A Near-Death Experience Question

[Anja]

Ask anyone who has served time in prison if time is what he was taught it was in school!

Time is an illusion. Created by humans. We were born with the innate potential for spirituality. That's why all tribes have some form of it. My thought. At least I haven't heard of a group of peoples who don't have some form of spirituality. It's apparently essential to human well-being.

We don't even know whether everything IS actually happening at the same time or not. I'm assuming you're well read enough in physics to know this is one frame of thought. How could intelligent people be so confused about that? The clock tells me that it's 2:28pm where I am. What time is it really in terms of the Universe? No one can say.

We know nothing. Not where we are or where we are going. Certainly not what "time" it is. Some of us haven't even figured out what we are doing here.

So we strive to figure it all out, to prevent all possible calamities, to be able to know what the hell it's all about. We can look pretty silly sometimes.

Minds fail with time - hearts don't.

But now we are far afield of the OP and I'm not satisfied with explanations I have received as providing any conclusive evidence. Didn't expect that. I appreciate everyone's taking time to give their thoughts and enjoy considering the different aspects.

I'm fine with continuing the conversation right here because it's interesting to me. Feel free.

Everything' s all about everything, anyway. INFP says so.

 

[Venom]

I've been reading Richard Carrier's Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (Sense and goodness without God). Being so thorough, he has a chapter on Mind body physicalism and claims about OBEs and NDEs.

To quote from pages 155-156 (there is also an extremely dense two pages of bibliography at the end of this chapter):


1.-Direct tests of the power to "see" things from a perspective outside one's body--such as reading or recalling a word only a hovering observer could see-- have all turned up negative. Instead, people sometimes report experiencing, for example, what turns out to be a non-existent word, proving that OBEs are actually invented by a person's brain.


2.-In some cases, NDE's happen even when there is no real physical damage or threat, induced by natural brain chemistry , causing experiences of calm or elation, and inspiring reactions like self-reflection on the meaning of life. There is nothing supernatural about that.


3.-Analysis of "typical" NDE cases and elements has found that each feature had a ready natural explanation as an hallucination induced by oxygen deprivation, endorphin release, and random neural firing, all typical effects of dying. The OBE has been proved to be a common type of hallucination, which can be caused by chemical changes in the brain when dying. Likewise, "seeing" gods or deceased relatives is one of the most common forms of hallucination on record. Since many NDE's involve meeting living relatives in heaven (an obvious impossibility), not to mention even stranger person's (like Elvis), hallucination is the best explanation.


4.-Most importantly, trips down the tunnel have been proved, through computer analysis of the effects of oxygen deprivation on the optic nerves or visual cortex, to be a natural optical illusion.

And here's the big ones:


5.-Though there is often the claim that the subject could hear or even see things while clinically dead, such things said or done by the doctors and nurses attempting to revive them, or equipment in the room, these claims never come with real proof of one essential element: that these things were experienced when the subject was dead. In every case that could be investigated, everything reported was either unremarkable (the sort of thing anyone could guess or would know) or could have been seen or heard when there was still sufficient brain activity to experience them normally, sometimes even well before the NDE itself.


6.-For example, scientists have confirmed that we only perceive things after our brains do, not the other way around. Likewise, when we make decision, say to move our arm, we know our brain has already sent the signal to move our arm (and thus has already decided to move it) a fraction of a second before we become aware of making such a decision. This is very hard to explain unless mind body physicalism is true. For only then would perception be a process occurring in a physical organ, one that takes time (a fraction of a second) to complete itself, and only then would self awareness itself be such a process of perception.


7.-consider a different problem. There are many people who suffer from synesthesia, where their brain fails to physically separate sensory processing, so they "see" sounds or "hear" colors, and so on. If this is what happens when the brain's wires get crossed, how can a disembodied soul experience distinct sensations? After all, the soul has no physical wires to keep such sensations seperate, and clearly can't keep them separate in synthethetes. Yet every OBE has been reported without synesthesia.