Jim, the entire motivation behind BK idealism here is to counteract shallow, mostly unconscious materialism of modern Western culture, as you already know. I think its unconcious in her case because she does not explicitly acknowledge this axiomatic influence, and I think I remember her explicitly denying it in a debate with Peterson. But, conscious or unconscious, most everyone here thinks materialism is shallow and mysticism which takes materialist concepts and substitutes mystical terms for them is just as shallow in my view.
I don't think materialism is shallow. On the contrary idealism is shallow. Materialism provides a complex view with much still not understood. Idealism just provides a superficial, unthinking one.
They are both shallow when informed by modern prejudices of rationalism, dualism and materialsm. The shallow idealism and mysticism is that way because they adopted materialism, usually without knowing. Materialism has the added shallowness of not even being plausible to any thinking mind.
I don't think materialism is shallow. On the contrary idealism is shallow. Materialism provides a complex view with much still not understood. Idealism just provides a superficial, unthinking one.
They are both shallow when informed by modern prejudices of rationalism, dualism and materialsm. The shallow idealism and mysticism is that way because they adopted materialism, usually without knowing. Materialism has the added shallowness of not even being plausible to any thinking mind.
They are both shallow when informed by modern prejudices of rationalism, dualism and materialsm. The shallow idealism and mysticism is that way because they adopted materialism, usually without knowing. Materialism has the added shallowness of not even being plausible to any thinking mind.
BTW, not all metaphysically idealist philosophical-spiritual systems are the same. Spiritual science, for ex., gives more than one could ever ask for in terms of specifying "mind", "ideas", etc. and all of their various functions in our phenomenal experience.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Blackmore was doing her own ganzfeld research but not getting any significant result. Sargent on the other hand seemed to be getting off the chart sorts of results. So a society paid Blackmore to visit Sargent's lab to find out what he was doing differently. Sargent gave her complete access to the lab and its operations. She apparently discovered irregularities in how the randomizations were done as well as Sargent popping into the room and guiding a rater toward the correct result when the rating was supposed to be completely independent of the experimenter. Later he refused to provide his data for other independent analysis and left the field completely.
The whole affair seemed to have contributed greatly to her increasing skepticism about the field.
You already had said it and probably didn't even realize it.
Jim,
I am sure you have been asked this a million times, but what is your interest in being on this forum? Do you feel we idealists are too insulated and it is your duty to expose us to all those arguments for materialism we don't consider? If you pay attention at all to other threads, you know some people hold to vastly different versions of idealism, ones which you also have not considered, given how all your critiques of idealism being too vague about its claims do not apply to that version. I am talking about The Philosophy of Freedom, not Steiner's spiritual science. Have you read PoF? Who knows, maybe you would find it a refreshing idealist take, since it only deals with the givens of our experience and makes no added metaphysical assumptions. Until some serious consideration of that sort is done, you should not be surprised if I say you are not thinking about these things carefully before making critiques. Heidegger said "we are [all] still not yet Thinking", so it's not even really an insult in that sense. That is one of the first things we need to realize before having any hope of understanding matured forms of idealism. Materialism truly is not even plausible to that living Thinking, and while other forms of idealism are plausible and valid at low resolution, they practically make no positive difference in anyone's life more than materialism. So we probably agree there.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
You already had said it and probably didn't even realize it.
Jim,
I am sure you have been asked this a million times, but what is your interest in being on this forum? Do you feel we idealists are too insulated and it is your duty to expose us to all those arguments for materialism we don't consider? If you pay attention at all to other threads, you know some people hold to vastly different versions of idealism, ones which you also have not considered, given how all your critiques of idealism being too vague about its claims do not apply to that version. I am talking about The Philosophy of Freedom, not Steiner's spiritual science. Have you read PoF? Who knows, maybe you would find it a refreshing idealist take, since it only deals with the givens of our experience and makes no added metaphysical assumptions. Until some serious consideration of that sort is done, you should not be surprised if I say you are not thinking about these things carefully before making critiques. Heidegger said "we are [all] still not yet Thinking", so it's not even really an insult in that sense. That is one of the first things we need to realize before having any hope of understanding matured forms of idealism. Materialism truly is not even plausible to that living Thinking, and while other forms of idealism are plausible and valid at low resolution, they practically make no positive difference in anyone's life more than materialism. So we probably agree there.
So now Ashvin, I suppose you want to decide who should and should not be on this forum, which ideas are worthy of consideration and which ideas are not?
Jim Cross wrote: ↑Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:59 pm
One of the things I learned from this interview that I didn't know was about the spike in electrical activity found just before death in humans.
I knew this spike had been detected in rats but didn't know it had been detected in humans.
I managed to track down the study that Blackmore mentions.
In each case, loss of blood pressure, as monitored by indwelling arterial line, was followed by a decline is BIS/PSI activity followed by a transient spike in BIS/PSI activity that approached levels normally associated with consciousness.
We further speculate that since this increase in electrical activity occurred when there was no discernable blood pressure, patients who suffer "near death" experiences may be recalling the aggregate memory of the synaptic activity associated with this terminal but potentially reversible hypoxemia.
These spikes are temporally associated with the loss of measurable blood pressure, and immediately after the spike, the BIS/PSI signal drop to zero and the patient is soon pronounced dead. The BIS spikes last for a few minutes at maximum, but usually last between 30–180 seconds.
The thing is, drugs are well-known to cause bursts of brain activity before death. The only way to fairly judge the near-death experience and to see if there could be a spike in brain activity before death is to look at undrugged patients.
Secondly, even if there was a burst in brain activity, this fails to explain the near-death experience from a physicalist point of view. Veridical OBEs such as the case of Pam Reynolds cannot be explained by hypothetical, unproven bursts of activity.
Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:11 pm
Ashvin owns the forum.
Or thinks he does.
If a number of people tell me my contrarian views are unwanted, I'll move on. As I've said, I don't consider myself a materialist.
I have found some of the more scientifically oriented posts - NDEs, OBEs, psychedelics, brain acitivity, etc - to be interesting here, frequently with links to papers I wouldn't have found otherwise.
I thought this Blackmore post might be of interest since NDEs and NDE research has been brought up with some frequency on this forum.
