The story so far: Mario Beauregard published a very silly article in Salon, claiming that Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) were proof of life after death, a claim that he attempted to support with a couple of feeble anecdotes. I replied, pointing out that NDEs are delusions, and his anecdotal evidence was not evidence at all. Now Salon has given Beauregard another shot at it, and he has replied with a “rebuttal” to my refutation. You will not be surprised to learn that he has no evidence to add, and his response is simply a predictable rehashing of the same flawed reasoning he has exercised throughout.
In his previous sally, he cited the story of Maria’s Shoe, a tall tale that has been circulating in the New Age community for decades, always growing in the telling. This story is the claim that a woman with a heart condition was hospitalized, and while unconscious with a heart attack, her spirit floated out of the coronary care unit to observe a shoe on a third-floor ledge. As has been shown, she described nothing that could not be learned by mundane observation, no supernatural events required, and further, that the story is peculiarly unverifiable: “Maria” cannot be found, not even in the hospital records, and no one has been found who even knew this woman. The entire story is hearsay with no independent evidence whatsoever.
Beauregard attempts to salvage the story by layering on more detail. The description of the shoe was very specific, he says, right down to the placement of the laces and the pattern of wear, and she could not possibly have learned this by overhearing staff talking about it because “it would have been difficult for Maria to understand the location of the shoe in the hospital and the details of its appearance because she spoke very little English.” This is a curious observation; the claim is that she could not understand a description of the shoe, but she was able to describe the shoe herself to a woman, Kimberly Clark Sharp, who did not understand Spanish.
“When I got to the critical-care unit, Maria was lying slightly elevated in bed, eyes wild, arms flailing, and speaking Spanish excitedly,” recounts Sharp. “I had no idea what she was saying, but I went to her and grabbed her by the shoulders. Our faces were inches apart, our eyes locked together, and I could see she had something important to tell me.”
The question isn’t whether a seriously ill woman with poor command of English could see the shoe; it’s whether a healthy, ambulatory, English-speaking woman who has made a career out of the myth of NDEs could see the shoe. Beauregard’s additions to the anecdote do not increase its credibility at all.
Beauregard adds another anecdote to the litany, the story of another cardiac patient who was resuscitated and later recounted seeing a particular nurse while his brain was not functional. Seriously — more anecdotes don’t help his case. He threatens to have even more of these stories in a book he’s in the process of publishing, but there’s no point. He could recite a thousand vague rumors and poorly documented examples with ambiguous interpretations, and it wouldn’t salvage his thesis.
This new anecdote is more of the same. The patient is comatose and with no heart rhythm when brought into the hospital; over a week later, he claims to recognize a particular nurse as having been present during his crisis, and mentions that she put his dentures in a drawer.
I am underwhelmed. I must introduce Beauregard to two very common terms that are well understood in the neuroscience community.
The first is confabulation. This is an extremely common psychological process in which we fill in gaps in our memory with fabrications. I described this in my previous response, but Beauregard chose to disregard it. The patient above has a large gap in his memory, but he knows that he existed in that period, and something must have happened; he knows that he was resuscitated in a hospital, so can imagine a scene in which he was surrounded by doctors and nurses; he knows that his dentures are missing, so he suspects that someone put them somewhere, likely one of the people surrounding him during the emergency. So his brain fills in the gap with a plausible narrative. This whole process is routine and unsurprising, and far more likely than that his mind went wandering away from his brain.
The second term is confirmation bias. Only positive responses that confirm Beauregard’s expectations are noted. The patient guessed that a nurse he met during his routine care was also present during his episode of unconsciousness, and he was correct. What if he’d guessed wrongly? That event would be unexceptional, nobody would have made note of it, and Beauregard would not now be trotting out this incident as a vindication of his hypothesis. This is one of the problems of building a case on anecdotes; without knowledge of the range and likelihood of various results, one can’t distinguish the selective presentation of chance events from a measurable phenomenon.
While unaware of basic concepts in science, Beauregard seems to readily adopt the most woo-ish buzzwords. His explanation for this purported power of the mind to exist independently of any physical substrate is, unfortunately and predictably, quantum mechanics. Every charlatan in the world seems to believe that attaching “quantum” to a word makes it magical and powerful and unquestionable. I have to accept Terry Pratchett’s rebuttal: “‘Let’s call it Quantum!’ is not an explanation.” And neither is Beauregard’s feeble insistence that the universe possesses quantum consciousness, that psychic powers represent quantum phenomena, or that there is an infinitely loving Cosmic Intelligence.
Beauregard then accuses me of having an ideological bias, and that I’m a fanatical fundamentalist. He, of course, is the dispassionate, objective observer with no axe to grind, only interested in reporting the scientific facts. Unfortunately, his book The Spiritual Brain reveals to the contrary that he has some very, very strange beliefs.
“Individual minds and selves arise from and are linked together by a divine Ground of Being (or primordial matrix). That is the spaceless, timeless, and infinite Spirit, which is the ever-present source of cosmic order, the matrix of the whole universe, including both physics (material nature) and psyche (spiritual nature). Mind and consciousness represent a fundamental and irreducible property of the Ground of Being. Not only does the subjective experience of the phenomenal world exist within mind and consciousness, but mind, consciousness, and self profoundly affect the physical world…it is this fundamental unity and interconnectedness that allows the human mind to causally affect physical reality and permits psi interaction between humans and with physical or biological systems. With regard to this issue, it is interesting to note that quantum physicists increasingly recognize the mental nature of the universe.”
If I am an ideologue, it’s only in that I demand that if you call something science, it bear some resemblance in method and approach to science, not mysticism. Beauregard insists on trying to endorse the babbling piffle above as science by reciting the number of publications he has made, and how much grant money he’s got, when I’m looking for verifiable, reproducible, measurable evidence.
I would also remind him that Isaac Newton, who was probably an even greater scientist than the inestimable Beauregard, wasted much of his later years on mysticism, too: from alchemy and the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, to arcane Biblical hermeneutics, extracting prophecies of the end of the world from numerological analyses of Revelation. While his mechanics and optics have stood the test of time, that nonsense has not. That his mathematics and physics are useful and powerful does not imply that he was correct in his calculation that the world will end before 2060 AD; similarly, Beauregard’s success in publishing in psychiatry journals does not imply that his unsupportable fantasies of minds flitting about unfettered by brains is reasonable.
(Also on Sb)
Kimberly Clark Sharp ?????
Kimberly Clark make shoes. Someone’s having a bit of a laugh here.
I wonder if that poor seagull had an NDE before the actual death experience.
How would Beauregard like to be convicted on “evidence” similar to the worthless anecdotes he trots out?
If it would be excluded (quite rightly) as hearsay from the courts, it’s hardly something upon which you can build a “scientific conclusion.”
Glen Davidson
Ah, nothing cheers me up on a Monday morning more than a PZ smackdown and vocabulary lesson! (I shall now add “babbling piffle.”)
I have really missed this place since my office started blocking FTB and SB. Someone over at IT has clearly had their head bashed in, as that is fixed now!
I just cancelled my Salon Premium membership because they published this drivel. They no longer have any credibility.
I also asked David Talbot to respond to me directly about why he would allow this to be published on his site.
Good on you, PZ.
Well, it’s interesting until you actually ask them. Then the wave function collapses and they go back to being scientists.
feralboy12
At least NDE’s exist as something to be reported, even if they exist as hallucinations or confabulations brought on by the brain’s known bugs. I’ve been dealing with dualists who are extremely coy about dualism, trying to bash materialism without explicitly offering an alternative.
No they don’t. [rolls eyes]
What’s the betting that if you showed any of these idiots Schrodinger’s equation they wouldn’t even recognize it, much less be able to tell you anything about what it means.
I knew it… quantum mechanics, AGAIN! I just heard the exact same thing about living off water and energy from the sun.
Of course… it’s always got something to do with quantum mechanics. I just heard the exact same thing about living off water and energy from the sun. Simply mind-numbing…
All this story supports is life despite stupid.
Also, don’t forget that PZ is mean and a poopyhead therefore supernaturalisms. Or something.
It’s one of those sophisticated arguments so beloved by theologians, the philosophically inept and various types of tone trolls or accomodationists. It’s quite important to remember that PZ’s poopyheadedness forever and ever proves that Jesus is love, especially when there’s good old fashioned Christian violence, and that PZ doesn’t understand this because he’s an evil fundamentalist who just hates everything and is really, really angry.
See also: WAHMBULANCE, I HAS A SAD, QQ MOAR, and Big Boys Done It And Run Away, Miss.
Louis
You think this is a smackdown? Shall I show you just how easily Dr. Myers’ screed is rebutted by repeating the word “open-minded” a number of times?
We are all part of the great granola that is the universe.
Some of us are oatmeal, some of us are nuts, some of us are raisins…
It is interesting to speculate how moron wooists like Beauregard reconcile this with the workings of the Large Hadron Collider.
Are they smashing mentons (whatever makes up “quantum mind”) together, telepathically reporting the resulting subatomic particles, affecting anecdotes about NDEs?
Come on Beauregard, how does the Large Hadron Collider probe the mental nature of the universe?
Dumbfuck!
Glen Davidson
Seems to me I have read about NDEs being created in lab with electrical stimulation to certain areas of the brain of people who were in good physical condition and no where near death.
I hope no commenter is offended by this comment.
Primordial matrix? Sacred ooze? There’s ooze alright, Beauregard has a full load of wankery going.
“There’s a SHOE on the window-ledge!!!11eleven!!” she gasped.
Nameless “quantum physicists” believe a lot of crazy things. Funny thing that all the ones with names and publication records seem to believe otherwise.
Unless you count Deepak as a quantumn physicist…
And if you have enough midichlorians in your blood you can use that cosmic force to lift spaceships and tell storm troopers these are not the droids they’re looking for.
Mr. Beauregard doesn’t have the intellectual sophistication required to appreciate the use of ad hominem.
If Beauregard had a single shred of integrity, he’d try to learn something. I recommend The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran. It’s possible Beauregard might get a clue if he had some idea of how the brain works.
According to href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics”> the pfft of all knowledge, both von Neumann and Wigner believed that the experimenter’s consciousness caused the collapse of the wave function, but this “remains a view held by very few physicists”. In fact, I’d say this was an early response to the perceived weirdness of QM; and as physicists have got used to it (as far as one can), it’s been realised that “observation” in QM is best interpreted simply as interaction with something outside the “observed” system. But I’m absolutely not an expert on this.
Borked link.
“And I want it!”
and he said””it is this fundamental unity and interconnectedness that allows the human mind to causally affect physical reality and permits psi interaction between humans and with physical or biological systems.””
well if there were in fact any psi interaction (outside of the imagination of course) of any kind what so ever then it might have some truth but ……..
uncle frogy
Yoav, #21,
But Star Wars is real. Don’t mess with the trilogy. That stuff happened for real.
Louis
nuhuh.
LotR on the other hand…
I’m a bit surprised nobody seems to be putting forth what seems to me to be the most reasonable explanation for many NDEs – just because the heart isn’t beating doesn’t mean the brain isn’t functioning (albeit poorly).
The very fact that any NDE claimant survived without horrific brain damage indicates their brain cells remained alive throughout the period of medical crisis, and living cells do stuff, even if O2 levels, temperature, pH etc aren’t the ideal levels. As I write this, I’ve got a frog muscle in oxygenated saline, and 4 hours after the frog’s death (and after over a dozen maximal contractions) it’s only lost about 5% of peak force output. Yes, ectotherm tissues are much hardier and more tolerant of departures from ideal conditions than endotherm tissues, but even mammal tissues can survive for hours outside of the body in nothing more than oxygenated saline. If the heart stops beating, yes, the blood stops flowing and oxygen levels decline, but the very survival of NDE claimants proves that these cells didn’t actually get hypoxic enough to die.
Honestly, I would not be surprised at a person remembering images or sounds after the heart stopped beating (and possibly even while unconscious), simply because the neurons are still firing away, albeit poorly. A car running on watered-down gas with a barely functional transmission won’t be in peak form, but it can still limp along for a while. Cells are tougher than we give them credit for.
No, no, Star Trek, remember? We hashed this out with Yec.
Chigau:
Do those of us who are raisins go out on raisin dates?
No, the midichlorians are real.
It can be done by accident too just in regular course of surgery/medicine in my experience. Those experiences are just not reinforced as “HUGELY MEANINGFUL! NEAR DEATH!” because death was obviously far away on vacation. Likewise, the NDE that DON’T conform to a religious mythology are ignored because they’re clearly just hallucinations.
I had a NDE as a believer that didn’t conform to mythology and had no real big emotional impact on me, because nobody reinforced or stressed to me that it was anything but a weird brain thing
I knew it! The Shoes are behind it!
SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOES!
What you have to keep in mind is that she was a Spanish speaker speaking to non-Spanish speakers. What she actually said was “¡Hay un sapo en la ventana!”, but “sapo” was misheard as “zapato”.
Find the toad, and you’ll know….
Bohr and Schroedinger as well, I’m pretty sure, at least for a time.
By the way, does anyone have a recommendation for good historical books about quantum mechanics? (Preferably not one written by Deepak Chopra.)
The best I’ve explanation I’ve heard is that interactions aren’t part of quantum theory itself, like biologists interacting with organisms aren’t part of evolutionary theory, for example. It’s just that biologists can find ways to prevent significant or relevant interactions with whatever they’re studying, but physicists can’t. So when people claim quantum theory involves “observers” in some special way (therefore quantum Jesus!), the theory doesn’t even do that. So right out of the gate, there’s nothing in the theory to interpret as “consciousness” or equivalent woo, not with any amount of handwaving.
That’s true, but they’ll claim there are similar cases when the brain has stopped functioning. The general point is that their memories (if they’re even telling the truth) were made when their brain is functioning, and they’ve confused that with a time when it wasn’t.
The brain generally hates having gaps in memories. This combined with a very poor method of actually keeping memories is what creates a lot of interesting mental phenomena. The brain basically makes shit up when it can’t find an answer it’s looking for.
Star wars is clearly just sciences fiction and that the lord of the rings is mythology is undeniable. But the stories about Dr Who are while created by very talented writers working in England are based on a real being! Dr Who exists in fact!
uncle frogy
@Ing
Having no mouth does not appear to be your problem. It’s your lack of shoes!
Grrr. Saying the universe has consciousness due to quantum mechanis is like saying objects move by Newton’s second law because of consciousness.
Damn it. Trying again
SHOOOOOOOOOOES!
@#24 KG:
Yeah this is basically how I saw it described by a physicist in an interview (can’t remember his name). Apparently there was a belief before quantum physics that if we could continue to make our measurements more and more subtle, we would always be able to measure a phenomenon without disturbing it, but measurements at the scale of quantum physics always disturb the thing being measured, and this is where the “consciousness changes reality at the quantum level” meme came from.
@Brain Hertz #8:
Let alone be able to solve it.
Ok so PZ wasn’t cordial in his initial response and that remains to be the only aspect of this exchange one can fault him for. Mario’s response was the most telling as I found myself waiting for the punchline well after I read his article. He presented no empirical evidence, all anecdotal. At the end he asserts his qualifications at one point stating he does not have a religious affiliation. If that is true he clearly has ideas on the metaphysical and supernatural, which I would hope any Neuroscientist would not peddle in public discourse.
Shoes…
Douglas Adams explained in “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”.
If there is an imbalance in the number of shoe shops, it wil inevitably grow until the system passes something called “the shoe event horizon” with Very Bad consequences for the people living there.
The Frogstar Fighter mercenaries dumped Ford Prefect on such a desolate, depopulated world that was used as site for the Total Perspective Vortex.
So, yes, shoes are important.
The absurdity of this particular part of the original article is particularly striking – apparently ~100 billion neurons just dumb down our thinking! Surely Beauregard would concede that slight brain damage would cause slight mental impairment, moderate brain damage would cause significant mental impairment and severe brain damage severe mental impairment – and yet what he is suggesting is if you go one step further and shut down the brain entirely, you can actually think clearer! I guess it’s a homeopathic thing.
@43 supernova
I don’t know anything about QM except the little I have read.
Seems at the subatomic level if you want to “see” some particle? or whatever you must shine a light or xray or some thing on that particle.
But at that level the photon or xray you need will interact with the subject particle to the point that the particle’s “position” or “direction” or “velocity” is affected.
I am just trying to get some idea of this marvelous stuff.
The above is not fact or truth or any of that. It is simply my imagination.
Objective idealism meets quantum mechanics. *Yawn*.
When will these BSers move on to something else?
Is it really ‘rehashed’ if it hasn’t had evidence added to it?
With regard to that sentence, it is interesting to note that Beauregard makes shit up as he goes along.
(I’m not sure if he’s conscious of the fact that he’s lying.)
Exactly.
That’s why Schrödinger’s cat doesn’t work: a cat consists of a very large number of elementary particles, and they all interact. To put every one of them into a superposition of states is just not feasible.
As described in comment 48, measurements are ultimately interactions between particles.
I thought it was Zaphod.
Well, when you’re as closely related as semi-cousins sharing three of the same mothers, of course beings are sometimes going to mistake Ford for Zaphod.
@#4 cjmitchell
I hear you bro…FTB has been blocked by my IT department as well….sucks. I have to read on my phone…such a crime. Not to mention, Mario Beauregard is a douche…
Oh yes, every good physics student knows that if you leave the quantum mental bullshit terms out of your Hamiltonian you get totally bonkers results. This is why everyone back in the 20th century thought quantum mechanics was complicated and difficult to interpret. Also it gets even easier if you don’t bother with operators and equations and just make lots of vague statements that sound somewhat magical and pleasant.
On a (serious) side note, I always wonder what the hell people like Beauregard are talking about when they talk like this. First of all quantum physics is not relevant to the workings of the mind unless the ‘mentons’ referred to by Glen Davidson up thread, or some other exotic particle are actually involved with consciousness.
If the magical quantum crap of Chopra, Beauregard et al. is a function of mere molecules and their associated protons and electrons, then the relevant field is quantum chemistry. As much as I like talking about molecular orbitals, quantum chemistry is not exactly magical. Most of the spooky shit from formal quantum mechanics such as tunneling only apply to the behavior of protons and electrons, which can sometimes be useful in rationalizing kinetic isotope effects and the like (protons tunnel more readily than deuterons). In general quantum has mapped onto preexisting ideas about how chemistry workes, however, and provided an enhanced understanding – it hasn’t shown us that our molecules are actually kittens or gateways to another dimension.
Moreover, if you extend the discussion to the kind of physical theory actually being applied to biomolecules, quantum is barely even used. Biomolecules are far too big to simulate using models derived from the time dependent Schrodinger equation, and theorists typically want dynamic information, so instead they use empirical potentials to describe intermolecular interactions, classical electrostatics for charge-charge interactions, Newtonian mechanics for molecular trajectories, and statistical mechanics in order to derive thermodynamic information from the simulation. And this often works pretty well, because proteins themselves are big enough that wavefunction formalism isn’t needed to describe their behavior.
None of the crap spewed by Depak Chopra addresses the way physics is actually extended into chemistry. In fact, I’m not even sure what the general argument is. Quantum is weird, therefore everything weird I say is true, maybe?
Hurin,
Stand up and be noted. Thanks for that.
So the plural of anecdote is not evidence. Good to know.
“Let me provide a detailed description of the laces and wear pattern to you, who doesn’t understand what I’m saying!!”
Unfortunately, I know why the woo-people use the quantum word. A few years ago, a friend of mine who is otherwise intelligent but lives by the woo, insisted that I sit through a film called “What the Bleep Do We Know?” It was a hodge-podge of interviews with new-agers and psychics, mixed together with parts of interviews with quantum physicists, who I’m sure had no idea why they were there. Only in one place did the two disparate worldviews appear to meet: A scientist mentioned that famous experiment in which particles appear to spray through a slit in random patterns when they aren’t being observed, but when we watch them, they narrow down into a more ordered stream. Whatever the cause for that is, the new-agers jumped on it, claiming that it was the power of our minds that made the particles behave themselves. From that they extrapolated that with our minds we can influence all aspects of reality, and thus you have the magic quantum!
By the way, in Richard Wiseman’s book “Paranormality: Why we see what isn’t there”, he covers the mystery of Maria’s Shoe pretty well, and mentions that in 1996 a team of Canadian scientists, Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry Beyerstein, went to Harborview Hospital and interviewed Kimberly Clark, and re-created the shoe scenario according to her account. Leaving a shoe on the same ledge as in the story, they found it was plainly visible, not only from the hospital bed in the room, but from the parking lot below as well. Plus, Ms. Clark wrote about the event seven years afterward, so even her own story had plenty of time to evolve before it was committed to paper.
Ummm…
If NDEs are proof of life after death, shouldn’t everyone who has a cardiac arrest or whatever caused them to be “dead” have them? I mean, we should have lots of consistent descriptions from all these people instead of random histories from only a few cases, most of which are pretty dubious.
Right?
Or doesn’t everyone get a life after death?
Well, I’m sure they just…umm…forgot in all the excitement…and blah discouraged by skeptics blah…LOOK!! BACON!!!
I cannot find it and confirm, but years ago, I heard…
That a trauma surgeon placed a big attention-getting sign face up on one of the tall cabinets in the E.R. operating room. He said there were a number of near death situations, and sometimes the patients would afterward report floating and looking down on themselves and the surgery team. But none of them ever noticed the sign. This was before the WWW.
There were a lot of similar experiences described; the surgeon assumed it was because of similar processes in the brain. I have experienced a dramatic narrowing of vision from blood loss, as has many folks simply close to fainting. It could be easily experienced as a tunnel with a light at the end, especially by the woo infested.
@ chigau (副) @ 14
I believe the quote you are looking for is “All the world is a cookie, and you are but a crumb, but I, I am a chocolate chip”
Garfield
You are welcome, that is all.
Kermit there is supposedly an ongoing experiment right now along exactly those lines but we’ve been waiting for ages for the results, I’m not holding my breath. I can’t remember off the top of my head who’s doing it and where. It would take me some digging through the woo infested forums over at Skeptiko to find it, which I’m in no mood for atm.
@Dhorvath
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.
Do you have Tourettes Myers? Is it really that difficult to reply without resorting to petty name calling and childish insults? Go get your blood pressure checked