Questioning Consciousness

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Sun Apr 01, 2018 11:19 am

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My orgasm

Postby thrulookingglass » Mon Apr 02, 2018 3:51 pm

My orgasm:

The ability to love is the greatest blessing of all. Emotional pain is an indication of a wrong path chosen. A vilification of one condemns all. Tell me when this life isn't important to you? What hell have we brought upon each other out of spite. ALL SWORDS ARE POINTLESS. For no beautiful flower should be raised in darkness. What theatre is this? But crumbs for salvation. AWARENESS. When we try to quantify something we often lose its true value. I hurt myself by hurting others. Let us do no harm to each other. Poverty is a form of violence. Love one another, that is the command of life. Matter is a gift of the stars. Only a slave seeks a greater master. Laughter is medicine. "God's" Jim Jones colony. Intelligence is the ability to love. Choosing a God is like choosing a radio station...we all hear what we want to hear. Love is the seed we sew together. All things require care. All. The whole phrase of 'Carpe Diem' actually means, "Do what you can today to make tomorrow better."
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby dada » Mon Apr 02, 2018 10:44 pm

Some questions concerning the transformation of the questioner.

Is it even possible for the questioner to transform? You may not think so. But let's assume for the sake of argument that it's possible.

First of all, I think it's worth asking: What is the form that the questioner is transforming from? Let's say it's like an hourglass. The sand in the top half of the hourglass is the future. The sand in the bottom, the past. The questioner sees itself as the place where the sand passes through the bottleneck, which is the present. In this conception, consciousness is a place of constriction.

To free itself from the constriction of the bottleneck, the questioner expands its conception of itself to encompass the entire hourglass. Now the sand of past, present, future are all the questioner.

Has the questioner transformed, though? Expanded, yes. But transformation means a change of form. The hourglass form is still the same. The questioner has expanded, but only to the limit that this form will allow.

To free itself from the constriction of the hourglass form, the questioner must break the hourglass. Sand spills everywhere.

Has the questioner transformed, though? Not quite. The questioner is free of the old form, yes. But there is no new form. Just sand all over the place, what a mess.

So, what new form can the questioner take, so it can say that it has actually transformed? I suggest the whirlwind. In the whirlwind, the sand has form. It turns in an order of its own. There is no whirlwindglass needed for it to hold its form.

I think this transformed questioner will naturally ask very different questions about the nature of consciousness.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Apr 03, 2018 2:11 pm

.



https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... ean-to-die

Questioning consciousness, among other beliefs; Excerpts:


What Does It Mean to Die?

When Jahi McMath was declared brain-dead by the hospital, her family disagreed. Her case challenges the very nature of existence.


Before having her tonsils removed, Jahi McMath, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl from Oakland, California, asked her doctor, Frederick Rosen, about his credentials. “How many times have you done this surgery?” Hundreds of times, Rosen said. “Did you get enough sleep last night?” He’d slept fine, he responded. Jahi’s mother, Nailah Winkfield, encouraged Jahi to keep asking questions. “It’s your body,” she said. “Feel free to ask that man whatever you want.”

...

The operation, at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital, took four hours. When Jahi awoke, at around 7 p.m. on December 9, 2013, the nurses gave her a grape Popsicle to soothe her throat. About an hour later, Jahi began spitting up blood. The nurses told her not to worry and gave her a plastic basin to catch it in. A nurse wrote in her medical records that she encouraged Jahi to “relax and not cough if possible.” By nine that night, the bandages packing Jahi’s nose had become bloody, too. Nailah’s husband, Marvin, a truck driver, repeatedly demanded that a doctor help them. A nurse told him that only one family member was allowed in the room at a time. He agreed to leave.

Nailah, who worked in contractor sales at Home Depot, said, “No one was listening to us, and I can’t prove it, but I really feel in my heart: if Jahi was a little white girl, I feel we would have gotten a little more help and attention.” Crying, she called her mother, Sandra Chatman, who had been a nurse for thirty years and who worked in a surgery clinic at Kaiser Permanente, in Oakland.

Sandra, who is warm and calm and often wears a flower tucked into her hair, arrived at the hospital at ten o’clock. When she saw that Jahi had already filled a two-hundred-millilitre basin with blood, she told a nurse, “I don’t find this to be normal. Do you find this to be normal?” A nurse wrote in her notes that the physicians on duty were “notified several times over course of shift” that Jahi was bleeding. Another nurse wrote that the doctors were “aware of this post op bleeding” but said “there would be no immediate intervention from ENT or Surgery.” Rosen had left the hospital for the day. In his medical records, he had written that Jahi’s right carotid artery appeared abnormally close to the pharynx, a congenital condition that can potentially raise the risk of hemorrhaging. But the nurses responsible for her recovery seemed unaware of the condition and didn’t mention it in their notes. (Rosen’s attorney said that Rosen could not speak about Jahi; the hospital couldn’t comment, either, because of medical-privacy laws, but a lawyer said that the hospital is satisfied that Jahi’s nursing care was appropriate.)

There were twenty-three beds in the intensive-care unit, spread over three rooms. A doctor was standing on the other side of Jahi’s room, and Sandra asked him, “Why aren’t you guys seeing about my granddaughter?” The doctor instructed the nurse on duty not to change Jahi’s hospital gown, so that he could assess how much blood she was losing, and to spray Afrin in her nose. Sandra, who teaches a workshop at Kaiser Permanente on the “four-habits model,” a method for improving empathy with patients, told me she was surprised that the doctor never introduced himself. “He was all frowned up with his arms crossed,” she said. “It was like he thought we were dirt.”

At twelve-thirty in the morning, Sandra saw on Jahi’s monitor that her oxygen-saturation levels had fallen to seventy-nine per cent. She yelled to the medical staff, and several nurses and doctors ran toward Jahi and began working to intubate her. Sandra said that she heard one doctor say, “Oh, shit, her heart stopped.” It took two and a half hours to restore Jahi’s heartbeat and to stabilize her breathing. Sandra said that when she saw Rosen early the next morning he looked as if he’d been crying.

Two days later, Jahi was declared brain-dead. With the help of a ventilator, she was breathing, but her pupils did not react to light, she did not have a gag reflex, and her eyes remained still when ice water was dripped in each ear. She was briefly disconnected from the ventilator, as a test, but her lungs filled with carbon dioxide. On an EEG test, no brain-wave activity could be seen.

Like all states, California follows a version of the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act, which says that someone who has sustained the “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.” California law requires that hospitals permit “a reasonably brief period of accommodation” before disconnecting a ventilator—long enough to allow family to gather, but not so long that hospitals neglect the “needs of other patients and prospective patients in urgent need of care.”

...

Nailah’s younger brother, Omari Sealey, began sleeping in a chair next to Jahi’s hospital bed, to make sure no one could “kill her off.” He said, “I just felt her life wasn’t worth that much in their eyes. It was like they were trying to shoo us away.” A former baseball star at San Diego State University, he had a large following on social media, and on Instagram and Facebook he announced that the hospital was rushing them to unplug Jahi’s ventilator. “They are trying to feed us legal bull shit,” he wrote. “It’s not over until God say so.” In the comments section, one friend wrote, “This is universal chain of disrespect!!!! fck this healthcare system!!!” Another wrote, “They either wana see us dead or in jail they don’t wana see us alive.”

A week after the surgery, Sealey called a personal-injury lawyer, Christopher Dolan, and told him, “They’re going to kill my niece.” Dolan agreed to take on the case pro bono, though he had no experience with legal issues involving the end of life. A self-described “cafeteria Catholic,” he acted on a vague feeling that a child with a beating heart was not entirely dead. He wrote a cease-and-desist order: if doctors unplugged Jahi’s ventilator, he said, they would violate her and her family’s civil rights. Sealey taped the note to Jahi’s bed and oxygen monitor.

In a petition to the Alameda County Superior Court, Dolan requested that a physician unaffiliated with the hospital examine Jahi. He wrote that the hospital had a conflict of interest, because if its doctors were found guilty of malpractice they could “drastically reduce their liability by terminating Jahi’s life.” In cases of wrongful death, California places a cap of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on damages for pain and suffering. But there is no limit on the amount that can be recovered when a patient is still alive. In a separate motion, Dolan argued that the hospital was infringing on Nailah’s right to express her religion. He said that, as a Christian, she believed that her daughter’s soul inhabited her body as long as her heart beat.

On December 19th, ten days after the surgery, David Durand, the hospital’s senior vice-president and chief medical officer, held a meeting with the family. They asked Durand to allow Jahi to remain on the ventilator until Christmas, suggesting that the swelling in her brain might subside. Durand said no. They also asked that she be given a feeding tube. Durand dismissed this request, too. The idea that the procedure would help her recover was an “absurd notion,” he later wrote, and would only add to the “illusion that she is not dead.”

When they persisted, Durand asked, “What is it that you don’t understand?” According to Jahi’s mother, stepfather, grandmother, brother, and Dolan, who took notes, Durand pounded his fist on the table, saying, “She’s dead, dead, dead.” (Durand denies pounding his fist or repeating the word.)

Fisher repeated the standard brain-death exam and confirmed the hospital’s conclusion. He also performed a radionuclide cerebral-blood-flow study. “You see a complete white void, a whiteout in the part of the head where the brain is,” he told Judge Grillo the next day. “Normally it would be dark black.” Grillo ruled that the hospital could unplug Jahi’s ventilator in six days.

The family set up a GoFundMe page to pay for Jahi to be airlifted to another hospital (“We acknowledge that the odds are stacked against us,” Nailah wrote), and strangers who learned about the case in the media contributed more than fifty thousand dollars. The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network—an organization founded by the parents and siblings of Terri Schiavo, who was in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years and became a cause célèbre for the right-to-life movement—offered to use its contacts to find a facility. Nailah had never had an opinion on the right to life. On abortion, she was pro-choice. But, she said, “I just wanted to get her out of there.” Sandra said she sometimes wonders, “If the hospital had been more compassionate, would we have fought so much?”

Nailah asked Children’s Hospital to perform a tracheotomy, a surgery that enables ventilator air to be pumped directly into the windpipe—a safer way for Jahi to breathe when transported to a new hospital. The hospital’s medical-ethics committee unanimously concluded that the intervention was inappropriate. “No conceivable goal of medicine—preserving life, curing disease, restoring function, alleviating suffering—can be achieved by continuing to ventilate and artificially support a deceased patient,” they wrote. They said that the doctors and nurses caring for Jahi were experiencing “tremendous moral distress,” and that accommodating the family’s requests would raise “significant concerns of justice and fairness.”

Just before the court’s protective order was set to expire, Judge Grillo extended it by eight days. Not long afterward, Dolan and the lawyers for the hospital reached an agreement: the hospital would release Jahi to the Alameda County coroner, who would declare her dead. Then the family would become “wholly and exclusively responsible” for her.

On January 3, 2014, the coroner issued Jahi’s death certificate. For cause of death, he wrote, “Pending investigation.”

...

Nailah was the only family member permitted on the plane, which was paid for with money received from GoFundMe. Nailah was terrified of the noise her daughter’s portable respirator was making, which seemed as loud as the jet’s engine. It wasn’t until they landed that she learned they were in New Jersey, one of only two states—New York is the other—where families can reject the concept of brain death if it violates their religious beliefs. The laws in both states were written to accommodate Orthodox Jews, some of whom believe, citing the Talmud, that the presence of breath signifies life.

Jahi was admitted to St. Peter’s University Hospital, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, which is run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Metuchen. Nailah said, “I had no plan, no place to live, no nothing.” She had packed one suitcase. “When it comes to my kid, I’m an animal,” she told me. “It wasn’t until later on that I was, like, What did I do?”

....

Children’s Hospital hired Sam Singer, an expert in crisis communications and reputation management, to deal with the media that were covering the case. “The general perception inside the hospital was that they were under siege,” Singer told me. “They were not used to engaging in a gutter fight.” Two days after Jahi’s departure, Singer (whom the San Francisco Chronicle calls the city’s “top gun for hire”) told a local paper, “I’ve never seen such reckless disregard for the truth.” At a press conference in front of the hospital, he said that Dolan had “created a hoax. A very sad hoax. That Jahi McMath is in some way alive. She’s not. She’s deceased by every law in the state of California. And by every spiritual belief system imaginable.”

Bioethicists also disparaged the family’s decision. In an op-ed in Newsday, Arthur Caplan, the founding director of N.Y.U.’s Division of Medical Ethics and perhaps the best-known bioethicist in the country, wrote, “Keeping her on a ventilator amounts to desecration of a body.” He told CNN, “There isn’t any likelihood that she’s gonna survive very long.” In an interview with USA Today, he said, “You can’t really feed a corpse” and “She is going to start to decompose.” Laurence McCullough, a professor of medical ethics at Cornell, criticized any hospital that would admit Jahi. “What could they be thinking?” he said to USA Today. “There is a word for this: crazy.”

Robert Truog, the director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, said that he was troubled by the tone of the media coverage. “I think that the bioethics community felt this need to support the traditional understanding of brain death, to the point that they were really treating the family with disdain, and I felt terrible about that,” he told me. Truog thought that the social context of the family’s decision had been ignored. African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to ask that their lives be prolonged as much as possible, even in cases of irreversible coma—a preference that likely stems from fears of neglect. A large body of research has shown that black patients are less likely to get appropriate medications and surgeries than white ones are, regardless of their insurance or education level, and more likely to receive undesirable medical interventions, like amputations. Truog said, “When a doctor is saying your loved one is dead, and your loved one doesn’t look dead, I understand that it might feel that, once again, you are not getting the right care because of the color of your skin.”

...

When Jahi arrived in New Jersey, she hadn’t been fed for more than three weeks, and her organs were failing. The chief of pediatric critical care at St. Peter’s wrote in her records that there was “no hope of brain recovery.” Nailah said, “I didn’t have a clue. I had really thought that I would get her a feeding tube and a tracheotomy, and she would just get up, and we would be good.” In the hospital cafeteria, she saw other families whispering about her.

A surgeon at St. Peter’s gave Jahi a tracheal tube and a feeding tube, which provided nutrition and vitamins. Nailah, who spent all her waking hours in the hospital, became friendly with some of the nurses, who told her that the surgeon who performed the tracheotomy had been ostracized by his colleagues. “They were, like, ‘You operated on that dead girl?’ ” she said. (The hospital did not return calls to speak about the case; in Jahi’s records, a physician wrote that the St. Peter’s administration had agreed to treat her “without medical personnel’s acceptance.”)

Nailah and Marvin slept at a house that the hospital owned, until, after three months, they were told they needed to move on, to make room for other families. They took a cab to a Motel 6. For the next three months, they stayed at whatever motel had the best weekly rate. Nailah’s youngest child, Jordyn, moved in with her aunt, and her son, Jose, moved in with his father, in Oakland. (Nailah’s oldest child was an adult, living on her own.) The human-resources department at Home Depot kept calling Nailah to ask when she’d return. “I don’t know,” she told them. They finally stopped calling. Nailah, who owned her house in Oakland, told me, “I felt like I was exiled out of my state.”

By March, Jahi’s condition had begun to stabilize. Her skin became more elastic, her limbs and face became less swollen, and her blood pressure steadied. In their progress notes, her doctors simply wrote, “Status quo.” No rehabilitation facilities would accept her as a patient, so she remained in the hospital’s intensive-care unit, her treatment covered by Medicaid. Nailah said that the cost of care was roughly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a week. According to New Jersey’s 1991 statute on death, insurance providers can’t deny coverage because of “personal religious beliefs regarding the application of neurological criteria for declaring death.” Alan Weisbard, the executive director of the bioethics commission that drafted the law, told me, “I thought our position should be one of humility, rather than certainty.”

Weisbard had previously served as the assistant legal director for the President’s Commission on death and, like Wikler, he felt uneasy about the result. He said, “I think that the people who have done the deep and conceptual thinking about brain death are people with high I.Q.s, who tremendously value their cognitive abilities—people who believe that the ability to think, to plan, and to act in the world are what make for meaningful lives. But there is a different tradition that looks much more to the body.” The notion of brain death has been rejected by some Native Americans, Muslims, and evangelical Protestants, in addition to Orthodox Jews. The concept is also treated with skepticism in Japan, owing in part to distrust of medical authority. Japan’s first heart transplant, in 1968, became a national scandal—it was unclear that the donor was beyond recovery, or that the recipient (who died shortly after the transplant) needed a new heart—and, afterward, the country never adopted a comprehensive law equating brain death with the death of a human being. Weisbard, a religious Jew, said that he didn’t think “minority communities should be forced into a definition of death that violates their belief structures and practices and their primary senses.”

At St. Peter’s Hospital, a music therapist visited the intensive-care unit every few days. She stood next to Jahi’s bed and played lullabies and soothing melodies on a harp. Nailah observed that Jahi’s heart rate, which tended to be high, would lower when the harpist played. She wondered if her daughter found the songs calming.

Nailah said, “I knew that Jahi was in there.” She began requesting that she move different parts of her body. In one test, which Nailah recorded on her cell phone, she stands at the side of Jahi’s hospital bed without touching it. Jahi’s eyes are closed, and the upper half of her bed is raised at a forty-five-degree angle. Her hands are placed on rolled cloths, to keep them from contracting into fists. “Move your hand,” Nailah says. Two seconds later, Jahi cocks her right wrist. “Very good!” Nailah says. “Can you move your hand again? Move your hand so we can see it. Move it hard.” Nine seconds later, Jahi flexes her forearm, turns her wrist, drops the cloth, and lifts her fingers. Her face is expressionless and still.

In another video, Nailah says, “Kick your foot.” Jahi’s purple blanket has been folded back, revealing her bare feet and ankles. After fifteen seconds, she wiggles her toes. “Try your hardest,” Nailah says. “I see you moved your toes, but you have to kick your foot.” Twenty-two seconds later, Jahi flicks her right foot upward. “Oh, I’m so proud of you,” Nailah says, leaning over the bed and kissing her cheek.

Seven months after moving to New Jersey, Jahi began menstruating. Sandra was visiting, and she asked the doctor on call to give Jahi a heating pad and Motrin—all the women in her family had severe cramps—and to note in Jahi’s medical records that she had got her period for the first time. The doctor told Sandra and Nailah that he couldn’t say for sure what was causing the blood flow. Nailah told him, “Blood is coming out of a teen-age girl’s vagina, and nowhere else, for five days—what do you think it is? Is there another diagnosis?” Sandra said that they both became so agitated that the doctor finally told them, “Why don’t you two girls go for a walk in the park outside.”

In late August, 2014, Jahi was released from St. Peter’s. Her discharge diagnosis was brain death. She moved into a two-bedroom apartment that Nailah and Marvin had rented in a colorless condominium complex near New Brunswick. They slept on an air mattress on the floor, and Jordyn, who had just moved to New Jersey, to begin first grade, slept on the couch. Jahi had the brightest room, with a large window overlooking the parking lot. Nurses, paid for by Medicaid, provided twenty-four-hour care, in eight-hour shifts. Every four hours, Nailah helped them turn her daughter’s body. One of Jahi’s most loyal nurses taped a note to the wall of her bedroom: “During your shift, interact with her,” she had written. “She does hear you! Speak clearly, softly, slowly.” She added, “No one knows if she understands, but just your comforting voice or touch should help.”

Not long after the family moved in, two detectives and a patrol officer showed up at the apartment. The Franklin Township Police Detective Bureau had received an anonymous tip that there was a dead body in the house. Nailah led the detectives into Jahi’s room and showed them her ventilator. The cops concluded that there was no criminal activity and left, but the nurse on duty was rattled, and she quit. Nailah had for months been flooded by e-mails and Facebook messages accusing her of child abuse or of exploiting her daughter for money. Strangers started a petition on Change.org to “stop NJ from paying for corpse care out of taxpayers money”; the petition said that Nailah had bought a Michael Kors purse and expensive wine, an accusation based on pictures on Instagram. Nailah’s lawyer, Dolan, told me, “They think she’s just some black lady sucking down social resources.”

A month after Jahi’s discharge, the International Brain Research Foundation, a neuroscience think tank that supports novel research, helped pay for Jahi to have MRI scans at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Calixto Machado, the president of the Cuban Society of Clinical Neurophysiology, flew to New Jersey to analyze the scans. Machado has published more than two hundred papers on disorders of consciousness and runs a symposium every four years that attracts the world’s leading scholars of brain death. He said, “Everybody was talking about Jahi—Jahi this, Jahi that—but nobody knew the neurological picture.” The fact that Jahi had begun menstruating—a process mediated by the hypothalamus, near the front of the brain—suggested to him that not all neurological functions had ceased.

Dolan sat beside Machado in the hospital as he looked at two computer screens showing images of Jahi’s head and the top of her spine. In the rare cases in which brain-dead patients are sustained by a ventilator, neurologists have reported a phenomenon called “respirator brain”: the brain liquefies. Machado said that if Jahi’s original diagnosis was correct, and she’d had no cerebral blood flow for nine months, he expected that she’d have little tissue structure in her cranial cavity, just fluid and disorganized membranes.

On the scans, Machado observed that Jahi’s brain stem was nearly destroyed. The nerve fibres that connect the brain’s right and left hemispheres were barely recognizable. But large areas of her cerebrum, which mediates consciousness, language, and voluntary movements, were structurally intact. Dolan shouted, “She’s got a brain!”

Machado also performed a test that measures the interplay between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, a relationship that regulates states of arousal and rest. He used three experimental conditions, one of which he called “Mother talks to the patient.” Nailah stood next to her daughter without touching her. “Hey, Jahi, I’m here,” she told her. “I love you. Everyone is so proud of you.” Machado noted that Jahi’s heart rate changed in response to her mother’s voice. “This cannot be found in a brain-dead patient,” he wrote.

Three days after the scans, Dolan submitted a report by Machado to the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau and asked it to rescind Jahi’s death certificate, so that Nailah could return to California and have Jahi treated there. The coroner and the county’s public-health department rejected the request. “Any opportunity to overturn the Court’s holding that Jahi McMath is brain dead has long expired,” their lawyers wrote.

...

Two months after Machado’s tests, Shewmon flew to New Jersey and visited Jahi at her apartment. He pulled a desk chair next to her bed and, with a notepad in his hand, watched her for six hours. Jahi did not respond to his instructions to move her limbs, a fact that Shewmon did not find particularly revealing. He had analyzed the videos that Nailah had recorded, and they suggested to him that Jahi was in a minimally conscious state, a condition in which patients are partly or intermittently aware of themselves and their environment. He wrote that her condition “creates a particular challenge to either disprove or verify, because the likelihood of Jahi being in a ‘responsive’ state during a random examination is small.”

After Shewmon left, Nailah took more videos. She followed Shewmon’s instructions not to touch her daughter during the filming and to begin the video outside Jahi’s room. Shewmon eventually analyzed forty-nine videos containing a hundred and ninety-three commands and six hundred and sixty-eight movements. He wrote that the movements occur “sooner after command than would be expected on the basis of random occurrence,” and that “there is a very strong correspondence between the body part requested and the next body part that moves. This cannot be reasonably explained by chance.” He noted that the movements “bear no resemblance to any kind of reflex,” and that, in one video, Jahi seemed to display a complex level of linguistic comprehension. “Which finger is the eff-you finger?” Nailah asked her. “When you get mad at somebody, which finger you supposed to move?” Two seconds later, Jahi flexed her left middle finger. Then she bent her pinkie. “Not that one,” Nailah said. Four seconds later, Jahi moved her middle finger again.

James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth who helped develop the theory of brain death that formed the basis of the 1981 President’s Commission report, told me that Shewmon showed him some of the videos. “My thoughts about this are not fully formed,” he said, adding, “I’m always skeptical of videotapes, because of the videos of Terri Schiavo.” Her family had released video clips that they presented as proof of consciousness, but the videos had been edited, giving the impression that she was tracking people with her eyes, even though she was blind.* Bernat said, “I have a huge amount of respect for Alan, and if he says something, I am going to pay attention to it.” He called Shewmon “the most intellectually honest person I have ever met.”

When Shewmon was a college sophomore, at Harvard, he listened to Chopin’s Trois Nouvelles Études No. 2, in his dorm room, and the music lifted him into such a state of ecstasy that he had an epiphany: he no longer thought it possible that all conscious experience, particularly one’s perception of beauty, could be a “mere electrophysiological epiphenomenon,” he said. The music seemed to transcend “the spatial limitations of matter.” An atheist, he converted to Catholicism and studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. He went to medical school, in 1971, and then specialized in neurology, because he wanted to understand the relationship between the mind and the brain.

For the next fifteen years, he believed in and defended the notion of brain death, but in the early nineties he began to feel increasingly troubled by the concept. When he engaged in what he called “Socratic conversations” with colleagues, he saw that few doctors could confidently articulate why the destruction of one organ was synonymous with death. Usually, they’d end up saying that these patients were still living biological organisms but had lost the capacities that made them human. He thought the formulation seemed too similar to the idea of “mental death,” which the Nazis embraced after the publication, in 1920, of a widely read medical and legal text called “Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Living.”

Shewmon’s research on what he calls “chronic survival” after brain death helped prompt a new President’s council on bioethics, in 2008, to revisit the definition of death. The council’s report referred to Shewmon’s research thirty-eight times. Although it ultimately reaffirmed the validity of brain death, it abandoned the biological and philosophical justification presented by the 1981 President’s Commission—that a functioning brain was necessary for the body to operate as an “integrated whole.” Instead, the report said that the destruction of the brain was equivalent to death because it meant that a human being was no longer able to “engage in commerce with the surrounding world,” which is “what an organism ‘does’ and what distinguishes every organism from nonliving things.”

In a personal note appended to the end of the report, the chairman of the council, Edmund Pellegrino, expressed regret regarding the lack of empirical precision. He wrote that attempts to articulate the boundaries of death “end in some form of circular reasoning—defining death in terms of life and life in terms of death without a true ‘definition’ of one or the other.”

In 2015, after Nailah filed her taxes, her accountant called to tell her that her submission had been rejected by the I.R.S. One of the “dependents” she’d listed was deceased. “I was, like, Oh, God, now I have to tell this guy what is going on—that she’s alive on a state level and dead on the federal level,” she said. She decided not to fight the I.R.S.; she was sure that she’d lose. “It’s not even about money,” she told me. “It’s the principle: I really have a human being that I get up and see about every day.”

Nailah sold her house in Oakland to pay her rent in New Jersey. She almost never left the apartment. Consumed by guilt for having urged Jahi to have her tonsils removed, she was given a diagnosis of depression. “I used to watch the antidepressant commercials, where people would stare out the window and say they couldn’t go outside, and I’d think, That is ridiculous,” she told me. “Who can’t go outside? Who can’t get off the bed? Where I’m from, you have survival skills—you learn to adapt. If you’re poor, if anything goes wrong, you can still make it. But this is one situation that I cannot adapt to.”

In the spring of 2015, Nailah filed a malpractice lawsuit against Oakland Children’s Hospital, seeking damages for Jahi’s pain, suffering, and medical expenses. The hospital argued that deceased bodies do not have legal standing to sue. “Plaintiffs are preserving Jahi’s body from its natural post-mortem course,” the hospital’s lawyers wrote. “It would be against public policy to hold health professionals liable for the costs of the futile medical interventions performed on a dead person.”

Dolan submitted video recordings of Jahi and declarations from Machado, three New Jersey doctors who had examined her, and Shewmon, who concluded that Jahi had fulfilled the requirements of brain death at the time of her diagnosis but no longer did. He wrote, “With the passage of time, her brain has recovered the ability to generate electrical activity, in parallel with its recovery of ability to respond to commands.” He described her as “an extremely disabled but very much alive teenage girl.”

The hospital hired its own medical experts. Thomas Nakagawa, who wrote the 2011 guidelines for pediatric brain death, said that the only accepted criteria for brain death were those stipulated by the guidelines. MRI scans, the heart-rate analysis, the videos of movement, and the evidence of menstruation were not relevant to the criteria. Sanford Schneider, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, referred to Jahi as a “corpse,” and told the court that she “cannot respond to verbal commands, because she has no cerebral mechanism to hear sound,” a conclusion based on a test that measured Jahi’s brain-wave activity in response to different noises. Schneider wrote, “There is absolutely no medical possibility that J McMath has recovered, or will someday recover, from death.”

Last summer, a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court rejected the hospital’s argument that the brain-death exam from 2013 “must be accorded finality for any and all other purposes.” He ruled that “a triable issue of fact exists as to whether Jahi currently satisfies the statutory definition of ‘dead.’ ” In a trial expected to last a month, a jury will decide if Jahi is alive.

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby dada » Sat Apr 07, 2018 6:13 pm

82's Panic thread got me thinking about the nature of panic.

I feel that panic, whether it's mass panic, or the subjective experience of panic, is created by the fear of fear. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop, like the one that occurs between a microphone pointed at a speaker. Panic is like the resulting high-pitched noise. Makes one appreciate the wisdom behind the words, "there's nothing to fear but fear itself."

This gave me an insight into the Litany Against Fear. You know, "Fear is the mindkiller, the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear, permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain."

A useful little thing. But I realized that there's more to it than at first appears. "the Litany against the Fear of Fear" might be a more accurate title, although more cumbersome.

Because it isn't really against fear, but against panic. Seeing it in this light gives mastering fear a distinctly Reichian flavor. The Litany looks like a shorthand formula for full biological orgasm.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby thrulookingglass » Thu Apr 12, 2018 2:41 pm

Quantification - quantum: a particular amount. To gauge. To measure. To Judge. A square and compass. Discernment. The ability to make decisions...consciousness. Welcome to causality, not reality. What we make is what is. Causality. Thought is a prism of many distinctions.

Some fan mail here, I appreciate all your input. Dada, you have some beautiful thoughts. Thanks to you all here in a way.

To pick apart this reality and what is is not higher consciousness. Forgiveness. Compassion. When shall we kill our way to peace? Never. Fuck Trump and his promised retaliations to the attacks in Syria. Violent retaliations are terrible. Two wrongs shall never create a right. War is wrong. All war.

Intrusions...demons, dreams, aliens, angels, gnomes, m.i.b., reptilians, filtered reality, interesting outtakes to the normal scenarios. Strange. Someone has a message for us, and it is not to pursue the ways of violence.

We pay criminals to steal our money.

Life is more than what you "own". Or at least it should be. Wouldn't you rather know peace more than anything?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:07 pm

Fear is primal. Good thing we've got a scream to go with it.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby DrEvil » Mon Apr 16, 2018 2:41 pm

Idle speculation:

I'm a huge scifi geek, and one of the ideas that really stuck with me came from one of Alastair Reynold's books, where a person has their world-line erased from reality. The result is that this person never existed in the first place, reality rearranges itself around this person not existing, and the only people who can even remember him is the two people present when he was erased.

In the book this happens because of some science hoodoo gone wrong, but what if it can happen spontaneously?

Maybe you had a friend five minutes ago who was spontaneously erased from reality. You wouldn't remember this friend because he never existed. And what if it can go the other way too, a person being spontaneously created with a full history. Maybe your current best friend didn't exist five minutes ago, but you can still remember being his best friend for years because the whole history of your friendship was written into reality at his creation.

And then of course you can start pushing the idea. What if the coffee mug in your hand wasn't there two seconds ago? Maybe you didn't even drink coffee until reality rewrote itself and you did. Or maybe you were a completely different person yesterday, different name, different gender, different job, different history, different world, different species.

What if it happens all the time to everything? Reality constantly rewriting itself, details small and large, but we don't know because the history of our experiences are also rewritten.

Now I have to go finish my book in case the author becomes a plumber and never writes it.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Apr 16, 2018 4:11 pm

Now I have to go finish my book in case the author becomes a plumber and never writes it.


:scaredhide: :lol:
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Mon Apr 16, 2018 5:48 pm

George Orwell, 1984:

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”



The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that day they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence, it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

He had gone straight to working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside down from the point of view of the telescreen.

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair, so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident - a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance - would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph down the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.

That was ten - eleven - years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept the photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold on the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from the ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other charges - two, three, he could not remember how many, Very likely the confessions had been re-written and re-written until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him a sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.


He wondered, as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes around the sun: today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he also might be wrong.

He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force was pressing down on you - something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of our senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of the external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they might kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O'Brien - to O'Brien: it was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person and took its colour from that fact.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.


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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby minime » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:11 pm

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.




No one has ever been born; no one has ever died.
Last edited by minime on Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby minime » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:16 pm

Division by zero?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Mon Apr 16, 2018 7:04 pm

a nitwit?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby minime » Mon Apr 16, 2018 10:06 pm



you, me, Winston or O'Brien?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue Apr 17, 2018 1:14 am

nothing exists. together, you are alone.
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