THIRD EYE : My Ontological Journal : thoughts on what I am learning from the confluence of science and spiriruality

 THIS IS NOT AN INTEGRATED ESSAY OR JOURNAL.  ITS MORE OF AN ARCHIVE OF THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS APPEARING ON DIFFERENT SITES AND REFERRING TO DIFFERENT QUESTIONS OR REACTING TO VIDEOS OR PODCASTS. THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL REACTED TO DOES NOT APPEAR HERE SO INSTEAD OF FLOW THERE IS FRAGMENTATION. NEVERTHELESS AS INFIVIDUAL PIECES THEY CAN MAKE A DEGREE OF SENSE SO I HOPE THAT READING THEM WILL NOT BE TOO IRRITATING.

 

 https://youtu.be/o0FXT5xlmVs?si=BGrp2cFwXTUdfN8R

Posted on Facebook: 18th December 2023

Do we realise what is happening ?

Since I was a teenager back in the 1970s I was fascinated by the questions 1. What are we really ? And 2 What is reality really? This made me head into the deep and difficult waters of spiritual enquiry for which I was scarcely mentally or intellectually equipped. 

Meanwhile, science was telling us its increasingly rich and detailed classical narrative based on classical methodology.  This method, extremely powerful for relatively uniform and uncomplicated processes such as in mechanics and astronomy worked very well. The better the instruments the better the observations and calculations.  

But almost the same time that classical physics reached its hugh point in Einstein's radical redefinition of spacetime,  quantum mechanics came in and shattered the foundations of the mechanistic narrative of the world. The world was no longer a mechanism that was unconscious but was fundamentally indeterministic, choice was built into the structure of reality, and consciousness started emerging as a fundamental and not a derivative.  By 1930 the experimental data was overwhelming.

Fast forward to 2022 when the Nobel prize for physics was win by Alain Aspect and his colleagues who effectively proved that spacetime was NOT and COULD NOT BE the ground reality. The ground reality, as Federico Faggin, the inventor of the microprocessor and the touchscreen, explained, is quantum reality based on infinites and probabilities and on the primacy of consciousness as the determinant of phenomenological outcomes.  In a nutshell, the reality that we see and perceive including all the measurements and descriptions of modern science are NOT the core reality but simplifi3d iconic REPRESENTATIONS through our consciousness EXPERIENCES reality. Faggin came to realise this through certain mystical epiphanies that shattered his previously atheist materialist world view. His talks on YouTube are fascinating and compelling.

Of course loads of top scientists reject this outcome.  Feynman said " we don't understand quantum mechanics. " Yes we do. We understand it the way we understand that time is warped by gravity and speed: through the mathematics of the observations.  We do not experience space or time warping any more than quantum indeterminacy and the paradox of being in two.potential.states until observed. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking,  Francis Crick...you name them.  None of them can accept the FACTS.  But that indeterminacy and the primacy of consciousness is the ordinary fact of big science.

What has all.this got to do with you and me and the big life questions? Well...everything ! If we are not just robots in biochemical bodies but immortal consciousness then all the spiritual stories are true...these experiences could not and still cannot be described in scientific language because the core reality is the CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE and not an objective state at all. That's the staggering fact facing us today.

Kastrup attends to quantum understanding to explain why the death of the body appears like the death of the self but is in fact not. This resonates with Eckhart Tolle's realisation that we are "not the ego" ( mind-body composite) but consciousness freed of the body in the material world. As we die we experience the death of the body which is frightening while the idemtitucwyion persists. If we recognise that we experience the self in the body but we are NOT the body then the death experience starts to become positive. We can start letting go thr body and the self detaches from it with mind and personality intact and coherent. Understood this way, death becomes a positive and not a negative experience.

This is not 'woo woo.' This explanation of the death process working with the liberation of consciousness from the body us fully compatible with our dawning understanding of quantum reality.

As Faggin points out, we are in the age when we are using quantum computers (qubit information handling via light beams) instead of classical computers ( bits) without any grasp of the dimension from which the computation comes because it is TRANSCENDENT ( outside) of spacetime. This was already proved by Bell's Theorem after 1964 and confirmed by Aspect's work over the forty years since 1982.

Welcome to the new age when spirit meets matter and proves itself the primary reality !

I feel privileged as a humble non expert to listen in on the discussions of these giants of modern science made possible by social media. Finally I'm getting thr inkling of answers to questions previously thought impossible and pointless. It is a great privilege to still be mentally engaged in this enquiry in the second decade of the twenty first century.

 Some of us may wonder why despite the solid demonstration of the reality of quantum states ( entanglement, nonlocal vommunication, indeterminacy, infinite superposition of states, collapse to specific phenomenal states through observation/measurement/primary role of consciousness, collapse of subject object divide in pre collapse states, transcendence of linear logic and spacetime) is so extensively resisted by the science establishment. It seems extraordinary that despite overwhelming experimental evidence, quantum THEORY is resisted in defence of classical ( mechanistic/ deterministic / reductionist / physicalist) theory.

Well, its actually not that surprising. To admit to quantum THEORY amounts to throwing out the idea that science can one day explain everything IN PRINCIPLE. In a real sense its the beginning of the discovery of TRUTH but the end of the line for scientific method. Built only to discover and explain THIS dimension, which it can do with awesome effectiveness, it CANNOT GO FURTHER.

By 1900 scientists were declaring that science was sure to explain everything, only the details had to be padded out. By 1930 that certainty was destroyed - and mainstream science attitude has been in denial ever since.

Its changing. In the end, science will bow to facts. The 2022 Nobel prize in physics given to Alain Aspect and his colleagues in effect acknowledges that spacetime as a baseline description of reality is dead.

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 Facebook, 8th December 2023 on a Near Death Experience site,my comment: 

I'd like to share a few thoughts that I  worked through, trying to attend to a question by member Grace Cao , about why so much evil goes on in this world if God is Love ..

 The problem of EVIL is the hardest one to explain.  It has been made worse by RELIGION. It is probably the most important reason why people are dumping religion and looking for other answers.

 Organised and established Religions are power systems that seek to control you by telling you stories to accept. But these stories fall apart when closely examined.

Evil exists NECESSARILY in this world. It is rooted in IGNORANCE. The ignorance arises from identifying with one's lower nature. The lower nature is essentially cruel, selfish and predatory. It arises out of the essential condition of material existence : the separation of creatures from each other, the need of creatures to take over and consume each other. The normal person also has an instinct for it's spiritual ( anti material.) side : to seek union with others, feel.altruism,compassion, love. The struggle between ego and spirit MUST happen in the material world. In some people the ego side is completely dominant.  This manifests in evil. In some ways this approach ( material existence supports ignorance, the dark side of the soul, cruelty, evil) is closely comparable to powerful religious movements that got wiped out by the Christians,: Manichaeism and it's Christian counterpart, Gnosticism).  Varieties of these teachings survived in the far East until medieval times as well as among the Albigensians in France ( wiped out, 12th century). Since then the Christian churches proclaimed that all of creation was good and made by a good and loving God, but had difficulty in explaining your very question : then why does he allow evil ? The Christians answer 'because that's the Devil's work' but if God is all good AND all powerful then why doesn't he / didn't he destroy the Devil? The fact is that in order to impose their view of the world through selected texts forning the established Bible, they removed a coherent and rational grasp of the true nature of the world. The mystical and esoteric traditions DID grasp it but they were persecuted, destroyed or driven into hiding, with the notable exception of Jewish Kabbala and the esoteric teaching of the Zohar. Only in India were the esoteric teachings allowed to survive whereas in the Islamic world the Sufis and later the Baha'is were persecuted. In short, the control of the moral thinking of most of the world has been at the EXPENSE of understanding which is why your question doesn't get a satisfactory answer from standard religions.

Once we return to the idea of the NECESSARY dichotomy between the material and the spiritual, it starts making more sense. If we go back closer to Manichaean or Gnostic ideas that the material world is NECESSARILY or INTRINSICALLY evil ( because violence, predation, egotism, fear, greed, insecurity, arriogance, love of domination all are essential parts of how Nature operates - just look around and check any natural history programme or look at the record of human history) then you can see why IN THIS EARTHLY LIFE the power of ignorance, violence and ego NECESSARILY dominates and Spirit - in complete control of the transcedental realm of love, unity, understanding, knowledge and transformation of the ego.- is weak. Spirit struggles to make a breakthrough in the material world and this is a NECESSARY condition of the material world itself. That is why all these cruel and terrible evils - both natural and human - go on. The task of the spirit in each of us is to evolve our path of liberation from egotistical desires and rejoin The Light / God / whatever you want to call It in pure love, union, end of ego which is end of evil.  

Only if one begins to approach the nature of material existence from this kind of perspective can we begin to understand how evil can go on and even prevail in the world while God is in fact pure love and beyond all evil. Because Good is TRANSCENDENT and Evil is of this world.

The purpose of material life is to recognise this process and to CHOOSE the path of evolving our spirits away from ego and arrogance back to God and Loving Union in the transcendent realm.  Our CHOICE is in having the power or capacity to see this and choose.  In so far as we have this capacity we can choose Spirit over Matter and follow that path or choose Matter and hence evil. Natural evils ( disease, suffering, predation, bodily death) are NECESSARILY rooted in the laws of Nature ( physics, chemistry, energy transfer, entropy).

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The first and only time I had a direct experience of this was when I was ten ( I am now nearly seventy). Bear in mind, I had a.quite a happy and sheltered childhood and no imaginings about evil spirits ever before.  In the darkness of night while asleep next to my younger brother, I suddenly woke up. I saw/ felt or something in between, a terrible presence, a darkness above me near the ceiling. The night was dark but this blob seemed somehow darker. A huge fear gripped me. And then I realised somehow that this evil presence was not directed at me but at my BROTHER who was peacefully sleeping.  I hid tightly under the bedclothes and eventually fell.asleep.  Next morning it was a bright normal day. The memory of the evil spirit faded.

Ten years later my brother fell ill with psychosis depression. He had hallucinations, heard evil voices in his head. No treatment could fix it.  Nine years later he committed suicide.

I remember coming home from University classes one day and my mother telling me that my brother had collapsed. It seemed so sudden,no obvious earning signs. Yet si instantly remembered that night from ten years previously when we were young boys, and the evil presence. I was shockingly not surprised but couldn't say anything. My parents were rationalists and would think I had gone mad as well.

It was from that point that it came home to me that the evil that happens in this world is connected partly to the work of evil spirits but that work itself rooted in the intrinsic properties of natural existence that allows both good and evil to do their work in the cosmic story.

 

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Let's have a simple test : if the mind is the same aa the brain activity or just a product of it,you should get the same level of output from plugging electrodes to the brain as you would from.a computer onto a peripheral like a screen or sound equipment. Yet you do not. Just as the electronics of a computer can be outputted as a movie, or words and images, plugging into the brain should produce images, ideas, word, sounds, emotions ( we should actually perceive the emotions directly)... yet all we get are thermal images and squiggly lines of brain electrical activity. We do not see the meaningful content of the mind at all. So to me it's obvious from this experiment that the mind is non physical and how it interacts with the physical world is actually an incoherent problematic : it could be suggested that something non physical does not need a MECHANISM to interact with the physical world ipso facto, it is inherent in it or the physical is actually an expression or matrix of an ideal reality.  Thus the problem of interaction disappears once the ground or base state of reality is seen as Consciousness, not the physical world. The problem with all these scientific conundrums about the mind is that it defaults to the natural world and then seeks to explain the mind after that standpoint. But our exploration of the natural world has now got us to the point in which we know that spacetime does not in fact exist as the ground state: consciousness does. The Nobel prize for physics in 2022 win by Alain Aspect and his colleagues proves that very conclusion. Therefore if spacetime  is a COHERENT STRUCTURED ILLUSION that science can observe and describe, then the real counterintuitive problem is to show how reality ( Bell transcendent reality) which is the ground state produces physical reality including brain states and perceptions, not mind states !

In case this seems puzzling, I revert to my experiment : why does output from my brain NOT reproduce my mental content as a computer can output a movie or directly meaningful information content? Why cannot we "see" emotions and feelings or meaning ? Why cannot we describe and output qualia? My answer is that it is because mind is the ground state and phenomena are secondary states in reverse of the standard scientific position.

For references, see the theoretical work of Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Spira and Donald Hoffman.

It's important to understand that reality works at different levels and has to be accepted at all these levels.  Our knowledge needs to inform our outlook on life. Physical reality is not to be denied but put in perspective. If you knock your knees in the table and it hurts, this is useful information for managing ourselves in the environment. But if we know that all this stuff - the table, our knees, our brains - are all mostly wave patterns and not solid at all at the atomic level, and at the superpositional state before wave function collapse they are not anything at all...these are facts about reality as well. This knowledge should contribute to our PERSPECTIVE while we remain adjusted to the everyday realities that we need to not only survive but to experience and create.

 

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 The discussion between British philosopher and panpsychist Philip Goff and American idealist neuroscientist Donald Hoffman clearly shows the continued resistance to nonlocal realism that manifests itself in both mainstream science and a philosophy.  Imagine if you believe stubbornly in the flat earth, you would contimue to maintain this position even after they sailed round the world. Goff represents typical British materialism as well as the compromise mentality he admits to. But its all rather sad.  Like trying to convince a mentally slow schoolboy about some non intuitive fact. By insisting on a physical reality on purely intuitive grounds unsupported by scientific evidence effectively relegates panpsychism to a form of suprrstition or at least, intellectually incoherent. Analytical idealism in philosophy and the headset hypothesis in neuroscience works mich better with science today and also crucially acknowledges all nonlocal experience because thst is experience IS real and IS subjective. Its thr death of the OBJECT as an INDEPENDENT reality that Goff resists and puts him in the position of a pedestrian thinker holding a major academic post for which he simply hasn't got the intellectual level to be suited to. In all fairness, on this point, you could also consign most British intellectuals to a bin called obscurantist ( because intellectually unjustified or incoherent) objective realism / plastic physicalism ( material reality with a nugget of inexplicable consciousness tied onto its head like a pieceof luggage ).

 Everything is in the form of potentiality described by the wave function. That does not mean even that the wave is a thing at all : it means it is a potential and therefore DOES not exist in any materially definable form.

What could that mean? One obvious conclusion is that the wave potentiality is a structured ABSTRACTION until it is realised into something definite by collapse through observation.

To make this intelligible, the clearest way is to think of the primary state of reality as Mind. Mind contains all possibilities as abstracted potentials and Mind collapses this into phenomenal definites producing the headset experience of reality Hoffman describes.

You can call it the Mind of God ( see Paul Davies, hardly a religious scientist!) but I have no desire to freak anybody out. Physicist Amit Goswami Goswami would call it the Ground of All Being.

The problem with talking about 'waves' is that it keeps us looking for some kind of 'tactile' reality ( physicalist) but the truth seems to be more radical: below the wave is deep reality which is a cosmic Thought not a cosmic Thing. Not a new idea : check out Sir James Jeans from the 1930s.

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24 December 2023 : 

 

My reaction to a YouTube video extolling the message of late nineteenth century sage Ramana Maharishi that we are Brahman (cosmic soul) and our ego condviousness (Jiva) that experiences joy and suffering is illusory; there is no path or spiritual journey, we just have to realise that we are essentially Brahman and our individual selves are not real at all.

" I find it very disappointing that a philosophy that completely negates the value of our lives, our joys and sufferings, everything that gives life meaning, is celebrated as a good thing. This is a very sophisticated form of nihilism.  It also begs the question why Brahman somehow degenerates into ego dissociation snd hence all the joy snd suffering that tells our stories snd through our stories gives us mewningfulness. Why are we here having to find out that our experiences are meaningless snd illusory?

This just sums up what I never liked about Eastern philosophy: its negation of life experience by its focus on the transcendent state. Its such a complete dismissal of the dignity and pathos of the human and animal condition.

By discarding suffering as a form of spiritual ignorance is worse than atheism or secularism.

Far more helpful to us is Western analytical idealism which says, based on the implications of quantum science, that while physical reality is an illusion in thst its a projection of a fundamentally mental / conscious meta reality, those physical spacetime experienced are completely real snd relevant and meaningful but they are MENTAL : physicality is a projection and ego consciousness is dissociative of cosmic unity but is nevertheless real. So this approach does NOT trivialise our experiences but explains its place in the lsrger scheme of things. Today analytical philosophy based in science snd Advaita Vedanta are starting to talk to each other. This will ultimately help us more than the 'ego is ignorance' and 'our sufferings are ignorance' line taken by Vedanta of this kind and disseminated in the West most prominently by Eckhart Tolle. That will not help us to live at all but will just make our sufferings and life narratives look irrelevant and pointless."

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 Bernard Carr's interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn on YouTube channel Closer to Truth entitled Why Did Consciousness Emerge.   ..

My criticism of Carr's position, although I appreciate that he is not another materialist physicist because that view is dead on its feet now except to the brute mass of jobbing scientists who know how to calculate but apparently do not know how to think ( and I include in this category not only deceased greats like Stephen Hawking and Francis Crick but living high profile mediocrities like Tim Maudlin and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  )

 

Carr seems to have a kind of panpsychist view but even this view is not clear or coherent. Panpsychism at large is not coherent. It's a form of dualism without invoking dualism directly in an attempt to avoid dualism's obvious problems. Panpsychism provides no explanatory structure for consciousness in nature; it just tags it on. Materialism is a failure because not only can it not explain consciousness but it has no ontological grasp of reality out there because it says we can only perceive objects and processes via our brain filtered observations. The ontic reality if objects and processes is therefore ipso facto unknowable. The only coherent position with a coherent explanatory structure from conscious experience to physicality is analytical idealism ( Kastrup and Hoffman). All experiences are real; physical reality is a dissociative projection from cosmic unity of Consciousness; everything is mental. In this view there are no contradictions or.gaps but we need more development of the approach, but it is by far the most powerful and useful approach we have today. 

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I posted a picture of myself with two young companions in Ladakh in 1996. This was at Leh at 3500 metres above sea level. Ajay and I had just returned from a trip to the border with Tibet and Chinese controlled Aksai Chin. I remarked on the Facebook post that this was my last big adventure.

In a way that's not true ; in 2002 my wife and I upped sticks and with a set of suitcases, rented out out flat in London and moved to Spain to find a new life. No jobs and very little language but in the end we did move over permanently. That WAS an adventure. But I suppose in terms of the INNER adventure, the one of the spirit, that was indeed the last I made. I can't see it happening again.

My artistic friend Karan Gambhir asked me to comment so this is what I wrote !

Karan Gambhir 🙂. Hope this message finds you well.
Whether I like it or not I have settled into later age stillness. We have a cat and can rarely find anyone to stay at our place so we don't go away much. Short trips of s few days occasionally. I count myself lucky : it's beautiful where we live by the mountains and the sea with the best climate in the world and, for such a major tourist hotspot, very little crime. Even old people can wander around in the night without worrying about getting robbed and attacked. Mostly.uxg better than most other places with as good a climate.

Life has certainly been an adventure in the sense not just of going here and there - there are plenty of people who have travelled much much more - but rather, moving half blind and not really knowing where I was going and what I was doing a lot of the time. Life only started getting into focus once we moved to Spain over twenty years ago.

There are things I'd love to do but know I never will : ride a motorbike slowly across the Himalayas, travel the great train route from Chicago to L.A., return to Ladakh several more times to see parts I haven't seen before, do the Qinghai - Tibet motorable road, visit Taoist retreats in Taiwan and Zen shrines in Japan, see Mount Burhaan Khaldun in Mongolia where Genghis Khan's secret burial site is believed to be located but nobody knows where, and the snowfields of Tierra del Fuego and the far south of the Chilean Andes, the deserts of Arizona and Mexico....mainly places where there are fewer people and more silence and great spaces...

But tied now we are  to our house and cat. This is it. My wife wants to see more and she will and that's good but as for me,  I'm sort of at peace.  Most of "adventure" is interior now : things I read about, explorations in the intersection of science and metaphysics, in short,  getting ready for death by enquiring into how to die well with good knowledge and preparation.

I'd like to follow the music but I can't do that as I'd need a lot of money and the freedom to globetrot but we have downloads for everything so I can bring the music to me. I often pick up the guitar and try to play some chords and pick a tune. As the jazz historian Ted Gioa said in a YouTube dialogue, if you can get five minutes or more into a song you can enter a hypnotic state which shifts your brain waves into a slightly altered awareness state. Time suddenly stands still as it does in a dream. Stopping time in altered awareness states without drugs is an interesting and even slightly adventurous way to live. I believe most people don't do it, looking ever more desperately for external stimuli.

I see now that in my time of life I can do two  things : try to help those less fortunate than myself within my modest means and prepare for the end of my life with study, enquiry, investigation, reflection. I'm a contemplative by nature but not a good meditator. My mind seeks always to be active and I indulge it instead of commanding it to be still. Why worry about that ? One should follow one's nature ; we have eternity to follow the inner adventure or we have nothing at all.

So these are good things to do. And I am grateful for no longer really needing anything more. I can live without those outward adventures now.

I suppose I've become a little  disappointed with the world. It's in many ways less spiritual than it used to be. Common, everyday values have weakened. I expect most places now to be broadly alike in their obsession with electronic entertainment and consumer content. There's less commitment to solving the global problems of war and climate catastrophe despite the struggles of millions to encourage people to demand more from their governments. The threat of world destruction is closer now than it was sixty years ago. A measure of elderly cynicism has set in and I don't fight it.

When I was a young man aged 20 nearly half a century ago, living in India which seemed a vast enough place, the West or China seemed as remote as the Moon. It was hard to imagine what it FELT like to be there even if I could see images of what they looked like. Africa was a mythical place, more exotic than the lands of the Bible, especially if you were brought up reading stories of European explorers, lost Zimbabwe of the buried city, moonscapes of the wide Sahara or H Rider Haggard's nineteenth century romances.

 Now my gut tells me it probably mostly feels much the same everywhere  even though the world is even more broken apart today than it was then. The food, the customs, the language , they might vary widely, but except for the ultra religious landscape of conservative Islam, people seem to want and believe much the same things everywhere. I can check all this from where I'm sitting, on social media, and everyone else around the world is watching those.same clips and thinking comparable thoughts. Everyday mundanity is much the same at heart.

I wrote a memoir about my childhood in India in the sixties and seventies. It's in draft and I'm working in getting it published. Whatever its merits and demerits it is at least a little unusual : the struggles of a culturally conflicted upbringing and recollections of my family and relations evoking a time and a way of life largely gone today.  I like the novellas of Amit Chaudhari like ',Afternoon Raag.' There is a stillness to his stories, a momentousness of each simple moment of living, that is evoked in his work that points to something deep. I think I'm looking for that inward adventure now, trying to find what is strikingly interesting and inherent in very ordinary things.

So it seems to me that to settle for my little space which is itself a modest privilege compared to what might have been ( I was briefly homeless once and often wondered if I'd make it alive to retirement age) - is perhaps enough.

When I wake up in the morning and see the fine light of day gleam through into my house, and see the flowers outside and the everyday objects  glow in that light, I remind myself that there is no need to find anywhere to go; the journey of the heart and the inner space can be made where one is standing. After all, that's the point of a Zen shrine or a Tibetan cloister.

 I only have to learn better to stay still and listen very carefully; one day, perhaps, time will stop as my eye fixes on a sliver of light and I may see into Forever.

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15/04/2024

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/09/the-mysteries-of-near-death-experiences?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwAR0mA7vPHYpgyNrpbDSk4FKbQoysiPHBRxZcpPlYnGE9DOSdrNmMA11tinc

A Guardian article showed itself impressed with yet another neuroscience piece of chaotic speculation attempting to protect that the brain produces the mind. I comment as follows:

Feroza Baldick The article is a long winded piece of plummer. It leads the not very experienced reader ( in this field) to look like a faur historical review of the studies into NDEs. Concealed within this ostensibly straightforward account is subtle debunked that many people would not detect. Sam Parnia's work is of  unparalleled rigor and gas not been sidelined by neurological work as the article writer seems to suggest. He quotes the well known psychologist Susan Blackmore who has made a career of debunking the independent consciousness hypothesis by creating unreasonable conditions for evidence. Veridical reports like the famous shoe incident are arbitrarily dismissed by demands for clinical ( verifiable) data which is impossible.  Meanwhile a big hoo ha is made out of the case of Patient One which is a complete red herring.  Patient One displayed extensive brain activity for a good period beyond initial.cloinical death. This anomaly is definitely interesting for neuroscience but is no more repeatable than the shoe incident Veridical report. The writer goes on to speculate that this Patient may have had an NDE. Is that a scientific thought process? The Patient died so we'll never know. Meanwhile, only between 12 and 20 per cent of near deathers actually report NDEs so the soevulwtiin about Patient One is both unscientific and egregious because it cannot even be supported by anecdotal evidence. Meanwhile THOUSANDS of carefully studied cases gave built up since 1980 of people who definitely flatlined and had no cardio ECG either and who returned with highly structured, intense and meaningful experiences, all broadly consistent across ages and cultures. No neurological or chemical analyses have adequately explained these experiences even though some features can be chemically induced by ketamines but this is pointless since the NDE patients had no ketamines. Brain and heart shut down during NDEs is completely well documented and shows clearly that consciousness is NOT produced brain even if under NORMAL healthy functioning correlation between consciousness and brain function is very consistent. This works well with the TV set hypothesis: if you damage part of the TV it will not function properly but the signals and meaningful content are not inside the TV and produced by the TV. Contemporary philosopher Richard Swinburne is now convinced that the soul hypothesis needs to be taken seriously. The whole Patient One thing is a transparent piece of flummery produced by the neuroscience establishment which every week attempts to convince the public that brain science will solve the problem of consciousness.  After thirty years of furious science it is clear that it will not and the solid case for independent consciousness from the medical data of NDEs and brain and body function is far stronger than these neuroscience speculations. Behind this lies the battle in the philosophy of being between physicalism and idealism. Quantum theory has pushed materialistic theories into the naivety box and the conventional view of reality has been shaken to its foundations by the physics of nonlocality and entanglement ( Aspect and team, Nobel Prize 2022) which points to deep reality being TRANSCENDENT of the physical world. This was argued by Bell's Theorem that proved nonlocality ( implying transcendence of spacetime) in 1964, finally VERIFIED by four decades of experiments with photons by Aspect's team at CERN leading to the Nobel Prize. Neuroscience articles rely on a gullible public unduly impressed with science blah and naive media outlets publish their "findings" and unsupported speculations as well as dismissal of the considerable body of anomalous data because neither the media people nor the general public have a JOINED UP grasp of what I happening across all the sciences and their assessment in philosophy. Idealist philosopher's like Kastrup have presented rigorous theses based on the DCIENCE that points to reality bring IDEALIST ( MENTALIST) and material phenomena could be nothing more than dissociative projections of Mind. Even some neuroscientists with the courage to think out of the box like Donald Hooffman accept that 'spacetime is dead ' and that all observable reality is a projection of some kind of Cosmic Mind, not reality itself.  Articles of this level of naivety at best, flummery and materialistic speculation somewhat worse, and downright manipulation of evidence at worst. appear in the establishment press every week.

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