards death then at that point the subjective is real and reality the dream. Once your senses go, the outside world becomes unreal, ineffectual like dreams during life, while the dream world - the subjective - becomes a new all-encompassing and all-important reality. For how long? Apparently at least a few minutes until the oxygen runs out. From there, decide what you will. I personally haven't decided anything.
Putting aside metaphors, what exactly is the "dream world" and the "outside world"? For what I know, even though the NDE is considered to be subjective in nature, the reports are about the objectivity of the experience itself, I mean, they tell about a world independent of the subject: there are places, there are relatives, there is time, there's even the vision of your own physical body and consciousness floating in a physical space, etc., but more importantly, there's a consciousness in relation to these things. But how come? With no body taken into account, what explains this realm of inside/outside worlds within a consciousness? It makes no sense in terms of consciousness alone at last with itself. It's more like a physical brain that dreams.

If we give credit to a specific experience of consciousness, and we know that such experiences commonly happen to living subjects with functioning bodies, it's more rational to presume that these subjects have not died. That they "come back" to tell the experience is more than a good hint of that and that's why they are called "near-death experiences" and not "after-death experiences".
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Count Lucanor wrote: December 15th, 2018, 9:40 pm
Greta wrote:Your question as to when consciousness is independent of the body raises the problem of other minds that Nagle famously illustrated. If, say, the Earth, the Sun, the solar system or the galaxy are conscious systems, how would or could we know?
Talking about famous illustrations, if we are to admit wild guesses, how would or could we know that a flying teapot in an unknown orbit is not the one thing running the whole show in Earth. Whoever claims consciousness is independent of bodies, has the burden of proof. The proof does not go along the line of "anything goes until we have reached 100% of empirical knowledge about the universe".
Many informed observers, including physicists, think that panprotopsychism is possible. Thus, a teapot may have some measure of protoconsciousness.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 15th, 2018, 9:40 pm
Greta wrote:"Supposed" is the wrong qualifier in referring to the mysteries of NDEs. "Arguable" or "apparent" would be more logical.
But that was not the point. It seems taken for granted that the problem is figuring out whether or not the "independent" consciousness (aka the soul) leaves the body for a trip into another "independent" dimension (aka the spiritual world) and then comes back. If the whole "mystery" of NDE is to know if consciousness actually did that, it's obvious that some important things are overlooked, or better said, neglected. First thing to look is whether there's an independent consciousness at all, and you don't need dying person to research that, although a certified, long-time defunct person could certainly work. Where is that research? Perhaps in Theology seminars or medium sessions.
Who says that something leaves the body and comes back? Not me.

That, in fact, might not be how things work at all. There seems to be an assumption that people have worked out the ultimate nature of existence and know exactly what happens when we die. However, it's very possible no human has ever worked out what actually happens. It's quite possible that our brains are not even capable of understand such a thing, like comprehending the size of cosmic objects.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 15th, 2018, 9:40 pm
Greta wrote:When humans can create life from scratch from base chemicals in a laboratory and create genuine sentience within a complex machine, then we are in a position to have an informed opinion on the matter.
Humans cannot create solar systems in the laboratory and I don't think anyone will believe that we are not in a position to have an informed opinion on the matter of planets and stars.
Despite great strides, ask any astronomer how much of our solar system we know about and understand. Every mission uncovers more surprises. Water on Mars, Titan, Europa, Io, Enceladus, Pluto, Eris, Triton, the heliopause, to name just a few. Thus, you only emphasise my point. We do not understand enough to have opinions of certainty about these things.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 15th, 2018, 9:40 pm
Greta wrote:In the light of this, all definite views about life after death - pro and con - are just wishful thinking, a gambler's punt made without having anything like enough information.
That's the wrong approach: thinking that it is either life after death or not. What could make that possible would be the separation of mind and body, so the real problem is either they are separated or not. And so far, most odds should be in favor of not being separated. The evidence from everyday is overwhelming: bodies are destroyed and their former consciousness does not reappear. Still not enough information? Compare it to the scarce, unreliable information that makes some people believe there's a chance that consciousness reappears somewhere.
Incorrect interpretation. I was not talking about what happens regarding life and death in the quoted passage, just people's opinions. There is no valid either/or situation here because both theists and materialists are both almost certainly wrong.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 15th, 2018, 9:40 pm
Greta wrote:Tests have not been devised because, as noted, dying people are too busy dying to be measured.
Back to my first argument: that's a poor excuse for not researching what needs to be researched. Typical of pseudoscience: it will be stuck precisely where it cannot make progress, so that its claims remain alive, untested.
:lol: Medically treating dying people and not freaking out relatives by treating their departing loved ones as test subjects when they are their most vulnerable is a rather important consideration, don't you think?

I notice you apply the "pseudoscience" label, but in a way that is in itself pseudoscientific. You are the one making dogmatic claims about the nature of life and death. For you, this thread was a non starter. For you the answer here was always obvious. Thus, your participation is not about considering possibilities but preaching your gospel of materialism to the heretics.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 15th, 2018, 9:40 pm
Greta wrote:However, when the respiratory and circulatory systems shut down and one heads towards death then at that point the subjective is real and reality the dream. Once your senses go, the outside world becomes unreal, ineffectual like dreams during life, while the dream world - the subjective - becomes a new all-encompassing and all-important reality. For how long? Apparently at least a few minutes until the oxygen runs out. From there, decide what you will. I personally haven't decided anything.
It's more like a physical brain that dreams.
Ya think? Gosh, are you sure it's not Pikachu's influence?

Now, just for a moment, try to empathise with the existential situation of a dying person. You have only a few minutes of brain oxygen left, and you are locked within an insensate body. Thus, you perceive yourself as a non physical mind in a total void. In this situation the world of cause and effect is reversed. Now what happens to your body doesn't matter as it once did but what happens in "dreamworld" (consciousness not constrained by sensory input) suddenly becomes all important; it's all you have at that point.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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'Evidence' is also always a ticklish subject, not in the least because whatever statistical evidence that comes up gets thrown into the discard pile based on outcomes but there's always the risk that hucksters do move in and with a bit of fraud somewhere everyone gets to wash their hands clean of anything else yet unexplained.

I really think the next couple generations, especially with open internet and a free range of information, will be more apt to clean up the discard heap of knowledge, purge out the 'BS" that actually is BS and then clean up and re-categorize the 'BS' that has some actual ground to be examined, that points to questions we haven't answered about the laws of our universe, but fell in the 'BS' bag due to current political realities. Even today though the challenge with research on psi, the paranormal, things equivalent perhaps to applied panpsychism, is that you have credible research going on right along side snake oil and new age quackery, people can't easily tell the difference, those who struggle on to get it right have to put up with everyone else in the field who they wish weren't there in how they give it a bad name or obscure the credible angles, and for a while it may be like that. People who have enough interest in the topic can see a whole spread between people who are all in and uncritical, people who are critical but partial to certain interpretations of psi as an existing phenomena, and people who research it more from the starting point that none of it's real - and even the later camp runs into things, like the Ganzfeld, that they admit they're stumped on.

Ultimately though politics always poisons the well on these conversations. For example - is there any other reason to be super-ticklish over the concerns as to whether consciousness only exists on neurons or whether it's spread throughout the universe? No. That in and of itself has no negative impact. That it's true or not isn't the problem, it's what we perceive people would do with such conclusions - most specifically the people we don't like who may or may not (depending on the person in example's intellectual clarity) factually have the goal of using such information to oppress other people's rights, put their own dogmas into law, and cramp other people's freedoms to disagree with them in an open manner or live how they'd chose to live. The current war that's starting up against aspects of biology and evolutionary psychology has all of those hallmarks - ie. that gender is essentially bimodal with a fraction of a percent yielding variances is not in and of itself a problem, it's what people think people will do with it that's turning it into a knock-down-drag-out where research is heading toward potentially being classed as hate speech based on outcome.

You really have to look at people's behavior in aggregate to see just what driven and limbic animals we can be. It's also why I think one always has to dial back really strong aversions to outcome in certain topics based on people they can't stand and then do the work of actually separating facts from political concerns.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Papus79 wrote: December 16th, 2018, 2:06 pm 'Evidence' is also always a ticklish subject, not in the least because whatever statistical evidence that comes up gets thrown into the discard pile based on outcomes but there's always the risk that hucksters do move in and with a bit of fraud somewhere everyone gets to wash their hands clean of anything else yet unexplained.

I really think the next couple generations, especially with open internet and a free range of information, will be more apt to clean up the discard heap of knowledge, purge out the 'BS" that actually is BS and then clean up and re-categorize the 'BS' that has some actual ground to be examined, that points to questions we haven't answered about the laws of our universe, but fell in the 'BS' bag due to current political realities. Even today though the challenge with research on psi, the paranormal, things equivalent perhaps to applied panpsychism, is that you have credible research going on right along side snake oil and new age quackery, people can't easily tell the difference, those who struggle on to get it right have to put up with everyone else in the field who they wish weren't there in how they give it a bad name or obscure the credible angles, and for a while it may be like that. People who have enough interest in the topic can see a whole spread between people who are all in and uncritical, people who are critical but partial to certain interpretations of psi as an existing phenomena, and people who research it more from the starting point that none of it's real - and even the later camp runs into things, like the Ganzfeld, that they admit they're stumped on.
I think this is an astute point. But is it really just the quacks and snake oil salesmen who benefit from advocating these ideas in a bad faith way? Why is it that these ideas attract so many crazy people in the first place? I think I gotta look into the history of the new age movement at some point.
Ultimately though politics always poisons the well on these conversations. For example - is there any other reason to be super-ticklish over the concerns as to whether consciousness only exists on neurons or whether it's spread throughout the universe? No. That in and of itself has no negative impact.
I think this misses some of the latest neuroscience on cognitive dissonance and epistemic closure. Being wrong can cause neurological stress through the same nociceptive stimulation as physical pain, and can generate the same fight or flight response. Like our muscles in the tolerance of heavier weights, the brain requires training to increase tolerance of new cognitively dissonant ideas that contradict our existing schema.

That it's true or not isn't the problem, it's what we perceive people would do with such conclusions - most specifically the people we don't like who may or may not (depending on the person in example's intellectual clarity) factually have the goal of using such information to oppress other people's rights, put their own dogmas into law, and cramp other people's freedoms to disagree with them in an open manner or live how they'd chose to live. The current war that's starting up against aspects of biology and evolutionary psychology has all of those hallmarks - ie. that gender is essentially bimodal with a fraction of a percent yielding variances is not in and of itself a problem, it's what people think people will do with it that's turning it into a knock-down-drag-out where research is heading toward potentially being classed as hate speech based on outcome.
Hmm. I don't really want to touch this radioactive subject, this seems like the express train into left vs right dogmatown. Which is maybe your point. But I think you might want to consider that it's not just a hypothetical of what people think people will do with a conclusion -- science frequently gets co-opted into supporting oppressive positions. If you're not already familiar, you might be interested in David Reich's NYT article on race science, who shares your position, but acknowledges that white supremacists will cling to any racially-based conclusion to try to justify their political position. Same for the transgender stuff you're talking about -- whatever I think about the bivalence of gender, they really get a lot of hate that doesn't make any sense to me, so I can understand if their defense is perhaps a logical overreach like you are saying.
You really have to look at people's behavior in aggregate to see just what driven and limbic animals we can be.
I think this statement here is covering an unrelated idea that fascinates me. How weird is it that humans can be so individually difficult to predict in a given instance, by virtue of their possession of consciousness and free will, and yet we have all these effective financial instruments to predict their economic behavior on a collective level?

Similarly, take a look at the behavior of electrons -- isn't it weird how at the quantum level they zip around everywhere, unmeasurable under the limitations of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but yet at the collective level, organic chemistry can predict exactly how the individual electrons will travel during the course of a chemical reaction.

Obviously that can't be used as proof of the consciousness of anything by any means, but it makes me suspicious of a fractal similarity. If later we were to definitively discover that individual electrons were conscious I don't think it would run afoul of any coherence theories of truth on the subject. And how terrible that would be -- our daily use of electricity as the enslavement of how many vast numbers of conscious entities!?
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Papus79 »

ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 3:47 pm I think this is an astute point. But is it really just the quacks and snake oil salesmen who benefit from advocating these ideas in a bad faith way? Why is it that these ideas attract so many crazy people in the first place? I think I gotta look into the history of the new age movement at some point.
You might appreciate Gary Lachman and Mitch Horowitz, they seem to have similar goals in terms of keen interest in social and political history of occult movements and they both have a lot to say on Victorian New Thought both positive and negative.

It seems like part of the problem is that this is high-velocity territory for wish fulfillment. New thought was big on people manifesting things with their thoughts. Briefly assuming it were true and was limited by the 2nd law of physics, had to grapple with how many other people were thinking about that thing, and then also grappling with how many people you might have told about it - the result is pretty modest and unimpressive for the most part, unless you're the kind of person whose so patient and persistent that they make a wonderful life out of judicious tiny steps as such. None of that's really easy, it would take quite a bit of expended effort, and in most cases it would be much easier to get something through the normal channels through which you'd get it - leaving this sort of concern for needs that are both novel, long-term, and can't be pursued by normal means.
That last part is where this starts to sound boring to most people, and a lot of very lazy people who want shortcuts to life (get rich quick schemes or whatever else) will run at these sorts of things looking for secrets. The trouble here - the number of people who are simply patient and would want to know such things, use them accurately, and handle their lives responsibly, is a relatively small crowd. The people who really want something exciting is much greater. Hence the huxters are there to delude the people who want to be deluded. There's also the risk that people who are more in the first category, ie. more diligent, might get bumped off their objectivity by enough flim-flam and hype from various things that they start believing certain things about it without evidence and in turn they may start offering ideas that don't work because they think those ideas should.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 3:47 pm I think this misses some of the latest neuroscience on cognitive dissonance and epistemic closure. Being wrong can cause neurological stress through the same nociceptive stimulation as physical pain, and can generate the same fight or flight response. Like our muscles in the tolerance of heavier weights, the brain requires training to increase tolerance of new cognitively dissonant ideas that contradict our existing schema.
It's possible that I could be overemphasizing certain angles of that. I've gotten quite familiar, especially when I watch politics, of the tendency of anyone with an extreme position to reliably double-down whenever confronted. Also, a really odd and oblique example but something that shows bizarre sorts of social conformity - try going on something like a music share site on Facebook and try posting something that you know is by very good musicians, something that's not particularly well known, and watch how many songs like that you can post that get 0 likes and 0 replies. It seems like there are certain aspects of human behavior where it seems like the people who dip out of them are a very small percentage and most people have a way of doing the same thing without thinking about it - to such a degree that it creates a boundary that, when crossed, really seems to go to infertile and ineffective places for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

For the number of people who make up their minds on politics based on what some talking head has offered, without checking the source at all, and who'll reliably tow that line and ignore anyone whose offering articles, interviews with that person or group of people, admittedly I can't understand how that works. When I have to make a best guess as to why they're like that, especially if they have enough time on their hands and interest to even try debating people who disagree with what they were fed, the only way I can come up with a logical pathway for that is some level of self-interest that they have in defending a social structure, a particular strategic situation they have economically maybe, but whatever it is something else is more important to them than the truth on that particular issue. Politics being such a basket of individual and group special interests seems like it's filled with that and even tends to add more of that to whatever sector of life that it touches.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 3:47 pmHmm. I don't really want to touch this radioactive subject, this seems like the express train into left vs right dogmatown. Which is maybe your point. But I think you might want to consider that it's not just a hypothetical of what people think people will do with a conclusion -- science frequently gets co-opted into supporting oppressive positions. If you're not already familiar, you might be interested in David Reich's NYT article on race science, who shares your position, but acknowledges that white supremacists will cling to any racially-based conclusion to try to justify their political position.
I think the left and right dogmatism is a good way to put that - ie. science needs to be able to defend itself against both sorts of thinking. The race realism stuff is just the right-wing variant of it. Historically I have heard a fair amount about racialist beliefs in science, apparently it took WWII for the world to really take seriously how big of a problem racism is (which is both sick and sad). There are probably a lot of details we may have wrong in biology and evolutionary psych but there are clearly areas where their validity gets continuously compounded with each visit or visit to adjacent territories that researchers make.

ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 3:47 pmI think this statement here is covering an unrelated idea that fascinates me. How weird is it that humans can be so individually difficult to predict in a given instance, by virtue of their possession of consciousness and free will, and yet we have all these effective financial instruments to predict their economic behavior on a collective level?
I find myself closer to where Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris are on free will, ie. the inputs and processor are given to us, OTOH it seems like economics are still a pretty big dust storm where you do have some people who really know what they're talking about (I like listening to Mark Blyth when I can for example) but there are also all kinds of other people who either think they know what they're talking about or want to sell you or the public at a large something beneficial to their employers. Paraphrazing something Mark mentioned in one of his lectures about everyone running on insane games in economics that they know will come crashing down (like overleveraging and doing dodgy things with derivatives) any business that knows that it'll bring disaster and doesn't play along will lose out and go out of business because the machine that creates the delusion has deep enough pockets to finance it for years.

Maybe giving a tell to where I find my thinking politically - I really appreciate a lot of what Bret and Eric Weinstein and Heather Heying are doing these days because they're covering evolutionary psychology, economics, politics, and covering a lot of what I'd consider to be validly overlapping ground in places where certain professional disciplines had set up 'out of bounds' flags for people outside their territory, for example Heather mentioned that biologists were told by the social sciences that they were free to apply it to animals but not to people and she (as well as Bret by his own demonstration on these topics) considers that a big mistake.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 3:47 pmSimilarly, take a look at the behavior of electrons -- isn't it weird how at the quantum level they zip around everywhere, unmeasurable under the limitations of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but yet at the collective level, organic chemistry can predict exactly how the individual electrons will travel during the course of a chemical reaction.

Obviously that can't be used as proof of the consciousness of anything by any means, but it makes me suspicious of a fractal similarity. If later we were to definitively discover that individual electrons were conscious I don't think it would run afoul of any coherence theories of truth on the subject. And how terrible that would be -- our daily use of electricity as the enslavement of how many vast numbers of conscious entities!?
Our biggest problem there is getting a handle on subjectivity. Our handle seems to range from mystical to religious to popular psychological models and each one gets varying mileage case by case. The challenge panpsychism has in my opinion is it's pointing a finger in the right direction and giving us a way to make sense of there being a subjective aspect in nature but as of yet it doesn't give us that hook or that bridge where we can go back and quantify the shape of the container and figure out, for example, what it would mean or look like for electrons to be conscious. Also if conscious - what kind of consciousness? For good reason we're somewhat uncomfortable with things we can't substantiate and while we do leave the floor open to speculation we tend not to let things into mainstream consciousness (especially if they upset a lot of apple carts) unless we've been able to bridge that gap. This is probably where panpsychism as a model will have to start yielding more information in the laboratory and in a different way than 'is it real' - it will also need to give us tools that we didn't have without that model and new inroads to examine nature to get further testable results.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by ktz »

Papus79 wrote: December 16th, 2018, 5:33 pm It seems like part of the problem is that this is high-velocity territory for wish fulfillment. New thought was big on people manifesting things with their thoughts.
Ah -- I hadn't intuitively considered this even though I'm familiar with the creative visualization stuff. I think this thoroughly answers my question of why it attracts crazy people. I appreciate the references as well, they both look interesting reflections on the occult. I get the appeal -- Carnegie Secret stuff, or just watch Jim Carrey tell his story about how he wished for a bicycle and it appeared in his living room a few weeks later. But occultism has a long history of course -- is this variant really all that different from a layman's use of prayer through the ages or an ancient Chinese emperor consulting the I Ching? I'll have to check out those books with some interest.
I've gotten quite familiar, especially when I watch politics, of the tendency of anyone with an extreme position to reliably double-down whenever confronted.
Yep -- fight or flight, baby, and how many testosterone-fueled extremists do you think are going to back down from a fight?
Also, a really odd and oblique example but something that shows bizarre sorts of social conformity - try going on something like a music share site on Facebook and try posting something that you know is by very good musicians, something that's not particularly well known, and watch how many songs like that you can post that get 0 likes and 0 replies. It seems like there are certain aspects of human behavior where it seems like the people who dip out of them are a very small percentage and most people have a way of doing the same thing without thinking about it - to such a degree that it creates a boundary that, when crossed, really seems to go to infertile and ineffective places for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
Some degree of this phenomenon you're describing is probably covered by the familiarity heuristic. I'm not sure if Kahneman covers it directly in Thinking Fast and Slow but it's definitely inspired by his whole System 1 - System 2 bit, where it takes active thoughtful work from system 2 of our mind to overcome the initial gut-reaction of System 1. I'd be surprised if there's not a coherent explanation for it somewhere in evolutionary biology -- it seems intuitive to me that a natural propensity towards familiarity is related to tribalism and kin selection, which can be quite beneficial protective traits when civil society is not a guarantee. People or animals who you've seen many times are less likely to be a predator who will murder you first chance they get. Too bad this whole system has gotten co-opted by political shills and the advertising industrial complex nowadays. Also, openness to experience is considered one of the Big 5 personality traits, so there's probably a decent degree of variability between groups based on the kind of personalities that a certain group attracts.
For the number of people who make up their minds on politics based on what some talking head has offered, without checking the source at all, and who'll reliably tow that line and ignore anyone whose offering articles, interviews with that person or group of people, admittedly I can't understand how that works. When I have to make a best guess as to why they're like that, especially if they have enough time on their hands and interest to even try debating people who disagree with what they were fed, the only way I can come up with a logical pathway for that is some level of self-interest that they have in defending a social structure, a particular strategic situation they have economically maybe, but whatever it is something else is more important to them than the truth on that particular issue. Politics being such a basket of individual and group special interests seems like it's filled with that and even tends to add more of that to whatever sector of life that it touches.
I think it's pretty ironic that the same blind trust in television news anchors that enabled Edward R Murrow to help America overcome McCarthyism is now being used to spread echo chambers and McCarthyism 2.0 on both sides of the aisle. Ever since the Fairness Doctrine went down in the late 1980s and the 24-hours news cycle began a few decades ago, anyone who follows the news on a regular basis is basically simulating the evolutionary equivalent of being constantly under threat by predators.

My personal theory is that this whole terrifying trend of epistemic closure we're observing is just an unfortunate part of the evolution of identity that's been happening. For centuries, the average person was who they were by virtue of birth, essentially based on your father's profession or wherever your family could afford to send you to get you apprenticed or schooled. Your family might spend its whole existence generation after generation in the same 50-mile radius. In the modern world we have lost that familiar certainty, and I hypothesize that in a world without elders, where progress happens obscenely quickly and with the decline of small communities with tight family bonds, and especially considering the isolating effects of technology, people are now searching desperately for the kind of belonging and validation that can sometimes be provided by holding a certain worldview. When adopting a political position as part of our identity, every time our way of thinking gets validated we get a little dopamine hit that I think over time starts to simulate something closer to addiction than recognition of the truth.

Regarding the bit about the proliferation of politics and special interests in particular, are you familiar with Adam Curtis's documentaries? They're available for free on Thoughtmaybe, and I think The Mayfair Set covers capitalism's subsumption of government directly, but The Power of Nightmares covering the rise of the Neocon movement and his coverage of Murdoch may be connected as well. Curtis gets Malcolm Gladwell-type criticism in that he cherry picks stuff to support his overall narrative, but I think his stuff and Gladwell's are worthwhile regardless. But the problem of concentrated benefits with diffuse costs is one that I think might end up cannibalizing capitalism itself if we can't find a way to get it under control. I'm currently reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money and it's... depressing, to say the least.
I think the left and right dogmatism is a good way to put that - ie. science needs to be able to defend itself against both sorts of thinking. The race realism stuff is just the right-wing variant of it. Historically I have heard a fair amount about racialist beliefs in science, apparently it took WWII for the world to really take seriously how big of a problem racism is (which is both sick and sad). There are probably a lot of details we may have wrong in biology and evolutionary psych but there are clearly areas where their validity gets continuously compounded with each visit or visit to adjacent territories that researchers make.
I agree. I think as a society it's pretty clear that we have not yet reached a baseline maturity to handle the gift of communication at lightspeed that the internet has bestowed upon us. The kind of nonsensical outrage you are talking about hinders science, it hinders politics, and it can even hinder personal well-being -- take the brigading of social media bullying in schools today, for example.
I find myself closer to where Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris are on free will, ie. the inputs and processor are given to us, OTOH it seems like economics are still a pretty big dust storm where you do have some people who really know what they're talking about (I like listening to Mark Blyth when I can for example) but there are also all kinds of other people who either think they know what they're talking about or want to sell you or the public at a large something beneficial to their employers. Paraphrazing something Mark mentioned in one of his lectures about everyone running on insane games in economics that they know will come crashing down (like overleveraging and doing dodgy things with derivatives) any business that knows that it'll bring disaster and doesn't play along will lose out and go out of business because the machine that creates the delusion has deep enough pockets to finance it for years.
I think a lot of hard science types look down on the social sciences, and maybe despite my interest in philosophy I can count myself in that camp as well. Not only because academia's perverse incentives make it hard enough for anyone to learn anything for real -- I mean, just look at the replication crisis that happened in psychology -- but there's something that simply doesn't sit right with me intuitively when we attempt to apply the scientific method to a target as decidedly unscientific as human decision making.

Regarding your bit about Blyth, who is new to me and seems like someone who I might be interested in, a similar point is referenced in the Big Short, where Steve Eisman (Steve Carrell's Mark Baum character in the movie adaptation) recounts why he stopped considering himself a conservative. "When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off." But then he discovered the world of consumer finance, which is basically an entire industry devoted to ripping people off. The free market is a great idea if everybody is playing fair, but due to the tragedy of the commons, all it takes is a couple gambling asshole derivatives traders for the Nash Equilibrium to shift everyone's best position into blow up the economy. So now I pretty much boil over anytime someone tries to tell me how great of an idea deregulation was -- and the blame is on both sides. Clinton and Obama were just as guilty as Reagan or the Bushes, let alone the cheeto in chief we've got now in America.
Maybe giving a tell to where I find my thinking politically - I really appreciate a lot of what Bret and Eric Weinstein and Heather Heying are doing these days because they're covering evolutionary psychology, economics, politics, and covering a lot of what I'd consider to be validly overlapping ground in places where certain professional disciplines had set up 'out of bounds' flags for people outside their territory, for example Heather mentioned that biologists were told by the social sciences that they were free to apply it to animals but not to people and she (as well as Bret by his own demonstration on these topics) considers that a big mistake.
I'm reasonably sympathetic here. I think liberals can be just as bad as conservatives when it comes to dogma, and I am wary about how easily the oppressed can become the new oppressors. I'm all for the intersubjectivity movement, but probably would echo Obama on what happened at Evergreen specifically:
"I've heard of some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal toward women," Obama said. "I've got to tell you, I don't agree with that, either. I don't agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view."
My thoughts on that basically conclude along the lines of Jung's bit about how some problems can't be solved -- only outgrown. I think these technologies are so new and some old disempowered movements just beginning to wield them with force that we have not developed a culture of maturity around them. But I think the maturity or restrictions will come with time, for better or for worse. We will outgrow these problems into big fat new existential issues when the next transformative technology comes around. Or we will blow ourselves up or boil ourselves via climate change and start from scratch regardless.
Our biggest problem there is getting a handle on subjectivity. Our handle seems to range from mystical to religious to popular psychological models and each one gets varying mileage case by case. The challenge panpsychism has in my opinion is it's pointing a finger in the right direction and giving us a way to make sense of there being a subjective aspect in nature but as of yet it doesn't give us that hook or that bridge where we can go back and quantify the shape of the container and figure out, for example, what it would mean or look like for electrons to be conscious. Also if conscious - what kind of consciousness? For good reason we're somewhat uncomfortable with things we can't substantiate and while we do leave the floor open to speculation we tend not to let things into mainstream consciousness (especially if they upset a lot of apple carts) unless we've been able to bridge that gap. This is probably where panpsychism as a model will have to start yielding more information in the laboratory and in a different way than 'is it real' - it will also need to give us tools that we didn't have without that model and new inroads to examine nature to get further testable results.
Sure, I think this is reasonable. I think we're of a similar mind in the belief that exploration into panpsychism might not be pseudoscience, and probably share the expectation that we are far, far, far away from anything resembling a useful result. Even if we found a researcher who discovered something monumental, we'd probably do an Ignaz Semmelweis on the guy and send him straight to the loony bin. Science relies on repeated observation and replication -- these are simply not useful tools to explore phenomena that can't be well observed or phenomena exceeding a certain degree of variation at the individual level. I just like to support open minds on the subject when I can, as long as those minds aren't too divorced from reality. Greta's opinions on this subject basically mirror my own right now. I admit I myself have had some seriously strange experiences along the lines of Jung's acausal principle that have led me to really believe first-hand that truth is stranger than fiction, so I may not be a totally unbiased participant in the conversation.

In terms of the consciousness of non-human stuff, I like to defer to pragmatic theories like the one put forward by Francis Heylighen's anticipation control theory of mind. Basically he proposes a kind of duck-typing -- if it's an emergent phenomena that does all the anticipation and control functionality that consciousness appears to be intended to do, we might as well just call it consciousness. I think his whole bit with the global brain is pretty compelling and fun to think about, though certainly I'm not about to argue that it's well substantiated by any means.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Papus79 »

ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 10:11 pm I get the appeal -- Carnegie Secret stuff, or just watch Jim Carrey tell his story about how he wished for a bicycle and it appeared in his living room a few weeks later. But occultism has a long history of course -- is this variant really all that different from a layman's use of prayer through the ages or an ancient Chinese emperor consulting the I Ching?
I'd say not all that different. New Thought seemed to be a bunch of people trying to hash out the difference between religions and trying to find the common ground, and I think a lot of them were deeply interested in figuring out the question 'how do I really get it right with life' in the absence of a credible religious institution.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 10:11 pm Yep -- fight or flight, baby, and how many testosterone-fueled extremists do you think are going to back down from a fight?
When I've seen it up close, as much on TV, it seems like a mode of face-saving or ego-saving activity. It can be tough to tell what's scarier to them - admitting defeat or admitting to themselves and others that they were wrong.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 10:11 pmSome degree of this phenomenon you're describing is probably covered by the familiarity heuristic. I'm not sure if Kahneman covers it directly in Thinking Fast and Slow but it's definitely inspired by his whole System 1 - System 2 bit, where it takes active thoughtful work from system 2 of our mind to overcome the initial gut-reaction of System 1. I'd be surprised if there's not a coherent explanation for it somewhere in evolutionary biology -- it seems intuitive to me that a natural propensity towards familiarity is related to tribalism and kin selection, which can be quite beneficial protective traits when civil society is not a guarantee. People or animals who you've seen many times are less likely to be a predator who will murder you first chance they get. Too bad this whole system has gotten co-opted by political shills and the advertising industrial complex nowadays. Also, openness to experience is considered one of the Big 5 personality traits, so there's probably a decent degree of variability between groups based on the kind of personalities that a certain group attracts.
Sometimes I'm surprised that it doesn't get worse in the other direction - ie. that people don't just regionalize music and look weird at someone like they're celebrating an out-of-town sports team when they're listen to a band from overseas or across the country.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 10:11 pmMy personal theory is that this whole terrifying trend of epistemic closure we're observing is just an unfortunate part of the evolution of identity that's been happening. For centuries, the average person was who they were by virtue of birth, essentially based on your father's profession or wherever your family could afford to send you to get you apprenticed or schooled. Your family might spend its whole existence generation after generation in the same 50-mile radius. In the modern world we have lost that familiar certainty, and I hypothesize that in a world without elders, where progress happens obscenely quickly and with the decline of small communities with tight family bonds, and especially considering the isolating effects of technology, people are now searching desperately for the kind of belonging and validation that can sometimes be provided by holding a certain worldview. When adopting a political position as part of our identity, every time our way of thinking gets validated we get a little dopamine hit that I think over time starts to simulate something closer to addiction than recognition of the truth.
I've sensed occasionally that there's an awareness that what used to be local competition with peers has expanded to globalized proportions and making the grade in that environment is getting harder. From that perspective a lot of people moving toward gimmicks over integrity may also be something of a desperate long-shot attempt to stand out and be recognized in a place where if you aren't loud or extreme people don't seem to hear or see you.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 10:11 pmRegarding the bit about the proliferation of politics and special interests in particular, are you familiar with Adam Curtis's documentaries? They're available for free on Thoughtmaybe, and I think The Mayfair Set covers capitalism's subsumption of government directly, but The Power of Nightmares covering the rise of the Neocon movement and his coverage of Murdoch may be connected as well.
TY - I'll have to check that out.
ktz wrote: December 16th, 2018, 10:11 pmRegarding your bit about Blyth, who is new to me and seems like someone who I might be interested in, a similar point is referenced in the Big Short, where Steve Eisman (Steve Carrell's Mark Baum character in the movie adaptation) recounts why he stopped considering himself a conservative. "When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off." But then he discovered the world of consumer finance, which is basically an entire industry devoted to ripping people off. The free market is a great idea if everybody is playing fair, but due to the tragedy of the commons, all it takes is a couple gambling asshole derivatives traders for the Nash Equilibrium to shift everyone's best position into blow up the economy. So now I pretty much boil over anytime someone tries to tell me how great of an idea deregulation was -- and the blame is on both sides. Clinton and Obama were just as guilty as Reagan or the Bushes, let alone the cheeto in chief we've got now in America.
Yeah, the vulnerability of things over there can be frightening. With some of your later points here I particularly remember the Glass Steagall repeal being a big part of the issue and it seems like neo-conservative and neo-liberal are a lot closer to one another than different, ie. both parties in lockstep taking the country in the same direction. John Gray made an interesting point about Margaret Thatcher in a recent interview where he suggested that something interesting happened with her time in office that she neither anticipated nor would have wanted credit for, that she was hoping for a return to traditional values and the things she did in hopes of setting the stage for that really set something more like wild-west capitalism off. I think that probably happened in a lot of places where people tried electing conservatives hoping to claw back some of the cultural changes that they were less happy about and in the end their ideas met an environment that wasn't tuned for the results they wanted.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Greta wrote:Many informed observers, including physicists, think that panprotopsychism is possible. Thus, a teapot may have some measure of protoconsciousness.
So now when they start making extraordinary claims, all of the sudden they become "informed observers". So much for the "we-never-have-enough-information-to-know argument". In any case, whatever any physicist believes about panpsychism and its offspring, they won't believe it as physicists, but as philosophers at best, or religious followers at worst.
Greta wrote: Who says that something leaves the body and comes back? Not me.
I'm pointing at anyone who, when talking about NDE, has not ruled out a supernatural process, unrelated to the physical properties of reality. That includes not ruling out the possibility of an immaterial substance (call it spirit, soul, consciousness, whatever) liberating itself from a physical body and navigating a realm all of its own, that is, of an immaterial, spiritual nature. That's what the OP suggests and what I'm arguing against. You're welcome to join me in ruling out that possibility.
Greta wrote: That, in fact, might not be how things work at all. There seems to be an assumption that people have worked out the ultimate nature of existence and know exactly what happens when we die. However, it's very possible no human has ever worked out what actually happens. It's quite possible that our brains are not even capable of understand such a thing, like comprehending the size of cosmic objects.
I suspect that by "working out the ultimate nature of existence" you mean reaching the knowledge of whether reality is material or immaterial, or a strange merge of both. That's decisive in our inquiries of what actually happens and knowing what possibilities we could be open to, considering our current state. As if we were in a dark room, we have to take what we can grasp and move cautiously with the most reliable information at hand and take steps to discover new reliable information, until we solve the blank spaces in the puzzle of reality. That is what science is and up to now, the puzzle of reality is entirely made of physical, material pieces. The level of development, reliability and systematization of physical science, as limited as it could be, is overwhelming, compared to any other approach. So, when dealing with NDE, we have not just started our journey in the dark room, our blindness is not even near absolute, and we certainly can rule out some things.
Greta wrote: Despite great strides, ask any astronomer how much of our solar system we know about and understand. Every mission uncovers more surprises. Water on Mars, Titan, Europa, Io, Enceladus, Pluto, Eris, Triton, the heliopause, to name just a few. Thus, you only emphasise my point. We do not understand enough to have opinions of certainty about these things.
Actually, what we do know, we acknowledge it as part of the repository of certainties. We don't suspend our pretty accurate knowledge of where cosmic objects are, what are they made of, or how they behave and why, in order to give room to completely bizarre possibilities. We may try those possibilities, but we don't chant the "anything goes" slogan with the excuse that we ought to find the last piece of the puzzle.
Greta wrote: Incorrect interpretation. I was not talking about what happens regarding life and death in the quoted passage, just people's opinions. There is no valid either/or situation here because both theists and materialists are both almost certainly wrong.
But I did mean the wrong approach in people's opinion about the issue of life after death: thinking that there may be as many good chances of consciousness surviving bodily death as of not surviving it. There could only be as many good chances for both if they had determined FIRST that consciousness and bodies are distinct substances. But theists and believers in supernatural realms are assuming they are, without much rational justification. They're trying to identify the last piece of the puzzle without ever trying the first ones.
Greta wrote:
Count Lucanor wrote:Back to my first argument: that's a poor excuse for not researching what needs to be researched. Typical of pseudoscience: it will be stuck precisely where it cannot make progress, so that its claims remain alive, untested.
:lol: Medically treating dying people and not freaking out relatives by treating their departing loved ones as test subjects when they are their most vulnerable is a rather important consideration, don't you think?
May I insist again: my argument is precisely that treating dying people is irrelevant for solving the real issue, which is whether consciousness and bodies are distinct ontological substances that can be united or separated. To say that the only way to find out is when people are dying is a poor excuse for not doing proper research. Don't bother dying people, don't freak out relatives, just take the plenty of resources available: living people, which perhaps miraculously always seem to carry their bodies and consciousness with themselves.
Greta wrote:I notice you apply the "pseudoscience" label, but in a way that is in itself pseudoscientific. You are the one making dogmatic claims about the nature of life and death. For you, this thread was a non starter. For you the answer here was always obvious. Thus, your participation is not about considering possibilities but preaching your gospel of materialism to the heretics.
To my knowledge, considering possibilities also involves ruling out the possibilities that don't work. And I said why they don't work: lacking evidence and looking for evidence in the wrong place. Also, I find nothing useful and rational in a permanently open, "anything goes" approach.

As for "preaching materialism", I wouldn't mind seeing this as a crusade against supernatural idealism and its offspring, which is what undoubtedly most of NDE studies stand for. But actually I'm forced to side provisionally with materialism, not having better alternatives, simply because I'm an obstinate realist. That's my gospel: realism.
Greta wrote:
Count Lucanor wrote:It's more like a physical brain that dreams.
Ya think? Gosh, are you sure it's not Pikachu's influence?
Well, under your approach, Pikachu shouldn't be ruled out. Anything goes. Under my approach, will be ruled out until some evidence comes in.
Greta wrote: Now, just for a moment, try to empathise with the existential situation of a dying person. You have only a few minutes of brain oxygen left, and you are locked within an insensate body. Thus, you perceive yourself as a non physical mind in a total void. In this situation the world of cause and effect is reversed. Now what happens to your body doesn't matter as it once did but what happens in "dreamworld" (consciousness not constrained by sensory input) suddenly becomes all important; it's all you have at that point.
I think I've already dealt with that. That's the description of a personal experience as told by a living person. Not different than the telling of any other personal experience, either of a natural or supernatural kind. Several life-meaningful concerns can detach from this basic information, both for the speaker and for the audience. One of such concerns for some people is to find out whether the story is an actual account of real things and real events. Usually science and other rational and systematic methods of research help us in that task. The OP represents a failed attempt in that line of research and other approaches don't adjust to said rational methods. That sums up the scope of my concerns.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Sy Borg
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Sy Borg »

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Greta wrote:Many informed observers, including physicists, think that panprotopsychism is possible. Thus, a teapot may have some measure of protoconsciousness.
So now when they start making extraordinary claims, all of the sudden they become "informed observers". So much for the "we-never-have-enough-information-to-know argument". In any case, whatever any physicist believes about panpsychism and its offspring, they won't believe it as physicists, but as philosophers at best, or religious followers at worst.
Its important here to understand the difference between protoconsciousness and consciousness. I have seen this mistake made very often on forums, where a person is seduced by a word with a strong semantic, like "consciousness". So the "proto" prefix is ignored. Thus idea of panpsychism is treated as if one is claiming that rocks have feelings, as opposed to reactivity (aka proto-consciousness). Try Michio Kaku for a simple primer on this.

By the way, thinking that a phenomena might be possible is not the same as making an extraordinary claim of fact.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Greta wrote:Who says that something leaves the body and comes back? Not me.
I'm pointing at anyone who, when talking about NDE, has not ruled out a supernatural process, unrelated to the physical properties of reality. That includes not ruling out the possibility of an immaterial substance (call it spirit, soul, consciousness, whatever) liberating itself from a physical body and navigating a realm all of its own, that is, of an immaterial, spiritual nature. That's what the OP suggests and what I'm arguing against. You're welcome to join me in ruling out that possibility.
Since we don't know all that we are, and have no idea how much we don't know, I will decline your offer to engage in unsubstantiated beliefs.

"Supernatural" is a bad word anyway. There is only nature, discovered or not. The issue is that we simply only have a sketchy understanding of nature. I certainly do believe that spirit (animated configuration of atoms) exists, which seemingly breaks up at death like the body, but maybe not. After all, can information that does not fall into a black hole be destroyed? Doesn't that contravene quantum theory? Are there other dimensions? Maybe, maybe not, depending on which mathematician you ask.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Greta wrote:That, in fact, might not be how things work at all. There seems to be an assumption that people have worked out the ultimate nature of existence and know exactly what happens when we die. However, it's very possible no human has ever worked out what actually happens. It's quite possible that our brains are not even capable of understand such a thing, like comprehending the size of cosmic objects.
I suspect that by "working out the ultimate nature of existence" you mean reaching the knowledge of whether reality is material or immaterial, or a strange merge of both. That's decisive in our inquiries of what actually happens and knowing what possibilities we could be open to, considering our current state. As if we were in a dark room, we have to take what we can grasp and move cautiously with the most reliable information at hand and take steps to discover new reliable information, until we solve the blank spaces in the puzzle of reality. That is what science is and up to now, the puzzle of reality is entirely made of physical, material pieces. The level of development, reliability and systematization of physical science, as limited as it could be, is overwhelming, compared to any other approach. So, when dealing with NDE, we have not just started our journey in the dark room, our blindness is not even near absolute, and we certainly can rule out some things.
When I refer to humans not knowing 'the ultimate nature of existence' I do not mean they are yet to know 'whether reality is material or immaterial'. Materiality is only relative anyway. To a neutron star the Earth is like a cloud. To a black hole it is nothing at all.

Rather, I mean that there's probably many things we have not even conceptualised or imagined yet, let alone observed, studied and understood. So I remain pretty open minded, although obviously not entirely so.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Greta wrote:I was not talking about what happens regarding life and death in the quoted passage, just people's opinions. There is no valid either/or situation here because both theists and materialists are both almost certainly wrong.
But I did mean the wrong approach in people's opinion about the issue of life after death: thinking that there may be as many good chances of consciousness surviving bodily death as of not surviving it. There could only be as many good chances for both if they had determined FIRST that consciousness and bodies are distinct substances. But theists and believers in supernatural realms are assuming they are, without much rational justification. They're trying to identify the last piece of the puzzle without ever trying the first ones.
Believers in the supernatural are not of much interest to me, nor flat Earthers, although I have some sympathy for believers in Reptilian subterfuge because at least the idea is fun. Why talk about such people? Is this just about putting forward views to counter the retreat to superstition and fascism as seen in parts of the west? All laudable enough, but I'd rather leave the politics to others.

It's the physical, visceral reality that matters to me now. There's more that we don't know than we do know. For instance, what do you think qualia is? Having a sense of being? Do you think it is graded or on/off?

Do you think reality is just a matter of quantum machines within molecular machines within cellular machines within animal machines on planet with machinelike processes driven by a nuclear reactor in a big machine of a galaxy?

Do you think this universe is the first one? The only one? Do universes come serially or in parallel? Are there other dimensions? Might universes might have a mature form and ours is currently in its infancy?

Or it might this be the first of a great future dynasty of universes? Or, it might it be the first and only universe, a fluke to soon be extinguished forever? Or it might be an utterly middling universe, neither first nor last, big nor small, a "Goldilocks universe". Or this may be one universe of a vast multiverse, operating in parallel with them.

Or it might be an Everett universe, where every choice branches off another universe in the fifth dimension (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7L65em0d88). Or it might be Minkowski's block universe and our travel through time is illusory. Of might reality be arranged on fractal time where the future drags the past to it (there is some decent match to suggest this, apparently)?

What actually is reality?

I don't even know what you mean by "surviving death". What does that mean? It's a phase change of matter. It's not as though we'll be sitting on a cloud basking in God's rays like a lizard for eternity.

Rather, let's follow the breadcrumbs of an archetypal NDE. The senses break down and you find yourself in utter blackness, nothingness. Not even a body. Then you see a light that seems warm and welcoming so you gravitate to it. What happens when you go into the light? Do you just disappear? Another dimension? Reincarnation? We'll all find out soon enough, one way or another. I plead ignorance as I don't know the answer to these questions, although I have reservations about some.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pmMay I insist again: my argument is precisely that treating dying people is irrelevant for solving the real issue, which is whether consciousness and bodies are distinct ontological substances that can be united or separated. To say that the only way to find out is when people are dying is a poor excuse for not doing proper research. Don't bother dying people, don't freak out relatives, just take the plenty of resources available: living people, which perhaps miraculously always seem to carry their bodies and consciousness with themselves.
Try this: If a relative or friend is dying and rushed off to hospital, when you get there suggest to their spouse, parents, children, nurses and doctors that you'd like to test the patient for a possible NDE. Let me know how that goes. Also, try getting the project funded while you're at it.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Greta wrote:I notice you apply the "pseudoscience" label, but in a way that is in itself pseudoscientific. You are the one making dogmatic claims about the nature of life and death. For you, this thread was a non starter. For you the answer here was always obvious. Thus, your participation is not about considering possibilities but preaching your gospel of materialism to the heretics.
To my knowledge, considering possibilities also involves ruling out the possibilities that don't work. And I said why they don't work: lacking evidence and looking for evidence in the wrong place. Also, I find nothing useful and rational in a permanently open, "anything goes" approach.

As for "preaching materialism", I wouldn't mind seeing this as a crusade against supernatural idealism and its offspring, which is what undoubtedly most of NDE studies stand for. But actually I'm forced to side provisionally with materialism, not having better alternatives, simply because I'm an obstinate realist. That's my gospel: realism.
If your gospel was "realism", though, you'd be interested in what was real rather than just what has been proved, more curious and interested than didactic.

There is a balance to be struck between "anything goes" and unquestioning adherence to today's knowledge. Much of what we know today is provisional and will be superseded in the relatively near future. Humility in this situation is the appropriate response IMO.

Count Lucanor wrote: December 17th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Greta wrote:Ya think? Gosh, are you sure it's not Pikachu's influence?
Well, under your approach, Pikachu shouldn't be ruled out. Anything goes. Under my approach, will be ruled out until some evidence comes in.
Greta wrote: Now, just for a moment, try to empathise with the existential situation of a dying person. You have only a few minutes of brain oxygen left, and you are locked within an insensate body. Thus, you perceive yourself as a non physical mind in a total void. In this situation the world of cause and effect is reversed. Now what happens to your body doesn't matter as it once did but what happens in "dreamworld" (consciousness not constrained by sensory input) suddenly becomes all important; it's all you have at that point.
I think I've already dealt with that. That's the description of a personal experience as told by a living person. Not different than the telling of any other personal experience, either of a natural or supernatural kind. Several life-meaningful concerns can detach from this basic information, both for the speaker and for the audience. One of such concerns for some people is to find out whether the story is an actual account of real things and real events. Usually science and other rational and systematic methods of research help us in that task. The OP represents a failed attempt in that line of research and other approaches don't adjust to said rational methods. That sums up the scope of my concerns.
You have not dealt with it, Count. Did you try to empathise with that situation and notice the reversal of priority between subjective and objective? Have you ever tried to realistically imagine dying?

Pls let go of the OP. Yes, there were some well-documented mistakes made in that posting (which wasn't me, anyway). Now you are speaking with me and what I have said. Discussions move on.
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