NDE - Latest news supports survival

CFLarsen said:
And...as usual...this thread has been saved for posterity.
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Indeed, it's saved right up Darat's posterior!

I always wondered why you had such easy access to those archives you keep referring to.
 
Lucianarchy said:
Since you also posted ...
Edited by Darat: 
Edited for breach of Membership Agreement and Rule 8.


and:

Edited by Darat: 
Edited for breach of Membership Agreement and Rule 8.


This is a blatant attempt of forgery. This post has been reported.

Lucianarchy said:
....in your attempt to report me to your boyfriend, then that also applies to you. You could easily have removed the naughty words yourself before reposting the text, but you didn't. So now Darat's going to have to do the same to you. Unless, of course, Darat's a hypocrite, that is.
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Wrong, BigLiar.
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Lucianarchy said:
But there's the thing, in Fenwick's study the death is recorded as no brain activity, actual death. Go check it out.
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I will go check it out, but I also note that we would not hear of these stories if the subject was still dead. I have never doubted that these persons were very near death. Stories told when living do not really count.

I used to think that I had dreams all night. Now I know that I only for very short periods, and that I cannot remember any other dreams than the last, which was probably created in a very short time, compared to what I felt when I dreamed.

I do not know when these hallucinations are created, or how much they resemble dreams. They could be created while the brain was not working, but considering how much simpler physics is when they are created just before or just after, I think that is the most likely explanation. Especially since I do not subscribe to any religion that forces me to postulate a life after death.
 
Lucianarchy said:
Indeed, it's saved right up Darat's posterior!

I always wondered why you had such easy access to those archives you keep referring to.
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I don't need to have anyone at JREF help me archiving the threads. Nobody has, ever.

A simple PERL script will do the trick.
 
I've closed the thread while I am editing it.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: darat


Thread re-opened.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Darat
 
steenkh said:
I will go check it out, but I also note that we would not hear of these stories if the subject was still dead. I have never doubted that these persons were very near death. Stories told when living do not really count.
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And therein lies the paradox of NDE claims: When the heck do you know when you are "near death"? You can only claim to have an NDE when you:
  1. Are actually dying.
  2. Tell what you experience.
  3. Then acually die.
But, since you apparently have to be unconscious to have an NDE....
 
Well, I followed some of the links. They lead to a lot of believer stuff, where skeptic viewpoints are dismissed out of hand.

The only argument they bring up that really counts is in my opinion the psi argument. They claim that in some cases the NDE patients have vivid out-of-the-body experiences of what happened to their bodies while their brains were stopped. But these experiences are always retold with the ardor of the believer, and they do not seem to have been evaluated in a critical light.

None of the documents are original documents stating just how the research has been done or what controls have been implemented.

From a purely theoretical standpoint I have problems with these out-of-body experiences because I do not really understand why they hover near their bodies, and I do not understand how these souls interact with the physical world, like when they "see" the doctors and their own bodies. Seeing means stopping photons with your eyes, and just this cannot be done by a soul whithout a body. The very nature of these experiences make me think that they are artifacts of something that is going on close to the operating table.

In one of the documents it is stated that none of the patients had religious experiences, and in another it says that the dying person was greeted by a Jesus-like person, and another heard somebody say "It is not your time yet". You can find descriptions of people who have spoken to their relatives in the relatives' mind, and in general it seems like people's imagination is running amok with these possibilities. By 'people', I am not only thinking of the dying and their relatives, but also the doctors who report it.

It would be nice if some skeptical doctors would engage in this research because it seems that it is a field that has possibilities, but is wide open to wishful thinking.
 
steenkh said:
It would be nice if some skeptical doctors would engage in this research because it seems that it is a field that has possibilities, but is wide open to wishful thinking.
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Yeah, but there are some very serious ethical issues to deal with: How can you possibly justify doing experiments with dying people? I'm sure we can find people willing to do this, but wouldn't they already be biased towards a belief in the afterlife?

I would like to see some very good guidelines for this kind of research, before I would think it was OK.
 
CFLarsen said:
Yeah, but there are some very serious ethical issues to deal with: How can you possibly justify doing experiments with dying people? I'm sure we can find people willing to do this, but wouldn't they already be biased towards a belief in the afterlife?

I would like to see some very good guidelines for this kind of research, before I would think it was OK.
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Would it matter if the dying person was a believer? We can also test other believers.

I think the problems lies more in the fact that you cannot predict an NDE. When a patient arrives with a cardiac arrest, you do not have time to set up careful controls. Fast action is required, or there will not be any NDE to speak of, or even worse, the patient survives as a vegetable, and any interesting NDE will remain locked up inside that skull until the body dies of old age.
 
Lucianarchy said:
But there's the thing, in Fenwick's study the death is recorded as no brain activity, actual death. Go check it out.
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This just suggests that our measurements of "brain activity" are either not sufficiently accurate to measure the tiny amounts that may be present in an NDE, or what would seem much more likely to me is that the brain has a significant chemical element involvement as well as electrical and that after the electrical activity has stopped there may still be some chemical activity going on that "imprints" some kind of memory which on "re-activation" of the brain can then be interpreted. OK no proof for any of that, just a theory that may be testable one day when we can get round the ethical issues of research in this area.

The other thing to do of course is hook everybody up to a brain activity detection machine (can't recall the appropriate acronym) and hook this to a big LCD display above the bed. When brain activity is measured as having stopped, a word is flashed up on the screen. If the patient recovers, they are then asked what the word was that flashed up for them.
 
Lucky, All these year posting on this board and you still can't get it right.

:nope:
 
steenkh said:
Would it matter if the dying person was a believer? We can also test other believers.

I think the problems lies more in the fact that you cannot predict an NDE. When a patient arrives with a cardiac arrest, you do not have time to set up careful controls. Fast action is required, or there will not be any NDE to speak of, or even worse, the patient survives as a vegetable, and any interesting NDE will remain locked up inside that skull until the body dies of old age.
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It would matter, the same way it would matter if we had a believer in mediumship involved in a test about mediumship.

You are quite right about not being able to predict NDEs. If they happened every time, then we would not have a problem. But when we have the choice between a possible rescue from brain damage and a very unlikely NDE, there is absolutely no choice at all.

We can't test vegetables either.

It would be nice to see the proponents of NDEs suggest ways of testing this.
 
"Yet whenever we asked people when their near-death experiences occurred, they said it was during unconsciousness."
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How do they know what happens to them when they are unconscious?

Isn't that the very definition of being unconscious? Not knowing what happens to you?
 
steenkh said:
It is also known that stimulating certain areas in the brain can cause the same experiences as NDE's. Since these people clearly are not dying, I think nobody will claim that the Pearly Gates will open or close on the whim of a neurologist with an electrode.
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Can you explain your reasoning here? Why shouldn't appropriate alteration of the brain allow one to have a glimpse of a differing reality? I don't understand.
 
CFLarsen said:
And therein lies the paradox of NDE claims: When the heck do you know when you are "near death"? You can only claim to have an NDE when you:
  1. Are actually dying.
  2. Tell what you experience.
  3. Then acually die.
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That's a deathbed vision, not an NDE.
 
Interesting Ian said:
That's a deathbed vision, not an NDE.
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Yeah, but...Ian...you need to clearly define when you are "near death", and when you are not.

Go ahead.
 
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