Can science explain Heaven in NDEs? They're working on it.

You don't have to lecture me, I surpassed the basics way long ago ; )

Coulomb's and Newton's laws being both inverse square laws is exactly what I meant by them having the same form.

F sub e = k q1q2/r^2
F sub g = k m1m2/r^2

My main point was that the difference between them is one can be +/- and the other is always +

However, just because the negative/repulsive form of gravity has not been detected does not mean it doesn't exist, and this idea is now finally being questioned by the physicists at Fermilab.

Oh, and I forgot to add that yes, of course physics is expressed simply and beautifully in mathematics, the language of the universe, but the mathematical equations for all forms of energy still do not describe the INNER NATURE of what energy is - the equations are only descriptions of the casual and observable effects.

Same with forces.

I had an ADC (After Death Communication) it was my father who had been dead for over two years at the time and my family kept it a secrete from me.
I have not seen my Mother or Father since I left them over 35 years ago due to extreme child, abuse was done to me for fourteen years.

I had an experience while sleeping that defies sciences; in fact, it was so real that it changed my life forever.
I not only spoke to my deceased father but also the following day I called my sister who I had not spoken to in a long time and asked her if my father was dead.

She asked me who told me that our father was dead and I told her our father told me.
I proceeded in telling her the entire story of what had transpired and what our father was wearing and she drop the phone on the floor in absolute shock! My sister trying to hold back her tears told me that yes our father had died in the VA hospital about two and half years ago.
I asked her why she never called me to tell me and she said that mother didn’t want me to know or show up at the funeral, which made sense to me because my mother and I hated one another since she birthed me. I had no bonding with my mother she was a sick woman, mentally sick to say the least.

Anyway, the proof that this was very real, to me and to my sister, it was when I told her in great detail what our father was wearing. My sister said to me as she was crying, the clothes that I describe to her was what they buried my father in.

My sister said there is no way I could have ever known this, unless I was at the funeral and she said only her and mother were the only one’s there.

The last time I saw my father, I was a teenager I am in my mid 50s now how would I know what kind of clothes my father would be wearing. I described his shirt as a light powder blue short sleeve shirt with four pockets on the front and a white flora pattern running down the buttonholes, and he was wearing kaki dress pants without pleats.

My sister told me that was his favorite shirt and she had never revealed that secret to anyone.

I know what happened to me was very real and it is an experience that shook me to the core, it was also very enlighten what I saw with my own eyes and heard, told me that there is a whole lot more to life than man will never understand nor will science be able to comprehend it.

Because of this experience, I am a firm believer that we continue on, on the other side in a different dimension, only the body dies, not the spirit.

reply to post by impressme


i have a very difficult time believing your story
so any way what did your father say concerning the after life anything at all?

reply to post by OnceReturned

The evidence very strongly suggests that the brain is responsible for conscious experience.

And here's more evidence: Firing on all neurons: Where consciousness comes from

It appears that unconscious brain functions are localized in terms of their activity, whereas conscious functions are spread out across the whole brain, with particular concentration in those areas thought to be part of the 'global workspace'. Interesting article, especially in the light of my contention, in our earlier discussions, that consciousness is either a specific way of processing information or the byproduct of one.

Of course, your beloved 'hard problem' (if it exists) remains unaddressed. All the same, I think you'll enjoy the article.

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reply to post by nomorecruelty

Take the case of the man who was in the car accident - the paramedics were there at the scene the entire time, had already pronounced him dead for at least an hour and a half, and were waiting on the coroner to arrive.

Did the paramedics keep checking his respiration and heartbeat all that time? Or were they just standing around, shooting the breeze?

(Don Piper) said he went over to the paramedics and told them they needed to help the "dead" man because he was still alive.

Right. So they were standing around shooting the breeze. The victim could have started breathing again at any time during those 90 minutes.

Can "scientists" ever explain this? Probably not.

I just did, and I'm not even a scientist.

And why the quotation marks around 'scientists'? Are you suggesting that scientists are really frauds and imposters?

p.s. the above is but ONE account of an experience - there are thousands, if not more, of these that have happened.

In that case, I suggest you have a look through your files and post one more credible than this.

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reply to post by nomorecruelty

Doctors, who hold MD degrees, state that the human brain cannot survive non activity (death) without oxygen more than 4-6 minutes.

The world record for static apnea (holding your breath under water) is a staggering 11 minutes 35 seconds, achieved by Stéphane Mifsud in June 2009. I myself have held my breath for over four minutes (aged fifteen, timed by my classmates) without any noticeable ill effects.

If you want to debate the MD's, feel free - you can't dispute the facts.

It's you we're debating, not the MDs, and you're presenting fiction, not facts.

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reply to post by BellaMente

We cannot get to the inner from the outer, or go within from without.

Star for your post, but as I have argued elsewhere, there may be no 'inner'; no fundamental way the world is, no ultimate truth about it that is different from the manifested reality humans have evolved to apprehend and inhabit. There may be no 'what is it like to be a force?'

Originally posted by BellaMente
Oh, and I forgot to add that yes, of course physics is expressed simply and beautifully in mathematics, the language of the universe, but the mathematical equations for all forms of energy still do not describe the INNER NATURE of what energy is - the equations are only descriptions of the casual and observable effects.

Same with forces.

Well, I'm not so sure what can be done with that. Philosophers often refer to this concept of "inner nature" as the promised land of true, deep understanding. Are we sure that such a thing even exists? What things do we know the inner nature of? Anything? I think not. Perhaps we know the inner nature of human concepts like pain or an itch or humor, but that's because we devised those concepts from the inside out. They have no inner nature appart from our understanding of them. Are there "inner natures" out there in the world, waiting to be discovered? I'm not going to hold my breath.

I think it's probably safe to say that the closest we will come to the inner nature of physics the math that describes it. I don't think that means that or methods are inadequate or that our understanding is superficial. I think the math tells the whole story; once we have a complete mathematical description, there's nothing left.

I suppose that we may be inclined to hold the position that our math, or understanding, or linguistic description, all of these things are representations of some information or reality that exists independantly of us. So, it may be tempting to believe that we have to access whatever that objective "stuff" is in order to have a "true" understanding. But, in order for us to address it we have to put it in terms that can fit into our brains. The information has to take some form apart from the physical reality which it defines. We are always once removed from things in reality which we seek to understand, because we only have access to perceptions and concepts about those things, not to the things themselves. Their inner nature in some sense is inaccessible in principal.

And, I didn't mean to sound like I was lecturing your before. I contributed what I thought would be useful to the discussion.

reply to post by Astyanax


Thanks for the article Astyanax. I do like the Global Workspace Theory as an explanation for the roll of consciousness in cognition. I'm fairly certain it's correct. And, as you said, it leaves out the hard problem.

There may be no "what it is like to be" force, but there is certianly something that it is like to be. How will we ever figure it out what it is?

Science should start with the shared NDE cases, then move on to the blind and deaf since birth having NDEs and being able to see and hear cases. Good luck science. lol

reply to post by cLOUDDEAD


How would a blind person even know that a new type of experience was one of sight? It's just a new experience. They wouldn't say, "I can see!" because they wouldn't know that the new experience was what the rest of us call "sight." The same story goes for deaf people and hearing. They would just be having a new experience that was very strange to them. Even if they did establish that they had "seen" something in the NDE, they wouldn't know what worlds go with what colors, or how to describe their visual experience. This means there's no way to tell if what they were seeing coresponded to anything in the room, because they wouldn't be able to describe it in a way that we could understand. If they did have a new visual experience you can be certain that it was a hallucination induced by the dying brain.

You guys are right in saying there might not be any inner nature at all... But there has to be some fundamental level behind our perceptions- whether it be the objects as things in themselves as Kant preferred to think, or if it is some mysterious unmanifested force Schopenhauer calls Will, has yet to be determined.

But our sense organs work as converters of frequencies, and our brain has been found to function in the same way a hologram functions, with fourier transforms and all. This seems to imply to me at least that what is behind those perceptions and representations are actually a soup of interference patterns, energy forces, etc.

Holography is a manifestation of interference patterns. A hologram is really a bunch of non-local interference patterns recorded on a piece of holographic film. When a laser is shone through the film, a 3D image forms. Now, holography has many interesting properties. One of these properties is that no matter how many times you cut the holographic film up into pieces, each piece will contain the entire image of the whole. Each part contains the whole - This idea is actually found in many religions. Almost all eastern religions, and even western. For example, even in Christianity we find in the New Testament "The Kingdom of God is within you" and we find in both the Old and New Testaments "Ye are all little gods within the great God". Both of these examples imply the holographic recursiveness / fractal nature, or the "each part contains the whole" principle. We also happen to find this holographic principle in nature, specifically in mathematics - called phi, or the golden ratio. This number = 1.618033989... which is also the ratio of the whole to the larger as the larger is to the smaller, has many unique properties in itself, and is found all over nature and all over the universe, even still to this day making appearances in modern physics, and has been known since the days of Ancient Greece through its contributions to aesthetics. It also can be represented as 1+1/1+1/1+1/1+1/1+1/1+1.... and so on to infinity, demonstrating the holographic property of recursion.

Going back to philosophy, we see this holographic universe in Schopenhauer's Will, the Indian non-dualistic system, Vedanta's Brahman, Spinoza's Substance,Hegel's Highest Form of Spirit, Carl Jung's Collective Unconsciousness, the idea of God, and many others.

There IS scientific support for these ideas:

(David Bohm, Karl Pribram, Modern Scientific Research)

1) David Bohm's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

In case you are not familiar with interpretations of quantum mechanics, they are just different philosophies of what is really going on down there, different ontological approaches to QM. David Bohm's Interpretation makes the same predictions as the other interpretations, however the mathematical formalism of Bohm's theory is harder to work with, so by the principle of Occam's razor, more physicists naturally gravitate towards the Copenhagen interpretation. In addition, Bohm's theory would suggest that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, and there is still work to be done.

However, ontologically David Bohm's theory is clear and also very interesting. Basically, the universe is a giant hologram, with an implicate order and an explicate order. The implicate order is the realm of the sub-quantum, and it is called the quantum potential (analogous to the vector potential of classical mechanics). The explicate order is our 3D reality. These two orders are constantly enfolding and unfolding into and out of each other, which explains such phenomena as an electron popping in and out of existence, entanglement, and the close-to-infinite amount of energy in a small region of space. So in analogy to a hologram, the implicate order, which can be thought of as our noumenal world, would be the non-local interference patterns on the holographic plate, and our phenomenal world would be the 3D holographic image.

continued...

2) Karl Pribram's holonomic brain model. 

This theory demonstrates how the brain functions as a hologram. This theory shows that things such as memory, movement, and vision are recorded holographically in the brain and it can be represented mathematically the same way as holography (i.e. Fourier Transforms). 

Note: (David Bohm and Karl Pribram, after both coming to there conclusions independently, ended up meeting each other and developing their two theories further. There is a book called The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot which discusses Bohm and Pribram's theories and the new paradigm it suggests. (Their theories taken together have amazing implications and they have the capability to scientifically explain such controversial phenomena as medical" miracles", 'ghost' sightings, mental illnesses, psychic abilities etc.) I recommend it to many people; it is definitely worth a read. 
 
 
3) There has been recent studies that demonstrate the holographic nature of the universe and many scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe is in fact a giant hologram (i.e. black holes were shown to be better explained if the universe is a hologram.) 

So, this is my view- the universe is a giant hologram. So to me the inner nature of reality is in fact non-local interference patterns of unmanifested/manifested energy.

And it makes sense. I mean look at how many 'levels' there are to reality- you start with a universe, break it down to galaxies, to solar systems, to planets, to life, to cells, to molecules, to atoms, to protons, neutrons and electrons, and then to quarks and leptons.... David Bohm goes further with his quantum potential, and string theorists with their infinitesimal strings.

But who says we stop here?

I just seen this:

"It appears that unconscious brain functions are localized in terms of their activity, whereas conscious functions are spread out across the whole brain, with particular concentration in those areas thought to be part of the 'global workspace'. "

This I have not heard, but consciousness dispersed non-locally throughout the brain is exactly what I was talking about with the Holonomic Brain Model. This is just more evidence of the brain working as a hologram!!

Very interesting...

In order to understand NDEs one must first fully understand consciousness.

Our understanding of consciousness is piss poor.

While science can map the brain and tell us exactly what part of the brain are used to process different thoughts, they can't tell us where those thoughts originate.

For example, if I decide to think about a monitor, we can see what part of my brain lights up when I think about a monitor, but there is no way to tell what caused me to think about a monitor in the first place.

The action of invoking a thought is a total mystery.

We can see all the way down to the level of individual neurons, yet there is no theory to explain why when neurons are connected in a specific way that conscious thought arises from this.

Given that the brain is a bio-electric system, it doesn't seem that far off for me to conclude that the brain (perhaps the entire body) is nothing more than an antenna. A receiver of conscious thoughts which are processed by the bio-electric system.

Given our current knowledge of the brain right now, this seems to be the most rational and logical conclusion to me.

If chemicals are introduced to the brain which interfere with the reception of thought or the processing of sensory information, it wouldn't be a surprise to see the effects of NDEs arise from drugs like K or '___'.




[edit on 30-3-2010 by mnemeth1]

reply to post by BellaMente


Thank you for that explanation. Conceptualizing the fundamental structure of reality as holographic is an interesting endeavor indeed. What predictions does such a model make with regard to NDEs? As far as I can tell, it does not provide us with any earth shattering insights about the nature of consciousness, and does nothing to separate the process of consciousness from neurobiology. What role, exactly, does consciousness play in the analogy to artificial holograms? What it in reality corresponds to the laser, or the "thing" which is manifesting the interference patterns imbedded in the holographic medium? What is the holographic medium? If consciousness is critical to this model of reality, what is special about brains and their connection to consciousness?

Additionally, I can't imagine that such a model of reality is compatible with the literal interpretation of NDEs: that they are a genuine experience of a soul going to heaven. The holographic model still keeps everything in this reality separate from alternate spiritual or mystical realities. It does allow us to explain certain paranormal/mystic observations (ghosts, psi phenomena) in terms of the same physics that we use to describe conventional phenomena, but there doesn't seem to be any room in this explanatory paradigm for something like the soul to migrate to some "place" like heaven and then bring back memories of the experience when the body is revived.

Thoughts? I've added you as a friend by the way, I'm enjoying this conversation.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Maybe you should read the book and refute the scientific studies he sites from around the world from reputable scientist in all fields before you comment on his theory or lack of qualifications.

Saying Dr. Lanza is not qualified to formulate a theory on the subject because he does not have a proper degree in the field or specialization is ludicrous at best and it comes from the same mindset of the middle ages when it was heresy to say the earth orbited around the sun.

Using your logic we should not have airplanes because the Wright brothers did not attend college or have the proper degrees or qualification to invent the plane.

reply to post by etshrtslr


But using your logic we would replace the mainstream understanding accepted by the major of experts as the best interpretaion of the evidence with an absurd theory that hasn't even been vetted by the peer review process, all because the abusrd theory makes us more comfortable about what happens when we die.

You still haven't answered my question about how you reconcile the obvious connection between the brain and consciousness with the theory that consciousness is not based on the brain. I've made my argument, if you learned something compelling in the book feel free to share it. I'm all ears. The existance of the book cannot be the thrust of your position. What, specifically, can possibly lead you to believe that consciousness is not a product of the brain despite the constantly growing (and already overwhelming) body of evidence connecting brain states to consciousness and showing that effecting the brain effects consciousness?

reply to post by OnceReturned


We’ll see the hard thing is, that were is overwhelming evidence on both sides. There are as many good theory’s about the afterlife as there aren’t about the afterlife. I forgot the Nobel Prize winner, but he also worked in cold fusion (which is now being proven) and people ridiculed him, and he is also researching the afterlife. Like what he said, it is VERY hard to present evidence to the mainstream community about the afterlife. So even though a theory isn’t in the mainstream community does not mean it is crap.

Professor Brian Josephson thats the name

[edit on 30-3-2010 by Maddogkull]

Everyone interested in this should read up on the Pineal Gland, and about '___' production in the human brain.

Basically, I believe the case is: when dieing, dmt (which is the most powerful hallucinogen known to man) is released into the brain causing a very powerful visual experience. If '___' is anything similar to lysergic acid, your perception of the 'real' physical world is altered dramatically, and thus some people who have NDEs might feel as if they have left their body, and have seen 'heaven', or whatever you would want to call it.

and as far as an after life, or passage of one's soul goes, it really depends on your belief system

No one can know for sure what goes on.

There might be several other planes of existence, this world we live in might be a small stage of life

Or, we might just rot in the ground with some worms eating our eyeballs n stuff like that.

The only way to know for sure is to die, but if the latter is true it might suck a little.

I am just amazed and greatful for these researchers, honestly.

I think it is testiment to the human spirit that we can and want to search for answers to these things so we can just know more. But for what?...just so we can know more, we want more info about everything it seems. Like our spirit just wants to grasp at knowledge and wants info about all things in this existance. Maybe its reaching out to find out more about ourselves the universe a puddle on the ground or get closer to where it might be going.

Maybe its like a baby that wants or needs to learn as much as it can before its matured. ie. released from the body to whatever or wherever it goes.

Sorry its hard for me to articulate my thoughts so people can understand what im thinking, i will try better next time. I just wanted to get this out while its fresh. I just keep an open mind to these things on both sides. I LOVE science and am pretty open to most spiritual things. Just in case lol...you never know is what I say.

What if when I die and when I meet the maker if there is one. And its a Giant purple Dolphin, and when he sees my dropped jaw he says "Hey you entertained the thoughts of stranger things!.....Your in!!"

Just a thought.