Near Death Studies - Consciousness After Death

Almindor

Well not really. What I meant to ask was whether there's any evidence contradicting the hypothesis that human consciousness (or soul if you wish) is just a "software program" running in the brain. I probably over-complicated the question tho :)

Yes, the computer has differences in HW which make it harder to compare (like hard disk and no need for stable power income) but that'd be another discussion. And I also doubt that robots would have NDE even if they had consciousness, but not for the lack of soul, but rather the lack of certain chemicals and their effects :)

Btw. so was the monkey head swap experiment done or is it bogus? I'd be very interested in the results...

LightbulbSun

I don't mean to be harsh, but are you choosing to dismiss actual evidence because you personally want to think there's more to it than that?

wittgenstein

First, let me say that I believe that my experience was because of a lack of oxygen to my brain, not a confrontation with ultimate reality.
I was 12 and in band during try outs. Most of the band had nothing to do. So, my friends and I fainted each other. When I fell...well pardon the cliche but I cannot describe what happened literally so I will resort to poetry. Imagine walking near the rim of the Grand Canyon. The immensity was breath taking. I looked at an ant and desperately tried to stop concentrating on it. Unfortunately, the ant became the center of my focus. That ant was my life on earth and the Grand Canyon was what I really am. Anyway, as I said, I am only telling you what I experienced. I have been too well trained in logic to believe that it was real.

Nick666

Consciousness after death is the same as consciousness before procreation.

levon105

what if consciousness is part of energy and when the body dies, energy leaves the body which means consciousness also leaves.

Just a thought :)

ZapperZ

I can detect when energy is being transferred from one location to another. That is how we are able to quantify such transfer. Would you like to let us know what energy this is so that we can make such detection? Or have you found papers that have made such detection?

Zz.

LouieHussey

There have always been reports of life after death experiences, but never so many as today, for medical practice has advanced to the point today where resuscitation of patents can be successfully preformed fairly frequently, so these instances are far more common than they used to be—and generally speaking, they are far better documented. Pollster George Gallop Jr. in 1982 (see Closer to the Light, pg 9) found that eight million adults in the United States had had near death experiences, so the experience is more common than originally thought. And it is not just a western or “cultural” phenomenon, peoples from around the world, and from every religious persuasion, have had the experience.

There have been at least half a dozen books published in recent times that document life after death experiences. One very well documented case that particularly sticks in my mind was a case in which a woman died in a hospital on the operating table. She was clinically dead: no heartbeat, no respiration, no brain waves, no signs of life at all, nothing. As the code went out, the room filled with doctors and nurses scurrying around trying to resuscitate her. She says that she floated out of her body and hovered just under the ceiling, watching everything that was happening in the room, and listening to everything that was said. And when they finally got her resuscitated, she reported to them that she had watched them from outside her body, and she reported to them everything that they had said and done. Note that the eyes of her body as she lay dead on the operating table had been closed, she could not have seen anything with her physical eyes.

This is poof, absolute proof, that she had been outside her body as she lay dead on the table, and that she had heard and seen everything from the perspective of someone outside their body, of someone just under the ceiling. (There have even been cases where blind patients have seen everything).

There is another case that particularly sticks in my mind. Not every one goes to Heaven or hangs around the earth or whatever, some come back from the dead with stories of having been in Hell (although most who have that experience do not want to talk about it). There was a man on the operating table undergoing a heart catheterization that died during the procedure. They worked on him and got him back, but he started slipping back again. And he cried out to the doctors, I’m in Hell, I’m in Hell, get me back! And he was deadly serious. At first the doctors did not take him seriously, but when they saw the sheer terror in his eyes and in his voice, they worked feverishly to get him back. They brought him back three times, before they finally got him back for good. You will never convince anybody who has seen Hell that there is no Hell.

These documented cases and many others can be found in the following books (a couple of which were written by medical doctors who interviewed life-after-death patients), along with details about what happens at death, many of these were best sellers, and they make for fascinating reading:

Beyond and Back: those who died and lived to tell it, by Ralph Wilkerson, 1977 Bantam Books.
Beyond Death’s Door, by Maurice Rawlings, M.D., 1978, Bantam Books.
Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody Jr. M.D., 1975, Bantam Books. Pg 83
Reflections on Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody Jr, M.D. 1977 Bantam Books.

See also:
The Light Beyond: New explorations by the author of Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody Jr, M.D. 1988, Bantam Books.
Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near Death Experiences of Children, by Melvin Morse, M.D. with Paul Perry, 1990, An Ivy Book, Published by Random House Publishing Company.
Lessons from the Light: What we can Learn from the Near-death Experience, by Kenneth Ring and Elsaesser Valarino.1998, Published by First Moment Point Press.

There are thousands of documented cases of people who died and came back to tell about it--eye witness accounts of life after death. And these include people of all walks of life who did not know one another, some of them having never even heard of life after death experiences, and yet their experiences were similar. They bring back stories of having seen God, the Being of Light, the personal judgment, and all that.

And those who have had these experiences are absolutely certain, without any shadow of any doubt whatsoever, that it was real, that they were not hallucinating, that they were not dreaming, it was too vivid—far, far too vivid. They have heightened senses, and they describe it as the most real thing to ever happen to them. And you will never convince any of them that they did not experience what they experienced. As they say, seeing is believing.

Those who laugh it off in the face of such evidence, or who just categorically dismiss it, need to think twice about that, because, you know, you are not getting any younger. Those who categorically dismiss such documented accounts are being presumptuous, and there is no accounting for presumption. And presumption certainly has no place in science.

Those who refuse to accept such documented eye witness accounts of life after death experiences as evidence (some sworn to under oath)are not going to believe short of them experiencing it themselves. Some years ago I read that there were people in Europe who were paying good money to have a doctor put them to death so that they could personally experience life after death experiences. But I do not recommend that. It’s dangerous--they might not be able to resuscitate you.

There have been mentions in these replies about the soul and the brain. There is a connection. When the soul leaves the body it comes out through the top of the head according to those who have had the experience. And there is reason to believe that the soul is connected to the brain. Old timers sometimes say that when someone dies, their souls leaving their bodies sometimes make a sound something like wings flapping, they call it “angel wings”. That would be, I assume, the sound of the soul disconnecting from its attachment to the brain.

Another set of evidence of life after death is found in eyewitness accounts of human ghosts seen in haunted houses and such. There are essentially two categories of spirits, which include the spirits of deceased human beings, namely light spirits (meaning spirits that give off light) spirits dark spirits (spirits that do not). Light spirits are visible to the naked eye, especially in the dark, because they give off light, usually faint, and can be photographed by cameras with regular film. We have many eyewitness accounts and many pictures of them, which is photographic evidence. Dark spirits are lost human spirits. These cannot normally be seen with the naked eye (some people claim to be able to see them, but that is rare, most cannot, and some animals can see them), and they do not show up on regular photographic film, but they do show up on infrared film as a dark shadow of a human being. (Some digital cameras can see them, but some cannot, depending on the light sensors in them). Dark spirits make the room feel cold, like you are sitting next to a block of ice, although a thermometer may not show that the room is cold. These effects of dark spirits are accounted for if dark spirits absorb inferred light (radiant heat). Spirits can pass through solid objects like walls. Human spirits often appear as humans (so if your deceased grandfather appears to you, you will recognize him right away, for he will look like your grandfather) while demons (damned angels) appear as unknown humanoids, half human, half animal. If you want to prove the existence of spirits to yourself, you can go to haunted houses known to be frequented by spirits, and spend the night there, or a whole week--if you dare. But I don’t recommend it, especially if there are demons there. In my younger day, I made the offer to a number of people who claimed there were no such thing as ghosts, to go with them to spend the night in a haunted house in which spirits were known to frequent. Their eyes got big as saucers. Oh no! No! No! They were not going to do that! Absolutely not! So when it came right down to it, they were not so sure. They were not willing to put their stated beliefs to the test.

Here are some collections of ghost pictures:

http://paranormal.about.com/od/ghost...-Ghost-Photos/

http://www.angelsghosts.com/famous_real_ghost_pictures

There have also been a half dozen experiments done around the world, in which a dying person is weighted on a scale, and at the moment of death, they lost a slight weight. Showing that at the moment of death something with a slight weight left their body. Which is physical proof that there is a human soul. But those who do not want to believe are not going to accept any of this evidence.

Weight anomaly references:

See the paper: The soul: hypothesis concerning soul substance together with experimental evidence of the existence of such substance, by Duncan MacDougall, M.D., March 1907, the journal American Medicine.
The full text of Dr. MacDougall's soul mass experiment with dying human patients can be found at: http://www.scientificexploration.org..._hollander.pdf

See the report: Weighing the Human Soul, by Ragan Dunn in the Weekly World News, Nov 8, 1988, a copy of which may be found at:
http://lilt.ilstu.edu/kfmachin/FOI/W...man%20soul.htm
East German researchers weigh over 200 terminally ill patients at death, detect the same weight loss for each, Dr. Becker Mertens of Dresden said in a letter printed in the German science journal Horizon.

Unexplained weight gain transients at the moment of death, by Lewis E. Hollander, Jr., Journal of scientific exploration, Vol 15 #4, pg 495, 2001.
The full text of Hollander’s paper can be found at:
http://www.scientificexploration.org..._hollander.pdf
Anomalous Weight transients occurring at the moment of death of twelve animals.

Ivan Seeking

You have offered no links to support your claims. The only acceptable links are those providing documented information about the claims themselves. No theories. Also acceptable are papers published in appropriate scientific journals.

If no links are provided within a day, and your post will be deleted until supporting information is provided.

ideasrule

Do you seriously believe that a drugged and demented brain that's on the very verge of death can be trusted to produce reliable observations? Even normal brains often hallucinate. Most people don't realize, during dreams, that they're dreaming because dreams seem so real and vivid. A person near death can easily assume that his dream was real, especially if it conforms to his religious beliefs, whereas the same dream would have been dismissed as a dream if it happened on a regular night.

Ivan Seeking

To be fair, I know that there are some cases of people allegedly describing the ER or operating room, the people in the room, the operating instruments, etc, when they shouldn't have been able to do so; and even events that occurred when they were technically brain dead. But proper references are still required. I don't know if any of these claims are published in a proper paper. In the event that these are only stories coming from medical workers, or claims made in unpublished papers, the claims would be purely anecdotal.

ideasrule

I'm aware of that, but I was responding to LouieHussey, who seems to have 100% trust in the patients' words. Cases where dying people accurately describe details in the operating room are harder to explain.

ZapperZ

It is interesting that they HAVE done studies to mimic and "out of body" experience to "normal" brain. See:

[1] H. Henrik Ehrsson Science v.317, p.104824 (2007).
[2] Bigna Lenggenhager et al. Science v.317, p. 1096 (2007).

.. and a review of these can be found (with suitable subscription access) at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/0708...s070820-9.html.

From what I gather, the brain that is under "stress", such as near death, will undergo even more trauma and "random" activity, almost like the sleep state when dreams occurs. That's why some time you get reports of incoherent "vision", while others the person can also hear and think they "see" what's going on around them even when they are unconscious. In other words, it is HARDER to trick normal, healthy brains into doing this trick, such as an "out of body" experience, than a "sick, stressed" brain.

So, like you, I certainly won't buy purely anecdotal "evidence" that was brought up here by LouieHussey. There have been way too many of those, and people should know better than try to use those has convincing evidence.

Zz.

mxcryno

I think we should all read books before posting things:

http://www.amazon.com/90-Minutes-Hea.../dp/0800759494

http://www.amazon.com/23-Minutes-Hel...6725606&sr=1-1

Evo

Anecdotal stories?

mxcryno

I suppose its only anecdotal if you take out the fact that the guy who went to heaven was depressed for the rest of his life because heaven was so amazing, and the guy who went to hell changed his entire life completely.

Evo

They're stories, there are no facts.

mxcryno

True no facts. Only the human experience. Only self-realization, which is only relevant to those who experience it. And self-realization and raw human emotion, they passed lie detector tests btw, is far more convincing. Unfortunately perhaps none of us will experience what they did in our lifetimes. But maybe in our death times.