The Limits of Science

[skakos]

My question was simple: Do you believe consciosuness is produced by the brain? ...

No, I told you, 'brain' is a misnomer in my opinion, I think consciousness is the product of having a body with senses in an external world and I think a body needs to have a CNS of a certain complexity to have the consciousness that we do and I tend to suspect(if you and are I are talking about self-consciousness here) that it also needs to be two bodys that recognise each other and have a language to truly make the consciousness that is us.

Do you have evidence for that claim? ...

None other than just being one and what I appear to be is a body in an external world that recognises others and can talk about it.

Do you believe you have solved the consciousness problem which baffles scientists?

I think they haven't yet framed the questions in the way that their methodology can answer them.

OK. So you believe that complexity is related to having a consciousness. Good. But in what way? I mean what role does that body play related to consciousness? Is it that consciousness "exists somewhere outside the body" and a complex enough nervous system is able to act as a "reciever" for that consciousness?

[skakos]

Dean Radin is the central figure in all published research on paranormal psychology. I became very familiar with him, when studying and following his work with a clear conscience and an innocent curiosity. Even then, I do not find his work convincing, particularly in those places where there is a demand that fundamental laws of physics are violated. In an ideal world we would take each claim of Radin one-by-one, and remain focused. ( rather than just blasting the issue with catch-all summaries and ranting.)

You should read about what people with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy experience during seizures. They are identical to OBEs. There is simply no reason to think that OBEs (and associated NDEs) stand as evidence of anything supernatural.

Surely people with Near Death Experiences experience things other people experience (I am not sure in what degree, but for the sake of the discussion let's assume this). The weird in these cases is not what they experience (which is interesting on its own, sure) but mainly the fact that they experience it while having zero activity in the brain! Totally different from anything else in that way...

See the difference?

PS. And in the cases you mention - although not relevant to the NDEs I mentioned - what do you mean by "I do not find his work convincing, particularly in those places where there is a demand that fundamental laws of physics are violated"? Most of the times the opposite is the case: we believe that all physical laws MUST apply everywhere/ anytime, so we find it easy to reject as true anything that violates them...

[Ginkgo]

OK. So you believe that complexity is related to having a consciousness. Good. But in what way? I mean what role does that body play related to consciousness? Is it that consciousness "exists somewhere outside the body" and a complex enough nervous system is able to act as a "reciever" for that consciousness?

What you are saying here would fit in rather well with a quantum interpretation of consciousness. Not strictly scientific, but interesting nonetheless.

[Arising_uk]

OK. So you believe that complexity is related to having a consciousness. Good. But in what way? I mean what role does that body play related to consciousness? Is it that consciousness "exists somewhere outside the body" and a complex enough nervous system is able to act as a "reciever" for that consciousness?

No.

You've already said this and again I'll refer you to this post about halfway down for why I think this idea fails.

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10567&hilit=radio&start=60

[skakos]

OK. So you believe that complexity is related to having a consciousness. Good. But in what way? I mean what role does that body play related to consciousness? Is it that consciousness "exists somewhere outside the body" and a complex enough nervous system is able to act as a "reciever" for that consciousness?

No.

You've already said this and again I'll refer you to this post about halfway down for why I think this idea fails.

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10567&hilit=radio&start=60

OK. Could you please write what you mean? I do not want to guess. It is YOUR opinion after all.

[skakos]

OK. So you believe that complexity is related to having a consciousness. Good. But in what way? I mean what role does that body play related to consciousness? Is it that consciousness "exists somewhere outside the body" and a complex enough nervous system is able to act as a "reciever" for that consciousness?

What you are saying here would fit in rather well with a quantum interpretation of consciousness. Not strictly scientific, but interesting nonetheless.

Quantum mechanics is filled with these conclusions that some years ago would be tagged as "NON-scientific"...

[Godfree]

Atheists have a hypochondriac moment when they realise they have 'faith'

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith

confidence or trust in a person or thing

Everyone on earth has faith when they are driving their car, faith the brakes will work when they push them. You have faith right now that the light travel time from the screen to your eyes is getting the message across correctly.

I'm an Atheist and I have faith that you are a religious person who believes in god and life after death ,
I have zero faith in those ideas ,
science tends to put a % of probability ,
the chances of religion being real , I give .ooooooooooooooooooo1 , in other words , almost zero ,
I have faith that science will get a lot closer to the truth than religion will ,
I have faith that religion will remain ignorant ,
and I have faith that you will not agree with any of this ...

[Godfree]

OK. So you believe that complexity is related to having a consciousness. Good. But in what way? I mean what role does that body play related to consciousness? Is it that consciousness "exists somewhere outside the body" and a complex enough nervous system is able to act as a "reciever" for that consciousness?

What you are saying here would fit in rather well with a quantum interpretation of consciousness. Not strictly scientific, but interesting nonetheless.

Consciousness , the ability to extract memories and arrange them into something that makes sense ,
a blind deaf quadraplegic has a consciousness ,
the stored memory is the most important ,if you can't remember yesterday ,
you will have to learn it all over again , so the ability to store information ,
if you are trying to create the science that would allow for a consciousness like spirit or soul ,?
then you would have to answer how to store information , out of the body ,
without these memories able to be accessed , you know nothing ,,!!!

[Arising_uk]

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10567&hilit=radio&start=60

OK. Could you please write what you mean? I do not want to guess. It is YOUR opinion after all.

No need to guess, at least with respect to what I think about your idea of the body as receiver of a transmitted consciousness, as if you click the link above and look for my second post you will find out.

[Kuznetzova]

what do you mean by "I do not find his work convincing, particularly in those places where there is a demand that fundamental laws of physics are violated"? Most of the times the opposite is the case: we believe that all physical laws MUST apply everywhere/ anytime, so we find it easy to reject as true anything that violates them...

My fundamental problem is a methodological one. We do not change the laws of physics by measuring human beings in labs, or by taking opinion polls. Word-of-mouth does not constitute the type of evidence that is collected in order to amend the laws of physics. You might not like that personally, and I might not like it -- but there is a well-established methodology for this now.

So for example, Dean Radin has measured the pupils of women in a lab who were being shown horrifying or stressful images flashed in sequence against images of flowers, puppies, and landscapes. His statistics suggest women's pupils dilate prior to a horrible image being shown. That's called predicting the future. Predicting the future, is, of course , in violation of Special Relativity. The problem for paranormal research is that no matter how much evidence Radin collected, and now matter how compelling his data was, that data is never used to change the laws of physics. It is the wrong type of data for that science. I don't think this is a conspiracy and I don't think it's a taboo. Rather it's just an entrenched methodology.

At some level, Dean Radin knows this -- that is why he has changed the name of his research to "Paranormal Psychology". Psychology is the correct word here. (Since I'm on the subject, Radin's actual published evidence is not very compelling. Female pupils dilate roughly 7% above random chance, which is a fluke in my opinion.)

Human pupil's dilating is ...just nearly.. physical in nature. I mean we are dealing with body tissue moving after all. But back to this issue of word-of-mouth, and how word-of-mouth is used in sciences, particularly the hard sciences. By and large, there is no space for word-of-mouth in physics or chemistry. Outside of psychology and psychiatry, I can't think of any science that allows word-of-mouth to act as data points for evidence. For this reason, Near Death Experiences and Out-of-body have a hard road to climb.

What the paranormal advocate usually says: "While the person was floating outside their body they saw something they could not have seen, or they overheard some conversation in a far away room." This is an attempt at corroboration of word-of-mouth. That is, the paranormal advocate is aware that word-of-mouth is highly suspect. The more conservative example is Remote Viewing. More conservative because it does not rely on all sorts of middle concepts like souls floating around "outside the body" and such. Occam's Razor would say that Remote Viewing is easier to corroborate than OBE.

Let me add a final note on OBE here. Today we have a very good understanding of why human beings bodies can sense the outside world. Light of a certain narrow spectrum is emitted from surfaces as radiation. The lens of the eye focuses this radiation on the back of the eyeball. Retinal cells respond to this light and send nerve signals to the visual cortex. This was not understood during the medieval ages. That is to say, the method by which the environment is perceived was a form of "magic" as far as anyone knew. OBEs require that I accept that a spirit floating around outside a body would "see" the environment. Worse, this "spirit/soul" thing happens to perceive the environment precisely as a human eye-brain system would see it, precisely in the visual range of EM radiation. I don't think that makes very much sense. It makes sense only from some magical medieval context, not from a context of modern biology.

[Kuznetzova]

The Waning of Materialism
Edited by Robert C. Koons and George Bealer

http://global.oup.com/academic/product/ ... escription

[skakos]

what do you mean by "I do not find his work convincing, particularly in those places where there is a demand that fundamental laws of physics are violated"? Most of the times the opposite is the case: we believe that all physical laws MUST apply everywhere/ anytime, so we find it easy to reject as true anything that violates them...

My fundamental problem is a methodological one. We do not change the laws of physics by measuring human beings in labs, or by taking opinion polls. Word-of-mouth does not constitute the type of evidence that is collected in order to amend the laws of physics. You might not like that personally, and I might not like it -- but there is a well-established methodology for this now.

So for example, Dean Radin has measured the pupils of women in a lab who were being shown horrifying or stressful images flashed in sequence against images of flowers, puppies, and landscapes. His statistics suggest women's pupils dilate prior to a horrible image being shown. That's called predicting the future. Predicting the future, is, of course , in violation of Special Relativity. The problem for paranormal research is that no matter how much evidence Radin collected, and now matter how compelling his data was, that data is never used to change the laws of physics. It is the wrong type of data for that science. I don't think this is a conspiracy and I don't think it's a taboo. Rather it's just an entrenched methodology.

At some level, Dean Radin knows this -- that is why he has changed the name of his research to "Paranormal Psychology". Psychology is the correct word here. (Since I'm on the subject, Radin's actual published evidence is not very compelling. Female pupils dilate roughly 7% above random chance, which is a fluke in my opinion.)

Human pupil's dilating is ...just nearly.. physical in nature. I mean we are dealing with body tissue moving after all. But back to this issue of word-of-mouth, and how word-of-mouth is used in sciences, particularly the hard sciences. By and large, there is no space for word-of-mouth in physics or chemistry. Outside of psychology and psychiatry, I can't think of any science that allows word-of-mouth to act as data points for evidence. For this reason, Near Death Experiences and Out-of-body have a hard road to climb.

What the paranormal advocate usually says: "While the person was floating outside their body they saw something they could not have seen, or they overheard some conversation in a far away room." This is an attempt at corroboration of word-of-mouth. That is, the paranormal advocate is aware that word-of-mouth is highly suspect. The more conservative example is Remote Viewing. More conservative because it does not rely on all sorts of middle concepts like souls floating around "outside the body" and such. Occam's Razor would say that Remote Viewing is easier to corroborate than OBE.

Let me add a final note on OBE here. Today we have a very good understanding of why human beings bodies can sense the outside world. Light of a certain narrow spectrum is emitted from surfaces as radiation. The lens of the eye focuses this radiation on the back of the eyeball. Retinal cells respond to this light and send nerve signals to the visual cortex. This was not understood during the medieval ages. That is to say, the method by which the environment is perceived was a form of "magic" as far as anyone knew. OBEs require that I accept that a spirit floating around outside a body would "see" the environment. Worse, this "spirit/soul" thing happens to perceive the environment precisely as a human eye-brain system would see it, precisely in the visual range of EM radiation. I don't think that makes very much sense. It makes sense only from some magical medieval context, not from a context of modern biology.

You mention all too many things in one post.

I will try to address them all.

First of all, the "word of mouth" as you call it is nothing else than the experience some people have. And experience means "evidence". This is what science is based on. Surely being objective is hard, but which experiment is 100% fullproof objective? When you set up an experiment you somehow predetermine what you want to find (e.g. CERN LHC was built to detect particles - it cannot "discover" anything else - even though theories in the next years might say that "particles do not exist") The attempt to document NDEs is made by doctors and we have made all attempts to be objective - not measuring brain function is one such attempt of objectivity. Surely they can get better? OK. So can every experiment.

Secondly, the experiment with eye dillation before seeing the images shows something important. And I do not agree that 7% is just withing the margin of statistical "randomness". Toss a coin 1000 times and if you get 7% more heads then you will know something is wrong...

See for example the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/. Is that "objective"? Can it get "better"? Yes. And yes.

And do not forget that physics and chemistry "explain" things WITHIN the boundaries of their axioms. They do not explain things starting from a white piece of paper. They are based on assumptions and dogmas and their objectivity is an illusion, mainly sustained by their proponents who have no philosophical education whatsoever.

[Godfree]

The Waning of Materialism
Edited by Robert C. Koons and George Bealer

http://global.oup.com/academic/product/ ... escription

Our government here in NZ has been trying a concept called trickle down ,
an excuse for the rich and powerful to grab more of the money ,
with the pretense that the money will trickle down to those at the bottom ,
like capitalism it is a failed experiment , america fell for it , russia fell for it ,
they both have rediculously low top tax rates , because the rich and powerful told them to do so ,
14 or 15% , while the poorest pay more ,
capitalism gone mad , running a muck and out of control ,
trickle up is the best way to run an economy ,
give the money to the people at the bottom and it is back in circulation ,
the next day ,
instead of being locked away in the family trust never to be seen again ,
so capitalism a failed experiment ,
religion a failed philosophy ,
the bbt , another failed philosophy ,
we get a lot wrong don't we ,,???

[Kuznetzova]

First of all, the "word of mouth" as you call it is nothing else than the experience some people have. And experience means "evidence". This is what science is based on. Surely being objective is hard, but which experiment is 100% fullproof objective? When you set up an experiment you somehow predetermine what you want to find (e.g. CERN LHC was built to detect particles - it cannot "discover" anything else - even though theories in the next years might say that "particles do not exist") The attempt to document NDEs is made by doctors and we have made all attempts to be objective - not measuring brain function is one such attempt of objectivity. Surely they can get better? OK. So can every experiment.

Secondly, the experiment with eye dillation before seeing the images shows something important. And I do not agree that 7% is just withing the margin of statistical "randomness". Toss a coin 1000 times and if you get 7% more heads then you will know something is wrong...

See for example the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/. Is that "objective"? Can it get "better"? Yes. And yes.

And do not forget that physics and chemistry "explain" things WITHIN the boundaries of their axioms. They do not explain things starting from a white piece of paper. They are based on assumptions and dogmas and their objectivity is an illusion, mainly sustained by their proponents who have no philosophical education whatsoever.

Some recent Dean Radin experiments. Website contains the whole published paper too. (Personally, I think the paper is more interesting than the article).

http://noetic.org/research/project/doub ... xperiment/

[skakos]

Will check it out. Thanks.