Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[smcder]

Further information re Ayers's NDE:

An Atheist Meets the Masters of the Universe by Peter Foges - Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly

Interesting his private conversation with Dr George and the personality changes after his experience:

“He became so much nicer after he died,” was the mordant way my mother-in-law, Dee Wells, put it to Cash. “He was not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people."

And then his deepening friendship with opponent Father Copleston at the end of his life ...

What do you make of it?

 

[smcder]

ENGL 310

Three lectures on Stevens, one by Marie Borroff ... With transcripts ... I haven't finished the third lecture yet ... I don't think they mention phenomenology at all

 

[flipper]

Interesting his private conversation with Dr George and the personality changes after his experience:

“He became so much nicer after he died,” was the mordant way my mother-in-law, Dee Wells, put it to Cash. “He was not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people."

And then his deepening friendship with opponent Father Copleston at the end of his life ...

What do you make of it?

I was working in a hospital. There was a very angry patient. He took out his angry on everyone. There was one patient who was so upset by the angry patient's behavior that he died of a heart attack that night. The angry patient never did know that his behavior had precipitated the death of another patient. The angry patient said to me in the morning that he had thought about his life and what had brought about his own heart attach. He talked about how he was always working and neglecting the things that were important. How all the stress was making him angry. He said after thinking about these things, he was going to look after his family, work less, and be a kinder person who did what was really important.
What do you make of it?

 

[smcder]

I was working in a hospital. There was a very angry patient. He took out his angry on everyone. There was one patient who was so upset by the angry patient's behavior that he died of a heart attack that night. The angry patient never did know that his behavior had precipitated the death of another patient. The angry patient said to me in the morning that he had thought about his life and what had brought about his own heart attach. He talked about how he was always working and neglecting the things that were important. How all the stress was making him angry. He said after thinking about these things, he was going to look after his family, work less, and be a kinder person who did what was really important.
What do you make of it?

I'm not sure I understand the comparison you're making here with Ayer's experience?

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/an-atheist-meets-the-masters-of-the-universe

An Atheist Meets the Masters of the Universe by Peter Foges - Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly

 

[smcder]

I was working in a hospital. There was a very angry patient. He took out his angry on everyone. There was one patient who was so upset by the angry patient's behavior that he died of a heart attack that night. The angry patient never did know that his behavior had precipitated the death of another patient. The angry patient said to me in the morning that he had thought about his life and what had brought about his own heart attach. He talked about how he was always working and neglecting the things that were important. How all the stress was making him angry. He said after thinking about these things, he was going to look after his family, work less, and be a kinder person who did what was really important.
What do you make of it?

Did this angry person follow up on his stated intention to make changes in his life?

In Ayers case, like some other NDE experiencers (based on what I've read) - there were positive changes in personality, reported by others, that were persistent.

There was also a conversation after the experience in which Ayers seemed to indicate that he may have altered his view on religious belief as a result of his NDE.

Finally, he seemed to cultivate a close friendship with someone who had very strong religious beliefs - someone he'd debated publicly about religion in fact.

In your story I didn't see an NDE involved and the insight the angry man may have gained seems consistent with a life threatening event like a heart attack and it would also be normal for someone in this situation to talk about making changes ...

Is there more to this story?

 

[Constance]

ENGL 310

Three lectures on Stevens, one by Marie Borroff ... With transcripts ... I haven't finished the third lecture yet ... I don't think they mention phenomenology at all

Excellent resource you've found here, Steve. I've read and enjoyed the transcript of the first lecture on Stevens by Langdon Hammer (excellent teacher who knows his stuff concerning the major modernist poets). I'm now getting into his second lecture, on Stevens's later poetry, and this time I'm watching/listening to Hammer in the videos of that. Afterward I'll read Borroff's lecture, evidently also presented to Hammer's class at Yale. She was one of the first accomplished Stevens scholars.
It was J. Hillis Miller, a major literary critic and theorist at Yale, who first turned Stevens scholars and readers toward phenomenology, but the fact is that most of the astute critical readers of Stevens's poetry even in the early years of the now 60+ year old body of Stevens scholarship and interpretation have understood the phenomenological ideas expressed in the poetry without knowing what to call them. As Hammer's readings demonstrate, it is not necessary to refer directly to phenomenology to comprehend and interpret/explicate what Stevens was expressing and doing in his poetry, but contextualizing his poetry within phenomenological philosophy (especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) reveals a layer of philosophical depth and significance in the poetry that can otherwise be missed. So revealing this layer of insight and signification provides a fuller appreciation of the poetry, as a number of Stevens scholars since the late 70s have recognized.

Here are the links to videos of Prof. Hammer's second lecture on Stevens's later poetry:

Open Yale Courses | Modern Poetry | Lecture 21 - Wallace Stevens (cont.)

As a reader of Heidegger, you'll find value in Albert Hofstadter's collection of late essays by Heidegger (entitled Poetry, Language, Thought), which reveals Heidegger's theory of authentically phenomenological-existential poetry* as 'originary' speech that expresses Dasein's progress in coming into 'dwelling' in nearness to the being of the things that are, the being of what-is to the extent that we can fathom it.

*Heidegger's exemplary poets were Rilke and Holderlin.

 

[Constance]

No it is not.
This is one reason why I change from HST to HCT... because the term "HST" has been misappropriated by systems science. In the context used by systems science it has no relation to my HCT (HST) of consciousness. The other reason is related to a comment Dennett made to me after he looked at my review of his Intentional Stance.

Is there an online source where you explain the reasons for changing the name of your theory to foreground your conception of 'hierarchical constructs'?

 

[smcder]

Excellent resource you've found here, Steve. I've read and enjoyed the transcript of the first lecture on Stevens by Langdon Hammer (excellent teacher who knows his stuff concerning the major modernist poets). I'm now getting into his second lecture, on Stevens's later poetry, and this time I'm watching/listening to Hammer in the videos of that. Afterward I'll read Borroff's lecture, evidently also presented to Hammer's class at Yale. She was one of the first accomplished Stevens scholars.
It was J. Hillis Miller, a major literary critic and theorist at Yale, who first turned Stevens scholars and readers toward phenomenology, but the fact is that most of the astute critical readers of Stevens's poetry even in the early years of the now 60+ year old body of Stevens scholarship and interpretation have understood the phenomenological ideas expressed in the poetry without knowing what to call them. As Hammer's readings demonstrate, it is not necessary to refer directly to phenomenology to comprehend and interpret/explicate what Stevens was expressing and doing in his poetry, but contextualizing his poetry within phenomenological philosophy (especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) reveals a layer of philosophical depth and significance in the poetry that can otherwise be missed. So revealing this layer of insight and signification provides a fuller appreciation of the poetry, as a number of Stevens scholars since the late 70s have recognized.

Here are the links to videos of Prof. Hammer's second lecture on Stevens's later poetry:

Open Yale Courses | Modern Poetry | Lecture 21 - Wallace Stevens (cont.)

As a reader of Heidegger, you'll find value in Albert Hofstader's collection of late essays by Heidegger (entitled Poetry, Language, Thought), which reveals Heidegger's theory of authentically existential poetry* as 'originary' speech that expresses Dasein's progress in coming into 'dwelling' in nearness to the being of the things that are, the being of what-is to the extent that we can fathom it.

*Heidegger's exemplary poets were Rilke and Holderlin.

Great information , thank you - I had read that the phenomenological interpretation / analysis developed near the beginning of Stevens scholarship ... I wasn't sure how to put it in context - wasn't sure about Langdon's lectures either, I'm glad to get your feedback - I enjoyed Boroff's guest lecture and I'll finish the third lecture and then go back through them all - I hope to listen to the other lectures in this series by Hammer.

I'll make a note of Hofstader ...

I jactually just returned a collection of Rilke's poems to the library and a copy of "The Ister" to Netflix:

The Ister (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Ister was inspired by a 1942 lecture course delivered by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, published in 1984 as Hölderlins Hymne »Der Ister«. Heidegger's lecture course concerns a poem by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin about the Danube River.

The film The Ister travels upstream along the Danube toward its source, as several interviewees discuss Heidegger, Hölderlin, and philosophy. The film is also concerned with a number of other themes, including: time, poetry, technology, home, war, politics, myth, National Socialism, the Holocaust, the ancient Greek polis, Sophocles, Antigone, Agnes Bernauer, Edmund Husserl, the 1991 battle of Vukovar, and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia."

 

[Constance]

I was working in a hospital. There was a very angry patient. He took out his angry on everyone. There was one patient who was so upset by the angry patient's behavior that he died of a heart attack that night. The angry patient never did know that his behavior had precipitated the death of another patient. The angry patient said to me in the morning that he had thought about his life and what had brought about his own heart attach. He talked about how he was always working and neglecting the things that were important. How all the stress was making him angry. He said after thinking about these things, he was going to look after his family, work less, and be a kinder person who did what was really important.
What do you make of it?

It's possible that the angry man participated in, received the sense of, the emotions of the other man, whose fatal heart attack was provoked by his emotional responses to the first man's anger. This would be mind to mind communication. If so, the surviving (angry) man might have felt the stress or shock of the other man within the cathartic emotions he felt at his death -- both the pain that man had perhaps felt at the waste and misunderstanding of life expressed by the first man and possibly also sensing the second man's will to die, his need to leave this atmosphere. The angry man might also have felt the first stages of an NDE experienced by the dying man as his consciousness left his body, finding the immediate sense of peace and well-being reported by the great majority of NDEers as they discover themselves outside the body and on the way to a different dimension of being.

I'm tempted to describe a vivid dream I had a week after my father's death fifteen years ago, after my daughter and I had returned home from Wisconsin. I guess I will. I had awakened from a deep sleep to empty my bladder and just after returning to sleep entered a vivid dream in which I was observing an enormous round light like the sun through the limbs of a large leafless tree. As I watched, a multitude of streams, like continuous ribbons, of brilliantly colored light flowed like living liquid outward from that central light, dazzling vivid colors, more colors than I had ever seen. And the feeling I received from this phenomenon was pure and total bliss -- a feeling of unconditional love saturating me and everything else it flowed outward toward (which I took to be everything that is). At the same time I felt a tugging at my right side and the message that I could go there to the place where that experience would continue if I agreed. I could just slip out of my body. I replied in my mind to this message that I couldn't go yet because I needed to stay and continue raising my daughter. About a week later as I was walking down one of the hallways in the building where I worked and thinking about something immediately work-related, the same tugging at my right side and the same suggestion that I could just slip out of my body reoccurred, and my response was the same as the first time. I thought then, and still think, that what I experienced in the vivid dream and its invitation to follow, was a mind to mind communication from my father sharing with me the feeling that he had found on the other side of death and letting me know that I could, would, experience it myself at some future point.

The tugging sensation on both occasions was the same, a gentle tugging with a gentle message, not a suggestion of suicide. My father would never think or expect that I could leave my growing child behind me. But I have just at this moment realized that he might well have tried to reach me with these experiences to prepare me for what lay ahead in my own and Annie's lives.

 

[Constance]

Interesting his private conversation with Dr George and the personality changes after his experience:

“He became so much nicer after he died,” was the mordant way my mother-in-law, Dee Wells, put it to Cash. “He was not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people."

And then his deepening friendship with opponent Father Copleston at the end of his life ...

What do you make of it?

It's pretty clear that he had a classic NDE that changed his thinking and his behavior.

 

[Constance]

Re Ayer’s experience, near-death research has recognized a significant change of behavior among many NDEers, including increased patience with and concern for others, increased psi abilities, major changes in value systems, and in many cases abandonment of former lifestyles and careers to enter lives of service to others. Sometimes the changes are so marked that it becomes difficult for the spouse of such a person to adapt to the changes, even to feel they’re still living with the same person they knew so well previously.

The most impressive veridical evidence of the existence of postmortem consciousness, presented both through mediumship and in NDE experiences, involves precognitive knowledge expressed by discarnate individuals {F.W.H. Myers’s postmortem message through a medium to Oliver Lodge informing him of his son’s impending death on a WWI battlefield is a well-known example} and precognitive knowledge attained during some NDEs of the future conditions (expressed as specific visual representations) of the individual’s life if he or she decides to return to the body. NDE research also contains a number of examples of returning individuals encountering someone on the ‘other side’ who has recently died and whose death had not yet been reported to the experiencer or his/her family. And there are cases of several children’s NDEs in which the child returns to the body and reports having met a relative they never knew or knew about, including one or two cases of encountering an older sibling who died very young and whose existence the child had not been told about.

 

[Randall]

 

[Constance]

Do I have to watch the whole movie to be persuaded of what you're suggesting?

"Once upon a time, a bored megasupercomputer far far away dreamt the entangled narratives of a group of people who thought they lived and loved, laughed and learned, suffered and wept in an actual world they also loved palpably. The End."

 

[flipper]

It's possible that the angry man participated in, received the sense of, the emotions of the other man, whose fatal heart attack was provoked by his emotional responses to the first man's anger. This would be mind to mind communication. If so, the surviving (angry) man might have felt the stress or shock of the other man within the cathartic emotions he felt at his death -- both the pain that man had perhaps felt at the waste and misunderstanding of life expressed by the first man and possibly also sensing the second man's will to die, his need to leave this atmosphere. The angry man might also have felt the first stages of an NDE experienced by the dying man as his consciousness left his body, finding the immediate sense of peace and well-being reported by the great majority of NDEers as they discover themselves outside the body and on the way to a different dimension of being.

I'm tempted to describe a vivid dream I had a week after my father's death fifteen years ago, after my daughter and I had returned home from Wisconsin. I guess I will. I had awakened from a deep sleep to empty my bladder and just after returning to sleep entered a vivid dream in which I was observing an enormous round light like the sun through the limbs of a large leafless tree. As I watched, a multitude of streams, like continuous ribbons, of brilliantly colored light flowed like living liquid outward from that central light, dazzling vivid colors, more colors than I had ever seen. And the feeling I received from this phenomenon was pure and total bliss -- a feeling of unconditional love saturating me and everything else it flowed outward toward (which I took to be everything that is). At the same time I felt a tugging at my right side and the message that I could go there to the place where that experience would continue if I agreed. I could just slip out of my body. I replied in my mind to this message that I couldn't go yet because I needed to stay and continue raising my daughter. About a week later as I was walking down one of the hallways in the building where I worked and thinking about something immediately work-related, the same tugging at my right side and the same suggestion that I could just slip out of my body reoccurred, and my response was the same as the first time. I thought then, and still think, that what I experienced in the vivid dream and its invitation to follow, was a mind to mind communication from my father sharing with me the feeling that he had found on the other side of death and letting me know that I could, would, experience it myself at some future point.

The tugging sensation on both occasions was the same, a gentle tugging with a gentle message, not a suggestion of suicide. My father would never think or expect that I could leave my growing child behind me. But I have just at this moment realized that he might well have tried to reach me with these experiences to prepare me for what lay ahead in my own and Annie's lives.

Yes, it makes sense that he had a life changing event during his sleep because he certainly was different when he woke up. I have offend wonder what happened.

 

[Soupie]

If we can't look within without being told our inner world is an illusion 13 billion years in the making ...

Illusion is too strong of a word. Our phenomenal experiences of reality are filtered and subjective. That is, the information we receive and integrate from the environment will be different from all other organisms, including humans for a plethora of reasons.

Thus, our inner world isn't so much an illusion as it is a filtered, specialized version of the totality of what-is.

1 Corinthians 13:12King James Version (KJV)

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I read the following two papers and while they were interesting, I found them ultimately unsatisfying. Also, both seem to take a physicalist stance. And both are restricted by the limitations of language: the first gets bogged down over the meaning of thing/object, the second over the meaning of substance. Both papers I feel suffer from lacking a Whiteheadian approach to the nature of reality.

Galen Strawson: The Self

(iii) The discussion of materialism has many mansions, and provides a setting for considering the question ‘What is a thing or object?’ It is a long question, but the answer suggests that there is no less reason to call the self a thing than there is to call a cat or a rock a thing. It is arguable that disagreement with this last claim is diagnostic of failure to understand what genuine, realistic materialism involves.

http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/inaugural.pdf

Persons are substances in this sense, beings with a special balance of psychological and bodily characteristics. It is worth noting that something like this idea is suggested by some famous remarks of Descartes, which are rather out of harmony with his dualistic view of soul and body:

‘I am not lodged in my body like a pilot in his ship, but, besides ... I am joined to it very closely and indeed so compounded and intermingled with my body, that I form, as it were, a single whole with it.’

Hm, that quote by Descartes dovetails nicely with the information philosophy theory of mind, in my opinion, as the physical brain and the informational mind share just such a relationship as described.

I haven't read the following yet but it's on deck: https://ethik.univie.ac.at/fileadmi...__T._1990_There_is_no_quest.._Physicalism.pdf

However, I'm not too interested per se as I don't think our understanding of the physical world is complete by any means, and I think any dualistic version of reality is false. What I'm saying is that any suggested dichotomy between mental/physical or mind/body is a false one.

Regarding the value of phenomenology and introspection: I do value it, however I think it's value is finite. We know that what people think and experience is often not isomorphic with reality, indeed, as per above, cannot be. Furthermore, cognitive distortions and sensory illusions are well documented. I don't think I need to list them here.

Furthermore, while phenomenology can be used to explore the structure of the mind from the inside, what it can tell us about its nature and origin is limited.

I'm sure the following will fall on deaf ears but I was recently considering working memory: Working memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roughly speaking, working memory is an important facet of intelligence. It's the process/system by which an organism (brain) temporarily holds "information" in mind for on the fly use and manipulation.

For instance, one is using WM when they are doing mental math, trying to recall a phone number they were just told, or trying to mentally picture a room and rearrange the furniture.

Some people have a much stronger WM capacity than others. Many people who struggle with math have poor WM and thus struggle with mental math, etc.

For example, if you were to ask people to visualize the following list of animals as you read it out loud and ask them repeat the list back to in reverse, you would find that people would have varying amounts of success:

Pig horse dog mouse cat fish shark whale

My wife would be able to repeat the list back to me in reverse with almost no problem. I would probably only recall the first two. Honestly.

What is going on here? Why can some brains maintain phenomenal mental images of these animals and some can't? It's not that these people (brains) can't produce phenomenal images of each animal individually, because they can. It's just that the can't maintain these phenomenal images all at once while some people can.

My conclusion is that there must be some intimate relationship between brains, phenomenal experience (mind), and information. As noted, I believe the mind is information.

Re: NDE and sustained personality change. Similar phenomenon have been recorded with DMT and psilocybin trips.

If you're suggesting that this phenomenon means physicalism is false or that dualism is correct, I don't follow.

Likewise with psi phenomena.

 

[Constance]

smcder said: ↑
If we can't look within without being told our inner world is an illusion 13 billion years in the making ...

Illusion is too strong of a word. Our phenomenal experiences of reality are filtered and subjective. That is, the information wed receive and integrate from the environment will be different from all other organisms, including humans for a plethora of reasons.

Thus, our inner world isn't so much an illusion as it is a filtered, specialized version of the totality of what-is.

What is it that persuades you that our species is capable of understanding "the totality of what-is" given that we know that knowledge arises in lived experiences in and of the world which differ from species to species and, to a less significant degree, from one human to another?

 

[Soupie]

smcder said: ↑
If we can't look within without being told our inner world is an illusion 13 billion years in the making ...



What is it that persuades you that our species is capable of understanding "the totality of what-is" given that we know that knowledge arises in lived experiences in and of the world which differ from species to species and, to a less significant degree, from one human to another?

:face palm:

 

[Constance]

:face palm:

?Did I say something stupid? Please let me know what it was.

 

[Michael Allen]

" . . . if we can't trust introspection - phenomenological analysis, meditation, etc to return something true about the world, how can we trust our conscious experience in doing science or even everyday life?"

Why do you think that "we can't trust introspection -- phenomenological analysis, meditation, etc to return something true about the world"? It seems to me that all three of those resources enable an individual to resist and replace dominant assumptions and valuations about life, self, and others when those assumptions and valuations are found to be destructive and unfounded in personal experience and thought.

There's a more subtle and insidious attribute of this argument that almost stands as a paradoxical impossible structure that is painted and yet all know cannot stand or exist due to its manifest self-contradiction.
/begintangent
One of the reasons humans may not be as familar (intuitively) with contradictions and paradoxes is that no such objects are practical in the real world (unless you wish to bewilder another human being on purpose). We are more familiar with things that are invisible (taken for granted) and yet form the foundation of our existence than we are with certain paradoxical "what ifs."
/endtangent

The point is (bluntly) that if we cannot trust our own faculties of introspection, then we cannot trust the mistrust of the same...leading to an absurd position that counters the very essence of our being (which is...again...taken for granted).

We don't think about a door unless it is broken...in the same manner we do not ask questions about our introspection unless we've lose some of the qualities that allowed us to proceed quietly and unnoticingly into that introspection. We introspect all the time (we do so whenever we think about something else)...introspection is not a mere function that operates on reality reporting to our "inner selves" -- its structure lies embedded (all of its strands) in the relations between our bodies and their worldly extensions as tools and dwellings/objects/other people. The word "existence" or "introspection" is an abstraction we create to model this total system to ourselves...but the model is not the thing we are looking for.

 

[Michael Allen]

?Did I say something stupid? Please let me know what it was.

No you did not...and I say stupid things all the time.