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A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
41–50 of 165 posts
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's Plato's thing, the "myth of Er": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need…
So it has the same stages as modern NDEs: - Out of body experience - Journey through realms - Bright/universal light - Life review - Encounters with spiritual beings - Reincarnation / life selection - A message of peace, well-being, and survival of consciousness I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#43The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death. > My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be . (italics mine) I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas…
It is the safest and easiest solution. You die, nothing happens. When there is an afterlife or perhaps even eternity, the problems begin.
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Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#44The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death. > My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be . (italics mine) I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas…
religious beliefs aside, there’s something pleasing about living a good life and facing a decent death: closure.
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#45Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one. Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality. Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge. - Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few - Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping…
> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases. This sounds intriguing. > Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of…
If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.) I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish…
So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.
If the brain is ever completely inactive (as seen in EEGs) for any length of time, there is no chance of recovery from that state. The body can be kept alive, but the brain is gone and will never have any other activity again.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality shou…
We're talking past each other. The problem isn't coming up with a hypothesis of why experiences differ according to experiences. Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. But after that we come to a stage where experiences differ so much that they aren't reconcilable in one objective reality and that's what I tried to address.
> Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain.
Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it has the same stages as modern NDEs: - Out of body experience - Journey through realms - Bright/universal light - Life review - Encounters with spiritual beings - Reincarnation / life selection - A message of peace, well-being, and survival of consciousness I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
It's obviously impossible to say. Why would there be a life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#49Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one. Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality. Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge. - Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few - Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping…
Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife? This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness? > On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
for some it's impossible to witness death. We get forced to sometimes see someone else's lifeless cask, but our own becomes impossible, as our very own worldline/probability trees branch before witnessing what others see as their objective reality; someone else's death. and this won't make any sense to anyone that doesn't already see this occurring, so it's just like an ouroborus of a string of jokes, each punchline becomes the begining of the next joke.
Re: A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
It's obviously impossible to say. Why would there be a life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
You're the one who claimed that we should believe NDEs represent more than hallucinations because they all contain the same elements. I was pointing out that I can see major differences between two of these NDEs we are just discussing, instead of the consistency you were claiming.