Reddit's latest NDE thread: claims of EEG being unreliable to detect activity

https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/c...ection_of/

Sam Parnia is being referred to as a "woo peddler"

People are remarking that NDEs are simply brain activity that the EEG didn't detect due to it being ancient technology and that the brain doesn't actually shut down after 30 seconds of cardiac arrest

I'd be interested in some skeptical and non skeptical perspectives because I feel like the skeptics DID have a bit of a point when they said that the funding for AWARE II came from the Templeton Institute, a religious organization.
I'm a bit skeptical on those due to what I've seen creationists say.

Sam Parnia is being referred to as a "woo peddler"

So? You meet all sorts of people if you wander around corners of the internet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/c...ection_of/

Sam Parnia is being referred to as a "woo peddler"

People are remarking that NDEs are simply brain activity that the EEG didn't detect due to it being ancient technology and that the brain doesn't actually shut down after 30 seconds of cardiac arrest

I'd be interested in some skeptical and non skeptical perspectives because I feel like the skeptics DID have a bit of a point when they said that the funding for AWARE II came from the Templeton Institute, a religious organization.
I'm a bit skeptical on those due to what I've seen creationists say.

You'd drive yourself mad trying to show hospital EEG measurements are/are not responsible for an NDE. It's not possible, there is no way to show the EEG measurements are correlated with the patients experience. EM fields from firing in the brain have been measured by up to around 5 minutes after energy starvation in animal studies. As for brain 'activity' - a much broader concept than measuring EM fields using EEG/iEEG - well that goes on for hours. None of this gets us anywhere as regards the typical hospital NDE.

The ONLY area that can be investigated is the OBE. What we want to know is whether patients are recalling any accurate visual information from their OBE? No one is doing such studies. Parnia etc is still hiding his secret visual targets, Blanke etc don't even bother using visual targets.

I think worrying about what Redditors say is a waste of time.

There are billions to trillions of present-to-future dollar amounts based on the idea the conscious experience is completely captured in materialist terms so the accusation of bias can cut both ways. 

For example...

I don't spend time on reddit - for years I thought it was a malware site (because I arrived there through malicious browser redirects). I of course blocked it from my browser as a result.

I also don't spend time on the AwareofAWARE site but it does appear to offer some discussion around the topics relevant to research into NDEs.
https://awareofaware.co/welcome/blog/

https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/c...ection_of/

Sam Parnia is being referred to as a "woo peddler"

People are remarking that NDEs are simply brain activity that the EEG didn't detect due to it being ancient technology and that the brain doesn't actually shut down after 30 seconds of cardiac arrest

I'd be interested in some skeptical and non skeptical perspectives because I feel like the skeptics DID have a bit of a point when they said that the funding for AWARE II came from the Templeton Institute, a religious organization.
I'm a bit skeptical on those due to what I've seen creationists say.

All of this concentration on AWARE II ignores two crucial factors: (1) NDEs are by their very nature extremely hard to investigate using "scientific" laboratory techniques, so Parnia's studies were destined to almost certainly fail because NDEs are rare, unpredictable, are usually due to extreme trauma (which can't ethically be induced in the lab), and finally, because NDErs suddenly out-of-body are very unlikely to be interested in studying and memorizing some sort of random image presented for them near the ceiling of their room. (2) There has accumulated over the years a large number of veridical NDE OBEs, where observations out of body and interactions with known witnesses have been reliably investigated, confirmed and documented. Over 120 of these documented cases have been presented in the well-known volume The Self Does Not Die by Rivas, Dirven and Smit. It is extremely unlikely that despite the evidence every single one of these cases can be explained as a worthless anecdote. Even one unexplained one would still establish the case for the reality of veridical NDE OBEs (see the "One White Crow" principle established many years ago by William James).

https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/c...ection_of/

Sam Parnia is being referred to as a "woo peddler"

People are remarking that NDEs are simply brain activity that the EEG didn't detect due to it being ancient technology and that the brain doesn't actually shut down after 30 seconds of cardiac arrest

I'd be interested in some skeptical and non skeptical perspectives because I feel like the skeptics DID have a bit of a point when they said that the funding for AWARE II came from the Templeton Institute, a religious organization.
I'm a bit skeptical on those due to what I've seen creationists say.

Aside from the lack of valid arguments for the unmeasureable brain activity claim based on actual evidence (somebody can always claim without evidence that some unobservable something exists, even for instance that 1000 angels are dancing on the head of that pin over there), the disparaging Templeton Institute remark is a perfect example of the ignorant Genetic Fallacy. Genetic fallacies deny the truth of an argument based on its source. It invalidly focuses on the person or situation, and appeals to prejudice, rather than actually engaging with the argument itself. Leaving it a likely supposition that the genetic fallacy argumentor really doesn't have any valid response.

I don't spend time on reddit - for years I thought it was a malware site (because I arrived there through malicious browser redirects). I of course blocked it from my browser as a result.

I also don't spend time on the AwareofAWARE site but it does appear to offer some discussion around the topics relevant to research into NDEs.
https://awareofaware.co/welcome/blog/

Yeah if there is a serious argument with great reasoning and/or a collection of citations it might be worth posting, but I don't see the point of us discussing what people on Reddit think about a topic.

If anything having lost the cultural battle against acceptance of the paranormal the New Atheist types seem to have retreated there to wallow...