Posted: Sep 13, 2012 11:52 am
Shrunk wrote:DrParisetti wrote:3. Many posters take the position that the conscious experience owes to the fact that the brain is not "dead" and there is some residual activity. Professionals in this field, who do this for a living and are not related to NDE research, say that this is categorically impossible. There may be residual activity but not even the most basic, survival-related functions of the brain stem shut down. People don't even breath autonomously, but are supposed to have a structured conscious experience, generally described as "more real that everyday reality"? And produce long-term memory?
You are failing to understand the argument. Even if we assume there is a period where the brain is completely devoid of any activity whatsoever, we are talking about people who suffered a cardiac arrest, and then were resucitated. So this period of "brain death" was preceded and followed by periods during which at least rudimentary brain activity was present. So by far the more likely and parsimonious explanation is that the experiences under discussion are the result of those periods, when the brain is still active, but severely impaired.
+1 Not only is the primary evidence anecdotal, not only does it involve further interpretation of anecdotes by the likes of Dr. Parisetti, not only are the anecdotes possibly tales about hallucinations (rather than anything otherworldly), but we cannot even establish that the brains are dead at the time the alleged experiences.
The only person who'll find any of this compelling is someone who wants to find it compelling:
Dr. Parisetti wrote:It is really difficult for me to pick one [piece of evidence]. If I really had to, it would probably be the Scole experiment. That is a wide set of pieces of evidence, though. If I were to really chose one piece, just the one, then I would let my heart do the judging, not my mind. There are things that speak to me as a person, as a human being, much more than as a man of science.