Aware II results

When the spirit is in body. During NDEs the brain can be totally dysfunctional, with the mind and spirit having separated from it and obviously not constrained by it. It occurs to me that an analogy would be the sound of music heard in the home from a poor audio system, say a table radio, versus live at a concert. In the home the music RF signal has to be detected, amplified and transduced by a physical electronic system or machine in order to hear a poor facsimile, whereas in the concert hall the music is gloriously live in the presence of the musicians playing away, and the state of the poor little table radio at home matters nothing.

But would this even explain being hungry making someone irritable, let alone cognitive changes due to neurological issues?

Terminal lucidity seems quite different than just getting better reception. Instead it seems like a radical restoration. This makes me think neurological issues seem more akin to something like getting stuck in a dream even while awake, one of those dreams where one's personality itself is altered like my go to example my dream of having a bizarre hate-filled rivalry with the actor who played Harry Potter.

But would this even explain being hungry making someone irritable, let alone cognitive changes due to neurological issues?

Terminal lucidity seems quite different than just getting better reception. Instead it seems like a radical restoration. This makes me think neurological issues seem more akin to something like getting stuck in a dream even while awake, one of those dreams where one's personality itself is altered like my go to example my dream of having a bizarre hate-filled rivalry with the actor who played Harry Potter.

Materialist explanations for terminal lucidity as of now are just like the ones for NDE's. Theoretical scenarios that make little sense with what they are based in yet have a "logical" label to them.

Materialist explanations for terminal lucidity as of now are just like the ones for NDE's. Theoretical scenarios that make little sense with what they are based in yet have a "logical" label to them.

Oh I don't think materialist explanations make any sense for terminal lucidity, NDEs, or even physics.

But I do think the filter/transmitter theory needs some adjustment. I'm not sure what the exact update should be - I've wondered if we could think of the brain as providing greater/lesser degrees of accuracy on the nature of events and this explains some neurological issues, like if the screen of a video game system was cracked or how it ran the game lead to varied issues.

But there are also things like the potential increased hostility that can occur during dementia - why I liken this to a dream where you are feeling emotions that just seem strange upon awakening like my hatred of Daniel Radcliffe in one dream.

NDEs are like UFO sightings. Scientific minded persons accept the phenomena as one that warrants further investigation like Sam Parnia. “Beliefers” jumps to conclusion and firmly conclude that the only possible explanation are E.T.s flying around even though it contradicts everything we know about physics.

Please note that I do accept that consciousness cannot be explained by the usual approach of reductionism. But it still takes an enormous leap of faith to believe it can exists outside of a living body. It after all emerges in a living body. The notion of the ‘self’ is not established before around 24 months after inception. Should it suddenly be able to detach?

Yawn. It's late and I decided I should stop procrastinating. I ought to finally add my 2 cents into this entire thing. 

I'm of the same mind as Sbu in regards to a lot of this. While anectdotal NDE reports are incredibly interesting, they don't offer much in regards to scientific evidence other than saying that these experiences exist, they have these crazy reports that have been verified in non laboritory settings, we should probably try and validate them in laboritory settings. We've tried doing that a bunch of times with not very conclusive reports, so guess we've got to keep doing it. 

In relation to other parapsychological phenomena that's studied, like reincarnation, mediums, ect, there's good reason to take NDEs seriously and use them as evidence that consciousness can exist outside the body, but on their own it's a lot harder to do so. You can, it's just harder, because anecdotal evidence isn't as good as concrete scientific studied and confirmed ones. 

The self thing stood out to me cause it seemed kinda odd. Babie's brains are barely even there, should we expect them to show a sense of self right off the bat? I dunno.

Yawn. It's late and I decided I should stop procrastinating. I ought to finally add my 2 cents into this entire thing. 

I'm of the same mind as Sbu in regards to a lot of this. While anectdotal NDE reports are incredibly interesting, they don't offer much in regards to scientific evidence other than saying that these experiences exist, they have these crazy reports that have been verified in non laboritory settings, we should probably try and validate them in laboritory settings. We've tried doing that a bunch of times with not very conclusive reports, so guess we've got to keep doing it. 

While in theory understanding NDE's would be good to shed light on the nature of consciousness, regardless if it's proven to be a purely physical phenomenon or not, I notice that skeptics have some kind of fear of this phenomenon, prefering to formulate some explanation, either based on third party experiments replicating in a imperfect way aspects of the experience (The epilepsy chip and astronaut experiment arguments for example) Or simply a theory with no evidence, sometimes even contradictory.(The playing dead argument) It's hard to find skeptical researchers that actually studied NDE's closely instead of searching for physical explanations, no matter how absurd.
Materialism, specially strongly reductionist variants like eliminative materialism and epiphenomenalism, are treated like facts, when they are theories.(Free will denial is extremely popular among neuroscientists who become social media personalities in my country, some doing wild claims about neuroscience making it obsolete to validate their personal opinions yet some quote the Bereitschaftpotential experiments as their hard evidence, become philsophical with nature and nurture arguments or ironically parrot Dennett's ideas. I cringed when one of them cited the endogenous DMT theory as a fact.) 
They also defend their "facts" with the same religious fervor they love to mock, reacting from dismissal filled with hubris and insults to outright rage. (Novella is a clear example) Given that they dominate academia, and materialism is the de-facto norm in society, most are afraid to even consider a alternative to strong reductionism, with the possibility of angering the groupthink and having their careers tarnished with credibility loss, sometimes with "secular" media joining in, bring very real, making studies related to "transcendental" phenomena difficult.
I say all of this while considering myself a skeptic, albeit not in the definition the mainstream academia likes. The large amount of "theories" (variants of the two main schools of reductionist materialism) developed as time went on could be a sign of desperation.  (Exemplified by a recent "theory" that was basically just a variant of epiphenomenalism being presented as something groundbreaking, with articles even having the arrogance of stating it can aid in the treatment of neurological disorders such as alzheimer.) More open minded research can happen in the future, and possibly "save" physicalism, but if the opposite happens major societal changes would come, and a lot of people would react very badly. (AI/transhumanism proponents such as Graziano and Musk are just some.)

NDEs are like UFO sightings. Scientific minded persons accept the phenomena as one that warrants further investigation like Sam Parnia. “Beliefers” jumps to conclusion and firmly conclude that the only possible explanation are E.T.s flying around even though it contradicts everything we know about physics.

Please note that I do accept that consciousness cannot be explained by the usual approach of reductionism. But it still takes an enormous leap of faith to believe it can exists outside of a living body. It after all emerges in a living body. The notion of the ‘self’ is not established before around 24 months after inception. Should it suddenly be able to detach?

Regarding the bold:

The emergence of human consciousness: from fetal to neonatal life

A simple definition of consciousness is sensory awareness of the body, the self, and the world. The fetus may be aware of the body, for example by perceiving pain. It reacts to touch, smell, and sound, and shows facial expressions responding to external stimuli. However, these reactions are probably preprogrammed and have a subcortical nonconscious origin.

So at least the possibility is acknowledged that consciousness exists prior to birth. Also:

"The Brain Before Birth - Using fMRI to Explore the Secrets of Fetal Neurodevelopment"

Human brain development starts soon after conception and continues into early adulthood. The fetal brain begins to develop during the third week of gestation. Over the course of pregnancy, the structure of the brain will change as it grows and begins to form the characteristic folds that designate distinct brain regions. “We don’t know a lot about what happens in fetal life, because we haven’t had the tools to measure brain development in fetal life,” says Robert Wright, an environmental epidemiologist and pediatrician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The developing brain relies on environmental and endogenous stimuli such as these to help it determine which connections should be pruned and which should not. “When a neuron fires after a proper signal, its synaptic connections are solidified,” Wright explains. “If a neuron’s synaptic connection is rarely fired, it regresses and is removed.” Other researchers agree that acting on environmental risk factors may be key to developing effective neurobehavioral interventions. For preterm infants, interventions could include changing the hospital environment, says Annemarie Stroustrup, a neonatologist at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Stroustrup leads a study designed to look at the developmental impacts of NICU exposures. She plans to incorporate the use of neuroimaging to assess neurodevelopment in premature infants under NICU care and then compare early brain connectivity to measures of exposure and childhood behavioral outcomes. 
— Robert O. Wright, MD, Professor, System Chair, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director, Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research

I realize there is a political aspect to all this, but my point is that it is quite debatable the consciousness emerges after being born. Since "emergence" in the materialist faith means "complexity" gives rise to consciousness I cannot take it seriously since, as Sam Harris notes, it's akin to saying Something comes from Nothing.

Yawn. It's late and I decided I should stop procrastinating. I ought to finally add my 2 cents into this entire thing. 

I'm of the same mind as Sbu in regards to a lot of this. While anectdotal NDE reports are incredibly interesting, they don't offer much in regards to scientific evidence other than saying that these experiences exist, they have these crazy reports that have been verified in non laboritory settings, we should probably try and validate them in laboritory settings. We've tried doing that a bunch of times with not very conclusive reports, so guess we've got to keep doing it. 

In relation to other parapsychological phenomena that's studied, like reincarnation, mediums, ect, there's good reason to take NDEs seriously and use them as evidence that consciousness can exist outside the body, but on their own it's a lot harder to do so. You can, it's just harder, because anecdotal evidence isn't as good as concrete scientific studied and confirmed ones. 

The self thing stood out to me cause it seemed kinda odd. Babie's brains are barely even there, should we expect them to show a sense of self right off the bat? I dunno.

I think using the word anecdote here is too dismissive to really capture what is going on with afterlife research. I'm sure many of us have the experience of going to a bar or other hang out and running into someone telling tall tales that cannot be verified and even seem suspect. Then in other cases people give testimony and it seems quite compelling.

In afterlife research you have a lot of stories that have been checked out by researchers in addition to the two types of anecdotes above. We could compare this to stories that build up accounts of history, or stories that tie into criminal allegations. It is possible that everyone has been fooled or is faking, but to me this gets into the realm of the implausible. Since there is already reason to believe consciousness is irreducible it lends weight to the idea that it is not destroyed when the body dies, though I would agree the "Hard Problem" isn't a slam dunk for the immortality of the soul.

As for defying physics, since physical laws don't actually have any binding power over matter (where are they? how [do] they by-pass the Interaction Problem?) that isn't necessarily the final standard though I agree if a "tall tale teller" told me he flew the night before I'd be skeptical because of gravity.

As for defying physics, since physical laws don't actually have any binding power over matter (where are they? how [do] they by-pass the Interaction Problem?) that isn't necessarily the final standard though I agree if a "tall tale teller" told me he flew the night before I'd be skeptical because of gravity.

I’m not sure what you mean here. Laws and matter is not treated as seperate entities in physics. The “standard model” which even though is incomplete, is the most accurate model we currently can create for all known interactions except gravity. Mass is just a property among other properties of the most fundamental building blocks of the universe.

It's hard to find skeptical researchers that actually studied NDE's closely instead of searching for physical explanations, no matter how absurd.

I think this is obvious. NDEs are not something you simply choose to study (scientifically). You need to be a nurse/doctor working on a hospital with resusication like Sam Parnia or Penny Sartori just to be a candidate to do research in this field. And then I bet it’s also highly controversial conducting these kind of interviews in the hospital setting. Look at how few interviews Sam Parnia and his team has conducted after 15 years of research.

I’m not sure what you mean here. Laws and matter is not treated as seperate entities in physics. The “standard model” which even though is incomplete, is the most accurate model we currently can create for all known interactions except gravity. Mass is just a property among other properties of the most fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Basically saying something is in violation of laws of physics isn't a reason to automatically discount an account.

I think this is obvious. NDEs are not something you simply choose to study (scientifically). You need to be a nurse/doctor working on a hospital with resusication like Sam Parnia or Penny Sartori just to be a candidate to do research in this field. And then I bet it’s also highly controversial conducting these kind of interviews in the hospital setting. Look at how few interviews Sam Parnia and his team has conducted after 15 years of research.

Yet shouldn't pseudo-skeptics be less quick to say NDEs have a materialist/reductionist explanation? They seem to insist their faith in atheist-materialism is correct at every turn?