Dan Peterson at Quackery Conference

[MetaProf]

If it has already been established that one can have out-of-body experience without being dead, or nearly dead, then why would “Modern Physics” waste any time on the quackery espoused by IANDS?

I don't think you could ever get a paper about OBEs published in any physics journal, but the issue is whether physics has ruled out substance dualism for mind/spirit and body/matter. If it has, then there is clearly no way for consciousness or spirit to exit the body, and so OBEs can only be psychological phenomena occurring inside human brains.

The argument for why physics has ruled out dualism is just an update on the old problem of how spirit substance could interact with material substance in order to control a human body. Any such interactions that were strong enough to let me raise an eyebrow would have been seen by now in particle physics experiments—and they haven't been seen. So this old case really is closed.

(As psychological phenomena, OBEs aren't quackery at all, but a really interesting topic in psychology. Besides being weird enough that anyone would just like to know more about them, they might tell us things about how our brains generate our usual sensation of being located somewhere behind our eyes. If we have to have a sense of being located somewhere, behind the eyes is an obvious choice of where, since most of our sense organs are clustered around there. It's really not obvious how a bunch of neurons can generate that sense of location at all, though. Single nerves don't know anything, so they don't know where my retinas are. They might as well be in my toes or on stalks, as far as any brain neurons can tell.

Our viewpoint sense is a complex neural construct that is really just one choice of data representation out of many. So why are we playing a first-person shooter instead of an overhead view game? OBEs seem to mean that sometimes our brains do present our visual data in an overhead view. Learning how and why they sometimes switch viewpoints like that might tell us a lot about how the whole system works even in the normal first-person mode.)

There is a clever little study from a few years ago that addresses some of your points about "why first-person" etc. Skin conductance is a pretty blunt instrument, but shows kind of a neat effect here.

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.112 ... ce.1142175
(the supplementary materials doc has more details on methodology)

[drumdude]

As psychological phenomena, OBEs aren't quackery at all, but a really interesting topic in psychology.

The experience is certainly real. Any delusion can exist within the human mind. But that shouldn't be conflated with the belief that one's soul is actually floating around viewing things out of the body.

That's why no one who has had an OBE has been able to read the hidden numbers on the top of the cabinets in the room. They're just experiencing a delusion of being detached from their bodies.

[Moksha]

He has to look the part amidst all the crystal healers, homeopaths, and necromancers.

Are you saying BYU should not be represented? What if they had important information to convey regarding the Illusion Arts, dowsing, and NDEs?