Between Yesod and Malkuth
- Papus79
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- Joined: February 19th, 2017, 6:59 pm
Re: Between Yesod and Malkuth
- Sy Borg
- Site Admin
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Re: Between Yesod and Malkuth
That's the usual rationalisations, well encapsulated and needed to be said.Eduk wrote: ↑October 5th, 2018, 10:43 amThe experience is identical to that reported by those who have had an NDE. This experience can be replicated by drugs or magnetic stimulation. There are even reports (I have had one such patient) of people who have a typical NDE experience during seizures. The bright light can be explained as a function of hypoxia (relative lack of oxygen) either to the retina or the visual cortex. Any everything else is simply the culturally appropriate hallucinations of a hypoxic brain.
In short NDE's show nothing other than that which can be accounted for by the failing (or at least under pressure) functioning of the brain. This has been demonstrated repeatedly neurologically. If you, or anyone, would like to suggest otherwise then you will need evidence. Failing any evidence I will go with the scientific consensus and the solution with the least assumptions which has been demonstrated to work over and over again.
I think the similarities are quite superficial and have been rather quickly accepted without further question as "identical to that reported by those who have had an NDE" by those keen to debunk "the paranormal crowd".
The trouble is that during an NDE the rules change. The below quote from your link displays a one-dimensional debunking approach that focuses on debunking religious claim and completely ignores the depth of the situation,
This is a basic and superficial, akin to a wealthy man spending a night living in the streets and then claiming that he now exactly understands the poor.The burden of proof for anyone claiming that NDEs are evidence for the survival of the self beyond the physical function of the brain is to rule out other more prosaic explanations. This burden has not been met.
The machines can measure what they will but there is only one realm of important action at this stage (unless there is a chance of reviving the patient with full functionality) and that is within the dying person's mind. Once they are cut off from the senses the subjective realm of dreams is their only realm, not to be taken so lightly as a dream from which one wakes. NDEs seemingly last for three to six minutes until brain oxygen is used up, unless the brain is kept cold.
Dreams "compress" apparent reality in a similar way to the compression of digital images and music, by discarding all that is deemed peripheral or unnecessary and focusing on the most important information. So dreamers don't tend to report ten-hour dreams of driving on a highway to a holiday destination including toilet stops, munching and radio broadcasts. Instead a dreamer is effectively "teleported" between scenarios and locales instantly.
One would expect significant compression in a dying brain as functions are being handed between whatever working brain parts remain. How much compression? To what extend can mental functions be compressed before they fade to grey? How long can this afterlife last subjectively? Reportedly far longer than three minutes, and perhaps for a subjective eternity, with ever smaller amounts of mental information sufficing as total reality until the brain shuts down. A subjective eternity within minutes.
This notion is consistent with the physics and biology we know today, but tomorrow's physics and biology may reveal more interesting possibilities.
- Papus79
- Posts: 1798
- Joined: February 19th, 2017, 6:59 pm
Re: Between Yesod and Malkuth
That was something else I was thinking about bringing up with respect to laboratory simulations. The moment we have medical techniques to make someone feel like they've been cast out of their body, down a tunnel, and spend an undefined/undefinable amount of time in a place where sequence can only be mapped logically but not so well with respect to time, where they claim the experience seemed far more real than their waking life, when they can see something like a bright white version of the Solaris star that they'd perhaps identify as the All, God, Atman, etc. and it's so profound that they want to go back in immediately and often times come out full believers in the experience - that's when we can say we have NDE in a bottle. It might also be the first time where we know that we can get a 1:1 measure or brain activity during that to see what's happening.
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