Keith Augustine interview

Desperado,

I do understand your desire to get to the truth about the reality of near death experiences but presenting Keith Augustine's "nits" to be "re-picked" is never going to resolve anything or satisfy you.

Keith is an ideological debunker. I've had quite a few email exchanges with him, the last time I sent him confirmation from Dr Robert Spetzler (Head of Barrow Neurological Institute) that Pam Reynolds was under burst suppression when she heard the conversation about her arteries.

Keith responded by informing me that he doesn't pay much attention to what "this" or "that" doctor says about the case.

Funnily enough however, he does listen to what militant atheist and failed NDE debunker, Dr Gerald Woerlee (who was never involved in the case) has to say. So, as regards the question of "inconsistencies" and cherry picking, I think Augustine takes the biscuit and cannot be taken too seriously.

(email available for admin privately if required)

Hear hear!

[Laird]

Sabom , as you know of course, wasn't there at Barrow.

Oh, did I say Sabom? I meant Greene. Who relayed his hallway conversation to Sabom, so he knew to send the wrong image first. But of course this is all anecdotal so it doesn't count anyway.

Desperado,

I do understand your desire to get to the truth about the reality of near death experiences but presenting Keith Augustine's "nits" to be "re-picked" is never going to resolve anything or satisfy you.

Keith is an ideological debunker. I've had quite a few email exchanges with him, the last time I sent him confirmation from Dr Robert Spetzler (Head of Barrow Neurological Institute) that Pam Reynolds was under burst suppression when she heard the conversation about her arteries.

Keith responded by informing me that he doesn't pay much attention to what "this" or "that" doctor says about the case.

Funnily enough however, he does listen to what militant atheist and failed NDE debunker, Dr Gerald Woerlee (who was never involved in the case) has to say. So, as regards the question of "inconsistencies" and cherry picking, I think Augustine takes the biscuit and cannot be taken too seriously.

(email available for admin privately if required)

I understand the frustration tim, thanks. At this point I'd like to be clear I have pretty much written Keith off as I have found my own answers to his arguments. It's just that single one that I mentioned never really got touched much by others. 

I'll be the first to tell you that it seems pretty weak and yes, "nit picky". If debunkers like Augustine ever have a real valid criticism of a case, it seems to be a very small or odd one that even an idiot could figure out isn't really that significant. He can be right, but the stuff I find myself agreeing on usually isn't here nor there in relation to validity of the evidence. It's just not nearly as damning as he thinks. 

Yeah I heard about the email exchanges over Pam Reynolds in another post, and he has never been much a "balanced" guy for sure. He has got to have one of the deepest faiths in materialism I have ever seen. And it's been a chain of a events with him in my eyes. He has long since taken the materialist interpretation of consciousness as fact and you know the rest.

So no, by now I'm pretty well covered on his usual runaround

Forgetting about the afterlife stuff (I don't personally believe NDE's say anything for or against an afterlife - but I do believe that it's likely some type-of-experience may follow my death)... and ignoring Augustine's philosophy arguments, because I think they are pretty much irrelevant.

 Hey Max, how come you think NDEs don't say anything for or against? I'm not arguing for a literal understanding of NDE's but they do say something about some experiences that happen near death, and atleast in some cases when the brain can't support (according to modern understandings) those kinds of experiences.

I used to read the Skeptiko forums, and have a general sense of the way you think about EM and the brain. What puzzles me about the idea regarding a deep mechanism, a deep structure, or something of the like, an idea that a range of people share, is that there doesn't seem to be any evidential traction to this. I don't see how an EM field would not suppose some degree of metabolism needed on the part of the brain to be causally efficient in regards to the experiences in NDEs, and at least in some NDEs we know that there is very little activity going on in the brain, and at the very least *those* situations seem to be evidential respect to the possibility of rich, subjective experience being possible without what we call a "physical"* support.  It just strikes me as implausible that this experientially rich experience is running on fumes.

I agree that current understandings of the brain are limited, perhaps severely limited, and I agree that we see intelligent behaviour associated with simple organisms, however, the *kind* of experiences ocurring in NDEs are, I think, quite more complex than what we see in simple organisms that lack neurological structures, I don't even know how many people would be willing to ascribe such a rich experience, or even a moderately rich experience, to said organisms.

*The problem with physicality and materiality, however, is that they are rather obscure categories. We don't even have a clear notion of what we mean when we say that something is physical, or material, and there seems to be no reason why the subtrate of reality wouldn't generate different structural relationships that sustain different experiential realities. That is to say, we think that when we posit survival we are talking about a reality that is qualitatively distinct from our material, phsyical, embodied reality, I'm not even sure that's wise to do.

It doesn’t make any sense to me that you claim on one hand that we know there is not a lot of activity going on within the brain during the NDE (presumably you mean from medical EEG measurements), and then to suggest it’s implausible that these near death experiences are “running on fumes”. Particularly when I’ve just pointed out that some simple organisms do just fine in navigating spacetime, and behaving apparently intelligently, when they don’t even possess any neurons, so couldn’t produce a measurable EEG from firing neurons if they tried.

Nobody knows how sensitive the brain might be in an energy starved state, although we’ve got some possible suggestions from Borgijin’s work. We do know that some more complex organisms such as rodents, birds and turtles are exquisitely sensitive in just their normal state to magnetic fields. Fields thousands of times weaker than the earth’s magnetic field, even hypomagnetic fields are generating behavioural effects. Nobody knows what mechanism is producing the results in these behavioural studies, but the suggestion is that it is operating at a level such as the magnetic moment and spin. We even have some evidence that these hyperweak effects are involved in some way with encoding memory.

I think that there are cases, like the Pam Reynolds case, as well as the cases that comprise the studies that Greyson, Van Lommel, Parnia, have described, in which measurement of brain activity indicates that there is no significant activity going on. Of course, you can and would reply that the issue hinges on what we consider "significant", and my reply is that the kind of experiences that are reported in NDEs are all associated in otherwise normal conditions with an energetic footprint that would be picked upon by measuring instruments; if these experiences are ocurring when the brain is not active, this suggests that they don't depend upon any kind of activity in the brain per se. This is why I am saying that if not outright shut down, some NDEs ocurr at best when the brain is running on fumes, regarding its metabolic and electrical activity. This is, of course, not always the case, but if it is true for some NDEs that the experience is not related to particular brain activity, I don't see why it wouldn't be true for all NDEs.

You mention Borgjin, but in those cases the brain is not "energy deprived", because the spike in coherent brain activity is precisely the "footprint" I am referring to in the first paragraph. Is there any evidence that NDEs that occur in monitored patients are seen to be associated with the kind of spike you are referring to?

Anyhow, I don't see how you can successfully argue that NDEs are a reconstruction of information relayed through EM fields when some OBEs of NDEs happen when there is no one around. In the old skeptiko forums another member posted a thread about a pilot that was flying alone and crashed into a bog, the thread was about multiple timelines, but in any case the pilot was in the middle of nowhere, had his OBE, and only after some time did anyone arrive at the scene (prompted by the distress signal). You would have to argue that the brain reconstructed that experience after the rescue team arrived, but then why didn't the OBE include the actual team itself? It was just the guy in the middle of nowhere. You will say that it is not veridical, but I don't see how that changes anything. You've discussed the case of the tennis shoe before, and argued that the students that were bent on debunking said that the shoe could be seen from the ground. Well, that doesn't really explain how in the experience Maria was seeing the shoe from up close and from the vantage point that she describes, seeing as that particular vantage point couldn't be reconstructed from supposed observers.

You might study what medical EEG is actually measuring, so that you understand the limitations of medical EEG. A major problem for your argument is the existence of well known organisms - such as paramecium - which navigate within spacetime, and exhibit complex behavior, but which do not contain any neurons at all.

I am aware that EEGs measure only the upper layers of the brain, and not deeper activity. Couple of things here: There's no evidence that deeper structures in the brain are associated with anything like waking experience, much less the kind of experiences that are reported in NDEs; many of the experiences remember the experience vividly even though they don't remember other events in the vicinity of the NDE. Now, you might say that it is reconstructed after the fact, but this doesn't account for the sense of continuity in various NDEs, case in point Pam's NDE, nor the fact that even after resucitation many patients have a swollen brain that is barely capable of processing simple elements of the environment: patients are often confused, don't make sense, have delusions or hallucinations, etc.

The fact that there are such organisms does nothing to my arguement, are you willing to ascribe a rich experiential reality to such organisms? If you don't, why don't you?

How does your model account for OBEs and NDEs that occur to people who are alone? How does it account for perceptions that wouldn't be available to other observers? Are you telling me that people, from the street, could see the scuffing on the shoe? That they could see the shoelace under the shoe? And that somehow María's brain reconstructed, either when compromised or after resucitation, a complex hallucination out of the aggregate of observers? How would perceptions be aggregated? Why don't NDEs feature memories from those in the scene? A human being has tens of thousands of impressions, thoughts, memories every day, why are NDEs structurally similar and not a dissociated composite of thoughts, memories, emotions, of those around?