Consciousness, identity, OBEs... (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, July 17, 2011, 22:36 (4877 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

In OBEs/NDEs, the patients are respectively deemed to be unconscious/clinically dead. These patients, when revived, report on observations which theoretically they could not have made, and provide information to which they could not have had access. I suggested that if these experiences were authentic, (we might also take them in conjunction with other types of paranormal experience such as those of BBella and her family), they indicated that either 1) 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.-TONY: The two items you listed are not fundamentally linked, so not mutually exclusive. IF the EM theory is true, yes, the brain could have unknown properties that allow our consciousness to connect with our bodies allowing us to experience a physical existence, and no, the conscious is NOT necessarily dependent on the brain for existence, but possibly only for sensory translation and as an interface with a physical body.-I don't think there's any disagreement between us here, but I take your point. I probably haven't made my focus sharp enough. The interplay between the senses and the brain is clear, but CONSCIOUSNESS of that interplay and all the phenomena associated with consciousness (ideas, emotions, memory etc.) and with identity ... all of which apparently remain in place during OBEs and NDEs ... are the mystery. My focus, then, is on those phenomena that can't be explained in terms of "sensory translation and as an interface with a physical body". Either the non-sensory and hitherto unexplained phenomena listed above are the product of unknown areas of the brain or they are not. In other words, I'm asking if it's the brain that pulls all the strings, or if we have another form of consciousness that directs the brain.-NDEs at least seem to suggest the latter, but as I've commented before, in that case one might expect ALL patients to have similar experiences, since presumably all would be a mixture of the "physical" and "non-physical". On the contrary, however, only 62 out of 344 of Pim van Lommel's patients had an NDE. If one considered the remaining 282 cases, one might perhaps infer that the clinical death of the brain = the end of consciousness ... i.e. that the brain is the source of consciousness, and one should seek physical explanations for the other 62 cases.-TONY: Just a thought. One that also does not imply an impersonal universe.-Agreed. If consciousness and all its associated phenomena are NOT produced by the brain, there may be other forms and levels of existence we do not know about. That is why this subject is so fundamental to our discussions.