near to death episodes: latest study (Endings)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 01, 2017, 12:12 (2367 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 2) I challenged the assumption that […] an inability to communicate and to perform physical functions denotes unconsciousness. My poor late wife had the same symptoms after her second stroke, but I was told by her doctors that we could not know if she was conscious or not. There are also documented cases of coma patients who were deemed to be unconscious but were fully aware of what was going on around them.
It is clear, then, that all those NDEs that recount events going on around the patient mean that he/she is conscious. But as you say, nobody knows how. Maybe a dualistic “soul” is the answer. But if the cortex is not dead, and is active enough to be the “receiver”, it could also be the generator, and that would be the materialist view. However, in many cases of NDEs, the patient “returns” with information from outside the operating theatre, and I suggest that those are the experiences which cannot be explained by materialism. The article itself provides no evidence for dualism,

DAVID: Point 2 regards your wife and cases of coma; there is EEG activity from the cortex which is generally not normal in appearance. The cortex is alive to some degree. The 'locked in' state does describe a very special group of patients who are aware but do not or cannot communicate after the event that damaged their brain. This may persist for years, not the 20-40 minutes in prolonged resuscitations. For me NDE's prove dualism. The article refers to them.

This whole discussion began when I pointed out that the article itself did NOT provide any evidence for dualism. For some reason you have taken this as an attack on the concept of dualism as evidenced in NDEs. I can only repeat that the article does not go beyond patients’ awareness of conversations after the heart has stopped beating, and refers to “a burst of brain energy”, which you have said is irrelevant. I DO accept that information such as the hitherto unknown death of a relative may be regarded as evidence for dualism. I do NOT see how awareness of conversations taking place around a patient whose cortex is still alive but cannot manifest any function (akin to the “locked in” state of coma victims) can be regarded as evidence. Your comment on the article was: “consciousness survives brain death for a few minutes. It is obviously separate from the brain itself, and if so dualism is correct.” The article proves that consciousness survives heart death for a few minutes, but the cortex is NOT dead for a few minutes. I cannot see how this proves that consciousness is separate from the brain. Once more: I am commenting on the limitations of the article, not on NDEs in general.