A materialist and an NDE proponent go to a stage magic show together

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.

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. 

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

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 ...

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/

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=

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

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

Here's another academic article, seemingly unbiased: 

Near-death experiences between science and prejudice

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

I have an equal problem with those papers which attempt to explain NDE's on a psychobiological basis as I do with those which attempt to debunk those xplanations. These questions are empirical in nature, and that is why studies of the kind I mentioned are more relevant. Rather than guessing whether NDEs can be distinguished from hallucinations (which seems to depend upon having an unrealistic stereotype of what a hallucination is like), look at all the experiences together and see if some of them are different, and in what way.

Linda

What do you mean how do I know? There are literally thousands and thousands of pages of NDEs as told by people on nderf.org, and while those aren't studies, they are at least material to study. There are multiple books (including Smitty's) which go into much greater detail about a number of cases and studies. There are other studies like the Pim van Lommel ones and the Parnia studies, the Greyson studies, etc, and those are just for NDEs. I think, to me, those clearly are more voluminous than your 25+ pages.

I was referring to research on these phenomena, which means prospective cohort studies. There have been 6 prospective cohort studies by parapsychologists (http://forum.mind-energy.net/forum/skept...post238502) and dozens and dozens of them by mainstream researchers. Now these are not researchers who are setting out to debunk NDE's, like Watt and Mobbs referred to in Kamarling's link. They are performing this research, for the most part, without NDEs in mind.

Yeah, just saying that they're mistaken is again nonsense. Completely biased opinion that isn't supported by research, if you do what I've been saying here, which is to actually pay attention to the majority of those who have actually studied the material and listened to the experiences from actual NDErs.

I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. Researchers on the parapsychology side have asserted that they think NDEs are different from "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences" based on having a stereotype in mind about what a hallucination is like and comparing this with their stereotype of what an NDE is like. But their description of this stereotype is unrealistic, just like most lay-people seem to have an unrealistic stereotype in mind of what a hallucination is like. For example, many say things like they expect hallucinations to feel like they're not quite real, to be confused and chaotic, or to be delusional. If you actually read accounts of hallucinations, such as the transcripts from Sartori's interviews which she classed as "hallucinations", or from the mainstream research I referenced earlier, you discover that hallucinations take a wide variety of forms and include experiences which feel as though they are more real than real life, that are rich and detailed, which contain elements which are not regarded as delusional, etc. 

Both parapsychology and mainstream researchers start with the same group of experiences for their prospective research. They specify a cohort, which may be people who have experienced cardiac resuscitation, coma or an ICU stay. They ask each subject whether they have any memories from the event, and then they interview them as to the content of those memories. Parapsychologists ask a series of leading questions in order to select out a smaller portion of those experiences on the basis of whether their content fits an "NDE scale" and then they focus on those experiences. All other experiences are "hallucinations". Mainstream researchers look at all the experiences and describe their content and their characteristics.

What happens as a result is that mainstream researchers find these experiences have a variety of characteristics - some are delusional, some have emotional qualities such as feelings of peace or anxiety, some can be grouped by their thematic elements including whether they have spiritual themes, some are transformative, some are distressing, etc. But what they don't find is a set of experiences which are different from the others in terms of whether or not they can be regarded as hallucinatory.

Parapsychologists on the other hand, find a set of experiences which they call NDEs based on their content, emotional qualities, and thematic elements. They describe their content and characteristics, and then assume that they can be distinguished from the  "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences" they discarded from their cohort, without testing whether this is so.   

This is the perfect example of lending too much credence to opinion and subjective, unsupported statements. The difference between NDEs and hallucinations is clear and well elucidated, so you just saying they're mistaken is point blank false when it's at best debatable.

That's my point. It's not that parapsychologists are performing research which investigates whether or not these experiences can be divided into "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences" or "something else", and that "something else" turns out to be NDEs. They are giving their opinion and making subjective, unsupported statements which assume this is so. While mainstream researchers who are actually investigating "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences", without the NDE-scale in mind, do not find a set of experiences which don't fit in with the rest, that look like NDEs instead.

Same goes for whether brain activity is insufficient (the key of course being the often severely reduced brain activity of the experiencers, which is itself besides the point given the number of shared OBEs that have been studied and reported).

Same here. Parapsychologists are not actually investigating whether or not there is brain activity, but rather relying on a series of unsupported assumptions. The closest it looked like we were going to get on this was Parnia's AWARE study, where they were going to measure cerebral oximetry in some of these cases. Mainstream researchers, who actually investigate whether brain activity is present during medical crises, find a variety of results. 

I scanned over some of them, not in great detail. The last few months have been insanely busy for me. I have, in my time studying this materials, read accounts by researchers who, as I said, have felt that the phenomena aren't legitimate. That's fine, and I've read those. But I found the others more persuasive, and in my research I found far more erring towards the proponent side. That's my experience.

These are not references to researchers who feel that the phenomena aren't legitimate. These are references to research which looks at the same experiences which parapsychologists dismiss as "hallucinations" become they don't fit the NDE-scale. I think it is useful to discover what those experiences actually look like. I also think it is useful to discover what experiences from prospective studies which are identified as NDEs look like, because they aren't like the stories you read on NDERF.

Linda

I was referring to research on these phenomena, which means prospective cohort studies. There have been 6 prospective cohort studies by parapsychologists (http://forum.mind-energy.net/forum/skept...post238502) and dozens and dozens of them by mainstream researchers. Now these are not researchers who are setting out to debunk NDE's, like Watt and Mobbs referred to in Kamarling's link. They are performing this research, for the most part, without NDEs in mind.


I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. Researchers on the parapsychology side have asserted that they think NDEs are different from "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences" based on having a stereotype in mind about what a hallucination is like and comparing this with their stereotype of what an NDE is like. But their description of this stereotype is unrealistic, just like most lay-people seem to have an unrealistic stereotype in mind of what a hallucination is like. For example, many say things like they expect hallucinations to feel like they're not quite real, to be confused and chaotic, or to be delusional. If you actually read accounts of hallucinations, such as the transcripts from Sartori's interviews which she classed as "hallucinations", or from the mainstream research I referenced earlier, you discover that hallucinations take a wide variety of forms and include experiences which feel as though they are more real than real life, that are rich and detailed, which contain elements which are not regarded as delusional, etc. 

Both parapsychology and mainstream researchers start with the same group of experiences for their prospective research. They specify a cohort, which may be people who have experienced cardiac resuscitation, coma or an ICU stay. They ask each subject whether they have any memories from the event, and then they interview them as to the content of those memories. Parapsychologists ask a series of leading questions in order to select out a smaller portion of those experiences on the basis of whether their content fits an "NDE scale" and then they focus on those experiences. All other experiences are "hallucinations". Mainstream researchers look at all the experiences and describe their content and their characteristics.

What happens as a result is that mainstream researchers find these experiences have a variety of characteristics - some are delusional, some have emotional qualities such as feelings of peace or anxiety, some can be grouped by their thematic elements including whether they have spiritual themes, some are transformative, some are distressing, etc. But what they don't find is a set of experiences which are different from the others in terms of whether or not they can be regarded as hallucinatory.

Parapsychologists on the other hand, find a set of experiences which they call NDEs based on their content, emotional qualities, and thematic elements. They describe their content and characteristics, and then assume that they can be distinguished from the  "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences" they discarded from their cohort, without testing whether this is so.   


That's my point. It's not that parapsychologists are performing research which investigates whether or not these experiences can be divided into "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences" or "something else", and that "something else" turns out to be NDEs. They are giving their opinion and making subjective, unsupported statements which assume this is so. While mainstream researchers who are actually investigating "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences", without the NDE-scale in mind, do not find a set of experiences which don't fit in with the rest, that look like NDEs instead.


Same here. Parapsychologists are not actually investigating whether or not there is brain activity, but rather relying on a series of unsupported assumptions. The closest it looked like we were going to get on this was Parnia's AWARE study, where they were going to measure cerebral oximetry in some of these cases. Mainstream researchers, who actually investigate whether brain activity is present during medical crises, find a variety of results. 


These are not references to researchers who feel that the phenomena aren't legitimate. These are references to research which looks at the same experiences which parapsychologists dismiss as "hallucinations" become they don't fit the NDE-scale. I think it is useful to discover what those experiences actually look like. I also think it is useful to discover what experiences from prospective studies which are identified as NDEs look like, because they aren't like the stories you read on NDERF.

Linda

I was referring to research on these phenomena, which means prospective cohort studies. There have been 6 prospective cohort studies by parapsychologists (http://forum.mind-energy.net/forum/skept...post238502) and dozens and dozens of them by mainstream researchers.

Can anyone help me to understand what this woman is talking about ?  Since when was Pim Van Lommel a parapsychologist ? What the hell is she talking about ? Does anyone know ?

"While mainstream researchers who are actually investigating "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences", without the NDE-scale in mind, do not find a set of experiences which don't fit in with the rest, that look like NDEs instead."

  ? ?        

I was referring to research on these phenomena, which means prospective cohort studies. There have been 6 prospective cohort studies by parapsychologists (http://forum.mind-energy.net/forum/skept...post238502) and dozens and dozens of them by mainstream researchers.

Can anyone help me to understand what this woman is talking about ?  Since when was Pim Van Lommel a parapsychologist ? What the hell is she talking about ? Does anyone know ?

"While mainstream researchers who are actually investigating "hallucinations, dreams and unreal experiences", without the NDE-scale in mind, do not find a set of experiences which don't fit in with the rest, that look like NDEs instead."

  ? ?        

She's saying, in a long winded way peppered with academic sounding jargon, that mainstream scientists do not recognise the NDE as being separate from a class of mental phenomena generally regarded as hallucinatory and that the qualitative distinction is an invention of parapsychologists such as Greyson. Of course, as you rightly point out, people like van Lommel and others involved do not consider themselves parapsychologists and they are the ones with experience of interviewing patients after an NDE. It is also the assertion of ND experiencers themselves that there is a significant difference in vividness, cohesiveness and long-term impact.

It is sophistry. She does it all the time to undermine evidence she doesn't like. You know how long she maintained ridiculous arguments about the Pam Reynolds case. She will do the same here and you can shower these pages with as many links as you like, she will dismiss them all: it is not worth the effort.