A major but biased new paper on consciousness

I'm puzzled as to why she would actually do this

They're running scared, or at least that's my best guess...

Can't disagree with any/much of that and even if I did, they're still reasonable points. The last paragraph is certainly something that I feel to be true, even though it's completely unscientific. 

(Just in the NDE field) Sartori's Patient 10 has an out of body experience and surveys the scene perfectly whilst in a coma, things that he could not have seen, but does not look on top of the monitor (of course there's no reason why he would have particularly but I guess she was hoping the bright colour would catch any disembodied "eyes") and misses the target. 

Sceptics say, there you go, he didn't see >it< so his report is worthless. Cynical, dishonest treatment of really hard to get data. And no allowances made for difficulty.  

Parnia spends years chasing thousands of cardiac arrests and only two of them actually have the (OBE) experience he's looking for. Both of those not in research areas and one of them is too ill to talk about it in depth. Sceptics give it the thumbs down even though one patient described everything perfectly while he was dead which should be incredibly interesting scientifically, but is practically ignored. 

Next...

I think this is a clear example of the deliberately elusive nature of the NDE phenomenon, and of the experimenter effect.

Back 30 years ago near the beginning of systematic research into NDEs, when Pim van Lommel conducted his Netherlands Prospective Study, fairly substantial results were obtained.


From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article..._sec2title (the Dutch study was first published in the Lancet in December 2001):

"....Within four years, between 1988 and 1992, 344 patients who had undergone a total of 509 successful resuscitations were included in the study. All the patients in our study had been clinically dead and in the first stage of the process of dying.

We found that 282 patients (82%) had no recollection of the period of their unconsciousness, whereas 62 patients - 18% of the 344 patients - reported a NDE. Of these 62 patients with memories, 21 patients (6%) had some recollection; having experienced only some elements, they had a superficial NDE with a low score. Because of the prospective design of the study, we also included these patients. And 42 patients (12%) reported a core experience: 18 patients had a moderately deep NDE, 17 patients reported a deep NDE and six patients a very deep NDE. The following elements were reported: half of the patients with a NDE were aware of being dead and had positive emotions, 30% had a tunnel experience, observed a celestial landscape or met with deceased persons, approximately one-quarter had an out-of-body experience, communication with ‘the light’ or perception of colors, 13% had a life review and 8% experienced the presence of a border. All the familiar elements of a NDE were reported in our study, with the exception of a frightening or negative NDE."

This was 30 years ago near the beginning of systematic research into NDEs. At that time 18% of the 344 total patients with successful resuscitations from cardiac arrest reported NDEs, of whom 50% (32) reported being aware of being dead and had positive emotions, and (especially importantly) 25% (16) had an OBE and communication with 'the light' or perception of colors, and 5% (3) reported full-blown deep NDEs with most of the features.

Looking ahead  a quarter century or so, Sam Parnia's AWARE study was initiated a few years ago, followed by AWARE II with only preliminary results published so far. 

Results from the later studies appear to be far less good. In AWARE I, it took over 2000 cardiac arrest cases to accumulate 140 total patients who survived with resuscitation, of whom only 9 patients (6%) were capable of narrating their accounts and reported that they had had NDEs, and of those only 2 had detailed memories (and those 2 just happened not to be in research protocol prepared locations).

Of course, the AWARE research study protocol was different from that of the Van Lommel study, but it is still apparent that in this later study there was much less "signal" (i.e. true NDEs) in the "noise". It looks to me like "the system" (whatever it really is) decided as usual that scientific investigators were getting too close to real information on these matters, and it was necessary to step in to maintain the desired ambiguity and uncertainty and lack of anything like rigorous scientific evidence. In other words, humans appear to be required to do it in large part the hard way, through intuition, faith and direct experience where possible. So the usual pattern of scientific investigations into the paranormal ensues, where initial excellent results and derived evidence are sooner or later followed by great difficulty in getting even mediocre results.

Just a theory.

They're running scared, or at least that's my best guess...

They're hard to work out (pin down), Sci, that's for sure.

So the usual pattern of scientific investigations into the paranormal ensues, where initial excellent results and derived evidence are sooner or later followed by great difficulty in getting even mediocre results.

A daemon at work perhaps? I hope to find out, one day. I think Parnia's study suffered from a lack of staff (funding basically). Van Lommel's was also done on a shoe string but he managed to get enough unpaid volunteers. I think during Parnia's study it may have been harder to meet the inclusion criteria and actually get to the point where a patient could be intervewed because of a higher requirement of patient sensitivities. (I don't know that though, I'm assuming and it may be wrong) 

Van Lommel's data collection, just on the resuscitations, was conducted between 1988-1992. Parnia's was 2008-2012 (approx) some twenty years later and patient care (protocols etc) would have advanced, I would imagine. I would say both studies compliment each other, Van Lommel bagged many more NDE's but no actual out of body experiences that could be specificaly addressed as being veridical (although I think about 25% had an OBE). The denture case, which was outstanding, actually occurred in 1979, ten years before. (I do not accept the criticism that it is therefore not a reliable case, though)   

Parnia caught two, both verifiable but one much more evidential than the other. He also found that nearly 50% of patients that were interviewed in the first stage (out of 140) had some kind of awareness when they showed no external visible signs of it (see below) 

"Although no patient demonstrated clinical signs of consciousness during CPR as assessed by the absence of eye opening response, motor response, verbal response whether spontaneously or in response to pain (chest compressions) with a resultant Glasgow Coma Scale Score of 3/15, nonetheless 39% (55/140) (category 2) responded positively to the question “Do you remember anything from the time during your unconsciousness”. There were no significant differences with respect to age or gender between these two groups."

So, I would disagree slightly here. I think Parnia's study was a success, just not on the scale that everyone (except the pseudo sceptics) hoped. I really thought they would get a target hit. One at least but I was wrong. Looking back now, I realise how incredibly difficult these studies are and also how unfairly critical the sceptics are when they dismiss them with a blase wave of the hand.

Neardeath experiences: the experience of the self as real and not as an illusion (pimvanlommel.nl)

[Laird]

Just a heads-up, @tim: the second link in your post immediately above is to a file in your local filesystem, and can't be opened by anybody else.

Just a heads-up, @tim: the second link in your post immediately above is to a file in your local filesystem, and can't be opened by anybody else.

Thanks, Laird. Computer technology has always been one of my greatest worst attributes.

So put this down to an ultimately unsuccessful project irretrievably marred by a scientistic bias leading to exclusion of one of the major (if not the major) areas of empirical evidence for the existence of the human spirit. Of course, being "scientific", such terms as "spiritual" and "spirit" will not be found within the paper. It's still useful however as a seemingly thorough review of the current state of theoretical work on the nature of consciousness, albeit excluding one of the major areas of evidence.

I strongly disagree.  Maybe you should post what is empirical evidence that you accept in the matter.  Maybe it could be classified as semi-empirical?  What model of activity organizes the process?

The article is rooted in solid reporting and is a review of the topic.  I find it very professional and helpful.  I find this quote instructive.

 “We can carry on doing physics, but we must be absolutely logical about it, considering our intentions as physical realities, with the added ingredient that they do not appear to depend solely on our brains but also on an information system outside spacetime” (Guillemant, 2016, p. 9).

"Outside" of spacetime is not how I would say it.  The relationship of information objects - such as meaningful instruction - can be physicalized ultimately,  but in fact probabilities (as informational probability waves) can develop in a larger environment than a single place and time.  The missing assertion for this is that information has relations and structure that science is only starting to experiment on.  (think entanglement)

[Laird]

Computer technology has always been one of my greatest worst attributes.

OMG, tim's a cyborg!

(I just couldn't resist that corny joke...)

I strongly disagree.  Maybe you should post what is empirical evidence that you accept in the matter.  Maybe it could be classified as semi-empirical?  What model of activity organizes the process?

The article is rooted in solid reporting and is a review of the topic.  I find it very professional and helpful.  I find this quote instructive.


"Outside" of spacetime is not how I would say it.  The relationship of information objects - such as meaningful instruction - can be physicalized ultimately,  but in fact probabilities (as informational probability waves) can develop in a larger environment than a single place and time.  The missing assertion for this is that information has relations and structure that science is only starting to experiment on.  (think entanglement)

So do you consider the evidence exhaustively investigated and elucidated by Ian Stevenson and colleagues of past life memories of small children, and birth defects/deformities strongly correlating  with death traumas of apparent immediate past lives, not empirical evidence? Do you consider the many well investigated and confirmed veridical accounts from NDEers of details of resuscitation teams working on their bodies, communications with and encounters with distant people (and even deceased loved ones not known to be dead), all while their brains were dysfunctional, not empirical evidence? References to this data would be well covered collectively by the winning papers submitted for the Bigelow essay contest, and the book The Self Does Not Die by Rivas, Dirven and Smit, at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php and https://www.amazon.com/Self-Does-Not-Die...0997560800.

Do you think that a large body of strong empirical evidence should simply be thrown out for serious consideration if it is not accompanied by a detailed "scientific" model explaining all its characteristics? In other words, that data does not trump theory?

Do you consider that all this research work doesn't constitute a source of data that should be seriously considered as relevant to the issue of which current theory of consciousness is the most valid? Or do you think it was rightly excluded mainly because it is taboo to the academic establishment?

As I mentioned in a previous post, it appears that the NDE and reincarnation data was considered by the authors, but ultimately rejected for inclusion, because it would have prevented the survey paper from being published by this mainstream journal.