The NDE industry is run by people who are making money off of it, selling books, videos, all manner of stuff. There is no independent corroboration of any of the subjective experiences of those reporting the NDE other than by confederates also making money off of the NDE industry.

The report is that the person experiencing the NDE had “zero” brain activity although it was never reliably measured. The reports of HM are detailed and span over 50 years. During that entire time he never produced long term memories despite having brain activity except for the parts that were inactive due to them being missing.

HM is not the only case of amnesia induced by brain damage. People with damage to their visual centers can’t see even with intact eyes. According to the NDE industry, people with inactive eyes that are closed and an inactive brain can still “see”. Why is there such a thing as blindness if seeing is so easy to do without eyes or an operating brain? Why is there not a single example of a person without eyes being able to see? With an active brain, it should be easier to couple the visual experience of an immaterial mind with that of the brain. Since blind people have many years to try and achieve such a connection and enormous incentive to do so, why has there been not a single reliable report of it happening? If that state is so easy to enter that it happens in unprepared individuals undergoing emergency life saving operations under near death circumstances, it should happen with individuals who are blind who are in that state for many years. Even if blind individuals only get a partial effect, with practice they should be able to get better at it, and with years to practice and enormous incentive to do so, why has it not happened?

No one has suggested that emergence could lead to properties that are infinite. A variety of very well established physical principles suggest that could not happen, including conservation of mass/energy and the finite speed of light. The observed expansion of the universe suggests that it will have a finite duration.

Postulating multiple infinities when none are actually known is not credible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change

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If I understand your notion of identity (over time) — and I may not — then there are few if any interesting objects that persists over any significant length of time; and certainly no persons, minds, or brains.

Personal identity certainly IS a sticky wicket; at various times I too have been skeptical whether there is such a thing. That said, I’m not yet ready to abandon the notion (ala Hume).

While there certainly are signifignat problems with the notion of personal idenity over time, a strict one-to-one correspondence of all points, parts, or relations certainly is incompatible with change over time. Thus, most conceed that change is possible — the trick, then, is to makes sense of change of times as happaneing to one thing.

Consider Theseus’ Ship? Do you take it to be the same despite its repairs and physical changes throughout its voyages?

What if they recovered all its discarded original pieces and built a (quite worn, admittedly) ship out of that; would IT be the Thesues?

Indeed, the metaphysical alternatives seem, on the one, that there is identity but that things cannot change over time at all and that what seems to be change is merely the succession of quite similars or, on the other hand, that personal (etc.) identity and change are BOTH possible, albeit within certain kinds of limits(and perhaps admitting of fuzzy boundaries).

Certainly personal identity can break if there enough or the right kind (wrong?) of changes. Permanent wides spread amnesia? Significant or radical personality change through TBI (Mr. Phineas Gage)? “Changing your mind” or opinions and beliefs over time, though, seems more akin to Theseus’ ship — same vessel on the same journey (to speak roughly) despite its physcial replacement and even, perhaps, upgrades.

And this goes for the brain too — it’s recycled and changes over time, but barring identity breaking changes of note, it’s the same brain despite of (indeed, perhaps because of) the normal and to be expected changes it undergoes.

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As (not so subtlety) implied above, I’m (I suspect) more of an “anomalous monist” or “property dualist” . But these are neither her nor there re your points. Indeed, I’m not entirely sure how these bare on the above except re supervenience, which is, admittedly, a hard subject to get clear on, but not one that requires any of the difficulties I think you are suggesting above.

It seems that the same mind could supervene on many different possible brain states; but this does NOT mean that change in the supervened on state (the brain) wouldn’t thereby require a change in the supervening one (the mind) — depends on the kind of change!

The other way ’round, ANY change in the mind, as the supervening state, would thereby require a change in the substratum (the brain).

Consider a table. And change in the table necessarily changes the atomic and chemical substructures it supervenes on. But you’d count it (or at least many would) as the same table if you made some kinds of changes to the substratum — hells, you wouldn’t even notice most such changes!

The dualists have been acting as if “the mind” of an individual is a unique object which is self-identical with “the mind” of an individual over that individual’s entire life span. There is no actual data to suggest that is the case.

To me, objects are only identical if they can be put in a one-to-one correspondence at every point. No “material” objects are identical unless they can be put into a one-to-one correspondence and are indistinguishable. So far as we know, only elementary particles are identical. Macroscopic objects are not.

Obviously as a person ages, their body and their brain change and the brain of an individual at one age is different than the same individual’s brain at another age. Is their mind the same? Presumably not because if the mind didn’t change it would have no capacity to learn or to adapt.

A non-dualist (such as myself) would say that as the brain changes, so does the mind, and vice versa. The brain is an extremely complex assembly of matter, with a few hundred billion neurons with a few hundred trillion connections that are all in a dynamic state of change. Each change in the matter of the brain, results in a “new” mind, a mind that is different from the mind represented by the earlier matter assembly. The number of possible states this assembly of matter can be in is not small. At least on the order of (10^11)! ((that is 10 raised to the 11th power) factorial). Maybe it is more like ((10^11)^(10^4))! Many of these different minds are likely not distinguishable from each other by any techniques that we have. There are more than enough degrees of freedom for an individual to have a different and unique mind at every moment of their life. Which one of these is the “real” mind? I would say that they are all real, and any of them are just as much the real mind of the individual as any other.

The dualists have the problem of the mind changing but staying the same; the problem of normal development and sub-fatal injury changing and degrading the functionality of the mind without fatal injury degrading that functionality to zero. The problem of how such a mind would/could evolve coupled to a material body. Evolve both in the sense of via common descent in human and other species and also in individuals human and nonhuman.

If you were able to reproduce an identical brain, with identical neurons connected in identical geometry, I would say that you would reproduce the mind contained in that brain identically. The two identical minds would only stay “identical” for a tiny fraction of a second before they changed and diverged along different paths because the physical processes involved in the brain are non-linear and coupled.

I’m just not sure that philosophy of mind has been or could be so easily solved by neuro- or cognitive science. Some of these issues (including that of dualism) are more philosophically intractable and the subtle than the treatment given here.

Indeed, I suspect the real problem is analogous to pseudo-science; perhaps pseudo-philosophy being used for a religious agenda?

What is still philosophically troublesome is — if anything — I think highlighted by Steve’s comments above re the distinction between ‘if’ vs. ‘how’.

Steven Novell said, “We know the brain causes mind from multiple independent lines of evidence, that cannot be accounted for by any other testable hypothesis that anyone has yet devised.

That is different than knowing how the brain causes mind, which is still a thorny issue, although not intractable within materialism.”

I think this is all true, but misses the philosophical debate; as you said, the brain may well *cause* the mind (this is all but indisputable) but is the mind REDUCIBLE to just the brain?

That is, nothing so far touches on dualism!

The brain may well be one substance and the mind another WHILE still one, the brain, might well cause, be necessary for, (be a substratum for?) the other, the mind. This in no way denies — so far — that the mind is, nevertheless, a separate thing from the brain.

The above example of cells and organs serves us well here: this heart X is not JUST the aggregate of this set of heart (et al.) cells here. It is more than that. It is this, in a certain configurations, probably also given a certain history and causal path through the world. Indeed(This analogy may not be the best one, but I think it BEGINS to make the point, which is a thinly disguised supervience one).

Now, I expect Steve would rightly concede that not just ANY brain cause just any mind, that it is, as I’ve described, this *particular* brain, given its particular structures (at various levels), and its particular history that gives rise to a particular mind.

Ok, but would Steve (or his apologist, etc. ) mean by “gives rise to” cause? is identical to? I think this is where dualism digs in and tries to make its case. Can’t the SAME mind might “emerge” (more on this infelicitous language below) from different functionally equivalent systems? Doesn’t this begins to reify the dualist’s point? That more than one brain-system can “give rise to” the same mind means that mind and brains are not SIMPLY identifiable. And it isn’t SIMPLY the matter or its configurations that ARE a given mind, even if the mind is still nothing more than these.

Notice, that both dualism and materialism can be true on this reading. It’s *reductivism* that’s the real issue. And there IS still a traditional “dualist” problem lurking here in explaining just how the one thing really does give rise to the other. Just how DOES the mind seem to have properties (intensionality, qualia, etc.) that the other doesn’t or couldn’t? How do or could neural structures code for the qualia of red above and beyond the mere red information.

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The emergence talk suggests that Steve is NOT being a reductive materialist here — or at least not a straightforward reductivist (by which no deception is implied, only that if there is reductivism here, it lies somewhere in how “emergence” is fleshed out.)

Indeed, I take sonic’s best point to be that “emergence” talk tend to boil down to handwaving, “then a miracle happens” type explanations — at best these are a place holder for further work.

And over the last 20+ years or so, “emergence” talk has given way to more subtle and sophisticated philosophical alternatives …

BUt this is long enough, no?

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(Talk of NDE is non sequitur and irrelevant so far as I can tell.)

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Steve: I LOVE the SGU, listen weekly (actually more as I’m still catching up on past episodes), and do consider myself a skeptic; and as such, I worry that on issues both philosophical and ethical you and yours sometimes get a bit out of your depth (not that all your commentators fairly call you on this…). E.g. it’s not obvious to me (as you sometimes assert) that issues of value are subjective and not open to rigorous or objective argument — that they’re issues of “mere” value. Scientific reasoning is NOT the only method to objective truth (just ask a mathematician)!

But, you want to limit the scope of your discussions; fair enough.

And, all that said, this is meant as praise by faint damning! Even when out of your depth, you’re skeptical metholdogy serves you well!

Keep up the excellent work!

A person recently died, Henry G. Molaison, the patient known as HM.

http://janneinosaka.blogspot.com/2008/12/hm-has-passed-away.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)

In 1953 he was treated for epilepsy by removing parts of his brain. He never again remembered a new experience. If the loss of those parts of the brain prevented the production of new memories, then complete inactivity of those same brain areas should also prevent the formation of new memories.

The patient discussed in your link is reported to have produced new memories while her entire brain was (reportedly) inactive, presumably including those parts of the brain essential for producing new memories.

My conclusion is that the NDE did not occur when the brain was totally inactive because (as the well documented experience with HM illustrates) activity in some regions of the brain is essential for long term memory. Either her brain was active during the operation, or the memory occurred at another time when her brain was active and she confused the timing of the memory. It is probably the latter. With HM, because his loss of the brain structures was permanent, there is no opportunity for memories of events to be produced and the timing confabulated. With the patient with the NDE, she could produce long term memories during a time when her brain was active and misremember those memories as having occurred when her brain was inactive (a time she could not form memories).

To find evidence that the mind can operate without brain function start here-
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html
For a neuroscientist who came to the conclusion that the mind and the brain aren’t the same thing try Wilder Penfield.

But note the science and the philosphy are not about the same questions or issues.