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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

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Constance said:
Thanks Steve. How did you get the photo to embed?
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From my cell phone I clicked on your link, then clicked on the photo ... "save image". That put the file on my device. Then I went to new post and chose "Upload a File" selected the image and chose "tumbnail".
 
Soupie said:
That was my thought. Wow.
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,Rather than Kant failing to anticipate Darwin, as is usually suggested, Kant was already thinking in terms of what Darwin was going to deliver – as indeed were a great many other thinkers at this time. What they lacked, and what Darwin delivered, was a viable mechanism i.e. natural selection. Darwin big idea was not, in fact, as explosively novel as is sometimes suggested, which is in no way to denigrate its contribution to natural science."
 
Thinking out loud:

The problems with discontinuous approaches to consciousness (emergentism) are well documented, ie, the HP.

But continuous approaches have difficulties of their own.

One problem is the fact that for humans, there seem to periods of non-consciousness, such as during deep sleep and anesthesia.

However, as we have discussed and as the Bitbol paper recently shared outlines, these periods of supposed non-consciousness may not be such afterall. Rather there may be reasons that consciousness during these periods is simply not recalled.

While that idea is likely difficult for some to grok or accept, the following is even wilder.

According to both panpsychism and Conscious Realism (which are related but subtly different), a dead body would still be conscious.

Because according to both models consciousness is continuous it follows that all "systems" are conscious, it follows that living bodies and dead bodies are conscious.

But it's important to point out that the concept of consciousness and the concepts of mind/minds are not synonymous!

So while a living and a dead body may both be conscious, one could say a living body has a mind but a dead body does not have a mind.

It's a very important distinction to make and maintain.
 
The next week's report:

The Archdruid Report: Not Written in the Stars

1. "In such a future, government funding for scientific research will be at the mercy of the first demagogue who realizes that gutting the National Science Foundation, and every other scientific program that doesn’t further the immediate needs of the Pentagon, is a ticket to a landslide victory in the next election."

2. "The vision of futurity central to their identity is already becoming the subject of bitter jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety."
 
Soupie said:
One problem is the fact that for humans, there seem to periods of non-consciousness, such as during deep sleep and anesthesia.
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Evan Thompson's most recent book --
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy -- reports on research that reveals a deep condition/state of consciousness as persistently present in living beings past a certain level of evolutionary complexity, present even in dreamless sleep, thus never shut down.

Nor is deep consciousness 'shut down' completely even under anesthesia or in coma states. And of course we also have the viridical evidence of cases of out-of-body consciousness of the waking type [i.e., capable of perception and understanding of things, events, and persons present while the individual's neural networks are deeply suppressed during major surgery and in near-death states].

Add to that the research experiments reported by Pim von Lommel in European hospitals, measuring the brain activity of comatose patients at the point when they are about to have their life-support systems shut down and discovering rapid and immense increases in brain activity after years in which these patients have shown only the minimum degree of brainstem activity -- a persistent state that indicates that consciousness has remained latent even in persistent comas. This critically important research was first widely reported in the second edition of von Lommel's book, though likely also in some of his published papers. His book Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience is essential reading for anyone engaged in consciousness studies. Amazon has kept the Kindle price low -- $11.99 -- and used copies are available at amazon for under $9.00.

Von Lommel also discusses other research concerning the reality of nonlocal dimensions of consciousness. In this thread, where we have for several years now operated under title "Consciousness and the Paranormal," I think it's about time that we try to make good on that subject matter.
 
Michael Allen said:
A very interesting read -- I have scanned through it somewhat and have found some very interesting passages. I digest this stuff slowly, so my impressions and commentary will take some time to build.
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Michael, I'm very glad you find this material interesting and look forward to your responses to it.
 
Constance said:
Evan Thompson's most recent book --
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy -- reports on research that reveals a deep condition/state of consciousness as persistently present in living beings past a certain level of evolutionary complexity, present even in dreamless sleep, thus never shut down.

Nor is deep consciousness 'shut down' completely even under anesthesia or in coma states. And of course we also have the viridical evidence of cases of out-of-body consciousness of the waking type [i.e., capable of perception and understanding of things, events, and persons present while the individual's neural networks are deeply suppressed during major surgery and in near-death states].

Add to that the research experiments reported by Pim von Lommel in European hospitals, measuring the brain activity of comatose patients at the point when they are about to have their life-support systems shut down and discovering rapid and immense increases in brain activity after years in which these patients have shown only the minimum degree of brainstem activity -- a persistent state that indicates that consciousness has remained latent even in persistent comas. This critically important research was first widely reported in the second edition of von Lommel's book, though likely also in some of his published papers. His book Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience is essential reading for anyone engaged in consciousness studies. Amazon has kept the Kindle price low -- $11.99 -- and used copies are available at amazon for under $9.00.

Von Lommel also discusses other research concerning the reality of nonlocal dimensions of consciousness. In this thread, where we have for several years now operated under title "Consciousness and the Paranormal," I think it's about time that we try to make good on that subject matter.
Click to expand...

Yes!
 
Constance said:
Evan Thompson's most recent book --
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy -- reports on research that reveals a deep condition/state of consciousness as persistently present in living beings past a certain level of evolutionary complexity, present even in dreamless sleep, thus never shut down.

Nor is deep consciousness 'shut down' completely even under anesthesia or in coma states. And of course we also have the viridical evidence of cases of out-of-body consciousness of the waking type [i.e., capable of perception and understanding of things, events, and persons present while the individual's neural networks are deeply suppressed during major surgery and in near-death states].

Add to that the research experiments reported by Pim von Lommel in European hospitals, measuring the brain activity of comatose patients at the point when they are about to have their life-support systems shut down and discovering rapid and immense increases in brain activity after years in which these patients have shown only the minimum degree of brainstem activity -- a persistent state that indicates that consciousness has remained latent even in persistent comas. This critically important research was first widely reported in the second edition of von Lommel's book, though likely also in some of his published papers. His book Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience is essential reading for anyone engaged in consciousness studies. Amazon has kept the Kindle price low -- $11.99 -- and used copies are available at amazon for under $9.00.

Von Lommel also discusses other research concerning the reality of nonlocal dimensions of consciousness. In this thread, where we have for several years now operated under title "Consciousness and the Paranormal," I think it's about time that we try to make good on that subject matter.
Click to expand...

Radin's page is due for a visit:

http://deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
 
To complete the summary quote earlier presented:

"Whereas the neo-Kantian idealism then dominant in France (e.g., Léon Brunschvicg, Jules Lachelier) treated nature as an objective unity dependent on the synthetic activity of consciousness, the realism of the natural sciences and empirical psychology assumed nature to be composed of external things and events interacting causally. Merleau-Ponty argues that neither approach is tenable: organic life and human consciousness are emergent from a natural world that is not reducible to its meaning "

So we have

(1) Objective unity dependent on synthetic activity of consciousness
(2) External things and events interacting causally

MP's answer is interesting in saying that fundamentally anything like human consciousness or organic life not reducible to its [own?] meaning.

So one might think that neither (1) or (2) provide the infrastructure for "meaning." And this becomes a rather shallow understanding of MP.

I think the core of the problem is in the above passages I posted, which take the extreme case of filling out the entire plenum of possibilities for which consciousness would have to traverse in order to have it's experience.

as quoted in the article:

"If the thing and the world could be defined once and for all, if the spatio-temporal horizons could even theoretically, be made explicit and the world conceived from such a point of view, then NOTHING [my emphasis] would exist; I should hover above the world, so that all times and places, far from being simultaneously real would become unreal, because I should live in none of them and would be involved nowhere"

I think the analogies of "breadth," "height" and "depth" are in and of themselves distractions from the main point (MP may not even at this point realize they are mere notions which do not completely capture the components of his phenomenology).


That is all I have to add on this for now...work in progress.

Edit: Someone please tell me what "chiasm" means in this literature...the closest thing I can think of lies in Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis
 
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smcder said:
Radin's page is due for a visit:

http://deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
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Wow. What a bibliography, and as Radin says this list does not include thousands of published articles in psychical and parapsychological research available since the founding of the SPR.

Do you remember the name of the author, a female psychologist whose book I linked in the last year or so and which you found impressive, whose research concerned comparative research into reports of NDEs and past-life regressions? I have it around here somewhere but it's probably still in one of the boxes yet unpacked from my move last August.

Thanks for the Radin bibliography of links. I've saved it in Word.

ETA: Times like this I wish we had maintained (or could readily create) all the links to psychical research we've posted in this thread .
 
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