A hodgepodge of items, in no particular order …
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I just read two Skeptiko interviews with Dr. Jeffrey Long and Dr. Kevin Nelson. Interesting to see how two experts can look at the same data and arrive at totally different conclusions.
Dr. Long is convinced that NDEs provide "proof" of life after death and has written a book promoting this viewpoint. Dr. Nelson believes that NDEs can be explained by standard neuroscience.
I have some problems with Dr. Long's position. He seems to have acquired his database from stories submitted to a Web site. I don't know how much (if any) checking and verification he performed.
He also insists that the veridical parts of NDEs are almost always accurate, but I have read a fair number of NDE accounts in which the veridical part was inaccurate in some respects. As one example, in his book The Truth in the Light, Peter Fenwick includes a case in which a man hovered over his body but did not see his companions near him. When he returned to his body, he found that one of his companions was actually lying on top of him (dead) – something he certainly should have seen from an elevated vantage point.
Of course, I have my doubts about Dr. Nelson's position too. His case is basically that the brain continues to function for 10-20 seconds after cardiac arrest, thus accounting for any veridical details in the NDE. But this seems unsatisfactory on a number of levels. For one thing, NDErs do not report confused, disconnected impressions, but coherent, vivid, structured narratives that are inconsistent with a feebly flickering consciousness. For another, some NDEs involve perceptions of thing totally outside the patient's normal range of awareness – a shoe on a ledge, for instance. Some veridical accounts involve visual details that could only be perceived by some form of sight (such as the unusual color of a hospital worker's blouse), yet the patient's eyes were closed. Etc.
Dr. Nelson also claims that science understands a lot about how the brain produces consciousness. I don't think this is correct. It would be correct to say that science has learned a lot about brain states and how they correlate with mental states (although the correlation is not always as clear as popular articles suggest), but the "hard problem" of how subjective consciousness emerges from electrochemical operations in the brain remains unanswered.
As leading neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has said, when it comes to brain research, "We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road." (Quoted in There Is Life After Death, by Roy Abraham Varghese.)
Naturally, the same could be said for research into life after death.
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Cyrus posted an interesting comment that may have been overlooked, so I'm putting it here:
As usual I'm jumping into this conversation very late, but I found Zetetic Chick's points about the "third way" to be very interesting.
I generally feel disdain around both materialism (objectivism, reductionism, other god-awful philosophies) and religiosity which are the two prevailing mind-sets for most people in the West. As somebody who follows spiritual research I generally consider myself as belonging to some undefined third-world view.
Those who made the most headway in trying to define this world-view in concrete terms were probably the Spiritualists. This didn't work out very well because Spiritualism is / was an "ism" that came forth in an age of cults and public weariness towards new movements and ideas.
But what you'll find is public perception of things like communication with the deceased is rapidly increasing. I dare to say it's more commonly accepted and discussed in 2010 than ever in history (except perhaps.. ancient Egypt?). So, in an undefined way, it's slipping through the cracks.
The bane of its existence may very well be the "new age" movement, otherwise known as the worst attempt yet to define an organizational movement around not only communication with the departed, but a million whack-ideas, ranging from 2012 nonsense, to healing crystals, Plaedian aliens, and other bunk topics which completely invalidate the legitimate phenomena.
In essence, a world where life after death is recognized as legitimate is an entirely separate culture, far removed from the religious or materialist philosophies humans have grown up with. This would be a culture with an entirely new and unique set of philosophies and issues.
Flash-forward 100 or 200 years to a world where communication with the deceased has become technologically advanced and accepted by society:
On the plus side, I do think that in such a world there would be a higher appreciation about life. More people would take chances and dare to really "live" versus being afraid of boogeymen and staying inside their homes their whole lives. There would certainly be less materialism, which would mean the possessive, covetous, and selfish nature of many would diminish. And with less attachment to organized religion there would be more emphasis on individuality and self-expression.
The down-side: with an entire new system of philosophies, there would be many strange and alien philosophies and movements.
There would be assemblies of people who take Earth-life completely for granted. Imagine highly suicidal people prone to extreme levels of risk-taking or public displays of death.
This world would see followers of "Chaotic philosophies", perhaps in rebellion to the perceived order in the universe. These people would herald the importance of conflict and would be prone to terrorist attacks and blowing up buildings simply for the purpose of undoing other people's work.
And communication with afterlife entities could seduce entire countries. Imagine a third-world country ruled by the whims of a council of mediums who believe they are taking orders from far superior intelligences, which are in reality disruptive or dark entities.
So, as you can imagine, this would be an entirely different world. When you think about it this way, perhaps it's easy to understand why people are so weary of the supernatural, because some people just like the world for as it is right now.
However, when I look at the direction we're heading, this theoretical society may come around sooner than we think. Perhaps not our generation, but in a couple of hundred years.
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And Ben posted a poem of his that deserves to be lifted out of the comments thread:
Wising Up
So how did honeybees evolve,
To do business as they fly;
To navigate
By the sun’s position in the sky?From eggs laid by a queen,
Most hatch as worker clones;
Some are guards; others scouts;
There are nurses; even drones.They co-operate in colonies
Fifty thousand strong;
Single-mindedly, determinedly,
All summer long.They’ve arranged a special symbiosis
With the flower;
In exchange for pollination:
Nectar-power!Whenever scouts discover
Blossoms at their best,
They fly back home
And dance directions to the rest.With big bulbous eyes
And ultraviolet sight,
They can see patterns on petals
Which guide them to alight.By use of two pairs of wings
Which hook up in flight,
They can pitch up and down;
Or yaw left and right.Inside the nest, by alchemy,
The nectar (gathered crude)
Is refined to golden honey,
Transcendental food.The honey store does more
Than just permit bees to survive;
By sipping it, they somehow milk
The wisdom of the hive.I know our brains to theirs
Are twenty thousand times the size;
But fifty thousand honeybees
Add up to ‘very wise’.