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Out-of-Body Experience on Demand
GT_Alias writes "CNN has an article reporting that some neurology researchers in Switzerland have triggered repeated out-of-body experiences by firing certain electrodes in the patient's brain. It seems that a part of the brain called the angular gyrus, responsible for logic and spatial awareness, triggers the sensation."
The news here is that the "real" scientists, who for years have claimed out of body experiences were either lies, hoaxes, drug induced hallucinations or intentional self deceptions, have verified an experience paranormal investigators have been describing for a long time.
You're confused. Imagining or hallucinating that you're floating outside your body is not paranormal. It's only paranormal if the subject is literally able to see what is going on while their eyes are closed or something. This article did not describe the verification of anything like that. They were able to cause out-of-body experiences, but nothing indicated that they were anything more than hallucinations.
If all paranormal investigators claimed is that people sometimes imagine themselves floating outside their bodies, nobody would have called that "lies, hoaxes, or intentional self deceptions" (I'm sure it could be caused by drugs in some cases, though).
There's something like this in Schrodinger's and Einstein's and Pauli's theories, where you can't tell if the cat's alive or not, provided you don't observe it, and that matter and energy are interchangeable, and that electrons can't occupy any energy state they bloody feel like, but that they exist only in one of a finite number of discrete states at one time, and that you can make 'em jump from one state to another, but you can never shove 'em halfway in between these states.
> I know it is not a popular scientific tradition among americans and, specially, among computer scientists, but it is a pretty interesting line of thought.
I know it is not a popular poststructuralist tradition among academics, and, specifically, among philosophers, but the notion that there exists an objective reality, whose nature can be determined through the scientific method, is also a pretty interesting line of thought.
> It will sure be difficult to show he who had an out-of-body experience that what he saw is an illusion.
A lot of people tried the "objective reality" idea, built devices like transistors, cathode ray tubes, radio and X-ray telescopes, nuclear weapons, and laser keychain pointers based on those principles.
In the meantime, what have postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists brought us, other than graduate papers on postmodernism?
I think the scientist denying the OBE-believer's claim as mere illusion has a much easier time of it than a poststructuralist philosophy student's attempted denial of everything from the 15-kiloton explosion over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the 0.5 milliwatt HeNe laser reflecting annoyingly off his computer's display after having been aimed there by a couple of wise-ass geeks in the engineering lab across campus.
I can't speak for Dostoevsky, but I think Nietzsche would have been embarassed at you. Who, since Nietzsche's day, has done more to completely redefine our understanding of reality than the scientist? Will to Power, indeed.
> http://www.layhands.com/HowToCastOutSpirits.htm
1) Gentoo. Build from source.
2) FDISK and install Linux instead.
We have to be very carefull with Occam's Razor. This discriminator must be used to order hypothesis, not to rule them out. Moreover, the ordering is highly dependant on the technological level of the observer. And too often, we don't go beyong the first hypothesis in the ordered list.
Let me give you an example: I have a clock on the wall behind me. Here are some hypothesis:
1. A quartz is oscillating by feeding it using white noise generated by a device composed of chemical stuff (battery). The white noise triggers the quartz's natural resonnance frequency. The time is then indicated by a complex set of electronics dividing a quartz oscilation and driving a step motor to which is attached the hands we see.
2. Someone is hiding behing the wall and turning the handles.
Occam's Razor would put the second explanation as the simplest. I don't think it is the right explanation though.
It is not because an explanation is satisfactory that it is the right one. We have to keep an open mind.