Interaction between body and soul

[JayUtah]

I said that NDEs suggest the existence of a soul, not that they are evidence of it, let alone any NDE.

That's carefully parsed. What precisely do you consider the difference between "suggests the existence of" and "is evidence of?" Isn't the intended effect in each case to make the proposition of the existence of the soul more probable?

 

[abaddon]

I said that NDEs suggest the existence of a soul, not that they are evidence of it, let alone any NDE.

I will overlook that particular dishonesty. For now.

I don't know what you expect of me but I would like to know what you think was a hallucination in your NDE and what was not, and why you think so.

Well then you have a problem of definitions. The OOBE? A hallucination of perspective. The events actually happened, that is true. My perception of them was false. That is also true.

From my POV I was outside my body observing all of it from the point of view of an external dispassionate observer of a mere slab of meat. I was entirely disconnected from my body. Or felt that way.

To you, that might seem to be confirmation of your "soul" idea. That begs an obvious question. At the time, I was spaced out on whatever drugs they were intravenously pumping into me. If you are going to accept the drug fueled experience that I had, or any other NDEr at face value, then you must by the same argument, accept any claim by the next junkie you meet on the street. That is absurd on it's face. Drug induced experiences are de facto not arguments, Deal with that for starters.

 

[litewave]

Because religion says so? Do you mean "possible" in the sense of congruence among religious beliefs, or "possible" as something that science should consider?

"Possible" as logically possible, without an obvious contradiction. The religious doctrine of the fall is just something that emphasized that possibility to me.

No. What you actually said was

Originally Posted by litewave View Post
Apparently this is due to the soul detaching from the brain.​

Nothing about what the patient believes.

That sentence was preceded by a sentence about how the patients describe their state of mind during NDE and I already clarified in two other posts that the "apparently" is from the standpoint of patients.

What about patients who don't believe in souls?

If there are patients who had an NDE with an out of body experience or with a sense of having died and they don't interpret the NDE as involving a soul, they appear to be in a minority.

Originally Posted by litewave View Post
If the NDEs had just random elements that would make it more believable that they are caused by firings of a distressed or dying brain.​

What evidence supports this claim? Is that what neurologists think?

I don't know but I would imagine that a distressed or dying brain would produce experiences like panic and confusion.

 

[litewave]

Yeah. the patient. Would that be the patient under the influence of intravenous drugs? That patient? The same one having intravenous drugs intentionally used to alter their consciousness?

They gave you intravenous drugs to alter your consciousness? How alter? To produce an out of body experience?

Don't you think that drugs intended to alter anyones consciousness might actually do that? Or did that thought simply not occur to you?

You mean drugs like LSD? Sure they can alter your consciousness.

Sure. Insufficient to make me believe in <insert deity of choice> though.

Strawman. I didn't say that an NDE would make the experiencer believe in a deity. Many NDErs don't believe in any specific deity.

 

[abaddon]

"Possible" as logically possible, without an obvious contradiction.

It is possible that cream cheese originates from planet sausage in some far distant galaxy. Should we spend time considering that possibility?

The religious doctrine of the fall is just something that emphasized that possibility to me.

Total derail. The fall is entirely made up crap. take it to an appropriate thread.

That sentence was preceded by a sentence about how the patients describe their state of mind during NDE and I already clarified in two other posts that the "apparently" is from the standpoint of patients.

Yay, you mean me. Oh, only patients who agree with you. Right. That's objective. (sarcasm)

If there are patients who had an NDE with an out of body experience or with a sense of having died and they don't interpret the NDE as involving a soul, they appear to be in a minority.

But you have one directly to hand that you can directly question. Why are you dodging that?

I don't know but I would imagine that a distressed or dying brain would produce experiences like panic and confusion.

The evidence says you are wrong and why would anyone care whatever you "imagine"? I could imagine Luke Skywalker is about to sort out the galaxy with a laser sword. Does my imagination make that true?

 

[litewave]

That's carefully parsed. What precisely do you consider the difference between "suggests the existence of" and "is evidence of?"

By "evidence" I meant something based on which you can make a conclusion.

 

[abaddon]

They gave you intravenous drugs to alter your consciousness? How alter? To produce an out of body experience?

Wow. Do you really think that I would have had all of that metalwork bolted into my leg without the benefit of a lot of hard drugs? And do you somehow think that said drugs do not have serious effects? Seriously?

You mean drugs like LSD? Sure they can alter your consciousness.

No I mean like general anaesthesia, which can switch your brain right off but is not perfect. This is exactly why I mentioned honesty earlier. You simply make crap up out of whole cloth for religious reasons.

Now, I genuinely made an offer that I would share my experience of NDE if you would commit to be honest. You have comprehensively burned that bridge. Not my problem.

 

[litewave]

Wow. Do you really think that I would have had all of that metalwork bolted into my leg without the benefit of a lot of hard drugs? And do you somehow think that said drugs do not have serious effects? Seriously?

Is an out of body experience listed among the side effects of the drugs they gave you?

You simply make crap up out of whole cloth for religious reasons.

What crap have I made up? I pointed to many reports of NDEs, which you readily dismiss.

 

[Loss Leader]

If there are patients who had an NDE with an out of body experience or with a sense of having died and they don't interpret the NDE as involving a soul, they appear to be in a minority.

Name three. Name three people who are alive and who describe an NDE as an experience of a soul.

The last time I asked you to name three neuroscientists who believe in souls, you just gave me a googled list of scientists studying brain behavior at or near the time of death. None of them state that the existence of a soul is the logically sound explanation for NDEs. In fact all of them state the opposite.

So, of your thousands of reports of NDEs, pick three that I can verify.

Is an out of body experience listed among the side effects of the drugs they gave you?

That's a silly question. Is an out-of-body experience listed on the packaging for LSD or peyote or certain toads? No, it's not. There is no packaging. Yet all of these substances have led people to feel like they were out of their bodies.

Drug packaging provides information relevant to helping the prescribing doctor choose the proper treatment for the patient. What possible good would it do for doctors to know that a small percentage of people under the drug might think they remembered an out of body experience? The drug packaging for propofol already says, "Intravenous injection of a therapeutic dose of propofol induces hypnosis." It also lists one of the side effects as, "Delirium." Mostly, it's concerned with respiration and cardiac conditions because, you know, that information helps doctors keep patients alive.

You're demanding proof from us that the existence of a soul isn't possible. You've got it the wrong way around. You're proposing a soul. It's your responsibility to show that it is necessarily true in order to explain observed phenomena.

Instead, you've wandered down a road about NDEs, which you concede may be (but are not necessarily) some evidence for souls. You've derailed your own argument into one about NDEs and OOBEs because it's easier than confronting the issue head on.

Describe a repeatable, falsifiable experiment showing that souls necessarily exist.

I can do it for gravity. I can do it for the shape of the earth. I can do it for a triangle made up of 3 right angles. And I haven't taken a math or science class since 1988. I don't know a tangent from a tangerine.

Can you do that for souls?

 

[JayUtah]

By "evidence" I meant something based on which you can make a conclusion.

That wasn't my question.

When I step back, it certainly looks like you're arguing for the existence of a soul and proffering NDEs as evidence in favor of it. It's surprising to hear you try to say you're not. You gave us a carefully-worded statement that looks like it's trying to split hairs. I'm looking for clarity.

When you say NDEs "suggest" the existence of a soul, it's not really clear what you mean and how that differs from offering evidence of it. The concept of a soul long predates any discussion of NDEs. When NDE is brought up in connection with souls, the audience is expected to know what a soul means. Whether you believe in it or not, the hypothesis of the soul is common knowledge. So clearly NDE did not "suggest" the existence of a soul in the sense of being the genesis of the idea.

And unless one has lived under a rock -- or deep in the American South -- for his whole life, one should probably concede also that the debate over the existence of the soul is common knowledge. In light of that, I'm struggling to understand how "NDE suggests the existence of a soul" can be rationally interpreted in any way other than to propose that the information provided by NDE reports is meant to persuade the listener toward the conclusion that the soul exists, more so than if no such information were available.

Please take another turn and tell me what I asked. How is "suggests the existence of..." different than "is evidence of the existence of...?"

 

[JayUtah]

"Possible" as logically possible, without an obvious contradiction. The religious doctrine of the fall is just something that emphasized that possibility to me.

I think you're trying to be forthright here, but my question was really about context. We can hypothetically look at the doctrines of some religion and conclude that they are mutually consistent. That is, we could conclude that they are properly inferred from the antecedents according to syllogisms of validating form. We could further observe that no internal contradictions arise. In a certain sense we can appreciate the effort it would take to fashion such a religion. But then at the same time we can reject the whole thing in toto because we disagree with the truth value of the antecedents. And this is generally an "agree to disagree" situation because the antecedents are meant to be taken on faith, not demonstrable as fact.

In science too we require conclusions to be properly inferred from the antecedents, but in this case the antecedents are hard data or scientific laws. So we have to reckon "possibility" not just in the strength of the inference but in the truth of the antecedent. You have to go further than mere internal consistency. And a hypothesis that requires science to materially alter what it knows or can reliably deduce can't really be described as "possible."

That's what I mean by context. So if you're proposing that end-of-life memory transfer doesn't run afoul of any religious tenets you know of, irrespective of whether you believe them, then we're on the same page. It's moot, but it's a page. If you propose that it doesn't run afoul of scientific understanding, then we disagree.

That sentence was preceded by a sentence about how the patients describe their state of mind during NDE and I already clarified in two other posts that the "apparently" is from the standpoint of patients.

And nobody bought that argument, including me. You talk about "state of mind" in the preceding sentences, but you don't talk about "soul" until the sentence I quoted. The part where that supernatural concept pops up out of the blue is where people have an issue.

If there are patients who had an NDE with an out of body experience or with a sense of having died and they don't interpret the NDE as involving a soul, they appear to be in a minority.

You are fond of abusing the word "appear." I'm entirely certain you have insufficient data to back up this assertion. Loss Leader asked for names. He's a lawyer and that's what persuades him. I work differently. Show me the numbers.

I don't know but I would imagine that a distressed or dying brain would produce experiences like panic and confusion.

Isn't it wonderful that our advancements as a species have almost no regard for what ignorant people imagine? What does the field of neurology say on the subject? What do the people say who do know?

 

[Pixel42]

"That sentence was preceded by a sentence about how the patients describe their state of mind during NDE and I already clarified in two other posts that the "apparently" is from the standpoint of patients.

It is apparent to a dowser who finds water that dowsing works. It is apparent to a patient who takes a homeopathic remedy and then feels better that homeopathy works. Both are mistaken. Subjective experiences are unreliable indicators of how the world actually works, that's why the scientific method had to be invented.

 

[JayUtah]

The last time I asked you to name three neuroscientists who believe in souls, you just gave me a googled list of scientists studying brain behavior at or near the time of death.

That's one of the major criticism against Greyson. He studied only near-death experiences. He filtered his data according to whether the reported perceptions occurred when the patient's death was imminent, thereby ignoring all the times the same symptoms occurred in other contexts having nothing to do with death or the threat of death. No wonder he was fond of the conclusion that NDEs were evidence of dualistic separation at the time of death.

None of them state that the existence of a soul is the logically sound explanation for NDEs. In fact all of them state the opposite.

These days Parnia even says he thinks NDEs are just an "illusion."

So, of your thousands of reports of NDEs...

Greyson's Handbook alludes to thousands of subjects. But subsequently he had to walk back that claim and admit that they couldn't be sure of all of them. Why? Because -- as someone pointed out -- ultimately an unknown number of them were just stories passed around. In a more serious mea culpa he even wrote a paper advocating a better method for filtering reports.

The Greyson scale is a codification of the depth of an NDE according to the criteria of "commonly reported" symptoms. The very existence of the scale proves that coherence of the phenomenon is a sliding scale, not a deterministic set of perceptions that always happen together. For subsequent studies, only NDEs that met a certain arbitrary score on the Greyson scale could be considered "true" NDEs.

That's a silly question. Is an out-of-body experience listed on the packaging for LSD or peyote or certain toads? No, it's not. There is no packaging. Yet all of these substances have led people to feel like they were out of their bodies.

it's also straw-manically silly. "Out of body experience" is not a clinical term. The neurology literature describes the phenomenon, but doesn't use the term except to note that this is what layman use to refer to a family of more prosaically considered phenomena and symptoms.

 

[litewave]

Name three people who are alive and who describe an NDE as an experience of a soul.

Why should I look up patient names for you? Do you doubt that the thousands of NDE reports collected by doctors according to the Wikipedia article on NDEs came from real people?

French summarizes this model by saying : "the most popular interpretation is that the NDE is exactly what it appears to be to the person having the experience". The NDE would then represent evidence of the supposedly immaterial existence of a soul or mind, which would leave the body upon death. An NDE would then provide information about an immaterial world where the soul would journey upon ending its physical existence on earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Spiritual_or_transcendental_theories

Here is a short video featuring Anita Moorjani, who also wrote a book about her NDE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipmeTbo1tOY

The last time I asked you to name three neuroscientists who believe in souls, you just gave me a googled list of scientists studying brain behavior at or near the time of death. None of them state that the existence of a soul is the logically sound explanation for NDEs. In fact all of them state the opposite.

I said there are neuroscientists and doctors who don't regard neurological explanations of NDEs as sufficient. For example:

Bruce Greyson:

Likewise Greyson writes that although some or any of the neuroanatomical models proposed may serve to explain NDEs and pathways through which they are expressed, they remain speculative at this stage since they have not been tested in empirical studies.

Sam Parnia:

According to Parnia, neurochemical models are not backed by data. This is true for "NMDA receptor activation, serotonin, and endorphin release" models. Parnia writes that no data has been collected via thorough and careful experimentation to back "a possible causal relationship or even an association" between neurochemical agents and NDE experiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Physiological_explanations_(organic_theories)

Is an out-of-body experience listed on the packaging for LSD or peyote or certain toads? No, it's not. There is no packaging.

Surely the drugs used in hospital must have some kind of packaging, and even if there is no leaflet in the package there must be some articles about those drugs, including their side effects.

"Intravenous injection of a therapeutic dose of propofol induces hypnosis." It also lists one of the side effects as, "Delirium."

Is that a sufficient explanation of out of body experiences and other common features of NDEs? Your own bar is pretty low.

 

[litewave]

When I step back, it certainly looks like you're arguing for the existence of a soul and proffering NDEs as evidence in favor of it. It's surprising to hear you try to say you're not.

I argue that NDEs suggest the existence of a soul, that NDEs provide data in favor of the existence of a soul, and I also said that I don't have enough data to make a conclusion about the existence of a soul.

 

[Darat]

By analogy suppose you are simulating a collection of particles following the laws of physics.

For convenience you allow yourself a back door to move particles from one place to another with your mouse pointer.

Do you have to change the physical laws that the particles follow in order to do that? No. The particles can just follow the same laws in the simulation and you can allow your mouse pointer to alter certain variables.

For example if the particles in your simulation are behaving according to the Dirac equation then you do not need to add another term to the Dirac equation to allow for your mouse to drag a particle to a different location. Indeed that would be a very inefficient way of achieving this.

If someone asks does the mouse pointer obey Lorentz invariance then the question would be meaningless because your mouse pointer is not part of the simulation.

If you ask "how far apart is particle A in my simulation from particle B in my simulation?" then you can get a sensible answer. If you ask "how far is my hand from particle B in my simulation" it makes no sense because your hand is not part of the simulation and yet it can make changes to the simulation.

A supernatural force, if there was such a thing, would be like that. The supernatural realm would act according to a different set of rules and our physics would be implemented on those rules just as our simulations physics are implemented on the physics of our world.

But we would still be able to detect the location of the moved particle, which means we would know something had moved them.

 

[Darat]

It doesn't have to be any more 'magical' than familiar forces and resonance is a familiar physical phenomenon. The new particle(s) might be incorporated in an extended Standard model

Not if you want it to interact with the brain, there is simply no place for such a force, because we would have detected it as an "anomaly" in the data from actual experiments, never mind that there is simply not the space for such a new "force".

 

[litewave]

You are fond of abusing the word "appear." I'm entirely certain you have insufficient data to back up this assertion. Loss Leader asked for names. He's a lawyer and that's what persuades him. I work differently. Show me the numbers.

You are certain that a majority of patients who had an NDE don't interpret it as involving a soul?

Here is the same quote I gave to Loss Leader:

French summarizes this model by saying : "the most popular interpretation is that the NDE is exactly what it appears to be to the person having the experience". The NDE would then represent evidence of the supposedly immaterial existence of a soul or mind, which would leave the body upon death. An NDE would then provide information about an immaterial world where the soul would journey upon ending its physical existence on earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Spiritual_or_transcendental_theories

 

[Darat]

There is no scientific evidence of consciousness, period. We can test if a 'unit' exhibits behavior we deem as conscious behavor.

The highlighted above reads like any religious apologist.

There are no explainations or even wild hunches how matter becomes conscious because in principle there are none. We need a new / different way of thinking about this.

Seriously, find a friend who has just had a baby and get them to let you interact with the baby once a month, over just a few years you will see how consciousness arises, it's in fits and starts and takes quite some time to kick in fully. And sadly then you can go and do the same observations of babies born with various forms of brain damage/developmental problems and see how consciousness doesn't get going because they never have or never develop the structures required. You can even do this with adults who were conscious and then had some form of brain damage and are no longer conscious.

 

[litewave]

It is apparent to a dowser who finds water that dowsing works. It is apparent to a patient who takes a homeopathic remedy and then feels better that homeopathy works. Both are mistaken. Subjective experiences are unreliable indicators of how the world actually works, that's why the scientific method had to be invented.

Yes, but I guess it is also apparent to you that you are reading words on a screen. I will let you make your own conclusion from that appearance.