Needing clarification on a materialist concept

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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...experience

This is saying that OBEs are all from the brain and that the sense of self is an organ. How do I interpret this, is this a point for materialism?
Yeah those are some claims of the materialist dogma, as per the quote by Bertrand Russell in my signature.

Edit: I don't consider it a point for materialism because I don't see how lacking an explanation for consciousness one could still dismiss all the varied witness accounts of OBEs.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'

- Bertrand Russell


(This post was last modified: 2023-09-14, 01:57 PM by Sciborg_S_Patel. Edited 1 time in total.)
(2023-09-14, 05:41 AM)LotusFlower Wrote: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...experience

This is saying that OBEs are all from the brain and that the sense of self is an organ. How do I interpret this, is this a point for materialism?

I’ve not read the paper. There have been a handful of studies implicating other areas of the brain to be responsible for the wakeful out of body type experience. These different competing claims from researchers are sufficient to show that no one area of the brain appears to be key to the wakeful OBE. Rather, it suggests instead, that destabilising (any) key areas of the brains networks with electrical shocks, seems to produce a brain-wide destabilising effect on the subjects networks, which can result in the temporary destabilising of their sense-of-self, which researchers are describing.

There is also no satisfying explanation as to how our experiences arise.

Also such studies begin with the assumption that our experience arises totally isolated within each individual themselves, so it’s hardly surprising that researchers interpret their results in this way.

However, there are overwhelming numbers of human anomalous experiences, which suggest that experients can come into possession of experiences (information) which are not their own. So it seems likely that that the assumption that experiences arise totally isolated within the individual, will in the future, turn out to have been wrong.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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(2023-09-14, 05:41 AM)LotusFlower Wrote: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...experience

This is saying that OBEs are all from the brain and that the sense of self is an organ. How do I interpret this, is this a point for materialism?

This is the standard matra of materialist neuroscience. Any claimed correlation of activity in particular neurological structures with particular conscious experiences is still just a correlation, not proof of causation. There is a vast amount of empirical data against materialist neurology's claim that consciousness is located in the brain and is what the brain does. Veridical NDEs furnish one of the largest bodies of evidence for human consciousness actually being a mobile center of consciousness that can separate from the body and observe and experience some things that can be and have been verified by independent investigators, things that the NDEr could not possibly have observed if in his body. Especially including many cases where the physical brain of the experiencer was dysfunctional due to trauma such as cardiac arrest. See the following excellent compendium volume: The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences, by Rivas, Dirven and Smit  (https://www.amazon.com/Self-Does-Not-Die...0997560800).
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