With enough mental control and training, out of body experiences are possible. You can also train the brain to consciously relive past experiences while awake, as if you were in the past. You can also train the brain to consciously live future experiences while awake, as if you are in the future. Some rare individuals have complete control over the functions of their brain, with or without psychotropic drug use. The brain can achieve feats currently deemed impossible.
A couple of big problems are the drug culture and dumbing down of children in the united states. Drug abusers create an environment which sobriety is rare and socially awkward. Dumbing down of children creates an environment abrasive and humiliating for intellectuals. So extremely smart, sober boys and young men, are shunned by most. You have to abuse drugs, and watch reality television shows, to “fit in” to American society. If this trend were bucked, and intellectuals heralded by society rather than shunned, then new limits could be reached by the human brain. But all this seems unlikely. If new achievements are met, then they’ll most likely be hidden, not talked about, or ridiculed if it is.
The problem is, stunted minds want to apply their own limits to everybody else. If it’s impossible to one ignorant mind, then they immediately rationalize, it must be impossible for everybody else. The stunted mind literally, actually wants to impose its impossibility against everybody else. This is done due to fear, of the unknown. And fear predominantly defines mental limits anyway. Almost none can think, rationalize, reason, or imagine beyond their fears. Almost none can step into a realm of pitch black darkness, and find their way around using an ancient sense, atrophied and long forgotten.
There were some interesting responses in a similar thread he made on another forum.
The general consensus seems to be “This ability is not definitively contrary to materialism”.
“The problem is, stunted minds want to apply their own limits to everybody else” - So true. If you cannot hear the music, then you think those who dance are crazy…
In the begininning materialists claimed that we are just a mindless machines with just the illusion of “free will”. Now we are starting to realize that this “free will” acually is Free Will and CAN affect the way body works (see placebo, faith acting as a healing agent, ignoring pain et cetera).
Yes, and materialists have rationalized out of body experiences, no one is really leaving there body they just think they are. (Actually, everything everyone knows about me is an OBE (that is out of my body), through my words through ‘sound waves’ (and maybe sound particles (if light can be both, why not sound?)) and through my fingers typing and then electric signals (as opposed to the more primitive form of using torches on mountain tops blinking in code).
Skakos, I don’t think subjective is the word here. I could go along with “arbitrary”, so long as you said something like, “because we define mind and brain essentially the same by identifying them as one in some way through a common thread of adherence to the principles underlying physical laws, the border between the self and the outside world must be decided arbitrarily with regard to that fact.”
Man using the word “subjective” is like a dead giveaway that you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s like a word they give to freshmen and the trick is to see how many of them realize that distinction almost never holds up to scrutiny. Then the classes get smaller and you start to really learn the good stuff.
And even if you don’t know what you are talking about someone out there does, or would if they heard you and not only that but they might agree completely.
I remember that you are an expert on the defintion and origin of the use of the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ and I took your lessons to heart because I on occasion wish to communicate with professional philosophers.
I wonder if you’re implying the supposed incoherancy of Sartre’s philosophy in B&N with it’s reminants of Descarte versus Heidegger’s dasein. For Sartre subjectivety has priority over objectivity and yet he still speaks about the arbitrary nature of the limits of one’s body.
But, look not to be perseived as a weed in academia (I’m not in anything, except I would go with the CA/US/Earth, but even then I hardly bother to reknew my Eartling membership card regularly.) let me say that it’s not that I misunderstand the word ‘subjective’, but that I choose to redefine it, I’m not going to declare it’s defintion, that would trully be arbitrary, like saying that I’m a waiter (I can play at being a waiter, but I still won’t be one) rather than one who scrapes subjectivity off of toilletes (a role in which I can assume or not despite that I actually do regularly have subjectivity smeared on my cleaning gloves), I am going to simply use subjectivety in a completely different way than most do (subjectivity, I’ve been already doing so in this paragraph.)
Now if there is no more subjectivity left to cover here I’m going to go subjective.
What are the “objective” criteria which define “our” self then? Is it the boundaries of our body? Are the millions of bacteria in our body “ours”? Is the artificial limb we control “ours”? Is our heart placed inside us or is it extended towards the ones we love?
We have for decades known that skilled humans can control the autonome system. Like heart frequence, breath control and air consumption even in India it has been forbidden for trained people to burry their heads in the earth, as too many casualties occur. Pain reflexes, stress control etc, etc.
What OP talks about, is some outdated information that doesn’t represent the real world at all.
Stuart, for a while I thought you were talking about me. Of course I can not leave out my body. Of course I could very well leave out of my mind. But it's too risky. - Obe, however, on second thought, anything. Is worth a try.(Need not respond, just couldn't resist the pun)
You’re saying the kind of things that illustrate you can’t match language perfectly with reality. To say the shit I’d have to say to get you to understand that, if you don’t really understand it now would be very tiring and I’d have to be baited with a series of pretty good questions.
I do not understand what you are saying here. Could you be more clear? I asked if there is an “objective” way to define our self. What is that “reality” you refer to?
There is a way to define the self. That way constitutes some kind of object. There is an element of the overall knowledge that exists pertaining to any and every object that is to be determined, or superimposed or what have you by an observer as a result of some element of bias on his part.
Skakos, I would think there is a reason why you would include this philosophical question in the psychology forum. (Philosophically you are using an inductive reduction, meaning you are reducing the philosophical definition of what a self is:::an objective one---to a psychologically evolved, subjective concept of what an object is.
What is that object of the self? A boundary, yes but of what? Not of the body as a physical body, but the body, as the object of thought. It is thought of the body that’s bounded, therefore it is the thought that’s bounded. The thought of the body is the body, because it’s bounded. A bounded idea, becomes thought of as the idea. We create a gap between the body and the thought of the body, wheas we cannot differentiate one from the other. Thought and idea (bounded thought) are non differentiable.
So this is a phenomenological reduction into the phenomena and its boundedness, it's idea. Right? The material body is reduced to a bounded idea of it's self, as apart from the pure phenomena which can not be bounded (defined)