Commentary thread for tim's "NDE's" thread

Dead is final - no coming back.  Hear stopping doesn't equal death. As he was still around after the event, he wasn't dead.  Ergo "...appeared to be clincally dead." 

Consciousness disappears in both cases but returns in only one of them.  

Leadville said > "Dead is final - no coming back."

I'm so bored of seeing this perennial sceptical mantra which has no basis in fact. Do you so called sceptics never actually read the hundreds of posts where this has been discussed (on Skeptiko) ? Do you not feel any shame, clinging on to tiny perceived loopholes and semantics so you can keep your outdated world view intact ?

Dr Sam Parnia is a recognised expert in resuscitation. He has the blessing of both of the most vocal (and sceptical about NDE's) British psychologists on this subject, French and Blackmore, to carry out his study and report whatever he may find. 

This is what he said recently :

In the vast majority of terminal cases, physicians medically define death based on when the heart no longer beats, said Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone School of Medicine in New York City.
"Technically speaking, that's how you get the time of death — it's all based on the moment when the heart stops," he told Live Science.

Once that happens, blood no longer circulates to the brain, which means brain function halts "almost instantaneously," Parnia said. "You lose all your brain stem reflexes — your gag reflex, your pupil reflex, all that is gone."

A trajectory of cell death :

The brain's cerebral cortex — the so-called "thinking part" of the brain — also slows down instantly, and flatlines, meaning that no brainwaves are visible on an electric monitor, within 2 to 20 seconds. This initiates a chain reaction of cellular processes that eventually result in the death of brain cells, but that can take hours after the heart has stopped, Parnia said.

Performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation

(CPR) does send some blood to the brain — about 15 per cent of what it requires to function normally, according to Parnia. This is enough to slow the brain cells' death trajectory, but it isn't enough to kick-start the brain into working again, which is why reflexes don't resume during CPR, he said.

https://www.livescience.com/60593-flatli...ation.html

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Death is a process that begins when the heart stops. There is no known absolute marker for how long someone can be dead for and brought back, if their body cells are still viable (meaning they haven't burst). This is a fact, it's not me wanting it to be true.

The crux of the matter is that a person's consciousness is just as absent in the first stage of death (from cardiac arrest) as it is when their head has turned into a ball of maggots. 

Trying to suggest that someone who is lying flat out in cardiac arrest, still has some potential ability to know what is occurring around him/her is frankly, idiotic !

I'm not new to the evidence, I just suffer God awful self doubt and anxiety. I consider myself a proponent for sure. For me personally, I don't know if it is the variables of personal testimony are what bothers me but rather the accusations of it's all wishful thinking or coincidence.

It doesn't matter to me, Desperado whether or not you believe in a continuation of consciousness, although personally I have no doubt. I would however urge you to look very carefully at what the so called sceptics actually have to say about all this because it amounts to basically nothing.

Well then ~ apparently, you can come back from death. If people report explicitly floating outside of their bodies, then their bodies must be, for all intents and purposes, truly, fully and clinically dead, no exceptions, and if they are able to report events that their dead bodies obviously cannot sense, then their consciousness does not disappear, because it has merely detached from the dead body. Therefore, consciousness is non-physical, and survives death.

Dead means dead - there's no coming back from death.  Any state from which an individual emerges wasn't death no matter how much it gave the appearance of finality.  Or the word 'dead' needs to be re-defined.

Dead means dead - there's no coming back from death.  Any state from which an individual emerges wasn't death no matter how much it gave the appearance of finality.

Believe whatever you want to believe. You'll be happier that way.

[Laird]

Dead means dead - there's no coming back from death.  Any state from which an individual emerges wasn't death no matter how much it gave the appearance of finality.  Or the word 'dead' needs to be re-defined.

Or is it perhaps you who would like to redefine the word "resurrected"?

It doesn't matter to me, Desperado whether or not you believe in a continuation of consciousness, although personally I have no doubt. I would however urge you to look very carefully at what the so called sceptics actually have to say about all this because it amounts to basically nothing.

I'm aware of it. Honestly I'm looking for the same conclusion if the evidence is really capable of leading me there and I am convinced it pretty much already has. I'd agree with a certain Titus Rivas in saying that "a belief in the survival of consciousness after death is more justified then it ever has been before"

Believe whatever you want to believe. You'll be happier that way.

No need for me to believe anything about what 'dead' means - I know.  But you should hold whatever beliefs you wish - you'll be happier that way.

No need for me to believe anything about what 'dead' means - I know.  But you should hold whatever beliefs you wish - you'll be happier that way.

Ah, but you're the one claiming that clinically-dead people are not actually dead, even if they've been clinically dead for close to an hour.

You would deny experiences like this, where the patient is obviously clinically dead:

http://www.skeptiko.com/172-melvin-morse...-accounts/

Dr. Melvin Morse: So by chance or coincidence or fate or whatever, I happened to be in Pocatello, Idaho and there was a child there who had drowned in a community swimming pool. She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. It just so happened that a pediatrician was in the locker room at the same community swimming pool and he attempted to revive her on the spot. His intervention probably saved her life but again, he documented that she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her. This was a very deeply religious Mormon family. They actually did. They crowded around the bedside and held hands and prayed for her and such as that. She was then transported to Salt Lake City. She lived. She not only lived but three days later she made a full recovery.

Alex Tsakiris: And what did she tell you…

Dr. Melvin Morse: Her first words, the first words she said when she came out of her coma, she turned to the nurse down at Primary Children’s in Salt Lake City. She says, “Where are my friends?” And then they’d say, “What do you mean, where are your friends?” She’d say, “Yeah, all the people that I met in Heaven. Where are they?” [Laughs]

The innocence of a child. So I saw her in follow-up, another one of these odd twists of fate. I happened to be in addition doing my residency and just happened to be working in the same community clinic in that area. My jaw just dropped to the floor when she and her mother walked in. I was like, “What?” I had not even heard that she had lived. I had assumed that she had died. She looked at me and she said to her mother, “There’s the man that put a tube down my nose.” [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: What are you thinking at that point when she says that?

Dr. Melvin Morse: You know, it’s one of those things—I laughed. I sort of giggled the way a teenager would giggle about sex. It was just embarrassing. I didn’t know what to think. Certainly, I’d trained at Johns Hopkins. I thought when you died you died. I said, “What do you mean, you saw me put a tube in your nose?”

She said, “Oh, yeah. I saw you take me into another room that looked like a doughnut.”

She said things like, “You called someone on the phone and you asked, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

She described the nurses talking about a cat who had died. One of the nurses had a cat that had died and it was just an incidental conversation. She said she was floating out of her body during this entire time. I just sort of laughed. And then she taps me on the wrist. You’ve got to hear this, Alex.

After I laughed she taps me on the wrist and she says, “You’ll see, Dr. Morse. Heaven is fun.” [Laughs] I was completely blown away by the entire experience. I immediately determined that I would figure out what was going on here. This was in complete defiance of everything I had been taught in terms of medicine.

No need for me to believe anything about what 'dead' means - I know.  But you should hold whatever beliefs you wish - you'll be happier that way.

You're just playing with semantics, Leadville. There is always a theoretical possibility (if the body hasn't been destroyed) that a person could be restored to life even if it meant cryogenically freezing them to be brought back in some technologically more advanced future. Therefore, it's fair to argue that such a position is unfalsifiable.

If you look at the case studies, one that comes to mind from memory, was a young Japanese girl who committed suicide in a forest (I think it was an overdose)

Her body wasn't found for many hours. They don't know exactly how long she was dead for, but they estimated it as at least five to ten hours or more (by her body temperature which was very low). They tried multiple CPR  but it didn't work.

At this point anywhere else in the world (apart from South Korea and some hospitals in the US) they would have given up.  NOTE : This girl was obviously judged to be dead, it is ridiculous to suggest anything else.

In the UK she would have been handed over to the undertaker. However in Japan they have a plentiful supply of a very remarkable machine called an ECMO...Extra corporeal membrane oxygenator. So in one last desperate (many medics would say crazy) attempt to bring her back, they hooked her up to that machine (which is like a heart bypass machine) and they allowed it to run for many hours.

Eventually and incredibly, her heart fluttered back to life at some stage and after that, she was transferred to intensive care where she eventually recovered.

Are you going to try and tell us that this girl wasn't at any stage dead ?

If you look at the case studies, one that comes to mind from memory, was a young Japanese girl who committed suicide in a forest (I think it was an overdose)

Her body wasn't found for many hours. They don't know exactly how long she was dead for, but they estimated it as at least five to ten hours or more (by her body temperature which was very low). They tried multiple CPR and shocks but it didn't work.

At this point anywhere else in the world (apart from South Korea and some hospitals in the US) they would have given up.  NOTE : This girl was obviously judged to be dead, it is ridiculous to suggest anything else.

In the UK she would have been handed over to the undertaker. However in Japan they have a plentiful supply of a very remarkable machine called an ECMO...Extra corporeal membrane oxygenator. So in one last desperate (many medics would say crazy) attempt to bring her back, they hooked her up to that machine (which is like a heart bypass machine) and they allowed it to run for many hours.

Eventually and incredibly, her heart fluttered back to life at some stage and after that, she was transferred to intensive care where she eventually recovered.

Are you going to try and tell us that this girl wasn't at any stage dead ?

This was a great read! It really makes me wonder just how exactly consciousness is bound to the body... like a magnet of sorts. Heal the body enough so that consciousness can inhabit it, and consciousness will gravitate back...