Hopefully as an FYI that is free of too much skeptical criticism (I mean... I actually get it, but I just don't want to deal with negativity right now), there's actually a rapidly growing number of NDE accounts on YouTube right now. I am putting together a playlist of the most compelling ones: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvnDbwjRqIOkgR1eUMfpn...
Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, former skeptics and at least 1 neuroscientist.
What he described actually sounds a lot like lucid dreaming. Even complete with waking up. I am still interested in watching a few more of these but I'm getting the feeling that I'll be thinking that a lot.
YouTube likes to pre-add videos to other recently-added-to playlists before I've even checked one off. I still haven't figured out a way to have it stop doing this. Frustrating. I have to constantly comb my playlists to fix these. I've now removed the non-NDE-related ones.
I would strongly assume that a big chunk is made using generative AI with the purpose of spreading one particular religion, or just making the population more spiritual and therefore less opposed to certain changes. With all due respect, we don't know everything, but know enough about our brain to be fairly certain that there is nothing even close to any afterlife, with all respect to people's own beliefs that they are entitled to. It is wishful thinking, it makes humans feel good, gives them hope and is a pretty significant psychological relief, especially given the current mental health situation on earth, but what happens after life is fairly certain - nothing. I suspect the letters were written with the exact goal I have listed above - to give hope, to make happy and to give psychological relief. After all, you want people you interact with to be happy. If you will tell them the truth in cold blood, well, that won't be a very pleasant moment and it will lead to sadness. I do the same to be honest. Small lies that make people that I care about happy. It makes me happy in return. Is it bad? What even is bad? Everyone defines bad for themselves. Making other people happy is definitely not bad in a system of values where bad is on the opposite side of happy. But what do I know.
You very clearly haven't seen a single one, much less a bunch of them as I have. There's no generative AI going on with people on video telling their stories going back years ago. I'm a skeptic and I am pretty convinced at this point that something real is going on, here. They also actually are mostly ANTI-religion (in fact, the ones that seem very religion-slanted also seem false or fail to maintain internal consistency, so I've easily dismissed the vast majority of those). The testimonies in the playlist I put together almost entirely push the notion that most if not all religions are false in small or large part.
> but know enough about our brain to be fairly certain that there is nothing even close to any afterlife
You can't say that for sure. The brain might be a consciousness conduit and not a consciousness generator (which is pretty much what these testimonies are saying). If I step on a garden hose (assuming I can't see beyond it) and the water stops, and I stop stepping on it and the water resumes, you're basically saying the garden hose must be the source of the water, when we know that isn't true (but only because we can see beyond the garden hose). A naïve individual from, say, 10,000 years ago who has never seen seemingly unlimited pressurized water on tap who encounters a garden hose might initially conclude that the hose produces the water...
> it makes humans feel good
There's a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true which do not make people feel good and a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true that do. "Feeling good" is therefore orthogonal to veracity so this is a non-argument.
I'm disappointed that you're responding as a person who literally hasn't watched a single one of the videos (because the very things you said prove that). You're just yet another human who prefers to bury their head in the sand than confront evidence against their pre-existing worldviews, like most people. And "with all due respect," that's not rational at all.
I’ve noticed these near-death-experience videos coming up in my recommendations and found it truly odd. They don’t seem to have anything to do with what I normally watch. I have to wonder if they’re the top of the funnel for religion campaigns like “hegetsus”.
That's interesting to me because they showed up in mine but I'd already expressed interest. I don't know why they're being tossed at you.
I honestly don't believe there's much money in the "NDE space". Certainly less than "hegetsus". Which is funny because the vast majority of NDE accounts really make all of the most popular world religions look pretty wrong (including Christianity, although its message of love over all remains... Not that its adherents follow that much or anything).
Is this to say that you possess necessarily accurate knowledge about the objectively true status on an afterlife, or is this more so just standard culture war rhetoric?
The most accurate thing we can say is that no one knows what happens to consciousness after death. The evidence we have, like NDEs, doesn't support a continuation of consciousness beyond bodily disintegration.
Is there an amount of concordant eyewitness testimony that should count as evidence?
If your answer to that is "no", you're not being reasonable. The courts of most countries would also disagree with you. This even takes into account the fact that "eyewitness testimony is bad"... Like sure, maybe if it's 10, but if it's 100 people all making extremely similar claims? 1000? 10,000?
The NDE people often use language like "realer than what I thought was real". While some drugs can induce this too, drugs also give quite random experiences, while the NDE thing seems fairly well-structured with few exceptions.
It also seems internally-consistent (as in, within the realm of itself and its claims about reality, it doesn't seem to violate its own rules).
If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them?
Consider that every eyewitness can be mathematically treated as a "noisy sensor" (who might also be a bad actor via lying). What if we applied a Kalman filter to quantized claims made across thousands of self-claimed NDE experiencers? Might this be a way to quantify (and therefore bring into the realm of rationality) eyewitness testimony of this nature?
There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)?
I don't dispute that people have NDEs and that they sincerely believe what they say. The problem is that that kind of evidence cannot in principle support the continuity of consciousness after bodily disintegration because 1) the body is still intact and 2) they don't test the difference between experiences near death and those after death. There is no way for a person to know if what they experienced happened during a time that an outside observer could see no brain activity.
To take another example, many people report the experience of waking up with a demon, visible or invisible, sitting on their chest. I've had this experience. Should we accept this eyewitness testimony at face value? Isn't the simpler, more naturalistic explanation of sleep paralysis more fitted to the evidence?
> There is no way for a person to know if what they experienced happened during a time that an outside observer could see no brain activity.
Exactly...so, when a human on planet earth, 2023, encounters such a scenario (indeterminateness), they project an illusion upon it, declare that illusion to be true, and most other humans will agree with them, depending on the metaphysical framework (aka:culture - currently, we are in the age of "science", before that it was "religion") they have been trained upon (like an LLM....if there are differences, I'd very much like to know).
You can literally see this in action as people talk, relatively highly rational people will literally make things up, utilize very well known (by science) cultural/psychological exists, etc etc etc.
For fun, try this: point out where they claim something (in general, or specifically), and then ask them for proof/evidence - then, do this 1000+ times - you will see a normal distribution of stories emerge, reliably.
There is something very weird about humans in 2024.
I think it is an excellent approach, I expect that we could benefit from applying it to all claims, including all the not actually/necessarily factual "facts" that inevitable emerge when these sorts of topics are discussed. But applying it in epistemically inconclusive areas like this seems like something worth trying, for more reasons than one (there is a lot of harmful social disharmony in such areas).
Part of the point I'm completely unsuccessful in making here, or a way to look at it, is: different ideologies have different methodologies and standards for practicing epistemology (belief, "reality", etc) - the "NDE type" (religion, woo woo, etc) of thinkers have their form and quality, and "scientific"[1] thinkers have theirs. To me, the scientific folks have an objectively and vastly superior methodology to the others....however, it is far from the best - the best genuinely wonders what is true, which in my experience is always(!) considered a literally unacceptable approach (as can be seen in such conversations: I have been told that asking such question is not allowed here on HN).
I propose that if even our very best "intellectual hangouts" culturally insist on suboptimal thinking, if not denying that it is even possible (~trying to cover it up), it increases risk within the system (I always like to use climate change to substantiate the claim).
[1] to some degree - like the religious, science practitioners are also unable to follow their scriptures to a T, like remembering that their theories are theories (that is just one example).
I do believe most demon experiences are sleep paralysis. (I can't assert that all of them are, no more than I can assert with certainty without existing in every female body ever that reports of "female ejaculation" are just urine.)
Regarding brain activity or lack thereof during an NDE, here's a perspective:
“In cardiac arrest, even neuronal action-potentials, the ultimate physical basis for coordination of neural activity between widely separated brain regions, are rapidly abolished (Kelly et al., 2007). Moreover, cells in the hippocampus, the region thought to be essential for memory formation, are especially vulnerable to the effects of anoxia (Vriens et al., 1996). In short, it is not credible to suppose that NDEs occurring under conditions of general anesthesia, let alone cardiac arrest, can be accounted for in terms of some hypothetical residual capacity of the brain to process and store complex information under those conditions.”
“Michael Sabom, MD, a cardiologist in Atlanta, Georgia, monitored the brain waves of his patients using an electroencephalograph (EEG) and was able to show that some who had reported NDEs had been clinically dead, meaning they registered no electrical activity in their brain.”
Most NDE's are associated with heart stoppages. And in fact, NDE's started to begin to be reported more after working resuscitation techniques became more fleshed-out.
My thought is that NDEs might occur before or after the cessation of neural activity. From a first person perspective, there would be no way to distinguish whether it happened when there was no neural activity. From an outside perspective, it would need to be a rigorous, carefully designed test to distinguish. If not properly designed, it would be easy to bias the results through unblinded participants, etc. I'm not aware of such a test being conducted?
> If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them?
This is pure gold analogy, if you don't mind I am going to borrow it.
> There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)?
I believe Taylor Swift is a substantial glitch in the matrix, I wish I had something more insightful to say on the matter.
If this was not actually the case, would you necessarily be able to know? If so, can you describe the novel, literally foolproof epistemic methodology you are using?
Would you please stop posting these cross-examination comments? You've been doing it endlessly, it seems, and perpetuating flamewars in the process. This is not what HN is for.
Should the HN guidelines perhaps be modified to reflect that pursuit of truth has an undocumented upper bound that shall not be breached? That way it would be more transparent what HN is about, though it would give up the powerful flexibility and illusory nature of ambiguity. Tough call!
I'm curious why you never (or rarely) seem to scold people for practicing soothsaying and other forms of pseudoscience under the guise of science & rationality.
I'm also curious if you ever wonder what good the substantial cognitive power concentrated on HN could bring to the world if we were to play our cards mildly differently.
I'll answer, but as your comment here is doing exactly what I just asked you to stop doing, I need first to tell you that these interminable cross-examination barrages are not what HN is for, and if it keeps up we're going to have to ban you. We've already had to ask you this many times. I don't want to ban you, but slack isn't infinite here either.
The answer is that HN is for curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. Does that involve being wrong sometimes? Of course it does. It would be absurd to ban people simply for being wrong. Moreover, even if we wanted to, we couldn't, because we don't know what the truth is on every question. (Some internet commenters appear to believe they know the truth about everything, but we are very far from feeling that way, and don't have a truth meter* to tell us.) Moreover, even if we did know the truth about everything, others would disagree, and trying to impose the truth on people who disagree would create a firestorm that would easily destroy the community.
The idea is in fact so obviously absurd that when people make this complaint, they can't mean it literally, and so must really be complaining about something else. Since I don't have a mind reader (or a truth meter), I don't know what the real issue is, but based on observable behaviors, it seems most likely that they want the mods to boost everything they agree with and ban everything they disagree with. Since each person has a different set of what they would like to see boosted and banned, this is impossible; we'd end up having to boost and ban everything.
Do you know that banning me is necessary, or even an improvement? Do you even care?
You happen to have landed in a position where you hold substantial power on this planet Dang, I recommend you wield that power wisely and with humility.
If you can't or won't stop posting in ways that break HN's rules and the intended spirit of the site, we're not going to have much choice. I'm happy to be patient, but 7 years is a long time.
I'm not trying to be difficult Dang, but there is more than one very legitimate issue with "as intended".
While I acknowledge my comments are upsetting to many, I do not think you are substantially taking into consideration that it takes two to tango when it comes to getting upset. And while it is often good policy to please the majority over the minority, sometimes the majority is actually incorrect.
Further, is it not also true that many others are doing, and repeatedly so (though not ~solely), things that are also upsetting, and at least arguably worse (telling untruths)? I do not deny you or others their right to their opinion, I am saying that it is often wise to realize that what one is dealing with is an opinion.
Look at all the "serious" conversations we have on this site, day after day. I do not deny that it is enjoyable, but I think it is worth considering whether maximizing enjoyment to the detriment of everything else (risk management, for example) is the way to go. You are welcome to disagree, but can we at least mutually admit that we are comparing opinions on the matter?
It's not a tough call that you can't have a conversation about truth, pseudoscience or anything else in the form of a harangue and it's supposed to be a site for conversation.
It might be a subjective opinion but if enough people have the subjective opinion you are writing harangues (which, as you can read, is the case), you get the effect of harangue-writing whether you think you are or don't. So you have to stop the harangue-like writing in order to meaningfully participate. There are a bunch of guidelines and endless moderator commentary about that.
harangue. / (həˈræŋ) / verb. to address (a person or crowd) in an angry, vehement, or forcefully persuasive way.
I don't see how this applies, especially since if anything it is other people who are engaged in persuasion, and experiencing anger or other negative emotions. I am sincere in that I believe that truth matters, and should at least be taken into consideration.
Seriously, what is the big issue with disagreeing with the crowd, without applying speculative subjective framing to the situation?
You've been here plenty long to know it's not how HN works, everyone is responsible for their own commentary.
I am sincere in that I believe that truth matters, and should at least be taken into consideration.
I'm sure most people share that sincere belief, it's just that few enjoy, well, being harangued.
Seriously, what is the big issue with disagreeing with the crowd, without applying speculative subjective framing to the situation?
"I don't understand what I'm supposedly doing wrong" is conversation. The above is haranguey, especially since no one is asking you to eschew speculative or subjective framing.
Do you write software for a living, or at least write scripts, deal with complexity, ambiguity, and humans?
I think both the moderator and I are trying to explain to you that you can't talk to people on HN like this because because it's not what the forum is for. That's all.
If all comments that technically violated one or more guidelines, objectively or subjectively, there wouldn't be much content left here. Luckily, we have heuristics and culture (containing norms such as do not acknowledge the existence of heuristics, at certain times) to smooth over such complexities, making everything appear logical.
Most people believe one way or the other. We don't however know what is true (meaning in this case having a reasonably justified belief based on looking at the evidence as a whole and weighing alternate explanations). The evidence doesn't rise to the level that anyone can reasonably claim to know one way or the other. People just feel like they know which isn't the same thing as knowing.
Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, former skeptics and at least 1 neuroscientist.