Sceptism

Sometimes when I reflect on the list of things that now comprise my belief system – afterlife, reincarnation, alternative medicine, psychic powers – compared to just a couple of years ago, it can momentarily cause a sense of disquiet in me. Am I starting to go soft in the head? What will I start believing in next? Pixies and fairies? Maybe my age related dwindling of neurons has caused me to lose it a bit. Or perhaps I smoked too many spliffs at university and it is now beginning to catch up with me. Maybe my bs filters have been compromised. Perhaps they need beefing up a bit?

If I am honest, I think with regard to that last point the opposite might be true. My bs detectors are working more keenly than ever before as they now get  more exercise. What need does a sceptic have for the ability to discern truth? To simply impose a blanket ban on anything coming dangerously close to brushing up against the perimeter of one’s current belief system takes no real ability of discernment at all.      

            It is sometimes a good thing to be a former sceptic. It allows one to identify more with sceptical arguments. Some viewpoints are actually reasonable (that’s not to say they are also valid). One of them is the thought that if there were an afterlife why is it not more evident? Surely dead people would be popping up left right and centre and making us aware of their presence. Passed loved ones would be coming back all the time to tell us they were still around. If an afterlife were real it would be as evident to us as is the fact of gravity. And I for one would have great fun haunting people if I managed to come back. That would be the start of some seriously frenetic poltergeist activity! Just think of all the wonderful possibilities for scaring the bejesus out of people. 

            It would be a nice thing if there was that kind of in your face evidence to support belief in an afterlife (not the poltergeists) however what we do have is not that bad either. After years of hard work researchers have provided us with an extensive and comprehensive insight into what goes on when people come close  to death.

             The words close to death are actually a bit inadequate though. The full significance of clinical death is not always obvious to people. It is not simply a case of being unconscious! When people are brain dead there is no neural activity whatsoever. Not a flicker. Not so much as a whimper of a neuron firing. In other words it is pretty much like actually being dead. I sometime hear it said that if the people had really died they would not have been bought back again. However this statement is confusing clinical death with biological death. They are two different things. It is true that if someone is biologically dead they will not come back. That’s why decomposing corpses don’t suddenly spring back to life (except on Jeremy Beadle. Remember that one where the corpse suddenly sat upright in front of the mortified mortician and said ‘hello’. Actually you wouldn’t remember it because they weren’t allowed to air that particular episode due to the fact the mortician jumped out the window. It would have been great to see though wouldn’t it?) Clinical death occurs when the heart stops beating and blood flow to the brain stops. The crucial point is that clinical death has an associated brain state of nil activity, which is also the brain state corresponding with biological death. You don’t get neurons firing in a decomposing corpse (I assume) as also you don’t get neurons firing when a person is clinically dead. That is the connection. There is admittedly some debate surrounding the validity of the assumption there is absolutely zero brain activity, since EEGs measure only surface brain activity. However there is something slightly hair splitting about making a big thing of this, as some sceptics do. In conditions such as cardiac arrest (not a heart attack) the affects on the brain are well understood. Loss of consciousness occurs in seconds due to complete cessation of blood flow, then the neurons stop firing. Simply put the brain needs oxygen (and lots of it) to function. The brain doesn’t have a reserve store of energy for a rainy day in the form of glucose or glycogen or anything like that. It gets its supply of glucose from the blood, and if that stops coming so does the glucose. And even if the brain did store its own supply of glucose it would need plenty of oxygen to burn it anyway. So the brain is in double trouble. No energy and no oxygen to burn energy. (It is true that the brain is capable of anaerobically utilizing glucose, but there still needs to be blood flow to the brain, if only deoxygenated blood which will carry on supplying the glucose. This is clearly a different situation to what we are talking about here where there is no blood flow to the brain at all. Even in that situation the anaerobic utilization of glucose contributes  only to briefly maintaining cell integrity. The oxygen still needs to come back pretty sharpish!)

              The brain’s metabolic processes are very power hungry too. It burns a lot of calories to work properly. Although the brain represents only 2% of the body weight, it receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization (Wikipedia) and the bioelectric signals in the brain consume nearly 10% of the whole bodies energy. Without that constant supply of oxygen the neurons simply stop signalling to each other and go on strike. Everything shuts down real fast. All this is very well understood and there is no real debate about it.

           As well as all this there have been studies looking at blood flow and glucose utilization in the brain at the time people have flat EEGs, using isotope tracers and such things. They find flat EEGs do correlate closely with a very inactive brain. So medical doctors are not just shooting in the dark when it comes to EEG readings. Much is understood about  flat line EEGs and what it means in terms of brain activity (there is none).

There was however this one guy, an anaesthesiologist by the name of Dr. G.M. Woerlee I think it was, who tried to make the claim this isn’t what happens. He said he was shocked by the fact that Pim Van Lommel’s research (a cardiologist from the Netherlands involved in a major NDE study) was accepted for publication in the Lancet (a well respected peer reviewed medical journal) and that it should never have got in there. He was basically claiming that cardiac arrests don’t result in a cessation of brain activity. This is the mother of all whoppers! How dare he! Someone should whip him with his stethoscope for telling such porkies! It does result in a cessation of brain activity Dr. Woerlee and you are a cheeky monkey for suggesting otherwise.      

            He does raise a slightly more valid point with regards to the potential of the resuscitation procedure itself to generate some level of consciousness, such as applying heart massage, defibrillation etc. However, even though the possibly of the resusitation procedure generating some brain activity can't be entirely discounted, this doesn't seem to be an adequate explanation for the lucid and coherent forms of consciousness experienced during a typical near death experience. Can a few sporadic spikes of activity really be responsible for such elaborate and meaningful experiences? A brain trying to splurt and splutter its way back online is hardly likely to result in any coherent thought patterns. In fact this is well understood also. The immediate period of time surrounding a person regaining consciousness is typically characterized by confusion, not clear coherent thoughts. And certainly not the upgraded level of consciousness typically associated with an NDE. So there does seem to be something slightly straw clutchy about the claim this is what’s causing near death experiences. Also it doesn’t explain how people can have veridical experiences incorporating conversations that took place in another part of the hospital or viewing objects or people they had no way of knowing about by normal means even if they were fully conscious. Additionally it doesn’t seem to explain cases such as Pamela Reynolds, who due to having a deep brain aneurism had all her blood drained from her body while she was kept in a frozen state. Pam was able to identify a range of surgical instruments used during the course of the operation and was aware of conversations taking place between the surgeons while the operation took place (all verified). It also doesn’t explain people who are blind, some from birth, who are able to see during their near death experience. One of the more remarkable NDE cases I have heard of concerns a woman by the name of Anita Moorjani (a Facebook friend of mine). She had end stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a form of cancer) and was given just a few hours to live (this was back in 2006). Many of her organs had shut down by this stage and she was in a coma. This resulted in a near death experience where she was presented with the choice of whether or not to return to human life. She was told that if she made the decision to return her cancer would clear up as a result of that decision. And it did. In a matter of weeks! She went on to make a full recovery and has been in full remission ever since. The doctors concerned were completely baffled, admitting there was no medical explanation for this. In fact medically it was impossible. The huge quantity of cancer cells being flushed from her body should have killed her never mind the cancer itself. This is a well documented case that took place during 2006 in a hospital in Hong Kong.

               So the idea that a few possible spikes of electrical activity during defibrillation could cause all  of these things to occur seems to be stretching things a little. Also even if one were to concede there might be undetected brain activity taking place despite the flat EEG one is still confronted with the curious fact that a dramatically reduced level of brain activity (something everyone agrees on!) results in a dramatically (in most cases) increased level of consciousness. Something doesn’t seem quite right about this. Wouldn’t you agree?

              One has to wonder about Dr. Woelee’s motives in the first place. He has published a couple of debunking NDE books and appears on various chat shows for the sole purpose of rubbishing ideas of an afterlife. Even if he doesn’t personally believe in this stuff, why is he, and people like him, on some personal crusade to persuade others not to either. This in itself doesn’t mean he is biased but one certainly wonders if this is the case. If you heard about a person who had  invested serious time conducting a study in order to confirm people of a certain ethic group have inferior intelligence you would probably have immediate concerns about the quality of the research on account of the implicit bias being suggested by the actual point the person was trying to make. It wouldn't necessarily be correct to simply assume the conclusion reached was incorrect, but you would certainly have a reasonable basis for alarm bells going off in your head. (By the way this kind of study has been done. It was called phrenology and has since been thoroughly debunked). The sceptics of course could make a similiar claim about NDE researchers, claiming they are biased in favour of NDEs, but at least on close inspection their conclusions do seem to correlate with the actual data. And  anyway I am not altogether convinced that kind of bias is quite the same thing as the negative bias motivating some of these sceptics.  

         Another sceptical line of attack is to question the significance of the fact NDEers can accurately describe the details of the resusitation procedure used to revive them during a cardiac arrest, and in the case of operations are able to identify the surgical instruments that are used.  The general claim by sceptics is these people have simply watched TV shows such as ER and have picked up details of how resusitations are performed from watching these shows. It is allegedly this they are describing. Also in the case of surgical instruments it is alleged by sceptics that it is not too hard to make intelligent guesses as to what they look like. Dr. Penny Santori, an ex-nurse and former NDE researcher,  directly confronted these issues in her research. She conducted a five year study where she used a control group to establish the difference between the accuracy of the descriptions of resuscitation from people claiming to have had an NDE and those that hadn’t. It was subsequently found people who didn't have an NDE experience had no idea about the resuscitation procedure that had been administered to them, and when they made guesses their replies were based on TV dramas, and as a result were wildly inaccurate. The people who had a  near death experience on the other hand were able to very accurately describe the resuscitation procedure that was used to revive them. The difference between the two groups was profound, lending considerable support to the validity of the out of body experience reported by near death experiencers. Another issue Dr. Penny Santori looked at in her research was the effects of endorphins, abnormal blood gases or low oxygen levels, the very things typically used by sceptics to explain away the near death experience. She claimed in regards to these things “all the current sceptical arguments against near death experiences were not supported by the research”. This has been consistently found in a number of other relatively recent large scale studies also. The traditional arguments against NDEs are looking quite worn. They are simply not supported by the data.  

It is not unheard of that following a near death experience people can develop some form of psychic ability, or perhaps become slightly more intuitive compared to before. This led me to do a bit of research on psychic powers. Again I was surprised regarding the scope and credibility of the research on this subject. This is all stuff I simply knew nothing about until now because my preconceived biases prevented me from ever looking into it. IONS (Institute of Noetic Sciences) has been conducting a comprehensive and detailed study of psychic phenomena for several decades, including such things as exposing one person to flashing lights and looking at corresponding brain activity of someone sitting in an adjacent room (the rooms were sealed). The results are pretty unambiguous. The global consciousness project is another study which has been running for 10 years and is still ongoing. The alleged odds of the correlates they have found to large events are something  of the order of billions to one. Obviously the results are attacked by sceptics, normally on statistical grounds. I do however know something about this subject since statistics was a compulsory module during the first year of my undergraduate mathematics degree, and I have to say the accusations levelled against IONS constitute pretty basic statistical errors. Most of the researchers conducting this research are of such a calibre I find it hard to believe they are capable of making the kind of errors they are accused of. These are people with  some impressive  academic credentials behind them, not some whacked out bunch of hippies (sorry if you happen to be a hippy. I mean no offence).        

          Going on to the subject of alternative/complementary medicine, as my girlfriend works in the local hospital as a mental health worker I am in a position to be aware of the more recent changes in attitude towards alternative and complementary therapy in the UK Health Trust. Techniques such as mindfulness have become fairly common place, and Buddhist type practitioners are springing up in the Health Trust like there’s no tomorrow. The accusation that these kind of therapies and treatments are being introduced into the health service on purely financial grounds is certainly not true according to what I am hearing. Apparently it is generally quite expensive to use complementary and alternative therapies. They are being used because they work. There are other alternative treatments available in the health service as well, including such things as reiki and reflexology. Since we are fundamentally energy anyway (I know this from physics) the idea of any healing modality that works through manipulating one's energy seems to be quite a reasonable premise. (Things like homeopathy are different. I am not sure on that one). 

            People sometimes claim the only reason anyone believes in an afterlife is because it is comforting. Take that psychological motivation out of the equation and no one would believe it. I certainly think we should always be cautious about being led astray by our wishful thinking. An awareness of this character trait is healthy. If we weren’t able to rise above wishful thinking we would be at the whim of every fraudster out who relied on this potential vulnerability to dupe us into buying into whatever it was they were selling. So this character trait is a good thing to acknowledge.  However it doesn't at the same time mean if something is good it isn't true. Sometimes things are good and true at the same time. If you saw the lottery results and the numbers looked somehow familiar you wouldn't fail to check your ticket simply on the assumption that you can't have won because it would be too good to be true would you? You would check your ticket anyway. That is because acknowledgment of the connection between wishing and believing things to be true isn't carte blanche to outright reject the possibility of all good things. You look at the facts. If the data or facts is justafiably leading you in a certain direction then this legitimately overrides the concern about wishful thinking getting the better of you. There should be some sort of reasonable balance between healthy sceptism and outright dogmatism. I  don’t think this balance is always achieved.

            I don’t think embracing spirituality is all about believing what one wants to believe anyway.  Certainly not for me it isn't. Take life reviews for instance. Thinking about these always makes me feel a bit on edge. I don't mean by this that I think they are a bad idea. I think they are a great idea! I can think of no other form of justice that is better than for everyone to be accountable for every misdeed they ever made in their lives, and to feel all the hurt and pain they inflicted on others. This has got to be the crème de la crème of any form of justice that could possibly be thought up. The only snag of course is that it applies to me as well. Another aspect of spirituality that doesn’t immediately jump out at me as being a  particularly good thing is reincarnation. This is something you have to confront sooner or later if you get into studying NDE accounts in any great depth at all. There is no serious doubt that we keep coming back here (what lunatics). The good news is that we get to choose whether or not to do this. We don’t have to. It isn’t like some of the more Buddhist and Hindu kind of ideas on reincarnation where you simply default into another life when you are through with this one. That’s the good news. The bad news is you make the choice from an entirely different perspective to that of human perspective. And that lead us to make choices we would not necessarily make here. I find that a bit disempowering. Some reasons I would currently have for not wanting to come back here again mean squat to a light being (I should say light being perspective since we are light beings). So this another aspect of spirituality I have had to get my head around that hasn’t bought me any immediate comfort. I don’t like the idea of not existing but I am also not too keen on the idea of multiple trips back to Earth for yet more lesson learning. I think I am going to try and learn all my lessons in this incarnation so I don’t wind up coming back here again! In terms of the evidence to support reincarnation this is quite compelling as well. Dr. Michael Newton is just one researcher in this field who has produced surprisingly compelling results. You do have to be a bit careful with believing things like this. I am sure there are many cases of fraud, and sometimes false memories produced by hypnotism etc. But the number of compelling cases with verifiable evidence backing them up is strongly suggestive of the reality of reincarnation to say the least.

           With the issue of fraud in general, I have always had the attitude that irrespective of whether or not such a things as psychic abilities exist there are always going to be some people who will make false claims  about posessing psychic abilities. That is just obvious. To some degree that probably applies to such things as NDEs as well.  I'm sure some people are probably fabricating stuff for whatever reason they have. So the odd case of fraud popping up presents no surprise, whether talking about NDEs, reincarnation or whatever. The key question is whether there are enough credible cases to back the phenomena up. In the case of NDEs even sceptics don’t doubt the general validity of their occurrences. To believe otherwise is to believe there has been some global conspiracy to make them all up. Not even the sceptics believe that.

           In terms of proving conclusively by the standards of scientific rigour that there is an afterlife, that is a tricky one. I prefer to think of it more in terms of a law of court kind of thing. We can reasonably apply concepts such as balance of probability and beyond reasonable doubt to the evidence supporting the existence of an afterlife. In a civil court balance of probability will dictate the outcome of a trial (something OJ Simpson is acutely aware of after being successfully tried in a civil court). In terms of balance of probability I think that is a safe bet. In terms of beyond reasonable doubt, in my personal opinion this as well. In fact I personally know of two NDE cases where each case individually is beyond reasonable doubt, at least as far as I am concerned. So I am pretty confident overall. That’s not bad going for someone who’s most profound spiritual experience was to see Avatar. There is certainly no substitute for a personal spiritual experience but I seemed to have done quite well without one. It would be nice however to have a near death experience without the near death part wouldn't it?

Sometimes I have heard it said that if you are going to believe the anecdotal evidence supporting NDEs then you might as well believe in the anecdotal evidence supporting anything at all. In fact you might as well believe in pixies and fairies they say. However branches of social science relies to some degree on anecdotal evidence. Surveys and questionnaires are especially used in psychology and sociology for instance. This form of research is in essence anecdotal evidence, and the results of these methods of research form the basis of many social science theories. Even the use of census forms presupposes most people will tell the truth. Additionally circumstantial eye witness testimony can sometimes secure a criminal conviction. Of course the penalty of lying under oath is a powerful enough incentive to make most people think twice about not telling the truth on the stand, but this doesn’t change the brute fact it is still anecdotal evidence. There are mistrials of course but I am not stating any of this to indicate proof of an afterlife. I am simply stating that while sceptics reject outright the use of anecdotal accounts associated with NDEs simply on the basis that it is only anecdotal evidence they will inconsistently accept it in other contexts. This seems to me to be kind of hypocritical.    

                Couldn’t this same argument apply across the board though? What about all the anecdotal evidence regarding UFO sightings and other things such as alleged sightings of the Loch Ness monster and Yetis? Well anecdotal evidence is like all other forms of evidence. You take them on their individual merits. I personally don’t know enough about UFO sightings to make any sort of meaningful judgement on the matter. If I looked into it and the evidence was as suggestive as I currently believe it is for the case of near death experiences I would probably end up believing in UFOs as well. I simply don’t know because I haven’t looked into it in any depth. But it is not mutually exclusive anyway. UFOs might be a reality and NDEs might be a reality. In terms of the other things such as the sightings of monsters, fairies, pixies etc exactly the same principle applies. 

This leads us naturally to the classic archetypal sceptical argument:- extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The first question to ask oneself when considering the above statement is in what sense the notion of an afterlife is extraordinary. Or more to the point why does it seem so extraordinary. Is it because it is extraordinary in real terms or is it just extraordinary in psychological terms? What is the difference?

            The idea of consciousness existing without an associated physical form is only extraordinary if one believes that humans are physical in the first place. But what is physical? Science tells us there is no physical. At least not the way we imagine it. What we call physical is just energy. That’s all there is. The distinction between what we call the physical realm and what we would call the spiritual realm is pretty much an artificial one. According to people who have had extensive near death experiences we don’t literally go anywhere when we die. Instead it is an expansion of consciousness. The resulting expansion of awareness takes us out of this limited human perspective and enables us to perceive a larger part of reality, the part we can't perceive while in human form. The idea of living without physical form is only surprising if one insists on making a distinction between physical and spiritual. In other words it is only extraordinary in a purely psychological sense, and is simply resulting from the erroneous belief that we already live in a physical world. The world only seems physical to us because of the way the human senses work and the way the human mind works to construct a convincing appearance of physical reality. So acknowledging the fact we are not physical in the first place is in effect a realization that the notion of living a non-physical form of life is not that extraordinary at all.

           So let's go back to address the original point of why dead people don’t pop back all the time to say hi. Is there some sort of conspiracy going on to prevent us from knowing the truth? One of the things apparent from examining multiple NDE accounts is the reason we come to human life in the first place is for a bit of lesson learning  (the situation is slightly more complex than this according to extensive NDEers  but I will cover all that in a future post). It is clear we don’t come here for the sole purpose of having a good time. Everyone who has died and come back to tell the tale is very definite and clear about how much better it is on the other side. They generally don’t want to come back again. So this isn’t a vacation (for most of us anyway). The amnesia we have as humans of the real reality and the nature of what we really are is a deliberate design feature. It is necessary for us to  be able to carry out the kind of missions we have come here for in the first place. The fact that we are beginning to get a significant hint of an afterlife now as a result of the many people being bought back through improved resuscitation techniques doesn’t offset this in any relevant way. None of this really takes away from the feeling of reality we get when we come here to Earth. We are not constantly able to remember our former spiritual lives because it would prevent us from believing the human experience is real, which is necessary in order to get what we want out of the experience. The fact that we are now getting these indications of an afterlife doesn’t really take that crucial aspect away.

         Despite acknowledging that contacts with the dead aren't everyday occurences for most people I do sincerely believe it does occur on a lesser scale. I have personally had family members tell me of events that have happened to them that are quite profound in nature. And more recently from my current girlfriend as well. These are all people I trust and I am personally sure of the fact they are not fabricating the details of these events. So as far as I am concerned contact does sometimes happen on some sort of level.   

                                   

In summary:

          Sceptics (informed ones) believe in the reality of the near death experience (they believe they do actually occur). The focus of  their sceptism is generally concerning two main issues. One is the issue of how much brain activity is going on during an NDE and how this contributed to the NDE itself. The second issue  of their focus concerns the timing of the NDE. For instance did the NDE happen just prior to slipping into unconsciousness or perhaps when coming out of unconsciousness.

          We have looked at why we can be sure nothing much is going on in the brain during the period of flat EEGs and found the claims of the sceptics unfounded. They are not really basing their argument on the actual data. Researchers such as Penny Santori have successfully addressed the second issue. By using a control group she found stark differences in the ability of people having NDEs to be able to accurately relate details of their resuscitation procedures compared to those who had no such experience.   

Just a quick comment on something I just recently found out about. Michael Jackson is still making music apparently. They dug him up the other day and he was decomposing.

(Sorry!)

Consciousness

These are just some brief points that will relate (eventually) to my posts entitled Are we all part of the same entity?

i)  Listed below are all the possible outcomes for tossing 2,3 and 4 coins respectively.

All possible combinations for 2 coins -  HH,HT,TH,TT

All possible combinations for 3 coins -  TTT, TTH, THT, THH, HTT, HTH, HHT, HHH

All possible combinations for 4 coins -  TTTT, TTTH, TTHT, TTHH, THTT, THTH, THHT, THHH, HTTT, HTTH, HTHT, HTHH, HHTT, HHTH, HHHT, HHHH

It’s quite straightforward to see from inspection that the first list contains all combinations that are possible from throwing 2 coins. It’s not too difficult to see this for the other 2 lists either. Also if you look at the patterns you can probably tell how the lists are compiled which allows them to exhaustively cover all possible combinations of throws.

We could if we wished follow this same basic method of compiling lists and allow for more and more coins and all their combinations of throws. The lists would get bigger of course but the principle would be the same.   

Each coin could be regarded as a binary piece of information. The word binary simply means there are two possible states that each bit of information can have. The labelling is arbitrary, but the standard binary notation used to represent the states is 1 and 0. The 1 and 0 is a simple and convenient way to label the two states. They are simply labels so it doesn’t matter what we call them. Flib and flob would do the job just as well. We could if we like regard the 1 as equivalent to H and the 0 equivalent to T.  The only requirement is we need two labels, one to represent each possible state.

If we were throwing dice instead of coins we could compile lists similar to the ones shown above which would cover all possible combinations of throws. Instead of 2 values for each object there would be 6 values. The lists would be bigger but the method of compiling them would be exactly the same. We could imagine that instead of having 6 sided dice we had 7 sided dice. We could still compile the lists covering all the possibilities of throws in exactly the same manner. We could continue going up  to 8, 9, 10 sided dice and so on as high up as we liked. The lists would become correspondingly larger to accommodate the increasing number of possible combinations of throws but the principle of compiling them would remain exactly the same.

Consider a digital LCD screen. Each pixel or picture element can take on a range of values. The range of values is limited by virtue of being represented by binary bits. The more bits used to represent each pixel the more colours are available. If we consider a 16 bit digital screen each pixel can have 4096 different values. If the screen is 1920 pixels across and 1200 pixels down we would have a screen containing 1920 × 1200 = 2304000 pixels in total (about 2.3 million pixels). We could imagine compiling tables similar to described above. If it helps to conceptualize things imagine we have 2.3 million dice each having 4096 sides. It is not possible to visualize this physically of course but it is very easy to conceptualize. It is also very easy to imagine (or at least conceive of) compiling whoppingly huge tables in the manner described above which will accommodate all possible combinations of pixel states for the whole screen.

A small subset of this huge list would contain the pixel combinations corresponding to all of the TV pictures you have ever seen in your life. It would also contain all the TV pictures everyone has ever seen in their life, or will ever see. In fact it contains all possible pictures. It also contains all the text you have ever seen in your life and all possible text that could ever exist, in all possible languages. All this would still only be a small subset of the total possible combinations.

Instead of thinking in terms of pixels and bits of information you could equivalently think of it in terms of physical configurations of matter. All binary bits are stored within physical devices. It is the configuration of matter within these physical devices that store these binary bits of information. Therefore a small subset of these possible configurations of matter will correspond to all possible meaningful pictures and text.

What is special about these configurations of matter, or their corresponding pixel patterns? Asking what is special about the pixel patterns (or configurations of matter) is equivalent to asking what is special about a TV picture of Sarah Palin compared to a random splattering of colour. One appears more meaningful than the other (just) but on what basis? Certainly nothing we can tell from the physical facts alone. They are all on equal footing whether we think in terms of configurations of matter or pixel patterns. What is it that causes a purely quantative difference in physical reality to translate into a qualitative difference in our mental state, ie from gibberish to non-gibberish.   

In the original lists where we considered all possible combinations of coin or dice throws, it would have been highly unreasonable to ask the same question. What could possibly make anything special about any particular combination or subset of combinations relative to the others. Dice and coin combinations could also be viewed as configurations of matter (that's actually what they are) and there is nothing that could make any one of them special, at least not in physical reality. But we are asking exactly the same question concerning the list containing all the possible combinations of pixel patterns. Isn't this equally unreasonable? Yet something does seem to make them special to us. But whatever it is doesn't seem to have any explanation, or conceivable explanation, from considering the physical facts alone. But what else could come into it?

You may think the answer to what gives particular pictures meaning is the degree they mirror reality. But any such appeal to physical reality to provide the benchmark for meaning is unacceptably circular. Reality itself is nothing more than configurations of matter, so the same argument remains fully intact. We have simply pushed the same argument back to reality itself. To suppose reality provides the answer presupposes that the physical configurations of matter in reality are somehow endowed with some special property which is absent in the physical configurations of matter within the TV set. We have not solved the problem so much as simply pushed it back to another set of physical matter configurations.
             To suppose that the brain is somehow able to pick out patterns from a background of randomness is also unacceptable. In order to pick out the patterns the patterns must exist in the first place. But they don't as we have seen. All configurations of matter are neutral. There is nothing about any one configuration that makes it special or unique to any other. What we call patterns is always an interpretation.

ii)     Imagine a snooker table. This snooker table is different from normal however because the usual rules of physics don’t apply to it. The trajectories of the balls are not fixed by any deterministic laws. Neither are the motions of the balls random. Also it is not some combination of the two. It is something completely different. But what else could exist apart from determinism and randomness, or some combination of both? Assuming free will exists, there should, indeed has to be according to neuroscience, some kind of physical activity within the brain that is subject to the aforementioned constraints.

(more to come)

 

A lot more could be said about each of the issues highlighted above, but these are just provisional outlines to raise awareness of certain considerations relevant to particular posts I will be making at some stage in the future.

Life Reviews

The life review is one aspect of the near death experience that doesn’t get the full attention it should. I say this because life reviews say much about the nature of NDEs and what is really causing them. It adds significant weight to the idea they are genuine spiritual occurrences and works strongly against any idea they are simply a result of a dying brain trying to comfort itself in it's last few moments.
             To believe this remarkable phenomena is simply the result of a dying brain stretches credibility to the limit. For one thing why would a dying brain, which is allegedly trying to comfort itself, dredge up so many inconvenient facts from the past, such as kicking the neighbour’s cat when you were 10 years old for instance. One of the core features of life reviews is that you get to experience everything that you ever did to everyone else in your life as if you were them at the time it happened. You literally take on their perspective and feel all the emotions and pain you inflicted on them. And to top it all off you get to feel all the indirect effects of your actions, such as how it impacted the people close to them for example. Why can't the brain think of a better way to comfort itself whilst it is dying?

The consistency of the experience is another thing that demands some attention. This surely works against any idea this is some sort of elaborate hallucination. Why do so many people experience it  in  exactly the same way? You never hear someone say they experienced just a portion of their life, or it involved only the pleasant events. Nor is there ever any notion that the events are played out sequentially in time. Everything is experienced all at once. I have never heard any account deviate from this baseline fact.  Also no-one ever seems to claim their life review revolved exclusively around their own personal thoughts and feelings and not also the feelings of all the people they impacted over the course of their life. Nor is there ever a claim that judgement came from some outside agent such as god. Why doesn't anyone claim this last point especially? Surely some people should be claiming to be judged by god? That's the standard non-atheist view of what happens when people die. To my knowledge that has never happened, and I have read a lot of accounts.
               Another feature always present in life reviews is that it is experienced from an elevated perspective of unconditional love. This has the general affect of magnifying considerably the feelings of remorse felt about all the suffering one has inflicted on others during the course of their life. The subsequent feelings of remorse can be very intense indeed!
              As could be expected all of these features compound together to produce some very unpleasant life reviews. But what accounts for all this consistency? There is a lot of details here, with a  corresponding potential for a lot of discrepancies between accounts. Yet there never appears to be any. What gives?


                                                                                                                                              

(to be continued)

Are we all Part of the Same Entity? (Part Three)

In order to understand the opening statements in Tractatus it is necessary to get inside the mind of Wittgenstein and see things how he was seeing them. The foundations of his theory of meaning were highly axiomatic (self-evident) in nature. He was laying down early on what he thought simply must be the case if we, as it seems, are able to represent elements of the world with the language we use. In this early part of Tractatus where he lays the foundations of his theory, he says virtually nothing (or at least provides no elucidation) of details of the theory which weren’t strictly part of this rock solid scaffolding upon which his theory was built. He was stipulating what in his view just has to be the case given the way language seems to mirror reality. If we represent the world through language, in Wittgenstein’s view, then certain strict conditions have to be met. A failure to understand this crucial point at the outset is nothing short of failing to understand the foundations of Tractatus itself, at least in the fullest sense.

His vagueness on certain details has always been a source of confusion amongst philosophers, who sometimes (erroneously) fill in the missing details with what seems like reasonably intuitive proposals. It is not altogether clear what Wittgenstein’s views are on some of these missing details, or even if he was certain himself. In fact it was an important part of his theory that certain things are necessarily hidden from us. But I certainly believe the concise and conservative assertions made in the early part of Tractatus were partly Wittgenstein’s attempts to establish and make evident his axiomatic approach to the problem, and moreover to make a crystal clear distinction between what was necessarily true and what could only (perhaps reasonably) be surmised. Why he wasn’t more explicit with regards to this I am not sure, although it did seem to be part of his nature not to always make things explicit. But nonetheless this is unquestionably what he was up to.

 

To explain what an axiom is consider the following statements:-

All fish swim in water

Goldie is a fish

Therefore Goldie swims in water

The first two lines are premises or assumptions. The final line is the conclusion, and is simply a logical consequence of the two assumptions being made. The assumptions are in essence acting as axioms and the final line is essentially a theorem. In a similiar manner the whole of Euclidean geometry is a logical consequence of 5 basic assumptions, or self evident facts. It is nothing more than a set of theorems derived from 5 axioms. The principle is exactly the same, only the details differ. The logical arguments are not generally of this particular form of course, and tend to involve more subtle reasoning, but the process of deductively proving theorems from assumptions is exactly the same. It is really a very straight forward concept. There is nothing deep about it. Axioms are assumptions and theorems are simply logical consequences of axioms. (You may find it hard to believe that entire areas of mathematics such as geometry can be built up from just a few underlying assumptions, but once you have established some theorems these can in turn be used as building blocks themselves for further theorems, which in turn become building blocks themselves, and so on). Interestingly if you drop one of the five axioms of Euclidean geometry, the one that states that parallel straight lines never meet, you end up with non-Euclidean geometry. (Strictly speaking the axiom isn't dropped. It's simply changed from parallel lines never meet to parallel lines will meet if they are long enough).

Other fields of mathematics are built using exactly this same process of deductive logic. However the axioms of pure mathematics can never be incorrect (although they could be inappropriate). They are simply your starting point upon which to build your theorems. The example of Euclidean geometry provides a perfect example of this. The fact that altering one axiom leads to non-Euclidean geometry doesn’t make the original axiom incorrect. It’s modification simply leads to a different set of theorems. Of course the theorems themselves could potentially be incorrect if you fail to use the logic properly. 

In the case of axioms relating to physical sciences things are different. Any axiom making an assertion about the physical world could always be incorrect in principle. However in practise this rarely happens because they are normally very carefully selected in the first place. They are meant to be self-evident truths (as far as possible) which require no justification for believing. They simply stand on their own merit without any further requirement to be validated. In deed there is usually no way to validate them, at least on strictly logical grounds, although they will generally gain considerable credibility by the predictive power of the resulting theorems based on them. In science the axioms  are typically nothing more than the formal declaration of direct empirical observations (Newtonian mechanics being a very good example) whereas in philosophy the beginning assumptions can be slightly more open to debate. Wittgenstein  effectively purports his assertions at the beginning of Tractatus to be self-evident, at least after some period of reflection.

Wittgenstein’s theory doesn’t necessarily entail we live solipsistically in our own private worlds, but it is certainly designed to accommodate that view. And the spirit of this idea runs the entire way through Tractatus in as far as the very essence of the theory is attempting to explain how worlds that are subjectively and qualitatively different from each other (within some well defined constraints) can nevertheless be isomorphically mapped onto each other. It is this isomorphic mapping that provides the crucial link which makes communication possible. I explain all this in extremely clear terms later on.  

How do we Experience the World?

            In my previous post entitled What is love? (Part One) I made use of the idea that we have no direct experience of the external world. Remember these famous words from the first Matrix film –

‘What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can

feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply

electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know.’

Although Matrix is clearly a work of fiction the above statement that Morpheus makes in an effort to explain to Neo how the Matrix is possible does neatly encapsulate the current model suggested by neuroscience. Our senses take in forms of energy from the outside world, converts them into electrical signals and feeds these electrical signals into the brain. The brain then grabs hold of these electrical signals and creates an internal representation of the world based on the information embedded within these signals.

 So as a consequence of this we don’t in effect have any direct experience of the external world. Take our sense of hearing for instance. Our ear drums vibrate in response to sound waves. These vibrations are then converted into electrical signals by the cochlea and fed into the brain via the auditory nerve.  The brain then interprets these electrical signals and creates our sense of sound. The sensation of hearing – what we actually hear in our head – is quite separate from what is going on externally in physical reality. To realize this fact ask yourself the question what do vibrating air molecules really sound like?

           Displacements of air molecules can’t really sound like anything at all when you think about it.  What could vibrating  air molecules possibly sound like?  The sounds we hear in our minds are the subjective aspect of sound. It is what we commonly refer to when we talk about sound. The displacement of air molecules is the physics definition of sound. It is what goes on in physical reality. These are clearly two entirely separate sets of phenomena. The only thing that relates them is a cause and effect relationship.  People invariably fall into the temptation of conflating the two things simply because they are empirically associated with each other in this cause and effect relationship. The objective phenomena of vibrating air molecules ultimately causes the subjective sound you hear in your head. The organs of our hearing system are in effect capturing information that is embodied within the displacements of air and translating this  information into a form that can be understood by the brain. This is how we are able to understand each other when we have conversations. The information is captured within the process. Similarly with sight, the colours are not physically out there in the objects we see. They are created within the mind in a similiar way. Physical reality only contains different frequencies of light, or electromagnetic radiation. The frequencies reflected by objects that enter the eyes are what forms the basis of the colours we see. But the colours themselves are not really out there. The optic nerve simply carries electrical signals to the brain, not light. We never see light, which physics tells us is simply the fluctations of an electromagnetic field.
                    The same principle is true of all the senses.  What does a particular configuration of molecule smell like? The question simply has no meaning. The world presented to us by physics is one of odourless, tasteless, colourless particles. The mental representations we all experience in our minds adds on all these  other features, which appears very convincingly to us to be out there in the physical world. 
                 The statement referred to above from the first Matrix movie is making reference to this very fact. It is this idea of how we apprehend the external world around us that motivated the well known philosophical conundrum If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? There is sound from a physics point of view of course since the falling tree will generate displacements of air molecules irrespective of whether someone is present or not. In terms of subjective sound, what we hear in our heads and what we usually refer to as sound, this will not of course exist. It is in this subjective sense that an unobserved falling tree will not make a sound.

            All of this has profound implications. Each of us supposedly lives solipsistically in our own little worlds of mental representation. The external world is unreachable - to all of us. All we are directly aware of is what our minds choose to create in response to certain forms of energy which are constantly impeding our senses. Neuroscience also tells us that our brains even create our sense of time and space! It is all beginning to look a bit like the Matrix isn't it?

            I mention all this because this idea of how we apprehend the external world is something that I will bring into question in my series of posts entitled ‘Are we all part of the same entity’. For some years I have accepted this model without question. It is after all implied by our best understanding of how the brain and mind work and also by our current model of physics (actually I should say Newtonian physics but more on this later as well). It is the solipsistic aspect of this model that I particularly bring into question in my discussion of whether we are part of the same entity. But once this aspect is questioned it starts to bring into question the validity of the whole model itself. How can we in any way experience a shared reality if this model is correct? I feel however that an appropriate analysis of language and meaning, particularly in relation to the question of how it is we are able to communicate our inner thoughts to each other, demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that something is fundamentally wrong with this model as it currently stands, however convincing it might seem to be.
           I should probably draw attention at this point to the fact that this model in itself doesn't necessarily commit one to the notion that we are all experiencing different things within our minds. Perhaps if  I were to jump into someone else's mind and directly observe their representation of the world it would perfectly match  the representation I experience, and everyone else's to. For instance my version of the colour red is the same as your version of the colour red and everyone else's version of the colour red. I don't see green or some other colour whilst you see red for instance. Perhaps this is the case because our brains are somehow 'programmed' to respond the same way to the same stimulus as some people claim to be the case.
           Also the description of the model above appealed exclusively to Newtonian physics (as opposed to modern day physics) which presents an obsolete and completely erroneous worldview. Newtonian physics is still used for pragmatic reasons but any appeal to this 18th century Newtonian model in order to explain perception is entirely misplaced. In a sense I was playing devils advocate. I don't believe this is how things work at all. My point here was to show where our current conception of things seem to lead us. I later show that this conception of how things work must somehow be incorrect. It is not compatible with certain facts of the world. I believe we do experience a shared reality, but the way this happens is fundamentally different from anything described above. It has to be in order to fit into all the observable facts of the world, which hopefully I will make very clear in future posts.  
           The reason I allowed myself to use this model in my previous post is because the validity of this model is not relevant to the particular points I was making in that post. It was simply a convenient frame of reference to use in order to elucidate certain points I was trying to make. It seems reasonably applicable in that context  also since everyone who embraces the generally accepted understanding of how the brain and senses work will implicitly encapsulate the notion that our reality is grounded exclusively within our own personal mental representations of a strictly out of bounds external world (although of course not everyone accepts this idea explicitly). The thrust of my argument was levelled against what we believe we understand when we talk about love and not what it actually means in reality.

What is Love? (Part Two)

              Trying to answer the question ‘what is love’ in a philosophical context  goes back at least as far as Ancient Greece. Socrates was asking exactly the same types of questions – what is justice, what is courage, what is love, what is beauty – and so on. Wittgenstein in his later work philosophical investigations also tackled these questions, with considerably more success that Socrates it must be said. Many people think these questions have now been philosophically resolved. And in some respects they have been. However Wittgenstein was answering these questions within a certain historical and philosophical context. He was basically trying to elucidate how it is that we are able to understand each other and how language works. He succeeded on one level but arguably not to the extent that is often accredited to him (much more on this later!) However my basic point here is that I am aware of the Wittgenstein ‘solutions’ to these types of question , but as I stated in my previous post, my arguments weren’t specifically directed on how we define words and how we can communicate with each other. My concern is how our everyday concept of love relates to the idea of love espoused by spiritually orientated people, and particularly those who have had near death experiences. So Wittgenstein arguments don’t concern me at present. (But they certainly will in future posts.)

            Another aspect of this subject that should be talked about is how the spiritual conception of love differs from that typically espoused by religions. It is the latter that is much more deeply engrained in the general psyche of people. It accords with our intuitions far better than the spiritual notion of what unconditional love is, and how we can make it manifest in our lives. We generally believe that the route to becoming more godly is to suppress all human tendencies that run contrary to what it means to exhibit love. It becomes more like a battle of will. Those who are 'good' people have simply made more effort to tame their unloving urges. What makes them good supposedly is the amount of effort they have put in to be good people. There is of course the view that some people are inherently evil, but religious institutions and our justice systems do presuppose (with the exception of mentally ill people) that it is within anyone’s ability to control their behaviour no matter how strong the urge to do wrong things are. I do not disagree with this view. People should make an effort not to commit bad acts. And we need to punish those who commit crimes. But I am relating this with my current understanding of what spirituality says regarding this issue. The basic idea in spirituality is not a mere suppression of negative traits but becoming aware of our true spiritual nature and bringing our true nature of unconditional love into our human lives. Of course this takes effort. But there is a big difference between this and the standard non-spiritual view of what it means to endeavour to be more godly. The first view automatically lends itself to the idea that there are good people and bad people. The bad people may not be intrinsically bad. But they are bad in the sense that they haven’t used their free will to overcome bad character traits. In extreme cases this leads to the idea that there are evil people. This is something that spirituality flat out denies. I intend to write a future post on what is wrong with this long held notion of good bad and evil when I get round to it, but for now I am simply highlighting the contrast between the spiritual and non-spiritual viewpoints on this matter.       

                  In the spiritual view we are all equally good. Since we are all fundamentally spiritual beings, and spiritual beings by nature are unconditionally loving, then the degree that we bring our spiritual nature into our lives is essentially the degree we will exhibit and experience genuine unconditional love. There is nothing wrong with trying to become a better person by affiliation with a religion, or simply making an effort to become a better person by controlling bad character traits. But spiritually adds to this by suggesting that we have the intrinsic capability to tap into our true nature as spiritual beings and use this also in our quest to become more loving people. It is  then not simply a battle of will to overcome bad character traits and suppress negative impulses but also an endeavour to invoke our true nature as spiritual beings.     

What is Love? (Part One)

    

         I first started thinking seriously about this question after watching the 2001 Stephen Spielberg/Stanley Kubrik movie AI. In this movie a young couple, struggling to cope with the fact their son was in what appeared to be an irreversible coma, decides to adopt a robot boy, who possessed the capability by virtue of future advances in the field of AI research to flawlessly simulate the behaviour of a human child.

          As time progresses the mother is depicted in the movie as starting to develop a maternal bond towards the robot child, in much the same way she would towards a real human child. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact the mother jeopardizes her real son’s life (who by this stage had unexpectedly awoken from his coma and returned home), at least from their point of view at the time, so that she could continue to play the role of mother to the robot boy. Eventually the mother is forced into the agonizing dillemma of choosing between her real son and her adopted robot son, leading ultimately to a harrowing scene showing her abandoning the robot boy in the middle of nowhere to fend for himself.

            To me one of the more intriguing questions raised by the film was how real the love was between the mother and robot boy. The movie (as expected) was deliberately ambiguous to the question of whether the robot boy was actually conscious or not, leaving the viewer to make up their own mind on the matter. But the real question is this; did the legitimacy of the mother’s love solely depend on whether the robot boy was conscious or not?

Of course it is perfectly possible to love an inanimate object. I love my car. But that is an entirely different kind of love. There should ideally be an entirely different word to describe that kind of love in order to distinguish it from the word we commonly use to describe the love humans feel towards each other. Interestingly the Ancient Greeks had five different words for love in their vocabulary (although they were perhaps getting a bit carried away with this).

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the robot boy was in fact a brilliant simulation of human child behaviour, and as a consequence was able to convincingly create the impression of consciousness.  The underlying reality however was essentially all smoke and mirrors. The lights were on so to speak but no-one was home. So in this case was the experience of the mother that of genuine maternal love or was it more like some kind of pseudo-love? Could true love, the type of love we experience and give to other fellow humans, ever be legitimately directed onto to a bunch of wires and well programmed sillicon chips? The key question being asked here is this; is the fact that the mother experienced what we would typically regard as the emotion of love sufficient reason in itself to qualify this as a genuine case of maternal motherly love irrespective of any other facts?

           We can make further probes into the meaning of love by considering the phenomena of people falling in love without ever having met each other. We have all heard stories of two people falling in love on the internet, meeting in real life, getting married, and living happily ever after. Some people may scoff at the idea of people who have never met falling in love. You might decide instead that what really happens in such cases is that the people concerned fall in love only after they have met each other in person. If you do however happen to be one of those people who believe genuine love can happen prior to meeting up then consider instances where various levels of deception are involved. We might imagine for example that one of the people lied about their age. Does this change things in any crucial way? What if even more deception was involved, maybe dishonesty regarding level of education, occupation, airbrushed photographs etc. We could even suppose that one of the people, perhaps being socially awkward, resorted to the occasional use of a friend as a mediator whom he employed whenever speaking person to person using skype for instance. At what stage in this steadily increasing line of deception can we be confident that the emotion of love has been effectively directed at a fictitious person, so has therefore become completely meaningless?

            We can start stretching this kind of idea further still. Let’s imagine a science fiction type scenario where an alien from an advanced alien civilization comes down in the middle of the night and abducts one person from a married couple whilst they are asleep. Let's suppose this fiendish alien nicks the husband. So as to ensure the wife doesn’t suspect any foul play this alien craftily replaces the abducted hostage with an exact physical replica. Let’s suppose this alien possesses advanced technology which allows it to scan the human and produce a convincing facsimile that is completely indistinguishable from the original being. This replica has advanced inbuilt sensor technology that continuously monitors the immediate environment in a way that perfectly mimics the manner in which the human senses absorb data from the outside world. This data is continuously streamed to the orbiting alien spacecraft above via a radio link where it is fed into a supercomputer. The alien uses these signals as a basis for creating a simulated Earth environment that is convincing enough to fool it’s hostage into believing it is real and he is still back on Earth with his wife. We could for ease of imagination assume that the alien has extracted the brain from the husband’s skull and placed it within a vat of nutrients to keep the brain alive. The supercomputer is wired to the brain in such a way that the sensor data being streamed from the doppelganger back on Earth enters the appropriate sensory regions of the brain. Providing the brain is receiving the equivalent electrical signals normally received from the optic, olfactory, auditory nerves etc the brain won’t be able to tell the difference, so will create the usual mental representations as per normal. To the brain it is simply business as usual. Each time the brain in the vat forms the intention to move a body part the relevant signals are extracted from the motor cortex regions and transmitted back to Earth in order for the doppelganger masquerading as the husband to make the corresponding movements. The signals are also fed into the supercomputer which makes the appropriate adjustments to the simulated reality.

By doing all this the alien is now in a position to deceive both marriage partners into believing they are both still together on Earth. The only difference of course is there is no direct physical connection between the married couple. All interactions are mediated via a two way radio link between Earth and the orbiting alien spacecraft (ignoring propagation delay).
             After twenty years or so of this the alien gets a bit bored and decides to indulge in a bit of sadistic fun by revealing to the poor woman all that has been going on. As soon as the woman recovers from her nervous breakdown the alien proceeds to ask the woman if she feels she is still in love with her husband despite there being no direct physical contact between them for the last twenty years. If she were to claim that she was in fact still in love with her husband would she be correct in stating this? You might  perhaps think so but we can start tweaking with the parameters of the original experiment in ways that makes it increasingly difficult to answer this question. For instance perhaps after a short time of the brain being hooked up to this alien supercomputer, this computer, being advanced as it is, is able to use the accumulated data  to provide a very accurate simulation of the behaviour of the brain in the vat, to such a degree it is able to reliably predict probable responses to a whole range of various social and interpersonal relationship situations. This enables the possibility of intermittent transmission of signals to the doppelganger back on Earth alternating between the brain in the vat and the simulated human behaviour generated by the alien supercomputer. In this way the alien can make the connection between the wife and former husband increasingly more tenuous. We might imagine that the switching takes place on alternate days. Or perhaps as the supercomputer accumulates more and more data within it's memory banks and becomes ever more accurate at predicting  typical behavour and responses is used to incrementally over time take over from the brain in the vat. Therefore even if we decided with the original experiment that genuine love was sustained for the duration of the experiment we are now facing the same question under more tightly controlled conditions. We could picture to ourselves the increasing dominance of the supercomputer in the experiment and ask the question at what point does the love the woman feels towards what she believes to be her husband become meaningless? Does her emotion of 'love' gradually become diverted from her former husband onto the supercomputer in a piecemeal fashion? Or does genuine love simply cease to exist at some point?            

We would (in my view) actually be justified in asserting that the woman still loved her husband in the original experiment. This is because it doesn't differ in any crucial way from how things work in reality – at least not according to the story told by neuroscience regarding how we experience the external world. Our apprehension of the external world is always mediated through our senses. Our sense organs are merely transducers, converting one form of energy into another – in this case electrical energy. As a consequence the only thing the brain is aware of is the electrical signals being fed to it by all the different nerves connecting it to the sense organs, the olfactory, auditory, optic nerves etc. The brain uses these signals to generate an internal representation of the external world, using the information embedded within these electrical signals as a basis for doing so. It is this internal mental representation that we are aware of, nothing else. So we don’t ever directly experience the external world anyway. And once we have acknowledged this key fact it is easy to see that the original experiment doesn’t actually change things in any crucial way relevant to the question we are asking. But things do however get somewhat more perplexing in the latter case of the fine tuning experiment. Here we are able to imagine a progressive tweaking taking place controlling precisely the degree to which the married couple interact. The connection between the two people becomes increasingly more tenuous as the duration of the experiment proceeds. In this case there must come some point where everyone would agree that the connection has become so tenuous that it is no longer tenable to consider there existing meaningful love between the wife and former husband.

                One possible response to the above scenario could be that the wife's love was made real by virtue of the time she had spent with her husband prior to him being abducted by the alien. After all if her husband had simply died instead of being abducted by an alien she could still quite reasonably claim to love the husband she had lost 20 years ago. However we could simply change the above scenario by imagining that the alien abducted the man at the same time or even prior to meeting his wife. Also we could imagine that right from the outset the behavour of the doppleganger masquerading as this woman's  husband was partly being controlled by a computer simulation of his behavour. In this case the woman has never strictly speaking met the man she believes she loves and potentially has all along been exposed to two sets of behavour coming from two different sources - one set of behavour from the brain in the vat and the other set of behavour from the alien supercomputer! 

So is love simply an emotion or is there more to it? The problem in my view in defining love simply as emotion is that it starts to come dangerously close to the philosophical materialist definition of love; that is of being purely a response created in the mind by chemical reactions in the brain. It doesn't of course strictly commit one to this view but it doesn't seem too far off either. Also it seems to leave open the possibility of  the claim that love exists in situations where it would be clear to most of us that it doesn't. For instance if a person continuously abuses their partner but claims at the same time to love them would it not be fair to conclude that this wasn’t a legitimate case of love? It doesn’t appear to be strictly impossible for such a person to genuinely experience emotions towards the person they are abusing. I am not asserting this to actually be the case very often, if at all. I am simply claiming that even if we were to believe the person in this regards would this not legitamately drop out of consideration upon making any decision as to whether this was a genuine example of love. We could alternatively adopt the weaker position that despite the emotion of love being felt by the abuser love was not being shown to the abused, however this still appears to attribute unfair credit on the abuser by claiming that at the very least he felt love towards the person he was abusing.

            Of course there is a sense in which all the above discussion could be construed as a purely semantic argument. What the word love means is simply what we define it to mean, as with all words of course. (How many TV debates have you seen which appeared to be fuelled primarily by a lack of agreement over definitions of key words being used in the arguments. There have certainly been some debates I have watched where this seems to have been the case. A consensus to agree to precise definitions beforehand would  have shortened if not pretty much resolved some debates before they had even begun. Instead they spend an hour or so unwittingly engaging in what amounts to not much more than a semantic argument!) But the issue being raised here has more to do with the concern of what the most appropriate way is to define love which most efficiently captures our intuitions about what love should really mean. Spirituality has a quite intriguing answer to this question which appears to resolve the non-clarity of the term love highlighted by the aforementioned examples.

It is very difficult to read the words ‘near death experience’ in a sentence without seeing the words ‘unconditional love’ somewhere nearby. Also statements such as 'love is all there is', 'love is the only real emotion' and 'we are love' are often used by people who have had some kind of spiritual experience. The meaning of the words unconditional love are sometimes elaborated on by people who have had near death experiences. The claim seems to be that in our natural spiritual state we have unconditional love as an innate character trait, to the degree that we can’t help but always act out of unconditional love. In other words there is no situation we would encounter in our true spiritual state where we wouldn’t act out of unconditional love. This is a very strong claim to make in as far as it is radically different from our typical behaviour as humans.  To get a sense of perspective on this imagine that someone comes along, burns down your house, totals your car, and then chops off your arms and legs, after which they say 'sorry about that, I was just having a bad day'. If we were to act out of the unconditional love described above you would accept their apology and probably state something along the lines of  'that's all right, it could happen to anyone.' It deviates sharply from anything remotely resembling typical human behaviour doesn' t it?
       The maternal love of a mother to a child is probably the closest most of us see of unconditional love in human life. And I'm not entirely convinced this is exactly the same thing. I think all of us, myself included, would find it very difficult to express unconditional love in all possible situations. I consider myself as being a fairly decent person as far as people go. However if someone hurts me I tend to feel the impulse to hurt them back in return, and often to a higher degree than they hurt me. I don't often act on this, at least  in any significant way, but I do nonetheless have this impulse. It seems to be inbuilt into my very nature as a human to the degree where I can't imagine not being that way. So unconditional love to me is quite an alien concept. It is certainly not something I personally experience or exhibit in all possible situations.

So does this explain the archetypal spiritual statement ‘we are love’. In a slightly metaphoric sense it appears to, and I use the word metaphoric because it doesn’t seem to quite make sense that we could in a literal way be an emotion or be a behaviour characteristic. Both are adjectival words, and as such are characteristics of people and not something you could literally be a physical instantiation of. How can you  literally be an emotion or be a behaviour characteristic?

             The spiritual notion of love actually appears to extend beyond this however. What we  would normally identify as energy is apparently the very thing that people who experience unconditional love are experiencing. They seem almost to be interchangeable terms, at least on the basis of what is sometimes stated by NDEers. This doesn’t mean however that what we typically identify as love in human form is interchangeable with what we call energy. It appears to specifically refer to what NDEers choose to call unconditional love. What we would identify as the emotional aspect of this is actually only a part of what we would  identify as energy, but the striking and almost incomprehensible feature of this explanation to me is that one particular aspect of what we would commonly regard as energy is actually unconditional love.
              One could at this stage almost be justified in believing this to be one of those category mistakes philosophers often talk about. But this conclusion I think would be premature and unwarranted, coming from an assumption that the human perspective ought be the basis for making a judgement on this. People who experience NDEs appear to be quite definite about this claim of what unconditional love is. So this in my view should deter a casual disregard of the spiritual definition of unconditional love. Also we have already seen we are on somewhat shaky grounds with our current understanding of what love is. We have been able to  analyse a  range of real life examples and construct various hypothetical ones to tease out our fairly indeterminate and vague ideas as to what really constitutes love. In these examples the emotion of love, what we generally would consider as reasonable to identify as the very essense of love itself, becomes detached from anything resembling what could sensibly be regarded as really being love, at least in any meaningful sense, thus exposing our incomplete concept or grasp of what love should mean.
             These have clearly been very contrived examples used for the purpose of making a point, so might seem quite unrelated to typical everyday relationship situations. However the issue of how integral or incidental the emotion we identify as love is to what are genuine cases of love has been successfully highlighted. Is the emotion just part of the story? (Or any of the story?)
            The real force of the argument can be seen by being aware of the suggestion being made by these examples, that if the emotion of love becomes meaningless when directed at non-conscious or fictitious characters, or unwittingly directed at someone or something other than what was intended by the person believing they were in love, then it seems the entire legitimacy of love in ordinary everyday cases hinges solely on the degree there exists a correspondance between the perceived facts and the actual facts. This seems to be an unacceptably artificial and arbitrary criteria to use as a means to cross the huge chasm between  the mere presence of a subjective feeling and something as powerful and real as we consider true love to be. The subjective feeling of love, if not directed at a meaningful recipient, seems no more significant than the subjective feeling of an itch. This suggests to me there is something slighly fishy about our current conception of what love really is.
            This analysis should at least provide us with reasonable grounds to consider the spiritual definition of what constitutes love claimed by people who have had extensive near death experiences. Unconditional love is not afflicted with these same philosophical problems. Unconditional love is indiscriminant. Everything and everyone is loved equally irrespective of whoever or whatever it is and whatever the facts are. It contrasts sharply, qualitatively and quantitively, with the fleeting contingent modes of love we  normally experience in human life. Unconditional love is a baseline characteristic of our true spiritual state. It is the very nature of what we are as spiritual beings. Near death experience accounts shift us sharply away from the notion that love is purely an emotion, or a conditional reaction, and more towards the fact it is the very essence of what we are as spriritual beings. We don't pick and choose which occasions we apply unconditional love. It persists no matter what.    
  

Clarification of my Previous Post on Relativity

            I should probably add a bit of clarity to some of the points I made in my previous post on relativity before someone accuses me of not understanding things properly.

            When I stated that 'time and space are relativistic always' I did not refer specifically to the observable time dilations and length contractions. It is still true that relativistic effects are happening around us all the time whenever  non-zero relative velocities are encountered. But the discrepancies do disappear when objects are stationary with respect to each other. However my comment applies equally in this situation  as well if taken in the intended context. We do generally have the experience of objective space and time in that we can’t detect the discrepancies, but my reasoning is slightly more subtle than this. Consider two objects whose relative velocity is gradually reducing to zero. When these objects reach zero velocity with respect to each other they will agree on time durations and distances. In that sense relativistic effects disappear. However if each object's 'reality' prior to this moment was composed of separate versions of space and time then this still remains the case even when their clocks and distances agree in quantative terms. The relativity in this deeper sense does not simply disappear.

            The statement ‘we do live in that world’ can be understood in a similar light. The way relativity works will always prevent us from encountering the potentially paradoxical situations presented by relativity such as the disagreement over sequences of events (the effects of general relativity sort things out in a way to ensure this, as neatly highlighted by the infamous twins paradox). So we don’t 'live in that world' in a directly observable sense but we do in a deeper metaphysical sense. To make this more concrete reflect for a moment on what we would commonly regard as reality. Our reality at any given moment encompasses all events happening in our immediate vicinity that we can readily observe, but also events which we can’t immediately observe. For instance someone in the next door room watching TV is included as part of our reality even though we can’t actually see them.  This means by implication we have to include all events happening in the entire universe at any given moment as part of our reality. We can’t justifiably draw a perimeter around ourselves of some arbitrary diameter and claim anything outside that boundary is not part of our reality (what would you base your choice of distance on?). So we are acknowledging basically that it is the entire list of now events in the universe that comprise our reality at any given moment in time.
               Now suppose there is an alien in some distant galaxy many light years from Earth who is watching TV at this very moment in their living room. I won’t bother to do the necessary calculations to produce specific numbers but providing we are prepared to consider distances of sufficient magnitude the effects of relativity will be magnified to produce more dramatic discrepancies in time and space for much slower relative velocities between objects. If we ignore things such as gravitational effects, expansion of the universe and the motion of the planets we can imagine that there is no relative motion between you and this alien at this moment in time whilst he is sitting watching TV. Consequently his conception of now, the entire list of now events in the entire universe which comprise his conception of reality, coincides with yours. If this alien  now walks across his living room to switch his TV set off, and the direction of his walk happens to be in a direction away from Earth, then his list of now events will include events in Earth time (from our perspective) that happened hundreds, thousand or millions of years ago, depending on exactly what distance we are considering.
          Just a few moments ago before he got up to switch his TV set off both realities coincided. Now there is  suddenly this huge discrepancy.  And the important thing to bear in mind here is that his conception of reality is just as valid as yours. This is one of the key aspects of special relativity - it's symmetry.
          Now suppose instead the alien had chosen to walk in a direction towards Earth rather than away from it. This will consequently have similar results but  this time going forward into Earth's future.  If the distance between planets is made sufficiently large enough the Earth  won't even exist  in his reality now!  During this short interval of time (from the alien's perspective) our sun went supernovae and engulfed the entire Earth!

            The fact that relativity works in a way to always prevent us from directly witnessing the bizarre behaviour of time dilation, length contraction and lack of simultaneity cuts little ice doesn’t it ? At least on  purely metaphysical grounds. It’s almost as if the universe is pretending that  space and time exist but  at the same time will always contrive to conceal this fact from us  (I guess Einstein screwed that one up). What a sneaky universe!

            Quantum mechanics presents us with even more startling results. The delayed quantum eraser experiment demonstrates retrocausality in such a striking way so as to establish beyond doubt that when ‘reality’ and knowledge are entangled the question of ‘when’ something happened quickly becomes quite meaningless. The notion of an objective reality being out there all the time simply doesn’t hold water. Again the universe invests considerable cunning in trying to disguise it's bizarre quantum behavour at the macro level of reality. The universe likes to pretend things are real when they are not. Even more sneakiness from the universe!

Still believe time is real?