Spirituality and the Brain (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, May 23, 2010, 07:43 (5081 days ago) @ dhw

I asked David why only 18% of Pim van Lommel's 344 patients experienced NDEs. As this takes us away from E Coli vs. Linux, I'm reopening the thread George started on Spirituality and the Brain, as that is the most recent one to tackle the nature of such experiences. David has replied:-"Humans vary, as certainly do our brains. Using the disputed IQ as an example, it has a huge range. Some folks are psychic, as my wife. Some are privileged to be able to have NDEs. Nothing else makes sense."-For me, as for you, NDEs come under the range of psychic experiences, but they differ from all others in that the brain is supposed to be clinically dead. This is why they raise the whole question of the nature of consciousness. The materialist argument is quite specifically that the source is the cells and chemicals in the brain. Patients who experience NDEs apparently retain their consciousness and identity INDEPENDENTLY of the cells and chemicals. Now even though we all have different brains and mental capacities, it would surely be absurd to argue that the actual source is different in 18% of van Lommel's patients. That would mean materialists are right about 82% of us and wrong about 18%. -I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a believer, and I suppose an answer might be that for 82% of people, the trauma of death is so massive that the spirit blacks out for a while. And so those spirits just didn't have time to "recover" before the patients were resuscitated. But if I put myself in the shoes of a non-sceptical materialist, I'd be inclined to use your own argument: "Humans vary, as certainly do our brains." Maybe some brains are so differently wired that they result in what we call psychic experiences (see my other post on this thread), and maybe there are impulses beyond the current scope of our measuring instruments, and maybe these continue for a short time after the death of the brain, before the final blackout. Lots of maybes. George, as a sceptical materialist, would no doubt come up with more radical theories. As for "nothing else makes sense", I sometimes wonder if anything at all makes sense.