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Consciousness and the Paranormal

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boomerang said:
Much of Hemingway's character and that of numerous other creative people throughout history is best viewed within the context of Bipolar Disorder. Note that Manic Depression is the most heritable of all psychiatric disorders and that suicide is a sadly recurrent theme in the Hemingway family.
In Ernest Hemingway's family, there have been 5 suicides over 4 generations! - OMG Facts Sex
And--writers mostly live in the left hemisphere of their brains. Not the happiest region of the neuro-psyche.
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Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychiatrist who lives with bipolar disorder - her book: Touched With Fire explores the relationship between bipolar and creativity.
 
smcder said:
Of course we are only looking here at a writer in terms of his quality of output, aren't we?and not thinking they might drink for the same good reasons anyone else does. And we also assume they would just go on and on better and better had they not ever, ignoring any relationships more complicated than "if . . . Then" when it's the totality of all influences from which we can't extract any one thing. After all How much better do you think Hemingway Faulkner or Thomas could have been? The answer to that might have been what set them to drinking in the first and last places.
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Really well said, Steve.
 
i dont know where this fits in here, but fit the thread it does, i read all of this, and its both impressed and set me thinkin.

this is perfectly in context insitu in the article.

During night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He was found in coma about 30 minutes before in a meadow. When we go to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the 'crash cart.' After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. The moment he sees me he says: 'O, that nurse knows where my dentures are.' I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: 'You were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath, and there you put my teeth.' I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. It appeared that the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with the CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death.
 
trainedobserver said:
Stories like that make the gears grind in my brain.
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There's a lot more of that {veridical evidence of personal consciousness in out-of- body and postmortem states}, not only in the NDE research but in the long recorded history of mediumship research, reincarnation research, and after-death communications.
 
ufology said:
Sorry but it's laced with quantum-woo. The article talks about the EM waves created by the brain that are believed to be associated with consciousness. That part is fine, and we've known about it for a long time. But saying, "The consciousness can, in a way, affect or interact with a power greater than anything conventional instruments have been able to measure thus far." is at best an unsubstantiated opinion. Human instruments and engineering are capable of dealing with EM fields millions of times more powerful than what a brain puts out ( e.g. radio transmitters ), and there are tools that are sensitive to EM fields beyond the ability of our biological systems to detect on any level ( e.g. superconducting sensors ). That's not the whole of it of course, but I don't have the time to deconstruct it all in written detail right now. Just trust me, it's fine up to a point and then falls off the ledge like most other quantum-woo.
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I did get a good whiff of quantum woo whilst scanning over the article. But I think valid efforts to quantify a mechanism by which mind and matter interact are always fascinating and very lacking. This subject has been treated on the forum with a thoroughness worthy of a college thesis. The reason being, I think, that we so little understand the "I am" in relation to the "It does."

Perhaps the only way to firmly demarcate quantum woo from quantum mystery is by use of mathematics most people can never hope to comprehend. And even in this, I think there is academic disagreement.
 
boomerang said:
I did get a good whiff of quantum woo whilst scanning over the article. But I think valid efforts to quantify a mechanism by which mind and matter interact are always fascinating and very lacking. This subject has been treated on the forum with a thoroughness worthy of a college thesis. The reason being, I think, that we so little understand the "I am" in relation to the "It does."

Perhaps the only way to firmly demarcate quantum woo from quantum mystery is by use of mathematics most people can never hope to comprehend. And even in this, I think there is academic disagreement.
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If you think you smell woo in the article, try watching the videos. That being said, the subject of mind and matter is very interesting ( and fraught with sophisticated pitfalls ). Take the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness for example. One faction thinks it's a valid problem, and another see's it as incoherent. I'm of the latter viewpoint, but coming to that conclusion requires a depth of analysis that goes beyond what is required to think it's a valid problem. More simply, it's easier for some people to believe a problem is so difficult that it can't be comprehended than to figure out why it doesn't make sense in the first place. Religion has depended on the same tactic for generations. It usually goes something like this: "God is beyond our ability to comprehend and therefore we are in no position to question his word." In the end, the evidence suggests that although our minds may not be material, they are still as physical as anything else in the universe.
 
"There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe…..

At every crossing of the threads there is an individual.

And every individual is a crystal bead.

And every crystal bead reflects

not only the light from every other crystal in the net

but also every other reflection throughout the universe." - from the Rig Veda
 
In all of this it is the disconnectedness that is the problem - not the solution.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." - John Muir

 
ufology said:
If you think you smell woo in the article, try watching the videos. That being said, the subject of mind and matter is very interesting ( and fraught with sophisticated pitfalls ). Take the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness for example. One faction thinks it's a valid problem, and another see's it as incoherent. I'm of the latter viewpoint, but coming to that conclusion requires a depth of analysis that goes beyond what is required to think it's a valid problem. More simply, it's easier for some people to believe a problem is so difficult that it can't be comprehended than to figure out why it doesn't make sense in the first place. Religion has depended on the same tactic for generations. It usually goes something like this: "God is beyond our ability to comprehend and therefore we are in no position to question his word." In the end, the evidence suggests that although our minds may not be material, they are still as physical as anything else in the universe.
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yes but our minds[brain] are totally renewed every year, not a cell survives from the previous year, all are replaced with new cell's, yet our memories are there intact year after year.
 
ufology said:
If you think you smell woo in the article, try watching the videos. That being said, the subject of mind and matter is very interesting ( and fraught with sophisticated pitfalls ). Take the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness for example. One faction thinks it's a valid problem, and another see's it as incoherent. I'm of the latter viewpoint, but coming to that conclusion requires a depth of analysis that goes beyond what is required to think it's a valid problem. More simply, it's easier for some people to believe a problem is so difficult that it can't be comprehended than to figure out why it doesn't make sense in the first place. Religion has depended on the same tactic for generations. It usually goes something like this: "God is beyond our ability to comprehend and therefore we are in no position to question his word." In the end, the evidence suggests that although our minds may not be material, they are still as physical as anything else in the universe.
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"I'm of the latter viewpoint, but coming to that conclusion requires a depth of analysis that goes beyond what is required to think it's a valid problem"

Why not seek publication of this analysis (and the virtual photon theory?) in a peer-reviewed journal? I will re-post David Chalmers and Thomas Nagels email - both have done extensive work on the hard problem and could give you feed-back.

chalmers at anu dot edu dot au

thomas.nagel@nyu.edu
 
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ufology said:
If you think you smell woo in the article, try watching the videos. That being said, the subject of mind and matter is very interesting ( and fraught with sophisticated pitfalls ). Take the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness for example. One faction thinks it's a valid problem, and another see's it as incoherent. I'm of the latter viewpoint, but coming to that conclusion requires a depth of analysis that goes beyond what is required to think it's a valid problem. More simply, it's easier for some people to believe a problem is so difficult that it can't be comprehended than to figure out why it doesn't make sense in the first place. Religion has depended on the same tactic for generations. It usually goes something like this: "God is beyond our ability to comprehend and therefore we are in no position to question his word." In the end, the evidence suggests that although our minds may not be material, they are still as physical as anything else in the universe.
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"More simply, it's easier for some people to believe a problem is so difficult that it can't be comprehended than to figure out why it doesn't make sense in the first place."

Now this sounds like a position called New Mysterianism - the leading exponent is Colin McGinn. A key phrase is "cognitive closure" - basically the argument runs that we don't have the sorts of minds (the "hardware" on his view) that can understand certain things and the mind body problem is one, but he thinks there is a physical explanation that might be accessible to some other kind of mind. Ill post his key paper on the subject for general interest if I can find it.

McGinn has a contact form here:

Contact - Colin McGinn

But I suspect he may be less accessible than Chalmers or Nagel. Nagel's probably tired of explaining his position by now! and there is a good, short explanation of his original argument here for those interested:

What is it like to be a bat?
 
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ProblemOfPhilosophy.html

"Let us call the hypothesis 'transcendental naturalism', TN for short, because it combines deep epistemic transcendence with the denial that what thus transcends is thereby non-natural. How well does TN account for the odditites of philosophical inquiry? I have considered this question, and allied issues, at some length in a book, and I cannot here repeat everything I say there.(13) Instead I shall try to summarise the main points, providing what I hope will be a synoptic overview of the position. To this end, I begin with a sketch of the typical geography of philosophical debate; the suggestion will be that TN both predicts this geography and is itself superior to the sorts of position routinely adopted within it. After that I shall offer a conjecture about what it is that distinguishes (certain) philosophical problems from other problems we find cognitively amenable. All this will be highly speculative, naturally, and excessively compressed, and no doubt grievously flawed: but speculation can be audacious and risky without being irresponsible - and what else is philosophy for anyway?"
 
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