Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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Sy Borg
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Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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Physicists like Robert Lee Park et al point out that there is no evidence of an afterlife. It's a very 'science" way of looking at things, reflexively discounting the subjective. Trouble is, afterlives are entirely subjective.

For a person in the final gasps of life, only the subjective matters. Normally dreams don't much matter since they do not directly impact on the physical world. Dreams can influence subsequent behaviours, but they cannot directly change the environment. When a person is almost dead, they will never be able to change their environment again, so that final dream is everything to them.

It's often pointed out that near death experiences are the final dreams of a dying brain using its last few minutes of oxygen. Yet how long might those final few minutes seem subjectively? As the brain shuts down, there may be a significant sense of time dilation*. Many NDE reports describe death dreams that seemed far longer to the recovered patient than was recorded, and which had a different quality to usual dreams.

Obviously, heaven and hell are subjective experiences rather than physical domains or dimensions. We can be in metaphorical heaven or hell, awake or in dreams and nightmares. So the question of afterlives is more a domain for psychologists than physicists.

Apparently, most dying people report nothing, blankness (chalk up one for Robert Lee Park). For a significant minority, though, the rush of dopamine in a dying brain seems to bring euphoric experiences in those final few minutes of brain oxygen, and that may subjectively last a long time.

It's ironic to think that, while loved ones are shocked or weepy around a dead relative, the recently-deceased may be having a wonderful time :)




* Actual time dilation does not occur in dreams, as was once believed, but subjective effects take on special importance towards the end of life.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

Post by Steve3007 »

Greta wrote:Physicists like Robert Lee Park et al point out that there is no evidence of an afterlife...
Given the points you go on to make about subjective experiences in what the rest of the world sees as the last few minutes of one's life, perhaps we could conclude that any disagreement you might have with people like Robert Lee Park are due to disagreements in terminology, not a fundamental disagreement as to what is the case.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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It's ironic to think that, while loved ones are shocked or weepy around a dead relative, the recently-deceased may be having a wonderful time :)
You could say that, as long as you're clear what you mean by the word "while". Our language is so full of words that implicitly assume a universal observer-independent time scale that we barely notice it, The word "while" (to me at least implies "at the same time according a universal observer-independent clock". But I think part of your point is related to the idea that no such clock exists. It's perhaps not the same as how this works in Relativity, but its analogous to it.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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Minor error: I missed out a closing bracket there.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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Steve3007 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 7:01 am
Greta wrote:Physicists like Robert Lee Park et al point out that there is no evidence of an afterlife...
Given the points you go on to make about subjective experiences in what the rest of the world sees as the last few minutes of one's life, perhaps we could conclude that any disagreement you might have with people like Robert Lee Park are due to disagreements in terminology, not a fundamental disagreement as to what is the case.
Also qualitative. He appears to not take NDEs seriously while I consider them to be the crux of the issue.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

Post by Steve3007 »

If the disagreement was over terminology then I guess the term being used differently between the two of you would be "afterlife". If he were to clarify how he's using that word a bit, he might say that it's a life which happens on a timescale which is such that the person experiencing it would, in principle, be able to gain knowledge of events in other people's lives that happen (according to their subjective experience of time) after you are long dead.

So, for example, according to the subjective experience of my kids (I hope) the event called "my death" will happen many years before theirs. If he's talking about a definition of "afterlife" which means me being able to see my kids' deaths then that clarifies that he's using that word differently to the way you're using it. So it would then be just a terminological difference.
Greta wrote:Also qualitative. He appears to not take NDEs seriously while I consider them to be the crux of the issue.
OK. Fair enough, then your disagreement with him might be about more than just terminology. It might be about what is the case. But I guess that would depend on what he's said about NDE's.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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Steve3007 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 7:07 am
It's ironic to think that, while loved ones are shocked or weepy around a dead relative, the recently-deceased may be having a wonderful time :)
You could say that, as long as you're clear what you mean by the word "while". Our language is so full of words that implicitly assume a universal observer-independent time scale that we barely notice it, The word "while" (to me at least implies "at the same time according a universal observer-independent clock". But I think part of your point is related to the idea that no such clock exists. It's perhaps not the same as how this works in Relativity, but its analogous to it.
Consider the time dilation of dreams. There is significant information compression, much as per JPG and MP3 files. You just tweeze out the least useful information so, in dreams you are unlikely to go to the toilet, brush your teeth, put on your socks, moisturise, walk to the shops, and the other mundanities that make up most of life. No, you'll be horizontal folk dancing, or running from assailants, or driving off a cliff, flying and other "exciting" events.

So, not emcumbered by space and time, in dreams we can walk out the door of an ice cream shop and on to the summit of Olympus Mons. No dull struggles with the long commute. Without the tedium and slowness of life's "connective tissue" there are only the "nodes" - the major events. This means that much more can happen in dreams in a given time period, say, four minutes than when awake. As Sam Harris has said, the difference between dreaming and being awake is that the latter is more constrained by external events.
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Re: Near death experiences - an entire afterlife in 3-6 minutes?

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Steve3007 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 7:23 amSo, for example, according to the subjective experience of my kids (I hope) the event called "my death" will happen many years before theirs. If he's talking about a definition of "afterlife" which means me being able to see my kids' deaths then that clarifies that he's using that word differently to the way you're using it.
Yes, I cannot see a pathway that would allow a dead person to see events beyond their lifetime. Still, that doesn't mean much, given that we are just technological apes only a couple of decades into the Information Age, who will be surely seen as extremely simple and primitive by any advanced successors who manage to pass The Great Filter.

Steve3007 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 7:23 am
Greta wrote:Also qualitative. He appears to not take NDEs seriously while I consider them to be the crux of the issue.
OK. Fair enough, then your disagreement with him might be about more than just terminology. It might be about what is the case. But I guess that would depend on what he's said about NDE's.
He would surely say they are just dreams. What he says seems mostly fair enough, but the fact that he didn't mention NDEs suggests that he doesn't take them seriously enough to warrant examination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGNlOm_o75I
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