171. Anthony Peake on Near-Death Experiences Versus Actual Death Experiences (Podcast)

[alextsakiris]

Interview with author Anthony Peake examines how our understanding of time may effect our understanding of the near-death experience. - Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Anthony Peake author of, The Labyrinth of Time.

Click here to read more ...

[anonymous]

I always say to people, “Please, please, please just because I come to these conclusions now doesn’t necessarily mean that in six months’ time somebody won’t come along and give me another bit of information that I can put into the mixture that will actually change my ideas and concepts.”

There are a lot of people who write books on that premise. My philosophy is to wait till they're dead and read their last book. It saves a lot of time, money and confusion.

There are a couple of things that I hope are transcription errors:

Consciousness exists in a field and what the brain does is it eschews into that field.

if you take the ever as many worlds in circulation as possible in physics or you take the later versions with alliterations of this such

[EthanT]

Originally Posted by anonymous

There are a lot of people who write books on that premise. My philosophy is to wait till they're dead and read their last book. It saves a lot of time, money and confusion.

There are a couple of things that I hope are transcription errors:

"Consciousness exists in a field and what the brain does is it eschews into that field."

Pretty sure he said "the brain does is tune into that field."

"if you take the ever as many worlds in circulation as possible in physics or you take the later versions with alliterations of this such"

I believe the bolded part was actually Everett's Many Worlds interpretation

Many-worlds interpretation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Still only halfway through the interview myself. So far, some of the ideas are a little too wild for me .. but interesting nonetheless.

[Michael Larkin]

I've been chasing Peake's work up on YouTube, reading Amazon reviews, etc. As far as I can see, he seems to be speculating a lot and trying to tie it in with science - the usual stuff (multiverses, DMT, QM/Copenhagen interpretation...). Also, throwing in some pop mythology (Groundhog day, the Matrix...), and doing a lot of name-dropping along the way .

After a while, I switched off. That doesn't mean I know what he is saying is BS, but my BS detectors are nonetheless twitching in the same way they do when I watch cosmologists on TV prattling on so confidently about dark matter/energy, inflation, string theory and what have you. I get a similar feeling with Gregg Braden's stuff.

He may know the psi literature quite well, but I think his motivation may be to tie it all together in a way that seems scientific. Not like, say, Rupert Sheldrake, who I'm convinced is scientifically-minded (regardless of whether he happens to be right or wrong).

Ultimately, of course, whatever turns out to be the truth will be scientific (since scientia = knowledge), but I doubt it will be fully explicable in terms of whatever scientific conjectures happen to be currently in vogue. Somewhere in there I suspect, there will be directly perceived knowledge/understanding that will evade what we currently think of as "scientific" explication.

[happyknownothing]

Originally Posted by Michael Larkin

I've been chasing Peake's work up on YouTube, reading Amazon reviews, etc. As far as I can see, he seems to be speculating a lot and trying to tie it in with science - the usual stuff (multiverses, DMT, QM/Copenhagen interpretation...). Also, throwing in some pop mythology (Groundhog day, the Matrix...), and doing a lot of name-dropping along the way .

After a while, I switched off. That doesn't mean I know what he is saying is BS, but my BS detectors are nonetheless twitching in the same way they do when I watch cosmologists on TV prattling on so confidently about dark matter/energy, inflation, string theory and what have you. I get a similar feeling with Gregg Braden's stuff.

He may know the psi literature quite well, but I think his motivation may be to tie it all together in a way that seems scientific. Not like, say, Rupert Sheldrake, who I'm convinced is scientifically-minded (regardless of whether he happens to be right or wrong).

Ultimately, of course, whatever turns out to be the truth will be scientific (since scientia = knowledge), but I doubt it will be fully explicable in terms of whatever scientific conjectures happen to be currently in vogue. Somewhere in there I suspect, there will be directly perceived knowledge/understanding that will evade what we currently think of as "scientific" explication.

Hi Michael, I'm thinking along the same lines as you. I'm currently reading his book 'Out of Body Experience', and I enjoyed this interview. Peake is a good writer in that his style is clear and engaging. There is just something not quite right with his ideas, and the way he presents them. It is like he is trying to be all things to all men, and he can sometimes come across as a tiny bit smug. There is no doubt that his theory is fascinating, but the same could be said for lots of theories. He doesn’t give me a good reason to accept his conclusions. I also find it tiny bit irritating the way he seems to name drop all the time. Maybe he is a good friend to all these great thinkers and researchers so perhaps I’m being unfair.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Michael Larkin

I've been chasing Peake's work up on YouTube, reading Amazon reviews, etc. As far as I can see, he seems to be speculating a lot and trying to tie it in with science - the usual stuff (multiverses, DMT, QM/Copenhagen interpretation...). Also, throwing in some pop mythology (Groundhog day, the Matrix...), and doing a lot of name-dropping along the way .

After a while, I switched off. That doesn't mean I know what he is saying is BS, but my BS detectors are nonetheless twitching in the same way they do when I watch cosmologists on TV prattling on so confidently about dark matter/energy, inflation, string theory and what have you. I get a similar feeling with Gregg Braden's stuff.

He may know the psi literature quite well, but I think his motivation may be to tie it all together in a way that seems scientific. Not like, say, Rupert Sheldrake, who I'm convinced is scientifically-minded (regardless of whether he happens to be right or wrong).

Ultimately, of course, whatever turns out to be the truth will be scientific (since scientia = knowledge), but I doubt it will be fully explicable in terms of whatever scientific conjectures happen to be currently in vogue. Somewhere in there I suspect, there will be directly perceived knowledge/understanding that will evade what we currently think of as "scientific" explication.

Thanks - you have probably saved me an hour of listening time, and maybe some raised blood pressure, because I am sick of BS.

The Everett QM interpretation is speculative, and so, I believe is the multiverse concept that comes from string theory - a theory that I understand doesn't seem to be doing too well according to the LHC results (but I am not remotely up to debating string theory!). My feeling is that some people pile speculation on speculation - almost as a new type of novel!

David

[Michael Larkin]

Originally Posted by happyknownothing

Hi Michael, I'm thinking along the same lines as you. I'm currently reading his book 'Out of Body Experience', and I enjoyed this interview. Peake is a good writer in that his style is clear and engaging. There is just something not quite right with his ideas, and the way he presents them. It is like he is trying to be all things to all men, and he can sometimes come across as a tiny bit smug. There is no doubt that his theory is fascinating, but the same could be said for lots of theories. He doesn’t give me a good reason to accept his conclusions. I also find it tiny bit irritating the way he seems to name drop all the time. Maybe he is a good friend to all these great thinkers and researchers so perhaps I’m being unfair.

Thanks for the response. I too (to some extent) enjoyed the interview (more like a monologue - Alex didn't get much chance to engage him and I don't think he is simpatico with where Skeptiko is coming from), but my subsequent researches, as I said, increasingly set my BS meter aquiver. Much the same happened recently with Gregg Braden, who tries to tie together all sorts of ideas with tenuous scientificky-sounding stuff.

[Michael Larkin]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Thanks - you have probably saved me an hour of listening time, and maybe some raised blood pressure, because I am sick of BS.

The Everett QM interpretation is speculative, and so, I believe is the multiverse concept that comes from string theory - a theory that I understand doesn't seem to be doing too well according to the LHC results (but I am not remotely up to debating string theory!). My feeling is that some people pile speculation on speculation - almost as a new type of novel!
David

Don't let me stop you listening to the interview, David!

Nice point about the "novelisation" of science, so to speak. Often carried out by those who boldly go where even angels fear to tread. But to be fair, it goes on even in so-called "serious" science. Much alarmist "climate science" is as pretty a fairy tale as you'll ever find in science fiction novels.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Michael Larkin

Don't let me stop you listening to the interview, David!

Nice point about the "novelisation" of science, so to speak. Often carried out by those who boldly go where even angels fear to tread. But to be fair, it goes on even in so-called "serious" science. Much alarmist "climate science" is as pretty a fairy tale as you'll ever find in science fiction novels.

It certainly does, and they don't even listen when someone like Steve McIntyre picks through Mann's work and points to the actual line of Fortran code that was wrong and lead to spurious statistical results!

I get the feeling this must have seeped a long way into science, otherwise the biologist and Nobel Prize winner, Sir Paul Nurse, would not have stooped to making a hugely deceptive Horizon program, which was basically about climate change.

I participated in an interesting exchange on Bernardo's blog. As you may have seen, some recent fMRI results suggest that the brain is less active while under the influence of psilocybin. When confronted by this observation, two neuroscientists respond by questioning the significance of fMRI results. Since these results seem to be used endlessly to create pictures of the brain, I can't help feeling that there is another novel under construction in that field!

David

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by Michael Larkin

I've been chasing Peake's work up on YouTube, reading Amazon reviews, etc. As far as I can see, he seems to be speculating a lot and trying to tie it in with science - the usual stuff (multiverses, DMT, QM/Copenhagen interpretation...). Also, throwing in some pop mythology (Groundhog day, the Matrix...), and doing a lot of name-dropping along the way .

After a while, I switched off. That doesn't mean I know what he is saying is BS, but my BS detectors are nonetheless twitching in the same way they do when I watch cosmologists on TV prattling on so confidently about dark matter/energy, inflation, string theory and what have you. I get a similar feeling with Gregg Braden's stuff.

He may know the psi literature quite well, but I think his motivation may be to tie it all together in a way that seems scientific. Not like, say, Rupert Sheldrake, who I'm convinced is scientifically-minded (regardless of whether he happens to be right or wrong).

Ultimately, of course, whatever turns out to be the truth will be scientific (since scientia = knowledge), but I doubt it will be fully explicable in terms of whatever scientific conjectures happen to be currently in vogue. Somewhere in there I suspect, there will be directly perceived knowledge/understanding that will evade what we currently think of as "scientific" explication.

Agree! It sounded like a bad Coast-to-Coast episode and I turned it off after a while.