Out of Body Experience

Discussion in 'Eastern Philosophy' started by kmguru, Jan 21, 2010.

  1. kmguru Staff Member

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    Questions and answers about moment of death

    AWARE project uses technology to investigate ‘out-of-body experiences’

    What is the Human Consciousness Project?

    It is a multidisciplinary collaboration of international scientists and physicians who have joined forces to research the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain.

    What is the purpose of the AWARE study?

    AWARE is the world’s largest study that will investigate what happens to the human mind and consciousness during clinical death and the relationship between consciousness and the brain. This project is currently being coordinated among 25 major medical centers in Europe and the United States and will be expanded to more centers in the future.

    Read more at the link above and comment

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    In India, some Swamis claim to have detail outer body experience through meditation. Perhaps they tap into some unknown structure of our consciousness. We have a long way to go before science proves such mechanisms and how!
     
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  3. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    Taking large doses of Vitamin A (I think it was A) has the same effect. Also, some anesthesia can induce an out of body experience. Meditation activates areas of the parietal lobe to produce this effect. Some cancers have been known to do have a similar effect.

    Shockingly, there was one woman who, for an unknown reason had an out of body experience and never returned. It's as if she disconnected from her somatosensory brain. So every time she looks in the mirror she doesn't see herself but a body that "she" seems trapped inside.

    All up, I'd love to give the meditation a go, if I ever pull some spare time out of my arse! It took my one buddy about 3 years to get there.
     
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  5. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    But what is the point of such studies if they do not have a comprehensive philosophy to make sense of the results?
     
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  7. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I believe that “out of body experience” is achieved by the same process that all experience are. I.e. all our perceptions are not of the physical or “real” world, but of a simulation, which very probably runs or executes in parietal brain tissue.

    Thus, experiences or perceptions do not need to follow the laws of physics* or correspond to events that have actually happened. These experience or perceptions have a MORE valid claim to being real (for the experiencer) than external physical events as even the very existence of that external real world is only INFERRED from these directly experienced perceptions. For more on this POV, see:

    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66

    Which is mainly an essay demonstrating that Genuine Free Will, GFW, may be possible but in it is a description of the Real Time Simulation, RTS, from which, we and all or experiences come. Many empirical facts are presented in the link in support of the RTS POV and to demonstrate that the accepted POV about our experiences “emerging” after many stages of neural processing of input neural impulses from our sensory nerves is wrong.

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    *They usually do as evolution has selected for or constrained the RTS to be normally an accurate model of the external physical world, but various visual hallucination and illusions are common even without drugs altering normal brain function.
     
  8. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    And this is the thing most people forget - everything we "experience" is being simulated in the six layers of our neocortex (a part of which is the parietal lobe). There are main centers that process the raw data (for example visual information from a point on the retina can be traced all the way back, neuron to neuron, to a grove in the back of our brain -the calcarine sulcus). The information is then passed on to "association cortex" where we lose track of it somewhat (I mean we can't trace the neurons).

    People forget that when they have an out of body "experience" it's just made up in their mind - they don't really leave their body. They just imagine they do.

    All of who we are and the world around us is a figment of our imagination.
     
  9. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    In general, I agree with your post, but want to point out the implicit and very common dichotomy reflected in your final words: "figment of our imagination."

    This seems to imply (by the "our" as if we exist separately) that we can view or observe the "figment" we have "imagined." (Instead of "imagined" I would prefer to say "created", but will stick with your term).

    Most people at least tacitly have this concept or idea. I.e. that the data from the body’s sensory transducers (Nerves that convert physical stimuli into streams of neural impulses sent to the brain.) create an internal image or picture of what we are seeing. They may realize that it is not like a photograph but only more nerve impulses (or more accurately, an internal representation of what is viewed).

    But most people do have this dichotomy between the internal image (in whatever form they imagine it to be) and themselves as the viewer or observer of the image. The phrase "in the mind's eye" also reflects this common presumption. Daniel Dennet in his book Consciousness Explained called this common concept the "Cartesian Theater" and effectively exposed its inconsistencies. (Too bad he did not explain consciousness with his Multiple Drafts model.)

    I too believe there is a dichotomy, but it is not between ourselves viewing either (1) the internal representation of the external world or (2) some non-existent thing we have "imagined.” The dichotomy I believe in is between the brain (a physical thing) and the information it contains (a non-material thing). I believe that the brain creates this information. Furthermore, it creates “us.” I.e. we are just information, not a physical body. We and everything we experience or perceive is just information in the brain. I go into considerably more detail and justify this POV with empirical evidence in my discussion of free will at:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 22, 2010
  10. Forceman May the force be with you Registered Senior Member

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    If there truly exists a slight difference between the physical brain and the more subtle mind an OBE wouldn't be too extreme, as we don't understand the mind fully (neither do we understand the brain fully- ptuh). Some say there is a shadow effect, in which if your mind doesn't separate properly and expand to the inner universal mind field that some of your mnd will still be attributed to your physical experience while some is transferred to a higher plane. So whether your mind can map the world based on subliminal/electromagnetic reception (or something like that) and create an experience based on expectation and perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum, scientists will surely never know. The objective truth is that these experiences happen, and some people have gotten farther than others.

    Believe the mind exists after death!
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Your "mind" seems to be identical with "soul" - some non material eternal item that some how can faciliate the violation of the laws of physics with in the flow of neurtransmitters and ions in the brain.

    If that is not the case, how does your "mind" differ from "soul."

    I try to understand all things, humans included, with only objects / items for which there is solid evidence that they at least exist.

    I do not claim that there can be no other things than those for which there is this evidence, but understand things quite well without postulating the existance of things for which there is no evidence.
     
  12. kmguru Staff Member

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    Unless we are connected to an analog of Cloud Computer either in Earth's electrical field or in another dimension or in a subatomic layer like strings - it is difficult to prove such is possible.

    Just as we think black holes (death of matter as we know it) exist in the center of all galaxies, strange things are out there that we are yet to fathom...
     
  13. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    If all that we see of ourselves and the world around us is imagination, there's absolutely no validity to your claims about the neocortex (since thats also an imagination)
     
  14. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    This argument would work against vision as well.

    It is basically solipsism
     
  15. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    And the people who actually believe that and live accordingly reside in white padded cells.
     
  16. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    lightgigantic, Doreen, and Signal are taking Michale’s post 5’s final phrase as a denial of the existence of an external reality (including even the existence of other persons). I.e. as solipsism.

    While that may be his intent, I doubt it. I think he is simply stating the obvious truth that every thing we know about a presumed to exist (not a solipsistic POV) is in (and from) the neural representations of it in the brain. With this I agree and it is not solipsism as it recognizes the material brain, at least.

    For reasons I discussed in post 6, I do not like how he expressed this idea. His use of “imagination” by some thinking being reflects a dichotomy that does not exist.

    If I were to state basically the same idea I would say that a real time simulation, RTS, runs in the human brain (probably in parietal cortex) whenever we consciously exist. I.e. whenever we have thoughts and perceptions, even those of dreams. When it is not executing, only our body exist, “we” do not. (By we in quotes, I mean our psychological selves in contrast to our body.) IMHO, “we” are only information in this RTS. - I.e. "we" are non-material. Thus, as part of a simulation we are not bound by the laws of physics. E.g. "we" can float to the ceiling and look down on our body, etc. The wife of the current leader of Japan has gone farther – to Venus and back! But I assure you her body remained on Earth. The main point is: “we” are not our bodies, not disembodied eternal "souls," but information being processed in / by our body's brain.

    BTW, solipsism is logically the most sound POV, but a rather useless one. (The existence of a physical world is only inferred from our direct experiences). The solipsist make no assumptions – does not need to infer or assume anything.

    AFAIK, solipsism was first advanced more than 300 years ago by Bishop Berkeley. He argued consistently* that the physical world (entire universe) may / does not exist, but he required a God to give him his experiences. My view is similar to his in some aspects (I do not exist as a physical object in the material world.) but it makes no reference to God. Instead, a brain-based simulation is creating both my experiences and “me”. Being non-physical is the price one must pay for genuine free will (not just an illusion of it) to exist, if one rejects miracles that violate physics, as the firing of every nerve in your body is deterministically controlled by the laws of physics – especially those related to diffusion of neurotransmitters across synaptic clefs and the diffusion of Na+ ions into the interior of axons. (That is what a nerve firing consists of. – The normal -70mV interior is driven a few mV positive by this wave of Na+ ion actively diffusing thru the axon sheath.)

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    *Many scholars have tried for 300 years to find even one logical flaw in his presentation of the solipsistic position (a book) and failed. I especially like his explanation as to why the world seems to be governed by physical laws (is regular). He said that only if the world did normally have a regular behavior, could God work miracles, which by definition are violations of the physical laws.

    For Berkeley, there are no physical laws, no universe - just regularities in our perceptions caused by God. Perhaps that is why the four fundamental forces of physicist cannot be unified into one general law? Berkeley thought of him self as a "lessor spirit" It is not clear if God was creating experiences in other "lessor spirit" or not.
     
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  17. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    But it recognizes it through a vision that is just as fallible as anything else. IOW there is a very real problem with trying to see what one is "seeing" with, even if one isn't necessarily riding with the notion of reality being some synthesized issue of the brain.
     
  18. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    What you just did here is say that the map is real and the experience that lead to making that map is virtual.

    There may be solipsists who make no assumptions, but they sure wouldn't all themselves solipsists. The moment you think it is a logical position you are assuming all sorts of things - about logic, epistemology, etc.
     
  19. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I am not sure what your point is, but note that "seeing," like everything else you perceive, is a construct of the brain, not any copy of the your retina stimulation caused by the light falling on it for you to somehow look at. It need not be accurate but often is. (Evolutionary selection has caused that.)

    With vision this is especially clear /obvious if you know anything about the structure of the retina. The fovea is slightly more than half a solid degree wide. Only it has the dense layer of rods necessary for high resolution. Yet, what you see or perceive has the same sharp high resolution over more than 90 degrees wide field of view! A clear case of "garbage in" "quality out."

    This simple fact is one of the strongest arguments that what you see does NOT "emerge" for the neural inputs coming to your brain as standard cognitive science claims. That are only used as data for your brain to construct what you see.* In my terms the REAL TIME SIMULATION, RTS uses data from the retina, which passes thru the LGN and then arrives at the visual cortex, V1, in the back of the brain, but this information is only used to keep the RTS, usually an accurate version of what exists in the world before you - not a copy of the image processed by the retinal nerves.

    The RTS's information (corresponding to an image) in parietal brain is constantly sent back (via "retrograde" nerve fibers) to V1 where any conflict with that arriving via the LGN is noted and used to adaption the RTS. There are actually slightly more retrograde nerves sending information to V1 from the parietal lobe than there are nerves coming to V1 from the retina via the LGN. Conventional / accepted concepts of vision cannot offer any reason why these retrograde nerves exist, but they are an essential part of my RTS theory. I.e. the V1 area, in addition to many other things it does, is acting as a differential comparator find minor errors in the RTS and helping to correct them. These errors could be found later when the new sensed information has had time to arrive at the parietal tissue, but then it would not be as "real time" - Evolution has caused the comparison to be done earlier in the data flow stream.

    Likewise there are a huge and unexplained by conventional theory number of retrograde nerves going from the parietal brain back even earlier - i.e. to the LGN. Only my RTS theory explains why these retrograde nerves exist. I.e. vision (like all other perceptions) does NOT "emerge" it is created in the brain.

    When one dreams, this differential comparison is not made (the eyes are shut - there is not retinal input for the vision of dreams to "emerge" from. In my RTS theory the parietal brain's constructed vision is "running open loop" - not being checked and corrected. These retrograde nerves are not used when dreaming.

    My link in earlier post to old post 66 give the specific pages where these retrograde nerves are discussed and notes there is no know reason for them to exist within the accepted concept of how vision functions. They are an almost essential prediction of the RTS theory and within it there purpose is very clear! (The differentia comparator function occurring in V1 requires two inputs, not just one from the retina.)

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    *The “filling in” of colors or lines thru the “blind spot” is more strong proof that your vision is constructed, not emergent.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 23, 2010
  20. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think you are following me correctly. I did not say anything was virtual. Because of your prior post, I did spend a couple of hours reading about "map and territory" and watched a video on it. It is my conclusion that this relatively new jargon is useless for discussion of how vision and other perceptions are achieved by the brain. I will try to clearly state what I know and what I believe to be "real" - I know my experiences happened, at least while they are happening, are real. (I may falsely recall or fabricate earlier experiences I am now only remembering.) I, as a Ph.D. physicist, have much too much invested to not believe that the observable universe actually exists, but that is only a firmly held belief, just like the belief that a few minutes ago I did experience reading your post. (I don't now as I am typing mine.)

    You may have a point here, but I think logic is a universal ordering process, not an assumption. E.g., everywhere in the universe 2+3 = 5 and if the reference of the words in a syllogism are unique, well known, real, then the conclusion is valid anywhere in the universe. This can get to be much more of a problem (but not within the same language community) as Hilary Putnam illustrated with his "Twin Earth" so I will not go into epistemology with you. Another similar problem is the "moring star" vs. "evening star" back in time when it was not know that both are Venus.
     
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  21. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1955636,00.html#ixzz0dXuXvvWX

    Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long says if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade's worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people who have gone through them — he makes the case for that controversial conclusion in a new book, Evidence of the Afterlife.

    Medicine, Long says, cannot account for the consistencies in the accounts reported by people all over the world. He talked to TIME about the nature of near-death experience, the intersection between religion and science and the Oprah effect.

    Medically speaking, what is a near-death experience?

    A near-death experience has two components. The person has to be near death, which means physically compromised so severely that permanent death would occur if they did not improve: they're unconscious, or often clinically dead, with an absence of heartbeat and breathing. The second component [is that] at the time they're having a close brush with death, they have an experience. [It is] generally lucid [and] highly organized.

    How do you respond to skeptics who say there must be some biological or physiological basis for that kind of experience, which you say in the book is medically inexplicable?

    There have been over 20 alternative, skeptical "explanations" for near-death experience. The reason is very clear: no one or several skeptical explanations make sense, even to the skeptics themselves. Or else there wouldn't be so many.

    You say there's less skepticism about near-death experiences than there used to be, as well as more awareness. Why is that?

    Literally hundreds of scholarly articles have been written over the last 35 years about near-death experience. In addition to that, the media continues to present [evidence of] near-death experience. Hundreds of thousands of pages a month are read on our website, NDERF.org.

    In the book you say that some critics argue that there's an "Oprah effect": that a lot of people who have had near-death experiences have heard about them elsewhere first. How do you account for that in your research?

    We post to the website the near-death experience exactly as it was shared with us. Given the fact that every month 300,000 pages are read [by] over 40,000 unique visitors from all around the world, the chances of a copycat account from any media source not being picked up by any one of those people is exceedingly remote. Our quality-assurance check is the enormous visibility and the enormous number of visitors. (See what happens when we die.)

    You say this research has affected you a lot on a personal level. How?

    I'm a physician who fights cancer. In spite of our best efforts, not everybody is going to be cured. My absolute understanding that there is an afterlife for all of us — and a wonderful afterlife — helps me face cancer, this terribly frightening and threatening disease, with more courage than I've ever faced it with before. I can be a better physician for my patients.

    You say we can draw on near-death experiences to reach conclusions about life after actual death. But is that comparing apples and oranges?

    Scientifically speaking, interviewing people that have permanently died is challenging. Obviously, given that impossibility, we have to do the next best thing. If these people have no brain function, like you have in a cardiac arrest, I think that is the best, closest model we're going to have to study whether or not conscious experience can occur apart from the physical brain. The research shows the overwhelming answer is absolutely yes.

    You raise the idea that your work could have profound implications for religion. But is whether there is life after death really a scientific question, or a theological one?

    I think we have an interesting blend. [This research] directly addresses what religions have been telling us for millenniums to accept on faith: that there is an afterlife, that there is some order and purpose to this universe, that there's some reason and purpose for us being here in earthly life. We're finding verification, if you will, for what so many religions have been saying. It's an important step toward bringing science and religion together.

    Is there any aspect of human experience that you don't think science can touch?

    Oh, absolutely. What happens after permanent death — after we're no longer able to interview people — is an absolute. To that extent, the work I do may always require some element of faith. But by the time you look at the evidence, the amount of faith you need to have to believe in life after death is substantially reduced.
     
  22. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Good question. Why not answer it?

    For example no one has seen an angel*, yet all believe they have a pair of white wings on their back and that the devil has red skin, two small horns and a tail, etc. I.e. the Oprah effect is powerful means to generate common reports of many things not actually observed.

    Perhaps it is even deeper than Oprah - Yung suggested we all are born architypes / forms. I do not know if that is correct but mention it only to point to another possible reason for common discriptions of events not actually experienced / are imagined.

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    *Not counting the Navy's "blue angels" but their wings are blue. Why are no spirit angel with blue wings? Answer the Oprah effect.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 26, 2010
  23. Forceman May the force be with you Registered Senior Member

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    I think the best model of OBE's is the Matrix. You jack in, meaning in real-life that you allow your silver cord to provide your higher bodies with the energy to transport to a higher plane. We know in the higher planes that the laws that govern our world don't matter AT ALL in the astral plane or place where all OBE's take place. Also consider that when multiple people are projecting at the same time, they can itneract with each other, which is true in the Matrix with multiple people jacked in. Finally, to go from the Matrix (if you're a bluepill) to the real world, you have to realize what real is and that the Matrix is artificial, sort of like lucid dreamers realizing they're lucid. Don't you think? Huh? Do you hear me now? Can you hear me now?
     

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