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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.)

I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.

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You think it's cute, do you? But there are endless unfalsifiable and silly alternative explanations for everything. They're distinguished only by being silly. The observation that everything could be a simulation deserves a "so what". Maybe you're the cutie pie.

It means something to you that I should be, eh? I don't really take a position in the matter, but one can't spend all day reading - though feel free to continue flattering my looks here while I do so, of course! Being called cute is a rare pleasure indeed for me, these decades.

So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.

> NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables)

I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later.

They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.

Yes they don't happen 100% of the time or even 10%.

That’s been my exact experience in each of my 5 occasions.

I also once semi-fainted while standing up. Felt unusually calm and care free as my head bashed against a nearby object. Fortunately it wasn’t serious.

Do you frequently experience and remember dreams?

Yes I even used to do lucid dreaming. These days best I can do is wake up and stop dreams on command.

I also regularly experience sleep paralysis. That took a lot of work to get used to.

Everyone reading this should pull on the sleep paralysis thread if you decide to research this topic. It's a interesting one.

I do remember dreams. The times where I was anesthesized it was that on/off switch, I completely lost time. No NDE or even dreams.

If the brain is ever completely inactive (as seen in EEGs) for any length of time, there is no chance of recovery from that state. The body can be kept alive, but the brain is gone and will never have any other activity again.

So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.

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