ok, i guess i will be rambling on, but here you go: out of body experiences can be explained scientifically and have been shown to be inducable as NewDawn already pointed out (in case you are interested in evidence i can warmly recommend the following papers: [Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions, Blanke et al., Nature, 2002] and [Linking out-of-body experience and self processing to mental own-body imagery at the temporoparietal junction, Blanke et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 2005], as well as further reading on the neurobiology of time perception and higher processing body perception, states of mind, etc).
near death experiences are relatively common in patients who were clinically dead after cardiac arrest and successfully resuscitated, which suggests that those experiences are more than just a rare curiosity. in my opinion one of the most remarkable findings in nde research is the fact that the reported experiences are very consistent, not necessarily in details of what people saw but in core features such as a warm atmosphere, brightness, unconditional love and the whole experience being a very positive one. id however find it hard to jump to a conclusion based on this finding and judge whether the experience is so consistent because there is a loving, merciful god or at least a rewarding afterlife that all those people had the chance to observe, or because there is a specific neurotransmitter system involved in the physical mechanism that is controlling positive emotions, probably via endorphin release, and results in something quite similar to a shock response which enables us to blend out all pain for example.
further it has been found that nde reports did not correlate with the duration of death (as far as our current scientific understanding tells us the oxygen transported to neurons via bloodflow is used to deliver energy that is used to power ion pumps that stabilize the membrane potential that enables neuronal activity, which means that we would definately expect a loss of function increasing the longer there is no circulation) and that patients even reported ndes after their eeg went completely flat. the common argument that this would indicate that ndes are not caused by a physical mechanism and you would have a proper disconnection between body and soul in those cases can however be easily refuted because the patients could simply have had an nde when they became unconscious and recalled it as what just happened upon regaining consciousness after resuscitation, which would be especially likely if they would have been dead in the meantime since from a materialist perspective there would be no experience ie no perception of time whatsoever. there is no way to determine when exactly a patient was having the nde which means that we can not link the nde to the medical state.
the only findings in nde research up to this date that i do not have a scientific explanation for are a number of stunning anecdotes reported by medical doctors, patients, scientists and hospital staff about patients showing detailed knowledge of events happening while they were resuscitated, ie unconscious and clinically dead. to give you an example, cardiologist pim van lommel reported a patient describing precise details of what happened around him while he was resuscitated and in a comatoes state to a nurse who was present during those events and later identified as such by the patient [Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands, van Lommel et al., The Lancet, 2001]. the credibility of such anecdotes can of course be questioned, but personally id think its as unlikely that van lommel bribed his staff to tell a nice story as it is that he fudged data. the problem with individual reports under uncontrolled conditions is that they are neither representative nor ignoreable, but the argument 'it might be a coincidence' (that what the patient was convinced he knew turned out to be the case) seems like a pretty weak one to me.
on the mind-body problem itself:
consciousness depends on physical correlates in every case we observe which makes it extremely reasonable to assume that this is a general causal law, but if consciousness would also exist independent from physical correlates we would probably not be able to observe it. when you look at the testable fatal consequences of cortex lesions, manipulations of brain function and neurological disorders, they all result in a persons mind being impaired and the nature of the impairment being consistently linked to the nature and location of manipulation or damage, which suggests that brain function is both necessary and sufficient to elicit phenomena of the mind. it can be perfectly explained by neuroscience how all the vast amount of information the mind deals with, from perception to memory to emotion to higher cognition and everything that makes us ourself, is processed by the brain, but not how the brain understands it, ie why our conscious experience is a constant nonlocal overview of the information being processed and therefor a true metaphysical level that has its own distinct qualia. i wont go into neural networks theory now, but i do not have a computational solution for this nor do i know of anyone who would have suggested one.
based on this i can not adapt a dualist or a materialist perspective because i think that the idea that consciousness would be sufficiently explained as brain function because the processing of information and our conscious experience of it would just be one and the same thing, as well as the idea that consciousness could just be seperated from all its complex physical representation that is essentially the information processing itself and still be the same thing we know as our self are just, well, obviously wrong. i dont have an answer for this, but i am certain that it can not be that simple.
19 Jan 2013, 1:34 pm
