Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Awareness at Death

community.macmillanlearning.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 180 posts

Re: Awareness at Death

#151

Post by archibaldJ »

gehwartzen wrote: post #140

You came out of nothing and you return to nothing. Think about the last 13.8 billion years of your existence. Death is merely returning to that place. Was it uncomfortable or scary for “you” during those 13.8 billion years. Probably not. The “you” that has the capacity for worry, sadness, joy, etc. won’t exist after death. And perhaps a new “you” will pop into existence out of nothing just as it did before. Or maybe…

no no you came out of the universe and you return to the universe

nothing is free !

everything that made up of you had always been here since the beginning :)

Re: Awareness at Death

#152

Post by MailleQuiMaille »

We don’t even know what consciousness is, where we come from and why we are here. When you start to delve in the areas of synchronicities, archetypes, placebo effect and quantum mechanics, you realize that science can only get you so far.

I long for a new company exploring the fringe of such phenomena, something like Sony did with ESPER (google it, it’s a nice rabbit hole). I could bet that some people in the world are currently doing this, just not in public.

Re: Awareness at Death

#153

Post by bumby »

ericmay wrote: post #141
bumby wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point. And if you also want to take a strictly materialistic worldview, there’s nothing wrong with it. But what’s strange to me is when people take such a hard line in one area but don’t apply the same logic to another. Would you, for example, extend that same logic to claim your loved ones are philosophical zombies incapable of subjective experience? After all, there’s no good proof of the hard pro…

Better yet, consciousness as you’re describing it here is most likely an illusory artifact and evolutionary adaptation, particularly useful for survival and group cooperation. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume about the OP. With that being said I think it’s fair to suggest we can’t prove that others are conscious but we can do a lot more here with science than we can with the alleged afterlife.

I think that’s why it’s generally broken down into the “easy” and “hard” problems of consciousness. Easy in the sense that we can use our existing scientific toolset; hard as in we cannot.

Re: Awareness at Death

#154

Post by perfmode »

archibaldJ wrote: post #150
perfmode wrote: post #72

If I am about to die, and you repeat apple, pear, banana in my ears in headphones, I will haunt you from the afterlife.

As funny as this is, there is something trippy in what you said. Actually this is why LSD is so important - it helps you better recognise the voices repeating apple, pear, banana in your everyday life we are all always about to die: 1. everyday billions of your cells die and are dying 2. death is the single most real/important matter in life, and about to or not really only depends on how relativistic you want to be…

Thanks for sharing

Re: Awareness at Death

#155

Post by yencabulator »

nativeit wrote: post #105
whatshisface wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your brain is working well enough to have thoughts about its experiences, I don't see how you could call that death when people whose brains are not working that well at all, are alive.

It’s an open question in many (most?) of the reported NDEs as to whether their experiences were contemporaneous with their “deaths”, or rather their brain’s retrospective backfilling of the period when it was oxygen-starved and neurotransmitters lacked the ability to regulate their concentration and flow. I’m not a neuroscientist (or any kind of scientist) but I don’t think the consensus involves approaching reported…

I think the naming fruits test with the headphones was meant to cover this. The evidence seems to point at "nobody formed memories of language sounds while they were flatlining", the one correct answer matches expected random chance.

Re: Awareness at Death

#156

Post by yencabulator »

_nalply wrote: post #125
darkteflon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely no disrespect intended to your beliefs (and I agree with your second two paragraphs) but there mere fact of your brain experiencing something is not proof that it is “real”, if that word means anything at all.

Are dreams not real? We all know that we dream.

My dream from last night of being younger, back in the university, in an an advanced math class, and being unable to write lecture notes except for the one word "grape" does not mean an alternate reality like that exists.

Re: Awareness at Death

#157

Post by yencabulator »

k9unit wrote: post #115
_nalply wrote: post #71

Out-of-body experiences are real. My wife had one. Because of special circumstances I am convinced that she didn't know about them. It was an unknown and completely new thing for her. When I told her that some people also experienced out-of-body, she was stunned. I came to the realisation that science has limits. I have the hypothesis that the set of measurable effects is smaller than the set of all true things. In o…

I may have experienced an OOBE myself, but I'm not sure. Anyway, what I'm interested in is, let's say your looking down from above. Are you able to accurately describe details behind you? Things that your eyes can't possibly see? Are there cases where someone is with another person, describing information they shouldn't normally be able to sense? What happens when they do?

The experiments in the article had a tablet computer pointed at the ceiling; nobody could pick which symbol it showed during their "experience". All evidence points toward hallucinations and after the fact imagined detail to fill in blanks.

Re: Awareness at Death

#158

Post by yencabulator »

hnfong wrote: post #117
ShamelessC wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was an unknown and completely new thing for her. My priors tell me that your wife simply had some sort of chemical induced dream or hallucination due to the extreme stress of being near death. Why are you so quick to assume something supernatural occurred?

You answered yourself. You had your priors. GP had theirs.

Russell's teapot says rational people have the hallucination prior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Re: Awareness at Death

#159

Post by yencabulator »

elil17 wrote: post #26

>First, most of the 53 survivors initially flat-lined on the EEG, but, with continued CPR, recovered brain activity up to 60 minutes later. Good lord that's a long time. Does this mean that if I'm performing CPR, I should keep going for 61 minutes? Longer?

A medical doctor friend some 30 years back said patients coming back to consciousness after reaching the hospital after 45 minutes of CPR definitely did happen.

He also said that if you enter the hospital on a stretcher, you're most likely also leaving on a stretcher...

The chance of 45+ minutes of CPR allowing someone to recover to even near normal health is tiny. The right question to ask is, do you care enough to cling onto that tiny hope? As in, is it your child or loved one? (Or, is it your job to administer CPR while the patient is being transported to a hospital...)

Re: Awareness at Death

#160

Post by yencabulator »

bagels wrote: post #62

Deja-vu and false memories exist. It's hard to know whether these experiences are just more of the same, where the brain is placing unreal memories.

The fact that nobody could remember the fruit names (better than random chance) implies that at least sound and/or language are not processed, and thus reports of such are false memories.

The fact that nobody could remember the image on the tablet facing the ceiling implies that no actual OOBE happened, and that part is false memory.

Post reply on HN