Afterlife: Matt Take Notice!!! (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 14, 2012, 08:44 (4698 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: dhw has a way of encyclopedically referencing old posts to contradict.

The references were all taken from your posts of the last few days. However, they were not contradictory – you simply came up with one different reason after another for your scepticism towards NDEs. Matt, we can only discuss what you write, and you’ve honestly admitted that your thinking can be hard to follow! I know David also had the impression that you were dismissing NDEs too lightly, and so we needed clarification. My last post was simply meant as a summing-up of a week’s to-ing and fro-ing, after we finally appeared to have reached agreement. I’m sorry if this has made you uncomfortable.

MATT: dhw must hate my ability to alter definitions: I speak in metaphors often in my own head, and for me to be able to "take a subject seriously" I HAVE to be ABLE to study it.

Study just means finding out as much as you can about a subject (look at the variety of subjects on offer at university). It doesn’t even entail reaching conclusions. So once again we’re back to subjective definitions. I suspect yours demands objective results of some kind. On the other hand, of course, you won’t bother to study a subject unless you take it seriously!

MATT: [...] my uncomfortableness with the topic stems from the two facts I will restate: 1. We lack a real knowledge of the human consciousness. 2. To understand NDE, we must understand consciousness.

Absolutely right, and that’s why this subject lies at the heart of our attempt to gauge whether or not there might be a form of energy beyond the material world as we know it (e.g. a “soul”, a UI). Your second point can be reversed: to understand consciousness, we must understand NDEs – along with any other authenticated psychic phenomena, and along with emotions, memory, imagination etc., and along with how the physical brain functions. All these things are intertwined. At present we can do no more than speculate, but that’s all we can do about many of the subjects that matter to us.

Thank you for the link: http://www.near-death.com/experiences/triggers06.html <

Quote: “The need to understand the states of consciousness, subconsciousness, and unconsciousness, along with the mechanisms that cause the transition between these states is shared by those investigating NDEs and G-LOC.”

Exactly. (And some people can and do investigate/study NDEs!)

Quote: “Loss-of-consciousness episodes of all types appear to have an explainable physiologic basis.”

The mystery of NDEs lies not in loss of consciousness but in retention and even enhancement of consciousness when the body and brain have been certified dead. We know that drugs and diseases can also affect consciousness, and can also result in strange experiences, which may be evidence for materialism but, as you have acknowledged, that doesn’t solve the mystery of independently authenticated observations and information.

Jerry Gross’s out-of-body “astral realm” would be more impressive if he provided concrete examples of information verified by independent third parties, so I’d rather stick to the website we’ve been discussing. I’m sure you’ll agree!