Psience Quest

(2017-11-16, 08:37 PM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]For example, the feeling of "you" leaving your body, seeing yourself from above and then travelling to another place where you meet Jesus suggests that there is a disembodied essence which did so. Leaving your body to fly on a jet to Italy to take part in a business meeting tends to be regarded as a hallucination.

Linda

Boy, is that a bastardization of how NDEs are reported to feel.

Greyson NDE scale

12. Did you feel separated from your body?
0 = No
1 = I lost awareness of my body
2 = I clearly left my body and existed outside it
13. Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world?
0 = No
1 = Some unfamiliar and strange place
2 = A clearly mystical or unearthly realm
14. Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice?
0 = No
1 = I heard a voice I could not identify
2 = I encountered a definite being, or a voice clearly of mystical or unearthly origin
15. Did you see deceased or religious spirits?
0 = No
1 = I sensed their presence
2 = I actually saw them

(2017-11-17, 02:00 PM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]Greyson NDE scale

12. Did you feel separated from your body?
0 = No
1 = I lost awareness of my body
2 = I clearly left my body and existed outside it
13. Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world?
0 = No
1 = Some unfamiliar and strange place
2 = A clearly mystical or unearthly realm
14. Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice?
0 = No
1 = I heard a voice I could not identify
2 = I encountered a definite being, or a voice clearly of mystical or unearthly origin
15. Did you see deceased or religious spirits?
0 = No
1 = I sensed their presence
2 = I actually saw them

Right, I forgot descriptions of experiences and feelings are limited to scales and numbers

(2017-11-16, 11:59 AM)Hjortron Wrote: [ -> ]The thing is that "the truth of what happens after death" necessitates that, from the highest perspective, this world is like a stage play. It may not appear that way to us while we are inside of it, and it may not be useful to regard it that way, but it absolutely is true that this world is reasonably viewed as a stage play that we knowingly agreed to participate in in light of what the NDE testimonies are converging on. Hence, it does indeed follow.

Physical reality is an orchestration of individual and collective consciousness which 'project' this world through those consciousness. The only thing that is real is the experiences themselves.

It is not only useful it is imperative to understand the basic (and advanced) energetic states, how vibration separates one thing, one space, one bit of creation from each other. Unless it is your path to enjoy your journey without these fundamentals.

As far as many NDEs are concerned, or perhaps better termed After DE, if you physically expire before your journey is completed, you have the choice to 'stay dead' in spirit, move along to a new vibration (new being, new settings, etc.) and/or return to a parallel world that is almost but not completely the same as the one you just vacated. Many of the classic NDEs are the playing out of that choice.

(2017-11-17, 04:19 PM)Dante Wrote: [ -> ]Right, I forgot descriptions of experiences and feelings are limited to scales and numbers

I don't disagree that NDE researchers' use of the Greyson scale can be misleading with respect to what the experiences are like.

Outside the field of parapsychology, these experiences would be regarded as hallucinations ("a hallucination is a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception"). However, my point was just that NDE researchers separate the collection of "vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space" experiences which people have in association with medical crises, into "hallucination" or "NDE" based on those questions. That is, it's an NDE if you meet Jesus, but a hallucination if you meet some business associates.

Linda

(2017-11-18, 11:51 AM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]I don't disagree that NDE researchers' use of the Greyson scale can be misleading with respect to what the experiences are like.

Outside the field of parapsychology, these experiences would be regarded as hallucinations ("a hallucination is a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception"). However, my point was just that NDE researchers separate the collection of "vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space" experiences which people have in association with medical crises, into "hallucination" or "NDE" based on those questions. That is, it's an NDE if you meet Jesus, but a hallucination if you meet some business associates.

Linda

"Outside the field of parapsychology, these experiences would be regarded as hallucinations"

At the risk of Madam accusing me of trolling or following her around, just for the record, that statement is nonsense. The team of researchers currently involved in the largest study of this field have told us that NDE's cannot be described as hallucinations.

"NDE researchers separate the collection of "vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space" experiences which people have in association with medical crises, into "hallucination"

And NDE researchers do that for a good reason, namely that they are obviously hallucinations and the patients know they are (sooner or later) when they recover their faculties. There weren't giant spiders crawling up the walls or red rats running around the floor. The list of hallucinations has no predictable common consistency whereas the stages of the near death experience are very consistent, ultra real and life changing.

"That is, it's an NDE if you meet Jesus, but a hallucination if you meet some business associates."

I've never heard of a patient reporting an experience of leaving their bodies during a cardiac arrest, travelling down a tunnel
and seeing their living business associates at the end waiting for them.

I'm making this one post and not getting involved further (even though the thread is interesting to me). This member's (FLS)business here is nothing more than mischief.

(2017-11-18, 11:51 AM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]I don't disagree that NDE researchers' use of the Greyson scale can be misleading with respect to what the experiences are like.

Outside the field of parapsychology, these experiences would be regarded as hallucinations ("a hallucination is a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception"). However, my point was just that NDE researchers separate the collection of "vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space" experiences which people have in association with medical crises, into "hallucination" or "NDE" based on those questions. 

I never said that the scale was misleading. I said that it isn't the only way to talk about an experience. When you actually read a large number of NDEs, and then read a number of hallucinatory accounts, it seems to me that the two are distinct in a vast number of ways. There are examples of people who have had both and been able to easily distinguish between the two.

Outside the field of parapsychology, if they're regarded as hallucinations (they aren't considered that universally), it's because of the a priori assumption that conscious experience is reductive. So that doesn't mean much. 

Quote:That is, it's an NDE if you meet Jesus, but a hallucination if you meet some business associates.

This is such an utterly garbage statement it's comical that you go on claiming to represent a reasonable position. It is just not true, point blank. If anyone's trolling, however you define that term, that sort of statement sure looks like it.

An Article from Psychology Today: The Puzzle of Near-Death Experiences

Quote:Perhaps the best way of explaining NDEs in material terms is - as touched on briefly above - to see them as unusual experiences which occur shortly before the brain becomes inactive. Perhaps they are simply a kind of hallucination generated by a dying brain. For example, It has been suggested that cerebral anoxia - a lack of oxygen to brain tissue - causes many of the characteristics of NDEs. It results “cortical disinhibition” and intense, uncontrolled brain activity. The vision of tunnels and lights can be linked to disinhibition in the brain’s visual cortex. At the same time, the intense sense of well-being could be caused by the release of endorphins. 

However, there are also problems with these explanations. You would expect intense, uncontrolled brain activity to result in crazy, chaotic experiences, but NDEs are usually very serene and well integrated experiences - certainly not what one would associate with ‘disinhibition’ and over-stimulation. You would also expect uncontrolled brain activity to result in a very wide range of different experiences, as varied and different as dreams. However, as we have seen, the majority of people who report this continuation of consciousness report the same “core” experience (according to another researcher, Pim van Lommel, 66% of NDEs included the core characteristics.) An additional (although not as significant) point is that, subjectively, people feel that, far from being illusory or hallucinatory, NDEs are much more intensely real than normal consciousness. They carry an intense sense of clarity and revelation which is very different to most hallucinatory experiences.

Another suggestion is that NDEs are caused by the release of large amounts of DMT in the brain close to the point of death. The basis of this explanation is the similairity of some DMT experiences (when it is taken as a drug) to NDEs. However, in actual fact, studies have shown that only a small percentage of DMT experiences have any strong similarity of NDEs. If it was the source of the experience, one would expect a stronger relationship.

From the conclusion ...

Quote:There is a tendency for us to believe that we perceive the world as it is, and that we are capable of coming to a clear understanding of how the universe operates. Certainly many materialists believe that they possess a sound explanatory framework to make sense of human life and the world we live in. However, this is premature and arrogant. Like any other animal, we have a limited awareness of reality and a limited intellect. The world is much more complex than we can sense, and most likely full of phenomena which we are not aware of, or which we might be aware of but cannot explain or understand. Near-death experiences are so significant because they remind of this.

Here's another academic article, seemingly unbiased: 

Near-death experiences between science and prejudice

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399124/

(2017-11-19, 12:43 AM)Dante Wrote: [ -> ]I never said that the scale was misleading. I said that it isn't the only way to talk about an experience. When you actually read a large number of NDEs, and then read a number of hallucinatory accounts, it seems to me that the two are distinct in a vast number of ways. There are examples of people who have had both and been able to easily distinguish between the two.

I agree that it isn't the only way to talk about an experience. Individuals tell others about their experiences, individuals describe their experiences in a semi-structured manner on sites like NDERF, researchers advertise for experiencers and interview them, researchers prospectively interview groups of patients with respect to their experiences and classify them according to an NDE scale (reporting on those interviews may consist of tabulations of the elements present, summaries of the themes present, summaries of individual experiences, or transcripts of the full interview).

When I said "can be misleading", I was referring to the (oftentimes substantial) differences in the descriptions of the experiences between those different ways of reporting on NDEs.

I do not doubt that some hallucinations which people describe are quite different from descriptions of NDEs. However, it is not clear that they can be easily distinguished, other than by the NDE scale, when you look at the memories which people report in the prospective studies. For example, in the AWARE study, half the people with memories were not classed as having NDEs on the basis of the NDE scale, yet they also reported narratives which could be categorized on the basis of cognitive themes with respect to their cardiac arrest (http://www.horizonresearch.org/Uploads/J...on__2_.pdf). We aren't given as much detail in the non-NDE experiences, but we are given that detail in Penny Sartori's study of NDE's.

In Sartori's study, 3 of the subjects described a variety of experiences, some of which were classed as NDE and some of which were classed as hallucinations. The distinction between the two were made on the basis of content. The patients were able to rationalize, later on, that some of their experiences couldn't have happened and therefore must have been hallucinations. Or the subject matter was mundane or distressing, and therefore was not associated with the "sense of peace" which was assigned to "NDE". However, there was no indication that the experiences were qualitatively different in terms of how real they felt, whether they were vivid or substantive, whether there were elements of confusion or chaos, etc. And as I mention below, when researchers aren't primed to ask leading questions with respect to an NDE scale, NDEs don't jump out from as somehow qualitatively different from the pool of "hallucinations, dreams, and unreal experiences" which mainstream researchers have been investigating for decades.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en...real+&btnG=

Quote:Outside the field of parapsychology, if they're regarded as hallucinations (they aren't considered that universally), it's because of the a priori assumption that conscious experience is reductive. So that doesn't mean much.

What I'm referring to are the investigation of these same experiences which have been undertaken by mainstream researchers, but without the "NDE selection process" which parapsychologists undertake. If NDEs were a unique experience were which different from the hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences which are reported by people under the same kinds of medical conditions, then they would be noticeable to the researchers who look at the details of these experiences in terms of quality, vividness, themes, etc. Yet we don't find this in their reports. Instead, what parapsychologists would select out as "NDEs" seems to simply represent some of the themes which are found among the unreal experiences which are otherwise indistinguishable from NDEs.

For example, Sartori suspects the subjects in this study with "dreams centered on the theme of divine experiences" may have been identified as NDEs had it been a parapsychology study. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15267166

Quote:This is such an utterly garbage statement it's comical that you go on claiming to represent a reasonable position. It is just not true, point blank.

This was an actual example from Sartori's study. The experience which included Jesus was classed an NDE. The experience which included flying to Italy for a business trip was classed a hallucination.

Linda