Near Death and Out of Body Experiences

Resume said:
What you are describing are claims of a phenomenon that could have multiple alternate explanations. If the claim is to be accepted, it needs corroboration; so far NDEs have not been sufficiently corroborated.
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I would say millions of obe's around the world are corroboration...
 
shuttlt said:
Could you just flesh out the part where it turns out this predicting the future stuff doesn't allow you to make specific testable predictions in advance? All the mystical forms of predicting the future that I'm aware of, astrology for example, fall apart when the prediction is tied down to prevent the prediction being reinterpreted after the fact.
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Kids and adults are shown scenes of themselves in the future...one young girl who had run her sled into a brick wall trying to kill herself (she was abused and neglected at home) told the Beings of Light " no one cares about me"...the Beings told her "that's true , but your life is important"...back in her body she decided to try to kill herself when she got out of the hospital. Immediately the Beings took her out of her body and showed her months in the future ( after she healed) of herself enjoying an apple....( showing her that she would have good times in the future)...some teens were shown their future spouse and kids...
 
Pixel42 said:
Neither does anything else, though some people with no knowledge or understanding of cognitive biases, the malleable nature of memory and basic probability sometimes manage to fool themselves into thinking otherwise.
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Some people with no knowledge or understanding of their multi-dimensional existence manage to fool themselves into thinking only the physical worlds exist...............
 
zengirl said:
I would say millions of obe's around the world are corroboration...
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... of the fact that people under great stress and hypoxia can experience brain activity indistinguishable from delusions.

... of the fact that personal experience doesn't equate with truth, as billions of people experience the world as essentially flat and unmoving.

... of the fact that people who believe hard enough can colate disparate stories that have little in common and call them all by one name.

... of nothing.
 
zengirl said:
I would say millions of obe's around the world are corroboration...
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You have repeatedly demonstrated lax standards for evidence. If I were a proponent of OBE or NDE, I would distance myself from the kind of 'evidence' you have presented so far.

In fact, regardless of your position, I would distance myself from the kind of 'evidence' you have presented. It's not falsifiable, and therefore not scientific.

Karl Popper would be a good source of reading material for you.
 
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John Jones said:
Neither does precognition, astrology, OBE, NDE, reincarnation, LSD, DMT, nor any other woo-woo superstition you can name.

If they did, we would be examining any such empirical evidence now.
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It's a non-physical experience....how do you measure that?
 
Olowkow said:
Dr. Sam Parnia has been touting his study into OBE and NDE for years.


Forthcoming study! Dr. Sam again.


Yay! Results next year!!





Instead, we get movies like Hereafter which is a pretty good simulation of a near yawn experience.

What has the Southampton University's School of Medicine in England reported? Certainly these results would be front page news.

Dr. Sam Parnia is an Assistant professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.



Emphasis mine.

Finally published just this year.


Much like an all knowing creator, it's very unlikely that there is such a thing as "out of body experience" or travel. If there is, it probably precludes any interaction with anything in the real world, and for all intents and purposes, is non-existent.
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Neils Bohr said----"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real"....so what is real and what is the 'real world'?
 
dlorde said:
I agree. The only large-scale, well-controlled study into NDE/OBEs that I know of, the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, sponsored by the University of Southampton in the UK in 2008, involving 2060 patients undergoing cardiac resuscitation in 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States and Austria, put signs & objects in places out of direct sight (high shelves, etc), and took detailed accounts of patient experiences.

They kept postponing publication of their results until this year, when they published in the journal Resuscitation. They had 9% reported NDEs reported, but none of the hidden indicators were seen. They had only one (1) verifiable instance of someone reporting visual awareness of what had happened during resuscitation, and concluded, "conscious awareness may occur beyond the first 20–30 s after cardiac arrest (when some residual brain electrical activity may occur)". Bear in mind, these patients were in cardiac units, so CPR would be going on during cardiac arrest, maintaining sufficient blood flow to the brain for survival.

In other words, a large scale study specifically designed to investigate NDE/OBEs, found nothing that could not be explained by conventional means. It doesn't prove paranormal NDEs can't happen - that can't be done; but given the lack of physical basis, and the contradiction of known physics; given that over 70 years of sophisticated neuroscience is entirely consistent with consciousness arising from the brain alone, and has found no indication of any unexpected external influence; given that similar experiences can be artificially induced, given that we know the human tendencies for confirmation bias, unreliability of memory, elaboration, confabulation, etc.; a reasonable person would surely conclude that there is currently no justification for invoking the paranormal.

ETA: I've always wondered what the (invisible) supposed wandering spirit uses for eyes, and if it can see perfectly well without physical eyes, why we have physical eyes at all... Just sayin'.
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We have physical eyes for the physical dimension...until we have learned to understand the physical dimension well , then we will likely leave it for good....
 
John Jones said:
If you mean that it has no effect on the physical universe, then the answer is: What difference does it make?

I can't measure things that never happened.
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It changes the soul forever, they have a far greater understanding of their multi-dimensional existence....atheists who have had obe's often start believing in God and the afterlife as a result...
 
zengirl said:
Neils Bohr said----"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real"....so what is real and what is the 'real world'?
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You've been caught-out misquoting people several times now. Cite this Neils Bohr quote in context.

Furthermore, have you studied quantum mechanics? There are plenty of smart people here who have done so.

It has been said that if you think you understand QM, then you don't understand QM. The obverse is by no means true.
 
zengirl said:
It changes the soul forever, they have a far greater understanding of their multi-dimensional existence....atheists who have had obe's often start believing in God and the afterlife as a result...
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Bald assertion.
 
zengirl said:
It's a non-physical experience....how do you measure that?
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That would be up to you as you are the one making the claim. If it can't be detected or measured in the real world, as Dr. Parnia discovered, that's a bit of a problem for the reality OBEs.

For some reason, it seems to be difficult for claimants of the paranormal to understand that science does not claim to be able to observe the paranormal, but a lot of religions and supernatural believers yearn for some semblance of scientific status or vindication. All this means is that they have no idea what the scientific method is.
 
zengirl said:
Neils Bohr said----"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real"....so what is real and what is the 'real world'?
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This a difficult question to answer, because there are so many levels of understanding of "real". To some, god is "real" and snakes can talk. To others planets' positions can determine who we will marry.

Bohr knew exactly what can "be regarded as real" in his physics, and found that the quantum world was very odd from that standpoint at the particle level only. It is often the case that the quantum metaphor is pushed too far into the macro world by those who have no idea what Bohr was describing. So, my answer to the question at the level of our daily experience is that the real world is the world that we can detect with our instruments and our senses. If it cannot be detected in any conceivable way, it can't hurt or benefit us.

There is no question that there is much that we probably cannot yet detect properly in the universe, such as dark matter and dark energy, but we understand their effect on the "real world".

If anyone has a hypothesis on the nature of NDEs or OBEs, let's hear it. If they are real, they will have qualities that can be measured and described by experimental techniques.

For example, what is the physics that determines how high an out-of-body body can rise or detach from the human? What speed can be achieved? Can this body move in three axes? What is the formula for determining the energy needed to become an external version of a body? What means does the body copy use to detect light when viewing its double? What wavelengths are available to this mechanism? What is the power source for the remote version of the OBE?

Does an out-of-body body need to pee once in a while? Does it get hungry? Can it feel pain? Does it wear a copy of the same clothing as the main body? What if the floating body made the surgeon drop the scalpel and kill the main body? Would the floater rejoin the main body? How fast? Could this outer body have sex with the nurse down the hall? Could such a union produce offspring? Would they be originals or ghostly copies of the parent ghost?

Just a few questions scientists would have if only we had one, just one instance of an OBE that was reliable. Otherwise, not worth the effort to research.
 
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zengirl said:
It changes the soul forever, they have a far greater understanding of their multi-dimensional existence....atheists who have had obe's often start believing in God and the afterlife as a result...
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As do some people who have faced death but did not die or get sent back from the end of the tunnel. This is along the line of, "The thought of being hung in the morning does focus one's mind considerably."
 
zengirl said:
It changes the soul forever, they have a far greater understanding of their multi-dimensional existence....atheists who have had obe's often start believing in God and the afterlife as a result...
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Only if they don't bother to do any research whatsoever into what actually causes them.
 
zengirl said:
Neils Bohr said----"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real"....so what is real and what is the 'real world'?
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Was he alive or dead when he said that?
 
zengirl said:
Kids and adults are shown scenes of themselves in the future...one young girl who had run her sled into a brick wall trying to kill herself (she was abused and neglected at home) told the Beings of Light " no one cares about me"...the Beings told her "that's true , but your life is important"...back in her body she decided to try to kill herself when she got out of the hospital. Immediately the Beings took her out of her body and showed her months in the future ( after she healed) of herself enjoying an apple....( showing her that she would have good times in the future)...some teens were shown their future spouse and kids...
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I've had better dreams than that. Just having an experience doesn't mean it's real.

When people are under severe stress, mental or physical, certain parts of the brain may function abnormally, and they may have strange experiences, often culturally influenced, often wish-fulfillment fantasies. The 'Third Man' effect (named by mountaineers) of a guiding companion that sometimes occurs in physical extremis is a similar experience. Many aspects of these experiences have been duplicated in the lab by messing with the multisensory integration that generates sense of self & location, etc. Hallucinogenic drugs can have similar effects. As was already mentioned, fighter pilots can experience classic NDEs during G-Loc (g-force induced loss of consiousness), particularly in the training centrifuge.
 
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