Dear Paul,

Thank you for your kind response. I think we may be able to discourse here, down, well below the bright NEW lights.

>Thus, science shies away from such questions as paranormal phenomena and only dabbles in the surface effects of such phenomena as sleep or consciousness.

That is true. But it does not require a great number of good people to do good low energy science. Just talented people. My complaint is that good, credible science is being discriminated against by the science establishment. But that may also be OK because quackery abounds. The great scientists like Sheldrake, Josephson, Radin, etc., will eventually win the day. Galileo had to contend with the church. Now they have to contend with the scientific establishment in the universities. Majority rule! Seems like you already said most of this.

On consciousness, there is a great discussion of the role of consciousness in collapsing wave functions on the Physics Forum going on right now.

So that out of the way, it seems that we agree that OBEs are probably extant even though the data is clinical. The next question in my mind is 'How could it possibly be that your consciousness, the awareness aspect of your consciousness, could leave your body and gather information remotely?'. What natural mechanism could there be to allow such a thing? Well, to pursue that one must ask what consciousness is while in the brain. And that is just where the leading edge of science is at the moment. I should not say 'moment' as it's been there for awhile and seems not to be moving. Even the definition of consciousness is problematic. We see that right on this forum.

What I do see in science is that various disciplines are defining consciousness systematically. But the definitions from discipline to discipline are hardly consistent.

So there is the neurological appraoch based of course on neurons. There is the physics approach largely based on quantum mechanics. There is the logic appraoch based on set theory. There is the computer aproach based on virtual reality. And there is philosophy, not to mention psychology which hardly mentions consciousness. Perhaps I missed a few.

So the questions are:
1. What is it(hard)-
2. What does it consist of(easier)-
3. What media can it exist in(?)
4. etc.
Probably the answer to 1 is given by the answer to 2,3,... Like we we do not really know what an elementary particle is, but we can understand what it is from its properties and its relationship to other particles.

My start on these questions is to claim that consciousness is the experience of information by which a live organism relates to the outside world. The information is imprinted on a medium, which could even be some day in a computer. In humans the information experienced is visual, audio, feelings, emotions, smells, and imagination. The human can imagine everything sensed and then experience the imagination.

For OBE considerations, the important question is what possible media can the sensed and imaginary information be stored on? Frolich proposed membrane dipoles. Penrose proposed water within microtubules. There seems to be agreement that it has to be a Bose-Einstein medium. But for the consciousness to leave the body, we need the possibility of a medium that exists outside the body, as well as in it, I might add. Sounds like space so far. Do we know of anything else that exists in and out of the body on which information can be imprinted? .....Radio waves.

But the information imprinted on radio waves is only imprinted at their source. We need something like radio waves but for which something can imprint information both in and out of the brain. A medium that can allow sources of consciousness to operate at any point in space. A super space?

Well, I think that is enough for this year.
This year has been a difficult one for the world.
Let's hope the new year finds some solutions to the world's problems.

Appreciatively,

Wanda