Our Television Brain and Near-Death Experiences

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:04:49 -0400

Our Television Brain and Near-Death Experiences
© Surazeus
2012 04 30

This is my response to the discussion about Near-Death Experiences between Mario Beauregard and PZ Myers. I tend toward believing the functions of our brain are based on the material world, and that mechanical explanations can eventually be found to explain all spiritual phenomena.

The best approach to knowledge and truth is to start with empirical evidence of the material world, and build a verifiable world view on provable facts.

While it is fun to entertain conjectures and possibilities, the acceptable method is to present a conjecture as a hypothesis, develop tests to prove or disprove the hypothesis, then present the results in an object manner, accepting or rejecting the hypothesis based on facts. Never believe anything without substantial, verifiable, and repeatable proof.

Organize all information in two basic categories. Things that can be verified and are true. Things that people speculate and may or may not be true. Build true facts into a world view like a Temple of Truth, but keep unverified speculations in a pile that may or may not get used to build that Temple of Truth.

Since I stand secure on my world view as developed from scientifically verifiable facts, I feel strong enough to speculate on spiritual mysticism without getting sucked into absurd speculations. No matter how far out I venture in speculation, I always return to my scientifically-based world view.

It is ridiculous to assert things like, "no one believed in germs or atoms at one time, or that the world was round, and mocked those speculators who suggested the ideas, but now those ideas have been proven as true facts, so therefore we should believe in these unverified speculations."

Yes, those are provable facts of the material world, and once they were proved true we all came to believe them, and incorporated them as part of our world view. However, that does not mean we should believe in any speculation that is not provable. We are safe to entertain the idea, but never move that idea into the verifiable world view without proof first.

One fact I personally believe is that all consciousness and experience can only occur within the material mechanism of a functioning brain. We know all our experiences are memories of perceptions of our brain through the senses, especially sight and sound, that we organize with language through written and spoken words.

When I am awake, my eyes perceive objects that reflect sunlight, and my ears perceive sounds. I have learned to speak and understand a series of sounds to refer to objects, actions, and qualities, and to read and write physical marks that refer to those sounds. So I can communicate and comprehend ideas and thoughts of my own for other people to perceive, and ones that others communicate to see what they see. While I am awake, my brain generates a vision of the world that helps me navigate the landscape and people around me to seek food and pleasure.

When I am asleep, I remember nothing, except fleeting images or feelings from dreams that occur after my brain is already beginning to return to a state of consciousness. I do not believe our consciousness can persist without the chemical and mechanical functions of the brain. Death is as dark and mute and meaningless as sleep.

I will now present a speculative hypothesis for myself and others to consider the idea that our brains may function like televisions and radios that send and receive brain waves. Communication is enhanced through language, so while someone is speaking words we understand, within a context of past experience, we can almost see what they see through their eyes. Our brains generate visions of their words based on our own collection of images and memories, creating new visions as they speak.

I entertain the speculative idea that our brains send images like a television broadcast, and receive images like a television receptor, so that while we go in a trance or sleep it might be possible for our brains to receive the collective mental broadcasts from all the people who are alive and perceiving, so that we are able to perceive things while asleep or near death because we are receiving visual images being broadcast by other human minds. We may be able to receive brain waves better from people who are close by, who are broadcasting a strong emotional signal, or who are closely related to us because their brains likely have a more similar physical structure.

The best speculative explanation about near-death experiences I can present is that the brain of the patient, which appears to have ceased functioning, is acting like a television receptor receiving intense visual broadcasts from all other brains present during the near-death experience. This may explain how one brain is perceiving things without using its own sensory receptors. This hypothesis would have to be rigorously tested in controlled circumstances to be proved or disproved.

This idea sounds plausible, but I will not believe it until it has been proven to be a material function by rigorous testing.

The one apparent fact we can attest to about near death experiences is that most people whose brains appeared to cease to function, then began to function again, experienced a similar dream state of apparently seeing people and events while the eyes were closed, and then going toward a light.

Another speculative explanation for near death experiences is that the perceptive brain dreamed those experiences after the brain began to operate again, as if the brain were being rebooted, or may be processing the images received from other surrounding minds who were broadcasting waves of feelings during the intense emotional period of operation on the body.

Since our bodies are the result of two sets of genetic information from two people coiling together to generate the fetus that grows into our body, we can make an assertion of material process that our bodies have been evolving more and more complex forms for millions of years over many generations. The experiences of survivors who have children form the basic programming of the brain, so as new generations are born, the brain of each new-born person becomes more complex. In each case the better-functioning brains of survivors are passed on through genes.

A speculative idea about the commonality of the dream experience of near death experiences could be that an ancestor, common at least to all humans, far back in the process of our physical evolution, experienced something similar to that approach toward a white light, and the vivid memory became a template that all brains use in their wiring. The white light may likely be that most inward original bulb at the core of the brain.

Another speculative idea is that this experience common to us all is a vivid memory of the hour of birth. I remember very clearly when I was born, struggling toward the light, being pulled out, seeing a round silver lamp with a bright light, seeing the face of the doctor with the mouth-covering, with his side-combed hair and square-rim glasses, and screaming when I got smacked, then lying on the warm breast of my mother. I met the doctor again when I was 12 at a Christian campmeeting and he looked exactly the same as I remembered him at my birth for years.

Often while I sleep, it seems that I experience the lives of people who are complete strangers to me in real life. The sense of self and memories seem to be reasonable and normal while I am dreaming, but when I wake, they are totally weird to me. I have lived in about a dozen areas around the United States during my life, and in every town I have a different set of dreams. How does it seem I experience lives totally unlike my own?

I speculate that, during rapid-eye movement dream time, my brain may be receiving images and vision-videos of recorded experiences being broadcast from the minds of other people while they sleep. I cannot verify this as fact, so it is my hypothesis based on all I do know about the material world and how the brain functions. Before the invention of radio and television, which would seem mystical and magical before the age of science, I could not have presented a material hypothesis for dreams and visions, but now I can since I know how those machines function.

If the brain of a person undergoing a near-death experience acts like the receptor of a television, and they are perceiving events through the visual perceptions of other minds around them, then this may possibly explain how a person who appears to be dead might be perceiving events and objects they cannot normally perceive while awake.

Beauregard refers to a Ground of Being and the Primordial Matrix in his book "The Spiritual Brain" without specifying what that means. I will speculate that he might mean the physical material world of atoms that constitute the sun and the Earth, and that our bodies are small globs of atoms moving about within the vibrating mass of molecules that compose the world where we live and perceive. His spiritual mysticism might be explanable by mechanical functions of atoms, if that is what he means. I know that is how I tend to perceive our planet, a mass of vibrating atoms that interact in complex biochemical processes of mechanical functions, which could easily be described as a matrix.

We know that television stations send images and sounds on waves, that ripple through that mass of molecules, and televisions receive those waves and that we can see those images and hear those sounds on the screen. So I speculate that our brains may also send and receive images and sounds in waves. That is the best I can do in presenting a material hypothesis for spiritual concepts.

I personally feel there are simple explanations for all those near-death experiences that are completely based on natural functions of our brains. My speculations here are attempts to find material explanations for apparent spiritual occurrences, but in the end, they are still only speculations, unverified by material proof.

Blue Bic Pen-Cap

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:04:04 -0400

Blue Bic Pen-Cap
© Surazeus
2012 04 30

The following poem I wrote
based on the standard form
of the Psalm of the American Modernist
Secular Self-Help Confessionalist Religion
of the Twentieth Century established
by the Prophet Robert Lowell, my cousin,
fellow descendant of Anne Bradstreet.

Observation of Object.
Memory Trigger.
Insight into Meaning.

I find a blue Bic pen-cap
and remember when I was a boy
in Texas how I played
with blue Bic pen caps
like they were star ships
but now I think about
how women are enslaved.

Red-Brick Road Of Amen

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:04:10 -0400

Red-Brick Road Of Amen
© Surazeus
2012 04 28

Water trickles in endless flow of light
splashing in old fountain in city park
where Chattahoochee River falls on rocks
and ghosts of people who lived in Columbus
glide in quiet sunlight on red-brick road.

I park white car and walk to Vintage Cafe
to join writers on a stroll around town
in small groups, and I sit on red-brick wall,
listen to song of water in fountain pool,
and read names and stories of famous people,
stamped in metal plaques by history societies,
who lived in small Georgia town long ago,
dreaming and despairing on red-brick road.

Stirling Gilbert, Georgia Supreme Court Justice,
lived in red-brick Victorian townhouse,
where his wife Mary still reads in lace gown,
ghost who smiles at me through gleaming window,
and Colonel Salisbury, Confederate soldier,
edited Columbus Enquirer-Sun,
assassinated for expressing opinion,
two old ghosts wandering on worn red-brick road.

I wonder about every man and woman,
living by Chattahoochee thousands of years,
whose names and stories are never recorded
on metal plaques in parks and before homes,
like me and two hundred thousand living souls
who drive asphalt streets in church and store maze,
soon ghosts in wind blowing along red-brick road.

Someday I will visit a colonial house
on a quiet street in Ipswich, Massachusetts,
and get my photo taken by plaque that reads
Anne Bradstreet, Puritan Poet, lived here,
for I descend from her thirteen generations
who journeyed west almost four hundred years
so I was born by Willamette River in Oregon,
then hitchhiked all across this ancient land,
singing voices of ghosts I hear in wind,
till today I walk Columbus red-brick road.

Old couple glides bicycles side by side
on regular Saturday morning ride,
all their love-making and arguments
sizzling in warm silence between their eyes,
story of pain and pleasure best kept secret
when tour bus stops for travelers to see
houses where famous people once ruled fate
while feet of living wear down red-brick road.

Every story we remember and write
detailing actions of people who are dead
crumble to silent dust at grinding of time,
since Amen, young woman on river shore
in Africa, first drew pictures in red mud
she baked as bricks to build small pyramid
to sing safe from Nile flooding after rain,
so we say her name, Amen, after prayer,
she signed on tablets after hymns she wrote,
as we write uptown on her red-brick road.

I Look For God

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:04:29 -0400

I Look For God
© Surazeus
2012 04 27

Our world spins around. I climb a green mound
where apple trees my mom planted grow high.
I lie on my back, enjoy peaceful slack,
and stare empty-headed at clear blue sky.
I soon will be dead. I get in my head
deep aching desire to learn how to fly.

I float above this world on wings of light.
I look for God, but see only myself
alive in everyone watching my flight.

I build a stone tower, and plant sweet flowers,
where wife and children play happy and free.
Ten thousand years flow. Morning sun still glows
on huge world spinning away under me.
I climb high mountains. I drink from clear fountains
and explore vast world, sea to shining sea.

I float above this world on wings of light.
I look for God, but see only you all
alive in everyone sharing my flight.

Tubes of Squeezed Words

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:04:45 -0400

Tubes of Squeezed Words
© Surazeus 2012 04 26

Just another herd of posers
clutching at tubes of squeezed words,
or profound prophets of plastic truth
lost in a wilderness of cement
shouting at television clones?

Surazeus's Open Salon Blog

Our Television Brain and Near-Death Experiences

Blue Bic Pen-Cap

Red-Brick Road Of Amen

I Look For God

Tubes of Squeezed Words