Evidence: Life After Death

No, I still don't get it. How can you be part of a collective conscious when you're unconscious?

Because individual consciousness is a physcial thing, whereas the collective conscious is a metaphysical thing. You're best asking someone with more knowledge of occult matters for more details, or reading the relevant bits of Karl Jung's work. Dean Radin has also written a book called "The Conscious Universe" which I've yet to get round to reading, but I understand also contains discussion on this sort of thing.

I always look at it along the lines of “I think, therefore I am” and when I refer to survival of consciousness I tend to mean retaining the ability of conscious thought and a self awareness.

So we're not talking about real everyday consciousness at all then, but some theoretical construct.

If that's the case then I think it is important to distinguish from the consciousness we all experience every day which is the result of brain activity. It's important because discoveries about real brain consciousness may be completely irrelevant to this metaphysical collective consciousness.

This answers my question 'what has consciousness got to do with life after death'? Answer: nothing obvious (I was refering to normal everyday consciousness).

They're not mutually exclusive - my understanding is that we don't know exactly how consciousness or memory works. It's speculated, therefore, that we all retain some element of ourselves away from our physical bodies. Hence, those elements stored extra-bodily survive physical death and so allow "communication" from beyond the grave via this metaphysical structure.

Although this all operates outside of the known mechanics of everyday conscious, it doesn't mean that facets of everyday conscious aren't involved.

I think we know enough about consciousness to say that it's definitely a brain function. No brain - no consciousness. No one has ever measured consciousness in something without a living brain.

I think you need to come up with a new word to describe what you are talking about.

I am inclined to agree with you here. What do you suggest?

I make no claims as to a suitable knowledge of psychology, so I can't counter your argument or agree with it.

However, the use of the prefix "collective" is to distinguish it from the conventional model of individual brain-based conscious, so why do we need a different word? For the record, variations of this theory are ages old - in the past it's been called the Akashic Record, and I think there's also some Planck-related quantum thinking on the matter.

I'd be interested to learn of evidence that conclusively limits consciousness and/or memory to physical brain functions.

OK, we can call it the 'collective unconscious'. I've no problem with that.

You have to understand that if you asked any neuroscientist about consciousmess, they may not be able to fully explain all its functions yet, but they would all agree it is undoubtedly a brain function.

Perhaps it was my fault by not specifing what I meant by "consciousness".
It's all down to my old philosophy teacher "Consciousness is what makes human beings as opposed to a simple catalogue of protheins, fats etc".
Call it Baron von Frankenstein's lighting strike, if you like...