(March 18, 2015 at 9:34 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: 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.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
