Latest from Dr Sam Parnia

A few weeks ago, the promised youtube channel has appeared online.
NY Critical Care & Resuscitation Science Group

There are a few shorter videos along with this longer discussion:

A recording of our 2022 Brain Awareness Week Panel Discussion, where we chat about topics related to what happens to our brain, mind, and consciousness as we die. Unfortunately the first ~10 minutes were cut off, but we begin with the question of, "How can we define death?"

Thank you to all who attended, with a special thanks to our brilliant panelists:

• Dr. Lindsey Gurin, assistant professor of neurology and psychiatry, with expertise in neuro-rehabilitation at NYU Grossman School of Medicine
  
• Dr. Megan Craig, associate professor of philosophy and art at Stony Brook University, with an interest in the mind-body problem
  
• Dr. Anthony Bossis, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, conducting psychedelic research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine
  
• Dr. Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science, studying consciousness at University of California, Irvine
  
• Dr. Sam Parnia, associate professor of medicine and director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research at NYU Langone Health, dedicating his research to improving resuscitation techniques and understanding what happens to the human mind during and after cardiac arrest
  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl_DxGHR3Z0

Not sure if this is the right place to put this paper which is some kind of rebuttal to Parnia et al's recent guidelines paper. 
I was suprised how bad this is and also what they are complaining about. Mainly, they don't think Parnia's patients were really dead because to be really dead you have to be brain dead and therefore irretrievably dead. And you can't ask someone who is irretrievably dead (obviously) what happened (if anything). So effectively, they are implying that Parnia's work is pointless. If I'm in error here, please feel free to point it out. 

  commentonparniaetal_final.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362838256_Studying_death_and_near-death_experiences_requires_neuroscientific_expertise

Not sure if this is the right place to put this paper which is some kind of rebuttal to Parnia et al's recent guidelines paper. 
I was suprised how bad this is and also what they are complaining about. Mainly, they don't think Parnia's patients were really dead because to be really dead you have to be brain dead and therefore irretrievably dead. And you can't ask someone who is irretrievably dead (obviously) what happened (if anything). So effectively, they are implying that Parnia's work is pointless. If I'm in error here, please feel free to point it out. 

  commentonparniaetal_final.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362838256_Studying_death_and_near-death_experiences_requires_neuroscientific_expertise

Damn it's sure been a while since I left a comment on here. So I went through this and the perspective of the authors is very much on the physicalist end, which they firmly stand on the side on. One of the things they say pretty much highlights their bias on the issue. 

"Here, the authors make a logical fallacy. It is a prerequisite for being able to report an NDE that during the actual experience the person has to had a functioning brain and has survive without extensive brain damage. Without a functioning brain, how would it be possible to have such a detailed experience, store it for long periods of time, retrieve it from memory, and then narrate it eloquently many years later?"

The paper does make some good points as to why it is good to have more neuroscientific expertise when it comes to researching NDEs, but I feel like this statement is such a painful display of circular reasoning that it calls the authors intentions into question. NDEs happen, people can report their NDEs, therefore the brain must have been perfectly functioning in order for them to happen. We certainly have our own biases researching PSI stuff, but this is just painfully on the nose.

Later on in the paper they put forward their own hypothesis as to how NDEs happen:

"Rather than concluding that NDEs made during cardiac arrest are evidence for human consciousness being able to exist outside a functioning brain, the most parsimonious explanation is that NDEs are made just prior to the loss of consciousness (or immediately after consciousness is regained) - and hence can be remembered with successful ressucitation."

This, to me, demonstrates either a lack of familiarity with the published literature, a selective reading of it, or simply a major ignoring of anecdotes. Or they've read the rebuttals to these kind of ideals and disagree with them. But then I'm just a guy, not a researcher, so I can only say so much. I just felt like I should comment on it. Apparently these guys have had trouble with NDE researchers responding to their ideas around the potential evolutionary cause of NDEs in the past, so many they've become even more apprehensive about the subject.

[Ninshub]

"Here, the authors make a logical fallacy. It is a prerequisite for being able to report an NDE that during the actual experience the person has to had a functioning brain and has survive without extensive brain damage. Without a functioning brain, how would it be possible to have such a detailed experience, store it for long periods of time, retrieve it from memory, and then narrate it eloquently many years later?"

The paper does make some good points as to why it is good to have more neuroscientific expertise when it comes to researching NDEs, but I feel like this statement is such a painful display of circular reasoning that it calls the authors intentions into question. NDEs happen, people can report their NDEs, therefore the brain must have been perfectly functioning in order for them to happen. We certainly have our own biases researching PSI stuff, but this is just painfully on the nose.

You're picking out exactly what struck me too, which I posted about here:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-a...0#pid49040

I can understand the authors of that article wanting to label "brain death" at another specific point in the dying process rather than another.

However, just reading the beginning, this is fatally problematic to me:

Here, the authors make a logical fallacy. It is a prerequisite for being able to report an NDE that [b]during the actual experience the person has had a functioning brain and has survived without extensive brain damage. Without a functioning brain, how would it be possible to have such a detailed experience, store it for long
periods of time, retrieve it from memory, and then narrate it eloquently many years later?
[/b]

Yes 1) it is logical to say that it is a prerequisite to be able to report an NDE to have survived without extensive brain damage (or without sufficient amount of brain damage to prevent the reporting), but in the same sentence that 2) "during the actual experience the person had to have a functioning brain" is begging the question. [b]They've already inserted the answer into the question they're supposed to be investigating.[/b]

 
Incredibly lousy reasoning.

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads - Nautilus

Here is another lousy article (it is because it's not an accurate picture of the state of play) on the NDE. Parnia, the current leading investigator into this phenomenon is quoted.... 

“What we’re saying is science is showing you that death is not the end that we thought,” Parnia said. “It’s almost like a new, uncharted, unexplored territory.”

.....and ignored or trumped by 

Renaud Evrard, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Lorraine in France, who works with patients grappling with exceptional and paranormal experiences, including NDEs. Evrard accused Parnia and his co-authors of ignoring the actual data on NDEs. “They focus too much on the interpretation of testimonies and not enough on the evidence,” 

His main interests are on clinical, historical and theoretical aspects of parapsychology. In 2016, he published a book about the history of parapsychology in France (La légende de l'esprit : enquête sur 150 ans de parapsychologie), in 2018 about the anthropological aspects (Sur le divan des guérisseurs... et des autres. A quels soins se vouer ?, co-directed by D. Kessler-Bilthauer), and in 2019 about the sociological aspects (Vers une sociologie anomalistique : le paranormal au regard des sciences sociales, co-directed by Eric Ouellet).

So the author of that article prefers to listen to someone who has no direct experience whatsoever with hospitalised patients and their experiences. I do think they do it deliberately just to wind us up                                                  

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads - Nautilus

Here is another lousy article (it is because it's not an accurate picture of the state of play) on the NDE. Parnia, the current leading investigator into this phenomenon is quoted.... 

“What we’re saying is science is showing you that death is not the end that we thought,” Parnia said. “It’s almost like a new, uncharted, unexplored territory.”

.....and ignored or trumped by 

Renaud Evrard, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Lorraine in France, who works with patients grappling with exceptional and paranormal experiences, including NDEs. Evrard accused Parnia and his co-authors of ignoring the actual data on NDEs. “They focus too much on the interpretation of testimonies and not enough on the evidence,” 

His main interests are on clinical, historical and theoretical aspects of parapsychology. In 2016, he published a book about the history of parapsychology in France (La légende de l'esprit : enquête sur 150 ans de parapsychologie), in 2018 about the anthropological aspects (Sur le divan des guérisseurs... et des autres. A quels soins se vouer ?, co-directed by D. Kessler-Bilthauer), and in 2019 about the sociological aspects (Vers une sociologie anomalistique : le paranormal au regard des sciences sociales, co-directed by Eric Ouellet).

So the author of that article prefers to listen to someone who has no direct experience whatsoever with hospitalised patients and their experiences. I do think they do it deliberately just to wind us up                                                  

I think it's clear they are running scared.

My guess is we'll see a lot of more of this type of thing, though I am not to[o] worried about it. At this point they are probably just preaching to the choir, so to speak.

The interest in the Survival hypothesis is only going to grow, AFAICTell, for a variety of reasons. One important one being people would rather watch a documentary about the paranormal than listen to a skeptic tell them how dumb everyone else is.

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads - Nautilus

Here is another lousy article (it is because it's not an accurate picture of the state of play) on the NDE. Parnia, the current leading investigator into this phenomenon is quoted.... 

“What we’re saying is science is showing you that death is not the end that we thought,” Parnia said. “It’s almost like a new, uncharted, unexplored territory.”

.....and ignored or trumped by 

Renaud Evrard, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Lorraine in France, who works with patients grappling with exceptional and paranormal experiences, including NDEs. Evrard accused Parnia and his co-authors of ignoring the actual data on NDEs. “They focus too much on the interpretation of testimonies and not enough on the evidence,” 

His main interests are on clinical, historical and theoretical aspects of parapsychology. In 2016, he published a book about the history of parapsychology in France (La légende de l'esprit : enquête sur 150 ans de parapsychologie), in 2018 about the anthropological aspects (Sur le divan des guérisseurs... et des autres. A quels soins se vouer ?, co-directed by D. Kessler-Bilthauer), and in 2019 about the sociological aspects (Vers une sociologie anomalistique : le paranormal au regard des sciences sociales, co-directed by Eric Ouellet).

So the author of that article prefers to listen to someone who has no direct experience whatsoever with hospitalised patients and their experiences. I do think they do it deliberately just to wind us up                                                  

I don't want to get back into a habit of ragging on people who disagree with our interpretations of NDEs, it seems unproductive and needlessly defensive. But I still feel the need to comment on stuff like this. They bring up possible chemical causes, which we know aren't tenable. They bring up hypoxia causes which we know aren't the same. There's some stuff about OBEs but then they don't compare the differences between the two. To me it feels like a case of going these 2 things are similar, therefore they are the same. Something painfully frequent in neuroscience since it requires the clinical seperation between subject and researcher. The thing that really made me want to comment though was...

"But memories, things that minds do, like remember things and talk about them, depend on brain activity. No brain activity, no mental process. If somebody with no brain activity were able to experience something and remember it later, then pretty much everything we know about the brain, about science, about physics is wrong.” - Anil Seth

Is this, which I feel like is a perfect example of the self reinforcing nature of the paradigm we are currently in. Instead of seeing things like NDEs as a possible expansion of the way we see the world, they are seen as a threat to the paradigm we are currently a part of. Like all of a sudden if physicalism is wrong my car will stop running and everything we've learnt about physics up until this point will be worth nothing, it's silly.

This thread is entitled the latest from Dr Sam Parnia, so this is it (the latest)...I think. 

 Near death experiences: What really happens when you die? - YouTube

This thread is entitled the latest from Dr Sam Parnia, so this is it (the latest)...I think. 

Nice touch from Sam: "it's good to know that your spouse will scream at you even if you're dying"

This thread is entitled the latest from Dr Sam Parnia, so this is it (the latest)...I think. 

 Near death experiences: What really happens when you die? - YouTube

It is certainly fascinating how everything involving this is continuing to play out. People have been frantically going around like ants, worrying whether or not Parnia has suddenly become a materialist or something, and then he comes out with this and seens to confirm he's mostly of his old opinions. It'll be interesting when the actual paper finally comes out.