My Response To Keith Augustine In Michael Prescott Blog Post Called Rover

Keith,


I am sorry i don't remember about you saying how the production theory could be falsified. I have a lot on my mind these days. I have also offered a plausible explanation for the combination key lock experiment

"Apparently, deceased Thouless could remember Oram and other similar facts. Now Keith says even though that is so the simpler explanation would be because he didn't remember the simple keys would be that he didn't survive his death. But their are certainly more explanations then that. One explanation would be that he was not communicating with thouless at all but some other entity and was being deceived by this entity. To me the explanation that another entity who pretended to know Oram is more plausible than the explanation that Thousless didn't survive death. Why? because apparently this entity knew Oram, did Oram ask this entity if he could know anything that thousless would know when he was alive?. According to Oram this entity just knew him. So what we have hear is no confirmation that this was indeed Thousless or some other entity pretending to be Thouless".


Keith says

Ditto when talking about the causes of OBEs and NDEs, as it is anything but clear that something leaves the body during them, given the mismash of nonexistent things seen during them, clear cultural influences on them, and reports of veridical perceptions. It's not as if these experiences are always clearly veridical or just unknown. Sometimes people see things that don't exist, as Charles Tart even notes in the conclusion of his OBE chapter in his recent _The End of Materialism_. Given that the evidence is all over the map with respect to theory, I think we would have to establish conclusively that real target identification happens during OBEs/NDEs, the sort that simply couldn't be explained by overhearing things or any other normal means. And I think that's an entirely rational point of view.


Leo- I totally agree this appears to be what is happening now with positive results already in the pilot study of the Aware study on near death experiences.

Keith says

If you keep personal survival, you will be doing so in blatant contradiction of the findings of physiological psychology, maintaining the pilot-to-ship simple dualism implied by the TV show-to-TV, Mars rover, Predator drone, and so on analogies.

Not if the brain is an advanced tv receiver, Keith is presumming that mind brain dependency is so tight that it can't be conceivable that the mind could survive death.


Keith says


Transmission implies that the brain plays a major part in shaping what the mind is while "inside" a living organism, not simply in allowing that mind to control the physical world. Hence why PCP, or LSD, can directly alter the mind, instead of just cutting off the mind's ability to control the body, or perceive the physical world.

Leo- Wait a second, the transmission isn't the brain it's a medium of somekind, that can only be speculated on. We can alter receivers, so the brain itself is being altered while the mind is also being altered, which is information. The real issue here is whether than is an immaterial soul or not, neuroscience is shown that yes mind exists [information] and the brain exists. But what about soul? which is i call our subjective experiences, inner life. Can the soul tranferred all the information from the brain to this soul, this i saw is very possible.


Keith i will explain to you the weaknesses in the particular case you just mentioned that of Rosemary. If you have cases that are bullet proof and really deliver the evidence for the production theory instead of the the very weak cases such as Phineas Gage, and Rosemary Kennedy. I love to see them .


Now let's look at the doubtful case you mentioned.

1] "Rosemary has been described as being a shy child whose I.Q. tests reportedly indicated a moderate mental retardation, but this is a question of some controversy".

Strike one it appears that their is indeed some controversy over what amount if little mental retardation occur to her I.Q.

Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. Her mother, Mrs. Rose Kennedy, remarked that although the lobotomy stopped her daughter's violent behavior.

Verbal skills eh, that is the thing, this is explained by the fact that her soul was restricted and constrained by particular damage to part of her brain.


"Ronald Kessler, author of The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, disagrees with this assessment. He believes that Rosemary's problem was instead mental illness. He says it’s true that Rosemary had always been slower than the other children. But as a teenager, she was able to write endearing letters, dance, and do arithmetic. At the age of nine, Rosemary neatly and correctly multiplied and divided: 428 × 32 = 13696, for example."[7].

So we see that her intelligence was not affected by the lobotomy also her inner subjective character was not affected either .


Keith, sure those five individuals have concluded the same as you, but that doesn't prove your case. As much as me pointing out several neuroscientists who DON'T agree with your position. Such as Dr. Wilder Penfield, Dr. John C Eccles, Karl R. Popper. Keith their is no doubt their is mind brain dependency but how strong is the dependency is the question at stake here. What i am suggesting is yes personality radically changes in many cases, however when the mind brain connection is broken the mind get's immediately restored to an age like 20 years old. It's the soul that get's released from the body and restores all memories, thoughts and feelings after physical death. Also your forgetting that simple dualists know that the mind is information, where the soul is the one that takes over once the body/brain dies.

Perhaps the soul is an abtract entity who uses it's imagination to create an afterlife in the platonic realm.


Would you say that Wilder Penfield's work gave experimental support for mind brain dependency? Wilder Penfield never endorsed this theory, nor did he think that this was the best explanation for his data. Wilder Penfield started out an materialist until he started doing work with epileptic patients.


"For myself, after a professional lifetime spent i trying to discover how the brain accounts for the mind, it comes as a surprise now to discover, during this final examination of the evidence, that the dualist hypothesis seems the more reasonable of the two possible explanations. Mind comes into action and goes out of action with the highest brain-mechanism, it is true. But the mind has energy. The form of that energy is different from that of neuronal potentials that travel the axone pathways. There I must leave it."

You also forget that simple dualism and interaction dualism both propose that the soul is made of a different type of matter, that the soul has a brain too, possibly of dark matter.