The following is a guest post be nkendall:
One of the striking things about our experience as conscious, thinking humans is how constant our sense of self–our identity–is. Never in my life has there been any suspension or change of my conscious sense of who I am other than during sleep. Throughout our lives our brains change considerably. A myriad of new synaptic connections are formed especially in the early years. Yet one’s identity is immutable. Aside from these ongoing modifications of the brain, there are catastrophic changes as well. Those who have experienced surgery under general anesthesia or suffered cardiac arrest have had their brains shut down and consciousness suspended even if only briefly. Near death experiences represent a more profound disruption of consciousness often involving complete cessation of detectable brain activity. Yet we know from countless surgeries conducted under general anesthesia and near death experiences that one’s consciousness, sense of self and mental faculties, i.e. memories, knowledge, beliefs, etc. are usually fully restored even in extreme cases following the event. Why is it that our sense of self is so constant even when the brain is subjected to change and catastrophic effects? What material causal processes in the brain could account for this constancy of self?
Near death experiences are dismissed by materialists as hallucinations resulting from a brain in distress; this despite the fact that many near death type experiences occur when the subject is not near death and even cases where multiple persons witness the events, i.e. “shared death experiences”. Nevertheless, materialists believe that by dismissing near death experiences as hallucinations they are safeguarding their materialist world view. The reality is that when materialists make this claim they are unwittingly embracing an explanation that disproves materialism. If the near death experiences are hallucinations, they cannot be hallucinations of a material brain, they can only be hallucinations of an immaterial mind. The reason is simple: the brain, being an electro-chemical computer in a sense, cannot possibly generate vast quantities of novel, continuous, unique, complex specified information spontaneously especially when it involves unearthly and ineffable visual and abstract mental content which accompany near death experiences. The brain cannot even account for the complex specified information we experience in our nightly dreams. It requires a callous disregard of reason to believe that a brain in distress could spontaneously produce an interactive audio-video experience, with the most real, unearthly and spectacular mental phenomena one has ever experienced. There are no material process that could account for this even in principle. Furthermore, out of body experiences associated with near death experiences, also dismissed as hallucinations by materialists, cannot be hallucinations if what the subject is experiencing is real and can be corroborated as such. And in fact several, and perhaps many, out of body experiences have been corroborated to some extent.
The last refuge of materialism is simply to dismiss near death experiences as a bunch of unverifiable anecdotes. The subjective nature of near death experiences and the timing as to when they actually occur, make it difficult to disprove materialism based on human testimony alone. Therefore, I want to take a different approach in order to disprove materialism with respect to near death experiences. I want to focus on the materialist claim that consciousness, one’s sense of self, along with memories, knowledge and beliefs could be restored by material processes unaided by an immaterial mind following a near death experience. First lets take a brief look at materialist claims about the brain.
Although it is not known or even imaginable how our mental experiences could be reducible to physical phenomena in the brain; nevertheless, that is what materialists believe. According to materialism, consciousness and all mental phenomena we experience are the result of complex molecular interactions in the brain. Since all mental phenomena involve time, there is a dynamic quality to them. If materialism is true then it has to be the case that precise and specific neural sequences of events underlie these mental phenomena. These sequences of events have to be precise and specific because there is an incalculable number of ways in which various thoughts, memories, beliefs and knowledge can be modified in just the slightest and nuanced ways. Imagine a memory, belief, insight, or bit of knowledge that you possess. Then think of the innumerable ways in which it can be slightly modified even in very subtle ways. Each version of these mental phenomena would have–must have if materialism is true–a slightly different underlying neural signature otherwise they would not be distinguishable from thoughts which were slightly different.
What would happen–what should happen–under a materialist accounting of mental phenomena, if the precise and specific causal sequences of events in the brain, from which all mental phenomena are purported to be derived, were disrupted in a catastrophic way? Many such cases have occurred. I want to focus on one well-known case involving a women named Pam Reynolds.
Pam Reynolds had a large aneurysm deep in the base of her brain. In order to remove the aneurysm, the medical team would have to use a procedure referred to as “standstill” whereby all molecular activity in her brain would be halted. To achieve this the doctors would have to chill her body and drain all the blood out of her brain. The surgery was a success. The surgeon removed the aneurysm, the medical staff warmed the blood and re-infused it back into her brain. They then resuscitated her which required a defibrillator. During the operation Pam Reynolds had many of the classic elements of a near death experience, including two out of body experiences, an trip through a dark tunnel with a bright light, a visit with deceased relatives and it appears a brief life review. Pam’s near death experience began while she was under deep general anesthesia and ended just prior to her resuscitation. She is reported to have said that her experience was continuous–uninterrupted–from the time of her first out of body experience in the operating room prior to “standstill” to her second out of body experience, also in the operating room, just prior to her resuscitation. This time period would include the time she was in “standstill.” Much of what she claims to have witnessed in the operating room during her first out of body experience, has been corroborated by the medical staff who were present in the operating room. I suppose skeptics can nitpick about a few things here and there. But in any case, if she was correct that the experience was continuous, then materialism and atheism can be relegated to the ash heap of history once and for all where they belong.
For the primary point I am making in this post, it really does not matter whether or not Pam Reynolds had the subjective experiences associated with near death experiences that she claims. Personally I have little doubt that she experienced what she claimed. What matters here is that her brain was entirely shut down with no molecular activity for about 45 minutes. She was effectively brain dead throughout “standstill.” This is known with certainty based on medical records. Yet when she was resuscitated, her consciousness, sense of self, memories and presumable all, or most all, mental capabilities were restored. That her sense of self and all other complex mental phenomena were restored, is an inference that can be made by watching interviews with her on Youtube and reading accounts of interviews with her. Just to cite one example, shortly after she regained consciousness, she recognized the Eagle’s song “Hotel California” and commented about a particular line in the song in a clever way to the attending physician. In order to do this, she would have to have been conscious, cognizant as to who she was and what had happened to her, recognized the song, understood the meaning of the lyrics and applied the meaning differently in a metaphorical way. All these mental phenomena are extraordinarily complex and would necessarily have extraordinarily complex material process underlying them if materialism is true.
In order to re-establish one’s consciousness, sense of self, beliefs, knowledge and memories and all associated mental capabilities following complete cessation of the brain, some prior set of conditions would have to have been re-established and resynchronized throughout the brain. But by what set of complex material causes could a prior set of conditions been preserved and re-established? And how could such a marvelous function have evolved in the first place? There could have been nothing like an orderly shutdown of her brain given the nature of the general anesthesia and the “standstill” process. There must have been countless molecular reactions interrupted, neuro-transmitters half built, aborted synapse firings, synaptic connections partially constructed as she transitioned through deep general anesthesia to “standstill” without any blood in her brain. The delicate balance of inter-dependencies that must have existed during her prior set of neural sequences of events would have been irreparably lost. There would be no conceivable way to restore the prior conditions to any sort of “known-good” state. Rather, a new set of “initial conditions” would have asserted themselves upon resuscitation and, given materialism’s strict bottom up causation, the sequence of molecular activity would continue to act in accordance with this new set of local causal sequences of events. But it would have been totally random as to which synapses within which neuron’s within which area of her brain would have come up first and begun operating. To gain just a hint of the complexity involved, imagine if you stored a computer’s boot loader, operating system and application programs in volatile memory and then pulled the power plug. What would you expect to happen when you plugged the power cord back in?
To think that the precise, specific set of complex brain processes that materialism alleges give rise to consciousness, one’s sense of self, memories, knowledge and beliefs could re-establish themselves, strictly through material causation following complete cessation of brain function, is an appeal to miracles but without any human testimony or empirical evidence to support them. Calculating the probabilities for the material causation required to bring about the necessary causal sequence of events to restore the same person cannot be done and is utterly pointless. The only reasonable conclusion is that there is some sort of immaterial quality we are endowed with–mind–that orchestrates the resumption of all the necessary brain functions to re-establish the person and all their accompanying mental faculties.
I think it is also very compelling when it is verified that people who were “brain dead” are correct about what was going on while they were out. It has also been verified that items of which they became aware in other locations while they were out were really there. See:
http://www.magiscenter.com/lif.....periences/
There is an enormous amount of evidence that consciousness survives death and is not derivable from local/bodily causation. Pam Reynolds is probably the best documented case, but far, far from the only case, and NDE’s are just one kind of such evidence.
Materialism busted again…. I swear materialists are like piñata ‘ they just can’t help getting beaten over and over and over again.
Problem is, we’ve known for 60+ years (since Donald Hebb) that learning and memory are mediated by synaptic plasticity, whereby the strength of synaptic connections between neurons change in response to coordinated neural activity, given the correct timing. Roughly, “neurons that fire together wire together” (although the required timing is more nuanced than suggested by this phrase). This is ultimately a physical change.
Those connection strengths, and hence the learning (and memory) they mediate, endure even in brains at “stand-still.”
Hence it is no surprise that learning, memory, a sense of self etc. persist through such a stand-still. Indeed, it is the physical persistence of those connections that account for pre- to post-standstill continuity – which works against the argument that nonmaterial factors are at work.
RB @ 4. I confess that I don’t know much about this area. But I do know about materialist claims to knowledge.
So when you say “we know . . .” do you mean we actually know? Or, as is so often the case with materialists, do you mean, “we assume because it is the only assumption consonant with our metaphysics”?
If the former, how exactly do we know such a thing?
This took a bit of research but it is worth reading a bit of background. Pam Reynolds brain was taken to a state called “Burst Suppression” a distinctive EEG pattern. This is not the same as “no molecular activity”.
Pam Reynolds is not the only case. What does brain dead mean to a materialist? Dead but not really? It is a very good thing to be sceptical, but that is not what you lot are.
Hi Bill,
I am aware of this (comment #4). But it cannot possibly be the entire story and cannot account for the resumption of mental phenomena. I will respond in detail in a few hours once I clear my current work load. Thanks for the comment.
Mark Frank (Comment #6) Ditto. Well be back at you.
Thanks
The rest ion of mental states is not Bill’s only worry. He needs to explain the replacement of all atoms over a period of time and why we don’t lose self. After all the atoms have been replaced we are still who we have been mentally but not physically.
So, I tried to post this earlier, and it apparently didn’t go through – my apologies if this ends up a double post. Quoting myself:
Update: Re Andre – the brain obviously has self-repairing RAID drives holding the memory and in-process state backup. As cells die and are replaced, a self-repairing process repopulates the correct data to the cells from the live backup (again – a materialist response).
Update 2: If any materialists feel I am mis-representing their position, feel free to chime in.
I’m not exactly sure what near death experiences actually reveal or prove? That there is life after death? That humans have a soul that survives after death? Or that humans can hallucinate as their body functions–especially brain functions–subside? There are drugs out there that have similar if not the same effect.
Brains are effectively behaving like FLASH memory in computers. In order to program or erase FLASH, power is used. If it is not explicitly erased, ( with a cost in energy ), the FLASH preserves its bit configuration. That’s why turning off a computer for days does not change the software code and data in the FLASH.
When the computer is turned on again, the FLASH will be intact and will reboot the OS which is then loaded and run from RAM memory which does get mangled when the power is removed and thus needs to be re-initialized.
The brain seems to mimic the workings of FLASH memory and not RAM and therefore it should retain its configuration.
At death, there would be no power to run the physical and logical processes required to break connections between neurons and so I think it would be possible to be clinically dead for a period shorter than the time required for cell death and come back with an intact self.
Frank at 6 cites Woerlee to try question the credibility of Reynold’s NDE account.
An atheist named Woerlee tried to attack the credibility of Dr. Beauregard’s timeline of events for Pam Reynold’s NDE. Here is a technical defence of Dr. Beauregard’s timeline from that attack:
For those who cannot afford the $16, here is a brief outline of the main points of the debate between Woerlee and Carter in the IANDs magazine:
http://michaelprescott.typepad.....-this.html
Judge for yourself whether Woerlee was overly dogmatic
Here is a short defence of Pam’s NDE
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-553744
Moreover, Woerlee, the atheist who attacked the credibility of Pam Reynold’s NDE, is shown to be grasping for straws in trying to ‘explain away’ NDEs:
I see this post as very valid. I say only this — I take a pill that gives me a very active dream life. My experience as a dreamer is that I never loose my sense of self even in my dreams.
KN: Or that humans can hallucinate …. There are drugs out there that have similar if not the same effect.
Since the use of psychotropic substances for the study of mental health and mental illness is a serious study topic of yours truly since 1977 with my first reading of Grof and others, trust me, the quoted assertions are quite naive. If the contributor knew anything about the topic, he would know that the terms “hallucination” and “same effect” are slippery terms that lose explanatory utility when the clinical use of psychedelics is explored. When misuse of the psychedelics is undertaken, in other words in inappropriate settings, the aesthetic prelude to the normal psychic unfolding process is corrupted. And so the subject can interpret that which makes sense in the proper setting as that which has no utility and no sense in improper settings. Sometimes it can be misinterpreted as insanity and the subject can even remain with this interpretation and be imprisoned by it for the long term.
The above contributor’s words indicate naivete in the sense of psychedelics having a psychological effect, when in truth these substances are content neutral. And so they do not bring content to the awareness, and as such are not content specific, having no psychic content. And the fact of their utility in obliterating mental illness should further cement my argument, as the subjects who experience the so induced mental progress do not identify their experiences as “hallucinations”. This even as what they report in many cases is parallel to the NDE reports. This is all made plain by extensive study of the literature on these substances, which most materialists do not undertake for obvious reasons unless they are in a position to jettison their worldview which can be difficult, even painful. But it is what they have created, such is the power of the mind to create even delusions.
Here’s how Grof puts it and it should be apparent why the NDE’s and similar experiences of non-ordinary states are normal, beneficial aspect of existence and perceived as threats to materialists and their worldview:
“The individual comes to realize, through these [perinatal] experiences, that no matter what he does in his life, he cannot escape the inevitable; he will have to leave this world bereft of everything that he has accumulated and achieved and to which he has been emotionally attached. The similarity between birth and death-the startling realization that the beginning of life is the same as its end-is the major philosophical issue that accompanies the perinatal experiences. The other important consequence of the shocking emotional and physical encounter with the phenomenon of death is the opening up of areas of spiritual and religious experiences that appear to be an intrinsic part of the human personality and are independent of the individual’s cultural and religious background and programming. In my experience, everyone who has reached these levels develops convincing insights into the utmost relevance of the spiritual and religious dimensions in the universal scheme of things. Even hard-core materialists, positively oriented scientists, skeptics and cynics, and uncompromising Marxist philosophers suddenly became interested in a spiritual search after they confronted these levels in themselves. “
Barry:
It’s the former, knowledge derived from decades of empirical neuroscience stimulated by Donald Hebb’s 1949 book, extending through the discovery of long term potentiation in the 1960s, the development of techniques such as single unit recording, and so on.
Hi Bill,
Regarding your comment #4
I may not fully understand your point so correct me if I have misunderstood.
I think it is possible that there is some confusion between cause and effect, between structure and function and between necessary causation and sufficient causation.
Regarding cause and effect – The thought must arise first, correct? New thoughts arise all the time without the aid of a prior structural change in the brain facilitating it. If this were not the case then no new thoughts would ever arise except by chance–maybe that is what you believe? New insights occur on the fly, then they are stored and then perhaps the physiological connections are made or existing connections strengthened through neuro-plasticity to reinforce or to allow for a more expeditious recall. If physical changes in the brain were required for learning, then how could you explain that we can learn so quickly? I coach girls softball. I explain something to them and they get it right away. No time for any new connections to be built in the brain. Sometimes I use analogies. Analogies make associations to other knowledge and memories which have associations with other knowledge and memories. Therefore, almost immediately there are a vast number of new “virtual” hyperlinks to other memories created when we learn. How could it be the case that structural changes–physical hyperlinks in the brain–are required for all these new mental “virtual” hyperlinks between knowledge and memories?
Regarding structure and function – Thought is dynamic. Thoughts have a temporal quality; they take time to unfold. So thinking must involve events not just structure. I understand that the structures are left intact even following standstill but it is the events, these precise patterns of neurons firing–a process–that needs to be explained. The software not the hardware. Neuron firings are caused by a complex cascade of events–a chain of antecedent causation. Disruption of that chain of causation should produce a different result if materialism is true. Yet we know that all one’s mental capabilities including consciousness itself, sense of self, ability to think, one’s knowledge, behavior, memories, beliefs are restored following massive, catastrophic disruption to a vast set of causative chains of events in the brain. There is no magic reset button to re-establish the initial conditions across 100 billion neurons and there synapses.
Regarding necessary and sufficient causation – The fact that we witness events in the brain when we acquire knowledge does not mean that these events cause the acquisition of knowledge or are required for the acquisition of knowledge.
Sorry for the hasty response, I am out of time…I hope I did not misunderstand you. Before I go though, although I won’t ask you to explain how all this marvelous abstract thought could have evolved throughout the brief tenure of hominids, I will ask you how thought and especially abstract thought and memories are represented in brain and how they are registered in one’s consciousness.
Carp:“At death, there would be no power to run the physical and logical processes required to break connections between neurons and so I think it would be possible to be clinically dead for a period shorter than the time required for cell death and come back with an intact self.”
This is excellent what you have written but there is one problem, I think.
What if, and I think some individuals very keen on OOL may suspect it, there is energy undetectable to us that sustains and provides life? Why can’t supposedly intelligent scientists recreate life or even sustain it? Why?
Hello Mr. Frank, (comment #6) nice to meet you.
The purpose of my post was not to rehash the Pam Reynolds case. I was primarily asking how person-hood, and all that goes with it, could have persisted though a complete shut down of the brain and then a resuscitation. Mr. Bornagain77 has adequately responded to much of this, so I will make my response at least somewhat brief.
I have read the critique by Woerlee of course. Pam was in fact taken to standstill where all the blood was drained out of her head unless all other accounts that I have read are part of a vast urban myth. They had to do this because of the size and location of the aneurysm. So all molecular activity was halted. The point Mr. Woerlee is trying hard to make through tortured logic is that, perhaps she could have had the entire near death experience before she was put into standstill. The near death experience did start when she was under general anesthesia, prior to standstill. That is known (assuming you believe her story) because she described what was going on as she watched from above and her statements correlated with the medical records. I think Woerlee, like others who dismiss out of body experiences and near death experiences as hallucinations, are confusing out of body illusions with what are (this is the question) real time out of body experiences that many hundreds of near death experiencers have testified to. The mind (not the brain) can produce some marvelously creative motion video; dreams for example. I think it is impossible that a physical brain could produce these (see my previous post). But these come from the mind’s imagination; people do not dream about something that is really happening at that moment in time. And if they did, it would be another demonstration that materialism was false. I do not see how, without positing an immaterial mind, one’s eyes could be disembodied then render, in the distant physical brain, a real time view of what was really going on.
Furthermore, as I mentioned in the post, Ms. Reynolds indicated that her experience was continuous from the first out of body experience during anesthesia to her second out of body experience just prior to being resuscitated. This would of course include the time she was in standstill. There is a time anchor during her second out of body experience as well as the first out of body experience (where her statements and descriptions were corroborated). The second time anchor was that she is reported to have said she saw her body jump just before she was instructed to jump back into it. The most likely and consistent explanation for this is that her body jumped as a result of the defibrillation attempts during resuscitation. So one would have to explain how on earth it is possible to have very similar types out of body experiences involving the same people both prior to standstill and after standstill, (unless the claim is that the non-out of body experience portion of the near death experience occurred after standstill, but then the explanation gets further muddied).
I am not sure what your view on this is but I suppose if you really want to be a materialist you could believe that the body jumping could have been something else and not the defibrillation. In this case maybe the near death experience ended prior to standstill. Even that is not that clear cut though. The accounts of this in the various books are not clear. I suppose that she could have been lucky and guessed what the saw used to cut her skull looked like and the way the operating room looked. I suppose with 100dB clicks in her tapped shut ears she could somehow have heard a women speak. I suppose that the out of body experiences that so many others have experienced could be hallucinations where the imagination just happens to correspond with reality. I suppose she and many hundreds if not thousands of persons who have related similar accounts during a close encounter with death (and even not when close to death such as shared death experiences) are all just making this stuff up. But boy, that is a very fragile set of denials to hang one’s ideological hat on, especially if one fancies themselves as a skeptic. In that case, I would simply tip my hat and say God Bless and best regards.
Hello drc466,
Regarding your Comments in #10, Yes it is “technically possible to design and build a computer that has the characteristics you cite in your article” with a few important caveats. Computers do in fact store data and preserve it through non-volatile memory as I stated. That decision and all others related to the creation of computers was accomplished by humans. Humans are intelligent, they can design things from the top down in a thoughtful way. But the brain is suppose to have evolved by chance processes according to materialism so it would have not way of designing any complex feature that would seem to require foresight. That the brain stores things in non-volatile memory is an inference you are making because you know that things like resumption of memories and thought occurs following near death experiences, cardiac arrest, etc. So in a sense I think at least some of what you are saying is begging the question. I do not agree that the brain alone can do these things; that was the point of my post.
Secondly, computers do not think in the sense that we do. Only by greatly diminishing the meaning of the term “think” could you claim that computers think. They store data, crunch through algorithms and for the most part produce a deterministic output which could always have been predicted by the programmer in theory. Computers store words and can search through text to match things but they do not understand the words they store. People understand things and store knowledge through thought and memory. But humans do much more than just store symbolic things like words. The demonstration of this is that the same words whether in poem, prayer or prose, mean different things to different people but are treated identically by a computer. If symbolic things like words were all that was necessary to comprehend then learning would be reduced to rote. Computers store pictures and video as well but they have no clue about the content. Notice that a human is always required to interpret the meaning of the symbolic content that computers store.
The fact that a computer (programmed by humans) can beat humans in chess is unimpressive. I am surprised it took a team of programmers and chess champions as consultants, as long as it did to beat the best humanity has to offer.
I know there is a lot of buzz about a “singularity” from people who should know better, e.g. Bill Gates, Steven Hawking. This just reveals one of two things: 1) how strong the grip of materialism has become through the brain washing one is subjected to in the university environment or 2) that there is a fine line between genius and idiocy. Noam Chomsky calls the singularity “science fiction.” I agree with him, and that might be the only thing I agree with Noam Chomsky on.
The other aspect to all this is that you have to account for the origin of all this marvelous abstract thought that we humans are endowed with. Invoking evolutionary explanations that go back to the Cambrian are not valid–and would not help anyway. You have very few hominids to amortize the necessary magical mystery mutations that are presumed by materialists to give rise to higher abstract thought. We may be talking about a couple billion individuals over 5 million years leading to the advent of Cro-Magnon man. That is the blink of an eye given the capabilities of human thought.
Just to wrap up, your questions: “what part of your (my) description of an NDE event (and I can add, any human thought for that matter) above do you feel could NOT be duplicated by a machine?” My response is: thinking, loving, wishing, caring, sacrificing, worrying, hoping, longing, despairing, entreaty, consoling, sympathizing, contentedness, certainty, anger, jealously, envy, selfishness, hatred, analysis, imagining, creating, composing, writing poetry and novels, sculpting, painting, drawing, lusting after and…well it would be easy to cite the things that both humans and computers have in common: both humans and computers can add numbers; computers can do it much faster but they know not what they do.
Some years ago, I was a guest at a wedding in western Canada. I live some thousands of kilometres east of the venue.
A guest seated beside me asked what I did for a living. I said I wrote popular science; a recent book of which I was co-author argued for the existence of the soul. Somehow, we got talking about near-death experiences. He, a middle-aged man, commented that he had had one.
He said he had had a heart attack, and suddenly became aware of himself looking *down* at the paramedics trying to revive him. He heard them say, “He’s going, he’s going …” but they persisted anyway. He ended up – he says – back in his body, and at that time, waiting with me for our turn at the beef n’ beans. Apparently, the paramedics HAD said that. They had thought they would lose him.
Well, I don’t know. I hear stories. Do they sound similar because people are copying each other or because, as great physicists have said, consciousness is immaterial? In which case, we might expect such things.
News @ 22
People who have NDEs sometimes report verifiable information when there is no electrical activity in their brain and some of these verifiable reports are of things they could not perceive with their normal senses even if they were conscious. How can you copy that from someone else?
Materialist explanation of NDE’s do not explain the anomalies of the phenomenon.
To fully understand the phenomenon you have to read the full accounts of what people experience:
http://www.near-death.com/notable.html
It is much harder to explain away the phenomenon if you understand exactly what people are experiencing. This is why so many of the doctors who study NDEs, after initial skepticism, become convinced NDEs are evidence of the afterlife because of what they hear when interviewing patients.
nkendall, in regards to ‘Constancy of Self’, it might interest to know that that there are at least six “conditions of mind”, including ‘Persistence of Self-Identity’, that are irreconcilable with materialism:
Detective J. Warner Wallace, author of the best-selling book ‘Cold Case Christianity’, uses these six properties of mind, in conjunction with the law of identity, to prove that the mind is not the same thing as the brain:
Alvin Plantinga, using the ‘modal argument’, and by imagining that his body could possibly be a ‘beetle body’, has a humorous way of getting this ‘Law of Identity’ point across:
Moreover, besides airtight philosophical arguments for the reality of mind, due to advances in science, we now also have excellent empirical evidence for the reality of mind and soul.
The following video shows, completely contrary to ‘bottom up’ materialistic thought, that the mind is able to have pronounced effects on the structure of the brain (i.e. brain plasticity).
Moreover, besides effecting the structure of the brain, i.e. to effect brain plasticity, the mind is also, through a technique the researchers term ‘mindfulness’, now shown to have the ability to reach all the way down to the molecular level of our temporal/material bodies and effect the expression of our genes:
Needless to say, this is NOT what materialism would expect or predict whereas in Theism it is expected for mind to have such deep causal power.
Also of related interest to empirical evidence for the soul/mind, it is now found that transcendent, and ‘conserved’, (cannot be created or destroyed), ‘non-local’, (beyond space-time matter-energy), quantum entanglement/information, which is not reducible to matter-energy space-time, is now found in our material bodies on a massive scale (in every DNA and protein molecule).
Moreover, the quantum entanglement is found to be in the brain. Yet, in contrast to the material/temporal body, the quantum entanglement in the brain is found to be much more ‘spread out’ that it is in the material body:
The following paper appeals to a ‘non-local’, (i.e. beyond space and time), cause to try to explain the synchronization in neural circuits,,,
Materialists would hold that this ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement/information would simply disappear from our material body upon the death of our temporal/material bodies. But, contrary to what atheists would prefer to believe beforehand, it is found that quantum entanglement/information is, in fact, ‘conservered’:
But where does this ‘conserved’ quantum information that cannot be destroyed, and that is in our material bodies, go upon the death of our material bodies? Well Theists hold that your soul either goes to the higher, eternal, dimension of heaven or to hell.
Some people may think we have no evidence for higher dimensions above this one. They would be wrong in that presupposition. Although higher dimensions are invisible to our 3-dimensional sight,,,
Although higher dimensions are invisible to a 3-dimensional sight, we have far more evidence for a higher dimension(s) above this one than we have for the infinite universes that are conjectured by materialists to try to get around the theistic implications of the fine-tuning for this universe.
In physics we find two very different higher dimensional ‘eternities’ just as Theism has held for millennia. An orderly eternity associated with Special Relativity and a destructive eternity associated with General Relativity.
In the following, I will focus on the eternity associated with Special Relativity.
One higher dimensional eternity in physics is found ‘if’ a hypothetical observer were to accelerate to the speed of light. In this scenario, time, as we understand it, would come to a complete stop for the hypothetical observer. To grasp the whole ‘time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light’ concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
Some may think that time, as we understand it, coming to a complete stop at the speed of light is pure science fiction, but, as incredible as it sounds, Einstein’s famous thought experiment has many lines of evidence now supporting it.
This following confirmation of time dilation is my favorite since they have actually caught time dilation on film:
(of note: light travels approximately 1 foot in a nanosecond (billionth of a second) whilst the camera used in the experiment takes a trillion pictures a second):
This higher dimension, ‘eternal’, inference for the time framework of light is also warranted, by logic, because light is not ‘frozen within time’, i.e. light appears to move to us in our temporal framework of time, yet it is shown that time, as we understand it, does not pass for light. The only way this is possible is if light is indeed of a higher dimensional value of time than our temporal time is otherwise it would simply be ‘frozen in time’. Another line of evidence that supports the inference that ‘tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday’, at the ‘eternal’ speed of light, is visualizing what would happen if a hypothetical observer were to approach the speed of light. Please note, at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.).
And we have testimonies from Near Death Experiences testifying to these ‘higher dimensional attributes’ that are witnessed in Special Relativity. Specifically, we have testimony for both the ‘eternal’ attribute and the ‘tunnel’ attribute of Special Relativity.
Here is testimony from Near Death Experiencers experiencing the ‘eternal’ attribute of special relativity:
And here is testimony from Near Death Experiencers experiencing the ‘tunnel’ attribute of special relativity:
Vicky Noratuk’s, who is physically blind, ‘tunnel’ testimony is interesting to look at because her testimony also includes testimony of her being ‘a body of energy, or of light’:
Many other NDEers also testify to being a ‘body of light’. But do we have scientific evidence that humans can be ”a body of energy, or of light’? The answer to that question is, surprisingly, yes! Yes, we do now have scientific evidence that humans can be ‘beings of light’:
You can see an actual picture of humans emitting the weak ‘biophotonic’ light here:
Moreover, this light coming from the human body is found to a emitted by a quantum process, it is not emitted by a classical process:
Thus Vicky Noratuk’s testimony that she was ”a body of energy, or of light’ during her NDE finds strong support from our present scientific evidence for biophotonics in our material bodies.
Of related interest: Regardless of how much energy we pour into a particle of matter, we can never ‘push’ the particle of matter to the higher dimension of the speed of light:
Verse and Music:
Thank you so much Mr. Bornagain77 for the information. You are a source of great insight and resources. I am familiar with much of what you have provided but not all. I will take a look when I have a chance.
I am YEC but disagree that there are near death experiences. the bible is clear that abscent from the body means present with the lord for Christians.
It is not the brain that shuts down. There is no brain. Thats just a interpretation of complex things in the skull.
it is the memory that is the important thing.
The memory is the brain I say.
these people simply use their memory, awake or not, and create these floating over the body things.
Pete townscend, THE who, had it during a drug experience. Not deadish at all.
its no big deal.
The memory would not be affected by any operation. its powerful and doesn’t shut down by mans efforts.
By the way in order to see ones body laying there requires all the memories of what things look like and spave and distance.
Yes I believe the soul takes its memories with it to the afterlife BUT there is no evidence the soul has memorized the material world as we know it.
Tes we have souls but NOPE its not floating about. god doesn’t let it. in fact it must separate from the memory machine called the brain.
its just the glory of the human ,memory. sorry folks.
NKendall:
No – I don’t think this is correct.
Again, I don’t think this is correct.
I disagree with this statement as well. Quite the reverse: rapid successions of complex, reentrant brain states, very likely involving the simultaneous operation of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, accompany and in part determine the creation of thoughts in a verbal modality. The temporal lobes mediate conceptual representations that become increasingly abstract as we move anteriorly. Activation of parietal and visual cortex accompany imagined body states and visual experiences. Limbic activation mediates fundamental emotional states (fear, attachment) and underwrites motivation and interest. And so forth.
Learning and memory are hierarchical and multifaceted. Some elements (sustaining the contents of working memory, acquiring and updating an immediate spatial map) are sustained by rapid functional activities, such as reentrant neural activity within the hippocampus and 40 hz synchronization/desynchronization within the cortex. Because they require active maintenance these functions are vulnerable to disruption. Hence the retro- and anterograde amnesia that can accompany traumatic brain injury. Others elements of memory, such as long term biographical memory – including the foundational representation of self and identity to which you refer – are thoroughly baked into the structure and networks of the cerebral cortex and persist despite interruptions brain function. Even at that level, profound structural disruptions, such as severing the corpus callosum, result in equally profound disruptions of the experience of a unitary self – the disconnections of the hemispheres can result in the creation of separate selves (KeithS at TSZ has discussed this at length.)
As if that weren’t enough, positing a further immaterial author of those activities has zero explanatory power.
as to this claim:
“the disconnections of the hemispheres can result in the creation of separate selves (KeithS at TSZ has discussed this at length.)”
actually that claim is false. There are not ‘two selves’ in split brain patients. Here is a personal testimony
a more detailed refutation of the atheistic claim of ‘two selves’ in split brain patients is in the following video
of related interest is the first video from InspiringPhilosophy in which ‘dual aspect’ Idealism, instead of substance dualism, is established as true:
also of related interest:
If the mind of a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before, but that is not the case. The ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
In further comment from the neuro-surgeons in the John Hopkins study:
If you wanna see a complete annihilation of an atheist/materialist you need to listen to the skeptiko interview with atheist oxford educated ucsd professor of the philosophy of neuroscience patricia churchland .
She got destroyed so bad that instead of answering the assertions aboit Nde’s she ended up making a fool out of herself and hanging up on the interviewer not once but 3 times. This interview shows how blatantly ignorant and dishonest these people are at the academic level.
Nde’s are a major thorn in the atheist/materialists side
http://youtu.be/7a6ZaivvCnE
Sorry to be pedantic, but I don’t believe all molecular activity can cease unless the brain is cooled to absolute zero.
What is meant, I think, is that electrical activity ceases.
Now back to the very interesting discussion! 🙂
Two selves produced by a split brain would not conflict with belief in a soul. The brain does not produce consciousness it filters consciousness.
http://sites.google.com/site/c.....cies_brain
Broken sunglasses might produce double vision, or if you put your finger across the opening of a hose when watering your garden, you can get two streams of water coming out of it.
This is entirely compatible with many personal spiritual experiences that suggest we are all part of the same oneness.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/201.....imate.html
Moving awareness to the base of the comb is not like losing individuality, it is like remembering who you really are.
There it is Bill denying that there is such a thing as the law of causality, foundational to science but not for Bill’s religion.
Jim Smith:
Nkendall’s argument is premised on a putatively unchanging sense of self, identity, memory, and so forth in the face of drastic physical events, such as “standstill.”
You acknowledge that split brains may produce “two selves.” If that’s not a change in the sense self, identity, memory etc., (a “profound disruption of the experience of a unitary self”) then I don’t know what is.
Andre:
In what way do my posts above “deny that there is such a thing as the law of causality?”
Bill @30, Only by operating from a materialist assumption could your response be at all viable. I have heard all that stuff. Just because we observe activity in the brain during thought does not mean it causes thought. I have a busy day to day so I will have to get back to you later with a more detailed response. In the mean please explain in some level of detail how thought is represented in the brain and how it is registered in one’s consciousness. Also what are the structures that you claim give rise to self-hood and are “backed in”. Be well.
Of related interest to undermining Bill’s materialistic assumption:
God, Immanuel Kant, Richard Dawkins, and the Quantum. – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQOwMX4bCqk
Hi Bill (Comment #30),
Here is what your points related to thought distill down to:
“Rapid successions of complex, reentrant brain states…accompany and determine the creation of thoughts.”
I am not sure how to interpret the statement. You could mean “rapid succession” of new structures or you could mean rapid succession of neural events over these new structures. Then you say both “accompany and determine the creation of new thoughts.” Accompany and determine are very different; one is a cause and one is an effect. I am going to guess you mean the creation of new neural structures are required to facilitate the creation of new thoughts which are produced by new neural sequences of events over these new structures. I am sure there are neural structures and events that accompany new thoughts. The brain clearly does something. So I will focus on the point that you seem to be making that new structures and new neural sequences of events (my words) “determine the creation of thoughts.” I hope I am understanding you correctly.
So at time0 there are no structure in place at locationsX,Y,Z…; then some unidentified cause occurs such that at time1 there are a new structures put in place at locationX,Y,Z…. Shortly after, a specific series of neural events occur through these new structures that gives rise to a new abstract thoughts–something that you may never have thought of before. This process cries out for foresight. What possible set of material causes could produce new rewirings of the brain which just happen to facilitate and accommodate an extraordinarily complex, specific cascade of events which just happen to produce a coherent series of thoughts which just happen to get hyperlinked to other related knowledge and memories (presumably through new neural structures and processes) and just happens to be consistent with what one is interested in and just happens to occur in such a way that they can interface to one’s consciousness such that they are recognizable? Do you have any idea how complex that process must be at a molecular level? There would have to be hundreds of billions and probably trillions of molecular reactions that would have to occur in just the right way, at just the right place, at just the right time. Yet you claim all this arises virtually instantaneously. I wish road construction in Chicago could be as efficient.
This appears to be coming from something Giulio Tononi wrote. It is just a proposal, a theory. It isn’t science, it’s magic. Science is about explaining causation. You are simply describing changes that have been observed and inferring that they are the cause of thought as oppose to the effects of thought or some administrative process in the brain.
I am not going to address learning which is more complex than creative thinking because it (learning) is interactive and requires recall from memory, processing input as well as creative thinking.
So I will move on to your comments related to constancy of self:
“Self and identity are thoroughly baked into the structure and networks of the cerebral cortex and persist despite interruptions brain function.”
You appear to be suggesting that one’s conscious sense of self results purely from neural structures that are “baked in” to the brain. I think you really would acknowledge that there are complex and specific sets of neural sequences of events that have to occur over these neural structures, right? I mean, to use a computer analogy, obviously, an intact circuit board is not enough to account for the function of a computer. There is firmware, admin software and application software, which is highly specific, that is required to do something useful. Similarly, there must be a complex set of neural processes, analogous to software, that underlies all these mental phenomena including consciousness and one’s sense of self. The fact that there must be an interface between one’s consciousness and all thoughts, memories, beliefs and knowledge is indicative of a process, not simply a structure. I hope you would agree that these neural events would have to be very complex and very specific. If not we can just end the conversation at this point. Assuming that you agree with this, then in order to re-establish the identical set of mental qualities following an abrupt, complete disruption and cessation of all neural (and actually molecular activity) the same complex set of precise, specific neural sequences of events would have to reassert themselves, right? How? All the underlying molecular components and activity that are necessary to produce the specific causal chain of events producing consciousness and one’s sense of self (and all other mental phenomena for that matter and all inter-associations between all phenomena) would be in an unknown and unfamiliar state–complete chaos–resulting from both the complete shut down and turn up of the brain. Saying that the process is “baked in” by the structure is again an appeal to magic.
As an aside, I am sure that there is not enough information in the DNA to specify the neural structures that you claim are “baked in” and persist to produce one’s consciousness and sense of self. So again you have to explain not only how the neural circuits that give rise to consciousness can somehow magically appear from random connections in the brain, you also have to explain how it evolved and you also have to explain what material causation can even account for consciousness, thought, memory, etc.
The explanatory power of an immaterial mind to produce complex specified information is effectively infinite. In another post I asked if we started receiving signals from the far reaches of outer space that used an unfamiliar modulation scheme and encoding scheme, yet when demodulated and decoded produced the Bible, I am sure that your response would not be something like: “Well, we know it is some natural phenomenon because the explanatory power of an immaterial (intelligent) mind is zero.” Yet the complexity you are claiming occurs strictly through material causes in the brain far exceeds the complexity of the signals I used in this example of space communication.
This is going to have to be it for me for a day or two. I am swamped and way behind on things. Be well.
How many of you have heard or read about near-death-experiences where the person having the experience saw God, Jesus and Holy Spirit in Heaven?
I’ve read quite a few:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/201.....e-who.html
KevNick:
It should be noted: All foreign, non-Judeo-Christian culture, NDE studies that I have looked at have an extreme rarity of encounters with ‘The Being Of Light’ and tend to be very unpleasant NDE’s save for the few pleasant children’s NDEs of those cultures that I’ve seen (It seems there is indeed an ‘age of accountability’).
The following study was shocking for what was found in some non-Judeo-Christian NDE’s:
Also of note: if scientists want to find the source for the supernatural light which made the “3D hologram – photographic negative” image on the Shroud of Turin, I suggest they look to the thousands of documented Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) in Judeo-Christian cultures. It is in their testimonies that you will find mention of an indescribably bright ‘Light’ or ‘Being of Light’ who is always described as being of a much brighter intensity of light than the people had ever seen before.
All people who have been in the presence of ‘The Being of Light’, while having a deep NDE, have no doubt whatsoever that the ‘The Being of Light’ they were in the presence of is none other than ‘The Lord God Almighty’ of heaven and earth.
KevNick @11
Read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception : Heaven and Hell. Fascinating.
How do people experiencing the “visions” know that what they are seeing in their near-death-experience are the actually “persons” like God, Jesus the Holy Ghost and even Mary? How?
KevNick, as Rene, ‘I think therefore I am’, Descartes would ask, ‘and how do you know that what you are seeing, touching, hearing, right now is really real and is not an illusion?’
Especially now that quantum physicists are in the habit of referring to material reality as an illusion?
As Descartes, Chalmers, and modern philosophical zombies make clear, it all comes down to a subjective first person account as to whether the experience is ‘real’ or not.
And when measured against that standard of subjective first person accounts, Judeo-Christian NDEs are found to be ‘even more real than real’:
Hi KevNick @ 44,
I have struggled with that question as well. If the mind can produce phenomena such as dreams with persons you have never seen before, then perhaps NDEs are sort of like spectacular dreams. I do tend to believe that they are probably more than just spectacular dreams because of the consistent nature of the message–unconditional love and the importance of knowledge and the unimportance of material success. I do think there are cases where genuine NDE experiences are mixed up and confused with dreams and also cases where people embellish the content or simply make things up. I suppose, unless and until I have one I will always have some level of doubt as to what they are. But I do view NDEs as disproving materialism for the reasons I mentioned.
However…”shared death experiences” are an entirely different thing and they corroborate NDEs to a significant degree. Here, multiple healthy persons in the same room claim to have witnessed the same unearthly phenomena when someone close to them passes away. These are detailed in a recent book by Ray Moody, who himself–with others–had such an experience. If these really do occur, then as Ray Moody says near the end of his book, “If these are not proof of life after life, [then] what are they.”
Nkendall:
Revisit my post. I have described a continuum of neurobiological phenomena, from rapid neural firing (e.g. rapid glutamate-mediated neural transmission underlying sensory experience, variations in reentrant neural firing that characterizes the hippocampus as it sustains patterns of activity that underlie the transfer of short term recall in to longer term storage, and so forth) to changes in the structures themselves, such as assemblies of neurons that wire together due to repeated joint activity – sometimes over a lifetime of development, use and learning. At still other levels are elaborate brain structures and interactions that arose over the course of evolution and are essentially invariant across individuals, in some instances across species (e.g. limbic organization that is more or less invariant across all mammals, including ourselves).
As an example: There are facts about the organization of the brain structures responsible for the generation and comprehension of speech that have intriguing implications for “thought” in a verbal modality. Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are massively connected through the arcuate bundle – hence areas of the human brain required for the generation of speech are closely connected to those responsible for the comprehension of speech, and the reverse. Further connections extend into frontal and prefrontal cortex where the volatile contents of working memory are sustained. These connections are largely absent in other primates and are a likely basis for the human capacity for silent “thought” in a verbal modality. The generation of sentences (including thoughts) therefore reflects the existence evolutionarily derived structures (Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, the arcuate bundle etc.), reflects enduring changes encoded in these structures through the establishment and modification of synaptic connections within these areas (and others) as one’s specific language is acquired in childhood (the structure of which, per Chomsky, is probably innately primed to verbally instantiate a grammatical subject – “I” in English), and reflects rapid neural firing over these structures as specific verbal thoughts are entertained. If you wish to maintain that thought nevertheless can occur absent these structures given the decades of research and clinical experience (e.g. with various aphasias in stroke patients) that have established these facts, the burden of proof (and credibility) is, I’m afraid, on you.
So the distinction you draw between structure and functional changes over that structure is an important one. It also points to crux of of the problem with your argument.
You describe a sense of self that is invariant regardless of transient experiences, sleep states, anesthesia, decades of life and even brain “standstill” and reboot. I don’t dispute that – I think that is mostly accurate. Where I think you depart from the evidence is in identifying this sense of invariant self primarily with the countless rapid functional changes and states that occur over those structures (with the software rather than the hardware, as you describe it), states you find unlikely to be quickly re-established after an event as drastic as “standstill.”
I’ve think you’ve got it backward, and in that reverse miss the obvious explanation for the persistence of a sense of self to which you refer. Specifically, in a manner similar to the cortical structures and functions that underlie speech, one’s sense of enduring “self” reflects a continuum, or perhaps an historical hierarchy, of neural facts, from the deeply and historically structural to the rapidly functional, with the lion’s share lying at the structural end of the continuum. That’s why the experience is phenomenologically invariant! It remains invariant as other experiences rapidly come and go because it is embodied in myriad elements of brain and bodily organization that persist through shut-down, and across the years. Some of those persistent elements reflect individual elements that have been “baked in” during individual development through processes such as LTP and the establishment of new connections. Some are “recently” evolved human adaptations (those underlying speech, theory of mind, etc.) that organize experiences unique to human beings. Still other structures are almost unimaginably ancient, organizing a base stratum of experience that is common to all mammals, and perhaps all vertebrate animals, a stratum that is more ancient than the neurological peculiarities that originated with the evolution of hominins. In the human much of this is expressed at the midbrain level, in, for example, the relationship of the thalami and the cerebral cortex, modulated by the reticular formation, and so on. Hence the integration of sense information and the coordination of motor plans and volitional behavior in the human being are organized, in part, through a biology of awareness and behavior that is very ancient. These ancient platforms of experience and behavior comprise in each of us the deep and persistent sense of experiencing and acting self to which you refer.
nkendall this may interest you
As should be needless to say, this ‘top down’ finding is completely contrary to what the ‘central dogma’ of neo-Darwinism would predict.
Thank you ALL for your comments. I’m sorry I’m not commenting much but rather ask a lot of questions. I’m just trying to establish some fundamental premises first.
Here is what I have been able to establish so far:
1. So for, I have not found even 1 description of the Holy Ghost/Spirit by anybody who had NDE and saw God and Jesus in the Heaven.
Have you? If yes, please provide one and a link if possible.
2. Most, if not ALL of the descriptions of God and Jesus fit the typical representations of the well known paintings and religious literature.
God-usually man with white and long hair and beard, dressed in white long robes.
2.Jesus-similar to God just a younger version with shorter beard and brown hair.
3. Holy Ghost/Spirit-no description found so far and whether It is a He or She.
4. Some NDE reported seeing Virgin Mary in Heaven with the typical “La Madonna” description, which pretty much tells me that this NDE bears no relation to reality.
KevNick, it is clear that you did not go through the links I provided for you yesterday and are just rehashing your original complaint.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-562122
I suggest watching the Mary Neal MD video
Reciprocating Bill
Bill,
I don’t understand how you get from concrete material molecules, which are normally associated with the brain, to abstract immaterial thoughts, which are understood to be the product an immaterial mind. How do you account for the existence of abstractness in the first place? As we know, non material minds are consistent with non material abstraction. However, you seem to be saying that abstraction doesn’t exist.
Are you, in fact, trying to argue that the laws of logic and math or the concepts of truth and justice are mere manifestations of matter in motion? If so, how can they remain unchanged? Why doesn’t the Pythagorean Theorem or the Law of Non-Contradiction evolve with their material components? For that matter, how much do the virtues of courage and compassion weigh? Are they extended in space? If so, where are they located?
KevNick: The following two videos go over the commonalities of Near Death Experiences
Near Death Experience Documentary – commonalities of the experience – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTuMYaEB35U
Life After Life – Raymond Moody – Near Death Experience – The Tunnel, The Light, The Life Review – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z56u4wMxNlg
As well it should be noted: Contrary to popular belief that holds that NDEs are basically the same worldwide, All foreign, non-Judeo-Christian culture, NDE studies that I have looked at have an extreme rarity of encounters with ‘The Being Of Light’ and tend to be very unpleasant NDE’s save for the few pleasant children’s NDEs of those cultures that I’ve seen (It seems there is indeed an ‘age of accountability’).
Near-Death Experiences Among Survivors of the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake (Chinese)
Excerpt: Our subjects reported NDE phemenological items not mentioned, or rarely mentioned in NDE’s reported from other countries: sensations of the world being exterminated or ceasing to exist, a sense of weightlessness, a feeling of being pulled or squeezed, ambivalence about death, a feeling of being a different person, or a different kind of person and unusual scents. The predominant phemenological features in our series were feeling estranged from the body as if it belonged to someone else, unusually vivid thoughts, loss of emotions, unusual bodily sensations, life seeming like a dream, a feeling of dying,,, These are not the same phemenological features most commonly found by researchers in other countries. Greyson (1983) reported the most common phemenological feature of American NDE’s to be a feeling of peace, joy, time stopping, experiencing an unearthly realm of existence, a feeling of cosmic unity, and a out of body experience.
http://www.newdualism.org/nde-.....-39-48.pdf
The Japanese find death a depressing experience – From an item by Peter Hadfield in the New Scientist (Nov. 30th 1991)
Excerpt: A study in Japan shows that even in death the Japanese have an original way of looking at things. Instead of seeing ‘tunnels of light’ or having ‘out of body’ experiences, near-dead patients in Japanese hospitals tend to see rather less romantic images, according to researchers at Kyorin University. According to a report in the Mainichi newspaper, a group of doctors from Kyorin has spent the past year documenting the near-death experiences of 17 patients. They had all been resuscitated from comas caused by heart attacks, strokes, asthma or drug poisoning. All had shown minimal signs of life during the coma. Yoshia Hata, who led the team, said that eight of the 17 recalled ‘dreams’, many featuring rivers or ponds. Five of those patients had dreams which involved fear, pain and suffering. One 50-year-old asthmatic man said he had seen himself wade into a reservoir and do a handstand in the shallows. ‘Then I walked out of the water and took some deep breaths. In the dream, I was repeating this over and over.’ Another patient, a 73-year-old woman with cardiac arrest, saw a cloud filled with dead people. ‘It was a dark, gloomy day. I was chanting sutras. I believed they could be saved if they chanted sutras, so that is what I was telling them to do.’ Most of the group said they had never heard of Near-Death Experiences before.
http://www.pureinsight.org/node/4
The following study was shocking for what was found in some non-Judeo-Christian NDE’s:
Near-Death Experiences in Thailand – Todd Murphy:
Excerpt:The Light seems to be absent in Thai NDEs. So is the profound positive affect found in so many Western NDEs. The most common affect in our collection is negative. Unlike the negative affect in so many Western NDEs (cf. Greyson & Bush, 1992), that found in Thai NDEs (in all but case #11) has two recognizable causes. The first is fear of ‘going’. The second is horror and fear of hell. It is worth noting that although half of our collection include seeing hell (cases 2,6,7,9,10) and being forced to witness horrific tortures, not one includes the NDEer having been subjected to these torments themselves.
http://www.shaktitechnology.com/thaindes.htm
We would suggest that the near-constant comparisons with the most frequently reported types of NDEs tends to blind researchers to the features of NDEs which are absent in these NDEs. Tunnels are rare, if not absent. The panoramic Life Review appears to be absent. Instead, our collection shows people reviewing just a few karmically-significant incidents. Perhaps they symbolize behavioral tendencies, the results of which are then experienced as determinative of their rebirths. These incidents are read out to them from a book. There is no Being of Light in these Thai NDEs, although The Buddha does appear in a symbolic form, in case #6. Yama is present during this truncated Life Review, as is the Being of Light during Western life reviews, but Yama is anything but a being of light. In popular Thai depictions, he is shown as a wrathful being, and is most often remembered in Thai culture for his power to condemn one to hell. Some of the functions of Angels and guides are also filled by Yamatoots. They guide, lead tours of hell, and are even seen to grant requests made by the experient.
per shaktiti
Near Death Experience Thailand Asia – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8M5J3zWG5g
Near-Death Experiences of Hindus Pasricha and Stevenson’s research
Except: “Two persons caught me and took me with them. I felt tired after walking some distance; they started to drag me. My feet became useless. There was a man sitting up. He looked dreadful and was all black. He was not wearing any clothes. He said in a rage [to the attendants who had brought Vasudev] “I had asked you to bring Vasudev the gardener.,,, In reply to questions about details, Vasudev said that the “black man” had a club and used foul language. Vasudev identified him as Yamraj, the Hindu god of the dead.
http://www.near-death.com/hindu.html
Of related interest:
Muslim near death experience – Sees Jesus (Isa) and becomes Christian Pt 1 – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TC-TLFYNCQ
Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F70Ray8Mdn4
ba77 @ 52 Do you have an opinion on what the cultural differences mean? Do the cultural differences indicate that NDE’s are not experiences of disembodied consciousness and the afterlife? Or do they mean that different cultures have different experiences in the afterlife and if so, why would that be?
Thanks
Jim Smith, I hold NDE’s to be real.
And although single NDEs cannot be relied on too much to establish any particular ‘religious’ position, I do find the fact that the predominant form of NDEs in Judeo-Christian cultures are extremely pleasant, i.e. heavenly, and the fact that the predominant form of NDEs in non-Judeo-Christian cultures are extremely unpleasant, i.e. hellish, to be strong confirmation that the basic overarching precepts of Christianity are true.
John 8:23-24
And He was saying to them, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world. “Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”
Hi Bill (at Comment # 47)
There is no reason to believe that consciousness, sense of self, thought, belief, meanings, memories and values, etc. could possibly be reducible to material phenomena. They are as dissimilar to one another as poetry is dissimilar to dust. And the fact that higher level abstract thought is a quite recent phenomenon in evolutionary terms, makes any materialist explanation, doubly difficult. There are just too few individuals involved for chance mutations to account for the vast difference in mental capabilities between humans and hominids.
Much of what you have described I am at least somewhat familiar with. What you are doing is making assertions and simply offering a description of the brain and noting some correlations between various activities in the brain and structures over which these activities occur on the one hand and mental phenomena on the other. No dualist would ever deny that the brain does something. Clearly it does a lot. If you perturb the brain there will usually be an effect on the mental phenomena (but interestingly, not always). However, correlation is not the same as causation. A poorly tuned piano will result in bad experience despite the best music and pianist. That is why I said that I thought you were confusing necessary and sufficient causation and cause and effect.
If my daughter were to ask me how to write a novel, the answer would not be limited to a description of a word processor, paper and ink. She would want to know about the plot, character development, description of settings, etc.
In my post, I was making an imaginary concession—it was a hypothetical–of sorts by saying in effect, “Suppose it were the case that consciousness, sense of self, thought, belief, meaning and values were reducible to material phenomena” what could we then say about how the brain might be able to recover from a catastrophic interruption.
When I ask how the conscious sense of self arises, you offer the following:
…“one’s sense of enduring ‘self’ reflects a continuum, or perhaps an historical hierarchy, of neural facts, from the deeply and historically structural to the rapidly functional, with the lion’s share lying at the structural end of the continuum.”
To me this statement of yours, once I remove all the words that get in the way, distills down to something like:
One’s sense of self results primarily from structural components in the brain but also involves rapid functional activities (I assume neural firings).
Of course it is not only consciousness and sense of self that is restored following near death experiences. Memories, ability to think, one’s beliefs, values, etc. are also restored. These other mental phenomena all interact with one another and interact with consciousness. It therefore must be a complex process. If the underlying cause of these things were strictly based on the structure of the brain, then what on earth is the purpose to all the neuron firings? And why is it that anyone ever loses consciousness during cardiac arrest or anesthesia? The structures remain intact. Unless the neuron firings are superfluous then they are doing something and that something is likely necessary for any mental phenomena and in all likelihood very specific and complex.
If materialism is true and there is a material explanation for these things, then it has to involve a complexity comparable to what it claims to explain. Structure in and of itself is not complex because it is fixed and therefore not a good candidate to explain the dynamic versatility of mental phenomena which is attested to by the sum total of all human knowledge, all human artifacts and artistic renderings, all musings from the sacred to the profane and the sublime to the ridiculous.
This will probably be my last comment on this thread. I think we are probably talking past each other and will just have to agree to disagree. If you respond I will read what you write and consider it and possibly reply.
Before I leave though let me ask you a hypothetical. Suppose a good friend or relative whose honesty and integrity you really respected was in a car accident and told you, “Bill, it was unbelievable, I was up above the scene of the accident floating around watching them try to revive me. I could move around focus my attention where ever I wanted. It was the most lucid I have ever been. Then suddenly I was back in my body in the hospital. I later confirmed that what I saw really appears to be what was actually going on!”
There are many who claim to have had these experiences and they aren’t flakes. Would you say that this would disprove materialism?
Regardless of your response on this, I will close by saying that you strike me as a decent, intelligent man and I thank you for participating in this thread. God Bless you sir. I wish the best for you and your loved ones. And I would hope that in your mind in this respect, you would be reciprocating Bill.
Nkendall:
Thanks for your kind remarks. Consider them reciprocated. I do see that we are talking past one another. For example, you ask:
Yet my last post alludes to the following, and the roles they play in sensory experience, memory, thinking and speech, and a sense of self:
Not to mention in earlier posts:
Which of course also refer to neural firing.
I don’t intend this as a “gotcha,” but it is beyond me how you take from what I have written a view that phenomenal consciousness and a sense of self are based “strictly on the structure of the brain” without reference to neural firing and other transient functional states.
You should consider the possibility that you are leaving this discussion without really understanding what I am arguing, and how it bears upon your remarks on recovery from “standstill.”
Reciprocating Bill: I have really enjoyed your posts on this thread, and absolutely agree. To add just a little more detail still: I am currently doing a lot of work investigating the electrophysiological correlates of mental states, including those involved in cognitive processing, using magnetoencephalography, which essentially measures oscillatory neural processes EEG does, but gives us better spatial resolution (because the inverse problem is more tractable), and there has also been a lot of recent work published on data collected from patients with deep electrode arrays, and what is increasingly clear is that, firstly (and we know this from fMRI as well), that the brain exhibits a relatively small number of large-scale “networks” in which specific sets of brain regions tend to work together, forming a large-scale “brain state” that can readily flip from one state to another, depending on whether attention is being focussed on the external or the “internal” (remembered, imagined) world; and secondly, that gamma oscillations are strongly associated with events that can readily recalled, i.e. mental experiences that the subject reports being aware of.
So there really isn’t a problem with the idea that the same brain can be conscious and unconscious at different time – sure, the brain’s physical structure is always changing (Hebb’s rule, as you point out) but that just underscores the fact that, while a person is alive (and their brain functioning) the brain is undergoing constant dynamic change, both in terms of ionic current flow and actual change to the proteins and other molecules that it is made of. And, as such, it can enter a state in which its owner is unconscious (e.g. asleep) and recover readily from that state as consciousness resumes.
Even while awake, we are constantly “flipping” from brain state to brain-state as need requires.
And we can even simulate these processes, to some extent, in robots, resulting in robots that “sleep” and “wake” and “learn” and “become aware of objects” and “avoid obstructions” and “find ways of achieving goals in a dynamic environment filled with obstructions” and “solve problems”.
So we can account for most cognitive functions, including awareness and problem-solving, and sleep, in entirely physical terms.
The remaining problem is, I suggest, entirely philosophical: is it coherent to imagine a physical zombie who behaved exactly as we do – problem solving, expressing opinions, learning, sleeping, making mistakes, navigating a dynamic and unpredictable environment” but not be “conscious”?
For me the answer is no, but not because I know stuff about the brain (well, maybe a little) but because the behaviour of a conscious entity exemplifies their consciousness of things, and if they can’t do those things, then they won’t be able to behave as though they are conscious. Sure, you could have a conscious person who was so immobilised that you might mistake them for an unconscious person (which is why research into the brain correlates of consciousness is of such great practical importance) but I suggest that a “person” who is able to function as a conscious person does, but not be conscious is an oxymoron.
Bill,
Elizabeth (welcome back),
My questions @51 persist:
How do you reconcile the existence of unchanging principles with your argument that they can be reduced to changing matter?
Inasmuch as you rule out all manner of spirit and non-material existence, how do you get from changeable to unchangeable–from concrete to abstract?
If abstractness or unchanging principles can be reduced to matter, why doesn’t the Pythagorean Theorem or the Law of Non-Contradiction evolve with changing matter? Indeed, how can anything remain unchanged?
If abstract virtues are really products of changing matter, do they have quantifiable physical characteristics such as weight and location? If not, why not?
Bill @comment #56,
Let me net this all out. Neuroscience is going through a phase where each new technology gives greater insight into what goes on in the brain. I could pretty much have guessed most of what you are saying—or at least it is not surprising. I know the brain is complex and I know we are finding this out through various technologies. The field is enamored with these new data. But none of it has anything to do with explaining causation. It was like the early days of the modern synthesis, there was this excitement about how random mutations could produce all these marvelous features of life. I think now there is a coming to terms and a slow realization that random mutations and natural selection simply cannot explain the complexities of life. This same realization will someday occur in neuroscience. Soon there will be a realization that the field is only describing what is going on during conscious thought and not what is causing it.
You talk about structures and you talk about neuron firings. It is not always easy to determine what physical phenomena you are ascribing to what mental phenomena. The bottom line is that you have not proposed any theory as to how these physical phenomena can possibly account for–cause–the mental phenomena. You have simply described what structures and functions in the brain appear to be associated with them. I know that. It is no surprise that there would be correlations. Obviously, thought, analysis, memory storage and recall, beliefs, as well as consciousness and sense of self are very complex and must have complex underlying material causal phenomena if materialism is true. And if materialism is not true, the brain will reveal complex physiological signatures about what is going on.
Given the dynamic, interrelated and complex nature of all mental phenomena, it must be the case that many, many, complex cascade of events underlie these mental phenomena if materialism is true. You appear to be saying that both complex structures and complex functions (neuron firings) are associated with them. Complexity always means specificity. Specificity means that in order to re-establish the precise mental phenomena one experiences prior to an abrupt, total, catastrophic shut down of the brain that these same specific sequences of events have to be re-established when the brain was “rebooted”. Yet the underlying molecular components would be in complete disarray following shut down and would follow a new set of local complex causal chains of events. There is no conceivable way, save a hopeless appeal to chance, that a prior known-good state could have been re-established such that a person would experience a resumption of consciousness, one’s sense of self, thought, knowledge, memory storage/recall, one’s belief’s, meanings, values, etc. Best regards.
Bill,
You did not respond to my hypothetical:
Suppose a good friend or relative whose honesty and integrity you really respected was in a car accident and told you, “Bill, it was unbelievable, I was up above the scene of the accident floating around watching them try to revive me. I could move around focus my attention where ever I wanted. It was the most lucid I have ever been. Then suddenly I was back in my body in the hospital. I later confirmed that what I saw really appears to be what was actually going on!”
Would you say that this would disprove materialism?
I would like to emphasize the fact that quantum mechanics has now shown that the atheistic belief that consciousness is ’emergent’ from a material basis is false.
As to consciousness in quantum mechanics. That consciousness is integral to quantum mechanics is fairly obvious to the unbiased observer (no pun intended). I first, much like everybody else, was immediately shocked to learn that the observer could have any effect whatsoever in the double slit experiment:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video:
To back Zeilinger’s preceding statement up, recently the ‘superposition’ of a particle, which is something that Einstein himself fought against, was experimentally verified to be true:
Feynman said this in regards to the double slit experiment with electrons,
The double slit has now been accomplished for objects much larger than electrons:
Feynman also stated this in regards to quantum mechanics,,,
Dean Radin, who spent years at Princeton testing different aspects of consciousness, recently performed experiments testing the possible role of consciousness in the double slit. His results were, not so surprisingly, very supportive of consciousness’s central role in the experiment:
Of course, atheists/materialists were/are in complete denial as to the obvious implications of mind in the double slit (invoking infinite parallel universes and such as that to try to get around the obvious implications of ‘Mind’). But personally, not being imprisoned in the materialist’s box, my curiosity was aroused and I’ve been sort of poking around, finding out a little more here and there about quantum mechanics, and how the observer is central to it. One of the first interesting experiments in quantum mechanics I found after the double slit, that highlighted the centrality of the observer to the experiment, was Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries. Here is Wigner commenting on the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
Wigner went on to make these rather dramatic comments in regards to his work:
Moreover, Wigner was certainly no lightweight in quantum mechanics, but his deep insights continue to foster ‘a second revolution’ in quantum mechanics:
Then after I had learned about Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, I stumbled across Wheeler’s Delayed choice experiments in which this finding shocked me as to the central importance of the observer’s free will choice in quantum experiments:
Then, a little bit later, I learned that the delayed choice experiment had been extended:
And then I learned the delayed choice experiment was refined yet again:
i.e. The preceding experiment clearly shows, and removes any doubt whatsoever, that the ‘material’ detector recording information in the double slit is secondary to the experiment and that a conscious observer being able to consciously know the ‘which path’ information of a photon with local certainty, is of primary importance in the experiment. You can see a more complete explanation of the startling results of the experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video:
And then, after the delayed choice experiments, I learned about something called Leggett’s Inequality. Leggett’s Inequality was, as far as I can tell, a mathematical proof developed by Nobelist Anthony Leggett to prove ‘realism’. Realism is the belief that an objective reality exists independently of a conscious observer looking at it. And, as is usual with challenging the predictions of Quantum Mechanics, his proof was violated by a stunning 80 orders of magnitude, thus once again, in over the top fashion, highlighting the central importance of the conscious observer to Quantum Experiments:
Prof. Richard Conn Henry stated this after the Leggett results came in
As with the delayed choice experiment, the violation of Leggett’s inequalities have been extended. This following experiment violated Leggett’s inequality to a stunning 120 standard deviations:
The preceding experiment, and the mathematics behind it, are discussed beginning at the 24:15 minute mark of the following video:
The following video and paper get the general, and dramatic, point across of what ‘giving up realism’ actually means:
But, as if all that was not enough to demonstrate consciousness’s centrality in quantum mechanics, I then learned about something called the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’,,
The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno effect as to establishing consciousness’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, by a wide margin, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang:
For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power for actions within the space-time of the universe:
In fact, entropy is also the primary reason why our physical, temporal, bodies grow old and die,,,
And yet, to repeat,,,
This is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^120 entropy is?
Putting all the lines of evidence together the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
Related notes on ‘interaction free’ measurement:
The following video also clearly demonstrates that “decoherence” does not solve the measurement problem:
Verse and Music:
Moreover, ‘spooky’ non-local, beyond space and time, quantum information/entanglement, though at first thought to be impossible to maintain in ‘hot and noisy’ cells, is now found in molecular biology on a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule:
In fact, non-local, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement is also strongly implicated in how the brain correlates activities between different parts of the brain:
That ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement, which conclusively demonstrates that ‘information’ in its pure ‘quantum form’ is completely transcendent of any time and space constraints (Bell, Aspect, Leggett, Zeilinger, etc..), should be found in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule, is a direct empirical falsification of Darwinian claims, for how can the ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement ‘effect’ in biology possibly be explained by a material (matter/energy) cause when the quantum entanglement effect falsified material particles as its own causation in the first place? Appealing to the probability of various ‘random’ configurations of material particles, as Darwinism does, simply will not help since a timeless/spaceless cause must be supplied which is beyond the capacity of the material particles themselves to supply!
In other words, to give a coherent explanation for an effect that is shown to be completely independent of any time and space constraints one is forced to appeal to a cause that is itself not limited to time and space! i.e. Put more simply, you cannot explain a effect by a cause that has been falsified by the very same effect you are seeking to explain! Improbability arguments of various ‘special’ configurations of material particles, which have been a staple of the arguments against neo-Darwinism, simply do not apply since the cause is not within the material particles in the first place!
And although Naturalists have proposed various, far fetched, naturalistic scenarios to try to get around the Theistic implications of quantum non-locality, none of the ‘far fetched’ naturalistic solutions, in themselves, are compatible with the reductive materialism that undergirds neo-Darwinian thought.
Thus, as far as empirical science itself is concerned, Neo-Darwinism is falsified in its claim that information and consciousness are ‘emergent’ from a reductive materialist basis.
Dear Mr. Bornagain77, Thanks again for the insights and references. Although I had not brought that up, yes it certainly appears that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality and not a derivative. This is another embarrassing scientific finding that has been swept under the rug by materialists desperately wishing to hold on to their place of prime importance in the world of ideas. Were this to become widely known throughout the universities, it would mean that the philosophers and theologians would have an equal or better claim to the truth.
Stephenb:
Thanks 🙂
First of all, I don’t “rule it out”. I just don’t think it’s necessary to account for our [common] observations.
It could still be true.
I don’t really understand your question. I don’t think that abstract principles ARE matter (physical things), so I’m sniffing a map-territory confusion here. And I’m not really sure what you mean by “reduce to”. I don’t think that abstract ideas (Pythagoras’ Theorem; justice; General Relativity) “reduce to” matter. I think they are the output of material beings, but there’s nothing that “reduces” in my conception.
So I’m not sure what it is you think I think.
So let me turn to your earlier post, referred to in the one I just quoted:
I’m certainly not saying that “abstraction doesn’t exist”. I think “abstraction” is something that people do, by virtue of their material bodies (and with particular use of the part of the body called the central nervous system). So “running” is an abstraction, in a sense (there’s no such material object as “a running”), and a specific race has real existence, even though it was run last Monday and never will be again. They are “material”, but nor are they particularly mysterious. I accept that “pythagoras theorem” is a bit more abstract than “the Boston marathon”, but I think the comparison is nonetheless fair. As I think I’ve said before, I think consciousness is best understood as something that people (or animals) do (“be conscious of X”) than something they are “conscious or not conscious”)
And so address your question directly, the approach I take to getting “from concrete material molecules, which are normally associated with the brain, to abstract immaterial thoughts” is to say that the output from the complex system we call, say Stephenb includes the articulation of concepts that he then, using English language and the internet, causes to be, at least partially, processed by the complex system we call Lizzie, and output by her, back to Stephen, hopefully in not too mangled a form.
More importantly, though, I’d say that what you, Stephenb (or the material system I know as “Stephenb”) are doing when you evoke in your mind, say, Pythogoras theorem, is that you are modelling the world (by means of neural circuits) on a map on which you yourself are represented, and because you yourself (the system-known-as-Stephenb) are represented on the map that you yourself (the system-known-as-Stephenb) are modelling, we have what Hofstadter calls a “Strange Loop” – a reentrant process by which we not only model the world, but model our own reactions to it, and the model the model of our own reactions to it, and the model of the model of the model of our own reactions to it, and it is that “Strange” (in the Lorenzian sense) loop that gives rise to both an experience and an experiencer, a loop that starts in utero at some point, and continues until death. One experience of which is the experience of conceptualising the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle in terms of the sum of squares on the hypotenuse being equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. And as you can share this concept with me, and with others, and as we have essentially the same mental equipment, we can all appreciate its unchanging coherence.
I hope my attempt above has at least answered some of these questions.
Cheers
Lizzie
Elizabeth
But that is precisely what I am asking. How do you get an immaterial modeling map from a territory made of nothing but matter? How can changing matter produce or be the source of unchanging non-matter (The concept of triangle or the Pythagorean Theorem)? How can the cause give something to the effect that it does not have to give?
I just noticed my last comment isn’t here. Don’t know what happened.
Anyway:
BA77: you are right that I didn’t watch ALL recommended by you videos. The reason is simple. All the ND experiences you provided are of people who think and believe more or less the same as you or you wouldn’t link them.
These people, like you, are influenced by two things I can think about:
Popular culture and literal interpretation of the bible text regarding US being created or made in “the image of God”. This can’t be…….for many, many reasons and that is why I don’t watch the videos you recommend because of this very serious flaw. I’m still a Christian at heart but not that kind.
@KevNick #69
“Popular culture and literal interpretation of the bible text regarding US being created or made in “the image of God”. This can’t be…….for many, many reasons and that is why I don’t watch the videos you recommend because of this very serious flaw. I’m still a Christian at heart but not that kind.”
Really? Why is that KevNick? What is your definition of being “created in the image of God.”
Also, you should watch Mickey Robinson’s Near Death Experience testimony. He was an atheist at the time of his NDE. Also, you should watch the documentary called “The Enemy God.” It is about a Shaman living in the Amazon who ends up converting to Christianity… The similarities between the experiences of shamanism and NDE’s, better yet, out of body experiences, OBE’s for short, is utterly fascinating.
KevNick, contrary to what you believe, actually we are made in the ‘image of God’. And, unlike you in which you made a claim and provided no evidence, I will list evidence for that fact.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-562165
nkendall, in regards to ‘Constancy of Self’, the following is closely related:
Einstein was once asked (by a philosopher):
Einstein’s answer was categorical, he said:
Quote was taken from the last few minutes of this following video or can be read in full context in the article following the video:
Quantum Physicist Antoine Suarez puts the situation like this:
The statement, ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement’, was an interesting statement for Einstein to make since ‘the now of the mind’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics (see posts 61-65), undermined the space-time of Einstein’s General Relativity as to being the absolute frame of reference for reality.
Quote:
i.e. ‘the now of the mind’, contrary to what Einstein thought possible for experimental physics, and according to advances in quantum mechanics, takes precedence over past events in time. Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to phrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher in this way:
Of related note, Einstein took the importance of mind (and free will), as to coherently explaining reality, far too lightly, since he himself would not have been able to deduce relativity unless he possessed faculties of mind that are not reducible to a material basis:
Hey Bornagain77…
Out of curiosity, have you seen the documentary “The Enemy God?” I think you’d like it if you haven’t. I’d post a link but I could not find the full version of the documentary on YouTube, just the trailers. Here’s a post to the official website though.
http://www.theenemygod.com
Thanks KRock
Elizabeth,
I agree with StephenB @ Comment #68,
Elizabeth you have not answered the question as how a set of material causes can give rise to a mental concept. Let’s take your 152 word sentence as follows:
“More importantly, though, I’d say that what you, Stephenb (or the material system I know as “Stephenb”) are doing when you evoke in your mind, say, Pythogoras theorem, is that you are modelling the world (by means of neural circuits) on a map on which you yourself are represented, and because you yourself (the system-known-as-Stephenb) are represented on the map that you yourself (the system-known-as-Stephenb) are modelling, we have what Hofstadter calls a “Strange Loop” – a reentrant process by which we not only model the world, but model our own reactions to it, and the model the model of our own reactions to it, and the model of the model of the model of our own reactions to it, and it is that “Strange” (in the Lorenzian sense) loop that gives rise to both an experience and an experiencer, a loop that starts in utero at some point, and continues until death.”
I have no idea what you are saying. I suppose if I read it over and over again, I might. If you are purporting to explain how material causation can produce a human conceptual thought and consciousness, I remain unconvinced. Let me get you started see if you can fill in the details.
Since language is sort of the currency of the brain or “coin of the realm” so to speak, it seems probable that there are a host of brain functions related to language encoding, storage, recall, analysis and transmission. Since language is specific and learned in one’s life time all these functions would have to have a function that converts a specific language to an internal language.
But language is only symbolic. In and of itself it has no meaning. So it is not enough just to manipulate language as symbols. Language always requires a human to interpret it into some sort of conceptual phenomena that we as conscious humans recognize in our mental experience. However, since the material and conceptual are two very different things, you will need some sort of a transduction function. But this is a very special kind of transducer. This transducer has to convert material, neural activity into something that has no obvious material qualities at all, i.e. human thought. It has to convert a concept (let’s take your 152 word sentence) into a complex, specific sequence of neural events and back. Note that no matter how many symbols (words) you use and to what level of detail you use to describe something there will always remain a subjective quality about what it means. If that were not the case then learning would be reduced to rote. For example, if I wanted to understand precisely what you are saying, all that would be necessary is to commit the words to memory. Clearly that is not the case. Understanding is an abstraction of the symbolic words.
So Elizabeth, get to the point and tell us how material events can cause consciousness, one’s sense of self, memories, thoughts, knowledge, beliefs, meanings, values, etc. Give us a theory about how it might be possible. Best regards.
BA77 and KRock,
If we were created as the literal image of God, as some of you here claim, why couldn’t Moses see God’s face and stay alive?
Exodus 33:19-23
“And He said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” 20But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live! Then the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; 22and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. 23″Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen.”
I guess God had to protect Moses from some kind of radiation similar to the one that Sun emits. I mean it would be very hard for me to imagine that God, the Creator of stars like the Sun, literary resembles the image of human like Moses whom had to shield with his literal hand from seeing his own image.
KevNick, I’ll leave scriptural debates to Theologians, and pointless arguments as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin to philosophers, but as to the actual scientific evidence, I can back up my claim that we are made in the ‘image of God’ and you cannot back up your claim that we are not:
Although the fossil record, genetic evidence, and anatomical evidence, contrary to what Darwinists have misled people to believe, certainly does not indicate that “We are just a species of ape”, the most notable evidence that we are are not just another species of ape, but instead are made in the ‘Image Of God’, is our unique ability to understand, communicate, and create, information:
More interesting still, the three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic, i.e. the unique ability to process information inherent to man, are the very first things to be taught to children when they enter elementary school. And yet it is this information processing, i.e. reading, writing, and arithmetic, that is found to be foundational to life itself:
As well, as if that was not ‘spooky’ enough, information, not material, is now found to be foundational to physical reality:
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information.
I guess a more convincing evidence could be that God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
But who has ever heard of such an overwhelming evidence as that?
Verses and Music:
Also of note as to providing a viable ‘mechanism’ for the apparent ‘burst of light’ emanating from the body of Christ:
BA77,
“I’ll leave scriptural debates to Theologians, and pointless arguments as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin to philosophers, but as to the actual scientific evidence”
That’s is fine and yet you still quoted some scriptures that you think seem to support you theological idea that we were created in the literal image of God. Make up your mind.
“I can back up my claim that we are made in the ‘image of God’ and you cannot back up your claim that we are not”
I don’t think you did. You keep referring to NDEs of people saw God resembling a human. You believe that too so you keep linking it over and over again.
I,on the other hand quoted scriptures that from scientific point of view indicate that God can’t resemble a human and that is why Moses could not see God’s face and yet live.
You said it yourself: “the most notable evidence that we are are not just another species of ape, but instead are made in the ‘Image Of God’, is our unique ability to understand, communicate, and create, information.
In bold I personally think is what being created in the image of God means..
KevNick, IMHO, your last response is just about completely incoherent.
I stand by the evidence (and scriptures) I presented, and ignore the evidence you have presented since you have in fact presented no scientific evidence to support your position that we are not made in the image of God but have only presented your personal opinions as if I should care what your personal opinions are above what the empirical evidence actually says.
Let me make it crystal clear, I don’t care what your personal opinion is in this matter but only what the empirical evidence supports!
KevNick
We are made in God’s image insofar as we have been endowed with the faculties of intelligence and free will. In any face to face encounter, however, God’s infinite brilliance would overwhelm our finite capacities.
BA77,
What empirical evidence did you present for man to be created in the image of God? Your quantum mechanics “assumptions”? Non-locality? At best it can indicate that science is not as simple as some people think and yes, sometimes it doesn’t make sense.
I know why you withdrew from debating theology, because we would eventually have to get to the point where the history of religion shows that the teaching of the immortal soul was introduced to Christianity from pagan beliefs of Egypt and Babylon and is not taught by the bible. You just want to fit both your religious and “scientific” beliefs into your own faith claiming that you have proof both scientific and scriptural. You have neither but you just do not want to look behind the veneer of faith you have yourself created.
Further discussion to me is pointless.
KevNick, it is interesting that you blow off solid empirical evidence that we are made in God’s image with a wave of your hand,,,
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-562719
And then rely on, as far as I can tell since you did not reference your claim, highly questionable Theological teachings to claim that,,,
“the immortal soul was introduced to Christianity from pagan beliefs of Egypt and Babylon and is not taught by the bible”
I believe you may be referring to this:
If that is the myth that you were referring to, then I agree wholeheartedly that further discussion with you is pointless.
I have nothing else say to you. I’m sorry.
I don’t want state my own opinion about your mostly irrelevant, overwhelming and pointless floods of information and why they are being tolerated here.
I believe in creation but I can’t tolerate imbeciles who call themselves creationists. I’m not surprised Darwinists are laughing their asses off.
KevNick
“I have nothing else say to you. I’m sorry.”
It would be more convincing if you would not have said “I have nothing else say to you. I’m sorry.” Kinda defeats the purpose.
I’m glad you don’t “want state my own opinion”. That is my whole gripe with you. You have done nothing in this thread but state and restate your opinion as if it is a established fact, without a single reference, and hand wave off facts presented against you, facts that are referenced, with your personal opinion as if that was enough to settle the issue. Excuse me for not being impressed with your own personal opinion of your own personal opinion.
With people like you defending ‘creation’, Darwinists certainly will not run out of laughing material at anytime soon. Your defense of ‘creation’ is a joke!
KevNicK
That’s just silly. The “soul” has always been understood to be the internal principle by which we think, will, and feel. The soul was not “introduced” to Christianity any more than the body was introduced to Christianity. Where do you get this nonsense?
….
Be sure to pass that information along to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—
**”And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?”**
Again, I have to ask: Where do you get this stuff?
StephenvB plus BA77,
What if you are wrong?
Have you ever considered it?
Have you ever considered it?
Certainly!
Nichole Nordeman – What If? – Passion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltu_30dHmWA
1 Thessalonians 5:21
but test everything; hold fast what is good.
Semi-OT: I’m reading “Finding Peter: A True Story of the Hand of Providence and Evidence of Life after Death” by William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist.
http://www.amazon.com/Finding-.....162157332X
Fascinating insights into evidence for the existence of the soul and the afterlife, in a non-scholarly, autobiographical book. It probably won’t convince any hard-core skeptics, but it could do something for fence-sitters.
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Session 3) – Norman Geisler, PhD – video
The Unmatched Reliability of the New Testament
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8GN1k-ocLw&list=PL-0zpu2toenaPM19kDyBsPibjaGAxup9K&index=3