Debate: That veridical NDEs are a myth [split: A splendid video about evolution]

Our target population is patients experiencing cardiac arrest in hospital [in the emergency department or hospital wards] or out of hospital [in whom resuscitation efforts are ongoing at ED arrival]. Emergency Department or Research staff will be alerted to cardiac arrest and will attend with portable brain oxygen monitoring devices and a tablet which will display visual images upwards above the patient as resuscitation is taking place.

https://www.hra.nhs.uk/planning-and-impr.../aware-ii/

Zero hits

There have been zero studies measuring the visual accuracy of recalled NDE OBE's. Martial's will be the first.

AWARE's visual target was attempting to measure whether patients were up on the ceiling, all targets were hidden and secret.  AWARE was not measuring the visual accuracy of experients NDE OBE recollections.

There have been zero studies measuring the visual accuracy of recalled NDE OBE's. Martial's will be the first.

AWARE's visual target was attempting to measure whether patients were up on the ceiling, all targets were hidden and secret.  AWARE was not measuring the visual accuracy of experients NDE OBE recollections.

The problem with what you are suggesting is that it is not a double-blinded methodology and therefore has much lower scientific value than what the AWARE study attempted. In AWARE, visual targets were hidden from everyone except a potential out-of-body experiencer, which is essential for reducing bias and ensuring valid data.

The problem with what you are suggesting is that it is not a double-blinded methodology and therefore has much lower scientific value than what the AWARE study attempted. In AWARE, visual targets were hidden from everyone except a potential out-of-body experiencer, which is essential for reducing bias and ensuring valid data.

While supporting all the sincere dialog in this thread, the experiments under discussion are well designed but not to the point, from my perspective.  Treating PSI like a physical event defeats the purpose and conflates units of measure.

Eyes see refracted light.  Differently than physical processes, minds detect the signals communicated via the optic nerve, add meaningful input and produce vision.  Refracted light is physical and measurable as to its materials and energetic states.  Light patterns in nature only elicit meaning when detected and decoded by agents.  In nature, biological sensation brings motive to an organism.  In both cases, natural and computational, information processes reveal the representation and the important meanings.

There are no objective meanings in photon patterns.  What would a "spirit" see as a mind. Real world meanings provoke entanglement.  Affordances motivate agents and are extracted from the environment, specifically the informational environment.  They are found with local understanding as the key activity.  Understanding is measured by different criteria than physical units of measure.  Understanding is demonstrated by focus on probable pasts, futures and current meanings.  Finding future relations, in the past is not physical.

Vision is a non-physical mental experience.  Our vision, if normative (real good) leads agents, like ourselves into believing that our eyes magically are delivering reality direct and that they can reach into the environment through focus.  In fact, eyes stay in sockets and they are just sending electrochemical signals to the brain.  Perception by biological organs are a well-developed senses evolved through billions of years.  The meaning in sight is not in the physical environment. 

 The reading of meanings in vision is from entangled relations between organism and his environments.  Meaning is found in the informational environment and organic perception reads meanings directly.  see J. J. Gibson

What the eyes of people see is from physical signals.  What a "spirit" would see - as a mind - would be with mental understanding (and not with a physical channel of input).  Different than the actual physical source of sight, minds can see through imagination, prior knowledge, expectation and with love.

If the experiment is hoping that - like on tv effects - the mind sees like an eye....  It will fail.  If however, if the experiment finds that the subject found meanings - related meaning and symbolic information, then it would make sense to measure if communication has taken place.   When testing info transfer, informational units of measure should hold.

 What is Gibson's theory of perception?
AI Overview
James J. Gibson's theory of perception, also known as the Ecological Approach, proposes that we directly perceive the environment without cognitive interpretation, as the rich, continuous information available in the world itself specifies what to do. Key concepts include affordances (what the environment offers to a perceiver), the optic array (patterns of light that provide information), and direct perception (which emphasizes information pickup rather than mental construction).

  bolding mine

 "Thought from the eye closes the understanding, but thought from the understanding opens the eye". - Swedenborg

Ah, the myth of veridical NDEs makes its predictable entrance. Yes, if this were a reliably reproducible phenomenon, I'd absolutely call it empirical evidence. But let's talk numbers: we're dealing with roughly a hundred anecdotal reports collected over decades, most documented secondhand, none under controlled conditions.
This isn't evidence - it's the plural of anecdote. 

Science evidence leads to process models.  Evidence from measurement works for the physical environment, such as chemistry.  Reactions are confined to materials and forces, with high reliability to outcomes. (Methodological Materialism) Gases evolve from splitting bonds in substances and a process model of the chemistry maps outputs from initial conditions.  Empirical evidence is apparent when viewed in an holistic configuration, such as a model for ionic bonds and their dissolution.

However, evidence is equally valid at the informational level, such as computation where algorithms model the action.  Specific structured information outputs from prescribed parsing of data.  Experience and mental states by living things is not so easy to objectively measure as are chemicals after a process.  However, outcomes are indirectly measurable through narrative reporting and changes in behavior or useful knowledge.  Marketing companies are highly skilled at measuring opinions and desires, using information science.  The growth of the internet as a tool to gain knowledge of opinions and desires is a frantic scientific industry. 

If one was to measure natural behaviors based on specific experiences, a controlled environment may mask the informational root causes at hand.  Real-world situations are unique, unlike mindless chemicals.  Tests in controlled environments may have a built-in damper on Psi outcomes.  However, in the natural environment Psi is everywhere all the time. 

There are not a few cases of Psi and OBE, but ubiquitous narrative reports in all cultures throughout all history.  The problem is the lack of a clear process model for how information leaks, from one mind to another or how there is inner sight and imagination which can change real-world circumstances. Methodological Informationalism, where information is see as an equally valid field to define process models in an informational environment is balanced reponse.  Methodological Materialism works by isolating physical events and excluding other causes.  Methodological Informationalism can likewise exclude physical causes and focus on logic, communication and meaningful interactions.  It is hard to say that a desire for meaning is not a featured real-world driver. 

I appreciate your sincere arguments, but claiming it's just a few nuts in the past few years who have had experiences where information communication was greater than expected from physical signals - is incredibly weak.  People see other people in dream states all the time.  Many times it comes with deep meaning.  There is no chemistry explaining deep meaning or how someone can suddenly understand from inner vision.
 
The process model I see starts with how the mind transcends physical signal limitation.  A science model for how understanding, beyond physical clues is modelled in biological organisms.  What informational processes occur need to be defined.  Information science can get to the bottom of how mental understanding operates!  It just needs to resume the work on mental evolution and see how understanding, as a capability, evolved.  I am sure it may confuse some folks who are committed to the modern narratives, but the champion for mental evolution is Charles Darwin -- in direct conflict with neoDarwinism.

I offer the example of biological evolution as a comparison.  At the end of his career Charles Darwin worked 8 or more years with George Romanes.  Romanes, as his close protégé, who continued their work.  Six years after Darwin's death Romanes published the title Mental Evolution, in 1888, with a forward by Darwin written before his death.  and mental evolution, As per Darwin and Romanes, where left behind and the work of A. Weismann.  Weismann ensured his place in history with his physical barrier to mental/experiential genetic effects with his "Weismann Barrier".  Today it is simply false and set-back the study of mental evolution a 100 years.  Today we know that the genome has many channels for switches and regulation through information being altered by adaption from experience.

So, like Weismann the whole idea that mind changes real-world probabilities, was been set-back 100 or more years.  Like Darwin and Romanes belief in mind as an agent of change in evolution, so we must reinstate the role of mind and how it leads to understanding the past and future, while stuck in the physical present.

There have been zero studies measuring the visual accuracy of recalled NDE OBE's. Martial's will be the first.

AWARE's visual target was attempting to measure whether patients were up on the ceiling, all targets were hidden and secret.  AWARE was not measuring the visual accuracy of experients NDE OBE recollections.

What is the structure of Martial's study? What is she doing differently?

The recent-back-and-forth here has triggered memories of a discussion a few years back about one of Sartori's cases; I don't know that you could call that a hit, but it is the one example I know of where a patient remarked on something connected to hidden symbols during their NDE.

What is the structure of Martial's study? What is she doing differently?

The recent-back-and-forth here has triggered memories of a discussion a few years back about one of Sartori's cases; I don't know that you could call that a hit, but it is the one example I know of where a patient remarked on something connected to hidden symbols during their NDE.

I wouldn't say that's a hit and it goes to show how much further our research methods have come over time when it comes to reducing potential sensory leakage and other related ways of compromising accounts. The fact that he didn't mention noticing anything in his first interview is very standout and is consistent with the other NDEs in her study where people were high enough to see the monitor but weren't concerned enough to pay attention to it. Sartori's line of questioning itself is very leading and the fact that he only brings up noticing something after she does so means I definitely wouldn't count that as any kind of accurate perception.

I wouldn't say that's a hit and it goes to show how much further our research methods have come over time when it comes to reducing potential sensory leakage and other related ways of compromising accounts. The fact that he didn't mention noticing anything in his first interview is very standout and is consistent with the other NDEs in her study where people were high enough to see the monitor but weren't concerned enough to pay attention to it. Sartori's line of questioning itself is very leading and the fact that he only brings up noticing something after she does so means I definitely wouldn't count that as any kind of accurate perception.

As I recall, her one partial hit who accurately described parts of the room and events but didn't see the hidden troll doll said that he just didn't turn his head that way when asked.

Also, it's very nice to see there's still some psi-skeptics on this site because otherwise this would'vbe devolved into an echo chamber long ago. We need skeptics to keep things grounded.

What is the structure of Martial's study? What is she doing differently?

The recent-back-and-forth here has triggered memories of a discussion a few years back about one of Sartori's cases; I don't know that you could call that a hit, but it is the one example I know of where a patient remarked on something connected to hidden symbols during their NDE.

I don't know anything about her study, other than snippets in the media... like this one...

...The University of Liège team is also trying to more thoroughly evaluate claims about out-of-body experiences. Around 79 percent of people who have an NDE report leaving their body, and some wake up knowing facts about their environment that they seemingly should not know. “I’m not saying it’s not true, but here we want to objectively test it,” Martial says.
To this end, she and her colleagues have decorated the hospital resuscitation room with unexpected objects and images, some of which are hidden in places that could be viewed only from the vantage point of someone near the ceiling. While a patient is in the resuscitation room, including while they are conscious, the team plays an audio clip of various words and animal sounds once every minute. They test for recollections of any images or sounds in follow-ups with surviving participants, and they also use video recordings to compare people’s memories with reality...

...which suggests she may be using some visual targets which are neither hidden nor secret, unlike AWARE I/II's crazy target methodology. Although I suspect that any accurate OBE recall of non-hidden/non-secret targets would not be assumed to be anomalous. However any hit on a non-secret/non-hidden visual target would be a huge success IMO, casting doubt on claims that medical-type NDE OBE's are just hallucinations - even if people still disagree on the mechanism behind the patients accurate recall. But it's very much dependent on the particular targets, and their placement/positioning. I'm pretty sure they are not going to have a 3D scan of the recovery-room/target-objects - to explore the positioning and view of these targets :-)... but this sounds like it could turn out to be the best planned study on medical-type OBE's we have to date.