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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2239 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 11, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Interesting video on Near-Death Experiences and what they might tell us about the afterlife.

It's basically a summary of the book "Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists" by Swedish philosopher Jens Amberts. It makes the case that:

  • Almost everyone who has an NDE comes to believe in an afterlife
  • There are no psychological/sociological predictors of who has an NDE, so they are a random sample of the population
  • 10s of millions of people have had them
  • They're skewed by age ofc, but even children who've had these experiences describe them in similar terms

The go-to physicalist explanation for why these happen is a release of DMT in the brain at the moment of death, which I'm sure the author is aware of. I haven't read the book yet but I'd be curious to know how he compares these experiences to DMT trips. Given the sheer number of people who've had NDEs there must be a few thousand who have also tried DMT, would love to read their thoughts comparing them. Of course, even if they did claim there were substantial differences, we could say that other chemicals are involved in different doses and these are all just a particular flavor of psychedelic trip. Still, seems like a topic worthy of more research.

Spinning people in centrifuges until they black out is useful for the US Air Force. Also inadvertently causes "out of body" experiences more typically associated with near death experiences. From this entirely mechanical process. Depriving blood to the brain by purely mechanical means produces all the hallmarks of NDEs.

So NDEs are just the feeling of lack of blood to the brain Google used to return articles written by Air Force officers about this. Now it's damned LinkedIn post.

How can anything grapple with:

  • Subjective experience is rooted in the physical state of the brain (children who get kicked in the head by a horse become less intelligent, drugs, alcohol, the guy who had a steel bar go through his head and had his personality change completely)
  • Therefore, if the brain is destroyed, subjective experience ends

Even if 100% of the population believes an afterlife exists, or would if they had a 'sufficiently deep NDE' (I sense a no-true-scotsman), it doesn't necessarily follow that an afterlife exists. Reals > feels. You can do all kinds of funny things with drugs and magnets. Somebody used an MRI machine to induce religious experiences, another where they weakened faith in God. There was a headline about how disabling parts of people's brains made them more accepting of immigrants.

You're basically contrasting materialism with the spiritual and dismissing the spiritual out of hand. Or at least suggesting that the doors of perception, as it were, are not the road to spirituality (or to authentic spirituality). That empirical experiences cannot be trusted to verify the transcendent. Yes?

That empirical experiences cannot be trusted to verify the transcendent.

If God sends forth thousands of angels to scour the world in fire and sword, then I will definitely accept Christian doctrine. People having weird dreams near the point of death is not on that level. Should we also trust in witch-doctors, seances, ghosts and such? They can produce subjective experiences, yet not much more than that. Just throwing one's net into an ocean of beliefs won't help truth-finding.

In my mind, to be scientifically useful, more than one person needs to be able to observe the same phenomenon. I can see the flaming angel, so can you. We can take a photo of it, observe the heat from the blade setting off the fire alarm. But feelings? We can't observe them outside MRI machines and even then it's not very helpful.

What can we observe of the afterlife? Literally nothing, just feelings from people who, by definition, aren't in it! There's no objective records, no second-order effects either. At least UFOs show up on radar from time to time.

I am not making any sort of suggestion as to what you should believe or what criteria you should apply to verifying or holding that belief, I was just trying to get a handle on your point of view as to what we need to classify something as acceptably believable. I'm still not sure I have it.

skewed by age ofc

I'm curious--why does this seem obvious? I don't know which I'd expect to be more likely--children for being more credulous, or adults for familiarity with cultural expectations. Or more visual experiences on which to draw, et cetera.

For an alternate (if somewhat dated) perspective, consider Greg Egan's 1998 novella, Oceanic.

I just meant the sample is disproportionately older people

The issue I’ve always had about NDEs having anything to really tell us about what happens when we die is just how culturally specific they tend to be. (https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE76-Japanese-and-western-JNDS.pdf) just for a quick example. Japanese people tend to see the light, but not interpret it as a being, westerners see cities of light, Japanese see flower gardens. Westerners have life reviews where fewer Japanese do. As an objective experience, this simply should not be, an experience of reality might be interpreted differently, but it should be a similar experience.

The case he makes is that there is significant overlap. A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva, but there’s still a sense of the other reality being eternal and more real than this one.

If anything, it being so subjective points to it being less real than the one we live in.

A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva

But, isn't that exactly the hallmark of a subjective phenomenon based on hallucination/misremembering/wishful thinking/etc, rather than an objective phenomenon based in reality? The most parsimonious explanation when confronted with mutually contradictory reports of the same phenomenon is that someone (or everyone) is simply mistaken.

It's analogous to how you have a lot of wildly contradictory reports of UFO encounters, with people reporting different physical appearances of the aliens themselves, different appearances of the craft (which suspiciously seem to evolve along with American aesthetic preferences, from the Cold War-era flying saucers to the modern Apple-inspired cubes and spheres), so some believers try to explain the contradictions away by saying "well, maybe they aren't really aliens, maybe these are spiritual entities that are manifested by the collective unconscious, so they take whatever form a particular observer is expecting", and it's like, yeah maybe that's the case... or there could just be no UFOs to begin with. That theory also resolves all the contradictions, in a much more parsimonious manner.

That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."

I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.

That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."

I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.

I've had an NDE but I can't disentangle the profound sense of bliss from also being pumped up full of pain killers by the doctors at the hospital.

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