How do you determine what is part of the system and what is not?
Is it possible for a system to contain a system?
If yes, what exactly is a system of all systems? — Pieter R van Wyk

In the Markov Blanket perspective, there are no strict boundaries and systems under this definition can be recursively nested within each other, which is natural; molecules in cellular components in cells in organs in people in societies, ecosystems, solar systems, etc, etc.

Because its a rigorous formal framework, it can be put into practise. An interesting proposal in this paper where they do this, producing algorithms for distinguishing systems and components of systems - "a Markov Blanket detection algorithm".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21217

Point particles with intrinsic properties is itself an incoherent idea. Therefore you wrongly classify your interpretation as coherent. "Point particles" is just a mathematical facilitation, which physicists know does not represent anything real, due to that incoherency. Therefore it does not avoid the so-called measurement problem, it's just a fiction which simplifies some calculations. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I don't think there is any picture or theories of any kind of physics or metaphysics where a point particle wouldn't be a kind of idealization or fiction to simplify conceptualizations of the world. The fact that fields are fundamental doesn't necessarily make particles inconsistent with them; but I do take the point that quantum field theory does seem to suggest to people that some point particle properties just cannot exist in QFT (e.g. a photon cannot be localized in space like a you would expect of a point-particle). But I believe this only conflicts with point particles if you conflate a particle with the quantum state - its the quantum state which cannot be localized. This would not be the case in stochastic mechanics or Bohmian mechanics where neither particles nor field configurations would be identical to a quantum state, so there would be no inherent contradictions even if particles are generalized by a field description.

Very nice analysis :up: :up:

Rather, experience cannot be disentangled from the functional structure of the brain; attempts to do so result in bizarre paradoxes like the p-zombie who believes they are conscious, reports their own experiences and can converse about it as well as yourself.

I could write it out, but my argument doesn't depend on this Bayesian framework. Most people won't understand it anyway. What I think is funny is that I estimated the probability of my conclusion being correct at 95% even before the Bayesian analysis. — Sam26

No one's going to take you seriously unless you are going to back up your mathematical claims. I would like to see how you got to these numbers.

Edit: in [ ] : nevermind, I see what you're saying for this bit.

Updating yields a posterior probability of approximately 0.95 (95%). — Sam26

Can you explicitly write out this calculation?

Yes, it does seem odd that even though we don't need brains for experiences, our earthly-transcendent spirits have experiences of the exact same kind which are supported by brains which, in the earth-bound counterparts, would be compromised by brain injury. If I have a stroke, will my stroke-related deficits manifest in the afterlife? If not, why do I even have a brain in the physical world that can be disrupted to produce stroke-light deficits. If stroke-like deficits are specific to my earth-bound experiences, why does my transcendent experiences resemble my earth-bound ones? Lots of bogglement ensues.

It would put into question things we know about how physics and biology works.

Very much hoping for a chapter on your NPC hypothesis.

But don't you see how momentous that decision would be? The admission that the fundamental particles of physics are not themselves physical? That you choose not to see this, is not any kind of argument. — Wayfarer

But you can say the wavefunction is just mathematical object that is describing the behavior of physical particles without being identical to them. You can use an evolving probability density function to describe the behavior of a single particle undergoing diffusion, the evolving probability density function is not the particle itself.

luck — Sam26

This can only be done statistically.

history and forensics don't wait for lab recreations to draw conclusions — Sam26

Because forensics is based on established science which is used to assess whats going on. History makes much weaker inferences than the ones you are trying to make.

but that doesn't erase the explanatory power of what's already on the table. — Sam26

No explanatory power at all. You don't have any model, just a vague claim that life exists after death based on circumstantial evidence rather than any explicit refutation.

for every edge case — Sam26

You shouldn't be using underexplored edge cases to make leaping claims that overturn entire paradigms.

you know, the ones courts and historians use daily) — Sam26

Good lord, try brining this to a court or historian and lets see how that goes.

That's not a fallacy; that's consistency. Your crowd's the one gerrymandering epistemology to protect pet paradigms. — Sam26

Just ridiculous to think you can overturn the whole body of knowledge regarding physical science from a few case studies that completely lacking in methodological rigor. And yes, its the entire body, because if there was any other weird stuff going on that was anything like the claims you are making, we probably would have found it scientifically by now.

"more rigorous testing" while ignoring the rigor already in play. — Sam26

Its very basic. Take a class in methods in sociology and see what they tell you about the pros and cos between things like case studies and qualitative research as opposed to quantitative ones.

Clinicians deal with anomalous data all the time without tossing out naturalism wholesale. Historians reconstruct events from fragmentary evidence without demanding Petri dishes. — Sam26

Yes, they make inferences as reasonable based on evidence and the methodological principles they have been taught. Do you really think any of these people would come to the same conclusions as you regarding this topic? If not, there is no point bringing them up.

independent reports matching on checkable facts. — Sam26

Yeah, and you don't know if those effects would replicate in systematic study with lots of these cases as opposed to the case studies where you cant control what people say, how things are reported or checked, cant control how or why these case studies came to prominence (i.e. some kind of selection effect in sampling). You can't control lucky statements, you can't control actual genuine naturalustic ways people may have come to that knowledge. Unless these things are systematically tested then we are forever speculating on these case studies without a definitive conclusion about what happened.

quantum weirdness, consciousness gaps, — Sam26

Quantum weirdness is naturalistic and consciousness is naturalistically studied.

You say science isn't different from other knowledge, but then pivot to demanding everything fit sociology, cog sci, or biomed methods? — Sam26

Because its clearly the subject matter. How is it not? Those are the natural methods you would use to answer exactly this topic.

it's about what holds up under scrutiny. And mine does — Sam26

The whole issue is the dearth of scrutiny, ironically.

but know you're missing out on a paradigm shift. Your call. — Sam26

:lol: :rofl:

But surely this was linked to the fact that science was in search of a or the 'fundamental particle', the basic componentry of the atom. So it is natural that this would amount to a search for a physical particle. The fact that this ended up with the uncertainty principle just is the measurement problem. — Wayfarer

But you can interpret the wavefunction in other ways coherently. From my perspective, fact that people decided to try to interpret it as the physical particle is misplaced. They could have decided to interpret it differently from the beginning and no measurement problem would have existed. The measurement problem is not an inherent part of quantum theory, it is a property of certain interpretations. The only reason it seems so widespread is a knee-jerk inclination of how to view it. The uncertainty principle can be interpreted purely statistically.

Even if consciousness plays no unique role, the measurement problem remains: something distinguishes measurement interactions from non-measurement interactions, and standard quantum theory doesn't specify what that 'something' is. We still need to explain why certain physical interactions produce definite outcomes while others maintain superposition. — Wayfarer

Well, I endorse an interpretation that has a measurment problem so this is solved for me, personally.

But the measurement problem is precisely why interpretations were needed in the first place. — Wayfarer

No, the measurement problem is a result of the fact that when quantum theory was first created, people's first and perhaps natural inclination (considering the predecessors to quantum theory) was to interpret the wavefunction as the physical particle itself. If you choose to do this, you are going to come up with a measurement problem. But its also clear that you can produce coherent interpretations and formulations of quantum mechanics where you don't interpret the wavefunction as an object. Nonetheless, this habit has stuck even though it is not a necessary one. The need for interpretation does not come from the measurement problem; the measurement problem comes from assuming a certain kind of interpretation.

This puzzle can't be dissolved simply by adopting interpretations that claim it doesn't exist. — Wayfarer

It absolutely can. There exists more than one interpretation where you have point particles in definite configurations that reproduce all the predictions.

Hmm, I misread this bit as something to do with philosophical zombies.

Basically, if there was no consciousness, the electrical activity, magnetic activity, blood flow, blood oxygenation, metabolic activity, gap-jumping neurotransmitters, and whatever else, would still be taking place. How would the readings of any scans look different in that case? The differences in the scans of brains with identical activity, one with consciousness and one without, would reveal the physical properties of consciousness. Obviously, we can't scan a normally-functioning human brain that is not conscious. I guess this is a TE about if we could. — Patterner

The point being I don't think there's anyway something could not experience things in a way that is not directly related to how brains, or something equivalent, work.

Edited: spelling

No. I shut the door on untested alternatives that never touch the specific constraints of specific cases. — Sam26

This is very obviously, fallaciously presuming that these specific case studies have some kind of priority here when in reality the problem people might take with your work is that the case studies you have are all themselves methodologically limited, and we should be creating new studies to test alternatives rigorously and systematically. Trying to explain specific case studies does not allow you to assess things statistically with factors like luck or confounds that you cannot have accounted for. With specific case studies like these, you cannot even really be sure of what happened.

That’s an appeal to popularity (a fallacy in basic logic). Truth isn’t a vote. The standard I’m using is ordinary public standards — Sam26

:snicker: :chin:

does not rebut existing anchored matches any more than “take more photos” makes today’s photo disappear. — Sam26

Sure, but this is only if you can definitively validate those photos and what they show, which is difficult to do retroactively for case studies as opposed to more rigorous testing.

A null there doesn’t touch other time-locked, public particulars (verbatim speech, staff actions, instrument use, timestamps) — Sam26

Which themselves should be validated in more rigorous testing.

Courts, historians, and clinicians use the same epistemic tools. — Sam26

Absolutely no one in these categories of people would agree that your evidence is sufficient to justify the claim there is life after death. I think you don't seem to understand that whatever self-imposed standards you seem to apply to these case studies, the issue here is that the evidence is too sparse for most people to take it seriously as a falsification of the most successful paradigms of knowledge in human history.

What I won’t do is treat generic “maybes” as if they were explanations. — Sam26

Bottom line for readers: When independent reports line up on the same publicly checkable details, the burden shifts — Sam26

I think what you have got to understand is that our scientific, naturalistic paradigms are so successful that the burden of proof is much higher for a relatively small number of methodologically limited case studies that make claims contradicting them without even presenting alternative models for what is happening.

Clearly, the issue is that you treat naturalism with disdain, so your standard of evidence for the supernatural is much lower than most other people who think that the success of naturalism demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary contradicting claims.

If you think science alone defines knowledge, you fall into what philosophers call scientism, the idea that only scientific results count as real knowledge. — Sam26

I don't think science is inherently different from other kinds of knowledge. Its just obviously the case that this topic is in the realms of evaluation using the same methods of science you would find in sociology, cognitive science, biomedical science.

because they shut down the door on untested "alternative hypotheses" that conveniently dodge empirical accountability. — Sam26

They don't though, and seemingly a majority of posters don't agree with you on this thread.

You have this bizarre attitude that the fact that actual experiments or studies to verify alternative hypotheses haven't been done or are difficult to do means that they shouldn't be entertained. No other rational person takes that attitude; instead they will say: "lets go out and study this more, lets not jump to conclusions when other possibilities exist that haven't been fully explored". When other people suggest that more rigorous studies need to be done, you then suggest that those kinds of methods aren't the right kind.

Just mind-boggling your inability to entertain alternative possibilities that could feasibly be the case.

they are evasions, shifts of definition, or vague possibilities dressed up as if they were explanations. — Sam26

And from their perspective what you do looks like evasions, faulty definitions and an inability to entertain plausible alternatives.

Are you suggesting that people shouldjust accept what you are saying and there is no need to explore alternative options and that all other naturalistic explanations have been shutdown?

but in philosophy — Sam26

This isn't philosophy though. This discussion is clearly in the realms of science. It is an empirical question. Seems to me like you are trying to turn this into a philosophical discussion to try to downplay the idea that people don't think your evidence is empirically sufficient.

don’t mistake volume for rigor — Sam26

Good lesson for reading your book!

There’s probably precious little agreement amongst them about what the word even refers to. — Wayfarer

But there seems to be largely agreement that measurement does not require consciousness because there is simply nothing in quantum theory to suggest this. It only arises as something you might consider when speculating about interpretation, and if your preferred interpretation does not have a profound measurement problem, there is no longer a reason for you to want to bring consciousness into it, on top of the fact that quantum theory does not suggest consciousness is required in any way.

Just seems to me like you're gerrymandering standards of evidence in a way that no one would reasonably accept outside of the vicnity of yourself and other likeminded bastions of woo-ism like Bernardo Kastrup and Wayfarer. "Yes, these are extremely rigorous standards of evidence if you are not allowed to entertain alternative hypotheses that the methods do not explicitlh account for or we don't generallyhave a great deal of knowledge about currently." Sounds good to me.

Basically, if there was no consciousness, the electrical activity, magnetic activity, blood flow, blood oxygenation, metabolic activity, gap-jumping neurotransmitters, and whatever else, would still be taking place. — Patterner

I disagree. Such a brain would still report its own consciousness and talk its own consciousness in the exact same way we all do. It would be able to engage with you just as well as anyone about phenomenal experiences.

It stands to reason that your knowledge and reports and whatever compels you to make the statements, have the beliefs you do about consciousness would be for the same kind of reason as this brain that supposedly does not have consciousness - the electrical, biochemical activity is what makes you open your mouth, type the words on screen, does it not?

If everything you say and claim about consciousness is for the same reason as this brain that supposedly does not have consciousness, then the idea of distinct "physical" stuff with completely separate, independent causal powers to some distinct "phenomenal" stuff becomes increasingly absurd and also causally redundant. It also leads to questions of reliability about your "knowledge" about conscious stuff, after all, this brain without consciousness may come up with the exact same viewpoint as you without having any consciousness itself, supposedly. Why would it do such a thing?

Seems to me if you want to bite the bullet and commit to such a picture you would have to commit to some bizarre mental gymnastics about the nature of the universe, entertain supposed hypotheses about the brain in relation to conscious - possibly with serious implications for physics and other sciences - that we simply have no empirical, scientific evidence for.

I find there is a certain bizarre lack of humility in people who think that, in principle, their own direct aquaintance with experience is beyond and superior to facts about the causal powers of their own brains and the possibility of illusions or fallibility about the way they are as beings in the world.

:up: :100:

It absolutely can, people can just be either unfairly dismissive or ignorant.

:chin: :chin:

I don't really like these quantum examples because you are getting to a point where people don't really know what these things mean in a metaphysical sense. In other parts of science, I don't see arguments over downward causation being anything other than semantic, because it is clear that what is not necessarily reducible is an explanatory framework in an epistemic sense, rather than any genuinely novel strongly emergent metaphysics. You obviously get novel behavior, but again, my intuition is that arguments over the significance of this would largely be semantic. There is something like a downward causation in Friston's description, but it is does not invoke anything more than the same genre of mechanisms that you would talk about to explain natural selection in evolution which are "blind".

They aren't criticisms, and if you just read the papers and try to understand what is being said then you will see that. Your best criticism was "belief is a silly word".

Which authors? — apokrisis

Of the papers I linked, including Friston! Friston has even talked about examples like the rock in zoom discussions.

My point is that it is just dumb to confuse equilibrium systems with far from equilibrium systems. A hot rock has its internal state. Drop it in a bucket of cold water and it then shares the collective internal state of the thermal system that is the much colder rock and the now slightly warmer bucket of water. — apokrisis

Yes, a point which refuses to engage with what I am talking about. Its very simple. Read the papers and they will tell you precisely what I have been saying. Nothing is being confused apart from yourself.

So your strawman is a strawman. — apokrisis

How? The thread is about systems in the most generic sense. You're the one who started unnecessarily complicating things with your misunderstandings.

Bringing Bayesian belief into this discussion is a publicity stunt and not serious science or philosophy. — apokrisis

This is an area I have been busy in for a long time. — apokrisis

For someone who has apparently had discussions with Friston himself, its bewildering your inability to just engage with what is being said in these papers and the thread itself.

But with a point of view inserted. — apokrisis

Bayes' rule is just as valid for objective probabilities. Thats why its just generic probability. Bayes' rule describes frequencies for things that have nothing to do with beliefs or minds or living systems. Its just generic probability theory.

The properties of living systems doesn't strictly come from Bayes but their complicated nature in the sense that if you characterize a system as performing Bayesian inference, but its state space is simple, its not going to look like a living thing. An often used example is a thermostat, sensing the temperature and regulating it. That can obviously be seen as active Bayesian inference, and aligns with your dissipative topic. But it doesn't look very much like a living creature does it.

I come back to the point that to claim belief for a rock is to collapse your epistemology into ontological confusion. — apokrisis

This is just a strawman if you refuse to engage with the way "belief" is intended by the authors of the theory.

Bayesian reasoning is great as a general theory of the organism in its semiotic relation with the world, and so then loses its way when it goes beyond what it was meant to be and is bandied about as a theory of literally anything — apokrisis

Bayesianism is just probability theory. There is absolutely no reason that this should be organism-centric, and the authors have literally constructed mathematical proofs describing its domain of applicability. Whether you like the theory or not, its just a mathematical fact that it can describe a rock. I don't actually see any constructive criticism in your comments other than an unexplained intuition that there is something about it you don't like. The theory fully accomodates characterizations of complicated life; and even so, the topic of the thread is "systems", a concept far more general than ypur favorite topic. The generality of Bayesian mechanics then fits it perfectly.

The best theory of absolutely everything in my book is dissipate structure theory. — apokrisis

Which is more or less just the free energy principle that has been talked about, or at least a corollary with regard to persistent, complicated structures.

You can give a description in terms of what brains do and perhaps how brain relates the perception in of thought.

One can say that money or love or meaning are not strictly physical properties, but that doesn't mean those concepts aren't instantiated in the physical world in such a way that physical modela describe all the events one could possibly associate with any of these things. I would s ay the same goes with consciousness. Ofcourse consciousness is conceptually distinct from the physical just like money is from paper, machine learning from brains, musical theory from the physical vibrations that carry pitch, squiggles on pages from meanings. But that doesn't mean there are inherent dualisms carrying distinctly independent causal powers regarding any of these things. Its just in regards to different levels of explanation that concern different scales of detail regarding patterns that exist in the universe.

Yes, but then I do not believe the distinction in your other post that there are these mental things separable from physical things and have to somehow causally affect them.

It would be easier if you tell me what you don't understand about the post I referred you to.

Maybe you should type yours rather than silly one-line questions.

A quick point is that the kind of dynamics that could even be coupled would have to be in a state of criticality. — apokrisis

Well it depends on how complicated the system is, what it does. But again, the free energy principle applies in principle even to just a description of a normal rock that doesn't overtly display behavior like that.

A balance of geological and chemical forces over many scales of being. In some sense its own model as at some particular distance or horizon, the landscape’s smallest fluctuations become a lower bound blur, and its largest fluctuations become so large the system now appears to live inside a fixed background, captured by its laws. — apokrisis

Not really clear to me what is being said here.

But then you can see how the humble rock lacks that kind of dynamics which brings this systems perspective into things. — apokrisis

Again, you are misinterpreting the theory somewhat. If you look at the paper, they say a rock can be described under the theory and its more or less mathematically proven that the principle can apply to something like a rock. What you are talking about is a special case of system that is highly complicated.

But on a skim, I would say he is trying too hard to explain everything by the self-organising dynamics and being too glib about the self-information or measurement aspect of a hierarchical system. — apokrisis

Can you specify what exactly you mean? Its a mathematical principle that applies generically and is not restricted to self-organizing dynamics.

No, it really doesn’t. The information that the rock contains bears no resemblance to a system of belief.

You can present your evidence to the contrary if you wish of course. — apokrisis

Again, you're interpreting "belief" in a way that is more elaborate than the minimalist version used in the theory which is not much more than Bayesian probability. Bayesian probability is often linked clisely by people to a kind of subjectivist view of probabilities but Bayes' rule holds regardless of interpretation - its just probability theory. If you read the papers I linked you will see it explicitly expressed that even a rock comes under this formulation. If you like you can think of the word "belief" as just a metaphor. Its just saying that the internal system has information about the external system. The internal system is predictive of the external system (predictive define purely in terms of conditional probabilities) - as if the internal system could be said to have beliefs.

A rock doesn’t actually have beliefs about its environment. — apokrisis

It does. Bayesian mechanics and Free energy principle can apply to anything sufficiently complicated. As said in the first paper I linked before: if something persists over time, it must be encoding a model of the relevant environment we have used in constructing or picking out this system. Doesn't matter if its a rock or a person or an ecosystem, a society. Obviously, a rock may not be very interesting though as a kind of dynamical system.

thermo maths. — apokrisis

Information theory. Rather than calling that thermo math, we should be talking about thermodynamics in terms of a statistical mech.. oh wait!

But the rock never had any say in the matter. — apokrisis

Well the notion of model being used is far more minimalist and general than what you're implying. The FEP does apply to any thing, and so provides a generic characterization of any system complicated enough to have anything interesting to say about it, including stones and even smaller, simpler systems for that matter than stones, I should think.

An account that is extremely general, simple but I believe mathematically rigorous, well-defined.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=10954599080507512058&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

(quotes from second paper in abstract and introduction part)

"This monograph attempts a theory of every ‘thing’ that can be distinguished from other ‘things’ in a statistical sense. The ensuing statistical independencies, mediated by Markov blankets, speak to a recursive composition of ensembles (of things) at increasingly higher spatiotemporal scales. This decomposition provides a description of small things; e.g., quantum mechanics – via the Schrödinger equation, ensembles of small things – via statistical mechanics and related fluctuation theorems, through to big things – via classical mechanics. These descriptions are complemented with a Bayesian mechanics for autonomous or active things. Although this work provides a formulation of every ‘thing’, its main contribution is to examine the implications of Markov blankets for self- organisation to nonequilibrium steady-state. In brief, we recover an information geometry and accompanying free energy principle that allows one to interpret the internal states of something as representing or making inferences about its external states. The ensuing Bayesian mechanics is compatible with quantum, statistical and classical mechanics and may offer a formal description of lifelike particles."

"To address the nature of things, we start by asking how something can be distinguished from everything else. In pursuing a formulation of self organisation, we will call on the notion of conditional independence as the basis of this separation. More specifically, we assume that for something to exist it must possess (internal or intrinsic) states that can be separated statistically from (external or extrinsic) states that do not constitute the thing. This separation implies the existence of a Markov blanket; namely, a set of states that render the internal and external states conditionally independent. The existence of things (i.e., internal states and their blanket) further implies a partition of the Markov blanket into active and sensory states – that are not influenced by external and internal states, respectively. This may sound a bit arbitrary; however, this is the minimal set of conditional independencies" – and implicit partition of states – that licenses talk about things (that possess states). Specifically, it provides a partition that constitutes the ‘self’ in self-organisation. The subsequent sections tackle the next obvious question: what are things? At this point, we deploy the Langevin formulation of random dynamical systems as an ansatz that is recursively self-verifying, when considered in the light of Markov blankets. In brief, the formulation on offer says that the states of things (i.e., particles) comprise mixtures of blanket states, where the Markov blanket surrounds things at a smaller scale. Effectively, this eludes the question “what is a thing?” by composing things from the Markov blanket of smaller things. By induction, we have Markov blankets all the way down, which means one never has to specify the nature of things."

So a system is a thing with a Markov blanket that separates the kind of thing it is from its environment. This can be applied to virtually anything complicated enough, from a rock to a brain to a planetary system to... virtually anything. The internal states of the system can then be descibed as modelling the states if its environment.

the meaning they convey is not. — Wayfarer

What we call meaning is completely explainable in terms of sciences, even if difficult. Its just anoyher thing brains do.

They still fall under the umbrella of science, but they’re worlds away from the hard-edged materialism of earlier generations, precisely because that old framework has proven untenable. — Wayfarer

Statements like this just make me think you are saying a lot of these things not based in any of your own kind of thought out analysis of these issues but just because you have a deep dislike of certain science-like things for no reason discernible to me. You then just pick someone to quote and parrot off their view.

One thing I notice in your posts is the taken-for-granted-ness of many of your responses, and the many arguments you “don’t see the point of.” — Wayfarer

Explain the mystery. Explain why it can't be explained. I don't understand. You then cite biosemiotics which seems likena contradiction.

I suspect you're trying to critique some kind of explanatory reductionism but thats not really the right target because most physicalists or naturalists would say that in principle these things can be or will be explainable in terms if hard sciences but its just not practically feasible or something like that. No one really takes difficulties in explanatory reductionism as strong argument when it comes to something like the mind-body problem. In fact, I'm sure most don't even think explanatory reductionism is desirable, just that it is in principle possible. Showing that there are things that don't have a drilled in explanation in terms of hard sciences now is not sufficient for your point. You need to argue that in principle these things can never be explained. You need to show something like its in principle impossible to model in terms of things like physics, biology, machine learning, the kinds of behaviors, cognition, interactions with the world associated with what we call meaning. Or at least give a convincing reason why it could never be done that is not contingent on something tangential like technology limits.

See this post

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1009371

We are, however, talking about a case of NDE in which the person does not have any brain activity. — MoK

That is what a flatlined brain is. When they say that a brain has no activity, they mean it is flatlined. The point is that clearly the report of a flatlined brain doesn't necessarily mean it actually has no activity.

And what is the physical explanation for NDE? — MoK

Brain activity... like the brain activity that would cause experiences for someone under psychedelics or from a traumatic injury.

We need them. Experience is an accepted phenomenon in the domain of materialism. Materialists claim that matter also exists and behaves according to the laws of physics. Materialism also claims that matter does not have any experience in most forms, but in the brain. They claim that experience is the result of neural processes in the brain. We are dealing with a kind of strong emergence, as experience is something more than just neural processes in the brain. Granting that such an emergence is possible, we are still dealing with a problem. — MoK

You have not justified the presuppositions, just regurgitated them.

This seems like a strawman wrapped in speculation. My argument/book isn't relying on "limited amounts of case studies" as isolated anecdotes; it's drawing on millions (100's of millions worldwide) NDE reports worldwide, corroborated by thousands of verified accounts in peer-reviewed studies (e.g., via IANDS, Greyson's NDE Scale, and prospective hospital research like the Dutch study I mention). These aren't cherry-picked "case studies"; they're a massive, diverse dataset of testimonial evidence spanning cultures, eras, ages, and medical contexts. I'm not claiming causality in the narrow experimental sense (e.g., "NDEs cause afterlife belief"); I'm making an inductive argument that the patterns in this evidence (veridical perceptions during flat EEGs, cross-cultural consistency, transformative effects) make consciousness persistence beyond brain activity the most probable explanation. — Sam26

But again, the fact that people report experiences doesn't entail an interpretation unless you can rule out alternatives, doesn't matter how many people report them, and I strongly suspect the great majority of reports nowhere near make claims that are strong enough to make any conceivable challengr to naturalistic explanation: i.e. its probably very rare in the scheme of things where people have near death experiences that involve verifiable claims about things that happened while they were not in a normal awake conscious state. The fact that your instinct is to say that these reflect something supernatural is itself speculation because the studies that rule out alternative explanations or explain what actually is happening during these reports has not been done. Your induction is ignoring the possibility that if more detailed scientific exploration was done, we might find naturalistic explanations.

Your speculation that a "physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information" isn't evidence; it's a defeater that could be applied to anything to avoid confronting data. Imagine applying this to historical knowledge: "Sure, eyewitness accounts say Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but without controlled experiments, a physicalist explanation (like mass hallucination or forged documents) is possible if we had more info." We'd dismiss all history! Or in medicine: "Patient testimonies correlate smoking with cancer, but without infinite data, an unknown physical factor might explain it away." This is epistemic paralysis, not rigor. — Sam26

No, you are confused. My arguments are nothing to do with skepticism. My arguments are is that naturalism is very successful at explaining. The supernatural is not successful. The degree to which I am skeptical that Caesar crossed the Rubicon depends on whether I have reason to think him doing so is not likely.

This is not epistemic paralysis, its epistemic confidence, and it makes any skepticism of these supernatural claims very reasonable.

already confronts physicalist alternatives, hallucinations, anoxia, endorphins, temporal lobe seizures, DMT surges, and shows where they fail: they don't account for veridical elements (e.g., Pam Reynolds' accurate description of the Midas Rex bone saw and arterial issues during no brain activity), consistency across non-hypoxic cases, or reports from blind individuals gaining "vision" that's later verified. — Sam26

The problem is that it is widely acknowledge that we don't actually have huge scientific mastery over how the brain works compared to say physics. The fact that these explanations may be limited does not necessarily rule out explanation if we were to gain more knowledge about what is actually happening. Retroactively trying to fit explanations to case studies is not the way to resolve this either. The way to rwsolve this is controlled experiments where you can account for confounding variables, account for statistical "luck", all sorts of things. As I said before, I can find controlled experimental studies that show that brains are still responsive when they are "isoelectric" which is the criteria used to characterize a brain as having no activity. Again, the problem with case studies with verifiable information is that they are extremely rare, and even in the studies like Parnia's where they try to actually do controlled experiments with verifiable information, they couldn't actually get anything from it because reports which contain that kind of information are very rare. These reports come under the realm of anecdotal case studies.

we accept quantum mechanics based on unreplicable (in everyday terms) experiments, black holes from indirect inference, and the Magna Carta's signing from testimonial convergence. — Sam26

Again, this depends on what yoy are studying. Quantum mechanics isn't based on unreplicable experiment.

But the kind of verification you need dependa on what you are studying. Inferring that Jesus existed or the Magna Carter was signed has a different standard to quantum mechanical experiemnts which has a different standard to biomedical studies. Because these are all very different things making claims of different strengths with different confounds. Applying the kind of standard that warrants belief that Jesus existed to experimental trials in medicine would be frankly ridiculous. The claims of NDEs and supernatural arguably require more rigor than any of these and do demand replication.

But that's an argument against over-relying on "controlled" science as the sole arbiter of truth, not for dismissing testimonial evidence! My book isn't pretending NDEs are lab-replicable; it's evaluating them epistemologically, where replication isn't the benchmark — Sam26

NDE studies use the same kind of methods as biomedical and social sciences. It is exactly these kinds of methods that have issues with replicability. And if they are not in principle replicable then they are limited in saying anything more than a qualitative characterization of what people experienced. Its fine to have studies doing this. You can have qualitative studies in social science examining the opinions of a certain community, of people's recollections of some historical event. Does this allow you to infer something more fundamental about the world? Not necessarily. And if you're studies are trying to make scientific claims about the world, then they require scientific methods to ensure that they can make reliable inferences. You are making a scientific claim about the way the universe is. Just as physics and biology require replicable experiments to show that their theories are empirically adequate, you need to do the same to show there is no possibility that scientific theories can account for the same phenomena.

If you do not have a strong basis to do so, people are justified in not believing you given a confidence in naturalism.

You ignore how my inductive argument mirrors successful scientific inferences: germ theory wasn't "replicated" in one lab but induced from converging testimonies (patient reports, autopsies). — Sam26

Sure, ans maybe they were sufficient for certain claims at the time. Doesn't mean the same necessarily applied to your theory.

NDEs' veridical hits (e.g., the Dutch dentures case, where a revived patient described the nurse's actions and trolley layout) are replicable in pattern, occurring in ~10-20% of documented cases. Dismissing this as non-convincing requires ignoring epistemology. — Sam26

Again, verification doesn't point to why they were verified. Was the verification because of the supernatural or because of naturalistic reasons, maybe a mix of actual sensory information coming into the brain, maybe luck, maybe other confounds. I am.completely entitled to want to know exactly how this happened and rule out naturalistic explanations. Just giving reports does not do this.

The power of corroborated testimonial evidence—your blind spot—is that it's how most knowledge travels (Chapter 1: birth dates, Antarctica, DNA). When it meets my criteria (high volume: millions; variety: global/demographic; consistency: core patterns; corroboration: medical verifications; firsthand: direct reports), it's not "intuition"—it's justified true belief. Speculating "more info might physicalize it" is like a flat-Earther saying "unknown optics explain away satellite photos." It's not engagement; it's evasion. — Sam26

The issue is that you have a prior inclination for the supernatural so you interpret testimonials that way. My inclination is not that way so I demand stronger evidence because this is not the natural way for me to interpret those testimonials. I am happy to except testimonials on other things where their claim seem justified. None of my criticism isn't about some inherent bias toward a specific method for the study of all things. Simply, in this case those methods are warranted.

flat-Earther saying "unknown optics explain away satellite photos." It's not engagement; it's evasion. — Sam26

These testimonials are nowhere near the evidence that earth is not flat. You don't even have a description of what is happening in the other realm of souls and spirits.

In sum, your comment is ridiculous because it demands impossible standards (lab NDEs?) — Sam26

You literally cited authors who have tried to do this. At the same time, so what? Verifying quantum mechanics would have required standards impossible hundreds of years ago. Doesn't mean it is not the case.

Otherwise, it's just a dogmatic defense, exactly what I warn against. — Sam26

Its no more a dogmatic defence than you. The evidence appears to you a certain way because of your inclinations which is not convincing to most others. If I have string confidence in naturalism for good reason, there is nothing unreasonable about demanding more evidence.

Your appeal to life after death is about as handwavey as my appeal to what future science might say because you dont have any model of what happens after death, there is no reliable empirical evidence of any other realm.

This fallacy occurs when a position is structured to be unfalsifiable; any counterevidence is automatically reinterpreted or dismissed as incomplete, with the promise that "more information" or some unknown mechanism will eventually confirm the theory. In your case, speculating about possible physicalist explanations "if we only had more information" seals off the argument from refutation; no matter how much converging testimonial evidence piles up (veridical perceptions, cross-cultural patterns, etc.). This isn't rational skepticism; it's a rhetorical move that begs the question, assuming materialism's truth while demanding infinite proof from alternatives. — Sam26

No, this is what happens naturally in all science and eventually when more evidence occurs or people can no longer defend their views, they change their minds. But this happens because the new theories offer new things that the old theories cannot match. You have not met the standard for me to change my views. You need more concrete evidence. Until them I am entitled to be confident in naturalistic explanations.

But it can't. — Wayfarer

But physics, biology, machine learning explains how we can learn things about the world and interact with it efficaciously, including words and symbols. Where is the mystery? You're aiming at the wrong thing. Meaning isn't problematic in these arguments, phenomenal experience is the big target.

Why doesn't phenomenal experience bother me either? As you would agree, we only perceive the world experientially. My engagement with scientific facts is through my experience, and people can only engage with what science predicts through experience. Using science requires people doing stuff, reading, talking, etc, which they experience. Science is embedded and enacted in the informational structure of out experiences. Science doesn't deal with or characterize something like an intrinsic way the physical world is.

At the same time, no one can give any non-primitive, fundamental characterization of their own experiences or what elucidate further description /explanation of what exactly the phenomenal aspect of experience is. There is absolutely nothing more to experience than direct aquaintance. Science then also just deals with descriptions of structure grapsable in terms of directly aquainted information of our own experiences, like any description or explanation does.

Science represents us our knowledge of the natural world and gives strong evidence of the relationship (or even isomorphism in Chalmer's words) between our experience we are directly aquainted with and at least aspects of information in brains. There is no scientific evidence for phenomenal experience as an independent stand-alone structure in the universe.

There is simply no evidence for dualism, simply put, that phenomenal experience meaningfully represents any kind of independent causal structures or powers that we are not already probing in the sciences of physics, brains, cognition, machine learning. I am no better able to characterize an intrinsic nature of experience as I am some putative intrinsic nature of scientific structures that should be the case under physicalism / naturalism / materialism / whatever your preferred label. There is simply nothing here of fundamental incompatibility between physical science and experiences unless maybe you look at what science says about the physical in the kind of hyper-naive realist, hyper-reductive sense which is just not a plausible way of looking at anything. At the same time, it seems evident to me that part of our perplexity about our own experience could be, should be, plausibly explainable through science itself as a consequence of natural limitations to what brains and machine learning can do. There's no reason to think our opinions about experiences come from anywhere else. Other than that, the perplexity of there being anything that it is like to be a macroscopic thing is not addressed by any perspective on the hard problem of consciousness; but such a question jumps the gun because imo it presupposes a way the world is that is fundamentally incompatible with that, a presupposition that is unjustified because science doesn't actually talk about that. The notion of an intrinsic fundamental nature of the world isn't graspable scientically; nor can I grasp anything meaningful about my own experiences other than I have them, that I see stuff.

It can all be explained in terms of physical events and brain activity. I don't see that as contoversial. There is nothing else additional going on. You think because you have a brain, you act because you have a brain, you talk because you have a brain, you see stuff because you have a brain. I don't see what else is going on.