Boy visits heaven

[Neo-Scholastic]

In this thread, however, I have only claimed that NDE’s are well documented and suggestive. This is clearly and undeniably true. In previous threads I have defended a panpsychic philosophy. Meanwhile, most of the atheists on this forum have made a habit of dodging their burden of proof when it comes to defending the material basis for subjective experiences. The atheist claim presented here is that material processes, at the level of classical physics, i.e. elecro-chemical reations, produce non-physical subjective experiences. That is a very extraordinary, though common, claim. The theory that subjective experience = brain state is so woefully inadequate as to be on the same level as creationism. And here is why.

Mental phenomena have no mass or volume, so whatever is happening, must be happening outside of classical physics. Explaining consciousness as an emergent property of matter at the scale of classical physics defies logic. The most common example of emergence is the relationship between a car and its parts. Drivability for example is a property of the car but not any of the parts. This analogy is flawed. First, it only describes a functional relationship. Functional relationships describe what thoughts do, not what a thoughts are, how they feel, or why they occur at all. Second, a car shares basic physical properties with its parts. Parts respond to heat and collisions in the same way that the car as a whole does. Not so with brain matter and thought. Although they are functionally related, what we call mind and the brain have no shared physical properties. Physical trauma to the brain may alter the contents of consciousness, but it doesn’t make any sense to describe a thought as being physically damaged. You could dye the brain green and it wouldn’t make the thoughts green.

This leads to quite a tangent on a common subject, so I will start a new thread with this post.