Yohan wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2018, 5:57 am
In the scientific world, data have disproved the validity of subjective NDEs. Most believe that a brain in an oxygen-deprived state of abnormal energetic balance is simply not a reliable source. A story that promises hope and unimaginable rewards, from a neurosurgeon of all people, is dubious at best. Most scientists in the world would tell us that he was in a dream-like state induced by coma-enhancing drugs. Perhaps Dr. Alexander, being a board-certified authority, should provide evidence for his claims. Until he does, his story will fall on deaf ears in the scientific community. Scientists generally don't listen to each other directly, they review each other's evidence—or proof.
No data hasn't disproven NDEs. All the theories to the contrary (such as The Dying Brain Hypothesis) are mere speculations with no facts to back them up. They are based on circular reasoning (because the brain creates consciousness, therefore the experience must be fully explained by the brain, despite no plausible mechanism or no experiences correlating the each feature of a NDE with a particular brain defect). In fact,
data shows that NDE memories are more real than normal memories, ruling out the case that they are a confabulation by a deprived oxygen brain.
A majority of the scientists are just normal hard-working people trying to make a living. They are just indifferent to paranormal phenomenon such as NDEs because it doesn't have anything to do with their job, and it also could cause ostracization if they openly come out for the paranormal. That's the real reason their claims fall on deaf ears. Also, when money is involved and people are trying to make a living, all integrity and "how things ought to be" goes down the drain. See:
half the findings are probably fake. When people are in pressure to publish to keep their status/job and make a living, when there are socially acceptable conclusions, when the experiment is very expensive or complicated to replicate, and when the experiment is utterly significant to everyone's day to day life (and thus people cannot check your findings against their own experience), integrity goes down. If our modern day economists are no better than blind monkeys, then the same lack of integrity could be true for other sciences.
How the hell do you provide evidence for a subjective experience? We know that his brain was flat-lined during his NDE. Steven Novella makes the laughable claim that he experience the NDE before and after his flat-line, which falls flat because that would mean that he would have discontinuous experiences.
People generally don't have money to gain or careers to advance by pushing their NDEs. Usually you're ostracized by some people for reporting your NDE since they think you're nuts. On the contrary, career skeptics have plenty of reputation, fame, and money to gain by ridiculing NDEs, regardless of what they actually believe deep down. Skeptics also have an ego motive to ridicule NDEs as it allows them to express their inferiory complex out loud, while sharing a NDE is usually humiliating and embarrasing to the experiencer.
Yohan wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2018, 5:57 am
The premise that someone might use his authority as a neurosurgeon to market a book about his journey to the afterlife is alarming. To claim that there is nothing in neuroscience to explain his experience is like saying there's nothing in physics to explain some newly observed phenomenon. To be deceptive and say there's nothing in science that can explain it—and subsequently use your own authoritative degree as a practitioner to back it up—is a classic ruse of a con artist.
You're completely misunderstanding what's going on. He's using his authority as a neurosurgeon to show that
despite being in the field that's most against the possibility of afterlife, he still can't explain his experience in materialist reductionist terms. And if he had no brain activity during his experience, then so be it.
Yohan wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2018, 5:57 am
Most scientists in the world would tell us that he was in a dream-like state induced by coma-enhancing drugs.
Dreams and NDEs are vastly different in many ways. A dreamer tends to exhibit below normal awareness levels, while a NDE experiencer experiences hyperawareness,
as if the normal life were a dream! Also, nobody knows what dreams actually represent. While a lot of the dreams seem to be just random thoughts (though weirdly most my dreams are completely unrelated to anything in real life around me or my experience) there might be something more to some of the random symbols. After all, if dreams were really random thoughts, then I'd likely be dreaming about which college I go to, what house I get, what job I have, but I dream of things far disconnected from what I think of during the day. Furthermore, after hallucinations it usually becomes clear that you hallucinated and you forget the experience as insignificant, but after NDEs it remains vivid in your head years later AND has extreme life transformative effects (see: Howard Storm).
Also, against the notion that NDEs are invalidated because drugs can reproduce some of the features,
the cause of the NDE is irrelevant to whether they are real afterlife experiences or not. Here's a brief rebuttal by Sylvian Poirier:
In any of their argumentative texts (that I know of) against the reality of the perceptions out of the body in near death experiences, skeptics have put forward the observation that these perceptions were "reproduced" by drugs or special stimulations of the brain, or the like. They presented this as an evidence that out of body perceptions were hallucinations, by arguing that the "natural" NDE were the same perceptions as these stimulated ones, and assuming that these stimulated ones are mere hallucinations, that would be a "model" of hallucination for the spontaneous NDEs.
A rational argument based on an observation, when addressing a competition between 2 worldviews (once assumed that these worldviews are well-defined enough as concerns the observation being discussed), is a matter of how it affects the ratio of probabilties between these views, whatever the a priori ratio of probabilities that one could give them.
As we explained with classical probabilities, the effect of an observation on the competition between two hypothesis, consists in a multiplication of the ratio of their probabilities by p/p' where p is the probability for the observation to have given the perceived result under one hypothesis, and p' the one under the other hypothesis. Thus it can significantly promote one hypothesis, only if the probability of the oberved result under the other hypothesis is close to zero.
In particular, in order for the observation of "out of body sensations" under drugs or specific brain stimulations, to be an argument against the "real out of body" interpretation of NDEs, this would require this result to have a probability close to zero under this hypothesis.
But, under the "real out of body" interpretation of NDE, there is absolutely no surprise that such experiments on the brain can really drive the soul out of it and thus produce real out of body perceptions in this way.
Strangely, when putting forward their experience of stimulated out of body perception as a "model" for NDE, they did not even consider any question of how it can be at odds or not with the real out of body hypothesis. So they did not contradict either that its probability for their observation can be 1. In fact, all they showed is their a priori unability or unwillingness to dare thinking about the view they are claiming to oppose.
Conclusion: skeptics are ridiculizing themselves by their way of showing that they don't even understand how to assess the weight of a rational argument based on an observation.