Spirituality and the Brain (Identity)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 12:10 (5295 days ago) @ David Turell

David has reminded me of the various near-death experiences in which patients acquired information they could not have known normally.-This, of course, is precisely why I keep an open mind on the subject. I have no explanation. But if we are to take NDEs as evidence of an afterlife, we can scarcely ignore the fact that the vast majority of resuscitated patients had no such experience. You say that "18% is an approximation. Different studies vary from 1/5th to 1/4th in the occurrence of these phenomena." Then at the very best 75% of resuscitated patients experienced nothing. Apparently only 15 of van Lommel's 344 patients (4.36%) actually had an out-of-body experience. I can only repeat, if consciousness and identity are independent of the brain cells and survive them in an afterlife, this should be the case for all of us, so why is the proportion of surviving identities apparently so low? -As for "the killer statistic: the deeper and more complex the remembered NDE, the quicker you die", I don't understand why this should be regarded as evidence of an afterlife. Your final point is: "all we know about are those who survive and tell the tale. We don't know the percentages of NDEs in those that simply go ahead and die." Well, I guess those that go ahead and die don't have near-death experiences, they only have death experiences! We would have to move into the world of spiritualism to get beyond the accounts of the survivors.-Pim van Lommel's examples plus other experiences of inexplicable knowledge, as recounted by yourself, BBella, my wife and countless others, simply cannot ... in my view ... be ignored. We can only speculate on how these phenomena occur, and a non-physical consciousness (tied in with an afterlife) is a possible explanation. My comments are not meant to be dismissive. But how can one even begin to conceive of such an immaterial identity, let alone explain it? If matter is not conscious of itself, how can non-matter give it consciousness? If our identity exists independently, what is its relationship to its physical container? If I began with my physical conception, when and how did I develop a non-physical identity? Whatever explanation we come up with is riddled with gaps, in this field as in most of the matters we discuss. Without faith to fill those gaps ... either spiritually or materially ... I still see no way down from the picket fence.