Comment by paged90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paged90 | Hacker News Reader

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It should be noted that the Pam Reynold case, the portions for which she had the out of body experience (OBE), she was technically not clinically dead. Additionally, following entering the light we have no way of knowing what time-frame this occurred in; how do we know this occurred when she was recorded as having no brain activity.

I find myself flopping between the two camps in a Devil's advocate manner - the evidence really isn't strong on either side. There seems to be many questions raised by NDE's, but seeing as we don't even have a firm grasp on what consciousness is, or where it comes from, to suddenly say "NDE's prove an afterlife, we can maintain consciousness when we're dead" is a very tenuous claim.

Until we can say "This is consciousness, this is where it comes from, this is what we believe to be the main contributors" to make a leap of this magnitude concerning a topic we know little about is simply irresponsible.

Agreed - we need to fight against the (quite human) desire to believe regardless of evidence.

There's enough questions posed at this point that we cannot draw conclusions, so I guess we have to be patient and piece it together over time.

You would think that if there were something real here more evidence of "verifiable" NDE experiences would have become available. Instead articles like this are still rehashing cases from 10 or 15 years ago.

It could be that due to the inherent lack of ability to perform this in a controlled manner it is not being looked at. I can't imagine there's a line of people waiting to be put in a near-death situation for an experience you have ~16% (?) of having, with the risk being death or brain damage.

Even if you could find volunteers, I'd like to see an institute willing to take on the impending lawsuit should something ever go wrong.

But you could put blackboard into operation room, write there result of a few rolls of dices after the patient is unconcious, and clear the board before patient wakes up.

Of course people will argue it's wasting time that is important to heal that person, but if we want to get results, we could invest into one additional person, that will perform this function.

Or we could just put monitor there, showing (not pseudo) random numbers when pacient is for sure unconcious, to minimize costs, and risk of infection becouse of additional person.

If NDEs and OBE are so common (a few percent people experienced it) after year we would have our proof, or we would know it's extremely unprobable. Not that I think right now it's true, but if we can check, why predict?

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