Today Show Sybill Shepherd and NDEs

[Brian37]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...of-heaven/

The fact that mind and consciousness are not fully explained by natural forces, however, is not proof of the supernatural. In any case, there is a reason they are called near-death experiences: the people who have them are not actually dead.

To be beyond merely flying under the radar, you have to be beyond the window of repair. If you came back that only means "near" not chopped up in tiny unusable bits and magically reconstituted.

Again, no different than a car. You can damage some parts of the engine, but damage too much of it or key parts of it, it will not function. With your body, you can jolt things back into order before any permanent damage, sure, but beyond that window of any partial repair or full repair, you don't come back.

[Pizza]

They are called Near-death experiences not after death experiences. If after I die, I wake up in another world or in another body is the day I believe these afterlife claims. Maybe not even then because the afterlife proponents have failed to give me a means for testing what an afterlife is or isn't. It's all just random guessing on their part.

[Brian37]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...ear-death/

. "Many of the phenomena associated with near-death experiences can be biologically explained," says neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, at the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

And here is the link to the study and the University he and others did it at.

http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sci...155-0?cc=y

Although he does use the word "many" and not "all", is the same principle of place a safe bet on anything we don't currently know as being all natural needing no supernatural explanation.

When you hit a wall in knowledge, you don't stop and assume a gap answer you like, you continue and what science is proving over and over time after time none of life needs a supernatural cause because we always end up finding a natural reason eventually for what we don't currently understand.

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience

Now don't just cherry pick the parts of this wiki entry, more towards the bottom they have multiple scientist saying that this "experience" really is nothing more than our brain flipping out.

Here is another scientist criticizing another proponent of "something after death"

Jason Braithwaite, a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience in the Behavioral Brain Sciences Centre, University of Birmingham. He issued an in-depth analysis and critique of Lommel's prospective study published in the medical journal The Lancet, concluding that while Lommel's et al. study makes a useful contribution, it contains several factual and logical errors. Among these errors are Lommel's misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the dying-brain hypothesis, misunderstandings over the role of anoxia, misplaced confidence in EEG measurements (a flat electroencephalogram (EEG) reading is not evidence of total brain inactivity), etc. Jason concluded with, "it is difficult to see what one could learn from the paranormal survivalist position which sets out assuming the truth of that which it seeks to establish, makes additional and unnecessary assumptions, misrepresents the current state of knowledge from mainstream science, and appears less than comprehensive in its analysis of the available facts.

[quote]"it is difficult to see what one could learn from the paranormal survivalist position which sets out assuming the truth of that which it seeks to establish,

Yea, and again, if you are a doctor and you set out to make the data fit what you want to see, sure you will come to that conclusion.

Ethical science isn't about looking for justifications or seeking the answers you want. Ethical science is proper methodology and going where the evidence leads, not where you want it to go.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Ethical science also includes scrapping theories that do not conform to the data.

The important finding here is that the higher order cognition and complex sensory processing evident during NDEs is not consistent with any model of consciousness based on large scale electro-chemical processing. What I mean is that when people point to FMRI images and say something like, "increased activity is this part of the brain is correlated with experience X" that is not the same as saying "increased activity in this part of the brain IS experience X." The data clearly refutes several current theories of consciousness including: mind-brain identity, computationalism, and functionalism. Those who cling to these discredited theories are stuck on stupid. The specific brain activities these theories associate with hallucinatory experiences are empirically absent. Nevertheless, some of the remaining options are epiphenominalism, substance dualism, pan-psychism, and eliminative materialism. I'm on the fence about how aspect dualism fares with respect to the data.

[DeistPaladin]

I'm skeptical but open minded as to what consciousness is. One of my earliest memories as a child is being stymied by the riddle of what I experience reality only from this frame of reference and why I'm self-aware, though I didn't have the word "sentience" to describe it. I'm open minded that there COULD be something beyond brain activity, emphasis on wild speculation rather than anything we know.

That said, there are things we do know about our experiences. Memory is stored in the brain and accessed through it. We know that when the brain is damaged, memory access may also be damaged. This lesson was painfully taught first by the experience of my granny who, in the later stages of Alzheimer's, was unable to recognize me or remember who I was. The lesson was taught again by a mother who died of necrosis of the brain (mercifully within months and not years). Then there's my own experience from my younger party-animal phase of my life of waking up in a strange room and wondering where I was. I remember the sensation, that split-second confusion, as if I was accessing a file to answer that question. I wondered if this is a small taste of what Alzheimer's must be like, how terrifying it must be to not find that file and be trapped in that confused state.

Anyway, point is we know memory is accessed in the brain. So if memory can be lost if that brain is damaged in some way, it is reasonable speculation that the memory is lost when the brain is utterly destroyed. If the "soul" has a memory function, why can this not be accessed in life?

So if we were able to somehow bring back the dead and they had stories of the afterlife, it would break my brain. I would wonder how they were accessing these memories and where those memories would have been stored.

Now the lack of memory doesn't preclude conscious experience. I was alive prior to my first memory of my 3rd birthday (and I was able to later in life look at pictures to confirm that my memory was accurate) but I have no memory of any of that. The nature and limitations of memory as a function DOES, within reasonable speculation, preclude the Heaven/Hell scenario. Reincarnation might be a workable model and the nature of memory as a brain function would explain why we have no memory of previous lives. Fluctuating population would be a complication, solved perhaps if time is not so linear as we think but we've veered off into wild speculation at this point.

I learned long ago that the best way to deal with worry is to imagine the worst case scenario and ask if we could deal with that. The answer is usually "we can" and the unknown is usually more frightening than the worst case. The worst case scenario is that God gives us one shot at the brass ring and then it's fade-to-black, credits roll. It won't be painful. We won't know any better. We'll go to a place where no tears fall, no fears loom over us and no wish goes unfulfilled. I think I can deal with that.

[Angrboda]

No measurable brain activity occurs after 20 to 30 seconds of cardiac arrest, yet a small percentage of people report seeing and hearing things that actually occurred up to 3 minutes after cardiac arrest.

Small percentage is right. Out of 2060 interviewed, only 2 cardiac arrest patients had such recall, and only one of those two was verified for accuracy.

That's 0.1% And seeing as the data on flatlining is based on dogs and a handful of cases, I think you're exaggerating the meaning of this study. It does not appear that they measured cortical activity in any of the CA patients studied, so it's anybody's guess what cortical activity was present in those two cases.

I'm intrigued by the study, but I think you've blown things out of proportion.

---

The notion that NDEs mean anything requires a lot of metaphysical scaffolding which just isn't there. So you end up with a curious circular logic in which the metaphysical postulates support the interpretation of the NDE itself, which in turn validates the metaphysical postulates upon which the interpretation originally rested. I'm not going to open up another thread on consciousness, but in order for any of this to make sense, you have to believe in certain things about the nature of consciousness which are unproven, and for which there is a strong circumstantial case against them being true.

[Pizza]

Chad, if dualism is true how is it that brain damage effects the mind at all? While we are at it, what is "mind" made of? How is it that mind stuff does anything at all? The dualist model creates more problems than it actually solves(if any).
"Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Accept or lean toward: physicalism 248 / 414 (59.9%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 105 / 414 (25.4%)
Other 61 / 414 (14.7%)"
http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl...ain=coarse
I guess 59.9% of philosophers studying the issue are stupid by your dickhead reasoning.

[Brian37]

I'm skeptical but open minded as to what consciousness is. One of my earliest memories as a child is being stymied by the riddle of what I experience reality only from this frame of reference and why I'm self-aware, though I didn't have the word "sentience" to describe it. I'm open minded that there COULD be something beyond brain activity, emphasis on wild speculation rather than anything we know.

That said, there are things we do know about our experiences. Memory is stored in the brain and accessed through it. We know that when the brain is damaged, memory access may also be damaged. This lesson was painfully taught first by the experience of my granny who, in the later stages of Alzheimer's, was unable to recognize me or remember who I was. The lesson was taught again by a mother who died of necrosis of the brain (mercifully within months and not years). Then there's my own experience from my younger party-animal phase of my life of waking up in a strange room and wondering where I was. I remember the sensation, that split-second confusion, as if I was accessing a file to answer that question. I wondered if this is a small taste of what Alzheimer's must be like, how terrifying it must be to not find that file and be trapped in that confused state.

Anyway, point is we know memory is accessed in the brain. So if memory can be lost if that brain is damaged in some way, it is reasonable speculation that the memory is lost when the brain is utterly destroyed. If the "soul" has a memory function, why can this not be accessed in life?

So if we were able to somehow bring back the dead and they had stories of the afterlife, it would break my brain. I would wonder how they were accessing these memories and where those memories would have been stored.

Now the lack of memory doesn't preclude conscious experience. I was alive prior to my first memory of my 3rd birthday (and I was able to later in life look at pictures to confirm that my memory was accurate) but I have no memory of any of that. The nature and limitations of memory as a function DOES, within reasonable speculation, preclude the Heaven/Hell scenario. Reincarnation might be a workable model and the nature of memory as a brain function would explain why we have no memory of previous lives. Fluctuating population would be a complication, solved perhaps if time is not so linear as we think but we've veered off into wild speculation at this point.

I learned long ago that the best way to deal with worry is to imagine the worst case scenario and ask if we could deal with that. The answer is usually "we can" and the unknown is usually more frightening than the worst case. The worst case scenario is that God gives us one shot at the brass ring and then it's fade-to-black, credits roll. It won't be painful. We won't know any better. We'll go to a place where no tears fall, no fears loom over us and no wish goes unfulfilled. I think I can deal with that.

I'm not, while "technically" we "don't know". Our macro medicine is pointing to the safest bet, "You" are merely your brain in motion. It is really a bad idea to treat "you" as separate than your brain" It is a process, combined with fuel/material in a specific structure/and motion.

I don't think it is a bad idea to say we are finite and say we are merely our brains/fuel/motion.

We don't know everything about the brain, no. But every time we figure something out it is never a result of the super natural.

Ocham's razor basically says when you have competing claims trying to fill in a gap, the one with the least superfluous or no baggage is your most likely answer. And that is one of the core principles of modern science today. When you sit up an experiment you don't over complicate the data, formula, or control groups or methodology. Keep it as simple as possible.

Trying to separate you from your brain begs more questions than it would solve. Our consciousness is an outcome of those factors mentioned, those are specific in size and arrangement. Take those things away, the process cannot function.

[DeistPaladin]

I learned long ago that the best way to deal with worry is to imagine the worst case scenario and ask if we could deal with that. The answer is usually "we can" and the unknown is usually more frightening than the worst case. The worst case scenario is that God gives us one shot at the brass ring and then it's fade-to-black, credits roll. It won't be painful. We won't know any better. We'll go to a place where no tears fall, no fears loom over us and no wish goes unfulfilled. I think I can deal with that.

I'm not, while "technically" we "don't know". Our macro medicine is pointing to the safest bet, "You" are merely your brain in motion. It is really a bad idea to treat "you" as separate than your brain" It is a process, combined with fuel/material in a specific structure/and motion.

I think you may need to re-read my post. I'm not disagreeing with you. My description is a flowery one of oblivion.

Ocham's razor basically says when you have competing claims trying to fill in a gap, the one with the least superfluous or no baggage is your most likely answer. And that is one of the core principles of modern science today. When you sit up an experiment you don't over complicate the data, formula, or control groups or methodology. Keep it as simple as possible.

Trying to separate you from your brain begs more questions than it would solve. Our consciousness is an outcome of those factors mentioned, those are specific in size and arrangement. Take those things away, the process cannot function.

Again, I don't disagree. I would only say that there is a difference between discussing what we know or even what seems most likely given the information we have vs. opening the field to speculation, so long as it is clearly labeled as such.

[Faith No More]

No measurable brain activity occurs after 20 to 30 seconds of cardiac arrest, yet a small percentage of people report seeing and hearing things that actually occurred up to 3 minutes after cardiac arrest. The fact that some people can have complex cognitive functioning when cerebral activity is absent should at least give pause to those that think electro-chemical reactions are solely responsible for consciousness.

This comes from the most recent large scale study of NDEs:

AWARE Study 2014

The article mentions nothing about afterlife or consciousness surviving death, so I'm not going to say that it implies something it doesn't say. What the article does suggest is that NDE phenomena defy all mind-brain identity theories of consciousness. They are not even remotely comparable to delusions or hallucinations in terms of their clarity, complexity, and profound life-altering after effects.

Key word in bold.

Look, as much as we've learned about the brain in he last 30 years, much of our understanding of it is infantile. It's a highly complex processor that we've only just begun to peel the layers back on how it works, so to say that something is completely beyond the brain's natural capabilities is ludicrously overstepping the bounds of our current knowledgeand understanding.

Much of the brain is a mystery, and you're pulling shit out of your ass to justify your beliefs. To say NDE's are less than compelling evidence for the soul would be an egregious understatement.