Psience Quest

(2018-01-16, 10:39 PM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]I think the problem might be semantic. We are used to thinking of dreaming and, especially, hallucinations as most decidedly non-real. 

It has been nearly 50 years since I became a no-doubter, knowing that if the stream of signals that we experience from our bodies is cut-off, that the reception of real-world signals to the mind does not stop.  I have been making the case that living things are working with ambient information in their environments.  Their informational environments are made from structured information objects that are measurably detectable, and are just as real as physical objects.  My point is that just like a flat earth, we have been mistaken about the role of mind, believing our eyes, instead of rational analysis of the data.

Stomachs process materials; and chemistry is the tool for understanding.  Minds process information and information science is the proper tool.  We will not "see" the picture until information is understood to structure reality, as much as materials.  Minds have evolved (more than once) and each different track of mental evolution is a case study for what information affords living things.

Quote: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? 

(2018-01-16, 09:56 PM)stephenw Wrote: [ -> ]If dreaming is only a physical function or an epiphenomenon - brain stops --> function stops.

If dreaming is an informational process in the mind, and the mind is processing nothing physical - but is processing meaning, then dreaming in cardiac arrest would be possible.

If meaningful ideas are just physical - well  living things effect meaning only by physical actions.  We simply know that this is not true, living things can adapt, from mental work and not doing things can bring order and organization.

We used to think in science that matter was it and everything, then we modeled energy (a few hundred years ago).  No literate person today believes that the energy they exert is from their "being."  We know that we are only transformers of energy.  We don't think when a cut heals that the material healing the cut was from our being, but from what we drank, breathed and ate.

Why in the world, do we think that meaning is from our brain's being.  We live in a sea of meanings - that we assimilate, expel and build.  We are not meanings, we incorporate meaning from the inner and outer environments we inhabit.

In the model I am using - NDE's are just self-aware dreaming, without having the sensory inflow from the brain.  Better than dreaming - because it is focused only on what can be detected in the infosphere. (informational environment)

That doesn't agree with the data though. Once the mind has exited the brain after cardiac arrest (as is consistently subjectively reported) accurate observations of the surroundings are reported. It's clearly nothing to do with a dream. Now if you're hypothesising that this entity (the mind/psyche whatever) then has the capacity to dream, that's beyond our scope and always will be.

(2018-01-17, 06:22 AM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]Anybody who reads the questions can see that they only cover a certain type of experience. Take one simple example to try and illustrate my point, if we just look at the four questions from the portion of the questionnaire covering the experients affective reaction during their experience...



Only very specific positive experiences can get points... I don’t think anybody on here would argue that distressing experiences are not also considered to be a part of some people’s NDE... but the questionnaire doesn’t cover those types of affective reactions.

I see what you mean, Max but does it ultimately matter if some people are not awarded NDE status for whatever reason ? Don't the people themselves know what occurred to them ? I mean it's not like mainstream science actually accepts that these people are getting a glimpse of another world, is it ? They just insist it's a complex hallucination that they haven't fully explained yet and if it's only a hallucination then it's not much different (effectively in the end) than an ordinary hallucination, such as the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

EDIT : I think people do know the difference between the stages of the NDE and hallucinations. That is why the hallucination explanation doesn't satisfy them.

(2018-01-17, 01:58 PM)tim Wrote: [ -> ]I see what you mean, Max but does it really matter if some people are not awarded NDE status for whatever reason ? I mean it's not like mainstream science actually accepts that these people are getting a glimpse of another world, is it ? They just insist it's a complex hallucination that they haven't fully explained yet and if it's only a hallucination then it's not much different (effectively in the end) than an ordinary hallucination, such as the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

I think people know themselves what occurred, where they've been, or the reality of it. I don't think they need a certificate with points on it, rather just acceptance that what they experienced was real, which they don't get from science in general at the moment. Maybe that will change.

Well if you actually want mainstream science to accept this stuff then yes you are going to have to be actually scientific about it. I mean, how can you praise Sam Parnia but then turn around and go "oh well who cares if IANDS has totally biased questionnaires, it's not like anyone takes this stuff seriously" and then also harp on skeptics that they're just being close minded and constantly propping Parnia up as some sort of saviour that will vindicate you in the end?

And acceptance? Wow, no, I'm sorry but no. I'm someone who's busted my ass day in and day out for years now obsessing over trying to figure out how to properly classify my own projections as real or not from within the projection and although I have certainly found some very good coorelating criteria that has helped me improve reliability it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I do not at all trust that someone who has not put in the hours that I have could accurately determine the reality of their OBE experience. I'm sorry but full stop, no, I don't think they can do it. It's like how a musician is able to listen to a song they've never heard before and then write out the sheet music for it by ear. Why? Because that musician has been working with those notes in many different forms so consistently for so long that they know them when they hear them. Someone who just enjoys the sound of music is not going have that level of precision. All they really know is "this sounds good" or "this sounds bad." This makes coming up with criteria for a real NDE not just stupidly important but also stupidly difficult because a layman might not be skilled enough to notice the smal details that set one apart from another. I for one have identified as many as 7 distinct dream states, only one of which has a very high likelyhood of being "real" when it occurs. "Very high" does not mean "certain" and It's "as many as" because I'm still on the fence about whether 3 of them really constitute their own distinct states or if they are occasional components of other states. It was not easy coming up with this criteria, it took a lot of hard work, a lot of experiments that I had to run both awake and asleep. Some of them I could control the set up of, others I had to wait for the right opportunity for. Acceptance is not something I will ever endorse or support in any way, it's bullshit spiritualist nonesense that spits in the face of everyone who actually cares about applying real science to this phenomena to really find out what's really going on with it and how to use it.

It reminds me of a Rune Soup podcast I listened to where he was interviewing someone called Ramsay Dukes or something, apparently someone with a lot of renown in the "magick" community. and he was talking about the differences between a magical thinker and a skeptic. He posed one example of a friend who's dying of cancer and all their friends are like "we're gonna cast a spell and cure his cancer' and then they come back the next day and his cancer is still there but he has a positive outlook on his remaining life now. He goes "well a skeptic would look at that and go 'well see your magic didn't work he still has cancer!' but a magical thinker would go 'no it totally worked man because now he has a totally differnet view on life that happened all spontaneous like'"

All I could think was "yeah, this why I'm the guy that figured out how to program a SELF REPLICATING ENERGY BALL that both Dreamsoap and I WATCHED OPERATE IN FRONT OF OUR FUCKING EYES while you gave up on 'results magic' and instead relegated yourself to using magic to 'appreciate life' more."

It's probably because off all that bullshit magical thinking that values feeling good rather than getting actual, useful, replicatable, stable results. I can't believe someone who expounds crap like that actually is considered a big shot in that community, then I realized that it just means the quality of the community must be somewhere in the sewer system.

I get really annoyed, almost insulted whenever some spiritualist tries to act like they know what they're talking about but then just backtrack and go "but muh feelins, muh feelin's matter, I totally knows it, cuz I feelz it." The same way I get annoyed when someone with an actual Ph.D in ANYTHING goes “oh well I don’t think you can use the scientific method to study this.”

Yeah, people who are in heat stroke FEEL cold, they're not cold, their brain is melting, feelings on their own are not evidence. But if you can reliably coorelate those feelings with some external event, like feeling hungry, and yes even feeling cold then yes you can use it as evidence that something is probably happening which is why skeptics also shouldn't discount feelings in terms of evidence.

But there are always caveats, always ways those sensations can be duped the same way flares dupe the heat seeking sensor of a sidewinder missile into thinking it's the engine of that f-16 it was targeting. Which is why modern missles use a whole bunch of different sensory data, radar,thermal, cameras with picture databases of what they're supposed to be aiming for, so that if any single one gets duped it can then be offset by the others that aren't. I've found that even the energy sense can be duped, just feed it the right signature and it will feel exactly like the thing it's mimicking, so I learned that there's even more criteria that I have to look for like the pattern of variance in the signature, what happens when you stress the signature because real ones react very differently than fake ones, is there a lens or water type type distortion of the "image" and how do you tell and then how do you correct for it. All this stuff that I've had to try figuring out on my own. This is why all religion and spiritualism as a whole just needs to go away and also why I think the all or nothing methodology of skeptics needs to also go away. It’s the wrong methodology, it’s like if you go into a martial arts studio trying to determin if flying spinning kicks are real and people do their best but you pull out the micrometers and go “nope, sorry you were five microns off from the thing we defined as a flying spinning kick, guess flying spinning kicks aren’t real and you’re all just crazy spiritualists.”

And then some of the students go “yeah but we got close, some were further than others but come on, we got something that at least started to look like it, maybe if we practice some more we’ll be able to do it” and the scientist goes “nope sorry, you said you could do and you couldn’t so clearly you’re just lying or faking for attention, I’m only interested in real science, the kind that is right 100% of the time every time about everything ever. Imma go tell everyone you’re all full of shit now because I’ve scientifically determined it with all my sciencing.”

@ Mediochre,

The only part of your rather aggressive post I'm going to deal with is this paragraph:

"Well if you actually want mainstream science to accept this stuff then yes you are going to have to be actually scientific about it. I mean, how can you praise Sam Parnia but then turn around and go "oh well who cares if IANDS has totally biased questionnaires, it's not like anyone takes this stuff seriously" and then also harp on skeptics that they're just being close minded and constantly propping Parnia up as some sort of saviour that will vindicate you in the end?

What do you mean, I'm not being scientific ? And what do you mean that IANDS has (biased) questionnaires. The NDE scale, which is what I was talking about was formulated by Bruce Greyson. He is a member of IANDS of course but that's not the point. The point I was making is that it's not the end of the world if some people's NDE's didn't score enough on the Greyson scale but if you think it is, then fine. Get your knickers in a twist by all means.

As for me harping on sceptics (do you mean harping on about ?) and calling them closed minded, I don't. I only define closed minded people as closed minded (pseudo sceptics)...true sceptics are fine by be.

As for "propping" up Sam Parnia...what does that mean ? Is Sam falling over ? Do you mean supporting his work, yes I do. Is there a problem with that ?

Finally, If you don't like my posts, don't read them.

(2018-01-17, 06:48 PM)tim Wrote: [ -> ]@ Mediochre,

The only part of your rather aggressive post I'm going to deal with is this paragraph:

"Well if you actually want mainstream science to accept this stuff then yes you are going to have to be actually scientific about it. I mean, how can you praise Sam Parnia but then turn around and go "oh well who cares if IANDS has totally biased questionnaires, it's not like anyone takes this stuff seriously" and then also harp on skeptics that they're just being close minded and constantly propping Parnia up as some sort of saviour that will vindicate you in the end?

What do you mean, I'm not being scientific ? And what do you mean that IANDS has (biased) questionnaires. The NDE scale, which is what I was talking about was formulated by Bruce Greyson. He is a member of IANDS of course but that's not the point. The point I was making is that it's not the end of the world if some people's NDE's didn't score enough on the Greyson scale but if you think it is, then fine. Get your knickers in a twist by all means.

As for me harping on sceptics (do you mean harping on about ?) and calling them closed minded, I don't. I only define closed minded people as closed minded (pseudo sceptics)...true sceptics are fine by be.

As for "propping" up Sam Parnia...what does that mean ? Is Sam falling over ? Do you mean supporting his work, yes I do. Is there a problem with that ?

Finally, If you don't like my posts, don't read them. 

No I don't think you're being scientific if you're going to handwave a scale allegedly designed to be scientific but then praise Parnia for "tightening up the methodology" as I believe you put it. I've seen you get into arguments with Steve001 and Linda over this, stating that it's a matter of fact that the survival of consciousness research Parnia is doing will/could settle the question once and for all. Hell you ripped on Linda earlier in this thread for it.

A biased scale gives biased results and thus anyone who uses it should not/will not be taken seriously. Acting like this isn't a big deal devalues the work of people actually trying to make this mainstream science because it shows the mainstreamn exactly the stereotype they critisize "oh look at these spiritualists, they don't care if their scale is biased, they don't care that the methods are faulty, they just care that it feels good. Guess there's nothing important they have to say after all." Something that I thought you cared about.

(2018-01-18, 12:08 AM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]Yes, of course, considering the OP's question.

Everybody's experiences which don’t meet Greyson's arbitrary NDE criteria get sidelined, both personally, and in relevant research - which is therefore necessarily biased, particularly where it compares the Greyson sub-group with the overall pool of experiences available.

Take the distressing type experience I mentioned earlier as an example. There are plenty of people who will still say things like... if these distressing experiences had only lasted longer, they would have eventually turned into the 'positive' Greyson type experience, you know... it's just that these NDE's were interrupted before they got to the good bit.

That's why Nancy wrote "Dancing Past the Dark", because these distressing NDE's have been pushed aside. It's another reason, for instance, why say Penny doesn't believe NDE imagery is a glimpse of the afterlife. And neither do I.

There are a massive range of Near Death Experiences, ranging from the repelling-type... all the way through to the highly attractive-type experience.

Personally speaking, I think it does matter... because it takes research down the wrong path.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with the "negative" NDE part and how it says anything against them being glimpses of the afterlife? How does their existence hamper the idea? 

There are a number of NDE researchers who acknowledge negative experiences and plenty of NDErs who were revealed to the "darker" side of reality that some of these distressing experiences may reflect on. Amongst the actual experiencer community, they welcome people with negative experiences and help the ones who don't fully understand them. 

It just doesn't defeat the idea of an afterlife to me. Simple as that. A bias amongst some researchers is a different thing, but in studies that have included negative experiences still all say they are in the minority. They exist but are far from equal in number to positive experiences

(2018-01-18, 12:08 AM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]Yes, of course, considering the OP's question.

Everybody's experiences which don’t meet Greyson's arbitrary NDE criteria get sidelined, both personally, and in relevant research - which is therefore necessarily biased, particularly where it compares the Greyson sub-group with the overall pool of experiences available.

Take the distressing type experience I mentioned earlier as an example. There are plenty of people who will still say things like... if these distressing experiences had only lasted longer, they would have eventually turned into the 'positive' Greyson type experience, you know... it's just that these NDE's were interrupted before they got to the good bit.

That's why Nancy wrote "Dancing Past the Dark", because these distressing NDE's have been pushed aside. It's another reason, for instance, why say Penny doesn't believe NDE imagery is a glimpse of the afterlife. And neither do I.

There are a massive range of Near Death Experiences, ranging from the repelling-type... all the way through to the highly attractive-type experience.

Personally speaking, I think it does matter... because it takes research down the wrong path.

"Everybody's experiences which don’t meet Greyson's arbitrary NDE criteria get sidelined, both personally, and in relevant research -"

The main and most important research is not concerned with analysing the subjective experience as a whole (although that is important)..it's focussed on the one element that can finally settle the debate, namely the out of body experience. That's where the work is, that's the most important feature of the NDE (for science anyway) and the only one that is testable. That is the one component that can (possibly) change the world for ever, make it necessary to re-write the text books.

Now, I honestly don't understand why you say you are so concerned about the content of people's near death experiences being ignored by users of the Greyson scale. YOU don't even accept the reports at face value, you don't believe that something is leaving the body. You argue for some kind of linking of people's brains, so I would say quite fairly, what does it matter to you ? Ultimately it doesn't mean anything if your model is correct because after the brain dies that's the end.

And are you really telling us that NDErs are happy as long as their subjective experience is fully accepted but not that their soul left their body/brain ? Of course not but that's what you're proposing. 

"There are a massive range of Near Death Experiences, ranging from the repelling-type... all the way through to the highly attractive-type experience."

You're putting too much emphasis on the negative reports. What can we do about them ? It's quite obvious that they seem to have little or nothing to do with the character of the person, or if they are religious or not, or not spiritual enough, or not "good" enough etc and so on. And finally once again, why does it matter if when you're dead, you're dead.

(2018-01-18, 02:29 AM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]No I don't think you're being scientific if you're going to handwave a scale allegedly designed to be scientific but then praise Parnia for "tightening up the methodology" as I believe you put it. I've seen you get into arguments with Steve001 and Linda over this, stating that it's a matter of fact that the survival of consciousness research Parnia is doing will/could settle the question once and for all. Hell you ripped on Linda earlier in this thread for it.

A biased scale gives biased results and thus anyone who uses it should not/will not be taken seriously. Acting like this isn't a big deal devalues the work of people actually trying to make this mainstream science because it shows the mainstreamn exactly the stereotype they critisize "oh look at these spiritualists, they don't care if their scale is biased, they don't care that the methods are faulty, they just care that it feels good. Guess there's nothing important they have to say after all." Something that I thought you cared about.

You don't seem to understand what is really important and what is not. The subjective elements of a near death experience cannot be objectively measured or tested EVER. The one exception is the out of body experience. The important question is not how many elements of the Greyson NDE scale, the person encountered, the question is, can consciousness occur separate from the brain. 

And if it can, what does that tell us ...in other words, do we have a soul, something that survives the death of the body. Because if we do (and I believe we do) it has massive importance for how we choose to live our lives.

Of lesser importance (just in my opinion) is dissecting the subjective reports. The Greyson scale is what it is, I don't see the big deal if it's not quite perfect. So what ?

(2018-01-18, 05:55 AM)Desperado Wrote: [ -> ]I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with the "negative" NDE part and how it says anything against them being glimpses of the afterlife? How does their existence hamper the idea? 

There are a number of NDE researchers who acknowledge negative experiences and plenty of NDErs who were revealed to the "darker" side of reality that some of these distressing experiences may reflect on. Amongst the actual experiencer community, they welcome people with negative experiences and help the ones who don't fully understand them. 

It just doesn't defeat the idea of an afterlife to me. Simple as that. A bias amongst some researchers is a different thing, but in studies that have included negative experiences still all say they are in the minority. They exist but are far from equal in number to positive experiences

If you are talking about all the experiences people have when they are near death, it's difficult to say that they are glimpses of the afterlife because so few of them contain elements which are related to our preconceptions of what "the afterlife" consists of. For example, what is the distressing experience of the nurses and doctors as nazis subjecting the patient to medical experiments meant to be telling us about the afterlife? Even among the people whose experiences are labelled "NDE" based on reaching the cutoff on the Greyson scale, there is very little in the descriptions which could be taken as a glimpse into the afterlife. Most of these experiences aren't like the stories on the IANDS site, but rather reach the cutoff because there was a sense of peace, a time distortion, and some life review scenes, none of which relates to an afterlife. Even visits from people who weren't there in real life don't really tell us much about the afterlife, because subjects describe visits from a wide variety of people - alive, dead, strangers, celebrities, mundane, meaningful, etc. If seeing your dead aunt is supposed to be a glimpse of the afterlife, what is being visited by the local grocery store clerk meant to be telling us?

Picking out some of the stories post hoc because they fit our preconceptions as to a spiritual realm may just be telling us more about our preconceptions than it does about an actual place (using the term "place" loosely).

Linda