Hubris (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

I'm sure we all remember the spectacle last year of Terri Schaivo's last days. Court decisions came down, then were appealed appealed to higher courts. In the end, Schaivo - who we were told emphatically was "already gone" years ago - was pulled off her feeding tube and dehydrated to death and was laid to rest.

Practically the entire "scientific" medical community assured all of us that Schaivo's condition was permanent, that the real Terri Schaivo was hopelessly gone. But what if the medical consensus was based on a flawed understanding of how human consciousness works? What if our memories and personalities are not really "stored" in our brains after all, but simply accessed through them. In that case recovery from extremely severe brain damage seems much more reasonable.

This week, the Guardian published a fascinating article about a new treatment for "hopeless" PVS cases that is bringing many of them back to life:

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these 'strange and wonderful' rebirths.

For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it's as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. "No," George smiles, and his family burst into tears.

It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated - and bewildered - GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.

Across three continents, brain-damaged patients are reporting remarkable improvements after taking a pill that should make them fall asleep but that, instead, appears to be waking up cells in their brains that were thought to have been dead. In the next two months, trials on patients are expected to begin in South Africa aimed at finding out exactly what is going on inside their heads. Because, at the moment, the results are baffling doctors.

The remarkable story of this pill and its active ingredient, zolpidem, begins in 1994 when Louis Viljoen, a sporty 24-year-old switchboard operator, was hit by a truck while riding his bike in Springs, a small town 30 minutes' drive east of Johannesburg. He suffered severe brain injuries that left him in a deep coma. He was treated in various hospitals before being settled in the Ikaya Tinivorster rehabilitation centre nearby. Doctors expected him to die and told his mother, Sienie Engelbrecht, that he would never regain consciousness. "His eyes were open but there was nothing there," says Sienie, a sales rep. "I visited him every day for five years and we would speak to him but there was no recognition, no communication, nothing."

The hospital ward sister, Lucy Hughes, was periodically concerned that involuntary spasms in Louis's left arm, that resulted in him tearing at his mattress, might be a sign that deep inside he might be uncomfortable. In 1999, five years after Louis's accident, she suggested to Sienie that the family's GP, Dr Wally Nel, be asked to prescribe a sedative. Nel prescribed Stilnox, the brand name in South Africa for zolpidem. "I crushed it up and gave it to him in a bottle with a soft drink," Sienie recalls. "He couldn't swallow properly then, but I helped him and sat at his bedside. After about 25 minutes, I heard him making a sound like 'mmm'. He hadn't made a sound for five years.

"Then he turned his head in my direction. I said, 'Louis, can you hear me?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Say hello, Louis', and he said, 'Hello, mummy.' I couldn't believe it. I just cried and cried."

Hughes was called over and other staff members gathered in disbelief. "Sienie told me he was talking and I said he couldn't be - it wasn't possible," she recalls. "Then I heard him. His mother was speechless and so were we. It was a very emotional moment."

Louis has now been given Stilnox every day for seven years. Although the effects of the drug are supposed to wear off after about two and a quarter hours, and zolpidem's power as a sedative means it cannot simply be taken every time a patient slips out of consciousness, his improvement continues as if long-dormant pathways in his brain are coming back to life.

How to maintain the hegemony of a reductionistic viewpoint. . . (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

Just offer misleading criticism of dissenting scientists, then refuse them the opportunity to respond:

i) Dr Sheldrake said the programme's treatment of his decision to remove trials when N'kisi did not respond, was flawed for two reasons:

a) The programme did not understand that the decision not to include these trials was in line with established practice in mainstream research with animals, young children and autistic people. Dr Sheldrake explained that analysis is performed in this way, to take into consideration the subject's limited attention span and inability to know that they are being tested.

b) Notwithstanding the first reason, Dr Sheldrake said the programme completely ignored a key finding of one of the paper's reviewers. This reviewer, included at the end of the paper, directly questioned and tested the effect that the removal of non-response trials had had on the results. The reviewer found that if the non-response trials were included, the results "differed only trivially". Therefore it was false for the programme to imply that by omitting these trials the results would have altered.

Dr Sheldrake said the programme implied that by removing the trials, where rarely used words were used, from the analysis of test results he increased the probability that N'kisi would appear telepathic.

However, Dr Sheldrake said that, as his paper had explained, by removing such trials the opposite occurred: the removal of such trials "made the result slightly less significant, rather than more". Dr Sheldrake said the programme failed to explain that regardless of which methods of analysis were used, the experiment's results remained significantly above the level of chance.

ii) Dr Sheldrake maintained that the test conducted by programme makers was flawed, therefore making a comparison between the two tests unscientific. However notwithstanding such flaws, Dr Sheldrake said that the programme's attempts to apply his methods of analysis were misleading for the following reasons:

a) Dr Sheldrake's conclusions were not based on 'percentage hit rates', as used by programme makers. Rather the conclusions were based on standard kinds of statistical probability analysis including randomised permutation analysis.

b) The programme implied that N'kisi's success in telepathy tests was a result of data manipulation rather than due to any genuine ability of N'kisi. The programme made it appear to viewers that Dr Sheldrake had omitted or massaged data to get the desired result, regardless of what the facts indicated. Dr Sheldrake said his results were analysed in several alternative ways and the significance of the results were not dependent of the type of analysis used.

. . .

Dr Sheldrake complained that the programme makers gave assurances that his work would be presented fairly and without bias, which they did not fulfil. Ofcom noted that both broadcaster and complainant offered correspondence which confirmed that such an assurance had been given by programme makers to Dr Sheldrake.

. . .

Dr Sheldrake complained that the programme did not offer him or any other qualified scientist an opportunity to respond to Mr Youen's claims, which resulted in unfairness. As previously noted, if a programme alleges wrongdoing or incompetence or makes other significant allegations, those concerned should normally be given an appropriate and timely opportunity to respond. Accordingly, Ofcom first considered whether the programme made any such allegations. In this respect, Ofcom concluded that the programme's critique of Dr Sheldrake's work was capable of adversely affecting the regard in which Dr Sheldrake's work was held which in turn drew into question Dr Sheldrake's professional credentials. As such, Ofcom considered that in order for the programme not to be unfair to Dr Sheldrake, programme makers should have given Dr Sheldrake an opportunity to respond to the criticisms contained in the programme concerning the conduct of his experiment and his interpretation of that experiment. Ofcom noted that though Dr Sheldrake had been asked to make a contribution to the programme on a number of occasions, at no time was he asked to comment on the specific criticisms of his research which were to be included in the programme. This failure to give Dr Sheldrake an opportunity to respond to what would amount to a damaging critique of his research resulted in unfairness to Dr Sheldrake. Ofcom has upheld this part of the complaint.

What is the brain for (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

Reductionistic materialism tells us the brain is an information processing device, where memories are stored, experiences occur, where decisions are made. That our brain is us, and the destruction of the brain is the end of an individual's existence.

We've already seen a lot of evidence that this might be incorrect.

If we let go of the assumption that all of the properties of consciousness and mind are explained by brain constituents, structure, and behavior, if we allow the possibility for a non-corporeal component to awareness and qualia and memory and mind, then what might the brain be for?

The brain and nervous system could be an interface for mind to manifest itself within matter, and to interface with sense perceptions. If this is the correct interpretation, what would we expect to see?

One of the arguments for no free will is that the physical universe is causally closed. That is, all of the behaviors of atoms, molecules, cells, organs and organisms are already specified through the equations of physics.

In the early twentieth century, we learned that at the smallest scale, the universe is indeterminate. Reductionists typically claim that it doesn't matter, that while quantum effects may be indeterminate at the smallest scale, they wash out at the level of molecules, cells and organisms. Chaos theory casts considerable doubt on this claim, ie: the butterfly effect. They also usually say that quantum indeterminacy is essentially random, not meaningful. But what if this is wrong? What if consciousness itself can influence the collapse of the quantum waveform, in a desired direction. This would provide the mechanism for consciousness to act within the world.

Neural firing is indeterminate. That is, the behavior of any given neuron and its firing is probabalistic. In other words, sometimes a neuron will fire under stimulus, and other times not. This is almost certainly because neural firing is mediated by the behavior of ions within the synaptic gap, and the behavior of those ions is subject to quantum fluctuations. Because the firing of a single neuron can be amplified through thousands or millions of other neurons throughout large areas of the the brain, and trigger motor neurons, this gives the possibility for individual quantum events to determine gross motor behaviors (shall I give the possible example of neurons controlling muscles in fingers typing a blog entry?). To a large degree, the brain can be seen as a device for magnifying the effects of quantum indeterminancy to the macro-scale, and if those quantum fluctuations are somehow influenced by consciousness, they can use them to drive behavior.

Certainly there is evidence that consciousness can influence quantum systems (ie: RNG PK). Is this how the mind drives the brain and body?

Mind and Brain (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

One of the assumptions of most people with a "scientific" worldview is that human consciousness is entirely a function of the brain. One reason for this is the well-known finding of neuroscience, that damage to the brain often affects the functioning of the mind. For example, damage to or destruction of the hippocampus through stroke or brain injury will lead to memory impairment of varying degrees. Probing different parts of the brain with electrical currents can lead to reliving memories or experiencing emotions. And a loss of blood flow to the brain leads to immediate unconsciousness.

However these phenomena can be interpreted in multiple ways. The standard reductionist viewpoint of the brain could be termed the "ipod model". That is, the hardware, software and content are all encoded and packaged into a stand-alone device. The obvious alternative to this is the "radio" model. A radio looks very much like a tape player or an ipod. Removing components from the radio may prevent it from playing certain bands (AM or FM), lock the tuning onto a particular station, or create distortion in the music. However the music itself is external to the device, and destroying the radio does not destroy the music.

Which of these two models is correct? Is mind / awareness / memory solely a product of the brain, or does the brain "tune into" and affect the mind in some fashion? There are a number of relevant points of fact that shed some light on this question.

The first pertinant factor is the current state of understanding of the mind from the findings of neuroscience. Have the mysteries been solved? Despite the absolute certainty of reductionists that the mind is fully explainable in terms of neural properties, the most prominent questions today are the same questions we had fifty years ago. Certainly, neuroscientists have faith that most or all of these questions will be answered soon with materialist explanations, but this is more a matter of faith in their assumptions than anything else.

Despite many decades of investigation, the sacrifice of thousands of laboratory animals and the efforts of the best minds in neuroscience, memory traces have never been located in the brain. In exasperation, some have posited a "holographic" or distributed storage of memories throughout most or all of the cortex, while others embraced a non-material aspect to the mind and memories.

Brain functions are highly plastic, after a stroke, some patients are able to recover from massive loss of abilities through remapping areas of the brain to take on new functions. What, exactly, is organizing this recovery?

Some people have demonstrated a high degree of functioning despite the lack of most or nearly all of their brain tissue.

Psi experiments provide substantial evidence that mind phenomena extend beyond an individual brain in space-time.

Near-death experiences with veridical perception have been reported when the brain is completely shut down.

Genuine mediums have brought back information from the deceased, even under tightly-controlled experimental conditions that preclude ordinary explanations.

All of these factors give support to the "radio" model of the brain and consciousness versus the "ipod" model.

Great post. . .

Michael Prescott hits the nail on the head, yet again:

Remember those halcyon days of the O.J. Simpson trial, when instead of worrying about the next terrorist attack, we all crowded around our television sets to hear the latest testimony about the double murder in Brentwood? There was, as innumerable commentators pointed out, a "mountain of evidence" against O.J. Simpson -- yet his legal defense team, styled the "dream team," managed to create at least the illusion of reasonable doubt and obtain an acquittal. How'd they do it?

They did it by taking each piece of evidence individually and casting doubt on it. The doubt in question was often based on nothing but far-fetched speculation, and much of the speculation was contradictory. For instance, bloodstains on Simpson's driveway were said to have been planted by the police, while other blood samples found at the crime scene were said to have been contaminated. In other words, we were asked to believe that in some cases the blood was unquestionably Simpson's but it got there through sleight of hand on the part of some corrupt detective, while in other cases the blood wasn't Simpson's at all but somehow matched his DNA because of an unspecified error in chemical analysis.

As for eyewitness testimony, it was debunked by casting doubt on the competence, credibility, or honesty of every single witness from the hapless Kato Kaelin to the limo driver to the neighbor who found Simpson's vehicle awkwardly slant-parked outside the Rockingham Estate. In order to believe Simpson's innocence, you pretty much had to believe that every other person involved in the case was corrupt or hopelessly prejudiced or impossibly stupid or desperately seeking the media limelight. Police detectives who had handled hundreds of cases without incident were presented as bumbling nincompoops who were simultaneously criminal masterminds bent on framing Simpson for some nefarious reason that was never quite explained. All the evidence was either planted or faked on the one hand, or hopelessly mishandled and misinterpreted on the other. It worked. But you don't have to go back to the 1990s to see this strategy in effect. Because as you might have guessed by now, this is very much the same strategy that is used by many diehard skeptics. . .

Faced with a "mountain of evidence" that is in some respects even more intimidating than the evidence in the Simpson case, the skeptics have chosen the same counterattack. They simply dismiss all of it, claiming that there is no evidence of all, not a single bit, and they back up this sweeping assertion by casting doubt on any and every individual item of evidence. . .

It turns out that just as O.J. Simpson was the only honest man in the courtroom, so the skeptic is the only perceptive person on the face of the earth.

It doesn't much matter if the skeptic can't support most of these speculations, or even if the speculations contradict each other, as they did in the Simpson case. All that matters is that a penumbra of doubt has been cast over the evidence. The testimony has been called into question. The data have been challenged. And most people, lacking the time or the interest or, in some cases, the ability to look into the matter for themselves, will conclude that the doubt is justified. They may not side wholeheartedly with the skeptics in denying all paranormal phenomena, but they will grant that they just don't know and probably nobody knows -- which is really all the skeptics need to accomplish. . .

Now go read the whole post. . .

In the hot seat. . .

I will be appearing tomorrow (Tuesday July 10) on Marcel Cairo's internet radio show AfterlifeFM at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PM PDT. You can listen live and call in too. . .

UPDATE

Thank you very much Marcel for the opportunity to appear on your show. You are a very generous host, free iPhone or not. ;-)

You can download the show from Marcel's archives here.

Burying Ockham

This article shows quite clearly how far from the wisdom of Sir William of Ockham modern cosmology, and biology, have strayed:

Recent developments in cosmology radically change the conception of the universe as well as the very notions of "probable" and "possible". The model of eternal inflation implies that all macroscopic histories permitted by laws of physics are repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite multiverse. In contrast to the traditional cosmological models of a single, finite universe, this worldview provides for the origin of an infinite number of complex systems by chance, even as the probability of complexity emerging in any given region of the multiverse is extremely low. This change in perspective has profound implications for the history of any phenomenon, and life on earth cannot be an exception.

Ah, yes. We are now in a position where googleplexes, or even an infinity, of completely unobservable, untestable universes are used to explain (away) anything that looks purposeful or friendly towards the development of life about the properties and regularities of our universe. But any mention of the possibility of psi phenomena being real means instant relegation to crackpot status. Such are the sociological taboos of science.

Blogs that make me think. . .

After Jack Pickard meme-tagged AMNAP as a blog that makes him think, I immediately came up with a list of my own. However, a busy life has been intervening, and it has taken me a couple of weeks write up my own list here. It was tough narrowing things down to five, and indeed I cheated a bit as you will notice. Please don't feel any obligation to continue the meme, but I thought it was worth noting five blogs that make me think. . .

Here they are, in no particular order:

Camera Obscura by Billie -- This gifted artist writes about and photographs the subtle currents and nuances of her life with a deep groundedness and soulfulness that I marvel at and strive to notice within my own life.

Michael Prescott's blog -- Michael writes much more eloquently, and in far greater length, about many of the topics that appear here on AMNAP, as well as other things that interest him and his many readers and commenters.

The Daily Grail -- Not exactly a blog, but there are always new and amazing things on the daily link / story updates. There's also stuff there that exceeds even my rather extensive boggle threshold. TDG has also been very generous with links to AMNAP, and I expect many of you reading this originally found your way here via TDG.

Marginal Revolution -- Tyler Cowen is a polymath, and the breadth of his interests always surprises me. Alex Tabarrok argues the case for liberty most persuasively. MR is NOT really an economics blog, although a few economics posts do manage to find their way there from time to time. . .

Fifth place is a tie, and neither are actually blogs either. But I always listen to the Skeptiko podcasts with its list of impressive psi researchers, skeptics, and spiritual philosophers, and Marcel Cairo's new Afterlife FM internet radio show and podcast is off to a great start with some very knowledgable and articulate guests. Marcel has been gracious enough to invite me to his show next Tuesday, July 10th.

Thanks again Jack for listing AMNAP as a "blog that makes you think".

Interesting show ahead. . .

Marcel Cairo is hosting the very knowledgable Public Parapsychology blogger Annalisa Ventola today on his Afterlife FM show.

Don't miss it!

The show starts at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PDT.

Looks like an interesting book. . .

Guy Playfair has written what looks to be a fascinating new look at evidence suggesting reincarnation occurs in some cases. . .

I'm sure one of the usual subjects will be the first to read and review it. ;-)

H/T Annalisa @ Public Parapsychology