another theory heard from

Found this article about NDEs, OBEs, etc., today

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near_death_explained/

I enjoyed this. Thanks, Kate!

Personally, I'm not convinced these experiences can be explained by the areas of materialistic science we already have a firm grasp on. I don't see this as confirmation of a Spiritual realm, per se. But, I think things may be a lot different than we think know.

For example, my wife and I have been watching the TV show Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman (it's terrific!), which reports a lot of interesting research findings. One researcher contends that the transfer of information between neurons happens much more like quantum entanglement than a more linear, mechanistic process. If (and that's a big "if" for me, because I really don't know) information is received by human brains via quantum mechanics, the possibility of this information existing outside of the brain seems likely. If consciousness involves similar processes, we're dealing with a completely different animal than we think we are.

Like I said... "if." I don't know the answers. What seems clear, though, is that science is far from having all the answers. It sure is fun that we keep trying, though!

Thanks for the clarification, Chris. Yes, I also understand QM to be "materialistic" science.

Though, I think my "non-linear" point still sticks. That was the part that was so thought provoking to me. Information may not be stored only in the brain; studies suggest that in some cases, information may be received by the brain through non-linear events (dare I say "quantum leaps").

I have so much fun learning this stuff My wife is into it, too, so we get to be nerdy together on a regular basis.

In case it appears that I was trying to sneak an argument in favor of/ disproving... whatever-- let me plead guilty of posting after reading only the first segment, which struck me as just a REALLY interesting story, and the header referring to neuroscience.

Later, I went back and read the whole thing and saw that it seemed to be NOT drawing the usual simple straight line between brain and mind, which inclines me to want to look at the book from which it is excerpted. I'm starting to think that I'm looking for the 'middle way' through this apparent duality of 'material vs. immaterial ["... irrelevant, and leading to the witness, Your Honor"].

After attending almost 18 years of Sunday School trying to see/believe/understand the proposition that reality was 'spiritual, not material'-- and abandoning the attempt; and also having experienced such things as instantaneous distance-healing by a Christian Science practitioner-- my current grappling with the subject is illuminated by my poking around in Asian traditional medicine teachings.

Maybe both sides to the argument are simply sorting the pile of data differently, when it comes to the ambiguous ones: the materialists sort anything that can be apprehended by the senses, or their extensions [microscopes, telescopes, electronic hookups, etc.], AND derived by calculating formulae based on physical observation-- into the 'material' pile. The 'immaterialists' come in various persuasions, but the common impulse seems to be 'beyond the common sense of Newtonian mechanics, we're looking for a different order of explanation.' So the ambiguous data goes into the 'not-material' pile.

Some of those explanations are archaic and religious [and those hold little appeal to me personally, since I don't have the experiences to incline me]; and some are just taking more interest in the dynamics and functioning of the common world, without having to posit some 'stuff' [like the ether, or the crystal spheres in which the planets were supposed to be embedded to keep their orbits around the Earth true] This latter endeavor is millennia older than the Western science tradition, and it is based on observation-- observation of such patience and precise detail that it really staggers the imagination.

The further difficulty for any Western person studying this, is that translation of the various accounts/source literature can be really so poor as to misrepresent what's being said into not only 'English' but '19th or 20th century Western materialist or Edwardian theosophical cosmology'.

So, Chris, in lay people's terms, is it like this?

"Material" means it could potentially one day be measured, known, captured, diagrammed, calculated, etc even if we don't yet know how or what or why.

and

"Non-material" means it would forever and always be impossible, because the "unknown thing" in question is not a thing, has no form or qualities, is forever unknowable, etc?

I'm aware that many of the terms I use aren't very specific. So what I meant by "non-linear" may not be how the term is used in this kind of science.

What I'm trying to point to is the idea that information doesn't always travel like a row of dominoes bumping into one another, or like the old game "telephone" where one person transmits a message to another person, down a line of people until some end point/person. In my limited understanding of QM, a particle can be in more than one space at a time, and multiple particles can occupy the same space; this is why (in my understanding) QM and general relativity have yet to be unified into one theory.

So, the way I was thinking of "linear" was that of going from thing to thing to thing, effecting change the usual form of transferring energy between successive particles. But even at the level of neurons, this may not be the case. Information seems to leap between particles, or even be in two or more spaces at once. I don't know if there are any experimentally validated mechanisms for how this works, but the fact that it happens is quite amazing all by itself.

Again, I could be (and most likely am) expressing these ideas with amateur understanding at best

All I know is that I'm not as obsessed with brains as many people are. I think they play a tremendous role in consciousness, but I'm not convinced they create it. There seems to be evidence that information and conscious experiencing can go beyond the brain, and even to other brains, via mechanisms we have yet to fully understand. Whether material or otherwise, it's beyond the realm of predictive science at this time in history. I don't doubt we'll keep making progress, though.

"Kate, another terminology point -- materialist does not equal "what we
can see with our senses." There are all kinds of things that cannot be
see yet are material in nature. From the tiniest particles like quarks
to the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum (from infrared to
ultraviolet to radio, x-rays, gamma rays and the like. All of those
things are invisible, but material."

-- granted: that's what I was pointing at with " or their extensions [microscopes, telescopes, electronic hookups, etc.], AND derived by calculating formulae based on physical observation--
into the 'material' pile."

And just because I'm a naughty nonconformist, I'm suggesting that I disagree with, and find the respective opposing arguments of both sides facing off over 'matter' vs. 'spirit'-- unconvincing and inadequate. Because I have some familiarity with logic and rhetoric, I'm a naughty, nonconformist critic with teeth: I know a circular argument when I see one. If everything perceptible-- by any means-- as a substance or force is defined as 'material'-- there's nothing left but hallucinations to be 'not-material.' Whereas if 'materialism' means "the theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter" [what Mr. Webster says]-- there's a lot of exploration to be done, a lot of 'Wow! I don't know!' to be said.

Not even hallucinations... thus perhaps my confusion about the terminology. Nothing in the "non-material" category can't be potentially, possibly, moved to the "material" category once a device is found with which to detect and measure it, no?

By george! You're right-- onward and furthur to go...

I'm not saying I think that's right or true or not, I'm just trying to figure out how the category "non-material" can even exist if one posits this "material" category... I'm not sure the existence of a "non-material" category makes any sense unless you are the sort of person trying to propose that some-non-thing "exists" that cannot and will not ever be understood in terms of the material category...

You see what I mean?

Well, as long as the category 'material' includes everything perceptible-- now known, or to be discovered in the future with better instrumentation-- it is not possible to posit anything else. In the not-distant past, however, 'energy' was not considered 'material', so it was a handy category with a folk usage as a place to put phenomena that had been called 'spiritual.' This usage doesn't please me, for different reasons than the one that riles the materialists, who find it a sloppy term for the 'energy' referred to by physics. Which, QED, has been parked in the 'material' pile.

It's as if it has become a priori impossible to deconstruct these things, that 'not-knowing' is all very well as a kind of philosophical amusement, but far too dangerous to be looked into very deeply. And if there are things we don't know now, when we know them in the future they will fit into the framework of what we do know now. We will discover more material stuff and it will act according to the rules we have for the material stuff we know about now.

Whereas I'm just piping up with a gentle plea for the possibility of things being radically different, if looked at in ways that we can't presently imagine. That someday we may look at some phenomenon that's commoner than dirt-- and see a whole new universe of implications: something like the discovery that 'you' are both far less than you'd assumed [not absolutely autonomous, not the Master of the Universe] and far more than you could have imagined-- inseparable from the 'unborn' or the cosmos itself.

Which returns me to the parts of this account of the NDE that struck me when I read this article: first, that by all measures we currently have for the brain being operational, this woman's was not. Yet she reported experiencing cognition of an extraordinary sort. The second thing was that she was left with unshakeable certainty, as has been the case with others, that there is some 'thing' that is not limited to the body and its little life. It's kind of the inverse of all the 'god machine' studies, where the experience of the transcendent is mapped to some particular area of the brain, that lights up in meditators, or can be stimulated in volunteers.

I think it's not only possible, but likely, that we will discover things about things that will act according to rules we *don't* yet imagine, too. No one imagined many of the rules of nature we now think of as standard and normal.

I also would hope that even if science were able to explain completely and thoroughly something like non-dual experience, that should not be cause to disparage people's human experience, anymore than understanding how grief works should mean disparaging mourning.

We (the general population) are still impacted, I think, by earlier attitudes, such as "it's all in your head" being a dismissal of a person's experience as valid and important.

Curiosity requires me to ask why knowing how something works at a very deep level is potentially disparaging? I'm sure I've heard "it's all in your head" but always from an MD, never from a practicing scientist in the research profession (and no, MDs are not scientists).
Somehow the commonly accepted definition of what a scientist is, and what science is, is very different from mine and that of others I hang with. Maybe my pals, relatives and I need to go to re-education camp


-cmarti

There seems to be a rather large difference between how science is understood by PSiRPs and the rest of the population (who perhaps are the ones who need a heck of a lot more science education).

PSiRP = "Publish/Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm"?

http://www.psirp.org/

tee hee

...a practicing scientist in the research profession...


-cmarti

PSiRP

Caution: high-stakes philosophy in progress...