One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.
Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".
How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams.
I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.
If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.
No more resonance with the frequency of your station.
That equals death on this plane.
What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.
The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.
And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.
In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.
That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.
What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.
Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.
At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.
Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.
Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.
Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not.
These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)
1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.
2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.
I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.
But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:
1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.
2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.
This sounds intriguing.
> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.
Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
Yeah, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths . This does not mean that at some point there was a global flood brought about by a deity in retribution. It just means people throughout time knew the same stories or invented the same stories, and often thought about deities and floods. Similarly with your afterlife tropes. Memes are the freaky thing here.
https://avesselofhonour.com/2023/06/28/48-hours-in-hell/
Some of those features show up there too. Of course, this comes from a Christian background, and draws on that. But it does have a river, and there's no river in hell in the bible.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...
> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?
> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.
I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later.
They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.
I also regularly experience sleep paralysis. That took a lot of work to get used to.
I also once semi-fainted while standing up. Felt unusually calm and care free as my head bashed against a nearby object. Fortunately it wasn’t serious.
You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
Some cells are still technically alive after 1 hour mark in the sense that there is no necrosis and cell membrane is still operating. This depends on cell type and nourishment - for example cells that have high amount of CoQ10 can live longer etc.
In any case, brain is definitely NOT 100% dead in a sense that ALL of its cells are necrotic which might explain why it is in a dream like state.
Also, I doubt 1 hour mark is regular thing in NDE.
Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.