Theory of Natural Eternal Consciousness
I've been reading about a theory from Dr. Bryan Ehlmann which supports a "natural afterlife." Basically, he suggests that if non-existence follows after death, then we will be forever locked in a state of experience comprising of our very last moment. He uses the following thought experiment:
"You’re totally engrossed in watching an extremely exhilarating movie. Then, without knowing, you unexpectedly, without any perceived drowsiness, fall asleep. For you the movie has been unknowingly paused, while in reality (that for others) it continues on. Until you wake up, you still believe you’re watching that movie."
He suggests that because we will never perceive any indication that our consciousness has ceased when we die, we will continue this final state of consciousness forever and that in this state, time will become infinite.
I'm not doing the best job at articulating it, but one of his papers on the topic can be downloaded here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320552180_The_Theory_of_a_Natural_Eternal_Consciousness_The_Psychological_Basis_for_a_Natural_Afterlife
Some of my thoughts on the topic:
- There will no longer be a self to consciously experience this last moment, so how can it be that this moment will continue forever?
- How specific is this static moment? Is it an everlasting experience of the second before we die? A millisecond? This quickly becomes an irrational thing to discuss.
- What if we die in some horrible way and are suffering until our last moments? (e.g., burned alive, suffocation, etc.) If we take this theory seriously, then that provides some pretty daunting implications. An eternity of extreme pain locked into a single moment? Yikes.
Overall, I don't know what to think about the plausibility of this theory. It makes sense to me that without a transferred state to let me know that I am no longer conscious, then from my point of view, I won't know that my final moment of consciousness has ended. But as mentioned, how can consciousness exist without an entity to experience it?
What do you guys think?
"You’re totally engrossed in watching an extremely exhilarating movie. Then, without knowing, you unexpectedly, without any perceived drowsiness, fall asleep. For you the movie has been unknowingly paused, while in reality (that for others) it continues on. Until you wake up, you still believe you’re watching that movie."
He suggests that because we will never perceive any indication that our consciousness has ceased when we die, we will continue this final state of consciousness forever and that in this state, time will become infinite.
I'm not doing the best job at articulating it, but one of his papers on the topic can be downloaded here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320552180_The_Theory_of_a_Natural_Eternal_Consciousness_The_Psychological_Basis_for_a_Natural_Afterlife
Some of my thoughts on the topic:
- There will no longer be a self to consciously experience this last moment, so how can it be that this moment will continue forever?
- How specific is this static moment? Is it an everlasting experience of the second before we die? A millisecond? This quickly becomes an irrational thing to discuss.
- What if we die in some horrible way and are suffering until our last moments? (e.g., burned alive, suffocation, etc.) If we take this theory seriously, then that provides some pretty daunting implications. An eternity of extreme pain locked into a single moment? Yikes.
Overall, I don't know what to think about the plausibility of this theory. It makes sense to me that without a transferred state to let me know that I am no longer conscious, then from my point of view, I won't know that my final moment of consciousness has ended. But as mentioned, how can consciousness exist without an entity to experience it?
What do you guys think?
Comments (64)
I would not believe anything, because I am asleep. That consciousness has been abruptly suspended does not mean the experience immediately preceding this interrupt is itself somehow suspended indefinitely. It just ends.
Antinatalists would be jumping with ''joy''!
I follow Ludwig Wittgenstein's conceptions on what eternity is, basically timelessness.
If you died with a clock in the room, that clock wouldn't move.....seems as though there would be nothing to experience, no way to even think about anything.
I think an argument for an actual afterlife, can be linked to the OP referenced idea in that you can't go from being conscious to being nothing;; there would be no continuity.
At first glance this sounds really stupid. Considering that the author's previous article was published in a crackpot open-access "Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research," I'll save myself the effort of looking further into this.
what does that lack of continuity say about nonexistence though? If we never continue out of existence, then would there not be any difference between existence and nonexistence from our standpoint? If that's the case, wouldn't that make existence some sort of experiential illusion that cannot be valued in any way?
I very much appreciate that you seem to be trying to grasp my theory instead of just readily dismissing it as ridiculous as is often done. I know it is way "outside the box" and requires much contemplation on one's part before it can be accepted. First, I will address your questions and then later reply to some of the comments of others.
I am new to The Philosophy Forum and yesterday initiated my first discussion by posting a short essay. See A Natural (vs. Supernatural) Eternal Consciousness and Afterlife. The essay may help you and others better understand how a seemingly impossible natural eternal consciousness (NEC) is possible given a non-existent brain. I will reference this essay below and dialog further on the NEC as part of the above referenced discussion rather then here. I do this because I would like others to at least read the essay before they engage in a discussion of the NEC and I would like not to have the address the same questions and concerns in two different places.
You first question: "There will no longer be a self to consciously experience this last moment, so how can it be that this moment will continue forever?"
The sense of self is present in the last conscious moment. Then it is no more. BUT, this lost of self in never perceived by the dying person. The last conscious moment is experienced at a point of time t, and this experience can never be undone from the perspective of the dying person. It is irrelevant to the dying person that the moment will not continue forever, i.e., after t.
Second set of questions: "How specific is this static moment? Is it an everlasting experience of the second before we die? A millisecond? This quickly becomes an irrational thing to discuss."
Conscious moments are perceived approximately every 40-50 milliseconds. The duration is irrelevant since it is unchanging. It is deceptively everlasting, but again only from the perspective of the dying person, the second before brain death if it occurs before one second before such death. It is not, however, everlasting from the perspective of the living. I don't believe it is "an irrational thing to discuss" as long as we keep the two perspectives straight.
Third question: "What if we die in some horrible way and are suffering until our last moments? ..."
This is the common concern of many when first encountering the NEC theory, i.e., with Hypothesis 2 (see essay in the above referenced discussion). The article you and this discussion references states: "Will this perhaps terrifying moment become the NEC? Or will it, as often seen after recovery, have been graciously replaced via amnesia and a “rewind (??)” to some prior present moment?". Also, a horrible last moment can be supplanted by a subsequent dream or NDE moment. Whether this is done by nature or a God is a question for philosophy and religion. For those who cling to Hypothesis 1 despite its uncertainty (see the essay), your question can (or should?) be seen in some respects as similar to the question "What if there is a Hell?"
Where did you get this from?
this would fall in line with what some call a collective consciensce which is common in alot of religions. In some ways a collective consciense through out the universe makes sense to me or at the very least i believe it is a strong possibility. As to why believe this is highly plausible is that i think consciousness is a strange enough concept to that requires much more than basic mathematics and even physics to understand that i think that it would take a single person or set of people that studied the issue thousands of years to come up with a good solution to what causes consciousness. As to the OP i think that theory comes closer to the truth than what alot of people who call themselves educated happen to put out there.
Elliott, M. A., & Giersch, A. (2016). What happens in a moment. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(1905). DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01905.
That theory is mainly about trying to figure out NDEs and such. Coz death isn't just about how/what a person perceives, it's also how/what they're perceived as. A person can alter their perception into various simulations of consciousness but how does a person alter everyone else's perception into simulating his/her death? Death is beyond a person's subjective report in consciousness, it has objective ramifications too, e.g., the dead body.
There's the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover" and perhaps one shouldn't judge an article solely by its publisher. New ideas that challenge current orthodoxy, e.g., that the earth revolves around the sun, are at first widely and readily rejected, even ridiculed. Also, it doesn't help when the idea is hard to grasp, provocative, and put forward by someone not in the related discipline, here for the most part psychology.
This has been the premise of more than one movie. Signs appear to the protagonist that something is wrong. Finally the dream collapses.
But the idea of an unending dream is interesting.
So, when you are dreaming, at what point do you know that the dream is over and that you are no longer experiencing it? Answer: Not until you wake up. And if you've experienced general anesthesia, at what point do you know that you are not in the operating room being given the anesthesia? Answer: Not until you wake up (experiencing a new present moment). And if you never wake up?
But how do you know it ends?
Well I simply think you cease being conscious of anything -- there is no experience at all at a certain point. You never become aware or know of when exactly that happens, but it does happen. There's a difference between replaying or being stuck in a moment and having a final thing you're conscious of and just ceasing to be aware of it, without being aware that you became unaware of it. I'd imagine in the former case - [the eternal experience of the final moment case] -you would recall being in a moment for an extended period of time - would you agree with that?
You state "I'd imagine in the former case - [the eternal experience of the final moment case] -you would recall being in a moment for an extended period of time - would you agree with that?" Absolutely not! Memory and recall is not necessary for the NEC because it is timeless. Such things are only applicable to the passage of time.
You state: "there is no experience at all at a certain point. You never become aware or know of when exactly that happens, but it does happen." This is true from the perspective of the living but irrelevant from the perspective of the dying person. From this latter perspective, there is the awareness of an experience as represented by a final conscious moment and, though this moment is materially erased, it will never be psychologically erased because it's never replaced by another moment. Moreover, it can't be forgotten as that takes time, which for the dying person has unknowingly ceased.
Think about it!
There's no way to sensibly articulate this, so it's understandable that you were unable to. The "mind" is physical and requires certain physical parameters to be met in order to maintain consciousness. It requires physical stimuli and chemical and energetic processes, all dependent on living tissue, in order to be experienced.
If there is no time, there is no change. If there is no change, there is no contrast. If there is no contrast, there is no presence. If there is no presence, there is no NEC.
"If there is no time, there is no change." True. "If there is no change, there is no contrast." True, at least there can be no contrast between two different states occurring at different times, say time t1 and t2. "If there is no contrast, there is no presence." False! There is still the presence of the state occurring at t1. "If there is no presence, ..." But there is a presence! Therefore, your conclusion does not follow.
Probably a crazy tangent but this reminds me of the idea in physics that we can never see an object cross the event horizon. This ends up being wrong, but the illusion is created due to a misunderstood matter of perspective. Might the transition from consciousness to unconsciousness also naturally occur, but we don't understand how due to our limited perspective?
hmmmm, I can't tell if that is a clever association or just a bunch of BS. Philosophy right?
In any case, I have NOT been convinced that our final moments will last forever.
I think to use the term “theory” in an academic context give the content of the paper is both disingenuous and likely purposefully deceitful.
You state: "The idea of a presence with no content , texture, contour, outline, features, is incoherent." I agree with you here, as I make clear in my article Why Something vs. Nothing and the Essentialness of Consciousness.
In analyzing your statement
"If there is no time, there is no change. If there is no change, there is no contrast. If there is no
contrast, there is no presence. If there is no presence, there is no NEC."
I believe it's important to clearly identify the observer and what is being observed if anything. It is also important to recognize that with the NEC we are not just dealing with a timeless state but with the transition into this state. With the NEC the observer is the dying person and what is being observed, or perceived, is their final conscious moment--be it an awake, dream, or NDE moment--followed by timelessness, which cannot be observed. This final moment is observed by the dying person in some state of mind at t1. Then the dying person transitions into a forever timeless state and thus (assuming no supernatural afterlife) there is no state at t2 wherein anything can be further observed. Thus there is no change from the state at t1 that can ever be observed and thus no observed contrast between the state at t1 and a subsequent state at t2. However, contrast in "content, texture, contour, outline, features" was observed by the dying person within the state at t1, Furthermore, from the perspective of the dying person, this state is still present in the mind as the final present moment is not supplanted by another--i.e., no perceived "blank screen", "The End," or observed darkness moment (unless the darkness behind the eyelids is the visual part of the final moment). Thus from the perspective of the observer, the dying person, there is contrast and presence and both are imperceptibly timeless.
I think bodily death is irreversible and unavoidable. I like to think it's possible for some (non-physical) part of me/us to continue afterward, but that's just speculation, just like saying that the world our senses show us is Objective Reality. We speculate, and cling to beliefs we feel close to.
But being stuck in our final moment eternally? I can't make it make sense. Can anyone else? :chin:
And I wonder if theorising, in this sense, is the same as art? I.e. if the artist says it's art, then it is. Our bit is to judge it (for ourselves!) to be good art or bad art. So what I'm saying is that a theory is a theory, if the person presenting it says it is. Our job is to judge the value of the theory. And so far, it looks like our judgements mainly coincide: this is not a good theory. :up:
You argue for the idea of an instant of time constituting a state that can persist as itself, that is to say, to have a duration. In the case of NEC, the duration would be eternal. Maybe you wouldn't want to use words like duration or persistence, because they imply passage of time. Your idea that Quoting Bryon Ehlmann supposes that one can experience these features simultaneously, at once, as one single state. But anything that constitutes a feature, a color, a shape, form, line, dot, registers itself as a change over something else. IF your dying state is a plurality of forms, features, shapes, sizes, colors then it is not just t1, but also t2, t3... Every dot, line, contour in that dying 'state' must have its own time becasue it is its own change. When we look at a painting we don't take it all in at once, there is a temporal sequence of changes as we make our way over the space.
Let me be more clear. If you look at the / (slash mark) I just typed, you only see it in the first place becasue it emerges out of the white background as a change. But if you continue to stare at it , it doesn't simply persist self-identically from that point onward without change. There must be continual change in order for it to appear constant and unchanging for you. This is how perception works. Our pupils oscillate rapidly from side to side almost imperceptibly ,, in order for stable objects in our visual field to continue to appear the same . Every feature, not only in order to be recognized in the first place, but in order to continue to be itself identically, must continue to change in order to be perceived.
So your timeless state , if it is to be a state of features, contours, shapes, colors, must be in continual process of transformation in order to be what it is, and this is the very definition of time.
On the other hand, a state with no time is the very definition of nothingness.Time doesn't begin with stasis and then add change onto this. Change is the precondition for stasis, state. Meaning is change. As soon as change disappears, the world disappears, even if that world is just a mental picture.
Words like "duration" or "persistence" are often used by those arguing against the NEC but viewing it from the wrong perspective, the material perspective of the living. The eternal aspect of the NEC, which implies duration and persistence, can only be seen from the perspective of the dying person. From this perspective the NEC is eternal. The living need to view this as an illusion.
You state "So your timeless state, if it is to be a state of features, contours, shapes, colors, must be in continual process of transformation in order to be what it is, and this is the very definition of time."
You seem to be saying that any "state of features, contours, ... " cannot be timeless. Is the state captured by a photograph or by the frame of a motion picture not timeless? Is a discrete conscious moment itself, which is rendered by the brain based on "continual" unconscious processing within the brain, not timeless? Once rendered, the content of such moment never changes but is only replaced some milliseconds later by another such moment.
My article on the NEC Theory states: "The present moment includes our sense of the flow of time, of self, and of life by incorporating selective memories of past conscious moments and the anticipation of future ones—especially the next one, which we naturally assume will be consistent with the last."
Is perhaps the perceived change you seek not already incorporated into each discrete conscious moment by "the selective memories past conscious moments" or perhaps the unconscious processing of ever-changing sensual information? See the (Herzog, Kammer, & Scharnowski, 2016) reference in the NEC article.
The NEC article also states: "One is aware of only what one perceives in these [discrete conscious] moments." So, in trying to grasp the NEC, the most basis question is: Assuming someone dies without ever awakening after having let's say a dream or NDE, precisely what will they perceive to make them aware that those last "features, contours, ...," present in their last conscious dream or NDE moment, are no more?
We call such states 'timeless' or instantaneous or simultaneous, but that's just an abstract theoretical contrivance that we use for logical convenience. The constructs we've invented for empirical purposes (state, object, content, identity) have fooled us into confusing them with real entities in the world, which don't ever have 'states' in the sense of an internal identity outside of change and time. In terms of the subjective MEANING of a state for us, our experience of the multiple features of a photo unfolds richly over the temporal span of milliseconds.
There is no such thing as a simultaneously apprehended spatial multiplicity. Meaning is change, change is time and each feature is its own time, unless we want to pretend that an empty theoretical abstraction like 'instantaneous state' comes anywhere close to explaining how we meaningfully experience entities.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
I think people have this notion that emotional significance comes as a discrete content, whose power is experienced as 'this' instantaneous state. If the emotional experience lasts for a while, we assume that all that has happened is that equally powerful instantaneous states have been strung together, and that the only purpose served by the temporal extension was to provide duration to the already powerful experience. But anything meaningful to us unfolds as a narrative, whether it is the way the spatial scene in a photo unfolds in milliseconds or a song or emotionally significant event develops its meaning for us over time. Meaning arises IN THE MIDST OF continuous change, not as something encoded in each individual frame. There has to be SOME meaning in each instant, but the effect of significant relevance comes from from the totality of unfolding moments, not in any individual one. Meaning is EMERGENT and CUMULATIVE, not immediate. The more richly and densely an experience unfolds in time, the more meaningful it will appear to us. Intensity is not instantaneous, it is temporal.
When we listen to music, let's say the NEC freezes a single instant of our favorite song. That instant by itself is meaningless. If I extract a random note from a song, it obviously doesn't give me the song. That single moment doesn't even give me the relation between the note and the previous note, since that requires a comparison and recourse to memory, which implies change and time. It's true that in NEC there was a prior unfolding context that leads up to the last frame . But as soon as that last frame is frozen, it destroys flow and ongoingness.
Now that I think about it, even if we are talking about freezing the most elemental and singular sort of presence, there would be necessarily not one but two frames involved. First would be your assumed 'last' state, which you are proposing as frozen for eternity outside of time. That last state, you agreed, would present itself as a change, a contrast over the preceding state ,and that would provide its meaning. But note that I'm arguing that the TOTALITY of the meaning of the allegedly last state is in the particular way that it emerges out of, stands apart from, what it unfolds out of. That last state is not a state yet. It is movement itself. We don't really know what a frozen state is, because no one has ever experienced it. Photos and video pauses don't count, since they don't present us with frozen experience, simply frozen mechanics, which is very different. Everything we experience or imagine is ongoing, in process of becoming while having been. Even our imagining of frozen states takes place as an ongoing becoming.
But in your example, what instantiates and defines its very essence as a movement and a change(the last state, chock full of wonderful features and feelings) is frozen. That is an interruption of what it is. Because it is not a state until it is interrupted. We only artificially and abstractively talk about states as if they exist as discrete frames outside of the continuity of change and time, but you would be trying for the first time to have it be more than just an empty abstraction. In doing so, I would argue, your would have to add something onto that last 'state'.
IF that last state in its meaningfulness(however little that stands for in itself) is first a change, then to become a static state it will have to change from ongoing to frozen. To become the last 'state', it will have to do something that experience has never done before, it will have to transition from mobile to static, and that is a (second) meaningful change. So it is two meaningful events, not one. The question then is, why would one not notice this second event? And what kind of event would it appear as? No living person has ever experienced your hypothesized frozen state, but all of us have experienced what it is like when our mobile involvement in the world changes from dynamic transformation to 'holding steady'.
Changing from rapid acceleration to constant speed is a noticeable shift. Color perception involves rapidly oscillating changes in frequencies. If those frequencies become steady, the color will no longer be seen. A developing reality that stops developing will stop being interesting. But first it will appear noticeable, surprising , jarring , confusing, like someone suddenly turning out the lights(hey, who froze the world!). So I guess there would be three events. 1)the final 'state' of bliss, the last scene of game of thrones or whatever
2)the surprising, jarring , noticeable freezing of this meaningful presencing into pure self-identicality.
3)the transition from freeze to frozen, where surprise turns to boredom which turns into nothingness. That may actually be a pretty good description of the experience of dying
for some people.
So I think the issue is that you believe that meaningfulness in all its power is encoded in individual instants, as content that can be thought about separately from change, and therefore , one can imagine manipulating separately content from change, which is what your thought experiment is based on. The very fact that you don't think you're doing something ADDITIONAL
and MEANINGFULLY NEW to an already meaningful experience by freezing it into a state shows your dualistic thinking about content and time.
I , on the other hand, side with those philosophers and psychologists who believe that meaning is not static , instantaneous content, but transformation. We believe there is no such thing as content distinguishable from change. An experiencing is a change. Freezing that experience is a further change. The transit from freezing to frozen is yet a further change. The more temporally rich and developing the transformative unfolding, the more meaning we will perceive. Photos are great examples of dynamically changing developments. Stare at a great photo and it will dazzle you with the way its meaning changes for you from one moment to the next, and the ways that it spins out a narrative for you. Do something to interrupt that dynamism and you will kill meaning.
Relatedly, you cannot seem to imagine how "freezing' an experience at a point in time, i.e., after a discrete conscious moment, can leave one perceiving that they are still in that experience. This is true despite the fact that I'm sure you've paused a movie without losing all of the experience up to that point including the emotions that were evoked. Ditto for your dreams that were "paused" (and ended) because you woke up.
Finally, you fail to adequately answer the basic question I asked: "Assuming someone dies without ever awakening after having let's say a dream or NDE, precisely what will they perceive to make them aware that those last "features, contours, ...," present in their last conscious dream or NDE moment, are no more? Your seemingly off-the-cuff, hyper speculation that the final conscious moment would actually morph into three events in the "process" of being "frozen" is ridiculous. It again fails to accept the empirical evidence that a discrete conscious moment is a static (timeless) state that once produced will not change and requires no change. It also speculates that the final conscious moment somehow becomes multiple conscious, meaning perceived, moments so as to not make the final conscious moment really final. (Btw, "boredom" requires the passage of time, which for the dying person has ended.)
I feel you're now really stretching it so as to cling to Hypothesis 1, which is referenced in my next comment below. For my part, I believe our dialog has concluded.
I use the word "theory" in my NEC article in its scientific sense. A scientific theory is an explanation of some natural phenomenon that is based on evidence that has been confirmed through observation and experiment. The theory itself must be able to be empirically verified or falsified.
I claim the NEC theory can be so verified or falsified because unlike all other claims of some postmortem consciousness, the NEC actually occurs psychologically before death and nothing can occur within the psychological timeliness that follows, either just before death and after death, that can affect it. The NEC article discusses the theory's validity as a scientific theory is much detail.
There, I fixed it for you. Science and the scientific method do not deal with verification, only falsification. Some people see that as one of its drawbacks. :chin:
The term "verified" is widely used in connection with scientific theories. To illustrate its wide usage, the first sentence given for the definition of "scientific theory" in Wikipedia reads:
"A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can be repeatedly tested and verified [my emphasis] in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results."
"Verified" does not mean "proven once and for all." Rather, it means, as given in dictionary.com: "confirmed as to accuracy or truth by acceptable evidence, action, etc." The action here being testing. An acceptable test is performed and the theory is either verified or falsified by the test.
For a former prof, you give up way too easy. I'd like to think our dialog has just gotten started.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
IF we were to agree for the sake of argument that 'a discrete conscious moment is a static (timeless) state that once produced will not change and requires no change", then my argument is , first of all, we do not know what percentage of people who are dying have near-death experiences, and of those who do, we cannot guarantee that this will be an experience where you will, as you put it " be overcome by marvelous feelings of wonder, love, and contentment. You truly believe that you have arrived and are experiencing heaven, and you’re excitedly anticipating the next moment and an eternity of joyful experiences." IF someone's last experience before dying is one of terror, dread and sadness , will this then haunt them for all eternity? You have been careful to keep your argument empirically oriented, but is there any spiritual thinking (Buddhism, perhaps) leading you to assume that last state would always be blissful?
My other point is that even among those who have a blissful end-of-life experience, I see no reason to assume that would necessarily be their last experience. If I am looking at a beautiful painting on the wall and all the lights are suddenly turned off, and then for some reason I am knocked unconscious, when I wake up my last memory before being knocked out may very well be the lights having been turned off rather than the image of the beautiful painting. Why should we assume that a dying person's last state would be bliss rather than bliss turning into pain, fear, confusion or disorientation as their cognitive faculties degenerate further? Just because we have reports from people who recovered from near death states? Need i remind you that this is a select group? The very fact that they did not die tells us that their neural integrity never degenerated beyond a certain point. It would be instructive to study a range of people who were revived after their neurological condition had degenerated along a spectrum from mild to severe and see if we could correlate points along this spectrum with the quality-pleasantness of reported near death experiences (or whether they appeared at all). We only hear about the blissful reports, I'm guessing , becasue they are more in demand by readers and everyone is desperate to believe in a happy ending.
I haven't even mentioned the enormous conceptual difficulties with your claim that a 'timeless' state
"goes on forever “living in the moment."”. Since no one has ever experienced a 'timeless' state that 'goes on' , all you have to draw from in imagining what this would be like are real experiences we all go through IN TIME , of an enjoyment that endures a while. You want to remove words like persist and endure, yet you don't express any doubts or raise any questions about whethher an actual state 'out of time' can be justifiably compared to our familiar experiences of enduring, persisting enjoyments.
A little empirical skepticism on your part may alleviate the impression of dogmatism.
Think about it for a moment. To falsify a theory, you only have to show it doesn't work in one set of experimental circumstances. Easy. But to verify it, you have to test it under every possible combination of context/circumstances, and show that it works for all of them. Not just the ones you thought of, or the ones you had time to test, but all of them.
To falsify the claim "there are no black swans", you only have to find one black swan. To verify it, you have to examine every swan that has ever lived - anywhere, anytime - and confirm that every one of them is non-black. You see? This is why science and the scientific method focus on falsification.
True, you can view a scientific experiment as focusing on trying to falsify a theory, but if the results confirm the theory, the experiment can be said to have verified the theory.
If no one has ever seen a black swan then "there are no black swans" can be legitimately called a scientific theory (though a very narrowly focused one), and every time someone sees a black swan the theory is verified.
Hey, we've only talking about the appropriate use of a word here. I think we are in agreement on the substance, i.e., what is a scientific theory.
No, I don't think we are. What you describe as verification is actually failure-to-falsify. Verification is an infinite act, as I described. You need to verify your theory in every possible circumstance. All ? of them. Which is why no sane scientist tries.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
It can indeed, but we're talking about how that theory (or any other theory) is tested. According to the scientific method, it is tested by attempting to catch it out: to falsify it. We do this many times, of course, in many different ways. Just one 'successful' falsification falsifies the theory.
If you read or studied my NEC Theory article more carefully, I believe you might understand why I have no interest in arguing with you on the issues you raise.
Read the first few paragraphs of the article Einstein Was Right! Scientists Confirm General Relativity Works With Distant Galaxy and you should see how words like "confirm," "validate," and yes often "verify" (though not specifically here) are used in regard to the results of an experiment related to a theory.
Bye! :smile:
See also Einstein's "Time Dilation" Prediction Verified. I'm only saying that I use the term "verify" consistent with its common scientific usage.
I don't know how to look people up here, I'm new, but I'll talk to you. I didn't understand everything you wrote but I'll try. I'm here for company as much as learning and trying to share my ideas with others. Feel free to "look me up" (notice me). I still don't know how to do the quote thing.
You're using it consistently with common everyday usage. In a discussion of scientific method, "verify" is the complement of "falsify". [The latter as in Popper.]
My final word on this: True, a scientific theory can never be proven, only falsified. However, in the scientific literature the term "verify" is often used in the context of a test, experiment, or study. In this context, it is understood that the reader recognizes that "verify" means only "verified in this case," not "verified once and for all."
I read your article after I posted my last comment and saw that you discussed.negative near death experiences and brain deterioration. So let's talk about a different aspect of your thesis. You wrap your claims up in science, but that is misleading. The science with regard to human experiences is multi-faceted; one particular focus has to do with describing and measuring the dynamics of neural processes(what has been dubbed the sub-personal level). Other approaches deal with cognitive-affective and perceptual levels of functioning. But while there may be superficial agreement on facts at the discrete molecular and neural levels, as soon as we shift to complex levels of mental functioning, disagreements multiply. How does a neural net function? Should it be modeled as a computational system, a distributed parallel, dynamic, a connectionist architecture, or via a non-representational enactivist description? The differences in these approaches are key to assumptions concerning what consciousness might be.
Robert Lanza, who you reference in your article, treats the basis of consciousness as energy, which he explains, can never be eliminated, only transformed. Thus, "At death, you change reference points. It‘s still you, but you experience different lives, different friends and even different worlds. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling—the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?"
You also mention Hameroff, who, following physicist Roger Penrose, believes that consciousness can be understood as a sub-neural quantum process(they call it Orch-OR). Their notion of an afterlife apparently shares with Lanza the presumption of an active energic process. Critics have pointed out the major problem with such theories is that they aren't compatible with the current models in physics.
"Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that “new physics” to interact with the atoms that we do have."
Your approach overlaps these researchers in some ways but departs from them in others.
Like them, you draw form older information processing models of consciousness, using the computer as a metaphor for how thought functions. This first generation approach to cognition has been abandoned by researchers in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience in favor of embodied, enactive approves which, following Gibson, don't understand the mind as simply receiving 'information' , as data, from an external world and then computationally manipulating it.Rather, they see perceptual processes as interpretative from top to bottom,.They see meaning as more of an activity, performance, exchange, than as static content, 'data', 'information'.
You also mention Bruce Greyson, Emily Williams Kelly, and Edward F. Kelly, who have embraced Frederic W. H. Myers' psychical, spiritualist ideas of consciousness. Myers doesn't seem particularly compatible with what you are claiming. The active, changeable character of his post-physicalist subjectivity contrasts sharply with your static , frozen picture .
When we speak about states of consciousness we are referring to subjective ways that the world is like for us . Objective third person empirical approaches cannot 'prove' what goes on at a subjective level. They cannot tell us what it is like to be a bat. They can only produce models of functioning of neural components and attempt to correlate these processes with subjective reports of states of consciousness.The problem boils down to the fact that doing something like measuring metabolic activity in a portion of the brain during a subjective state is not the same thing as elucidating the nature of that subjective state. Quantum science and neurological measurement are not the right approaches to deal with the arena of subjectivity and consciousness as it is lived by persons. The most promising avenues toward integrating empirical psychological science and subjectivity are the recent interdisciplinary areas of philosophical phenomenology and cognitive science(the journal phenomenology and the cognitive sciences is a leading resource), The work by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and others correlating neuroscience, phenomenology, cognitive science and mindfulness practices is another promising avenue.
In sum, the problem with claiming to have 'proven' a particular theory of consciousness is that the very nature of subjectivity touches upon the conditions of possibility of empiricism. In other words, subjectivity and objectivity are reciprocally dependent on each other when it comes to studying consciousness. Thus, any claim about the nature of subjective experience is both an empirical and a philosophical claim. Your idea of a subjective state as potentially freezable , out of time and absent of material conditions(except for the initial material condition of the dying state) implies a philosophical position which differs not only from those of philosophers and psychologists I follow, but also Hameroff, Penrose and Lanza, who point to persisting real and changing energic fields as substrate of beyond-death subjectivity, and Myers, whose romantic spiritualism is an animated force.
I imagine if I were to suggest to you that your model requires a physics that doesn't exist yet, or a spiritualist transcendentalism that you have yet to elaborate, you might point to the 'empirical evidence' in favor of your theory. But I would be willing to lay down big money that if you submitted your article to Hameroff, Penrose or Lanza, they would likely make the same argument as I would. Of the large list of references in your paper, none of them directly support , much less speak to, your central claim of a timeless, static, yet meaningful ongoing state of awareness. Rather than couching it in empiricist terms, it would be more interesting, and others would pay more attention, if you fleshed out the philosophical presuppositions grounding it and contrasted them with those of competing approaches.
What does winding down mean? Look at it this way. When someone is in what Ehlmann calls a blissful end of life experience, you can be sure that state will involve lots of complex neural activity. Why is this? We know what the brain's activity is like during rem sleep. It is very active, especially in the frontal cortex, where emotion and cognition are centered. During non-rem sleep the brain is much less active, even though the person is healthy and not near death. So near death 'bliss' must look neurologically somewhat like a dream state. What we also know about dreams is that a person is much more likely to remember their dreams if they are woken in the midst of one, rather than during non-rem sleep.
This is because once the level of brain activity drops below a certain threshold, forgetting takes place. Recall of a context requires the ongoing maintenance of that context , or else the reconstruction of it. I'm guessing that near death experiences of bliss or whatever are like rem sleep. They are remembered because the relative level of brain activity they require is maintained up till the point that they are revived. Studies have shown that "when the heart stops, neurons in the brain appeared to communicate at an even higher level than normal, perhaps setting off the last picture show, packed with special effects."
A dying person's neurological activity will at some point drop below the threshold necessary to recall an experience like 'meaningful bliss'. It doesn't matter whether the brain winds down to this threshold or reaches it all at once. Forgetting will take place. Think about a person getting electroshock treatment. This causes an immediate degradation of brain activity rather than a winding down, and amnesia is a side effect of it. So it should be irrelevant from the perspective of memory and recall how rapidly one transitions from 'meaningful bliss' to brain death. It is absolutely certain that the last states of neural activity one will experience will not be complex bliss but disorientation, confusion, incoherence or something less organized. If you're going to argue, as Ehlmann has, that each frame of consciousness carries its own discrete meaning, then it is contradictory to arbitrarily choose the blissful frame as the last one that will be remembered when we know it will not be the last state of mind for a dying person.
The only way one could justify such a claim is if one made a distinction between the blissful state and what follows it in terms of its qualification as conscious. One would have to abandon an emergent , relativist notion of what consciousness is(global, distributed patterns of neural activity), and substitute a dualist, platonic notion where consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon residing in certain states but not others. Then one would have to cherry pick a speculator subjective state associated with near death experieince and crown that the 'real' last state of consciousness for everyone.
Do you know what psychoneural identity theory is? You can look up the definition, but it's been explained to me that brain states are identically mental states. People who hold to this theory claim that the brain and mind are not logically distinct. Not distinct in any way, not even in abstraction.
For me, what I've experienced every waking moment of my life and some when I'm sleeping, is my noetic subsystem of mind being evaluative & supervisory.
Haven't caught up on my research in regard to being knocked out, but it's happened to me at least two times. I come back into my consciousness not remembering a thing during the time I was "blacked out" because I was blacked out.
Every instance of a person arguing against the reality of life after death experience, the 12 stages as outlined by nderf.org, Jeffrey Long & his book, the arguments entail that the brain was still active, the person wasn't actually dead, and that the phenomena can be attributed to "consciousness winding down." Asphyxia.
It's your position emotion is there (in the brain), but the definition of mind is "the seat/facility of the emotions/affections & will, and is regarded to survive the death of the body.
There's a book available from the site above called "Mind Sight." There are two books with the same title, one of them is all about people born blind and deaf who first see and hear after they die.
This is my main field of study and experience. I'm a minister (servant - Cox). I prefer that to Reverend. So, I'm pleased as pie to talk to you about this until I go to heaven.
I have a hundred good arguments (proofs) against emergent materialism. One is that a mental state can be dispositional.
Quoting Joshs
These questions are not relevant to the NEC theory. That is, it does not matter how the neural net functions to form the final conscious moment, how this network should be modeled, or what consciousness as represented by this moment might be.
I've read Robert Lanza's books on Biocentrism and my thinking much aligns with his on the critical role of consciousness in understanding the nature of our universe, but I thought his discussions of death in these books were ambiguous and inadequate and wrote him concerning this. He asks the question "But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?," but he never answers it or explains the how. Perhaps when oxygen and nutrition are no longer consumed and blood flow ceases to supply energy to the brain, the "‘Who am I?’ ... 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain" may just dissipate as leftover heat into the environment as the body turns cold. So is there really any energy left? I believe the NEC theory is more explainable than is his and actually more consistent with Biocentrism with its emphasis on perception, i.e., that our universe is that which we perceive. Besides, the NEC requires no energy at death or beyond for sustainability!
Also, unlike the theories of Hameroff and Roger Penrose, the NEC theory is compatible with "the current models in physics." It requires no "new physics." Moreover, while I draw upon modeling techniques used in computer science to model states of mind, events, and moments in order to explain the theory, I do not believe I assume "older information processing models of consciousness" or use "the computer as a metaphor for how thought functions." The theory's basis is the concept of discrete conscious moments, one present moment at a time. The underlying type of processing required to produce these moments is not material to the theory.
I reference works of Bruce Greyson, Emily Williams Kelly, and Edward F. Kelly to support some of my characterizations of NDEs.. Just because one references another article to support a statement does not mean they subscribe to all of the claims or positions taken by that article or those of its authors.
You are right in that my theory is novel. Indeed, it does not conform to the positions of Hameroff, Penrose, Lanza, and I imagine most philosophers. Nor need it conform. In terms of subjectivity, a final conscious moment, and so an NEC, can range from dull to extremely intense and from an all encompassing thought of dying at any moment to a sensually gratifying and pleasurable "awareness" of spending an eternity in heaven. The precise "nature of subjective experience" is not specified by the theory and thus need not be determined via any empirical testing designed to test the theory. The "idea of a subjective state as potentially freezable, out of time and absent of material conditions" is not so radical. It simply boils down to never being aware that your final conscious moment was indeed final. I'm very tempted here to state "Duh!" :-)
You state "But I would be willing to lay down big money that if you submitted your article to Hameroff, Penrose or Lanza, they would likely make the same argument as I would." First, what is your specific argument when stripped of much that I've pointed out is irrelevant to the NEC theory? Second, so what? The three you mentioned have their own theories about an afterlife that I too could argue against. And besides, unlike theirs, my theory makes no claims about anything materially surviving after death, i.e., energy, and thus is compatible with current models of physics.
Finally, I believe my article has already "fleshed out the philosophical presuppositions grounding it." The following presuppositions are much discussed.
- the perception of time as relative to an ordered sequence of events
- a consciousness that occurs only in discrete conscious moments, one present moment at a time
- the inability to perceive the transition from a time-perceiving state into a timeless state.
You state: "It is absolutely certain that the last states of neural activity one will experience will not be complex bliss but disorientation, confusion, incoherence or something less organized."
Oh really, "absolutely certain"? Can you give some references for this? Some research that backs up such certainty? From the numerous reports by NDE survivors, which are well documented in books and articles, I don't believe you will find recounted such experiences of "disorientation, confusion, incoherence or something less organized" at the end of their NDEs. When I wake up from dreams, I don't recall such experiences. Do you?
You also state: "If you're going to argue, as Ehlmann has, that each frame of consciousness carries its own discrete meaning, then it is contradictory to arbitrarily choose the blissful frame as the last one that will be remembered when we know it will not be the last state of mind for a dying person."
Again, "we know"? Really? There may be more states of mind for a dying person after the last final conscious moment but they're likely at a subconscious level and result in the production of no new discrete conscious moment. Such production likely requires assimilating subconscious results and rendering them at a higher level of consciousness.
And once again, don't forget that with the NEC words like "recall" and "remembered" are not applicable. The NEC is timeless. The last conscious moment happens at a point in time, it becomes part of one's consciousness at that point, and nothing--i.e., no new awareness--happens to undo it. Forgetting takes time and besides there is no reason to "recall" the final moment because by definition its recall can never become a new present, discrete conscious moment.
I believe you are having trouble keeping the timeless nature of the NEC in mind as you continue to speculate and strain in order to somehow turn the final conscious moment into something the will inform the dying person that they are dying, perhaps in order to destroy any perception of eternal bliss that they may have. :-)
NDE survivors didn't die, did they? So their brain activity never deteriorated below a certain threshold. Dead people's brains activity, by definition, deteriorated below a certain threshold. We tend to remember having dreamt only when woken up during rem sleep.
As you know, there are other states of sleep, and not all of them are 'unconscious'.
We can be woken from a certain stage of non-rem sleep and feel profoundly disoriented.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
You must know that there are an enormous variety of levels and degrees of consciousness. the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness far from all or nothing.It's not a light switch but a spectrum and near death awareness is at the more active end of the spectrum. What you are doing is choosing a particularly alert state of consciousness in near death experience and making that the sole definition of consciousness.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
Forgetting takes no more time that the transition from state 1 to state 2 if state 2 involves a deteioration of brain function with respect to state 1. And since one will not be recalling the prior more aware state, one is stuck, according to your terms , with whatever deteriorated state happens to be the present one, and it makes no difference wherever that transition from aware bliss to groggy incoherence happens in a milisecond or 10 hours.
So you believe that when brain function deteriorates near-death below the threshold allowing for the NDE, the brain will somehow still manage to produce a discrete conscious moment that will inform us of our death? Okay, I'll let you hang your hat on that belief, but remember deteriorated states of which you speak, i.e. a state 2, must be perceived.
This will be my last reply. I believe you're taken the discussion down to a level of brain activity that has never been perceived by the living and thus one that can only be speculated about in future discussions.
Have you seen many scientific studies that support notion that NDEs result from the process of the brain shutting down and are seen as a sudden spike in brain activity just prior to death?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/surge-of-brain-activity-may-explain-near-death-experience-study-says/2013/08/12/47026016-0105-11e3-9a3e-916de805f65d_story.html?utm_term=.6a7c7895aaa4