Consciousness, identity, OBEs... (Identity)

by dhw, Saturday, July 16, 2011, 12:47 (4667 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Dhw: If we accept the authenticity of experiences in which people receive information that would be inaccessible to them under normal circumstances, we can only infer either 1) that the brain has unknown physical means of transmitting and receiving electrical impulses beyond its own confines, or 2) that consciousness does NOT depend on the physical brain. Clearly this has a huge bearing on the concepts of "soul" and "afterlife", and is not exactly irrelevant to the concept of "God" (a universal consciousness). -TONY: One could also ask why you seem to imply that 1 & 2 are mutually exclusive? To me it seems that there are some fundamental assumptions being made about the nature of the 'soul', 'afterlife', and consciousness.-Forgive me, but I think you may be suffering from a brand new syndrome which I shall call "assumptive paranoia". I have no idea whether there are such things as soul, afterlife and God, and if there are, I have no idea what they consist of. But I would love to know. In what I'm fully aware is a vain quest to find out, I join together the various dots of information I have, and try to form a pattern with them. This is how we all endeavour to make sense of things. In quoting me, you omitted the introductory "if clause", which makes it clear that I am building on a hypothesis. That, I'm afraid, is all I can do in my speculations.-Are 1 & 2 mutually exclusive? In the OBE/NDE context that I was referring to, I'd say yes. As far as the concepts of soul and afterlife are concerned, the survivors of NDEs have reported events in which they clearly retained their consciousness and their identity. IF the brain is dead, I'd say only 2) is possible. For me, a soul and afterlife without personal consciousness and identity sound pretty pointless, but I'm not assuming anything. As far as a UI is concerned, if it is not conscious, it seems to me that you might just as well believe in an impersonal universe. If it is conscious, I see no reason why we should not look for clues concerning the nature of its consciousness in the only form of consciousness we know, which is ours.-TONY: I would posit the following:
The brain DOES have an unknown, or perhaps known but not understood, method of transmitting and receiving external information, and that consciousness, in the terms of a conscious awareness of the material world as we know it, does in fact rely on the brain to interpret data into the reality that we experience. However, material experience and consciousness as we understand it do not exclusively hold the sole keys of existence, but rather only on the range and form of sensory perception unique to 'living' organisms.-This whole debate, in which consciousness is one of the key focal points, revolves around whether or not there are forms of being/existence/consciousness beyond those of the material world as we know it. I am an agnostic precisely because I cannot for the life of me find a convincing answer either way. By contrast, your last sentence (presumably you omitted the word "rely") is phrased as a definite answer. One might even call it an assumption.