Hmmmm….I thought the whole point of having solar panel roads would be to power itself plus more.
Too bad…it sounds as if they were underprepared...
Earlier this month Intelligence[SUP]2[/SUP] hosted a debate on the question of the afterlife, with ground-breaking near-death experience author Dr. Raymond Moody and neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander arguing for the statement "Death is not Final", while countering that claim were physicist Sean Carroll and neurologist Dr. Steven Novella.
With the event being a sell-out, Intelligence[SUP]2[/SUP] graciously streamed the debate via video to the internet, and have since shared the recorded version on YouTube (see embedded video below).
I mentioned my concern over the choice of panelist arguing 'for' the proposition before the debate, and that concern was largely borne out. In my opinion, they failed badly and the negative side were worthy winners of the debate.
Moody and Alexander seemed unbelievably badly prepared, given how obvious the arguments of the negative side were going to be. Neither seemed ready for the critiques, which certainly have vulnerabilities of their own which the positives could have responded with (see my examination after the video below). B
oth Moody and Alexander also seemed to be pre-occupied by their own personal interaction with the topic, and as such rather than surveying the whole landscape of the afterlife debate to bolster their case, they stayed within their own very narrow boundaries.
Eben Alexander led off almost completely with his own, subjective (and not totally NDE-like) experience, which was no doubt profound for him, but is not a story which should win any logic-based debate.
Raymond Moody - who is certainly owed a huge debt by us all for his contribution to the field with his seminal NDE book Life After Life - indulged in his predilection for deep philosophical musings, which may be fun over a casual drink, but in an hour-long public debate is an action doomed to fail.
Moody got so lost in his musings in fact, that at one point he said point-blank "I believe parapsychology is a pseudoscience", and later was invited by the negative side to join their panel because he seemed to be arguing on behalf of their side!
You can watch the entire debate for yourself here:
[video=youtube;h0YtL5eiBYw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h0YtL5eiBYw[/video]
I said before the debate that I would have preferred to see someone with the credentials of Dr. Bruce Greyson arguing for the positive, as he has a deep knowledge of these topics, understanding both the evidence for and the critiques against, and is a fairly unflappable character.
Since the debate, I've thought of other possible candidates who would also have done a good job: Michael Prescott, Chris Carter, Janice Miner-Holden, Michael Grosso, Julie Beischel, Sam Parnia and Steve Volk.
Nevertheless, here's how I think Moody and Alexander should have conducted the debate:
The 'for' side needed to concentrate on the weight of anomalistic evidence in support of the statement. There is no killer (pun not intended) case to win the day – sorry Eben – but there isa preponderance of very curious cases which would have fascinated and likely swayed what was a very sympathetic audience.
Alexander should have started the debate by giving a broad overview of all this evidence: firstly by introducing NDEs, then pointing out the multiple cases of veridical NDEs (where the person having the NDE reports back information that they should not have had access to, such as details about the operating theatre), then pointing out Peak in Darien cases (where the NDEr sees someone in the 'afterlife realm' who was thought to be alive, but was subsequently verified to have died shortly before that time).
Rinse and repeat with end-of-life experiences reported by those on their death-bed shortly before they passed. Follow up on the end-of-life experiences of the dying with reports of strange phenomena at the death-bed witnessed by healthy individuals caring for the dying. Move on to mediumship, and the long history of research into that area - start with the conclusions of many distinguished scientists with the Society for Psychical Research that mediums did have access to those 'beyond', and move through to more recent research such as that conducted by Julie Beischel and Emily Kelly.
In other words, come out swinging! The negative side were sure to counter those topics, but the skeptical arguments are fairly stock standard and predictable, and thus could have been answered in more detail in the following segments.
And truly, there was no surprise in the negative arguments. Carroll, the physicist, argued that these experiences are outside of physical laws. Novella, the neuroscientist, argued that we have a complete description of the mind as arising from the physical brain.
The counter-argument to Carroll's 'physical laws' critique is quite simple: it needed to be pointed out that his claim is largely tautological: "we know these physical laws, thus our reality is defined, thus we know what the physical laws of reality are".
A fun and accessible thought experiment based on the 'simulation argument' might have been a nice exercise to win the audience here. For example, get them to consider a person totally immersed in the world of id Software's first-person shooterQuake: within that game, the physics are slightly different to the physics of 'our realitiy' - you can swerve around corners as you jump, you can fire a rocket at your feet to jump higher, there is such thing as teleportation of the body, and so on.
Only once that person 'unplugs' do they find a world where those things are inconceivable. (And to push the gaming analogy even further, in the game Counterstrike: Source, when you die you have an out-of-body experience, able to fly around and watch what people are doing, far from your dead 'body', just as is reported in veridical near-death experiences.)
So why should the existence of another reality – the afterlife one – either enclosing this one, or sitting beside it, require adherence to the physical laws of our living reality?
Additionally, on a separate tack, it might be worth mentioning that other respected scientists – such as Professor Henry Stapp and Stuart Hameroff – have actually argued that the physical laws of this world do not preclude the existence of consciousness surviving our bodily death (see this TDG story for example).
Sean Carroll also brought with him some neat debate tricks, such as when he asked a ghost to lift his glass of water to prove the afterlife. It was good for entertaining the audience – which is half of the challenge in winning a debate – but it really had no basis in logic and Alexander or Moody could have 'exposed' the ruse as a cheap trick for their own benefit.
And Carroll's statement that "physicists used to think consciousness was involved in quantum physics, we've moved on now though" (paraphrasing) was his own personal viewpoint (which it must be said, however, is assuredly an expert one). There is no doubt that there are many very capable physicists who do not share that view, such as the afore-mentioned Henry Stapp, Sir Roger Penrose, and the authors of the book Quantum Enigma, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, who have said that the link between consciousness and the quantum is physics' "skeleton in the closet".
Pointing this out would have weakened Carroll's reputation with the audience considerably ("he's not telling us facts, he's just giving his opinion).
Steven Novella's gambit was also a predictable one, given his background in neuroscience, and his high ranking in skeptical circles: "we know the mind is a creation of the brain, because when the brain is damaged, mind is damaged".
The obvious response to him here would have been to point out the error in his assumption: that correlation equals causation. In a transmission theory of consciousness, in which the brain acts as 'receiver' of consciousness from elsewhere, any damage to the 'receiver' (the physical brain) is obviously going to affect the 'transmission' (mind).
The oft-used analogy is a television set - if you throw a brick into the TV, it's going to cause problems in seeing the picture in some way, but that doesn't mean the channel you were watching is contained with the TV.
Another more up-to-date analogy might be the Mars Curiosity rover: smash the 'control centre' of the rover and it will 'die', a lonely inert piece of metal on the lifeless surface of the Red Planet. But the intelligence that was directing Curiosity (the driver of the rover) remains fully conscious and alive on the 'Earth plane' which is its origin, just unable to control its body anymore.
Novella did make a good point in asking if near-death experiences were truly happening during the 'death state' of resuscitation, or whether they might have actually been occurring during the short intervals of consciousness on either side (e.g. upon regaining heart function).
The response here should have been along the lines of what Dr. Bruce Greyson told me (mentioned in the chapter on NDEs). Acknowledge that it's a good question, and requires further research, but that the accounts of veridical near-death experiencers appear to offer us with 'time anchors' which show us that these experiences happened during the 'death state'.
It would have been good to give an example here, so that the audience could grasp the point, such as the veridical NDE of a patient recounted by pioneering surgeon Dr. Lloyd Rudy. Rudy and his assistant had done bypass surgery on the patient, but had been unable to get them back off the bypass machine, eventually being forced to give up.
The anaesthesiologist left the room to get something to eat, and Dr. Rudy and his assistant removed their surgical gowns and began debriefing while others cleaned up the OR. Then, after showing a little bit of intermittent electrical activity, the patients heart began beating again on its own, and Rudy and his team leapt into action to stabilise the patient.
Here's what happened afterwards, from Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife):
Cases such as this could have been used to call out Steven Novella's statement that "there are “no cases with evidence of when NDE happened”", and doing so would have been a useful tool in throwing doubt over everything else the negative side – who held the advantage of coming across as serious, knowledgable scientists – were saying.
A few days later, Rudy was talking to the patient about the operation, asking him if he had felt or experienced anything during this strange situation.
The patient told Rudy about having seen a bright light at the end of a tunnel – standard fare for an NDE – but it was what he related about the Earthly realm that “astounded” the experienced surgeon: “He described that operating room [and] floating around and saying ‘I saw you and the [other doctor] standing in the doorway with your arms folded talking…I didn’t know where the anaesthesiologist was but he came running back in.
And I saw all of these post-it notes, sitting on this TV screen’.” This particular aspect was the most intriguing to Rudy – during a surgery, if he received any phone calls he would get the nurse to answer and then write down the name and number on a post-it note, and stick it to the monitor so that he could call them back once the operation was finished.
Dr. Rudy laughs at this point and exclaims animatedly: “HE DESCRIBED THAT!! I mean there’s no way he could have described that before the operation because I didn’t have any calls…he described the scene, things that there is no way he knew”.
With a flabbergasted look on his face, Rudy clarifies: “I mean he didn’t wake up in the operating room and see all this – he was out, and was out for a day or two while we recovered him in the Intensive Care Unit”.
Similarly, discussing the correlation equals causation error, and explanation of how transmission theory shows it to not necessarily true, offered a fine way of rebutting Novella's statement that the available evidence about the relationship between brain and mind “can only lead to one conclusion”.
Some really fine opportunities were not taken advantage of here by the positive side, who as I said seemed to be woefully prepared for their opponents' strategies. The negative side certainly overstated their case in many places, but the audience largely didn't know any better and it was up to the affirmative team to seize on those mis-statements and educate the audience, and in doing so win their trust – but they failed in that respect.
Not so much on the knowledge side of things, but the other area where the positive side could have been better was in the personal stakes. The negative side were a great combination of humour, confidence, and scientific information (although I think Carroll's confidence veered into almost being academically snobbish, which could have been played on strategically by Moody and Alexander).
The affirmative side, on the other hand seemed (at least to me) rather self-interested, overly serious and too philosophical (especially in Moody's case). They may have even lost the argument simply on these grounds, as the crowd really seemed to want a reason, any reason, to vote for the positive, if they could just give it to them (witness the ovation Alexander got simply for mentioning the 'hard problem' of consciousness).
On the flip side, Carroll and Novella may well have had 'more gears', but their opposition was so poor that they didn't have to get out of first gear. Which is more the shame, because this could have been a cracking debate, both entertaining and educational.
For me it was frustrating to watch the positive side fail to mention so much positive evidence, and fail to predict and counter the negatives' rather obvious strategies. But at least there was a public debate on this topic, which I would love to see more of.
It's one of the biggest questions of our existence, and there is fascinating evidence supporting it as well as powerful critiques against. It deserves to be discussed properly.
By “soul transmission” what do you specifically mean? That the person is only seeing from the point of view of an outside entangled particle(s), and they aren’t really “leaving” their body?
Alan Watts & Terence McKenna - Our Need For A Sense Of Unity
Alan Watts and Terence McKenna talk about our need for a sense of unity as our global problems are getting worse and we have become enemies of our planet and each other.
Created by The Omega Point Project.
[video=youtube;Iu0ozHCneWM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Iu0ozHCneWM[/video]
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, yet more problems; more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor.
We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less.
We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; big men and small character; steep profits and shallow relationships.
These are the days of two incomes but more divorce; fancier houses but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom.
A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete. Remember, spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Remember to say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.
Remember to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a cent. Remember to say “I love you” to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it.
A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you. Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.
Give time to love, give time to speak, and give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind. –Dr. Morehead
Interesting history….(Happy shitsack day…lol)
May is an important month in the British folklore calendar, falling as it does midway between spring equinox and summer solstice. It is the month when the rising sap reaches its culmination; buds become blooms, lambs are in the field, and chicks are in the nest.
The Old English name for the month was Þrimilci-mōnaþ (“month of three milkings”) while the modern name is thought by some to derive from the pre-Christian goddess Maia to whom a pregnant sow would be ritually sacrificed on the first of the month. Associations with fertility and with plenty are abundantly clear in both cases.
Although many surviving customs such as the crowning of May Queens (young women picked for their beauty and virtue to act as May personified for the day), dancing around the Maypole (a relic of pre-historic dendrolatry, or phallic pagan fertility symbol, depending on who you ask/believe), and so on, chiefly take place on May Day there are many varied traditions spread throughout the month. As we approach May’s end we come upon a curious cluster of events centred upon today’s date - the 29th.
In 1660 British Parliament declared the 29th of May a public holiday in commemoration Charles II’s escape after the Battle of Worcester nine years earlier. Charles II is said to have evaded capture by Parliamentarians by climbing an oak tree (The Royal Oak in Boscobel Wood, Shropshire) and hiding amongst its leaves, so the holiday came to be nicknamed Oak Apple Day.
Around Dorset, Oak Apple Day was once known as Shit-Sack Day or Shick-Sack Day. There was a custom of adorning the door of one’s home with oak leaves on the day and Oak Apple loyalists would visit any undecorated house and place a wreath of stinging nettles on the door singing:
“Shit Sack, penny a rag
Bang his head in Cromwell’s bag
All done up in a bundle”
Similarly, people not seen to be wearing a sprig of oak themselves were sometimes beaten with nettles or pelted with eggs.
At All Saints Church, Northampton (www.allsaintsnorthampton.co.uk) a statue of King Charles II which sits on the parapet of the portico is garlanded with oak leaves at noon every Oak Apple day.
Underneath the statue is the inscription This Statue was erected in memory of King Charles II who gave a thousand tun of timber towards the rebuilding of this church and to this town seven years chimney money collected in it.
During the English Civil War, Northampton – with an already long history of religious dissent – supported the Parliamentarians; even providing boots for Cromwell’s New Model Army. After regaining the throne, Charles II went so far as to take revenge upon Northampton by ordering the destruction of the town walls and the partial demolition of its castle.
Despite all this, the Earl of Northampton had remained a friend and confident of Charles’ throughout the interregnum and it was he who persuaded the King to contribute the timber and repeal seven year’s chimney tax in order to build the church. The decoration of Charles’ statue is followed by a celebration of the Holy Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer - a book whose use was famously outlawed under Cromwell.
Traditional May Day celebrations had very much fallen out of favour during the interregnum of England, Scotland and Ireland – a period of which began with the execution of Charles I in January 1649 and was ended in July 1660 Charles II, took to the throne.
During this period maypole dancing was outlawed, denounced as “a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness” by Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans. So it was that many of the former May Day customs came to be re-adopted and incorporated as part of the new Oak Apple Day celebrations.
In Castleton, Derbyshire (www.castleton.co.uk) the 29th is Garland King Day. The Garland King rides a cart-horse wearing a large wooden frame completely covered in flowers and greenery so that only his legs are visible. At the apex of the King’s floral finery is fixed a posy of especially fine flowers and this is known as the Queen. Following the King is a second Queen, on horseback like himself. Up until 1956 the Queen (or 'the Woman' as she was then) was always a man in female dress.
The Garland King leads a procession which makes its way through the village, via the six public houses (naturally), into the churchyard. There the great garland is hoisted up on ropes to the top of the church tower, and the Queen posy is laid at the foot of the village War Memorial.
In Aston on Clun, Shropshire, May 29th is Arbour Day (www.arbordayuk.co.uk). A Black Poplar tree which stands at the centre of the village is dressed with flags each Arbour Day. The ceremony’s origins are claimed by the village to have their roots in ancient tree-dressing rites dedicated to Brigid, the Celtic Goddess of Fertility.
On Arbor Day in Aston on Clun in 1786, local Squire John Marston of the Oaker Estate married Mary Carter of Sibdon. They arrived back at the Arbor Tree to see it dressed with flags, and the villagers having fun. The Marstons were so taken with the joy of the celebrations that they set up a trust to pay for the care of the tree and the flags, until the mid 1950’s, when Hopesay Parish Council took up the task.
In 1995, the 300+ year old Black Poplar tree was toppled in a fierce storm. It was replaced by a sapling which had been taken from the tree twenty years earlier, and it is this thirty-nine year old tree which now takes centre stage.
On the 29th villagers of Wishford in Wiltshire celebrate the right to collect wood from the nearby Forest of Grovely which was granted in the Middle Ages, and confirmed by the Forest Court in 1603. An oak bough is taken, decorated and then hanged from the tower of Saint Giles' Church.
In order to maintain their charter, the villagers must proclaim their right at a special ceremony in Salisbury Cathedral, where they repeat the ancient refrain:
"Grovely, Grovely and all Grovely!".
A banner emblazoned with the same slogan is paraded through the village before dancing, drinking and feasting take place.
So, praise Bridgid the exalted one! All hail the mighty trees and their spirits! God Save the King! And a very happy Shit-Sack Day to you, one and all!
