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I've written this about 20 years ago in haste and bad english:

https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1kevin_p_nde.html

Which isn't my real name btw. They pseudonymized that.

My memory is a bit hazy, but I thought what you are describing is very common with people who flatline and come back? I have vague memories that a new anesthetic drug was developed and used on soldiers undergoing surgery in the Vietnam war, and there was something about it that caused the same kind of reaction in those who were put under. Again, my memory is very hazy on the subject. I should go do some research and update this comment (and I just might).

EDIT I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Near-death_experience

I prefer Mullah Nasruddin's experience, which was that death is perfectly OK unless you disturb the camels, at which point they beat you. https://ia800908.us.archive.org/28/items/idries-shah-the-exp...

Amazing recommendation! I was hooked by that most powerful New York Times Bestseller endorsement but in 1600s. "Many say: I wanted to learn, but only found madness. But those who seek wisdom will not find it elsewhere."

I was going to mention ketamine. Famous for this type of effect. I don't want to belittle the meaningful experience, but the mind is a really powerful organ and it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it. Shrug.

>>it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it

Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.

I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.

Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.

Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.

Safer why?

Lots to say there. The last few centuries have shown that many things which previously seemed inexplicable have been convincingly explained without resort to the supernatural. So a material basis of conscious experience seems a good bet.

Related, and hinted at by my original comment: the brain is capable of generating truly profound experiences. There is a tendency to ascribe them to something 'beyond ourselves' but again, advances in medicine and neuroscience have shown that these are explicable, subject to manipulation by chemical and electrical signals, which again suggests a material basis for conscious experience.

It's true that many things have yielded to science. And yet, what we discuss (the "hard problem of consciousness") hasn't. In my opinion, the burden is on you to prove that progress in other questions implies inevitable progress on an unrelated question that hasn't budged at all.

I said this in my other comment but, when you say the brain generates truly profound experiences, you beg the question (in the philosophical sense of the phrase). It's all in the word "experience." For in order for an experience to happen, some entity has to be experiencing. For there to be an illusion, there has to be an entity being deceived. And then how do you explain that entity? It can't be illusory experiences all the way down..

Any honest person has to see the connection between experience and the material brain. But I don't think it's honest to say it's obvious that experience is entirely material. The connection is deeply mysterious and may never be understood. I personally would rather accept that than claim that I don't really exist just so that everything can be explained.

The evidence is abundant and continues to chip away at the "hard problem". For example, we can through anesthesia turn on and off conscious experience. Through various drugs we can manipulate the character of conscious awareness, inducing ecstasy, visions, abiding serenity, terror, pain, grief... all states that were previously described as ineffable.

To say we haven't made progress on understanding consciousness is to move the post; we continue narrowing the 'hard problem' and eventually it seems like there will be nothing left other than a misunderstanding, something like the resolution of Xeno's paradox.

I don't mean to be insulting but, you don't seem to understand what the hard problem is. It is not "is the brain intimately linked with conscious experience?" I would agree we've made progress on that question. It is the harder question of "why is there conscious experience at all? Why does it feel the way it does?" I would argue no progress has been made on this whatsoever, and possibly can't be done.

You can try to claim that this question is meaningless, but that doesn't seem principled to me, not to mention that it completely ignores the fact that gestures broadly all this is happening.

In light of the fact that the entire universe is perceptible only through conscious awareness, the 'hard' question is equivalent to the question "why is there anything instead of nothing?" When asked this way, it's clearly not answerable. Everything short of that seems to have a material answer.

Edit: happy to chat more about this, as it's deeply interesting to me and I do want to understand your perspective. It may need a longer form than this thread allows. I've added a link to get in contact with me on my about page.

Not answerable != immaterial/nonmeaningful.

I'd be happy to talk more as I am passionate about this. I think the idea that there is no soul is actually extremely dehumanizing, and involves someone essentially saying "I don't really exist" (even if they redefine "I exist" to mean something more Materialist, it is, in my view, still saying that). I'll ping you on bluesky.

Jacob's Ladder is a great movie based on this theme.

It matches what I briefly experienced when I felt ill staying alone in a hotel. (E. g. I understood that the events of the few recent days were sort of preparing me for that; I could ask questions.)

BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.

This is lovely. Thank you for sharing this

> To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.

If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.

As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).

I hope you're right though.

I'm a skeptic too, so I appreciate your position.

I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.

Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.

I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.

I don't know, this sounds like your subjective experience, I have no reason to disbelieve it. If you had said that your experience showed you the future, and X Y and Z were going to happen, then I might not believe that, but why wouldn't I believe you experienced what you say you did? Why would you lie?

This is HN so I'm not trying to evangelize you or anyone here, but what you described is 100% in line with Spiritism [1], a French-founded doctrine that's very popular both in France and Brazil [2]. I'm a believer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism#cite_note-...