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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does consciousness exist after death?
« on: 06/07/2016 13:36:24 »I regret that I expressed the types of memory in terms so vague. As memory in an absolute sense I mean declarative memory. As other coherent memories I mean procedural and short-term memories.OK thanks, that clarifies your meaning. It still doesn't make sense to me though; clearly, declarative memories can't form until the child has developed a coherent perceptual model of the world with which they can be associated, and procedural memories can't form until coherent proprioceptive feedback and control is established. To say that, "It is widely known that at some time during growth of the baby, all memories disappear." seems unrelated and nonsensical - a foetus has no memories to begin with, and a developing child will acquire memories as and when its faculties are sufficiently developed to support them. It's true that childhood development after birth is accompanied by large-scale synaptic pruning, which continues into puberty - one could say that the brain's functional architecture is as much 'carved' out of excess connectivity as it is established with new connectivity, just as its functioning involves the suppression of neural circuits as much as it involves excitation...
I hope that this will help making it less nonsensical.
I'm happy that things are more clear now.
I'll study the subject better so that I may offer a more consistent opinion.
I'm not so sure fetuses don't have memories. They must have some form of memory, not declarative for sure, as it is demonstrated that they learn their mother's voice in utero and can recognize it among many voices after birth.
I'll try to define at what time time former memories are removed. My oldest memory I can date is from the time I was 2Y10M, but I have some more memories which I believe they are a few months earlier but can't date them for sure. Perhaps some day I'll be able to date them as they happened at a time I lived with my grandmother and the clues to date them must be in the letters between my mother and her, which are kept inaccessible by my mother.
For the subject in topic, my opinion is that consciousness survival after death is a philosophical matter and thus can never be definitively answered, as there is no empirical way to gather any evidence on it. The only thing that can be proved is the OBE, which didn't happen so far, altough it was tried by the AWARE study, and is still running to the best of my knowledge. Further, consciousness has never been defined scientifically and not even an algorithm of it has ever been created so that there's evidence consciousness depends on nothing else but matter, that is atoms. How did such things escape so many intelligent people for such a long time is a mystery, I think, more at a time people could trace the universe back to the big bang.