Religious Miracles

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Don't know.

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No worries. I don't know either, however, I'm now curious.

I did find this one, dated August 13, 2013, so it is not too out of date: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-flatwor...ies-brain.html

What you have to do is this:

1) Find a species you can train to do something.
2) Assume the memory is stored in some body part that the species can do without.
3) In the case of planarian flatworms, their entire brain is apparently disposable, so assume their memories are stored somewhere in their brains.
4) After they have been trained, cut off their heads and see if they can still remember what you taught them.

Edit:

I just found this about slime molds: http://www.livescience.com/23797-bra...-memories.html It looks like they have a brainless form of memory. What I find even more amazing is that it looks like they make choices based on those memories. Does that mean they're intelligent in some way?

In order to link this back to the OP, maybe I should just say, "It's a miracle!"

Edit 2:

Speaking of intelligence, and getting back to higher forms of life, here is a video describing the savant Daniel Tammet who uses synesthesia to learn languages and calculate: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-b...redible-brain/

It is a good thing they called him a savant rather than a psychic although I wonder what the difference is between the two. As a child he had a seizure which left him in this state and it makes me wonder what the difference is between that and an NDE.

Is Tammet's ability "miraculous"?

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I don't know either, however... maybe I should just say, "It's a miracle!"

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With a bit of clever editing, I just showed how your post accurately describes ALL claims of miracles!

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

With a bit of clever editing, I just showed how your post accurately describes ALL claims of miracles!

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I doubt it, but I am not looking for miracles. That doesn't mean that the non-miraculous, mechanistic belief system is correct. That looks even more false than saying something is miraculous.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

That looks even more false than saying something is miraculous.

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"More false"? Huh? Having a natural cause behind unexplained phenomena is the opposite of proclaiming divine/supernatural miracles. One can not be "more false" or "more right" as they're mutually incompatible explanations. Every "miracle" claim is identical to the "God of the gaps" fallacy: "we don't know, so God/miracle!" The entire history of science, especially modern science, is one of finding natural, mechanistic explanations behind what were once explained by God and miracles. There is no evidence that trend won't continue as our knowledge increases.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

It's not enough that you have three (!!!) leading neuroscientists (Harris, Sacks, Cohen)...

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Not that I disagree with your argument, but it's an enormous stretch to call Sam Harris a "leading" neuroscientist.

If you don't count blog posts as "publications", his output is minimal, and his research is neither particularly original or insightful.

Then, if you ever thought Sam Harris was worth listening to, you'd only have to read his defence of torture or profiling to realise that he is a legend in his own mind only.

A [very short] list of his actual neuroscience publications can be found here: http://www.jneurosci.org/

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Not that I disagree with your argument, but it's an enormous stretch to call Sam Harris a "leading" neuroscientist.

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Fair enough, though the argument works just as well without the "leading" adjective, and is probably all the more damning if even a middling or substandard neuroscientist can point out the glaring flaws in Alexander's claims. I am not a big fan of Harris' philosophical writings, and I would agree there are far better atheism advocates out there, but I'd never heard anything said against him as a neuroscientist.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

He doesn't come right out and say it, but that's very much what he's implying...

...Sacks is implying that Alexander is quite ignorant of the relevant science by pointing out how he's ignoring alternatives, or making extremely dubious claims. In fact, calling him "anti-scientific" would arguably be worse to a scientist than calling him "ignorant" on a particular topic of science. I'm quite certain that Sacks utterly agrees with Harris's statement that: "everything — absolutely everything — in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was 'shut down,' 'inactivated,' 'completely shut down,' 'totally offline,' and 'stunned to complete inactivity.' The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate — it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.” Harris provides a long list of reasons why the claim is inadequate, Sacks provides but a few, but both are making, essentially, the same claim that Alexander's claims are extremely dubious and, if not "ignorant," than quite "anti-scientific."

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You are probably right about Sacks's circumspection compared to Harris's re Alexander's supposed "ignorance" of neuroscience. I agree with Sacks's opinion, and find it more measured and polite.

I do believe that all of our subjective experiences, including NDE, are produced by our brains. We still do not know exactly how our brains produce our conscious experience of the world, but we are very certain that the brain is the organ that provides us with such experience. The human brain has evolved over time to be what it is.

The brain is part of the body, and depends on the rest of the body to remain "alive" to do what it does. The same applies to any other bodily organs, such as the skin and muscles. When the body "dies," its tissues and organs can no longer "live" and will sooner or later "die," mainly from lack of oxygen and nutrients. By organ death, I mean "irreversible" injury to the cellular tissues of the body. The time for particular body tissues and organs to "die" varies. For example, after cardiac arrest the brain typically dies after about 5 minutes, maybe longer if there are factors, such as hypothermia, that could slow the entropic degradation of the tissues. Some tissues and organs, like the skin, kidneys, and heart, can survive longer periods of cardiac arrest. Indeed, this is the reason that such tissues can be used for organ transplantation.

Unlike these other "unconscious" tissues, the brain has a function of "awareness." During cardiac arrest, the brain is deprived of oxygen and reacts to the loss, presumably by producing the "experiences" of NDE. That may include all sorts of experiences, such as visual hallucinations (the tunnel and white light) the experience of random memories, etc.).

I don't think that we need to invoke any "miracles" about NDE's, as these could be explained as due to the in extremis function of the human brain.

A "real" miracle would be the resuscitation of a thermodynamically "dead" brain and body, i.e. the Biblical resurrection of Lazarus.

Also, maybe people would be more likely to believe religious miracles if the ones claimed - holy fire, levitating hosts and Medujgorje weren't such obvious fakes.

The kind of miracle I'd like to see would involve all weapons being turned into chocolate.

Shouldn't be too hard for an entity that creates entire universes.