Thread: Consciousness and OBEs/NDEs: Sorry guys, its all in your minds. Literally.

Excellent article in the Times. Well worth a read.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...0394-1,00.html

Some interesting bits

Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

THE BRAIN AS MACHINE

SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.

And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.

But different views on consciousness do exist even in scientific circles. I can also quote some interesting bits:

Originally Posted by David Calmers, in Scientific American

The Hard Problem
RESEARCHERS use the word “consciousness”
in many different ways. To clarify
the issues, we first have to separate the
problems that are often clustered together
under the name. For this purpose, I find
it useful to distinguish between the “easy
problems” and the “hard problem” of
consciousness. The easy problems are by
no means trivial—they are actually as
challenging as most in psychology and
biology—but it is with the hard problem
that the central mystery lies.
The easy problems of consciousness
include the following: How can a human
subject discriminate sensory stimuli and
react to them appropriately? How does
the brain integrate information from
many different sources and use this information
to control behavior? How is it
that subjects can verbalize their internal
states? Although all these questions are
associated with consciousness, they all
concern the objective mechanisms of the
cognitive system. Consequently, we have
every reason to expect that continued
work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience
will answer them.
The hard problem, in contrast, is the
question of how physical processes in the
brain give rise to subjective experience.
This puzzle involves the inner aspect of
thought and perception: the way things feel
for the subject. When we see, for example,
we experience visual sensations, such
as that of vivid blue. Or think of the ineffable
sound of a distant oboe, the agony
of an intense pain, the sparkle of happiness
or the meditative quality of a moment
lost in thought. All are part of what
I call consciousness. It is these phenomena
that pose the real mystery of the mind.
To illustrate the distinction, consider
a thought experiment devised by the Australian
philosopher Frank Jackson. Suppose
that Mary, a neuroscientist in the
23rd century, is the world’s leading expert
on the brain processes responsible for
color vision. But Mary has lived her
whole life in a black-and-white room and
has never seen any other colors. She
knows everything there is to know about
physical processes in the brain—its biology,
structure and function. This understanding
enables her to grasp all there is
to know about the easy problems: how
the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates
information and produces verbal reports.
From her knowledge of color vision, she
knows how color names correspond with
wavelengths on the light spectrum. But
there is still something crucial about color
vision that Mary does not know: what
it is like to experience a color such as red.
It follows that there are facts about conscious
experience that cannot be deduced
from physical facts about the functioning
of the brain.
Indeed, nobody knows why these
physical processes are accompanied by
conscious experience at all. Why is it that
when our brains process light of a certain
wavelength, we have an experience of
deep purple? Why do we have any experience
at all? Could not an unconscious
automaton have performed the same
tasks just as well? These are questions
that we would like a theory of consciousness
to answer.
….
The trouble is that physical theories
are best suited to explaining why systems
have a certain physical structure and how
they perform various functions. Most
problems in science have this form; to explain
life, for example, we need to describe
how a physical system can reproduce,
adapt and metabolize. But consciousness
is a different sort of problem
entirely, as it goes beyond the scientific explanation
of structure and function.
….
Of course, neuroscience is not irrelevant
to the study of consciousness. For
one, it may be able to reveal the nature of
the neural correlate of consciousness—
the brain processes most directly associated
with conscious experience. It may
even give a detailed correspondence between
specific processes in the brain and
related components of experience. But
until we know why these processes give
rise to conscious experience at all, we will
not have crossed what philosopher Joseph
Levine has called the explanatory gap between
physical processes and consciousness.
Making that leap will demand a
new kind of theory.
In searching for an alternative, a key
observation is that not all entities in science
are explained in terms of more basic
entities. In physics, for example, spacetime,
mass and charge (among other
things) are regarded as fundamental features
of the world, as they are not reducible
to anything simpler. Despite this
irreducibility, detailed and useful theories
relate these entities to one another in
terms of fundamental laws. Together
these features and laws explain a great variety
of complex and subtle phenomena.
…
Toward this end, I propose that conscious
experience be considered a fundamental
feature, irreducible to anything
more basic. The idea may seem strange at
first, but consistency seems to demand it.
In the 19th century it turned out that
electromagnetic phenomena could not be
explained in terms of previously known
principles. As a consequence, scientists
introduced electromagnetic charge as a
new fundamental entity and studied the
associated fundamental laws. Similar
reasoning should be applied to consciousness.
If existing fundamental theories
cannot encompass it, then something
new is required.
Where there is a fundamental property,
there are fundamental laws. In this
case, the laws must relate experience to
elements of physical theory. These laws
will almost certainly not interfere with
those of the physical world; it seems that
the latter form a closed system in their
own right. Rather the laws will serve as a
bridge, specifying how experience depends
on underlying physical processes.
It is this bridge that will cross the explanatory
gap.

And besides of this, you seem to conveniently ignore some of the more interesting cases that suggest that during NDE some people still could experience accurate on their surroundings while having no brain activity. Im not saying that you are totally incorrect, but you make it sound like the final word on it has been said. If this was so, then why would dozens of scientists world-wide start different research projects on NDE and the possibility of consciousness existing seperate of the physical body? Maybe if, after this study they find the exact process behind the NDE-experience (which has so far not been found yet), and they come up with a materialist explanation of consciousness and subjective experience, we can more or less close the debate. Untill then, I'm sorry, it is somewhat premature.

Making such a conclusion as the article does is like shooting yourself in the foot, there is no, let me say again, NO evidence about how consciousness works, how it is related to the brain, how thoughts come to be.

There is much evidence on the contrary, that shows people experiencing NDE's or OOBE's can get information which would simply be impossible by todays standards.

If you look at neuroscientists, you will see that they are split in two groups, the old school and the new school. The old school do not show much interest in the evidence that goes against their materialistic world view, the new school and often those of younger age accept that something can not be explained by traditional means, but that more research and experimentation is needed before any conclusion can be reached.

There is by far no consensus in todays neurology.

Read about the AWARE projekt and it sister projects.

See these 4 parts of the press conference, it is interesting for anyone who cares for the nature of consciousness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGl9BZmoWtU

The article is pretty thin, it does not go deep enough. Too many assumptions and early conclusions.

Im a believer of OBEs pretty much being lucid dreams but consciousness and the workings of the mind are still pretty unkown from a scientific standpoint. The .pdf thats been posted here that he mentioned (the hard problem) has a lot of interesting stuff about this though. It seems like what you posted is a theory on consciosness not something thats been proven.

Originally Posted by kr3wskater

Im a believer of OBEs pretty much being lucid dreams but consciousness and the workings of the mind are still pretty unkown from a scientific standpoint. The .pdf thats been posted here that he mentioned (the hard problem) has a lot of interesting stuff about this though. It seems like what you posted is a theory on consciosness not something thats been proven.

I agree on all of that .

Originally Posted by kr3wskater

Im a believer of OBEs pretty much being lucid dreams but consciousness and the workings of the mind are still pretty unkown from a scientific standpoint. The .pdf thats been posted here that he mentioned (the hard problem) has a lot of interesting stuff about this though. It seems like what you posted is a theory on consciosness not something thats been proven.

Yes and no. Some of it is theory, some of it is fact.
The salient point, that consciousness resides in the brain is most certainly correct. There is sufficient scientific evidence demonstrating the same.
Yeah theres a lot of work to be done, but science is working on it.

The OBE thing is very interesting though. It does demonstrate what most lucid dreamers already know, that the mind is quite capable of generating "out of body" feelings without any actual (astral) movement of the "consciousness".

Originally Posted by Specialis Sapientia

There is much evidence on the contrary, that shows people experiencing NDE's or OOBE's can get information which would simply be impossible my todays standards.

But given all the discussions about OBE's and Astral Travelling, this pesky evidence seems to be very hard to find.

Originally Posted by moonshine

But given all the discussions about OBE's and Astral Travelling, this pesky evidence seems to be very hard to find.

Do you expect this evidence to be shown at some "highly respected" scientific journal?

It is hard to find yes, how often do you find at scientist who can master the OOBE and do scientific experimentation over the course of 40 years?

I have found only one so far, he is a pioneer that is mostly unknown to most people. His work might, like so many other great pioneers and scientists first get the appreciation when the world is ready for it, when we are ready for a paradgime shift. It might take some (many) years before his work is known to the general population.

Originally Posted by Specialis Sapientia

Do you expect this evidence to be shown at some "highly respected" scientific journal?

I'd settle for anything with an ounce of credibility.

Brilliant article.
Thanks Moonshine

Originally Posted by moonshine

Excellent article in the Times. Well worth a read.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...0394-1,00.html

Some interesting bits

Like i said in the other thread, this article is REACHING. Consciousness is unknown to science, even doctors/neruoscientists say this is a very grey area because they have no idea what it is, or how it works with the brain. There is no evidence to suggest it is in your brain. Theorys are ment as guessing, not actual proof so stop suggesting it's already proven because of some theorys.