161–170 of 223 posts
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It sounds like it was a really heartfelt experience.
I certainly felt it.
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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.
I reckon they'll just go stuffing multiple souls into each baby. Has anyone tried counting the number of souls per body?
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I certainly felt it.
I'm sorry, I had to. Re-reading your response though, there's something unclear to me. What part was intense and strange? Wouldn't it just be like going under and then waking up? Was there a sensation of going in and out as they performed surgery?
It all sounds trippy and enjoyable to me as I write it now, but really, it sucked.
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.…
> as EEG/fMRI augury suffers from blatant methodological and even statistical flaws Maybe https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9.epdf
> subject cooperation is required both to train and to apply the decoder
That's fascinating and kinda bends my intuition. Can't wait for the paper to be on ***hub (strangely my institution does not have access).
> 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…
Tons of the greatest scientists were religious and therefore not materialists.
It's pretty easy to just brush it all aside, but I don't think we should.
Also - I suggest you don't need to take acid, but rather just look into your child's eyes to start to fathom something more. I mean, the notion that we are merely blobs of particles randomly bouncing around completely disintegrates pretty much everything we would otherwise believe, I mean, literally the notion of 'intelligence' itself, as such a thing cannot exist out of randomness.
Imagine if scientific materialists had to preface every time they said 'life' or 'intelligence' or 'love' or 'creativity' or 'communication' or 'knowledge' with 'supposed life' or 'supposed intelligence' etc. because after all, 'we know none of that exists, neither does consciousness, and we are not having a discussion, we just appear to be having it'.
What's funny is a '5th force' that we might crudely refer to as 'Spirit' or whatever that seems to somehow influence matter/energy in some way, is literally and logically a better and more intuitive explanation that 'we are randomness'. And that position would be in many ways much less hypocritical than those walking around professing that they are 'nothing but noise' and yet living every aspect of their lives as though they were not.
Random particles cannot have 'rights' folks, so pick a side!
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I'm sorry, I had to. Re-reading your response though, there's something unclear to me. What part was intense and strange? Wouldn't it just be like going under and then waking up? Was there a sensation of going in and out as they performed surgery?
I remember nothing of surgery itself, but for weeks after that I was on Vicodin and half-crazy. I remember a dream that felt like I had spent a hundred years on a submarine, with almost no input but the ping of a radar. I remember being mostly unable to participate in a Skype conversation my visiting parents had had with some friends from fifteen years ago, putting my head down, and seeing that everyone was in fact a…
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.
"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."
I love that the "it" in this sentence could be lots of things, heart surgery, marriage, school, and even life as a whole itself.
Just a words thing
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I remember nothing of surgery itself, but for weeks after that I was on Vicodin and half-crazy. I remember a dream that felt like I had spent a hundred years on a submarine, with almost no input but the ping of a radar. I remember being mostly unable to participate in a Skype conversation my visiting parents had had with some friends from fifteen years ago, putting my head down, and seeing that everyone was in fact a…
This sounds very familiar to when I was a young man and I was given a lot of painkillers and had a very high fever due to an infection. I had a very intense waking dream where I felt like I was hurtling into an infinite void. I had a few flashbacks in the next week while totally sober. Overall it was an intensely unpleasant experience.
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.…
As someone who works in EEG, you may be surprised that I somewhat agree with you. Let's start with where I am in agreement. EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought. What I do find interesting is that in the ag…
Earlier 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…
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.
I'm going to take issue with this. Anytime we sufficiently understand something it stops becoming supernatural and becomes natural. For a long time lightening, and disease were considered supernatural.
To assume there cannot exist things or beings we do not yet understand about the universe simply because we cannot explain it is the height of huburis.