If we agree that one case of NDE was real, then we are dealing with an anomaly that materialism cannot describe. I am wondering how you could explain the NDE experience when there is no brain activity.Even if NDEs were veridical, that wouldn't be enough to challenge physicalism or mind-brain equivalence. — sime
:100:[A] flat EEG reading isn't a sufficient measurement for defining brain death. — sime
If we agree that one case of NDE was real, then we are dealing with an anomaly that materialism cannot describe. I am wondering how you could explain the NDE experience when there is no brain activity. — MoK
Carroll says: everything we know about quantum field theory rules this out. But that simply restates his physicalist presupposition: psyche must be physical, because everything is physical. That is circular. The real question is whether that underlying assumption is itself adequate to the evidence. And perhaps that will require more than ad-hoc adjustments to the presumption that everything is physical. — Wayfarer
I am not an expert in this field, so let's see the opinion of @Sam26 on this matter.For the record, I don't consider any such case to be real - a flat EEG reading isn't a sufficient measurement for defining brain death. — sime
I think if NDEs are proven to be correct, then to have a better model, you need to add other substances into consideration, including the mind.But if such cases were real in some sense of having intersubjective confirmation of anomalous phenomena, then it would at most imply a hole in our current physical theories, resulting in a new physical theory with regards to an extended notion of the body with additional senses, coupled with a new definition of personhood. — sime
According to my discussion with @Sam26, the person does not show brain activity during NDE. So, at least in this case, we are not talking about brain activity near death.I don't think NDE experiences themselves are necessarily problematic in themselves regarding physicalism; studies of dying brains show there is a lot of activity just before death. — Apustimelogist
And we also have this spiritual experience, which seems common among NDEs. Why do such people have such an intense experience, which is common when they are dying or are basically dead?What would need more explaining is the claim that people have accurate knowledge about events that are happening. — Apustimelogist
Well, the question is, what is the right model of reality when it comes to NDEs and normal life? Physicalism fails to explain the strong emergence of experience. Experience cannot be causally efficacious in the physical world, considering the fact that the physical world is causally closed. Moreover, experience is only a mental event, so it cannot affect the physical world since it does not have any physical properties to affect the physical world.Ofcourse, in order to study this you would want to be able to validate the claim that people can have genuine knowledge of things happening externally during NDEs that are not just lucky guesses or confabulation or other things that would not indicate genuine knowledge. — Apustimelogist
Carrol would say that the mental is nothing m9re than the physical. — Apustimelogist
The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. It is not even the buzz of neuronal events that take place in your brain as you read them. What a sentence means, and what it refers to, lack the properties that something typically needs in order to make a difference in the world. The information conveyed by this sentence has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. — Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature
According to my discussion with Sam26, the person does not show brain activity during NDE. So, at least in this case, we are not talking about brain activity near death. — MoK
And we also have this spiritual experience, which seems common among NDEs. Why do such people have such an intense experience, which is common when they are dying or are basically dead? — MoK
Well, the question is, what is the right model of reality when it comes to NDEs and normal life? Physicalism fails to explain the strong emergence of experience. Experience cannot be causally efficacious in the physical world, considering the fact that the physical world is causally closed. Moreover, experience is only a mental event, so it cannot affect the physical world since it does not have any physical properties to affect the physical world — MoK
The "meaning" is not different to the sounds, squiggles and neuronal events in anyway that suggests some inherent divide between physical and menta — Apustimelogist
plainly and obviously. — Wayfarer
It can all be explained in terms of physical events and brain activity. I don't see that as contoversial. — Apustimelogist
I don't see what else is going on. — Apustimelogist
Why must it be physical? this assumes from the outset that everything real must be made of particles or fields described by physics. But that is precisely the point in dispute.
Consider an analogy: in modern physics, atoms aren’t little billiard balls but excitations of fields. Yet fields themselves are puzzling entities—mathematically precise but ontologically unclear. No one thinks an electromagnetic field is a “blob of energy floating around.” It’s astructuring principle that manifests in predictable patterns, even if its “substance” is elusive. — Wayfarer
↪Sam26
Case studies aren't causal, and without detailed imvestigation of possible explanations in a controlled way, there is no reason why someone should not hold the belief that a physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information, which we can't have from limited amounts of case studies like this.
Biomedical sciences, as well as social sciences by which the required methods overlap, have notorious difficulties with replication as it is, how do you think this is going to convince people. Sure, keep on holding to you wild intuition about the otherside and NPCs, but you haven't presented any smoking gun refutation of naturalistic explanations, which have been far more successful throughout history than things like parapsychology and ghost-ology or even god. — Apustimelogist
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.