6 ms·

Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one. Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality. Now, it's almost

Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one. Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality. Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge. - Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few - Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping DMT, preconceived notions from Hollywood, the general culture and so on) - Assess whether these make any sense under the conditions that NDEs occur, and scratch the ones that don't. Then watch a few more and you'll have to reject more still. In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases. In the end, my conclusion is that objective reality has to be partially rejected, and all experience is the combination of some "nature of reality" as interpreted by each individual. This leads to clear contradictions if one assumes that there is one objective reality. Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. So the nature of it is something like being pulled silently without effort towards a point in a manner that isn't part of the experiencer's notion of what's possible, and it is then realized and interpreted by each individual in the closest way that they can relate to.

golly_ned 6mo ago
Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife? This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness? > On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
- 12345678UP 6mo ago
  for some it's impossible to witness death. We get forced to sometimes see someone else's lifeless cask, but our own becomes impossible, as our very own worldline/probability trees branch before witnessing what others see as their objective reality; someone else's death. and this won't make any sense to anyone that doesn't already see this occurring, so it's just like an ouroborus of a string of jokes, each punchline becomes the begining of the next joke.
adammarples 6mo ago
Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality should be rejected.
- BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
  We're talking past each other. The problem isn't coming up with a hypothesis of why experiences differ according to experiences. Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. But after that we come to a stage where experiences differ so much that they aren't reconcilable in one objective reality and that's what I tried to address.
  - nemomarx 6mo ago
    How would we determine that the experience happened during that time and not as a memory created when oxygen reached the brain after, or so on? If you assume that narrative memory is a little bit hallucinated (which I think is pretty observable, try dissociating a little and you can experience it) then many options are on the table.
  - tsimionescu 6mo ago
    > Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
    - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
      [dead]
  - majkinetor 6mo ago
throwanem 6mo ago
A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.) I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
- BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
  So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.
  - throwanem 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
      Ok :D
  - Swizec 6mo ago
    > NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later. They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.
    - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
      Yes they don't happen 100% of the time or even 10%.
chongli 6mo ago
If multiple people independently report the same experience (across time and space), isn't this actually evidence of objective reality rather than a refutation of it? It points to some underlying universal structure of our experience as constructed by our brains, which suggests that our brains are part of a mechanistic, external, and therefore objective reality instead of a subjective one (where our own ideas constitute reality).
amelius 6mo ago
Reminded me of this TED talk of a woman who had a stroke and told about the experience: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins... > And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
card_zero 6mo ago
Here's Plato's thing, the "myth of Er": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
- BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
  So it has the same stages as modern NDEs: - Out of body experience - Journey through realms - Bright/universal light - Life review - Encounters with spiritual beings - Reincarnation / life selection - A message of peace, well-being, and survival of consciousness I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
  - tsimionescu 6mo ago
    Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
    - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
      It's obviously impossible to say. Why would there be a life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
      - tsimionescu 6mo ago
        You're the one who claimed that we should believe NDEs represent more than hallucinations because they all contain the same elements. I was pointing out that I can see major differences between two of these NDEs we are just discussing, instead of the consistency you were claiming.
tsimionescu 6mo ago
> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases. This sounds intriguing. > Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
- BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
  If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    Have you read any pop neuroscience book? There are common experiences that can be generated by one or another kind of brain-wrong. You sort of acknowledged this already when you mentioned DMT. If you poke somebody in specific parts of the brain you can get illusions of changing size, shadowy figures, mirth, and other delightful errors. We also interpret things very eagerly, like the "night hag" phenomenon where being unable to sense one's own breathing turns into an illusion of something sitting on your chest. That's another worldwide cross-cultural concept, by the way, but there is no night hag, there's just human physiology. So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
    - throwanem 6mo ago
LocalH 6mo ago
Objective reality exists, but nobody can ever perceive it, at least not while they're perceiving things through the filter of their body
- bobbyswiss 6mo ago
  What's realer than reality as it's directly experienced?
  - rhyperior 6mo ago
    The raw electromagnetic emissions of uncountable atoms jostling through space and time.
    - bobbyswiss 6mo ago
      But that's a model and models are of the mind
      - LocalH 6mo ago
        But outside of what we can model, said atoms exist, and we perceive them. Objective reality is those atoms before we perceive them
        bobbyswiss 6mo ago
        [dead]
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ericmcer 6mo ago
I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really. One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years. Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever". How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
- BobbyTables2 6mo ago
  I wonder if there even is such a thing as “eternal consciousness” the way people assume. It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams. I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.
  - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
    since I have dreams in which I am not in the dream https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de924c8 https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92... it would actually be weird if I remembered aspects of my daily life in those dreams.
  - HerbManic 6mo ago
    I have a fondness for the idea that the brain is like a radio reciever for a greater flow of the universe. Thus brain damage is like a broken antenna. The radio can die but the signal continues. That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously. Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
- _DeadFred_ 6mo ago
  Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving it's purpose. Sadly, to create an emergent reality that allows free will you have to create a reality that allows suffering and children dying of cancer and Alzheimer's and consequences if you hit someone in the head. But the blow to the head/Alzheimers is nothing different than an alcohol haze one night that goes away in the morning. The you in the underlying lower (higher?) real dimensions doesn't change just because you got drunk/alzheimers/hit on the head in the emergent dimensions/reality/holographic world. Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality. Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
olalonde 6mo ago
> the brain dumping DMT Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  Yeah I didn't want to burst anyone's spiritual bubble earlier, but I had a very similar experience one time when I smoked salvia divinorum: there was an eerie and overwhelming purple light, sort of like a "fluorescent" UV bulb, and the Ministers of The Universe pulled my life history in front of me, something something ALL OF SPACE AND TIME WAS- I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.
  - jdbohrman 6mo ago
    No you didn't that's not even what a salvia trip is like why lie about that in HN of all places haha
  - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
    There is either a spiritual bubble or a materialistic/scientistic bubble, and we shouldn't be afraid to burst either.
    - olalonde 6mo ago
      I disagree that the materialistic/scientistic view can be characterized as a "bubble". Unlike the spiritual camp, almost no one in that camp wishes it were true or fantasizes about it. I'm personally in the materialistic camp but wish the "spiritual" view was true.
    - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
      No, us scientific folks shouldn't go around needlessly poking people's spiritual bubbles. It's rude and disrespectful, and it almost never actually matters. Who cares if someone thinks they spoke to Jesus when they had a heart attack? Leave them alone.
sleepyguy 6mo ago
Taking it to another level, there are several cases where people who weren't dying experienced the NDE (ex: Nurses, loved ones at someones bedside, etc). They actually witness what the dying person might have been experiencing when dying.
colechristensen 6mo ago
There's this mushroom Lanmaoa asiatica that causes people to hallucinate hundreds of tiny people running around interacting with the environment. Consistently, across cultures and regions. You eat this mushroom and you're pretty likely to have a very similar hallucination to everybody else who eats this mushroom. Now is there some objective reality of hidden little elves everywhere that only this mushroom unlocks? Or is it a specific physical trigger that when people go through it they have the same sort of experience. You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
I011010011 6mo ago
100% agree with BoardsOfCanada. Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.
- mock-possum 6mo ago
  No, you’re wrong - Atheism is the opposite of religion - it’s disbelief, not belief. This whole “well actually atheism is just another kind of religion” thing is why I begrudgingly have started to prefer describing myself as ‘irreligious,’ just so that there is absolutely no opportunity for equivocation.
  - I011010011 6mo ago
    As Mikhail_Edoshin pointed out precisely in the comment below. Religious thinking has certain common characteristics. For example, you go to length to defend Atheism is a sort of X negating a Y etc, that's emotional investment indicating religious adherence and sincere belief in being right. I, from time to time, suffer from this too. It's very indication that I'm likely being misguided by myself or ideas.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6mo ago
  False religions are all fanatic; they are narcissistic pseudo religions, stemming from the desire to be right.
- BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
  Wear the downvotes as a badge of honor.
  - I011010011 6mo ago
    Lol, indeed BoardsOfCanada :). I didn't know one could downvote. Anyway, Aggressively downvoting indicates religious/religious-like fanaticism, the problem is pervasive.
marcus_holmes 6mo ago
I have two data points thet I ponder occasionally: 1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied. 2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy. I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them. But I'm inclined to believe two things from them: 1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand. 2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.

golly_ned 6mo ago

Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife? This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness? > On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness

12345678UP 6mo ago
for some it's impossible to witness death. We get forced to sometimes see someone else's lifeless cask, but our own becomes impossible, as our very own worldline/probability trees branch before witnessing what others see as their objective reality; someone else's death. and this won't make any sense to anyone that doesn't already see this occurring, so it's just like an ouroborus of a string of jokes, each punchline becomes the begining of the next joke.

adammarples 6mo ago

Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality should be rejected.

BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
We're talking past each other. The problem isn't coming up with a hypothesis of why experiences differ according to experiences. Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. But after that we come to a stage where experiences differ so much that they aren't reconcilable in one objective reality and that's what I tried to address.
- nemomarx 6mo ago
  How would we determine that the experience happened during that time and not as a memory created when oxygen reached the brain after, or so on? If you assume that narrative memory is a little bit hallucinated (which I think is pretty observable, try dissociating a little and you can experience it) then many options are on the table.
- tsimionescu 6mo ago
  > Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
  - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
    [dead]
- majkinetor 6mo ago

throwanem 6mo ago

A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.) I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.

BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.
- throwanem 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
    Ok :D
- Swizec 6mo ago
  > NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later. They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.
  - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
    Yes they don't happen 100% of the time or even 10%.

chongli 6mo ago

If multiple people independently report the same experience (across time and space), isn't this actually evidence of objective reality rather than a refutation of it? It points to some underlying universal structure of our experience as constructed by our brains, which suggests that our brains are part of a mechanistic, external, and therefore objective reality instead of a subjective one (where our own ideas constitute reality).

amelius 6mo ago

Reminded me of this TED talk of a woman who had a stroke and told about the experience: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins... > And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.

card_zero 6mo ago

Here's Plato's thing, the "myth of Er": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).

BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
So it has the same stages as modern NDEs: - Out of body experience - Journey through realms - Bright/universal light - Life review - Encounters with spiritual beings - Reincarnation / life selection - A message of peace, well-being, and survival of consciousness I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
- tsimionescu 6mo ago
  Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
  - BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
    It's obviously impossible to say. Why would there be a life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
    - tsimionescu 6mo ago
      You're the one who claimed that we should believe NDEs represent more than hallucinations because they all contain the same elements. I was pointing out that I can see major differences between two of these NDEs we are just discussing, instead of the consistency you were claiming.

tsimionescu 6mo ago

> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases. This sounds intriguing. > Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.

BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.
- card_zero 6mo ago
  Have you read any pop neuroscience book? There are common experiences that can be generated by one or another kind of brain-wrong. You sort of acknowledged this already when you mentioned DMT. If you poke somebody in specific parts of the brain you can get illusions of changing size, shadowy figures, mirth, and other delightful errors. We also interpret things very eagerly, like the "night hag" phenomenon where being unable to sense one's own breathing turns into an illusion of something sitting on your chest. That's another worldwide cross-cultural concept, by the way, but there is no night hag, there's just human physiology. So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
  - throwanem 6mo ago

LocalH 6mo ago

Objective reality exists, but nobody can ever perceive it, at least not while they're perceiving things through the filter of their body

bobbyswiss 6mo ago
What's realer than reality as it's directly experienced?
- rhyperior 6mo ago
  The raw electromagnetic emissions of uncountable atoms jostling through space and time.
  - bobbyswiss 6mo ago
    But that's a model and models are of the mind
    - LocalH 6mo ago
      But outside of what we can model, said atoms exist, and we perceive them. Objective reality is those atoms before we perceive them
      - bobbyswiss 6mo ago
        [dead]

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ericmcer 6mo ago

I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really. One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years. Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever". How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?

BobbyTables2 6mo ago
I wonder if there even is such a thing as “eternal consciousness” the way people assume. It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams. I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  since I have dreams in which I am not in the dream https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de924c8 https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92... it would actually be weird if I remembered aspects of my daily life in those dreams.
- HerbManic 6mo ago
  I have a fondness for the idea that the brain is like a radio reciever for a greater flow of the universe. Thus brain damage is like a broken antenna. The radio can die but the signal continues. That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously. Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
_DeadFred_ 6mo ago
Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving it's purpose. Sadly, to create an emergent reality that allows free will you have to create a reality that allows suffering and children dying of cancer and Alzheimer's and consequences if you hit someone in the head. But the blow to the head/Alzheimers is nothing different than an alcohol haze one night that goes away in the morning. The you in the underlying lower (higher?) real dimensions doesn't change just because you got drunk/alzheimers/hit on the head in the emergent dimensions/reality/holographic world. Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality. Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.

olalonde 6mo ago

> the brain dumping DMT Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
Yeah I didn't want to burst anyone's spiritual bubble earlier, but I had a very similar experience one time when I smoked salvia divinorum: there was an eerie and overwhelming purple light, sort of like a "fluorescent" UV bulb, and the Ministers of The Universe pulled my life history in front of me, something something ALL OF SPACE AND TIME WAS- I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.
- jdbohrman 6mo ago
  No you didn't that's not even what a salvia trip is like why lie about that in HN of all places haha
- BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
  There is either a spiritual bubble or a materialistic/scientistic bubble, and we shouldn't be afraid to burst either.
  - olalonde 6mo ago
    I disagree that the materialistic/scientistic view can be characterized as a "bubble". Unlike the spiritual camp, almost no one in that camp wishes it were true or fantasizes about it. I'm personally in the materialistic camp but wish the "spiritual" view was true.
  - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
    No, us scientific folks shouldn't go around needlessly poking people's spiritual bubbles. It's rude and disrespectful, and it almost never actually matters. Who cares if someone thinks they spoke to Jesus when they had a heart attack? Leave them alone.

sleepyguy 6mo ago

Taking it to another level, there are several cases where people who weren't dying experienced the NDE (ex: Nurses, loved ones at someones bedside, etc). They actually witness what the dying person might have been experiencing when dying.

colechristensen 6mo ago

There's this mushroom Lanmaoa asiatica that causes people to hallucinate hundreds of tiny people running around interacting with the environment. Consistently, across cultures and regions. You eat this mushroom and you're pretty likely to have a very similar hallucination to everybody else who eats this mushroom. Now is there some objective reality of hidden little elves everywhere that only this mushroom unlocks? Or is it a specific physical trigger that when people go through it they have the same sort of experience. You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.

I011010011 6mo ago

100% agree with BoardsOfCanada. Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.

mock-possum 6mo ago
No, you’re wrong - Atheism is the opposite of religion - it’s disbelief, not belief. This whole “well actually atheism is just another kind of religion” thing is why I begrudgingly have started to prefer describing myself as ‘irreligious,’ just so that there is absolutely no opportunity for equivocation.
- I011010011 6mo ago
  As Mikhail_Edoshin pointed out precisely in the comment below. Religious thinking has certain common characteristics. For example, you go to length to defend Atheism is a sort of X negating a Y etc, that's emotional investment indicating religious adherence and sincere belief in being right. I, from time to time, suffer from this too. It's very indication that I'm likely being misguided by myself or ideas.
Mikhail_Edoshin 6mo ago
False religions are all fanatic; they are narcissistic pseudo religions, stemming from the desire to be right.
BoardsOfCanada 6mo ago
Wear the downvotes as a badge of honor.
- I011010011 6mo ago
  Lol, indeed BoardsOfCanada :). I didn't know one could downvote. Anyway, Aggressively downvoting indicates religious/religious-like fanaticism, the problem is pervasive.

marcus_holmes 6mo ago

I have two data points thet I ponder occasionally: 1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied. 2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy. I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them. But I'm inclined to believe two things from them: 1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand. 2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.