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Man claims to have seen the afterlife

Desert Storm said:
DUH!!! Obviously I think they're real.
After all my posts ITT you still have to ask that question??

Now let me ask you again, and please respond with just a yes or no answer.
After I posted the studies, do you now admit there have been dozens of studies done on NDE's?? Yes or no??
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By real do you mean physically real? If so, what makes these physical phenomena special or different than any other?
 
reinaert said:
Well, to be fair, much of what occurs in the visual field is hallucinatory. That's my point. Brains are hallucination machines. Some of these visual constructs are quotidian. They are functional solutions to perceptual problems. They are also rigorous, in so much as brains are regularly solving these problem across multiple persons and instances. Everyone who sees purple is "hallucinating" it, for example. The brain is "smudging" blue and red wavelengths the eye cannot process well at the same time.

This may or may not be the case with NDEs, which have similar elements (probably related to occipital structures) but also are wildly individual.
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Seeing purple is not really analogous to an hallucination or what the word means in general use. I had hallucinations when I had fevers and they are entirely different experience from seeing color or even a mirage that looks like water. It is where the main hallucination effect is coming from that is the crucial difference.
 
devildavid said:
Seeing purple is not really analogous to an hallucination or what the word means in general use. I had hallucinations when I had fevers and they are entirely different experience from seeing color or even a mirage that looks like water. It is where the main hallucination effect is coming from that is the crucial difference.
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The word "hallucination" is nonetheless correct. Which goes to my point. Much of what we experience is an artefact of sentience, of brains kludging visual constructs, not an unadulterated perceived fact.
 
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Gordy327 said:
NDEs are all about the brain, especially in response to traumatic events and related stimuli leading to death. There was a case a few years ago where a patient was having a brain EEG and he died as it was recording brain activity. The EEG recorded what happens in the brain immediately before and after death, namely brainwaves similar to dreams and memory recall. This would explain the claims of NDEs.
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No doubt. I'm as materialist as one can reasonably be, but we have to remember that brains are not adept at perceiving so much as at constructing.

As a personal note may apply, here: I am comprehensively aphantasic. I have no imaginal experiences, no inner voice, and no capacity to recall or reconstitute sensory or symbolic experiences. I am utterly silent to my self, but I rather obviously can think, communicate, and conduct ordinary tasks. I also have good sequential recall, and a facility for language.

Others, by comparison, are hyperphantasic, which is equally not a disorder, but they nonetheless actively see, hear, and experience non-confirmable images and events in their ordinary sensorium.
 
Gordy327 said:

A Unified Neuroscience Model Explains Near-Death Experiences​

Near-Death Experiences: Neuroscience Perspectives on Near-Death Experiences​

The Neurology Of Near-Death Experiences​

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These studies all present some interesting circumstantial evidence but I don't think they address my point that none of them are able to study, in real time, a NDE (or OBE, since the second study makes the valid point that OBEs aren't always triggered by NDEs). The evolutionary argument that OBEs might enhance survival is not much better than the one about the opossum-human. If your body seeks to rally from some trauma, wouldn't the OBE-experience serve to weaken the will to survive? If the subject thinks he's moving into some paradisical fantasy, why rally?

None of the studies address the part of my question that deals with whether or not any subjects testify that they've seen events of the real world that they could not have seen while their bodies were not capable of seeing anything. Now, it's fair to point out that not all OBEs are accompanied by real-world insights. Maybe it's a very small percentage, and at present there seems no way to replicate such an experience in a laboratory. I forget if it was you or someone else who simply discounted the alleged real-world insights (seeing one's own body operated upon by doctors, etc.) as mistakes, though you've said comparable things above. The studies you cited won't, or can't, address that claim. It does not follow, though, that because science cannot investigate a phenomenon based in anecdote, that the phenomenon did not take place. Here's an anecdote which, though not about an NDE, could be true:

In 1954, [Thelma Moss] co-wrote the mystery comedy Father Brown, based on a short-story by G. K. Chesterton, starring Alec Guinness in the titular role. Essentially the future Obi-Wan Kenobi chases an art thief around France. A particularly entertaining scene finds Father Brown in quite a pickle, when his nemesis overpowers him in the Paris Catacombs and ties him up against a pile of bones.

One startling moment involving Alec Guinness was surely an influence on Thelma's later decision to study parapsychology. In his memoirs, entitled Blessings in Disguise , Guinness tells the story of an evening when he met Thelma Moss for dinner in Los Angeles. At a little Italian bistro named Villa Capri they find no tables available and leave discouraged, but James Dean comes to the rescue, following them outside and inviting them to join him at his table. On the way back to the restaurant, bursting with pride, James Dean draws their attention to his new sports car in the parking lot.

Despite James Dean’s boyish enthusiasm, like a true Jedi master, Alec Guinness gravely blurts out, “Please never get in it. It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be dead in it by this time next week.” Catching himself, Alec Guinness swiftly apologized, blaming his strange outburst on jet-lag from an international flight. Thelma, Alec, and James went on to have a lovely dinner. Unfortunately, James Dean wouldn't take Alec Guinness’s spooky advice to heart. By 4 p.m. the following Friday, James Dean was indeed dead, killed in an accident in his new sports car.
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You are free to think that either Guinness made the story up out of whole cloth-- notice that it's not coming from Moss, later a prominent parapsychologist, but from an actor who does not seem to have been stumping for the psychic-- or that some things in the story happened but not the way Guinness remembered them. But your disbelief does not mean the phenomenon did not take place. The story also does not support anything for theists. One or more of them might hear the story and believe that God vouchsafed Guinness with a vision, but that too would be imposing a POV upon a narrative.
 
devildavid said:
Stalin didn’t kill in defense of any belief system. He killed and imprisoned as a means to gain absolute power. He was a criminal who developed a cult of personality. He had been used by Lenin to fund the revolution through robbery and kidnapping for ransom. He never had a problem killing anyone who opposed him. It had nothing at all to do with his materialism, as you put it. His actions were personally motivated, not philosophically so. From his youngest days, he routinely and habitually killed anyone who opposed him in his quest for power.
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Wow, a new belief in mind-reading. You know for a positive fact that Stalin held no real belief in the materialism of Russian Communism? Of course you don't. You may have read every Stalin bio in existence, but how can any of the authors prove that his lack of religious belief did not impact on his ruthlessness? Maybe it did and maybe it didn't. But you HAVE to believe that it did not, and that's dogma.
 
devildavid said:
Science doesn’t prove things, it provides supporting evidence or it demonstrates that there is no supporting evidence.

We know that people have dreams and what physical things happen in the brain during them. It doesn’t mean the content of the dream is something beyond an individual’s brain activity.
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I've never encountered a materialist who did not make the conclusion that if (a) science cannot provide supporting evidence for an alleged phenomenon, then (b) the alleged phenomenon does not exist. A materialist who does not make that conclusion-- now, THAT's a phenomenon no one can demonstrate.
 
Desert Storm said:
Yes, physically real. Going OBE is as real as anything else you would do during the day.
If anything it feels more real
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So it is not spiritual or non physical. So it is no big deal and doesn’t suggest that there is an existence other than the physical. It is just a personal experience that is self contained and has no meaning beyond what the individual feels, like all our other personal physical experiences. We already know that.
 
Ouroboros said:
I've never encountered a materialist who did not make the conclusion that if (a) science cannot provide supporting evidence for an alleged phenomenon, then (b) the alleged phenomenon does not exist. A materialist who does not make that conclusion-- now, THAT's a phenomenon no one can demonstrate.
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You have never encountered a materialist. You just make up straw men materialists. Materialists don’t say that dreams don’t exist, they just say how they exist. As physical phenomena in the physical brain.
 
Ouroboros said:
Wow, a new belief in mind-reading. You know for a positive fact that Stalin held no real belief in the materialism of Russian Communism? Of course you don't. You may have read every Stalin bio in existence, but how can any of the authors prove that his lack of religious belief did not impact on his ruthlessness? Maybe it did and maybe it didn't. But you HAVE to believe that it did not, and that's dogma.
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Yet you claim to read his mind and know exactly what motivated him. You have no idea either but make claims based on your own need to believe that people are motivated purely by ideology and belief. So we are at a stalemate.
 
reinaert said:
The word "hallucination" is nonetheless correct. Which goes to my point. Much of what we experience is an artefact of sentience, of brains kludging visual constructs, not an unadulterated perceived fact.
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What we experience is not accurately described as hallucinations.
 
devildavid said:
What we experience is not accurately described as hallucinations.
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Not all perception, no; but, the brain regularly hallucinates perceptual fixes. Which, for our purposes, doesn't yet include the 2-4% of all people who are hyperphantasic, or, equally as fascinating, people who can "see" visual overlays in addition to ordinary brain interpretations of visual stimuli.
 
reinaert said:
Feels and real are hardly as objective, or universal, as you seem to suggest.
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Best way I can describe it, when you wake up in the morning, and you take a shower, and you drive your car to work, and then you come home, you eat your dinner and you go to bed...etc. Does all this feel real to you?? I suspect you will probably answer that it feels real to you.

Well.......going out of body, and entering the astral world, feels just as real as that
 
reinaert said:
Not all perception, no; but, the brain regularly hallucinates perceptual fixes. Which, for our purposes, doesn't yet include the 2-4% of all people who are hyperphantasic, or, equally as fascinating, people who can "see" visual overlays in addition to ordinary brain interpretations of visual stimuli.
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I still wouldn’t use the word hallucinate. My hallucinations due to fever don’t fit whatever you seem to think a hallucination is.
 
Desert Storm said:
Best way I can describe it, when you wake up in the morning, and you take a shower, and you drive your car to work, and then you come home, you eat your dinner and you go to bed...etc. Does all this feel real to you?? I suspect you will probably answer that it feels real to you.

Well.......going out of body, and entering the astral world, feels just as real as that
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But what exactly does astral world mean? A physical place? Or is it like any other internal experience taking place in the physical brain but without an exterior analogue? Feeling the sun on my face elicits an exterior amd interior physical experience. Is there an exterior astral plane that interacts with our bodies physically, like the rays of the sun?
 
Desert Storm said:
Best way I can describe it, when you wake up in the morning, and you take a shower, and you drive your car to work, and then you come home, you eat your dinner and you go to bed...etc. Does all this feel real to you?? I suspect you will probably answer that it feels real to you.

Well.......going out of body, and entering the astral world, feels just as real as that
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What I haven't done is gainsay your experience of verisilimitude. I question the subsequent conviction that this constitutes "real".

I once ate a bunch of windowpane, and to avoid going to prison for a long time, a sheet of sinceptus white cloud. In both cases, I can state with certainty that much of what I experienced felt authentic, lived and "real". I can also state with certainty that the other folks with me, both times, had no access to or sharing of that experience. It is fundamentally incommensurate with quotidian events, and therefore no kind of evidence.
 
reinaert said:
It is the correct term, though. The brain conjures non-stimulated, non-verifiable visual constructs.

What it is not, is delusional hallucination.
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No, it is not the correct term at all. The brain doesn’t normally hallucinate.
 
reinaert said:
See above.
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I did. I stand by what I have posted. The brain doesn’t normally hallucinate. If iIt did, we would not be able to successfully function in physical reality. Hallucinate is not an accurate word to describe how the brain normally functions.
 
devildavid said:
I did. I stand by what I have posted. The brain doesn’t normally hallucinate. If iIt did, we would not be able to successfully function in physical reality. Hallucinate is not an accurate word to describe how the brain normally functions.
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All the same, you are too narrowly assuming "hallucination" means "delusional decoupling from ordinary experience", when, in fact, much of ordinary experience is hallucinated by brains. That's the broad, and well-researched consensus of neuroscientists.
 
reinaert said:
All the same, you are too narrowly assuming "hallucination" means "delusional decoupling from ordinary experience", when, in fact, much of ordinary experience is hallucinated by brains. That's the broad, and well-researched consensus of neuroscientists.
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No, you are giving hallucination an incorrect meaning based on a personal belief that you have about how brains actually function. Neuroscience doesn’t support your belief at all. Ordinary experience is processed from physical stimulus in the brain. The brain is not just making things up based on nothing.
 
Desert Storm said:
Best way I can describe it, when you wake up in the morning, and you take a shower, and you drive your car to work, and then you come home, you eat your dinner and you go to bed...etc. Does all this feel real to you?? I suspect you will probably answer that it feels real to you.

Well.......going out of body, and entering the astral world, feels just as real as that
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A vivid dream might feel real. But it's still just a dream.
 
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