Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Carl Jung: witchdoctor or radical scientist?

Rate this topic


Nicky

Recommended Posts

6 hours ago, Eiuol said:

... 

We wouldn't say that a paramecium shrinking away from the light is having an emotion.

But this is why mysticism isn't just a mistake. It's a framework of thinking. Jung didn't simply have radical ideas that questioned the paradigm around him. That would be fine. How the heart relates to emotional processing could end up with some pretty groundbreaking ideas if pursued far enough. Yet this would change entirely if we are trying to say that an emotion itself, like what we say when we mean sadness or excitement, manifests in the heart. That would require additional premises, particularly ones about an unconscious. And then we wouldn't be grounded in empirical science anymore. 

No, a paramecium doesn’t have a heart and thus has no emotions. I differentiate thoughts (cognitive content) from emotions, just as I differentiate positive from negative emotions that cancel out, like fear and love. Excitement during exercise and peace are also emotions, since they occur at or after heart-rate changes, when we can become conscious of them. However, just like thoughts, emotions can also be subconscious or unconscious: I use these two terms interchangibly, although I realize there is a technical difference. In philosophy, though,  they both would mean being outside of conscious thought.

Measuring objective emotions that I’ve been talking about is real. All you need is a device that can find the differential of heart-rate, known as heart-rate variability, or heart rhythm. Emotion research like that is quite groundbreaking and completely ignored by most neuro & cardio scientists.

As for MisterSwig’s comment, I’m not sure if it’s serious or sarcastic, so I won’t reply to it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:

As for MisterSwig’s comment, I’m not sure if it’s serious or sarcastic, so I won’t reply to it.

Okay, here's a serious question. How do you define brain? You say there is an independent brain in the heart. What exactly do you mean by this? Can you point to the heart-brain on an X-ray?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What happens to people who have a heart transplant? Are they experiencing the emotions of the dead person? How do these new, different emotions get translated in a different brain that doesn't speak the same language of these new heart emotions? Do you know what a metaphor is and when it's applied correctly?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:

However, just like thoughts, emotions can also be subconscious or unconscious: I use these two terms interchangibly, although I realize there is a technical difference. In philosophy, though,  they both would mean being outside of conscious thought.

One sense of subconscious is information that can be consciously accessed with normal effort, but not necessarily always in conscious attention. Mostly, this would be what your memory refers to.

My main criticism about Jung and other psychoanalysts is that very often there will be interesting initial ideas like the heart to emotion connection, yet they will take the thought as if it is definitely a viable scientific idea worth empirical investigation. I very much appreciate radical ideas, strange ones even. But when they aren't really grounded in either science or philosophy, it really ends up as arbitrary. Or people end up taking metaphors as literal. And don't forget scientific investigation requires careful conceptual distinction. There already are distinctions for electric signals sent by different parts of the body, emotions, and cognition. 

If you stub your toe, does that mean your toe generates an emotion? There is a signal, an emotion will probably occur, but is the toe forming an emotion? It's causal confusion. You might end up offering a scientific explanation of heart as the source of emotions. In the process, you would end up destroying any sense there is of making any distinction of brain processes or any other systems in the body. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

From Novella's article:

Quote

The heart contains its own electrical system that regulates itself in order to keep the heart pumping in a coordinated fashion. ... A recent review of the evidence indicates that the heart contains a complex intrinsic nervous system comprised of multiple ganglia (clusters of neurons) that network with each other.

Indeed, the neurons in the heart that are only called a 'brain' (for ease of understanding) regulate, that is, as HeartMath found out, encode blood with impulses that have information in them. Skeptics stuck in brain-centered consciousness cannot accept this because this idea doesn't correlate with Kantianesque science, but only some ancient philosophy (like that of Aristotle, who was indeed heart-centered and thus self-conscious).

Quote

None of this means that the heart has a mind.

Indeed it doesn't. But it means it might have a soul, which is not reducible to mind (contrary to what Descartes and his followers thought). This soul is also pre-conscious, or at least serves as only a part of our consciousness, since it affects (as HeartMath studies have shown) our intelligence -- how clearly we are able to think, for example.

And here is a logical mistake:

Quote

It takes more than neurons, or even a system of neurons, to form a mind. A complex network of neurons can function like a computer chip, and no more has a mind than your laptop does.

Neurons in our head may form mind, but mind is only in the head by definition. Hence what's in the heart is not a mind, but a (little) 'brain', independent from our brain/mind. A complex, natural network of neurons, however, cannot function like a computer chip because they have nonlinear, that is synergetic, qualities in their interaction, which cannot be artificially imitated (at least with today's neurology) or with computer engineering, in which about 50% of circuits are linear (and only memory circuits are non-linear, but they are not the same sort of complex nonlinearity as in neurology). It's a faulty comparison and obsolete metaphor, as other neurologists know ("Unplugging the Computer Metaphor", "Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer", etc.), and it's an equivocation with the term 'mind', following in Descartes' (or more clearly, Kant's) steps.

Quote

It takes the specialized organization of neurons in the brain to produce cognitive processes that we experience as the mind.

Neither emotions, not the heart (and its mechanisms) have anything to do with cognition. That's called overthinking, which is another problem of both this article's author and today's culture that follows this kind of Kantian thinking (categorized as DIS). The author, Steve Novella, by the way, is one of the critics of HeartMath, having called their research 'noise' in an article on his blog (but disabled the comments after his fellow skeptics posted a few responses) a year before this article in Neurologica. This blog post was used for a Wikipedia article directed against HeartMath (with no comment from HeartMath on it, of course). I was able to write enough criticism to have the article deleted. Other skeptics also realized their mistake, as Wikipedia tends to be overcrowded by skeptics, and there are not enough open-minded individuals there. My criticism, however, was deleted because it was too lengthy (the moderator said it's not a forum), and I've seemingly lost it and cannot find it. I remember that through my research Novella happened to be a kind of person (like Kant) with problems with his heart, a very narrow-minded, brain-centered scientist, who only pathologically tries to destroy but doesn't really create.

12 hours ago, EC said:

What happens to people who have a heart transplant? Are they experiencing the emotions of the dead person? How do these new, different emotions get translated in a different brain that doesn't speak the same language of these new heart emotions? Do you know what a metaphor is and when it's applied correctly?

I've already pointed out the incorrect metaphor used by Novella to compare our brain/mind with computer. I think my comparison of heart with soul is credible, just as brain is related to mind. We also know that these people who have transplanted hearts are very confused sometimes and shocked by the new kind of and unfamiliar emotions they are feeling perhaps for the same reason you are pointing out: namely, that their brains weren't related to the same hearts and hence are unable to understand these new emotions from the lives of the previous owners. It can be particularly shocking sometimes, depending on the kind of person the donor was. For example, here is something from The Heart's Code:

Quote

I have a patient, an eight-year-old little girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old girl. Her mother brought her to me when she started screaming at night about her dreams of the man who had murdered her donor. She said her daughter knew who it was. After several sessions, I just could not deny the reality of what this child was telling me. Her mother and I finally decided to call the police and, using the descriptions from the little girl, they found the murderer. He was easily convicted with evidence my patient provided. The time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what the little girl he killed had said to him . . . everything the little heart transplant recipient reported was completely accurate. (qtd. on p. 7)

And we already know how emotions serve as the foundation for memory.

9 hours ago, Eiuol said:

...

If you stub your toe, does that mean your toe generates an emotion? There is a signal, an emotion will probably occur, but is the toe forming an emotion? It's causal confusion. You might end up offering a scientific explanation of heart as the source of emotions. In the process, you would end up destroying any sense there is of making any distinction of brain processes or any other systems in the body.

The confusion is taking nonessential parts of the body and giving them meaning to which they don't contribute essentially. Physical pain is processed by the brain and isn't the emotion I'm talking about here. Emotions like fear, love, hate, excitement, peace, etc. are not reducible to brain impulses (or nerve impulses, for that matter), senses or sensations, facial expressions or intuitive feelings. Emotions are those (im)pulses that contain information from environment or other parts of the body (toes included) but are produced within us. They are sent to processing centers in the brain to interpret this information, which then becomes conscious and gets mixes with a lot of complex conscious and subjective processes. Hence we can, with our brain, repress emotions, but that doesn't mean they don't occur somewhere deeper and are transferred throughout the circulatory system. What's causing emotions is different from the source of emotions. Cause of emotions is not the place where emotions are produced. The same confusion you are showing between cause and source are found in the brain. Kant, in particular, believed that we cause our phenomenal realities, and even the source of them was somewhere within our brains (the noumenon as the direction toward which we go through practical reason to the deeper levels within ourselves). This is the same confusion found in neuroscientists like Novella who are in the same category as Kant.

What causes the formation of our human information is the environment, the context. We, however, are the ones who produce this information (we don't cause it, in this sense). Reality causes, we adapt, assimilate impulses, integrate information (even subconsciously!) and hence produce it, but the sources of production of such information are different and not only found within one organ, but within many (and yes, even our stomachs have their own electromagnetic frequencies and own neurons, but stomachs are not as significant as our hearts, without which a person cannot live and with even an artificial heart a person lives maximum of 4 years). Yet we see animals who can live without their brains or heads, but no animal can live without a heart for very long.

Edited by Ilya Startsev
added 'facial expression' to non-purely-emotional types of behavior
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just to show that I've considered empirical research concerning emotions from more authoritative sources than HeartMath, here is what I wrote to Bill Harris on my blog after banning him in 2016:

I found Purves et al.’s Neuroscience (2004; see complete reference below) to be the most respected and used textbook in graduate neuroscience courses. I’ve read the section on emotions (Chapter 28) and skimmed through most of the book. Here is my interpretation of the neurological perspective on emotions (if you are not familiar with it, see the textbook, and also compare to similar findings of Ekman summarized in Lakoff, 1990).

I thought about neurological emotions and decided that the deviation in the position of the facial muscles from the natural (neutral or no expression) requires more blood flow. It’s the same with our bodies — when you exercise your body or you rub the skin, you excite the muscles, so the pulse quickens, and the excited skin area becomes red from increased blood content (in most cases). So, in contrast to “emotions” that neurologists see, this phenomenon is better defined as excitation, which is triggered in the muscles/tissues by increased blood pulse, and not other emotions, like happiness, hatred, etc. Moreover, expression of hate or fear (correlating with specific positioning of eyebrows, cheeks, and other features of the whole face) requires a greater blood flow than the expression of happiness or pleasure (smiling). Therefore, the negative “emotions” on the face lead to a greater increase in heart rate than positive “emotions.” Clearly, none of their research really deals with emotions other than excitation.


REFERENCES

Purves. D., G. J. Augustine, & D. Fitzpatrick et al. (2004). Neuroscience (3d ed.). Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, Inc. Ch. 28.

Lakoff, G. (1990). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago UP. pp. 38ff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:

Indeed, the neurons in the heart that are only called a 'brain' (for ease of understanding) regulate, that is, as HeartMath found out, encode blood with impulses that have information in them. Skeptics stuck in brain-centered consciousness cannot accept this...

I read the HeartMath slides at the website. I saw no mention of "encoding blood." They talk about sensory neurons in the heart which send nervous signals to the brain, something Dr. Novella also talks about and accepts.

Quote

It is true that the heart, like the rest of the body, especially the autonomic nervous system, provides sensory feedback to our brains. This can affect our emotions – when something physical is happening to our body we can feel anxious or depressed. Pain itself is a physical sensation that carries with it a specific emotional response, because pain pathways specifically send signal to the limbic system to create the negative emotional response to pain.

I can see you're heavily invested in this belief and have read a lot more on the subject than me. So, can you link me to a scientific article about this idea of encoding blood with information? I want to at least understand what you're talking about before responding further.

Also, can you link to articles for your other main claims, namely that people with heart transplants are emotionally confused, and the story about the heart recipient tracking down the murderer of the donor?

Edited by MisterSwig
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

I can see you're heavily invested in this belief and have read a lot more on the subject than me.

Too bad he never read a book on basic biology. The nervous system runs through the body, and sends signals to the brain through the mechanism of action potentials (a change in polarity that travels down an elongated cell)...which, in vertebrates, is in the skull. There are neurons (literally NERVE CELLS) everywhere in the body. They exist in even the simplest animals. Even some plants (like those carnivorous ones) have cells capable of generating an action potential. Doesn't mean they have brains.

That's how sensory information gets to the brain: a specialized organ of up to 86 billion neurons, which processes sensory information, decides what is the appropriate reaction to that information, and directs the body to react appropriately.

There are also ganglia through the body, which are clusters of nerves that are nothing like the brain, and simply regulate the automatic functions of individual organs (and handle communication with the brain). The heart has them too. You can get a heart to beat in a jar (or in the palm of your hand, when you rip it out of the chest of your enemies), for instance, because of this.

In the heart, they contain approximately 40 thousand neurons. If my math is correct, that's 0.000005 percent of the ones in the brain. Very clearly, it's 40 thousand neurons that have nothing to do with anything except the function of the specific organ. No organism could ever evolve to move some of its central brain function to another organ. It would be ridiculously inefficient.

Edited by Nicky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:

What's causing emotions is different from the source of emotions.

This is basically my point. You are making points that emotions come from the heart, or that people like Jung are mystics in the sense that they have a belief in emotions that don't stem from the brain per se, but from other parts of the body. This is still confusing the cause that gets the ball rolling, and the source that completes the manifestation of an emotion. It's perfectly fine to say that the heart or other organs send signals to the brain that may involve emotional processing. When you say the signal itself is the emotion, you end up dropping the entire meaning of a signal, then equivocating anything internal as some kind of mental content (which is conscious or unconscious according to you). If information is sent by the heart, through the circulatory system, counts as an emotion, then certainly the signal sent by your toe count as an emotion; if the heart counts as a source of emotions, your count can as well.

4 minutes ago, Nicky said:

That's how sensory information gets to the brain: a specialized organ of up to 86 billion neurons, which processes sensory information, decides what is the appropriate reaction to that information, and directs the body to react appropriately.

All that you said about the heart is well and good. But would you offer a similar explanation as to why you don't think Jungian archetypes, for example, are not mystical?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

I read the HeartMath slides at the website. I saw no mention of "encoding blood." They talk about sensory neurons in the heart which send nervous signals to the brain, something Dr. Novella also talks about and accepts. 

The more recent work by HeartMath begins thusly:

Quote

Every cell in our body is bathed in an external and internal environment of fluctuating invisible magnetic forces. It has become increasingly apparent that fluctuations in magnetic fields can affect virtually every circuit in biological systems to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the particular biological system and the properties of the magnetic fluctuations. One of the primary ways that signals and messages are encoded and transmitted in physiological systems is in the language of patterns. In the nervous system it is well established that information is encoded in the time intervals between action potentials or patterns of electrical activity. This also applies to humoral communications. Several studies have revealed that biologically relevant information is encoded in the time interval between hormonal pulses. As the heart secretes a number of different hormones with each contraction, there is a hormonal pulse pattern that correlates with heart rhythms. In addition to the encoding of information in the space between nerve impulses and in the intervals between hormonal pulses, it is likely that information is also encoded in the inter beat intervals of the pressure and electromagnetic waves produced by the heart. This supports Karl Pribram’s proposal that low-frequency oscillations generated by the heart and body in the form of afferent neural, hormonal, and electrical patterns are the carriers of emotional information and that the higher frequency oscillations found in the electroencephalogram (EEG) reflect the conscious perception and labeling of feelings and emotions. It is quite possible that these same rhythmic patterns can also transmit emotional information via the electromagnetic field into the environment, which can be detected by others and processed in the same manner as internally generated signals. (McCraty, 2015, pp. 125-126, citations deleted)

Then the rest of the article flushes out the details and shows empirical data that is brushed aside by Novella as mere "noise".

3 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

I can see you're heavily invested in this belief and have read a lot more on the subject than me. So, can you link me to a scientific article about this idea of encoding blood with information? I want to at least understand what you're talking about before responding further.

Also, can you link to articles for your other main claims, namely that people with heart transplants are emotionally confused, and the story about the heart recipient tracking down the murderer of the donor?

References & Bibliography:

McCraty, R., & Childre, D. (2002). The Appreciative Heart: The Psychophysiology of Positive Emotions and Optimal Functioning. Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath.

McCraty, R. (2001). Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance. Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath.

McCraty, R. (2015). The Energetic Heart: Biomagnetic Communication Within and Between People. In Rosch, P. J. (Ed.), Bioelectromagnetic and Subtle Energy Medicine (Chapter 14). Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Pearsall, P. (1999). The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy, The New Findings About Cellular Memories and Their Role in the Mind / Body / Spirit Connection. NY: Broadway Books.

1 hour ago, Nicky said:

They exist in even the simplest animals. Even some plants (like those carnivorous ones) have cells capable of generating an action potential. Doesn't mean they have brains.

That's exactly right. Notice that they also don't have blood cells. Heart and brain develop together only in higher animals.

1 hour ago, Nicky said:

Very clearly, it's 40 thousand neurons that have nothing to do with anything except the function of the specific organ. No organism could ever evolve to move some of its central brain function to another organ. It would be ridiculously inefficient.

I don't think we understand how the human body operates very clearly as well. Some, like Richard Dawkins (in his talk with Lawrence Krauss), think that our bodies are so inefficiently made that we should modify them in order to improve them. Others, namely, geneticists, see a huge amount of seemingly redundant DNA and call it "junk" DNA. And the stories just pile and pile. In contrast to them I think our bodies are extremely efficient, if you learn to understand them correctly (through the prism of good philosophy, of course). The 40 thousand neurons are mentioned by McCraty in his 2001 version of Science of the Heart (p. 4), but in the newer version available free on their website that paragraph, among others, is missing, which is very strange. They are clearly trying to show that those neurons have functions other than simple autonomous functions like pumping blood, and these neurons surely aren't used for processing pain, as we can't feel our hearts, so that already means they are relatively independent from the nervous system as a whole. McCraty & Co. usually cite in their earlier work Armour (1994), but I don't know what that neurocardiologist's standing is in the field and whether he is still relevant.

Reference:

Armour, J.A. and J.L. Ardell, eds. Neurocardiology. 1994, Oxford University Press: New York.

Edited by Ilya Startsev
added year to the quote
Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

When you say the signal itself is the emotion, you end up dropping the entire meaning of a signal, then equivocating anything internal as some kind of mental content (which is conscious or unconscious according to you). If information is sent by the heart, through the circulatory system, counts as an emotion, then certainly the signal sent by your toe count as an emotion; if the heart counts as a source of emotions, your count can as well.

But I'm not equivocating in terms of the source from where that signal originates. This confusion is similar, for example, to misunderstanding Aristotle's epistemology. The forms (causes) exist objectively, but we need to use our soul (source) to make "imprints" of them, thus originating them within our (sub)consciousness for further processing. If our heart counts as the source of emotions, surely our toes don't. The idea that taking a signal for the thing itself (hereby, emotion) as false goes back to Alfred Korzibski's work (another darn Kantian) who tried to disprove Aristotelian objectivism. I am indeed taking the signal for emotion, but it's a specific kind of signal (not just any kind) because it was imposed by the specific organ in our body (namely, heart) which then allowed the signal to be transferred throughout the body. This signal, in contrast to Korzibski's reified abstractions, is natural and therefore objective. Similarly to this equivalence of blood pulse (the aforementioned signal) and emotion, I would, however, go even so far as to think of my ontological Model as reality itself, but now that would be supported by Korzibski's idea of knowledge being structure, and hence what we would call reality is our knowledge of it that we gained through structure that was correctly taken (read: imprinted, a la Aristotle) from outside. Someone would say that correspondence theory is false, but that's another topic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Nicky said:

This part of it is understood just fine. Your claims contradict basic, well researched Biology.

Is that so? You are right that I don't know Biology (sic) so well, or maybe not as well as you do. Can you tell me what the purpose of "junk" DNA is, please?

Edited by Ilya Startsev
clarification
Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, Ilya Startsev said:

Is that so? You are right that I don't know Biology (sic) so well, or maybe as well as you do. Can you tell me what the purpose of "junk" DNA is, please?

Not really, no. Not definitively, because Genetics is a young science. I can tell you that it has nothing to do with the subject at hand though. You don't need Genetics at all to understand why what you posted is nonsense.

Edited by Nicky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Since MisterSwig is seemingly accepting Novella's criticism of HeartMath for granted, I want to quote a famous sociological work concerning some of the practices of the likes of Novella that are common in modern science:

Quote

Sources of "subjectivity" ... disappeared in the face of more than one statement, and the initial statement could be taken at face value and without qualification ... It is in this manner that our scientists, when noticing a peak on the spectrum of a Chromatograph, sometimes rejected it as noise. If, however, the same peak was seen to occur more than once (under what were regarded an (sic) independent circumstances), it was often said that there was a substance there of which the peaks were a trace. (Latour & Woolgar, 1986, p. 84)

In other words, if Novella and his team had the result that McCraty had gotten, they would accept it as true science. The problem with that is that these scientists don't see the problems that McCraty and his researchers do because these individuals clearly look through different methodological lenses, structured by different epistemologies.

Reference:

Latour, B. & S. Woolgar. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP

Edited by Ilya Startsev
changed 'frameworks' to 'lenses'
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Ilya Startsev said:

Since MisterSwig is seemingly accepting Novella's criticism of HeartMath for granted...

I don't take it for granted. I take it for more reasonable. Much of your argument does not mesh with my knowledge.

I watched the latest video on HeartMath's site. Here is the YT link. I'm starting to think this theory is actually influenced by mysticism and collectivism, not actual science. The video is all about electromagnetic intuition and collective healing. In the end, when I saw that the video was produced by "Liquid Buddha Studios," I was not surprised at all to learn that the enlightened One had a hand in it. Frankly, I don't see much science here. The closer I look, the more fantastically supernatural the whole thing gets.

I also found a free download of Dr. Pearsall's book, The Heart's Code. In the introduction he's explicit about trying to connect modern medicine with ancient religious wisdom. So, his methodology is absurd.

Also, I learned the context of the story about the girl who found her donor's murderer via heart memories. Dr. Pearsall says he was speaking at a conference in Texas, when the girl's therapist told him the story. So, it's hearsay upon hearsay. Where is the official police or court record of this miracle? Furthermore, his reaction to hearing this story amounts to blind, religious faith.

632426007_Screenshot_20190314-1202242.thumb.png.f72181f16b4946dac9f06918b7f7159d.png

My BS detector is firing on all cylinders.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

...

I watched the latest video on HeartMath's site. Here is the YT link. I'm starting to think this theory is actually influenced by mysticism and collectivism, not actual science. The video is all about electromagnetic intuition and collective healing. In the end, when I saw that the video was produced by "Liquid Buddha Studios," I was not surprised at all to learn that the enlightened One had a hand in it. Frankly, I don't see much science here. The closer I look, the more fantastically supernatural the whole thing gets.

I also found a free download of Dr. Pearsall's book, The Heart's Code. In the introduction he's explicit about trying to connect modern medicine with ancient religious wisdom. So, his methodology is absurd.

Also, I learned the context of the story about the girl who found her donor's murderer via heart memories. Dr. Pearsall says he was speaking at a conference in Texas, when the girl's therapist told him the story. So, it's hearsay upon hearsay. Where is the official police or court record of this miracle? Furthermore, his reaction to hearing this story amounts to blind, religious faith....

My BS detector is firing on all cylinders.

For sure this new science is influenced by spirituality and mysticism (collectivism -- not so much). Ancient philosophy of Aristotle was pointing exactly to this kind of science as well. You wouldn't call Aristotle a collectivist due to his political views?

That story about the girl touched Pearsall for sure, and he was quite honest, if gullible, and emotionally charged in the positive sense. I haven't finished all of the book, but there seem to be more stories about patients experiencing their heart donors' emotions. I would rather believe him than pathological individuals like Novella. And BS detector might be your overcharged brain (not in a good sense).

I am not aware of what "Liquid Buddha Studios" is about. Have they made some videos with faulty information?

Addendum: In any case, even if they did, there can always be good things hidden among rotten stuff. The book with McCraty's article I quoted from (Bioelectromagnetic and Subtle Energy Medicine) is exactly like that. I wouldn't believe other articles in it.

Edited by Ilya Startsev
addendum
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Nicky said:

This part of it is understood just fine. Your claims contradict basic, well researched Biology.

Well, your claims about psychology and Jung are the same way. Ilya has provided more cited sources, not to say he is correct, but (I claim) he is wrong for the exact same philosophical reasons as you. I don't know how you'll react to that, but I'd at least like to talk about it 

Edited by Eiuol
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Well, your claims about psychology and Jung are the same way. Ilya has provided more cited sources, not to say he is correct, but (I claim) he is wrong for the exact same philosophical reasons as you. I don't know how you'll react to that, but I'd at least like to talk about it 

I would too. But not with you. With someone at least modestly rational.

This has been my position for years, by the way. Only reason why you're not on my ignore list is because I can't ignore mods. And you know this, so I have no clue why you keep trying to get into a conversation with me.

Especially since the only tool in your arsenal is the delete button, every time someone calls you out on your bullshit.

Edited by Nicky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:

I am not aware of what "Liquid Buddha Studios" is about. Have they made some videos with faulty information?

They are a small visual effects studio somewhat obsessed with Buddha. They also like Plato. You can check them out here. I just think it's interesting that HeartMath hired them for the video. It smells like Buddhist propaganda to me.

Edited by MisterSwig
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Eiuol said:

I guess I'll leave the post up

I don't care. You shouldn't be allowed to moderate your own conversations. This whole site has gone to shit ever since guys like you have been given mod powers, because you don't understand the basic rules of having a conversation online. You're either a mod or a participant in a conversation, asshole. You can't be both. There are other mods on this forum. You're supposed to let them moderate, when you decide to participate in a thread.

Edited by Nicky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...