A new Guardian article on near-death experiences

The point I was making concerned your chemistry claims. I was suggesting that failure to predict poorly isolated macro molecular structures using quantum chemistry, may also be related to QM and Spacetime themselves, both appearing to emerge from a more primitive structure.

I am not qualified to have an opinion on emergence of QM and Spacetime from deeper sources.  There is ontology in this view, but has epistemological analysis that is our real guide.  The primitives for a potential model that would incorporate a complete picture would include non-local factors.  Information, as per Shannon's equations and meanings that can be experienced are. Free to be applied to nature's phenomena outside of space and time.

So besides the primitives of energy, matter and information, there is another.   Meaningful probabilities, assumed to be there - as background to QM.  This activity is the analogue to energy, but is not local.  In this way, there are reductive epistemological methods to find the patterns from the ontological sources of that are energy, matter, information and wavelike meaningful probabilities.  These exist in a coherent environment where past, now and future are continuous.

Kant has warned us about knowing the primitives directly.  However, computable methods can lead to reductive analysis about current outcomes, their past and projections of their future.  As of current opinion, the primitive of "real-world meanings" is not explicit, although its context is implicit in theories.

With reductive methods in the physical environment corresponding to those reductive activity (like logic) in the informational environment, some emergent questions can be addressed.

I suspect others might be growing weary of responding to my comments, so I'm considering taking a lengthy break.

If you do, so might I.  I don't want to be the only one looking for counter evidence to balance the debate only to have it hand-waved away because everybody else's evidence is considered superior.

Thank you for your kind words, StephenW. I suspect others might be growing weary of responding to my comments, so I'm considering taking a lengthy break.

Regarding your concept of a 'virtual machine,' would you say it resembles a form of dualism? How do you view the influence of bodily needs on behavioral outputs, such as binge eating, within your model?

The concept of a virtual drive can be helpful.  It is physical only during electronic computation.  The output is not, it can occur to you later on and when you are relocated!  Its when you understand the probabilities being sorted.  I respect Dualism, but I am a Pluralist, thinking there are 3 levels (think C. S. Peirce).  Physical, informational and spiritual/ethical all as separated environment effecting each other.

I am not to the task of a thoughtful analysis of the psychology of compulsion.  However, it is easy to think of it as a feedback loop.  The virtual information processing doesn't get the stop output, but recursively signals for efferent behavior for satisfaction.  The real question is not how the brain signals for food (we know a lot), but how the virtual machine (mind/spirit) induces chemistry.  The answer for me is correspondence.  An information object forms (decision, choice) that creates a state where the real-world probabilities correspond to the chemistry.

If you do, so might I.  I don't want to be the only one looking for counter evidence to balance the debate only to have it hand-waved away because everybody else's evidence is considered superior.

The gospel of NDE dominates these forums, a tradition dating back to the origins at the Mind-Energy forums, which, regrettably, are now closed. Nevertheless, I value the participation of you, Nbtruthman, David, Sciborg and others in the debate and their responses to my arguments. Engaging in this process of debate and counter-debate refines my ideas and understanding in a way that simply reading others' opinions on the Internet cannot. Has my own stance evolved? Undoubtedly!

Wrong. And I'm in good company with this assessment, with proponents including David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, among others.

Well simply telling me I'm wrong isn't very convincing.

Where else, besides consciousness, is there anything in nature where we should expect Strong Emergence? Seems to me people have simply attached themselves to the idea to get away from the possibility of God or Survival.

There doesn't even seem to be any clear idea of what the "material" and "physical" are, save for their lack of any mental character.

Where else, besides consciousness, is there anything in nature where we should expect Strong Emergence? Seems to me people have simply attached themselves to the idea to get away from the possibility of God or Survival.

But I posted an entire thread regarding the evidence for strong emergence in chemistry:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-t...-chemistry

There doesn't even seem to be any clear idea of what the "material" and "physical" are, save for their lack of any mental character.

I have no input on this. Why does the material even exist if there are a mental reality?

But I posted an entire thread regarding the evidence for strong emergence in chemistry:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-t...-chemistry

Yeah at best this seems like an argument saying newer unexpected properties emerged, but this doesn't seem to be necessarily "strong" emergence at all.

A quick search shows this is more an interpretation than scientific fact.

... the strong emergence of molecular structure faces three challenges that have not been met and which have so far remained unnoticed. First, the putative empirical evidence presented for the strong emergence of molecular structure equally undermines supervenience, which is one of the main tenets of strong emergence. Secondly, it is ambiguous how the assumption of determinate nuclear positions is invoked for the support of strong emergence, as the role of this assumption in Hendry’s argument can be interpreted in more than one way. Lastly, there are understandings of causation which render the postulation of a downward causal relation between a molecule’s structure and its quantum mechanical entities, untenable.

Also, here's Chalmers on Strong Emergence by the way:

Chalmers]: strongly emergent with respect to physics, weakly emergent with respect to physics-plus!

[Me]: OK, therefore we don’t have any known case of genuine “strong emergence”, right? (To be strong, emergence needs to be strong across any possible domain, even those we haven’t yet discovered or invented, I assume we agree on this.)

[Chalmers]: No, emergence is always relative to a domain. there’s nothing that is strongly emergent with respect to all possible domains

AFAICTell Chalmers himself doesn't seem to be going for Strong Emergence in the Something-from-Nothing sense that the physicalist would have to claim is happening. 

(I'll have to double check what Nagel said in Mind & Cosmos, though I don't recall him being too keen on the idea of Strong Emergence...)

Seems to me the very idea of Strong Emergence, in the Something-from-Nothing sense, is just faith-based catechism where the ignorance of what "matter" & the broader "physical" are leaves the physicalist's religious belief in Strong Emergence as a supposed possibility.

So just more of Materialism-of-the-Gap's promissory notes to keep believers from having to examine their faith in what noted atheist Bertrand Russell referred to as the dogma of Materialism.

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I have no input on this. Why does the material even exist if there are a mental reality?

Well the question I have is what is the material/physical, I can't tell you why it exists if I don't know what it is. There doesn't seem to be any clear answer save for the claim that whatever the "material" & "physical" are they don't have any mental character.

Yet there are then clear differences between what is "mental" and what is "physical", to the point it's quite unclear why the former would strongly emerge (whatever that means) from the latter.

(I'll have to double check what Nagel said in Mind & Cosmos, though I don't recall him being too keen on the idea of Strong Emergence...)

Seems to me the very idea of Strong Emergence, in the Something-from-Nothing sense, is just faith-based catechism where the ignorance of what "matter" & the broader "physical" are leaves the physicalist's religious belief in Strong Emergence as a supposed….

Yes I understand all this is disturbing for the gospel of the NDE followers, hence this baseless denial of even the possibility of strong emergence (divine insight again and again). The point of the discussion was to show Brian and others that reality (that is the observable reality and not the imaginative spritual realm) may be a lot more complex than presented in these forums. 

The notion that entities can’t emerge from nothing is equally baseless, as even if one adheres to extreme reductionist views and explores beyond the realm of quantum field physics to what might precede it, one is confronted with the reality that these entities seem to appear spontaneously, without a discernible origin or cause, rather than existing inherently. 

Regarding the view of Thomas Nagel I presented that in a different thread some months ago.

Yes I understand all this is disturbing for the gospel of the NDE followers, hence this baseless denial of even the possibility of strong emergence (divine insight again and again). The point of the discussion was to show Brian and others that reality (that is the observable reality and not the imaginative spritual realm) may be a lot more complex than presented in these forums. 

The notion that entities can’t emerge from nothing is equally baseless, as even if one adheres to extreme reductionist views and explores beyond the realm of quantum field physics to what might precede it, one is confronted with the reality that these entities seem to appear spontaneously, without a discernible origin or cause, rather than existing inherently. 

Regarding the view of Thomas Nagel I presented that in a different thread some months ago.

So, to be clear, your argument rests on the assertion that you can get Something from Nothing?

I would simply reply that this is deeply flawed logic. Sam Harris has been pretty critical of at least Eben Alexander's NDE and he also notes that the materialist faith depends on a bizarre Something from Nothing claim ->

But other analogies seem to offer hope. Consider our sense of sight: Doesn’t vision emerge from processes that are themselves blind? And doesn’t such a miracle of emergence make consciousness seem less mysterious?
Unfortunately, no. In the case of vision, we are speaking merely about the transduction of one form of energy into another (electromagnetic into electrochemical). Photons cause light-sensitive proteins to alter the spontaneous firing rates of our rods and cones, beginning an electrochemical cascade that affects neurons in many areas of the brain—achieving, among other things, a topographical mapping of the visual scene onto the visual cortex. While this chain of events is complicated, the fact of its occurrence is not in principle mysterious. The emergence of vision from a blind apparatus strikes us as a difficult problem simply because when we think of vision, we think of the conscious experience of seeing. That eyes and visual cortices emerged over the course of evolution presents no special obstacles to us; that there should be “something that it is like” to be the union of an eye and a visual cortex is itself the problem of consciousness—and it is as intractable in this form as in any other.

But couldn’t a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy.

So this criticism of Strong Emergence isn't related to the "gospel of the NDE followers". Remember that it is the Physicalist who claims the "physical" has no mental character and that any separate mind cannot interact with the "physical" brain. 

I, OTOH, am simply noting the characteristics of the mental that are radically not like anything that is supposedly "physical", and making the logical conclusion we shouldn't expect the mental to emerge from this "physical" stuff.

Of course one can deny there is any Interaction Problem (note Natural Laws require Interaction, as do Mathematical Universals), or that the "physical" has some aspect of consciousness or is just consciousness. But it seems any movement in these directions negates the a priori assumption that Survival reports have to all be lies, distortions, confusion, etc. 

Which then just leads back to the question of why, if we accept witness reports and historical observations going back millennia, these particular witness reports should hold no weight?

Regarding Nagel, flipping through Mind & Cosmos he admits the idea of Strong Emergence is a bizarre claim that isn't satisfying...Maybe I've forgotten some passage?

I am not qualified to have an opinion on emergence of QM and Spacetime from deeper sources.

I'm sure you are, just a bit of watching Nima's videos, it is simple, but alien, as it dispenses with spacetime (virtual particles) and QM (Hilbert space)