:shrug: Mediumship happens...

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I still don't think I'm anywhere close to losing interest in this topic and in particular the most important thing it tells us IMHO is about the basis of what it is we are. If you can think of your momentary awareness as the bleeding edge of a mathematical equation that doesn't start with your conscious self awareness a lot of this makes more sense.

But yeah, while I wouldn't bother asking em for winning lottery numbers or anything like that (it's not fungible to personal desire - no surprise I suppose) clearly something's happening to em and it's always interesting to note how often, on repeat, that these people are driven into these kinds of things - ie. because it just starts happening and they can either make lemonade or they can turn into shut-ins for the rest of their lives. Life's not always fair I suppose!

hmm. I don't know man.
For a while I did some breathing exercises as popularized by the "Ice man" Wim Hof, aDutch guy who's the world record holder in some things related to withstanding extreme cold, like, sitting in a bathtub full of ice water, and who did some things like hike to Mt. Everest base camp in shorts and nothing else.
Anyway, he got these abilities and a few more that are considered medical miracles, and he attributes them to breathing exercises followed by ice-bathing.
I got interested and followed his instructions to see what that felt like.
The breathing exercise is basically built on inducing hypocapnia - low levels of CO2 in the blood. If you overdo it, you might easily pass out, but his approach is to hyperventilate and hold your breath and hyperventilate again and so on to the brink of passing out.
And it feels quite incredible - a certain disconnect between mind and body, loss of proprioception, seeing lights with eyes closed, and loss of a sense of gravity.

It is funny that one could enduce an altered state by breathing, but then again, one does upset one's body chemistry quite a bit by elevating the blood ph-levels (breathing off CO2 means reducing carbonic acid in the blood, leaving it less acidic).

but the experience made me doubt a whole lot of out of body experiences, or supernatural experiences, and when people occasionally tell me about their epiphanies they had on drugs ..... I attribute all these things to exceptional states of brain chemistry that can be induced one way or another, but probably shouldn't.
Like... who said these people didn't have a small stroke they recovered from? - I just don't want to draw conclusions about the world from other people's subjective experience, be they near death or buddhist enlightenment-like in nature. And if someone were to hear the voices of ghosts, well, that sounds like schizophrenia to me - something we know some forms of - I'd rather expand an existing category of how experience can be processed differently ba an individual brain, than throw all of physics overboard and look for new categories I can't prove in any way.

there's been millennia of people having experiences and enlightenments and talking to ghosts and nothing progressed in any way, and only a few centuries in which atoms existed as an intellec24ual concept, and all hell broke loose in those centuries, and by now people can edit their genome. so... screw subjective experience as source of knowledge about the world, I guess.

Nothing funny about that at all. Buddhists, yogis, and dervishes have been playing with breathing patterns and various forms of pranayama for thousands of years. If it didn't kick in an altered state I have my doubts that they'd be doing it.


I'm a little more positive on the psychedelics. What I see them doing for people is putting them in touch with deeper layers of subconscious processes. There tend to be a lot of things lurking down there that can be anything from repressed in the proper sense to just things that the rest of the brain just doesn't hand off to the conscious mind for whatever reason and sometimes you'd wonder why that's the case when you see what it is. Yes, having this pop up can cause people to have bad trips but it can also be tremendously healing when something, lets say a trauma or a deep self-doubt of some kind that's been separated from conscious access, bubbles to the surface and gets popped when it touches discoursive reasoning. I think that's something that psychology and psychiatry really need to look into again and from the looking of things I think they're starting to.



In my own experience you really shouldn't hear voices. You'll likely feel a very distinct 'other' presence near you or in you, quite often feel almost glowing like it's made of light and smiling or regarding you very warmly - and the odds are you likely won't visually see anything. If you do get any affect displays or ideas they'll register through your own nervous system, come through in your own words but will rocket through as if something behind you put some extra velocity on them.

I think the side I fall on is this - the plural of anecdote probably isn't evidence but when that anecdote goes from a handful to tens of thousands, not tens of thousands of new agers necessarily who wanted the experience and got it but many if not most of which were just going on their way, had an NDE, and something changed permanently - I think it tells us something about our wiring, ie. that something changes, and if I had to take a guess as to why it might go something like this; when you're a baby your brain is scrambled eggs or pretty close to it, everything is in primacy, so you can't hold anything about where you might have come from or what things are like before conception. You have to learn how to do everything from scratch, colonize your brain by absorbing your environment, and there's simply no time or place for memories of anything else. When someone has an NDE and remembers it it's usually either a fully developed adult or at least a child old enough to be past that unmashing and ordering of their nervous system - therefor what happens has a context to tack into and settle.

My sense of it's place in the universe goes back to my sense of a sort of functionalist panpsychism, ie. that the whole universe is at least protoconscious, that there is probably a lot of geometry and moving parts that would be conscious, but to that extent also if it doesn't touch base directly with a physical reality we'd understand (say, suppose, it's rotated in context), we'll observe a symbol of some kind that we could make sense of. Being that I think we're mathematical monsters sort of jutting out of the background of the universe it wouldn't shock me at all if there's a whole jungle of chaos mathematics behind us, feeding into us, and structures like ourselves behind that. Our subconscious minds are furious editors of information and it's partly because they're too good at what they do which is data collection. To that extent it seems like they take in, on some levels, a whole hidden geography, and edit it out - largely I think for no other reason than that that geography is by and large harmless, doesn't have anything that's likely to eat us (some harassment might be possible), but a bear, a lion, another human from a warring faction - that can take you out immediately.

The conscious mind being as limited as it is in horsepower, I think for that reason, has a curtailed point of view - geared toward survival - and if it's not drugs or an NDE it's usually one heck of an existential crisis where someone's contemplating taking their own life before their subconscious says "Woahwoahwoah! Wait! There's all this too!" and a lot of people experience odd things like kundalini awakening and the like when they're in the kind of crisis where they have the sense that life is slowly squashing them like a bug and all they can do is accept their imminent destruction.


I think that just tells us more that our fantasy of excarnate entities being omniscient is a wives tale or pipe dream fed to us by a rather Manichean religions that make it sound like everything is an angel or a demon, everything knows exactly what's happening and has decided to either aid or rebel, and that every human being when they die will know too. Also I'd think of it like this - if something evolved in a different environment with different priorities the things that would matter to it would match the salient details of its environment not ours, so whole technologies of what would be useless gibberish to us are possible if something's truly living in a different context. Similarly I think allocation of mental resources would be different, much like we find that certain kinds of chimps - while they could never cut muster in a human society, could smash almost any human being at Simon Says or any short-term memory game.

I also see this sort of thing not really comparing to a technology in any proper sense and much more accurately to a sport. For example how much advancement can we make in Muay Thai if we're just ramping up training techniques? Football? Basketball? If it's a competency that has its nexus through the physical there's genetics, there's all kinds of experience wiring one's brain, so in a lot of ways I have my doubts that it would really have much of a way to advance. Savantism, whether natural or by injury, is another thing where a savant can write a book on what kinds of things they think should impart their skills, people can try it, and it's not likely to work for most of them. The hard sciences enjoy a lot of grace in that they often take very clear, external, and easily measured things to set up experiments and reiterate them to come up with theories, sometimes even moving those theories to laws when there seem to be enough new tiers of data built on top of them. Add to that anything you can make with a hard science you can teach another person to make. That kind of science is great for things at the level of physics and chemistry, has more challenge with things as complex as biology but can do them, and it's where we cross into zones like psychology, sociology, and some areas of medicine (autism's a great example) where we get overwhelmed.

Also I'd reiterate this point - that if it's a real mathematical landscape they're in touch with its likely not going to be fungible. If something zaps down their way they might be able to grab if if they know how to but that's about it.

My guess at what'll probably happen in the next twenty years is that this stuff will be so prolific, eventually, that we'll be rethinking what NDE's, STE's, spontaneous mediumship, etc. mean and my early best guess is that we'll just have to assume that there is a much deeper geometry to the information layer of the universe, that consciousness is much more of an active natural process than something necessarily locked away only in functioning neurons, and if it has much impact on us its much less likely to give us technology but much more likely to inform our ethics toward environment, industrial processes, plant and animal welfare, and I'm sure it'll take some of the ennui that we have out of human welfare. I think we'd also get a lot of good hygiene tips for how to operate our nervous systems and we'd likely take a serious bite out of the more common and pervasive mental illness as people managed their habits differently.

^^ I'm not sure I'm following you here.
Are you trying to say that there may be a different "dimension", for lack of a better word, that these experiences tap into - and the people having these experiences are trying to make sense of them, in human terms, while the other "dimension" is not inherently human?

I'd say yes to all everything above except that I feel uncomfortable calling it a 'dimension', it might be a fair word for use in the most clinical sense but it's got a lot of Twilight Zone baggage. I'd think of it a bit more like a causal hotbed of sorts, or really a series of feedback loops that are stomping up the kinds of complexity that give is organic life and particularly something as complex as sentient life. Also, this might be a bit counter-intuitive on the surface, human consciousness isn't all that human in the way we'd usually think of it either without the rigorous conditioning that it gets from its environment - split it apart and the pieces take on what would probably seem alien if and when they aren't acting as a socialized whole.

In that sense, if I maybe reach out on a limb to try and consolidate that more, it's a bit like the suggestion that there might be something like subsystems in the universe that carry information in a more active rather than coincidental or secondary manner. If consciousness, or protoconsciousness, is a normal thing rather than an aberration this would perhaps be expected behavior. On a side note a year or so back I got curious about examples of neural webbing in nature - from neurons and slime moulds to telecom wiring, and highway systems to the webbing of galactic superclusters it seems like there's a conductance optimization. I've often had some considerations that this sort of thing might have sort of helped cheat the spark a bit as well as expedite/catalyze Darwinian evolution, the whole thing where once a beneficial mutation comes on line it seems to proliferate a little faster in some cases than reproduction quite explains.

yeah, I get what you mean with "dimension" being too twilight-zone-y a word....
yes, slime molds and city planning and communication networks - as far as I understood it, that example shows nust how fiercely competitive evolutionary systems are- you couldn't design it better if you tried....

a friend of mine who loves playing chess talked to me about alpha zero a bit-google's AI that taught itself chess by playing against itself rather than by learning from previous games. And he mentioned a peculiar thing - in previous conversations, he complained how chess computers aren't playing "beautiful" - they are playing perfect but without idiosyncrasy. - Allha zero, however, he said, was playing like a human - unexpected, creative and frankly genius.
He says it's like watching a player with perfect intuition rather than a machine. he was seriously awestruck when he told me this. - point being: alpha zero's AI is evolutionary along the lines of the game, rather than a machine learning algorithm that just learns from man made material, i.e. a designed approach.

yes, that thing about evolutionary steps seeming to occur faster after the first time is fascinating - but it's not enough yet as the basis for a new paradigm, radically different than pure materialism. - materialism explains so much, so well, that for now, I consider it more likely that the materialist story is incomplete. But a new paradigm has to be better than the materialist one- and it has to contain the materialist one, that is, explain the same phenomena, and add explanations for previously unexplained ones.
What bugs me is that "esoteric" explanation often ONLY serve to explain new phenomena, and basically skip all of established science. they're not better, in that sense, just different.

If they're purely esoteric they seem to be a niche enough concern that only those who either find the mystic/magical path and think it's the best thing since sliced bread or, alternately, have all hell break loose in their life along lines that aren't supposed to be there tend to dive on. Either of those two tends to have rather narrow priorities. As a consequence there's a lot of 'how do I get from A to B' and much less concern about connecting dots or trying to really make proper sense of the big picture.

One of the reasons I do enjoy listening to Gordon White is that he's the kind of guy where he wants to take the best of everything and he seems to be able to speak as lucidly and intelligently on sociology, economics, politics, and even postmodernism, as he can on chaos magic and the various other traditions that he's interested in drawing from. John Michael Greer's another guy who's done as much in the way of studying esotericism as he has in studying environment and resource issues, peak oil, and I think the only thing that can be a little controversial with him is that I sometimes think he's more convinced than is justified that we're headed toward a sort of dark age in the west where we have a partial technological reversion and end up living the Appalachian lifestyle due to resource scarcity, economic downturn and the like.

Where I think I'm really at on this - I'd have to agree with you that no theory is worthwhile if it attempted to completely overturn the observations of the current scientific paradigm. Where it gets challenging in my books is that NDE's, STE's, magicians scrying the paths of the Tree of Life, or whatever else - it's all far enough into what's commonly thought of as subjective territory that it probably won't get much research outside of some areas of the medical community (like University of Virginia) and people will unfortunately tend to be either true believers or out-and-out skeptics for equally bad reasons. I think it would take finding increasing numbers of bridge issues for the more conservative members of mainstream science to consider reopening inquiry, or the other possibility - that NDE's and things of that nature get as common as autism diagnoses.

I think if we do progress in this direction of knowledge on a public level though, as I mentioned before, we'll likely find that what we thought was a spooky territory is less spooky and more a very stable, mundane, and in most cases boring thing which in some senses got buried under other priorities but in other ways just wasn't testable and also had to be sidelined for a lot of unfortunate political reasons. The model that seems to fit best with what I've seen, both in studying and interacting with the 'occult' or esoteric elements of things, is that it seems to edify the functionalism hypothesis, which in a lot of ways seems like a special case of panpsychism that describes hierarchical structures which encapsulate one another (ie. multiple realization) without necessarily sharing mind or any immediate sense of consciousness with subordinate pieces or parts. Being that it's also likely not a place where we'll be pulling much scientific observation out (I like what Eric Weinstein said when he was on stage with Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro - that we're blazing through our low-hanging fruit right now) I also have my doubts that this will even be scientifically driven first and foremost as it could turn out that our search for a sociology that works, or a heart to match to science in order to de-alienate ourselves from the broader universe, may have a more significant hand to play.

Speaking of...

Well, from my materialist viewpoint, I find occultism and esotericism as well as panpsychism... regressive.
It appears to me like an intuitive explanation that makes sense to a lot of people, while the scientific explanation is unintuitive and demystifies things, and often is less elegant.

I can't remember where I read the comment that a magician should try to produce his tricks via mundane and unelegant means, since people prefer the elegant story (even if it requires magic) to the mundane reality.
And then there's Daniel Dennett, noticing that magic tricks are real, whereas "real magic" is not real.

But of course, the scientific explanations actually are elegant, but to realizy just how amazing and fascinating just everything is, one has to actually get familiar with it.

I remember an xkcd comic in which one figure complains that science demystifies the world and makes everything mundane - and in the next panel, a scientist marvels over the fascinating beauty and complexity of the biological organism that is a snail, to which the character from the first panel comments that science is icky.
And I think there's a lot of truth to that - to understand and cherish the world as it is, it needs scientific knowledge and a different relationship to "disgust"- one has to learn to see the world in non-human terms.
Panpsychism and occultism are still trying to put humans into a universe that works in human terms.
But I think that humans don't function in human terms, really. That "human terms" are just that layer of cognition that evolved and made humans function superior to other species, which is covering up the cellular automata, the affinities of chemicals bonding together, the atomic forces.
I think identities and "thinking" are pragmatic solutions to the problem of hunting and mating and defending yourself and your offspring against predators.

but the science of how stuff works, from subatomic particle to postmodern gender theory, is endlessly fascinating. way more than ghosts and gods and eternal souls.

I think as far as science is concerned its an endeavor that we have to keep pushing forward, it's incredibly unlikely to serve us ill unless we stop its progress in some awkward or embarrassing position, it's done a lot to greatly decrease the grim mathematics of scarcity, we're seeing a precipitous fall of religious fundamentalism around the world as knowledge increasingly finds its way int peoples hands, and to that extent I don't think anyone should get the idea to dispense with the scientific endeavor nor keeping its standards as high as possible regardless of what may bear out with what we come to understand about the role of consciousness in the universe.

I'm not going to listen to watch an hour-long video that is almost certain to be insubstantial (it's made by an organisation that draws meaning from NDAs, for a start). Is there any actual evidence for mediumship? Do any of these people ever make any substantial falsifiable predictions? Is there any way to differentiate "honest, I can sometimes see the future" from "I had a hallucination"?

The only thing I can tell you is you'd probably have to wade through more, I mean days worth, of these sorts of videos to even feel like you're seeing the bigger picture of what's likely to be neurological or 'neurological plus' about these experiences. I also don't know how far we can get with falsified predictions - they've been claimed, interpretations seem to get really elastic when those claims come up in favor of the NDEer's experience (both proponents and opponents seem to lose their objective capacities fast), and even if we were to assume hyper-conservatively that the answer were 'no - no predictions can be made', that answer would only squash the Judao-Christian assumption that these people are in contact with omniscience.

I think this is the one of the few rare topics that might even make discussions on global warming or abortion rights look like they have comparatively high sanity levels for public discourse. That unfortunately means also that any search for a pristine smoking-gun is outright useless when the pristine part of the equation is impossible.