Near Death Studies - Consciousness After Death

moonstroller

Attached in what way?

W3pcq

Like if we do have souls that can leave the body, they could be attached to our minds, but when we die, our souls are released from the grip of the mind.

moonstroller

Kinda like the hand and glove thing. The body, including the brain is the glove and the hand is the soul.

I notice in most of these types of conversations, that one point that limits discussion is the possibility of eternity, which is itself hard to define. Given that all reality is immersed in a fabric of eternity, then all possible outcomes of any event can actually happen. I recently saw the video "Next" with Nicolas Cage and it was a breath of fresh air for the real SF fan.

I wonder sometimes about dreams. What if: you died in this life and awoke in another life thinking that the former life was nothing more than a dream. In essence, you would live forever. This could be possible, if every decision you make takes you along a separate path within eternity and every possible decision you could have taken would take you along a different path. All these paths could co-exist in eternity. It is a form of multiple existence, which eternity could contain with no problem at all.

Weird huh?

Noone

If someone has a near death exp they think they do but they dont mainly because there not dead there brain is still alive but has cut off the normal functions of the eyes and the perception of light so there for with out light coming into your brain, you can no longer feel time hence you would be un-concious but not dead so people that say that they seen somthing while having a near death exp just had a dream made up by there mind when they were no longer taking in light from there eyes hence, we see with our minds and are eyes just take in the light our brain makes the image's we see from that light so if people had a near death exp it is completly de-bunked here and now that if they seen somthing that would mean there brain was still alive so therefor they would be still alive they would just think that they had died and came back... its a matter of perception from the beholder of the memory but my perception of the matter is true and is not a miss-conception that is deluted by the lack of understanding or a false judgement on the matter. your welcome for DE-BUNKING this crazy wacked out theory of peoples near death exp's and the thought about whats after death. for whats after death we cannot prove nor dis-prove so it dosnt matter for those that are living just do onto others as you want done onto your self, get food, water air, shelter , entertainment and someone for you to love and live while you can and stop thinking about things that can be dis-proven by other proven information. This is a statement from Noone aka No.One

Noone

without the brain your not abale to take make images from the light from your eyes and proccess information of any other kind so consciencs is the brain and you are your brain there isnt any other you. your flesh makes the thoughts that you think even if they are not true. you just think your thoughts are true due to the fact that you have made your own judgement by using your understanding of the concept your talking about. please dont post such fruitless things there not needed and im sure that it didnt make you happy or passed the time or got you food or money so if it didnt do any of these things for you why do you do such? is it that you dont know? if so that would be the part of your dna that knows..

Noone

Physics needs logical and reasonal pruff and your theory about enterneity or anything of the matter isnt proven or will be so please once again see post number 2

-.-'

moonstroller

I have to say, I disagree with some of what you said and agree with some of it but I'm not sure what you said. Could you condense it a bit?
Nonoe wrote: "...stop thinking about things that can be dis-proven by other proven information."

Also, could you direct me to the "dis-proven" information?

moonstroller

No. I'm not going to look at post number 2. Thank you anyway.

moonstroller

So could you tell me, using scientific evidence; and not so many words, where the end of the universe/reality is; and, where is begins?

Pythagorean

my understanding is:

QM doesn't really say that. Physicists describe it that way qualitatively, but particles behave like particles. The only reasons terms like 'particle' and 'wave' came in is because a) people were surprised that light can knock electrons around and b) the wave equation is used to express the motion of particles.

One could argue that matter is just wave-like, and there's no such thing as 'particles' (i.e. hard pellets) on the quantum level.

FadeToBlack

Consciousness effects the brain and vice-versa. Though some people believe that consciousness is seperate from the brain, but this cannot be the truth. Consciousness does depend on the brain, but the brain doesn't seem to depend on consciousness to function. So in other words, the brain is a necessary condition for the mind (or 'consciousness') to exist, but not a sufficient condition. You don't 'only' need the brain for consciousness to exist. It seems to be interconnected but at the same time seperate. I don't know if we will ever know.

Also, the bit about DMT naturally occuring in the brain is interesting too. For all we know, that could be the source of our NDE. It could all be a hallucination/illusion.

There are a lot of theories out there, but there aren't many concrete answers.

thomasxc

i agree. it would all be in your head.../

thomasxc

but either way, its pretty fascinating....

Moneer81

Hello,

Time to get this thread going again...I am not sure how relevant what I'm about to say is, but here are my two cents

A couple of years ago I got very interested in astral projection (also known as astral travel.) First I was obviously skeptical, but I did a bunch of research and decided to try it. I followed some techniques and excercises that are to be done as you're falling asleep. To make a long story short, I was able to experience some really bizarre phenomena and on multiple occasions, I was able to "leave my body". My experiences were brief and I didn't meet any "beings" or anything of that sort. I also tried lucid dreaming, which basically training your mind to be conscious while dreaming. That was no easy task. Anyways, I truly think that there exists some kind of energy, call it soul, and that there is more to existence than the four-dimensional universe that we know of. At this point, I can't really concoct a theory or explanation for all of this, but I feel there is so much more that we don't understand or can't understand. I am an atheist by definition, but I think existence is much more complicated than we know so far. A good book I read about out of body experiences is Adventures Beyond the Body: How to Experience Out-of-Body Travel by William Buhlman. That book actually has a good amount of physics in it, but I'll let you judge if the author's reference to physics theories is bogus or not.

Moneer81

Sounds like someone has been watching the new x-files movie...

Almindor

I think that while we cannot easily prove that NDE "symptoms" are caused by the dieing brain and it's "last attempts", it's pretty logical however. (the problem is, we can't force NDE on humans safely, and doing it by safe drugs cannot be considered 100% the same thing for the sake of finding out how it works, because then it might not be NDE we're looking at, at least if my understanding of scientific experimentation is right).

I'll put the question in another, inverted, way:

Apologies up front for this analogy, but I'm an IT student :)

If the body (including the brain of course, all the physical parts) is the hardware, and the mind (that is the current state, memory etc.) is the software then I think it's pretty clear that if you destroy the processor, RAM etc. (brain) or the power lines (heart etc.) you "stop being".

Our consciousness is just like a software program which is running all the time.

A software program "is" only as long as it runs. With the exception of backups to non-active media (hard disk etc., by non-active I mean media not requiring power to remember data), the program ceases to exist if:

a) it's removed from execution (in our usual case the process is killed and it's memory is wiped from RAM).

b) we destroy the computer and hard-disk with it, and there's no other copy

Now, as far as I know, living beings cannot be "stored to disk and shut down" per-se, except perhaps arguably deep coma and hybernation kind of thing.

Now the question: is there anything to contradict this view on "consciousness"? Anything to suggest that our "consciousness" is more than a "software program" running on a computer called "the body"?

So basically I'm asking for a contradiction for this hypothesis.

P.S.: I guess in the end it's a bit OT, if you feel strongly about it I can post a new thread instead...

gareth

this is more of an 'artificial intelligence' question really.

If a computer can not replicate a real living organism in it's entirety then no comparisons or analogies can be made by replacing humans as machines.

Sure if we had the technology we could make a robot that looks and acts just like us, but everything it does we have told it to do in some discrete way.

Would these robots have NDE's?

I doubt it.