[dl9999]

These are very interesting.

I used to be convinced that NDEs were either made up, or the brain rebooting or something like that. I'm not so sure about it anymore. I'm not religious (not anti-religious either), but there are a lot of options between nothingness and a religious expectation of an afterlife. Maybe these NDEs are indicators of something else. I was surprised to see that almost 20% of people that "die" report them. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

Thanks for posting these.

[ericmcer]

Sorry for the cynical take.

I really want to believe in something after death, but watching my Grandma die of Alzheimers makes me skeptical. She was completely gone before her body died. She did not remember her name, or any of us. Whatever intangible thing was "her" was long gone. On scans of her brain you could see huge pieces just atrophied away.

How can we have some intangible "me" that transcends my physical form if that thing literally disappears as my physical form degrades. What part of me goes on? 20 year old me? 50 year old me? The broken remnants of when I finally die?

We have accounts of people on strong psychedelics that are similar to these NDE and we know the body produces endogenous psychedelics during crisis. I would postulate many of these life after death type NDE are just strong Psychedelic experiences. Most NDE accounts are just: "I remember right before unconsciousness and then my next memory was waking up".

[Bluestein]

> options between nothingness and a religious expectation of an afterlife.

May I ask what you consider some of those are? Honestly curious.-

[dl9999]

This is all speculation based on things I've heard, so take it with a big grain of salt.

I used to be on a forum with somebody who posted about having an excellent relationship with his dead wife. He said they interact regularly. He was not religious. Normally I would think he's a crackpot or somebody trying to sell something, but he was not either of those things. He came across as very honest and intelligent and sincere. The forum had nothing to do with life after death, but it came up occasionally. His other comments were always very rational.

There are others, e.g. Bernardo Kastrup, who think that there is a single consciousness, and that life as a human (if I understand correctly, any physical life) is like when somebody has multiple personalities. When we die (according to Kastrup) we "remember" that we are part of that consciousness.

I think panpsychism in general is a non-religious basis for at least the possibility that consciousness doesn't have to be physical. Consciousness could be fundamental.

To be clear, I don't believe any of those things, but I don't rule them out either.

The same goes for religious belief. My reasons for not believing might be due to perspective. I doubt that my dogs had any clue as to why I put them on a leash. I (and humans in general) could be in a similar situation, and that would change a lot. I suspect we are in a similar situation as far as making assumptions that work for us, but are not necessarily grounded in reality. I think it's very likely that there are things that we don't and maybe can't understand.

[Bluestein]

> Consciousness could be fundamental.

Oh, it very definitely is. It's an invariant "information" substrate of the universe.-

PS. I am personally convinced that one of the things that AI and the AGI search will yield is more clarity into - or even the discovery or demonstration - of that fact.-