Have you read it? It's written by a scientist. I mean, a real one! Good enough to be a nuclear physicist for NASAQuote:
Originally Posted by ludr
I can see why you wouldn't use it in a research paper though, but still wondering if you've read it
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Have you read it? It's written by a scientist. I mean, a real one! Good enough to be a nuclear physicist for NASAQuote:
Originally Posted by ludr
I can see why you wouldn't use it in a research paper though, but still wondering if you've read it
I didnt mean that his book is wrong or anything. It is just not appropriate to cite such a book in a research paper.
Edit: what is a nuclear physicist doing in psychophysiology? haha! not to offend him, but most books written by PhDs of completely different subjects (like a psychology PhD writing about archeology) usually have some unintentional errors.
If you're going to write a research paper on OBEs, then you need to stay up to date with the most recent research into consciousness. The story is much bigger then you realize based on your posts here.
OBEs do not happen in the real time. Nor do they happen in dreams. They happen in the merge of the two, blurring the lines of what we conventionally call reality. You will have a hard time writing about OBEs if you are set in stone that subjective reality is not reality.
In an OBE people not only witness real time events that were later confirmed to be true, they also witness thoughts and emotions. Let's say you float into the kitchen and your mom is cooking. You wake up and eagerly rush to the kitchen only to find your mom isn't there and theres no food. But she was thinking of cooking and that was the food she was thinking of.
The problems presented with studying the OBE can't be addressed without first addressing our problem with defining reality. If you want to strictly stick to physical objects existing objectively outside of your subjective awareness, then OBEs aren't real. Unfortunately for you, everything you experience you experience subjectively. By that logic, you've never experienced objective reality.
In a NDE the patient floated around the hospital and found a door that led to a beautiful garden. When she woke up from the surgery she wanted to go to that garden. But because of renovations, the garden was actually gone. OBE researches believe that this women, like many others, experienced the garden because the employees remember the garden and had fond thoughts of it.
Do you understand the issue I'm getting at? When people find out that OBEs aren't 100% accurate to waking reality they automatically say the OBE can't be real. But what makes the garden the patient saw any less real? What makes the thoughts of cooking less real?
Or rather, what makes thoughts not real? They are real aren't they? They're not physical objects, but they have physical properties right? Thoughts are electrical energy buzzing around your neurons carrying information, not unlike a digital computer. This is important to understand that our thoughts have a physical component to them that can be witnessed with todays technology. Our thoughts have different measurable frequencies. There is some great research going on right now *in other words its not done* showing that these thoughts of ours don't just stay stuck in our brains. They potentially broadcast like radio waves *some companies are trying to develop technology that interfaces our thoughts like a wireless device and they are having positive results*. Some have argued they aren't like radio waves, they are like light waves.
Once scientists started to imagine that thoughts could be like radio waves, they asked, where are these broadcasted thoughts now? Are they in the environment, and do we interact with the thoughts and emotions of others environmentally? This is where the research has taken us to now. "For instance, the earth and the ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz, and some of the large resonances occurring in the earth’s fields are in the same frequency range as those of the human heart and brain." This group of scientists now believe that the human brain and heart actually literally and physically influence the earth's electromagnetic field, and vice versa.
This is important research because for the human being our own electromagnetic field isnt just an electromagnetic field, its intimately tied to our thoughts and emotions.
Once upon a time the language of OBE research was "humans have a soul that can wander around at night". The language has completely changed thanks to research into consciousness and how our consciousness potentially influences the environment and vice versa. Now the language of OBE research is: human thought is electromagnetic energy carrying information operating at different frequencies. The human brain can pick up these different frequencies of thought like a radio player and experience them as senses. Bad vibes, good vibes are sensational reactions to the information on the field. During an OBE the individual's subconscious relays this global consciousness information as a dream like experience.
This makes the OBE a unique subjective experience of the field. It is however different than a dream, which is a personal reality. Because the field is not a personal reality, but a collective reality of all subconscious minds.
That's why I said OBE research is difficult if we define reality as physical objects having nothing to do with the human mind.
If OBEs are in the "field" then they are not AP. Additionally, there is no scientific evidence for the field you described. I do not want such convoluted explanations for failed OBEs. If you insist, I might want to do an experiment with a watcher constantly thinking of an action to test for the presence of broadcast of thoughts.
By the way, if there IS such a field, why is there so much hubbub about enhanced interrogation techniques in the Army? Why don't hire an OBE-er and dig in to the terrorists' minds instead of using the controversial methods?
Science is not a collection of theories and hypotheses. Scientists do not "imagine" a field or "formulate" an equation without statistically significant experimental evidence. In the case of OBEs, it would be either looking at the random number generator for the traditional explanation or looking into one's mind for your explanation. We know that electric fields exist because 1. they have definite effects 2. they can be measured 3. they are predicted by the laws of electromagnetism. If the thought field exists, it should at least have PREDICTABLE effects on Astral Projectors, not a correct mind-reading every year or two.
I am not trying to bash OBE-ers, I'm just wanting to have proof for everything. The law of burdens of proof easily gives the following:
If a perception cannot be proven to have a stimulus, assume it to be a hallucination or dream. This is common sense.
Not against your AP-ing though. I know it can be very fun! Our brains have a very detailed cache of the world we have explored.
Edit: your post has the following errors:
1. The garden the patient saw and the thought of cooking are not real - they are the subconscious and reality coinciding. If you make the patient go through and have OBEs over and over again and observe a constantly changing environment, most of the trials will get negative results.
2. Where is the research that is going on right now? Might you give me a heads-up on a research paper or a research process description?
3. "Some have argued they aren't like radio waves, they are like light waves." This is pure fakery. Radio waves are a type of light wave.
4. "the earth and the ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz" this is of course true and known throughout the history of science. However this does not in ANY WAY imply that the same thing holds true for the human brain. Let me put it this way: power lines generate a symphony of frequencies from 30 Hz to up to 6000 Hz. Does this imply that two freezers are able to wirelessly connect to each other using POWER LINE FREQUENCIES???
5. The earth's electromagnetic field cannot be manipulated unless you mess up with Earth's core. The only way your hypothesis can work is if brains themselves give off high-amplitude signals, which definitely do not exist (or else they would be easily measured long before).
6. Frequency bands get cluttered. That is a fact. For example if there are 1000 brains around you each transmitting different thought on the same carrier wave of 1000 Hz, your brain's receiver will get confused. And this is assuming that brains ARE in fact little radio stations.
7. The frequency range from 0.01 Hz to 300 Hz translates into an enormous wavelength, which means that transmission requires EXTREMELY vast antennae on brains. Assuming that brains emit radio waves, the wavelength is 1,000,000 to 30,000,000,000 METERS long, which requires antennae about as big. Earth-sized brains, anyone?
No, but we have theories based on phenomenons. The Field is a pet name really. Not everyone studying the Field calls it that, others have called it the matrix, others think its actually a part of unifying theory of everything.Quote:
Originally Posted by ludr
I have no idea why? But I have heard a lot of conspiracy theories *I didnt want to get into these* that someone somewhere already has some sort of technology that can interface the field and locate enemy thoughts. This conspiracy idea is coming from the alien conspiracy field. Its a doozy.Quote:
By the way, if there IS such a field, why is there so much hubbub about enhanced interrogation techniques in the Army? Why don't hire an OBE-er and dig in to the terrorists' minds instead of using the controversial methods?
You're right, thats why I said its not "done". Im not saying this is science written in stone. However, before you can even study if the field is real you first have to formulate a theory around it as to know what it is you are looking for and what kind of phenomenon the field would generate.Quote:
Science is not a collection of theories and hypotheses. Scientists do not "imagine" a field or "formulate" an equation without statistically significant experimental evidence.
I don't think a random number generator would work for OBE research. Nor did I say the OBEr can read minds. If the field is real and this is what the OBEr is experiencing, then thoughts manifest into the landscape, they would still have to figure out whose thoughts they are looking at. It could be their own.Quote:
In the case of OBEs, it would be either looking at the random number generator for the traditional explanation or looking into one's mind for your explanation.
Yes and no!Quote:
We know that electric fields exist because 1. they have definite effects 2. they can be measured 3. they are predicted by the laws of electromagnetism. If the thought field exists, it should at least have PREDICTABLE effects on Astral Projectors, not a correct mind-reading every year or two.
Dreams and hallucinations give us a slight problem. How the brain experiences the dream and the hallucination is virtually the same way we experience waking reality. When someone hallucinates the areas in the brain for vision or hearing might light up. This is why we have sleep paralysis else we would act out on what we see and hear in the dream. But since we don't see or hear what they are seeing and hearing we just call the experience a hallucination/dream. Science actually can't draw a clear line of what is and what is not real.Quote:
If a perception cannot be proven to have a stimulus, assume it to be a hallucination or dream. This is common sense.
Scientists (human beings) do. "I dont see what your brain is seeing so it must be a hallucination!"
The subconscious is real.Quote:
The garden the patient saw and the thought of cooking are not real - they are the subconscious and reality coinciding.
Yes, the landscape would be constantly changing. But so is ours. Change is the only constant you can count on these days. However, good news, old habits die hard and so do memories. If we take the theory of the field and OBEs seriously, then a place with a lot of memories will be the most stable.Quote:
If you make the patient go through and have OBEs over and over again and observe a constantly changing environment, most of the trials will get negative results.
There is the global coherence initiative and heart math, sister research projects. They are not studying OBEs, they are studying the Field and its effects on the human being. The research of heart math has discovered that the human heart produces an electromagnetic field far greater than the brain, and that this field directly correlates to emotional states of being. Through their research they believe the heart field of one person can directly influence the field of another, and that this field of influence can have global effects.Quote:
Where is the research that is going on right now? Might you give me a heads-up on a research paper or a research process description?
earth's magnetic field, ionosphere, Global Coherence Initiative Monitoring System
The websites are big and clunky but they do post research papers.
Its my naive understanding that radio waves and light waves are both a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so I guess you're right. I don't remember what the argument was about but it was about where in the spectrum does human consciousness fall.Quote:
"Some have argued they aren't like radio waves, they are like light waves." This is pure fakery. Radio waves are a type of light wave.
Freezers don't have a human brain! Part of this research is running on the theory that that human brain or heart can pick up these frequencies, and that we do so subconsciously - not consciously.Quote:
"the earth and the ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz" this is of course true and known throughout the history of science. However this does not in ANY WAY imply that the same thing holds true for the human brain. Let me put it this way: power lines generate a symphony of frequencies from 30 Hz to up to 6000 Hz. Does this imply that two freezers are able to wirelessly connect to each other using POWER LINE FREQUENCIES???
In the global coherence project, its the heart that is giving off the most powerful frequencies. And yes it is a hypothesis riding on the fact that there are billions of us. Numbers count for something right?Quote:
The earth's electromagnetic field cannot be manipulated unless you mess up with Earth's core. The only way your hypothesis can work is if brains themselves give off high-amplitude signals, which definitely do not exist (or else they would be easily measured long before).
It's been said the subconscious processes one million times more information per second than our feeble little conscious mind. Since we are not conscious of our subconscious, we don't really know whats going in and out! Dreams are a testimony to the incredible feat of the subconscious mind. I would not be surprised if the subconscious is capable of making sense of all that clutter, its already doing it from all the stimulus we get.Quote:
Frequency bands get cluttered. That is a fact. For example if there are 1000 brains around you each transmitting different thought on the same carrier wave of 1000 Hz, your brain's receiver will get confused. And this is assuming that brains ARE in fact little radio stations.
I'll let the researches postulate how it would work!Quote:
Assuming that brains emit radio waves, the wavelength is 1,000,000 to 30,000,000,000 METERS long, which requires antennae about as big. Earth-sized brains, anyone?
Research is based on existing ideas, not some new things pulled out of the air. For example if I'm going to research the orbits of a teapot around Earth, I should start from Kepler's laws - the speed of the teapots, the parameters of the orbits, everything. If I discover that the teapot does not obey Kepler's laws with respect to Earth, then I should try to make the orbit fit one around the sun. If in that case it does, I should conclude that the teapot orbits the Sun, not the Earth. However, if I re-invent the geocentric theory and throw Kepler's laws away just to rationalize that the teapot is orbiting Earth and not the Sun, I should be thrown away from the scientific community or anything.
Those people are reinventing lots of stuff. For example, that electromagnetism on the order of 0.01 Hz to 300 Hz are extremely low-energy and require open spaces hundreds of kilometers wide to propagate at all. Whether the waves come from the heart or the brain doesn't matter - they just won't propagate properly. You are purposefully restricting the application of my post. If I need an Earth-sized brain to emit 0.01 Hz brain radio, I should as a matter of course need an Earth-sized heart to emit 0.01 Hz heart radio. Additionally, the "research" papers on the websites you gave me are not based on rigorous experiments. We should be testing whether OBEers can actually detect the thoughts of other people, not straining our (Earth-sized?) brains to try to formulate a mechanism for such a hypothetical thing. We shouldn't be thinking BY WHAT MEANS, but WHETHER OR NOT. After we check out whether or not OBEers can go into thought planes, we can then try to formulate mechanisms.
The reason why nobody has tried to write a research paper On the Mechanism of the Locomotion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is because nobody has proved that the F.S.M actually exists.
Edit: another thing on the subconscious thingy. The subconscious as we know it is the low level libraries of the brain. For example, you don't need to consciously think about every single ripple and every single grain of sand in order to imagine (or dream about) a beach. This is because your conscious tells your subconscious to imagine a beach, and it returns lots of artificial detail. This however does not in anyway mean that the subconscious is faster or more efficient than the conscious. Our subconscious uses procedural generation. This method enables us to generate very detailed stuff in our imagination without doing a lot of computation. For an analogue in computers go get SpaceWay Space Flight Simulator - it only takes a few MB of space, however it "imagines" an infinitely large universe with infinite galaxies with lots of stars in them, each of them with unique planets. This is similar to our subconscious. However, our subconscious is only PART of the brains processes and CANNOT do information I/O or arbitrary computation/thinking by itself. This means that it doesn't make sense to have our subconscious "know" something or "communicate" something. Yes, our subconscious may help by generating some patterns with procedural generation, but the part doing the talking, dreaming, or thinking itself is the CONSCIOUS.
One thing I find funny with mankind- scientists specifically, is that they assume once they title something a LAW it is immutable. Or that they have "discovered" the actual nature of the universe, because they title something a LAW.
You should look into biophotonic communication in the human body. You would probably be interested. And the human brain has been extensively been recorded emitting ELF waves with a SQUID. And other types of electromagnetic waves as well.
Consciousness hasn't been measured by a scientific instrument, just the indirect effects of consciousness upon reality.
Out of body experiences are very, very real, and are not lucid dreams in the least bit. Once you experience them, you will understand this on a very intimate level. Not once in my experiences of WILDS( of which I have induced 50 lucid dreams intentionally) have I accidentally OBEd. When I did OBE, the process was completely different, and involved more of my body. Lucid dreams feel more like an opening of the mind, right above the eyebrows, and in, pointed 45 degrees upwards, and you feel as if you step into that opened space. OBEs are much different, refer to others accounts of them, because I have had very very few.
Radio waves and light waves are not the same thing. Radio waves are of a lower frequency, and just because they are in the same "spectrum" does not allow you to call them the same thing at all, they have much much different effects upon reality, and this demonstrates your ignorance of the subject.
Assume, and you make an ASS out of U and ME. If a perception cannot be proven to have a stimulus, upgrade your measuring equipment. All perceptions have a stimulus, whether internally provided, or externally provided. Idiot. What you meant to say was "If a perception cannot be proven to have a stimulus that comes from external, physical reality, then conclude it as a hallucination or a dream, or something we have no current knowledge of. This is a logical, and fair conclusion."Quote:
If a perception cannot be proven to have a stimulus, assume it to be a hallucination or dream. This is common sense.
Bioeletromagnetic resonance patterns do not operate the same way as artificial resonance induced by mechanical appliances, and they manipulate the propagation of electromagnetic waves differently than mechanical appliances. Again, I suggest you read into biophotonic communication, quantum field resonance, and also understand nuclear magnetic resonance, with reference to Cooper bonded electrons, and the way they bond through any distance and affect each other simultaneously, then follow that line of thought to how this works in biological organisms.
The teapot in your assertion is not obeying Keplers Laws, it is obeying all the laws of the Universe at once, and could give a damn about Keplers Laws. We apply Keplers Laws to the teapot to calculate what the teapot is doing, what it did, and what it will be doing.
I can't wait till humanity grows out of their egocentric viewpoint, that nature has to wait for them to discover something to use it properly. This perception of mine is brought up by the stimulus of assholes like you ludr that think they know everything about everything because they have read a few papers about it, and have experienced a couple experiences. Do us all a favor. Keep the article to yourself until you MASTER Astral Projection and Out of Body experiences. You are just like those scientists back in the 70s, completely knowing that they didn't have the clue about what the color of dinosaurs were, and yet suggested to artists what color to draw them, leading an inaccurate view of reality. Until you know every little detail about a subject, shut your trap, or write in private journals, lest you paint an inaccurate picture of the world for my children, who will be reading articles such as yours. Thank you.
Moto
No. I am not going to say that any law is immutable. However we should NOT be formulating NEW ones when there is no evidence against the old one. The only reason why Aristotle's theories got overthrown is because the new theories have evidence on their side and the old ones having evidence against their side.
Your assertions are still concerning whether the mechanism of APs exist. I want some evidence that APers actually enter an objective reality that is not created by the APer's mind. I am not suggesting that OBEs FEEL similar to dreams. I've had OBEs and they feel VERY VERY different from ordinary LDs. That is a fact. However I have yet encountered anything statistically significant that suggests that I was in fact entering an astral plane instead of simply the world of my subconscious.
If you place the astral plane in "subjective reality" and that such a reality is unpredictable, you are just being stupidly defensive. However, based on most APers' descriptions of their OBEs I can conclude that they truly believe that they have entered a plane that is at least indistinguishably similar to the real world - otherwise the stories about seeing unknown objects that exist wouldn't make sense. Therefore, my random number generator test will still hold water.
I can say I master AP and OBEs. I can do them pretty much whenever I want when I WILD by WILDing in a different way, so to speak.
I am not trying to defend anything or hold the "status quo". I welcome ALL new theories, as long as they have more evidence than the existing ones. As there is no "mainstream theory" that has tons of evidence to explain OBEs and APs, I am welcome to any theory that has ANY statistically significant evidence. Any theory. I am much more open minded than you blindly conceive.
Hey :)
After "That"s tip to read My Big TOE (Tom Campell) I got into the material a bit, and must say it is interesting, though not as scientific as he tries to make it look.
In any case, in case you have read it or watched some of the youtube videos, I would like to hear what your (ludr) opinion of his approach is?
I personally dont entirely agree with how he develops his theory from the idea that there was a larger consciousness system that is trying to lower its level entropy. and uses "us" (i.e. smaller units of consciousness) to do so. It sounds like an ok model (thats all it can be), but there are too many implied assumptions.. plus the logic he uses to "derive" his theory has flaws... anyway
What caught my special attention however was how he extends the implications of the double slit experiument ((light) wave-particle dualism) to "(physical) reality" (and beyond?).
For those less familiar with that experiment, here is my attempt to summarize it in two sentences: Scientists sent individual photons (light) through a wall with two slits, in one isntance measuring which slit the photon passed through, the other time not doing so. When not measuring, the light behaved wave-like, specificially it and was interferring with itself so to speak, resulting in a interference pattern; when it was measured, the light passed through one of the slits and appeared where you would expect it to (straight line from where it came).
Now I am not 100% on top of this experiment, but the theory that Campell follows says that until the measurement is made, the light only exists as a probability, and the measurement collapses this probability wave function into one value if you will.
He then goes on to expand this idea onto reality as a whole, saying that everything that is not perceived (=measured) by a (conscious) sentient being only exists as probability.
To illustrate this he uses the famous question: If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there, does it make a sound? My variation of that would be: "..does it still fall?" According to his theory this question is illogical, as the tree does not exists independently, but rather only as a probability (much like the light in the double slit exp., or the exact position of an electron for that matter).
That means that only once someone comes back into the forest and sees the tree in question, the function for the probability of the tree still standing (or lying on the ground) is collapsed.
Now if that is true, your random number generator experiment could be bound to fail. Apart from the possibility that AP/OOBEs are just augmented dreams, this could be because:
(a) your room does only exist as a probability when you are asleep (and no one else is in the room), so does the RNG, and the result (= the number) is only "decided" once when you perceive it when you are awake again
(b) "perception" in these states could collapse the probabilistic functions differently
Anyway, thats what I thought about just now.. somehow it all reminds me of Schrödingers Cat ^^
In essence this is probably more of a philosophical question than pure science.. In any case I wish you all the best with your research
If you have studied Campells ideas let me know what you think of it :)
What if there is someone else in the room?
Additionally, I am not trying to use OBEs to observe a dead cat. Some rather illogical experimenters have tried to observe unobserved things like actually doing a Schrödinger's Cat-type experiment and going into the box in an OBE. That is bound not to work.
His theory is quite correct, though by no means new. However this has no implications on things like random number generators since the generator:
1. Is actually deterministic. The number is a complex function of the milliseconds since midnight. However the changing rate is so fast it is practically impossible to predict.
2. Is observed constantly by the computer. The observer does not need to be a conscious entity - it only has to receive information that can be retrieved.
3. Is not isolated. Anyone can go in while the OBEer is asleep and look at the thing.
However there is a wrong thing about his theory - the unobserved tree's fall is not a probability; it is a meaninglessness. :D