A doctor's experience with the afterlife

[Angrboda]

Yep. It's just you. Don't you hate it when that happens?

[popeyespappy]

Sam Harris had an interesting article on his blog about this.

Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.

The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case.

The rest of the article can be found here.

[Tino]

I know of 3 cases in the erea where I grew up, where the dying started to sing nazi propaganda songs, wich they were succesfully indoctinated to sing as kids, in their final minutes.

Maybe they were on their way to Nazi heaven?

[Angrboda]

"Is that ignoratio elenchi 'to go', or would you like to eat it here?"