Saturday, October 11, 2008
The Paranormal
Being a materialist myself before I use to find this paranormal stuff was all bunk. It took a long while to realize this materialist view of reality is wrong. Near death death studies challenge greatly materialist theories of mind/brain relationship. They will continue too do for for years to come. If the evidence points towards a soul surviving death we must accept it. Bringing up the same old tired arguments like mind can't survive death because neuroscience proves mind dies when the brain dies. These arguments have been refuted over and over again.
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2 comments:
Hi Leo,
Materialists haven't proved their position. They assume it as true.
In fact, some materialists have admitted that materialism fails. In that sense, materialist William Lycan recently conceded: Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence
http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/Du.htm
The book "The Spiritual Brain" by Mario Beauregard presents the best empirical evidence for a non-materialistic neuroscience I've read.
You can read some of Beauregard's papers here:
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/PTRS.pdf
http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/beauregm/Beauregard2007_Progress.pdf
Also, a good critique of physicalism is this paper by philosopher Peter Williams:
http://www.arn.org/docs/williams/pw_whynaturalistsshouldmind.htm
ZC
I read this from neuroscientist S. Novella, and would like your thoughts
Evidence from neuroscience
Novella gave the following points to summarize the evidence from neuroscience:
Brain anatomy and activity correlates with mental activity.
There is no mind without the brain.
Brain development correlates with mental development.
If you damage the brain, you damage the mind.
Different states of consciousness correlate with different brain states.
Turn off the brain and you turn off the mind.
The mind does not survive the death of the brain.
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