Regarding the "spirit": Is perception of the world really an out of the body experience?

[thrasymachus]

Is perception of the world really an out of the body experience? You may think this a simple matter to prove, that is, that perception is NOT an out of body experience. Think again, because not only is it not simple, arguing that perception not an out of body experience is patently disprovable. What does this have to do with having/being a spirit? If you cannot show how knowledge relationships, given a certain model of what is place for conceiving such a thing, can even occur, then you are obliged to abandon that model. So, whatever model you have in mind, you will likely have to find another for the way the world is fundamentally put together, and I say fundamentally because, after all, knowledge relationships are prior to any model you can conceive; they are presupposed in whatever one has in mind.

Why is this question put in the philosophy of religion? If conscious perception cannot be contained by any attempt to localize in a body experience, then we are outside the purview of empirical science in constructing a theory as to what really things really are.

[Sy Borg]

Then again, what lies outside of empirical science today, may not remain outside in the future.

The senses are very interesting. In one sense we have an image of all that we sense inside our heads but, of course, the images and sounds it's actually not in there with the fats, water, proteins, carbohydrates, salts, blood vessels, neurons and glial cells. Rather, they are represented by the dynamic patterns of neurons.

In one sense, when you see something, photons have entered your eye, sparking photosensitive chemical reactions. In another sense, when you see something, you reach out and visually touch it, just as you reach out and make contact with something to sense it via touch. Ditto with other senses, especially hearing and smell (in humans).

Neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke some years ago (detailed in her book, My Stroke of Insight), and the condition injured parts of her left brain hemisphere. Her imaginative, non-logical right brain took over, as she described in her famous TED Talk:

And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy -- energy.

And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter -- my left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive ...

And later on:

Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

My guess is that losing her body's sense of location resulted in complete identification with her sensory range, which can even reach out to space. By contrast, our usual subjective boundary of self consists of dermal nerves. In a sense, spirituality is an expanded sense of identification, beyond that of family and other human and animal groups. There's still much about subjective experience that we don't understand.

[JackDaydream]

Is perception of the world really an out of the body experience? You may think this a simple matter to prove, that is, that perception is NOT an out of body experience. Think again, because not only is it not simple, arguing that perception not an out of body experience is patently disprovable. What does this have to do with having/being a spirit? If you cannot show how knowledge relationships, given a certain model of what is place for conceiving such a thing, can even occur, then you are obliged to abandon that model. So, whatever model you have in mind, you will likely have to find another for the way the world is fundamentally put together, and I say fundamentally because, after all, knowledge relationships are prior to any model you can conceive; they are presupposed in whatever one has in mind.

Why is this question put in the philosophy of religion? If conscious perception cannot be contained by any attempt to localize in a body experience, then we are outside the purview of empirical science in constructing a theory as to what really things really are.

To see perception as separate from the senses may be problematic phenomenologically. Out of body experiences and NDEs can't necessarily be taken at face value because the person is not separated from the body permanently. Some do see NDEs as a possible indication of potential spiritual existence beyond the body. Henri Bergson, in his idea of the creative mind, and Aldous Huxley, in his thinking about psychedelic experimentation saw the brain as a filter of consciousness. However, out of body experiences are different from daily perception. If we have spirits in this life they are connected to bodies on a general basis.

The underlying question of spirits has existed in many traditions, such as the idea of the angelic kingdom and some esoteric thinkers have spoken of ascended Masters. However, it is disputable because it is based on the sense of witnessing 'spirits' rather than being spirits. In many systems of materialism spirits are denied. This may be the other extreme to believing that spirits exist. Many see the word spirit not as being about disembodied consciousness but as 'inner reality' as real. The issue may be whether beings of forms do exist without bodies as we know and live in them in daily life and perception. In the tradition of theosophy, Madame Blavatsky saw evolution very differently. She thought that human beings existed as spirits originally and what happened in the process of evolution people gained dense as opposed to ethereal bodies.

[thrasymachus]

Sy Borg wrote
Then again, what lies outside of empirical science today, may not remain outside in the future.

The senses are very interesting. In one sense we have an image of all that we sense inside our heads but, of course, the images and sounds it's actually not in there with the fats, water, proteins, carbohydrates, salts, blood vessels, neurons and glial cells. Rather, they are represented by the dynamic patterns of neurons.

In one sense, when you see something, photons have entered your eye, sparking photosensitive chemical reactions. In another sense, when you see something, you reach out and visually touch it, just as you reach out and make contact with something to sense it via touch. Ditto with other senses, especially hearing and smell (in humans).

Neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke some years ago (detailed in her book, My Stroke of Insight), and the condition injured parts of her left brain hemisphere. Her imaginative, non-logical right brain took over, as she described in her famous TED Talk:

I have heard Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk. And there are others, too. Some of the near death experiencers are striking, and are not to be dismissed, as many are inclined to do, with some facile talk about brain chemistry gone wild. After all, even if the objections were correct, reports of qualitatively extraordinary experiences are true regardless of how they are produced, for the quality of an experience is unassailable. I may have an hallucination that I am experiencing absolute horror, e.g., in a dream, and while the dream had content that did not correspond to or represent anything in the waking world, but the horror remains what is it, regardless.

But the claim I make here is really more mundane: it goes to the very possibility of having a object perception at all, and the problem arises instantly on inquiry, and not via some discursive scientific thesis. The inquiry puts it simply: how does my knowledge claim about my cat being there on the couch have any validity about something out there, in a world that is not me? How does the epistemic connection work? But no: how is it, because this is not an empirical argument, that we can even conceive of something like an epistemic intimation that brings the known to the knower?
This just asks for basic justificatory thinking. If S knows P, what makes this even possible? One cannot bring in possible future scientific progress that that will one day bring light to this because the nature of the problem is not empirical.

My guess is that losing her body's sense of location resulted in complete identification with her sensory range, which can even reach out to space. By contrast, our usual subjective boundary of self consists of dermal nerves. In a sense, spirituality is an expanded sense of identification, beyond that of family and other human and animal groups. There's still much about subjective experience that we don't understand.

Terminal nerves is an empirical concept. That is, the justification that there is such a thing issues from observation. But this begs the question, for it is this very connection that makes an occasion of empirical observation one that is actually "about" what is out there, in the brain tissue. Confirmations about brain tissue and its composition are just as in question here as my cat.

[thrasymachus]

JackDaydream wrote
o see perception as separate from the senses may be problematic phenomenologically. Out of body experiences and NDEs can't necessarily be taken at face value because the person is not separated from the body permanently. Some do see NDEs as a possible indication of potential spiritual existence beyond the body. Henri Bergson, in his idea of the creative mind, and Aldous Huxley, in his thinking about psychedelic experimentation saw the brain as a filter of consciousness. However, out of body experiences are different from daily perception. If we have spirits in this life they are connected to bodies on a general basis.

I do take such things seriously, but not yet. I am questioning normal perceptual encounters when we cross the street of pay our taxes. Or observe a cat on the sofa. I am asking, simply, how it is that a perceptual experience like this is capable of reaching across the room and over to the sofa to bring the cat into my awareness such that I can affirm the cat to be in fact on the sofa. This is an assumption that lies beneath all we think and do, really, in the world.

The underlying question of spirits has existed in many traditions, such as the idea of the angelic kingdom and some esoteric thinkers have spoken of ascended Masters. However, it is disputable because it is based on the sense of witnessing 'spirits' rather than being spirits. In many systems of materialism spirits are denied. This may be the other extreme to believing that spirits exist. Many see the word spirit not as being about disembodied consciousness but as 'inner reality' as real. The issue may be whether beings of forms do exist without bodies as we know and live in them in daily life and perception. In the tradition of theosophy, Madame Blavatsky saw evolution very differently. She thought that human beings existed as spirits originally and what happened in the process of evolution people gained dense as opposed to ethereal bodies.

Sure, but I tend to dismiss most of this. Close to all of it, really. For no other reason than it lacks confirmation and justification. If there is a spirit our human existence, then, in good doxastic conscience, I cannot affirm this until I can understand what there is in the world that supports it. I'm not Huxley's experiences with mescaline (reading his Doors of Perception along with Ram Das' Only Dance There Is, and others) did possess anything interesting. They do. I am saying to take it seriously, there has to be an objective basis for belief.

Again, the question here belongs to basic epistemology. Nothing could be more simple.

[Gertie]

Is perception of the world really an out of the body experience? You may think this a simple matter to prove, that is, that perception is NOT an out of body experience. Think again, because not only is it not simple, arguing that perception not an out of body experience is patently disprovable. What does this have to do with having/being a spirit? If you cannot show how knowledge relationships, given a certain model of what is place for conceiving such a thing, can even occur, then you are obliged to abandon that model. So, whatever model you have in mind, you will likely have to find another for the way the world is fundamentally put together, and I say fundamentally because, after all, knowledge relationships are prior to any model you can conceive; they are presupposed in whatever one has in mind.

Why is this question put in the philosophy of religion? If conscious perception cannot be contained by any attempt to localize in a body experience, then we are outside the purview of empirical science in constructing a theory as to what really things really are.

There's a lot in there, I'll have a go.

There is no way of testing ''the way things really are'' except via our conscious experience of them, and applying rules/patterns we have found to be consistently predictive. What we discover is that our experience of the way things really are looks more like it evolved for utility rather than being being perfect and unlimited, and even if we somehow combined every subject's first person pov to construct a model of reality, it would still not be perfect or complete.

But we can also think of ''the way things really are'' differently to the way physics models reality. We can think of reality as something which exists in the form of the relationships of its parts. That seeing your cat on the sofa is as real a way things are as particles and forces, just manifesting a different level of granularity/resolution. But when you close your eyes that part of the relationship changes.

Knowledge - or knowing, is itself a type of experiencing. The seeing of the cat on the sofa, is how you know the cat's on the sofa. You know the cat has four legs (hopefully) because you've seen them, that she gets hungry and her scratches hurt because you've experienced these things. Other things you know from experiencing hearing or reading. But as above, we've discovered humans are imperfect and limited perceivers and thinkers, imperfect and limited knowers.

Even so, we have an incredibly detailed and vast physicalist model of the world, which is at least third person falsifiable, by other flawed and limited humans. And this model, barring current gaps, potentially explains and predicts everything we can experience of the universe. So it's reasonable to infer our knowing at least correlates to the way things really are well enough for our model to work for us.

Except that model doesn't encompass or predict conscious experience itself. Either as fundamental or something we'd predict to emerge from physical processes. To describe experience as an in or out of body experience tries to locate it in that spatial physicalist model of bodies, without knowing how it fits into the model, or if it really does. If conscious experience is an emergent property of physical brain processes in terms of the physicalist model, then in a sense that's where it's located, even though it 'extends outwards' to encompass your cat. But as discussed, 'your cat' is a unique knowing experience to you from your first person pov, and other humans will have a slightly different knowing experiences of your cat (mine only goes as far as reading about it on the sofa), and physics will give us another description, and that too is derivable from limited and flawed human experiential knowing.

As I say, you can think of experiential knowing not as flawed and limited, rather as the way you and other humans interact with cats and everything else. It's as real as any other interaction, like billiards balls colliding. There may be another physicalist, idealist, or whatever way of describing that reality too, but we don't have first person direct perfect knowledge of what that is.

I don't know what you mean by 'spirit' or what that adds, or on what basis you think this is a religious topic, you'd need to explain that more.

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote
There's a lot in there, I'll have a go.

There is no way of testing ''the way things really are'' except via our conscious experience of them, and applying rules/patterns we have found to be consistently predictive. What we discover is that our experience of the way things really are looks more like it evolved for utility rather than being being perfect and unlimited, and even if we somehow combined every subject's first person pov to construct a model of reality, it would still not be perfect or complete.

Just to be clear, this question is PRIOR to assumptions about any talk about what is "really" going on in terms of the way semantics may be in part reducible to pragmatics or how evolution may have been determinative. The latter does not attempt to explain qualitatively what the world is, only seeing how what is there may have been conducive to survival and reproduction. I think, with you, that our relation with the world is essentially pragmatic, and that knowledge relations are just this. but then, more than this. Epistemology is not reducible to pragmatics; in fact, pragmatists like Rorty, James, Dewey, they talk in naturalistic terms, but their pragmatic foundation provides nothing for an ontology beyond the pragmatics. Rorty was NOT a naturalist at the basic level, for naturalistic terms are defined within the structure of the future-looking dynamic. The meaning of 'cat' for example, has no recourse outside the understanding's problem solving encounters with things "out there" that deal with that look like cats, for the meanings are confined to problem solving consummations: I know what cats are in that I have had encounters with the world that were early on, perceptual problems dealing with basic things like grass and trees and food, and, as Rorty tries to prove ALL knowledge is socially constructed, and these problems were modeled for me by people and the language use around me. A tree became a tree when I successfully internalized the signifier (sound) "tree" and associated it with those things out there like others do.

But this changes nothing for explanatory needs that arise. I may think language itself is simply a tool, as Quine put it (a naturalist, Quine was), but what language is "about" is not, and this goes to the issue here, pragmatics exclusively. Language and logic define the formal possibilities of the understanding, but it is indeterminable in the end, like everything else. I mean, I cannot tell you what logic IS because this belongs to the foundational givenness of the world. Pragmatics may tell us how thinking works in a basic way, but it ends there.

But we can also think of ''the way things really are'' differently to the way physics models reality. We can think of reality as something which exists in the form of the relationships of its parts. That seeing your cat on the sofa is as real a way things are as particles and forces, just manifesting a different level of granularity/resolution. But when you close your eyes that part of the relationship changes.

Particles and forces? How does one identify what a particle is? Or a force? And relationship of parts puts the knower, a "part" on one end and the known, my cat, on the other. But assuming the knower is a part, of sorts, one begs the question; what are these part-to-part relations about? In the model you bring up, this would be causality. And also, this talk about particles and forces subsumes human epistemics under a more broadly conceived notion of phyiscalist thinking, and so it fails to address the matter at the basic, philosophical level, which is epistemological. Prior to talk about particles and the rest, there is talk about how these get there meanings, and this refers us to the world. But it is our relation to the world that makes these terms possible that is in question. In other words, basic epistemic relations cannot be explained by something that presupposes a basic epistemic relation.

Knowledge - or knowing, is itself a type of experiencing. The seeing of the cat on the sofa, is how you know the cat's on the sofa. You know the cat has four legs (hopefully) because you've seen them, that she gets hungry and her scratches hurt because you've experienced these things. Other things you know from experiencing hearing or reading. But as above, we've discovered humans are imperfect and limited perceivers and thinkers, imperfect and limited knowers.

Even so, we have an incredibly detailed and vast physicalist model of the world, which is at least third person falsifiable, by other flawed and limited humans. And this model, barring current gaps, potentially explains and predicts everything we can experience of the universe. So it's reasonable to infer our knowing at least correlates to the way things really are well enough for our model to work for us.

If you want to frame the question in terms like this, then nothing really changes: Science is, of course, very successful in predicting outcomes, given that it is its very nature to do so (the scientific method is essentially a forward looking structure). So, let's begin: here I am, there is my cat: How does the latter epistemically get to the former?

Except that model doesn't encompass or predict conscious experience itself. Either as fundamental or something we'd predict to emerge from physical processes. To describe experience as an in or out of body experience tries to locate it in that spatial physicalist model of bodies, without knowing how it fits into the model, or if it really does. If conscious experience is an emergent property of physical brain processes in terms of the physicalist model, then in a sense that's where it's located, even though it 'extends outwards' to encompass your cat. But as discussed, 'your cat' is a unique knowing experience to you from your first person pov, and other humans will have a slightly different knowing experiences of your cat (mine only goes as far as reading about it on the sofa), and physics will give us another description, and that too is derivable from limited and flawed human experiential knowing.

This "extending outward" seems to be important. And it is the physicalist model that is mostly in question here. I would ask the "flawed and limited" be set aside for now, for the claim here is more fundamental: it is about the possibility of an epistemic "outwardness." How, that is, can it even be conceived? At all? This is first an apriori question about knowledge relations and what can make sense. The actual observations in play do not solve the problem, but simply give us the conditions in need of explaining. Consider it to be not unlike explaining anything else in science, except here, there is an unknown, an anomaly that is not constructed out of empirical paradigms, but epistemic ones, and so we have to deal with "S knows P" and the justificatory conditions for this to make sense. Belief and justification fill the void, generally, but affirming P has never been released from justification: talk about P and the conditions for knowing P cannot be separated. This is one way to look at it.

As I say, you can think of experiential knowing not as flawed and limited, rather as the way you and other humans interact with cats and everything else. It's as real as any other interaction, like billiards balls colliding. There may be another physicalist, idealist, or whatever way of describing that reality too, but we don't have first person direct perfect knowledge of what that is.

You are thinking like a person whose modes of inquiry are committed to a single model. My question to you is, how do epistemic questions like this even make sense? It is not as if science has a working concept, for the concepts it does have are grounded in physics, at the basic level. So what does physics say about epistemic relations? Nothing. Idealism? This brings all things into subjectivity, to put it simply. Kant's "out thereness" belongs to the analysis on the transcendental aesthetic, but he leaves the noumenal world at an impossible distance, and entirely out of the reach of thought and perception. Here, we acknowledge that when I see my cat, I am not confined to conditions like this, that I am aware of the cat being out there is a Real "out there".

I don't know what you mean by 'spirit' or what that adds, or on what basis you think this is a religious topic, you'd need to explain that more.

Well, this comes after it becomes painfully clear that epistemology is a sui generis concept. Causality is NOT a knowledge bearing medium, something of epistemic delivery. You see, epistemology is literally impossible here.

[JackDaydream]

JackDaydream wrote
o see perception as separate from the senses may be problematic phenomenologically. Out of body experiences and NDEs can't necessarily be taken at face value because the person is not separated from the body permanently. Some do see NDEs as a possible indication of potential spiritual existence beyond the body. Henri Bergson, in his idea of the creative mind, and Aldous Huxley, in his thinking about psychedelic experimentation saw the brain as a filter of consciousness. However, out of body experiences are different from daily perception. If we have spirits in this life they are connected to bodies on a general basis.

I do take such things seriously, but not yet. I am questioning normal perceptual encounters when we cross the street of pay our taxes. Or observe a cat on the sofa. I am asking, simply, how it is that a perceptual experience like this is capable of reaching across the room and over to the sofa to bring the cat into my awareness such that I can affirm the cat to be in fact on the sofa. This is an assumption that lies beneath all we think and do, really, in the world.

The underlying question of spirits has existed in many traditions, such as the idea of the angelic kingdom and some esoteric thinkers have spoken of ascended Masters. However, it is disputable because it is based on the sense of witnessing 'spirits' rather than being spirits. In many systems of materialism spirits are denied. This may be the other extreme to believing that spirits exist. Many see the word spirit not as being about disembodied consciousness but as 'inner reality' as real. The issue may be whether beings of forms do exist without bodies as we know and live in them in daily life and perception. In the tradition of theosophy, Madame Blavatsky saw evolution very differently. She thought that human beings existed as spirits originally and what happened in the process of evolution people gained dense as opposed to ethereal bodies.

Sure, but I tend to dismiss most of this. Close to all of it, really. For no other reason than it lacks confirmation and justification. If there is a spirit our human existence, then, in good doxastic conscience, I cannot affirm this until I can understand what there is in the world that supports it. I'm not Huxley's experiences with mescaline (reading his Doors of Perception along with Ram Das' Only Dance There Is, and others) did possess anything interesting. They do. I am saying to take it seriously, there has to be an objective basis for belief.

Again, the question here belongs to basic epistemology. Nothing could be more simple.

I think that your question should have probably been posted in the section on metaphysics and epistemology. I was a little disappointed by your reply in its emphasis on the mundane and dismissal of unusual experiences, such as NDEs. That is why I started my own thread on the 'supernatural'. It is not an attempt to dismiss your discussion of spirit but I don't think that your approach goes wide enough to encompass the various states of mind , including the 'spiritual'.

I am not sure what you are aiming to achieve in your quest for 'objectivity, as if the inner life, spoken of in the context of spirituality can be dismissed on epistemological grounds. Correct me if I am wrong, but I am left wondering are you trying to dismiss all inner experience as lacking value if they fail to stand up to the philosophy of realism, as the absolute denominator for judgement of validity of human experiences?

[thrasymachus]

JackDaydream wrote
I think that your question should have probably been posted in the section on metaphysics and epistemology. I was a little disappointed by your reply in its emphasis on the mundane and dismissal of unusual experiences, such as NDEs. That is why I started my own thread on the 'supernatural'. It is not an attempt to dismiss your discussion of spirit but I don't think that your approach goes wide enough to encompass the various states of mind , including the 'spiritual'.

I am not sure what you are aiming to achieve in your quest for 'objectivity, as if the inner life, spoken of in the context of spirituality can be dismissed on epistemological grounds. Correct me if I am wrong, but I am left wondering are you trying to dismiss all inner experience as lacking value if they fail to stand up to the philosophy of realism, as the absolute denominator for judgement of validity of human experiences?

I think you should be disappointed. I don't dismiss nde's. But underlying the possible acceptance of this kind of thing, there is a more or less implicit default understanding we all have that these kinds of things are flat out impossible, and this is due to the model of human existence that is essentially one of epistemic locality: I am in this local space and my cat in another, and the two are radically, physically distinct. I say radically because this is what the scientific model tells us, thereby drawing a sharp line between agencies that know, us, and things that are known. Science, therefore, has no choice but to simply assume there must be some account of our knowing the world that is consistent with this model. Even though it is flat out impossible. After all, what could it possibly be, this magically intimation that extends through space? One would have to literally invent an entirely new kind of relation.

I am not going to first make an intuitive leap to affirming what is reported in nde's. These are not just vivid accounts of unusual experiences. They say impossible things, as in reports of witnessing events out of the body that are filled with auditory and visual description. This is impossible, because we know the physicality of the organs involved in producing the phenomena in question, and without this physicality, no sounds, no sights and so forth. You see how the physical model of the world is what is thrown into question: How can it be, putting it plainly, that someone who is out of the body "watching" events, can SEE?? "Hear" what people say?

The point of my thinking is to show that this physicalist model is itself impossible, and it is not as if one has to reach far into theory to discover this, for it is plainly the truth, evidenced by the complete failure of this model to produce anything even remote to epistemic connectivity.

I have no trouble with realism, which is really a source of my own radicality. What is Real? And I hesitate to say this, but I follow Husserl and several others in this. I say I hesitate because continental philosophy is popular in anglo American thinking. At any rate, I hold that the Real din the intuitive substratum of everyday experience. This, I hold, is foundational for all ontological and epistemic philosophizing.

Affirming S knows P fails in analytic philosophy because mostly there is the assumption of some strain of physicalism, which, I argue, is fundamentally wrong, all of it. P will always be inseparable from justification and belief, only justification, to the point here, is not going to somehow be established through some causal account (see, e.g., the Gettier solutions). The only way to affirm S knows P is to release knowledge conditions from this separation, and this can only be done is my cat and I somehow share an epistemic intimacy, if you will; that is, I know my cat is there on the sofa because I am NOT a locality spanning space to reach OVER. Rather, there is no distance to span, for the transcendental ego is not so confined.

As to putting this in religion, this is the ultimate goal. The argument from epistemology is just the first step. Next is the argument from ethics and aesthetics, or affectivity. To affirm something in religious metaphysics moves first from the epistemic assumptions that are, it is clearly shown, absolutely absurd; then moves to metaethical issues.