Near Death expirience

[RED FIRE COW]

Ive been wondering if anybody knew of any proof why people are capable of seeing their own bodies and the people around them while they are dead, what I mean is while they are going through a near death expirience, it just seems like you have to believe it because the people present at the time claim that the victim was completely right on everyting they saw.

[Guest Panopticon]

I think its impossible for someone to see themselves in a physical sense. Perhaps when a person is nearing death, their brain goes through several stages of irrational thought. What a person perceives as vision are just electrical currents processed by the brain. So its a possibility that this is caused by the imagination of a dieing person... though I cant explain the part about being correct of what they see. Maybe because the person had actually saw the setting prior to their pre-death trance.

[Dave]

I saw a Horizon documentary about this a few weeks ago. The one story that interested me was a woman who was clinically dead (i.e. no electrical activity in the brain) for an hour while they performed some rather delicate surgery on her. She survived, and managed to describe in detail what had gone on during that hour, which she could not possibly have known otherwise.

 

Personally, I believe that there is some kind of afterlife, but it's not particularly easy to prove or disprove it. We don't have the understanding at the moment to do this sort of stuff, and we may never have the understanding to do so.

 

Of course, another speculation raised in this documentary was whether conciousness can be attributed to a physical characteristic of the human body. I suspect this is even harder to answer

[Glider]

Originally posted by dave

Of course, another speculation raised in this documentary was whether conciousness can be attributed to a physical characteristic of the human body. I suspect this is even harder to answer

Well...I dunno. If you remove a person's brain, they tend to lose consciousness. Wouldn't that suggest that the brain has something to do with it?

[RED FIRE COW]

Nah nobody can really prove the conciousness thing nobody knows were it comes from.

 

Anyway the fact that the person can see what is going on while they are clinically dead is strong, because this has been expiriencd by many and their has been many witnesses.

[Dave]

Originally posted by Glider

Well...I dunno. If you remove a person's brain, they tend to lose consciousness. Wouldn't that suggest that the brain has something to do with it?

 

Perhaps I should have been obtuse in my meaning. My comment was supposed to imply whether the brain is merely the receptor of conciousness or whether it creates it.

[Glider]

Aha! I see what you mean. Tricky.

 

To consider the brain a 'receiver' of consciousness raises a whole bunch of even trickier questions; where is it receiving it from? what is the mechanism of transfer? why can't we detect the signals? and so-on and so-on.

 

To consider the brain the 'generator' of consciousness is somewhat simpler, but still presents questions. Consciousness is considered an epiphenomenon that a result of the complexity of the brain; a kind of synergistic feedback where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, therefore consciousness is not a function of any one part of the brain, but rather the result of the complex circuitry of all of it.

 

Not least among the problems is that people still can't provide a specific and universal definition of consciousness. We can't even directly observe it. We know it in ourselves, but we can only infer its existance in others.

[Radical Edward]

I suggest the Emperor's nes mind and followup, Shadows of the Mind, to look at this topic. I keep suggesting it

[PogoC7]

Drugs such as Salvia divinorum have also had reports of "out of body experiences" when taken. Read on experiences --- http://www.sagewisdom.org/experiences.html

 

I have smoked this stuff two year ago, but I didn't like it. It just made me very warm, made me sweat and put me in a, want to kill someone mood. If anyone is going to smoke this stuff use the extracts (10x is good).

 

People have also reported:

-seeing lives pass before their eyes.

-watching themselves as a child.

-looking at one's self, but when walking to look at the back, there is none (only the face).

-Other craziness.

[fafalone]

I am aware of an experiment in rats where an electrical stimulus to a certain part of the brain produced an out of body experience... though I'm not sure how exactly one could have gone about determining whether a rat was having one or not....

[Radical Edward]

that is because the experiment was done on a human being. I will hunt it down if I have time later.

[MiguelBladesman]

Red Fire Cow:

 

The issue is often confused. To answer your basic question, YES there can be N.D.E.'s. However, all such experience are [in the most eminent PHILOSOPHICAL sense] Private and not Public experiences, and as such, they are beyond objective study. They are in every sense, subjective.

 

I had mine already. [drowning]

[NavajoEverclear]

Don't know exactly what out of body experiences are. My mother had a very extensive one herself actually--- yeah shes kind of private about it so i wont tell you. I am glad however that the subject was not soiled by unmoveable sceptics--- i really think they are quite ridiculous. As ridiculus as one who is unmoved in unsubsansiated belief. Well thats my thought for the day