Another nail in the coffin of NDE?, it's all in the brain as usual.., page 1

privacy

Pages:
ATS Members have flagged this thread 1 times

Topic started on 13-10-2009 @ 07:47 PM by reasonable

www.newscientist.com...

The first substantial clues came in 2002, when Blanke's team stumbled across a way to induce a full-blown out-of-body experience. They were performing exploratory brain surgery on a 43-year-old woman with severe epilepsy to determine which part of her brain to remove in order to cure her. When they stimulated a region near the back of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the woman reported that she was floating above her own body and looking down on herself.

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:05 PM by TheBandit795

The article attempts to debunk veridical NDE's but fails to do so. There are cases where it was not physically possible for people have the experiences they have had due to their brain being inactive (which means they were brain dead), and due to themselves being physically removed from objects or events they have seen.

The experiences the people have occured when they had no heartbeat and no brainwave activity. They were brain dead.

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:11 PM by EnlightenUp

reply to post by reasonable

I'm not sure that it proves that it's "all in the brain" just because you can mess it up to seemingly detatch consciouness from the body. Of course being a human is all in the brain. A human is a biological condition. Messing with the brain will change consciousness. Reading further it's clear they aren't sure why the 3rd person vantage point is there and they seem to be jumping through hoops to explain it.

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:20 PM by asmall89

reply to post by TheBandit795

To add further to you comment (which I starred).
When one is dead the heart stops which means there is no blood going through the body to distribute any chemicals (even in the brain). The brain is an amazing and mysterious organ, but it can't pump blood people.

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:26 PM by asmall89

reply to post by asmall89

Also I forgot to add this.
The brain typically stops firing neurotransmitters around 15 seconds after death. This was proven/studied during the French Revolution when a scientist who was being executed asked someone to count the number of times he blinked after his head was severed.

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:30 PM by xEphon

reply to post by EnlightenUp

Agreed.
It's the age old debate of where consciousness comes from. Some say the complexity of the brain gives way to conscioussness while others claim that the brain is just a receptor of conscioussness. Either way, messing with the brain is going to have an effect on conscioussness!
I give much more merit to those cases where people have NDEs while technically brain dead than I do the cases where scientists provoke an NDE in a normally functioning brain.

[edit on 13-10-2009 by xEphon]

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:32 PM by AshleyD

Interesting stuff but as has been said so many times, a replication of a phenomenon does not mean that is how it happens naturally.

You may be able to replicate a phenomenon in a science lab but that does not mean your method explains how it happens in nature.

So perhaps these experiments showed how some OBE's and NDE's are brain related but not all or they were able to reproduce the effects but that does not mean that is the explanation for all phenomenon.

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:35 PM by metamagic

The conclusion that the NDE is "all in the brain" doesn't follow from the observations. By analogy, if we stimulate certain areas of the brain we can induce vivid sensory sensations -- the sound of someone's voice, the aroma of coffee. Yet we would not assume that because we can generate the experience of smelling coffee by stimulating part of the brain, it would mean that there is no experience of smelling coffee in other circumstances or that coffee aroma is totally imaginary.

Instead, we would assume that we have artificially stimulated the part of the brain that somehow processes sensory input. It would seem more reasonable to assume that researchers were stimulating part of the brain that normally processes proprioceptic inputs or other froms of sensory input.

I think we should also ask how valid it is to generalize from a highly unusual situation were the neural tissues are directly stimulated to situations where the NDE experience is reported without someone sticking things into the subjects brain matter.

[edit on 13-10-2009 by metamagic]

reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 09:09 PM by EnlightenUp

reply to post by xEphon

The logical leap of faith being made is that a sense of self is equivalent to consciousness.

If it's strictly material then you are admitting the property is inherent in the matter which composes the individual. Nothing that is reduced can lack the potential for manifesting a property in its individual components. To explain consciousness by a magical point of complexity is really an attempt to explain it away; it's a copout. Even then, it's not complexity, it's organization and what manner of awareness manifests is a result of organization.

If it isn't strictly that, then where do we learn to easily conceive of matter without consciousness present but not consciousness without matter present? And, what is so difficult about conceiving of consciousness without self? The brain serves to manifest self by its organization, not the consciousness property.

The solution is simple to me, there is always consciousness but there is self only so long as there is organization and motion (time)-- perhaps not time as we know it, even though this would be a non-comparative sense of self and if change exists in some form then time exists in some form. Organization is constraint in potential and motion. Self is a diminished state of consciousness from no-self.

What needs to be answered is if the constraint exists beyond the death of what we would consider the physical body. Some clues presented here and elsewhere suggest it does. I won't bore anyone with minor personal experiences as it isn't really an argument anyway.

In any case, answering the hard problem still looks elusive.

Pages: ^^TOP^^