Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Friday, October 25, 2013, 17:15 (4046 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We must also keep in mind that the vast majority of patients in both types of case appear to have had no such experience (which should make us wary of generalizations).-DAVID: No. NDE's occur in about 20% according to Parnia. That is a sizeable number. -Why do you say no? 20% is a substantial number, and 80% is the vast majority. We still have to be wary of generalizations.
 
dhw: Like you, I'm fascinated by the implications of NDEs and the apparent independence of consciousness from the cells from which we think it may emerge. You have a problem here, since you seem convinced by "emergence" (which makes the cells the source of consciousness) and yet believe consciousness can survive the cells that create it. -DAVID: I didn't say it the way you are interpreting it. The brain has consciousness aa an emergent property, whikch may be tghat it acts as a radio receiver for species consciousness while generating its own consciousness. -The essential feature of NDEs is that it gives us a pointer to an afterlife (in which you say you believe), and that means individual identity and consciousness survive the death of the cells. Species consciousness does not give us our individual identity, and so you are still stuck with the problem of our personal consciousness being produced by and yet surviving the cells. But the panpsychist-type energy theory may solve it.-DAVID: And there is no question that consciousness survives brain cell silence and total inactivity, often for several hours or days, only to return with full resuscitation, and the memories recalled from during that coma-time are not hallucinations but very organized events.
 
But for some reason, this only happens to 20% of resuscitated patients. I am not casting doubt on the experiences (ditto those reported by some transplant patients), but am merely keeping in mind that there is another mystery here: why do the vast majority of people NOT have them?-Dhw: If both sets of examples are true (we can only speculate), the answer may perhaps lie in some form of personalized energy that is produced by the cells but can remain both inside and outside them. Species consciousness might be a generalized form of that energy (so perhaps the brain/heart/whatever could be both producer and receiver), or it might be cellular memories handed down through all the generations of species' cells (which makes the brain/heart/whatever a container and a producer). Whatever it may be, though I hate to mention this, we are getting perilously close to some kind of panpsychism.-DAVID: Yes we are, and it only another form of my favorite theory, that God is the universal consciousness of out reality.-I'm not sure what that fine-sounding expression means. Our reality is our own and other people's individual consciousness. NDEs all entail the survival of that individual identity. If it survives the death of the cells, it must be some kind of individualized energy which meets up with other individualized energies (you say the dead communicate by telepathy). Maybe all species generate their own individualized energies. And maybe the universe is filled with individualized energies. And maybe there is no such thing as one universal consciousness, but only an infinite number of individualized energies. Not your favourite theory, but doesn't it fit in nicely with NDEs?