near death experiences are probably more than just hallucinations

Happy_Killbot

@linate I think I can put the realness and accuracy of NDE's and out of body experiences to bed with just a single question.

Due to medical procedures and advancements in the medical field in general, it is now technologically feasible to "kill" someone whenever we need to and revive them shortly afterwords. (as a necessity for this subject)

If out of body experiences were real, and someone's consciousness could exist outside there body and be able to observe the world from above, that would be very useful for surveillance, for example in a search and rescue setting or in a war zone, where knowing what lies on the other side of a barrier is of vital importance.

If there is a new useful technology the military is almost always involved, and has dabbled in psychics and mystics in the past. If this is true and out of body experiences can and do lead to the ability to accurately see things from above, then why are we not using this as a military technology?

linate

@Happy_Killbot

that's a ridiculous argument. we dont have that kind of control over how they happen, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. 

Plaffelvohfen

@linate

All these studies do nothing to demonstrate anything except to confirm that these people do experience something... NDE's should more accurately be named EDCA, "Experiences During Cardiac Arrest", because that's all they are... Actual death is not involved, "near death" means nothing objectively, life-death is a binary state...

The AWARE study was very limited in scope really. The study recorded a total of 2,060 cardiac arrest patients. Of that base pool of participants, 1,920 were either not successfully resuscitated or failed to qualify for interview... Of the 140 survivors, 101 qualified for the second interview. Only 2% of those, (so only 2 people really) described awareness with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation. Only 1 had a verifiable period of conscious awareness during which time cerebral function was not expected. That's all... To use "almost always" as often as you did, with these numbers and method, is indicative of bias I'm afraid... And the preliminary result of the ongoing AWARE 2 study are far from being conclusive either...

To me it is more indicative that there must still be brain activity but that our current detection capabilities are not yet adequate, than it's indicative of even the remote possibility of life after death... 

Happy_Killbot

@linate Is there any reason to think that we can not control it?

If indeed what is happening is the "soul" or "spirit" or "consciousness" or whatever you like to call it is leaving the body, and it can in this state still perceive reality, then we can learn to control it, and this would mean developing all of these technologies and more.

There are many complex things that only happen under certain conditions, but if we can figure out what those conditions are, then we can control them by changing/establishing those conditions. If there is such a thing as a soul, then that means we can use it for pragmatic purpose.

Dr. Long's book was published in 1998, over two decades ago. Very rarely are any potential technologies not pursued for this long of a time. If there is credibility to his claims, then you will have to explain why there is no further research being done into the field, so that we can learn how to control it.

Dee

***there’s a load of other scientific factoids in that book. i highly recommend it. clearly there’s something deeper going on with NDEs than just hallucinations.

They  are not “scientific factoids” the total opposite in fact , do you not think it strange that Muslims who have a near death experience have a different experience to Christians experiencing the same and so it go’s in different cultures?

This nonsense has been debunked many times in the past but people will persist.

Note that logically anyone who is resuscitated did not actually die, and their experiences cannot be taken as direct evidence of an afterlife.

Oxygen deprivation to the brain during NDE is the cause of the hallucinations and is merely ones subjective experience of the effects of such 

MayCaesar

I have not read that book, but I do know that neuroscientists know fairly little about how brain operates in unusual conditions, such as when the person is nearly dead. When the normal operation of organism shuts down and the brain is forced to rely on a limited supply of nutrients and oxygen, in combination with neural pathways giving in to the overall organism decay, then what the person will experience will be hard to categorise in scientific terms. It is quite likely that someone who has held a strong belief, say, in god throughout their lives, should they survive such an experience, will try to connect it to that belief.

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is an out of body experience, however. And given that different people who have gone through such experiences tell quite different stories about what they saw, it is quite likely that, indeed, they are just a malfunction of their brains (not necessarily hallucinations; perhaps they serve some important function we do not understand yet).

There is no evidence to suggest that consciousness can exist outside a functional brain, even temporarily, although the possibility is not completely ruled out.