I disagree. NDE's are OOBE's.
First, if it's a matter of personal opinion, not fact, then you can't draw factual conclusions from them as premises. Second, we know that the temporal-parietal lobe of the brain is directly responsible for out-of-body experiences. Drug or electrical stimulation of this part of the brain produces these experiences. Many people, myself included, have trained themselves to trigger these experiences at will.
There's no evidence that anything leaves the body. At all. When my cat jumps on me or my alarm goes off, triggering my senses of touch or hearing respectively, it sends a signal to my brain, the experience ends, and I wake up. Specific physiological conditions are required for me to get these. By your reasoning (and plumjam's) my interpretation of my personal experience is sufficient to trump any arguments to the contrary that you or anyone else might come up with.
QED
The largest (and longest study) ever done on NDE's rejected materialistic causes (hypercarbia, cerebral hypoxia, etc.) , and had this to say:
http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm
They also had this to say:
Thus, induced experiences are not identical to NDE, and so, besides age, an unknown mechanism causes NDE by stimulation of neurophysiological and neurohumoral processes at a subcellular level in the brain in only a few cases during a critical situation such as clinical death. These processes might also determine whether the experience reaches consciousness and can be recollected.
In other words, they're still searching for a mechanism, specifically a mechanism that acts by altering the physical processes of the brain. This is what the study considers evidence, and is more than immaterialists are willing to admit. Besides, the study neglected to take into account that memories consist of neural connections and electrochemical patterns, and that the traumatized brain tends to reconfigure a lot of these existing patterns. It's possible for people to remember things they never experienced, as in false memory implantation. Given that the brain's chemistry and circuitry undergo system shock during trauma, it would actually be surprising for there NOT to be new memories formed.
Why would some master program or other not suffice. Why do you think evolution would have to produce subjective awareness as a survival benefit?
Reframing nonsense does not make it any less nonsensical. A "menal illusion" to whom? And what for?
Read over your own posts before admonishing me, first of all. While you're at it, read the sources I showed you with the evolutionary explanation for consciousness and awareness, which phrased it better than I could do in lay terms. Ignoring evidence that contradicts your beliefs does not make you right.
If there were numerous road signs pointing to a centralized location, you would assume that the location is of certain significance. If there were numerous sensory inputs leading into a centralized processing area, you would assume the same. Put all of these experiences together and, instead of just involuntarily reacting to stimuli, an organism is able to use them to guide its behavior and react in more complex ways. The sum of its experiences gives it a picture of a surrounding world, which is likely what leads to the sense that there is a perceiving self. In other words, if you rotate your head and the world revolves the other way, if you touch something and feel it, if you see, hear, and smell things around you, and if you're able to make the proper associations between these things, then your brain is going to put together all the inward-pointing arrows and assume there's an "I" that it's all happening to.
We actually know that the cerebral cortex
WP is responsible for consciousness, or if you prefer,
likely to be responsible for consciousness. In brain damage patients who have lost their cerebral cortex, all they have left are involuntary bodily functions and are reduced to a vegetative state. They're still alive, but the damage prevents them from experiencing a sense of self or conscious awareness. Their picture of the surrounding world is destroyed, gone forever.
Processing changes when you change the processor. That doesn't say anything about consciousness. The brain is like a TV set or radio for consciousness, that's all.
This analogy fails when you realize that no two people are receiving the same consciousness. Furthermore, if the consciousness is separate from physiology as you claim, then by what mechanism does it interact with the brain? Why is the brain even necessary? What does it do, just sit there wasting glucose and oxygen while
pretending to be the center of consciousness?
No. You're just trying to avoid the question. However you choose to describe it, it the Universe is uncreated it is therefore self (or auto) sustaining (or perpetuting or generating or whatever).
Really? So what exactly is it that would cause the universe to disappear if there weren't something to "sustain" it, as you prefer to call it?
You also missed my point yet again. I explained previously how "laws" and "information" are what we as humans label our understanding of the universe and how we quantify our knowledge of it. I never said the universe was made of laws.
I have never claimed that consciousness is self-sustaining.
It sure looked like you were implying it when you said that because "materialist atheists" can't explain how the universe is self-sustaining, we must go with the more "parsimonious" explanation of a God-consciousness. So what, in your belief system, sustains consciousness? I'd tell you the medical explanation, but you're likely to ignore that.
