What Do You All Think Of TED...?

[Love Zhaoying]

57 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Not deeply, but I've read articles about it. I'll have to work entirely from memory, but I recall this:

• Via FMRI, we've located brain regions that become active during NDE.
• Via (fatal) tests on lab animals, we've witnessed elevated brain activity shortly after cardiac arrest, followed by eventual cessation. I don't recall if we have any understanding of the neurochemistry involved. I only remember imaging.
• The drug Ketamine has been reported to induce NDE like experiences.
• People are able to meditate themselves into states that resemble NDE.

Unfortunately, I do not expect to be able to report back on my own eventual personal experiment. It will probably be a DE.

ETA: I'm sure I've missed some interesting research, let me know if you've got more. It's a fascinating topic.

ETA2: I wonder how much of my attitude is mine to control. ;-).

I’ve had friends who swear by Ketamine (I’m not a huge fan personally).

Specifcally, what do you think of NDE experiences where the person hears / sees something that they should not be able to (OOB)?

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Specifcally, what do you think of NDE experiences where the person hears / sees something that they should not be able to (OOB)?

The NSA hires people like that.

Seriously, though, the human mind is capable of great imagination, and the fact that some low-probability events happen anyway just tells you that we may not have imagined all of the good answers yet.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

The NSA hires people like that.

Seriously, though, the human mind is capable of great imagination, and the fact that some low-probability events happen anyway just tells you that we may not have imagined all of the good answers yet.

The idea that we could ever truly understand ourselves is astonishing!

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I’ve had friends who swear by Ketamine (I’m not a huge fan personally).

Specifcally, what do you think of NDE experiences where the person hears / sees something that they should not be able to (OOB)?

I'd need to see proof that they witnessed something thought impossible. So far, all I've heard is "eyewitness" reports. I've a cousin who's an FBI agent and places eyewitness testimony right down there with hearsay.

Mac, my boarder, suffers from anxiety and has described to me OOB experiences resulting from medications he was prescribed to ameliorate things. On a beautiful summer day, I can attain something close to an OOB by imagining myself floating in the clouds. I've even found myself brushing condensation off my arms, which was, of course, not there.

2 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

The NSA hires people like that.

Seriously, though, the human mind is capable of great imagination, and the fact that some low-probability events happen anyway just tells you that we may not have imagined all of the good answers yet.

 While checking into the books recommended by Luna I read a claim (in an attempt to prove that ESP is real) that the government had investigated it for 25 years. The implication they missed in "had investigated" is that the investigations ended. So, did ESP suddenly stop working, or did the government clean up their research methodology and watch their experimental evidence vanish under the light of day, as with Daryl Bem?

Edited January 7, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters

[Madelaine McMasters]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The idea that we could ever truly understand ourselves is astonishing!

It is, and we might never. Heisenberg really tossed a wrench in the works. There's also a difference between understanding the general mechanisms at work and the specific results they produce. We might understand how memory works, and affects perceptions, but that's not even close to understanding how my memories affect my perceptions. I think we're always going to be working with probability distributions.

Edited January 7, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Madelaine McMasters said:

On a beautiful summer day, I can attain something close to an OOB by imagining myself floating in the clouds. I've even found myself brushing condensation off my arms, which was, of course, not there.

We mentioned earlier psychotropics and Ketamine, don’t discount NO. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

We mentioned earlier psychotropics and Ketamine, don’t discount NO. 

NO? (Imagines nitrous oxide... and laughter).

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

It is, and we might never. Heisenberg really tossed a wrench in the works. There's also a difference between understanding the general mechanisms at work and the specific results they produce. We might understand how memory works, and affects perceptions, but that's not even close to understanding how my memories affect my perceptions. I think we're always going to be working with probability distributions.

On the subject of DE, NDE, etc. I learned interesting things about the general experience shown by Alzheimer’s patients as they die (from my parent’s) hospice workers. I suspect non-Alzheimer’s patients experience similar things (denial, begging, bargaining)..

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

NO? (Imagines nitrous oxide... and laughter).

Yes, has quite the psychoactive effect.

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I feel no need to invoke magic, spirits, gods, psi, or whatever to explain the feelings I have that there is something beyond what I understand. It's sufficient for me to say "I don't know" and keep digging.

[Rolig Loon]

7 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

NO? (Imagines nitrous oxide... and laughter).

Both

 

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

NO? (Imagines nitrous oxide... and laughter).

Or is it NO2?

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

Both

 

Classic!

[Selene Gregoire]

In the almost (just a hair shy of) 6 decades I've been on this mudball, the universe has taught me two things:

1) There is no such thing as perfection.

2) There is no such thing as impossible. Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

1) There is no such thing as perfection.

2) There is no such thing as impossible. Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

1) I was taught that learning to accept “what is” as perfection, is a good thing.

2) Impossible things are just things we can’t imagine, yet. Improbable things we can imagine, but may not believe. We may see improbable things and tell ourselves they were impossible.

[Rolig Loon]

14 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

There is no such thing as impossible. Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

I'm guessing that you never tried skiing through a revolving door.

Leaving that class of impossible things aside, I agree with both of your principles.  One basic lesson that scientists learn early is to report results with error bars.  No matter how careful your measurements are, there is always a degree of uncertainty that must be acknowledged.  Whether you mean "perfection" in the sense of "accuracy" or "precision," any scientist will tell you that nothing is 100% certain.  Hence, it is not only true that you can never get a "perfect" answer, it's also true that you can't be sure that any outcome is impossible. 

As they say in Vegas, however, that's the way to bet.

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I'm guessing that you never tried skiing through a revolving door.

Those doors are evil. I’m afraid I will end up stuck on an alien planet in a simulation of a bad detective novel (ST:TNG plot).

[Selene Gregoire]

32 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I'm guessing that you never tried skiing through a revolving door.

Never tried snow skiing and only got one opportunity to try water skies, however improbable that may seem.

Revolving doors, on the other hand, are a different story. 

 

[kali Wylder]

On 1/5/2019 at 11:34 AM, Love Zhaoying said:

I’ve more experience than anyone I’ve ever met, with psychotropics. The fact I’ve been lectured a lot about Sheldrake says more about who told me (guru), than anything else.

When you say experience with psychotropics, are you saying your an old hippie who did a lot of drugs way back when? I'm curious because I'm one of them.

Oh, never mind, I see that you explained this in a subsequent post

Edited January 8, 2019 by kali Wylder
question answered further along in the thread

[Love Zhaoying]

42 minutes ago, kali Wylder said:

When you say experience with psychotropics, are you saying your an old hippie who did a lot of drugs way back when? I'm curious because I'm one of them.

 

Oh, never mind, I see that you explained this in a subsequent post

Um, yes anyway lulz

[Madelaine McMasters]

6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The idea that we could ever truly understand ourselves is astonishing!

I was just thinking about this. Many years ago, in the early days of neural network computing research, neural nets started solving problems in ways we couldn't understand. Obviously the circuitry was understood, as it was designed by us, but the self learning those networks did wasn't something that could be probed. There was not sufficient debug/monitoring circuitry in the chips to dump a complete state of the machine. After iterating over problems, the networks would produce counterintuitive yet useful results. AI pioneer Marvin Minksy quipped that this was encouraging. He figured that if we didn't understand how humans did it, it was a sign of progress if we no longer understood how the machines were doing it.

It's a pretty popular sci-fi meme that machines eventually understand us better than we do.

[Madelaine McMasters]

55 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

1 hour ago, kali Wylder said:

When you say experience with psychotropics, are you saying your an old hippie who did a lot of drugs way back when? I'm curious because I'm one of them.

Oh, never mind, I see that you explained this in a subsequent post

Um, yes anyway lulz

I am curious about you two. The most fascinating aspect of the Marsh Chapel Experiment, and others experiments with psilocybin, is that one "trip" on the stuff can produce a lifelong "shift" in consciousness. Steve Jobs made such claims about the few times he took LSD. The drugs make lasting changes in brain wiring that persist long after the drug is gone. Do either of you have the sense this has happened to you?

[kali Wylder]

7 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I am curious about you two. The most fascinating aspect of the Marsh Chapel Experiment, and others experiments with psilocybin, is that one "trip" on the stuff can produce a lifelong "shift" in consciousness. Steve Jobs made such claims about the few times he took LSD. The drugs make lasting changes in brain wiring that persist long after the drug is gone. Do either of you have the sense this has happened to you?

Hard to say for me, I started partaking at the age of 15....and I continued partaking until I was 27.  I can't imagine what my consciousness might have been like without the experiences in those 12 years.  I had no baseline established to compare to so to say there was a shift would be difficult. I do remember thinking towards the end that it was unlikely I would receive any new profound revelations were I to take one more trip.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 minute ago, kali Wylder said:

Hard to say for me, I started partaking at the age of 15....and I continued partaking until I was 27.  I can't imagine what my consciousness might have been like without the experiences in those 12 years.  I had no baseline established to compare to so to say there was a shift would be difficult. I do remember thinking towards the end that it was unlikely I would receive any new profound revelations were I to take one more trip.

Yeah, if you do anything for a long time, you'll never tease apart the causes for change. I'm sure not the same after my marriage as I was before it.

I'm truly fascinated by the evidence that a single psilocybin trip can change your perspective.

[Madelaine McMasters]

12 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

And here's an article by the same scientist:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/fashion/25brain.html

I like how she resolves the issue, saying that both sides of the brain have validity rather than asserting one side has all the truth.

I loved Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk when I saw it years ago. Do note that the two sides of the brain she mentions are entirely within the body. She never mentions any external force or connection. The energy she mentions is, I think, just the energy of sensing expressed in a spiritual way, but not describing anything more than our five senses. And I don't think she believes in anything supernatural or paranormal. The NYTimes quotes from her book "Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain." That is pretty much what I've been proposing all along. Similarly Daniel Kahneman suggests that the human desire to define oneself via stories, along with confirmation bias, might be the basis for religion. Again, there is no need for supernatural or paranormal activity, we're naturally predisposed to imagine the supernatural.

At 17:15 in her TED Talk, Ms. Taylor thanks her "fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form". In light of that quote above, perhaps you can see that what appears to be a metaphysical discussion of her sense of self is actually a fairly materialistic one, with her giving thanks to the cells in her body for making it all happen.

You may know more about Ms. Taylor than I, and if she does believe in the paranormal, I'd like to know.

Edited January 8, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters