Are you a "zombie brain"? Does your brain work when it's dead?
Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon
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I'm not rejecting that these people had experiences. It's just that these experiences cannot be considered data regarding the subject of their thoughts. Just like your dreams about Middle Earth cannot be considered evidence of Middle Earth.
The only way that could happen is if these people possess data which they didn't previously about something they could not otherwise have known.
These people's brains were not dead, they were near dead, which is not the same thing.
Never been brain dead myself. Maybe you should tell us your experience.
I would like to have a list of doctors who believe this experience to be a sign of an afterlife. It should be published along with a major warning that says, "Danger! These doctors believe in woo woo. Use at your own risk!"
The only truly mathematically verifiable phenomenon is reality is MONEY. There is no Higgs field or Higgs particle. These are all scientific delusions. Gravity is real. God is real. Love is real. String theory is delusion. Human beings are real. Religion is real. Nonbelievers are just useless people spreading their gloom and doom.
Science is just a fancy accounting system. Money is more real than science because I can at least count my own money. Science dogma is as bad as Christian dogma.
You know, we can debate about the topic and agree to disagree, but that's just insulting. I haven't insulted you and your beliefs, even though I think they're not true. I even said I was fine with you believing them, so long as it helps you through life. And then you have to say something like that. What do you know about non-believers, anyway?
It's funny but I've seen Wynn, Jan Ardena and Lightgigantic make this same kind of claim- That atheists are "doom and gloom," "miserable," "depressed," etc without the belief in a God. I've always found it very interesting how they come to the nth degree of admitting that they only believe because they would find it depressing not to.
And I'm fine with that. Some people need something to hold onto. Maybe they've had problems in their life, and religion helps them get over it. Maybe they are scared of thinking that the universe just "is." They want to be told they have a purpose, instead of finding one for themselves. Whatever works for you.
But to turn around and make a generalization about those who don't believe...one, it shows the lack of knowledge about such people, and two, it's just rude.
I wasn't talking about math, or proof, but rather the nature of evidence. Individual human perception cannot be considered reliable evidence because we are subject to all sorts of illusions and delusions. Is that so hard to understand?
This is some of the most babbling rubbish I’ve ever heard!
For someone who in numberless posts on these forums, suggest high wired ideas which is beyond even fringe. I find it ironic that U just accused pretty much every good thing in science, of being untrustworthy... lol...
The only reason I read your posts is for the entertainment value, kinda like when you watch Idol, laughing at the hopeless git that cant sing at ALL!
Now come on surprise me, and post something for a change that actually has any scientific backing and acknowledgement.
Honestly I guess I’m impressed by your ability to mix subjects together which has nothing to do with one another at all, and yet sound like your the ONLY one who actually knows anything... very amusing and disturbing at the same time.
Back on the subject at hand:
From a perfectly scientific stand point, NDE's, will never be produced in a brain beyond certain points of oxygen insufficiency and the flood of chemicals basically numbs your subconscious.
While below these oxygen levels and above these chemical levels your brains high functions are shut down and the autonomic ones are barely making electrical charges noticeable on a scan.
How ever when ppl come in and out of these states its a proven fact, that many of the same centers associated with dreaming and sleeping are highly active.
Don’t take my word on it, ask a REAL neurosurgeon.... that's what I did =) (the perk of working were I do.)
Now the rest of his explanation I didn’t understand.... how ever it boiled down to above.
That's interesting. So the neural circuitry for dreaming is still online. I wish you could point me to a website that explains which part of the brain governs dreaming. Normal dreaming, the kind that we have every night, is usually a collection of random experiences strung together. They usually don't make sense or have a theme. One migt even say that dreams are collections of neurals firing in some random pattern. But near death experiences include one or more of the following:
Overwhelming love (69%)
Mental telepathy (65%)
Life review (62%)
God (56%)
Tremendous ecstasy (56%)
Unlimited knowledge (46%)
Afterlife levels (46%)
Told not ready (46%)
Shown the future (44%)
Tunnel (42%)
Jesus (37%)
Forgotten knowledge (31%)
Fear (27%)
Homecoming (21%)
Told of past lives (21%)
Hell (19%)
City of light (17%)
Temple of Knowledge (13%)
Spirits among the living (10%)
Suicide (6%)
Devil (0%)
But those are usually not topics of dreams. Personally, I would draw the conclusion that the neural circuitry for dreaming is receiving incoming information, as opposed to just a randomly generated set of dream events. I know all the skeptics are going to argue that NDE's are just random signals in the neurological dream circuitry. Nobody seems to really understand my argument. So I will conclude with a question related to quantum mechanics.
Do quantum systems exist? Are they part of reality?
Those do sound like the subjects of dreams. I don't know if dreaming is exactly what's going on but what does that have to do with quantum physics? The brain is too hot to be governed by quantum scale events.
At the risk of encouraging Mazulu, it is evidently not true that "the brain is too hot to be governed by quantum scale events".
As far as the brain goes, Hameroff and Penrose have a theory called Orch-OR. While it does seem to stretch the science into some questionable areas, the idea that is intriguing. Hameroff has several youtube videos where he talks about the subject. Disclaimer: Hameroff also appeared in that What The Bleep Do We Know film, but he does have some science chops.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmdJtSwH9O4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv32Ai0YRck&feature=relmfu
I was walking along the path of
No that's not, what I did say(or meant) was :
It's active to a certain point before the subconscious mind "numbs" (aka, the activity in the brain is to low to be considered 'working' yet not brain dead either.)
I’m using layman’s terms here cuz that’s my level of understanding the brain! And this is a secondhand explanation given to me by a neurosurgeon at work. (he talked an entire lunch break about it, And that’s 10 minutes working were I do lol.)
His conclusion to the subject is this:
If a person says they experienced an NDE, he see's it as an act of the subconscious mind.
If a persons brain is beyond these 'threshold' levels were the subconscious isn't “awake”
they wouldn't be able to remember the NDE, cuz wen even the subconscious is “numbed”
the centers of the brain that stores memories ain’t either.(as I understand it the two go hand in hand.)
So from a pure science view a person who actually had and NDE (from being dead.) wouldn’t remember it, and a person who says they remember one, have just had a subconscious experience
of massive proportions compared to a normal dream, brought on by the flood of chemicals in the brain that happens wen ppl are near death. (Above I find amazingly funny.)
And to add a last point...
it of course depends on your definition of near death......
And if your religious to believe we have a soul, that’s able to store memories even wen our brain can't.
Then you didn't understand.
I don't believe in God. I have asked people several times how they can be happy without believing in God, and as they replied, I had some further questions on the nature of the happiness without God.
So far, it hasn't been explained how a person can find satisfaction in things that are subject to decay and perishing. Claims have been made that such satisfaction is possible, but nobody worked out the details.
Riiiight. Because it is completely irrelevant whether the person gets well or not.
What matters is that the scientific protocol be followed, and if it means that the person dies in the process, so be it!
How do you know human beings are real? What if you are just a chimpanzee with fantasies of further evolution and all the other chimpanzees locked you in a cave somewhere because you were freaking them out after having shaved yourself.
Better yet, what if earth isn't even real and you are an alien on some other planet really far away and you are hallucinating our existence? Maybe you are imagining us and have become delusional thinking you ARE one of us and your family is desperately trying to get you to come home. They are even trying to connect to you in the alien mental hospital by telepathy and tell you how to get home, sort of reaching out to you in the terms you think you exist so that you will respond.
There is a difference between the concept of "having a soul" and "being a soul."
Christianity tends to be unclear on the matter; in the Bible, both formulations are used.
"Having a soul" suggests that you are the body, and you have an appendage, ie. a soul. This soul is apparently somehow both you and not you. What goes to heaven or hell: you or your soul?
"Being a soul" suggests that this is who you are.
See an explanation that is alternative to the mainstream Christian one.
Flat-out lie. It has been explained to you plenty of times what makes people happy and why. The failing has been on your part to recognize it, or even to show that there is any alternative to decay and perishing.
You're the one who is wrong here, you can test alternatives on yourself, I did multiple times, some of them work, some don't work. The problem with science is that they do not accept them as something that should considered. science has yet to prove that nothing of alternatives is effective or non-effective. There are many frauds, and this is another reason why science is so skeptical, but there are real deals as well (although not many), however, you will never see these people on tv or internet or anything like it. Yes, I will rather try to spend my money on every possible alternative and finds something that might work (but only in case if modern medicine cannot help me anymore at all), than do nothing, like you.
You have proven that let's suppose you have cancer, you will use everything what modern medicine offers, but if nothing works, you will still not try alternative since you have nothing to lose. I will use everything in disposal to get healthy, including all kinds of alternatives, if the best of modern medicine cannot help me.
Meaning: I'm open-minded skeptic, you're close-minded skeptic.
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.
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.
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").
I don't need to look at any scientific study, I have far more than enough experience that people are really, really evil, so please, don't sell me that people are good.
They are neither...
Good or Evil only exists for one race Homo sapiens for any other earth beeing the concept is of no importance.
The concept is by default individual, as it reflects the individual moral, ethics and belifes or non-belifs.
Sicence can there for not tell you something is good, neither can it tell u something is evil...Things just are what they are....
You belive ppl are Evil, wich is an individual statement of your crude generalisation of an entire race.