Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 22, 2009, 02:09 (5261 days ago) @ Frank Paris


> Here's what I think happens when we have a premonition of another person's death. In fact, we've had a telepathic but unconscious connection all along with that person while they were alive. Then when they suddenly die, that connection is severed. The brain is startled by that severing and sometimes in an attempt to make sense of it, it makes up a story about what actually happened. If the person believes in the afterlife, the story is couched in a "vision" of a "message from the other side." A more skeptical person like myself might also have a premonition of the person's death, but the brain does not manufacture a story about a "message from the other side," but is content with the strange feeling that the person is no longer with us. By Occam's razor, I think my explanation makes a lot more sense.-I have talked with patients who have had an NDE. I have reviewed the literature on it, many authors M.D.s, psychologists, etc. I don't think your Occam's solution works at all. First of all you have introduced mental telepathy, and from my wife's experiences, described here before, that does exist in some people, but not many. What happens in an NDE (the most common story), is that the patient dies, and while being resuscitated, goes down a long dark tunnel toward a very bright light. When coming into that light, there are recognizable to the patient, dead folks, who communicate telepathically ,and tell of someone else who has died at some recent time in the past, days, weeks, etc. The patient is very surprised to learn this. Many of the patients are in hospice, very sedated and waiting to succumb to their illness in a comfortable fashion. There is no way the patient could have learned of the death previously, a fact that has been checked by attending M.D.s in a number of these cases. I heard one case described by a hospice MD on the radio here in Houston. He had become aware of these phenomena only after he began working in that situation. 
These experiences were described in the Bardo-Thodol , the Tibetan book of the dead thousands of years old. The peaceful, loving feeling you describe from your own mystical experience is afterward felt by many of the NDE'rs. If they did fear death, they don't any longer. The experiences are not all good. If my memory is correct, about 17% have very bad experiences. And by the way, I am not discussing out-of-the-body experiences. Those are different and have been described under anesthesia, smoking pot (Susan Blackmore), and while the patient is essentially flat-lined.-One of my patients, dying at home with chest cancer, had an experience where he described to his wife, seeing a series of people floating by in boats, all dead folks known to his wife. The next day he died.Maybe a premonition for him, but the really revealing point to me about NDE's is the folks who come in contact with the NDE patient are always dead . This puts to rest that these are hallucinations, the contention Blackmore makes.("Dying to Live", 1993)I use Occam also, swear by him, but your Occam, has tossed in a factor that does not exist in this situation: only a few folks are telepathic, many have these experiences.-And by the way, your challenge worked. I'm doing a little introductory reading on process theology. I'll be back with some thoughts later.