Earlier quoted context omitted.
If reincarnation is real, I guess the afterlife faces a crisis due to the impending demographic crash here. The lines of souls awaiting reincarnation are about to get real long, as lots of people die of old age without people having children to ensure a fast return.
Who says you have to get reincarnated in the future? Maybe next up you'll be a 17th century peasant. Hell everyone that has ever and will ever live could all just be the same person. [0] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
101–110 of 223 posts
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#102It's a final upload to the cloud, with checksum checks...
Sounds funny but... I had a near-death experience and this is exactly how it feels - data recollection before departure. The weird thing is that you understand that it's not a totally new feeling - it seems that you are already got familiarized with it some time in the past but just forgot it while you was living your current instance of life.
I once read of a hypothesis that this is the brain desperately searching memories for a possible solution while its oxygen gets depleted.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the insect population is rapidly decreasing, so are many fish and birds. No if you ask me, most of us will reincarnate into bacteria.
Best bet are species that thrive despite or even thanks to humans. Like pets, pigeons or cockroaches.
As a dwarf shrimp breeder, we must be doing the bulk of the work. We buy vividly colored dwarf shrimp, go crazy when they carry 40 eggs and gift them when when there are more than way more than the recommended 10 per liter. We also strive to maintain a ton of other tiny crustaceans, snails and worms.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you believe the objects of your thoughts are material?
Yeah it seems to me the entire process of cognition is based on fully material processes.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider that the best argument against any kind of afterlife is the sheer banality of any claimed conversations with ghosts/deceased. I'd imagine that someone that has taken the final(?) journey would have incredible insights to pass on, yet they always just mumble on about something mundane.
Of course there are also stories of people who claim to have left their body and seen the operating theatre from above and to have noticed some unexpected object on top of a cupboard or in some other location visible only from on high ... and later, when someone checks, the object really is there ... [spooky music] ...
I like this kind of experiment, but it would have to be tightly controlled to avoid anyone viewing the object and possibly communicating it to the patient. Maybe some kind of duplicated 2FA device that shows a time-changing code and the twin device records its output over time - that would be tricky to cheat.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 res…
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.
> The universe is perfect
The universe is a cosmic horror, life emerges and with it untold suffering.
The very notion of perfection is also emergent (not to mention self relative), outside of the conceptual framework of the observer's mind perfection does not even exist.
The universe is beautiful, life emerges and with it all understanding, love and joy.
Two sides of the same emergent coin, the nature of all experience was forged by what it took for our ancestors to survive to the next generation.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#107https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-pPBwFFWz_k Some children can remember exact & verifiable details of their prior life they never could have come to know in this their current child life. These details can be objectively and independently confirmed. Remarkably & quite biologically enigmatic: Some of them have birth marks and birth defects at very same locations as the lethal injury causing their often abrupt and violent…
You are posting this and take that serious?
Have you read his wiki page or other sources?
His methods is wishful thinking.
I'm very curious what gives you the feeling that you would trust that stories.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#108If there's one hill I'm determined to die on (given the information that I have anyway) is that any scientific finding extrapolating information from "brain waves" or "region activation" is little more than modern day phrenology. Of course this is not an original thought, though I find it alarming that it's the minority opinion seeing as EEG/fMRI augury suffers from blatant methodological and even statistical flaws.
There are too many sources to list but I think [0] has a good and varied collection of what I consider to be statistically informed thoughts on "cognition" research, see e.g. [1] [2] for a gentle introduction.
(I should like to point out that I recognize the usefulness of brain measurements in medical contexts; I'm just saying that using them to say anything about non-pathological perception or metaphysics has so far been fantastically unsuccessful.)
[0] http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_cognition.html
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 res…
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.
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.
Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure what you mean, but sensory inputs can obviously affect you. Hearing a bear roar right behind you will probably change you state of mind pretty quickly.
From my own experience, "only" deep and intense breathing for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind drastically.
Am I correct that you meant:
> [...] something as simple as deep and intense breathing for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind drastically.
?
Because it seems some people are voting as if you wrote "[...] the only thing that can [...].