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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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PAUL REVERE & THE RAIDERS - INDIAN RESERVATION

 
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Joe Mahmood

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THE WAR OF THE WORLDVIEWS: DUALISM VERSUS MONISM

One fundamental distinction to make in WORLDVIEWS is that between dualism and monism.

Dualists believe that we consist of two substances - body and soul, brain and mind (called 'substance dualism' by philosophers).

Monists contend that there is just one substance - a body and a brain - from which consciousness is an emergent property, 'mind' is just the term we use to describe what the brain is doing, and the soul is just the pattern of information that represents our thoughts, memories and personalities.

As such, monists hold that the death of the body - the disintegration of the material body and the degradation of memory patterns in the brain - means the death of the soul.

By contrast, dualists assert that the soul, like the mind, is a separate entity from the body, so even after the death of the body the soul continues.

Most people are dualists because dualism is intuitive - it just feels as if there is something else inside us, in the same way that the thoughts floating around up there in our skulls feel like a mind separate from our brain.

The psychologist Paul Bloom calls us 'natural-born dualists', as reflected in our language when we use phrases such as 'my body aches' (rather than 'I ache') or 'my mind is muddled' (rather than 'I am muddled'), as if 'I' and 'body' and 'mind' are separate things.

In his delightful chapter on 'Homer's Soul' in The Psychology of the Simpsons, Bloom shows how pervasive this dualism is in pop culture, as in the episode in which Homer is trying to figure out why his phone bill is so high:

"Homer: Burkina Faso? Disputed Zone? Who called all these weird places?
Homer's Brain: Quiet, it might be you! I can't remember.
Homer: Naw, I'm going to ask Marge.
Homer's Brain: No, no! Why embarrass us both? Just write a cheque and I'll release some more endorphins.

Homer scribbles a cheque, then sighs with pleasure."

The scene is humorous because as intuitive dualists we get the joke, but as monists we know that there is no dualistic split between Homer and Homer's brain. There's just Homer's brain talking to itself.

By Michael Shermer author of HEAVENS ON EARTH - The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia

https://michaelshermer.com/


EDIE BRICKELL & NEW BOHEMIANS - WHAT I AM

 
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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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"When science is unable to explain and proof fully the origins of the universe, our existence and the afterlife; philosophy and faiths would prevail. The existence of the unseen and unknown God."

~ Joe Mahmood, December 2019, Singapore.


JOE SOUTH - GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

 
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Joe Mahmood

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Consciousness - first proponents retort that the brain is like a television set and consciousness is like the television broadcast signals. Just as you need a TV set to receive broadcast signals, you need a brain to register consciousness. The Dutch NEAR-DEATH experience researcher Pim van Lommel articulates the argument thus:

"We only become aware of these electromagnetic informational fields at the moment we switch on our TV, cell-phone or laptop. What we receive is not inside the instrument, not in the compartments, but thanks to the receiver, the information from the electromagnetic fields becomes observable to our senses and hence perception occurs in our consciousness. If we switch off the TV set, the reception disappears, but the transmission continues. The information transmitted remains present within the electromagnetic fields. The connection has been interrupted, but it has not vanished ('non-locality')...As soon as the function of the brain has been lost, as in clinical death ... memories and consciousness do still exist, but the receptivity is lost, the connection is interrupted."

This, says Van Lommel, death does not mean the end of consciousness. The full-throated version of the analogy was made in a 2009 book titled IRREDUCIBLE MIND, edited by Edward and Emily Kelly, in which they argue that:

"autobiographical, semantic, and procedural (skill) memories sometimes survive bodily death. If this is the case, memory in living persons presumably exists, at least in part, outside the brain and body as conventionally understood."

How could this be, given what we know about the brain and how memories are stored in neural patterns?

"The true function of the brain might for example be permissive, like the trigger of a crossbow, or like the keys of a pipe organ (or perhaps, in more contemporary terms, like the receivers in our radios and televisions)."

The analogy doesn't hold. Television studios generate and broadcast signals that our TV sets pick up. If our brains are analogous to television sets, where is the consciousness equivalent to TV production and broadcast facilities? Who or what is doing the consciousness broadcasting? In other words, if brains are not the source of consciousness, then what is? In this point of fact there is no consciousness broadcaster and the brain is nothing at all like a television set, and believers in the soul have no answers to these questions beyond a vague notion that consciousness is everywhere. What neuroscience tells us is that everything a mind (or soul) is supposed to do fails when the accompanying part of the brain fails, and that is probably why only 7.1 per cent of biologists believe in an afterlife.

By Michael Shermer, author of HEAVENS ON EARTH - The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia.

https://michaelshermer.com/


SILENT THEORY - FRAGILE MINDS

 
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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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HAILEE STEINFELD - AFTERLIFE




For more than twenty years cardiologist Pim van Lommel has studied near-death experiences (NDEs) in patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published a study on Near Death Experiences in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. He, then, wrote the Dutch bestseller Endless Consciousness in 2007; over 100.000 copies were sold in the first year.

The NDE is an authentic experience which cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis or oxygen deprivation. After such an profound experience, patient’s personalities underwent a permanent change. In Van Lommel’s opinion, the current views on the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too narrow for a proper understanding of the NDE phenomenon. The author provides examples and ways that our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions; that consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body.

https://pimvanlommel.nl/en/
 
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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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"FACING DEATH - AND life - with courage, awareness and honesty can bring out the best in us and focus our minds on what matters most: gratitude and love. Gratitude for a chance at life, given the biological reality that those hundred billion people who lived before us were, in fact, only a tiny fraction of the many trillions of people who could have been born but not. The chance encounter of sperm and egg that led to each of us could just as well have produced someone else, and you would never know it because there would be no you to know. Once born, we are each unique, a concatenation of genes and brains with thoughts, feelings, memories, histories and points of view that can never be duplicated, here or in the hereafter. Our sentience - yours, mine, everyone's - is ours alone and like no other anywhere in the cosmos. We are given this one chance to live, some four score trips around the sun, a brief but glorious moment in the cosmic drama unfolding on this provisional proscenium. Given all we know about the universe and the laws of nature, that is the most any of us can reasonably hope for. Fortunately, it is enough. It is the soul of life. It is heaven on earth."

By Michael Shermer, author of HEAVENS ON EARTH - The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia.

https://michaelshermer.com/


DAUGHTRY - GONE TOO SOON

 
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