[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'R')obski, has that new site replaced the "astralpulse" site, or is it a continuation with the same people, or an entirely unrelated site? And has Frank shown back up again? Sorry for my taking a while to dig into this but it deserves un-interrupted time which is not easily found here...

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')t minimum we have something here that is similar to a lucid dream. However, the interesting difference is that the lucid dreamer believes that s/he is dreaming, whereas the person having an OBE does not believe themselves to be dreaming. (And note, as I view these things, the issue of personal belief is irrelevant to the ontological status of the experience. Belief, like any other subjective state, is only another piece of data in the overall description of a state.) So there are already some interesting research questions to be asked about what constitutes the basis for the belief that one is or is not dreaming.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('robski', 'M')y conscious OBE's have been more real than the reality of waking life - hyper-real.

[robski]

Doly,

I suppose it is easy to view things like that from a common primary focus level ( daily waking consiousness), but from an uncommon one - perhaps just a few phases away from the physical, everything changes. Perhaps hyperreal isn't the best term to use. Within the experience everything seems objectively real - as real as me sitting here typing this message, but your surroundings and senses seem to be enhanced in a way that is very hard to write down in words.

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('robski', 'M')y conscious OBE's have been more real than the reality of waking life - hyper-real.

[Licho]

Joining this debate late huh?

Regarding "duplicating brain" and simulating it on a computer. Well I don't believe that computer which will compute simulation would experience consciousness..

I don't believe that Turing machine (and any of it's descendants, like current CPUs in computers) can experience consciousness.

Brain probably requires some quantum level interaction for us to experience consciousnes, and if experiences arise from resolving "all possible" quantum states, this cannot even be properly simulated on ordinary computers.

We might achieve levels of AI that will be able to talk with us and even emulate some human emotions, but I won't feel pitty for it throwing it into a trash or smashing it with a hammer, because I think, that unlike my cat and dog, silicon chip doesn't experience consciousness.

[Licho]

Regarding other stuff and OBE ..

There was one unique research who conducted most of his research in pre-war and war Czechoslovakia. Probably none of his work was ever translated (no luck trying to find "new basics of experimental psychology") and it's very hard to get his books even in Czech, because communists (which got elected here in 1948) persecuted such kind of research and imprissioned him.

He conducted lot's of interesting experiments, but his most famous included group of unique people that had amazing abilities under deep hypnosis.

Here are some key things I remember that he concluded from the experiments:

- no information is lost, every physical action and even states of mind and thoughts can be retrieved.

He did lot's of experiment's regarding this - he for example found, that he can replicate spiritism and mediumship - test subjects under hypnosis simply aquired information about dead person and played s peronality of a dead person using "stored" information (sometimes showing information only known to that dead person!).

He used his best "subject" to describe scenes from ancient history of Hittite nation for Czech linguist who was subsequently able to decipher their writings for the first time.

He found that some people subconsciously "read" information associated with certain place (haunted places). And he was able to artifically "add" information asssociated with some location - this later infuenced sensitive people in desired way.

The way this information is organized is very interesting - it seems that it's like an associative network. For example when given some personal item, hair or similar stuff, his subjects were able to track back original owner and provide lot's of information about him/her.

- consciousness can experience directly outside body without assitence of body senses. It can also act upon physical word.

This is probably most interesting area of experiments. His best subjects were regurally and reliably able to "extend" consciousness over for example some geographical area, directly experiencing everyhting that happens there and providing usefull information (such as locating people/items/understanding stuff).

They were also able to act upon physical world - such as moving items or producing sounds hundreds of km away.

Blind (since born) people were able to experience colors and describe items unknown to them.

Some of these took form of OBE "walks", but in most consciousness was subjectively extended over large areas, or in some items/animals etc..
(For example subject, who was first asked to extend his consciousness within bottle of water, was later reacting and experiencing hot or cold feelings as the water was warmed or called down in separate location)

Individual subjects had no idea how this "ability" works, but he was always using at least two people who were tasked to do the same job and sometimes one have provided insight into how this works. They described, that for consciousness to be extended out of body, some sort of very weak physical connection with body has to exists. This limits the volume into which consciousness can extend and range it can reach - they could without problem reach any area on Earth (although obervers told, that it's sometimes done using some other living beings as a proxy) but they couldn't reach for example to Mars.

- he had only had handfull of "subjects" who were able to do this. He said that only about 1 in 2000 had ability to fall into deepest level of hypnotic sleep as he called it. He was using technique similar to stage hypnotists to first filter out suggestible people and then later hypnotised them individually in a search for these people.

Those who were falling to this deepest state behaved unlike others. In deepest sleep, they actually had own "personality" more independent from suggestions of hypnotist than is usual, sometimes directly contradicting it.
This personality was unaware and completely disconnected from waked state "self" of these people, in similar fassion, waked up people had no memories of their hypnotic experience.
This inner self was also always superior to waked state self in terms of mental abilities, moral standards, etc. Even people who were mentally ill or were just dumb had this brighter "inner self" inside. When asked to learn more about "waked" state personality, they sometimes reacted with disgust over their "waked" actions and concerns.

Only in this state were those people able to reliably exhibit such "miracles" as described above.

[robski]

This is one of the most convincing OBE accounts ever - the case of Pam Reynolds. If you haven't heard of it, here it is:

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html

[gg3]

Hi y'all, sorry about the delayed reply here; nearly got Darwinized last week & just got back from the hospital tonight (more about which later in another topic, and no, I didn't lose any bits along the way...:-).

Sicophiliac:

Yes, a mix of accurate perception, inference, and imagination. In fact that's also what normal awareness consists of, though most people cling to the belief that it's predominantly accurate perception. Most of the people most of the time are neither conscious (aware that they exist and are present) nor lucid (aware of their internal state); although this can be overcome easily enough via mindfulness meditation.

Accurate info as percentage of total compared to random guessing: This is where statistical remote viewing tests come into play. When you're dealing with a constrained target set, i.e. the digits 0 - 9 for example, you can measure the hit rate and determine statistical significance compared to chance. Most of the OBE research has used open target sets, i.e. pictures chosen at random from sets of pictures, that kind of thing, and double or triple blind judging techniques to determine hits and accuracy (see Krippner & Ullman). Research methodology is a topic I could go into for paragraphs so I'll stop for now:-).

Eyeballs in the room: interesting metaphor, and you just came up with a great suggestion whether or not you realized it. My eyes are open, I perceive photons that are bouncing around the room: photons that enter my eye and strike the absorptive medium on the retina presumably are not reflected back into the room again, so you see two dark spots at the locations of my pupils. Generalization: perception of light involves absorption of photons by a sensory organ. Higher-order generalization: photons are conserved; any given photon will travel along until it is reflected off something (in which case it changes direction) or absorbed by something (in which case it adds its increment of energy to the absorptive medium).

Now watch where this gets us (and you'll also see why methodology is such a turn-on). The eye can detect single photons amidst background of complete darkness. OK, now from the beginning of these discussions we've postulated that nonlocality is involved in remote viewing. We know from other work on nonlocality in nonliving physical systems (the classic photon pair experiments) that once you "perceive" a photon with a detector, the state of the other photon in the pair is determined.

So: Consider a long narrow container, we'll call it a "detection chamber", through which individual photons pass one at a time. At the far end of the chamber is a photocell. If some kind of nonlocal perception is detecting a photon as it passes through the container, we might expect that the photon gets depleted of a certain amount of energy in the process, and thereby fails to retain the critical value of energy needed to trip the photocell. But we might see other behaviors instead or in addition: perhaps the polarization of the photon changes (so let's install a polarizing filter), perhaps something else occurs.

I suspect that we will notice some type of behavioral changes of photons that are detected nonlocally.

Here's a protocol:

Once per second a target is generated. The target would be one of a number of types, for example:

1) photon is (a) emitted or (b) not emitted into detection chamber; or

2) photon is always emitted into detection chamber but (a) is polarized or (b) is not polarized, or

3) photon is always emitted and always polarized but could be (a) horizontally polarized or (b) vertically polarized.

Also once per second, as the target photon is generated, a beep tone is played to Bob who is sitting in the human subject room in the psi lab in the next building. Bob's task is to press Button (a) or Button (b) (ten points to anyone who knows the completely irrelevant GPO Telephones reference for "Button A or B":-) depending on his perception of the target photon.

Hypothesis: Those target photons for which Bob scores accurate hits, will demonstrate different behavior compared to those target photons for which Bob scores inaccurately or at chance level. For example, if Bob has accurately perceived a target photon, then the photocell in the detection chamber will be unable to perceive that photon: it will have been "conserved" by being "absorbed" by Bob's nonlocal perception of it.

The test of the hypothesis would of course be the statistical significance of any difference between two groups of results, those being Bob's hits vs. Bob's misses. (For example, two-tailed T-test, looking for P<.01)

Hmm, I don't know if this one has been done yet, but if not, it would be interesting. I should pester a couple of people I know....

---

Dimensions: keep in mind that the term "dimension" only means "axis of measurement." Now it may be that my above wild speculation about a hypothesis & test protocol, could be worked as a multidimensional model involving more than fourspace (three spatial plus time). There was a 9-D model I've run across (about 5 years ago) that seemed reasonably elegant; and of course one can come up with a nicely symmetrical 9-D model based on 3 spatial, 3 time, and 3 "information," though how to populate some of the axes is not immediately apparent.

---

Here's another wild speculation. What if localized perception & consciousness was the anomaly and the exception, and nonlocality was the rule or the predominant characteristic of things? That is, what if you're really "out of a body" to begin with, and getting stuck inside a brain is the odd exception? Think of being accustomed to seeing and hearing in 360-degrees all the time, and now suddenly you're plonked into a container that only lets you see about a 120-degree field of view unless you rotate the container. (Technically we've already addressed this question but it's interesting to re-examine as a thought experiment.)

---

OK, I've rambled enough for now; more later...

[annie]

This makes more sense to me than almost anything I have read on the Peak Oil forums. This is what Dale and I are moving towards in the Mountain Sentinel.
Annie

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AIM9X', 'I')t was Einstein who united Space and time as one Space-Time.

I believe the Hard Problem of Consciousness can only be solved
by using a Nonreductive explanation. We need to take conciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality, just like space and time.

http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Fall98/close9802.html


In space-time when a material is sufficently DENSE it 'leaks' to another realm and alters/effects TIME, so in Consciousness-Space-Time, a sufficently dense objective collective CONCIOUSNESS can alter space-time!


Therefore could we use GLOBAL CONCIOUSNESS PROJECT to predict the WWIII or PEAKOIL (timing) or ALL OUT NUKES???

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

What do ya think? Possible?

[robski]

gg3, I'm not certain if my PM's have been getting through to you, or not.

Anyway, I hope you are doing ok your hospitalization.

Here are some more words from Frank Kepple with regards to phasing.

People with an open mind will find this to be interesting reading. I can certainly relate to many things that are being said here.

What is phasing and how can I do it?

[web]http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/index.php?topic=17413.0[/web]

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('annie', 'T')his makes more sense to me than almost anything I have read on the Peak Oil forums. This is what Dale and I are moving towards in the Mountain Sentinel.
Annie

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('robski', 'M')y conscious OBE's have been more real than the reality of waking life - hyper-real.