Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

[smcder]

No surpirse. It's just that I am thinking that if 18 degrees equates to 30 minutes wothout a pulse then how far can you go with it? And what, in the brain, is it that maintains the person as themselves—how 'dead' can you get and be alive?

Gotcha...i think @Constance may know just a little about this....;-)

 

[smcder]

No surpirse. It's just that I am thinking that if 18 degrees equates to 30 minutes wothout a pulse then how far can you go with it? And what, in the brain, is it that maintains the person as themselves—how 'dead' can you get and be alive?

Maybe 45 minutes...? If you hold your breath, 48. ;-) You can't freeze because of the water expansion thingy...but I also think there's some evidence that the brain may require very little energy to maintain consciousness - more precisely, whatever the relationship of the brain to whatever consciousness is ...there may be very little energy required to maintain that relationship. If you're not doing calculus in there. ;-)

 

[Soupie]

@smcder

I finally asked David Pierce the following. (I think I did; it's showing up only as an edit, not a question.)

"If reality is fundamentally continuous rather than discrete, could the Phenomenal Binding Problem be construed as a "filtering problem" and thus able to be resolved by non-materialist physicalism?"

 

[Soupie]

No surpirse. It's just that I am thinking that if 18 degrees equates to 30 minutes wothout a pulse then how far can you go with it? And what, in the brain, is it that maintains the person as themselves—how 'dead' can you get and be alive?

I think these are interesting questions coming from you, so I shouldn't give flip answers, but...

It would seem that as long as there is no structural damage to the body/brain and normal functioning can be restored, that 30 minutes could be extended indefinitely.

I don't think there is any one thing in the brain—a single neuron, cortex, or brain "circuit"—that maintains the person "as themselves." The body/brain just is the person. So if the body/brain is maintained, then the "person" is maintained.

 

[Constance]

If you really want to know what the scientific evidence is supporting NDEs, and OOBEs preceding them [demonstrating detailed veridical perception of ERs and operating rooms described from memories of the OOBE stages], here is a link to a compendium of articles from the Journal of Near-Death Studies. The webpage begins with a recounting of the OOBE and NDE experiences of Pam Reynolds during a surgery requiring the same procedures applied in the case @Pharoah cited. Data recorded in this case and others discussed in the linked articles from the Journal of Near-Death Studies will answer some of the physiological questions raised here about the extent of time during which a brain-dead patient [whether presenting in an ER as already brain-dead or undergoing brain surgeries requiring that brain-death be medically imposed] can regain his or her self-referential, contextually biographical, memories of lived experiences had before the radical surgeries and ER resuscitation procedures.

People Have Near-Death Experiences While Brain Dead

Two examples from section 4, cases of veridical perception taking place in brain-dead persons:

Letter to the Editor

Brief Report: A Near-Death Experience with Veridical Perception Described by a Famous Heart Surgeon and Confirmed by his Assistant Surgeon

 

[Constance]

The book linked below by Pim von Lommel, a European cardiologist, is widely considered one of the best books detailing the medical science of near-death experiences. I mention it now in order to point again to the phenomenon reported in this book of rapidly increased, actually 'spiking', brain activity monitored in persons long considered brain-dead and occurring at the point when a medical decision has been made to turn off their life-support systems. Von Lommel describes this recently measured and thus recognized phenomenon in a later section of his book. Its implications are stunning concerning the persistence of self-referential conscious awareness in persons assumed to be brain-dead for years, continuing to exist in irreversible comas.

Setting a link to the book at amazon.com results in a large block of white space, so here is the information you need in order to read about von Lommel's book at amazon or elsewhere, perhaps best at Google Books:

Pim von Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: Near-Death Experience


The following paragraph from an amazon review of von Lommel's book makes what I consider to be a critical point regarding whether or not one needs to accept a traditional religious or creationist theory of the universe or of Being in order to recognize the weight of the evidence that personal embodied, experiential, consciousness of the lived world does not appear to be extinguished with 'brain death'.

"For years I have felt that research into the near-death experience is among the most important in terms of understanding the spiritual aspect of the individual. While many spiritual approaches speculate on the existence of a spiritual dimension, a soul, this research presents consciousness, a non-brain dependent essence, as a stark reality."

 

[Pharoah]

@smcder You say maybe there is no explanation to WIAM. That's fine... I 99% agree.
What I would really like though is a succinct statement or way of describing the question that is WIAM in a way shows it to be different to other very similar and related philosophical questions. To my way of thinking, articulating the question succinctly would be the most potent comeback to people who think that there is nothing that science/objectivity cannot tackle in principle, or who think that there is nothing special about the situation... of the particular self.

 

[smcder]

@smcder You say maybe there is no explanation to WIAM. That's fine... I 99% agree.
What I would really like though is a succinct statement or way of describing the question that is WIAM in a way shows it to be different to other very similar and related philosophical questions. To my way of thinking, articulating the question succinctly would be the most potent comeback to people who think that there is nothing that science/objectivity cannot tackle in principle, or who think that there is nothing special about the situation... of the particular self.

First stab:

1. Is it different? or does it bring home to you the subjective/objective:

(Pick all that apply)

• Binary
• Gulf
• Yawning abyss

2. Like WILTBAB, the way it's posed may strike some and not others. The professor who says some percent of his class "get it".

3. How do we know who "gets" it? By how they talk about it-which means we need a good grasp of what a good grasp is. That leads us to think about how would someone convince you they get it, which I think will lead to your answer.

 

[smcder]

@smcder You say maybe there is no explanation to WIAM. That's fine... I 99% agree.
What I would really like though is a succinct statement or way of describing the question that is WIAM in a way shows it to be different to other very similar and related philosophical questions. To my way of thinking, articulating the question succinctly would be the most potent comeback to people who think that there is nothing that science/objectivity cannot tackle in principle, or who think that there is nothing special about the situation... of the particular self.

I think there may be more than one striking formulation. First as I said I'd get very clear in the way that you tell yourself how it's different from these similar problems...and see if the difference holds up to the light of articulation.

Then find the nearest ten year old kid...or whatever age that most people lose their wonder for philosophical questions.

 

[smcder]

For me, getting a good grasp of what a good grasp of what exactly explanation is and isn't for seems important. I think explanations may belong on one side or the other (but not both) of the subjective, objective divide.

So that means picking a standpoint and drawing your subject into...or out of, the problem with you.

 

[smcder]

"It remains, according to my limited international straw poll across the generations, a book still more often cited than read."

-https://aeon.co/essays/how-gaston-bachelard-gave-the-emotions-of-home-a-philosophy

I should like to have a library full of books more often cited than read.

 

[Constance]

we need a good grasp of what a good grasp is.

Quotable. If I could figure out how to set a sign-off to my posts, I'd choose this one, with your permission.

 

[Constance]

I think there may be more than one striking formulation. First as I said I'd get very clear in the way that you tell yourself how it's different from these similar problems...and see if the difference holds up to the light of articulation.
Then find the nearest ten year old kid...or whatever age that most people lose their wonder for philosophical questions.

?? Most ten-year-old kids I've known are just beginning to develop their capacities for philosophical curiosity.

 

[Constance]

For me, getting a good grasp of what a good grasp of what exactly explanation is and isn't for seems important. I think explanations may belong on one side or the other (but not both) of the subjective, objective divide.

I second your first sentence, but disagree with your following statement. For me, attempted explanations in every serious discipline need to recognize both ends of the subjectivity--objectivity spectrum and then to understand how subjectivity and objectivity meet and intermingle in the middle, in the medias res of experience. As existents, we are always in medias res. By the end of its first post-natal day, the infant is already living in medias res, a being finding itself within an encompassing sphere of existence that is temporal as well as spatial.

In Medias Res is the title of a book of essays concerning a poet and thinker named Peter Sloterdijk, concentrating on his Spheres Trilogy, which, according to the editors of the volume, "can be regarded as the Raum und Zeit that Heidegger never wrote." Sloterdijk's thinking might be of value to us in this thread as we speculate on the nature of personal identity and the self-world relationship. The link below goes to the first 12 pages of the introduction to this book of essays, available at amazon. The front matter of the book notes that this book is available open-source at www.oapen.org. After reading the first 12 pages of the introduction, I'm very interested in reading Sloterdijk's Spheres Trilogy and also his poems. A new thinker and a new poet. What could be better?

{Don't know why the Paracast software won't embed links to books at amazon. So the book I want to link to is:

In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being
by Willem Schinkel (Editor),‎ Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens (Editor)}


ps, in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, Stevens writes that the existence we experience, feel, and think about is "part of the res itself / And not about it."

 

[Pharoah]

By the end of its first post-natal day, the infant is already living in medias res, a being finding itself within an encompassing sphere of existence that is temporal as well as spatial.

I don't think that a infant has quite what you say on its first post-natal day.
My observation is that an infant does not know it has a body and must discover it. If it has a pain, it has no idea where it originates on its body or why. It has to discover that the world is spatial and temporal and before it conceives of such things

 

[Pharoah]

First stab:

1. Is it different? or does it bring home to you the subjective/objective:

(Pick all that apply)

• Binary
• Gulf
• Yawning abyss

2. Like WILTBAB, the way it's posed may strike some and not others. The professor who says some percent of his class "get it".

3. How do we know who "gets" it? By how they talk about it-which means we need a good grasp of what a good grasp is. That leads us to think about how would someone convince you they get it, which I think will lead to your answer.

We have had quite a few comments on this and you ask, "is it different?" That is the point really. We still have not articulated this in a way that is convincing, skeptics aside.
I am interested in reading Scotus on this...

 

[smcder]

We have had quite a few comments on this and you ask, "is it different?" That is the point really. We still have not articulated this in a way that is convincing, skeptics aside.
I am interested in reading Scotus on this...

"What I would really like though is a succinct statement or way of describing the question that is WIAM in a way shows it to be different to other very similar and related philosophical questions."

Can you list these and state (if un-succinctly) how WAIM is different?

• If there is SIIL (something it is like) to be a bat...then how is WAIM different from the puzzle of why the SIIL for that bat is for that bat and not another?

 

[Constance]

". . . as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

I wonder if that's true, though no less an authority than Shakespeare claimed it (or rather had his Theseus claim it). Would Oberon, also there in Midsummer Night's Dream, claim it? I don't think so. MP wrote that "imagination is present in the first human perception," which means that perception relies on, depends on, experience that precedes it in the prereflective being-there/being-with of consciousness.

When I listen to rain sounds like those in the linked video below, as I've been doing recently, I feel the sensors in my nasal passages opening up and find that I have the sensation of smelling the rain, the air filled with rain, the ground absorbing the rain, the way other sounds come through the rain. Must be that my past experiences of rain remain embedded in the memories collected in my prereflective consciousness. How many of our past experiences remain so embedded, so instantly recollected, as quickly as 'the speed of thought' we experience in thinking. A thread of felt experience seems to flow beneath our streams of consciousness and also within them.

@smcder You say maybe there is no explanation to WIAM. That's fine... I 99% agree.
What I would really like though is a succinct statement or way of describing the question that is WIAM in a way [that] shows it to be different to other very similar and related philosophical questions. To my way of thinking, articulating the question succinctly would be the most potent comeback to people who think that there is nothing that science/objectivity cannot tackle in principle, or who think that there is nothing special about the situation... of the particular self.

I think you're essentially right about that, @Pharoah. But it is difficult to articulate that question in ontological terms. I think we have to rely on the essential 'mine-ness' [self-referentiality] of experience that we share with other animals. As someone expressed it [perhaps Heidegger himself], the concept of ek-stase -- the indubitable sense of one's being situated in an environing world -- means that "standing- out is standing-in."


From the Dorato paper I linked a day or two ago: "Rovelli need not deny with the instrumentalists the existence of isolated quantum system: qua carriers of dispositions, such systems can be regarded as real as the table on which I am typing. “Going dispositionalist” as the second slogan recommends ensures both the reality of the isolated systems and the lack of definiteness of state-dependent properties. In a word, and summarizing the second slogan, I will regard isolated quantum systems as endowed with an intrinsic propensity (a probabilistic disposition) to reveal certain definite values of physical magnitudes by interacting with any kind of physical system. Whether propensities are a reasonable interpretation of the formal notion of probability is better left to another paper."

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.0132.pdf

 

[smcder]

Thomas Nagel
What is it like to be a bat?

"Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them. I shall not pursue this subject, however. Its bearing on the topic before us (namely, the mind-body problem) is that it enables us to make a general observation about the subjective character of experience. Whatever may be the status of facts about what it is like to be a human being, or a bat, or a Martian, these appear to be facts that embody a particular point of view. I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type."
...

"In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view.

This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism."

 

[smcder]

Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88