15 people reportedly dead for hours or days and coming back

I have always wondered how stories of those who were "dead" for prolonged periods of time, such as hours or as in some of the claimed cases below, days, and then "come back to life" fit into the idea that at death, our consciousness leaves the body. It seems to me that if such stories are accurate, it would create some problems for the belief of an afterlife. Maybe, in some as of yet, unknown way, our consciousness remains in tact, within the brain, but undetectable. And rather than it creating a dilemma on if the soul exists, it rather points to our complete misunderstanding of how consciousness works within the brain itself.

I firmly WANT to believe in a soul and the afterlife, as the idea that my life is in essence, entirely meaningless and I will never get to see lost loved ones again, creates a lot of suffering within me, I can't help struggle when I hear stories such as these.

So perhaps I haven't thought everything through, and their are many holes in cases such as these. I welcome such arguments.

Here is a video version of 15 cases of supposed people being "dead" for prolonged periods and coming back:

Edit : I Am unable to post links as of yet. If one goes to you tube and searches for 15 people who have come back from the dead. It is there under some user name called danger Dolan. You can probably find the same article in written form if you google that information as well.

I apologize for the inconvenience
 
My feeling is that you have to consider all the evidence. If there is one aspect you don't understand it doesn't refute all the other evidence in favor of the afterlife. NDErs say they come back to their body after temporarily leaving it. It would seem to me that the longer a body has been dead the more "miraculous" it is, the more it contradicts materialism, the more it would require supernatural intervention, that it comes back to life.

There is a huge amount of evidence for the afterlife:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/62014-...-afterlife.html#articles_by_subject_afterlife

This evidence includes:
Mediumship: Proxy sittings, Drop-in communicators, Cross-correspondences.
Near-death experiences, veridical near-death experiences, and shared near-death experiences.
Death-bed visions, veridical death-bed visions, and shared death-bed visions.
Apparitions and multiple witness apparitions.
Children who remember past lives including those with an unusual type of birth mark on their body where an injury was sustained in the previous life.

Neither ESP or Super-psi can explain the evidence for the afterlife:
...
Nobel Prize winners Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Brian Josephson, Sir John Eccles, Eugene Wigner, George Wald and other great scientists and philosophers such as John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Wernher von Braun, Karl Popper, and Carl Jung believed consciousness is non-physical because of the evidence:
http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers
...
Why you should not automatically trust "skeptics" but should demand the same high level of proof from "skeptics" that they demand for claims of the paranormal: Skeptical Misdirection:
http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection
 
Has there been any more news on the second aware study?. I haven't heard anymore about it since the results of the first study were published.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_death
The brain, however, appears to accumulate ischemic injury faster than any other organ. Without special treatment after circulation is restarted, full recovery of the brain after more than 3 minutes of clinical death at normal body temperature is rare.[6][7] Usually brain damage or later brain death results after longer intervals of clinical death even if the heart is restarted and blood circulation is successfully restored. Brain injury is therefore the chief limiting factor for recovery from clinical death.

I don't see how coming back to life after a long period of being dead could be considered support for materialism.
 
I appreciate the replys so far in this thread. Some good discussion and food for thought.

I guess the way my mind thought of it, in relation to my original post and certain apprehensions I have, is that I thought of our consciousness and brain like a computer. Imagine a computer being shut down. It still contains all the hardware, memory, processing abilities, etc but for whatever reason it is shut down. Once someone restarts it, or it is in someway enabled again, all the components are still there and it is fully functional again. What if somehow, our memories, sense of self, etc. is still somehow intact within the now "dead" brain, but upon restarting, it all "comes back." Maybe before our brain, or "hardware" decomposes, it is still somehow able to retain everything and able to be restarted again at some point. I don't know. It seems like a stretch after I typed it out but when I was thinking of it before, it made more sense. Maybe I didn't articulate my thoughts accurately enough...
 
I appreciate the replys so far in this thread. Some good discussion and food for thought.

I guess the way my mind thought of it, in relation to my original post and certain apprehensions I have, is that I thought of our consciousness and brain like a computer. Imagine a computer being shut down. It still contains all the hardware, memory, processing abilities, etc but for whatever reason it is shut down. Once someone restarts it, or it is in someway enabled again, all the components are still there and it is fully functional again. What if somehow, our memories, sense of self, etc. is still somehow intact within the now "dead" brain, but upon restarting, it all "comes back." Maybe before our brain, or "hardware" decomposes, it is still somehow able to retain everything and able to be restarted again at some point. I don't know. It seems like a stretch after I typed it out but when I was thinking of it before, it made more sense. Maybe I didn't articulate my thoughts accurately enough...

It makes sense to a point, but it doesn't explain how NDErs can have conscious experiences when there is no electrical activity in the brain. And it doesn't rule out the spirit returning when the patient is revived - as many NDErs say happened to them. There are also plenty of people who's body is alive but are in a coma - maybe that is because the spirit has left.
 
I appreciate the replys so far in this thread. Some good discussion and food for thought.

I guess the way my mind thought of it, in relation to my original post and certain apprehensions I have, is that I thought of our consciousness and brain like a computer. Imagine a computer being shut down. It still contains all the hardware, memory, processing abilities, etc but for whatever reason it is shut down. Once someone restarts it, or it is in someway enabled again, all the components are still there and it is fully functional again. What if somehow, our memories, sense of self, etc. is still somehow intact within the now "dead" brain, but upon restarting, it all "comes back." Maybe before our brain, or "hardware" decomposes, it is still somehow able to retain everything and able to be restarted again at some point. I don't know. It seems like a stretch after I typed it out but when I was thinking of it before, it made more sense. Maybe I didn't articulate my thoughts accurately enough...

Yeah, if you look at it from an approximate classical position, it seems we probably have a very poor understanding of how the brain actually works.

If you can recover from an energy compromised state like cardiac arrest with little effective brain damage, it's really not reasonable to say you were dead in the first place, as there was still sufficient energy available for most individual cells to survive intact - even if the whole organism had temporarily ceased to function.

The clues from the NDE/OBE seem to indicate that even though the whole organism has stopped functioning correctly, some type of consciousness and external sensory awareness is still possible, even though lack of energy means that firing of neurons in the brain has generally ceased.

However, there is very strong evidence of sensory, organisational and processing capabilities from simple organisms that evolved earlier than ourselves - these organisms don't contain any neurons at all, yet they still appear to sense, organise and navigate space-time without any problems.

We see similar capabilities in some of our individual cells, they organise, navigate, sense, and process information without any neurons. Yet destroy the cell centriole, or remove the contractile tissue from the cell, and all coordination and navigation capability seems lost.

So we can probably say with some confidence that even though the whole organism has stopped functioning correctly during cardiac arrest, as long as individual cells are still viable, some type of efficient - low energy - sensory and processing capability probably still exists within the organisms individual cells.

Neurons themselves seem only transmit information around the organism, it seems increasing unlikely to me that they are responsible for the heavy lifting of processing that is probably responsible for consciousness. To discover that mechanism, we will need to look at simple organisms and cells in much more detail.

However much evidence is pointing towards these tubular protein structures such as centrioles, cilia, etc as apparently having sophisticated sensory and processing functions. One can't help look at some of cross sectional electron micrographs of Centrioles and marvel at their highly conserved and intricate repeating structure. Intuitively, these types of structures look like they do far far more than is currently accepted within the general scientific community.

I certainly believe that within these tubular protein structures and their precise architecture, lies the secrets of our perception of space-time, our reality, our consciousness.
 
However, there is very strong evidence of sensory, organisational and processing capabilities from simple organisms that evolved earlier than ourselves - these organisms don't contain any neurons at all, yet they still appear to sense, organise and navigate space-time without any problems.

We see similar capabilities in some of our individual cells, they organise, navigate, sense, and process information without any neurons. Yet destroy the cell centriole, or remove the contractile tissue from the cell, and all coordination and navigation capability seems lost.

So we can probably say with some confidence that even though the whole organism has stopped functioning correctly during cardiac arrest, as long as individual cells are still viable, some type of efficient - low energy - sensory and processing capability probably still exists within the organisms individual cells.

.

Made me think of this one;
This is a real footage of a white bloodcell chasing a bacteria, and they look pretty "intelligent" in determination - both the chaser and the escapé.


He really had it in for that particular bacteria, leaving the more easier one alone as he passes it, and that is just freaky. :)
 
Made me think of this one;
This is a real footage of a white bloodcell chasing a bacteria, and they look pretty "intelligent" in determination - both the chaser and the escapé.


He really had it in for that particular bacteria, leaving the more easier one alone as he passes it, and that is just freaky. :)

There was a recent beautiful fluorescent dye video from a Swiss team showing Neurogenesis in the brain. Neurons which are initially formed deep in the brain... are moved into their final position in the outer cortex, with the neurons centriole leading the way, and the rest of neuron cell structure following behind.

I've lost that video, but the team were clear that it demonstrated that the centriole was responsible for locating the neurons final resting position in the brain during neurogenesis. It was fascinating watch the centriole clearly demonstrating it's sensory and navigation capabilities...

Yet this sort of evidence for an additional powerful processing role for the centriole and other tubular protein structures is simply not accepted by the wider scientific community.
 
There was a recent beautiful fluorescent dye video from a Swiss team showing Neurogenesis in the brain. Neurons which are initially formed deep in the brain... are moved into their final position in the outer cortex, with the neurons centriole leading the way, and the rest of neuron cell structure following behind.

I've lost that video, but the team were clear that it demonstrated that the centriole was responsible for locating the neurons final resting position in the brain during neurogenesis. It was fascinating watch the centriole clearly demonstrating it's sensory and navigation capabilities...

Yet this sort of evidence for an additional powerful processing role for the centriole and other tubular protein structures is simply not accepted by the wider scientific community.


Was it one of these, in this list? >> https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fluorescent+dye+brain

Or this one>>

 
It makes sense to a point, but it doesn't explain how NDErs can have conscious experiences when there is no electrical activity in the brain.
And even the materialist suggestion (though not so far substantiated) that some small part of the brain is still functioning at a very low level and giving rise to what is experienced, doesn't account for the rich and multi-faceted experiences which are reported, rather than some foggy or dull and extremely limited experience.

Also the experiencers' own reports describe leaving the body and later returning to it - regardless of prior belief or non-belief. There doesn't seem any good reason why this would happen consistently to many different people merely as a result of brain (in-)activity.
 
I appreciate the replys so far in this thread. Some good discussion and food for thought.

I guess the way my mind thought of it, in relation to my original post and certain apprehensions I have, is that I thought of our consciousness and brain like a computer. Imagine a computer being shut down. It still contains all the hardware, memory, processing abilities, etc but for whatever reason it is shut down. Once someone restarts it, or it is in someway enabled again, all the components are still there and it is fully functional again. What if somehow, our memories, sense of self, etc. is still somehow intact within the now "dead" brain, but upon restarting, it all "comes back." Maybe before our brain, or "hardware" decomposes, it is still somehow able to retain everything and able to be restarted again at some point. I don't know. It seems like a stretch after I typed it out but when I was thinking of it before, it made more sense. Maybe I didn't articulate my thoughts accurately enough...
Thanks for this, I think it more clearly expresses your concerns.

The problem as I see it is that this model of what occurs is unable to explain many aspects of Near-Death Experiences. At best the computer shutdown/reboot idea might predict some loss of data (memory loss), or data corruption (garbled images or text) and subsequent malfunction or loss of function.

Though some of these do occur, and recovery can be long and difficult, there are other things which are not expected at all, For example recovery after an NDE may be unexpectedly fast, physical ailments may heal more rapidly than expected, a person may have new or unexpected abilities, all this in addition to the reports of what takes place during the 'computer outage'.

One example of new abilities after an NDE:Toni Kofi which I posted about previously here. http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/inspiring-story-of-jazz-musician-tony-kofi.1567/
 
And even the materialist suggestion (though not so far substantiated) that some small part of the brain is still functioning at a very low level and giving rise to what is experienced, doesn't account for the rich and multi-faceted experiences which are reported, rather than some foggy or dull and extremely limited experience.

Also the experiencers' own reports describe leaving the body and later returning to it - regardless of prior belief or non-belief. There doesn't seem any good reason why this would happen consistently to many different people merely as a result of brain (in-)activity.

And yet it's only a couple of years ago that a couple of magic mushroom studies suggested that the active ingredient which produces an expanded, intense experience with improved access to emotions and memory... Was the result of decreased activity in key areas of the brains network... Rather than increased activity...

According to those studies, decreased activity is the cause of these heightened experiences.
 
And yet it's only a couple of years ago that a couple of magic mushroom studies suggested that the active ingredient which produces an expanded, intense experience with improved access to emotions and memory... Was the result of decreased activity in key areas of the brains network... Rather than increased activity...

According to those studies, decreased activity is the cause of these heightened experiswr
 
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