OBEs--a reductio ad absurdum

[_Tarski]

I am a bit dubious about out of body experiences but Tarskis opening statement presents some interesting questions to how we think about the theory of spirits.

I had two thoughts starting out. First I understand (as a Christian believer) our spirit to be a diminsion of our physical body not something fundamentally seperate from it. I do not find my self at all suprised by our counscious experience being tied to both the physical world and our physical processing of it.

Second, I think Tarski has seriously oversimplified perception. .

Why would I do that after just having finished one of the best books on the topic.
Check out Jackendoff's "2+1/2 D" description.

The more detail you include the more interconnections become entangled with physicality and the stronger my point becomes.
(where would a spirit hold it's model of the environment and why would it include the notion that objects block other objects from sight?)

[_The Dude]

Second, I think Tarski has seriously oversimplified perception.

Maybe so, but he's not doing it to gain advantage. Oversimplification gives the advantage to mystics, generally speaking.

We receive and focus photons on a retina but we experiece images which our imagination constructs out of a combination of those neural sensations and our understanding of the world. What we actual experience seeing is a constructed image, an active idea that the brain forms. If spirits saw in any fashion information received would be processed into the same image forming patterns we are familiar with. That is colored or light dark shapes whose contours reflect surfaces of volumes. The result would likely be that even if some different source of initial informaion was involved it would be possible that the experienced result would look the same because that appearance is how we understand seeing.

When you go into all this detail about how image processing really works, doesn't it make it even more obvious that the imagination is constructing the experience? I think it does.

[_karl61]

I wish I could still remember the questions I passed on my tests in my sensation and perception class. I do remember about the moon illussion and the fact that it looks big on the horizon is just an allussion as it is really no bigger when it is at it's zenith. The illussion occurs between the retina and some other place inside your brain.

[_Scottie]

I wish I could still remember the questions I passed on my tests in my sensation and perception class. I do remember about the moon illussion and the fact that it looks big on the horizon is just an allussion as it is really no bigger when it is at it's zenith. The illussion occurs between the retina and some other place inside your brain.

I thought this was because you had a different reference point to compare it to. When the moon rises over the mountains in Utah, it looks HUGE. But that's just because we can compare it to the mountains, where we have nothing to compare it to at it's zenith.

[_karl61]

If I remember correctly the image that hits the retina really looks like an upside down 35mm negatives that comes with your photos. It is the brain that turns it upright and gives it color.

what is interesting is that science really can explain the brain but not the mind. They will say that given these circumstances this should occur but they still can't describe why consciousness occurs.

[Guest]

Tarski (and other skeptics),

How do you respond to those that claim to have had an OBE, travelled to a loved ones presence and later described exactly what that person was wearing, doing, saying, etc?

Do you believe these are just non-credible stories?

[_karl61]

I wish I could still remember the questions I passed on my tests in my sensation and perception class. I do remember about the moon illussion and the fact that it looks big on the horizon is just an allussion as it is really no bigger when it is at it's zenith. The illussion occurs between the retina and some other place inside your brain.

I thought this was because you had a different reference point to compare it to. When the moon rises over the mountains in Utah, it looks HUGE. But that's just because we can compare it to the mountains, where we have nothing to compare it to at it's zenith.

I remember what you are saying my old book illustrates that issue.

[_Tarski]

Tarski (and other skeptics),

How do you respond to those that claim to have had an OBE, traveled to a loved ones presence and later described exactly what that person was wearing, doing, saying, etc?

Do you believe these are just non-credible stories?

A little story is in order.

Once I stayed home from church when I was still marginally a Mormon. My wife had been getting more and more unhappy with my skepticism.
That day at church she received what she needed to put me in my place. She came home with tear in hear eyes and told me the following:

"Today Jack Smith bore his testimony and told a story of something that happened to someone in his family. It wasn't a second hand rumor like you always say." (She was already crying).
She then told me that not only was it first hand information but that the spirit testified to everyone in the meeting that it was true. The spirit was there with a power and certainty she had never witnessed and everyone felt it.
Ok so what was this oh so credible story? Well, some one was driving a car at night and passed by some hitchhikers. They felt impressed to pick up these hitchhikers. They sat in the back seat, three men. As they were driving along. These men began to warn the driver that they should get a years supply. The driver suddenly felt the spirit but when he turned around to look the men in the eye they had vanished even though he was still driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour.

I recognized this as a variation of the vanishing hitchhiker story-a common urban legend.

So I called the guy who gave the talk. I found out it didn't happen to him or anyone in his immediate family but rather to his cousin or something. I pretend to sincerely want the details and asked him for the number of the relative. I got it. I repeated the process because the relative had heard it from someone who had the experience first hand.
This process continued until I ended up talking to somebodies grandmother in Arizona. She told me that she did indeed tell the story to the last person I talked to. I asked who it happened to and where. She said in a sweet innocent little voice "Oh may stars, I don't remember who told me about that".

Now I have been a skeptical type for a while and invariably what starts out as a "how can you explain this?" type story always ends up far far less impressive if one gets to track things down and ask one's own questions.

So yes, I think people lie, get confused, confabulate, and lose track of how they know things and who they have or haven't met or seen a pictures of etc. They misunderstand, hear what they wish to hear misconstrue what the other one just said "how did you know uncle Joe had blue eye?' (He actually didn't actually say he knew it but no he is willing to go along with excitement-confusion begets confusion and zeal begets mis-perceptions and so on.)
It's likely that people feed off each other and that something happens like when an over enthusiastic shrink puts ideas in a childs head and pretends like it all came from the child. Like leading the witness so to speak. We all do it to each other and build off each other.

This is why they invented the double blind proceedure becuase even scientists effect things unknowingly.

I don't trust people memories or their judgment or their honesty in some case (lying to prove an important spiritual principle).

Uri Geller could bend spoons well enough to fool scientists. It wasn't until James Randi came along and focused his skeptical gaze that, suddenly, Geller couldn't do anything. Randi controlled the situation to avoid the trick.

The worst offenders are they soft "scientists" who are out to prove materialism wrong. They are full of sentimental wishful thinking about death and they have a chip on their shoulders regarding what they don't like about where science has been going. It never stands up to scrutiny, but there is just so many instances of bad science and only so much time to go debunking like I did with the hitchhiker story.

[Guest]

I am a bit dubious about out of body experiences but Tarskis opening statement presents some interesting questions to how we think about the theory of spirits.

I had two thoughts starting out. First I understand (as a Christian believer) our spirit to be a diminsion of our physical body not something fundamentally seperate from it. I do not find my self at all suprised by our counscious experience being tied to both the physical world and our physical processing of it.

Second, I think Tarski has seriously oversimplified perception. .

Why would I do that after just having finished one of the best books on the topic.
Check out Jackendoff's "2+1/2 D" description.

The more detail you include the more interconnections become entangled with physicality and the stronger my point becomes.
(where would a spirit hold it's model of the environment and why would it include the notion that objects block other objects from sight?)

Dear Tarski, if I sounded as if I thought your understanding inadaquate my aplogy. I see no reason to doubt your understanding, I merely wanted to look at the question emphasizing something which I did not think you were addressing.

Similarly I do not see your question about why a spirit would see things in the manner or one item blocking other items. How else is seeing going to keep track of relative position in space? In most experience that matter is of prior importance to what may be the internal structure of objects around us. At the same time if the human mind understands images in conventional terms I would expect it to represent things within those terms whether seen or unseen. Consider dreams. We see all sorts of stuff that is not governed by our eyes yet follow the coventions of seeing in their representation as we dream them.

Which comes to Dudes observation that my comment supports the idea that out of body experiences are dreaming type experiences.

Come to think of it I assume they are. At least as a default starting point thinking about them.

[_The Dude]

Tarski (and other skeptics),

How do you respond to those that claim to have had an OBE, travelled to a loved ones presence and later described exactly what that person was wearing, doing, saying, etc?

Do you believe these are just non-credible stories?

Pretty much. I remember hearing an interview with Kary Mullis a few years back. He said that when he was a young man he had a tank of nitrous oxide in his house and he would sometimes put on the mask and zone-out for a while. One time there was something wrong with the tank and he passed out, and he should have died.... Years later he met a woman who claimed to have saved him that time. She was meditating in another part of the country and journeyed out of body to where Kary was slowly dying, and she shut off the gas and saved his life. So he says she said. Anyway, Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for inventing PCR, but he believes in so much crazy sh!t that I have little problem dismissing his story to the non-credible pile. PCR is a real time-saver, though!