Interaction between body and soul

[Little 10 Toes]

What if they did? Does this constitute any sort of repeatable, falsifiable test?

There are already records of thousands of NDEs.

I noticed that you didn't answer the question. Can you please do so?

 

[JayUtah]

I'm about to destroy you completely, which should teach you to stay in your lane:

I did, mostly. But you err in suggesting the chagrin is painful. It isn't. I welcome being corrected if the result is that people who read the thread walk away better informed.

None of these have to do with prejudice. All of them, if done away with, would produce more probative evidence that leads to more fair outcomes...

Agreed, but at what collateral costs? My point was to draw parallels between standards of evidence in various fields you brought up to illustrate standards of proof. I gave various examples, but I didn't propose to be comprehensive. I could have worded that analysis better.

But I can't lie: when I got to law, the only ones I could think of at the time had to do with prejudice, mostly because we had a great conversation in another thread about character evidence. I will take my lumps. I left out a lot of important ones and thereby conveyed an impression that wasn't accurate. I apologize.

So why do we have them? I'll give you a hint: it's a trick. My evidence professor tormented me with this and now I get to pass it on.

The cycle of Socratic abuse continues. I'm actually okay with that, even if it means I get called out for being wrong.

Well, let's see. The right to be represented by counsel would be worthless without attorney-client privilege. If I have to guard what I say to my attorney, lest it be given in evidence, he could not effectively defend me. The right to compel testimony in my favor seems like it would be affected by privilege against self-incrimination, but don't press me for details. I'm not real sure about that one. In short, I think, the common law provides that the value of certain communications for their first intended purpose outweighs the need for evidence in specific cases -- even, in extremes, if it costs the state a conviction. Sometimes our need to protect fundamental rights and guarantees is bigger than any of the particular issues that could benefit from violating them ad hoc.

There are more visceral reasons. I attended a certain gathering in Oregon several years back. Certain fellow attendees partook of certain substances that, in my layman's understanding of the law, were not strictly permitted. A bad reaction ensued, necessitating the intervention of medical professionals. At that point, a frank disclosure on my part was needed in order to preserve life. People responding to life-threatening conditions need accurate, complete information on what substances a person may have ingested. The law is often wise in realizing that it needs to step back and allow such disclosures to serve a greater end.

I hope I'm close. If I'm not, feel free to go all Kingsfield on me.

In the spirit of showing congruence between standards of evidence -- which was my original purpose, and which hopefully gives this post proper standing in this thread -- there are obvious principles that science considers important enough to outweigh possible methods of obtaining conclusive evidence. For example, despite the possible benefit from information about the soul and of the mechanics we suspect might prevail at death, it would be immoral to instrument a perfectly healthy human being and then kill him in hopes of measuring some physical phenomenon associated with the departure of the soul. CFR proscribes against a number of protocols applied to human and animal subjects on similar grounds. Certain protections and ethical values are deemed universally more important than the information we might obtain if we violate them. Although I could make a non-Godwin Nazi reference here. {shudder}

Don't get your standards of evidence mixed up with your standards of proof. Evidence is anything that makes a proposition more or less likely to be true. Proof is whatever satisfies the mind that a proposition is true.

That's where I started going with this

The way I conceive it, standard of evidence describes what kinds of evidence you will regard, while standard of proof describes how much of it you need before a proposition can be relied upon.

and it seems to have veered off course. In retrospect the attempt to make one field's standards look like another's may have been misguided and poorly informed.

Disagree strongly. The personal standard of proof is just whatever the individual happens to require to believe something. It can consist of scientific evidence, anecdotes, bedtime stories, or just whim.

I don't dispute that. That's a bigger-picture version of what I was trying to say. Perhaps it was a mistake to express that in such one-dimensional terms as probability. Not everyone thinks of it in those terms.

My friend believes that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America...

You just described my whole state.

...and that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri.

Narrator: It isn't. I've been there.

He's a great guy.

Frankly most are, and many of such folk work for me in capacities where I rely heavily on their prodigious critical thinking skills...in topics that don't involve Missouri.

I think his beliefs are bananas. But he is satisfied that these beliefs are true, and that's all he needs to satisfy his personal standard of what satisfies him.

See, and I would say that this means he considers it more probable that ol' Joe really got all that from God and a hat full of rocks than that ol' Joe just made it all up. It's subjective, and I think we agree on that. But your model of the subjectivity includes more factors than mine and therefore probably incorporates fewer hidden assumptions. I stand corrected. I like your broader perspective better.

Absolutely, so long as the claimant wants to convince anybody else.

True. And I have to concede that even when we can compute confidence in our answer to a 95% probability of being right, it's still up to the individual to consider whether that's probable enough for him. That is, whether it meets his standard of proof.

And, to get back on track, the supposition of the existence of souls is unconvincing to me without the same level of proof as the supposition of the existence of gravity - repeatable, falsifiable experimental data.

Strongly agree. For me, the argument is still that such factors as repeatability and falsifiability provide assurances that the results tend to be objective rather than subjective. For me, objective proof is more convincing that a parade of testimonials.

Thanks for taking the time to indulge me on a post that I didn't have time to make shorter and better.

 

[Loss Leader]

I hope I'm close. If I'm not, feel free to go all Kingsfield on me.

Ah, you take all the fun out of correcting you. What sort of torture is it when the person immediately apologizes and thanks you for the information? We had an intense two week trial techniques program in my law school for all 2Ls, where visiting trial attorneys would teach by burning your very essence like incense. Some 1Ls would serve as gofors and schedulers and drivers and whatever else for the visiting lawyers. And those 1Ls kept a list of every single 2L who cried during those two weeks. Oh, the delicious destruction it would cause when we'd show up at school at 8:30 a.m. to see our names on those neatly printed lists. And you ... you ruined my fun.

Clearly, you're right about privileges. You can throw out the wording about common law and everything else. The fact is that we, as a society, have chosen to value certain relationships more than right or wrong, guilty or innocent, liable or not liable. Imagine if spouses couldn't talk to each other, or people couldn't seek counsel from their spiritual leaders. That's not a world most people would want to live in. It's not a world most people would recognize.

I had one professor who put it this way: A couple's been married thirty years. He knows all her stories, she knows all his. They come home at night. If they can't gossip about the neighbors, what the hell are they going to talk about?

Thanks for being the best and most exhaustingly thorough poster here. I apologize for doubting you.

 

[litewave]

Why? The lack of NDE memories in 80-90% of the population is a pretty good argument that souls don't exist in any form that somehow downloads at the moment of death. Now, I expect, you'll offer some excuse for those 80-90%.

That's like saying that if only 10% of patients report a particular side effect of a medication that's a good argument that the side effect doesn't exist, especially if it is not clear how the side effect arises.

 

[Porpoise of Life]

That's like saying that if only 10% of patients report a particular side effect of a medication that's a good argument that the side effect doesn't exist, especially if it is not clear how the side effect arises.

No, like with NDEs, the side effect exists. The question is, is this side effect caused by an unexplained undefined (perhaps even magical) entity?
It's safe to say it isn't, unless you've got both independent evidence of this entity, and something to link it to the side effect.

ETA: thanks for your thoroughness and informativeness Loss Leader and JayUtah.

 

[Loss Leader]

That's like saying that if only 10% of patients report a particular side effect of a medication that's a good argument that the side effect doesn't exist, especially if it is not clear how the side effect arises.

Exactly what I predicted you'd say. You're now offering a defense of how your soul-download thing might still work even though it only works for 10% of people who almost die but don't.

You have yet to show evidence that a soul exists at all before trying to figure out why only 10% of people experience its effects. Frankly, seeing one's life flash vividly before one's eyes during trauma seems easily explicable to me under current material theories of the mind, but whatever.

Side effects from medication are completely different. We know that the pills exist. We can touch them. A company actually manufactures them. Independent scientists, or doctors, test them.* And one of the things they test them against are placebos. If 10% report a side effect with the pill and 10% with the placebo, we may question whether we've found evidence of a side-effect at all. And yet, the pills still physically exist and can be played with - they can be sorted, arranged into rows of ten, stacked, worn as a hat, etc. They are testable, physical things.

Any falsifiable, repeatabe test yet for the soul?



*I am aware that our current drug approval system has problems with both independence of testers, repetition of testing, and validity of statistical evidence based on group size and composition. Still, we're acknowledging those problems and trying to work on them. Also, the pills they're testing actually physically exist in real space - they can be felt with one's toes if one is so inclined.

 

[litewave]

Exactly what I predicted you'd say. You're now offering a defense of how your soul-download thing might still work even though it only works for 10% of people who almost die but don't.

My point was that whether a survivor reports an NDE may depend on various factors, just as whether a patient reports a side effect from a medication may depend on various factors. So the fact that only 10% report an NDE is quite conceivable also in the scenario that the experience is caused by the soul. For example, the survivor may experience an NDE and subsequently forget it, either naturally as one would forget a dream or as a result of anesthetics.

 

[Loss Leader]

My point was that whether a survivor reports an NDE may depend on various factors, just as whether a patient reports a side effect from a medication may depend on various factors. So the fact that only 10% report an NDE is quite conceivable also in the scenario that the experience is caused by the soul. For example, the survivor may experience an NDE and subsequently forget it, either naturally as one would forget a dream or as a result of anesthetics.

And my point was that you are making excuses for why your theory of the soul doesn't manifest in the overwhelming number of cases that you put forth as evidence.

Instead, the question you should be asking yourself is why you're assuming the soul exists at all. 1) It's not showing up in the overwhelming number of cases where you predict it will; and 2) current physical theories of neurochemistry already sufficiently explain the small percentage of cases without adding the extra assumption of a soul.

Now, I did not receive any anesthesia when I died and I came back to life and then consciousness within minutes. So, even your excuses aren't born out by my experience.

 

[abaddon]

My point was that whether a survivor reports an NDE may depend on various factors, just as whether a patient reports a side effect from a medication may depend on various factors. So the fact that only 10% report an NDE is quite conceivable also in the scenario that the experience is caused by the soul. For example, the survivor may experience an NDE and subsequently forget it, either naturally as one would forget a dream or as a result of anesthetics.

Have you had one? If not then you are merely making crap up. How can I be sure of that? Because I have had one. It's quite a wild ride but no souls are involved. That is post hoc rationalisation of a drug induced hallucination, nothing more.

 

[JayUtah]

For example, the survivor may experience an NDE and subsequently forget it...

This is called making the data fit the desired conclusion. Someone who disagrees with you can -- with just as much data to support him -- say that all those who do report an NDE are making it up.

 

[JayUtah]

My point was that whether a survivor reports an NDE may depend on various factors...

Including whether one actually finishes dying -- an important subset of the data that is missing for obvious reasons. Without it, we have little justification in saying that "near-death experience" is truly associated with death. "Clinical death" is a contrivance in medicine, hence the need to qualify it when we say it. All we can say is that it loosely correlates to a poorly coordinated set of physical parameters.

But because the phenomenon is correlated to severe distress in the organism, there's no reason to introduce a superfluous supernatural cause. The soul proposal doesn't explain anything we can observe that isn't easily attributable to the brain-in-distress model. The observation you've proposed to explain by the new cause is not actually an observation, but speculation that arises out of a different aspect of the supernatural proposal. This is circular reasoning at its roundest.

If, in the alternative, we reason in the direction suggested by the topic of the thread, the observation that's problematic for the soul proposal is the lack of evidence for ongoing interaction with the host. Under the hypothesis that the bulk of the interaction takes place as the organism is about to die, the proposal is that NDEs are the quod deductum est of that transfer. But you can't deduce any such thing for proof purposes, because there are no facts in the soul proposal upon which to hang such a deduction such that factuality passes to the desired consequent. Even if we grant all inferences in favor of the claim, the poor correlation to the proposed antecedent refutes the ultimate issue.

 

[Scorpion]

There just MUST be some way we can have a soul!

Wishful thinking. Modern neuroscience has shown us that the electrochemical activity of our massively complex and interconnected brains is quite adequate to produce consciousness, even if we don’t have all the fine details as yet.

Oh yea ! well is a fly conscious ? Because fly's interact with he environment and seek food and avoid being swatted. So are they conscious, because if so they are doing it with a brain smaller than a pin head.

Spirit guides have said insects have group souls. Many individuals make up one soul.

 

[litewave]

And my point was that you are making excuses for why your theory of the soul doesn't manifest in the overwhelming number of cases that you put forth as evidence.

Are you saying that people remember most of what happens to them during sleep or that anesthetics don't cause amnesia? How do you know that 10% is too little and not, perhaps surprisingly, too much?

Instead, the question you should be asking yourself is why you're assuming the soul exists at all.

Because that's what the common elements of thousands of NDE reports suggest.

1) It's not showing up in the overwhelming number of cases where you predict it will;

I am not predicting that a majority of clinical death survivors will report NDEs.

and 2) current physical theories of neurochemistry already sufficiently explain the small percentage of cases without adding the extra assumption of a soul.

There are neuroscientists and doctors who don't think that these explanations are sufficient. What is clear is that neurochemistry didn't predict NDEs, just suggested possible causes after the fact. If you want to complain about excuses, maybe you should turn to neurochemistry.

Now, I did not receive any anesthesia when I died and I came back to life and then consciousness within minutes. So, even your excuses aren't born out by my experience.

That's fine but it is already clear that most of clinical death survivors don't report NDEs.

 

[litewave]

Have you had one? If not then you are merely making crap up. How can I be sure of that? Because I have had one. It's quite a wild ride but no souls are involved. That is post hoc rationalisation of a drug induced hallucination, nothing more.

Did you have a drug induced hallucination? Or is it what you rationalized post hoc?

 

[litewave]

This is called making the data fit the desired conclusion. Someone who disagrees with you can -- with just as much data to support him -- say that all those who do report an NDE are making it up.

Amnesia in the context of a flatlined brain or anesthetics is a legitimate factor to consider, isn't it? It doesn't seem more of a data-fitting to a desired conclusion than suggesting possible causes like hypoxia, hypercarbia etc.

 

[JayUtah]

Amnesia in the context of a flatlined brain or anesthetics is a legitimate factor to consider, isn't it?

I don't know. Show me the medical research that supports such a claim.

It doesn't seem more of a data-fitting to a desired conclusion than suggesting possible causes like hypoxia, hypercarbia etc.

When there are actual numbers on the table you have to do more than suggest possible alterntatives. You're trying to excuse the poor correlation of quantitative data to the conclusion you say it supports by saying that the reported data and the actual phenomenon differ according to factors. They probably do, but which ones? In what direction? By how much? Until you can answer those questions with data, the numbers in hand are the quantities you have to use.

The percentage of people who had NDEs but forgot them lies somewhere between zero and ninety percent. You have no idea where it lies because you have no data to support any such error analysis. You're alluding to an error analysis as if it would fix the problem with your proposal, but you can't actually provide the error analysis to show that it does.

What I mean, however, is that you've allowed for factors only in the direction favorable to your claim. If the criteria for error factors is simply, "This is something I can think of," then someone else can say, "Yeah, all those NDEs are just stories the people made up when they were told they had been clinically dead." A person raising that objection would have just as much justification (mere possibility) and just as much evidence (none) as you have for your error analysis.

The lesson you were supposed to learn is that fixing evidence that doesn't fit your conclusion by idly speculating how the evidence may not be correct doesn't rehabilitate the claim.

 

[jrhowell]

Yes, I guess it would suck. Hopefully it was a wrong idea. Surely there are alternative ideas about how incarnation might work. Maybe a dormant soul receives memories throughout the life and at the time of impending death or a shock it wakes up and experiences them vividly for the first time.

So a soul should not experience life until its body approaches death.

If you are experiencing reading post this doesn't that mean "you" are just a body, not actually a soul, or else that you are about to die?

 

[JayUtah]

Ah, you take all the fun out of correcting you. What sort of torture is it when the person immediately apologizes and thanks you for the information?

As your story illustrates, there are worse ways to be corrected. And I've endured almost all of them.

That said, I take it seriously. Certain facts prevail, some of them being that the law really is a different animal and that people really should stay in their lanes. I do have an interest in the law, so I appreciate it when legal professionals let me wave at them from the next lane over. I know many people who are fascinated by my profession, and I'm always happy to indulge their curiosity and intellect. They just want to be better informed and become better critical thinkers. They get my vote.

A fair amount of my knowledge of the law comes from being in a profession that risks a good deal of liability, and thus of having been sued a lot and having to assist in preparing cases and seeing a few actually go to trial. I am not in any way a legal professional, nor even a serious student of the law compared to what I see law students endure. I'm merely a law "familiar." I'm the Art Garfunkel of law.

And you ... you ruined my fun.

Okay, then, can we settle on me owing you a Martini? As I may have said earlier, my home bar is the closest watering hole to our university's law school. This and other reasons seem to have made me popular with the law students and some of the faculty. As such I have sporadic access to tidbits of legal wisdom and snippets of insight into the apocalypse that is law school.

Having seen law school in action and having taught engineering, I wondered why we don't teach engineering Socratically, if only to get students to do the assigned readings. They never do, probably because we saddle them with crippling practical homework. Nothing would have given me more pleasure than to cold-call, "Mr. Jones, will you please recite the facts of Minnesota I-35 Bridge v. Gravity?" But we don't want science and engineering to think on their feet. We want them to be moderate, well-paced, and comfortably deliberate. We don't want to terrify science students into stumbling through a half-assed recitation of poorly-remembered natural law. I passed PhD orals, and that's good enough for me. That said, I want my litigators to be able to do that. So good on your law school for prepping students to think on their feet, however traumatic it may have been for them and however delightful for you to witness.

I have a certain upper hand, though. I proved mathematically once that an italicized period is different from a non-italicized period, even when the glyph is a circle, thus justifying certain Bluebook pedantry. I know they said there would be no math, but math nonetheless applies. Deal with it.

Clearly, you're right about privileges. You can throw out the wording about common law and everything else.

I brought it up only because in light of your rebuttal I went and read the actual rule, and that was mentioned. The notion of common law has a paragon in science. I think it's an important one.

The fact is that we, as a society, have chosen to value certain relationships more than right or wrong, guilty or innocent, liable or not liable.

No one scientific theory holds for all possible conditions. We can at best say that a theory holds only for the conditions that prevailed or were controlled for when the observations that confirmed the theory were made, and only insofar as they did. What one scientific theory ostensibly predicts may conflict with the prediction of another theory simply because we haven't yet figured out how to refine them to account for more factors that would distinguish the cases. Progressive refinement in science is motivated by much the same desire as motivates common law.

The way I see it, the body of law that governs our conduct will never perfectly be in harmony. There will inevitably arise a set of facts upon which two laws operate in conflict, even if in all other cases they do not. Therefore we must have a court with the power to decide which of the interests protected by those laws prevails for that set of facts, and in case that same set of facts should arise again -- stare decisis. This is how we arrive at the principle that communication with my attorney is not privileged if it involves the attorney helping to commit a crime. Novel fact patterns in law are the equivalent of unpredicted observations in science. They're why each of us gets up in the morning. The ability to refine knowledge and improve our scrutiny as we go is the hallmark of any rational means of observing and reasoning about the world. The hierarchy of power among theories is part of that.

Battering litewave's theories around shouldn't be unpleasant for either party. Nor is it that skeptics don't want to believe in a soul. The notion that some essence of life and memory persists after death is an attractive one, and the emotional component of that is not lost on skeptics. But skeptics consider it a higher law to believe in only those things for which there is reliable evidence. Skeptics are not buoyed up by false hopes or wishful thinking. If there is no conscious afterlife then there is no point treating the present as if there is one.

Someone up-thread posed the problem that the specific idea we're discussing suffers from an assumption that the soul, if it exists, must exist as a material entity. The epistemology that governs that question is as murky as for anything else that's pure speculation. How do you prove something exists when you can't be sure what properties it has? How can you determine what properties something has if you don't know whether it exists?

Claims for the existence of the soul have hidden forever in those vast chasms, resting on the belief that vagary means science can't know enough about souls to refute their existence. Some even claim that science can never know, because the mode in which souls exist is necessarily and forever invisible to science, because God wishes it. What some physicists have recently written aims at divorcing the problem of existence from the specific limitations of empiricism and specificity. They say that in order to have the claimed interaction effect, a soul must comport to certain deducible constraints no matter how it's composed. That undercuts the argument that the interaction can still be something we haven't discovered yet. It tries to argue that nothing in that chasm can rescue the claim, so no point hiding in it any longer.

If we were to compare this with the law, it would be equivalent to reducing the complaint to a contradiction in the matters asserted. As you well know, a court will not touch the merits of a case until it has ascertained -- among other things -- that the complaint is correctly pled and that it has been brought before a court empowered to judge it. One of the most important cases in American law, Marbury v. Madison, established a foundational concept in constittutional law and then went on to rule that it didn't have original jurisdiction in the matter Marbury brought and so dismissed the case "on a technicality." A suit for foreclosure cannot simultaneously assert that the homeowner both maintained and did not maintain homeowner's insurance as required by contract. At law, I believe such a claim would fail at the pleading stage because the assertions cannot be anything other than mutually exclusive, and a cause of action predicated on them cannot have any consistent basis in fact. In science, showing that the essence of interaction, as physicists model it, cannot simultaneously be said to occur yet not be observed is just as much a non-starter.

Advocates for the soul have tried to rehabilitate the claim by saying that the allegedly universal rebuttal still relies upon the soul being a material entity. They want to argue that the rebuttal thus fails as a straw man. Well, no. A soul that escapes all the requirements of matter, yet is purported to have a material influence requires us to imagine a wholly different -- and unevidenced -- mode of existence and interaction, just to accommodate the desired hypothesis. There are no gaps yet in our present model that require us to look for such a thing, so it fails on its face as ridiculously unparsimonious. Plus it raises existential questions like whether the souls of certain individuals went to heaven with a hairy hand. The premise that if a soul must exist, it must exist according to the only mode of all existence for which we have evidence, is entirely reasonable. It is not a straw man, and will not be until evidence -- not speculation -- for some other kind of existence arises

Related to this is the notion that science may yet discover more revolutionary ways to model and observe the natural world, as it has at times in the past. One of those may conceivably open the door to considering ways in which a soul may be understood by science. This should give litewave hope, at least in the comfort that we don't categorically close the door to any proposal. But it hasn't happened yet, and therefore it's improper to ask science to reason as if it has. Even though we look to the possibilities of the future, we keep our feet firmly on a grounding of fact. As it stands now, science doesn't allow for a soul that interacts with an organism as claimed.

Thanks for being the best and most exhaustingly thorough poster here. I apologize for doubting you.

That's high praise. Thank you.

 

[JesseCuster]

From NDE reports, the state of mind of the person during the life review is markedly different from the states of mind when they were experiencing those events during their life. They describe the state of mind during the life review as more vivid (hyper-real) and empathetic. Apparently this is due to the soul detaching from the brain.

There's nothing apparent about that to me. That seems to be a complete non-sequitur.

Why is it apparent that reports of vivid and empathetic states of mind during NDEs would be caused by souls detaching from the brain? Given that we've yet to even establish the existence of souls, where are you getting this information about how they detach from brains? What's the link between vivid NDEs or empathetic NDEs and souls detaching from brains?

Premise 1: NDEs are reported as being vivid or empathetic.
Premise 2: ?
Conclusion: Vivid and empathetic NDEs are caused by souls detaching from brains.

Like I said, it's a non-sequitur.

 

[litewave]

I don't know. Show me the medical research that supports such a claim.

General anesthesia usually causes amnesia.

Although improbable, with the current knowledge of neurophysiology one cannot rule out the possibility of memory formation during anaesthesia.

https://academic.oup.com/bja/article/115/suppl_1/i13/233639

As for a flatlined brain, I guess one would not expect memory formation just as one would not expect consciousness at that time.

You're trying to excuse the poor correlation of quantitative data to the conclusion you say it supports by saying that the reported data and the actual phenomenon differ according to factors. They probably do, but which ones? In what direction? By how much? Until you can answer those questions with data, the numbers in hand are the quantities you have to use.

Ok.