Do you believe in God?

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

I find NDE very interesting too. Deeply so. But not in any religious, paranormal or supernatural sense. I find them interesting in terms of what they reveal to us about the human brain and it's function.

I think there are many explanations and discussions one can have without thinking people are "faking it for a quick buck" too. I think that explanation is likely by far the rarest. There likely IS such people, but I doubt they make up much of the ones who had NDE.

There was a neurosurgeon who wrote a book about his own NDE for example. While he made a good buck from the sales, I doubt he did it for that reason. He seems to be genuinely moved by his experience. Alas being a neurosurgeon he was quite ignorant of a lot of neuroscience... and he made some glaring errors and assumptions in his thesis. Surgeons know a lot less theory than you might expect alas.



Funny, it is the opposite for me. I would find it more shocking if the millions of people were all having DIFFERENT experiences. That they are having the same experience seems normal to me. After all, when we do pretty much anything else.... we have much the same experience. If you have sex, eat a meal, sleep, stab your hand with a needle, get thirsty, spin around really fast, take alcohol.... or any other number of things I could name...... our experience would be pretty much identical. So why should we expect NDE to be any different?

We are diverse and individual to a degree, but really we are all the same too. Like a Skoda made from mostly VW car parts, they might look different on the outside but under the body they are essentially the same car that works the same way. The same is true of you and me and of people from other races. We all function pretty much identically. So our responses and experiences in many situations will be identical. So I would very much expect NDE experience to be consistent across our species.

If it was massively different from person to person.... now THAT would be interesting and compelling and weird.



Quite the opposite. NDE is about as much as experience of the after life as walking up to a plane but nor boarding it is an experience of a sun holiday away in the south of Spain. The N in NDE is the important bit for me. NEAR death. As in.... the patient did not die. So by definition it was not an experience of the after life, but very much an experience of THIS life.

Further there is not one aspect of NDE I am aware of that one can not experience in other ways. By chemical and/or physical perturbation of the body one can have everything from bright lights to out of body experiences. In fact you can stimulate a mild OBE in yourself using noting more than a small screen, a fake hand, and a feather. A party trick someone showed me which I love using on people now.

So no, nothing whatsoever about NDE is suggestive of an after life to me. Not even a little. But I fully agree it remains, as I said, a massively interesting phenomenon for many reasons none the less.

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Not in the slightest. I have endless respect for them and their profession. I just know their limits too. And he showed them in the book he wrote about his NDE.

There is nothing wrong with, let alone "undermining" about pointing out that someone in profession X does not know as much about profession Y as people might generally expect them too. This is quite normal in fact. I once knew a car mechanic who did not have a driving license. Never passed a test. I would have expected a car mechanic to know how to drive. I also know people who worked in the army who never held or fired a gun.

The simple fact is the neuro-surgeon in question made some glaring errors and assumptions in his book. Errors that surprised me at first given his field of expertise, but then I realised that that was my failing not his. I assumed too much about what he SHOULD know to do the work he does. Surgeons often have to know things you might not expect, and to know things you might expect.



Can you be more specific? Which assumption do you refer to? If you want to question something I said, then do so. My qualifications have nothing to do with it. What I can or can not defend as a claim or point does.

EDIT: Nice of you to ignore my reply to you and jump on my reply to someone else though.