RE: Where did the universe come from? Atheistic origin science has no answer.
June 22, 2015 at 4:03 pm
(June 19, 2015 at 10:49 am)Alex K Wrote:(June 19, 2015 at 10:07 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: Sounds like you had a near death experience (NDE). It's possible to have them without being close to death.
Fascinating. I'd love to know what is going on in the brain in these instances.
I quoted from one of Dave McRaney's books in one of these topics some time ago, but it seems as if the brain is constantly trying to make sense of the world around us. It does this quite well most of the time, helping us to filter through all of the information available to us every second so that we can function. Under certain circumstances the brain can become a bit scrambled, but it continues to try to build a working narrative in order to keep us functioning. The example McRaney used was the experiences of Air Force pilots who were being subjected to high G-forces, which produced many "NDEs" in those pilots that passed out. But we can see its effect in people who have suffered a concussion; some of them become quite disoriented and may behave as if they are in a completely different context, giving information and explanations that sound bizarre but appear to make perfect sense to them.
To be disoriented is to not be functional, and in the wild that can be fatal. So the brain keeps trying to get us on track, even when it doesn't have the wherewithal to do so. It's as if it makes up a scenario using whatever bits of conscious feedback it can grab, and forces us to accept it so that the world makes sense to us... even if what it's showing us is completely insane.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould