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End-of-Life Dreams

commonwealmagazine.org

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Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#171

Post by agubelu »

ggm wrote: post #70
LoganDark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since I have a rich interior dialogue with myselves "inside" Interesting~! We are a DID system that contains around 8 people but we don't have a very rich internal dialogue between ourselves despite the fact that we're capable of trying if we focus. What is this like for you? How rich is 'rich'? -Emily

Not that rich. It's usually a two-person dialogue. But the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves. Most? Above 50%. I think well above, the web disagrees. If it's couched by most people as an interior monologue rather than dialogue, I think it stands as a distinct state which argues at a minimum 2 participants (the one listening, unvoiced?) Sometimes mine is in schoolboy…

I don't know if I'm part of a minority, but I have no internal monologue or dialogue unless I explicitly decide to have one.

My default thinking mode is in abstract concepts, having to put it into words feels like a downgrade in the speed at which I can think.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#172

Post by amatecha »

andrepd wrote: post #145
amatecha wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, one time I was startled by a phone ringing full seconds before it actually rang. The person I was around was startled by me reacting to it, because "nothing was happening", then the phone rang. Unless we both simultaneously falsely constructed that memory :) lol

You live for 700,000 hours. There's bound to be plenty of weird coincidences during your lifetime. You're not a psychic.

No way? Damn, I had no idea I wasn't this thing I hadn't ever claimed to be! Huh.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#173

Post by selfmodruntime »

belinder wrote: post #67

Wonderful article, thank you for sharing. My favorite part: > “Old couples,” Kerr writes, “have much to teach us about true love. Their bond requires no big declarations, loyalty tests, or dramatic endings.… They continue to feel and believe in it even when the person through whom that love originated leaves them. For elderly patients especially, their love for their other half is who they are. Jobs, ambitions, hobbi…

This is somewhat romanticized. I feel like there are a lot of old couples (especially in the boomer generation) who are incredibly unhappy, but stay in their marriages.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#174

Post by selfmodruntime »

gspencley wrote: post #158

> I have spent a lot of time since my wife’s death trying to make sense of this paradox. In the high-tech, evidence-driven world of contemporary medicine, it was a dream that led a physician to conclude that my wife was dying. How was that possible? Here's a sobering hypothesis: it is not unheard of for nurses and physicians to be murderers and to target their patients. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but this c…

You missed the part where the patient was in hospice, with terminal cancer.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#175

Post by b800h »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #126
b800h wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is always nothing Classic atheistic arrogance here. Our understanding of the brain may be transformed, but had it occurred to you that when you dissect things you begin to miss the wood for the trees? Nihilism is more absurd than any religion.

Classic argument to obscurantism. I am not even a nihilist, but sure, after nihilism will destroy the lives of people for 2,000+ years, I will agree that it's more absurd than any religion. So far, the great religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, needed thousands of years to realize that slavery is not really a great idea, and some are not yet convinced, but are pressured by tho…

> given how atoms are mostly empty space and how the universe itself is mostly empty space

Are they? You've forgotten the wave/particle duality, which is appropriate, because it's analogous to the broader argument.

There are (at least) two ways of understanding reality. One is done wth science and analysis, the other isn't. One can be broken down into "things", the other features conglomerates of those things. Just saying "well microscopy and deconstruction don't work on this, so it doesn't exist" is literally absurd.

The rest of your comment there is just a strawman.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#176

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

b800h wrote: post #175
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic argument to obscurantism. I am not even a nihilist, but sure, after nihilism will destroy the lives of people for 2,000+ years, I will agree that it's more absurd than any religion. So far, the great religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, needed thousands of years to realize that slavery is not really a great idea, and some are not yet convinced, but are pressured by tho…

> given how atoms are mostly empty space and how the universe itself is mostly empty space Are they? You've forgotten the wave/particle duality, which is appropriate, because it's analogous to the broader argument. There are (at least) two ways of understanding reality. One is done wth science and analysis, the other isn't. One can be broken down into "things", the other features conglomerates of those things. Just s…

"Atomic nuclei consist of electrically positive protons and electrically neutral neutrons. These are held together by the strongest known fundamental force, called the strong force. The nucleus makes up much less than .01% of the volume of the atom, but typically contains more than 99.9% of the mass of the atom." [1] No need for the wave-particle duality.

Not sure where the straw man is. Doesn't Buddhism use "karma" to justify slavery?, doesn't Hinduism use the caste system as in a MMORPG?, didn't Christians use Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, VI, 5-7 "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh" to justify slavery?, doesn't Islam treat 50%+ of the world population as property (although women are viewed as property in most religions)? and so on.

If I were to use the software of a robotic arm that sometimes does what I ask of it, but sometimes beats me to a pulp, I wouldn't call that software as well designed, and I would stop using it at all. In just the same manner, religions were badly designed, they are codifications of behaviour made by people who didn't even know they were on a planet after all, so it's understandable, pitiable in the final instance (and the modern religions are just ridiculous parodies, from Mormonism to the Unification Church, when not downright murderous cults, from Theosophists to NXIVM).

I am not sorry to hurt your sensibilities, you are free to have whatever beliefs and religion you like, but just don't tell me about the Sky Daddy while using machines which were born from the collective sweat and genius of the humankind, machines for which most of their inventors would have been killed by various religions across times (putting aside that the bigotry risen from religion killed Alan Turing).

No, there are no two ways or more of understanding reality. We can build for ourselves whatever framework we need to encompass all and everything (even if the final framework will be somewhat self-contradictory as in the wave-particle duality), from the femtosecond event happening in a hadron collider to the trillions and trillions of future years which await the universe. But it is us, humans, tailless primates, conscious agents, and our tools who are doing the understanding. Nothing more, nothing less.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsnuclei#:~:text=At....

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#177

Post by LoganDark »

agubelu wrote: post #171
ggm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that rich. It's usually a two-person dialogue. But the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves. Most? Above 50%. I think well above, the web disagrees. If it's couched by most people as an interior monologue rather than dialogue, I think it stands as a distinct state which argues at a minimum 2 participants (the one listening, unvoiced?) Sometimes mine is in schoolboy…

I don't know if I'm part of a minority, but I have no internal monologue or dialogue unless I explicitly decide to have one. My default thinking mode is in abstract concepts, having to put it into words feels like a downgrade in the speed at which I can think.

It's difficult to tell if you're in a minority or not, because this is an area where one can say a lot of different things about themself and still be correct.

We also tend to think in abstract concepts but we also narrate things like text we're reading or sort of talk to ourselves in our mind when we're doing things. How do we know if we're explicitly deciding? No idea.

But we do know that our speed of thought is not limited by how fast we can mentally narrate, and translating things into words isn't an overhead on anything. Our thoughts aren't made of words, the words only describe thoughts that we have already derived.

Weirdness all around!

-Emily

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#178

Post by b800h »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #176
b800h wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given how atoms are mostly empty space and how the universe itself is mostly empty space Are they? You've forgotten the wave/particle duality, which is appropriate, because it's analogous to the broader argument. There are (at least) two ways of understanding reality. One is done wth science and analysis, the other isn't. One can be broken down into "things", the other features conglomerates of those things. Just s…

"Atomic nuclei consist of electrically positive protons and electrically neutral neutrons. These are held together by the strongest known fundamental force, called the strong force. The nucleus makes up much less than .01% of the volume of the atom, but typically contains more than 99.9% of the mass of the atom." [1] No need for the wave-particle duality. Not sure where the straw man is. Doesn't Buddhism use "karma"…

Strong recommend: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/863971

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#179

Post by yadingus »

Jataman606 wrote: post #114
clnq wrote: post #33

Whatever is happening, it is sad to hear about yet another case where doctors are too arrogant to listen to their patients and try to understand. It might not be a spiritual experience, it might be delirium. But perhaps it is important step in the human mind making peace with death. And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon and anyone who tries to research it. There is nothing wor…

Would you like to make bonds with people that will soon die over and over again? I think many people misunderstand the kind of stress and mental strain that many doctors are subjected to regularly. Ironically, people who call for doctors to be more empathetic, often lack empathy themselves. Also medicine is very broad field, it's probably hard to stay up to date in every new study. Especially that academic research i…

That stress doesn't come from empathy, it comes from treating death as something to be feared and not talked about.

In other cultures death is not such an icky subject, and making bonds doesn't mean generating attachment that will lead to stress.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#180

Post by yadingus »

NovaDudely wrote: post #75
drain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts". E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed m…

One does have to wonder if it is a case of us reconstructing the timeline after the fact. What we think as being the way it happened and how it actually did could be very different. But when it feels so real it can be hard to dismiss. Semi related. I remember see someones story about how they would talk to god when on LSD, so one day they figured, get a note pad, ask what the meaning of life is and then write it down…

> They did that and all they had written down was "Walls."

dude, that's deep

No but really, a lot of revelations I've had on trips, the extremely skeptic would disregard as nonsense, but I consider there's some sense there, only it comes from a different kind of lateral thinking and can get lost in translation.

If you think about it, even a single word, in your sober state of mind, carries huge amounts of information that we take for granted. If you shift those symbols around a bit, then you can have a single word like "walls" be the epic conclusion of a meaningful thread of ideas that you think is so obvious, you will be able to unpack later by just reading the word.

But while you were tripping, you're basically incapacitated precisely because you're devoting so much energy to following these symbolism labyrinths and then of course the trip is over, and the sober mind state has too many other background operations to worry about, so you can't "unpack" that meaning anymore.

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