To NDE or not to NDE (re-done)

I think the problem might be semantic. We are used to thinking of dreaming and, especially, hallucinations as most decidedly non-real. The stereotype of someone who hallucinates is that person is deluded or has a psychological or neurological illness. Hallucinations tend to be described as being chaotic and irrational - usually disturbing or frightening. Dreams can be scary or comforting but we don't usually wake from them feeling that they were more real than our everyday reality. We usually quickly recognise them as dreams - whatever that means.

Without getting into obscure definitions, NDEs are usually described as having an entirely different quality, often a life changing quality with the experiencer convinced of the hyper-reality of what they saw and felt. I don't doubt that dreams can be valuable in terms of information and inspiration but I have never felt such a life-changing, positive certainty after a dream, no matter how realistic it seemed at the time.

NB. Dreaming is at the very least a twofold process. The information that is received and transferred for use in physical reality i.e. what we remember when we awake. Much of this information is the physical mind reducing the dream data to symbols and images in order to give it meaning.

Here's the tricky part.

The other stage of dreaming is our etheric or astral body's extradimensional experiences and that information is, in part, translated back to our physical minds for re-imaging in what % I can only guess. The information that is of such a high order that only it is valuable - understandable - to our Higher Minds (Spirit).

The tricky part is that both experiences happen linearly, so to speak. This and That.

NB. Dreaming is at the very least a twofold process. The information that is received and transferred for use in physical reality i.e. what we remember when we awake. Much of this information is the physical mind reducing the dream data to symbols and images in order to give it meaning.

Here's the tricky part.

The other stage of dreaming is our etheric or astral body's extradimensional experiences and that information is, in part, translated back to our physical minds for re-imaging in what % I can only guess. The information that is of such a high order that only it is valuable - understandable - to our Higher Minds (Spirit).

The tricky part is that both experiences happen linearly, so to speak. This and That.

Speaking of a twofold process, I've had some strange dream experiences lately. They happen at the point of waking from an ongoing dream - in the morning when I would normally wake up. I find myself literally in two minds, each asserting its reality. So I alternate between being in bed and walking around in some other reality and each self is saying "this is reality, the other is a dream". Quite weird but equally convincing at the time.

Speaking of a twofold process, I've had some strange dream experiences lately. They happen at the point of waking from an ongoing dream - in the morning when I would normally wake up. I find myself literally in two minds, each asserting its reality. So I alternate between being in bed and walking around in some other reality and each self is saying "this is reality, the other is a dream". Quite weird but equally convincing at the time.

K, this is what happens when we start to wake up. Physical reality becomes flexible, it can come n go. I promise you I have been there, I arrive at places before I was supposed to get there leaving 10 minutes after the appointment time.

By 'wake up' I don't mean an ascension, "we are now enlightened" sorta thing. It's not an exclusive club. Some of us are having a physical reality experience that pushes our boundaries of believablity. That's the path we chose and continue to choose.

Once things settle down, when we understand what is happening is what we co-create, this malleable physical reality becomes a great joy instead of out-of-control chaos.

I think the problem might be semantic. We are used to thinking of dreaming and, especially, hallucinations as most decidedly non-real. 

It has been nearly 50 years since I became a no-doubter, knowing that if the stream of signals that we experience from our bodies is cut-off, that the reception of real-world signals to the mind does not stop.  I have been making the case that living things are working with ambient information in their environments.  Their informational environments are made from structured information objects that are measurably detectable, and are just as real as physical objects.  My point is that just like a flat earth, we have been mistaken about the role of mind, believing our eyes, instead of rational analysis of the data.

Stomachs process materials; and chemistry is the tool for understanding.  Minds process information and information science is the proper tool.  We will not "see" the picture until information is understood to structure reality, as much as materials.  Minds have evolved (more than once) and each different track of mental evolution is a case study for what information affords living things.

 Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? 

If dreaming is only a physical function or an epiphenomenon - brain stops --> function stops.

If dreaming is an informational process in the mind, and the mind is processing nothing physical - but is processing meaning, then dreaming in cardiac arrest would be possible.

If meaningful ideas are just physical - well  living things effect meaning only by physical actions.  We simply know that this is not true, living things can adapt, from mental work and not doing things can bring order and organization.

We used to think in science that matter was it and everything, then we modeled energy (a few hundred years ago).  No literate person today believes that the energy they exert is from their "being."  We know that we are only transformers of energy.  We don't think when a cut heals that the material healing the cut was from our being, but from what we drank, breathed and ate.

Why in the world, do we think that meaning is from our brain's being.  We live in a sea of meanings - that we assimilate, expel and build.  We are not meanings, we incorporate meaning from the inner and outer environments we inhabit.

In the model I am using - NDE's are just self-aware dreaming, without having the sensory inflow from the brain.  Better than dreaming - because it is focused only on what can be detected in the infosphere. (informational environment)

That doesn't agree with the data though. Once the mind has exited the brain after cardiac arrest (as is consistently subjectively reported) accurate observations of the surroundings are reported. It's clearly nothing to do with a dream. Now if you're hypothesising that this entity (the mind/psyche whatever) then has the capacity to dream, that's beyond our scope and always will be.

Anybody who reads the questions can see that they only cover a certain type of experience. Take one simple example to try and illustrate my point, if we just look at the four questions from the portion of the questionnaire covering the experients affective reaction during their experience...



Only very specific positive experiences can get points... I don’t think anybody on here would argue that distressing experiences are not also considered to be a part of some people’s NDE... but the questionnaire doesn’t cover those types of affective reactions.

I see what you mean, Max but does it ultimately matter if some people are not awarded NDE status for whatever reason ? Don't the people themselves know what occurred to them ? I mean it's not like mainstream science actually accepts that these people are getting a glimpse of another world, is it ? They just insist it's a complex hallucination that they haven't fully explained yet and if it's only a hallucination then it's not much different (effectively in the end) than an ordinary hallucination, such as the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

EDIT : I think people do know the difference between the stages of the NDE and hallucinations. That is why the hallucination explanation doesn't satisfy them.

I see what you mean, Max but does it really matter if some people are not awarded NDE status for whatever reason ? I mean it's not like mainstream science actually accepts that these people are getting a glimpse of another world, is it ? They just insist it's a complex hallucination that they haven't fully explained yet and if it's only a hallucination then it's not much different (effectively in the end) than an ordinary hallucination, such as the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

I think people know themselves what occurred, where they've been, or the reality of it. I don't think they need a certificate with points on it, rather just acceptance that what they experienced was real, which they don't get from science in general at the moment. Maybe that will change.

Well if you actually want mainstream science to accept this stuff then yes you are going to have to be actually scientific about it. I mean, how can you praise Sam Parnia but then turn around and go "oh well who cares if IANDS has totally biased questionnaires, it's not like anyone takes this stuff seriously" and then also harp on skeptics that they're just being close minded and constantly propping Parnia up as some sort of saviour that will vindicate you in the end?

And acceptance? Wow, no, I'm sorry but no. I'm someone who's busted my ass day in and day out for years now obsessing over trying to figure out how to properly classify my own projections as real or not from within the projection and although I have certainly found some very good coorelating criteria that has helped me improve reliability it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I do not at all trust that someone who has not put in the hours that I have could accurately determine the reality of their OBE experience. I'm sorry but full stop, no, I don't think they can do it. It's like how a musician is able to listen to a song they've never heard before and then write out the sheet music for it by ear. Why? Because that musician has been working with those notes in many different forms so consistently for so long that they know them when they hear them. Someone who just enjoys the sound of music is not going have that level of precision. All they really know is "this sounds good" or "this sounds bad." This makes coming up with criteria for a real NDE not just stupidly important but also stupidly difficult because a layman might not be skilled enough to notice the smal details that set one apart from another. I for one have identified as many as 7 distinct dream states, only one of which has a very high likelyhood of being "real" when it occurs. "Very high" does not mean "certain" and It's "as many as" because I'm still on the fence about whether 3 of them really constitute their own distinct states or if they are occasional components of other states. It was not easy coming up with this criteria, it took a lot of hard work, a lot of experiments that I had to run both awake and asleep. Some of them I could control the set up of, others I had to wait for the right opportunity for. Acceptance is not something I will ever endorse or support in any way, it's bullshit spiritualist nonesense that spits in the face of everyone who actually cares about applying real science to this phenomena to really find out what's really going on with it and how to use it.

It reminds me of a Rune Soup podcast I listened to where he was interviewing someone called Ramsay Dukes or something, apparently someone with a lot of renown in the "magick" community. and he was talking about the differences between a magical thinker and a skeptic. He posed one example of a friend who's dying of cancer and all their friends are like "we're gonna cast a spell and cure his cancer' and then they come back the next day and his cancer is still there but he has a positive outlook on his remaining life now. He goes "well a skeptic would look at that and go 'well see your magic didn't work he still has cancer!' but a magical thinker would go 'no it totally worked man because now he has a totally differnet view on life that happened all spontaneous like'"

All I could think was "yeah, this why I'm the guy that figured out how to program a SELF REPLICATING ENERGY BALL that both Dreamsoap and I WATCHED OPERATE IN FRONT OF OUR FUCKING EYES while you gave up on 'results magic' and instead relegated yourself to using magic to 'appreciate life' more."

It's probably because off all that bullshit magical thinking that values feeling good rather than getting actual, useful, replicatable, stable results. I can't believe someone who expounds crap like that actually is considered a big shot in that community, then I realized that it just means the quality of the community must be somewhere in the sewer system.

I get really annoyed, almost insulted whenever some spiritualist tries to act like they know what they're talking about but then just backtrack and go "but muh feelins, muh feelin's matter, I totally knows it, cuz I feelz it." The same way I get annoyed when someone with an actual Ph.D in ANYTHING goes “oh well I don’t think you can use the scientific method to study this.”

Yeah, people who are in heat stroke FEEL cold, they're not cold, their brain is melting, feelings on their own are not evidence. But if you can reliably coorelate those feelings with some external event, like feeling hungry, and yes even feeling cold then yes you can use it as evidence that something is probably happening which is why skeptics also shouldn't discount feelings in terms of evidence.

But there are always caveats, always ways those sensations can be duped the same way flares dupe the heat seeking sensor of a sidewinder missile into thinking it's the engine of that f-16 it was targeting. Which is why modern missles use a whole bunch of different sensory data, radar,thermal, cameras with picture databases of what they're supposed to be aiming for, so that if any single one gets duped it can then be offset by the others that aren't. I've found that even the energy sense can be duped, just feed it the right signature and it will feel exactly like the thing it's mimicking, so I learned that there's even more criteria that I have to look for like the pattern of variance in the signature, what happens when you stress the signature because real ones react very differently than fake ones, is there a lens or water type type distortion of the "image" and how do you tell and then how do you correct for it. All this stuff that I've had to try figuring out on my own. This is why all religion and spiritualism as a whole just needs to go away and also why I think the all or nothing methodology of skeptics needs to also go away. It’s the wrong methodology, it’s like if you go into a martial arts studio trying to determin if flying spinning kicks are real and people do their best but you pull out the micrometers and go “nope, sorry you were five microns off from the thing we defined as a flying spinning kick, guess flying spinning kicks aren’t real and you’re all just crazy spiritualists.”

And then some of the students go “yeah but we got close, some were further than others but come on, we got something that at least started to look like it, maybe if we practice some more we’ll be able to do it” and the scientist goes “nope sorry, you said you could do and you couldn’t so clearly you’re just lying or faking for attention, I’m only interested in real science, the kind that is right 100% of the time every time about everything ever. Imma go tell everyone you’re all full of shit now because I’ve scientifically determined it with all my sciencing.”

@ Mediochre,

The only part of your rather aggressive post I'm going to deal with is this paragraph:

"Well if you actually want mainstream science to accept this stuff then yes you are going to have to be actually scientific about it. I mean, how can you praise Sam Parnia but then turn around and go "oh well who cares if IANDS has totally biased questionnaires, it's not like anyone takes this stuff seriously" and then also harp on skeptics that they're just being close minded and constantly propping Parnia up as some sort of saviour that will vindicate you in the end?

What do you mean, I'm not being scientific ? And what do you mean that IANDS has (biased) questionnaires. The NDE scale, which is what I was talking about was formulated by Bruce Greyson. He is a member of IANDS of course but that's not the point. The point I was making is that it's not the end of the world if some people's NDE's didn't score enough on the Greyson scale but if you think it is, then fine. Get your knickers in a twist by all means.

As for me harping on sceptics (do you mean harping on about ?) and calling them closed minded, I don't. I only define closed minded people as closed minded (pseudo sceptics)...true sceptics are fine by be.

As for "propping" up Sam Parnia...what does that mean ? Is Sam falling over ? Do you mean supporting his work, yes I do. Is there a problem with that ?

Finally, If you don't like my posts, don't read them.

@ Mediochre,

The only part of your rather aggressive post I'm going to deal with is this paragraph:

"Well if you actually want mainstream science to accept this stuff then yes you are going to have to be actually scientific about it. I mean, how can you praise Sam Parnia but then turn around and go "oh well who cares if IANDS has totally biased questionnaires, it's not like anyone takes this stuff seriously" and then also harp on skeptics that they're just being close minded and constantly propping Parnia up as some sort of saviour that will vindicate you in the end?

What do you mean, I'm not being scientific ? And what do you mean that IANDS has (biased) questionnaires. The NDE scale, which is what I was talking about was formulated by Bruce Greyson. He is a member of IANDS of course but that's not the point. The point I was making is that it's not the end of the world if some people's NDE's didn't score enough on the Greyson scale but if you think it is, then fine. Get your knickers in a twist by all means.

As for me harping on sceptics (do you mean harping on about ?) and calling them closed minded, I don't. I only define closed minded people as closed minded (pseudo sceptics)...true sceptics are fine by be.

As for "propping" up Sam Parnia...what does that mean ? Is Sam falling over ? Do you mean supporting his work, yes I do. Is there a problem with that ?

Finally, If you don't like my posts, don't read them. 

No I don't think you're being scientific if you're going to handwave a scale allegedly designed to be scientific but then praise Parnia for "tightening up the methodology" as I believe you put it. I've seen you get into arguments with Steve001 and Linda over this, stating that it's a matter of fact that the survival of consciousness research Parnia is doing will/could settle the question once and for all. Hell you ripped on Linda earlier in this thread for it.

A biased scale gives biased results and thus anyone who uses it should not/will not be taken seriously. Acting like this isn't a big deal devalues the work of people actually trying to make this mainstream science because it shows the mainstreamn exactly the stereotype they critisize "oh look at these spiritualists, they don't care if their scale is biased, they don't care that the methods are faulty, they just care that it feels good. Guess there's nothing important they have to say after all." Something that I thought you cared about.