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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2380 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 11, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The issue I’ve always had about NDEs having anything to really tell us about what happens when we die is just how culturally specific they tend to be. (https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE76-Japanese-and-western-JNDS.pdf) just for a quick example. Japanese people tend to see the light, but not interpret it as a being, westerners see cities of light, Japanese see flower gardens. Westerners have life reviews where fewer Japanese do. As an objective experience, this simply should not be, an experience of reality might be interpreted differently, but it should be a similar experience.

The case he makes is that there is significant overlap. A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva, but there’s still a sense of the other reality being eternal and more real than this one.

If anything, it being so subjective points to it being less real than the one we live in.

A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva

But, isn't that exactly the hallmark of a subjective phenomenon based on hallucination/misremembering/wishful thinking/etc, rather than an objective phenomenon based in reality? The most parsimonious explanation when confronted with mutually contradictory reports of the same phenomenon is that someone (or everyone) is simply mistaken.

It's analogous to how you have a lot of wildly contradictory reports of UFO encounters, with people reporting different physical appearances of the aliens themselves, different appearances of the craft (which suspiciously seem to evolve along with American aesthetic preferences, from the Cold War-era flying saucers to the modern Apple-inspired cubes and spheres), so some believers try to explain the contradictions away by saying "well, maybe they aren't really aliens, maybe these are spiritual entities that are manifested by the collective unconscious, so they take whatever form a particular observer is expecting", and it's like, yeah maybe that's the case... or there could just be no UFOs to begin with. That theory also resolves all the contradictions, in a much more parsimonious manner.

That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."

I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.

That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."

I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.

I've had an NDE but I can't disentangle the profound sense of bliss from also being pumped up full of pain killers by the doctors at the hospital.

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