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Consciousness in death

Fair enough. I can't provide any evidence for the claim. ;)

It might, in any case, be to do with my brain reconstructing a narrative from separate stimuli that take place within the eight minutes.
 
Interesting Ian said:
It's probably research into lucid dreams which indicates that dreams occur in real time. You know, they hook a person up to various measuring apparatus which can register when a person enters REM, and the dreaming person can communicate with the outside world by pre-arranged directed movement of his eyes (the only part of the body which isn't paralysed).

And it's highly weird to think dreams don't occur in real time.
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It may be highly weird to you. To others (and to me) it's common knowldge that they don't. (hey cool, I can use the common knowldge-argument too! It's not that hard actually, just write common knowldge.)

It may be that while lucid dreaming, having more of a 'waking state' of conscioussness, dreams DO occur in real time, while normally, they don't.
 
Interesting Ian said:
I don't believe you.
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That settles it, then.

Still, I have had similar experiences of feeling like hours had passed in minutes.

Hard to say, though, since what exactly do we mean when we say that it seems to use like hours had passed?

It is, after all, rather odd to speak of how fast time passes, since such a statement is meaningless logically. Forget dreams, just consider real time. How fast--or slow--does it pass? Sixty seconds per... what, exactly?
 
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Interesting Ian said:
It's probably research into lucid dreams which indicates that dreams occur in real time. You know, they hook a person up to various measuring apparatus which can register when a person enters REM, and the dreaming person can communicate with the outside world by pre-arranged directed movement of his eyes (the only part of the body which isn't paralysed).

And it's highly weird to think dreams don't occur in real time.
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And that is the proof of logic, Ian says it is weird so it must be the way it happens.

Oh well 'sceptic and non-sceptics'. And now you can communicate by random eye movements, when did the REM become prearranged?
 
Interesting Ian said:
The events taking place in the dream appear to occupy the same subjective sense of time elapsed as in the waking state.
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Appear and are are different in meaning.

In a dream the fantasy often occurs with a complete history and setting. Doews that mean if I dream that I am at a bus stop and that I have been there a half hour, that I have been there a half hour. What if I dream a memory?
 
Dredred said:
It may be highly weird to you. To others (and to me) it's common knowldge that they don't. (hey cool, I can use the common knowldge-argument too! It's not that hard actually, just write common knowldge.)

It may be that while lucid dreaming, having more of a 'waking state' of conscioussness, dreams DO occur in real time, while normally, they don't.
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I'll weigh in on the side of common knowledge that dreams do not occur in real time. I often have dreams that seem to take place over several hours when I've only been asleep a short time. I've spoken to others about this, and they have concurred. As someone else said, in the time between snooze alarms (seven minutes on my clock), I can have an entire dream that spans a lot longer than seven minutes.

This doesn't seem "weird" to me at all. Since it's just happening in our brain, it can happen as fast as our brain is able to conjure it up. Little synapses firing at rapid pace.
 
Interesting Ian said:
The events taking place in the dream appear to occupy the same subjective sense of time elapsed as in the waking state.
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I think the key here is the term "subjective." It appears to the dreamer that the dream scenario is taking place in "normal" time. You have the subjective sense that (for example) half an hour has passed in your dream, but in real time only ten minutes have passed.
 
Interesting Ian said:
Dream time passes at the same rate as real time.
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Wrong. I have had many dreams that seemed to last for hours, but which in fact lasted a few minutes at most. I know because I looked at the clock.

I've also had marathon, semi-coherently plotted dreams that seemed to go on for hours, and which definitely spanned several wakings and fallings-asleep. I have no way of knowing whether the dream activity came in short bursts and seemed contiguous, but I suspect that to be the case.
 
Interesting Ian said:
The events taking place in the dream appear to occupy the same subjective sense of time elapsed as in the waking state.
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Meaning things don't seem to happen in fast-forward or molasses in January? One can hardly call dream perceptions reliable, can one? If so, I've got exciting news -- I can fly. No, really, I perceived it while dreaming.
 
Peoples' claims here are wholly contrary to my experiences. But let me accept what you guys claim. What I want to know is how this gives evidence against consciousness surviving our brains?
 
Interesting Ian said:
It's probably research into lucid dreams which indicates that dreams occur in real time. [snip]

And it's highly weird to think dreams don't occur in real time.
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I think that lucid dreams would be more likely than other dreams to occur in real time. If the research looks mostly at lucid dreams (for very good reason, I might add--it gives the opportunity for a clear signal from the dreamer to the researcher), this would tend to pile up "real time" evidence, perhaps artificially.

On the other hand, "real time" is relative. Einstein's example was "when you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity." To say that dreams "occur in real time" still leaves quite a bit of flexibility.
 
Interesting Ian said:
Peoples' claims here are wholly contrary to my experiences. But let me accept what you guys claim. What I want to know is how this gives evidence against consciousness surviving our brains?
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I would say it does not.

What it does do, though, is put the burden of proof back on the "survival" claim. If these NDE's could be dreams before or after the "death" incident, seeming longer than that time could seemingly explain, we are back to square one, with no definitive proof of survival.

This is not direct evidence against, but merely discounts the phenomenon as evidence for.
 
Mercutio said:
I would say it does not.

What it does do, though, is put the burden of proof back on the "survival" claim. If these NDE's could be dreams before or after the "death" incident, seeming longer than that time could seemingly explain, we are back to square one, with no definitive proof of survival.

This is not direct evidence against, but merely discounts the phenomenon as evidence for.
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It can't do if people really are seeing events unfold from some out-of-body perspective. On the other hand, if we assume that's just a fabrication, then that's begging the question to a large measure.
 
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