[BoardsOfCanada]

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.

[chongli]

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).

[ericmcer]

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]

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.

[HerbManic]

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.

[bryanrasmussen]

since I have dreams in which I am not in the dream 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.

[smokedetector1]

The brain is like a sail thats catching the wind of the soul. The wind pushes and shapes the sail, and the sail limits the shape of the wind inside it. If the sail is in bad condition, it changes how the wind catches it, or prevents it from catching altogether.

So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.

[ericmcer]

It is a nice thought, but still has a pre-requisite that there are "souls" floating around that get ensnared by human bodies. If that is true then life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death.

Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.

[smokedetector1]

I won't deny it takes giant leaps of faith. I think the questions are inherently unanswerable so any theory that's not in conflict with things we can know scientifically, and which doesn't lead to harming others, is as good as it can get. We can't really do better than thoughtful faith in this domain (and indeed I would (controversially) argue that the notion of inevitable scientific progress in this area is also a sort of faith, since there hasn't been any progress on the "hard problem" of consciousness..).

To your points, I would say that

> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death

Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.

> "I" go away when I die

Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.

> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless

I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.

> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.

I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.

[zzrrt]

I think Christian resurrection at prime usually means having the body of a 25-year old, not the mind. Maybe they'd say the physical brain can corrupt the eternal consciousness's expression while in this life, but it does still raise questions like how will you even recognize the eternal "you" when you've been trapped in a corruptible brain for all that you can remember, and what is the eternal part's worth if it can be corrupted by the brain. (Perhaps Mormonism addresses some of this, saying you lived as "you" unembodied before birth, but are not able to remember for now.)

[marcus_holmes]

Also well-known now is that our feelings are affected by things like our gut biome. Do all our little passengers resurrect with us?

[chubs]

The traditional concept of an 'embodied' resurrection (as opposed to ghosts playing harps) makes me lean towards: yes (eg the gut is part of the body). Who knows though, it's a fun question!

[marcus_holmes]

yeah it is :) Like, do we eat in heaven? If not, then all our little passengers must also be immortal in their resurrected form. But part of the biome is the dead bodies of those critters, and those dead bodies also affect our mood (chemistry doing its thing). So how does this work? Does heaven automatically maintain the correct chemistry in our guts to maintain our emotional and hormonal stability with needing the actual biome? Or does it maintain the biome at the correct chemistry without needing the actual ecosystem? And other parts - do the bugs that live on our hair follicles come with us? Does hair even grow in heaven?

I have questions...

[TrnsltLife]

John's vision of heaven in the book of Revelation includes both the wedding feast of the Lamb and the trees of life that will bear 12 different fruits in season. Jesus also ate fish a few times after his resurrection to demonstrate the physicality of his resurrected body. So there is the concept of eating in the resurrected paradise of the new heavens and the new earth.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Hrm. I've thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that we, or rather our brains are just an antenna, 'receiving stuff' from another plane of existence.

If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.

No more resonance with the frequency of your station.

That equals death on this plane.

What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.

The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.

And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.

In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.

That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.

What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.

Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.

At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.

Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.

[chubs]

I believe you resolve it by the concept of spirit/body dualism, where your body/soul degenerates but the spirit is still fine.

[_DeadFred_]

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.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Nope. Everything decays. So does any substrate which reality may run on whichever way.

So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not.

These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)

[_DeadFred_]

Nope. It would be very convenient for the modern American/Western nihilistic religion called atheism, but nope. Science doesn't support it.

In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.

Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.

Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.

Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.

To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.

How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain

[BoardsOfCanada]

As for myself, I try to do a thought experiment. Imagine that I could travel back in time and meet myself at 18-20 years old. I could most likely convince myself that I was me from the future. But I don't think I could convince myself of the thing I've learned that are outside of what is imaginable for my younger self. So we could never be angry with other people for not understanding. Even so, with everything that you get right compared to the people downvoting you, I think you have a too simplistic view of reality, and frankly, not optimistic enough.

[_DeadFred_]

Hahaha. Downvoted for posting my random thoughts converging CS Lewis and Susskind. This site really isn't curious.

[colechristensen]

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.

[tsimionescu]

> 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]

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]

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]

I would be seriously uncomfortable to discover myself making authoritative reference to anything out of a "pop neuroscience" book, unless I had myself validated the claim - at least as far as making sure there is a paper that says what is claimed of it, by whatever failed academic turned mountebank I am reading. (If those guys were comfortable being held to what they say, why did they stop writing for peer reviewers? I'm hardly an academic chauvinist, God knows, but if you want to be safe here in the 2030s, you really need to learn to spot a grifter...)

The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)

It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#DuaMinBodPro

[card_zero]

OK, you could also read a serious neuroscience textbook, but that seemed a less reasonable thing to expect of anyone. The basic point remains true though.

Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.

I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.

When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.

[throwanem]

Why is that unreasonable to expect? How can someone participate in a discussion of neuroscience without the requisite knowledge?

But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.

[smokedetector1]

You'd be hard pressed to find a principled neuroscientist who is as confident as you are that neuroscience can explain consciousness

[LocalH]

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

[bobbyswiss]

What's realer than reality as it's directly experienced?

[rhyperior]

The raw electromagnetic emissions of uncountable atoms jostling through space and time.

[bobbyswiss]

But that's a model and models are of the mind

[LocalH]

But outside of what we can model, said atoms exist, and we perceive them. Objective reality is those atoms before we perceive them

[throwanem]

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.

[card_zero]

You think it's cute, do you? But there are endless unfalsifiable and silly alternative explanations for everything. They're distinguished only by being silly. The observation that everything could be a simulation deserves a "so what". Maybe you're the cutie pie.

[throwanem]

It means something to you that I should be, eh? I don't really take a position in the matter, but one can't spend all day reading - though feel free to continue flattering my looks here while I do so, of course! Being called cute is a rare pleasure indeed for me, these decades.

[BoardsOfCanada]

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.

[tsimionescu]

If the brain is ever completely inactive (as seen in EEGs) for any length of time, there is no chance of recovery from that state. The body can be kept alive, but the brain is gone and will never have any other activity again.

So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.

[Swizec]

> 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.

[BobbyTables2]

That’s been my exact experience in each of my 5 occasions.

I also once semi-fainted while standing up. Felt unusually calm and care free as my head bashed against a nearby object. Fortunately it wasn’t serious.

[BoardsOfCanada]

Yes they don't happen 100% of the time or even 10%.

[emmelaich]

Do you frequently experience and remember dreams?

[the_af]

I do remember dreams. The times where I was anesthesized it was that on/off switch, I completely lost time. No NDE or even dreams.

[Swizec]

Yes I even used to do lucid dreaming. These days best I can do is wake up and stop dreams on command.

I also regularly experience sleep paralysis. That took a lot of work to get used to.

[jdbohrman]

Everyone reading this should pull on the sleep paralysis thread if you decide to research this topic. It's a interesting one.

[card_zero]

Here's Plato's thing, the "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]

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.

[card_zero]

These things are not really present, unless you do a lot of generalizing, squinting your eyes, and wishing. Besides which the ancient Egyptians influenced many of our shared tropes. There's that whole bit with weighing the heart while a monster (the Eater of the Dead) sits and watches. The Sumerians have a lot to answer for, too. You may now point to Amazonian tribes, but why shouldn't our tropes go all the way back to a shared past in Africa? Not to mention the convergent evolution of obvious ideas. South America (Maya? I forget) had flood myths of its own, and a world tree.

Yeah, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths . This does not mean that at some point there was a global flood brought about by a deity in retribution. It just means people throughout time knew the same stories or invented the same stories, and often thought about deities and floods. Similarly with your afterlife tropes. Memes are the freaky thing here.

[tsimionescu]

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]

It's obviously impossible to say. Why would there be a life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?

[tsimionescu]

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.

[card_zero]

Well, the claim is only that several of them contain some of the same elements as others.

[twic]

Not long ago, a local mad church put a packet of pamphlets through my door, one of which was this magnificent tale:

https://avesselofhonour.com/2023/06/28/48-hours-in-hell/

Some of those features show up there too. Of course, this comes from a Christian background, and draws on that. But it does have a river, and there's no river in hell in the bible.

[booleandilemma]

Where is that story from? Is George Lennox even a real person?

[mock-possum]

Of course not, it’s proselytizing material, the sort of stories that might be illustrated in Chick Tracts, down to the admonition to repent and pray at the end - a ‘Ticket to Heaven’

[amelius]

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_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.

[golly_ned]

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]

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.

[olalonde]

> 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]

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.

[BoardsOfCanada]

There is either a spiritual bubble or a materialistic/scientistic bubble, and we shouldn't be afraid to burst either.

[olalonde]

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]

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.

[jdbohrman]

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]

Because they aren't very similar in a lot of respects. If someone told you about their DMT/NDE experience you could determine which one it was with far greater than 90% accuracy. For example, in NDEs people express that they are outside of linear time, things happen in parallel (I can't imagine it but one person said they arrived at the bottom of a stair, and the moment he decided to climb it he was at the top, but could remember every single step on the way - that's the best explanation I have got of it) and in NDEs people meet relatives that tell them what is happening in a very pedagogic and honest way. In DMT trips there are foreign machine elves or other entities that accept you but don't really have that much connection to you. In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before. So even though DMT have similarities to NDEs when compared to our normal reality, they are also not that similar. If anything DMT trips are more similar to UFO abductions than NDEs. It's just weirder than I can expect anyone to accept.

[olalonde]

Sure, I didn't mean that the brain was releasing literal DMT.

You said what convinced you was how similar NDEs are, but we have evidence that similar experiences can arise from known brain chemistry changes (e.g., DMT-induced hallucinations) without requiring supernatural explanations. Death could simply be another case where a shift in brain chemistry produces consistent hallucinations across humans.

[fgd135]

> In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before

I've definitely had this exact experience on DMT, as well as the traveling through tunnels experience

[marcus_holmes]

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.

[adammarples]

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]

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]

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]

> 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).

[majkinetor]

> Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain.

Some cells are still technically alive after 1 hour mark in the sense that there is no necrosis and cell membrane is still operating. This depends on cell type and nourishment - for example cells that have high amount of CoQ10 can live longer etc.

In any case, brain is definitely NOT 100% dead in a sense that ALL of its cells are necrotic which might explain why it is in a dream like state.

Also, I doubt 1 hour mark is regular thing in NDE.

[sleepyguy]

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.

[I011010011]

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]

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]

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]

False religions are all fanatic; they are narcissistic pseudo religions, stemming from the desire to be right.

[BoardsOfCanada]

Wear the downvotes as a badge of honor.

[I011010011]

Lol, indeed BoardsOfCanada :).

I didn't know one could downvote.

Anyway, Aggressively downvoting indicates religious/religious-like fanaticism, the problem is pervasive.