Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by arauca, Oct 10, 2012.

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  1. Mazulu

    Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Consciousness is a pattern of electrical energy in your brain. Electrical energy is made possible by virtual photons (virtual photons are the carriers of electromagnetism). Now comes the jump. Virtual photons are excitations of the luminiferous aether, described with wave-functions. The luminiferous aether is spirit. Believe me or don't believe me as you wish. It won't change the outcome. When you die, you may experience the tunnel of light, family and friends who have died, luminous beings and heavenly bliss; these are documented experiences. And either it will continue as you become a spirit ... or you will cease to exist. What you believe will not change the outcome. So believe whatever gives you peace.
     
    Mazulu, Oct 18, 2012
    #401

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  3. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I understand that people feel they experience these things, but isn't near death an even more unreliable point of view from which to judge what is real than dreaming? And isn't dreaming much less reliable than conscious perception?

    I don't think anything happens to you when you die. I don't care. I only want to try and convince you that these reports cannot be considered evidence of what you are saying. Beliefs and the way we arrive at them matter. It is not the case that we may believe anything we wish to because it sounds appealing. Your accusations about atheists reveal more about you than about us. I, for one, would love to discover something that would radically change my point of view. It is a trait of intelligent individuals. That's why smart people are more likely to use psychoactive substances. One of these is DMT, and it is produced naturally during times of extreme stress in the pineal gland. When DMT is administered under controlled conditions, users commonly feel profound things not unlike a religious experience. I think this is the way the brain copes with extreme stress. Unconsciousness is another one, so is coma. For you to discount these explanations and take hallucinatory reports on face value is not intellectually honest. It is you who would lose your comfort if you considered a different point of view.
     
    spidergoat, Oct 18, 2012
    #402

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  5. Rhaedas

    Rhaedas Valued Senior Member

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    Well, that much is true.
     
    Rhaedas, Oct 18, 2012
    #403

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  7. Gravage

    Gravage Registered Senior Member

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    Like I said scientists would first have to know everything and about everything and it should have been irrefutably proven to prove/disprove the existence of afterlife or God. Skepticism is healthy for science but too much skepticism can also be counterproductive, if there is too much skepticism. One example is when you get sick get cancer, first I would try everything what modern medicine offers, if nothing works, I'll try alternative medicine, bio-energy, reiku and similar. If you're too much skeptical, you would have the situation where skeptical people will refuse to try out alternative, it doesn't matter if alternative work or not, the important thing is to try it, skeptical people would not do that because of their pride. I'm the kind of guy who will admit that he is wrong, but only when it is irrefutably proven that I'm wrong. NDEs/OBEs do not belong to this category, yes over 99% of NDEs/OBEs can be scientifically explain but not all.
    I have to say that let's say modern science proves the existence of afterlife, personally I don't think they would except it, it's just that kind of mentality, everything what they have learn would collapse, that's the kind of mentality. And please don't talk about rationalism, because science has proven no man how rational he/she is cannot be 100% rational.
    Sun will rise tomorrow as it will the next 4.6 billion years, this much we know based on the observations of other stars, so we have here a definite proof.
    The question, though, is why should people assume there is an afterlife in the absence of any evidence for one or any mechanism for how it might work? Isn't more reasonable to conclude that there very likely isn't one?

    The same could be asked why one would believe in justice or other fake terms like that. For some reason we all believe in "justice" but what is justice exactly? We call it doing the right thing. We always talk about it and support it.
    Now why would we think of something that can't be proven scientifically? Why do we have terms like ethics, justice, morality, etc. None of these have been proven scientifically.
    We have proven scientifically that humans are evolved apes and our true nature is greed. Our goal in life is to spread our genes. So why on earth are we helping each other? I understand helping the opposite sex because we can use them as advantage for spreading our genes. But why help the same sex?
    I'm just saying that it's strange for people to say "why believe in something not scientifically proven" when a lot of our life or thinking cannot be proven scientifically.
     
    Last edited: Oct 18, 2012
    Gravage, Oct 18, 2012
    #404
  8. wynn

    wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Not at all.

    It's you who is painting with a brush too broad.


    I consider myself neither. But not that it matters for this conversation.
     
    wynn, Oct 18, 2012
    #405
  9. Mazulu

    Mazulu Banned Banned

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    The wave-function is describing spirit; the wave-function is describing aether. If you think that quantum systems are solid-discrete objects, then you are mistaken. But the scientific is unwilling to see the truth; they are blind to it. DMT molecules are just quantum systems which are interacting with neurons which are also quantum systems. I'm afraid you have been mislead by science. Science is hostile to religion, to spirit. Oh well. :shrug:
     
    Mazulu, Oct 18, 2012
    #406
  10. Gravage

    Gravage Registered Senior Member

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    Tell that to this:
    http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/parano...eal-and-we-have-the-proof-say-scientists.html

    This is still a huge mystery.
     
    Gravage, Oct 18, 2012
    #407
  11. Neverfly

    Neverfly Banned Banned

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    This is not accurate. What you're not accepting here is that those alternative methods have been shown to be 'wrong,' ineffective etc. If you, personally, do not know if they are wrong or not does not mean no one knows if they are wrong. Can you tell me, does Homeopathy offer the chance for a cure or treatment for ailments? If you do not know about homeopathy, you might assume it has the possibility of merit. But those that know about homeopathy may know better.
     
    Neverfly, Oct 18, 2012
    #408
  12. wynn

    wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    That doesn't make those methods right either.


    Do all human bodies function the same way?
    Do all human minds function the same way?

    It is a common assumption that they do; yet it is an unprovable assumption. In fact, casual observation shows that not all human bodies function the same, nor do all human minds.

    Moreover, there are the phenomena of spontaneous healing and the placebo effect. These would need to be ruled out from the cases where people got well using standard Western medicine. Perhaps they would have gotten well without the treatment anyway.
     
    wynn, Oct 18, 2012
    #409
  13. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Money from writing New Age books is real says neurosurgeon.
     
    Captain Kremmen, Oct 18, 2012
    #410
  14. Balerion

    Balerion Banned Banned

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    This is a absurd. Nobody says that all people react the same to everything. And this being true does not mean that Homeopathy and other alternative treatments might actually work for some people.

    What does this have to do with the plausibility of alternative treatment?
     
    Balerion, Oct 18, 2012
    #411
  15. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Apes are not greedy, and neither were humans in the Paleolithic Era. Before the invention of the technology of agriculture and the building of permanent villages, there was no way for a nomadic hunter-gatherer to amass an unusually large collection of possesions. He had no way to carry them: no domesticated riding or draft animals, no wheels.

    You don't see other species of apes exhibiting greed. Sure, if there's a famine and there's not enough food, one tribe will defend its gathering territory (we are the only carnivorous ape so the other species don't hunt) from intruders, but within a community the members cooperate with each other. Stone Age humans behaved exactly the same way.

    But we are a pack-social species and our goal is to spread the genes of the community, not the individual.

    You need to study the Stone Age in a lot more detail. Most of what you think you know about it is dead wrong. Humans are not equipped to survive easily as individuals, the way tigers and other solitary hunters are. Our physical strength and our senses of smell and hearing are not adequate for a single person with Stone Age tools to bring down enough game to comprise a satisfactory diet.

    We use our uniquely superior intelligence (our forebrain is more than twice as large as any other ape relative to body size, and it's immense compared to all other warm-blooded animals) and our unique communication skill (no one knows when the technology of spoken language was invented but it almost certainly goes back to at least 70KYA, before we migrated out of Africa) to cooperate in clever ways. The power of the tribe is much, much greater than the sum of the powers of its individual members. One human with a spear is lucky to bring down a beaver. Twenty humans can bring down an entire herd of deer or goats.

    Humans have always cared for and depended on the few dozen members of their extended-family or "pack," people they've known and trusted since birth. That's an instinct programmed into our neurons by our DNA. The miracle of our development since the Neolithic Era (the dawn of agriculture) is that we've been able to override that instinct and redefine our "pack" to include a larger and larger group.

    In the first farming villages the pack included a few neighboring tribes whom we invited to join us because the economy of scale and division of labor made possible by a larger village increased productivity, and freed up a few people from "careers" in the food production "industry" to do other things such as building houses or composing music. These people were not total strangers, but they were not exactly "family," yet we learned to live in harmony and cooperation with them because it made us all more prosperous.

    The next step was the building of cities. In cities we had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. We had to respect the authority of a leader who was not our own grandpa. Once again, we were able to override our instinct and accept these people as pack-mates because it made us even more prosperous. We now had formal musical performances, fancy clothing, animals bred for racing, social dances, beautiful ceramics, alcoholic beverages, and other activities not directly needed for survival.

    We kept enlarging our "pack." Next it became a state, a large group of people, most of whom never met each other, but shared a common language and culture and respected the same leaders. Then it became a nation, then an empire, and then a trans-national hegemony such as the EU. At each step the benefits of accepting more distant strangers as pack-mates were so great and so obvious that we were willing to live a life that was not exactly synchronized with our instincts. And we were able to do this only because of our enormous forebrain, which gives us the ability to modify or override our instincts. It's obvious that the next step will be a single global civilization, one "pack" including all of us. The added benefits will be astounding. Just never having another war will enrich us by a couple of orders of magnitude--look at all the effort and resources we waste, protecting ourselves from each other! The prosperity of that era is unimaginable.

    The reason we help other people is that over the past twelve thousand years we have learned that helping other people enriches our own lives.

    We're not monkeys, content with a place to sleep and leaves to eat and a few simple games. We very much enjoy our modern life with its comfortable furniture, its climate-controlled homes, its inexhaustible variety of fantastic food, its transportation technology that allows us to see both the natural and man-made wonders in other lands, its communication technology that allows us to have friends on the other side of the planet and enrich ourselves by discussing our different cultures and ideas, its modern scientific medicine that allows us to build a family by having only two children instead of having ten and weeping as eight of them die, its dozens of domesticated animal species so we can form bonds with dogs and cats and parrots and capybaras and discover an entire new dimension to the universe inside our heads and hearts, and of course its inexhaustible supply of entertainment.

    I don't know about you, but for me that's more than enough reward to convince me to be nice to other people.

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    Anthropology is a science and nothing in this post is the least bit controversial to an anthropologist--except possibly the timing of the invention of language, and as an amateur linguist I'll pull rank on the professional anthropologists.

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    You need to delve a little deeper into the sciences. You'll find that a lot of your questions have already been answered.

    Anthropology would be a great place to start. Work your way from the Paleolithic Era (nomadic hunter-gatherers) to the Neolithic (people settling in one place and practicing farming and animal husbandry) to city-building (strangers learning to work together and respect authority, domesticated animals to augment our own musclepower) to the Bronze Age (metal tools that revolutionized nearly every aspect of life but also made war possible, written language, money, wheels that allowed us to travel more widely and trade goods and ideas with distant cities) to the Iron Age (not merely better metal tools but a quantum improvement in technology that created a civilization that we would recognize today with highways and sewers) to the Industrial Revolution (conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuel into kinetic energy increased the productivity of human labor so tremendously that 99% of the human race were no longer doomed to "careers" in food production and distribution, motorized transportation that took everybody everywhere) to the Electronic Revolution (instant communication among all people everywhere, breaking down the last boundaries between our various "packs").
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Oct 18, 2012
    #412
  16. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You don't know what the ---- you are talking about.
     
    spidergoat, Oct 18, 2012
    #413
  17. Neverfly

    Neverfly Banned Banned

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    True. But they are still demonstrated as false.
    Mostly, yes; with small or subtle variations.
    Mostly, yes; with small or subtle variations. Bear in mind, however how extraordinarily complex the human brain is. Even subtle effects can have exponentially remarkable outcomes.
    Psycho-symptomatic responses.
    ROFL
    Apes show greed during times of plenty frequently, hoarding food, shiny bobs to trade for sexual favors and getting their hand stuck in a vase for refusal to let go of a stupid apple.
    In fact, apes are only somewhat cooperative, hoping for some favor in exchange for that cooperation.
    I really wonder what apes you've been watching.
     
    Neverfly, Oct 18, 2012
    #414
  18. Mazulu

    Mazulu Banned Banned

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    ??? I don't know what point you're trying to make.
     
    Mazulu, Oct 18, 2012
    #415
  19. Mazulu

    Mazulu Banned Banned

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    You're not making sense.
     
    Mazulu, Oct 18, 2012
    #416
  20. Mazulu

    Mazulu Banned Banned

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    It's a beautiful story. The phenomena seems to be improving the quality of people's lives. Doctors are saying that they're convinced of life after death. It's a real phenomena that occurs rather frequently when the heart stops and the brain is starved of oxygen. Let's just go with it.

    Science/intellectualism is about 95% negative thinking/hostility and only 5% scientific reason based upon sketchy facts and this "zombie brain hypothesis" to explain high level cognitive functions. Clearly, the soul is not made of standard model particles so the scientific community can't really talk about it. There are hordes of laypersons who are habitually negative in their outlook. trying to perpetuate a picture of gloom based on their own opinions. But gloomy thinking only sinks the quality of my life experience. Why do I need it. Gloomy thinking doesn't pay my mortgage. Gloomy thinking doesn't help my job; gloomy thinking doesn't make my boss happy. Gloomy thinking doesn't make my wife happy. Gloomy thinking doesn't pay my taxes. Gloomy thinking doesn't mow my lawn. Gloomy thinking doesn't make me more likeable. Gloomy thing doesn't make me more competitive. Gloomy thinking doesn't make me happy.
     
    Mazulu, Oct 18, 2012
    #417
  21. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Clearly if there is no evidence for your treasured fantasies you just make up a fantasy realm that science cannot touch. It's not negative to embrace science, it's reality-positive.
     
    spidergoat, Oct 18, 2012
    #418
  22. gmilam

    gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    I think you see the real cause of what's going on... The brain is in distress. That is the most parsimonious explanation.

    Sorry that you find reality gloomy and negative. Maybe that's why you have a need to believe in fairy tales.
     
    gmilam, Oct 18, 2012
    #419
  23. Mazulu

    Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Here is a quote from the evidence of 3200 NDE experiencers.

    I know you guys like to throw out data that you don't like. After all, the experiences of 3200 human beings who have been to the brink of death means nothing to a deluded skeptic who believes in some kind of "zombie brain phenomenon". By the way, just to remind you: there was one person who had a confirmed NDE experience while they were operating on her brain. Her brain was drained of blood and cooled to 15 Celsius. Skeptics dodge this fact by calling upon the "zombie brain hypothesis" so even intellectuals can avoid the facts and be intellectually dishonest when it suits them.
     
    Mazulu, Oct 18, 2012
    #420
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