Differing explanations of NDE's

I don't think getting an exact distribution function of strange experiences as a function of awareness level is either possible, not terribly useful.

I don't really like the idea of vivisection, but does anyone think animal experiments could be useful?

David
 
fls said:
If I get at all technical, I am accused of being obfuscatory. :) I'm a bit gun-shy given that somebody on another thread I have been participating in doesn't even know what "odds" are. :eek:
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Hah... Poor Linda... just can't win...

In casual usage, "odds" and "chances" are often used interchangeably to refer to the concept of probability... thanks to Wikipedia (and not to your mostly unhelpful responses) I've learned that I need to be careful about distinguishing between "odds" and "chances" or "probability" or "risk".

Apparently even those of your ilk get it wrong too...

"Odds ratios have often been confused with relative risk in medical literature... A study of papers published in two journals reported that 26% of the articles that used an odds ratio interpreted it as a risk ratio.[13]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds_ratio

Anyway... carry on! :)
 
Max_B said:
How are you judging that other than 2 NDE'rs... "the remaining NDEers did not seem to understand their experiences or did not seem to regard them as significant"?
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If you don't mind me jumping in - That passage on the IANDS page confused me a bit. Was Sartori referring only to the subset of NDEs that "differed from those reported in the literature," or was she talking about the entire pool of NDEs she was working with?

But from what I know of Sartori and her work, I would broadly agree with you that her work hasn't necessarily been represented well in this thread.
 
Will said:
If you don't mind me jumping in - That passage on the IANDS page confused me a bit. Was Sartori referring only to the subset of NDEs that "differed from those reported in the literature," or was she talking about the entire pool of NDEs she was working with?

But from what I know of Sartori and her work, I would broadly agree with you that her work hasn't necessarily been represented well in this thread.
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The only thing that matters to me here, is that the data from Penny's study does not support Linda's claim that these NDE'rs...

"...did not seem to regard them [their experience] as significant".

I linked earlier in the thread, to a brief summary of the studies cardiac arrest NDE's - from a post I made in 2014. So you can judge for yourself whether these patients did/did not regard their experience as significant. Here's the link again...

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/top-ten-nde-myths.421/page-3#post-9579
 
Max_B said:
The only thing that matters to me here, is that the data from Penny's study does not support Linda's claim that these NDE'rs...

"...did not seem to regard them [their experience] as significant".

I linked earlier in the thread, to a brief summary of the studies cardiac arrest NDE's - from a post I made in 2014. So you can judge for yourself whether these patients did/did not regard their experience as significant. Here's the link again...

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/top-ten-nde-myths.421/page-3#post-9579
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Some of them did, but in the quote I linked Sartori pretty clearly indicates that a good portion did not.

I'll look at that thread again but I don't think you are being fair in ignoring the bits that don't support your contention. I believe we can see a similar pattern in other prospective NDE studies as well.

This is only a problem if one posits that NDEs must be considered transformative. No doubt many are (as are other similar types of experiences). It's not intrinsically good or bad that others don't react the same way.
 
Iyace said:
Yeah, my article of experience depth and clarity got glazed over my Linda uncontested as well...
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Yeah, I read that paper for the first time after seeing your link. I thought the suggestion that some of the differences observed might be similar to self-referential memory effects was interesting too.
 
Max_B said:
The only thing that matters to me here, is that the data from Penny's study does not support Linda's claim that these NDE'rs...

"...did not seem to regard them [their experience] as significant".

I linked earlier in the thread, to a brief summary of the studies cardiac arrest NDE's - from a post I made in 2014. So you can judge for yourself whether these patients did/did not regard their experience as significant. Here's the link again...

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/top-ten-nde-myths.421/page-3#post-9579
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Right - and I have a problem with people who seem to write from authority, and then misrepresent published evidence. Nobody has the time to go back and check everything, so thanks for doing so.

David
 
David Bailey said:
Right - and I have a problem with people who seem to write from authority, and then misrepresent published evidence. Nobody has the time to go back and check everything, so thanks for doing so.

David
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Except that he was wrong. But you don't seem to be interested in that.
 
David Bailey said:
Can we make something useful out of this thread, now that a certain individual is gone?
Perhaps some of you have good ideas as to what research on NDE's should be tried?
David
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In terms of sociological and linguistic research; I am excited about the Final Words Project. I think it has a larger surface area (more people who can be included) and its timing for occurrence is better announced than NDEs. Being present to document the actual reactions of individual's transition experiences is difficult with NDEs. The FWP method of being with the terminally ill and caring about their personal experiences is a humanistic win already! Even if no clear finding is discovered in the short term. Like lucid dreaming, practice and mental focus will improve the experience for the dying.

When you are with someone who is dying, you are a visitor to a world between worlds--and your friend or family member is between these two states of being.

Imagine that the language that you hear is much like the language of another country that you do not know but has its own sets of meanings and functions. You would not judge the language of another country as being less valid than the language you speak. You might be curious and want to learn more, taking note of new words, new ways of saying things, or even new ways of seeing things.

This is the mindset of the FWP. Until we know differently, FWP assumes that the language at end of life has some kind of organization to it--that there are patterns in symbols, themes, grammar--even, if not especially, in the language that does not seem to make sense.
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http://www.finalwordsproject.org/visitor-between-worlds.html


As for physical science, the issue needs to be turned on its head. Currently they are looking for neural correlates of consciousness. Progress will be made when bio-informatic results (knowing, understanding, intending, empathizing) are seen as mental correlates of a living thing's bio-physical workspace. This will bring the "meanings" of life experience in as a variable.
 
Stephen Wright said:
In terms of sociological and linguistic research; I am excited about the Final Words Project. I think it has a larger surface area (more people who can be included) and its timing for occurrence is better announced than NDEs. Being present to document the actual reactions of individual's transition experiences is difficult with NDEs. The FWP method of being with the terminally ill and caring about their personal experiences is a humanistic win already! Even if no clear finding is discovered in the short term. Like lucid dreaming, practice and mental focus will improve the experience for the dying.
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That project was new to me, and here is an interesting quote from the FWP website:
“That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: ‘This is all an elaborate hoax.’ I asked him, ‘What's a hoax?’ And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.”
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When I read that, after everything we have discussed on SKEPTIKO, it sounds so plausible - exactly what Jurgen Ziewe, for example, reports.

I suppose we have tended to concentrate so much on NDE's, and that seems to always end up in these endless debates about just how much neurological activity there is a brain without blood flow!

David
 
David Bailey said:
- exactly what Jurgen Ziewe, for example, reports.

I suppose we have tended to concentrate so much on NDE's, and that seems to always end up in these endless debates about just how much neurological activity there is a brain without blood flow!

David
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(yeah, ya think)

From a overview perspective, reports of second sight (each report being a data point) have been coming from "sensitives" and from average people for all recorded time. These reports present the transfer of information, specifically useful and meaningful information, being communicated directly and without physical representation. J. Ziewe is one source of these of these many millions of data points. My opinion is - that it is not the quality of any one data point - but the shear mass and persistence of continually occurring events of second sight - that is relevant to science.

The primary functional flaw of early biology was the belief in a magical essence of life-meaning, circulating as/with the organism's blood. This meaning was the heritage and being from the "blood" of ancestors. Oxygen and nutrients are important, but the magic information is now understood as being globally present in living things. The magic information of life is the DNA-RNA- Protein communication system. Why are we still making this medieval times context-bias mistake??

Looking to "blood and ectoplasm" are total distractions to research into the creation of a local scale capability for understanding meaning in each organism. In my worldview: science needs to model how meaning and affordance are imported from the environment and then utilized by living things and the "mystery" will disappear.
 
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