So forgive me if this topic borders too much on religion, but this is something I’ve never understood.
For those who don’t know what an NDE is, its a observed phenomenon where someone who is considered clinically or even full on brain dead. But then the person is revived and explains they had a sensation of floating out of their body and even observe the doctors working on them, some even claim to have heard conversations from far away, spoken with dead relatives, and some even claimed to have seen despite being blind.
Oh my god. Proof that souls exist, theologians rejoice, we have debunked materialism and proven life after death.
Only hold on not quite. No one buys it outside of a devoted few with various objections claiming it to be hallucination, the result of drugs, or even hoaxes perpetuated by the religious.
Except research conducted by men like Sam Parnia rules that out and shows that conciousness persists after death.
So… afterlife confirmed right? No people just label Parnia crazy and continue to say this is nothing, even after the debunks fail to land. Even after this gets reported thousands of times in various regions and the only thing that changes is whether people see Jesus, Grandma, or Shiva… aside from that little detail they remain uniform.
And well I never understood why.
I asked skeptics and they claim that the people are merely near death, not actually dead and thus it doesn’t count.
Only problem is that even if the person is barely clinging onto life there’s still the issue of conciousness being strong and present where none can exist.
If my computer’s power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn’t working. I’d consider that an oddity. I wouldn’t say “Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all.”
So to say “Oh they’re just NEAR death.” Is simply moving the goal post and not a satisfactory answer.
I ask proponents and they tell me that NDEs are completely proven and that the afterlife is for realsies, but big bad Academia won’t listen to anything that contradicts a physicalist view of the universe.
The problem with that is that’s the excuse creationists give as to why no one believes the Earth is 6000 years old. Which is so blatantly falsified by even a cursory glance at science that its not even funny.
So that’s not it. Unless I want to entertain conspiracy nonsense. Which I do not.
So I ask the scientifically trained what the real answer is, because obviously I missed something in all the data on NDEs that I’m simply too dense to figure out.
It really does require non scientific information to address.
Consciousness is not fully understood. Without that, anything regarding consciousness is still at least a little unanswerable. You can’t point to when and where consciousness ends if you don’t know what it is, what defines it in the first place. Death isn’t exactly at consensus either.
That means NDEs can’t be pinned down with 100% accuracy yet.
Here’s what I know. Nobody that has had the cells of their brain break down, as in begin decomposition, has ever come back.
So, based on that, I think the NDE experience is going to be based in some kind of brain activity. If the neurons are “melting”, they can’t function if enough of them aren’t melting and you can jump start things again, they weren’t dead at all. That, to me, is the definition of death that matters: if you can come back, it ain’t death.
Considering the general amount of precise experimentation in measuring the brain and body during the process of dying is extremely thin and limited by the very process, I don’t think we have the right tools to measure anything that would “prove” anything about NDEs, only indicate some probabilities.
But those probabilities lean much harder to it being a chemical and/or electrical event.
Now, if you want to bring souls into it, you aren’t dealing with science in the first place because it is currently impossible to even detect whether or not souls exist, it is a matter of faith. It’s essentially impossible to prove they don’t exist, but there’s absolutely nothing ever measured that points to anything resembling credible proof that they do. So souls just don’t matter for NDE discussions in a framework of science. You might as well factor in what granfaloon a person is mixed up with as a soul.
I’m not saying you can’t believe in souls and still attempt science regarding death, just that souls aren’t studyable with science.
Since nothing in any NDE has ever been unique to NDEs, it does make it harder to put faith in them as something other than a physical process. Everything anyone has ever described (at least in any useful setting) as happening has also happened with the influence of drugs, magnetic fields, meditation, or spiritual practices. Probably others my brain isn’t pulling up as well that aren’t under one of those headings, but I think it shows what I mean well enough.
And that point is that if the experiences aren’t different from things you can experience while alive, why would they be useful for determining if the person had died?