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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.

This sounds intriguing.

> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.

Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.

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If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.

Have you read any pop neuroscience book? There are common experiences that can be generated by one or another kind of brain-wrong. You sort of acknowledged this already when you mentioned DMT. If you poke somebody in specific parts of the brain you can get illusions of changing size, shadowy figures, mirth, and other delightful errors. We also interpret things very eagerly, like the "night hag" phenomenon where being unable to sense one's own breathing turns into an illusion of something sitting on your chest. That's another worldwide cross-cultural concept, by the way, but there is no night hag, there's just human physiology.

So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.

I would be seriously uncomfortable to discover myself making authoritative reference to anything out of a "pop neuroscience" book, unless I had myself validated the claim - at least as far as making sure there is a paper that says what is claimed of it, by whatever failed academic turned mountebank I am reading. (If those guys were comfortable being held to what they say, why did they stop writing for peer reviewers? I'm hardly an academic chauvinist, God knows, but if you want to be safe here in the 2030s, you really need to learn to spot a grifter...)

The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)

It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#DuaMinBodPro

OK, you could also read a serious neuroscience textbook, but that seemed a less reasonable thing to expect of anyone. The basic point remains true though.

Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.

I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.

When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.

Why is that unreasonable to expect? How can someone participate in a discussion of neuroscience without the requisite knowledge?

But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.

You'd be hard pressed to find a principled neuroscientist who is as confident as you are that neuroscience can explain consciousness

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