What is logic?

[Angrboda]

(emphasis mine)

You keep making this claim, yet I have not seen any evidence for it.  You don't explain how you know this is the case other than saying that you "don't buy it."  This pretty much tells me that your claim is pure bullshit.  An assertion that you pulled from your ass.  You want to make a substantive difference between NDEs and people who have NDE-like experiences, but this difference only occurs in your "theories" about consciousness leaving the body during death.  Your theories are nothing but guesses that are propped up by your religious dogma.  You have no evidence that there is any qualitative difference between these "NDE-like experiences" and the NDE experiences of those who died and were resuscitated.  Moreover, even your own "claimed" evidence of veridical NDEs is against you in the case of Pam Reynolds.  (And then there's your ridiculous assertion that Howard Storm was 'really' dead, even though there's no evidence that he ever was.  No evidence is pretty much standard operating procedure for you.)  As noted in the quote about the IANDS study above, "The 37 percenters [who had NDE-like experiences] claimed to have experiences every bit as real, involved, and life-changing as those that happened to people during death or close-brush-with-death crises; and their reports duplicate or parallel the same spread of scenario types and a pattern of psychological and physiological aftereffects."  You may not "buy it," but you not accepting that they are the same thing is based on nothing but your commitment to a specific set of religiously based assumptions.  The evidence indicates that the NDE-like experiencers have the same vivid, clear and sharp experiences that your supposed "real NDE" experiencers have.  In other words, even according to your own term of a "malfunctioning" brain, the evidence is against you; NDE-like experiences, G-LOC, ketamine, anoxia and 'real NDEs' -- all produce clear, vivid, and sharp experiences. So your claim that a "malfunction in the brain" cannot produce such experiences is a total fail.

Tell me something Yog.  

How many people who had a G-LOC, ketamine or anoxia after their experiences become strong believers
and engage in spirituality?  

And how many people that had an NDE after they died still keep their old beliefs?  

First, the point of the conversation was not that G-LOC or ketamine duplicate the features of an NDE, but that NDEs that don't involve death are the same experience as NDEs that do involve death and resuscitation.  Your insistence that an NDE must involve death is based upon nothing but your metaphysical theories about NDEs generally, and represents a usage of the term that runs counter to standard usage of the term NDE throughout the near death research community.  But we've encountered this before.  You think the answer to a technical difficulty is just to redefine the words.  That's nothing but anti-social and obnoxious.  Regardless, as usual when you're losing a point in a discussion, the first thing you do is change the subject.  Well I guess if you want to change the subject because you're losing, then we'll change the subject.

Second, we already have witnessed people having life changing experiences based upon the drug experience.  In the case of the ketamine user whose partner died in a fire, had an NDE, and then later turned to ketamine, this person found the recreation of the near death experience by the drug ketamine to be very "therapeutic" -- therapy being the changing of life attitudes and behaviors.  In his words, "I was put onto various things like Prozac, but I was finding that my own "extra treatment" (the ketamine) was doing me a lot more good because "K" is very cathartic. I was doing it because it made me feel better, except the first time when it was quite a shock. It made me feel a lot less unhappy knowing that she was still there in one way or another. It would have taken a lot longer for me to recover if I hadn't taken "K" because it gets rid of a lot of hurt instantly ... It's very reassuring in a way."  So the claim that ketamine induced experiences can't be cathartic just like the naturalistic event of an NDE is false.

Third, what is your point in asking this question?  If it is that because the two experiences have different after-effects that they thus have nothing in common internally, then that's just fucking stupid.  People reason about events in their life based upon the explanation they attach to the event.  Naturally, an event tied to the explanation "drug induced high" is going to be reasoned about differently than one to which you attach the explanation "experience of the afterlife."  That's just common sense.  That the two events have different psychological after-effects has as much to do with the difference in explanation they attach to the experience as it does any actual differences in the experiences.  Moreover, the point is not that a drug experience is exactly like an NDE, but rather that certain features of NDEs which are puzzling, such as their clarity and vividness, have naturalistic explanations.  If a chemical in the brain can cause NDE like symptoms, then it's reasonable to infer that the symptoms experienced during an NDE might have a basis in brain chemistry.  That the two have different after-effects and therefore are internally different is just dense.

That you think the difference between people's reaction to ketamine and their reaction to an NDE should be a "wake up call" to me is laughable.  It just shows the poverty of your reasoning about such experiences.  Paul of Tarsus had a vision on the road to Damascus and converted to Christianity.  It would be ludicrous to expect that everyone who has a drug trip on the road to Damascus is going to come to Christ, but that seems to be what you're implying.  The fact that Paul had his conversion, and the hippie did not, does not defuse the point that their respective experiences were likely natural events occurring in the brain.  And so it is with ketamine and NDEs; the commonality in the symptoms points toward something in common physically, that the two are a result of brain chemistry.  To draw any other conclusion about the "Pauline" conversions of near death experiencers is simply to be confused about the differences in context and the resultant psychology that this entails.  To imply that it shows a fundamental difference in the quality of the experiences is pure bollocks.  That simply does not follow.