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| InterestedinPsi's Most Liked Post | ||
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| RE: Debate: That veridical NDEs are a myth [split: A splendid video about evolution] | Yesterday, 05:55 PM | 5 |
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| Debate: That veridical NDEs are a myth [split: A splendid video about evolution] |
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Skeptic vs. proponent discussion
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| sbu Wrote: (2025-08-30, 07:44 PM) -- I’m all for gathering more data. However, if this study is carried out and the results are negative, the NDE community will simply cry foul play. -- Suppose the NDE community does that. So what? You seem to think that uniquely discredits veridical NDE proponents, but debunkers are no less prone to those kinds of post hoc attempts to rationalize away findings unfavorable to their views, or to ignore them altogether. A good example would be when Helmut Schmidt pretty much obliterated all the methodological complaints about psi research by introducing truly random number generators, especially when paired with precognitive experimental paradigms, and achieved many impressive results contra skeptical expectations. To run damage control, first debunkers speculated (hoped) that his random number generators were biased, hence not actually random, but, as debunker Charles Akers discovered directly, that line of critique was bogus. Then they fell back on the tried-and-true fraud supposition, since Schmidt often did experiments alone. Consequently Schmidt designed and implemented a thoroughly fraud-proofed multi-experimenter method to test retroactive PK (still achieving significant effects), which even James Kennedy, probably the most competent critic of parapsychology (who nonetheless believes in psi given events in his own life), takes to be remarkable, as he noted in his paper "Experimenter Fraud: What are Appropriate Methodological Standards?" (2017): "Special experimental designs with extraordinary measures to prevent fraud have also been described (Palmer, 2016; Schmidt, Morris, & Rudolph, 1986; Schmidt & Stapp, 1993); however, these measures are not practical for most research." Schmidt conducted a number of these unusually rigorous experiments with collectively highly significant results, completely refuting his critics: "Alcock (1987, 1988) and Akers (1987) alluded to one RNG-PK experiment conducted by Schmidt that was particularly well-designed to guard against fraud and error, in that certain crucial parts of the procedure (namely, the random assignment of the target directions that participants should aim for, and evaluation of the resulting data) were supervised by independent observers (Schmidt et al., 1986). Although the overall result was significant (z = 2.71, p = .0032), Alcock and Akers both took a cautious 'let’s wait and see' stance, urging that further replications using the same type of design were necessary. It turns out that this particular experiment was the first in a series of five (Schmidt & Braud, 1993; Schmidt et al., 1986; Schmidt et al., 1994; Schmidt & Schlitz, 1989; Schmidt & Stapp, 1993) that Schmidt conducted with independent observers. Three of these five experiments had overall outcomes at or exceeding the conventional level of statistical significance (i.e., z ≥ 1.64, p ≤ .05), and when evaluated altogether their results remained highly significant (Z = 3.67, p = .00012), with an associated odds ratio of about 8,200 to one (H. Schmidt, 1993a). This seemed to indicate that positive PK results were still achievable in Schmidt’s experiments even when the conditions were tightly monitored and controlled." Unsurprisingly, debunkers don't talk about these studies, preferring to pretend they don't exist. They'd rather repeat stories about flaws in J.B. Rhine's early work so they can keep up the illusion of "definitely nothing to see here." You make many other doubtful or erroneous claims and arguments. 1. "'the brain flatlines within seconds' myth has been dispelled" "We now know that during cardiac arrest, brain activity can be retained at a certain level" People who knew what they were talking about were never arguing that there's certainly absolutely no ongoing neurological activity during, for example, cardiac arrest NDEs. The issue has always been about neural activity sufficient to support complex conscious experience. This is apparent, for example, in Kelly et al.'s book Irreducible Mind from way back in 2007: "the current mainstream doctrine of biological naturalism has coalesced neuroscientifically around the family of 'global workspace' theories. Despite differences of detail and interpretation, all of these theories have in common the view that the essential substrate for conscious experience--the neuroelectric activities that make it possible and that constitute or directly reflect the necessary and sufficient conditions for its occurrence--consist of synchronous or at least coherent high-frequency (gamma-band, roughly 30-70 Hz) EEG oscillations linking widely separated, computationally specialized, regions of the brain. An enormous amount of empirical evidence supports the existence of these mind-brain correlations under normal conditions of mental life, and we do not dispute this evidence. The conventional theoretical interpretation of this correlation, however--that the observed neuroelectric activity itself generates or constitutes the conscious experience--must be incorrect, because in both general anesthesia and cardiac arrest, the specific neuroelectric conditions that are held to be necessary and sufficient for conscious experience are abolished--and yet vivid, even heightened, awareness, thinking, and memory formation can still occur." "How might scientists intent upon defending the conventional view respond to the challenge presented by cases occurring under conditions like these? First, it will undoubtedly be objected that even in the presence of a flat-lined EEG there still could be undetected brain activity going on. Current scalp-EEG technology detects only activity common to large populations of suitably oriented neurons, mainly in the cerebral cortex; and so perhaps future improvements in technology will allow us to detect additional brain activity not visible to us at present. This objection may seem to have some force, because both experimental and modeling studies show that certain kinds of electrical events in the brain, such as highly localized epileptic spikes, do not appear in scalp recordings (Pacia & Ebersole, 1997). Moreover, recordings carried out under conditions of general anesthesia comparable to those used with Pam Reynolds provide direct evidence that some residual electrical activity can appear subcortically or in the neighborhood of the ventricles, even in combination with an essentially flat scalp EEG (Karasawa et al., 2001). "This first objection, however, completely misses the mark. The issue is not whether there is brain activity of any kind whatsoever, but whether there is brain activity of the specific form regarded by contemporary neuroscience as the necessary condition of conscious experience. Activity of this form is eminently detectable by current EEG technology, and as we have already shown, it is abolished both by adequate general anesthesia and by cardiac arrest." | ||
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