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Curious!
If you just can’t give yourself a break, psychedelics might hold the answer.
MDMA can help people reduce their self-critical impulses and instead help them to treat themselves with more compassion, new research has discovered.
MDMA, better known by its street names Ecstasy or Molly, is a synthetic chemical that produces psychedelic effects as well as energy, euphoria and emotional warmth in people who consume it.
The study, conducted by the University College London and published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, tracked people’s reactions to “self-threatening scenarios” before and after MDMA consumption, and also after people were shown “compassionate imagery.”
The researchers noted that the pro-social effects of MDMA were similar to those associated with Eastern spiritual practices like meditation.
Given that comparison, they wondered if the psychedelic could also help with internal views as well.
“We propose that one potential mechanism of action of MDMA in psychotherapy is through enhancing effects on intrapersonal attitudes (i.e. pro-social attitudes towards the self),” the study states. “Compassionate imagery and ecstasy produced similar sociotropic effects, as well as increases in self-compassion and reductions in self-criticism.”
Researchers gathered 20 people who already had experience taking ecstasy and gave them guided exercises to increase their self-compassion.
The experiment worked the best on people who normally had high attachment-avoidance aspects to their personality, with the MDMA appearing to allow them to embrace compassionate feelings toward themselves while gaining a better understanding of negative emotions like fear and self-hate.
Self-criticism can be a component of many more serious mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders and personality disorders, so the findings have the potential to be groundbreaking.
“Finding effective ways of dealing with self-criticism therefore remains a priority for psychiatry and clinical psychology,” the study states. “Various lines of research support the use of self-compassion-enhancing strategies to overcome the effects of self-criticism. Yet, for some individuals the initial experience of self-compassion, even in therapeutic settings, can be challenging.”
The dosage and purity of the MDMA weren’t controlled in this experiment, so the scientists suggest further research in a more formal study to corroborate and refine the results.
Other recent studies have shown that MDMA can also be useful in treating PTSD,working through relationship problems and treating anxiety in adults with autism.
MDMA was used successfully in various forms of psychotherapy before the federal government banned the substance in 1985 after it gained a reputation as a party drug.
However, the non-profit psychedelic research center MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies) is hoping that these and other studies will help convince the government to approve MDMA as a legal medication by 2021.
“Much like marijuana, the therapeutic benefits of MDMA have long been known,” Betty Aldworth, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, said to Medical Daily.
“It’s our hope that support for therapeutic use of MDMA will similarly grow, particularly as the promise of MDMA-assisted therapy becomes more clear for conditions like PTSD and anxiety.”
@Dragon ( thought you might be interested!)
Study: MDMA Can Help Silence Self-Criticism
If you just can’t give yourself a break, psychedelics might hold the answer.
MDMA can help people reduce their self-critical impulses and instead help them to treat themselves with more compassion, new research has discovered.
MDMA, better known by its street names Ecstasy or Molly, is a synthetic chemical that produces psychedelic effects as well as energy, euphoria and emotional warmth in people who consume it.
The study, conducted by the University College London and published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, tracked people’s reactions to “self-threatening scenarios” before and after MDMA consumption, and also after people were shown “compassionate imagery.”
The researchers noted that the pro-social effects of MDMA were similar to those associated with Eastern spiritual practices like meditation.
Given that comparison, they wondered if the psychedelic could also help with internal views as well.
“We propose that one potential mechanism of action of MDMA in psychotherapy is through enhancing effects on intrapersonal attitudes (i.e. pro-social attitudes towards the self),” the study states. “Compassionate imagery and ecstasy produced similar sociotropic effects, as well as increases in self-compassion and reductions in self-criticism.”
Researchers gathered 20 people who already had experience taking ecstasy and gave them guided exercises to increase their self-compassion.
The experiment worked the best on people who normally had high attachment-avoidance aspects to their personality, with the MDMA appearing to allow them to embrace compassionate feelings toward themselves while gaining a better understanding of negative emotions like fear and self-hate.
Self-criticism can be a component of many more serious mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders and personality disorders, so the findings have the potential to be groundbreaking.
“Finding effective ways of dealing with self-criticism therefore remains a priority for psychiatry and clinical psychology,” the study states. “Various lines of research support the use of self-compassion-enhancing strategies to overcome the effects of self-criticism. Yet, for some individuals the initial experience of self-compassion, even in therapeutic settings, can be challenging.”
The dosage and purity of the MDMA weren’t controlled in this experiment, so the scientists suggest further research in a more formal study to corroborate and refine the results.
Other recent studies have shown that MDMA can also be useful in treating PTSD,working through relationship problems and treating anxiety in adults with autism.
MDMA was used successfully in various forms of psychotherapy before the federal government banned the substance in 1985 after it gained a reputation as a party drug.
However, the non-profit psychedelic research center MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies) is hoping that these and other studies will help convince the government to approve MDMA as a legal medication by 2021.
“Much like marijuana, the therapeutic benefits of MDMA have long been known,” Betty Aldworth, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, said to Medical Daily.
“It’s our hope that support for therapeutic use of MDMA will similarly grow, particularly as the promise of MDMA-assisted therapy becomes more clear for conditions like PTSD and anxiety.”
@Dragon ( thought you might be interested!)
Skarekrow
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FLUORESCENT FLORA
UNEXPLAINED REPORTS OF GLOWING, LIGHT-EMITTING FLOWERS
What a light-emitting orange-petalled flower might look like in the dark
UNEXPLAINED REPORTS OF GLOWING, LIGHT-EMITTING FLOWERS
What a light-emitting orange-petalled flower might look like in the dark
A still-unexplained yet little-known wildlife-related phenomenon is the extraordinary occurrence, discussed by several naturalists during the 19th Century, of sparks and flame-like flashes of light unexpectedly emitted by certain plants.
Those most commonly associated with this bizarre enigma are species such as marigolds and geraniums, which possess red, orange, or yellow flowers.
A beautiful yellow version of the common marigold Calendula officinalis
This circumstance was noticed on the 4th of August, 1842, at eight p.m., after a week of very dry warm weather; four persons observed the phaenomenon [sic]; by shading off the declining daylight, a gold-coloured lambent light appeared to play from petal to petal of the flower, so as to make a more or less interrupted corona round its disk.
It seemed as if this emanation grew less vivid as the light declined; it was not examined in darkness, which omission will be supplied on a future occasion.
It may be here added, in the view to facilitate any other observer who may give attention to this phaenomenon, that the double marigold is the best flower to experiment on, as the single flower "goeth to sleep with the sun," and has not the disk exposed for investigation.
Can marigolds really emanate light?
In 1882, Scientific American published a short note on this same subject by Louis Crie:
In living vegetables emissions of light have been observed in a dozen phaenogamous plants and in some fifteen cryptogamous ones.
The phosphorescence of the flowers of Pyrethrum[Chrysanthemum] inodorum, Polyanthes [sic -Polianthes] (tuberose), and the Pandani has been known for a long time.
Haggren and Crome were the first to discover such luminous emanations from the Indian cross and marigold, and a few years ago I myself was permitted to observe, during a summer storm, a phosphorescent light emitted from the flowers of a nasturtium (Tropoeolum [sic -Tropaeolum] majus) cultivated in a garden at Sarthe.
Several reports concerning light-emitting flowers appeared during the 1880s in the English periodical Knowledge.
These revealed that one early eyewitness had been none other than the daughter of Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern botanical and zoological classification, who witnessed this phenomenon while gazing at some garden flowers one summer twilight in 1762.
To misquote Gary Numan, are flowers electric??
A later eyewitness, a Mr S. Ingham, reported his sighting in Knowledge in 1883:
A short time ago, I was picking out some annuals on a flower-bed, on which some geraniums were already planted, when I was surprised to see flashes of light coming from a truss of geranium flowers.
At first I thought it was imagination, but my wife and a friend who were present also saw them.
Time was about 9 p.m., and the atmosphere clear.
There were other geraniums of a different colour on the same bed, but there was no effect on them.
The particular geranium was a Tom Thumb.
Is this at all common?
I have never seen or read of it before.
A field of light-emitting sunflowers would be a spectacular if inexplicable sight, and yet such flowers have indeed been claimed to possess this incredible ability
To the same source - electricity - we probably owe the light which, at certain seasons, and at certain times of the day, issues from a number of yellow or orange-coloured flowers, such as the marigold, the sunflower, and the orange-lily...similar phenomena have been witnessed by several naturalists.
Flashes, more or less brilliant, have been seen to dart in rapid succession from the same flower.
At other times the tiny flame-jets have followed one another at intervals of several minutes.
The sunflower Helianthus annuus is so bright that it almost appears to radiate light even under normal circumstances
A less radical alternative, perhaps, is that this curious optical effect may be caused by the reflection of sunlight by petals of certain colours acting as miniature mirrors (thus explaining why the effect lessens as daylight declines).
Whatever the answer, however, it is certainly true today that light-emitting flowers have become one of the forgotten phenomena of botany, ignored - if indeed even known about - by contemporary researchers.
Yet they were once known, and witnessed, by naturalists.
Cultivated version of the orange lily Lilium bulbiferum, another species alleged to emit flashes of light
After all, as succinctly pointed out by the late, much-missed fortean writer Mark Chorvinsky regarding this mystifying subject:
"There are a lot of marigolds and geraniums out there".
Skarekrow
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Dr. Julia Assante, Training Us To Talk With Spritis - Skeptiko #208
[video=youtube;h12Zc7q59E0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h12Zc7q59E0[/video]
Interview with author, scholar, and psychic medium Dr. Julia Assante challenges our fear of death.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Julia Assante author of, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death. During the interview Assante talks about the effects of technology on spirit communication.
[video=youtube;h12Zc7q59E0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h12Zc7q59E0[/video]
Interview with author, scholar, and psychic medium Dr. Julia Assante challenges our fear of death.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Julia Assante author of, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death. During the interview Assante talks about the effects of technology on spirit communication.
Skarekrow
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I know this one is a bit long…it’s a good one though.
Enjoy!
This essay was written in response to the call for essays by the Royal Institute of Philosophy for their yearly essay contest.
For the pleasure of readers, it is reproduced below.
Abstract
An assumption implicit in this question is that non-living objects probably don’t present a problem for materialism, because if that weren’t the case, we would be asking if materialism is a sound approach for all of science and not just the study of living forms.
In this essay I will argue that:
(1) the problem of materialism is not unique to living forms, but exists even for non-living things, and
(2) the problem originates not in materialism per se but from reductionism which reduces big things (or wholes) to small things (or parts).
Reduction has been practiced in all areas of science – physics, mathematics, and computing, apart from biology – and it makes all scientific theories either inconsistent or incomplete.
This is a fundamental issue and cannot be overcome, unless our approach to reduction is inverted: rather than reduce big things to small things, we must now reduce the small things to big things.
This new kind of reduction can be attained if both big and small were described as ideas: the big is now an abstract concept while the small is a contingent concept, and contingent concepts are produced from abstract concepts by adding information.
This leads us to a view of nature in which objects are also ideas – just more detailed than the abstractions in the mind; the abstract ideas precede the detailed ideas.
When the reduction is inverted, a new kind of materialism emerges which is free from its current problems.
This materialism presents a new theory of inanimate matter, not just living forms.
Introduction
There are broadly two kinds of materialism – theoretical and empirical.
The empirical materialist holds that if I can taste, touch, smell, see or hear something that lies outside my body, then that thing must be material.
The theoretical materialist holds that matter is independent objects with possessed properties, which exist even when observers don’t and these objects should therefore be described by observers in the same way as they exist independent of any observation.
It is important to make this distinction because empirical materialism may be true even though theoretical materialism may not.
For instance, we can observe a person’s brain and detect electrical activity that corresponds to their subjective reports of perception – such as the sight of redness.
This fact is indisputable.
What is disputable is whether the brain should be described in quite the same way as inanimate objects presently are.
This dispute is problematic because if we changed the description of the brain, then we would have to change the description of inanimate objects too.
Are there reasons in science why such a change would be warranted?
Objects and Collections
Science needs a change in its description of matter because it reduces collections to their parts, although in many situations this reduction is untenable.
My body is indeed built up of atoms, but the collection of these atoms also constitute an individual.
This individual has new properties – such as the ability to know the world and to own property – something that the parts of the individual’s body don’t seem to have.
If we reduced the individual to the parts, we must either show how the parts also have the same properties, or discard the new properties altogether.
Modern science is unable to reduce the properties associated with the individual to the parts within the individual.
So, we must discard them as illusions.
However, once you take away the idea of knowing and owning, then you cannot know science, and you cannot attribute any scientific theory to any particular individual.
Science – as an enterprise of individuals pursuing the truth of nature and creating theories that are then attributed to them as their creations – would itself collapse.
In everyday language, we treat object collections also as objects, although in science we don’t.
For instance, in everyday language, a ‘house’ is both a collection of parts, and an individual object.
In science the house is reducible to its parts, which are real, although the collection itself is not.
A collection draws a boundary around its parts, which is real in everyday language, but unreal in science.
Objects within this boundary are real in science because they are material and we can say that they exist even when the boundary does not exist.
However, the boundary is supposed to be merely our imagination, and hence it remains in our mind, not in reality.
This basic difference between everyday intuitions and science lies at the heart of the debate about material reduction: the whole is reducible to the parts because the boundary is not considered real.
Once you take out the reality of the boundary, macroscopic objects – and the concepts attached to them – also become unreal.
Collections become practically useful (and often essential methodological tools for doing science – which divide the world into smaller “systems”), but since the boundary is not a real physical entity in space-time, it has no theoretical role in science.
Living forms present a problem for materialism because there are some situations where we cannot ignore the existence of the boundary – in these situations we refer to the individual as a whole rather than simply a combination of parts.
If you have lost your hand or leg in an accident, you are not less of a person than you were before, even though you clearly have fewer molecules.
Similarly, if you committed a crime 10 years ago and all the molecules in the body have changed since then, you must still be punished for your crimes, because you are still the same person.
The problem whittles down to a simple question: Does the collection of parts in my body also constitutes an individual?
If there were no boundary around the molecules, then this individual would be an epiphenomenon and thus reducible to parts.
Therefore, for the idea of individuality to be scientifically meaningful, we would need a new theoretical construct in science – that of a boundary – which aggregates material objects.
This boundary would also be an object, although not quite a material particle.
Clearly, such objects would have to be described not by using a single type of thing – i.e. leptons and quarks – but also houses, teacups, and people.
The Reality of Collections
Can science theoretically work with the notion of a boundary?
For that matter, does science even need the notion of a boundary?
If yes, why?
A boundary is a space-time entity, because we will draw it in space-time, and therefore it can exist objectively.
However, we cannot perceive (i.e. see, taste, touch, smell, or hear) the boundary.
This is important because if the boundary were shown to be objective, then empirical materialism would be false: nature could comprise things that can exist objectively, although they cannot be sensed.
They can, however, be thought or imagined.
All science involves some imagination or thought but we don’t consider it real unless its existence has some observable effects.
In the absence of an effect, having the boundary would be indistinguishable from not having it.
We might as well then – by Occam’s razor – not have it.
So, can the existence of a boundary have empirical effects (which can be measured, and therefore seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelt), even though the boundary itself is not empirical (i.e. cannot be measured)?
Does the mental ability to divide the world into macroscopic systems have a real counterpart in the world?
Or is that division only a convenient imagination?
This question, I believe, is central to a non-reductive, but still material understanding of living forms.
In this understanding, there are physical entities – which can be called boundaries – which can have a theoretical role in science, although they cannot be measured by our senses.
However, if they have effects on our measurements, they can still be real – in the same way that we cannot see an electron although we can measure its effects.
We would still be within the confines of materialism, but outside the reductive – theoretical and empirical – view of materialism.
I will spend the next few sections in this essay arguing why boundaries are essential theoretical constructs for science – not just life sciences, but even physical sciences.
Only when we see a reason for inducting boundaries in science will we see a real scientific reason for describing these boundaries using everyday concepts (e.g., houses and teacups), which will then enable us to talk about a living being as a single individual, irreducible to parts although comprised of parts.
The Problem of Indeterminism
Physical sciences grew out of the description of individual object properties – mass, charge, energy, momentum, angular momentum, etc.
When you aggregate many such objects, the collection too has these physical properties in the aggregate.
However, if you begin in the collection, then there are many ways in which the properties of the aggregate can be divided into the parts and their properties.
As an illustration, if you begin with $1 notes and aggregate 100 of them, you have $100 in total.
But if you have $100 in the bank, you cannot be sure if that money exists in $1, $5, $10, or $50 denominations.
All these alternatives are equally possible, which leads to the problem of moneydistribution – we know the total but not the parts.
The same total money (and physical properties) can be divided into parts in many ways and even if you know the whole, you don’t necessarily know the parts.
Of course, if you knew the parts, you will necessarily know the whole.
Generally we suppose that matter is indeed individuated into parts, therefore this problem of matter distribution can never arise: even if we empirically do not know all the parts, there should never be a theoretical room for indeterminism if parts are real.
It would surprise many people if they realized that all fundamental physical theories of nature are (theoretically) indeterministic due to matter distributions, and this indeterminism has been empirically confirmed.
Note that if the theory was indeterministic and nature was deterministic, then the theory’s predictions would be false and we would reject the theory.
If, however, the theory is indeterministic and it is empirically confirmed, then the indeterminism is real.
Delving into all the forms of indeterminism in modern physical theories would take us out of the scope of the present essay, but I will illustrate the problem with the quantum slit experiment.
Quantum physics describes an ensemble of energy which can be divided into individual particles in many ways.
A quantum ensemble is not a priori individuated into parts: we can say that the whole is a priori real but the parts are not.
The experimenter can in fact choose to divide the ensemble into parts using a different number of slits.
With every such choice, a different set of particles are detected which correspond to a different eigenfunction basis.
The total wavefunction of the system can be divided into many eigenfunction bases, each of which represents a different set of material particles, quite like $100 can be divided into currency denominations in many ways.
None of these divisions is a priori real although the whole is.
The division remains a choice.
If the parts were real and the whole wasn’t, then no matter how we measured the system, we would always find the same parts.
If however the whole is real but the parts are created by the experimental setup, then we can always find a new way of dividing the whole into parts.
Now, it is impossible to claim that the whole is only an imagination of our minds.
It is more correct to say that the whole is real, but its parts are our imaginations, which can however be effected in an experiment.
The empirical confirmation of this theory establishes the theoretical reality of the whole, and the theoretical unreality (but the empirical reality) of the parts.
The parts are real at the point of observation, but they did not exist until the observation was made.
There are similar problems in General Relativity and Statistical Thermodynamics as well, but elaborating them would not add to the main point which is that if the parts were always real then the theories would not be indeterministic.
The indeterminism of the theories entails that the whole is more real than the parts, and our measurement choices interact with the measured system to overcome that uncertainty in state, putting the system into a definite state upon observation.
It is as if the whole system (prior to observation) paints a picture of reality in the outlines but not in the details.
The outline can be filled up with many different details, although not arbitrary details.
Our choices of observation act upon this pre-measurement outline to complete the picture upon observation, which makes us think that the world must be just as we observe it to be. However, you can also observe the world differently and describe it accordingly, and even that alternative description of nature would be empirically confirmed.
The fact that the theory permits infinitely many theoretical possible descriptions of the same system, and the fact that each of those descriptions can be empirically confirmed, entails a new conception about matter.
Modern science deals with the multiple possible alternatives in a peculiar manner: it hypothesizes (when possible) that nature has a probability of being all these alternatives, which randomly become real.
Your choice of the number of slits in the quantum slit experiment must, for instance, be due to the “collapse” of a wavefunction in your brain which is then viewed as a “choice”.
If you believe that nature is probability then it is not the real “stuff” that exists independently anyway.
The randomness further takes away the ability to predict what we will see upon observation.
Probabilities and randomness pervade modern science in more ways than I can summarize here.
This peculiar approach to scientific indeterminism juxtaposes our classical beliefs about nature as a priori individuated objects with the observed indeterminism: obviously we cannot reconcile the indeterminism with a priori reality, so let’s suppose that reality is the probabilities of all the possibilities.
Probabilities undermine both predictions and explanations.
Solving the Indeterminism Problem
There is, however, a better alternative.
In this alternative, we say that nature is not a priori individuated into parts.
Rather, it exists as wholes which are then divided into parts, quite like filling in the outline of a picture with details.
The outline limits the possible fill-in alternatives, but does not identify a specific alternative.
These alternatives become our choices.
The outline is no less real than its parts.
The outline is also an object, although not as detailed.
In fact, the outline can exist even when the details don’t, although the details cannot exist when the outline doesn’t (to define something as the detail of a picture, we need the outline of the picture first).
This kind of approach in science would reinstate the reality of the whole although it would not be as definite as the reality of the parts.
We would now need a new construct in science – that of a collection – which is then divided into parts based upon our choices.
To treat this collection as an object (prior to observation) we would have to treat it as a macroscopic object – like a house or a teacup.
Upon observation, we could also treat it as a collection of the observed parts.
The whole and the parts would now both be real; in fact, reality prior to observation would only be wholes and not their parts.
Each observer can find some new, but not totally random, fact about the same world.
The non-randomness indicates there is something objective.
The novelty in observation indicates that this reality is not defined as completely as we see it.
The scientific counterpart of this view is that it takes a more complex apparatus to measure the atoms than it takes to measure the shape of a macroscopic object.
From the standpoint of complexity, the outline is much simpler although the details inside of it are complex.
If we treated this complexity as information needed to define the object, the macroscopic object is a simple entity while the parts inside that object are the complexity that follows a measurement.
Towards an Informational View
This approach to science requires a fundamentally different view of nature in which the world is described not as things but as information.
The whole system represents abstract information while the parts in that system represent the contingent details.
We add details to abstract objects to create our reality, and as long as the world is abstract there can be many ways in which information can be added to transform abstractions into contingents.
When the world is already completely contingent, we can no longer add information into it, and that reality would always be described deterministically.
Determinism is therefore a logical limit to adding information into abstract objects.
If the universe were fully contingent, it would also be fully deterministic (as Newton envisioned in his mechanics).
But the world is not actually completely contingent; it exists as macroscopic objects which are abstract entities that can be made contingent by adding information during measurement and use.
This view does not deny the possibility of determinism, but presents it only as a limiting case of choice.
When all possible choices have been made, there is no more room for choices, and reality is deterministic.
Atoms are now units of information, and a measurement involves not just transfer of information from the measured system into the observer but also from the observer into the measured system via the choice of measurement apparatus.
A new causal model of interaction needs to be found which involves the interaction between units of information rather than between blobs of energy.
The laws of this causality would be quite different from how science currently describes objects.
If I have transferred some information – through the act of making a choice – then my brain is in a less certain state because it compensated the uncertainty in the external world. Similarly, when I consume some food or ideas, my body regains its original level of certainty.
We are still exchanging matter with the world, and my body and the external world are still material, although the matter is now described as units of information rather than physical things.
The units of information can be either abstract or contingent, although physical things can be only be contingent.
The uncertainty of my state is essentially that I exist in an abstract rather than contingent state, and that state can be made more (or less) certain by adding (or removing) information.
A Non-Reductive Theory of Information
The informational view is necessitated by problems of indeterminism, not merely by our desire to see ourselves differently (although such desires are not totally unfounded).
The mitigation of the problem is physical and material, although not in the same sense as in modern science: matter is now information such that even a collection (without the details) can be described as an abstract object.
This information would now be represented by forms in space-time; some of these forms we can see and touch, while others we cannot.
The presence of the latter would however be possible by adding information that transforms the abstractions into contingents.
This approach to information is non-reductive: it does not begin in the parts and does not construct the wholes from them.
It rather begins in abstract ideas and refines them through incremental additions of information.
As more information is added, the abstract becomes the contingent.
We perceive the contingent things by our senses, but the senses cannot perceive the abstractions.
Those who cannot understand the abstractions must rely on the abstractions being illustrated through examples and material instantiations of the ideas.
However, that doesn’t entail the non-reality of abstractions until the instantiation is found.
Abstractions too can be modeled realistically in a new science that recognizes the objective material existence of boundaries in space-time.
In a sense, we could now scientifically talk about mermaids and unicorns as ideas, although we cannot find physical instantiations of these ideas.
We cannot see, taste, touch, smell, or hear the mermaids or unicorns, although we can think about them.
Thought too is material and real now, even though it isn’t always translated into observable sensations.
The empirical confirmation of such a theory would involve firing photons at space-time.
Rather than transparently pass through space-time, these photons will transform into observable objects, if space-time had forms that we could not previously see.
Quite like CERN scientists smash particles to create measurements, it would now be possible to smash particles against space-time.
That smashing – and the fact that photons do not pass through space-time transparently – would show that sometimes space-time is not empty although we cannot model its fullness as a material particle.
The smashing photons fill the details within an abstraction: we could not see the abstraction before, but by smashing light into it, we have created its instantiation which we can see. In essence, we have taken the idea of a unicorn and created a unicorn out of it.
The ability to create things out of ideas would change science in ways we cannot imagine right now.
Biology Needs a Revolution in Physics
If living forms contradict materialism, that contradiction has to be seen in fundamental physics before its implications can be used to revolutionize our current understanding of life. The crux of that revolution is that ensembles and collections are more real than the particles science currently studies.
While these collections represent a material reality, it is not of the same kind as objects.
Quite specifically, both material objects and collections have to be described as information.
If matter is described as a priori real things, followed by the reduction of collections to their parts, then science will forever be incomplete.
The alternative is to reinstate the reality of boundaries in space-time but that creates a new problem – how should we model boundaries vs. objects?
If we have two kinds of things in nature, how do they interact causally?
That problem can only be solved by replacing the two types with only one – information.
Both objects and boundaries can be described as information, although neither can be reduced to one another physically.
Current physical theories fail because they try to reduce boundaries to objects, which cannot be achieved.
If, however, you discard the boundary itself, then you are not describing the system fully.
We cannot understand the reality of living forms unless we view the whole system as being something additional and logically prior to the constituent parts.
We will pragmatically treat the living being as a whole, but theoretically claim to reduce it to the parts.
We will assert the moral and political individuality of the person in a society but discredit that individuality as an epiphenomenon of the atoms within science.
People outside science will marvel at the achievements of science on one hand and feel the disillusionment of meaninglessness in life on the other.
Scientists themselves will struggle with the indeterminism pervading all physical theories.
The artists and creative people cannot say that art, literature and music created by humans are objective, but they must say that science – also created by humans – must be objective. The dual standards – in society and in science – result from the fact that science does not acknowledge that collections are real, while society treats them as individual entities.
Biological Information
My claim is that all structures in a living body are informational forms, and they are incomplete in themselves; this incompleteness is visible in the fact that all large biomolecules have numerous possible forms that are permitted by physical theories but not predicted by them.
The key problem for biological reduction is not that living beings are comprised of molecules, but how we predict which particular form a molecule takes and why.
The many forms of biomolecules are many equivalent material distributions of an ensemble; i.e., they are all allowed by current physical theories but not predicted by any physical theory.
Therefore, the theory remains indeterministic.
The myriad forms a biomolecule can take are like the various sentences we can form using a set of alphabets.
We can observe the different forms, but we cannot ascribe them functions quite like we can distinguish between various letter sequences but we cannot explain or predict their occurrence unless these letter sequences are viewed as expressions of meanings that existed even before the words did.
The occurrence of different forms is empirical and the inability to explain their occurrence is a shortfall in the theory.
The theory that can explain forms would have to recognize a property that can be associated with the whole form rather than with its parts.
It should now be obvious that there cannot be a consistent and complete theory that predicts and explains which forms are real (as opposed to all the possible forms) unless we take into account the whole.
This whole is now not an epiphenomenon of the parts; it is rather a fundamental construct.
Biologists can catalogue the mapping between forms and functions, but they can never predict which form (and function) will become real and never explain why a particular form is a specific function, unless an informational view of nature is adopted.
For instance, geneticists can catalogue the mapping between a gene and the biological traits, but why a specific gene represents a specific trait, and why a specific kind of gene is expressed or suppressed cannot be predicted.
We can find correlations between gene suppression or expression and the existence of epigenetic or paragenetic information, but why that even exists cannot be explained.
Without an informational view, biology will remain a cataloguing science, not an explanatory or predictive one.
We can enhance our catalogue through increasing experimentation, and that growth in data is called the advance in biology today.
It helps us improve our predictability, as we find more patterns in the data.
But those patterns are statistical correlations, not tied by any theory.
These patterns are quite like our measurement of letter frequencies in the English language.
We can say that the letter ‘x’ has 0.15% chance of occurrence while the letter ‘p’ has a 1.9% chance.
We can even measure the probabilities of letter succession, but they will be averages over large samples.
They will fail to predict the individual word sequence in a text and thereby understand what the text means.
The statistical approaches to biology may work on an average but will fail in many individual cases.
Essentially, biology will be an attempt to understand a book by measuring letter probabilities, unless we induct a real role for information even in the physical world.
The Doublethink in Biology
In talking about genes, biologists cut up the DNA into smaller units of code that represent different functional units.
What is the basis of this cutting up?
Why do we draw boundaries in a molecule when we don’t acknowledge the reality of boundaries in physics?
Aren’t there infinitely many ways to divide the DNA into individual genes?
Why is the DNA empirically partitioned in some ways when theoretically it can be divided in infinitely many ways?
And doesn’t that gap between theory and experiment represent a shortfall in our understanding of the genes themselves?
Science has always been practiced by reducing complex systems into simpler ones.
The simplicity helps us focus upon specific problems rather all of them at once.
However, in focusing on specific things, we use our minds and intellects to divide the world into parts, without acknowledging that there is a real material basis of that division in nature.
If we, for the moment, supposed that there is no physical basis for division in nature, then the scientific method will fall apart as we would have to now find an explanation for the entire universe at once.
If, on the other hand, we suppose that the division has a real basis in nature, then it must also have a real basis in science.
The pragmatic use of systems, collections, and ensembles in experiments combined with their rejection in scientific theories has created a double standard about everyday concepts in science: practically we need meters, clocks, kilograms – which are all macroscopic objects – but theoretically we believe that these entities are unreal.
We can no doubt reduce a kilogram to its constituent sub-atomic particles, but there are infinite ways to do it.
All these possible reductions are permitted by the theory but none of them is predicted or explained.
Biology and Language
There is a profound difference between how information is treated in biology today versus how it is viewed in everyday language.
The difference is that biology tries to correlate the occurrences of words and tries to interpret this correlation as causation, while everyday language supposes that in exchanging words we are transacting meanings and words are only methods of expressing meanings.
If the occurrence of the word “STOP” causes people to stop and the occurrence of the word “GO” causes them to walk, we can correlate the words with the actions, and we would not be wrong.
However, correlation is not causation.
The causal explanation underlying that correlation would be missing – we can describe the fact that “STOP” causes people to stop, but we cannot explain why that happens.
After all, the word “STOP” does not have enough mass, or momentum to stop a person, nor does the word “GO” have the force to make you walk.
Correlating the occurrences of the words “STOP” and “GO” with the actions that follow is not a true understanding of language.
In the same way, correlating the occurrences of genes and traits is not an explanation.
If, however, you don’t want to accept that fact, you will be faced with a new problem of indeterminism: sometimes the same word has a different meaning, and the effect of that word cannot be deterministically predicted.
Now, you would be faced with two choices:
(a) reject that there is any universal connection between the occurrences, which leads to a collapse of biology, or
(b) assert that there is a probabilityassociated with different occurrences.
This statistical view of science therefore arises because we reject a role for meanings in nature, because we cannot model nature completely based on current scientific concepts.
The problems of indeterminism that pervade physical theories are bound to recur over and over in biology.
They don’t render biology impossible.
But they make biology predictively incomplete.
The Failure of Reduction in Mathematics
Most scientists will not hesitate in accepting that current science is incomplete in many ways, although they will argue that this incompleteness is basically work in progress: we will eventually find a description that will be predictively complete because we have the method of reason and experimentation that allows us to keep progressing on the path of discovery.
I have no dispute with this claim, only with what is implied (but not explicitly stated) in it – namely that the new theories will be quite similar to the present theories.
For instance, the idea of collections as new kinds of fundamental entities in nature is also objective and empirical although quite different from concepts about matter in current science.
Let me illustrate that difference through an example in mathematics, which will also indicate the nature of the problem.
All physical theories employ numbers, and numbers depend on the notion of a set.
While a set can be succinctly stated as an idea, it cannot always be reduced to its members.
For instance, we can define the number 5 to be the collection of all possible sets that have 5 members.
E.g., 5 can be defined as the collection of sets such as the set of five shoes, five flowers, five horses, etc.
There are two issues in this definition:
(a) the total number of possible sets that can have 5 members is so large that it cannot be practically enumerated unless we knew all the objects in the universe and were able to count them, and
(b) to even count these objects, we would need to have the numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) defined prior!
The definition of number 5 now depends on 5 being already defined, and even with this definition we cannot know all its possible instances.
The point is that while we prodigiously use numbers in science we don’t truly have a foundation of number theory.
This foundation itself depends on recognizing that 5 is an idea and not something that can be reduced to the object members.
If we actually try to reduce the idea to its members, we end up in circular reasoning, which can then be used to create many logical contradictions – including, but not limited to, the infamous Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem.
Methodological reductionism pervades not just physical theories, but also mathematics.
When we try to reduce the set or collection to its parts, we can either create contradictions due to circular reasoning, or find that we can never complete the reasoning because the loop never closes.
Gödel summarized this fact into the claim that all theories capable of dealing with numbers (and hence individual objects) must be either inconsistent or incomplete.
The genesis of the problem lies in our inability to provide a coherent definition of numbers that begins in objects.
This is perhaps the most succinct indictment of reductionism, if there ever was a need for one.
There are better definitions of numbers that begin in collections.
For example:
0 := {}
1 := {0} = {{}}
2 := {0,1} = {{},{{}}}
3 := {0,1,2} = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}
However, now, we must find a physical analogue for drawing a boundary (two braces) in nature.
For instance, we can ask: How do we know that there are two braces and not three or four?
The definition of 0 requires the use of two braces, but two hasn’t yet been defined.
As a result, we haven’t yet escaped circular reasoning, although we reduced everything to sets.
This definition too, therefore, suffers from the same Incompleteness problem as other definitions.
My point is that if we ever are to solve this problem, we must treat numbers as ideas.
These ideas can be represented as things, and can be inferred from things, but they are not an epiphenomenon of things.
Rather, whenever we denote ideas through things – with the honorable aim of trying to illustrate them objectively to others – and then dishonorably pretend that that description is itself the idea, we create either logical contradictions or incompleteness.
The problems of indeterminism are therefore not simply about science being a work in progress; they are rather about the need for a fundamental breakaway from established dogmas where the material parts are real and their collections are epiphenomenal.
The problems associated with the current scientific dogma span from mathematics to computing to physics to chemistry to biology and beyond, although they have a very simple resolution: invert the reduction.
The problem is not materialism and reductionism, because even in the new scheme, there will be matter and reduction.
However, both matter and reduction are conceived differently.
Conclusion
Life too is an idea.
It is a very abstract idea, which can be expressed in many living forms.
We can represent the idea of life by giving birth to children.
We can also infer the idea of life from individual living forms.
But life is not the epiphenomenon of its representations.
Materialism as it stands today has come to a dead end, not just in biology but in physics as well.
To prop materialism, science has replaced matter with chance and probability.
The nature of their existence, and what we can call material about chance and probability, is deeply questionable.
The loss of predictability and the limits of science that arise from this indeterminism are numerous and well-known.
Materialists, however, dishonorably pretend that this incompleteness is only a question of science perfecting itself by extending the established paradigms over time.
One only needs to be aware of the various kinds of incompleteness, the intimate connection between them, the root cause underlying them which is the attempt to reduce ideas to things, before you will see why this belief is hopeless.
We can create things from ideas, but we cannot create ideas from things.
This means that the remedy is easy: we just overturn the attempts to create ideas from things to create things from ideas.
We will still have ideas and things, but things would be created from ideas.
This alternative requires us to think of ideas not as mysterious and otherworldly entities but simply as space-time forms, which we ordinarily call boundaries.
This entails important revisions to our notions about space and time – these are no longer linear and flat, but hierarchical much like ideas are organized in a hierarchy.
To envision this hierarchy we need to think about postal addresses and clock times.
Like a postal address first addresses the country which is more abstract than the city that comes next, or like a clock time which addresses the year before it addresses the month, there is an inverted hierarchical way of thinking embedded in our everyday world, which science has neglected thus far.
The intuitions of a new way of thinking are around us, although quite different from the way science has thought about the same world thus far.
Materialism as an empirical strategy can keep working, but as a theoretical strategy it has failed, not because there isn’t matter but because we reduce wholes to parts.
We can take pride in the empirical successes of science, and point to the fact that when we speak of life we are only speaking about the body, which in turn is comprised of molecules.
However, in making these claims we must also ask whether the theory can ever be predictively complete.
If all theories that reduce the whole to the parts are incomplete (although they make statistical predictions) we are making a fundamental mistake in our conception of nature.
This mistake appears in the contradiction between scientific reductionism and the personal sense of individual identity.
I believe this contradiction can be resolved, not by rejecting science, but by altering its notions about space-time.
Only with a new conception will we solve the problems of scientific indeterminism and the problems arising from thinking of life in a reductive manner.
Enjoy!
Do Life and Living Forms Present a Problem for Materialism?
This essay was written in response to the call for essays by the Royal Institute of Philosophy for their yearly essay contest.
For the pleasure of readers, it is reproduced below.
Abstract
An assumption implicit in this question is that non-living objects probably don’t present a problem for materialism, because if that weren’t the case, we would be asking if materialism is a sound approach for all of science and not just the study of living forms.
In this essay I will argue that:
(1) the problem of materialism is not unique to living forms, but exists even for non-living things, and
(2) the problem originates not in materialism per se but from reductionism which reduces big things (or wholes) to small things (or parts).
Reduction has been practiced in all areas of science – physics, mathematics, and computing, apart from biology – and it makes all scientific theories either inconsistent or incomplete.
This is a fundamental issue and cannot be overcome, unless our approach to reduction is inverted: rather than reduce big things to small things, we must now reduce the small things to big things.
This new kind of reduction can be attained if both big and small were described as ideas: the big is now an abstract concept while the small is a contingent concept, and contingent concepts are produced from abstract concepts by adding information.
This leads us to a view of nature in which objects are also ideas – just more detailed than the abstractions in the mind; the abstract ideas precede the detailed ideas.
When the reduction is inverted, a new kind of materialism emerges which is free from its current problems.
This materialism presents a new theory of inanimate matter, not just living forms.
Introduction
There are broadly two kinds of materialism – theoretical and empirical.
The empirical materialist holds that if I can taste, touch, smell, see or hear something that lies outside my body, then that thing must be material.
The theoretical materialist holds that matter is independent objects with possessed properties, which exist even when observers don’t and these objects should therefore be described by observers in the same way as they exist independent of any observation.
It is important to make this distinction because empirical materialism may be true even though theoretical materialism may not.
For instance, we can observe a person’s brain and detect electrical activity that corresponds to their subjective reports of perception – such as the sight of redness.
This fact is indisputable.
What is disputable is whether the brain should be described in quite the same way as inanimate objects presently are.
This dispute is problematic because if we changed the description of the brain, then we would have to change the description of inanimate objects too.
Are there reasons in science why such a change would be warranted?
Objects and Collections
Science needs a change in its description of matter because it reduces collections to their parts, although in many situations this reduction is untenable.
My body is indeed built up of atoms, but the collection of these atoms also constitute an individual.
This individual has new properties – such as the ability to know the world and to own property – something that the parts of the individual’s body don’t seem to have.
If we reduced the individual to the parts, we must either show how the parts also have the same properties, or discard the new properties altogether.
Modern science is unable to reduce the properties associated with the individual to the parts within the individual.
So, we must discard them as illusions.
However, once you take away the idea of knowing and owning, then you cannot know science, and you cannot attribute any scientific theory to any particular individual.
Science – as an enterprise of individuals pursuing the truth of nature and creating theories that are then attributed to them as their creations – would itself collapse.
In everyday language, we treat object collections also as objects, although in science we don’t.
For instance, in everyday language, a ‘house’ is both a collection of parts, and an individual object.
In science the house is reducible to its parts, which are real, although the collection itself is not.
A collection draws a boundary around its parts, which is real in everyday language, but unreal in science.
Objects within this boundary are real in science because they are material and we can say that they exist even when the boundary does not exist.
However, the boundary is supposed to be merely our imagination, and hence it remains in our mind, not in reality.
This basic difference between everyday intuitions and science lies at the heart of the debate about material reduction: the whole is reducible to the parts because the boundary is not considered real.
Once you take out the reality of the boundary, macroscopic objects – and the concepts attached to them – also become unreal.
Collections become practically useful (and often essential methodological tools for doing science – which divide the world into smaller “systems”), but since the boundary is not a real physical entity in space-time, it has no theoretical role in science.
Living forms present a problem for materialism because there are some situations where we cannot ignore the existence of the boundary – in these situations we refer to the individual as a whole rather than simply a combination of parts.
If you have lost your hand or leg in an accident, you are not less of a person than you were before, even though you clearly have fewer molecules.
Similarly, if you committed a crime 10 years ago and all the molecules in the body have changed since then, you must still be punished for your crimes, because you are still the same person.
The problem whittles down to a simple question: Does the collection of parts in my body also constitutes an individual?
If there were no boundary around the molecules, then this individual would be an epiphenomenon and thus reducible to parts.
Therefore, for the idea of individuality to be scientifically meaningful, we would need a new theoretical construct in science – that of a boundary – which aggregates material objects.
This boundary would also be an object, although not quite a material particle.
Clearly, such objects would have to be described not by using a single type of thing – i.e. leptons and quarks – but also houses, teacups, and people.
The Reality of Collections
Can science theoretically work with the notion of a boundary?
For that matter, does science even need the notion of a boundary?
If yes, why?
A boundary is a space-time entity, because we will draw it in space-time, and therefore it can exist objectively.
However, we cannot perceive (i.e. see, taste, touch, smell, or hear) the boundary.
This is important because if the boundary were shown to be objective, then empirical materialism would be false: nature could comprise things that can exist objectively, although they cannot be sensed.
They can, however, be thought or imagined.
All science involves some imagination or thought but we don’t consider it real unless its existence has some observable effects.
In the absence of an effect, having the boundary would be indistinguishable from not having it.
We might as well then – by Occam’s razor – not have it.
So, can the existence of a boundary have empirical effects (which can be measured, and therefore seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelt), even though the boundary itself is not empirical (i.e. cannot be measured)?
Does the mental ability to divide the world into macroscopic systems have a real counterpart in the world?
Or is that division only a convenient imagination?
This question, I believe, is central to a non-reductive, but still material understanding of living forms.
In this understanding, there are physical entities – which can be called boundaries – which can have a theoretical role in science, although they cannot be measured by our senses.
However, if they have effects on our measurements, they can still be real – in the same way that we cannot see an electron although we can measure its effects.
We would still be within the confines of materialism, but outside the reductive – theoretical and empirical – view of materialism.
I will spend the next few sections in this essay arguing why boundaries are essential theoretical constructs for science – not just life sciences, but even physical sciences.
Only when we see a reason for inducting boundaries in science will we see a real scientific reason for describing these boundaries using everyday concepts (e.g., houses and teacups), which will then enable us to talk about a living being as a single individual, irreducible to parts although comprised of parts.
The Problem of Indeterminism
Physical sciences grew out of the description of individual object properties – mass, charge, energy, momentum, angular momentum, etc.
When you aggregate many such objects, the collection too has these physical properties in the aggregate.
However, if you begin in the collection, then there are many ways in which the properties of the aggregate can be divided into the parts and their properties.
As an illustration, if you begin with $1 notes and aggregate 100 of them, you have $100 in total.
But if you have $100 in the bank, you cannot be sure if that money exists in $1, $5, $10, or $50 denominations.
All these alternatives are equally possible, which leads to the problem of moneydistribution – we know the total but not the parts.
The same total money (and physical properties) can be divided into parts in many ways and even if you know the whole, you don’t necessarily know the parts.
Of course, if you knew the parts, you will necessarily know the whole.
Generally we suppose that matter is indeed individuated into parts, therefore this problem of matter distribution can never arise: even if we empirically do not know all the parts, there should never be a theoretical room for indeterminism if parts are real.
It would surprise many people if they realized that all fundamental physical theories of nature are (theoretically) indeterministic due to matter distributions, and this indeterminism has been empirically confirmed.
Note that if the theory was indeterministic and nature was deterministic, then the theory’s predictions would be false and we would reject the theory.
If, however, the theory is indeterministic and it is empirically confirmed, then the indeterminism is real.
Delving into all the forms of indeterminism in modern physical theories would take us out of the scope of the present essay, but I will illustrate the problem with the quantum slit experiment.
Quantum physics describes an ensemble of energy which can be divided into individual particles in many ways.
A quantum ensemble is not a priori individuated into parts: we can say that the whole is a priori real but the parts are not.
The experimenter can in fact choose to divide the ensemble into parts using a different number of slits.
With every such choice, a different set of particles are detected which correspond to a different eigenfunction basis.
The total wavefunction of the system can be divided into many eigenfunction bases, each of which represents a different set of material particles, quite like $100 can be divided into currency denominations in many ways.
None of these divisions is a priori real although the whole is.
The division remains a choice.
If the parts were real and the whole wasn’t, then no matter how we measured the system, we would always find the same parts.
If however the whole is real but the parts are created by the experimental setup, then we can always find a new way of dividing the whole into parts.
Now, it is impossible to claim that the whole is only an imagination of our minds.
It is more correct to say that the whole is real, but its parts are our imaginations, which can however be effected in an experiment.
The empirical confirmation of this theory establishes the theoretical reality of the whole, and the theoretical unreality (but the empirical reality) of the parts.
The parts are real at the point of observation, but they did not exist until the observation was made.
There are similar problems in General Relativity and Statistical Thermodynamics as well, but elaborating them would not add to the main point which is that if the parts were always real then the theories would not be indeterministic.
The indeterminism of the theories entails that the whole is more real than the parts, and our measurement choices interact with the measured system to overcome that uncertainty in state, putting the system into a definite state upon observation.
It is as if the whole system (prior to observation) paints a picture of reality in the outlines but not in the details.
The outline can be filled up with many different details, although not arbitrary details.
Our choices of observation act upon this pre-measurement outline to complete the picture upon observation, which makes us think that the world must be just as we observe it to be. However, you can also observe the world differently and describe it accordingly, and even that alternative description of nature would be empirically confirmed.
The fact that the theory permits infinitely many theoretical possible descriptions of the same system, and the fact that each of those descriptions can be empirically confirmed, entails a new conception about matter.
Modern science deals with the multiple possible alternatives in a peculiar manner: it hypothesizes (when possible) that nature has a probability of being all these alternatives, which randomly become real.
Your choice of the number of slits in the quantum slit experiment must, for instance, be due to the “collapse” of a wavefunction in your brain which is then viewed as a “choice”.
If you believe that nature is probability then it is not the real “stuff” that exists independently anyway.
The randomness further takes away the ability to predict what we will see upon observation.
Probabilities and randomness pervade modern science in more ways than I can summarize here.
This peculiar approach to scientific indeterminism juxtaposes our classical beliefs about nature as a priori individuated objects with the observed indeterminism: obviously we cannot reconcile the indeterminism with a priori reality, so let’s suppose that reality is the probabilities of all the possibilities.
Probabilities undermine both predictions and explanations.
Solving the Indeterminism Problem
There is, however, a better alternative.
In this alternative, we say that nature is not a priori individuated into parts.
Rather, it exists as wholes which are then divided into parts, quite like filling in the outline of a picture with details.
The outline limits the possible fill-in alternatives, but does not identify a specific alternative.
These alternatives become our choices.
The outline is no less real than its parts.
The outline is also an object, although not as detailed.
In fact, the outline can exist even when the details don’t, although the details cannot exist when the outline doesn’t (to define something as the detail of a picture, we need the outline of the picture first).
This kind of approach in science would reinstate the reality of the whole although it would not be as definite as the reality of the parts.
We would now need a new construct in science – that of a collection – which is then divided into parts based upon our choices.
To treat this collection as an object (prior to observation) we would have to treat it as a macroscopic object – like a house or a teacup.
Upon observation, we could also treat it as a collection of the observed parts.
The whole and the parts would now both be real; in fact, reality prior to observation would only be wholes and not their parts.
Each observer can find some new, but not totally random, fact about the same world.
The non-randomness indicates there is something objective.
The novelty in observation indicates that this reality is not defined as completely as we see it.
The scientific counterpart of this view is that it takes a more complex apparatus to measure the atoms than it takes to measure the shape of a macroscopic object.
From the standpoint of complexity, the outline is much simpler although the details inside of it are complex.
If we treated this complexity as information needed to define the object, the macroscopic object is a simple entity while the parts inside that object are the complexity that follows a measurement.
Towards an Informational View
This approach to science requires a fundamentally different view of nature in which the world is described not as things but as information.
The whole system represents abstract information while the parts in that system represent the contingent details.
We add details to abstract objects to create our reality, and as long as the world is abstract there can be many ways in which information can be added to transform abstractions into contingents.
When the world is already completely contingent, we can no longer add information into it, and that reality would always be described deterministically.
Determinism is therefore a logical limit to adding information into abstract objects.
If the universe were fully contingent, it would also be fully deterministic (as Newton envisioned in his mechanics).
But the world is not actually completely contingent; it exists as macroscopic objects which are abstract entities that can be made contingent by adding information during measurement and use.
This view does not deny the possibility of determinism, but presents it only as a limiting case of choice.
When all possible choices have been made, there is no more room for choices, and reality is deterministic.
Atoms are now units of information, and a measurement involves not just transfer of information from the measured system into the observer but also from the observer into the measured system via the choice of measurement apparatus.
A new causal model of interaction needs to be found which involves the interaction between units of information rather than between blobs of energy.
The laws of this causality would be quite different from how science currently describes objects.
If I have transferred some information – through the act of making a choice – then my brain is in a less certain state because it compensated the uncertainty in the external world. Similarly, when I consume some food or ideas, my body regains its original level of certainty.
We are still exchanging matter with the world, and my body and the external world are still material, although the matter is now described as units of information rather than physical things.
The units of information can be either abstract or contingent, although physical things can be only be contingent.
The uncertainty of my state is essentially that I exist in an abstract rather than contingent state, and that state can be made more (or less) certain by adding (or removing) information.
A Non-Reductive Theory of Information
The informational view is necessitated by problems of indeterminism, not merely by our desire to see ourselves differently (although such desires are not totally unfounded).
The mitigation of the problem is physical and material, although not in the same sense as in modern science: matter is now information such that even a collection (without the details) can be described as an abstract object.
This information would now be represented by forms in space-time; some of these forms we can see and touch, while others we cannot.
The presence of the latter would however be possible by adding information that transforms the abstractions into contingents.
This approach to information is non-reductive: it does not begin in the parts and does not construct the wholes from them.
It rather begins in abstract ideas and refines them through incremental additions of information.
As more information is added, the abstract becomes the contingent.
We perceive the contingent things by our senses, but the senses cannot perceive the abstractions.
Those who cannot understand the abstractions must rely on the abstractions being illustrated through examples and material instantiations of the ideas.
However, that doesn’t entail the non-reality of abstractions until the instantiation is found.
Abstractions too can be modeled realistically in a new science that recognizes the objective material existence of boundaries in space-time.
In a sense, we could now scientifically talk about mermaids and unicorns as ideas, although we cannot find physical instantiations of these ideas.
We cannot see, taste, touch, smell, or hear the mermaids or unicorns, although we can think about them.
Thought too is material and real now, even though it isn’t always translated into observable sensations.
The empirical confirmation of such a theory would involve firing photons at space-time.
Rather than transparently pass through space-time, these photons will transform into observable objects, if space-time had forms that we could not previously see.
Quite like CERN scientists smash particles to create measurements, it would now be possible to smash particles against space-time.
That smashing – and the fact that photons do not pass through space-time transparently – would show that sometimes space-time is not empty although we cannot model its fullness as a material particle.
The smashing photons fill the details within an abstraction: we could not see the abstraction before, but by smashing light into it, we have created its instantiation which we can see. In essence, we have taken the idea of a unicorn and created a unicorn out of it.
The ability to create things out of ideas would change science in ways we cannot imagine right now.
Biology Needs a Revolution in Physics
If living forms contradict materialism, that contradiction has to be seen in fundamental physics before its implications can be used to revolutionize our current understanding of life. The crux of that revolution is that ensembles and collections are more real than the particles science currently studies.
While these collections represent a material reality, it is not of the same kind as objects.
Quite specifically, both material objects and collections have to be described as information.
If matter is described as a priori real things, followed by the reduction of collections to their parts, then science will forever be incomplete.
The alternative is to reinstate the reality of boundaries in space-time but that creates a new problem – how should we model boundaries vs. objects?
If we have two kinds of things in nature, how do they interact causally?
That problem can only be solved by replacing the two types with only one – information.
Both objects and boundaries can be described as information, although neither can be reduced to one another physically.
Current physical theories fail because they try to reduce boundaries to objects, which cannot be achieved.
If, however, you discard the boundary itself, then you are not describing the system fully.
We cannot understand the reality of living forms unless we view the whole system as being something additional and logically prior to the constituent parts.
We will pragmatically treat the living being as a whole, but theoretically claim to reduce it to the parts.
We will assert the moral and political individuality of the person in a society but discredit that individuality as an epiphenomenon of the atoms within science.
People outside science will marvel at the achievements of science on one hand and feel the disillusionment of meaninglessness in life on the other.
Scientists themselves will struggle with the indeterminism pervading all physical theories.
The artists and creative people cannot say that art, literature and music created by humans are objective, but they must say that science – also created by humans – must be objective. The dual standards – in society and in science – result from the fact that science does not acknowledge that collections are real, while society treats them as individual entities.
Biological Information
My claim is that all structures in a living body are informational forms, and they are incomplete in themselves; this incompleteness is visible in the fact that all large biomolecules have numerous possible forms that are permitted by physical theories but not predicted by them.
The key problem for biological reduction is not that living beings are comprised of molecules, but how we predict which particular form a molecule takes and why.
The many forms of biomolecules are many equivalent material distributions of an ensemble; i.e., they are all allowed by current physical theories but not predicted by any physical theory.
Therefore, the theory remains indeterministic.
The myriad forms a biomolecule can take are like the various sentences we can form using a set of alphabets.
We can observe the different forms, but we cannot ascribe them functions quite like we can distinguish between various letter sequences but we cannot explain or predict their occurrence unless these letter sequences are viewed as expressions of meanings that existed even before the words did.
The occurrence of different forms is empirical and the inability to explain their occurrence is a shortfall in the theory.
The theory that can explain forms would have to recognize a property that can be associated with the whole form rather than with its parts.
It should now be obvious that there cannot be a consistent and complete theory that predicts and explains which forms are real (as opposed to all the possible forms) unless we take into account the whole.
This whole is now not an epiphenomenon of the parts; it is rather a fundamental construct.
Biologists can catalogue the mapping between forms and functions, but they can never predict which form (and function) will become real and never explain why a particular form is a specific function, unless an informational view of nature is adopted.
For instance, geneticists can catalogue the mapping between a gene and the biological traits, but why a specific gene represents a specific trait, and why a specific kind of gene is expressed or suppressed cannot be predicted.
We can find correlations between gene suppression or expression and the existence of epigenetic or paragenetic information, but why that even exists cannot be explained.
Without an informational view, biology will remain a cataloguing science, not an explanatory or predictive one.
We can enhance our catalogue through increasing experimentation, and that growth in data is called the advance in biology today.
It helps us improve our predictability, as we find more patterns in the data.
But those patterns are statistical correlations, not tied by any theory.
These patterns are quite like our measurement of letter frequencies in the English language.
We can say that the letter ‘x’ has 0.15% chance of occurrence while the letter ‘p’ has a 1.9% chance.
We can even measure the probabilities of letter succession, but they will be averages over large samples.
They will fail to predict the individual word sequence in a text and thereby understand what the text means.
The statistical approaches to biology may work on an average but will fail in many individual cases.
Essentially, biology will be an attempt to understand a book by measuring letter probabilities, unless we induct a real role for information even in the physical world.
The Doublethink in Biology
In talking about genes, biologists cut up the DNA into smaller units of code that represent different functional units.
What is the basis of this cutting up?
Why do we draw boundaries in a molecule when we don’t acknowledge the reality of boundaries in physics?
Aren’t there infinitely many ways to divide the DNA into individual genes?
Why is the DNA empirically partitioned in some ways when theoretically it can be divided in infinitely many ways?
And doesn’t that gap between theory and experiment represent a shortfall in our understanding of the genes themselves?
Science has always been practiced by reducing complex systems into simpler ones.
The simplicity helps us focus upon specific problems rather all of them at once.
However, in focusing on specific things, we use our minds and intellects to divide the world into parts, without acknowledging that there is a real material basis of that division in nature.
If we, for the moment, supposed that there is no physical basis for division in nature, then the scientific method will fall apart as we would have to now find an explanation for the entire universe at once.
If, on the other hand, we suppose that the division has a real basis in nature, then it must also have a real basis in science.
The pragmatic use of systems, collections, and ensembles in experiments combined with their rejection in scientific theories has created a double standard about everyday concepts in science: practically we need meters, clocks, kilograms – which are all macroscopic objects – but theoretically we believe that these entities are unreal.
We can no doubt reduce a kilogram to its constituent sub-atomic particles, but there are infinite ways to do it.
All these possible reductions are permitted by the theory but none of them is predicted or explained.
Biology and Language
There is a profound difference between how information is treated in biology today versus how it is viewed in everyday language.
The difference is that biology tries to correlate the occurrences of words and tries to interpret this correlation as causation, while everyday language supposes that in exchanging words we are transacting meanings and words are only methods of expressing meanings.
If the occurrence of the word “STOP” causes people to stop and the occurrence of the word “GO” causes them to walk, we can correlate the words with the actions, and we would not be wrong.
However, correlation is not causation.
The causal explanation underlying that correlation would be missing – we can describe the fact that “STOP” causes people to stop, but we cannot explain why that happens.
After all, the word “STOP” does not have enough mass, or momentum to stop a person, nor does the word “GO” have the force to make you walk.
Correlating the occurrences of the words “STOP” and “GO” with the actions that follow is not a true understanding of language.
In the same way, correlating the occurrences of genes and traits is not an explanation.
If, however, you don’t want to accept that fact, you will be faced with a new problem of indeterminism: sometimes the same word has a different meaning, and the effect of that word cannot be deterministically predicted.
Now, you would be faced with two choices:
(a) reject that there is any universal connection between the occurrences, which leads to a collapse of biology, or
(b) assert that there is a probabilityassociated with different occurrences.
This statistical view of science therefore arises because we reject a role for meanings in nature, because we cannot model nature completely based on current scientific concepts.
The problems of indeterminism that pervade physical theories are bound to recur over and over in biology.
They don’t render biology impossible.
But they make biology predictively incomplete.
The Failure of Reduction in Mathematics
Most scientists will not hesitate in accepting that current science is incomplete in many ways, although they will argue that this incompleteness is basically work in progress: we will eventually find a description that will be predictively complete because we have the method of reason and experimentation that allows us to keep progressing on the path of discovery.
I have no dispute with this claim, only with what is implied (but not explicitly stated) in it – namely that the new theories will be quite similar to the present theories.
For instance, the idea of collections as new kinds of fundamental entities in nature is also objective and empirical although quite different from concepts about matter in current science.
Let me illustrate that difference through an example in mathematics, which will also indicate the nature of the problem.
All physical theories employ numbers, and numbers depend on the notion of a set.
While a set can be succinctly stated as an idea, it cannot always be reduced to its members.
For instance, we can define the number 5 to be the collection of all possible sets that have 5 members.
E.g., 5 can be defined as the collection of sets such as the set of five shoes, five flowers, five horses, etc.
There are two issues in this definition:
(a) the total number of possible sets that can have 5 members is so large that it cannot be practically enumerated unless we knew all the objects in the universe and were able to count them, and
(b) to even count these objects, we would need to have the numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) defined prior!
The definition of number 5 now depends on 5 being already defined, and even with this definition we cannot know all its possible instances.
The point is that while we prodigiously use numbers in science we don’t truly have a foundation of number theory.
This foundation itself depends on recognizing that 5 is an idea and not something that can be reduced to the object members.
If we actually try to reduce the idea to its members, we end up in circular reasoning, which can then be used to create many logical contradictions – including, but not limited to, the infamous Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem.
Methodological reductionism pervades not just physical theories, but also mathematics.
When we try to reduce the set or collection to its parts, we can either create contradictions due to circular reasoning, or find that we can never complete the reasoning because the loop never closes.
Gödel summarized this fact into the claim that all theories capable of dealing with numbers (and hence individual objects) must be either inconsistent or incomplete.
The genesis of the problem lies in our inability to provide a coherent definition of numbers that begins in objects.
This is perhaps the most succinct indictment of reductionism, if there ever was a need for one.
There are better definitions of numbers that begin in collections.
For example:
0 := {}
1 := {0} = {{}}
2 := {0,1} = {{},{{}}}
3 := {0,1,2} = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}
However, now, we must find a physical analogue for drawing a boundary (two braces) in nature.
For instance, we can ask: How do we know that there are two braces and not three or four?
The definition of 0 requires the use of two braces, but two hasn’t yet been defined.
As a result, we haven’t yet escaped circular reasoning, although we reduced everything to sets.
This definition too, therefore, suffers from the same Incompleteness problem as other definitions.
My point is that if we ever are to solve this problem, we must treat numbers as ideas.
These ideas can be represented as things, and can be inferred from things, but they are not an epiphenomenon of things.
Rather, whenever we denote ideas through things – with the honorable aim of trying to illustrate them objectively to others – and then dishonorably pretend that that description is itself the idea, we create either logical contradictions or incompleteness.
The problems of indeterminism are therefore not simply about science being a work in progress; they are rather about the need for a fundamental breakaway from established dogmas where the material parts are real and their collections are epiphenomenal.
The problems associated with the current scientific dogma span from mathematics to computing to physics to chemistry to biology and beyond, although they have a very simple resolution: invert the reduction.
The problem is not materialism and reductionism, because even in the new scheme, there will be matter and reduction.
However, both matter and reduction are conceived differently.
Conclusion
Life too is an idea.
It is a very abstract idea, which can be expressed in many living forms.
We can represent the idea of life by giving birth to children.
We can also infer the idea of life from individual living forms.
But life is not the epiphenomenon of its representations.
Materialism as it stands today has come to a dead end, not just in biology but in physics as well.
To prop materialism, science has replaced matter with chance and probability.
The nature of their existence, and what we can call material about chance and probability, is deeply questionable.
The loss of predictability and the limits of science that arise from this indeterminism are numerous and well-known.
Materialists, however, dishonorably pretend that this incompleteness is only a question of science perfecting itself by extending the established paradigms over time.
One only needs to be aware of the various kinds of incompleteness, the intimate connection between them, the root cause underlying them which is the attempt to reduce ideas to things, before you will see why this belief is hopeless.
We can create things from ideas, but we cannot create ideas from things.
This means that the remedy is easy: we just overturn the attempts to create ideas from things to create things from ideas.
We will still have ideas and things, but things would be created from ideas.
This alternative requires us to think of ideas not as mysterious and otherworldly entities but simply as space-time forms, which we ordinarily call boundaries.
This entails important revisions to our notions about space and time – these are no longer linear and flat, but hierarchical much like ideas are organized in a hierarchy.
To envision this hierarchy we need to think about postal addresses and clock times.
Like a postal address first addresses the country which is more abstract than the city that comes next, or like a clock time which addresses the year before it addresses the month, there is an inverted hierarchical way of thinking embedded in our everyday world, which science has neglected thus far.
The intuitions of a new way of thinking are around us, although quite different from the way science has thought about the same world thus far.
Materialism as an empirical strategy can keep working, but as a theoretical strategy it has failed, not because there isn’t matter but because we reduce wholes to parts.
We can take pride in the empirical successes of science, and point to the fact that when we speak of life we are only speaking about the body, which in turn is comprised of molecules.
However, in making these claims we must also ask whether the theory can ever be predictively complete.
If all theories that reduce the whole to the parts are incomplete (although they make statistical predictions) we are making a fundamental mistake in our conception of nature.
This mistake appears in the contradiction between scientific reductionism and the personal sense of individual identity.
I believe this contradiction can be resolved, not by rejecting science, but by altering its notions about space-time.
Only with a new conception will we solve the problems of scientific indeterminism and the problems arising from thinking of life in a reductive manner.
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
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5 Myths in Science and Spirituality - Introduction
A series that discusses five of the most common myths about the relationship between science and religion.
Prof. Alexander Moreira-Almeida, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora School of Medicine (UFJF) and Founder and Director of the Research Center in Spirituality and Health, Brazil (www.ufjf.br/nupes-eng).
Formerly a postdoctoral fellow in religion and health at Duke University (USA). Member of the Executive Committee of the WPA (World Psychiatric Association) Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry and coordinator of the section on spirituality of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association.
[video=youtube;C2lZOdm7mGg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=C2lZOdm7mGg[/video]
Myth 01: Universe is composed only by matter/physical forces
[video=youtube;Zp73p0XWEhg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=Zp73p0XWEhg[/video]
Myth 2: Brain produces mind
[video=youtube;R5TBbL-yS5Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=R5TBbL-yS5Q[/video]
(See next post)
Prof. Alexander Moreira-Almeida, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora School of Medicine (UFJF) and Founder and Director of the Research Center in Spirituality and Health, Brazil (www.ufjf.br/nupes-eng).
Formerly a postdoctoral fellow in religion and health at Duke University (USA). Member of the Executive Committee of the WPA (World Psychiatric Association) Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry and coordinator of the section on spirituality of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association.
[video=youtube;C2lZOdm7mGg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=C2lZOdm7mGg[/video]
Myth 01: Universe is composed only by matter/physical forces
[video=youtube;Zp73p0XWEhg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=Zp73p0XWEhg[/video]
Myth 2: Brain produces mind
[video=youtube;R5TBbL-yS5Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=R5TBbL-yS5Q[/video]
(See next post)
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
(From above ^^^)
Myth 3: Perennial conflict between science and religion
[video=youtube;aoI9DZrS9Yw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=aoI9DZrS9Yw[/video]
Myths 4 & 5: Incompatibilities between medicine/science and religion
[video=youtube;b0EcdQDq_n8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=b0EcdQDq_n8[/video]
5 Myths in Science and Spirituality - Conclusions
[video=youtube;8pMHNH2i694]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=8pMHNH2i694[/video]
Myth 3: Perennial conflict between science and religion
[video=youtube;aoI9DZrS9Yw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=aoI9DZrS9Yw[/video]
Myths 4 & 5: Incompatibilities between medicine/science and religion
[video=youtube;b0EcdQDq_n8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=b0EcdQDq_n8[/video]
5 Myths in Science and Spirituality - Conclusions
[video=youtube;8pMHNH2i694]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLTWTXQskmTHQ g6QI7ABeuxSgPxQE0_Se-&v=8pMHNH2i694[/video]
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
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He goes toe-to-toe with science big wigs...
and so far he's undefeated.
[video=youtube;9KZWvbv28A8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9KZWvbv28A8[/video]
This philosopher has a new take on who we are… and his conclusions don’t still sit well with mainstream science types
Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko interviews Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, author of Brief Peeks Beyond about the shortcomings of science's reigning paradigm of materialism.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup to discuss his work on the nature of consciousness and the widespread influence of materialism
and so far he's undefeated.
[video=youtube;9KZWvbv28A8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9KZWvbv28A8[/video]
This philosopher has a new take on who we are… and his conclusions don’t still sit well with mainstream science types
Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko interviews Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, author of Brief Peeks Beyond about the shortcomings of science's reigning paradigm of materialism.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup to discuss his work on the nature of consciousness and the widespread influence of materialism
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
"You are the artist of the spirit.
Find yourself and
express yourself in your own particular way.
Express your love openly.
Life is nothing but a dream
and if you create your life with love,
your dream becomes a masterpiece of art."
~ Don Miguel Ruiz
Find yourself and
express yourself in your own particular way.
Express your love openly.
Life is nothing but a dream
and if you create your life with love,
your dream becomes a masterpiece of art."
~ Don Miguel Ruiz
Hello Skarekrow, I hope you're having a good Sunday. I was wondering how you came to your beliefs. I haven't read everything in the thread. Did you have an experience in your job in the ambulance or removing the heart from braindead patients? Did you feel it coming on gradually or was it immediate?
I looked through your posts about outer body experiences in cardiac arrest and I'm looking forward to two hundred years later as well although I'm wondering what we'll be able to do with technology in a more INTJ way though I won't be there to experience it.
I looked through your posts about outer body experiences in cardiac arrest and I'm looking forward to two hundred years later as well although I'm wondering what we'll be able to do with technology in a more INTJ way though I won't be there to experience it.
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Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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Thanks for your expressed interest!Hello Skarekrow, I hope you're having a good Sunday. I was wondering how you came to your beliefs. I haven't read everything in the thread. Did you have an experience in your job in the ambulance or removing the heart from braindead patients? Did you feel it coming on gradually or was it immediate?
I looked through your posts about outer body experiences in cardiac arrest and I'm looking forward to two hundred years later as well although I'm wondering what we'll be able to do with technology in a more INTJ way though I won't be there to experience it.
I believe that whomever said “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” was probably an asshole. hahahaha.
TBH, my beliefs are always sort of in flux, there is no real solid thing in my mind I call a real belief other than the belief that I myself am conscious…but even then, materialist science says that that is only our brain fooling us? (Why it would do that makes less sense)
I came to hold what things I believe to be true, or certain “truths”, like the truth that I love my Son as only a Father can.
I was raised in the Mormon religion which was very family-centric and honestly could have been worse as I left around age 16 when my older brother came out as Gay to my Parents (who chose him over the religion, which I’m sure played some psychological role in how I am now?).
Anyway I guess you could say I was agnostic for some time, and still am to a certain extent.
The things that have lead me down this pathway of this thread were experiences I had in my own life.
I think I was haunted as a child (or I could just be insane), and I have experiences with witnesses (mass hysteria? doubtful).
I have had “paranormal” experiences with witnesses that in retrospect could have been some form of PSI activity…you see, I just don’t know, it could be one or the other. When I was a child it seemed like ghosts, as I’ve gotten older I’m not so sure of that anymore and cannot discount PSI (which is very well established as a legitimate things by our own government and many others around the world)
And once you start down this rabbit hole there is no going back, there is either disbelief or you find some semblance of “faith”
Which I personally define as our own ability to manipulate reality.
It is my “belief” that this computer is solid because I believe it to be so, if I had enough faith (and cognitive dissonance lol) maybe I could convince whatever subconscious part of consciousness that is bubbling up from a Unified field or Source or collective consciousness or God, a higher self, that it wasn’t solid.
I like to think that our brains are not just fancy biological computers running instinctual programs and only making us think that we have free will.
Yes. I have seen lots of people die. I can honestly say that I can see the moment when they are really dead.
Not with my eyes, there is no sparkly mist that I’ve seen ( and other Nurses will tell you the same ) - sometimes we can do CPR on someone for an hour and a half because there is still life there (even though physiologically dead), and I have done CPR on someone for 10 minutes before we called time of death, because there is a change…it’s subtle and I can’t even really describe it…it’s a physical change but not.
That sounds cuckoo I know but find a nurse and ask them.
Especially the hospice nurses.
If you want specific stories of every experience I have had that I couldn’t explain then I will have to compile several posts, but I will, just let me know.
I think this thread has been more about my search for faith in the face of reason and the ensuing mindfuck that entails hahahaha.
I’m getting there though, faith is what I sought and faith is what I have found albeit not in your traditional sense.
Hope that makes some sense!?
Feel free to post anything that you think would fit in here too!
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On one of your videos it said that once you accept quantum physics anything is possible. I've watched vids on youtube about Kundalini although these topics aren't really something I cover very often. I'm sorry I'm trying to answer but theres a wasp that's come in. It hovered around me then tried to land on me, I left the room for a while giving it a chance to leave. Came back in again and tried to land in my palm. Not scared of it, it's just buzzing around me being irritating. It's the citrus cream.
I'd be interested to see what your cards say for me if you have the time. : )
I'd be interested to see what your cards say for me if you have the time. : )
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Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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Well, quantum physics still has rules. It’s kind of been the catch all for any and every phenomena that science can’t seem to come up with a good answer for…but it doesn’t mean that we can’t one day figure out why all these seemingly “spooky” things the occur in the quantum realm.
So, I would advise to just be wary of anyone making a definitive claim…it’s all mostly theory, with small bits of provable bits, but it’s still very much in it’s infancy (even though the LHC is quite impressive!).
As for the visit from your wasp -
Animal Symbolism: Meaning of the Wasp
Symbolic Meanings of the Wasp
Unveiling animal symbolism affords us new insight into life, and lessons for life too.
Even the wasp has symbolic messages to offer us.
Granted, the wasp isn't the top ten most popular animal totem or guide, but do a little research, and you'll find the wasp is a highly regarded symbol in many cultures.
Here are some highlights from my own research...I hope you'll enjoy them, and gain new perspective into wasp symbolism from reading.
In some African traditions, the wasp is a symbol of evolution, and control over our life circumstances.
Some Native American Indian tribal myth inidcates the wasp as the creator of the earth, and was a symbol of order, organization as well as productivity.
Ancient European lore recognizes the wasp as big part in pollination.
Here the wasp is symbolic of fertility as this genre of earth-based believers honored the wasp for its role in continuation of certain plants and flowers.
Animal symbolism of the wasp deals many themes.
Here are a few...
Symbolic Wasp Meanings
- Order
- Progress
- Team-work
- Involvement
- Development
- Productivity
- Construction
- Communication
The prime season of the wasp is spring, and so it is symbolic of new beginnings, and starting new projects.
The wasp is very social, and has special means of communication with it’s family.
When the wasp appears in our lives it is a message for us to consider our own methods of communication.
The wasp might be a sign that we may need to express ourselves more clearly.
Because the wasp is symbolic of communication, order and productivity, those who encounter the wasp may ask themselves:
Those with the wasp as their totem may learn more by asking these questions of themselves, and calling upon the wasp for more clarification too.
Symbolic Messages the Wasp Sends to Us
"Are all my affairs in order?"
"Am I aligning myself with my goals?"
"Am I procrastinating about something?"
"Am I keeping myself from reaching my highest potential?"
"Am I allowing my progress to be held back by others?"
Wasps are perfect totems for those of us who need a bit of organized focus, and assistance with assertive communication.
The wasp can also help in areas of building, whether it be a new home, or building on a dream - the wasp is a master architect and can guide you with the planning of any building project you have in mind.
I can give you a Tarot reading too if you wish, I will PM you with the details.
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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"Untitiled"
'Persian Poems', an Anthology of verse translations
edited by A.J.Arberry, Everyman's Library, 1972
Poor copies out of heaven's originals,
Pale earthly pictures mouldering to decay,
What care although your beauties break and fall,
When that which gave them life endures for aye?
Oh never vex thine heart with idle woes:
All high discourse enchanting the rapt ear,
All gilded landscapes and brave glistering shows
Fade-perish, but it is not as we fear.
Whilst far away the living fountains ply,
each petty brook goes brimful to the main
Since baron nor fountain can for ever die,
Thy fears how foolish, thy lament how vain!
What is this fountain, wouldst thou rightly know?
The Soul whence issue all created things.
Doubtless the rivers shall not cease to flow,
Till silenced are the everlasting springs.
Farewell to sorrow, and with quiet mind
Drink long and deep: let others fondly deem
The channel empty they perchance may find,
Or fathom that unfathomable stream.
The moment thou to this low world wast given,
A ladder stood whereby thou might'st aspire;
And first thy steps, which upward still have striven,
From mineral mounted to the plant; then higher
To animal existence; next, the Man,
With knowledge, reason, faith. Oh wondrous goal!
This body, which a crumb of dust began-
How fairly fashioned the consummate whole!
Yet stay not here thy journey: thou shalt grow
An angel bright and home far off in heaven.
Plod on, plunge last in the great Sea, that so
Thy little drop make oceans seven times seven.
'The Son of God!' Nay, leave that word unsaid,
Say: 'God is One, the pure, the single Truth.'
What though thy frame be withered, old, and dead,
If the soul keep her fresh immortal youth?
~ Rumi
R. A. NicholsonPale earthly pictures mouldering to decay,
What care although your beauties break and fall,
When that which gave them life endures for aye?
Oh never vex thine heart with idle woes:
All high discourse enchanting the rapt ear,
All gilded landscapes and brave glistering shows
Fade-perish, but it is not as we fear.
Whilst far away the living fountains ply,
each petty brook goes brimful to the main
Since baron nor fountain can for ever die,
Thy fears how foolish, thy lament how vain!
What is this fountain, wouldst thou rightly know?
The Soul whence issue all created things.
Doubtless the rivers shall not cease to flow,
Till silenced are the everlasting springs.
Farewell to sorrow, and with quiet mind
Drink long and deep: let others fondly deem
The channel empty they perchance may find,
Or fathom that unfathomable stream.
The moment thou to this low world wast given,
A ladder stood whereby thou might'st aspire;
And first thy steps, which upward still have striven,
From mineral mounted to the plant; then higher
To animal existence; next, the Man,
With knowledge, reason, faith. Oh wondrous goal!
This body, which a crumb of dust began-
How fairly fashioned the consummate whole!
Yet stay not here thy journey: thou shalt grow
An angel bright and home far off in heaven.
Plod on, plunge last in the great Sea, that so
Thy little drop make oceans seven times seven.
'The Son of God!' Nay, leave that word unsaid,
Say: 'God is One, the pure, the single Truth.'
What though thy frame be withered, old, and dead,
If the soul keep her fresh immortal youth?
~ Rumi
'Persian Poems', an Anthology of verse translations
edited by A.J.Arberry, Everyman's Library, 1972
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Russell Targ at Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?
[video=youtube;pVZ24r3y5_U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pVZ24r3y5_U[/video]
[video=youtube;pVZ24r3y5_U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pVZ24r3y5_U[/video]
Originally conceived under a TEDx West Hollywood license as inspiration to change our fundamental value system to where mutual concern, as one humanity becomes our new worldview, a daylong program ultimately was presented under the auspice of Suzanne Taylor's Mighty Companions non-profit foundation. If you like what you see, please give it a shout- out and tell Chris@TED.com so there is some public outcry about TED's last minute license cancellation for her uplifting program.
Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and laser applications, and was co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI) investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s. His work with SRI in what was a new area, called remote viewing, has been widely published. His most recent book is "The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities." In 1976, Targ retired from Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space Co. as a senior staff scientist. Website: espresearch.com
Here is the statement issued by Russell Targ after TED questioned his scientific legitimacy:
In cancelling the TEDx event in West Hollywood, it appears that I was accused of "using the guise of science" to further spooky claims, (or some such). People on this blog have asked what I was going to talk about. That's easily answered. I was co-founder of a 23 year research program investigating psychic abilities at Stanford Research Institute. We were doing research and applications for the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Force and Army Intelligence, NASA, and others. In this $25 million program we used "remote viewing" to find a downed Russian bomber in North Africa, for which President Carter commended us. We found a kidnapped US general in Italy, and the kidnap car that snatched Patricia Hearst. We looked in on the US hostages in Iran, and predicted the immanent release of Richard Queen, who was soon sent to Germany. We described a Russian weapons factory in Siberia, leading to a US congressional investigation about weakness in US security, etc. We published our scientific findings in Nature, The Proc. IEEE, Proc. AAAS, and Proc. American Institute of Physics. I thought a TED audience would find this recently declassified material interesting. And no physics would be harmed in my presentation.
And this...
Remote viewing is an ability that many people can easily learn. It is a nonlocal ability, in that its accuracy and reliability are independent of distance. Dean of Engineering Robert Jahn has also published extensively on his experiments at Princeton (Proc. IEEE, Feb 1982). I am not claiming it is quantum anything. It appears to possibly make use of something like Minkowski's (8 dimensional) complex space/time that he described to Einstein in the 1920s, and is now being re-examined by Roger Penrose. This is not necessarily the answer. But the answer will be some sort similar nonlocal space/time geometry. We taught remote viewing to 6 army intelligence officers in 1979. They then taught a dozen other officers, and created an operational army psychic corps at Ft. Meade, which lasted until the end of our program in 1995. You can see two examples of real remote viewing on my website, www.espresearch.com. One with Hella Hammid is double blind, live on camera for a 1983 BBC film, "The Case of ESP." available on Google.
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
[MENTION=2434]Sloe Djinn[/MENTION]
[video=youtube;CRn_HD7nH8g]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CRn_HD7nH8g[/video]
[video=youtube;kaXJbNXsqmQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kaXJbNXsqmQ[/video]
[video=youtube;CRn_HD7nH8g]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CRn_HD7nH8g[/video]
[video=youtube;kaXJbNXsqmQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kaXJbNXsqmQ[/video]
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
LATE SHIFT:
NURSES SHARE THEIR SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS
NURSES SHARE THEIR SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS
‘Tis the season.
Ghost story season that is.
What better way to kick off the month of October than with terrifying tales from Nurses all over.
That’s what AllNurses.com have done.
They’ve collected dozens of spine-tingling tales from real nurses from across the United States.
What follows are 22 real-life encounters with the unknown by those who look after the sick, inured, or dying.
1. Don’t Let Them Take Me!
The best I have heard is from a nurse who said that one night she was floated to oncology at the hospital she used to work at.
She was given a patient who was passing away and had been unconscious for several days.
At one point during the night the nurse went into the room and the patient was at the top of the bed and looked at her and said, “don’t let them take me!”, the nurse was freaked out and asked her who was going to take her and she said that black thing up there and pointed up in the air.
This patient died within minutes.
2. The Black Shape Standing Over The Bed
One night I was caring for a dying male patient.
He was scared and I spent quite some time with him, trying to calm and reassure him.
Eventually he calmed and I left the bedside and went over to the nurses station which was about 15 feet away.
As I sat down I glanced over to him and there was a black shape standing over the bed, looking down at the patient.
I was terrified, and am sure it was something evil.
3. The Escapee
I used to work in a state inst for developmentally disabled.
We were temp relocated to another building for remodeling of our bldg.
Anyways… I was working one nite, 2nd shift.
We had a locked pica unit.
I saw one of the residents walking down the hall.
Very distinct gait and very distinct yellow t-shirt w/ a happy face on it.
I went into the ward to let staff know that they had an escapee.
This was a serious situation because this particular resident, Larry, would ingest absolutely anything (from clothing to pens to belts to *ugh* a bird’s head)… literally anything.
He was also very reluctant to go back to his home ward (hence why I didn’t bring him back myself…he needed two escorts).
When we got back into the hall, less than 15 secs later, Larry was gone!!
We searched the entire building!
Outside, downstairs, all wards…he was NO WHERE to be found!!!
This whole search lasted last than 10 mins because I had all extra staff looking for him.
I was just about to call the house supervisor to let her know that we “lost” someone when out from the bathroom walks Larry w/ one of the staff.
He had been getting his bath in the bathroom for the last 30 mins or so.
Kind of freaky!
I absolutely, without a doubt, saw Larry in the hallway.
I never would’ve short-staffed the wards like I did if I hadn’t seen him!
Like I said, very distinctive gait, look, clothing. I took a lot of razzing that nite!
They all thought that I was crazy.
Anyways, come to find out the next day, after the story goes around that I am crazy (haha, gigglegiggle, funnyfunny)… Larry had an identical twin brother who died in that building 10 yrs previously.
4. Nurse Betty
I was working in the nicu when we had a threat of a tornado.
Some Nurses got pulled to go to a sister hospital in town to assist in the disaster plan.
When all was over one of the nurses returned with this story:
She was assisting the nurses in giving some meds before pulling all into the hallways.
Every pt she went to said they already had their meds from that nice nurse in the white uniform and hat.
She realized after she left that its been awhile since a nurse has worn a hat.
That story revealed the urban legend of Nurse Betty.
Story goes she had an affair with a married md, became pregnant then agreed to allow him to perform an abortion on her on the 2nd floor OR room.
She died and he went to jail.
She never left the hospital and was seen frequently.
The local newspaper would do an article of her every year around halloween on her sightings.
The hospital has since been replaced with college dorms.
Hmmmm I wonder if any students have seen her?
5. He Jumped Out The Window
I heard a story once about a 5th floor neuro unit.
This was told to me first person, a nurse was at the desk and a guy in white nursing garb came through the double doors, walked into an empty room, and didn’t come back out.
Nurse thought it was weird so he went into the room, and it was empty.
He went to the double doors and opened them and there were 2 resp techs talking at the entrance who swore they’d been there talking the whole time and that nobody came through the doors.
When one of his co-workers returned from lunch and he explained what happened, she was like, “Oh, that’s just Bob (actually I don’t remember the name, so the name were changed to protect my ignorance).
He worked here as an LVN years ago and was accused of molesting a child.
He was sure he was about to be arrested so he jumped out the window in that room and killed himself.
We see him all the time . . .”
6. Rocking Mary
After Mary died we closed room 12 in our MICU because just about every patient that has been there since complains of seeing a woman in wearing a white habit rocking back and forth by their bedside.
Apparently this nun never makes eye contact… Just stares outside the window which happens to be on the patient left side over their head.
The window overlooks the hospital cemetery where nuns that have died where buried.
Mary was a nun that died of a car accident outside the hospital back in the 50’s.
She was only about 30 years old and all patient describes her as a young woman.
We all thought that it was the “sun-down syndrome.”
Anyways, since then room 12 became our storage room where no one goes in by themselves unless it is absolutely critical.
We had a patient, chronic CHFer, always on the call button, hated being on fluid restrictions. you know the type: the nurses have to take turns during the shift answering the call button so the primary can actually do other work.
And this was a frequent flier cause he was very chronic, very borderline, and the hospital was the only place he wouldn’t fluid overload.
I work 7p-7a.
He died about 8pm.
Oh the look on his face, like, “how could you let me die!” — Like it was our fault.
Anyway, family came and gone by 9pm, funeral home gone at 9:30pm.
About 10pm, the call button starts going off.
I was there — call button going off every 5 minutes.
One of the nurses was a very spiritual girl.
At about 2am, after like 4 HOURS OF THIS, nurse Mary snaps, ‘Enough!’
She walks down to the room, and, practically screams into the empty room, “Mr X, you have died. You can’t be in here bothering us anymore. Move along. In the name of Jesus, I’m exorcising you from this plane of existence. Go to the light and be happy!”
And I kid you not, the call button stopped going off then and there.
8. Time To Die
I don’t know if this qualifies as a ghost story but here it is.
I was taking care of a 12 year old with aplastic anemia.
A week before she died, every day, at 12:15PM I would get a cold chill across the back of my neck and the hair would stand up.
I mentioned it to the evening nurse, who was convinced she would die at that time.
Several days later, her parents decided to cease all treatment.
She lasped into a coma.
At 12Noon, she woke, asked me to hold her up, said goodbye to her parents, grandparents and siblings.
And died in my arms. It was 12:15PM.
9. The Name On The EKG
I was working in ICU before going to CRNA school.
We had a male patient come in with an MI, he was admitted to room 15.
He ended up having a carotid endartarectomy and eventually a CABG in about a week and a half.
His CABG did not go well at all.
He ended up with a coagulopathy and ended up bleeding and bleeding and dying…cardiovascular collapse.
Anyway.
A week later his brother was admitted to the hospital for an MI.
He was admitted to room 14.
We were able to do bedside EKGs from our monitors.
Upon admission to the ICU we did our standard admission EKG…the name on the EKG came up being his dead brothers name, despite the admission information in the computer being accurately entered as the brother’s name admitted that night.
10. Heavenly
This isn’t really a ghost story, but it definitely gave me chills.
I was working in a critical care unit and there was a minister that was a pt. I can’t really remember what was wrong with him but I do remember him saying that we better get his family because he would be “going home soon”.
In the course of the next hour, he was made a DNR.
I promise you, after that man died, he had a GLOW coming from his face and a smile that was so sweet…..I have never seen anything like it.
Nurses from all over the unit came to see this man’s face and everyone that saw it, cried.
To this day, I get tears in my eyes thinking of it.
I can not think of any other word to describe it but “heavenly”.
11. I Think I’ll Go With Him
I got called to a code in the hallway.
A patient was being transfered from the ER to the floor.
She passed away in the hall.
According to the tech, they were carrying on a conversation, the lady looked up, said ” Oh, here comes God, I think I will go with him.”
She passed away right then.
12. Maggie’s Home
A couple, retired military captain and his wife, Margaret, sold their house to move to Florida.
It so happens that they sold their house to the State — the state was going to use it as a resident home for mentally disabled teens.
After the closing, but before they moved, Margaret died in the house.
The Captain had to move cause the house was already sold.
Do you know where I’m going with this??
Residents always referred to ‘old lady’ that they always saw.
Nursing staff just referred to her as ‘Maggie’.
Now, late at night, when the residents were asleep, if the staff put the TV on more adult programming, like ‘Red Shoe Diaries’, etc., the TV would turn off, and when turned back on, would come on on a different channel.
There was this one nurse, it was like the house was out to get her.
She’d swear that ‘the carpet tripped me’.
When cupboards opened, knives would fall out aimed at her.
Turns out this nurse was eventually fired for abusing and stealing from the residents.
Maggie takes care of her ‘children’.
13. Betty’s Back
I work as a CNA in long term care.
We had one resident “Betty” who was totally independant, all ADL’s were done on her own and she did fine on her own, never had an incident.
The only time she wanted help was showers and then she only wanted you around to make sure she didn’t slip and fall.
Betty came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized.
When she came back she was too weak to do things on her own but too stubborn to ask for help.
The last thing the CNA told her before going to bed was “If you want to get up, hit your call light. I’ll come help you.”
Of course she didn’t, got rid of the bed alarm, climed out of bed and fell.
Betty died from the fall.
No one has been moved into her bed.
The following week the call light for the room went off at night.
Thinking it was the resident in bed B I walked down the room to see what she wanted.
I walked into the room only to see the call light for bed B and A off, the call light for bed C (Betty’s unoccupied bed) was on.
My eyes filled up with tears, I backed out of the room and made someone else turn the call light off.
14. Burning
A friend of mine who is also a nurse used to work in hospice.
She told me about a patient that she cared for that was a very mean individual who was hateful to her family as well as the nurses who cared for her.
As this woman was dying, she became very afraid and started yelling that she was burning!
She screamed and wailed about burning right up until she died.
I was walking past the nurses station on one of our units just before breakfast time and saw this big black figure that was behind a chair raise up from about three feet tall to seven feet almost touching the ceiling and it was coming my way over the counter.
I moved my butt on out there quickly.
When I shared this story with the folks who had worked 11-7 the day before and one of them had seen a big black figure go by and they both heard it make some kind of mournful moan as it went down the ramp to the other unit.
I nearly fell over when I found out I wasn’t the only one seeing it that day.
We both described exactly the same thing with even the same gait.
16. The Scent Of Roses
I used to work in an old catholic hospital.
Where the labor and delivery unit is located now, it used to be the convent for the nuns that worked at this hospital.
One of the nuns died of natural causes years ago.
This nun loved and raised numerous varieties of roses.
Ever since the OB department was moved to this area, anytime a mother or baby is having difficulties you can smell the scent of roses throughout the whole unit.
The OB nurses know to be prepared when they start smelling the scent of roses.
If a mother or baby dies, the room suddenly fills with rose petals.
It is one of the creepiest, but also loving things that happens.
I was standing in a room one night when the baby died.
The room filled with white and pink rose petals.
The nurses and family were creeped out.
18. She Knew Her Baby Would Die
A pt told me she knew that her baby would not live even though she had an emergency c/s for distress.
I asked her how she knew.
She had seen a family member in the hallway going to the OR that had recently died and they told her they would take of the baby, not to worry.
19. The Military Hospital
When I was a student working on a male medical ward one night with my mate (also a 2nd yr student).
The auxillary and staff nurse both left the ward together for their break leaving us two in charge ! (the done thing some years ago).
Suddenly a man in one of the beds sat bolt upright and said “Who are all those soldiers?”
A guy in the bed opposite awoke and commented that he could not see their feet.
My pal and I tried to calm them down, telling them it was probably the side effects of their tablets!
When the staff returned, we told them the patients had seen something on the ward, but did not say what.
The auxillary then went pale and said it must be their anniversary again.
She told us the hospital use to be a millitary hospital during the war, but the floor was 12 inches lower and every year a troup of ghost soldiers walk down the ward with their feet on the orriginal floor so you never see their boots!
Exit 2 student nurses!
20. There Goes That Little Guy
Growing up, my best friend’s Dad worked in LTC.
He told us about a blind resident who would occasionally become agitated and then say “there goes that little guy” from out of nowhere.
Every time he said that, another resident on the floor would pass away.
21. I See Her Too
My friend an RT told me she had this room her and another RT would rest during their break late at night..
The male RT, Donald, was sitting across a table from her with his head resting on his folded arm leaning on the table and facing the door.
The room was pretty dark and my friend Karen was reading when she noticed a mist forming by the door.
Before she could react the mist formed into a figure of a nurse or nun looking person in white with a long shawl over her head.
The apparition stood inside the room just looking at Karen and smiling.
Karen noticed she ended at the waist, no legs or pelvis was visible.
Karen was terrified and in a soft voice she called out to the other RT, “Donald?” and a little louder she called to wake him again, “Donald?”.
With out lifting his head he spoke up” I see her too Karen.”
The ghost faded away after a few moments and both agreed on what they had seen.
22. Don’t Let Me Die
My creepiest and scariest ghost story for me happened about a year ago.
It really was more of a posession than a ghost story.
I was helping another nurse with a patient that had lived a very hard life.
It had numerous things going on with him from cardiac to renal failure.
You name it, he had it going on.
This man was very much afraid to die.
Every time his heart monitor beeped, he would just go into a rage screaming, “Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die!”
The other nurse and I found out why he didn’t want to die.
About 0200 his cardiac monitor starts alarming V-Tach. We both rush into the room.
I am pulling the crash cart behing me.
When I get to the room, the other nurse is completely white.
This man was sitting about 2 inches above the bed and was laughing.
His whole look completely changed.
His eyes just had a look of pure evil on them and he had this evil smile on his face.
He laughed at us and said, ” You stupid b****es aren’t going to let me die will you?” and he laughed again.
We were kinda frozen.
I did reach up and hit the Code Blue button and when I did the man went into V-fib. He crashed back onto the bed.
We started coding him, but after 20 minutes it was called.
Five minutes after the code was called several of the code team is in the room cleaning up when this man sits straight up in the bed and says, ” You let him die. Too bad.” and then begins laughing.
The man collapsed back to the bed.
We heard a horrible, agonizing scream ( actually every patient in the unit that night commented on the scream), and then you could hear âdon’t let me die” being whispered throughout the unit.
Everyone of the nurses that night was pale and scared.
No body went anywhere by themselves.
By morning the whispers of “don’t let me die” were gone.
The night shift nurses had a prayer service in the break room before we left for home and then we all had nightmares for weeks.
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