Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

I know you have studied these matters for many years, but still I find it astonishing that you can consider it a distinct possibility that all the tons of empirical evidence for survival furnished by some paranormal phenomena is invalid because of things like "super-psi". This afterlife evidence comes from such phenomena as veridical NDEs, mediumistic communications and reincarnation memories. This is direct experiential evidence that I don't think is subject to reasonable dispute philosophical or otherwise. I think empirical evidence always trumps theory. 

I do agree that there may be even more evidence, and unbreakable philosophical and logical arguments, against materialism itself regardless of the issue of survival.

It has nothing to do with Super Psi.

It's more just the fact that there is a lot of death, a lot of brain illness, and comparatively few Survival cases. If Survival cases went up 10% the world would be a very different place. Heck maybe even 2%.

Additionally for me it isn't just the cases one can read, it is stories told [to] me that suggest the world has aspects suggestive of Psi & Survival. It's experiences I've had myself that are at the least very strange. Things are different when you can get a sense of the person outside just the case, or when something happens to you.

So if someone never read philosophy, read maybe a few cases, and never had any experiences that might suggest Psi let alone Survival I think it would be reasonable for them to doubt there is an afterlife.

Another way of looking at it is the way Zammit did, as a kind of legal case rather than something to be scientifically established. I think proponents are shooting too high, at least in the current landscape, of trying to establish Survival as fact. Making it conceivable [with a likelihood higher than 0] is probably as far as we could get, with future generations taking up the torch.

It has nothing to do with Super Psi.

It's more just the fact that there is a lot of death, a lot of brain illness, and comparatively few Survival cases. If Survival cases went up 10% the world would be a very different place. Heck maybe even 2%.

Additionally for me it isn't just the cases one can read, it is stories told [to] me that suggest the world has aspects suggestive of Psi & Survival. It's experiences I've had myself that are at the least very strange. Things are different when you can get a sense of the person outside just the case, or when something happens to you.

So if someone never read philosophy, read maybe a few cases, and never had any experiences that might suggest Psi let alone Survival I think it would be reasonable for them to doubt there is an afterlife.

Another way of looking at it is the way Zammit did, as a kind of legal case rather than something to be scientifically established. I think proponents are shooting too high, at least in the current landscape, of trying to establish Survival as fact. Making it conceivable [with a likelihood higher than 0] is probably as far as we could get, with future generations taking up the torch.

First of all, I don't think that the great amount of death in the world, and the great amount of other tragedy and pain, including countless observations of how damage to the brain can severely affect consciousness, is relevant to the issue. That's the way physical life in the world works. It sucks. Death seems very much to be a necessary consequence of life in the physical. Sure, it's relatively rare, but the evidence for survival such as it is remains stubbornly existent as real events that have been verified to have occurred.  

A number of people have not been very interested in philosophy, had no religious faith, but read a lot more than a few cases, in fact studied the evidence for decades, and never themselves had powerful spiritual experiences suggestive of survival, and still have estimated something like 98% for the probability of an afterlife. The evidence studied naturally included very strong evidence against materialism and consequently for the existence of some sort of spiritual order in existence, which conclusion in itself is at least suggestive of survival and has to be figured in. 

Of course there is still a residual doubt that is impossible to get rid of. I think it is "reasonable", looking objectively at all the evidence, to have a small but niggling doubt, but to consider the survival proposition to be 50% or less? I don't think so.

Unfortunately, the nature of the system makes it impossible for humans to be 100% certain of anything except the old "I think therefore I am".

First of all, I don't think that the great amount of death in the world, and the great amount of other tragedy and pain, including countless observations of how damage to the brain can severely affect consciousness, is relevant to the issue. That's the way physical life in the world works. It sucks. Death seems very much to be a necessary consequence of life in the physical. The evidence for survival such as it is remains. 

I would agree. I don't mean the death and brain illness is proof against Survival because an afterlife seems too optimistic. I mean that if we had even sporadic reversals of brain illness akin to terminal lucidity but during the intervening years, common feats of easily confirmed Psi functioning, and larger number of Survival cases - even the merest sparks that sometimes accompany death - it would be far more convincing.

That this doesn't happen is in itself strange.

A number of people have not been very interested in philosophy, had no religious faith, but read a lot more than a few cases, in fact studied the evidence for decades, and never themselves had powerful spiritual experiences suggestive of survival, and still have estimated something like 98% for the probability of an afterlife.

But each person is different. I think, given there is no clear cut proof [like the reproducible experiments that show QM's oddities], we have to accept a lot of people just aren't going to accept Survival. Now what I think can be done is make a persuasive case that Survival should be possible, part of this case being the fact the idea that non-conscious atoms/force/fields/etc can produce Consciousness is illogical.

The evidence studied naturally included very strong evidence against materialism and consequently for the existence of some sort of spiritual order in existence, which conclusion in itself is at least suggestive of survival and has to be figured in. 

Of course there is still a residual doubt that is impossible to get rid of. I think it is "reasonable", looking objectively at all the evidence, to have a small but niggling doubt, but to consider it 50% or less? I don't think so.

Actually for me personally I would probably put Survival at close to 100%. This however is less logical than just an intuition I've had since childhood. Similarly, my logical thinking is God *might* be real (60%?) but my intuition says a Limited God is real. Is that just conditioning from being religious for the first 25 years or so of life? Maybe.

My Survival and God odds are different than what I would demand of others though. Some people just have a clear certainty that it cannot happen, perhaps this is a influenced by a fear of damnation or refusal to accept "false comfort"...but maybe it's just their sum total of experiences gives them a different reasoning about probabilities here?

Unfortunately, the nature of the system makes it impossible for humans to be 100% certain of anything except the old "I think therefore I am".

According to Alex Rosenberg's Atheist Guide to Reality, to be a Materialist is to reject Cogito Ergo Sum...so I guess even that can be cast into doubt if one swallows the Materialist pill. ;-)

• At the lowest level, signals from senses like the eye and the sense of balance in the ear send signals to the brain. The brain organizes these signals into models, which are patterns of neuron firings based on these inputs from the senses. The brain compares these with previously saved models of these inputs. The brain can then identify what it sees based on what it had seen previously. It can also link these visual models to models of words that it hears and speaks, thus tying in words to match images. Thus, a person can see a tennis ball coming toward his racquet and think "that's the ball".

• These patterns of neuron firings associated with the sensing of the position of the ball and tennis racquet link to patterns of neuron firings that control motions. If one is playing tennis, for instance, and upper levels of the mind have decided to hit the ball, then the brain looks at these models of the ball's and racquet's positions and movements, and builds a model of the future movement of the arm and racquet needed to cleanly hit that ball. Deciding to execute on this plan, the brain's neural models direct other neurons which have models on how to move arm and body muscles such that they cause the racquet to hit the ball.

• Hitting that tennis ball cleanly and making it go where you want it to go is a very complex task. But if you have done it many times, your brain has saved models of what it means to hit a ball cleanly and calls on these models from its memory. Combining the inputs from the senses and its model of good strokes, the brain calculates the unique muscle movements needed to perform the stroke in this new situation. As the arm starts to move, there is constant feedback on the position of the racquet and ball, all of which are fed back into the models to make corrections to the stroke as needed. This basically all happens outside of the realm of consciousness. If you are a skilled tennis player, you might consciously decide to lob the ball into the far right corner of the court, for instance, and the brain takes over from there.

Your explanation is great, it's useful, it helps us understand how the brain acts like an input/output device, stores associations, weights those associations, and probably labels them on a scale of attraction -> repulsion.

However, very briefly... the problem we have is that brains are not perfectly isolated. If we can measure the summed EM field from the brain using crude metal sensors placed on the scalp (EEG), then it's obvious that such fields can work in reverse, whereby externally generated fields can also penetrate and intersect the brain. Prior to 2010, the brains EM field measured by EEG was considered to be only an epiphenomena, but research published in 2010 demonstrated that the EM field from neural firing of brain tissue, actually entrains the tissues neural network, in a feedback loop.

There is a large, and growing body of research on magnetoreception in organisms, which is only part of the much larger research area covering non-specific hyper-weak magnetic field effects of magnetobiology. Lots of effects are shown, going right down to 1 nanoTesla (nT), but often with poor reproducibility. It's suggested that the one thing we don't control for - magnetic fields - is confounding the results of experiments. Researchers like Frank Prato have reliably demonstrated bizarre hyper-weak magnetic field effects in mice, at field strengths so weak, that they are a challenge to integrate with our current understanding.

Returning to the topics of unexplained human experience, which are more generally discussed on this forum, and which we variously label NDE OBE's, Apparitions, Premonitions, Telepathy etc., there really is a lot of evidence that people do come into spontaneous possession of experiences which are not their own. But it's only when this dislocated information stands out so severely from what should be possible, that we take notice. I had one such spontaneous experience as a youngster. But I recognise that having had such an experience, it's going to be much much easier for me to entertain these ideas, than it will be for you.

Oh yeah I was just riffing, I think E.J. Lowe would agree with my divisions but they aren't explicitly mentioned in his paper. I just listed the aspects of consciousness that I previously mentioned a few times in this thread.

I agree that it isn't easy to separate the components of consciousness because our conscious comes to us in a unified whole (actually an argument for the soul in some arenas).

I actually like yours better than mine, just easier to have long protracted arguments that never seem to conclude with the divisions I listed. ;-)

Thanks, and I appreciate your humour

One of the concepts I was trying to express with 'creativity' is the sense of something positively active rather than passive like a calculator which awaits input then attempts to produce some output.

It's interesting to consider plant-life in the area of creativity. I was thinking of how they seek out what they need and may even communicate with their neighbours. Plants are studied but sometimes don't receive much publicity and tend not to enter into our general thoughts about the world as much as I think they deserve. I was also trying to think of in what sense a domestic cat (which often spends a lot of time sleeping) could be considered creative. I'm still pondering a little on that

So if someone never read philosophy, read maybe a few cases, and never had any experiences that might suggest Psi let alone Survival I think it would be reasonable for them to doubt there is an afterlife.

This is a specific instance of a more generalised argument that say an uneducated peasant in a simple farming community might have no reason to believe in the existence of say, Australia or Greenland. (Apologies to inhabitants of Australia and Greenland who I'm sure have no doubts about the existence of those places). One could come up with many other examples of having no reason to believe in something.

However, people are different and in most small communities there may be someone with some unusual experiences or gifts such as precognition. These small chinks in the ordinary routine may become established as folk-tales or traditions. I suspect (my hypothesis) that sometimes such a community might have a generation or two without any such unusual people and so the task of carrying on a tradition falls to someone with no knowledge or understanding of what it is they are passing on as tradition and so it may harden into something more formalised but empty. Then someone turns up in a later generation having their own gifts and insights but is damned as a heretic.

I suppose where I'm leading to with this is the need for education. I don't mean educating people to instil in them the idea that there is no such thing as an afterlife. What I mean is to provide a basis and skills in being able to investigate and find out, as well as critical thinking. It is often easy to follow a human instinct to belong to a tribe and accept whatever that group believes. Breaking out of that zone where it is comforting to feel that one is sharing in the same beliefs as many others and instead evaluating things oneself, that is more difficult but necessary.

That constructed self feeds back into the rest of the brain as a conscious self,

Firstly, isn't "self" in your context a product of awareness and not the mechanical brain?  Why would a mechanical brain produce a "self"?

Secondly, the feedback theory doesn't work because the brain, or the part of it that is receiving the feedback,  would have to already be conscious prior to the feedback in order to be aware of the feedback.  You could easily create feedback loops on a computer but it won't make the computer conscious because chips and wires do not have the capacity in themselves to be conscious.

Aren't swim classes and reunions just collections of objects? There are people, a swimming pool, a location for the reunion...

What is it about swim classes and reunions that would not be captured by the mathematical descriptions of physics?

Again, these are names we give to a set of entities doing a set of specific actions. "Reunions" might not be the best example of this class of things. Better examples include a conversation, a war, a party, a ballgame, a cattle stampede, or a concert. Each of these are names we give to an event which involves a set of entities doing something in which we recognize the combined resulting event as something specific that we can name. A set of soldiers is not a war. But if a set of soldiers are shooting in patterns that we recognize as a war, that is a war.

Likewise, the mind is the name some of us give to a set of neurons (plus anything else that might be involved) doing a set of specific actions that together we would call "mind". These actions include recalling from memory, thinking about options, and deciding. 

By this definition, the mind is a set of physical things doing distinct physical activities, just like a party is a set of people doing distinct physical activities.

I mean that if we had even sporadic reversals of brain illness akin to terminal lucidity but during the intervening years, common feats of easily confirmed Psi functioning, and larger number of Survival cases - even the merest sparks that sometimes accompany death - it would be far more convincing.

That this doesn't happen is in itself strange.

Yes, very strange.

Your explanation is great, it's useful, it helps us understand how the brain acts like an input/output device, stores associations, weights those associations, and probably labels them on a scale of attraction -> repulsion.

However, very briefly... the problem we have is that brains are not perfectly isolated. If we can measure the summed EM field from the brain using crude metal sensors placed on the scalp (EEG), then it's obvious that such fields can work in reverse, whereby externally generated fields can also penetrate and intersect the brain. Prior to 2010, the brains EM field measured by EEG was considered to be only an epiphenomena, but research published in 2010 demonstrated that the EM field from neural firing of brain tissue, actually entrains the tissues neural network, in a feedback loop.

There is a large, and growing body of research on magnetoreception in organisms, which is only part of the much larger research area covering non-specific hyper-weak magnetic field effects of magnetobiology. Lots of effects are shown, going right down to 1 nanoTesla (nT), but often with poor reproducibility. It's suggested that the one thing we don't control for - magnetic fields - is confounding the results of experiments. Researchers like Frank Prato have reliably demonstrated bizarre hyper-weak magnetic field effects in mice, at field strengths so weak, that they are a challenge to integrate with our current understanding.

Returning to the topics of unexplained human experience, which are more generally discussed on this forum, and which we variously label NDE OBE's, Apparitions, Premonitions, Telepathy etc., there really is a lot of evidence that people do come into spontaneous possession of experiences which are not their own. But it's only when this dislocated information stands out so severely from what should be possible, that we take notice. I had one such spontaneous experience as a youngster. But I recognise that having had such an experience, it's going to be much much easier for me to entertain these ideas, than it will be for you.

I agree that there may be aspects of our mental life, such as hyper-weak magnetic fields. There could even be things we haven't discovered yet, something akin to dark energy, which we only recently discovered. We don't know.

Whether we have good evidence for apparitions, premonitions, telepathy etc., I guess that gets to the heart of this forum. Let's just say that I don't find that evidence to be nearly as solid as others find it to be.