Near Death Experiences prove the afterlife exists

[Rivendale]

… and groups of joyous people dancing in harmony wearing peasant clothing.

That head is more than a handful.

[doubtingthomas]

DCP must be really afraid of death.

Very likely. He should sign up for Cryonics.

[dantana]

Evolutionarily speaking, I wonder how this trait developed. That is, how did the brain develop the trait of making the subject think it is experiencing an afterlife as a way to soothe the subjects fear of dying - since the subject dies. Which would make it hard to pass on any newly mutated genes.

Just curious. Not a denier.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

https://worldnewsdailyreport.com/women- ... -takeover/


ETA I might have posted in the wrong thread. My apologies.

[Rivendale]

Evolutionarily speaking, I wonder how this trait developed. That is, how did the brain develop the trait of making the subject think it is experiencing an afterlife as a way to soothe the subjects fear of dying - since the subject dies. Which would make it hard to pass on any newly mutated genes.

Just curious. Not a denier.

I think as people age they develop imprinted memory algorithms. Even young children have this urge for survival that create networks that probably are the genesis of later more elaborate experiences. And if you buy into the idea that electrical activity creates an electrical field which the brain picks up as a feed back loop it isn't a stretch see why this gains a foot hold in evolutionary biology. If bird species at birth can distinguish certain silhouettes as being friend or foe it isn't a stretch that the human mind does the same thing.

[Physics Guy]

Near-death experiences are still-alive experiences. They might conceivably present something that happens to be true, just as a dream or hallucination might, but they can't prove anything.

It's hard to see how evolution could specifically favour any particular kind of near-death experience as a feature of brain architecture, because as dantana points out, it's hard to see what kind of advantage NDEs would confer in gene proliferation. Presumably whatever brain structures support NDEs are what Stephen Jay Gould called evolutionary "spandrels".

Spandrels are features in church architecture: they're spaces between arch supports. Spandrels aren't there because of any benefit they themselves bring. They're just a geometrically unavoidable consequence of placing arches beside each other. Presumably there are some useful brain features that happen to have NDEs as an accidental side-effect.

As always when NDEs come up as a topic I plug Connie Willis's novel Passage because it is interesting if you are interested in NDEs ... or in the sinking of the Titanic.

[Dr Exiled]

Fear of death is a big motivator, clouding our thinking. It is a huge factor in why religions exist and might be the reason behind NDE's. Humans can trick themselves into believing anything and stampede like cattle when fear and panic set in.

However, I remember back in the late 70's when I was a kid that astroplaning was a fad. It was a way, supposedly, to get outside of the body. Perhaps there is something to this where the subconscious or the conscious brain can perceive the body from outside of itself? Brain waves can be atunned to control things unattached to the body as scientists have discovered. Maybe there is something to the brain's power to perceive the body as if one were outside of oneself?

My great grandfather had one of these and supposedly described what everyone was doing as he floated above his body. Also, I have a client that was pronounced dead and claims to have left his body for a time only to return to his body 15 hrs later as it was laying in the hospital morgue. He scared the nurses pretty good he said when he got up after seemingly being dead for hours.

The brain is a marvelous organ and can do a lot that we don't yet understand. However, sorry DCP, it has nothing to do with Mormonism.

[DrStakhanovite]

I've finished reading Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists: A Thought Experiment and Realer Than Real Near-Death Experiences and it is exceedingly bad (roughly 125 pages of material). The author goes down a lot of pointless rabbit trails to rant about how dismissive the world is about NDEs and spends an unreasonable amount of time meditating on how stupid we are all going to look to future generations. His entire thesis essentially breaks down to a thought experiment of people going into a room and then coming back out to describe it, presumably to show how critical testimony is to epistemology and then combines that with an argument that people who have experienced NDEs report that they are overwhelmingly veridical and so their testimony should be granted much more evidentiary value than we otherwise might give them. Think of Plato's cave analogy; skeptics are the ones chained inside studying shadows while those who have experienced NDEs are trying to convince us that there is another world awaiting us that is far better.

The guy has some kind of philosophy background, but I don't think he teaches anywhere and the majority of his bibliography comes from resources that exclusively deal with NDEs (popular and academic), but doesn't have much else in the way of brain science, neurology, and other relevant material.

Here is an insert from the publisher advertising other books to give you a flavor of what kind of audiences they cater to (The Interpreter should commission a piece from this guy, he'd fit in with their regulars):




It'll be interesting to see if DCP incorporates any of this into his own pièces de résistance

[drumdude]

DCP is a speaker at the yearly Near Death Experience conference. He should be as ashamed of speaking there as he would be speaking at a Healing Crystal conference, or a Flat Earth conference. Or a Young Earth Creationist conference. Or an anti-vaccine conference.

Basically any conference where the main message is, "Everyone is trying to conspire against our alternative facts and beliefs! Buy my book to see how you're being lied to!"

[hauslern]

Dan said he intends to read the book Whatever Happened to the Soul where Nancey Murphy ed arguing for the physicalist position. In another book she writes "the physicalist thesis is that as we go up the hierarchy of increasingly complex organisms, all of the capacities once attributed to the soul will also turn out to be products of complex organization, rather then properties of a non-material entity" Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?