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

I'm reasonably convinced that I wouldn't be having this experience without what I experience as my brain. But I would struggle to make the case for any broader claim. Also I find labels like the mind, consciousness etc too vague to be of use.

Physics is in a period of flux at present, it seems pretty certain to me that our ideas about Spacetime are going to have to give way to something more fundamental that underlies spacetime. Something new, and more fundamental that will generalise spacetime and quantum mechanics. Therefore it seems possible to me, that at the point of death, all bets are off, about trying to understand what happens after, or what happens after to ones sense-of-self, if our concepts about spacetime breakdown at this point. Asking about what happens after death, may not have any operational meaning we can yet understand, if our concepts of space and time themselves breakdown at death.

It seems reasonable to me that my experiences are the summed result of processing information, and not the information itself. That experience must also include my experience of brains (say for example, if I open up someones scull and stick some probes into their brain to make some measurements). i can't separate brains out from my experience, and say my experience starts there, as my experience of brains is also just part of my experience. But I strongly suspect how we experience them, will have some accurate relationship to the processing of information into the result of brains that we do experience.

My own research suggests that brains seem to be able to store patterns of association classically, and also sum those patterns non-classically, which I suspect is where our shared experience comes from.

Yeah I think these questions of Emergence of Spacetime and Nature of Information means we don't know what the "final physics" or even "future physics" will look like or how it will relate to consciousness.

Even McFadden accepts the possibility of Survival depending on how physics and his CEMI consciousness theory shake out ->

My hypothesis is that conciousness is the experience of information, from the inside. There is a postulate in physics that information is neither created or detroyed – the conservation of information ‘law’. It is however just a postulate, nobody has ever proved it. But, if true, it would suggest that awareness (associated with that information) – in some form – might survive death.

Would you please explain to me how the filter model answers some of the basic questions I have asked on this thread? For instance, how does the filter model account for retrograde amnesia after a stroke? See this post.

I want to make sure I understand the situation you are describing because I don't want to waste time trying to explain something that didn't actually happen.

I looked up retrograde amnesia and what I saw says retrograde amnesia is when someone can't remember things from before the damage occurred - and that doesn't sound like what you are describing.

So can you clarify exactly what the situation was: Your grandmother had stroke, after the stroke, at any moment after the stroke  she could not remember anything that happened 30 seconds previously? Or just some things including your visit? Was it always exactly 30  seconds?

You went to visit her. 30 seconds into the visit she didn't remember you were visiting? While you were still there?

Obviously I'm confused about the situation you are describing, can you provide more detail to clear up my questions?

Thanks

I want to make sure I understand the situation you are describing because I don't want to waste time trying to explain something that didn't actually happen.

I looked up retrograde amnesia and what I saw says retrograde amnesia is when someone can't remember things from before the damage occurred - and that doesn't sound like what you are describing.

So can you clarify exactly what the situation was: Your grandmother had stroke, after the stroke, at any moment after the stroke  she could not remember anything that happened 30 seconds previously? Or just some things including your visit? Was it always exactly 30  seconds?

You went to visit her. 30 seconds into the visit she didn't remember you were visiting? While you were still there?

Obviously I'm confused about the situation you are describing, can you provide more detail to clear up my questions?

Thanks

It might help to clarify what is being filtered. In the context of the filter model, "consciousness" is the essence that perceives subjective experiences, for example the awareness of what blue looks like that can't be explained in words to someone who is color blind.

The filter model says the brain doesn't produce this essence that is aware of subjective experience.

The filter model doesn't rule out the brain performing other functions. 

Those other functions could include balance, movement of muscles, heart rate, respiration rate etc.

I want to make sure I understand the situation you are describing because I don't want to waste time trying to explain something that didn't actually happen.

I looked up retrograde amnesia and what I saw says retrograde amnesia is when someone can't remember things from before the damage occurred - and that doesn't sound like what you are describing.

So can you clarify exactly what the situation was: Your grandmother had stroke, after the stroke, at any moment after the stroke  she could not remember anything that happened 30 seconds previously? Or just some things including your visit? Was it always exactly 30  seconds?

You went to visit her. 30 seconds into the visit she didn't remember you were visiting? While you were still there?

Obviously I'm confused about the situation you are describing, can you provide more detail to clear up my questions?

Thanks

My mistake. I meant anterograde amnesia. Again, see this post and https://mindsetfree.blog/if-only-souls-h...#Antegrade.

I feel like this question of amnesia has been addressed a few times over? ->

1. There's at least one study where those with amnesia remember things in dreams they claim to not remember on waking. I linked to it at least twice.

2. Since brains made of non-conscious constituents aren't the kind of things that could hold thoughts about things, they also cannot hold memories.

3. Filter Theory posits the Higher Self is constricted by a brain. Bergson even calls it a "vice". Brain-based illness would be a tightening of the vice, whereas stuff like artistic talent blossoming for elderly with dementia, Sudden Savants, and Terminal Lucidity are the vice loosening.

4. Survival cases show souls having memories, and psychic research in its nature supports the Filter Theory.

Even if one discounts 4, the other 3 are still there. Even rejecting 2 because it brings in some philosophy you have 1 & 3.

As a tentative Point #5 I'd probably throw in the question physicist Adam Frank raises, that the place of consciousness in physics is unknown and the "observer" may or may not require consciousness. It's not as directly related but I think the fact that consciousness may have a direct role within physics, rather than physics just not being able to account for consciousness (Hard Problem), seems interesting. Same with the necessity for qualia in natural selection, Mathematical Platonism, and the issue of Fine Tuning.

Science seems to directly run into the consciousness the materialist evangelicals were trying to "cash out" in terms of non-conscious constituents. To me even comparing amnesia to such a huge problem is like comparing a glass of water to a tsunami, so even if there were no accounting for it under the Filter Theory it still wouldn't shift the scales by much.

(I know you posted something that quoted me, will reply later )

You quoted back a link to  this post. Did you even read it? Because I see nothing here that address that argument.

Whether anterograde amnesia involves the person never recalling it, or recalling it only in dreams is immaterial. Why is it that events, for which the soul is fully aware of if dualism is true, are being forgotten?

Also, even if you think brains cannot be conscious, how does that in any way prove that brains cannot store memories?

You quoted back a link to  this post. Did you even read it? Because I see nothing here that address that argument.

Whether antegrade amnesia involves the person never recalling it, or recalling it only in dreams is immaterial. Why is it that events, for which the soul is fully aware of if dualism is true, are being forgotten?

Also, even if you think brains cannot be conscious, how does that in any way prove that brains cannot store memories?

Yeah I read the post a few times. Not sure why you think this is such a great argument?

Why is a soul fully aware of events if dualism is true? I've already pointed out that even after just finishing John Wick 4 I couldn't remember everything that happened in the movie. So I don't see why, if Dualism is true, it means I have to have perfect recall.

Additionally Sam just linked to a Nahm paper that mentions a person in coma who had a moment of paradoxical lucidity and thanked people for the care she received that she claimed to be aware of. So I'd say the question of memory presents challenges for the consciousness-dependent-on-brain position.

Regarding the point that a brain cannot hold memories -> If the brain consists of non-conscious constituents that cannot produce consciousness I don't see how those constituents hold memories. It's not like an electronic recording as when I watch a video of myself it's not the same as remembering the memory as events from my own actual past 1st Person PoV.

Beyond that already posted some arguments from Tallis re: the inability of non-conscious constituents to hold thoughts or memories. See this post for example.

As E.Flowers noted this whole discussion about memories and amnesia was had years ago, which is why nobody here is very impressed by someone bringing it up now.

My mistake. I meant anterograde amnesia. Again, see this post and https://mindsetfree.blog/if-only-souls-h...#Antegrade.

In the context of the filter model, "consciousness" is the essence that perceives subjective experiences, for example the awareness of what blue looks like that can't be explained in words to someone who is color blind.

The filter model says the brain doesn't produce this essence that is aware of subjective experience.

The filter model doesn't rule out the brain performing other functions. 

Those other functions could include balance, movement of muscles, heart rate, respiration rate etc.

The incarnated spirit doesn't remember being a spirit, so spirit memories are presumably blocked while incarnated.

Anterograde amnesia could be explained if the incarnated spirit, without access to spirit memory, relied on the physical brain for memory during incarnation. 

Also while access to spirit memories would be blocked, formation of spirit memories would not be blocked - the spirit would have memory of the incarnation after the death of the physical body.

What we basically have in these books is hearsay. The author says he heard a doctor tell of hearing from a patient about an NDE. That is hearsay. It would not be admissible in court, because it is notoriously unreliable.

Even if we have the direct statement from the person with the experience, we are talking about a simple anecdote that is expressed without cross-examination. We don't have access to the background information, and don't have the chance to question the claimant skeptically. Many falsehoods can slip through using this method.

What I would find more impressive would be an experiment where patients likely to need resuscitation would agree to participate in a trial under controlled conditions to see if they could verify the state of a random card in an operating room if they ever ended up in this situation.


If surviving souls do not have a degree "of consciousness and desires and inclinations and addictions and whatnot of the human embodied personality," similar to what the soul had as part of the earthly person, and souls do not have the capability to communicate with us, is it even proper to call your surviving soul, "you"?

If communication from the dead is only done occasionally through skilled mediums, why not set up controlled tests of this? Mediums could meet with sympathetic cancer patients that expect to die in the next few months, and set up a time and place to meet after death and communicate hidden information with these mediums. If the protocol was supervised by skeptical scientists who could act as a check to prevent cheating, this test could give significant results. Even if the results were not 100%, if they are significantly above the answers expected by chance, it would be evidence.

The plausibility of this all-inclusive blanket claim of falsehood covering every single one of the cases is minimal. You are basically claiming that for every single one of these cases it boils down to some or all of the eyewitness testimony of the NDErs, the eyewitness testimony of the original investigators, and the eyewitness testimony documented in the book itself as written by the authors, being all essentially fabricated or grossly exaggerated and distorted in many ways for some sort of sufficiently strong reasons. When a doctor wrote in his book that the NDEr told him that he left his body to observe his body and the attending medical personnel from above, then either the doctor or the NDEr absolutely must have been lying or seriously deluded. When neither party had any motive to lie and were not delusional. When often it was a doctor reporting and investigating the case, and where such medical professionals are trained in and accustomed to making accurate recounting of observed facts. Essentially there had to be gross lying, fabrication and exaggeration going on at each stage of the process, on the part of the NDEr, the first investigative witness hearing and recording the NDEr's account, and the authors of the book that compiled and summarized the cases.

The debunking claim applies this presumption of falsity to all of the separate statements about his experiences made by each of the more than 100 NDErs whose cases are documented in the book, and then to all of the many which must exist but were not found by the investigators/authors of the book. It almost looks like a claim that not just the typical NDEr and the typical NDE investigator are pathological liars or delusional (preposterous in itself), but that they all are, every one of them. They must all be given to, at a minimum, grossly exaggerating whatever experiences there were during the NDE, plus inventing many more. By the way, the investigator/authors of The Self Does Not Die had a policy of almost always going to original sources, to among other things minimize the natural accumulation of distortion as a story is passed from person to person.

If even just in one case the investigator and witness NDEr were not completely lying or deluded, then the blanket all inclusive falsity claim fails.

Let's look at just one of the cases I posted as an example, in detail:

"CASE 3.24. The Jacket and the Tie

Cardiologist Maurice S. Rawlings, affiliated with a diagnostic center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, described a case of a hospital patient who was suffering from recurring chest pain and severe depression. She happened to be a nurse herself by profession. Dr. Rawlings was asked to examine her, but when he arrived at the hospital, she was not in her room. Rawlings finally found her unconscious in the bathroom. She had tried to commit suicide by hanging. She had put a collar on herself—a collar used to support the neck—and then hung the collar on a coat hook on the bathroom door. After that, she had slowly bent her knees and finally lost consciousness. Her tongue and eyes looked swollen, as did her face, which also had a dark bluish color. Rawlings lifted her off the coat hook and laid her on the floor. He ascertained that she had enlarged pupils, and he could not hear a heartbeat when he placed his ear to her chest. He administered external heart massage and mouth-to-mouth respiration. Her roommate alerted some nurses to come and help. The patient was then administered oxygen through a ventilation mask. When electrocardiography was performed, however, the EKG showed a flat line, indicating that electroshock would not have helped—that is, the heart was in asystole, not in ventricular fibrillation that could respond to electroshock. She then also received several medications. Finally stabilized, the patient was brought by gurney to the intensive care unit, where she remained in a coma for 4 days. On the second day or so after she had awoken from her coma, Rawlings asked her whether she could remember anything about what had happened. The patient stated that she had observed all the effort he had gone through for her. She remembered that he had taken off his brown plaid jacket and tossed it on the floor and that he had loosened his tie, which had brown and white stripes on it. She also remembered that the nurse who came to help him had looked worried. She recalled that Rawlings had asked the nurse to get an Ambu bag (a mask with a balloon to give a patient artificial ventilation) and an IV catheter and that two men with a gurney had come. All these memories were correct, and Rawlings stressed that the patient was clinically dead when she observed these things. The patient recovered completely and even returned to nursing work. As it happened, she could not remember her suicide attempt at all and experienced no suicidal thoughts."

There's no getting around it -  according to you, all these detailed statements of factual events were really fabricated by Rawlings and/or the nurses involved, along of course with all the other ones in The Self Does Not Die and in cardiologist Rawling's other writings and for that matter in all the other volumes by all the other authors (often medical doctors) detailing other cases.

To repeat my observation previously made, "to believe that every single one of all the experiences documented in "The Self Does Not Die" is invalid, really somehow being a fraud or misperception or coincidence or anesthetic awareness or hallucination or whatever, reveals a strong and unquestioning religious faith in materialism."

I agree with you on only one point: indeed, the true nature of the soul and its relationship to the human person are persistent mysteries. The human person identifies himself as his unique human mind, personality, memories going back to childhood, and his physical body. Soul consciousness presumably is vastly greater and includes memories of other incarnations as other human personalities. We just don't know in what sense a person literally is his soul. However, the NDE and mediumistic communication evidence still shows that at least for a time after separation from the body, the human personality persists.

Anterograde amnesia could be explained if the incarnated spirit, without access to spirit memory, relied on the physical brain for memory during incarnation. 

Finally we have an attempt to answer anterograde amnesia. Thanks.

What do you mean when you say the spirit relies on the brain to store memories? Do you mean the brain is the place where the memories are stored? If so, the spirit looks stupid. For it makes all your decisions and drives your life, but it doesn't remember any of this. It constantly needs to ask the brain what is going on so it knows who you are, what you have experienced, and what you just said. That really doesn't make sense.

If such a spirit continued after your death, how would it be you? For it would lose its source of memory of who you even are. Does it then turn to a completely different copy of your memories that are somehow stored in the soul, but it currently has no access to?

If even just in one case the investigator and witness NDEr were not completely lying or deluded, then the blanket all inclusive falsity claim fails.

At least with memory I think paradoxical & terminal lucidity in the paper Sam posted is enough to question the idea mind is dependent on brain.

So even before NDEs we have those cases + Sudden Savants + people living relatively normally with minimal brain matter.