[HN Gopher] Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-d...
___________________________________________________________________
Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death
experiences
Author : RafelMri
Score : 118 points
Date : 2023-05-02 10:49 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Between having surreal dreams occasionally after merely a late-
| night dark chocolate snack, and some bizarre errors I've seen
| from computers with failing power supplies...zero "near-death
| experience" reports actually seem credible to me. ("Credible" in
| the supernatural / theological sense. However real an occasional
| dream of levitating myself feels...after waking up, that pesky
| "gravity" stuff is again ON, with the cool "off" option grayed
| out.)
| throwmemoney wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-pPBwFFWz_k
|
| Some children can remember exact & verifiable details of their
| prior life they never could have come to know in this their
| current child life. These details can be objectively and
| independently confirmed. Remarkably & quite biologically
| enigmatic: Some of them have birth marks and birth defects at
| very same locations as the lethal injury causing their often
| abrupt and violent past life death. Eg. Born with 5 missing
| fingers after a prior life accident where they were cut off...
| Birthmarks at the exact location where they got gunshot wounds in
| their prior life, which could be confirmed from the autopsy
| report of their deceased individuality. Furthermore: Some can
| speak a language they never have learnt in this life (xenoglossy)
| corresponding to their past life language & nationality. They can
| in some cases remember names of siblings and other family members
| in their past life family who they never have met in this life...
| xattt wrote:
| Is there a source on this that's not YouTube hearsay?
| Moneyyyyy wrote:
| You are posting this and take that serious?
|
| Have you read his wiki page or other sources?
|
| His methods is wishful thinking.
|
| I'm very curious what gives you the feeling that you would
| trust that stories.
| fjfaase wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoglossy
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| This seems to be arbitrary and completely open to
| interpretation unless you can predict which child is going to
| result from a "previous life". e.g. if you see a birthmark,
| then you can just make up what injury could have "caused" it
| and go looking for a suitable previous life to link to and thus
| "explain" it.
|
| Also, I don't believe there's been any incidents of xenoglossy
| that have withstood any detailed examination.
| supertofu wrote:
| A scholar monk closely investigated a Sri Lankan case of
| xenoglossy here: https://audiobuddha.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/08/Rebirth-i...
| dsego wrote:
| All anecdotal and hard to verify definitively.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Many things are not verifiable. "What does it feel like the
| moment after death?" :)
| Qem wrote:
| If reincarnation is real, I guess the afterlife faces a crisis
| due to the impending demographic crash here. The lines of souls
| awaiting reincarnation are about to get real long, as lots of
| people die of old age without people having children to ensure
| a fast return.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Who says you have to get reincarnated in the future? Maybe
| next up you'll be a 17th century peasant. Hell everyone that
| has ever and will ever live could all just be the same
| person.
|
| [0] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
| streakfix wrote:
| Give me the number of your dealer
| ransackdev wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
| streakfix wrote:
| > Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human
| was, or will be, experienced by you.
|
| _funkytown playing in the background_
| [deleted]
| jollyllama wrote:
| You're assuming all the ones on the way out have souls
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylics
| spyder wrote:
| Or Earth is not the only place to be reincarnated. * _cue The
| X-Files music_ *
| bentcorner wrote:
| I don't believe in reincarnation but sometimes I like to
| think that my "outie" is playing a video game
| (https://youtu.be/szzVlQ653as?t=25)
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I reckon they'll just go stuffing multiple souls into each
| baby.
|
| Has anyone tried counting the number of souls per body?
| jalk wrote:
| If you watch certain tiktok channels too much, you open up
| space for more souls to enter. Seems to works best for
| younger girls though.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Cool. I'm gonna seek out some extra souls and then do a
| roaring trade with some demons.
|
| "Why yes, I do currently own this soul, so it's MY soul,
| but not necessarily the one I was born with"
| xvilka wrote:
| Then it will cause a crisis described in Nights' Dawn[1]
| trilogy by Peter Hamilton.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/43318-night-s-dawn
| bulkprotocol wrote:
| I don't believe in reincarnation but had a phase of religious
| study. It's generally not a 1-to-1 mapping of you die and
| come back as a human. Depending on the religious school of
| thought "you" can spend some finite time in some afterlife
| (good or bad) then come back as some organism, not
| necessarily human. Also accounting for continued biological
| evolution may not be homo sapien if your "soul" comes back
| 1000 years later. Can't say I believe in reincarnation at
| all.
| byyyy wrote:
| [dead]
| notnaut wrote:
| We're in a period of karmic-inflation, where any given soul
| will get you about 1/5th what it'd get you in the good old
| days.
|
| Nowadays you'd be lucky to die into a fish or bird - most of
| us are destined bugs, or industrial farm animals.
| misja111 wrote:
| But the insect population is rapidly decreasing, so are
| many fish and birds. No if you ask me, most of us will
| reincarnate into bacteria.
| Qem wrote:
| Best bet are species that thrive despite or even thanks
| to humans. Like pets, pigeons or cockroaches.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| As a dwarf shrimp breeder, we must be doing the bulk of
| the work. We buy vividly colored dwarf shrimp, go crazy
| when they carry 40 eggs and gift them when when there are
| more than way more than the recommended 10 per liter. We
| also strive to maintain a ton of other tiny crustaceans,
| snails and worms.
| flangola7 wrote:
| You're kidding, right? From the Wikipedia article:
|
| >there is no scientifically admissible evidence supporting any
| of the alleged instances of xenoglossy
|
| Followed by four separate research citations.
|
| You're peddling obvious pseudoscience quackery.
| supertofu wrote:
| Clearly not many Buddhists on Hacker News.
| gjadi wrote:
| Is this the beginning of the Thanatonautes?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Thanatonautes
| rapnie wrote:
| Or maybe just the beginning of Flatliners?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatliners
| ne8il wrote:
| Or the ending of Brainstorm
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Next up: colon activity of dying people shows signs of near-death
| experiences
|
| That's what happens when a system designed to fire impulses on a
| good day is dying on a bad day.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| Yes, and thus it makes perfect sense that this system, firing
| impulses associated with consciousness, causes people to have
| near-death experiences.
| reuben_scratton wrote:
| When my mother died she had been completely unconscious for a
| whole week, but just 30 minutes before she died she opened her
| eyes and looked around the room. I was later told by a nurse that
| this is quite common when people are about to die. It seems to
| fit with the notion of one last burst of brain activity.
| supertofu wrote:
| The filter theory* of consciousness holds that consciousness is
| an element independent of the human brain. Every brain acts as a
| unique filter for this elemental consciousness, structuring
| reality in the most optimal way for that creature to survive.
|
| This filtered consciousness forms the "default mode network",
| which is the construction of ego or separate self. Near death
| experiences (and psychedelics and Buddhist jhanas) disintegrate
| the default mode network, allowing us to perceive the
| consciousness element beyond the brain's filtering mechanism.
|
| *vs commonly held production theory which assumes the brain
| produces consciousness.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The digression into mysticism in this thread is weird. Finding a
| physical correlate of NDEs reinforces the materialist view, which
| is basically the null hypothesis for "sceptics". Everyone who
| didn't already believe in an immaterial soul can calm down.
| moremetadata wrote:
| [dead]
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| In the cases of natural deaths, I think it's something you
| decide, or rather you give up, and shortly after the whole body
| turns off. I was with my mother with a strong cancer, she didn't
| want to go to hospital but her situation got really bad so we
| ended up carrying her to hospital, she died shortly after
| entering in the hospital despite all their systems (transfusions)
| set up
| fjfaase wrote:
| Original scientific paper:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216268120
| wessorh wrote:
| Having recently recovered from Legionnaires where I was in a
| medically induced coma for nearly 2 months where I received CPR
| twice for flat-lining here is my experience... I didn't know what
| happened but I did get to meet deities, aliens and participate in
| a bunch of sci-fi oriented excursions. In short I learned about
| where the mind goes under a lot of drugs and I appreciate the
| experience. It was easier to remember and clearer than dreams. As
| to the bright light -- I thought it was nuclear war :) It a long
| "bad trip" but recovering well, thanks to a great community of
| concerned friends and healers.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I had open heart surgery once, and was given a lot of drugs. It
| was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the
| edge of discovering something immensely important. In
| retrospect I believe I learned nothing.
| ppmx20 wrote:
| It's a final upload to the cloud, with checksum checks...
| andrewclunn wrote:
| People who die traumatically don't remember the event because
| their last back-up is a few hours old.
| garganzol wrote:
| Sounds funny but... I had a near-death experience and this is
| exactly how it feels - data recollection before departure. The
| weird thing is that you understand that it's not a totally new
| feeling - it seems that you are already got familiarized with
| it some time in the past but just forgot it while you was
| living your current instance of life.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I can't speak to near death experiences but I have been in a
| couple... for lack of a better term... "pre-death"
| experiences where for a split moment it's like you're
| experiencing all possible paths and none of them at the same
| time. Very Schrodinger's cat / multiversey.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Could you elucidate?
| garganzol wrote:
| Imagine a film of still and moving images depicting all
| situations that you ever experienced in your whole life.
| When you have a near death experience, that imaginary film
| appears in your consciousness and you immediately recall
| all those situations down to the greatest details, in
| parallel. You recall and relive even those moments that you
| thought were irreversibly lost in your memory. That process
| of recalling takes a split second, but once it comes to
| completion you get quite amazed that your brain (or
| something) was able to perform such a big and costly
| computational undertaking.
|
| However, in my case, that shocking astonishment was not
| joyful. For me, it was bitter because once I was able to
| see every moment of my life with all my deeds and
| intentions packed in a highly-concentrated billboard of
| information, I realized how miserable my life actually was.
| I was driven by fear, illusions, money, greed, and
| selfishness. I was not giving, I was taking. I was not
| caring, instead I was mostly ignorant. I knew nothing about
| life and now it's ending and I spent it awfully.
|
| A few moments later, I understood that a natural cycle of
| life and death was going to repeat itself one more time, so
| I made a hard promise to do it better next time, if at all.
|
| However, the cycle did not repeat itself, as I received
| adequate medical help in time. I was able to make a
| recovery. But that experience changed me forever.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| Can you perhaps expand on the sense it wasn't a unique
| experience as well? Do you feel you've "reversed" the
| course you saw?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I once read of a hypothesis that this is the brain
| desperately searching memories for a possible solution while
| its oxygen gets depleted.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I read the same hypothesis, but it does not really square
| with the observation that soldiers, sailors etc. in life-
| threatening situations report similar experiences even if
| they end up physically unhurt.
| Moneyyyyy wrote:
| Why do we clinge on this type of ideas?
|
| It's an EEG not a super high resolution device.
|
| Yes our brain does stuff at the edge of breaking. EEG changes
| somehow when we put ourself under anesthesia . Still we don't
| really get it.
|
| And weirdly enough comments here go into afterlife and other
| esoteric stuff.
|
| We know enough about our brain that we know we are our brain...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Near-death brain activity and any confirmation of near-death
| experience does not necessarily imply an _afterlife_.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I consider that the best argument against any kind of afterlife
| is the sheer banality of any claimed conversations with
| ghosts/deceased. I'd imagine that someone that has taken the
| final(?) journey would have incredible insights to pass on, yet
| they always just mumble on about something mundane.
| wk_end wrote:
| Well, that'd be an argument against ghost encounters, not
| necessarily against "any kind of afterlife". There's plenty
| of afterlife beliefs that don't involve ghosts at all.
|
| Moreover it's assuming that being a ghost would actually
| impart some incredible insights, or that the behaviour or
| experience of being a ghost would necessarily reflect that.
| Most of what I know about ghosts comes from the movie Casper
| (1995), and in that ghosts are depicted as beings who can't
| move on from some trauma from their life. Maybe the
| incredible insights come later, after moving on; maybe the
| nature of being a ghost necessitates fixation on the
| "mundane".
|
| I'm also not sure (nor am I not not sure) that most accounts
| of interaction with ghosts would even be described as
| "mumbling on about something mundane". A Christmas Carol
| (fictional) depicts ghosts as providing life-changing
| spiritual guidance, for instance.
|
| The best - and only - argument we have against belief in any
| kind of afterlife is that we have no actual evidence for one.
| The very idea lies outside of our capacity to know.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Well, you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone, right?
| Maybe the first thing we start missing is small talk. (Of
| course, I'm more of a Lisp guy myself)
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I wanted you to know I really appreciated the effort you
| put into that joke. Gave me a nice chuckle this afternoon,
| and I really needed it!
| bloak wrote:
| Of course there are also stories of people who claim to have
| left their body and seen the operating theatre from above and
| to have noticed some unexpected object on top of a cupboard
| or in some other location visible only from on high ... and
| later, when someone checks, the object really is there ...
| [spooky music] ...
| jzb wrote:
| I don't know if there's an afterlife or not, but if there's
| such a thing as a soul I wouldn't think it'd operate on a
| technicality.
|
| That is: our medical definition of death wouldn't be what
| determines freeing a soul from the body. I can't imagine an
| "oops, looks like they got your heart beating again - guess
| it's time to stuff that pesky soul back in the carcass. See
| you in a few years" scenario.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I like this kind of experiment, but it would have to be
| tightly controlled to avoid anyone viewing the object and
| possibly communicating it to the patient. Maybe some kind
| of duplicated 2FA device that shows a time-changing code
| and the twin device records its output over time - that
| would be tricky to cheat.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| 18 hospitals planted such objects so that only beings
| floating close to the ceiling can see them. Wonder if those
| objects are still there and how the rest of the research
| went.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2010/10/26/130829358...
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > stories
|
| Are there actual, verified instances of this happening?
| NateEag wrote:
| The canonical compilation of these anecdotes is "The Self
| Does Not Die":
|
| https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Self_Does_Not_Di
| e.h...
|
| There are a few stories in it that left me raising my
| eyebrows and going "well, that seems improbable."
|
| I've not found any I couldn't construct a reductionist
| dismissal for (usually of the form "confirmation bias -
| someone had to eventually have the hallucination that
| corresponded with reality and we don't hear about the
| failures" or "the witnesses memories are incorrect"), but
| that doesn't mean I find the dismissals entirely
| plausible or fully convincing.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| If there's _one_ hill I 'm determined to die on (given the
| information that I have anyway) is that any scientific finding
| extrapolating information from "brain waves" or "region
| activation" is little more than modern day phrenology. Of course
| this is not an original thought, though I find it alarming that
| it's the minority opinion seeing as EEG/fMRI augury suffers from
| blatant methodological and even statistical flaws.
|
| There are too many sources to list but I think [0] has a good and
| varied collection of what I consider to be statistically informed
| thoughts on "cognition" research, see e.g. [1] [2] for a gentle
| introduction.
|
| (I should like to point out that I recognize the usefulness of
| brain measurements in medical contexts; I'm just saying that
| using them to say anything about non-pathological perception or
| metaphysics has so far been fantastically unsuccessful.)
|
| [0] http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_cognition.html
|
| [1] http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2017-08.html#neuromania
|
| [2] https://www.powells.com/book/neuromania-9780199591343
| anthk wrote:
| On waves, read about it:
|
| https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Hear, Hear. A worthy hill.
| mike_d wrote:
| What you are experiencing is being present for the development
| of a major leap in technology. You'll see a lot of trial and
| error and near misses until someone cracks the big breakthrough
| of how we non-invasively read information in bulk from a mind.
|
| Have a look at all the historical cynicism that surrounded
| things like voice tracks in motion pictures or consumer
| automobiles.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| I don't deny that neuroscientists will discover something big
| in the future; I'm just saying that people should stop
| expecting that the next breakthrough will come from crude
| tools such as EEGs and fMRI, at least in conjunction with
| present-day computational power and statistical
| sophistication. These tools are useful enough without
| assigning an aura of metaphysical power to them; as things
| stand, billions of dollars are being wasted on adding noise,
| and what's worse is that the field has a track record of
| nefarious applications[0]. You could argue that the latter
| are not the scientists' fault, but if we keep promoting
| grandstanding pseudoscience for no clear reason, it's only a
| matter of time before somebody with both power and ill will
| is going to use it to harm people, all the while purporting
| to act in the name of "science."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology#Racism
| mike_d wrote:
| > I'm just saying that people should stop expecting that
| the next breakthrough will come from crude tools such as
| EEGs and fMRI
|
| Scurvy killed over two million people until we figured out
| the solution was simply eating an orange.
|
| We won't know if EEGs and MRIs are core to future
| technology until we have that breakthrough.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow; by the same argument, measuring
| bumps on people's skulls can't be ruled out as not
| crucial to future science since it hasn't yielded a
| breakthrough yet.
|
| The merits of a scientific methodology cannot possibly
| depend on the small chance that some hitherto
| unsuccessful approach might result in an unexpected
| breakthrough. Aside from the fact that _anything_ might
| hold the key to the next big thing, such an approach
| would inevitably end up following whims and fashions more
| so than robust and sound scientific reasoning. All else
| being the same, priority should be given to research
| which is grounded in solid experiment design and a firm
| grasp on statistic.
| mike_d wrote:
| > All else being the same, priority should be given to
| research which is grounded in solid experiment design and
| a firm grasp on statistic.
|
| Agencies like DARPA exist primarily to counter this line
| of thinking. We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch
| of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting
| scientists just kind of make it up as they went along.
|
| I hope you genuinely understand the difference between
| measuring bumps on ones head and well established
| scientific instruments that allow you to take
| measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of
| witchcraft that should be distrusted.
| echelon wrote:
| You can accomplish a tremendous amount with lossy, low
| resolution, derivative signals. I'd be happy to take the
| opposite of your bet.
|
| Even if you're right, continuing to invest in EEG/fMRI is
| tugging at salients near to the problems we want to solve.
| That's a good thing.
| o_____________o wrote:
| > as EEG/fMRI augury suffers from blatant methodological and
| even statistical flaws
|
| Maybe
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9.epdf
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light,
| reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives
| have all been reported by people from many cultures who have had
| a brush with death. Sceptics, however, say these experiences
| could be caused by people hallucinating as they recover in
| hospital.
|
| The way that the default is presented here is interesting.
| Interpreting the experiences as hallucinations makes you a
| "sceptic" - presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some
| kind of afterlife. Whether or not brain activity records of dying
| people are available, treating these subjective experiences as
| anything other than naturalistic in origin seems bizarre to me.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| On the other hand, it's the definition of solipsism to
| interpret any experience you don't personally share as
| "hallucinations."
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I hadn't considered this before. Brilliant.
| [deleted]
| spacephysics wrote:
| Unfortunately many things in western culture that get close to
| mysticism are disregarded as hallucinations or random
| neurological firings.
|
| Same goes with dreams and such. It's the 'religion of science'
| defaulting to the 'god' of deconstructionism. Just
| hallucinations, nothing more.
|
| I understand why, there's certainly many things which were once
| said to be mystic, but ended up less so.
|
| However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics
| probably agrees with me that there's a bit more to dreams, NDE
| and afterlife than "random" neurological firings.
| jrootabega wrote:
| The overall phenomenon is not random. Our brain is
| structured, so processes that are not meaningful can produce
| results that seem meaningful to our brains. Like wind blowing
| through wind chimes.
| yarg wrote:
| I think there are three fundamental aspects to the nature
| of the death of near death experience.
|
| Struggle, acceptance and (what I'm going to call) decay.
|
| The first two I believe to be evolved mechanisms, the third
| whatever fits incidentally within the constraints imposed
| by the former two.
|
| The struggle is obvious, we fight to survive or we do not
| replicate.
|
| I think the acceptance is an aspect that emerges from the
| constraints applied to social organisms.
|
| There is no evolutionary impetus for something that cannot
| survive to continue with the struggle, but there is the
| impetus not to harm its relatives in the process.
|
| What remains is hallucinatory nonsense born of a failing
| mind, understanding is lost piece by piece - your
| conceptual framework perceiving what remains even as it
| falls apart.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I've done fair amount of psychedelics and all they convinced
| me of is that people who think the experience is spiritual
| are credulous.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| I've done large amounts of psychedelics and if anything it's
| left me feeling more grounded in a materialist worldview.
|
| Not that that's a negative thing at all. The universe is
| perfect without any need for magic to arbitrarily insert its
| fingers into the clockwork.
| yarg wrote:
| > The universe is perfect
|
| The universe is a cosmic horror, life emerges and with it
| untold suffering.
|
| The very notion of perfection is also emergent (not to
| mention self relative), outside of the conceptual framework
| of the observer's mind perfection does not even exist.
|
| The universe is beautiful, life emerges and with it all
| understanding, love and joy.
|
| Two sides of the same emergent coin, the nature of all
| experience was forged by what it took for our ancestors to
| survive to the next generation.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Sigh, now you've got me sitting here having an
| existential crisis over my long held belief in the
| perfection of the universe.
|
| The belief was primarily based on a deterministic view of
| it, with the notion that everything comes from something,
| and becomes something else.
|
| Every moment has two perfectly balanced sides, with
| perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe giving you
| a perfect understanding of all the transformations that
| took place from one moment into the next.
|
| There is of course the debate over whether it is not
| deterministic, if the Everettian view is false then
| possibly not, but more to the heart of the matter, this
| idea that because a greater and greater understanding of
| the laws of the universe unravels all its dynamics, all
| its reasons for being and acting the way that it is. This
| idea that the fact that there is a reason for everything,
| an order to everything, is what makes it perfect.
|
| The thing is I have a hunch that an inquiry all the way
| to the bottom will eventually leave us with a bunch of
| arbitrary laws and constants, which have no further
| explanation for their being just so, other than the
| anthropic principle.
|
| It seems hard to me to ascribe such a scenario the
| quality of generic "perfection" even solely from the
| perspective of my biased human mind.
|
| I agree with you that perfection is a notion alien to the
| objective reality, which simply is, without any
| judgements or qualifications.
|
| So to go back to my original comment, I think it would be
| more accurate to simply say that I've seen no reason to
| believe that anything we experience cannot be explained
| by physical processes.
|
| Maybe consciousness itself will be the most relevant
| concept left inexplicable? Not the process of sustaining
| it, but the actual subjective experience of it. Why not
| have a universe of automatons processing their worlds and
| inner minds in all the same ways, but without anyone
| home? Why are we home, and how are we assigned to our
| homes?
|
| I don't know that these questions are enough to make me
| believe in the "supermaterial" or supernatural, my hunch
| is just that our current awe and inability to begin to
| approach the subject may simply be due to a lack of
| understanding of the processes at work, but that's
| admittedly based on faith.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Do you believe the objects of your thoughts are material?
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Yeah it seems to me the entire process of cognition is
| based on fully material processes.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Not the process, the plane of existence where the object
| is. Many who have left Plato's cave doubt that those
| objects are made of material.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Without a definition of what's material in this context,
| this discussion makes very little sense.
|
| We can't see objective reality since all we see and sense
| have to go through our brains. What we can do is to
| interpret what we see and try to arrive at something that
| represents a consensus among our different perceptions.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| If we take Plato's cave to be the mind, and the
| projections upon the wall to be reality's impressions
| upon our mind transformed into interpreted stimuli, then
| I don't believe anyone could have ever left that cave
| anymore than anyone could have ever stepped their
| consciousness outside of their own brain to verify how
| well reality correlates to their mind's interpretation of
| it.
|
| Regardless, all this this conjecture is invariably
| happening within the boundaries of our minds, which seems
| to be composed entirely of physical phenomena.
| kergonath wrote:
| > However, anyone who has done respectable doses of
| psychedelics probably agrees with me that there's a bit more
| to dreams, NDE and afterlife than "random" neurological
| firings.
|
| On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what
| "random neurological firings" can actually do? Particularly
| considering that you are not in a situation to understand
| what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how
| can you get any certainty out of this?
|
| It sounds a lot like the "complex behaviour cannot emerge
| from an assembly of simple systems" we see regularly, an
| updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you
| have no clue. More than that, you _cannot_ have a clue
| because you are trying to observe something through itself,
| and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way.
|
| That's why we have things like double blind studies and the
| scientific method: to try to tease some objective
| observations out of a complex mess. We don't understand
| everything in the brain, far from it. But it's not magical
| either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in
| real time how some patterns change when we eat various
| substances or do various things.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Yeah and the interesting part of it, scientific as we think
| we are, we don't even try to prove conciousness arises from
| neurological processes.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Of course we do, you're just not aware of the research: htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_conscious..
| .
| steveBK123 wrote:
| perception & reality are interesting can be thought of as
| overlapping imperfectly, with each having some influence on
| the other.
|
| We observe the world through our senses, which can impact our
| state of mind. Our state of mind impacts our senses, through
| which we observe the world.
|
| We are always unreliable narrators.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| > perception & reality are interesting can be thought of as
| overlapping imperfectly, with each having some influence on
| the other.
|
| That's a good way to put it. Belief systems are fascinating
| in a way that resists being easily categorized. At least by
| me. Or such is my belief...
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes. The older I get the more open minded I try to be
| about these things.
|
| I find some of my friends who are the most dogmatically
| anti-religion or anti-spirtuality, really just replace it
| with some other tribal thing like politics.
|
| There are questions we won't ever have an answer for, and
| we've been asking the same questions since as long as
| philosophers could record their writings.
| notnaut wrote:
| I've done plenty of psychedelics. I have no idea why you
| would imply dreams and near death experiences are in the same
| boat, and much further than that, why you'd combine them with
| the concept of an afterlife. The pineal gland isn't a third
| eye.
|
| Dreams are blatantly not random neurological firings, but
| have no inherent relation to death or the concept of life
| after death at all.
|
| Near death experiences are similar. The fact that humans have
| similar experiences when dying is probably not so different
| from how our behaviors and experiences line up in a multitude
| of ways, across cultures.
|
| You're the one dismissing hallucinations as simple or
| unimportant. Understanding them is crucial to understanding
| human perception and interpretation at large.
|
| Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that the
| human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make
| sense from anything. Close your eyes hard enough and put some
| white noise in your ears and see god now.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns
| and make sense from anything_
|
| I really wish more people would recognize this. I hear so
| much irrational thinking because people seem to think that
| random noise is somehow _meaningful_. Or because people
| choose to ignore all the information that _doesn 't_ match
| the "pattern", because they've decided what does match is
| important to them in some way.
| rapnie wrote:
| > the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns
| and make sense from anything.
|
| Fully agree. I've never done psychedelics, but years ago
| when overworked and by lack of sleep my mind went into a
| severe state of hyperassociativity. Though a serious health
| danger (feeling as if your brain gets cooked) it was a
| magnificent experience. Everything I saw with my eyes
| triggered an explosion of associations. I felt as if I
| could pierce the mysteries of the universe, perceive the
| future as it unfolded before me, and was sure that a higher
| entity existed. Until.. it became too much and I needed
| treatment and medication to bring me back to earth. The
| brain is a powerful machine.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| very interesting, do you know the name of this
| phenomenon? i have experienced something similar, when
| the brain is munched from overworking and undersleeping,
| you kind of start "daydreaming", although it might be
| slightly different than what you have described.
| rapnie wrote:
| I don't know a medical term, other than that it is in the
| area of Mania [0]. For me it was luckily a one time
| adventure induced by the circumstances. In hindsight I
| consider it positively, as an enriching experience. When
| reading the wikipedia page, I avoided some of the more
| severe afflictions. There are risk factors to avoid. Good
| sleep most important among them. After such episode the
| brain is completely drained and needs time to 'recharge'.
| Having multiple episodes in a row usually leads to a
| bipolar disorder with true depression following the manic
| episodes, I was told.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mania
| sammalloy wrote:
| > very interesting, do you know the name of this
| phenomenon?
|
| Not OP, but they are describing apophenia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
|
| Many things can trigger it, even high doses of caffeine
| (such as drinking too much coffee).
| metroholografx wrote:
| [dead]
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| > Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that
| the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and
| make sense from anything.
|
| Or was this the pattern you were primed to see?
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I don't understand the why anymore. More than 2000 years ago,
| we understood that we must be a sum of parts and that kind of
| idea yielded the atom. We applied the atom to many kinds of
| structures to discern their nature. Now, atom means some
| scientific particle.
|
| We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run
| into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it
| will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?
| ajuc wrote:
| > still constantly run into things we cannot name yet.
|
| Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for
| things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter
| is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods,
| elves, dragons, aliens, etc.
|
| I can't find one example of people not being able to name
| something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon
| X" where X is the first unused integer.
|
| I can find lots of examples of people naming things that
| don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you
| don't like fantasy and religion.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > I can't find one example of people not being able to
| name something that exist
|
| How about "The smallest positive integer not definable in
| under sixty letters"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I think we have both problems, actually. We definitely
| have names that are good, like New York, Justice, Earth,
| Peace, Aphex Twin's Windowlicker.
|
| But we also have names of things which are bad, because
| they are false. These the are names which are you talking
| about.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > We think this will end but it will not. If our universe
| is ever expanding, how can it?
|
| Heat death of the universe?
| danbruc wrote:
| _However, anyone who has done respectable doses of
| psychedelics probably agrees with me that there's a bit more
| to dreams, NDE and afterlife than "random" neurological
| firings._
|
| Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me,
| taking psychedelics will teach you that tiny amounts of
| chemicals can drastically alter how your brain works,
| especially how it perceives the world.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| If tiny chemicals can do that to you, because you ingested
| them, what about all of the other things you ingest,
| including sound, which cause chemicals in your brain to
| make reactions?
| kelnos wrote:
| I would think there's a difference between regular
| stimuli (through touch, sound, sight, taste, smell)
| causing your brain to react -- possibly drastically, and
| deliberately changing your brain chemistry in an
| "unnatural" way by taking drugs.
|
| One chemical change is caused by the brain working as
| designed, while the other is a deliberate attempt to
| change the brain directly.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Sounds do have a strong effect on people's emotions, but
| they don't tend to affect the way in which you think
| (maybe emotionally) in the same way that psychedelics can
| do.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Words, transmitted by sound _absolutely_, without a
| single doubt, can affect the thoughts of an individual.
| And, of course, horns and loud sounds and noises will
| also affect the thoughts.
| abawany wrote:
| Can confirm that the 'urgent'-sounding music and shouting
| on most cable news channels definitely affects my
| thoughts for the worse. I also have tinnitus and having
| the noise on constantly without any discernible source,
| even after all these years, is not conducive to peace.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Those affect your thoughts, but don't really change the
| manner in which you think to the same degree that
| psychedelics do.
|
| I'd grant some exceptions such as a zen student receiving
| a lesson/koan that drastically changes their thought
| processes, but I'd argue that the change was already
| within them and the sound was just the catalyst - the
| same lesson/koan is unlikely to have similar effects on
| other people, and certainly not without the recipient
| having spent time studying that religion/philosophy.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Do you have any reading for me?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Why yes, yes I do
|
| https://prirai.github.io/books/unix-koans.html
| danbruc wrote:
| I am not sure what you mean, but sensory inputs can
| obviously affect you. Hearing a bear roar right behind
| you will probably change you state of mind pretty
| quickly.
| whinenot wrote:
| Can confirm. Sleeping in a tent on the Serengeti whilst
| hyenas and lions prowl around the perimeter of the
| campground has a noticeable effect on one's sleep pattern
| and heart rate.
| Arrath wrote:
| "Probably" seems like a massive understatement.
| dnc wrote:
| From my own experience, "only" deep and intense breathing
| for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind
| drastically.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Am I correct that you meant:
|
| > [...] something as simple as deep and intense breathing
| for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind
| drastically.
|
| ?
|
| Because it seems some people are voting as if you wrote
| "[...] the only thing that can [...].
| eimrine wrote:
| Is this a question? If yes, what is the field of possible
| answers?
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Well, the answer is literally that everything you ingest
| affects you. It affects your body and the body affects
| the mind. From the food you eat to the words you hear,
| your body and mind is affected.
| eimrine wrote:
| That obviously is true, but you are completely ignoring
| the argument of the person you are answering to. He told
| that the brain might be learned using effect of some
| substance by the same principle when Neurophysiologists
| observe people with damaged brain and realize what the
| damaged surface is doing. And you are telling that people
| without brain damages can be observed by
| Neurophysiologists as well which is just a truism.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I am addressing the original argument. The original
| premise was mere amusement that such a chemical could
| exist which could alter the mind. What I'm saying is that
| there is more than just chemicals which can change your
| mind.
|
| If you say it is obvious that everything you ingest
| affects you, then what about time? Both of us are clearly
| ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs.
| And, of course, it is obvious that time affects our mind
| and body.
| danbruc wrote:
| _Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply
| another one of our inputs._
|
| We are not ingesting time, we are in a certain sense
| creating it. We constantly observe the world and it
| changes over time but just observing the world alone is
| not enough to perceive time. You have to memorize the
| current state of the world as you just perceived it and
| later compare your new perceptions with the memory in
| order to determine that the world has changed in between.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Observation is inherently a process with time. Without
| time, observation cannot be done. I'm not sure how
| observation without time could even be done, with the
| goal of observation being the measure from one state to
| another.
| danbruc wrote:
| Sure, an observation itself takes place in time and over
| a period of time, but a single observation itself does
| not capture time. Imagine you would see the world through
| your eyes and immediately forget about it. The process of
| seeing itself takes some time as chemistry and biology do
| their thing, but you yourself would not be aware of time.
| You would see the world in one state and shortly after in
| another state but you would be unaware that it changed as
| you already forgot the previous observation. For all you
| could tell, the world could be a static timeless place.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I agree with what you say, but do not think it is true
| for humans. I think this may be true for thinking
| machines like ChatGPT which do not think, do not observe,
| unless we give it something to think about. E.g. the
| thinking machine is just a program which runs its program
| with our input. In the future, seeing machines will not
| see unless we give it something to look at.
|
| Perhaps you are right, it is we who create time to
| observe.
| danbruc wrote:
| Humans obviously have the capability to remember so it is
| hard to imagine what it would be like if we could not.
| For artificial neural networks it depends on their
| architecture and use, to be able to get a sense of things
| changing over time you need the ability to process
| information from different times at the same time.
| Therefore the network itself needs some memory that feeds
| back internally or some outputs of the network must be
| fed back into the inputs externally or the inputs itself
| must be from different times.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It's hard to imagine what it would be like to actually
| live as something that doesn't remember, but we do have
| some experience observing people who have lost the
| ability to remember through illness or brain trauma or
| otherwise.
|
| In general it seems like attempting to live in human
| society without memory is a pretty traumatic experience.
| Or it would be, if you could remember experiencing it.
|
| It's also very hard on the people around you.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, everything you ingest affects you. But I think most
| people wouldn't expect drinking some clean water to cause
| them to hallucinate. Ingesting a chemical like LSD that
| is known to affect the brain in certain ways is
| different.
|
| Put another way: all things are not equal when you ingest
| them.
| [deleted]
| eimrine wrote:
| > However, anyone who has done respectable doses of
| psychedelics probably agrees with me that there's a bit more
| to dreams, NDE and afterlife than "random" neurological
| firings.
|
| Maybe anyone except of me. I am really comfortable when
| hallucinations are called as hallucinations despite of does
| they have any esoteric sense or not. All esoteric
| understanding of hallucination are really better to keep
| distance from science before some study will give a ground to
| consider more.
|
| You must distinguish known things from unknown things unless
| you are comfortable to be a not wise person.
| p1necone wrote:
| Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any
| phenomena being supernatural _ever_ , defaulting to assuming
| natural causes seems reasonable to me.
|
| If you open your mind too much your brain might fall out.
| 1827163 wrote:
| There shouldn't be anything wrong with having an open mind
| about such phenomena. While it's very likely that they are of
| biological origin, to immediately dismiss any other
| possibilities is closed minded dogmatism.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's reasonable to dismiss hypotheses that are untestable,
| provide no predictive power and have questionable evidence
| to support them. That's not so much about being close-
| minded, but just a practical methodology. If you accept
| non-testable hypotheses, then how can you tell whether it
| was the result of a specific deity or an invisible pink
| unicorn?
| rapnie wrote:
| > _Just_ hallucinations, nothing more. [..] _"random"_
| neurological firings.
|
| With 'just' and 'random' you are in a similar way derogatory
| to the 'religion of science' in favor of mysticism. If in a
| healthy and awake state it is our brains that model the full
| brunt of reality we perceive (an assumption, may be
| 'mysticism' involved here), then these hallucinations may be
| just as real seeming to a person, though not based on usual
| sensory input. Maybe based on past experience, memories.
| Maybe unconsciously collected until 're-lived' in the
| hallucination.
| stinos wrote:
| I don't agree there's more to it than random firings, but
| only in the sense they aren't quite random at all. For the
| rest I do still think there's nothing more to it than that.
| The biochemistry behind psychedelics is fairly well-
| researched and can be explained, so while there is a random
| component to it just like there are variations in, say, how
| people perceive color, I do still belive that's really all
| there is to it, just hallucinations (both sensory and
| mentally). No matter how in touch one might feel with
| whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it
| might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that
| somehow proving there effectively is something out there.
| Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just..
| feelings.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well
| researched and can also be explained, but that same science
| cannot convey the experience of being healthy.
| eimrine wrote:
| That leads to the outcome that your statement "The
| science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well
| researched" is false.
|
| Actually it is the least researched field among the most
| important, in my humble opinion.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| No, it doesn't. Because the study of health and the being
| of health are separate topics entirely.
| eimrine wrote:
| > the study of health and the being of health are
| separate topics entirely
|
| I would rather say that your statements in this
| particular topic and wise statements per se are separate
| things entirely and what you have just claimed is not at
| all.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean exactly by this, but I think I
| understand a little. The reason why the study of health
| is separate than the being of health is that the being
| requires time and experience. I cannot convey how I feel
| when I eat clean, lift well, read a lot, and socialize
| often, but I can say that I feel "happy" or "good" and
| give you a list of steps to achieve that state.
|
| This essence of "lossy transmission" is simply our
| reality.
| arolihas wrote:
| A lot of people either seem to not understand that
| science is focused on testable models of phenomenon and
| not the actual phenomenon itself, or they refuse to
| believe any such meaningful distinction exists.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of
| afterlife.
|
| That would never have occurred to me--my reading of the passage
| is that these are skeptics of near-death experiences _actually
| occurring near death_ , rather than later during recovery and
| becoming connected to the earlier experience.
|
| [EDIT] Struck a word that made the tone very slightly
| confrontational for no reason.
| atlantic wrote:
| You can only experience the external world through your
| consciousness. Certain contents of consciousness we assume to
| have an external correlate, others not, but there is no way to
| bypass our minds and check directly. Any given civilization has
| its own picture of reality, and draws its own line separating
| objective from subjective. We have a fairly conservative model
| of what is real, due to the influence of the scientific method,
| but the choice is ultimately arbitrary.
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