Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Friday, November 20, 2009, 19:04 (5261 days ago) @ David Turell

"I have a problem with your statement that consciousness stops with sleep. Are dreams consciousness in some form?"-I don't think dreams are generally recognized as part of consciousness. On the contrary, I think the psychologist's convention is to speak of dreams happening when we are unconscious. Dreams are certainly experiences that we have and we can remember our experiences, but not all of our experiences happen in our consciousness.-Let me give you an example. I do a series of daily 60-second stretching exercises. In some positions, I don't have my watch available for the timing and I count slowly up to 60. Often during this counting, my mind wonders away from my mental counting onto something else. My consciousness is no longer on the counting but on that something else. Nevertheless there are mechanisms in my brain that are keeping track of the counting that "wake me up" when I get close to 60 and then consciousness attends to the last five or so seconds and turns away from what I've been thinking about. Then when I look back, I can remember that I'd been counting to myself all along, even though my consciousness was turned elsewhere.-"There are many near to death (NDE) reports from patients who learn of other persons' deaths by communication with persons on the 'other side'. These are verified third person observations, especially in hospice situations.The patient had no other souce of inforation except from the NDE."-And you think this proves there's an afterlife? It's uncertain what it actually proves, but it may be nothing more then some kind of telepathic event. Personally the existence of telepathy is much more believable than an afterlife, and of course many materialists even doubt the existence of telephatic events. Personally I can't be that skeptical.-Here's what I think happens when we have a premonition of another person's death. In fact, we've had a telepathic but unconscious connection all along with that person while they were alive. Then when they suddenly die, that connection is severed. The brain is startled by that severing and sometimes in an attempt to make sense of it, it makes up a story about what actually happened. If the person believes in the afterlife, the story is couched in a "vision" of a "message from the other side." A more skeptical person like myself might also have a premonition of the person's death, but the brain does not manufacture a story about a "message from the other side," but is content with the strange feeling that the person is no longer with us. By Occam's razor, I think my explanation makes a lot more sense.