Near Death experiences and the scientific method.

[SkepticThinker]

It can't be the physical brain because it is dead. No brain activity, no nothing from the brain. That it is not the brain is a completely logically assessment. The phenomenon is not unexplained, it is perfectly explained. I am not jumping to conclusions, people have been aware of their spiritual nature since caveman days.

NDEs are not supernatural, they are the natural result of dying. There are no demons, devils, or hell. The word demon was originally used to define sickness. A person had a demon, that was before the germs were discovered. I am sorry but I have to laugh at aliens paying tricks on us humans. It is what it is!

But it isn't "perfectly explained." When did you demonstrate that minds exist apart from bodies? When did you demonstrate that there is a "spiritual world?" When did you demonstrate the mechanisms involved in minds separating from brains and floating around?
You didn't. You just asserted it.

You've injected a mystery into a mystery. Sorry, but there's no explanatory power there.

How do you know there are no devils? I know I guy who claims to have seen one. He's just as confident that devils exist as you are that spirits exist.
How do you know there aren't any tricky aliens? That seems slightly more plausible to me than your spirits idea because at least we know billions of other planets exist in the solar system, one of which could contain intelligent aliens.

 

[SkepticThinker]

The brain was not only dead, but all the blood had been drained from the brain so an aneurysm could be fixed. Now that would have been super supernatural if the brain were still able to "see" because the eyes were taped shut. Another important thing is position of the brain, it would have to fly out of the body in order to observe the instruments that were described. So, yes, I can dismiss your ideas of what happened.

You just have been given concrete evidence of the spiritual nature of us humans. There is no way an NDE can be physical, no way at all. The physical part is dead, kaput, finished. There was no physical part of anything, only spirit.

I don't care if you laugh off my beliefs, that changes nothing. It was a friendly laugh. I am addressing things scientifically. What I have written is logical and believable. I think it would be great to not treat ideas with bias. Your idea just didn't hold up under scrutiny.

Now let my say this again. I know some are very frightened of death and what might happen to them. No one has anything to fear from death and the afterlife. There will be no judgments or punishments. It is a loving, caring place this spirit world.

You know our brains fill in things for us all the time right? Like how we actually have a blind spot, but our brains fill in the missing bits so that we don't notice.

Also, there have been patients with brain injuries that caused them total blindness in one eye but they weren't even aware that they were blind in one eye because their brain was filling in the missing bits. Brains are much more remarkable than you're giving them credit for.

Concrete evidence? When did you produce that?
How did you determine that there is "no way at all" an NDE can be physical? That's a pretty definitive statement to be making.

How do you know what happens after death? None of these people you are citing actually died, right? I mean, they're all still alive, right? So they don't know either.

 

[HonestJoe]

The brain was not only dead, but all the blood had been drained from the brain so an aneurysm could be fixed. Now that would have been super supernatural if the brain were still able to "see" because the eyes were taped shut.

Even if all that was true, why would it be any more amazing for there to be something we didn't know about the physical brain allowing the information to be gathered than it would be for there to be something we didn't know about "spirit" allowing the information to be gathered?

You just have been given concrete evidence of the spiritual nature of us humans.

You've presented zero evidence of anything "spiritual". You've not even defined what this "spirit" is you are proposing and you've not presented any kind of hypothesis that any such evidence would apply to. All you've done is unilaterally declare that it can't be anything physical and therefore it must be "spiritual". What I am saying is "We don't know.".

 

[tas8831]

All that to distract attention from my simple question (that apparently you don't have an answer to):

What in the NDE as presented by Sabom supports evangelical Christianity?

You never asked me such a question. You are desperately trying to save face because you misinterpreted/could not grasp why I wrote what I did.

Not playing your game.

I documented pretty clearly my rationale and explanations, you can't have that. That is your problem.

 

[tas8831]

And to add Sabom is a scientist who understands the importance of remaining objective. A claim of slanted interpretation needs support.

He is a medical doctor. An evangelical Christian.
His 'preview' wiki bio states:

Michael B. Sabom is an American cardiologist, confessing Christian and near-death experience researcher.​

The blurb for one of his books:

Begun in 1994, The Atlanta Study is the first comprehensive investigation of its kind into near-death experiences (NDEs). The study's name hardly captures what lies behind it: life-and-death dramas played out in operating rooms and hospital beds--and simultaneous events unseen by medical personnel but reported with astonishing clarity and conviction by nearly 50 individuals who returned from death's door. Now the founder of The Atlanta Study, Dr. Michael Sabom reveals their impact on the people who have experienced them. From both medical and personal perspectives, he shares the electrifying stories of men and women from all walks of life and religious persuasions. He explores the clinical effect of the NDE on survival and healing and discloses surprising findings. He questions some common conclusions about NDEs. And he scrutinizes near-death experiences in the light of what the Bible has to say about death and dying, the realities of light and darkness, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.​

And re: the same book, from the publisher:

Combining scientific research and dramatic narrative, Light and Death is the first book to seriously explore the relationship of near-death experiences and traditional Christian faith.​

Didn't YOU read about this guy beyond trying to employ an appeal to false authority fallacy?


You feel the need to protect him because he gives your groundless beliefs a boost. Not wasting any more time on you - your bias prevents you from even understanding simple, straightforward explanations.

 

[Lekatt]

Even if all that was true, why would it be any more amazing for there to be something we didn't know about the physical brain allowing the information to be gathered than it would be for there to be something we didn't know about "spirit" allowing the information to be gathered?

You've presented zero evidence of anything "spiritual". You've not even defined what this "spirit" is you are proposing and you've not presented any kind of hypothesis that any such evidence would apply to. All you've done is unilaterally declare that it can't be anything physical and therefore it must be "spiritual". What I am saying is "We don't know.".

If you are saying here might be someway the brain could gather information while being dead, without blood, without eyes or hears, then no I don't believe there is anyway the brain could gather anything. It is just a piece of meat. It is the spiritual self that lives after death not the brain.

What was proven was that people live after the death of their body. I call that the spirit that lives, you can name it something else if you wish. The evidence is clear, strong, and real. Actually I know a lot about spirit having many spiritual experiences in the last 30 years. I know people who have not awakened to spirit have a hard time understanding, but you will in the future, everyone does.

 

[Subduction Zone]

If you are saying here might be someway the brain could gather information while being dead, without blood, without eyes or hears, then no I don't believe there is anyway the brain could gather anything. It is just a piece of meat. It is the spiritual self that lives after death not the brain.

What was proven was that people live after the death of their body. I call that the spirit that lives, you can name it something else if you wish. The evidence is clear, strong, and real. Actually I know a lot about spirit having many spiritual experiences in the last 30 years. I know people who have not awakened to spirit have a hard time understanding, but you will in the future, everyone does.

No one was dead in any of these cases. They were only close to being dead.


If you ask your questions without the strawman the answers become obvious.

 

[Lekatt]

You know our brains fill in things for us all the time right? Like how we actually have a blind spot, but our brains fill in the missing bits so that we don't notice.

Also, there have been patients with brain injuries that caused them total blindness in one eye but they weren't even aware that they were blind in one eye because their brain was filling in the missing bits. Brains are much more remarkable than you're giving them credit for.

Concrete evidence? When did you produce that?
How did you determine that there is "no way at all" an NDE can be physical? That's a pretty definitive statement to be making.

How do you know what happens after death? None of these people you are citing actually died, right? I mean, they're all still alive, right? So they don't know either.

If what you say is true that brains fill in things for us, where is the evidence that something is stored in the brain. There is no evidence the brain stores anything. That is the spirit filling in for us.

If a person is blind in one eye they lose depth perception. I am not sure what the missing bits are. I am not saying the brain is unremarkable, I am saying it is the interface between spirit and body.

I think the video showed very clearly the NDE was not physical. There are many more on YouTube and the Net.

 

[SkepticThinker]

If you are saying here might be someway the brain could gather information while being dead, without blood, without eyes or hears, then no I don't believe there is anyway the brain could gather anything. It is just a piece of meat. It is the spiritual self that lives after death not the brain.

What was proven was that people live after the death of their body. I call that the spirit that lives, you can name it something else if you wish. The evidence is clear, strong, and real. Actually I know a lot about spirit having many spiritual experiences in the last 30 years. I know people who have not awakened to spirit have a hard time understanding, but you will in the future, everyone does.

What is a spirit?
Is it a disembodied mind?
How do minds exist apart from brains?
What are their properties?
How do spirits see and hear and speak?


I have no idea why you think it has been proven that "people live after the death of their body," because it hasn't. Which is evident from your lack of response on my above questions.

 

[Lekatt]

No one was dead in any of these cases. They were only close to being dead.


If you ask your questions without the strawman the answers become obvious.

There were clinically dead that is term used for this sort of thing. I don't know what a strawman is, maybe a scarecrow,
The video evidence is clear and understandable.

 

[SkepticThinker]

If what you say is true that brains fill in things for us, where is the evidence that something is stored in the brain. There is no evidence the brain stores anything. That is the spirit filling in for us.

It's true. Every human being has a blind spot - the spot on our retina where the optic nerve connects doesn't contain any light-sensitive photoreceptor cells and so we are blind in that part of our field of vision. We don't notice this spot where we actually can't see anything because our brains, along with the information from our other eye, fill in the missing parts of our field of vision with what it thinks should be there. This is demonstrable and verifiable.

I'm not sure why you don't think things are stored in the brain but we know that episodic memories, for example, are stored in the hippocampus.

You really should brush up on what we know about the human brain if you're going to be making these kinds of definitive statements.
I would recommend "The Brain That Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge to start.

If a person is blind in one eye they lose depth perception. I am not sure what the missing bits are.

The blindness in this case was actually caused by a lesion on the visual cortex within the brain. The patient had experienced a stroke which had caused the lesion. Her vision was fine before the stroke, so her brain had ample experience with binocular vision for her entire life up to that point. For months after her stroke she had no idea that she actually could not see out of her left eye, because her brain (with the help of her right eye and with it's previous encounters with the environment) was filling in what it thought should be there. It was only after her doctor noticed something particular about the way she was interacting with her environment that she suspected the patient wasn't actually viewing what was in front of her. Then she had a person sit to the left of the patient, in her periphery, (and without telling the patient) and asked the patient if she could see him. Turns out she couldn't. It turned out that if she knew the person was there, she could see them. But if she was not told the person was there, she could not see him. Now clearly, memory must be stored in the brain or her brain wouldn't have the memory to fill in the blanks for her.
I can't remember the name of the book at the moment but I will try to come up with it and let you know. It's pretty fascinating, really.

I am not saying the brain is unremarkable, I am saying it is the interface between spirit and body.

You kind of are. You keep trying to attribute functions of the brain to spirits and spirit worlds when it isn't necessary. When we already have actual explanations with actual explanatory power for these things.

I think the video showed very clearly the NDE was not physical. There are many more on YouTube and the Net.

I didn't see any disembodied minds floating around. Did you?

 

[SkepticThinker]

There were clinically dead that is term used for this sort of thing. I don't know what a strawman is, maybe a scarecrow,
The video evidence is clear and understandable.

Evidence of what, exactly?

 

[HonestJoe]

If you are saying here might be someway the brain could gather information while being dead, without blood, without eyes or hears, then no I don't believe there is anyway the brain could gather anything.

We're both essentially saying that. After all, for NDEs, the information must end up in the physical brain of the surviving patient for them to be able to recall it after they recover. You have a definitive answer to that question (though still with zero detail or positive evidence) and I'm saying we don't (yet) know.

What was proven was that people live after the death of their body.

Nothing is proven by a video. Regardless, even if your conclusion was correct, I'd suggest it would be logically wrong to call it "life after death" (which is an implicit contradiction). You are proposing that some aspect of an individual somehow continues to exist beyond death, but we'd need to understand it's true nature before we identified it as any form of life (be it a continuation or something new). There doesn't seem to be any kind of definitive description of what exactly this "spirit" actually is or how it works.

The evidence is clear, strong, and real.

Is any of this evidence objective, entirely independent of a single person's perception or memories? We must be talking about some form of energy and/or matter that is directly interacting with both the brain and the wider environment. It is not odd that in all the decades of studying it, nobody has been able to identify or measure it directly?

 

[SkepticThinker]

There were clinically dead that is term used for this sort of thing. I don't know what a strawman is, maybe a scarecrow,
The video evidence is clear and understandable.

My grandfather didn't experience anything when he died on the operating table. So what happened to his spirit? Maybe he doesn't have one?

 

[Lekatt]

My grandfather didn't experience anything when he died on the operating table. So what happened to his spirit? Maybe he doesn't have one?

Some who die and are brought back don't experience anything, why, I don't know. May have to do with length of time dead or someone else.

 

[Lekatt]

We're both essentially saying that. After all, for NDEs, the information must end up in the physical brain of the surviving patient for them to be able to recall it after they recover. You have a definitive answer to that question (though still with zero detail or positive evidence) and I'm saying we don't (yet) know.

Nothing is proven by a video. Regardless, even if your conclusion was correct, I'd suggest it would be logically wrong to call it "life after death" (which is an implicit contradiction). You are proposing that some aspect of an individual somehow continues to exist beyond death, but we'd need to understand it's true nature before we identified it as any form of life (be it a continuation or something new). There doesn't seem to be any kind of definitive description of what exactly this "spirit" actually is or how it works.

Is any of this evidence objective, entirely independent of a single person's perception or memories? We must be talking about some form of energy and/or matter that is directly interacting with both the brain and the wider environment. It is not odd that in all the decades of studying it, nobody has been able to identify or measure it directly?

No, no, there has been nothing in the brain found by researchers in the way of data.

It does not matter what you call it. It is what it is.

Yes it is, the person tells what they saw, then the doctor verifies it by saying he saw it also.

 

[Lekatt]

Evidence of what, exactly?

Evidence of life after death.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Some who die and are brought back don't experience anything, why, I don't know. May have to do with length of time dead or someone else.

Well, you really should incorporate such experiences into your hypothesis, lest you succumb to confirmation bias.
You actually need to account for these experiences as well.

 

[SkepticThinker]

No, no, there has been nothing in the brain found by researchers in the way of data.

What do you mean by this? Are memories not "data?"

It does not matter what you call it. It is what it is.

It certainly does matter what you call it and how you define it, given that it's the basis for your entire hypothesis.
Again, you can't explain mysteries with other mysteries and expect to have explanatory power.

Yes it is, the person tells what they saw, then the doctor verifies it by saying he saw it also.

So they have a memory of these experiences, do they? Memories are stored in the brain via the hippocampus and accompanying pathways, so what they were recounting was a memory, that was stored in their physical brain.

How does the doctor verify what the patient's spirit supposedly saw while it was supposedly dead? And again, what is a spirit?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Evidence of life after death.

HOW?