Dan Peterson at Quackery Conference

[huckelberry]

Everybody wang chung ,sometimes you get a bit carried away and start sounding like a jilted lover or something.

[huckelberry]

he seriously needs some grooming help. Don't they have places for that in Utah? My boys both have beards but they are assiduous in keeping them well groomed and they look stunning. they would NEVER let their facial hair look so sloppy and unkempt. and even if you're mostly bald, you still need to groom what's left. Is he not well? is personal hygiene not a thing for retired BYU profs?

He couldn't have a beard as a BYU prof and so he is living it up now .... good for him.

I find myself agreeing with exiled here

I cannot but think that how to ware a beard is a matter of personal taste. I do not see much point in a lot of trimming and fussing with a beard. I suppose it might use a cut from time to time. Or not.

[drumdude]

I expect Dan will make a blog post noting our jokes about the beard and ignoring the larger point that his conference was full of quacks.

[hauslern]

If Petersen accepts many people have near NDE than how does one expain say Hindus and Buddists who claim to have seen relatives don't ask why have these folks not gone on to their next reincanation.? Buddists and Hindus have a different concept of where our final destinantion is. If science proves we originated in Africa. What then. Do neanderthals have souls? My brothers Lutheran pastor did a dna search and neanderthal was in the mixture.

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics

I shared Physicsguy comments with Murphy and her response was "Not surprising, except for his confusion of embodied intelligence with AI. I know you wouldn't have had time to read it but the speaker I responded to at Chautauqua Bruce Greyson, MD--titled After has some amazing stuff in it.

https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/india ... es-hindus/

[Dr. Shades]

My brothers Lutheran pastor did a dna search and neanderthal was in the mixture.

NEWSFLASH: It's not just your brother's Lutheran pastor. Every human being alive who isn't black African has Neanderthal DNA in the mixture. Up to 2% for Asians and up to 4% for Europeans.

[Physics Guy]

From a quick Google search it seems that Hindu beliefs include a period of afterlife between earthly incarnations, which could be a reward or a purgatorial punishment, depending on how the previous life went. So it’s not so surprising that Hindu NDEs would sometimes include meetings with dead relatives: you don’t necessarily go on to your next incarnation right away.

The article from Sanskritimagazine seems a bit sketchy. At the end it cites some surveys of a few dozen cases, but it mainly recounts a handful of anecdotes, in one of which the subject himself said that he was simply asleep and had a dream. Another subject had his experience at age 10 in 1931, and was unconscious and presumed dead for three days. The other anecdotes do not mention dates. A common theme in the anecdotes is bureaucratic error: the “revived” people report encountering authorities who recognize that the wrong person has died because they had been confused with a nearby person who had the same name.

[IHAQ]

This was the topic Dan spoke about in relation to Near Death Experiences “Has Modern Physics Proven Out-of-Body Experiences Impossible?”. But that’s a cheap way to go. For instance, one could do a talk on “Has Modern Physics Proven Magic Impossible?”. The problem with Out-Of-Body Experiences being used to support the argument for an after life, is that they can be derived from easily explained circumstances.

Induced OBEs[edit]
Chemical[edit]
OBEs can be induced by hallucinogens (particularly dissociatives) such as psilocybin, ketamine, DMT, MDA, and LSD.[19][20][21][22]
Mental induction[edit]
Falling asleep physically without losing awareness. The "Mind Awake, Body Asleep" state is widely suggested as a cause of OBEs, voluntary and otherwise.[23] Thomas Edison used this state to tackle problems while working on his inventions. He would rest a silver dollar on his head while sitting with a metal bucket in a chair. As he drifted off, the coin would noisily fall into the bucket, restoring some of his alertness.[24] OBE pioneer Sylvan Muldoon more simply used a forearm held perpendicular in bed as the falling object.[25] Salvador Dalí was said to use a similar "paranoiac-critical" method to gain odd visions which inspired his paintings. Deliberately teetering between awake and asleep states is known to cause spontaneous trance episodes at the onset of sleep which are ultimately helpful when attempting to induce an OBE.[26][27][28] By moving deeper and deeper into relaxation, one eventually encounters a "slipping" feeling if the mind is still alert. This slipping is reported to feel like leaving the physical body. Some consider progressive muscle relaxation as an active form of sensory deprivation.
Deep trance, meditation and visualization. The types of visualizations vary; some common analogies include climbing a rope to "pull out" of one's body, floating out of one's body, getting shot out of a cannon, and other similar approaches. This technique is considered hard to use for people who cannot properly relax. One example of such a technique is the popular Golden Dawn "Body of Light" Technique.[29]
Mechanical induction[edit]
Brainwave synchronization via audio/visual stimulation. Binaural beats can be used to induce specific brainwave frequencies,[30] notably those predominant in various mind awake/body asleep states. Binaural induction of a "body asleep" 4 Hertz brainwave frequency was observed as effective by the Monroe Institute,[31] and some authors consider binaural beats to be significantly supportive of OBE initiation when used in conjunction with other techniques.[32][33] Simultaneous introduction of "mind awake" beta frequencies (detectable in the brains of normal, relaxed awakened individuals) was also observed as constructive. Another popular technology uses sinusoidal wave pulses to achieve similar results, and the drumming accompanying Native American religious ceremonies is also believed to have heightened receptivity to "other worlds" through brainwave entrainment mechanisms.[34]
Direct stimulation of the vestibular cortex.[35]
Electrical stimulation of the brain, particularly the temporoparietal junction (see Blanke study below).
Sensory deprivation. This approach aims to induce intense disorientation by removal of space and time references. Flotation tanks or pink noise played through headphones are often employed for this purpose.[36]
Sensory overload, the opposite of sensory deprivation. The subject can for instance be rocked for a long time in a specially designed cradle, or submitted to light forms of torture, to cause the brain to shut itself off from all sensory input. Both conditions tend to cause confusion and this disorientation often permits the subject to experience vivid, ethereal out-of-body experiences.[37]
Strong g-forces that causes blood to drain from parts of the brain, as experienced for example in high-performance aircraft or high-G training for pilots and astronauts.[38]
An apparatus that uses a head-mounted display and a touch that confuses the sense of proprioception (and which can also create the sensation of additional limbs).[39]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience

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?

The Wikipedia article does contain some useful insight into the people involved and attracted to IANDS though…

In case studies fantasy proneness has been shown to be higher among OBErs than those who have not had an OBE.[66] The data has shown a link between the OBE experience in some cases to fantasy prone personality (FPP).[67] In a case study involving 167 participants the findings revealed that those who claimed to have experienced the OBE were "more fantasy prone, higher in their belief in the paranormal and displayed greater somatoform dissociation."[68] Research from studies has also suggested that OBEs are related to cognitive-perceptual schizotypy.[69]

Might Dan have a fantasy prone personality?

[Moksha]

Dr. Peterson will be the hit of the NDE Conference, especially if he brings his dowsing rod to the podium. By the way, he looks very distinguished with a full beard and I feel confident he appreciates not having to shave every day.

[Moksha]

Every human being alive who isn't black African has Neanderthal DNA in the mixture. Up to 2% for Asians and up to 4% for Europeans.

Wonder if the percentage is even higher for guys with a lot of hair on their backs?

[Physics Guy]

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.)