That's not the afterlife, it's a brainstorm

synchromium are you being sarcastic or just you usual sarcastic self? 'the more rational crowd at Dawkins .net i had a read .You need a lesson inthe Philsophy of Science.

Doesn't everything we perceive cause electrical activity in the brain? How could finding electrical activity near the time of death prove that the brain is perceiving nothing outside itself? Of course, I suppose it's more parsimonious to assume that the activity is being caused by lack of blood or oxygen, hence the scientific assumption.

And the meaning of the universe is... 42. Wow. That's truly satisfying. I guess what I once experienced as beauty or being or mystical oneness was just a chemical reaction in a physical brain inside a skull made of bone, supported by a bag of guts. Nothing holy or transcendent about that.

But seriously: of course there are biochemical correlates in the exterior, It perspective, of all interior, first person experiences, but to reduce it and say there's only an upper right 3rd person perspective, is narrow and deeply unsatisfying in relation to the unspeakable, ineffable subjective experience itself.

Even if we could reduce the mystery of the universe to a simple equation, what would it really tell us? Would we even believe it?

Correlation does not prove causation.

Gwyllm: I found this in a comment on RichardDawkins.net under the same article:

That's what the report more-or-less said. As I read it, the proximity of death caused the brain to react, in a last ditch attempt to keep the body functions going, by stimulating neurons en masse. The vast majority of people who enter this stage die, but thanks to modern medical science a few lucky people are dragged back from the precipice of death, and fewer still are able to recount the experience of more brain activity in a few seconds than they are used to.

Quite basically it's little more than a dream, we experience similar electrical brain activity, although to a lesser degree, when we dream, some people are able to recount those dreams, and a few deluded people see them as a message from a deity.

Actually, it's interesting to compare the comments there to the comments here. [link]

You can see quite clearly that the audience of this site is a lot more "spiritual" than the rational audience of Dawkins.

WTF? Just because there is observable physical activity correlating with these experiences does not invalidate them as having a metaphysical basis.

This proves neither the case for or against an after life.

Why would an electrical storm in a dying brain prove a lack of after life? What is the case for it? It's just an observation of a phenomena we don't understand and to claim to know without being a resurrected zombie or higher being is fucking ridiculous and ignorant. All we know is that we don't know and no one can prove that differently. In fact it's cool, part of what makes life so amazing, is we really don't have all the answers.

Plus, what about the individuals (and there have been documented cases) who come back with information that would have been physically impossible for them to have had access to. Such as events occurring in the hospital around them that their eyes or ears could not have heard.

If anything, it seems like all that extra electricity could make a case for the after life, as the spirit may very well be an electric current, and as the brain dies, it leaves the body but as we know, energy is not destroyed, but converted.

Plus how the fuck can people have completely accurate psychic dreams of events that have not yet happened and details of amazingly accurate past life experiences, if we are just some nearly random bio mechanical processor that has no spirit? That feelings are just an accident of evolution and don't exist. Not to mention our present experience of time being the only valid expression of consciousness.

Tripe.

[link]

So all they proved is what the brain is doing when a NDE happens, but how can it be said that there still isn't anything spiritual or mystical happening. Hundreds of people just dont have the same expierence for no reason, theres obvi somethin to it, and cant be proven like some math problem like these so called scientists think. One must think outside the box to understand. Scientists and people of this nature tend to stick to the facts and laws of how this physical world is, yet theres a much deeper side to it all.

tom's got it. sounded a hell of a lot like trypping your entire face off. other than that, just a bunch of dudes in labs making hypotheses and sensationalizing them.

If entheogens and drugs promote NDEs sensations of death and rebirth then you can't turn around and say NDEs are not chemical or neural in origin. NDEs are demonstrably chemical and neural in origin, they have direct neural and chemical causation and release, and can be reproduced by a number of different drugs and methods, such as getting hit on the head or simple oxygen deprivation or oxygen saturation. Sensation of afterlife is not evidence of afterlife, nor is oxygen deprivation the sole source of NDEs. This is just one of those articles that likes to push buttons, nothing is "proved" in this article. We already know that oxygen deprivation causes neural excitation associated with OBEs and NDEs.

This is not science - this is guesswork. The so-called scientists note that the electrical activity is peaking right before death, and with their biased mind they automatically assume that the reason for the experiences is this heightened activity. There's nothing to back that up at all. It's only a guess.

If we were to argue that these experiences were in fact real, we could use the exact same argument - the electrical activity is peaking because the soul of the soon-to-be deceased is about to leave! In other words, there's no way with that limited data to know if the electrical activity is a symptom or the cause. These people shouldn't be allowed to call themselves scientists!

Interesting Stuff... but what is the Darwinian Advantage to any of this if nothing follows?

reductionist bulshyt

Well, this chaotic brain surge making consistent experiences of meeting angels and ETs ? Let's be clear : I don't believe in anything about the afterlife. But I don't believe in that explanation either. DMT release sounds much more likely to me.