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Merged A new argument pro Near Death Experiences

The whole idea that if you deliberately make the brain malfunction it will somehow work better - by "expanding your consciousness" or whatever - is just so bizarre. When something malfunctions the results are never better than when it's working correctly. The brain evolved to provide an accurate understanding of its surroundings to its owner, hallucinations (whether the result of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, oxygen deprivation by centrifuge or other stress, or the ingestion of class A drugs) are neither informative nor desirable.
 
Maartenn100 appears to have gone to earth again. But don't worry- although completely refuted once again, he will wait for a few months and then return with exactly the same arguments.
 
When neuroscientists say that 'the brain creates these realistic expriences of BDE's', then we can also say: our mind is creating the experiences in this world.
Why not? If a hyperrealistic world can be created by the mind, why not his world?

The consequences of the reasoning of these neuroscientists is far reaching: in that case, this world can also be created by our mind. Do scientists want to accept this logical implication of their idea that NDE's must be created by the mind?
 
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Maartenn100 said:
When neuroscientists say that 'the brain creates these realistic expriences of BDE's', then we can also say: our mind is creating the experiences in this world.
Why not? If a hyperrealistic world can be created by the mind, why not his world?

The consequences of the reasoning of these neuroscientists is far reaching: in that case, this world can also be created by our mind. Do scientists want to accept this logical implication of their idea that NDE's must be created by the mind?
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My god it's full of stars!!!!

Nah, by an eerie coincidence my last reply to another thread is equally relevant here: It's pretty much the old ontological argument for god existing - Anselm et al.
 
Maartenn100 said:
Non sequitur.
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An apt description of your argument.

You do touch on a point of sorts: the fact that we experience something does not mean that it is real.
You're trying to use that backwards, by saying we should trust in NDE's or else suspect all of our experiences of being a hallucination.

However, we have independent verification of other things that happen. But for NDE's we only have the accounts of people who have experienced them, and no evidence that their consciousness has actually left their body.

The only other way out is solipsism, and if you want to go that way... we're not even having this conversation.
 
I think he'll try to argue that these hallucinations are actually some sort of Super Truth, and that the fact that brain damage makes you hallucinate 'proves' that the brain does not produce consciousness, because 'it makes no sense that an impaired brain can perceive more of the Super Truth than a properly functioning brain'.

This of course would require a very poor grasp of what the paper is actually saying and makes little sense.
 
Porpoise of Life said:
I think he'll try to argue that these hallucinations are actually some sort of Super Truth, and that the fact that brain damage makes you hallucinate 'proves' that the brain does not produce consciousness, because 'it makes no sense that an impaired brain can perceive more of the Super Truth than a properly functioning brain'.

This of course would require a very poor grasp of what the paper is actually saying and makes little sense.
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This is perhaps the best summary of woo thinking on this topic as I have seen. Well done.
 
I'm not going to explain you why I'm a little bit sad that no sceptic here can change his mind, even a little bit, based on scientific arguments to the contrary. In my long history of posting scientific arguments here, I never saw any sceptic her admitting that some arguments were interesting. Even admitting that you find an argument of the other party a little bit interesting, is not even considerable on this forum.

Very sad actually.
 
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Maartenn100 said:
I'm not going to explain you why I'm a little bit sad that no sceptic here can change his mind, even a little bit, based on scientific arguments to the contrary. In my long history of posting scientific arguments here, I never saw any sceptic her admitting that some arguments were interesting. Even admitting that you find an argument of the other party interesting, is not even considerable on this forum.

Very sad actually.
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The paper is very interesting, but I doubt you understood it correctly. That is why people are asking for you to summarize what you think it says.
 
Hokulele said:
The paper is very interesting, but I doubt you understood it correctly.
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Is there only one way to interprete this paper? Understanding it correctly or not correctly? Or are there multiple interpretations and opinions possible in this free world, based on these facts?
It's true that I see this paper as an argument to back up the possibility of life after death.
And that's not a completely illogical conclusion.
 
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Hokulele said:
When you break your brain, you believe in magic.

Um, OK?
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Fortunately, not always. When I broke my brain, I found myself almost dangerously impatient with fools. It's taken some time to cool down again, but I still find myself less patient with nonsense.

e.t.a. as it happens, the "near death experience" issue is one area of nonsense I have some difficulty with!
 
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From the abstract-
A broad pattern of correlations between mechanisms of brain function impairment and self-transcendence is shown. The pattern includes such mechanisms as cerebral hypoxia, physiological stress, transcranial magnetic stimulation, trance-induced physiological effects, the action of psychoactive substances and even physical trauma to the brain. In all these cases, subjects report self-transcending experiences often described as ‘mystical’ and ‘awareness-expanding,’ as well as self-transcending skills often described as ‘savant.’ The idea that these correlations could be rather trivially accounted for on the basis of disruptions to inhibitory neural processes is reviewed and shown to be implausible.
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Why implausible?

Under the physicalist assumption that experience is constituted or generated by brain activity, an increase in the richness of experience—as often entailed by selftranscendence—must be accompanied by an increase in the metabolism associated with the neural correlates of experience (Kastrup 2016). This is so because (a) there supposedly is nothing to experience but its neural correlates; and (b) richer experience spans a broader information space in awareness that only increased metabolism can create in the physical substrate of the brain. Any other alternative would decouple experience from the workings of the living brain information-wise, contradicting physicalism.
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"Richness of experience"..."self-transcendence"..."broader information space in awareness"- these are all woo masks, terms that sound impressively quantifiable but aren't any more than question-begging and subjective argot. You'll notice his cite for the assertion that "an increase in the richness of experience...must be accompanied by an increase in the metabolism associated with the neural correlates of experience" is "(Kastrup 2016)"; that's right, his source for his strawman is himself. And it's a circular assertion- the "increase in the richness of experience...must be accompanied by an increase in the metabolism" because only increased metabolism can create the "richer experience."
 
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