Do spiritual things exist?

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Ah, found it! Hey, check this out!

You know, this NDE stuff is getting interesting.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19213839

"Likewise, using capillary-liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, we observed a rapid increase in plasma oxytocin levels after carbon dioxide exposure. These surprising findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of studies involving brief carbon dioxide exposure prior to decapitation as well as those with euthanasia resulting from carbon dioxide-induced asphyxiation."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19234577

"our results demonstrated an attenuation of the infarct size in oxytocin-treated hearts, indicating a cardioprotective effect of oxytocin. The data suggest that the negative chronotropic action of oxytocin participates in its protective effects on ischemia-reperfusion-induced myocardial injury."

Dang! I mean, DANG! MAN! WOW! The "compassionate behavior" we are seeing in NDEs might actually be our bodies trying to defend themselves from another injury. I'm going to hit you with a suggestion here: my hypothesis here is that, after cardiac arrest, our bodies respond defensively by shooting us up with more oxytocin than normal.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1482037/

"our results demonstrated an attenuation of the infarct size in oxytocin-treated hearts, indicating a cardioprotective effect of oxytocin. The data suggest that the negative chronotropic action of oxytocin participates in its protective effects on ischemia-reperfusion-induced myocardial injury."

I would honestly like to see a comprehensive study on people reporting NDEs to see if they have higher levels of limbic oxytocin, and I wonder if this might actually have the effect of hedging against future risk of heart attack. I would also like to know if people who have suffered from NDEs have a lower risk of later heart complications.

Oh, and Tech guy, I'm watching your second long one now. He's not as interesting as the other one, but I'm following.

My response to Moody:

I don't really find Moody to be very credible. For one thing, he just rubs me the wrong way, and he comes across to me as a shyster. Sorry, but that's my reaction to him. It's like day and night compared to the last guy, Dr. Lommel. Dr. Lommel came across to me as a true academic, and I think he probably enjoys hearing other people's perspectives on the issue. Lommel seems like a person who would jump at a chance for discussion. Moody, on the other hand, broadcasts this sense that he would shut down if he felt that he was losing control of the direction of a conversation. I feel like, if I were to challenge one of his ideas, he wouldn't take the position of someone being given a puzzle to solve the way a legit thinker would, but I get a sense that he would feel put upon. I just wouldn't trust him.

His claim about people seeing a "replica of a person's body rising out of it" came across to me as very two-dimensional. He didn't hold it up for examination, but he presented this the way a salesman would present a product to a potential buyer. He kept going on about how "amazed" he was. He seemed to say, "look at how amazed I am! Aren't you amazed, too? Come and be amazed, like me!" Frankly, I smelled a rat. In fact that attempt to broadcast a lot of affected emotion, with all the hand-waving and dancing about, had me wanting to leap at his throat.

Also, what is this "new thinking" he is talking about? I guess next he's going to tell us that we can only correctly talk about NDEs in Newspeak. He didn't tell us how we were supposed to think about these things at all, but all he seemed to say was, "well, all of these skeptics are just thinking about it the wrong way, and that's why they are skeptics." Throughout that entire tirade toward the end of his speech, he did not once give a definitive explanation of his "new thinking," but he just said a lot of vague things about, "it's outside the scope of space and time." Again, I smelled a rat.

Tomorrow, I'll try to find time to view another of the long ones.

Agreed.

I call them Death-Deniers.

Good find! I was also reading Van Lommel's book and he brought up that DMT seems to have an incredible amount of resemblance as well and that he finds it convincing enough to say that he believes it needs more research for a possible relationship with facilitation of the experience. I don't know how oxytocin and DMT would interract but if they still behaved normally I could see a lot of interraction to the effect of what people are describing.


I only caught this one because I had the chance to watch all of the speeches. Eric Weiss at about 9:45 mentions it as Three Value/Modern Propositional logic. I don't really know much about it or what having the third 'unknown' variable yields but it would be interesting to see some of this actually spelled out rather than just talked about abstractly.

We use it all the time in our day-to-day thought processes. When we have unknown variables, we go through multiple possible inferences. Essentially, we sort of do a sort of "systemic sounding." Try to think of it as a form of limbic echolocation.

When an inference set lights up enough neurons, we move down that route with or without knowing for sure that it's got the answer we are looking for. We just move into whatever set of inferences "turns on the most lights," dive in, and hope for the best.

The thing is, when you commit yourself to any act, internal or otherwise, that is associated with an up-regulation of dopamine generally in the nucleus accumbens, you actually bias yourself toward repeating that act. You not only reinforce the interneural bonds that lead to "the right answer," but you also cut down on their propensity for wasting resources on "probable wrong answers" or "irrelevant answers." Essentially, by tightening bonds and cutting down on plasticity, your limbic system is trying to save resources and time.

Ultimately, you can end up in a cycle where, every time you think a certain thought, you get a sense of, "I did a good job," and that just keeps on reinforcing the behavior. It's akin to the effect of practicing at a musical instrument for a long time and repeating the same movements over and over.

Unfortunately, what happens with some people is that, when they do this "limbic echolocation" thing, they can end up being wedded to a set of potential conclusions, whether or not they have any truth value. For example, if a wife gets the idea that her husband is cheating on her, she might stay angry at her husband even when it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt he's been faithful. Why? "Because he's a no good, lying, cheating S.O.B." Try arguing with her, and you're wasting your time.

On the other hand, some of us don't have as high a propensity to become so grossly wedded to a set of ideas. There can be various reasons for this. For example, some of us find out we can get the reward stimulus not just from surfing down one string of inferences, but we realize that we can make new ones. Or we could make giant networks of them. Why settle for a toy slide when you can build yourself a water park?

That takes work, though. If your limbic system is trying to save energy, you ain't gonna do it, even if that's not your predisposition.

But it's something that human beings are uniquely able to do, for now, because of how our brains are put together. But we're getting a little bit better at getting machines to emulate it. Slowly.

That's an interesting look at the neural aspect. I'm wondering though, if we were going to apply 3VPL to live or 'real' problems in the sense of the societal big picture, if it would look like Einstein's 'Who Owns The Fish' except just on a much larger and more mind-numbing scale. That might not be the perfect example but it seems like a fair enough illustration of essentially seeking out structure to see how many dots can be connected within what we currently deem untestable subsets.

What you said above though does make me realize one thing - those of us who can shift entire worldviews at will based on evidence (or at least evidence that convinces us) have an incredible gift and we should never forget that.

This is actually the weakest as far as bringing forward evidence that these experiences are caused specifically by a "ghost in the machine."

For one thing, the story being told by Eben Alexander III is put together very artistically, and I see him as a talented speaker. However, he lacks sobriety, and this damages his credibility for me. Again, I do not appreciate being told how "amazed" I ought to be over something. Also, there is something fishy about a story involving a "beautiful woman" and "butterfly wings." Let's forget the fact that this is simply far-fetched. The real issue is that it's too earthly.

Another issue is that the story is expressly inconsistent with other NDE accounts. It is contradictory to other NDE accounts. Other NDE accounts seem to involve "going down a tunnel of light" and meeting deceased relatives. The details of his account just aren't there in most NDE cases.

The only way it would make sense would be if his particular experience were induced specifically by his meningitis or some of the drugs he was taking for it, which would point directly at a neuro-physiological cause. Otherwise, I'm getting some off vibes off of this one.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that video.

I found that weird and kind of animaeish as well, but I did like the catch or hook to it. He was mentioning that he'd really wanted to see his dad, wondered why he didn't, and wondered why instead he ended up seeing someone he'd never met. He knew all of his life he'd been adopted, he'd wanted to touch base with his by blood siblings but they'd been hesitant due to a death of another one of their siblings, strange things ensue from there. One could of course argue that he post-fabricated (perhaps unintentionally) the similarities between the dead sibling he'd never met and the girl on the back of the butterfly with him but if we take the route of him being a gifted speaker and the whole thing sounding like it was made up we run into what consider the conspiracy problem. What I mean by that is this; everyone has to be making it up - anything from NDE's with varifiability to the supposed doctors or nurses verifying strange and arbitary things that the NDE'r couldn't have guessed, same for healers, same for psychics; essentially if we take what we think is the easy way out - ie. impugning character and coming to the conclusion that they're in it for the money or their own personal dogmas - the pool gets unwieldy.

I think that last part is where I tend to part ways on the durability of anecdotal evidence when it comes in high quanities and occasionally incredibly high quality. I wouldn't call Eben's experience 'high quality' in terms of external evidence, he found it to be with the dead sibling he'd never met but there was nothing like the OBE's with the person dead at the time recaling that one of the staffers said something about strawberries or other things that are just too off the wall for a person to make up after a cardiac arrest. The later is what I tend to consider stronger evidence.

I have a certain understanding of memory. I see remembering things as a creative process, where we tend to interpret old information quite often based on new inputs. For example, for PTSD victims, the original trauma might not be all that serious. However, if the PTSD victim routinely avoids old memories and gets distressed and frustrated with being unable to suppress them, these emotions of distress and frustration will become interwoven with the memory. Over time, an untreated PTSD victim could remember a relatively trivial experience as something seriously traumatic. That's why it's so effective to get PTSD victims to discuss past experiences in controlled, calming settings. As we discuss old experiences in that manner, we revise them in our heads to the point where we can tolerate these memories and ultimately put them to rest.

The problem with his memory is that, if he didn't see an actual person during his vision, he would not have known any details of that person's appearance. He wouldn't have tried to suppose what those details would have been. Just like we thoroughly ignore the blind spot in our vision, rather than inserting a "black hole" in it, we tend to believe that we remember things more accurately than we actually do. Therefore, if we have a dream about a girl, we will assume, in our memory, that we had a complete experience, whether or not we can remember all of the details photographically.

If he later saw an image of his actual deceased sister and made the association, that would fill in the details of the old memory as if they had always been there. With nothing for those details to displace, it would just stand to reason.

The thing is, I don't think they are making anything up deliberately. I simply think that there are limitations on the methods our minds use for recalling old information. When we have memories that don't make sense in any real-world context, such as if they are hallucinations that we didn't really know for sure were hallucinations, we can end up tailoring the way we remember things in such a way as to achieve a degree of consistency. Our minds don't like dissociation. They don't like fragments.

Another problem with this last one, though, is that this is not a "skeptic turned believer." He portrays himself somewhat as such, but the problem is that he was never a declared atheist. The closest he comes to saying he was a skeptic is that he became discouraged over the ineffectiveness of prayer. That't not the same as dismissing religion altogether. Therefore, if he were to have what appeared to be an extraordinary experience, it would stand to reason that he would enjoy a sort of second honeymoon with religion and/or spirituality.

Then again, he might just have some really large medical bills, and he's desperate to save his estate. Anyway, I will give him credit for being a very gifted speaker.

maybe the question is ill defined. Whats the difference, in the lab, between spiritual and material?

Everything follows some sort of rules.

Spiritual stuff must also follow some kind of rules. They also must have some sort of way to detect them.

If you say no, then what? Randomness? That too is a rule. Here it is, its random. If its blurry like quantum physics, then in that case too, it would follow some kind of statistics.

Bottom line: Spiritual stuff, is simply a fancy name for a different kind of matter (if it exist).

(makes me think of the strange and charm quark, its just stupid names)

In other words, the question it self has a problem. Like the assertion: "i tell only lies"

I think that's why it doesn't work as evidence. We can't quantify how sure he is or how many pictures of his dead sister he'd seen to verify if her affect/expressionality matches correctly. That's where the best we can do is guess on how careful he'd be about saying such a thing (I *hope* careful enough to be considerate of his newly met siblings who are still alive and that just blowing off the top over a loose correlation in his head would be in credibly poor taste). From there though, as to the strength of anecdote, it seems to be more a thing of knowing him, his character, his habits, and whether or not he's an excitable guy in terms of jumping to conclusions.


I actually heard a different interview where he was clear that he'd been swayed to reductive materialism and he seemed to be implying that he was that ever since his college days or really starting to get into science. The question of the meningitis comes up as he sort of woke up in that state, somewhere else, with no idea who or even what he was. On one hand that could have possibly overturned his years of atheism as his childhood theism might have been at a deeper level than what the meningitis had gotten to? Even there that seems out on a limb, just like there's no reason the meningitis couldn't have attacked the parts of his brain that held more religious memories than memories of times when he had more atheistic beliefs.

I'd wonder what his health insurance would look like. I did an eight day stint in a hospital from peritonitis, that came to $20kish. He's a neurologist with a neurologist's income and it doesn't sound like he had much more than several weeks.

Its a possibility that he's just been a life long shiester and has been telling tall tales since he was a kid but, things like that tend to get out of the bag quick and no doubt the IANDS and NDERF type organizations believe what they're saying and put enough effort into not getting their research or reputation burned by charlatans. At a minimum he has to be making a pretty convincing showing that he himself at least believes it, so that pretty much leads us right back to the paragraph you mentioned before - that the remnants of his mind with released DMT and oxytocin could have made this happen; not impossible but definitely a bit wild from the standpoint of probabilities.

Actually, I think that another thing that needs to be pointed out is this:

We really need to rethink how we view "brain death." The idea that dying entails the functioning of the brain coming to a standstill is a bit of a fallacy. If it were that simple, we could restore all brain function by simply restoring oxygen flow. That's not really what happens. The brain doesn't just stop operating. When the brain is dying, a lot more than usual is going on chemically, inside the brain. Calcium is actually flowing into cells very rapidly, building up to toxic levels that actually kill the cell. Other changes are going on.

Therefore, if a lot of new memories were to suddenly form following a brush with brain death, memories that, by all rights, should not be there, then that might actually shed some important light on what is actually going on in the brain when we die.

Now, let me illustrate to you how resorting too quickly to the superstitious argument can actually be seriously harmful. If we jump directly to the conclusion, "There is a soul in there, glory, hallelujah, tapdance for Jesus," then we would end up overlooking information that could enable us to actually save lives. What the superstitious position amounts to is simply plugging your ears to any remotely scientific explanation and throwing it over for spiritual mumbo-jumbo that ultimately is a road to nowhere.

On the other hand, if we were to avoid letting ourselves get over-excitable and explored the topic from a sober perspective, we could eventually gather a lot of information from these NDEs. We could do a lot to help sharpen our understanding of how the brain actually works. In the future, when your brain is about to go into "brain death," we might be able to shoot you up with some kind of preservative chemical that would keep you alive until you could be gotten into an ICU. It might not be a magic bullet to do away with death and dying forever, amen, but it would be something we could arm paramedics with that could help get someone who is going into cardiac arrest from the scene to the hospital in relative safety. That's something we might not develop if we jump to a lot of unsupported conclusions without taking the time to look deeper.

I hear you on the medical possibilities, I just can't relate the argument that taking the viewpoint for evidence of a life hereafter means that the science by definition must grind to a halt. I don't think anyone would all of a sudden declare this some sort of hallowed 'God of the gaps' realm that must be obstinately guarded at all costs, and if a few wackaloons did I have no idea who they'd go to to authorize that kind of research shutdown and have it be in any way binding.

Four words: embryonic stem cell research.

I don't think this will require aborted fetuses or encouragement of having a stock of aborted fetuses. If you're theory was correct there should be all kinds of clamour against any type of AIDS vaccine because its a 'sinners' disease to those who would be 17th century churlish enough to say such a thing.

Yeah, that's pretty much what they're doing:

http://www.indecisionforever.com/blog/2 ... s-research

"Mr. Coburn has been critical of federal funding of past AIDS conferences. In 2006, he questioned whether the federal government was acting prudently in spending "millions of dollars" on several AIDS conferences that year."

http://www.blaghag.com/2009/11/purdue-p ... money.html

"As a Christian, I agree with the biblical condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle. However, we are living in a nation and world that increasingly rejects biblical norms. To defend traditional sexual morality against the encroaching threat of homosexuality and other aberrant forms of sexual expression, we need to be able to do more than cite Bible verses. Fortunately, there are plenty of economic reasons for being against sodomite degeneracy and I think as conservatives we need to be able to articulate why our nation cannot afford the extremely high financial costs of this lifestyle at a time when we are confronting dangerously high budget deficits, national debt, and personal debt."

And these people are really not all by themselves, here. At one point, whether we ought to see AIDS as "punishment from God for being a fag" was a very controversial issue! At one time, people were actually pretty evenly divided on the issue!

http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynu ... mberID=311

"Just 23% of the public now agree with the statement that "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior," while 72% disagree; when this question was first asked in 1987, public opinion was divided on the question, with 43% agreeing and 47% disagreeing."

And this isn't something that is in the distance for me. A friend of my s.o.'s is suffering from multiple sclerosis, and his family of missionary Baptists all think it's a punishment for him being a "sinner." These people really exist. His doctor tried to "help things along" by taking him off his MS drugs. While he was losing his hearing and his memory, he was waiting for his spinal tap results to come in to vindicate that he actually was suffering from MS. But his run-in with a redneck doctor who thought he would "give God a helping hand" nearly killed him. And he is too poor to press charges over this. You really do think I'm making this up, but this kind of crap is happening all the time.

You talk here like all of what I'm saying is far-fetched, but these attitudes are about as quotidian as they come. People who think this way are out there, and they are just dying to enact their superstitious drivel as law.

Tech, I think that there is a burden of responsibility on those of us who are able to turn over ideas and see them in different ways to try to curb this kind of behavior. I am not against people being religious. I encourage people who have the inclination to enjoy having the beliefs they do. The reason I do so is that I think it's a lot more important, in the long-run, to teach people beneficial habits of thinking that might lead people AWAY from harmful behavior.

For example, I think it's important to take these NDEs as an interesting phenomenon that we don't really have a concrete, set-in-stone explanation for. We might have a variety of different beliefs to start with, but all of us can approach it in the same way, which is to highlight a number of different possible explanations and try to narrow that list down. All of us, whether or not we believe in insubstantial spirits, can abide by this rule. All of us, religious or not, can conduct ourselves in a responsible manner.

And it sets off some serious alarm bells for me when someone is talking about how "amazed" he is, as if all of us are supposed to get "amazed" with him and close our ears to any other possible explanation for what he's talking about. I see it as immoral.