Misleading NDE articles?

Well... this is contradicted by the knowledge we have of verified brain states of patients who reported going through an NDE. Pam Reynolds, again, being the classic example where here brain was completely non-functional, yet she had full, lucid out-of-body awareness.

So, by that, it would appear rather succinctly that no brain processes are necessary for conscious experience in itself. Rather, brain processes are only necessary for a mind that needs to operate a physical form, in order to function in the physical world.

Brains are perhaps akin to... an engine in a car so to speak, in that you the driver don't need a functioning car engine to exist, but you need a functioning car engine to operate and make the car work.

My concern is that with advancements in technology we might find out that there are, in fact, some minimal electrical signals in new patients having NDEs. 

It might not be every single patient, but would we want to dismiss excellent cases just because the patient's brain was still over - however slightly - the threshold of what we would consider functional?

I mean if someone on this forum who I've never physically met privately messaged me and started telling me information about my family that even I didn't know that was told to them by a dead relative that I later verified, and this all came to them during an OOBE when they were sleeping in perfect health...to me that is better than a patient's vision of Heaven while in a hospital bed with no veridical aspects?

My concern is that with advancements in technology we might find out that there are, in fact, some minimal electrical signals in new patients having NDEs. 

It might not be every single patient, but would we want to dismiss excellent cases just because the patient's brain was still over - however slightly - the threshold of what we would consider functional?

I don't think minimal electrical signals mean much ~ it's just random noise without meaning, especially when contrasted with what the NDEr reports experiencing: being out-of-body, not experiencing anything happening to their body, the feeling and knowing of being dead, yet still existing.

The Materialist wants there to be residual electrical signals that they can desperately latch onto and claim that this means that the brain is the source, because there is "activity" of some non-descript sort.

I mean if someone on this forum who I've never physically met privately messaged me and started telling me information about my family that even I didn't know that was told to them by a dead relative that I later verified, and this all came to them during an OOBE when they were sleeping in perfect health...to me that is better than a patient's vision of Heaven while in a hospital bed with no veridical aspects?

I would just class those are just different forms of psychic / spiritual knowledge. That private individual telling you stuff? Sounds like classic mediumship. A vision of a heaven without veridical aspects cannot tell us anything, yes, but it doesn't discount any of the many more veridical NDEs.

That is why parapsychology research examines new NDEs against verified cases with veridical elements ~ cases with veridical elements have a vastly higher probability of being genuine. New NDEs may have enough common elements of other cases, even if they lack veridical elements, with the caveat that they cannot be easily corroborated.

I don't think minimal electrical signals mean much ~ it's just random noise without meaning, especially when contrasted with what the NDEr reports experiencing: being out-of-body, not experiencing anything happening to their body, the feeling and knowing of being dead, yet still existing.

The Materialist wants there to be residual electrical signals that they can desperately latch onto and claim that this means that the brain is the source, because there is "activity" of some non-descript sort.

Yeah, as you note the issue is not whether a person's brain has zero electrical signaling. Why it worries me when proponents loosely talk about the brain not functioning. I am unsure if minimal electrical signaling is random, it could serve a biological purpose.

We already know that when there is no veridical component the skeptic will say the memory of the NDE was formed before or after the period of no activity.

What proponents should stress is the question of what level of activity - and in what locations of the brain - being necessary for usual conscious experiences and how the NDEr's brain is not producing that activity. But the key still remains, IMO, the anomalous veridical components.

I just wish that there was no vital signs at all, period . When there are brain waves associated with consciousness or awareness like that, even in “spikes,” up to that far into cardiac arrest and doing CPR, now we have to correlate the brain signals with the seeming “out of body stuff.” And explain it or rationalize it from our “non dual perspective .” Seems i keep moving things around in my own mind to justify how it could still be real or true . 

Now, since it seems someone can claim the stuff they heard or saw somehow happened while there brain was still alive , like an assault victim being raped and feeling disassociated and out of body, either it’s the same , as in protective .. brain based .. or the actual self , pops out so to speak or something like that, or rejoins something it’s a part of , in circumstances of death, near death or related experiences.

I’ll focus on cases where someone perceived something they couldn’t have even in the area … like the person who supposedly saw the nursing room stuff above the floor he was on at the hospital.

And not “Mary’s” shoe type cases. Can’t really corroborate those . I bet once u break it down, barely any actually could be. Validated like that . 

Maybe the language is messing us up. Talking of paranormal and normal , physical and non physical . Maybe it’s all same stuff morphing into different things , in ways , forms , dimensions that never go away , just change . Who knows .

I agree with @Bill37 and I feel that we do need to be careful to keep our own bias under control with this subject.

We have real science with veridical evidence that supplies interesting things to ponder, and we have a whole bunch of stuffed turkey trying to fluff it's way into the evidence locker. To simply accept all the hype is to be bias. To accept theories because they sound right is bias. To use these experiences to support your own religion or beliefs is bias.

We still have to apply what we know to any actual survival situation, since the only evidence we have are from people who were revived and didn't then die to the point of no return. The tragic truth is that most people are very eager to survive death, but it isn't a given fact that everyone survives, yet. 

Then the spinoff systems, where they go, for how long, and do they return, etc. 

How do you even attempt proving this? Where are the experimental designs for death and survival, with possible rebirth?

To me, we have plenty of evidence that humans can and do collect data at a distance, just like with psychics, and RV, and OOBE's, and many other formats where we supply actual facts of things we couldn't know. So, this veridical evidence isn't specific to NDE's. Thus, the method for retrieving this data isn't solely near death experiences. An NDE becomes an altered state of consciousness capable of collecting real data, just like the many other altered states while living.

Another point is that these are not universal. Those of us who have died and had no experiences would likely outweigh the NDE reports by a mile.

Yeah, as you note the issue is not whether a person's brain has zero electrical signaling. Why it worries me when proponents loosely talk about the brain not functioning. I am unsure if minimal electrical signaling is random, it could serve a biological purpose.

I would consider it essentially random ~ especially when one considers that experiments using fMRI on a dead fish registered activity going on. It raises questions about perhaps not only fMRI, but the accuracy of the current tools science rely on so heavily. Perhaps there really is no activity or signally, and the tools are picking up erroneous stuff detected as such. But skeptics seem to not care about scientific accuracy if it favours their worldview.

We already know that when there is no veridical component the skeptic will say the memory of the NDE was formed before or after the period of no activity.

They say this with veridical components too ~ that someone told them something somehow, and "fed their delusions" and so on.

They still can't crack the Pam Reynolds' case, amusingly. The best they could resort to is "someone fed her information, and she dreamed it up" or something.

What proponents should stress is the question of what level of activity - and in what locations of the brain - being necessary for usual conscious experiences and how the NDEr's brain is not producing that activity. But the key still remains, IMO, the anomalous veridical components.

I don't think level of activity matters much, given the inaccuracies of fMRI and such. What matters is the veridical content the NDEr can bring back ~ most especially regarding deceased relatives, which go beyond mere physically accurate perceptions.

I agree with @Bill37 and I feel that we do need to be careful to keep our own bias under control with this subject.

We have real science with veridical evidence that supplies interesting things to ponder, and we have a whole bunch of stuffed turkey trying to fluff it's way into the evidence locker. To simply accept all the hype is to be bias. To accept theories because they sound right is bias. To use these experiences to support your own religion or beliefs is bias.

We still have to apply what we know to any actual survival situation, since the only evidence we have are from people who were revived and didn't then die to the point of no return. The tragic truth is that most people are very eager to survive death, but it isn't a given fact that everyone survives, yet. 

Then the spinoff systems, where they go, for how long, and do they return, etc. 

How do you even attempt proving this? Where are the experimental designs for death and survival, with possible rebirth?

To me, we have plenty of evidence that humans can and do collect data at a distance, just like with psychics, and RV, and OOBE's, and many other formats where we supply actual facts of things we couldn't know. So, this veridical evidence isn't specific to NDE's. Thus, the method for retrieving this data isn't solely near death experiences. An NDE becomes an altered state of consciousness capable of collecting real data, just like the many other altered states while living.

Another point is that these are not universal. Those of us who have died and had no experiences would likely outweigh the NDE reports by a mile.

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/artic...l-aspects/

Near-Death Experiences – Paranormal Aspects

Near-death experiencers sometimes show a detailed and accurate knowledge of scenes and incidents in the environment of their comatose body. Related paranormal phenomena include after-death communication, telepathy, miraculous healing and post-experience psychokinesis.

Introduction

This article lists externally confirmed (veridical) cases of clairvoyant perception and other anomalies during near-death experiences (NDEs), as documented by Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven and Rudolf H Smit for their book The Self Does Not Die (2016, 2023), first published in Dutch as Wat een Stervend Brein Niet Kan and translated in Italian and Spanish (Il Sé Non Muore and El Yo No Muere respectively). In all the cases, the paranormal aspect was directly corroborated by a third party, ranging from a partner, friend or relative, to a nurse or medical doctor. The authors excluded cases with a possible anomalous aspect if it was only confirmed by the persons who experienced the NDE and not by anyone else, or exclusively through the experiencers themselves. Confirmation by a third party refutes the claim that such testimonies are uncorroborated anecdotes lacking scientific evidential value.

Rivas participated in the development of a scale to measure veridical aspects of NDEs, called the vNDE scale.1

My concern is that with advancements in technology we might find out that there are, in fact, some minimal electrical signals in new patients having NDEs. 

It might not be every single patient, but would we want to dismiss excellent cases just because the patient's brain was still over - however slightly - the threshold of what we would consider functional?

I mean if someone on this forum who I've never physically met privately messaged me and started telling me information about my family that even I didn't know that was told to them by a dead relative that I later verified, and this all came to them during an OOBE when they were sleeping in perfect health...to me that is better than a patient's vision of Heaven while in a hospital bed with no veridical aspects?

"to me that is better than"

Better for what reason? Meaning, purpose, existence, what is life for? Well, at one point in my life I might have said simply, "life is for living", by which I suppose I meant, participating, being active in some way. Presumably, in a way which has some external impact, rather than purely internally-focussed. When we have an impact on the world, should we consider whether it might be a positive or negative one, and to whom or what?

I'm again more than a little convinced that our research or experimental goals might be inconsequential, trivial, whereas a patient experiencing something during an NDE which changes their own life or that of those around them, or even an experience which brings about a sense of peace in a world which can be very stressful and difficult, that might have some utility.

"to me that is better than"

Better for what reason? Meaning, purpose, existence, what is life for? Well, at one point in my life I might have said simply, "life is for living", by which I suppose I meant, participating, being active in some way. Presumably, in a way which has some external impact, rather than purely internally-focussed. When we have an impact on the world, should we consider whether it might be a positive or negative one, and to whom or what?

I'm again more than a little convinced that our research or experimental goals might be inconsequential, trivial, whereas a patient experiencing something during an NDE which changes their own life or that of those around them, or even an experience which brings about a sense of peace in a world which can be very stressful and difficult, that might have some utility.

Fair criticism, I should have stated "better" for the record of evidence evaluated by the public rather than a personal experience.

Though even there I'd concede that it is interesting we measure scientific facts by their causal power but an NDE that completely changes someone's life for the positive is arguably something of stronger causal power. 

What I have brought up before, regarding the recall of the veridical proof during the NDE, is that we have no real clue when this information arrives. If we include the known subjects of this forum, from precognition, RV, OOBE, and others, where future events are known, past events, and all sorts of other information that doesn't arrive in linear time...

Unless we can firmly show when the information arrives to the person, and in what manner, we are again assuming and guessing.

For many of us, who have experienced precognition that is verified and thus veridical, the actual point when these people got this information doesn't necessarily have to be when they were in a dead condition or having the lack of brain activity. That is the first false assumption that is a basic premise of this entire belief. It becomes a cult when we forget the rest of our knowledge and the known veridical data about how things of this nature happen, and when, because we abandon what we know about time and Psi phenomena.

What I have brought up before, regarding the recall of the veridical proof during the NDE, is that we have no real clue when this information arrives. If we include the known subjects of this forum, from precognition, RV, OOBE, and others, where future events are known, past events, and all sorts of other information that doesn't arrive in linear time...

Unless we can firmly show when the information arrives to the person, and in what manner, we are again assuming and guessing.

For many of us, who have experienced precognition that is verified and thus veridical, the actual point when these people got this information doesn't necessarily have to be when they were in a dead condition or having the lack of brain activity. That is the first false assumption that is a basic premise of this entire belief. It becomes a cult when we forget the rest of our knowledge and the known veridical data about how things of this nature happen, and when, because we abandon what we know about time and Psi phenomena.

But even Braude - one of the most ardent supporters of Living Agent / Super Psi theories - conceded the evidence ultimately tilts - however slightly in his view - toward Survival.

I made a thread going through that book - along with a few other cases beyond it - here.