On 26 May 2015, at 16:07, Pierz wrote:
On Tuesday, May 26, 2015 at 1:03:48 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote:
On 25 May 2015 at 00:34, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 9:08:30 PM UTC+10, spudb...@aol.com wrote:
I sure did, Telmo. Scroll to the bottom and you shall view my last,
number 26th, the last one. This kind of thing is interesting to me.
I tend toward the materialist stuff since it seems to have
potential. The mentalist stuff seems unreliable because people who
have NDE's or trances have not come back with information.
? Highly debatable! It's true that so far I'm not aware of any
experiments in which NDE subjects reported the content of cards put
in places only visible from the ceiling (as some researchers have
tried)
This could invalidate the "top-down" view often reportedly
experienced in NDEs, but my 13 year old daughter told me the other
day that she can easily imagine herself from an outside viewpoint
(we weren't talking about NDEs or anything like that) so it is
certainly possible for people to do this. Hence people being
"conscious" in some sense during NDEs isn't invalidated by their
inability to spot cards hidden on top of cabinets, even if the
viewpoint described is. It remains possible that they are aware of
their surroundings.....mind you I'm also very sceptical of this
woman's report, how exact and well testified is it, and could she
have picked up the information smoe other way?
It's not invalidated - those not predisposed to credit the
legitimacy of NDEs naturally latch onto this, while those
predisposed to believe tend to downplay it. Confirmation bias. But
there are credible explanations for the failure to confirm (so far)
via cards - firstly it is difficult to get enough subjects, because
one can't organize someone's near death easily, only about 10% of
people who come close to death have such an experience, and not all
NDEs involve the classic "looking down from the ceiling" experience.
Furthermore, people undergoing a near death experience are not lab
rats running a maze - they are typically fascinated by the sight of
their own body and the drama surrounding it, so it's plausible that
a card stuck to the top of a cabinet simply does not attract their
attention.
You should be skeptical of the report of course - extraordinary
claims bla bla. But invariably people who presume NDEs 'can't' be
legit don't investigate them properly, or read just enough to get to
the first skeptical account which then safely confirms their
assumptions. Brent's one sentence dismissal is typical, and
typically inaccurate. Far from exaggerating and confabulating
(though no doubt some people do), NDE experiencers tend to keep
their experience secret for fear of ridicule or being thought nuts.
And the experience is typically so intense and vivid that it in no
way resemble a dream or delirium in which second hand reports or
later memories could get confused with the original experience. The
particular case I cited was both *highly* accurate and witnessed by
multiple persons, including the neurosurgeon who for example stated
there was no way she could have heard the conversations she reported
- because she was profoundly unconscious according to her EEG, and
because she had earphones on at the time that were emitting
deafening noise.
I don't get into arguments about it because it is boring and
frustrating, I just encourage people to look into it for themselves.
I have some interest in it because my mother had one which changed
her life in a big way.
Very interesting.
And at least, assuming comp, for those dismissing the NDE or the
mystical experiences by the slogan: "all that is in the head", we can
remind them that the ideas of brain, and of life and death, are also
in the brain. The question is about the semantic, or content of those
experiences, and that was all what theology was about initially, with
just attempt to theorize on experience, which although not
communicable, can still be provoked, using some brain perturbation
technic. Nature exploits this already, plausibly through the dream
states, but also in some shocked state, to survive in extremely hard
situation. Mathematics reflects possible atemporal truths, and
mystical experiences reflect something like atemporal consciousness
state(s), accessible from inside, and usually related to injury and
death. That might makes sense with comp, if the "filter" theory is
confirmed, or at least confirmed in the relevant complexity range
where it is conserved, around the universal/Löbian threshold (I think).
Of course, we are still in the Aristotelian era, and materialism is
still taboo, either in the monist form of the atheists, or in the
dualist common theist position. The greek sciences have not yet
reborn, above the limit of naturalism.
Bruno
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