Interaction between body and soul

Well hell, lightwave ol' pal, I've had 2 near-death experiences, when I was shot at and missed. I don't recall anything but the immediate circumstances: crack-boom-echo, welp, I'm still here.

Do those count? If they do, why? If not, why not?

I think that maybe, just possibly, you may have to consider that

your opinion is worthless.
 
LarryS said:
As long as one begins with reality as a material / physical world, then the notion of a soul can never gain any traction. A material / physical world has no explanaition or possibility of a living conscious being, much less a conscious being that survives death. Yet consciousness is - so begin with a different model. I don't know what the term 'soul' refers to, so this is not my wheelhouse.
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What?

Why do you say that a material world has no explanation or possibility of a conscious being?

Quarks behave very differently than atoms. Atoms behave very differently than molecules. A single molecule behaves very different than a mass of them. And yet they're all predicted (and testable) in a single model. What is to prevent that from also including conscious life?

Sure, we may not have a strict definition of consciousness. We know we are, we suspect dolphins are, we've seen mother elephants grieve over the death of their child. Maybe dogs are, maybe birds are. Viruses definitely are not, nor are bacteria. So there's no bright line test of conscious/non-conscious animals. So what? Is there a bright line test between homicide and manslaughter, or male and female, or even our border with Canada? Parts of America that people live on are on the Mexico side of the border wall.

At the edges, things can start to get murky. There's a grey area in everything. There's a grey area in how badly Americans are willing to treat the people who make our clothes. Inside the US, they're treated relatively well. In Cambodia, they may be treated far worse than we could ever in good conscience allow. Yet we still go to Costco for $17.00 shirts.

So there's no good definition of consciousness, let alone a bright line for species to step over - so what? It doesn't change the fact that scientists can track the movement of electricity within the brain and predict whether a person is remembering something or smelling something. It doesn't change the fact that we've identified a massive number of chemical neurotransmitters that do different things when released into different parts of the brain.

The material world fully explains the actions of our brains. We deem ourselves conscious. Thus, the material world fully explains that we deem ourselves conscious.

Playing silly buggers with definitions is all good fun. But, in the end, however you personally define it, consciousness and materialism are completely compatible.

Unless, of course, you can design a repeatable, falsifiable test to show they're not. Can you do that?
 
JayUtah said:
This therefore can't be the authority for your claim that there are "thousands" of congruent reports.
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Prospective studies review groups of individuals (e.g., selected emergency room patients) and then find who had an NDE during the study's time; such studies cost more to perform. In all, close to 3,500 individual cases between 1975 and 2005 had been reviewed in one or another study. All these studies were carried out by some 55 researchers or teams of researchers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Research
 
jrhowell said:
If you decide to raise your arm and then do so, what just happened? If your hypotheses is true then the “you” that did that was just your physical body and your soul played no part in that action.
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That would be true if there was no interaction between the soul and the body during life. But my hypothesis allows such an interaction, so it can be the soul that raises the arm but in a different state of mind/perception than when it doesn't perceive through the body.
 
Loss Leader said:
Name three. Name three neuroscientists and/or doctors who think that. Provide contact information for each.
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Bruce Greyson (psychiatrist), Kenneth Ring (psychologist), and Michael Sabom (cardiologist), helped to launch the field of near-death studies and introduced the study of near-death experiences to the academic setting.

Sam Parnia (resuscitation doctor)

Pim van Lommel (cardiologist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Research
 
litewave said:
That would be true if there was no interaction between the soul and the body during life. But my hypothesis allows such an interaction, so it can be the soul that raises the arm but in a different state of mind/perception than when it doesn't perceive through the body.
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Then we are back to the soul having an ongoing influence on the brain, something for which no evidence has been found so far.
 
litewave said:
That would be true if there was no interaction between the soul and the body during life. But my hypothesis allows such an interaction, so it can be the soul that raises the arm but in a different state of mind/perception than when it doesn't perceive through the body.
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Then why are we so focused on the near-death life review as the mechanism of interaction?
 
Scorpion said:
No ! I said 'what if' the soul remains dormant? its a question, not a statement.
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Weasel words. You asked a hypothetical question and I treated it (gasp!) as a hypothesis. You proposed that the soul could lie dormant, and therefore not interact with the body, as a hypothesis to explain why no signs of interaction would be measured. I asked you to reconcile that with your later claim that you interacted with your soul in order to self-treat your schizophrenia. I don't care which one you choose to argue. I just want you to acknowledge that they can't both be true, and then own the consequences of the hypothesis you abandon. Will you do that?
 
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Loss Leader said:
What?

Why do you say that a material world has no explanation or possibility of a conscious being?

Quarks behave very differently than atoms. Atoms behave very differently than molecules. A single molecule behaves very different than a mass of them. And yet they're all predicted (and testable) in a single model. What is to prevent that from also including conscious life?
Sure, we may not have a strict definition of consciousness. We know we are, we suspect dolphins are, we've seen mother elephants grieve over the death of their child. Maybe dogs are, maybe birds are. Viruses definitely are not, nor are bacteria. So there's no bright line test of conscious/non-conscious animals. So what? Is there a bright line test between homicide and manslaughter, or male and female, or even our border with Canada? Parts of America that people live on are on the Mexico side of the border wall.

At the edges, things can start to get murky. There's a grey area in everything. There's a grey area in how badly Americans are willing to treat the people who make our clothes. Inside the US, they're treated relatively well. In Cambodia, they may be treated far worse than we could ever in good conscience allow. Yet we still go to Costco for $17.00 shirts.

So there's no good definition of consciousness, let alone a bright line for species to step over - so what? It doesn't change the fact that scientists can track the movement of electricity within the brain and predict whether a person is remembering something or smelling something. It doesn't change the fact that we've identified a massive number of chemical neurotransmitters that do different things when released into different parts of the brain.

The material world fully explains the actions of our brains. We deem ourselves conscious. Thus, the material world fully explains that we deem ourselves conscious.

Playing silly buggers with definitions is all good fun. But, in the end, however you personally define it, consciousness and materialism are completely compatible.

Unless, of course, you can design a repeatable, falsifiable test to show they're not. Can you do that?
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There is no scientific evidence of consciousness, period. We can test if a 'unit' exhibits behavior we deem as conscious behavor.
The highlighted above reads like any religious apologist.
There are no explainations or even wild hunches how matter becomes conscious because in principle there are none. We need a new / different way of thinking about this.
 
litewave said:
Because that's what the common elements of thousands of NDE reports suggest.
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Nonsense. All they are suggesting is that people near death experience altered consciousness. You are speculating about the source of that alteration, but even that explanation makes no sense: if you're not dead yet, why would you start experiencing the afterlife?

The much more reasonable explanation is that, deprived from its full operational capabilities, the brain is not functioning properly.
 
JesseCuster said:
There's nothing apparent about that to me. That seems to be a complete non-sequitur.

Why is it apparent that reports of vivid and empathetic states of mind during NDEs would be caused by souls detaching from the brain?
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In fact, without a brain attached to the soul, how does it record memories? Does the soul have its own memory system? If so, why the duplication?
 
litewave said:
Sure, I argue how the soul could interact with the body while eluding observations of physicists and neuroscientists. Because, as you see, a common argument against such an interaction is that physicists or neuroscientists would have detected it.
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More accurately, the argument is that it is detectable. And yet somehow its proponents always find a way to make it impossible to detect.

What does the soul do? The brain handles memory, perception, consciousness, personality, etc. What's left for the soul except the feel-good belief in one's immortality?

litewave said:
Are you joking? The Standard model is missing dark matter and gravity and has not been reconciled with general theory of relativity.
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What does that have to do with sould? Do you think Dark Matter will turn out to be magic?
 
litewave said:
As I clarified, it is apparent to the near-death experiencer.
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In what sense is it apparent? All you've done is say it's apparent and when asked how it's apparent, say that some other people who had NDEs say it's apparent.

But how is it apparent? There's no actual chain of reasoning for why vivid NDEs should be considered evidence of souls detaching from brains.

Also, is it actually apparent to NDE experiences and they have reported this? Have NDE experiencers actually specifically said they think vivid and empathetic NDEs are evidence of souls detaching from bodies? If so , did they give reasoning better than "it's apparent"? Linky to evidence please.

How many NDE experiencers have actually said it's apparent that vivid and empathetic NDEs are evidence of a soul detaching from a brain? How many have said something contradictory to that? You need to build an actual argument, not just handwave it away like this,.
 
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JayUtah said:
Then why are we so focused on the near-death life review as the mechanism of interaction?
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That's an extreme scenario where the soul doesn't interact with the body during life and only interacts with it at the end by downloading memories from the brain, which results in the experience of life review. A more general scenario is that the soul interacts with the body during life, and the experience of life review at the end is a result of experiencing the memories in an altered state of mind for the first time.
 
LarryS said:
There are no explainations or even wild hunches how matter becomes conscious because in principle there are none. We need a new / different way of thinking about this.
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If you mean Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness", I don't see how a soul would be helpful there. The hard problem is how to explain qualitative stuff (qualia) from quantitative/mathematical theories (of science). I think the best framework for making sense of the qualitative/quantitative dichotomy is something like Russellian monism, where mathematics describes structural relations but since it doesn't make much sense for there to be only relations without something else that stands in those relations, there must also be something else: non-relations, qualitative things. Those qualitative things are mutually associated through their relations but since mathematics describes the relations in a very general way it is difficult for us to imagine how qualities arranged in a specific complex configuration are related to the quality of the configuration (whole) itself. Mathematics can be reduced to pure set theory, which is based on a composition relation (set membership), so it just tells you which things consist of which other things and doesn't elaborate what that means for the qualities of the wholes and their parts.
 
JayUtah said:
Yes, but I don't currently have a copy. NDEs are a perennial subject here. What materials by Greyson have you read?
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Nothing by him, as far as I remember. I just read some articles on the internet and some books by Raymond Moody years ago. I know that there have been two studies by Sam Parnia where he placed some symbols in operating rooms that could be seen only from an elevated position to test whether a patient would see them during a supposed out of body experience. No patient mentioned such a symbol in their NDE reports. The second study is still under way.
 
litewave said:
So what did you experience?
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In brief, the tunnel, the light, the disembodied floating around the operating theatre as a disembodied "soul". The eerie sense of absolute serenity through all of it. I was even interviewed by the anesthetist post op because of some of the events.

Had you an actual question?
 
Belz... said:
In fact, without a brain attached to the soul, how does it record memories? Does the soul have its own memory system? If so, why the duplication?
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We can only speculate. The soul may have its own memory system and the material body may serve as a tool through which the soul interacts with the material world.
 
JesseCuster said:
In what sense is it apparent? All you've done is say it's apparent and when asked how it's apparent, say that some other people who had NDEs say it's apparent.

But how is it apparent? There's no actual chain of reasoning for why vivid NDEs should be considered evidence of souls detaching from brains.

Also, is it actually apparent to NDE experiences and they have reported this? Have NDE experiencers actually specifically said they think vivid and empathetic NDEs are evidence of souls detaching from bodies?
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NDErs often mention out of body experiences and that it felt very real, even hyper-real, vivid and with heightened empathy toward other people.
 
litewave said:
That's an extreme scenario...
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Okay, fine, I'll come back to that. My question really meant to ask why we're spending so much time on NDEs. It wasn't really part of the discussion to start with, and now it's taken over. I'm just curious where you plan to take it.

litewave said:
That's an extreme scenario where the soul doesn't interact with the body during life and only interacts with it at the end by downloading memories from the brain, which results in the experience of life review. A more general scenario is that the soul interacts with the body during life, and the experience of life review at the end is a result of experiencing the memories in an altered state of mind for the first time.
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Which scenario are you advocating? Or is it not an either-or dilemma for you?

Regarding the first scenario, we sort of stalled on the issue of the low rate of occurrence as it appears in the data. You argue from silence in a way that suggests you believe the numbers can only go up from there, but I pointed out that's not how arguments from silence work. Greyson also points out a few relevant things there too. I think we converged on the issue of people who die sudden deaths that don't afford a transfer. The degree to which it would be considered a poor system design depends on the degree to which one believes it is a designed system.

Regarding the second, general scenario, you made a comment that's gotten a lot of attention: that this appears to be the soul leaving the body. You're not making that statement now, so it's not clear whether you intend the life review in "an altered state of mind" to refer in any way to a soul. Others have argued that the dying or distressed brain would easily qualify as an altered mind. It matters because even if we grant you that the soul exists and that it communicates undetectably with the organism, why does the life review have to implicate a soul? Can it just be a function of the organism? The more fanciful properties, interactions, and roles you assign speculatively to the soul without reasons or evidence why, the less prima facie probable your soul hypothesis becomes.

But more importantly, you've been asked several times how the purported similarity among NDE reports means they must have a supernatural origin. That's a giant leap of logic that you have yet to explain.
 
abaddon said:
In brief, the tunnel, the light, the disembodied floating around the operating theatre as a disembodied "soul". The eerie sense of absolute serenity through all of it. I was even interviewed by the anesthetist post op because of some of the events.

Had you an actual question?
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Why do you think it was all a hallucination?
 
litewave said:
Why do you think it was all a hallucination?
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Given the post op interview, at least some of it was demonstrably real. In fact, I never claimed that it was "all a hallucination" because I know that at least some of it was fact based.

Why must you strawman everything?
 
litewave said:
Nothing by him, as far as I remember.
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You might want to brush up on him then. Wikipedia is probably not telling you all that you need to know about his work in order to effectively use him as an authority.

I know that there have been two studies by Sam Parnia where he placed some symbols in operating rooms...
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He mentioned in interviews that he wasn't satisfied that this was a good protocol. I agree. Probably why a new study is a good idea.

I hadn't intended to go on to the other people you mentioned until we focused on Greyson a bit. Gish gallops are easily noticed here for what they are. But now that I've ignored my own advice, look at your list. You said there were "neuroscientists and doctors" who disagreed that the existing understanding of neurology was sufficient to explain NDEs. Out of an abundance of fairness, Loss Leader asked you to name "neuroscientists and/or doctors." But your list contains no neuroscientists or neurologists. The closest is Greyson, who is an academic psychiatrist. This is not to say that clinicians or other specializations in academia don't have insight. But you're trying to argue that there is legitimate dissent over whether natural causes are sufficient to explain NDEs. Accuracy of specialization is a factor in that argument.

You also urge that Greyson and a few others ought rightly to be credited with bringing the study of NDEs into academic light. That's a two-edged sword at best. The Greyson scale is widely cited, it is true. But when you look at what Greyson et al. actually did, they formed their own institutes, research groups, and journals focusing on NDEs. They didn't really join the world of academia. They sort of went off and formed their own club to host the research they wanted to do. Not a transgression per se, but it undermines the notion that the alleged dissent is legitimate. Have you studied what actual neurologists say in actual neurology journals about the neurological implications of NDE?
 
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litewave said:
We can only speculate.
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Yeah, that's the problem. You start with the assumption that a soul exists and then speculate that it has exactly all the properties required to afford all the things you attribute to it, the end observation being exactly the same as it would have been without the soul. This is the paragon of antiparsimony.
 
JayUtah said:
Which scenario are you advocating? Or is it not an either-or dilemma for you?
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In my OP I had the general scenario in mind, that the soul interacts with the body anytime and in a significant way. Then Scorpion mentioned that the soul may be dormant during life and it reminded me of the doctrine of the spiritual fall of man in religious literature. So there seems to be a possibility that the soul interacts with the body only sometimes, or anytime but not much.

JayUtah said:
Regarding the second, general scenario, you made a comment that's gotten a lot of attention: that this appears to be the soul leaving the body. You're not making that statement now, so it's not clear whether you intend the life review in "an altered state of mind" to refer in any way to a soul.
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An NDE is often accompanied by an experience of being out of one's body or of having died and entering a spiritual realm, so it seems obvious to me that the patient feels as if he was a soul that has left his body. The altered state of mind -- a sense of hyper-reality and/or heightened empathy -- is often part of that experience, as is the life review.

JayUtah said:
Others have argued that the dying or distressed brain would easily qualify as an altered mind. It matters because even if we grant you that the soul exists and that it communicates undetectably with the organism, why does the life review have to implicate a soul? Can it just be a function of the organism? The more fanciful properties, interactions, and roles you assign speculatively to the soul without reasons or evidence why, the less prima facie probable your soul hypothesis becomes.
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Maybe the NDEs are products of a distressed or dying brain but that's a speculation too and it usually seems unconvincing to NDErs themselves.

JayUtah said:
But more importantly, you've been asked several times how the purported similarity among NDE reports means they must have a supernatural origin. That's a giant leap of logic that you have yet to explain.
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If the NDEs had just random elements that would make it more believable that they are caused by firings of a distressed or dying brain. Instead, the reports often mention common features that evoke the notion of a soul as a conscious entity that survives the death of the material body.
 
abaddon said:
Given the post op interview, at least some of it was demonstrably real. In fact, I never claimed that it was "all a hallucination" because I know that at least some of it was fact based.

Why must you strawman everything?
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So what was a hallucination?
 
litewave said:
So what was a hallucination?
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I can answer that. But I am uncertain that you care about any answer I may provide and thus lack motivation to do so since any answer I might provide is likely to be promptly dismissed by you since it will not conform to your presuppositions.

You have already decided that any NDE is evidence of a "soul". I am in a position to categorically state that it bloody well isn't on the basis of first hand experience of such.

You are fundamentally uninterested in my particular experience, only in ways to dismiss it. And that is a game I am unwilling to play.

So I will trade you. I will answer questions if you will be honest. Can you live with that?
 
litewave said:
...it reminded me of the doctrine of the spiritual fall of man in religious literature. So there seems to be a possibility that the soul interacts with the body only sometimes, or anytime but not much.
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Because religion says so? Do you mean "possible" in the sense of congruence among religious beliefs, or "possible" as something that science should consider?

An NDE is often accompanied by an experience of being out of one's body or of having died and entering a spiritual realm, so it seems obvious to me that the patient feels as if he was a soul that has left his body.
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No. What you actually said was
litewave said:
Apparently this is due to the soul detaching from the brain.
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Nothing about what the patient believes. What about patients who don't believe in souls? Is your interpretation still "obvious" in those cases?

Maybe the NDEs are products of a distressed or dying brain but that's a speculation too...
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How do you know that? Are you a neurologist? Do neurologists generally concede any such notion? Even if we were to grant that it's speculation, it would still be speculation of a much lower order than what you're suggesting. You have to conjure much more into existence in order for your speculation to hold.

...and it usually seems unconvincing to NDErs themselves.
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Why does that matter? Are they all neurologists?

If the NDEs had just random elements that would make it more believable that they are caused by firings of a distressed or dying brain.
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What evidence supports this claim? Is that what neurologists think?

Instead, the reports often mention common features that evoke the notion of a soul as a conscious entity that survives the death of the material body.
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That's an interpretation of the data, not the data itself. When you interpret data through the bias of your beliefs, it does not somehow become evidence of the belief.
 
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JayUtah said:
Have you studied what actual neurologists say in actual neurology journals about the neurological implications of NDE?
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I don't know if I read an article by a neurologist but I see from the Wikipedia article on NDEs that neurologists have suggested possible causes of NDEs, such as too little oxygen, to much carbon dioxide, endorphines etc.
 
abaddon said:
You have already decided that any NDE is evidence of a "soul".
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I said that NDEs suggest the existence of a soul, not that they are evidence of it, let alone any NDE.

abaddon said:
So I will trade you. I will answer questions if you will be honest. Can you live with that?
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I don't know what you expect of me but I would like to know what you think was a hallucination in your NDE and what was not, and why you think so.
 
litewave said:
In my OP I had the general scenario in mind, that the soul interacts with the body anytime and in a significant way. Then Scorpion mentioned that the soul may be dormant during life and it reminded me of the doctrine of the spiritual fall of man in religious literature. So there seems to be a possibility that the soul interacts with the body only sometimes, or anytime but not much.
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Are you aware that Scorp has proudly declaimed on this very site that he is a para-schiz refusing meds? This is not an ad-hom. He has flat out told everyone publicly. It isn't a secret.

litewave said:
An NDE is often accompanied by an experience of being out of one's body or of having died and entering a spiritual realm,
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Yup. Been there, done that. So? It is quite a trip, but not even vaguely mysterious.

litewave said:
so it seems obvious to me that the patient feels as if he was a soul that has left his body.
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Yeah. the patient. Would that be the patient under the influence of intravenous drugs? That patient? The same one having intravenous drugs intentionally used to alter their consciousness? Those patients? Don't you think that drugs intended to alter anyones consciousness might actually do that? Or did that thought simply not occur to you?

And that is the point. What it feels like is not what it actually is.

litewave said:
The altered state of mind -- a sense of hyper-reality and/or heightened empathy -- is often part of that experience, as is the life review.
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Sure. Insufficient to make me believe in <insert deity of choice> though.

litewave said:
Maybe the NDEs are products of a distressed or dying brain but that's a speculation too and it usually seems unconvincing to NDErs themselves.
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Not to me. NDErs see whatever cultural deity is appropriate.

litewave said:
If the NDEs had just random elements that would make it more believable that they are caused by firings of a distressed or dying brain.
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Strawman. NDEs are not random they are the result of notions ALREADY IN THE BRAIN. Thus christians see jesus, muslims see little mo and so forth. The point is that these myths were already in the brain in the first place.

litewave said:
Instead, the reports often mention common features that evoke the notion of a soul as a conscious entity that survives the death of the material body.
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Been there, done that. Your answer is No.
 
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