Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences • Hacker News Board

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#141

Post by virgildotcodes » Tue, May 02, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #138

virgildotcodes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it seems to me the entire process of cognition is based on fully material processes.

Not the process, the plane of existence where the object is. Many who have left Plato’s cave doubt that those objects are made of material.

If we take Plato’s cave to be the mind, and the projections upon the wall to be reality’s impressions upon our mind transformed into interpreted stimuli, then I don’t believe anyone could have ever left that cave anymore than anyone could have ever stepped their consciousness outside of their own brain to verify how well reality correlates to their mind’s interpretation of it.

Regardless, all this this conjecture is invariably happening within the boundaries of our minds, which seems to be composed entirely of physical phenomena.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#142

Post by mike_d » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:03 PM UTC

C-x_C-f wrote: post #131

mike_d wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm just saying that people should stop expecting that the next breakthrough will come from crude tools such as EEGs and fMRI Scurvy killed over two million people until we figured out the solution was simply eating an orange. We won't know if EEGs and MRIs are core to future technology until we have that breakthrough.

I'm not sure I follow; by the same argument, measuring bumps on people's skulls can't be ruled out as not crucial to future science since it hasn't yielded a breakthrough yet. The merits of a scientific methodology cannot possibly depend on the small chance that some hitherto unsuccessful approach might result in an unexpected breakthrough. Aside from the fact that anything might hold the key to the next big thing, s…

> All else being the same, priority should be given to research which is grounded in solid experiment design and a firm grasp on statistic.

Agencies like DARPA exist primarily to counter this line of thinking. We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting scientists just kind of make it up as they went along.

I hope you genuinely understand the difference between measuring bumps on ones head and well established scientific instruments that allow you to take measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of witchcraft that should be distrusted.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#143

Post by fnordpiglet » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

garganzol wrote: post #135

fnordpiglet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elucidate?

Imagine a film of still and moving images depicting all situations that you ever experienced in your whole life. When you have a near death experience, that imaginary film appears in your consciousness and you immediately recall all those situations down to the greatest details, in parallel. You recall and relive even those moments that you thought were irreversibly lost in your memory. That process of recalling take…

Thank you.

Can you perhaps expand on the sense it wasn’t a unique experience as well? Do you feel you’ve “reversed” the course you saw?

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#144

Post by virgildotcodes » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:26 PM UTC

yarg wrote: post #106

virgildotcodes wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

> 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 experien…

Sigh, now you've got me sitting here having an existential crisis over my long held belief in the perfection of the universe.

The belief was primarily based on a deterministic view of it, with the notion that everything comes from something, and becomes something else.

Every moment has two perfectly balanced sides, with perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe giving you a perfect understanding of all the transformations that took place from one moment into the next.

There is of course the debate over whether it is not deterministic, if the Everettian view is false then possibly not, but more to the heart of the matter, this idea that because a greater and greater understanding of the laws of the universe unravels all its dynamics, all its reasons for being and acting the way that it is. This idea that the fact that there is a reason for everything, an order to everything, is what makes it perfect.

The thing is I have a hunch that an inquiry all the way to the bottom will eventually leave us with a bunch of arbitrary laws and constants, which have no further explanation for their being just so, other than the anthropic principle.

It seems hard to me to ascribe such a scenario the quality of generic "perfection" even solely from the perspective of my biased human mind.

I agree with you that perfection is a notion alien to the objective reality, which simply is, without any judgements or qualifications.

So to go back to my original comment, I think it would be more accurate to simply say that I've seen no reason to believe that anything we experience cannot be explained by physical processes.

Maybe consciousness itself will be the most relevant concept left inexplicable? Not the process of sustaining it, but the actual subjective experience of it. Why not have a universe of automatons processing their worlds and inner minds in all the same ways, but without anyone home? Why are we home, and how are we assigned to our homes?

I don't know that these questions are enough to make me believe in the "supermaterial" or supernatural, my hunch is just that our current awe and inability to begin to approach the subject may simply be due to a lack of understanding of the processes at work, but that's admittedly based on faith.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#145

Post by echelon » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

C-x_C-f wrote: post #108

If 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.…

You can accomplish a tremendous amount with lossy, low resolution, derivative signals. I'd be happy to take the opposite of your bet.

Even if you're right, continuing to invest in EEG/fMRI is tugging at salients near to the problems we want to solve. That's a good thing.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#146

Post by wessorh » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

Having recently recovered from Legionnaires where I was in a medically induced coma for nearly 2 months where I received CPR twice for flat-lining here is my experience... I didn't know what happened but I did get to meet deities, aliens and participate in a bunch of sci-fi oriented excursions. In short I learned about where the mind goes under a lot of drugs and I appreciate the experience. It was easier to remember and clearer than dreams. As to the bright light -- I thought it was nuclear war :) It a long "bad trip" but recovering well, thanks to a great community of concerned friends and healers.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#147

Post by p1necone » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

spacephysics wrote: post #5

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #2

> The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives have all been reported by people from many cultures who have had a brush with death. Sceptics, however, say these experiences could be caused by people hallucinating as they recover in hospital. The way that the default is presented here is interesting. Interpreting the experiences as halluc…

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…

Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any phenomena being supernatural ever, defaulting to assuming natural causes seems reasonable to me.

If you open your mind too much your brain might fall out.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#148

Post by abawany » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC

leroy-is-here wrote: post #32

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds do have a strong effect on people's emotions, but they don't tend to affect the way in which you think (maybe emotionally) in the same way that psychedelics can do.

Words, transmitted by sound _absolutely_, without a single doubt, can affect the thoughts of an individual. And, of course, horns and loud sounds and noises will also affect the thoughts.

Can confirm that the 'urgent'-sounding music and shouting on most cable news channels definitely affects my thoughts for the worse. I also have tinnitus and having the noise on constantly without any discernible source, even after all these years, is not conducive to peace.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#149

Post by kergonath » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:51 PM UTC

spacephysics wrote: post #5

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #2

> The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives have all been reported by people from many cultures who have had a brush with death. Sceptics, however, say these experiences could be caused by people hallucinating as they recover in hospital. The way that the default is presented here is interesting. Interpreting the experiences as halluc…

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…

> However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.

On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how can you get any certainty out of this?

It sounds a lot like the “complex behaviour cannot emerge from an assembly of simple systems” we see regularly, an updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you have no clue. More than that, you cannot have a clue because you are trying to observe something through itself, and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way.

That’s why we have things like double blind studies and the scientific method: to try to tease some objective observations out of a complex mess. We don’t understand everything in the brain, far from it. But it’s not magical either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in real time how some patterns change when we eat various substances or do various things.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#150

Post by Jeff_Brown » Tue, May 02, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

wessorh wrote: post #146

Having recently recovered from Legionnaires where I was in a medically induced coma for nearly 2 months where I received CPR twice for flat-lining here is my experience... I didn't know what happened but I did get to meet deities, aliens and participate in a bunch of sci-fi oriented excursions. In short I learned about where the mind goes under a lot of drugs and I appreciate the experience. It was easier to remember…

I had open heart surgery once, and was given a lot of drugs. It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing.