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> The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives have all been reported by people

> The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives have all been reported by people from many cultures who have had a brush with death. Sceptics, however, say these experiences could be caused by people hallucinating as they recover in hospital. The way that the default is presented here is interesting. Interpreting the experiences as hallucinations makes you a "sceptic" - presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of afterlife. Whether or not brain activity records of dying people are available, treating these subjective experiences as anything other than naturalistic in origin seems bizarre to me.

spacephysics 4y ago
Unfortunately many things in western culture that get close to mysticism are disregarded as hallucinations or random neurological firings. Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more. I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so. However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.
- leroy-is-here 4y ago
  I don’t understand the why anymore. More than 2000 years ago, we understood that we must be a sum of parts and that kind of idea yielded the atom. We applied the atom to many kinds of structures to discern their nature. Now, atom means some scientific particle. We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    > We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it? Heat death of the universe?
  - ajuc 4y ago
    > still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods, elves, dragons, aliens, etc. I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon X" where X is the first unused integer. I can find lots of examples of people naming things that don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you don't like fantasy and religion.
    - leroy-is-here 4y ago
      I think we have both problems, actually. We definitely have names that are good, like New York, Justice, Earth, Peace, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker. But we also have names of things which are bad, because they are false. These the are names which are you talking about.
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      > I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist How about "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox
- danbruc 4y ago
  However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me, taking psychedelics will teach you that tiny amounts of chemicals can drastically alter how your brain works, especially how it perceives the world.
  - leroy-is-here 4y ago
    If tiny chemicals can do that to you, because you ingested them, what about all of the other things you ingest, including sound, which cause chemicals in your brain to make reactions?
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      Sounds do have a strong effect on people's emotions, but they don't tend to affect the way in which you think (maybe emotionally) in the same way that psychedelics can do.
      - leroy-is-here 4y ago
        Words, transmitted by sound _absolutely_, without a single doubt, can affect the thoughts of an individual. And, of course, horns and loud sounds and noises will also affect the thoughts.
        ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
        Those affect your thoughts, but don't really change the manner in which you think to the same degree that psychedelics do. I'd grant some exceptions such as a zen student receiving a lesson/koan that drastically changes their thought processes, but I'd argue that the change was already within them and the sound was just the catalyst - the same lesson/koan is unlikely to have similar effects on other people, and certainly not without the recipient having spent time studying that religion/philosophy.
- eimrine 4y ago
  > However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. Maybe anyone except of me. I am really comfortable when hallucinations are called as hallucinations despite of does they have any esoteric sense or not. All esoteric understanding of hallucination are really better to keep distance from science before some study will give a ground to consider more. You must distinguish known things from unknown things unless you are comfortable to be a not wise person.
- rapnie 4y ago
  > Just hallucinations, nothing more. [..] “random” neurological firings. With 'just' and 'random' you are in a similar way derogatory to the 'religion of science' in favor of mysticism. If in a healthy and awake state it is our brains that model the full brunt of reality we perceive (an assumption, may be 'mysticism' involved here), then these hallucinations may be just as real seeming to a person, though not based on usual sensory input. Maybe based on past experience, memories. Maybe unconsciously collected until 're-lived' in the hallucination.
- stinos 4y ago
  I don't agree there's more to it than random firings, but only in the sense they aren't quite random at all. For the rest I do still think there's nothing more to it than that. The biochemistry behind psychedelics is fairly well-researched and can be explained, so while there is a random component to it just like there are variations in, say, how people perceive color, I do still belive that's really all there is to it, just hallucinations (both sensory and mentally). No matter how in touch one might feel with whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that somehow proving there effectively is something out there. Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just.. feelings.
  - leroy-is-here 4y ago
    The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well researched and can also be explained, but that same science cannot convey the experience of being healthy.
    - eimrine 4y ago
      That leads to the outcome that your statement "The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well researched" is false. Actually it is the least researched field among the most important, in my humble opinion.
      - leroy-is-here 4y ago
        No, it doesn’t. Because the study of health and the being of health are separate topics entirely.
        eimrine 4y ago
        > the study of health and the being of health are separate topics entirely I would rather say that your statements in this particular topic and wise statements per se are separate things entirely and what you have just claimed is not at all.
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  I’ve done large amounts of psychedelics and if anything it’s left me feeling more grounded in a materialist worldview. Not that that’s a negative thing at all. The universe is perfect without any need for magic to arbitrarily insert its fingers into the clockwork.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Do you believe the objects of your thoughts are material?
    - virgildotcodes 4y ago
      Yeah it seems to me the entire process of cognition is based on fully material processes.
      - mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Not the process, the plane of existence where the object is. Many who have left Plato’s cave doubt that those objects are made of material.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        Without a definition of what’s material in this context, this discussion makes very little sense. We can’t see objective reality since all we see and sense have to go through our brains. What we can do is to interpret what we see and try to arrive at something that represents a consensus among our different perceptions.
        mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Are you saying the mind is another form of interpretation? Where is that plane of interpretation happening?
        4y ago
- notnaut 4y ago
  I’ve done plenty of psychedelics. I have no idea why you would imply dreams and near death experiences are in the same boat, and much further than that, why you’d combine them with the concept of an afterlife. The pineal gland isn’t a third eye. Dreams are blatantly not random neurological firings, but have no inherent relation to death or the concept of life after death at all. Near death experiences are similar. The fact that humans have similar experiences when dying is probably not so different from how our behaviors and experiences line up in a multitude of ways, across cultures. You’re the one dismissing hallucinations as simple or unimportant. Understanding them is crucial to understanding human perception and interpretation at large. Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Close your eyes hard enough and put some white noise in your ears and see god now.
  - rapnie 4y ago
    > the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Fully agree. I've never done psychedelics, but years ago when overworked and by lack of sleep my mind went into a severe state of hyperassociativity. Though a serious health danger (feeling as if your brain gets cooked) it was a magnificent experience. Everything I saw with my eyes triggered an explosion of associations. I felt as if I could pierce the mysteries of the universe, perceive the future as it unfolded before me, and was sure that a higher entity existed. Until.. it became too much and I needed treatment and medication to bring me back to earth. The brain is a powerful machine.
    - metroholografx 4y ago
      [dead]
    - meghan_rain 4y ago
      very interesting, do you know the name of this phenomenon? i have experienced something similar, when the brain is munched from overworking and undersleeping, you kind of start "daydreaming", although it might be slightly different than what you have described.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 1827163 4y ago
  There shouldn't be anything wrong with having an open mind about such phenomena. While it's very likely that they are of biological origin, to immediately dismiss any other possibilities is closed minded dogmatism.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    It's reasonable to dismiss hypotheses that are untestable, provide no predictive power and have questionable evidence to support them. That's not so much about being close-minded, but just a practical methodology. If you accept non-testable hypotheses, then how can you tell whether it was the result of a specific deity or an invisible pink unicorn?
    - mistermann 4y ago
      How is "provide no predictive power" achieved?
      - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
        > How is "provide no predictive power" achieved? It's very similar to being untestable. If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
        mistermann 4y ago
        > If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. Is this an accurate and comprehensive description of the situation we have before us though? > If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything. That you can identify one attribute of this nature is no guarantee that all attributes (which is not known) are of this kind.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  The overall phenomenon is not random. Our brain is structured, so processes that are not meaningful can produce results that seem meaningful to our brains. Like wind blowing through wind chimes.
  - yarg 4y ago
    I think there are three fundamental aspects to the nature of the death of near death experience. Struggle, acceptance and (what I'm going to call) decay. The first two I believe to be evolved mechanisms, the third whatever fits incidentally within the constraints imposed by the former two. The struggle is obvious, we fight to survive or we do not replicate. I think the acceptance is an aspect that emerges from the constraints applied to social organisms. There is no evolutionary impetus for something that cannot survive to continue with the struggle, but there is the impetus not to harm its relatives in the process. What remains is hallucinatory nonsense born of a failing mind, understanding is lost piece by piece - your conceptual framework perceiving what remains even as it falls apart.
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  Yeah and the interesting part of it, scientific as we think we are, we don't even try to prove conciousness arises from neurological processes.
  - stevenhuang 4y ago
    Of course we do, you're just not aware of the research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_conscious...
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  I've done fair amount of psychedelics and all they convinced me of is that people who think the experience is spiritual are credulous.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  perception & reality are interesting can be thought of as overlapping imperfectly, with each having some influence on the other. We observe the world through our senses, which can impact our state of mind. Our state of mind impacts our senses, through which we observe the world. We are always unreliable narrators.
  - runlaszlorun 4y ago
    > perception & reality are interesting can be thought of as overlapping imperfectly, with each having some influence on the other. That’s a good way to put it. Belief systems are fascinating in a way that resists being easily categorized. At least by me. Or such is my belief…
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Yes. The older I get the more open minded I try to be about these things. I find some of my friends who are the most dogmatically anti-religion or anti-spirtuality, really just replace it with some other tribal thing like politics. There are questions we won't ever have an answer for, and we've been asking the same questions since as long as philosophers could record their writings.
- p1necone 4y ago
  Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any phenomena being supernatural ever, defaulting to assuming natural causes seems reasonable to me. If you open your mind too much your brain might fall out.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    > Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any phenomena being supernatural ever, I'm going to take issue with this. Anytime we sufficiently understand something it stops becoming supernatural and becomes natural. For a long time lightening, and disease were considered supernatural. To assume there cannot exist things or beings we do not yet understand about the universe simply because we cannot explain it is the height of huburis.
    - p1necone 4y ago
      I don't think "anything we do not understand" is the commonly accepted definition of the word "supernatural". It certainly wasn't the one I was using.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how can you get any certainty out of this? It sounds a lot like the “complex behaviour cannot emerge from an assembly of simple systems” we see regularly, an updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you have no clue. More than that, you cannot have a clue because you are trying to observe something through itself, and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way. That’s why we have things like double blind studies and the scientific method: to try to tease some objective observations out of a complex mess. We don’t understand everything in the brain, far from it. But it’s not magical either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in real time how some patterns change when we eat various substances or do various things.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > But it’s not magical either. What is the meaning of magical in this context though?
    - kergonath 4y ago
      It’s not something that cannot be understood in terms of neurons sending ions across membranes and electrical potentials.
      - mistermann 4y ago
        That would vary greatly on the specific meaning one is using for the term "understood".
- jasmer 4y ago
  Well 'modern science' aka 'scientific materialism'. Tons of the greatest scientists were religious and therefore not materialists. It's pretty easy to just brush it all aside, but I don't think we should. Also - I suggest you don't need to take acid, but rather just look into your child's eyes to start to fathom something more. I mean, the notion that we are merely blobs of particles randomly bouncing around completely disintegrates pretty much everything we would otherwise believe, I mean, literally the notion of 'intelligence' itself, as such a thing cannot exist out of randomness. Imagine if scientific materialists had to preface every time they said 'life' or 'intelligence' or 'love' or 'creativity' or 'communication' or 'knowledge' with 'supposed life' or 'supposed intelligence' etc. because after all, 'we know none of that exists, neither does consciousness, and we are not having a discussion, we just appear to be having it'. What's funny is a '5th force' that we might crudely refer to as 'Spirit' or whatever that seems to somehow influence matter/energy in some way, is literally and logically a better and more intuitive explanation that 'we are randomness'. And that position would be in many ways much less hypocritical than those walking around professing that they are 'nothing but noise' and yet living every aspect of their lives as though they were not. Random particles cannot have 'rights' folks, so pick a side!
tboyd47 4y ago
On the other hand, it's the definition of solipsism to interpret any experience you don't personally share as "hallucinations."
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  I hadn’t considered this before. Brilliant.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
> presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of afterlife. That would never have occurred to me—my reading of the passage is that these are skeptics of near-death experiences actually occurring near death, rather than later during recovery and becoming connected to the earlier experience. [EDIT] Struck a word that made the tone very slightly confrontational for no reason.
atlantic 4y ago
You can only experience the external world through your consciousness. Certain contents of consciousness we assume to have an external correlate, others not, but there is no way to bypass our minds and check directly. Any given civilization has its own picture of reality, and draws its own line separating objective from subjective. We have a fairly conservative model of what is real, due to the influence of the scientific method, but the choice is ultimately arbitrary.

spacephysics 4y ago

Unfortunately many things in western culture that get close to mysticism are disregarded as hallucinations or random neurological firings. Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more. I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so. However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.

leroy-is-here 4y ago
I don’t understand the why anymore. More than 2000 years ago, we understood that we must be a sum of parts and that kind of idea yielded the atom. We applied the atom to many kinds of structures to discern their nature. Now, atom means some scientific particle. We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  > We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it? Heat death of the universe?
- ajuc 4y ago
  > still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods, elves, dragons, aliens, etc. I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon X" where X is the first unused integer. I can find lots of examples of people naming things that don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you don't like fantasy and religion.
  - leroy-is-here 4y ago
    I think we have both problems, actually. We definitely have names that are good, like New York, Justice, Earth, Peace, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker. But we also have names of things which are bad, because they are false. These the are names which are you talking about.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    > I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist How about "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox
danbruc 4y ago
However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me, taking psychedelics will teach you that tiny amounts of chemicals can drastically alter how your brain works, especially how it perceives the world.
- leroy-is-here 4y ago
  If tiny chemicals can do that to you, because you ingested them, what about all of the other things you ingest, including sound, which cause chemicals in your brain to make reactions?
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    Sounds do have a strong effect on people's emotions, but they don't tend to affect the way in which you think (maybe emotionally) in the same way that psychedelics can do.
    - leroy-is-here 4y ago
      Words, transmitted by sound _absolutely_, without a single doubt, can affect the thoughts of an individual. And, of course, horns and loud sounds and noises will also affect the thoughts.
      - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
        Those affect your thoughts, but don't really change the manner in which you think to the same degree that psychedelics do. I'd grant some exceptions such as a zen student receiving a lesson/koan that drastically changes their thought processes, but I'd argue that the change was already within them and the sound was just the catalyst - the same lesson/koan is unlikely to have similar effects on other people, and certainly not without the recipient having spent time studying that religion/philosophy.
eimrine 4y ago
> However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. Maybe anyone except of me. I am really comfortable when hallucinations are called as hallucinations despite of does they have any esoteric sense or not. All esoteric understanding of hallucination are really better to keep distance from science before some study will give a ground to consider more. You must distinguish known things from unknown things unless you are comfortable to be a not wise person.
rapnie 4y ago
> Just hallucinations, nothing more. [..] “random” neurological firings. With 'just' and 'random' you are in a similar way derogatory to the 'religion of science' in favor of mysticism. If in a healthy and awake state it is our brains that model the full brunt of reality we perceive (an assumption, may be 'mysticism' involved here), then these hallucinations may be just as real seeming to a person, though not based on usual sensory input. Maybe based on past experience, memories. Maybe unconsciously collected until 're-lived' in the hallucination.
stinos 4y ago
I don't agree there's more to it than random firings, but only in the sense they aren't quite random at all. For the rest I do still think there's nothing more to it than that. The biochemistry behind psychedelics is fairly well-researched and can be explained, so while there is a random component to it just like there are variations in, say, how people perceive color, I do still belive that's really all there is to it, just hallucinations (both sensory and mentally). No matter how in touch one might feel with whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that somehow proving there effectively is something out there. Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just.. feelings.
- leroy-is-here 4y ago
  The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well researched and can also be explained, but that same science cannot convey the experience of being healthy.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    That leads to the outcome that your statement "The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well researched" is false. Actually it is the least researched field among the most important, in my humble opinion.
    - leroy-is-here 4y ago
      No, it doesn’t. Because the study of health and the being of health are separate topics entirely.
      - eimrine 4y ago
        > the study of health and the being of health are separate topics entirely I would rather say that your statements in this particular topic and wise statements per se are separate things entirely and what you have just claimed is not at all.
virgildotcodes 4y ago
I’ve done large amounts of psychedelics and if anything it’s left me feeling more grounded in a materialist worldview. Not that that’s a negative thing at all. The universe is perfect without any need for magic to arbitrarily insert its fingers into the clockwork.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Do you believe the objects of your thoughts are material?
  - virgildotcodes 4y ago
    Yeah it seems to me the entire process of cognition is based on fully material processes.
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      Not the process, the plane of existence where the object is. Many who have left Plato’s cave doubt that those objects are made of material.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        Without a definition of what’s material in this context, this discussion makes very little sense. We can’t see objective reality since all we see and sense have to go through our brains. What we can do is to interpret what we see and try to arrive at something that represents a consensus among our different perceptions.
        mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Are you saying the mind is another form of interpretation? Where is that plane of interpretation happening?
        4y ago
notnaut 4y ago
I’ve done plenty of psychedelics. I have no idea why you would imply dreams and near death experiences are in the same boat, and much further than that, why you’d combine them with the concept of an afterlife. The pineal gland isn’t a third eye. Dreams are blatantly not random neurological firings, but have no inherent relation to death or the concept of life after death at all. Near death experiences are similar. The fact that humans have similar experiences when dying is probably not so different from how our behaviors and experiences line up in a multitude of ways, across cultures. You’re the one dismissing hallucinations as simple or unimportant. Understanding them is crucial to understanding human perception and interpretation at large. Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Close your eyes hard enough and put some white noise in your ears and see god now.
- rapnie 4y ago
  > the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Fully agree. I've never done psychedelics, but years ago when overworked and by lack of sleep my mind went into a severe state of hyperassociativity. Though a serious health danger (feeling as if your brain gets cooked) it was a magnificent experience. Everything I saw with my eyes triggered an explosion of associations. I felt as if I could pierce the mysteries of the universe, perceive the future as it unfolded before me, and was sure that a higher entity existed. Until.. it became too much and I needed treatment and medication to bring me back to earth. The brain is a powerful machine.
  - metroholografx 4y ago
    [dead]
  - meghan_rain 4y ago
    very interesting, do you know the name of this phenomenon? i have experienced something similar, when the brain is munched from overworking and undersleeping, you kind of start "daydreaming", although it might be slightly different than what you have described.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
1827163 4y ago
There shouldn't be anything wrong with having an open mind about such phenomena. While it's very likely that they are of biological origin, to immediately dismiss any other possibilities is closed minded dogmatism.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  It's reasonable to dismiss hypotheses that are untestable, provide no predictive power and have questionable evidence to support them. That's not so much about being close-minded, but just a practical methodology. If you accept non-testable hypotheses, then how can you tell whether it was the result of a specific deity or an invisible pink unicorn?
  - mistermann 4y ago
    How is "provide no predictive power" achieved?
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      > How is "provide no predictive power" achieved? It's very similar to being untestable. If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
      - mistermann 4y ago
        > If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. Is this an accurate and comprehensive description of the situation we have before us though? > If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything. That you can identify one attribute of this nature is no guarantee that all attributes (which is not known) are of this kind.
jrootabega 4y ago
The overall phenomenon is not random. Our brain is structured, so processes that are not meaningful can produce results that seem meaningful to our brains. Like wind blowing through wind chimes.
- yarg 4y ago
  I think there are three fundamental aspects to the nature of the death of near death experience. Struggle, acceptance and (what I'm going to call) decay. The first two I believe to be evolved mechanisms, the third whatever fits incidentally within the constraints imposed by the former two. The struggle is obvious, we fight to survive or we do not replicate. I think the acceptance is an aspect that emerges from the constraints applied to social organisms. There is no evolutionary impetus for something that cannot survive to continue with the struggle, but there is the impetus not to harm its relatives in the process. What remains is hallucinatory nonsense born of a failing mind, understanding is lost piece by piece - your conceptual framework perceiving what remains even as it falls apart.
wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
Yeah and the interesting part of it, scientific as we think we are, we don't even try to prove conciousness arises from neurological processes.
- stevenhuang 4y ago
  Of course we do, you're just not aware of the research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_conscious...
nathan_compton 4y ago
I've done fair amount of psychedelics and all they convinced me of is that people who think the experience is spiritual are credulous.
steveBK123 4y ago
perception & reality are interesting can be thought of as overlapping imperfectly, with each having some influence on the other. We observe the world through our senses, which can impact our state of mind. Our state of mind impacts our senses, through which we observe the world. We are always unreliable narrators.
- runlaszlorun 4y ago
  > perception & reality are interesting can be thought of as overlapping imperfectly, with each having some influence on the other. That’s a good way to put it. Belief systems are fascinating in a way that resists being easily categorized. At least by me. Or such is my belief…
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yes. The older I get the more open minded I try to be about these things. I find some of my friends who are the most dogmatically anti-religion or anti-spirtuality, really just replace it with some other tribal thing like politics. There are questions we won't ever have an answer for, and we've been asking the same questions since as long as philosophers could record their writings.
p1necone 4y ago
Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any phenomena being supernatural ever, defaulting to assuming natural causes seems reasonable to me. If you open your mind too much your brain might fall out.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  > Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any phenomena being supernatural ever, I'm going to take issue with this. Anytime we sufficiently understand something it stops becoming supernatural and becomes natural. For a long time lightening, and disease were considered supernatural. To assume there cannot exist things or beings we do not yet understand about the universe simply because we cannot explain it is the height of huburis.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    I don't think "anything we do not understand" is the commonly accepted definition of the word "supernatural". It certainly wasn't the one I was using.
kergonath 4y ago
> However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how can you get any certainty out of this? It sounds a lot like the “complex behaviour cannot emerge from an assembly of simple systems” we see regularly, an updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you have no clue. More than that, you cannot have a clue because you are trying to observe something through itself, and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way. That’s why we have things like double blind studies and the scientific method: to try to tease some objective observations out of a complex mess. We don’t understand everything in the brain, far from it. But it’s not magical either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in real time how some patterns change when we eat various substances or do various things.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > But it’s not magical either. What is the meaning of magical in this context though?
  - kergonath 4y ago
    It’s not something that cannot be understood in terms of neurons sending ions across membranes and electrical potentials.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      That would vary greatly on the specific meaning one is using for the term "understood".
jasmer 4y ago
Well 'modern science' aka 'scientific materialism'. Tons of the greatest scientists were religious and therefore not materialists. It's pretty easy to just brush it all aside, but I don't think we should. Also - I suggest you don't need to take acid, but rather just look into your child's eyes to start to fathom something more. I mean, the notion that we are merely blobs of particles randomly bouncing around completely disintegrates pretty much everything we would otherwise believe, I mean, literally the notion of 'intelligence' itself, as such a thing cannot exist out of randomness. Imagine if scientific materialists had to preface every time they said 'life' or 'intelligence' or 'love' or 'creativity' or 'communication' or 'knowledge' with 'supposed life' or 'supposed intelligence' etc. because after all, 'we know none of that exists, neither does consciousness, and we are not having a discussion, we just appear to be having it'. What's funny is a '5th force' that we might crudely refer to as 'Spirit' or whatever that seems to somehow influence matter/energy in some way, is literally and logically a better and more intuitive explanation that 'we are randomness'. And that position would be in many ways much less hypocritical than those walking around professing that they are 'nothing but noise' and yet living every aspect of their lives as though they were not. Random particles cannot have 'rights' folks, so pick a side!

tboyd47 4y ago

On the other hand, it's the definition of solipsism to interpret any experience you don't personally share as "hallucinations."

mensetmanusman 4y ago
I hadn’t considered this before. Brilliant.
deleted 4y ago
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yamtaddle 4y ago

> presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of afterlife. That would never have occurred to me—my reading of the passage is that these are skeptics of near-death experiences actually occurring near death, rather than later during recovery and becoming connected to the earlier experience. [EDIT] Struck a word that made the tone very slightly confrontational for no reason.

atlantic 4y ago

You can only experience the external world through your consciousness. Certain contents of consciousness we assume to have an external correlate, others not, but there is no way to bypass our minds and check directly. Any given civilization has its own picture of reality, and draws its own line separating objective from subjective. We have a fairly conservative model of what is real, due to the influence of the scientific method, but the choice is ultimately arbitrary.