Afterlife Thoughts!

[Ouroboros]

Pardon my ignorace here Hans, but what has kept other species from developing a mind as humans? Do you think the dinosaurs became smart enough to kill themselves off?

They do have minds, granted not as highly developed as ours, but they do have minds. Apes have social order and ethics. Dogs know about fairness. A fly makes decisions about which flower to fly to. It's all there.

 

It just so happened that we were the ones winning out in the lotto of higher intelligence. But think about this: lets say there is a species on another planet, which is far more intelligent that us. When they see us, they would see us as nothing but lower level species. We would be less intelligent than them, and they would ask the same question you made, why didn't humans evolve into the higher intelligence they possess? The answer is partly pure chance, even though it's not the whole answer. If Bob and Bill both play on Lotto, and only Bob wins. Why didn't Bill win? According to your question, Bob can only win Lotto, if and only if Bill also wins the Lotto. That doesn't make sense. Just because one specific thing happened, while another more general thing didn't, it doesn't take away the argument to how it happened.

 

One reason why it was more likely humans would evolve from the apes is the ability to walk, run, climb, etc. The pre-apes (our ancestor) were more dexterous than other animals, which means it had a better chance of using tools, like sticks, rocks, etc, and could hence learn more about the environment. Without that, it's less likely a species could evolve knowledge, and higher intelligence. So it's not totally chance, but somewhat.

[BuddyFerris]

... Ahh... but you have been programmed by others. We all have and most times we don't recognize it; a great many people never recognize it and simply assume it was their own ideas alone. If you don't believe you have programmed your own daughter, that's fascinating. "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." What do you thing is going on there if not programming? Where do you think that observation behind that proverb came from?

 

... No, I'm not describing machines in place of people. Quite the opposite. I'm arguing that being human is more than being a bag of chemical responses, and my drawing off of Hans example of the emergent program is to illustrate that. I resist notions of reductionism.

 

The analogy of computers works on certain levels, but is imperfect to fully talk about the human experience. It does however talk about the immaterial aspects of how we as humans exist. We "transcend" the machine on many levels, but we are however tied to it, just as we are tied to the physicality of the universe existing as well.

 

Our experience agrees to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, the interchange of ideas, the conflicts of differing opinions, the common causes, the shared perspectives, and so on. What our experience concludes and what is perhaps missing in your description is the oversight of such processes. Our awareness of ourselves suggests we live one step above the automatic machine processes, do we not?

Buddy

As I said above, we do make conscious choices, but we also are programmed without awareness on a conscious level. That's pretty hard to deny, but difficult to accept sometimes because we want to feel we're in complete control at all times. That's simply not a fact, and explains what the whole advertising world exploits in trying to get us to buy products. They sell ideas on the notion of "feelings", not cognitive reasoning! Goodness, the examples would be endless.

 

Again, I don't want to get to drawn off into the computer analogy as it's not intended to describe everything of what it is to be human. I will get back to the earlier points shortly after having taken a few day break from this discussion. Good conversation.

Hello, friend.

We agree in great measure, of course, which is probably what makes such discussions both interesting and difficult. The analogous description of the human experience in terms of computer programming is immediately interpretive, as you've pointed out in other discussions, and therefore problematic. Does a program or the content of active memory have an existence when you pull the plug on the computer? No. Not functionally anyway, and not at all unless you're going to equate the electronic etchings on the various media to 'existence'. Thus the problem with the computer analogy, which as you've said you would prefer not to continue so far.

 

We do make conscious choices, then. With that, we begin afresh and in agreement. In the context of the thread, though, if you pull the plug on the machine to which we are tied, does the transcendent persist in any fashion? The evidence for NDE is inadequate for basing any important life decisions, but is does support strongly a rather demonstrably loose coupling between 'you' and your 'machine'.

Buddy

[Antlerman]

Ahhh... but how would you know? Have you defined reality? And if so how?

 

I said it rarely succeeds, in case there is any philosophy that has succeeded in defining reality. It is a fairly straight forward process to find those philosophies that don't define reality. For example you have already found Christian philosophy is a bit short of being about reality.

No.. I think it does define reality in every instance, just as any philosophy/mythology sets itself to the task of giving existence definition. We can't know reality, we can only define our perceptions and call that reality. How we define those, is the point of this line of thought.

 

However, you are still doing what I pointed out. You have an idea of reality, by saying it misses the mark. How do you define the mark? How did you get that idea? Point in case:

 

What is not being taken into account is that awareness is easily fooled about the nature of reality.

Which is defined how?

 

Most of the more about reality that we have produced in recorded history has proved to be bull shit of the highest order.

Has it? Hasn’t it mostly been an exercise in “defining” reality through the framework of language? Isn’t this also what science does? Gives us the tools to look into our world and a provide a framework of language to discuss the mechanical aspects of it, which we in turn define as reality? Or do we have some absolute that transcends and evolving perspective by which to say “This is reality and this is not”? Are we replacing finding God in religion with finding God in science? My argument is that we should find God in our humanity which exists and explores aspects of itself through its perception of itself within the world. It exists in the idea living within the world through the machine. It's not just the machine.

 

Nevertheless, we've managed to produce a few diamonds of knowledge mostly in the last few centuries.

Are they diamonds to you, and that rest garbage? Or in their worlds in the context of how they lived it was all diamonds, in that it worked for them? In other words, how you define reality today, those things aren’t “relevant”, not bullshit. They’re bullshit only in that they don’t pertain to the current context, but prior to that they served a function. That we outgrow that need, or that it no longer pertains to our context, is beside the point.

 

For most of our stretch of existence the species has been content to shit in the woods so to speak. The art that we produced in prehistory, in spite of the self serving awe heaped upon it can be equaled or surpassed by the average 5th grader today.

I wouldn’t say this is true, if you’re talking about modern man, as opposed to our ancestors in the forest primeval.

 

That you can equate the “art” of a 5th grader with the earliest forms of human expression in art through cave drawings, is a shocking comparison. Mere simple representation is not what early art was, nor what any art is. The value judgment of the “quality” of the form misses what drove it. Even though its form can be judged as “crude”, what drove the creation of it verses what a 5th grader does is on entirely different levels. I don’t look at art as “pretty” "cute", or "nice". That's not art. That's ornamentation or decoration. I look at art as expressively revealing. Most 5th grader don't produce art. That's simple drawings and representation, as opposed to expressions of culture or humanity. I'm sure there are some 5th graders with the depth of soul to use the form to speak through, but that would be quite rare.

 

In short, the cave drawings were not about "oooh cool, look what I drew".

 

I am interested in facing reality about my nature as directly as possible.

Which is a philosophical choice and approach. My point. We can look at the machine and conclude we are nothing more that sophisticated tape worms on legs with big brains living an illusionary life in the face of reality; or we can choose to see ourselves a wonderfully unique and special within the context of the pool of life. Science doesn’t inform us as to that choice. We do.

 

We do through a system of immaterial, abstractions laced with emotional significations for the purpose of experience. Do we choose to reduce it all to the machine, or do we choose to see ourselves as free? In either case, that very choice is how we go about defining reality for us. We can look at the same thing, and see it many different ways. There is no single reality, nor can we know that as an absolute.

[Antlerman]

With that, we begin afresh and in agreement. In the context of the thread, though, if you pull the plug on the machine to which we are tied, does the transcendent persist in any fashion?

As I tried to state in the computer program analogy, I would say that my uniqueness is and will continue to be a part of others and the world as a whole after my demise. In that sense I continue. However, my own awareness and experience of me, or my uniqueness will be non-existent since my own self-awareness ends with the termination of the machine I live in. I will continue, but I won't know it or experience it.

 

The evidence for NDE is inadequate for basing any important life decisions, but is does support strongly a rather demonstrably loose coupling between 'you' and your 'machine'.

Well, I argue that the NDE is adequate as a source of insights on which to affect one's perceptions and consequently actions. Not in the sense that it in itself offers answers, but insights though which we can find answers in ourselves. At least that's my experience.

 

Again I don't see that the NDE is a demonstration of something "outside you", other than it showing that there is potential above what we see in the machine - within us. As I have more time, I'll pull back some layers to that. I see "God" as an expression of that potential in us that we symbolize externally. To find God then, is to find yourself through the potentials that are available in us: through perception, through openness, through the Will. All religion is an expression of that; not the other way around.

[Guest end3]

Which is a philosophical choice and approach. My point. We can look at the machine and conclude we are nothing more that sophisticated tape worms on legs with big brains living an illusionary life in the face of reality; or we can choose to see ourselves a wonderfully unique and special within the context of the pool of life. Science doesn’t inform us as to that choice. We do.

 

We do through a system of immaterial, abstractions laced with emotional significations for the purpose of experience. Do we choose to reduce it all to the machine, or do we choose to see ourselves as free? In either case, that very choice is how we go about defining reality for us. We can look at the same thing, and see it many different ways. There is no single reality, nor can we know that as an absolute.

 

It appears to me if you start at the particle level, the pushes and pulls, the relationships, can be defined/described to a point at which they become certain and real. Moving up to the "machine" level, it seems as though the trouble forms when the pushes and pulls between extremely complex systems don't produce a certainty within a reality.

 

I do think language plays a large part as you say, for example in your last paragraph, the phrase I highlighted reminds me of the difference between a legalistic (OT) and the "freedom in Christ (NT) thing.

 

The point is, if all things have an relational order, can we define this within a very complex system or does it become become "unreal" or indefinable aka, a spiritual existance.

 

That's as deep as my complex system can go this evening guys.

 

Edit: I think it would be in error to dismiss the possibility of a push or pull within a system we can't yet define, huh?

[Antlerman]

Is material able to produce art? It better be if we want any. There isn't anything else around. In point of fact material doesn't even have to be in a living arrangement to produce art.

 

Well now... but it isn't art until someone looks at it and responds to it. If you're going to argue that the sunset is a projection of beauty without a human interpreting it as such, then you would have to argue that nature without man creates beauty in and of itself; that beauty exists independently as an innate quality to existence. At which point, you are now arguing quite closely to the existence of God, an innate fabric of the universe independent of man's existence and his perceptions and interpretation of what is called beauty. Are you?

 

Actually, that is a concept I play with as part of a way to look at the universe and existence that transcends mere human perception, or at the least a way to mythologize it for the purpose of creating a certain "sacredness" to the experience of the aesthetic in the human experience; the innate quality of beauty in the universe that all life is motivated towards, which act drives the survival of life itself. But that's a bit of religious leap, albeit there is some credence offered within science to support this: http://www.dallasinstitute.org/Programs/Pr...ext/fturner.htm It's something I feel myself drawn towards for a variety of reasons. Do you? If not, then why say that the material without humans innately contain beauty?

 

BTW, some people might interpret the sunset as a symbol of terror, signaling the onset of night and the emergence of night predators which threaten to rip their flesh off their bodies and eat them alive. But we're in cities where we feel safe, so we can appreciate the sunset as beautiful.

 

I agree that humans need myth to feel ok and to keep groups together, which I suspect is its primary function. If we are going to reassign meaning to symbols, we may as well just get on with assigning reality to them. What would be the purpose of maintaining known false meanings?

No, meanings to myths were ever considered false. You're applying the modern criteria of historical and scientific accuracy as the litmus test of "validity" to the stories. Again we're back to assigning an idea of reality to the myths in your saying we should "get on with assigning reality to them." There's some degree of validity to this as I see it, but not calling it "reality", but more making the myths relevant to our current understandings of what we call reality. Since that's how we currently perceive the world, to make the myths build off of this would update the myths to function well again as in their original settings, where they indeed served a purpose and function that was not inconsistent with reality for those peoples, just as our "truths" are valid for us in this world at this time.

 

I would like to say that I get on fine without symbols, but I don't. My mind has reassigned negative meanings to those symbols which I still notice -- like the cross or olde glory.

And it also consumes and uses all manner of symbols every single day, not recognizing them as such without a concerted effort to extract them and analyze them apart from what is otherwise taken for granted as reality. Welcome to the world of symbols. You and I were born into it, and we don't have a clue how to define reality without them. In fact they define reality for us.

 

Some also value the angst and the child born through it, despite the anguish at times.

 

Only if it doesn't go on for decades. I like my migraines in retrospect, because it feels so damn good when they stop. But during the actual inspection they suck.

Again, I'm not under-appreciating the difficulties you've had to contend with. I see what you've found to be right for you, as is clearly the case in that you're not being torn apart anymore. That's a very good thing for you. But in my particular case I haven't found it necessary to turn to medication to find a balance. For me, the struggle has been worth it in finding insights upon which to build my world views, and my personal peace as a result. I wouldn't want to find peace at the expense of the gain for me personally found through the struggle. This is why I defend so strongly the spirit and the product of the artist. It's not mere depiction, it's an expression of the deepest desires within us as humans, which I believe a great many people relate to when exposed to these expressions, whether its in the vision expressed in cave drawings of the ancients, or the music of many modern composers, or the mythologies of people trying to exert themselves into the world. It's this that I see as our humanness in action, driving and compelling us towards..... Beauty?

 

So to tie all this back to the NDE, it's that for me at least that served my spirit on this level, like art on steroids. The vision and manifestation of Beauty.

[chefranden]

1. You guys provide interesting counterpoint which looks useful. You've postulated a metaphysical (natural) soul of the individual which is dependent on the machine but which is interactive across platform boundaries, interacting with other souls and exchanging ... programming information? In my thirty years as a father, neither my daughter nor I ever noticed we were exchanging programming information as we made our way through the years. Celebrating our anniversary last month, my wife and I never thought to thank one another for the thoughtful programming information we'd wrapped and given across the virtual space. As best I can discern from the narrative, you guys are describing machines in place of people, albeit sophisticated machines. No?

 

Our experience agrees to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, the interchange of ideas, the conflicts of differing opinions, the common causes, the shared perspectives, and so on. What our experience concludes and what is perhaps missing in your description is the oversight of such processes. Our awareness of ourselves suggests we live one step above the automatic machine processes, do we not?

Buddy

 

What you haven't noticed yet is that this interaction is not taking place at the bottom of the pile. I hate the computer analogy, because the machine that runs our consciousness seems to be an analog device. Nevertheless, you experience the program as if that were the core of you. If you acknowledge the machine at all you may suppose that you run it instead of the more probable it runs you.

 

The description of the machine is a description of people, a description of what is going on behind the scenes of your experience. Your consciousness is not directly aware of the machinery, but that doesn't mean it is not there. The machinery can be detected and examined by other means than direct awareness. The means to do so is rather crude yet, but it is becoming more fine tuned all the time.

[chefranden]

They do have minds, granted not as highly developed as ours, but they do have minds. Apes have social order and ethics. Dogs know about fairness. A fly makes decisions about which flower to fly to. It's all there.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/apegenius/program.html

[AKR]

I am almost sold on no afterlife, but, there is one thing that keeps me from being 100% sold.

I have read on death for over 45 years as well as NDE's, and there are the stories of people dying that see someone else in the family or friends that have also died about the same time, so no one else knew of the death till the NDE'r told them of the death..

This cannot possibly be explained by lack of oxygen to the brain...

 

Peace

Paladin!

 

 

I'm always suspicious of NDE stories. I'm gonna need more than that. Personally, life after death makes no sense to me. NDE don't make any sense either. How exactly do you see and hear things if you see and hear through your eyes and ears? It defies physics to hear things without ear drums. Sound is vibrations being transferred through the air to your ear drums, where the vibrations are translated by the brain. Your eyes capture light that is reflected off objects and it bounces around in your eye until it sends a signal to the brain.

 

 

Then you have the problem of retaining that memory for when you're brought back to life. If you're dead, you have no connection to your body, and therefore, no input is being received or stored in your brain. How do you remember something that never entered your brain via your senses? It's like saying you played video games on your computer when the electricity was out. You can't have memory without a brain. This is prove by very basic biology. We all know memory is stored in the brain, and damage to certain parts of the brain will destroy memory and/or render you incapable of storing new memories.

 

 

Your brain is also responsible for your personality. Your memories are a large part of who you are, and that is stored in your brain - not in some magical spiritual zone. Your personality is also dependent on the overall unique structure of your brain. Brain damage has made people angry and compulsive liars; drugs can make people happy or be honest; disorders give someone a particular type of personality that is very distinctive. There has been an incredibly amount of research in this area, and because of this, I have absolutely no reason to believe in an afterlife. If our personality is dependent on our brain, what goes on? If our ability to feel, taste, smell, touch, hear, and see is dependent on our physical body and the brain that interprets that information, how do we sense anything without it. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

 

I've been unconscious due to a head injury and dental surgery. I was out. There was nothing. If I have some sort of consciousness that isn't retained in my brain, then how come I experienced nothing? Why is it that I can go nights without even remembering my dreams, and I NEVER, EVER recall actually experiencing the room I'm sleeping in while I'm asleep. What, is this consciousness just hanging out, sleeping inside of me somewhere, and I don't get to use this extra consciousness until my heart stops beating?

 

I'd like to believe there's something after this, but I don't.

[Ouroboros]

What you haven't noticed yet is that this interaction is not taking place at the bottom of the pile. I hate the computer analogy, because the machine that runs our consciousness seems to be an analog device.

Of course. The analogy isn't to say that we are binary computers with Intel CPU's, and RAM, ROM, MMU, ALU, or harddisks from Western Digital. My analogy is that there are things that exists, on a meta-level to hardware. Windows doesn't exist, unless hardware does its processing. The code must be executed for the full experience of a "windows session" to be possible. Windows doesn't exist as a CD, or a harddisk, or a CPU, or a binary code. It must be installed, and it really comes only to its full potential of existing, when it is a process and "experience." And in that sense, human consciousness emerges in the same fashion, from the "hardware" we consist of, albeit this hardware is biological, electro-chemical, analog, self-adaptive, and so on. To make a comparison doesn't necessarily mean everything is the same. To make an analogy of "the sun is round like an orange," means to show how the sun looks like, and how there are similarities, but to conclude that because of that comparison you can consume the sun for breakfast, is to take the analogy to far.

[chefranden]

No.. I think it does define reality in every instance, just as any philosophy/mythology sets itself to the task of giving existence definition. We can't know reality, we can only define our perceptions and call that reality. How we define those, is the point of this line of thought.

 

However, you are still doing what I pointed out. You have an idea of reality, by saying it misses the mark. How do you define the mark? How did you get that idea?

 

I don't recall arguing that I didn't have an idea of reality. In fact I'm pretty sure that I am arguing as if my idea of reality is closer to real than some others recently mentioned.

 

I think that your definition of define is a little bit looser than mine. So say that Christianity defines reality, but it defines a reality that is not real

 

 

Point in case:

What is not being taken into account is that awareness is easily fooled about the nature of reality.

Which is defined how?

 

That which is real.

 

Most of the more about reality that we have produced in recorded history has proved to be bull shit of the highest order.

 

1. Or do we have some absolute that transcends and evolving perspective by which to say “This is reality and this is not”?

 

2. Are we replacing finding God in religion with finding God in science? My argument is that we should find God in our humanity which exists and explores aspects of itself through its perception of itself within the world. It exists in the idea living within the world through the machine. It's not just the machine.

 

1. I have not argued for an absolute. I've only been arguing that there is something real, that we are not very good at knowing what it is, and that we can use invented methods and equipment to know it better. I doubt we will ever know it absolutely.

 

Religion, myth... are not useful for finding out about what is real. But that is not to say they are not useful. They may be useful from an evolution of psychology perspective. The propensity to believe these things may be act as protection against too much cognitive dissonance. I think that it does act to help with group solidarity.

 

2. I'm not looking for God at all.

 

I argue that looking for a god anywhere is a waste of time. There's no point in reinventing the wheel. If you want a god there are already plenty of them around. I could be wrong, you might just find the rock under which a real god resides. But if you do, I bet it will be pissed off, or else why would it be hiding under a rock in the first place?

 

Are they diamonds to you, and that rest garbage? Or in their worlds in the context of how they lived it was all diamonds, in that it worked for them? In other words, how you define reality today, those things aren’t “relevant”, not bullshit. They’re bullshit only in that they don’t pertain to the current context, but prior to that they served a function. That we outgrow that need, or that it no longer pertains to our context, is beside the point.

 

They are bullshit in terms of finding out about what is real. Religion and myth are useful to certain degrees for social cohesion, protection from too much insanity, ripping off the masses and etc. They are even real phenomena, but they are not about finding out what is real and never were. We did not evolve as reality finding devices. The fact that we can look for what is real to some extent is one of those flukes of evolutionary noise that may turn out to be something, or may cause our extinction. Time will tell, but it won't tell me.

 

That you can equate the “art” of a 5th grader with the earliest forms of human expression in art through cave drawings, is a shocking comparison. Mere simple representation is not what early art was, nor what any art is...

 

In the first place you don't know what the cave art was done for. Nevertheless I agree that it wasn't probably about illustration of an actual deer etc. I bet not even a cave man would mistake it for the real thing. It might have been a memory device for a bad peyote trip. It might have been magic stuff. It might be doodles on a boring winter night, or all of the above. It might have been Moby Dick for all I know. But it wasn't Leonardo, or Monet, or Escher...

 

I don't think you can draw such a fine line between illustration and "art". I find Audubon's work to be art and good art. But it's purpose was illustration.

 

And value judgments are a huge part of what art is. For example, I wonder how anyone values Jackson Pollock stuff as art, when it is so obviously paint flung at canvas by a drunken con man. Nevertheless people will pay big money for one and ooh and aah over the meaning of it all. Perhaps there is meaning in Pollock after all; the meaning being people will fall for all sorts of bull shit and be happy about it.

 

More to follow.

[BuddyFerris]

I'm always suspicious of NDE stories. ... I'd like to believe there's something after this, but I don't.

Welcome to the doubter's club. I think perhaps most of us have real reservations about the validity of accounts that circulate, particularly among the religious advocates. I have little interest in any such event without a modicum of corroboration.

 

Like you, I've been unconscious. Doing superman on a bicycle with no hands, landed in a ditch, and woke up in he hospital much later that day. Don't remember a thing. No out of body, no visual of the guy stitching my head up, nada. Doesn't offer much as a data point.

 

Even if they were fully proved, I don't think NDE's are much more than interesting. To me, they don't seem adequately illuminating to be foundational for any particular position. That having been said, we can comfortably dismiss most accounts as being presented without supporting evidence. Unfortunately for committed skeptics, there's a wealth of well documented and medically certified events for us to peruse. For example,

As a near-death researcher at the Medical School at the University of Virginia, Bruce Greyson, M.D., presented some of the best examples of and theories about near-death experiences (NDEs) ... Greyson then mentioned some of the best-documented NDE cases:

 

1. The case of Al Sullivan: Al was a 55 year old truck driver who was undergoing triple by-pass surgery when he had a powerful NDE that included an encounter with his deceased mother and brother-in-law, who told Al to go back to his to tell one of his neighbors that their son with lymphoma will be OK. Furthermore, during the NDE, Al accurately noticed that the surgeon operating on him was flapping his arms in an unusual fashion, with his hands in his armpits. When he came back to his body after the surgery was over, the surgeon was startled that Al could describe his own arm flapping, which was his idiosyncratic method of keeping his hands sterile.

 

2. The case of the Chinese woman: The author Maggie Callanan in her 1993 book, Final Gifts, wrote about an elderly Chinese woman who had an NDE in which she saw her deceased husband and her sister. She was puzzled since her sister wasn't dead, or so she thought. In actuality, her family had hid her sister's recent death from her for fear of upsetting her already fragile health.

 

3. The case of Pam Reynolds:This is reported by Michael Sabom in his book Light and Death. Pam Reynolds underwent a very risky operation to remove an aneurysm from her brain, in which her brain was drained totally of its blood so that the doctors could clip off the swollen blood vessel. During this procedure, Pam had a deep NDE in which she saw all of the details of the operation and later reported on it with complete accuracy, even though she was "dead" by usual criteria (no heartbeat or respiration, and a flat EEG) for much of it.

 

4. Cases of the blind who can see: As recorded by Kenneth Ring in his book, Mind Sight, there is solid evidence for 31 cases in which blind people report visually accurate information obtained during an NDE.

 

Interesting stuff, suggesting a broader perspective might be required than the man/computer/machine analogies that are so popular among the anti-religious. Such a broader perspective needn't be religious.

 

Thoughts??

Buddy

[Ouroboros]

Welcome to the doubter's club. I think perhaps most of us have real reservations about the validity of accounts that circulate, particularly among the religious advocates. I have little interest in any such event without a modicum of corroboration.

...

Hey! You're starting to sound like ME!

 

Interesting stuff, suggesting a broader perspective might be required than the man/computer/machine analogies that are so popular among the anti-religious. Such a broader perspective needn't be religious.

Maybe, maybe not, but I'm willing to keep my mind open. (My brain is about to fall out!)

 

There is a possibility even in the natural view for extending the position of the mind beyond our observable universe. A natural view doesn't necessarily deny the possibility of something more than the physical. I'm not sure I can explain the concept, but I will use another illustration from the computer world: if we continue to think of mind as a software, then to illustrate it simply, I have a virtual machine setup on my computer. I run Windows as a virtual computer, within my Mac. (VMWare Fusion) I can suspend it, and even transfer the file to another computer, and start it up, and be back where I was. If we're software, running in a Universe computer, we would never know if something or someone would be sitting in the next dimension making snapshots of our minds every so often, and restart the copy somewhere else... I think it's highly unlikely, but not improbable, and we can't prove otherwise.

[chefranden]

I am interested in facing reality about my nature as directly as possible.

Which is a philosophical choice and approach. My point. We can look at the machine and conclude we are nothing more that sophisticated tape worms on legs with big brains living an illusionary life in the face of reality; or we can choose to see ourselves a wonderfully unique and special within the context of the pool of life. Science doesn’t inform us as to that choice. We do.

 

We do through a system of immaterial, abstractions laced with emotional significations for the purpose of experience. Do we choose to reduce it all to the machine, or do we choose to see ourselves as free? In either case, that very choice is how we go about defining reality for us. We can look at the same thing, and see it many different ways. There is no single reality, nor can we know that as an absolute.

 

There is an underlying supposition here that just ain't so. That is the idea that if we are machines we are nothing. If we are bio-mechanical machines as it probably the case, we are bio-mechanical machines that value the dignity of the individual, and the love and care of others. What the hell difference would it make what produces these phenomena as long as they are present.

 

What ever freedom we may have doesn't change a lick if we are machines or soul. Sure you can choose to pretend that we are not machines as most do, but it is the machine that is doing the choosing, making the abstractions, and making and feeling the emotions.

 

Knowing that we are machines would change almost nothing, because if we are, we've always been machines. We would still make art. We would still enjoy a sunset. We would still love our kids. We would still think profound thoughts. We would still argue on Ex-Christian. We would still struggle with morals. What ever we do, we would do, because that is what the machine does.

 

One thing would change. If we actually knew what human nature is we could make social reforms that could actually work rather than trying to reform to the wild ass guesses of a Marx or a Smith. But that won't happen if we keep denying the reality of what we are.

 

Edit: I agree that there are different views of reality. I agree that these views make people act somewhat differently across cultures. I don't agree that there are actual multiple realities. What ever you may think of air and what ever I may think of air doesn't change the reality that we both rely on the properties of Oxygen to stay alive. The universe doesn't care if we know. Oxygen doesn't care if we know. For most of our species' existence we didn't care if we knew, but know we know. Should we set aside the knowledge in favor of our favorite air myths?

[BuddyFerris]

... I'm willing to keep my mind open. (My brain is about to fall out!)

 

There is a possibility even in the natural view for extending the position of the mind beyond our observable universe. A natural view doesn't necessarily deny the possibility of something more than the physical. I'm not sure I can explain the concept, but I will use another illustration from the computer world: if we continue to think of mind as a software, then to illustrate it simply, I have a virtual machine setup on my computer. I run Windows as a virtual computer, within my Mac. (VMWare Fusion) I can suspend it, and even transfer the file to another computer, and start it up, and be back where I was. If we're software, running in a Universe computer, we would never know if something or someone would be sitting in the next dimension making snapshots of our minds every so often, and restart the copy somewhere else... I think it's highly unlikely, but not improbable, and we can't prove otherwise.

Aaaaargh!

Not another computer analogy, Hans! AM is gonna have a fit. This one is interesting though, and carrying it a bit further, we have distributed programs running concurrently in two (or more) locations. Here we might easily change language and describe the soul (local OS/primary programming) and spirit (distributed/parallel/virtual off-platform) and body (MyPC). That would fly in some circles, although I doubt it will be well received either here or at seminary. Does make you a bit of a visionary, though.

 

My desk still looks like Monday. Later,

Buddy

[Ouroboros]

Aaaaargh!

Not another computer analogy, Hans! AM is gonna have a fit. This one is interesting though, and carrying it a bit further, we have distributed programs running concurrently in two (or more) locations. Here we might easily change language and describe the soul (local OS/primary programming) and spirit (distributed/parallel/virtual off-platform) and body (MyPC). That would fly in some circles, although I doubt it will be well received either here or at seminary. Does make you a bit of a visionary, though.

Thanks!

 

My desk still looks like Monday. Later,

My desk is in a perpetual state of Monday.

[MikeyMac]

I am almost sold on no afterlife, but, there is one thing that keeps me from being 100% sold.

I have read on death for over 45 years as well as NDE's, and there are the stories of people dying that see someone else in the family or friends that have also died about the same time, so no one else knew of the death till the NDE'r told them of the death..

This cannot possibly be explained by lack of oxygen to the brain...

 

Peace

Paladin!

 

Oh cool.

 

I have read a lot about this. I have listened to a lot as well. There is a lot of evidence about an afterlife, I am just confused on all the spiritual things.

 

During and after being a Christian I looked into the afterlife NDEs and OBEs a whole lot.

 

I guess I should read the entire thread before I say anything redundant. First I want to snoop around the site a bit.

 

Very interesting though!

[AKR]

1. The case of Al Sullivan: Al was a 55 year old truck driver who was undergoing triple by-pass surgery when he had a powerful NDE that included an encounter with his deceased mother and brother-in-law, who told Al to go back to his to tell one of his neighbors that their son with lymphoma will be OK. Furthermore, during the NDE, Al accurately noticed that the surgeon operating on him was flapping his arms in an unusual fashion, with his hands in his armpits. When he came back to his body after the surgery was over, the surgeon was startled that Al could describe his own arm flapping, which was his idiosyncratic method of keeping his hands sterile.

 

 

Well, first, the part about his dead mother and brother-in-law are unsubstantiated. Anyone can come to someone in a dream and say "X is going to be ok." The part about the arms flapping, how do we know the guy wasn't doing that before the man was knocked out or came back to consciousness and simply imagined that he was doing it doing surgery?

 

2. The case of the Chinese woman: The author Maggie Callanan in her 1993 book, Final Gifts, wrote about an elderly Chinese woman who had an NDE in which she saw her deceased husband and her sister. She was puzzled since her sister wasn't dead, or so she thought. In actuality, her family had hid her sister's recent death from her for fear of upsetting her already fragile health.

 

Well, for all we know, she just had a dream of some sort that happened to have two people that were dead. Whether she knew her sister was dead or not is irrelevant to the possibility that it could be a dream. She also could have subconsciously sensed that her sister was dead based on the behavior of her family.

 

3. The case of Pam Reynolds:This is reported by Michael Sabom in his book Light and Death. Pam Reynolds underwent a very risky operation to remove an aneurysm from her brain, in which her brain was drained totally of its blood so that the doctors could clip off the swollen blood vessel. During this procedure, Pam had a deep NDE in which she saw all of the details of the operation and later reported on it with complete accuracy, even though she was "dead" by usual criteria (no heartbeat or respiration, and a flat EEG) for much of it.

 

And yet, she was not brain dead, or she would stay brain dead. Maybe something is going on in the brain that is simply not being detected by equipment. Maybe she watched the procedure on tv or some video and her brain simply superimposed her into the member of that surgery footage. Legally, they say a person is dead when their heart stops, but there's a difference between legal death and truth death. A heart simply pumps blood; it doesn't contain consciousness or the energy stored in your brain. I think the term "near death experience" is more accurate than they realize, because really, you're not dead. Unfortunately, they don't seem to get that since you're not really dead, you can't really base a near death experience upon what it's really like to be dead. When you're really dead, your heart not only stops but you're brain dead. The oxygen leaves your brain entirely and there's no coming back.

 

4. Cases of the blind who can see: As recorded by Kenneth Ring in his book, Mind Sight, there is solid evidence for 31 cases in which blind people report visually accurate information obtained during an NDE.

 

Interesting stuff, suggesting a broader perspective might be required than the man/computer/machine analogies that are so popular among the anti-religious. Such a broader perspective needn't be religious.

 

Thoughts??

Buddy

 

 

I'd have to see the actual studies. It's hard to analyze these thoroughly without having the details. Usually, more details I get, the more I can tear it apart. I'm also suspicious of information being sold in books. They're usually at least slightly biased in how they present their findings. That said, I must refer back to the fact that these people are not actually dead, and there may be some sort of weird sensory abilities humans have in altered states of consciousness. If some of these people actually see things while unconscious, this is very interesting, but it is still a stretch to say that there is some sort of consciousness once your brain actually dies.

[BuddyFerris]

... I'd have to see the actual studies. It's hard to analyze these thoroughly without having the details. Usually, more details I get, the more I can tear it apart. I'm also suspicious of information being sold in books. They're usually at least slightly biased in how they present their findings. That said, I must refer back to the fact that these people are not actually dead, and there may be some sort of weird sensory abilities humans have in altered states of consciousness. If some of these people actually see things while unconscious, this is very interesting, but it is still a stretch to say that there is some sort of consciousness once your brain actually dies.

Objections noted, friend. Feel free to hold out for reasonable evidence and clearer distinctions; we would do ourselves a disservice if we did not handle the material reasonably.

 

I'm inclined to accept a flat EEG and a brain drained of blood as dead, however temporarily. At such a point, brain function having ceased, the individual is outside the realm of 'life in the machine' to my thinking. Whether that's actually dead or not is well past both legal and medical definitions despite the subsequent successful resuscitation.

 

If the account is true, where might one physically locate 'some ... altered states of consciousness' during the period of brain inactivity/death? Troublesome questions accompany consciousness without brain activity.

 

We're told that there are tens of thousands of such accounts in various levels of detail and objective corroboration. Scholarly articles published in various peer reviewed journals are easily found. Such articles have appeared with reasonable frequency for more than a century. Recent and current studies by respected medical organizations are occasionally in the national and international news. Biased nonsense is available on either side, of course, but the preponderance of objective reporting seems to support the basic NDE premises. What we might make of that remains to be seen.

Buddy

[Antlerman]

And value judgments are a huge part of what art is. For example, I wonder how anyone values Jackson Pollock stuff as art, when it is so obviously paint flung at canvas by a drunken con man. Nevertheless people will pay big money for one and ooh and aah over the meaning of it all. Perhaps there is meaning in Pollock after all; the meaning being people will fall for all sorts of bull shit and be happy about it.

 

More to follow.

I've been taking a break from this discussion, but this came to mind tonight. To throw something out there for thought, Jackson Pollock happens to be my favorite artist. His work touches on something incredibly sublime and inspirational for me. No, paint flung at a canvas is not what Pollock's work is. It is something much more. When I first saw it, without any foreknowledge of what it was, I experienced a certain response that went beyond anything I had with other art I found value in. And it still does today. I have a print of one of his works in my music room. To me, it touches on something profound for us as humans. It's the energy of life outside the lines of explanation we hope to lay out for ourselves. It's purity.

 

 

I'll pick this discussion up later as I've pondered how to respond.

[chefranden]

Maybe consciousness is not as special as we would like to think.

 

Note: you have to read a bit through a whine before you get to the amazing bit.